Do flying saucers exist? We may be about to find out

An extraordinary document is due to land on Capitol Hill tomorrow, 1 June. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the US Secretary of Defense are required to provide the Intelligence and Armed Services Committee of Congress with an unclassified report on UAPs. UAPs or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, as the US military now call them, are more commonly known to us as UFOs. The topic has moved from the downright wacky to become a mainstream national security issue. That the report is considered serious enough to be published and debated in the US Congress in the midst of a pandemic underlines how far this subject has moved from the lunatic fringe in just a few years.

Barack Obama dropped a bombshell during an interview last week when he admitted that there is “footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory”. He was however, merely stating what the Pentagon has already repeatedly confirmed.

This is the latest evolution of a story that has been developing since 2017 when the New York Times first reported that the US Navy took the issue seriously enough to encourage pilots to report UAP sightings. Not only that, but the Pentagon was running a clandestine investigation into the phenomena called AATIP, or the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

Obama’s admission is simply the latest in a series of significant events surrounding UAPs this year, including the verification by the Pentagon of videos and photos leaked onto the internet. Earlier in the year John Ratcliffe, the former director of National Intelligence, was asked about the upcoming June report. His response described phenomena that appear all over the world and in much greater numbers than have ever been reported to the public. What has changed is that US military technology is now so accurate that these phenomena are being recorded on multiple sensors simultaneously, rather than depending on individual human sightings. In other words, the extraordinary events that military pilots report can now be verified by comparison with other data. Ratcliffe and others have described phenomena which far exceed the comprehension of current technology in the US inventory.

Social media are ablaze with the furious activity of the UFO community, who are anxiously awaiting what they call “disclosure” – the US Government admitting that 70 years of popular rumour about extra-terrestrial visitation are true. So, will this be the Summer of Saucers and how seriously should the rest of us be taking this?

Martin Heinrich, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has commented: “Any time you have legitimate pilots describing something that doesn’t seem to conform to the laws of physics that govern aviation and is in US airspace I think it is something that we need to get to the bottom of. If there was a foreign government that had these kinds of capabilities I think we would see other indications of advanced technology. I can’t imagine that what has been described or shown in some of the videos belongs to any government that I’m aware of…I have no idea what it is but I think we should figure it out.”

Marco Rubio, when Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested that in defence terms if the alternative explanation — that Russia or China had made a technological breakthrough of such magnitude — proved correct, the implications were potentially far worse for the US than aliens arriving.

Indeed, the possibility remains that what might be revealed in the report is the biggest intelligence failure in US history. If China, Russia or any other country had managed to achieve the capabilities observed, almost unimaginable acceleration, the ability to disappear at will and to withstand G-forces that no known technology can produce, then America’s security has been fatally compromised. Whatever the UAPs represent, they are operating with impunity in US airspace and elsewhere, thereby compromising the security of nuclear facilities and America’s most advanced carrier groups.

What is certain is that no human could be on board the UAPs and withstand the G-forces. That doesn’t mean the explanation is necessarily extra-terrestrial. A more terrestrial explanation, in keeping with developments in military technology, is that the swarms of UAPs are some form of drone. We certainly know that both Russia and China have kept pace with the US in the development of advanced aerospace technology in the form of hypersonic missiles. Potentially they could have achieved some sort of breakthrough in technological development. Alternatively, some credible analysts have suggested the very worrying possibility that these UAP phenomena are perhaps explained by Russia or China using civilian aircraft as launch platforms for advanced drones able to conduct reconnaissance with impunity.

There are serious question marks about this explanation. Firstly, why is the US Intelligence Community discussing its potential failures in such a public arena? Secondly, why would Russia or China risk the potential escalation in violating US airspace? There are no straightforward answers to either question.

Nonetheless to add credence to the intelligence failure explanation, the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, in effect a form of oversight, has launched an evaluation “to determine the extent to which the DoD has taken actions regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”. This suggests that the Department of Defense’s response to UAPs is being investigated for being wholly insufficient, potentially a national security scandal.

It is unclear whether the report will settle this debate. We have been here before. Throughout the 1960s the US Air Force ran Project Blue Book, an attempt to systematically study UFOs. Although Blue Book has become synonymous with the UFO issue being subject to ridicule, its actual findings were that some phenomena remained unexplained. It is entirely possible, indeed likely that everyone will be dissatisfied with the upcoming report’s outcome. It seems improbable that “disclosure” is imminent, rather that the report will confirm what we already know. It is incontestable that some aerial phenomena remain unexplained. The great difference between then and now is that technology has recorded these phenomena and there has been a sudden and marked shift in attitude within the mainstream scientific community towards UAPs. Once the topic was regarded as career destroying. Now many are prepared to publicly acknowledge that UAPs are worthy of their professional scrutiny.

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