The US intelligence community released its report on June 25, 2021 about what it knows about a series of mysterious flying objects that have been seen moving through restricted military airspace over the past several decades, marking one of the first times the US government has publicly acknowledged that these strange aerial sightings by Navy pilots and others worth checking out. In practice, the report was released after years of internal discord in Washington, including bureaucratic battles within the Pentagon and pressure from certain members of Congress for such a report. The report examined 144 observations of what the US government calls an “unidentified air phenomenon” from March 2004 to March 2021. The report failed to provide any explanation except for one view.
The intelligence report says that the Defense Ministry task force specified this period due to a number of factors, most notably that it was possible to obtain reliable data from multiple military sensors, and the procedures for reporting unknown flying objects, and collecting and analyzing data about them, are carried out according to standardized procedures and agreed upon between branches of the US military and the Federal Aviation Administration.
On the other hand, during that period, government employees, especially pilots, were encouraged to report the activity of any confrontations with unidentified objects, in contrast to what prevailed during previous periods, when the majority of military and civilian pilots in particular preferred not to report them, in order not to be accused of uttering superstitions or delusions, and this can affect their future career.
Before clarifying these possible explanations, a very important point must first be made, which is that this is not the first time that a US federal agency has been tasked with looking into this matter. In 1966, the US Air Force faced growing public pressure to provide an explanation for UFOs.
At the time, the Air Force funded a two-year scientific study of UFOs. The study was commissioned by the University of Colorado, headed by prominent physicist Edward Condon. Its results were published in 1969.
Condon concluded that there was no evidence of any UFOs using advanced modern technology. He gave multiple explanations, including, for example, that they are rare natural phenomena, and he also emphasized that he recommended not to do more extensive studies of unidentified flying objects until science progresses further. Of course, these explanations did not convince wide popular groups, which remained in their firm belief that such a report aims to cover up Washington’s monitoring of alien space objects.
Possible explanations
Before the report presents its possible explanations for these phenomena, it confirmed at the outset that in 143 observations out of a total of 144, the investigation authorities “lack sufficient information in the database to specifically explain these facts,” meaning that the report could not resolve to any degree the certainty of the nature of these phenomena.
Only one case deviated from this rule, as it was later identified as a large, deflated balloon sliding into the ocean. As for the remaining 143 cases, the report provided multiple explanations, which are as follows:
1 More advanced hostile technology: The report clearly indicated that some of these observations may be linked to technology from other countries such as China or Russia. Such an interpretation worries the United States, as it implies that a foreign adversary, such as Russia or China, may have advanced technological weapons about which the United States has no information.
Although this may seem unlikely to many, in practice it has been done before. The United States has previously admitted that Russia is the first country in the world to introduce hypersonic weapons into its arsenal, and US Deputy Defense Secretary Michael Griffin confirmed in late 2020, that the United States lags behind Russia in the development of hypersonic missiles. Indeed, Griffin asserted, “We do not have systems today that could create a similar danger to Russia and China. If they decided to use their missiles, we would be at a disadvantage because we are in a pursuit race.”
The United States is trying to catch up with Russia, and Lockheed Martin, in partnership with the US Air Force, is trying to develop American hypersonic missiles, especially since this type of missiles makes the air defense systems currently in force in the United States unable to confront these missiles. Despite the plausibility of this interpretation, its rationale is challenged on the grounds that it is not feasible to repeatedly fly advanced aircraft into adversary airspace where they can be easily documented.
2 Secret US technological programs: The report indicated that some of these views may be linked to “secret technological programs belonging to US institutions.” An important factor should not be overlooked, which is that the United States has deliberately concealed the reality of these phenomena for years.
In 2013, the United States recognized the top-secret US military base known as Area 51. It was popularly believed that the US government was hiding extraterrestrials at the base in Nevada, since local residents and visitors to the area reported seeing UFOs flying inside the site.
But in fact, these objects were in fact modern spy planes that the United States has been developing for years. The United States encouraged this belief among the local population, or at least, not correcting it, in order not to allow foreign countries to know that they are developing weapons in this region, and then encourage them to spy on them.
On the other hand, the report did not rule out the possibility that these observations were the result of innovations developed by private technology companies in the United States, but the report indicated that it does not know these parties.
3 Natural weather phenomena: The natural phenomena of the atmosphere include ice crystals, moisture and thermal fluctuations, which can be misread on some infrared and radar systems, meaning that these foreign objects are nothing but a defect in the performance of American sensors and reconnaissance systems, or a result of the jamming opeations against the United States.
It is noted that such errors are common errors. Since the discovery of nuclear weapons, the world has come close to the brink of a devastating nuclear conflict at least 22 times, largely because radars and other sensors have misinterpreted harmless events, such as a swarm of swans, the color of the moon, minor computer problems, or mysterious space weather phenomena.
A false alarm can be triggered by two types of error: Human error and technical error, as both may occur at the same time. In 1980, a technical error nearly caused disaster under President Jimmy Carter, when one of his administration officials received a call at 3:00 am from the US Air Defense Command’s control office informing him that computers had detected 200 guided missiles from the Soviet Union to the United States.
In this case, it turned out that the source of the problem was a faulty chip in the computer that was running the country’s early warning systems, and a year earlier, a technical worker had inadvertently shown a training tape depicting missile strikes that looked like real on the computers of the main warning centers, which almost could have caused an outbreak of military confrontations that include the use of weapons that have the ability to crush entire cities and level them to the ground.
The latest report issued by the US intelligence refers to one case, in which strange radio frequencies were picked up. In April 2019, the Parks Radio Telescope picked up a strange narrow-band radio signal from Earth’s closest star system, Proxima Centauri, later named BLC-1. While some scientists believed that this frequency is only a technical signature of a civilization living on one of the planets revolving around the “closest centaur”, other experts confirmed that this is nothing more than radio interference, since it used the same radio range as the satellites.
4 Airborne chaos: This category includes birds, balloons, unmanned recreational aerial vehicles, or airborne objects, such as plastic bags, that disturb the scene and affect the operator’s ability to identify real targets, such as enemy aircraft.
5 Other explanations: The report finally confirmed that most of the 144 things described, and recorded in US databases, may remain anonymous due to the limited data or the difficulty of analyzing them, as they may need, according to the report, additional scientific knowledge to collect and analyze them. Some of them have been described successfully. The report was satisfied that it would group these unexplained things into its own category pending scientific developments that would allow the United States to better understand them.
Exclusion of the alien extraterrestrials:
The report did not mention within its interpretations the possibility that the UFOs could belong to a civilization or life that exists outside the planet Earth. It is noted that the NASA Space Agency confirmed on its website the day after the issuance of the intelligence services report on these objects, that its mission is to try to explore any reliable evidence of life outside the planet. Although NASA asserted that the function of science is to try to explore the unknown, in the end, it confirmed that no indication of extraterrestrial life had been detected.
On the other hand, what gives credibility to the exclusion of the existence of extraterrestrials that own advanced spacecraft that visit Earth is that other countries, such as Russia and China, which have radar and space-oriented sensors, have not detected similar objects, which means that it may not be an exaggeration to claim that there is no objective indication that extraterrestrials exist on other planets.
By: Dr. Shadi Mohamed
(Military affairs’ researcher)
