UFOsDOD UFO Report Boldly Goes Where No Official Report Has Gone Before
If you have an interest in UFOs (unidentified flying objects, for the uninitiated) and have always wondered what exactly the US government and intelligence services know about them, June may be a big month for you, as a DOD task force will share data it collected on unusual flight phenomena with Congress. UFO enthusiasts rejoice, but some experts with decades of research under his belt doesn’t believe aliens have ever been to Earth.
If you have an interest in UFOs (unidentified flying objects, for the uninitiated) and have always wondered what exactly the US government and intelligence services know about them, June may be a big month for you. The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) Task Force, a group within the US Department of Defense (DOD), is set to present an unclassified report to Congress this month about what knowledge Pentagon officials have gathered on UAPs and how they are dealing with the data they have managed to collect.
UAPs is the term military officials and researchers who don’t want to be associated with the expression UFO use when talking about objects in the sky that fly without any visible form of propulsion, in patterns that defy our knowledge of physics. So yes: The US Department of Defense will tell US Representatives and Senators what they have learned about unidentified flying objects in US airspace.
And the public is going to hear all about it (though there could be a delay between the presentation in Congress and the release of the full report to the general public). No hushed conversations on secret military sites, which conspiracy theorists are sure have been going on since a UFO purportedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947, but a straightforward report.
‘Documented Evidence Collected by the Military’
Avi Loeb, professor of science at Harvard University and Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told DW what makes this such a momentous occasion.
“This new report is different from past discussions on Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in that it involved documented evidence collected by military personnel based on detection by multiple instruments (radar, infrared cameras, optical cameras),” Loeb wrote in an email.
The information presented in the report is likely to indicate “the possible existence of objects which behave in ways that cannot be explained by the technologies we possess.”
95% of cases have a worldly explanation
A Gallup poll from 2019 showed that one third of US-American adults believed that at least in some cases, UFO sightings involved actual alien spaceships. Hans-Werner Peiniger became interested in UFOs at 15 and has researched them for almost 50 years now. The head of the Society for Research into the UFO Phenomenon (GEP) in Germany says that the overwhelming majority of sightings, however, have natural or man-made explanations.
