Well if there is a...Look at that thing!
It's rotating. Strange objects have been seen.
Unidentified flying objects, or UFOs have captured the
imagination of Americans for decades.
But much of the conversation around UFOs has been confined
to science fiction movies and novels, such as the 1982
hit E.T.
In the absence of government commentary on the topic,
conspiracy theories around the U.S.
concealing alien life and technology in secret
compounds like Area 51 have run rampant.
In fact, a 2019 poll found that 68% of respondents
believed the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than
it's telling U.S.. Earlier this year, conversation
around UFOs reached a fever pitch after the U.S.
military shot down several unidentified objects in a
matter of days.
It has happened again.
For the third day in a row, and the fourth time in jU.S.t
nine days, the United States has shot down an unidentified
high-flying object.
One of the objects was later identified as a Chinese spy
balloon. The rest, President Biden has said, are likely
objects tied to private companies, recreation or
research institutions.
In an attempt to be more transparent and address
potential national security questions, the government has
taken up the charge to publicize and legitimize the
study of unidentified anomaloU.S.
phenomena, or UAPs, as the military has rebranded UFOs.
Today is the first hearing of its kind, where we will
attempt to get down to the bottom of what is actually
happening with UAPs.
We want to shift the conversation about UAPs from
sensationalism to science.
A 2022 UAP report published by U.S.
intelligence stated that 195 of the incidents the office
had examined could be attributed to ordinary
explanations like drones, balloons, and other objects,
including birds.
However, another 171 incidents were labeled as
uncharacterized, with some appearing to have
demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or
performance capabilities that require further
analysis.
We experienced was, like I said, well beyond the
material science and the capabilities that we had at
the time, that we have currently, or that we're
going to have in the next 10 to 20 years.
I think they have started to recognize that we should
actually have the ability to report these objects, not
because we're out there doing some type of UFO hunt,
but because it's a matter of national security and domain
awareness that the tactical air crew in this country
understand what's in front of their aircraft.
Here is another UFO bulletin.
The Defense Department has just announced that the
unidentified flying object has suddenly disappeared from
our radar screens.
The military defines UAPs as unidentifiable objects that
travel in the air or water, as well as transmedium
objects that can transition between space and the
atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of
water. Sightings of unidentifiable objects have
been reported all over the world.
Hotspots include the Middle East, the coast off of China
and Korea, and along both coasts of the U.S.
Such objects are usually described as round in shape,
white, silver or translucent in color, and with no thermal
exhaust for propulsion.
Investigation into UFOs in the United States can be
traced as far back as the late 1940s.
Project Blue Book, which ran until 1969, recorded over
12,000 sightings.
Out of those, over 700 remain unidentified.
Just take a minute to go back to the origin story of the
UFOs, which is Roswell, 1947.
It was learned after the fact that that metallic,
deflated object that was found in a field by a by a
rancher and his son was a government surveillance
balloon designed to look for Soviet noncompliance with
nuclear arms control that was in place after Second
World War. And the government didn't want that
program public.
And so a military spokesman actually spoke to the local
press and used the phrase 'flying saucer' and then
you're off to the races.
I am here to discuss the so-called flying saucers.
The Air Force interest in this problem has been due to
our feeling of an obligation to identify and analyze, to
the best of our ability, anything in the air that may
have the possibility of threat or menace to the
United States.
The U.S. is not the only country to take UFOs
seriously. A number of South American nations, including
Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru all have government
programs that study and investigate UFO activity.
In France, the French space agency has been studying UFOs
since 1977.
The modern era of UFOs being in the news pretty much
started in 2017, when the New York Times leaked, and
then the Defense Department admitted to them, these three
Navy videos that were quite striking, showing objects
moving apparently at very fast speeds and in erratic
ways that the pilots didn't understand.
And that's sort of opened up the box, if you like.
And then the government had to take it seriously.
The article brought to light the existence of a shadowy
$22 million program, known as the Advanced Aerospace
Threat Identification Program that the Pentagon had
funded from 2007 to 2012.
Public discourse around the topic reignited.
In response to mounting public pressure, a flurry of
government activity over the last few years has been aimed
at demystifying UAPs.
In June of 2021, the office of the Director of National
Intelligence released a preliminary report on UAPs.
This was followed in November by the Pentagon
establishing a group to identify and track objects in
restricted airspace.
Then, in June of 2022, NASA convened an independent
expert panel to help study UAP incidents and advise the
DoD on how to gather and interpret data on UAPs.
The following month, the DoD established the All-domain
Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, to synchronize
efforts across DoD and other federal agencies in detecting
and investigating UAP sightings.
Meanwhile, Congress has sought its own answers.
During a July hearing, Congress heard testimony from
three former military officials about their
experience with UAPs.
My testimony is based on information I've been given
by individuals with a long standing track record of
legitimacy and service to this country.
I was informed in the course of my official duties of a
multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse
engineering program, to which I was denied access to
those additional read ons when I requested it.
Grusch went on to say that he had interviewed individuals
who had recovered non-human biologics from crashed UAPs.
The Pentagon has denied such claims.
Experts are also wary.
I'm not going to attribute bad intentions to David
Grusch, but it was anecdotal. I mean, if you
looked at his actual statement, he was talking
about someone he knew who told him that this existed.
It was second hand.
So however dramatic it was, it's not going to be
persuasive.
Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves also testified.
Here he is talking about an incident he experienced in
2014 near Virginia Beach.
After upgrades were made to our jets' radar systems, we
began detecting unknown objects operating in our
airspace. At first, we assumed they were radar
errors, but soon we began to correlate the radar tracks
with multiple onboard sensors, including infrared
systems, and eventually through visual ID.
During a training mission in Warning Area Whiskey 72, ten
miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, two F-18
Super Hornets were split by a UAP.
The object, described as a dark gray or a black cube
inside of a clear sphere, came within 50ft of the lead
aircraft and was estimated to be 5 to 15ft in diameter.
The mission commander terminated the flight
immediately and returned to base.
Our squadron submitted a safety report, but there was
no official acknowledgment of the incident and no
further mechanism to report the sightings.
Soon, these encounters became so frequent that
aircrew would discuss the risk of UAP as part of their
regular preflight briefs.
CNBC spoke with Graves, who is the executive director of
Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit
organization dedicated to aerospace safety and national
security with a focus on UAPs.
Though initially conceived as a tool to educate the
public and Congress on UAPs, the organization's function
has expanded.
We weren't expecting to fill the role of information
receiving organization, you could say, but once we stood
up, we received a lot of contact from commercial
pilots, as well as other veterans that have had some
type of experience in their professional duties that they
want to share. So at safeaerospace.org pilots and
others can go, they can submit their experiences.
And we have relationships on Capitol Hill as well as in
the Pentagon, where we can bring these cases for further
investigation across official channels.
The DoD now has its own website to publicly share
declassified information and videos of UAPs.
The website will also eventually allow current and
former U.S. government employees, service members,
and contractors to submit reports regarding UAPs
directly to ARRO. The DoD plans to open the reporting
mechanism to the public as well.
While further study of UAPs is necessary for both matters
of national security as well as the advancement of
science, experts say it's going to be a difficult
undertaking.
I'm not sure the government has figured out a way to deal
with the potential fire hose of, you know, 300 million
Americans reporting strange things they see in the sky.
And the reporting rate and the number of incidents will
go up dramatically because everyone's heightened
awareness of this issue.
We already know that most UFO sightings, and this is
well documented, represent atmospheric or astronomical
phenomena. The planet Venus, meteors, fireballs, weather
balloons, make a list.
They're not exceptional, they're not strange.
And you don't really want to be inundated with that.
Another obstacle that the government and those trying
to study unidentified objects face is combating the
stigma associated with UFOs.
We've been kind of ingratiated into the little
green man and UFO conversation due to media and
whatnot for quite a while.
And, you know, it's turned into an entertainment topic
for the most part.
During his testimony, David Grusch said that he had been
persecuted for his reporting of incidents.
It was very brutal and very unfortunate.
Some of the tactics they used to hurt me both
professionally and and personally, to be quite
frank.
NASA has said that the scientists it tasked with
studying UAPs also faced harassment.
Not only were some of the the things that our panel members
received during the course of this study simple
trolling, some of them actually rose to actual
threats.
As for a connection between aliens and UAPs, both the
military and NASA have said that they have found no
evidence to suggest a link.
But the possibility can't be completely discounted.
If you ask me, do I believe there's life in a universe
that is so vast that it's hard for me to comprehend how
big it is? My personal answer is yes.
It's hard for me to imagine that we're completely alone
in this universe, and that's part of the difficulty in
this conversation. It's it's hard to deal with an unknown
when we have such little information. And it's why
gathering new information is just so important right now.
NASA says one of the biggest issues with UAP research
right now is lack of quality data.
While there are numerous eyewitness accounts and
visuals associated with UAP, they're not consistent,
they're not detailed, and they're not curated
observations that can be used to make definitive
scientific conclusions about the nature and the origin of
UAP.
To tackle this issue, the organization plans to use its
own highly-calibrated instruments to gather more
detailed data. NASA also plans to utilize AI and
machine learning to search the skies for anomalies.
The public can also help.
There's a wealth of data that a cell phone takes, and you
can imagine designing apps that make the images
relatively tamper free.
And I think if we have a collection where interesting
events are collected by citizens, hosted, and you
have multiple images of the same event, we will be able
to learn a lot.
In the meantime, we may just have to be patient.
I suggest that people, the media as well, just be
uncomfortable with the uncertainty for a while.
Anomalies in the history of science often tell you
something very important.
That your theories are incomplete, or there's some
whole new world of reality that you haven't understood.
And I think, you know, scientists being open minded
have to acknowledge that that may be the case with
this phenomena, too.
It's a small subset. It doesn't matter if it's only
one or two, if there's some genuinely new phenomena
there, let's find out what it is.
Let's figure it out.