Reports about UFOs always make people sit up and take notice in the USA. What does the US government know about this? And what is she hiding from the public? The US Congress followed up on this in a hearing. The statements and revelations leave room for the wildest speculations.
Are we alone in the vastness of space? The American astronomer Seth Shostak is convinced: “In our galaxy alone there could be around 10,000 extraterrestrial civilizations – not to mention other galaxies.”
Seti and the belief in aliens
Since 2001, the astrophysicist – his specialty is the study of extraterrestrial intelligence – has headed the Seti project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Seti is headquartered in Mountain View, a city in Santa Clara County, California.
“In a universe with trillions of galaxies, it would be presumptuous to assume that Earth alone produced intelligent creatures,” writes Shostak on the Seti website.
Why are UFOs suddenly even an issue in the US Congress?
Projects like Seti have so far mainly been something for science fiction fans. But what has happened in the past few days US-Kongress in Washington took place should be grist to the mills of many UFO fans and believers in aliens all over the world. FYI: UFO is the abbreviation for unidentified flying object, Alien is the English word for extraterrestrial.
Two former US Navy pilots, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, and former senior US military intelligence official and whistleblower David Grusch have testified before a US House of Representatives committee on sightings of unidentified flying objects and their Analysis reported by US government agencies.
Who are these UFO witnesses?
The two former F-18 pilots Graves and Fravor reported their own sightings of unidentified flying objects. Many incidents are not reported because pilots are afraid of losing their jobs, they complained in the hearing. Graves himself now directs an organization for reporting UFO sightings by civilian and military pilots.
According to US media, David Grusch had worked for 14 years as an intelligence officer with the US Air Force, among others, and was part of a working group for unidentified unusual phenomena from 2019 to 2021. According to his own statements, he was responsible for the analysis of UFO sightings or other “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)) by US pilots.
What did whistleblower Grusch reveal?
Grusch testified under oath in Congress that he spoke to government officials who had first-hand knowledge of flying objects. “Non-human” remains were recovered from it. Grusch described such objects as a problem for US national security. Because most of his information is confidential, he cannot speak about it in a public meeting, the whistleblower said.
How are US politicians reacting?
Congressmen then spoke out in favor of more transparency from the federal government in Washington on the subject. “I think we’re going to look at what we can do to make more of this information public,” said Republican Representative Glenn Grothman at the conclusion of the hearing.
Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett added, “We will uncover the cover-up and I hope this is just the beginning of many more hearings and that many more people speak out on this issue.”
Such sightings would be taken seriously and investigated, said National Security Council Communications Director John Kirby. “We don’t have the answers for what these phenomena are.”
This is how people imagined contact with extraterrestrials in the 1950s/60s:
“Father sees a UFO”: Drawing by Ray Stanford on the cover of Fate magazine, November 6, 1954. Photo: Imago/Gemini Colle/ction Cover of French magazine Savoir, November 1954, on UFO hysteria. Photo: Imago/Gemini /Collection This is how a French cartoonist imagined the attack by aliens in 1965. Photo: Imago/Gemini / Collection Contemporary posters from Roswell (US state of New Mexico), where a UFO with an alien on board is said to have crashed on July 7, 1947. Photo: Imago/Zuma/Wire
What do experts say about the “revelations”?
Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which is responsible for investigating alleged UFO incidents, criticizes most of Grusch’s statements. A secret salvage program for UFOs? That never existed, contradicts Kirkpatrick. Grusch aroused belief in extraterrestrial life and made headlines around the world. “To be clear, AARO has yet to find credible evidence to support claims of a reverse engineering program of non-human technology,” Kirkpatrick points out.
Since when is the US looking for UFOs?
The fact is: since the late 1940s there have been state research projects on UFOs in the USA – such as Project Sign (1947), Project Grudge (1949) and Project Blue Book (1952-1969).
From 2008 to 2021, the Pentagon maintained two other projects: a program to identify advanced aerospace threats called AATIP, and UAPTF – a task force on unidentified aerial phenomena. These were intended to “standardize” the collection and reporting of unexplained aircraft sightings.
In December 2017, the US Department of Defense confirmed the existence of a program to collect data on military UFO sightings. Accordingly, UAPTF – the abbreviation stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force – is a top secret project of the United States Office of Naval Intelligence, with which the recording and reporting of sightings of unidentified aircraft should be “standardized”.
How many UFO sightings are known?
According to the National UFO Reporting Center (Nuforc) in Davenport (Washington State), a total of 7,267 UFO sightings were reported over the United States in 2020 alone. A year earlier there were 1000 fewer, in 1990 only 319. Most of the reports came from private individuals.
What UFO information has the US disclosed so far?
In January 2023, there was a UFO hearing in Congress for the first time in decades. The reason was that the Pentagon had published secret reports in recent years according to which there were no explanations for dozens of celestial phenomena from the past two decades. However, there was no evidence of secret technology from other countries or extraterrestrial life, it said.
Finally, in June 2023, a group of experts from the US space agency Nasa held a public meeting and advocated more and better data on observations of unusual phenomena. Many observations from the past could not be clarified because there was too little and too bad data, it was reported. The Pentagon had also complained about insufficient data.