We Have Evidence That UFOs Are Real. What Now?

With a US Intelligence report on the reality of UFOs expected on June 1, it's not a question of "if" anymore. It's "What" and "Who" and "How"?

I've seen people try to explain it away, and what I don't like about when they explain it away, or attempt to explain it away, is that they're trying really hard. They're not going, “Who knows what this f***ing thing is?” They're not looking at it, like, cleanly. They're looking at it like a quote-unquote skeptic. I don't like the idea of being a skeptic. Not that I don't think you should be skeptical of certain things that I certainly think you should be… but there's a lot of people that brand themselves as “skeptics,” and I think it's a lazy way to look at things. I really do. Because I think you're just looking for the holes in things without looking at, objectively, if you wanted to be a scientist, if you wanted to be someone who is a fan of science, then you have to look at it as a thing with… “Look at this information, and let's study this without any bias, any preconceived notions.” I don't think they're doing that. They're looking at it, they're trying to find a way where they can justify that it's fake, and they're just doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to try to make it fake."

- Joe Rogan, Podcast #1361 - Cmdr. David Fravor & Jeremy Corbell

In the summer of 1977, I arrived — in utero — for my first-ever movie theater experience: Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. I would be born just a few months later, and the Star Wars universe, with its archetypal heroes and villains, weird aliens, quirky robots, uniquely-designed space ships, and lived-in feeling would go on to form a vibrant part of the imaginative framework of my childhood. After the first film (where the view was admittedly lousy) I went on to see every single subsequent live action Star Wars movie in the theater. Yes, all 10 of them. Even the lousy ones.

I don’t know how big of a role that cultural phenomenon played in my life as the pop-mythology of the day, but ever since, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of life elsewhere in the universe. It wasn’t just Star Wars, of course. My dad is a nerd, and my mom is nerd-adjacent, and I grew up in a house full of science fiction and comic books, as well as the toys, shows, and movies that went along with them. I’ve always been drawn to the unknown.

To add fuel to the fire, I also grew up in boring, nowhere towns in Connecticut and New York, where there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Looking up at the night sky, painted thick with stars, imagining what else might be out there — and whether I’d ever get to go or if they’d ever show up while I was watching — was an enjoyable mental escape. Twice, I had the good fortune of seeing the Northern Lights, which don’t usually stray that far south.

Space is the greatest source of natural wonder wonder in my life. The seemingly infinite possibility of it. The mysteries and secrets it holds. The implications of a literal ocean of stars, each of them incomprehensibly larger than our own little planet, each with millions of miles of distance in between, many of them with any number of planetary bodies in their orbits that could hold…well, anything.

I want to know what’s out there.

If I’d been better at Math, and was more self-disciplined, I’d probably have tried to be an astronaut. There were people in my family who were closer to that than I’d ever be: My late Uncle Jack, my godfather, whose ship picked up some of the returning space capsules that touched down in the ocean with astronauts aboard while he was in the Navy. My late, Great Uncle Paul, an electrical engineer who followed his own Naval service during World War II working on the communications team at NASA during the Apollo and Gemini missions.

But not me. I was a bookish kid, unusually tall, clumsy, and asthmatic to boot. I was also lazy. I thought the idea of going into the military — usually a prerequisite to any astronaut dreams — would make physical demands I’d never be able to meet. Great with words but terrible with numbers, I also knew I wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want to count on to do orbital calculations in a pinch. So I settled for reading books about Project Blue Book or alien abductions from the local library, lots of novels about space exploration and the alien menace, and indulged in lots of other entertainment about the same.

Although I’ve never stopped going outside at night to stare up at the stars and wonder, my curiosity about what else might be out there faded some over the years. I got out of my small town at 17 to go finish high school in Irving, Texas. Although I did make it to NASA Mission Control in Houston while I was there, I was busy having adventures, traveling, spending time with my girlfriend, and otherwise acting like a teenage boy. College soon followed, then graduation, then a new job, a new girlfriend, the prospect of marriage and the hope for a career somewhere in the ballpark of my talents. Before I knew it, we were surrounded by babies and bills, and the exigencies of family life left my fantasies about galactic civilizations relegated to the books, films, and video games I’d sneak in when I could.

Like Fox Mulder, the quixotic, alien-hunting FBI Agent in the long-running X-Files television series I watched religiously growing up, I wanted to believe. But I had no means of pursuing that interest, and the fact is, the Fermi Paradox is a harsh mistress, and I’ve always been pretty skeptical that there’s anyone else out there.

Recently, though, I’ve been given a reason to reconsider.

Over the past few years, the US Military, under the guidance of the Pentagon, has been declassifying — sometimes remarkably quietly — certain programs and documentary evidence that points to the very real existence of UFOs, operating at a technological advantage we cannot properly assess. They do not claim to identify origins or capabilities, only to point out that something is happening that they can’t explain, and even their best pilots, tracking systems, radar operators, and intelligence assets don’t have answers. On June 1st, 2021, an intelligence report, ordered by President Trump before he left office, is due to be released from the Department of Defense. It is expected to offer even more disclosure on just what the military has in its files.

Former National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe said on national news earlier this year that although they couldn’t get the report produced before he left office, it’s going to be of significant interest:

“Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” he said.

“Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by navy or air force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for.

“Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

[…]

“We always look for a plausible explanation,” he said. “Sometimes we wonder whether our adversaries have technologies that are a little bit farther down the road than we thought or that we realized.

“But there are instances where we don’t have good explanations.

“So in short, things that we are observing that are difficult to explain – and so there’s actually quite a few of those, and I think that that info has been gathered and will be put out in a way the American people can see.”

Asked by Bartiromo where the unidentified phenomena were sighted, Ratcliffe replied, “actually all over the world, there have been sightings all over the world.

“Multiple sensors that are picking up these things. They’re unexplained phenomenon, and there’s actually quite a few more than have been made public.”

I’m going to warn you now — this piece, if you have even the slightest interest in this topic but haven’t been following recent developments, may just suck you in. It’s a rabbit hole that can easily eat up many hours of your time. If you choose to, you can spend many hours watching documentaries, interviews, and declassified military tapes linked in this piece. You’ll realize, after having done so, that you’ve only scratched the surface. The information described below is about more than my own lifelong interest in space and the mysteries it may contain. On a purely pragmatic basis, it points to realities that, whatever their origin, present a real and present national security threat and the promise of disruptive, advanced technology that could change the world.

On an existential level, it has the potential to challenge our worldview forever. And in our collective search for meaning, and a better understanding of the universe we live in, that makes it a thing worth thinking about.

2017: Pentagon UFO Program (AATIP) Revealed

On December 16, 2017, a history-making report was published in the New York Times: Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.

I remember reading it the day it came out. I was on my phone in our family van while waiting for my wife to emerge from a store, the kids babbling away chaotically in the back. Usually, the noise and my own impatience might have made it hard to focus, but from the moment I started reading, I was hooked.

The article was fascinating, but even more important was the video it led with. The recording, which has since been declassified and made available to the public by the Department of Defense, was taken from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet flying from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Florida in 2015. Known as the “Gimbal” video, the footage is taken from the fighter jet’s sensor package as it tracks an unknown aerial vehicle in both infrared and standard black and white video. The pilot commentary makes clear that they are excited; they have no idea what they’re looking at or how it’s rotating as it moves, and are astonished by its capabilities:

A second video, known as “Go fast,” was also taken in the same timeframe from the Roosevelt, and was edited together with the “Gimbal” video in the Times piece to form a continuous, one-minute-and-eight-second clip. The following video comprises the second half of that clip:

A third video, taken from a Hornet fighter launched from the USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, California, was also included in the Times piece. It does not capture pilot audio, but shows similar sensor package footage, taken in 2004 — over a decade prior to the Roosevelt footage:

The Times article, written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, focuses on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, better known as AATIP — a secret Defense Department program tasked with investigating UFO reports:

It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena.

This is amazing. I thought. They’re actually going to admit that this is happening.

In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.

But then came the predictable return to denials:

“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an email, referring to the Department of Defense.

But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.

“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

That was 2017. It was a big deal, and an unprecedented disclosure — the videos alone are staggering — but it felt like a dead end. Elizondo, the Times reported, resigned in October of that year. According to the Times, he re-focused his efforts on public advocacy for more disclosure about UFOs — or Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAPs), as government insiders call them. He was joined in his efforts by, among others, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon.

And then, almost as suddenly as it first appeared, the story seemed to go away.

Bob Lazar - Rogue Physicist

In 2018, a documentary filmmaker named Jeremy Corbell released Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers. It never so much as crossed my radar. Here’s the trailer:

The following year, podcaster Joe Rogan — whose show at the time was receiving over 190 million downloads per month — had Corbell and Lazar on to discuss the film, which is available to stream on Netflix. And just like that, Bob Lazar rocketed to public notoriety.

The documentary tells the story of Lazar, a physicist who claims to have been hired in the 1980s to work on studying technology taken from recovered UFOs at a secret facility in Nevada near Area 51 known as “S-4.” When he felt concerned that he knew too much, and was potentially in danger, he went public with his story on the local news in 1989:

In the interest of space, I won’t try to summarize Lazar’s whole story, which is at times bizarre but always fascinating. To my surprise, I found it extremely compelling. Lazar makes some incredible claims — chiefly, that the United States government is in the possession of extra terrestrial technology that defies physics as we know it, which they have been trying for many years, unsuccessfully, to reverse-engineer — but he never for a moment struck me as an attention seeker or a liar. He came across as competent, confident, and frankly annoyed that he was still having to tell the same story 30 years later. He claims that he has never made any money from sharing what happened, and has in fact suffered personal and professional repercussions for it — including but not limited to an apparent attempt to make his work and educational records disappear, and an FBI-led inter-agency raid on his business during the filming of the documentary, allegedly to seek a sample of an extraterrestrial fuel source Lazar is said to have secreted away before his tenure investigating such things came to an end. (The nature of that raid, it should be noted, is shrouded in obscurity and contradictions. It’s all par for the course in this arena.)

Corbell’s editorial style is a bit heavy handed, and the narration from actor Mickey Rourke is at times distracting, but at the end of the day, unlike other UFO documentaries I’ve watched, it didn’t leave me with a sense that I was being sold a bunch of snake oil. Instead, it was one of the most interesting and believable exposés I’ve ever seen on the topic. Many of the things Lazar has been saying publicly for years about secret programs, technology, or locations have since been proven, adding real weight to his claims.

Perhaps even more compelling than the documentary was Lazar’s appearance on Joe Rogan to discuss it. It was there, fighting through a stress-induced migraine brought on by his reluctant appearance, that his “normal guy” status stood out even more profoundly. And by normal guy, I mean super-smart but not-at-all-crazy physicist normal:

Commander David Fravor & The USS Nimitz Incident

Another Rogan podcast on the UFO/UAP topic, which I only finally made the time to watch this week, is his interview with Commander David Fravor. Fravor is a retired US Navy Pilot and Top Gun naval flight school graduate with over 4,000 hours of flight time over the better part of two decades. And in 2004, as commanding officer of the VFA-41 Black Aces, he was one of the first pilots assigned to the USS Nimitz to encounter the “Tic Tac” UFO off the coast of California.

The short version, if you don’t have time for the full podcast (although I highly recommend it), was told by Fravor to the Washington Post two days after the Times broke the story on AATIP:

The encounter Fravor described was analyzed by the recent Defense Department program, he said, but its most significant questions — the nature of the object and what it was doing — have also remained unanswered.

Fravor says he is certain about one thing: “It was a real object, it exists and I saw it,” he said in a phone interview on Monday, as he described the sighting, on Nov. 14, 2004.

Asked what he believes it was, 13 years later, he was unequivocal.

“Something not from the Earth,” he said.

Fravor was the commanding officer of the VFA-41 Black Aces, a U.S. Navy strike fighter squadron of F/A-18 Hornet fighter planes doing an exercise some 60 to 100 miles off the coast between San Diego and Ensenada, Mexico, in advance of a deployment to the Persian Gulf for the Iraq War, he said.

An order came in for him to suspend the exercise and do some “real-world tasking,” about 60 miles west of their location, Fravor said. He said he was told by the command that there were some unidentified flying objects descending from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet and disappearing; he said officials told him they had been tracking a couple dozen of these objects for a few weeks.

When they arrived closer to the point, they saw the object, flying around a patch of white water in the ocean below.

“A white Tic Tac, about the same size as a Hornet, 40 feet long with no wings,” Fravor described. “Just hanging close to the water.”

The object created no rotor wash — the visible air turbulence left by the blades of a helicopter — he said, and began to mirror the pilots as they pursued it, before it vanished.

“As I get closer, as my nose is starting to pull back up, it accelerates and it’s gone,” he said. “Faster than I’d ever seen anything in my life. We turn around, say let’s go see what’s in the water and there’s nothing. Just blue water.”

Fravor’s plane headed back to USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, but a separate crew that had taken off toward the object began to search for it, tracking it for about a minute and a half and shooting a video, Fravor said.

But Navy superiors didn’t seem that interested in the event, so those like Fravor who had seen it, took a ribbing and got Men In Black jokes from their colleagues, and didn’t talk about it much afterward, Fravor said.

Until recently, that is.

After the Times story came out, followed by his interview with the Washington Post, Fravor has told his story a number of times. Most recently, he told it to Bill Whitaker of 60 minutes this past Sunday, along with Lieutenant Alex Dietrich, who was piloting the second plane at his wing during the encounter. She has never before spoken publicly about the sighting:

Alex Dietrich: I never wanted to be on national TV, no offense. 

Bill Whitaker: So why are you doing this? 

Alex Dietrich: Because I was in a government aircraft, because I was on the clock. And so I feel a responsibility to s-- to share what I can. And it is unclassified.  

Speaking about the experience of seeing the UAP moving randomly above the water, mirror the movement of the approaching fighter jet, then accelerate away so quickly it effectively disappeared only to appear at their destination coordinates 60 miles away just seconds later, Dietrich says it was difficult to process:

Alex Dietrich: So your mind tries to make sense of it. I'm gonna categorize this as maybe a helicopter or maybe a drone. And when it disappeared. I mean it was just… 

Bill Whitaker: Did your back-seaters see this too? 

Alex Dietrich: Yeah.

Dave Fravor: Oh yeah. There was four of us in the airplanes literally watching this thing for roughly about five minutes. 

Seconds later, the Princeton reacquired the target. 60 miles away. Another crew managed to briefly lock onto it with a targeting camera before it zipped off again. 

Alex Dietrich: You know, I think that over beers, we've sort of said, "Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything," because it sounds so crazy when I say it. 

Lt. Commander Chad Underwood was the pilot who took the video of the “tic tac” on a separate flight to investigate the incident, after Fravor returned from his encounter. In 2019, he spoke to New York Magazine’s The Intelligencer about the experience:

The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving. And what I mean by “erratic” is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets. It was just behaving in ways that aren’t physically normal. That’s what caught my eye. Because, aircraft, whether they’re manned or unmanned, still have to obey the laws of physics. They have to have some source of lift, some source of propulsion. The Tic Tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, a hundred feet in like seconds, which is not possible.

And it was doing that during your engagement too? 

Yes. That was the thing that was the most interesting to me: how erratic this thing was. If it was obeying physics like a normal object that you would encounter in the sky — an aircraft, or a cruise missile, or some sort of special project that the government didn’t tell you about — that would have made more sense to me. The part that drew our attention was how it wasn’t behaving within the normal laws of physics. You’re up there flying, like, “Okay. It’s not behaving in a manner that’s predictable or is normal by how flying objects physically move.”

Both Fravor and Underwood say they were never officially debriefed on the encounter, which struck them as odd. Similarly, nobody ever told them not to talk about it. Underwood says that about 20 minutes after he got back to the ship, he spoke to someone he assumes was from North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), but it was very limited:

I described it exactly as I just told you. I didn’t get debriefed. The interesting thing was, normally, if you see something out in the middle of the ocean that’s a test project, we would get debriefed on it, one-on-one, in a dark room. Whether it’s from the folks at Edwards test site or something like that. “Hey, yes, we were testing a project. This is what you saw.” Without going into great detail, it will be like, “Yes. This is project ‘Umptysquat’” and, basically, “This is what you saw. Don’t talk about it.” That never happened, which leads me to think that it was not a government project.

Luis Elizondo Returns to the Public Eye

Also appearing on 60 minutes last Sunday was Luis Elizondo, AATIP’s former chief:

Bill Whitaker: So what you are telling me is that UFOs, unidentified flying objects, are real?

Luis Elizondo: Bill, I think we're beyond that already. The government has already stated for the record that they're real. I'm not telling you that. The United States government is telling you that. 

[…]

Bill Whitaker: You know how this sounds? It sounds nutty, wacky. 

Lue Elizondo: Look, Bill, I'm not, I'm not telling you that, that it doesn't sound wacky. What I'm telling you, it's real. The question is, what is it? What are its intentions? What are its capabilities? 

[…]

Bill Whitaker: So what do you say to the skeptics? It's refracted light. Weather balloons. A rocket being launched. Venus.

Lue Elizondo: In some cases there are simple explanations for what people are witnessing. But there are some that, that are not. We're not just simply jumping to a conclusion that's saying, "Oh, that's a UAP out there." We're going through our due diligence. Is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that China has developed? Is it some sort of high-altitude balloon that's conducting reconnaissance? Ultimately when you have exhausted all those what ifs and you're still left with the fact that this is in our airspace and it's real, that's when it becomes compelling, and that's when it becomes problematic. 

Elizondo, at least in his public appearances, seems less concerned about where the UFOs come from, and more concerned about their military capabilities. In an interview with the NY Post that was picked up on Tucker Carlson last month, Elizondo tried to pull the focus away from how fantastical the idea of real UFOs seems to the general public and place it on something far more pragmatic: the threat they pose to national security.

“The last time we had an intelligence failure in this country,” Elizondo says, “a major one, which was 9/11, it took us almost three years to come up with the 9/11 commission report. It…takes a long time.”

He continues:

Elizondo: Let’s just go down the rabbit hole here for a second, and let’s just assume this is some sort of adversarial foreign technology that, several decades now has managed to leap-frog and evade all 18 members of the intelligence community, despite our best human intelligence, signals, intelligence, imagery, intelligence, yada, yada, yada, yada. That would be an intelligence failure that would eclipse just about anything else this country has ever faced, especially this has occurred for decades, that there is a foreign adversary that can put a nuclear warhead within moments over Washington, D.C.. OK, that's that's a problem.

To which, Tucker Carlson responds:

Carlson: Yeah, that's a problem. And too few have considered it from that perspective. Nick Pope is a former Ministry of Defense official from the U.K. and perfectly positioned to answer the obvious question, which is why didn't we see this coming? He joins us now. Nick, thanks so much for coming on. I thought Lou made a very solid point, and I'm embarrassed. I hadn't thought of it before, which is this is, among other things, whatever these objects are, a potentially very grave threat to nation states, so where was the intelligence community in warning about this and learning more about it? Where were they?

Pope: Well, that has to be answered. Absolutely. I mean, we are under siege. It's like there's a war of nerves going on and it's this war's drones belonging to a foreign adversary. There would be an absolute outcry. And yet the situation we're in that we don't know what these things are and they might even be extraterrestrial, that's worse. So I agree with Luis Elizondo on this. This is a potential catastrophic failure of intelligence. And if it happened because skeptical bureaucrats were just saying to themselves, it can't be, therefore it isn't…

Carlson: then there must be a reckoning. So you say and that is such a great point and nicely put. But you described it as a “siege.” Give our viewers who follow this topic closely a sense of the magnitude of data coming in about these encounters.

Pope: Yeah, I mean, this is absolutely extraordinary. And every day it seems like new information drops things that the public and the media weren't told. So, for example, former director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe just threw into the conversation the other day the fact that the satellite imagery of all this and some of the speeds being reported seemed to blow the theory about foreign drones out of the water. We must be told what's going on here. And we should think of this upcoming report to Congress as an intelligence assessment of the phenomenon itself and one that's long overdue.

The Forthcoming Intelligence Report

Tucked away inside the $2.3 trillion COVID relief bill signed last year as one of the last official acts of outgoing President Trump was a directive ordering a UFO disclosure report from the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence. From Reis Thebault writing for the Washington Post:

The legislation, which President Donald Trump signed into law, was a bureaucratic nesting doll that ran more than 5,500 pages and contained the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which itself carried an unusual provision in its “committee comment” section, beneath the understated heading “Advanced Aerial Threats.”

The stipulation mandates that the director of national intelligence work with the secretary of defense on a report detailing everything the government knows about unidentified flying objects — known in agency lingo as “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “anomalous aerial vehicles.”

It must be made public, and when it is, it will be big, former intelligence director John Ratcliffe said in a recent interview.

“Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” Ratcliffe told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Friday.

The report must include “detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence” gathered by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI, the provision reads.

It also calls for “a detailed description of an interagency process” that will ensure that data can be gathered and analyzed across the federal government. The report could document sightings from “all over the world,” Ratcliffe said.

“There are instances where we don’t have good explanations for some of the things that we’ve seen,” he added. “And when that information becomes declassified, I’ll be able to talk a little bit more about that.”

There’s apparently a lot more video that has yet to be declassified:

Former senator Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), a longtime backer of UFO research, said then that the footage “only scratches the surface of research and materials available.”

“The U.S. needs to take a serious, scientific look at this and any potential national security implications,” he said. “The American people deserve to be informed.”

The increasingly vocal crowd of space watchers is eagerly awaiting the forthcoming intelligence agency report. Some of them say that studying UFOs is essential to the country’s security.

And the national security concerns have gotten other members of Congress on board:

In a July interview with Miami’s CBS4 News, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, said the prospect that something otherworldly is behind the flying objects does not concern him as much as the idea that a U.S. adversary could be making secret technological advances.

“The bottom line is if there are things flying over your military bases and you don’t know what they are because they aren’t yours and they are exhibiting — potentially — technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal, that to me is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into,” Rubio said.

More Videos Have Recently Been Confirmed

Even before the intelligence report drops next month, more videos have come out. The first, released in April of this year, shows a series of what appear to be pyramid-shaped aerial vehicles flying over the USS Russell in July of 2019:

(For more context and backstory on this video, see here.)

The second video shows a “trans-medium” vehicle — one that transitions from aerial to underwater craft — caught on video by someone in the Combat Information Center of the USS Omaha the same month as the pyramid footage: July, 2019. In it, you can hear the surprise of the Naval officers as the UFO, which is hovering over the surface of the ocean, suddenly dives under the water:

Jeremy Corbell, the documentary filmmaker referenced above, released both of the videos after establishing chain of custody. (The context and background of the second video can be read about here.)

So What Now?

There’s simply too much information on this topic to share in a single overview. I haven’t even touched on historical UFO phenomena, such as the inexplicable events at Loring Air Force Base in Maine in 1975, or some of those discussed in documentaries like The Phenomenon, which date back even further. (It’s impossible to get clarity on events like Roswell, New Mexico, in 1957.) I’ve tried to constrain it to those things I’ve personally found most compelling. If anything, what we’ve learned so far raises even more questions while providing few answers. (And it’s not just our nation declassifying or reorienting in the face of potential military UFO encounters.)

Even if the more detailed scientific claims made by Lazar about what he observed cannot be proven without further declassification — and if the program he describes is real, that’s highly unlikely — we do know with relative certainty that something is happening, and it’s happening right in front of trained military operators who are using the latest tech in observing and tracking aerial threats.

In fact, one of the only reasons we’re finding out about all of this is that increasingly advanced tracking systems, sensors, and videos are making them indisputable.

We also know that what is being observed is inexplicable based on the known laws of physics — aircraft with abilities that defy everything we understand about inertia, reactionary propulsion, aerodynamics, and in-atmosphere speed and acceleration.

Further, we know that people within the military are concerned that these encounters represent a threat rooted in overwhelming technological supremacy. People high up in the government are, too. These craft are moving through our airspace with complete impunity, and they are actively jamming radar systems — which is considered an act of war. And disclosure, at long last, is seemingly on the horizon — if this is more than just another clever disinformation campaign in the guise of an investigation — something that happened before with Project Blue Book.

The government has a long and established track record of not telling the public the truth when it comes to UFO/UAP phenomena. Are they really finally willing to let us in on their secrets?