Dear British Government, It Is Time To Wake Up To The UFO Reality
Liberation Times Opinion
5 February 2024
Note: This article has been written anonymously by a British author.
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”
- John Maynard Keynes
In recent years, the government of the United States has been treating Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, previously known as UFOs) as an increasingly serious and bipartisan issue.
This has followed ground-breaking revelations in The New York Times in December 2017, that the US Department of Defense was running a secret UAP study programme with funding initiated by the late Senate Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid. Three leaked Navy UAP videos (two of which were published by The New York Times) were confirmed as real by the US Department of Defense in April 2020.
In June 2021, the US government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) published an unclassified preliminary assessment, presenting UAP as a matter of national security and air safety.
The report said UAP are real, the US military is encountering them, and the US government is seriously studying them.
The classified full report was submitted to the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees of the US Congress, and distributed within the relevant intelligence and defence organisations of the executive branch.
In an interview shortly before the unclassified UAP report was published, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said:
“Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for. Or travelling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”
Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, also commented on the UAP report.
Mellon said:
“It’s very interesting. The report submitted by the Director of National Intelligence said we see no evidence it’s from foreign government, none of the incidences in the 144 incidences they identified could be explained by US classified research programmes, so that leaves you wondering then what hypothesis best fits the facts, and frankly, the alien hypothesis, fits the facts. Better than the alternatives. I’m afraid I have to say that.”
Partly in consequence to the ODNI’s UAP report, Dr. Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard's Astronomy Department, and Dr. Frank Laukien, Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, founded the Galileo Project at Harvard University in July 2021.
The Galileo Project aims to “identify the nature of UAP and ‘Oumuamua-like interstellar objects using the standard scientific method based on a transparent analysis of open scientific data to be collected using optimized instruments.”
While almost silent on the issue today, the UK government has given UAP serious attention in the past.
A UAP study, “Project Condign,” was undertaken by the UK’s Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) between 1997 and 2000.
A report entitled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region was produced, drawing on approximately 10,000 sightings and reports that had been gathered by the DI55, a section of the Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence (DSTI) within the DIS.
This report was released to the public in 2006, after a 2005 Freedom of Information Act request by UAP researchers. Although the UK report was inconclusive, it stated:
“That UAP exist is indisputable. Credited with the ability to hover, land, take-off, accelerate to exceptional velocities and vanish, they can reportedly alter their direction of flight suddenly and clearly can exhibit aerodynamic characteristics clearly beyond those of any known aircraft or missile — either manned or unmanned.”
The report also said: “No attempt should be made to out-manoeuvre a UAP during interception.”
In France, the Committee for In-Depth Studies (abbreviated to COMETA), chaired by Major General Denis Letty, was created in 1996 to study UAP.
The COMETA Report was written by thirteen retired French generals, scientists, and space experts, including Andre Lebeau, the former head of the Centre National D’Etudes Spatiales (CNES, the French Space Agency) and General Norlain, former commander of the French Tactical Air Force and counsellor to the Prime Minister.
Although the report was written independently of the French government, some of the military officers were at the time serving with the French Institute for Higher Studies of National Defense, a quasi-government agency.
At that time, the French government had been officially studying UAP for twenty years and had a substantial amount of information.
The COMETA Report was submitted to the highest authorities in the French government and published for public consumption in July 1999. Describing COMETA in UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on The Record (Kean, 2010) Letty stated:
“All the testimony we retained for the COMETA Report is supported by tangible pieces of evidence: radar echoes, tracks on the ground, photographs, electromagnetic phenomena, and even the modification of the process of photosynthesis in plants. Many accounts given by totally independent witnesses confirm one another.
It became clear that at least 5 percent of sightings for which there is solid documentation cannot be attributed to man-made or natural sources. Our experts examined all possible explanations for these cases.” In conclusion Letty said: “The COMETA Report shows, in a straightforward manner, that the extra-terrestrial hypothesis is the most rational explanation, although of course it has not been proven.”
The following (in italics) are some thought-provoking extracts from the COMETA Report:
The extra-terrestrial hypothesis is far from the best scientific hypothesis. It certainly has not been categorically proven, but strong presumptions exist in its favor and if it is correct, it is loaded with consequences.
The idea is ridiculed by much of the media. At the same time, in this spirit, most politicians and the vast majority of members of the intelligentsia state that humanity has better things to do than to chase such rainbows.
It is clear that under the hypothesis that the existence of UFOs of extra-terrestrial origin is proven, there is a risk that not only the position of the intellectual authorities but, quite simply, the social position of the scientific elite would be considerably compromised.
If the Americans were able on that occasion [the 1947 Roswell crash] or on other occasions to collect at least debris or entire wreckages of extra-terrestrial vessels in fairly good condition, and even cadavers of humanoids, a certain type of contact might well have been established.
First statements and reactions are often considered to be more probative than subsequent affirmations. Thus immediately following what would later become the Roswell affair, General Twining was tasked with preparing a secret report on "flying disks" the existence of which was not revealed until 22 years later in the Condon report. It emerges from this that these objects truly do exist.
But since then the United States has followed a policy of increasing secrecy (classification above "top secret" of certain UFO files, according to General Barry Goldwater) and constant disinformation. The strange conclusions of the Condon report are just one case in point. Why would, and how could, such an important secret be kept all the way up to the present, despite everything? The simplest response would be that the United States wants to maintain at any cost military technological superiority over rival countries and, perhaps, a preferential contact.
This policy of secrecy and disinformation could have been dictated by an understandable concern for not creating panic reactions or irrational crazes among the public, or the concern at the time for protecting the country against actions by the USSR, or else, in a more prosaic and political fashion, not appearing in the eyes of voters to be incapable of providing convincing explanations regarding these phenomena.
No doubt it would not do to undermine the prestige of the armed forces, which was incapable of interdicting these violations of air space, and invite attacks against the military budgets on the part of political opponents. Anything is conceivable, even the fear of seeing various government agencies accused of having lied at one time or another.
Whatever the case, it is symptomatic and illustrative to note that since 1953, the United States has equipped itself with an impressive repressive arsenal, which is still in force, it seems. In particular, they enacted two military regulations, AFR (Air Force Regulation) 200-2 and JANAP (Joint Army Navy Air Force Publication) 146, the first prohibiting the public disclosure of information relating to sightings of unidentified objects and the second making the unauthorized disclosure of a UFO sighting by the witness an infraction punishable by 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The JANAP regulation applies to military personnel, but also to commercial airline pilots and captains in the merchant marine.
* * *
The COMETA Report referred to the 1968 Condon Report, a 1,500-page report which was the result of a UAP investigation commissioned by the United States Air Force from 1966 to 1968 and led by Dr. Edward U. Condon, a physicist at the University of Colorado.
The Condon Report stated:
“Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”
The report also concluded that the extra-terrestrial hypothesis was not useful in explaining UAP sightings.
However, Dr. James E. MacDonald, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics, University of Arizona, delivered a rebuttal of the Condon Report in December 1969 at the 134th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. MacDonald said:
“The Condon Report, released in January, 1968, after about two years of Air Force-supported study is, in my opinion, quite inadequate. The sheer bulk of the Report, and the inclusion of much that can only be viewed as ‘scientific padding’, cannot conceal from anyone who studies it closely the salient point that it represents an examination of only a tiny fraction of the most puzzling UFO reports of the past two decades, and that its level of scientific argumentation is wholly unsatisfactory.
Furthermore, of the roughly 90 cases that it specifically confronts, over 30 are conceded to be unexplained. With so large a fraction of unexplained cases (out of a sample that is by no means limited only to the truly puzzling cases, but includes an objectionably large number of obviously trivial cases), it is far from clear how Dr. Condon felt justified in concluding that the study indicated ‘that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.’"
* * *
"This satisfying demonstration of our self-importance, buttressed by daily observations of the heavens, made the geocentrist conceit a transcultural truth – taught in the schools, built into the language, part and parcel of great literature and sacred scripture. Dissenters were discouraged, sometimes with torture and death. It is no wonder that for the vast bulk of human history, no one questioned it."
- Carl Sagan
In December 2021 and December 2022, ground-breaking legislation on UAP was passed into law in the United States by President Biden, with full bi-partisan support.
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 (NDAA FY22) defined the term ‘‘unidentified aerial phenomena’’ as “(a) airborne objects that are not immediately identifiable; (b) transmedium objects or devices; and (c) submerged objects or devices that are not immediately identifiable and that display behavior or performance characteristics suggesting that the objects or devices may be related to the objects or devices described in subparagraph (a) or (b).”
The legislation also defined the term ‘‘transmedium objects or devices’’ as “objects or devices that are observed to transition between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water, that are not immediately identifiable.”
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 (NDAA FY23) redefined the term UAP as “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (where it was previously unidentified aerial phenomena) and the exact definition of UAP was retained from its definition in the NDAA FY22.
This UAP legislation established a permanent and fully-funded UAP office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, (AARO). AARO’s mission is to:
“Minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of unidentified anomalous phenomena in the vicinity of national security areas.”
The NDAA FY23 required AARO to review all of the US government’s UAP archives going back to 1945, and to produce a report detailing “(i) any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress; (ii) successful or unsuccessful efforts to identify and track unidentified anomalous phenomena; and (iii) any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.”
The NDAA FY23 also created a secure method for current or former government employees or contractors to report to AARO “any activity or program by a department or agency of the Federal Government or a contractor of such a department or agency relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, including with respect to material retrieval, material analysis, reverse engineering, research and development, detection and tracking, developmental or operational testing, and security protections and enforcement.”
The legislation enabled those bringing information forward to testify to the Congressional Armed Services and Intelligence Committees without risking imprisonment for breaking their non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The legislation also included an anti-reprisal clause.
In May 2022, the US held its first Congressional hearing on UAP in more than 50 years. In attendance were Ronald S. Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, and Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence.
During the hearing, Bray confirmed that US allies have seen UAP, and the Chinese government has its own UAP study programme.
In June 2022, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, confirmed that Russian officials were also conducting UAP studies. Rogozin said he did not rule out the extra-terrestrial hypothesis.
During the May 2022 Congressional hearing, Bray was asked if some UAP were part of a classified US programme. Bray said he was “quite confident that was not the explanation” and “we’re not aware of any adversary that can move an object without discernible means of propulsion.”
It is acknowledged by many governments, including the government of the United States, that there is a link between UAP sightings and nuclear weapons.
UAP researcher Robert Hastings wrote a comprehensive book on the topic, UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites after interviewing more than 150 military veterans.
During the Congressional UAP hearing, Moultrie and Bray were unable to acknowledge a prominent UAP incident that affected the Echo-Flight and Oscar-Flight nuclear weapon launch facilities at Malstrom Air Force Base, Montana, on the morning of March 16, 1967.
Ten Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at Echo-Flight and between six to eight Minuteman II ICBMs at Oscar-Flight were observed to have been switched to a “No-Go” status within several seconds.
Security patrols and maintenance crews had reported seeing UAP that morning. One UAP was observed to be hovering above the E-Flight silos.
A glowing red orb was observed by the Flight Security Controller to be hovering above the O-Flight gate. Air Force Captain Robert Salas (Ret.) was the Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander at O-Flight during the Malstrom UAP incident.
Salas is one of several military witnesses who publicly testified at a citizen UAP hearing in September 2010, live streamed by CNN and held at the Washington National Press Club. Salas also testified on the Malstrom UAP incident at a citizen UAP hearing in the United States in October 2021, and at a Brazilian government UAP hearing in June 2022.
After the Congressional UAP hearing in May 2022, British astronaut Colonel Tim Peak spoke on British national television. Peake said:
“I don’t think it’s a development of any state nation, or non-state organisation at all. I think when you see the video footage, it’s quite remarkable…it does seem extraordinary as to what these machines are capable of. There is no explanation for it.”
Peak is not the first astronaut to speak on this topic. NASA Astronaut and former United States Air Force pilot, Gordon Cooper, saw several UAP during his career piloting aircraft.
He said his first UAP sighting occurred in 1951. Cooper has publicly stated that he believes UAP are of extra-terrestrial origin. NASA astronaut Dr. Edgar Dean Mitchell was a former US Navy pilot and the sixth person to walk on the Moon.
Mitchell has publicly stated that he believes the US government has recovered crashed extra-terrestrial craft and bodies, and kept this information secret from the public.
In 1989, NASA Mission Specialist Bob Oechsler secretly recorded a telephone conversation he had with Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the former Director of Naval Intelligence, former Director of the NSA, former Director of the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, former Deputy Director of the CIA, and former Vice Director of the DIA.
In this conversation, Inman admitted the existence of a secret US programme to retrieve crashed UAP.
In a 2022 interview, Admiral Inman was re-played this 1989 telephone conversation with Bob Oeschler and he responded with a denial of the existence of a UAP crash retrieval programme, saying, “there were absolutely no, no retrieved UFOs. I have high confidence that was not the case.”
* * *
"Two or three millennia ago, there was no shame in holding that the Universe was made for us. It was a thesis consistent with what we thought we knew. But we have learned much in the interim. Holding such a position today amounts to wilful neglect of the evidence, and a shameful resistance to self-knowledge."
- Carl Sagan
In 2007, Dr. Richard B. Stothers, Astronomer and Planetary Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, published an article, Unidentified Flying Objects in Classical Antiquity in the Classical Journal, analysing ancient reports of UAP.
Stothers found a “small residue of puzzling reports” that “fall neatly into the same categories as modern UFO reports, suggesting that the UFO phenomenon, whatever it may be due to, has not changed much over two millennia.”
In June 2022, NASA launched its own UAP study programme to examine “observations of events that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.”
In May 2023, NASA held its first ever public meeting on UAP.
At this meeting, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Director of AARO, revealed that metallic spheres, moving without any signs of propulsion or flight control surfaces, were being seen in the Middle East.
He showed a declassified video of one such a sphere, recorded by an MQ-9 Reaper (a highly sophisticated military drone). Kirkpatrick said this is just “a typical example of the thing we see most of; we see these all over the world” and they make “very interesting apparent manoeuvres.”
At the NASA meeting, Kirkpatrick also confirmed that he had recently met with the Five Eyes to discuss UAP data collection and collaboration.
In April 2022, Luis Elizondo, former Director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP, a previous US government UAP study programme) confirmed that Japan has signed a bilateral agreement to share information on UAP with the US government.
In May 2022, Larry Maguire, Canadian Member of Parliament said:
“We must strive to declassify information in a responsible way to co-ordinate and collaborate with our allies when appropriate.
All efforts should be done in an open and transparent manner.”
In June 2022, it was confirmed that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission would reach out to its US counterpart, to share information regarding UAP and nuclear facilities.
Natural Resources Canada also confirmed it had reached out to the US Department of Energy, regarding the ODNI’s preliminary assessment on UAP. In November 2005, Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defence, gave a speech where he became the first cabinet-level minister of a G7 nation to allege the existence of extra-terrestrials.
In his speech at the University of Toronto, Hellyer said he had talked to members of the military community and now believed UAP were extra-terrestrial craft, the US government had secretly recovered such craft, and was engaged in a secret programme to reverse-engineer them.
In February 2023, John F. Kirby, the US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, said the White House was establishing its own UAP study group.
Kirby said President Biden had tasked National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to lead “an interagency team to study the broader policy implications for detection, analysis, and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks.”
The group included Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. Kirby said the group was tasked with engaging “their relevant counterparts to share information and to try to gain their perspectives as well.”
At a White House Press Briefing on July 17, 2023, Kirby said “some of these phenomena, we know, have already had an impact on our training ranges for – you know, when pilots are out trying to do training in the air and they see these things, they’re not sure what they are, and it can have an impact on their ability to perfect their skills.”
At a White House Press Briefing on July 26, 2023, Kirby also said:
“If the President didn’t believe that the sightings by pilots were serious enough to be – to be considered, he wouldn’t have wanted the Pentagon to stand up an office to – to look at this, to analyze the data, to collect reports, and provide a system by which we can collate the information and better figure out what we’ve got here.”
In July 2023, the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability held a public hearing on UAP. At this hearing, David Grusch, former National Reconnaissance Officer Representative for the UAP Task Force (a previous US government UAP study programme) testified under oath.
Grusch testified:
“I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering programme to which I was denied access to those additional read-on’s. I made the decision based on the data I collected, to report this information to my superiors and multiple Inspectors General, and in effect become a whistleblower.”
He also testified:
“The US Government is operating with secrecy – above Congressional oversight – with regards to UAPs.”
When asked by Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) if the US government was in possession of UAP, Grusch testified:
“Absolutely. Based on interviewing over forty witnesses over four years.”
Grusch was also asked where these UAP are being kept, and he replied:
“I know the exact locations and those locations were provided to the Inspector General and some of which to the intelligence committees. I actually had the people with the first-hand knowledge provide a protected disclosure to the Inspector General.”
Charles McCullough, III Esq., former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (IC IG), and legal representative to David Grusch, was also present at the hearing.
Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) asked if the US government was in possession of “the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft.”
Grusch replied: “biologics came with some of these recoveries” and they were “non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the programme I talked to that are currently still on the programme.”
Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) asked Grusch if there was an “active US government disinformation campaign to deny the existence of unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Grusch replied:
“If you reference my News Nation interview, [and] I talk about a multi-decade campaign to disenfranchise public interest, basically.”
Burchett also asked if Grusch had “any personal knowledge of people who have been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal this extra-terrestrial technology.”
Grusch replied:
“Yes. Personally.”
Burchett also asked which private corporations were directly involved in the UAP retrieval and reverse engineering programme.
Grusch replied:
“The specific corporations I did provide to the committees in specific divisions, and I spent 11 1/2 hours with both intel committees.”
A few days later, Grusch and McCullough were interviewed on the UK’s BBC Radio 4 World Tonight programme. Grusch confirmed that information on UAP “does cross into other countries and other allies to include the Five Eyes alliance.”
Investigative journalist George Knapp, also present at the Congressional UAP hearing, submitted a statement to Congress declaring “Russian leaders commissioned an unprecedented UFO investigation.”
Richard Rumelt, Professor of Business Strategy at UCLA, has not commented publicly on UAP but has written:
“A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.”
Lord Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, and economist Professor Sir John Kay, describe how Rumelt would invite his MBA students to tease out “what is going on here.”
As King and Kay point out in their book Radical Uncertainty (2020):
“The question ‘What is going on here?’ sounds banal, but it is not. In our careers we have seen repeatedly how people immersed in technicalities, engaged in day-to-day preoccupations, have failed to stand back and ask, ‘What is going on here?’ We have often made that mistake ourselves.”
Former US Navy Commanding Officer David Fravor (Ret.) also testified under oath at the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing on UAP in July 2023.
Fravor described a 2004 UAP encounter he had with a “white tic-tac object” with “no sign of visible control surfaces like wings” while he was attached to the USS Nimitz Carrier Group off the coast of California.
Recalling the UAP incident, Fravor said:
“The technology that we faced was far superior than anything that we had, and you could put that anywhere.
If you had one, you captured one, you reverse engineered it, you got it to work, you're talking something that can go into space, go someplace, drop down in a matter of seconds, do whatever it wants and leave, and there's nothing we can do about it. Nothing.”
Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) asked Fravor:
“Many dismiss UAP reports as classified weapons testing by our own government. But in your experience as a pilot does our government typically test advanced weapons systems right next to multimillion-dollar jets without informing our pilots?”
Fravor replied:
“No. We have test ranges for that.”
He also said:
“What concerns me is that there's no oversight from our elected officials on anything associated with our government processing or working on craft, believe it or not, not from this world.”
Ryan Graves, former Navy fighter pilot, and Executive Director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, also testified under oath at the hearing.
Graves stated that military and civilian pilots were frequently encountering UAP. He described some UAP as “a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere.” Graves reported one incident where a UAP “estimated to be 5 to 15 feet in diameter” came between two F-18 Super Hornets and got “within 50 feet of the lead aircraft.”
Graves also said:
“Right now, military witnesses to UAP have limited options for reporting UAP. But more concerning is that commercial aviation sector has not adapted to the lessons that the military has implemented.
The military and Department of Defense has stated that UAP represent a critical aviation safety risk. We have not seen that same language being used in the commercial markets. They're not acknowledging this risk.”
In January 2024, Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) and Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) introduced new bipartisan legislation, the Safe Airspace for Americans Act, for the reporting of UAP in the commercial aviation sector.
US Army Colonel Karl Nell (Ret.) and The Honorable Tim Gallaudet, PhD, Rear Admiral, US Navy (Ret.) have both publicly vouched for the legitimacy of Grusch, and others,’ testimony on UAP.
Writing in Politico in June 2023, Christopher Mellon said:
“Since AARO was established, I have referred four witnesses to them who claim to have knowledge of a secret U.S. government program involving the analysis and exploitation of materials recovered from off-world craft.
Other sources who, rightly or wrongly do not trust AARO’s leadership, have also contacted me with additional details and information about an alleged secret U.S. government reverse engineering program. Some have supplied information to the intelligence community’s inspector general, others directly to staff of the congressional oversight committees.”
In an interview with News Nation in June 2023, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Vice Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said:
“I would put it to people this way. There are one of two things here that are true. Either what [David Grusch] is saying is partially true or entirely true or we have some really smart, educated people with high clearances and very important positions in our government who are crazy and are leading us on a goose chase. One of these two things is true…So either one is a problem, we’ve got to figure this out. We can’t ignore it.”
When asked about Grusch’s allegations of a secret programme to retrieve craft not made by humans, Rubio stated:
“Remember, a lot of these people signed these non-disclosure agreements and they’re fearful of ever commenting because they think it’s punishable by death.
So, we passed a law, that basically said you can come forward and talk to Congress or the UAP Task Force [a previous US government UAP study programme].
So I don’t want to say that anybody’s not telling the truth. I understand that this is something that sounds fantastic and out of the ordinary. I would just say that even if it’s partially true, then somebody’s broken the law.
There’s been some violations because these things have to be disclosed to Congress. I mean, Congress has been paying for it, and probably for a long time.”
When asked about claims that UAP-related information was being withheld from AARO, Rubio said:
“If that is accurate then what you’re basically saying is that within the government of the United States there’s a group of people who believe that they possess something that they don’t need to share with anybody, including elected officials, whom they view as temporary employees of the government.
In essence, some sort of an internal military complex that’s their own government and is accountable to no one. So it would be a huge problem if it’s even partially true.”
Regarding other whistleblowers with first-hand knowledge coming forward to Congress, Rubio told News Nation:
“I will say that there are people that have come forward to share information with our Committee over the last couple of years. I would imagine some of them are potentially some of the same people that perhaps [Grusch] is referring to. I want to be very protective of these people. A lot of these people came to us even before these protections were in the law, for whistleblowers to come forward. And a lot of them come…have first hand claims of certain things.
Some are public figures, you’ve heard from them in the past. Others have not shared publicly. So we’re trying to gather as much of that information as we can…Some of these people still work in the government. And frankly a lot of them are very fearful. Fearful of their jobs, fearful of their clearances, fearful of their career. And some frankly are fearful of harm coming to them. And so I want to be very respectful of that because I don’t want to discourage others from coming forward.”
When asked if he finds the people who claim to have first-hand knowledge credible, Rubio said:
“Well I don’t find them either not credible or credible. Because we have no basis. Understand, some of these claims are things that are beyond the realm of what any of us has ever dealt with.
What I think we all want is just a mature understanding and listening. And trying to put all these pieces together, intake the information without any prejudgement or any conclusions in one direction or another.
I will say I find most of these people at some point, and maybe even currently, have held very high clearances and high positions within our government. So you do ask yourself, what incentive would so many people with that kind of qualifications – these are serious people – have to come forward and make something up?”
In June 2023, Representative Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, stated that the protections enacted by previous UAP legislation had resulted in “all sorts of [UAP whistleblowers] coming out of the woodwork.” He said the whistleblowers were telling members of Congress that they were “part of this or that [UAP] programme” and this had resulted in “a variety of pretty intense conversations.”
In September 2023, author and journalist Michael Shellenberger reported interviewing multiple sources who said:
“At least 30 other whistleblowers working for the federal government or government contractors have given testimony, or a ‘protected disclosure,’ to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General (IC IG), the Defense Department Inspector General (DOD IG), or to Congress over the last several months.”
Shellenberger reported that testimony included:
“Both first-hand and second-hand reports of crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs by US, Russian, and Chinese governments; the testing of materials obtained from retrieved craft; active and ongoing government disinformation operations; kinetic military action with UAPs; contact and collaboration with nonhuman intelligence (NHIs); and the successful reverse-engineering of a triangle-shaped craft with unconventional propulsion.”
There has been a long list, in recent years, of credible people making stunning statements on the UAP topic.
In July 2020, The New York Times published a story about Dr. Eric Davis, an astrophysicist who has worked as a subcontractor and a consultant for a Pentagon UAP study programme.
In the article, Dr. Davis said he gave a classified briefing to a Department of Defense agency as recently as March 2020 about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
In November 2020, General Haim Eshed (Ret.), head of the Israeli Defence Ministry’s Space Directorate for nearly thirty years, published a book The Universe Beyond the Horizon in Hebrew, with parts later published in English by the Jerusalem Post.
Eshed said Israel and the United States had been dealing with an alien organisation known as the “Galactic Federation” for years.
He said there was an “underground base in the depths of Mars” where there were American astronauts and alien representatives. Eshed also said there was an “agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens” and the aliens had “signed a contract with us to do experiments here.”
Eshed also said President Donald Trump was aware of the extraterrestrials’ existence and had been “on the verge of revealing” information but was asked not to, to prevent “mass hysteria.”
In an interview in December 2020, former Director of the CIA John Brennan said UAP “might constitute a different form of life.”
Referring to UAP in an interview in April 2021, former Director of the CIA James Woolsey said he hoped “we can be friendly and able to deal with a wide range of behaviours in terms of dealing with our fellow human beings or with other creatures if they exist.”
Republican Senator Mitt Romney, one of many officials briefed on the classified version of the ODNI’s preliminary assessment on UAP, told CNN in June 2021 that the objects were not from the US, and he did not believe they belonged to any foreign adversary.
“If they were, why that would suggest they have a technology which is in a whole different sphere than anything that we understand,” Romney said.
“And frankly, China and Russia just aren’t there. And neither are we, by the way.”
In an interview in June 2021, Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama, referred to the possible explanations for UAP. Rhodes said:
“That leaves aliens, which we presume it probably is.”
In summer 2021, investigative journalist Ross Coulthart published a book In Plain Sight: An investigation into UFOs and impossible science where the late Nat Kobitz, former Director of Science and Technology Development for the US Navy, went on record with Coulthart to say he was read-in to a secret US government programme to retrieve crashed UAP and reverse-engineer them.
In an interview in January 2022, Jim Semivan, who spent 25 years working in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, was asked if UAP are Chinese or Russian technology. Semivan replied:
“They are other worldly, and everyone in the government knows it.”
Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator and former Senator of Florida, voluntarily brought up the subject of UAP towards the end of an interview at the University of Virginia in October 2021.
Nelson said:
“I’ve talked to those pilots and they know they saw something, and their radars locked onto it, and then all of a sudden it was here on the surface, and then it’s there [pointing upwards]. And they don’t know what it is. And we don’t know what it is.
We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology. But it’s something.
So this is a mission that we’re constantly looking, what, who is out there. Who are we? How did we get here? How did we become as we are? How did we develop? How did we civilise? And are those same conditions out there in a universe that has billions of other suns in billions of other galaxies. It’s so large I can’t conceive it…who am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilised and organised like ours.”
Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, spoke alongside Nelson at an event in Washington National Cathedral in November 2021.
On the topic of UAP, Haines said, “of course also there is always the question of is there something else that we simply do not understand, that might come extra-terrestrially.”
In an interview with GQ magazine in November 2021, Luis Elizondo was asked about UAP crash retrievals and whether the US government had recovered a craft.
Elizondo replied:
“I have been told I have to be very careful how I answer this question. I am not allowed to expound upon anything I’ve already said. What I have said is that it is my opinion, my belief — a strong belief, hint, hint — that the US government is in possession of exotic material associated with UAPs. That is all I’m allowed to say.”
When asked if any presidents have been briefed on the UAP topic, Elizondo said:
“I know, as a matter of fact, three presidents have been briefed at some point, but I’m not going to disclose who they were and what was discussed.”
When asked about UAP in an interview in June 2020, President Donald Trump said:
“I won’t talk to you about what I know about it…but it’s very interesting. But Roswell’s a very interesting place with a lot of people who would like to know what’s going on.”
When asked if he would declassify the information, Trump said he would “have to think about it.”
President Barack Obama was questioned on UAP in an interview in May 2021. Obama said:
“There’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are...We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern.”
In an interview in June 2021, President Bill Clinton said: “There are things flying around out there that we haven’t fully identified yet.”
Luis Elizondo has publicly stated on numerous occasions that some UAP can accelerate at up to 600g and fly at up to 13,000mph.
The fastest unclassified air-breathing craft, the SR-71 Blackbird, can achieve a top speed of around 2,200 mph. The F-35 Fighter Jet is rated for 13.5g of acceleration.
At 13.5g its wings come off. Human beings can withstand up to 9g of acceleration. Some missile frames can handle higher accelerations. Ballistic missile terminal interceptors, for example, have accelerated up to about 100g structurally and have tolerated several tens of g laterally (i.e., while maintaining a trajectory).
Dr. Kevin Knuth, former NASA research scientist and Professor of Physics at the University at Albany, published a paper in the journal Entropy (Knuth et al., 2019) analysing the flight characteristics of UAP.
The paper analysed some of the military encounters included in the ODNI’s June 2021 preliminary assessment on UAP, including encounters involving the USS Nimitz Carrier Group off the coast of California in 2004.
Knuth et al. found:
“Estimated accelerations range from almost 100g to 1000s of gs with no observed air disturbance, no sonic booms, and no evidence of excessive heat commensurate with even the minimal estimated energies.
In accordance with observations, the estimated parameters describing the behavior of these craft are both anomalous and surprising. The extreme estimated flight characteristics reveal that these observations are either fabricated or seriously in error, or that these craft exhibit technology far more advanced than any known craft on Earth.
In many cases, the number and quality of witnesses, the variety of roles they played in the encounters, and the equipment used to track and record the craft favor the latter hypothesis that these are indeed technologically advanced craft.
The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel, i.e., if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks, proper time.”
In May 2023, Dr. Garry Nolan, Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, who has close ties to senior individuals from within the US defence and intelligence community, spoke at a SALT conference in New York.
SALT is a forum that encompasses finance, technology, and public policy. At this conference, Dr. Nolan said he was “100% certain” an advanced non-human intelligence “has been here a long time, and still is here” and that he knows people who have been “working on the reverse engineering programmes of downed craft.”
Dr. Nolan urged the need for transparency on UAP because “the best people are not working on this technology, and we need them.”
In June 2023, Dr. Colm Kelleher, a contractor to the US Department of Defense, who ran the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP, a former US government UAP study programme) said:
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone. Retrievals are not limited to the United States.”
Kelleher also said:
“A vast array of our most sophisticated sensors, including space-based platforms, have been utilized by different agencies, typically in triplicate, to observe and accurately identify the out of this world nature, performance and design of these anomalous machines, which are then determined not to be of earthly origin.”
In October 2023, Dr. James T. Lacatski, a Defense Intelligence Agency Program Manager, published a book, co-authored with Dr. Colm Kelleher and investigative journalist George Knapp.
The book, Inside the US Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations, was reviewed and cleared for public release by the US Department of Defense.
On its cover the book states:
“At the conclusion of a 2011 meeting in the Capitol building with a U.S. Senator and an agency Under Secretary, Lacatski, the only one of this book’s authors present, posed a question. He stated that the United States was in possession of a craft of unknown origin and had successfully gained access to its interior.
This craft had a streamlined configuration suitable for aerodynamic flight but no intakes, exhaust, wings, or control surfaces. In fact, it appeared not to have an engine, fuel tanks, or fuel. Lacatski asked:
What was the purpose of this craft? Was it a life-support craft useful only for atmospheric reentry or what? If it was a spacecraft, then how did it operate?
The authors reveal the deep commitment to physics and engineering of the United States Government-contracted UFO researchers as they sought to answer Lacatski’s seminal questions.”
In July 2023, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Senator Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), Senator Todd Young (R-IN), and Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM) introduced the UAP Disclosure Act (UAPDA) as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA FY24).
The UAPDA came as a surprise; it did not come out of a committee and almost certainly had White House approval. It proposed the establishment of a Review Board that would decide when to selectively disclose UAP records to the public.
The UAPDA referred to this as the "Controlled Disclosure Campaign Plan." The UAPDA proposed giving the Review Board the status of a federal agency and the power to hold hearings, subpoena witnesses and documents, and the ability to ask for any material relating to UAP.
The Review Board would consist of nine people, stipulated to include one economist, one social scientist, one historian, and three others with backgrounds, respectively, in national security, foreign service, and science or engineering.
The Review Board would be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Their tenure would last until 2030.
The Review Board would also be given the power to “request the Attorney General to petition any court in the United States or abroad to release any information relevant to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, or non-human intelligence that is held under seal of the court.”
Additionally, it proposed the Secretary of State should “contact any foreign government that may hold material relevant to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, or non-human intelligence and seek disclosure of such material[.]”
What is going on here?
The UAPDA stated several reasons why the legislation was necessary, including:
(i) “because credible evidence and testimony indicates that Federal Government unidentified anomalous phenomena records exist that have not been declassified or subject to mandatory declassification review;”
(ii) “to restore proper oversight over unidentified anomalous phenomena records by elected officials in both the executive and legislative branches of the Federal Government;” and
(iii) “to afford complete and timely access to all knowledge gained by the Federal Government concerning unidentified anomalous phenomena in furtherance of comprehensive open scientific and technological research and development essential to avoiding or mitigating potential technological surprise in furtherance of urgent national security concerns and the public interest.”
The UAPDA defined “non-human intelligence” as “any sentient intelligent non-human lifeform regardless of nature or ultimate origin that may be presumed responsible for unidentified anomalous phenomena.”
It defined unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) as “any object operating or judged capable of operating in outer-space, the atmosphere, ocean surfaces, or undersea lacking prosaic attribution due to performance characteristics and properties not previously known to be achievable based upon commonly accepted physical principles.”
The UAPDA described UAP as having the following observables:
(i) Instantaneous acceleration absent apparent inertia;
(ii) Hypersonic velocity absent a thermal signature and sonic shockwave;
(iii) Transmedium (such as space-to-ground and air-to-undersea) travel;
(iv) Positive lift contrary to known aerodynamic principles;
(v) Multispectral signature control;
(vi) Physical or invasive biological effects to close observers and the environment.
And including:
(i) flying discs;
(ii) flying saucers;
(iii) unidentified aerial phenomena;
(iv) unidentified flying objects (UFOs); and
(v) unidentified submerged objects (USOs).
The UAPDA defined “legacy program” as any UAP retrieval or study programme originating inside or outside government, including the examination of “biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence.”
It defined “technologies of unknown origin” as "any materials or meta-materials, ejecta, crash debris, mechanisms, machinery, equipment, assemblies or sub-assemblies, engineering models or processes, damaged or intact aerospace vehicles, and damaged or intact ocean-surface and undersea craft associated with unidentified anomalous phenomena or incorporating science and technology that lacks prosaic attribution or known means of human manufacture.”
It gave the US government exercise of “eminent domain” over “any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interest of the public good.”
The UAPDA was passed by the Senate in July 2023 but the majority of its contents were removed or toned down by a House-Senate conference committee in December 2023.
A much shorter amendment on UAP transparency, proposed by Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN), was also dropped by the conference committee.
Burchett blamed the intelligence community for stifling the proposed UAP legislation, and an anonymous source told The New York Times that “the Defense Department [also] had pushed back forcefully on wider measures.”
Earlier in December, Senate Majority Leader Schumer said House Republicans were “attempting to kill” the UAPDA, and a report in The Hill named Representative Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Mike Rogers (R-Ala), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
The Hill noted that the UAPDA “calls for the U.S. government to reassert control over ‘recovered technologies of unknown origin’ currently held by defense contractors” and “[s]ome analysts suspect that corporations potentially holding such exotic technology are exerting undue pressure and influence to oppose the provision in Schumer’s legislation.”
The terms “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” “non-human intelligence” and “technologies of unknown origin” remained in the final version of the NDAA FY24 that was signed into law by President Biden in December 2023, but the UAPDA definitions describing these terms were removed.
The term “legacy program” was dropped altogether.
The nine-person Review Board, the subpoena powers, exercise of eminent domain, and reference to the Controlled Disclosure Campaign Plan were also removed.
The final version of the NDAA FY24 included a much-reduced section on UAP, establishing an Archivist to undertake a government-wide collection of UAP records and to disseminate this information to the public, with oversight assigned to various House and Senate intelligence committees.
Heads of government agencies were given responsibility for determining which UAP records should be postponed from public release. Limitations on the funding of UAP-related programmes were included in the legislation.
Following the watering-down of the UAP Disclosure Act, Senate Majority Leader Schumer and Senator Rounds entered into a colloquy in the Senate.
Schumer said:
“The U.S. Government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people. That is wrong, and, additionally, it breeds mistrust.
We have also been notified by multiple credible sources that information on UAPs has also been withheld from Congress, which, if true, is a violation of the laws requiring full notification to the legislative branch, especially as it relates to the four congressional leaders, Defense Committees, and the Intelligence Committee.”
Schumer added that “it is beyond disappointing that the House refused to work with us on all of the important elements of the UAP Disclosure Act during the NDAA conference.”
Senator Rounds said that one of the “most significant shortcomings” of the watered-down UAP language was the:
“Rejection, first of all, of a government-wide review board composed of expert citizens, Presidentially appointed and Senate confirmed, to control the process of reviewing the records and recommending to the President what records should be released immediately or postponed; and a requirement, as a transparency measure, for the government to retain any recovered UAP material or biological remains that may have been provided to private entities in the past and thereby hidden from Congress and the American people.”
Schumer agreed, saying:
“It is really an outrage that the House didn’t work with us on adopting our proposal for a review board, which, by definition, needs bipartisan consent.
Now it means that declassification of UAP records will be largely up to the same entities that blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades. We will keep working. I want to assure the American people that Senator Rounds and I will keep working to change the status quo.”
Given the official recognition of UAP in federal legislation by the United States Congress, the Sol Foundation was established in August 2023 to undertake “rigorous and cutting-edge inquiry into all aspects of UAP” and consider “the world-changing consequences of UAP for the future of science, technology, economy, politics, law, religion, culture, and all other human institutions and endeavours.”
The Sol Foundation is led by Dr. Garry Nolan and sociocultural anthropologist Dr. Peter Skafish.
Charles McCullough III, the former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, is serving as legal counsel. The Sol Foundation’s inaugural conference took place at Stanford University in November 2023.
The New Paradigm Institute was also established in August 2023, “dedicated to comprehensive investigation and oversight of the UFO phenomenon,” with the aim of developing “a new paradigm that acknowledges the existence of non-human intelligence in our galaxy.”
The New Paradigm Institute aims to “convey this new worldview to our planet’s universities, religious institutions, secular governments, and people worldwide.”
The New Paradigm Institute was founded by Daniel Sheehan, a Harvard College, Harvard Law School and Harvard Divinity School–trained Constitutional Litigation and Appellate Attorney.
At a citizen UAP hearing in Washington in 2013, Sheehan testified that during the course of official duties in January 1977 he saw unquestionable photographs of UAP (including a crashed saucer lying at an angle in the ground with snow around it, with symbols around its dome and surrounded by official US Air Force personnel who were filming it, probably using 1950s filming technology) when he was granted access to a portion of the classified files from Project Blue Book (the US government UAP study programme that ran from 1952 to 1969).
Sheehan also said that access to classified UAP information was denied to President Jimmy Carter by George H. W. Bush, the then-Director of the CIA.
In 1995, Sheehan legally represented Dr. John E. Mack, Professor of Psychiatry and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, after Mack ran into trouble with Harvard University for studying the alien abduction phenomenon.
Mack "suffered professional ostracism, intense public scrutiny, and a secret Harvard inquest that jeopardized his position." (Blumenthal, 2021.)
In an interview in January 2024, Sheehan said he had interviewed, in person, a first-hand credible military witness who told Sheehan that while he was working on Project Blue Book, he witnessed, first hand, that the United States military had been in contact and communication with a live extra-terrestrial being at a US military facility. Sheehan is also the legal representative for Luis Elizondo.
What is going on?
* * *
“The truth is always better than anything else. I think we as a species deserve the truth, no matter what that truth is and is the reason why I’m committed to do what I do. As a former intelligence official, for me I really adhere to the old adage ‘and the truth shall set you free.’ And I do believe the truth – whether it’s good news or bad news – should always be a primary motivation. Especially when you’re dealing with your own people, you’re talking to your own citizens, we have a moral obligation to always tell the truth to ourselves.”
In January 2024, the US Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General released an unclassified summary of a classified report entitled “Evaluation of the DoD’s Actions Regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.”
The Inspector General said:
"The DoD’s first official UAP-focused activities occurred in December 1947, when the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff established PROJECT SIGN to investigate the first recorded observations of unidentified flying objects. From 1947 to 1949, Air Force personnel investigated 243 reported UAP sightings.
In 1952, the U.S. Air Force Director of Intelligence initiated PROJECT BLUE BOOK to investigate unidentified flying objects. Between 1952 and 1969, Air Force personnel investigated over 12,000 reported sightings. The DoD did not officially look at UAP again until mid-2000, when select members of Congress initiated and funded a program to study UAP, called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications program, under the direction of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Since then, the DoD has attempted to establish several programs for coordinating DoD-wide UAP reporting; however, none of the programs were ever fully implemented. In 2020, as a result of increased concerns of flight crew safety, national security, and adversary technology advances, Congress directed the DoD, through the FY 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, to develop, fund, and staff a formal interagency entity to study, collect data, and report on UAP. On July 20, 2022 the DoD established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to be that entity."
In conclusion, the Inspector General said:
“We determined that the DoD has no overarching UAP policy and, as a result, it lacks assurance that national security and flight safety threats to the United States from UAP have been identified and mitigated.”
In an interview in January 2024, Alain Juillet, the former Director of Intelligence at the DGSE (General Directorate for External Security, the French intelligence agency) said:
“The terrible thing about unidentified objects, whether flying or unidentified, is that our armies are incapable of responding to these systems.
In other words, we're faced with something we have no control over. And that's very serious, because it means we can't control them. If they're aggressive, which at the moment they're not, but if they ever get aggressive, we can run like hell, because we don't know how to stop them. So this poses a huge problem for national security in every country.”
Regarding the secrecy, Juillet said:
“I think it's because, since they don't know what it is, they don't want to scare people. Oh yeah, right. It's true that if we told people - we don't know where they're going, we don't know where they're coming from, we don't know where they're going to. Maybe there's something else below us, on land, that is not us. Well, obviously, then people would panic. So we prefer not to say anything.”
Juillet explained that:
“What has been happening for the past 20 years is that our measurement systems, our identification systems and our tracking systems have developed considerably with modern means, and so we have more and more identified and verified cases.
Today, we have more and more cases where we say ‘yes, something indeed happened, and these are the pieces of information we could gather on it.’ So, that poses real problems when a politician asks a general ‘so, facing this, what do you do?’ and the latter says: ‘There’s nothing I can do; I have no way to prevent this.’”
Regarding the topic of UAP crash retrievals, Juillet said:
“So it's obvious that every department in the world is interested in recovering pieces. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, because in these pieces, we'll be able to see the alloys used. Because everyone's asking the question today, it's very likely that one of the means used, the means of moving these machines shows, given their flight trajectories, their behaviour, that they've solved the problem of gravitation.
That much is clear…I think if [the Americans are] doing it, I think the Chinese are doing it, and the Russians must be doing it too, because today, as the Chinese have acknowledged, there's an office in the Chinese services working on this, and the Russians talked about it a few years ago, and said yes, we're working on it too.
So all the major countries in the world, and that's obvious today, because from an industrial and technological point of view, it could perhaps enable us to make some interesting advances and begin to understand how it works. For defence manufacturers, that’s definitely very interesting.”
He also said:
“Now, it's obvious that if we were able to rebuild a UAP today, the country capable of doing so would have a terrible advantage in terms of defence, since it would annihilate all airborne resources. Can you imagine?
So the hundreds of fighter jets that some countries, the big ones, have, fighter bombers, are no longer of any use. It's colossal, if you like. It's a revolution. That's why everyone is obviously watching and trying to understand.”
Regarding the possibility of UAP being detected in space, Juillet said:
“Today, all the great nations, including France, have tracking systems that allow following every satellite, every launch, and we monitor them to the exact hundred meters or the kilometre.
We monitor everything; all the debris and materials floating around us are known. We have extraordinary knowledge of what happens in Space – which also poses a problem, because under these conditions, how is it that we do not detect crafts, UAPs that could pass by there?
Ratcliffe spoke about it a little, but nobody showed images or informed of measures on UAPs that would have been taken in Space. And yet, there must be, necessarily, there are, since we see them on the ground, we see them at high altitudes; there’s no reason we wouldn’t see them in space. That’s yet another problem upon which there’s still much to be said.”
Interestingly, in November 2023, in response to an EU parliamentary question, Commissioner Thierry Breton, on behalf of the European Commission, said that “[g]athering knowledge or documentation about unidentified anomalous phenomena” was not an objective of the EU Space Programme.
Breton also said that The European Defence Agency (EDA) “does not hold any documents that would correspond to the topic of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs)” and “EDA does not have specific protocols on this matter as it falls outside the remit of EDA’s engagement with the Member States.”
Breton did, however, say that “The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and EU civil aviation authorities may receive safety reports on unidentified airborne objects that may endanger civil aviation safety.”
According to files from The National Archives, the UK’s Ministry of Defence closed its “UFO Desk” in 2009 because it served "no defence purpose" and was taking staff away from "more valuable defence-related activities.”
The UAP topic was discussed in the UK’s House of Lords in June 2021, a few days after publication of the US government’s preliminary assessment on UAP. Baroness Goldie, Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence, said:
“We are of course aware of the US assessment. The MoD has no plans to conduct its own report into UAP because, in over 50 years, no such reporting indicated the existence of any military threat to the UK.”
A Freedom of Information request regarding UAP and flight safety was sent to the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority in August 2023:
“Please provide copies of any risk assessments (quantified or unquantified) that the Civil Aviation Authority has carried out to assure itself that the existing measures in place are sufficient to protect pilots and air passengers from any risks associated with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).
Please, further, provide copies of correspondence in relation to the risk from UAPs to and from air safety and regulatory bodies in the United States; and any guidance given to pilots about UAP risks.”
The Head of Safety at the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority replied:
“Following a review of held information it has been determined, on the balance of probability, that the CAA holds no information within scope of the above original enquiry.”
Thus it would appear that the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority is “not permitted to acknowledge the legitimacy of the UAP topic.”
* * *
"All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
In December 2023, Boris Johnson, the former British Prime Minister, said:
“There is no evidence whatsoever that is available to the British government to suggest that alien life forms have ever existed.”
Johnson added:
“I have been through the papers, and I have listened to the best and most brilliant of our agents — and I am here to tell you that they do not have the slightest idea. On this greatest of all questions our intelligence community is totally dumb.”
Perhaps the British intelligence community has not passed on Five Eyes UAP briefings to our elected representatives?
And perhaps the former Prime Minister has not taken the time to read the unclassified information on UAP that is freely available?
There is enough material in this article alone, all of which is unclassified, to prove the seriousness of the UAP topic and the risks it presents to flight safety and national security.
Dear British Government: Please, it is time to wake up.
NOTE: References for this article can be found here.