No Aliens, Pentagon Office Says, But Hundreds Of New UFO Sightings

Politics & Government No Aliens, Pentagon Office Says, But Hundreds Of New UFO Sightings A large chunk of the 510 reports of unidentified aerial phenomena could not be explained, according to a newly unclassified report. Reply
Pentagon officials said Thursday that 510 reports of unidentified flying objects, many flying in sensitive military airspace, have been taken in the United States, 366 of them in the past year. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
WASHINGTON, DC — Spoiler alert: In its first required report to Congress, a new Pentagon office charged with investigating unidentified aerial phenomena said it took hundreds of new reports of UFOs in 2022, but found no evidence of extraterrestrial life.
But the report ended with a teaser: “Additional information is provided in the classified version of this report.” About half of the reports taken by the new All-Domain Anomaly Office and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence couldn’t be explained and remain shrouded in mystery, according to the unclassified version of its 2022 report released Thursday.
The report said the sightings “continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity.” Some 510 reports have been taken in the United States, including 144 previously reported and 366 new. The majority exhibit “unremarkable characteristics.”
The Pentagon has finally acknowledged the existence of UAP — the acronym for unidentified aerial phenomena used by the military — and is charged by Congress with investigating and explaining to the public what they’ve been seeing in the skies. The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, formed last summer after Congress held its first public hearing on UFOs in half a century, has so far received 366 reports of aircraft flying at mysterious speeds and trajectories to its database.
The Pentagon agencies are focusing on 171 cases in which objects “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis.” One of the most compelling accounts of UAP encounters came from U.S. Navy fighter pilot Alex Dietrich, who spoke about it publicly for the first time in an interview with “60 Minutes” in 2021, and David Fravor, a graduate of the Top Gun naval flight school and commander of the F/A-18F squadron on the USS Nimitz.
On Nov. 14, 2004, Fravor was conducting a training mission off the coast of California when he saw an oblong, Tic Tac-shaped aircraft flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed and mimicking his F/A-18F’s moves. Calling it “otherworldly,” he said in the “60 Minutes” interview that he wanted to get closer to the craft as it continued to gain altitude, “and when it gets right in front of me, it just disappears.” “So your mind tries to make sense of it,” Dietrich said. “I’m gonna categorize this as maybe a helicopter or maybe a drone. And when it disappeared. I mean, it was just ….” The steep rise in UAP reports likely stems from the government’s efforts to “destigmatize the topic of UAP and instead recognize the potential risks,” according to the report. Of the 366 new reports, 163 were balloons “or ballon-like entities,” according to the report. Another 26 were attributed to drones, which the report noted are gaining popularity among civilians. A half dozen were attributed to “clutter,” which includes plastic bags, birds and weather phenomena.
Ronald Moultrie, the under-secretary of defense for intelligence and security, and Sean Kirkpatrick of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office were asked at a news briefing in December if their investigation had turned up any visitors from another galaxy. “At this time, the answer’s no, we have nothing,” Moultrie said. “We have not seen anything that would — but we’re certainly very early on — that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin, if you will,” he continued. “If we find something like that, we will look at it and analyze it and take the appropriate actions.” The All-Domain Anomaly Office is tasked with studying any unidentified objects moving underwater, in the air, or in space, or something that moves between those domains, which could pose a new threat. UFO hunting has been a popular pursuit in the United States since the mid-20th century, when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report in 1947 of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour “like saucers skipping on water.”