Pentagon Ufo Report

“I expect much discussion and information about the real issues of unidentified flying objects. But I do not anticipate it will have much that will please the UFO enthusiasts,” West says. The unclassified nine-page report, released to Congress and the public, encompasses 144 observations - mostly from U.S. Navy personnel - of what the government officially calls "unidentified aerial phenomenon," or UAP, dating back to 2004.

Two commercial pilots flying over the Arizona desert have claimed of seeing an unidentified flying object pass overhead, according to a radio broadcast released by the Federal Aviation Administration . The report avoids any scientific discussion of the possibility that the unexplained phenomena are extraterrestrial in origin, Loeb added, since this goes beyond the charter assigned to the government's task force. Rodeghier said his center wholeheartedly agrees with the recommendation for continued study with improvements in data collection and analysis. A new and unprecedented U.S. intelligence report offers no explanation for what it calls unidentified aerial phenomenon. The Condon Report was reviewed by a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some of the larger organizations funded UFO studies and coordinated lobbying efforts to convince Congress to declassify UFO-related government documents. In the eyes of many UFO fanatics, government officials were conspiring to shield information on extraterrestrial UFOs for fear of mass panic, as in the case of Orson Welles's famed War of the Worlds broadcast. The task force report could quantify and analyze a wide swath of data, Scoles hopes, with the requisite background knowledge of sensor capabilities, current domestic and foreign military capabilities, and so on. If so, that would be a welcome change from previous high-profile studies, she concludes. A sober examination of these claims reveals that there is a lot less to them than first meets the eye,” Fraknoi says.

The MoD said it would continue to release UFO files to the public through The National Archives. Among the best known government studies are the ghost rockets investigation by the Swedish military (1946–1947), Project Blue Book, previously Project Sign and Project Grudge, conducted by the USAF from 1947 until 1969, the secret U.S. Army/Air Force Project Twinkle investigation into green fireballs (1948–1951), the secret USAF Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 by the Battelle Memorial Institute, and the Brazilian Air Force's 1977 Operação Prato . France has had an ongoing investigation (GEPAN/SEPRA/GEIPAN) within its space agency Centre national d'études spatiales since 1977; the government of Uruguay has had a similar investigation since 1989. These have included military personnel and control tower operators, simultaneous visual sightings, and aircraft intercepts. One such example was the mass sightings of large, silent, low-flying black triangles in 1989 and 1990 over Belgium, tracked by NATO radar and jet interceptors, and investigated by Belgium's military .

"But it seems possible that Congress might authorize some sort of ongoing program to act as a central belly button for the investigation of military encounters with UAPs." Meanwhile, in a June 25 posting of "frequently asked questions," NASA noted that the space agency does not actively search for UAPs. The search for extraterrestrial technology is "daring to look through new telescopes."

Most tragically, the Heaven's Gate UFO cult committed mass suicide in 1997 as part of an effort to gain the attention of a UFO they believed to be associated with the Hale-Bopp comet. Like other believers in UFOs, the Heaven's Gate cult located its hopes and fears about the world in the idea of disk-shaped alien spaceships, but, as scholar Curtis Peebles has aptly noted, "We watch the skies seeking meaning. In the end, what we find is ourselves." The form of the UFO myth changed shape somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, as individuals began to claim that they not only had seen UFOs, but that they actually had been on board the spacecraft, as aliens had abducted them and performed experiments on them before returning them to Earth.

Movies from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Close Encounters of the Third Kind portrayed extraterrestrial visitations via spaceships, while television series such as The X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries capitalized on public interest with weekly narratives on encounters with aliens and UFOs. One person who is taking a “wait and see” attitude about the upcoming report is Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, a research scientist in planetary studies at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The history of scientific studies of UAP in the U.S. is not limited to the recently released video snippets, which is a good reminder to avoid painting the whole phenomenon with one broad brush, he says. Additionally, this is not a U.S.-specific issue, nor is it limited to observations by U.S. armed forces. The U.S. Air Force conducted a previous investigation called Project Blue Book, ended in 1969, that compiled a list of 12,618 sightings, 701 of which involved objects that officially remained "unidentified."

If the Russian spy ship in Cuba was part of an intelligence gathering operation using covert tools of electronic warfare, that would mean the Kremlin unveiled a potentially sensitive system that would be more valuable as a surprise during an actual conflict. There are vast military ranges in Russia and China where sensitive systems can be tested without tipping their hand—just as there are within the United States. When radar operators receive returns showing things that are impossible—like extremely fast-moving objects and vanishing swarms of aircraft—electronic warfare is the first thing a crow considers. “If I see one enemy plane, and all of a sudden it becomes 20 planes in my display—I’m being spoofed,” Meany says.

Given sufficient evidence , UFO sightings can essentially always be tied to terrestrial or celestial phenomena, such as lights from human-made vehicles and reentering space junk, he adds. All but one of the listed sightings - an instance attributed to a large, deflating balloon - remain unexplained, subject to further analysis, the report said. For the other 143 cases, the report found that too little data exists to conclude whether they represent some exotic aerial system developed either by a U.S. government or commercial entity, or by a foreign power such as China or Russia. The presence of an unidentified flying object behind the Popocatepetl volcano sparked many conspiracy theories. Filmmaker and UFO enthusiast Jeremy Corbell has released footage that appears to show an unidentified flying object or a UFO disappearing into the water off California. US government cannot give a definitive explanation of aerial phenomena spotted by military pilots, said officials.

The Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar was a concept vehicle produced during the 1950s, which was a functional aircraft with a saucer shape. It has also been suggested by a few paranormal authors that all or most human technology and culture is based on extraterrestrial contact . In the U.S., an opinion ufo poll conducted in 1997 suggested that 80% of Americans believed the U.S. government was withholding such information.