The Pentagon UFO Report – Pt. 3
New Disclosures – What the Government Is and Isn’t Telling Us
When the government announced that the Pentagon was readying a report on its UFO studies over the past decade, it hit me like a ton of fish. I had to fan the air with my beat up copy of The Hynek UFO Report. Come on, I thought, what is the government up to now?
First, the announcement I saw in March was from the former director of national intelligence – John Ratcliffe – not the current one (Avril Haines). Why roll out the guy who ranthe office under President Trump?
Second, the announcement came out of the blue – pun intended. Congress had ordered the DNI to produce the report in December and it was expected to surface in late June. Why the public relations push in March? (There’s always a reason.)
Third, there was talk of an official UFO report back in 2017, when the New York Times first broke the story that the government had been secretly studying UFOs.
The hush-hush Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) had produced a 494-page report on UFO sightings worldwide as well as 38 studies on theoretical aerospace topics. Why weren’t these existing reports released four years ago?
In April, the U.S. Navy confirmed that this image was filmed by crew of the USS Russell off the coast of San Diego in July, 2019.
I’ve written about the history of government secrecy regarding UFOs in two previous installments: Air Force and CIA studies of 1947-1973 and recent efforts to spur government disclosure, leading successfully to the Pentagon report released June 25.
What does the new report say? What doesn’t it say? How do we explain what the government now admits we’re seeing in the wild blue yonder?
Nine Pages
The “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is nine pages long with a title page, wide margins and lots of white space.
The lead paragraph clearly lays out the report’s purpose: “An intelligence assessment of the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the progress the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding this threat.”
The focus on threat assessment harkens back to the Air Force’s 1948 Project Sign. As J. Allen Hynek described the top brass: “There were only two aspects of the UFO problem that ever really concerned them: whether or not UFOs were a threat to national security and whether or not they were extraterrestrial.”
Hynek said they determined the answer to both questions was no “rather quickly,” so the job was done.
The new report clearly states that the work of studying UFOs has fallen to the UAPTF – an organization run by the Office of Naval Intelligence. Although the Navy – not the Air Force – is now in charge of collecting and analyzing UFO sightings, the report was drafted by the ODNI National Intelligence Manager for Aviation, Air Force Maj. Gen. Daniel Simpson.
Simpson got input from scads of intelligence agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, FBI, National Reconnaissance Organization, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NSA, Air Force, Army, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ODNI/Emerging and Disruptive Technology, ODNI/National Counterintelligence and Security Center, and ODNI/National Intelligence Council.
This formidable array of intelligence brainpower produced five categories for explaining UFO sightings:
1. Airborne Clutter: birds, balloons, recreational unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), airborne debris like plastic bags.
2. Natural Atmospheric Phenomena: ice crystals, moisture, thermal fluctuations.
3. U.S. Government or Industry Developmental Programs: classified programs by U.S. entities.
4. Foreign Adversary Systems: China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity.
5. Other: something scientific advances might allow us to better understand. Hoaxes, hallucinations and aliens were not specifically mentioned.
The gist of the report is the government doesn’t have a conclusion, mostly due to haphazard reporting procedures – echoing Blue Book’s common catch-all of “insufficient information.”
There’s a lot the report doesn’t say. It was based on 144 UFO sightings by military personnel, but we’re not given any specific details. We don’t know how many sighting-reports were actually collected, but the 144 were considered serious and unidentified (with the exception of one explained as a “large, deflating balloon”).
At least one eyebrow deserves raising when the report mentions adversarial technology but offers no category for “Foreign Ally Systems.” Certainly allies like Britain, Germany, Japan and Australia could be developing experimental aircraft about which they haven’t briefed U.S. officials. Israel has a significant record of keeping its military capabilities top-secret.
The report did not confirm anything classified by the U.S. government and was mum about the role of the intelligence community in studying UFOs in the future. Nowhere in the alphabet soup do we find a mention of the Department of Energy – originally called the Atomic Energy Commission – which ran the Manhattan Project, the Nevada Test Site and Area 51.
Three theories
The news is the government is owning up to hard radar data on objects that exhibit “unusual movement patterns or flight characteristics,” such as the ability to hover, maneuver abruptly or move at extraordinary speed “without discernable means of propulsion.”
Whatever the UFO/UAPs are, there are three essential theories about why the government has been so dishonest about its interest.
1. The government is covering up the truth about UFOs to prevent mass hysteria. One reason Project Blue Book was established was fear that the Soviets might use faked UFO appearances to overload U.S. air defense systems with citizen reports.
In 1953, the CIA convened a secret group of advisors (“Robertson Panel”) to address growing public interest in UFOs. The panel concluded that the Soviets might use hoaxed UFO phenomena to induce “hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority.”
Project Blue Book was fundamentally a debunking exercise rather than the neutral, scientific inquiry for which Hynek had hoped. He wrote: “The unspoken orders from the Pentagon, stemming from the Robertson Panel, seemed clearly to be: to hold the fort, play down the UFO subject and not to rock the boat.”
Journalist Annie Jacobsen makes the case that Joseph Stalin planned to create a War of the Worlds-style hysteria by flying fake UFOs (complete with Russians surgically altered to look alien) over the U.S.
According to one of her 74 sources – a career nuclear weapons engineer who worked at Area 51 with contractor EG&G – one of Stalin’s crafts crashed near Roswell, N.M. in July, 1947. The Army’s cover-up of the crash (i.e. initially calling it a “flying disc” then insisting it was weather balloon debris) was aimed at foiling the Soviet plot to induce an alien-invasion hysteria.
“The first order of business was to determine where the technology had come from,” Jacobsen writes in her 2011 book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base. “Army intelligence officers believed that the flying disc was the brainchild of two former Third Reich airplane engineers, named Walter and Reimar Horten.”
Walter and Reimar Horten were designing jet-propelled flying wing aircraft for Hitler in the 1940s.
2. The government is covering up its own experimental technology. The U.S. military and CIA have long histories of secrecy and deception in the name of national security. When people reported seeing mysterious lights move at incredible speeds over the Nevada desert, for instance, they were told it was ice crystals and temperature inversions, not test flights of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane.
“Over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights,” says an official report, “CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90,” declassified in 1997. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.”
One of the five categories of explanation in the new Pentagon UFO Report is “U.S. Government or Industry Developmental Programs,” although the report states: “We were unable to confirm that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.”
Yet many of the latest UAP witnesses have said we could be seeing classified U.S. technology being tested or in use.
Retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich
“I believe there is an explanation that is of this planet,” says Alex Dietrich, one of the Nimitz pilots who observed the 2004 “Tic-Tac” object. “That is why I am encouraging more folks to report their incidents, so we can take a scientific approach to the analysis (rather than letting our imaginations run wild and fueling crackpot conspiracies).”
Does the Navy know everything the Air Force is doing? Does anyone know what the CIA is up to? How about that Elon Musk – or better yet, Robert Bigelow?
Most of the $22 million in the five-year ATTIP went to a private aerospace research company run by Bigelow, a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada. Bigelow’s Aerospace Advanced Space Studies authored ATTIP’s 494-page report and 38 research documents.
His private National Institute for Discovery Science also studied UFO phenomena and other exotic subjects at Bigelow’s Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, 1996-2004.
3. The government is covering up the extraterrestrial origins of UFOs, for any number of reasons. This is probably the most sensational – and popular – theory of the three. It has several versions.
• If the public knew UFOs were interplanetary, they would panic. Similar to theory #1, this one claims the government knows UFOs are extraterrestrial. Marine Corps naval aviator Donald Keyhoe advanced this theory in a 1950 book, The Flying Saucers Are Real.
Keyhoe helped form the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in 1956, to collect UFO reports and urge the government to share its knowledge with the public. Board members included Roscoe Hillenkoetter (the first CIA director) and anti-gravity researcher and inventor Thomas Townsend Brown.
Air Force Capt. Edward Ruppelt, Project Blue Book’s first director, offered a similar scenario in his 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Ruppelt claimed that Project Sign issued a top-secret “Estimate of the Situation” that concluded flying saucers were not only real, but probably extraterrestrial in origin. The Estimate was ordered destroyed by Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg.
• Majestic 12: The government wants to control all things alien. In 1984, documents surfaced purporting to reveal “Operation Majestic 12,” a secret committee authorized by President Harry Truman in 1952. They explain how the crash of an alien spacecraft at Roswell had been concealed, how the recovered alien technology could be exploited, and how the U.S. should engage with extraterrestrial life in the future.
The MJ-12 group supposedly included Project Sign instigator Gen. Nathan Twining, Hoyt Vandenberg, Roscoe Hillenkoetter and Vannevar Bush, early administrator of the Manhattan Project and presidential science advisor. The FBI declared the documents “bogus.”
• Bob Lazar: A small, autonomous group of the American government is controlling what we know about extraterrestrial beings. In 1989, Las Vegas-based investigative reporter George Knapp interviewed in-shadows source “Dennis” (later to be revealed as Bob Lazar) about his alleged employment at S4 near Area 51.
Lazar claims he was hired by EG&G to help back-engineer the antigravity propulsion system of one of nine flying saucers. Lazar says he was told the craft was extraterrestrial and was given briefing documents describing the alien involvement with Earth for the past 10,000 years.
Apparently extraterrestrial beings described as grey aliens come from a planet orbiting the twin binary star system Zeta Reticuli.
Lazar’s scenario got a boost from Steven Greer, MD, founder of the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). Greer’s “Disclosure Project” seeks to disclose to the public the government's alleged knowledge of UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence and advanced energy and propulsion systems.
In a notable twist, Greer claims that a covert, trans-national, mostly corporate group (with no oversight from world governments) possesses antigravity technology and manmade antigravity craft.
Although aliens are peacefully monitoring Earth to keep us from blowing ourselves up, this cabal has a plan to hoax an alien attack to unite the world behind it. Greer considers former ATTIP director Luis Elizondo a disinformation agent of the government.
“Other”
Three more explanations can be found in my “Other” bin (plus the fourth one that we haven’t thought of yet.)
• Unknown Earthlings: intelligent residents of this planet, i.e. Atlanteans, Hollow Earthers
• Ultra-dimensional: Hynek said trans-dimensional and interplanetary travel are equally plausible
• Psychological: originating in human consciousness; popularized in Carl Jung’s 1979 Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
In all journalistic inquiries, we rely on sources. We look for a narrative that is corroborated by multiple credible sources over time. The truth is out there – help!
