A new push by the Pentagon to investigate reports of UFOs has so far yielded no evidence to suggest aliens have visited or crash landed on Earth, senior military leaders said Friday. However, the Pentagon’s efforts to investigate anomalous, unidentified objects — whether they’re in space, in the sky or even underwater — have led to hundreds of new reports that are now being investigated, they say. But they have yet to see anything that suggests intelligent alien life. “To this day, I have not seen anything in these collections to indicate that there was an alien visit, an alien crash or anything like that,” said Ronald Moultrie, under secretary of defense for intelligence and security.
Possibility of extraterrestrial life
Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s newly created All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), did not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial life and said he was taking a scientific approach to the research. “I would just say that we’re structuring our analysis to be very thorough and rigorous. We’re going to go through it,” Kirkpatrick said at the first news conference since AARO was formed in July.
“And as a physicist, I have to stick to the scientific method, and I’ll follow that data and science wherever it goes.” AARO’s mission focuses on unexplained activity around military installations, restricted airspace, and “other areas of interest” and is aimed at helping identify potential threats to the security of U.S. military operations and to national security.
A government report last year documented more than 140 cases of what the U.S. military officially calls “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, seen since 2004. All but one of the reported sightings — a case attributed to a large inflating balloon — remain unexplained, pending further analysis, the report said. For the other 143 cases, the report found there was too little data to conclude whether they represented some exotic airborne system developed either by a US government or commercial entity, or by a foreign power such as China or Russia.
The 2021 report included some of the UAPs revealed in a previously released Pentagon video of the mystery objects exhibiting speed and maneuverability beyond known aircraft technology and lacking any visible means of propulsion or flight control surfaces. Kirkpatrick said several hundred more cases have been documented since then. The exact number will soon be released, but a senior Navy official said in May that the total number of reported cases had already reached 400.
Congress took aim at the Pentagon’s new push in its annual defense policy bill passed this week. The legislation, which has not yet been signed by President Joe Biden, requires the Pentagon to prepare a report on the US government’s historical records related to UFOs, or unidentified flying objects, dating back to 1945. “It’s going to be quite a research project,” Kirkpatrick said, acknowledging that Congress has sought to ensure that AARO examines all records — even those so top secret that few people know about them.
The Air Force conducted a previous investigation called Project Blue Book, completed in 1969, which compiled a list of 12,618 sightings, 701 of which involved objects that remained officially “unidentified”. In 1994, the Air Force said it had completed a study to find records related to the 1947 “Roswell Incident” in New Mexico. She said materials found near Roswell were consistent with a crashed balloon, the military’s long-standing explanation, and that there were no records indicating that alien bodies or alien materials had been recovered.
