On a variety of legislative fronts, the U.S. Government is being mandated to reveal its knowledge of UFOs to the public. UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects, is any aerial phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. It is possible that a UFO could be some type of extraterrestrial spacecraft, and it is for that reason why many want the government to come clean on what it knows.
In April of last year, the U.S. Defense Department de-classified three UFO videos shot by U.S. Navy pilots. After determining that the footage didn’t “reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems” and “does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena,” the Department of Defense released the videos which were taken in 2004 and 2015.
Since then, there’s been a growing push for the U.S. government to shed secrecy on similar incidents.
In July 2020, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force at the Pentagon agreed to share at least some of its work to the Senate Intelligence Committee every six months. Eric Davis, a former official with the Pentagon UFO program, told the New York Times that while he worked there, the team found objects he believed “we couldn’t make ourselves.” In that same report, Davis said he provided a classified briefing to the Defense Department in March before the U.S. Navy video release, elaborating on “off-world vehicles not made on this Earth.”
Senator Marco Rubio has been pushing for more clarity and transparency for national security reasons. During the summer, Senator Rubio told reporters, “We have things flying over our military bases and places where we are conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is -and it isn’t ours. Frankly, that if it’s something from outside this planet -that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this activity.”
As part of the $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief and government funding bill President Trump signed into law at the end of December, a provision was included that requires the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies to say what they know about UFOs.
Specifically, the bill’s language “directs the [director of national intelligence], in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of such other agencies … to submit a report within 180 days of the date of enactment of the Act, to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on unidentified aerial phenomena.” The report must address “observed airborne objects that have not been identified” and should include a “detailed analysis of unidentified phenomena data collected by: a. geospatial intelligence; b. signals intelligence; c. human intelligence; and d. measurement and signals intelligence.”
Based on that timeline, that report is due in 5 months. But even before then, the U.S. Government started releasing thousands of files.
John Greenwald Jr., who runs the “Black Vault” website, obtained thousands of documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Greenwald has made those files viewable, amounting to over 2,700 pages of content, on his website.
The Black Vault website has a master index of PDF files available for viewing. In all, there are 342 MB of searchable PDF file conversions.
In addition to what was dumped onto the Black Vault website, the CIA also uploaded dozens of downloadable records about UFO sightings around around the world to its FOIA Reading Room. The files there, ranging with titles like “Flying Saucers in Spain and North Africa” to “UFO at Time of Soviet Satellite Failure”, appear to be from the 1940s to the 1990s.
It remains to be seen what more will be shared in the coming weeks and months ahead of the late May deadline imposed by Trump’s bill.
