Govt to open New “Project Blue book”

UFO Report Inspires New Government Initiative to Study UFOs

Immediately after the release of the new intelligence report on unidentified aerial phenomena, the government called for the formation of something akin to a new Project Blue Book effort, either in the form of a much more robust Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) or a follow-up program. Meanwhile, the mainstream media, no-longer snickering or playing the theme music from X-Files, rushed to publish reaction pieces. “Buckle up. We ultimately could be in for a long and wild ride,” Tim McMillan says to conclude his in-depth analysis on the new UAP Report from the Office of the the Director for National Intelligence.

We didn’t get the Disclosure we might have hoped for last Friday afternoon (June 25, 2021), but what we got is almost just as good. The following article collects and collates media and government reactions from over the weekend.

Making Sense of the Intelligence Report

To the UFO community at large, the long-anticipated report seemed like more government obfuscation, but on closer analysis, there’s really exciting material packed into its awkward syntax and bureaucratic jargon. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear can read between the lines, and they are not disappointed. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon tweeted, “The implications are profound. UFOs, as we have known for a long time, are real, defy conventional explanation, and until more is learned, pose a serious potential threat to U.S. national security.”

To recapitulate, here’s a few things we learned from the report:

• UFO’s have been observed visually and recorded on multiple sensor platforms, indicating they represent objects and not merely illusions or phantasms.
• Some UFOs cannot be explained as misidentifications of normal things or as US or foreign craft.
• Some UFOs display characteristics that defy our understanding and the limits of science
• Some UFOs remains stationary against the wind or fly against it, maneuver abruptly, accelerate at considerable speed, without any discernable means of propulsion.
• Of the 144 reports studied by the task force, 80 of them were observed with multiple sensors.
• Most of the 144 reports have been collected since 2019.

Unless you work in the Intelligence field, a lot of the language contained in the June 25 report titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” sounds cryptic. For example, what does the Department of Defense mean when they say that some of the craft demonstrated “a degree of signature management” or exhibited radio frequency energy. Tim McMillan’s careful analysis unpacks the whole report and explains why it’s saying a lot more than it sounds like to the uninitiated. I encourage you to read The Debrief‘s full “Detailed analysis of the government’s report on unidentified aerial phenomena” here.

Basically, the UAPTF and ODNI say they’ve at least got some data, no matter how inconclusive, that has led them to be unable to say with a degree of confidence that some UAP incidents don’t involve something truly “otherworldly” or entirely unique to current understandings. 

The Debrief

Essentially it comes down to this. The report is merely a preliminary report intended to answer a question posed by the Senate Intelligence Committee: “Is the UAP problem something legitimate that we should be concerned about?”

The report replies to the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Yes. Although there are several potential mundane explanations for the phenomena, a significant number of the cases we looked at seem to defy conventional explanation and even exceed the limits of our current technology and our current scientific understanding. We’d like authorization to study these cases, and future cases like them, more closely.”

The government was quick to capitulate and grant a directive to do so.

The New Project Blue Book

The report got immediate results. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks ordered the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security to develop a plan for further study. The new directive (which you can read here) calls for the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (UAPTF) to establish a synchronized procedure for collecting, reporting, and analyzing all military encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena. The directive implies that the UAPTF may be replaced completely by “it’s follow-on activity,” i.e. a new government UFO analysis program. It’s essentially calling for a new version of the old Air Force programs Project Sign and Project Blue Book, but this time (we hope) a more serious endeavor, fully-funded and staffed, that reaches across multiple departments and military branches.

The new directive calls for timely reporting of UFO encounters from all military branches: “All members of the Department will utilize these processes to ensure that the UAPTF, or its follow-on activity, has reports of UAP observations within two weeks of an occurrence.”

This is a significant step forward. Not only has the government admitted that UFOs are real and that we don’t know what they are, but now we are officially going to launch a serious study of them. This is the first time the US government has publicly called for an investigation into UFOs since Project Blue Book closed in December of 1969. There may have been similar secret programs like AATIP hidden away in the Pentagon or underneath Air Force Intelligence, but this is the first above-board venture since Blue Book. And it’s the first venture calling for cooperation between all branches.

74 Years of UFO History Ignored

As fate would have it, the Preliminary Report was released the day after the anniversary of the first high-profile UFO sighting in the United States, 74 years ago when Kenneth Arnold reported a flee of flying saucers. Ironically, the report ignored almost all of the last 74 years of UFO encounters, concentrating primarily on cases collected since the Navy began to require pilots to report their encounters with the phenomenon. With the obvious exception of the 2004 Nimitz incident, most of the 144 cases the UAPTF examined are new cases acquired since 2019. Until March 2019, Navy UFO encounters were not being systematically reported or collected. Air Force not until Novembers 2020.

This means that our pilots are encountering a lot more UFOs than we have been led to believe. A lot more. It also means that the UAPTF did not even bother trying to assess what data the government might might have already collected in previous efforts.

“These reports describe incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2021, with the majority coming in the last two years as the new reporting mechanism became better known to the military aviation community.”

Preliminary Report

That’s a huge frustration to anyone who has been following the national UFO story or waiting for Disclosure. We’ve had UFOs flying through our airspace, buzzing our military, and checking out our nuclear assets since 1947. By focusing only on the last few years of reports, analysts and politicians lack the historical context to make an informed judgement. But it’s a start.

The Classified Version of the Report

Don’t forget that the truncated nine-page version of the Preliminary Report we saw last Friday is only the unclassified side of the report. The classified version of the report is rumored to be much more robust and to contain video footage. Yes, we’d all love to see those videos, but don’t hold your breath waiting for a leak. The government is holding this material close to the chest. According to the National Review, “The classified report given to appropriate congressional committees (Intelligence and Armed Services) is reportedly ten times longer and contains all manner of goodies, but we may never see those.” One source says that those who have seen it were “gobsmacked” by forty minutes of classified films that looked like “science fiction fantasy.”

Not Saying its Aliens … but it’s Aliens

The report creates five categories of possible explanation for UAP: a secret technology developed by an adversarial power like Russia and China, classified cutting-edge American technology, a naturally occurring phenomenon, airborne clutter such as errant weather balloons and a catchall “other” category. Although the report doesn’t come out and suggest “aliens” directly, it raises the implication by filing eighteen or so of the reports under the category “other.”

The UFOs — whatever they might be — are out there. They almost certainly are not the property of our government or of any of our allies or adversaries. And if you largely eliminate all those sources, we’re running out of candidates quickly.

National Review

More and more voices are speaking openly about the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis as a viable explanation for the “other.” In an interview with PBS NewsHour, Representative Andre Carson says, “This is a technology that we don’t completely understand, and it seems to be defying our understanding of physics. It appears to be more advanced than our own technology.” Former DOD insider Chris Mellon, who has been an activist for Disclosure along with Luis Elizondo, released a widely-circulated blogpost titled “Don’t Dismiss the Alien Hypothesis,” in which he states, “We have no reason to believe that many of these objects are from Russia or China, and in fact it seems improbable. Especially when we consider how long this phenomenon has been observed. Consequently, the “not invented here” hypothesis is the only theory currently consistent with the known facts.”

Former DNI John Ratcliffe calls for a larger discussion to figure out the unknowns. Setting aside the Russia and China question, he maintains, “There are technologies that we don’t have and that, frankly, we aren’t capable of defending ourselves against.”

People are starting to realize the obvious truth that has held the attention of the UFO community for 74 years. If the unknown craft bedevilling our skies are not human in origin, this could be the biggest story of all time–the biggest moment in human history when we finally and definitively realized that we are not alone.

Mainstream Media Response

Here’s a selected catalogue of media reaction to the release of the unclassified section of the report for your reading and viewing pleasure:

• National Review hits the nail on the head with the report “So the UFOs are real. Now what?“
• PBS NewsHour offered an excellent segment titled “We may not know if aliens exist, but UFOs still pose a national security risk.”
• CNN’s is pretty thorough in “US intelligence community releases long-awaited UFO report“. A shorter analysis piece “8 takeaways from the government’s big UFIO report” raises the media giant’s eyebrows.
• A thoughtful piece by Gideon Lewis-Krout of The New Yorker titled “The unexplained phenomena of the U.F.O. Report” observes, “The fact that there are eighteen cases in recent memory that apparently require unspecified “scientific advances” to comprehend seems to suggest that ‘Other’ might not, after all, be a negligible bin.”
• The respectable National Geographic jumped into the ring with an article titled “How the Pentagon learned to start worrying and investigate UFOs.”
• NBC news led with the provocative headline “UFO Report: Government can’t explain 143 of 144 mysterious flying objects, blames limited data.”
• Reuters called the report a watershed moment in “Watershed U.S. UFO report does not rule out extraterrestrial origin.“
• The Washington Post report on the report fell under their “National Security” department with the title “U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but new report finds no evidence of alien life.”
• The Washington Examiner did not pull punches in their good analysis “Decoding the government’s UFO report.”
• The in-depth analysis and explanations found in this article by The Debrief should be mandatory reading for everyone following the story. Read this “Detailed Analysis of the government’s report on unidentified aerial phenomena.”

We’ve been here before. This is not the first time in American history that our government has realized that there are UFOs flying around in our skies, and it’s not the first time we’ve seen our government create task forces to figure out the origin of the mysterious craft. Hopefully, the new directive to create better UFO report collection and analysis will have better results than the Air Force’s self-defeating Project Blue Book did. Time will tell.

Whatever you think of the report, it’s yet another indication that “It’s happening.”

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