Tag: UAP

Watch the skies!

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In a quiet Thursday report dump, the Pentagon released declassified intelligence on hundreds more of what it now refers to as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs for short.

The Director of National Intelligence’s report, which is the second since the Department of Defense opened its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) earlier in Joe Biden’s presidency, lists a whopping 366 total new incidents the Pentagon admits to having knowledge of, though a majority of those did have non-extraterrestrial explanations.

In total, as Vice notes in its write-up of the report, 163 of the UAP sightings on radar seemed to be balloons of some sort, 26 were probably drones, and six others were categorized as miscellaneous clutter, defined by the Pentagon as “birds, weather events, or airborne debris like plastic bags.”

That leaves 171 unexplained events out of the 366 new UAP reports that remain “uncharacterized and unattributed.”…”Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities,” the report continues, “and require further analysis.”

And a complete unwillingness to perform that further analysis, attribution, a touch of science.

An Explanation for UFOs Spotted Above Ukraine

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In September, Ukrainian astronomers published a report detailing what they thought were unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAPs, flying above the war-torn region. Now, alien-hunting Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has weighed in on the science out of Kyiv with a paper posted online on Wednesday…

Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project at Harvard University, a program that uses scientific rigor to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life and technology, and former chair of the school’s astronomy department…

Loeb told Motherboard…the authors of the initial paper out of Kyiv had contacted him with their work but that he hadn’t looked at it. The skies above Kyiv, Loeb said, are the last place people should be looking for UAPs right now.

“In science, we’re trying to minimize the noise so that we can pick up the signal and therefore Ukraine would be the last palace on earth where I would search for unidentified aerial phenomena… The noise level is so high,” he said.

Ukraine is at war, and during a war there’s lots of stuff flying through the sky. Drones, aircraft, and artillery shells, and satellites would conflict with any observations made of the sky.

Lots of useful information in MOTHERBOARD’S article. Interesting stuff. Some crap debunked…and how and where more research is needed.

NASA’s UFO talking points

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According to newly-released internal documents, NASA is keen on emphasizing its ongoing and impressive work searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life—but less keen on examining evidence brought to it by concerned citizens like the one who wanted NASA scientists to examine “a fascinating UFO UAP Alien cooking pot” the citizen proposed was evidence of alien life or interdimensional travel.

The documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act and posted by the transparency site Government Attic, contain all emails mentioning the term “unidentified aerial phenomena” sent to or from one of NASA’s top flacks between May and November of this year, a period surrounding the release of a highly-publicized government report on unidentified flying objects. They are heavily redacted, citing a deliberative-process privilege that allows the government to shield sensitive material from the public, but in internal communications, NASA administrators or scientists appear to be unaware of any evidence that UAPs have origins in the stars, and mostly concerned with crafting talking points emphasizing NASA’s impressive and ongoing work searching for evidence of life beyond our planet…

The questions and answers in the document, like much of the rest of it, are cloaked behind a veil of secrecy, leaving the question of whether NASA will ever be able to take advantage of public obsession with UFOs as frustratingly unclear as the answer to the question of what exactly UFOs are.

But, as always, worth a look!

Pentagon’s “UFO Report”

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Military officials say they have no real idea what’s going on, and need lots of money to find out. And, BTW, they couldn’t figure out what they were looking at 143 times out of 144 reports!

The Pentagon’s long-awaited report on UFOs details 143 sightings of aerial objects that cannot be explained. Titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” the report is a product of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). It’s nine pages long and while its findings are “largely inconclusive,” the report states that a small number of cases where UFOs “appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management” can’t be explained without “scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them.”…

This report didn’t come to many conclusions, but it did pose a few possible ideas. “UAP probably lacks a single explanation,” the report said. “Our analysis of the data supports the construct that if and when individual UAP incidents are resolved they will fall into one of five potential explanatory categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.”

Crap report masquerading as a less-than-crap report.

New rules for UFO sightings start [of course] by calling them something else

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The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with “unidentified aircraft,” a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.

The previously unreported move is in response to a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities…

To be clear, the Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied — rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction…

Luis Elizondo, the former Pentagon official who ran the so-called AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program] office, complained after he retired from government service that the Pentagon’s approach to these unidentified aircraft has been far too blasé.

“If you are in a busy airport and see something you are supposed to say something,” Elizondo said. “With our own military members it is kind of the opposite: ‘If you do see something, don’t say something.'”

Tales of American Military bureaucracy still seem to echo the worst of history’s examples. You’d think that with a budget guaranteed larger than any other significant combination of nations a bit of confidence might temper the character of our own Colonel Blimps. Or Admiral Blimps.