Congress awaits UFOs
From Russia with love?
This summer, the Pentagon is required by law to disclose a full report on its UFO investigations. There was some speculation that the report would be released yesterday, but the news wires don’t have it. One can only guess that the analysts are putting the final touches to it or delaying it altogether.
There’s got to be considerable pressure to get this right. After all the UFO hype over the last few months, it would leave a lot of important officials with egg on their faces if the report comes across as a joke.
For a few years now, the government seems to have been preparing the public for something important in this space. I first came across this new open-ness in 2017 when Sen. Harry Reid said that he had worked with two other senators to fund a UFO investigation program. I thought that was interesting given that Mr. Reid is not known to be a crank - after all he had been Senate majority leader and architect of the Obamacare health law. I mentally filed this away at the time as something like “I don’t understand why Harry Reid doesn’t understand this”. I fully expected this to go away, but it didn’t. Instead what followed was a steady drip of statements from genuinely puzzled officials and politicians. The whole thing culminated in a provision in last year’s covid relief act requiring the Pentagon to release an unclassified report on UFO observations within 180 days. That is the report we are awaiting.
A few days before Congress passed that bill, former CIA Director John Brennan appeared on a podcast with Tyler Cowen of George Mason University. Mr. Brennan’s language is painfully bureaucratic, but he managed to say that this could be aliens:
I’ve seen some of those videos from Navy pilots, and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising when you look at them….I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.
John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence1, was serving in the Trump admin at the time, but a couple of months after Trump retreated from the white house, he had this to add:
When we talk about sightings, we’re talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Usually we have multiple sensors that are picking up these things2.
Now that the government had backed this up, a “60 minutes” program on UFOs appeared a few weeks ago. It features actual footage of UFOs taken from military aircraft, US Navy pilots and a few other luminaries such as Sen. Marco Rubio and Mr. Elizondo, the head of the UFO program that Sen. Reid funded. Interesting, to say the least:
Perhaps the coup de grace was really delivered by ex-President Obama. He went on live TV to say that there is “footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are” and “we can't explain how they move, their trajectory”.
Well, now we know that we’re not supposed to find it funny!
It’s nice to think about this in statistical terms: the UFO “signal” has now risen above the “noise”. UFO “noise” comes from all sorts of explainable phenomenon such as weather balloons, auroras, experimental aircraft, faulty instruments, fraud and pure hallucination. There’s a lot of this noise, so you need a lot of data before you can say for sure that you have a signal. I think that’s what has happened here. The military is in a difficult situation because they have collected enough UFO data that appear “clean” and yet have no explanation for it.
But why does the public need to know about it? After all, there must be many intelligence matters that the government does not quite understand and yet keeps secret. The only explanation I can think of is that the government has some reason to believe that these phenomenon may not be entirely benign. They don’t wish to be accused later of hiding something that turns out to be dangerous. Thus, this new open-ness on UFOs is likely a “we told you so” thing.
Why are they worried and why do they think it may not be benign? Perhaps the answer is that an uncomfortable amount of the unexplained UFO activity is near US nuclear assets. In the past this seems to have included nuclear weapons laboratories in the south-west (e.g. Los Alamos, Sandia), and naval bases (San Diego) but lately it is mostly in the open ocean, around nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. There are some more details here (fair warning - that is the History channel website).
What is the best guess on what’s going on? My hot take would be that these UFOs are genuine but they are not alien. Maybe some humans do have aviation technology that the US military’s top brass doesn’t quite comprehend. I don’t see China as a good candidate for this because though their capabilities have improved a lot in recent years, some of these unexplained UFO videos go back a while such as the 2004 USS Nimitz incident. Given China’s high growth rate, you have to discount their technological abilities with a similarly large factor as you go backwards in time. Aside from technology, the China of 2004 was hardly Xi Jinping’s China of today that wishes to go toe-to-toe with the US military.
Assuming this technology is not made-in-USA (which is being strenuously denied) the finger should point to Russia. They are the only country that has shown the capacity to rival or exceed US military aviation after WW2. A good example is an old Soviet fighter jet, the MiG 25 “Foxbat”. This aircraft appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the 1960s. It flew much faster than any American fighter jet at that time and 60 years later still holds the record for the fastest fighter jet. It gave people a good scare until a Soviet foxbat pilot defected to Japan and US technicians got a closer look at it.
Another interesting observation is that most of the recent sightings have taken place in international waters, near US carrier groups. It is hard to see a reason why an advanced star-faring alien civilization should care about human international laws, but Russia certainly would. Open water is international territory and the Russians have every right to fly UFO-like aircraft over there. On the other hand if they were to be caught in an incursion deep into American airspace and over a military base - that could invite serious retaliation.
If it is Russia, then do they have a lot of these UFO craft? I doubt it. Russia is unlikely to have the budget to produce such aviation on an industrial scale, but perhaps they could create a few ingenious prototypes that sow confusion in the US establishment. And maybe that’s the whole point anyway. In favor of this case:
Russian/Soviet geopolitical strategy has always looked to destabilize the US
It would explain the UFO’s interest in US nuclear assets
One could also speculate that Russian fighter jet technology is different from the US and that may have something to do with this. Soviet fighters were always behind the US in electronics (such as radar and sensors) so their engineers tried to make up for that by speed and maneuverability. The idea was that perhaps they could at least outperform US jets in close encounters. The concept is known as supermaneuvrability in aviation circles. Could this heritage explain some of the UFOs ability to zig-zag at high g’s? No doubt the US military has carefully considered all these questions and may even suspect the same thing. We don’t know. Also, they may not want to admit their suspicions publicly given it’s not very flattering to be outdone.
What’s unavoidable is that when we have considered all the plausible alternatives and ruled them out, then whatever remains, however implausible, must be the solution. Among the implausible solutions, I see Russia as the least implausible.
What gives me tiny bit of pause though is that there have been a few statements that defense contractors like Lockheed may have some remnants of actual UFO machinery in possession. Here’s Sen. Reid talking to New York Magazine just a month ago:
I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials,” he said. “And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that. I don’t know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me.” He told me that the Pentagon had not provided a reason. I asked if that was why he’d requested SAP3 status for AATIP4. He said, “Yeah, that’s why I wanted them to take a look at it. But they wouldn’t give me the clearance.”
I haven’t seen too many such reports to be sure and it seems very speculative. But if true, that would be beyond remarkable, astounding even. It is one thing to confuse US fighter jets at supersonic speeds and a whole other thing to confuse laboratory scientists with a captive piece of machinery. That would blow my Russia thesis out of the water, leaving us in alien territory. So I hope that’s not in the UFO report!
Who says we don’t live in interesting times?
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The DNI is not exactly the “head of all intelligence” in the US. In theory he/she is senior to the Director of the CIA but it appears to be one of those “dotted” reporting lines. Some information here.
The emphasis is mine. It does seem important that these observations are multi-sensor and not just pilots seeing things.
I noted, with some curiosity, this briefing the other day: https://physicsworld.com/a/frozen-detonation-could-enable-hypersonic-flight/
The Law of Parsimony says that, if US Naval Research Laboratory has found "discovery of an experimental configuration and flow conditions" enabling greater than Mach 3 atmospheric flight, then other countries' military research programs have also considered, or invented, the same ( as opposed to E.T. visitations ).