Traditionally, government programs dedicated to studying UFOs remained in the realm of science fiction and conspiracy theories – but no more. The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), voted to require the Defense Department to release a detailed, unclassified report on UFOs – now referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The bill, titled Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, is a tacit acknowledgment of the seriousness with which our government is taking this issue. The days of hiding in the shadows, it seems, have come to an end.
The establishment of this intelligence-based UAP task force (UAPTF) lends credibility to what has typically been a subject derided as the addled obsession of “tin foil hat-wearers.” The news was welcomed by many, including the To the Stars Academy (TTSA), which was formed in 2017 as a collaboration between academia, pop culture, and industry to advance the understanding of these scientific anomalies and their technological implications.
In April of 2020, when the Pentagon officially released three classified videos of navy pilots tracking inexplicable aerial phenomena, it was after the wide circulation of these astonishing videos for some years. The amazement with which the pilots regarded the UAPs they encountered in the now-famous videos was due to the fact that these unidentified craft defied our understanding of many of the fundamental laws of physics, including the ability of one craft to rotate 180% while in flight. As Nick Pope – former head of the Ministry of Defense UFO project in the United Kingdom – explained in a 2018 exclusive interview with Liberty Nation’s own Mark Angelides, the revelations have helped to “push this subject of UFOs out of the fringe and into the mainstream.” No longer would media coverage of this subject be limited to tongue in cheek eye rolling and “jocular references to little green men and flying saucers.”
When these videos initially went viral, they were covered with some seriousness for the first time by establishment media, including The New York Times, FOX News, and CNN. What was revealed was that despite the government’s insistence that it had abandoned interest in the subject after closing down Project Blue Book in 1969, it had not. In 2007, at the urging of his billionaire friend Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace, Senator Harry Reid established the opaquely named AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program). For five years – and with a budget of 22 million dollars – this operation examined the UFO phenomenon.
And Harry Reid wasn’t the only political figure to lend credence to the subject. When she was running for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton pledged to “get to the bottom” of the UFO phenomenon and vowed to send a task force into Area 51. Her campaign manager John Podesta called for the release of all UFO files, insisting “the American people can handle the truth.”
In 2014, President Bill Clinton engaged in a light-hearted discussion with talk show host Jimmy Kimmel on UFOs, saying, “if we were visited one day, I wouldn’t be surprised.” President Jimmy Carter claimed he had a close encounter of the first kind when he witnessed a UFO in 1969. And President Trump recently stated he’s heard “very interesting” things about the Roswell incident in which an alien spacecraft was alleged to have crashed in the deserts of New Mexico. There is likely no connection, but Trump announced his plan to establish a sixth branch of the military called Space Force back in 2018 in advance of his Roswell statement.
All of this makes the establishment of this latest task force and the petition of the Pentagon to release its files by the Senate Intelligence Committee more of a logical next step than an eyebrow-raising initiative from left field. If what those navy pilots encountered is technology that may have been innovated by another country, it will need to be fully explored and explained as it constitutes a potential threat to our national security. Failing that, other less earth-bound possibilities must also be considered.
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