“There are no aliens here on Earth, and so the government cannot ‘disclose’ what it does not have. There is not going to be any “big reveal,” says Robert Sheaffer, a leading skeptical investigator of UFOs. Given sufficient evidence (which, arguably, many of the recent reports fail to provide), UFO sightings can essentially always be tied to terrestrial or celestial phenomena, such as lights from human-made vehicles and reentering space junk, he adds. A sober examination of these claims reveals that there is a lot less to them than first meets the eye,” Fraknoi says. “Recently, there has been a flurry of misleading publicity about UFOs. No “Big Reveal”Īndrew Fraknoi, an astronomer at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco, echoes the widely held sentiment among scientists that, for decades, the media has lavished too much attention on sensational claims that vague lights in the sky are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Lastly, according to the New York Times article, the final report includes a “classified annex” of information deemed unsuitable for public release-leaving more than enough room for die-hard UFO advocates to remain convinced that the U.S. The report’s firmest conclusion, it seems, is that the vast majority of UAP happenings and their surprising maneuvers are not caused by any U.S. Citing anonymous senior officials familiar with the report’s contents, the story said that the assessment has come up short of explaining what UAP are and that it provides no evidence to link them with any putative alien visitation-despite reviewing more than 120 incidents from the past 20 years. itself as part of some supersecret domestic program meant to detect flaws in the nation’s defenses? The mind boggles.Īlthough the task force’s unclassified assessment is not expected until June 25, the New York Times provided a cursory preview of its contents in an article on June 3. Might we be on the verge of a formal disclosure-backed by irrefutable evidence-that humankind is not alone and is indeed being monitored by extraterrestrial civilizations? Or could it be that UAP are entirely homegrown products of revolutionary and clandestine technological advances, whether by other countries now challenging American airspace or by the U.S. Those deeply entrenched public beliefs, paired with the apparent reinvigoration of investigative interest in these incidents at the highest levels of government, can lead to dazzling speculations. Through it all, a sizable contingent of true believers have steadily proclaimed, “We told you so,” insistent in their conviction that, whether called UFOs or UAP, the entities seemingly slipping through our skies are actually alien spacecraft-and have been visiting Earth for a very long time. Meanwhile all this strangeness has garnered considerable media attention, from front-page stories in the New York Times to 13,000-word articles in the New Yorker, as well as prominent coverage on 60 Minutes and other prime-time television programs. This includes examinations of incursions that are initially reported as UAP when the observer cannot immediately identify what he or she is observing.” Assessing the “Alien” Hypothesis The Department of Defense and the military departments take any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace very seriously and examine each report.

Upon establishing the task force, the DOD released an accompanying statement explaining the justifications for its existence: “The safety of our personnel and the security of our operations are of paramount concern. Produced under the auspices of a Pentagon group called the UAP Task Force, an unclassified version of the report is expected to be released later this month. government knows about so-called unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP (an alternate term with considerably less stigma than the much maligned “UFOs”). Beginning in 2017, videos and eyewitness accounts of these weird sightings found their way into public view, ultimately spurring Congress to demand that the Pentagon produce a report summarizing all that the U.S. Navy-of ships and fighter jets tangling with, or being tailgated by, unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Department of Defense has been quietly cataloging and investigating scores of bizarre encounters-most from the U.S.

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