Tucked inside the legislation was another bit of business entirely-a provision requiring the Pentagon to investigate more than 120 sightings by military pilots of what used to be known as UFOs, and now go by the more decorous-sounding "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP). Lawmakers wrote the requirement into the must-pass law in the hope that it might help explain cockpit footage that the Navy had declassified earlier that year.
The Department of Defense released the mandated report in 2021, analyzing both the video evidence and eyewitness accounts of flying objects moving in all manner of ways that defy conventional aeronautics-loop-the-looping and changing directions with a nimbleness no existing technology could manage. The military's verdict? A shrug. The objects weren't domestic, but whether they belonged to a hostile foreign power-terrestrial or otherwise was impossible to say.
Inauguration Day for Trump's second term is more than two months away, but when the once-and-future President returns to Washington, he'll find the mystery of UAPS again there waiting for him.
ON NOV. 13, two subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee held a joint hearing provocatively titled Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth, during which they heard from four witnesses making the case that American skies are indeed being plied by un-American-and quite possibly unearthly-machines.
"Let me be clear," testified Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who once ran a Pentagon program investigating the unexplained sightings, "UAP are real.
Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries. I believe we are in the midst of a multidecade, secretive arms race, one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars, and hidden from our elected representatives."
Elizondo was not the only witness to charge that officials are playing cute with what they know about the origin of UAPS. Retired rear admiral Tim Gallaudet was on deployment in January 2015 when one of the cockpit videos that were declassified in 2020 was first captured. According to his testimony, he and a handful of other naval officers received an email with the video attached-an email that vanished from their inboxes "without explanation" the next day.
The anomalous object, he said, exhibited "flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsena...
The Department of Defense released the mandated report in 2021, analyzing both the video evidence and eyewitness accounts of flying objects moving in all manner of ways that defy conventional aeronautics-loop-the-looping and changing directions with a nimbleness no existing technology could manage. The military's verdict? A shrug. The objects weren't domestic, but whether they belonged to a hostile foreign power-terrestrial or otherwise was impossible to say.
Inauguration Day for Trump's second term is more than two months away, but when the once-and-future President returns to Washington, he'll find the mystery of UAPS again there waiting for him.
ON NOV. 13, two subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee held a joint hearing provocatively titled Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth, during which they heard from four witnesses making the case that American skies are indeed being plied by un-American-and quite possibly unearthly-machines.
"Let me be clear," testified Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who once ran a Pentagon program investigating the unexplained sightings, "UAP are real.
Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries. I believe we are in the midst of a multidecade, secretive arms race, one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars, and hidden from our elected representatives."
Elizondo was not the only witness to charge that officials are playing cute with what they know about the origin of UAPS. Retired rear admiral Tim Gallaudet was on deployment in January 2015 when one of the cockpit videos that were declassified in 2020 was first captured. According to his testimony, he and a handful of other naval officers received an email with the video attached-an email that vanished from their inboxes "without explanation" the next day.
The anomalous object, he said, exhibited "flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsena...
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Time (Digital) - 1 Issue, December 09, 2024