UFOs retain their mysterious aura. Most are balloons, planes, drones, or birds, but the recent Pentagon report sent to the US Congress acknowledges many are unassigned and some have “unusual flight characteristics or capabilities.” If you consider that there is also a top-secret intelligence report, the unknowns are still there. At the same time, the official number of sightings has skyrocketed.
The first conclusion of the US Department of Defense report is that there is an increasing number of UFOs, or rather More Unidentified Airborne Phenomena (FANI), as they have been renamed for a broader definition. In official reports in English, the acronym UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) has supplanted UFO (Unidentified Flying Objects), but it remains in the media and the collective imagination.
Officially, the Pentagon has increased its list of unidentified phenomena to 510. In its first preliminary report, dated March 5, 2021, it cataloged 144 reports collected over 17 years. From then until last August, there were 247 consecutive event reports in just 17 months. In addition, an additional 119 previous sightings were added to the total, but were discovered or reported after March 5, 2021.
According to the Pentagon, the increase is “partially due to a better understanding of the potential threats that Fanis may pose, either as flight safety risks or potential adversary collection platforms, and in part to reduced stigma associated with reporting. In the past, many pilots chose not to report sightings for fear they would be seen as insane or unbalanced.
Of those 366 new UFOs and other phenomena, “more than half had unremarkable features,” according to the report. There are 195 cases, which were mainly characterized as balloons (163), drones (26), and other disturbances such as birds, meteorological phenomena, or aircraft debris such as plastic bags (6).
However, there remain 171 sightings whose explanation has not been attributed: “Some of these uncharacterized Fanis appear to have exhibited unusual flight characteristics or performance and require further analysis,” the Pentagon says.
Most of the new sighting reports come from United States Navy and Air Force pilots and operators who have observed the phenomena in the course of their operational duties and reported it through official channels. According to the Pentagon, many reports lack sufficiently detailed data to allow for a high-certainty attribution.
The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022 requires that the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, submit an annual report to Congress on unidentified aerial phenomena.
There is no indication in the Pentagon report (at least in public) of an extraterrestrial or extraterrestrial origin of the phenomena, but there are suspicions of foreign government involvement. “Incidents continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns about flight safety or data collection activities by adversaries,” says the report, which admits that this concentration in strategic spaces is the result of detection bias due to the number of Assets can be aircraft and sensors. Authorities “will continue to investigate any evidence of possible foreign government involvement in unidentified aerial phenomena,” the report added.
In another section, the report points out that these phenomena pose a threat to flight safety and a risk of collision for air resources, but that at the moment there have been no collisions between US aircraft and unidentified flying objects. Regarding health issues, no meeting has been confirmed as having a direct adverse effect on the observer or observers’ health.
Defense Department intelligence officials appeared in Congress last May to explain some of these phenomena. Scott Bray, deputy director of intelligence for the Navy, showed members of the House Intelligence Subcommittee one such video, taken from the cockpit of a jet. Above the blue sky, beside the ship, what appeared to be a shiny metal sphere moved at great speed in an encounter that lasted only a moment.
In parallel to the military efforts and concerns, the US Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA has created an independent multidisciplinary task force of 16 people to study these phenomena in depth. A full report with the results will be published in mid-2023. A disadvantage is that your analysis only focuses on information that is not classified as secret or confidential.
The report now released by the Pentagon leaves a salacious sentence in this regard: “Additional information is offered in the classified version of this report.”
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