DOD UFO Report Boldly Goes Where No Official Report Has Gone Before
“Since 1972, we’ve looked into roughly 4,500 sightings” reported to the GEP by witnesses, Peiniger told DW. “There are only around 5% that we couldn’t find any comprehensible explanation for.”
The rest, Peiniger says, are often helium balloons of the kind you see on fairs, insects in-flight that can appear like a flying saucer in photos, weather phenomena or satellites. As for the other 5%: “Maybe they’re natural phenomena that we simply cannot explain yet.”
Why Is the Report Coming Now?
It’s no coincidence that Congress members will get more info on UAPs this month. A detailed report from the UAP Task Force was a requirement in the $2.3 billion (€1.8 billion) spending package that Congress passed in December 2020. Within six months, the legislation stipulated, the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would have to present “detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence.”
Democrats and Republicans requesting a report about unidentified flying objects, a topic that until not too long ago was the purview of sci-fi movie fans, conspiracy theorists and alien enthusiasts, shows that the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence is a lot less absurd to high-level US officials now than it used to be.
The move came at the end of a year with several significant UAP developments. In April 2020, the DOD officially released three videos taken by Navy pilots that had been leaked years earlier. The recordings showed objects whizzing across the sky in a way that was strange enough to attract the pilots’ attention.
The DOD confirmed the videos’ authenticity years after UFO enthusiasts had already analyzed every last second of the footage online “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos,” according to a Pentagon press release. “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified.’”
No Commonalities among Reported UFOs
Less than four months later, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force was formed - and now its researchers will present their findings to Congress. Harvard professor Loeb, who earlier this year published the book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” says the Navy re-releasing old videos is not enough, and that officials should actively look for evidence now.
“Instead of declassifying documents that reflect … old technologies used by witnesses with no scientific expertise, it would be far better to deploy state-of-the-art recording devices… at the sites where the reports came from, and search for unusual signals,” Loeb wrote in his email to DW.
Peiniger says after the many cases he’s researched, he is highly skeptical that any UAP sightings are alien spacecraft.
“If there really was extraterrestrial intelligence that came to visit us, there should’ve been some things their UFOs had in common,” he pointed out — the alleged spacecrafts’ shape or flight patterns for example. “But we didn’t find anything like that in the cases we looked into.”
“I don’t want to rule it out completely,” Peiniger said, “but I am assuming that we are not currently being visited by extra-terrestrials.”
Carla Bleiker is a reporter for DW.This article is published courtesy of Deutsche Welle (DW).
