Washington / Berlin – When the special working group of a US secret service announces the publication of an investigation report, it causes quite a stir, at least in the American media. The world is looking forward to the report of the UAP Task Force of the US Naval Intelligence Service (ONI), which is due to be published this week. Because UAP stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenal – unidentified aerial phenomena. It used to be said to be UFO, but the term is frowned upon by those military personnel and scientists who seriously deal with flying objects whose propulsion and flight movements are inexplicable with human physics knowledge. When and where such mysterious UAPs were sighted in the past, the task force of the Navy secret service is now supposed to reveal.

Selected congressmen were informed of the content of the report in a secret briefing last Friday. Afterwards, some of them expressed their “deep concern” to the US media over the results of the official investigation. The Republican MP Tim Burchett, for example, told the online medium TMZ that he was sure that the flying objects did not come from another military power on earth, such as Russia or China. “Obviously something is going on that we cannot handle. It has to be something that is from outside our galaxy, ”said Burchett.

Democratic MP Sean Patrick Maloney told the New York Post that there is “a proliferation of technology out there that needs to be better understood.” His colleague Val Demmings said she was concerned about national security. Democrat Mike Quigley was a little less excited. It could be that the public is rather disappointed with the report because it does not provide any evidence of extraterrestrial existence, he said. Nevertheless, he spoke out in favor of finally taking the inexplicable phenomena seriously and removing the stigmatization of UFO researchers.

The US television program “60 Minutes” provided some examples last month , in which several US Air Force pilots described their observations. For example, two former officers told how they discovered a strange object near them during an exercise and went into pursuit. The “thing” was about the size of a fighter plane, but had no markings and no wings, the eyewitnesses reported. The object then suddenly accelerated so quickly that it seemed to disappear before reappearing seconds later at a distance of almost 100 kilometers.

The US secret services have been dealing with unknown objects in flight for a long time

On the same broadcast, ex-Navy soldier Ryan Graves said that pilots have been seeing UFOs over the Atlantic “every day for several years.” “If it were another country’s tactical jets, that would be a big issue,” he said. However, because the objects are different, nobody wants to face the problem. “We ignore the fact that they’re out there watching us every day,” Graves said.

However, these phenomena are not completely ignored by the US military, even if they are officially reluctant to talk about them. In fact, the subject of unknown flying objects has preoccupied the US Department of Defense and its military intelligence services for decades.

There have been several government research projects on UFOs since 1948, they were called Project Sign, Project Grudge and finally Blue Book, which ended in 1969. Most recently, two more recent projects that have been based at the Pentagon since 2008 became known: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP, in German: Program for the identification of advanced aerospace threats), which was officially discontinued in 2012, but in fact continued.

UAPTF

F-18 fighter pilots film UAP, an unidentifiable aerial phenomenon.

An unsettling number of celestial phenomena

It was a success in the UAP Task Force set up last year, which is now due to present its report to members of the House of Representatives and the Senate by June 25 at the latest. The report will then be published, albeit without the classified appendix, which should contain further details about the US military objects affected and their technology.

There is a plausible reason why the US Department of Defense is providing financial resources – albeit limited – for UFO research. Every time there is a report of suspicious flight movements, the Pentagon assumes that there could be a hostile force behind it that is testing new and hitherto completely unknown military systems.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, investigations then also reveal natural explanations for the supposedly observed phenomena, such as pilots’ perceptual errors or mirages. In the end, however, there is still a worrying number of celestial phenomena – often recorded with the latest radar technology – that cannot be scientifically explained. These are the UAPs that the task force is supposed to describe in its announced report.

So can we expect spectacular revelations from this report? “Definitely for the general public,” says specialist journalist Robert Fleischer. “We will surely learn from this that in the past few years objects in flight have repeatedly been sighted with properties that cannot be explained. And that these objects often seem to show an increased interest in sensitive military facilities that are important for national security. In fact, in the past there have been repeated sightings of such aircraft in war and crisis areas such as the Persian Gulf, but also in the vicinity of nuclear facilities, nuclear-powered or equipped warships and military objects, as well as areas contaminated with nuclear or chemical agents. “

AFP / handout

The Pentagon released a video still on April 28, 2020 showing a UAP.

Serious references to UAPs were downplayed

The 42-year-old butcher sits in the office of his Exopolitics Germany association in Leipzig-Connewitz and is already looking with great interest to June 25, when the UAP report is published in the USA. Not at all because he expects a lot of new information or even processes unknown to him from this report. For years the journalist has been evaluating approved government and military files from various countries, speaking to UFO researchers and scientists from all over the world and collecting statements from eyewitnesses.

He has just founded the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research together with scientists from 27 countries . The experts, including recognized physicists and astronomers, want to combine and analyze all the information already available from approved documents. Fleischer is also in close contact with the former head of the AATIP program at the Pentagon, Luis Elizondo. “I know the time pressure under which this report was produced, and therefore I do not expect that the report will contain a lot of new things for those familiar with the subject,” he says.

Fleischer, on the other hand, is much more interested in what consequences the UAP report will have for the public handling of the UFO issue. Also in Germany. “In this country, the media have for decades made the subject lower case and ridiculed,” he says. “Even when videos were released by the US military last year that contained serious references to UAPs, it was downplayed. And anyone who was interested in it and reported on it was dismissed as a weirdo. “

In addition, the revelations of the EAP report could lead to a crisis of confidence in politics. “There are now countless approved military files from the 1950s to the 1990s that clearly show that Americans have always had these phenomena on their radar and have never lost interest in them,” he says. “If now, after decades of denial, they reveal what they have been hiding from the public, then some will ask themselves: What is the government still keeping secret from us?” Therefore, it is exciting to see how the Americans have theirs Will formulate a report .

Barack Obama: “We really have to find out what this is”

Some high-ranking politicians and military officials have raised expectations of the report in recent months. Former US President Barack Obama said on the “Late Late Show” on CBS: “It is true that there are recordings of objects in the sky that we do not know exactly what they are.” The trajectories and movements of the mysterious Objects cannot be explained exactly, they are faster and more maneuverable than anything that exists in the US military. “We really have to find out what that is,” said Obama .

John Ratcliffe, director of the national intelligence services towards the end of the Trump administration, also confirmed in a TV interview that there were many more sightings than previously publicly known. Many of these observations are not only documented with eyewitness reports, but there is also data from sensors. These objects were recorded by satellites, for example. They would have made movements that could only be explained by the fact that they have a technology “that we do not have”.

Christopher Mellon, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under US Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, agreed with Ratcliffe. “What the Pentagon confirms is that there are indeed planes that have violated restricted airspace,” Mellon said on the aforementioned TV show “60 Minutes”. “This has happened and continues to happen and we don’t know where they come from, we don’t understand the technology.”

Avi Loeb, Professor of Astrophysics at Harvard University and Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, emphasized the importance of the UAP report to Deutsche Welle : “The new report differs from discussions about UFOs or UAPs in the past because they are based on evidence recorded by military personnel using instruments such as radar, infrared cameras and regular cameras. “The information in the report would most likely suggest” the possible existence of objects that are on behave in a way that our technologies cannot explain ”.

Luis Elizondo, who headed the AATIP project, also sees it this way. He told the Washington Post that we are dealing with technology “several generations ahead of what we consider to be the next generation technology.” What was filmed there is between 50 and 1000 years ahead of us.

The fact that the political view of the UAP phenomenon in the USA has changed in recent years is related to a spectacular revelation in 2017. At that time, the media reported that on November 14, 2004 there should have been a UFO incident with the aircraft carrier “USS Nimitz”. The aircraft carrier, which was cruising off the American west coast at the time, had tested a new type of radar system. Suddenly several unknown objects in flight were visible, which were buzzing around the ship. There are secret documents and a video about the incident , as confirmed by the Pentagon in 2019.

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Another unidentifiable aerial phenomenon.