They Know They Saw Something

Some people have lost sleep over (or devoted many waking hours) to the subject of UFOs, unidentified flying objects; or as the Pentagon prefers to call them, for some mysterious reason, UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.

Sightings have been reported at least as long ago as January 1926, when a pilot said he saw six “flying manhole covers” between Wichita, Kansas, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. Various agencies of the U.S. government — including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), and the intelligence branches of the Army and the Navy, respectively, not to mention the Air Force — have been studying them in tantalizing secret since around 1947.

At last, on Friday evening, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its long-awaited, unclassified report. Those who had been on tenterhooks for months since the report was announced were hoping that they were on the verge of historic revelations.

They were disappointed. The first sign that this disclosure would not fulfill expectations was its timing. A Friday night in the summer is not exactly peak news time.

And the size. Nine pages. Granted, it was labeled a preliminary report, but after all the buildup, it was a letdown.

Right away, it was obvious that this was not going to compare with the massive government unearthings of yesteryear, such as the Pentagon Papers (3,000 pages of analysis and 4,000 pages of original documents in 47 volumes), or the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (888 pages). Or, for that matter, annual federal budget reports (800 pages in 2021). The bipartisan Senate report, “Examining the U.S. Capitol Attack,” issued on June 8, ran to over 95 pages plus appendices.

Yet, here was the ostensible fruit of inquiry, the U.S. intelligence community’s condensation of decades of eyewitness reports, original video footage and scientific evaluations into fewer pages than the smallest edition of the daily Hamodia.

The central finding was that they don’t know what these things are.

However, the report states confidently 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 U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.”

But this is not to say that the report was of no significance. For the first time the American government has stopped denying the existence of UFO/UAPs. This report confirmed at least 143 unexplained sightings since 2004 alone.

They can’t say what they are, but they admit that they are. Not the imaginings of UFO “enthusiasts” or unclassified wackos, but documented events, things indisputably seen by highly trained, sober, skeptical, military aviators, the kind of fellows upon whom we depend for our national defense.

As NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who spoke with some of the pilots involved in the documented incidents, told the Washington Post, “They know they saw something.”

The intelligence community’s pursuit of answers to the UFO/UAP riddle is by no means a waste of time. Many of the sightings have been in the vicinity of U.S. military installations. If they do belong to a foreign adversary, it’s certainly important to know.

UFO/UAP objects have been seen traveling at incredible speeds in the air and undersea, without any discernible means of propulsion, but displaying a technology, if there is one, that far surpasses anything in the ken of the Pentagon’s experts.

The U.S. military has disavowed any such craft of its own making. That doesn’t mean they aren’t hiding something, but one supposes something like this would have leaked a long time ago.

If they were made in Russia or China, they would pose the greatest threat to national security since Stalin got the A-bomb.

Yet, the report did not rule that out. China and Russia are known to be making strides in hypersonic technology and directed energy, and the task force said it had insufficient information to determine that they had not achieved such capabilities.

Sen. Marco Rubio, who as the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee called the report “an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step.”

“The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern,” Rubio said in a statement.

In other words, the American people are still in the dark about what these objects are all about. It may be additional decades before we know which of those abovementioned five categories these sightings belong to. We may never know.

In the meantime, it isn’t something we need to lose sleep over.