Following a declassification directive from President Donald Trump, the Department of War released numerous reports and videos related to unidentified flying objects on Friday.
Referred to by the government as “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” UFOs have been a growing subject of public interest in recent years. Predictably, Friday’s file release didn’t significantly move the ball in terms of judging whether or not we are alone in the Universe (though the Washington Examiner understands that far more compelling videos and military witness reports will be released in the coming months). Instead, this first release reinforces the point that a small subset of UFOs remains truly strange and unexplained. Friday’s release also underlines the unnecessary secrecy that has characterized the U.S. government’s handling of this issue since the 1940s.
The most compelling information in Friday’s dump is the testimony and imagery related to Space exploration. It includes reports from numerous Astronauts on numerous different missions describing seeing UFOs out of their portholes. The government has also explicitly identified objects photographed from the Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 Moon landings as showing UFOs. At a minimum, this should encourage greater support for the continued efforts of manned space exploration.
As I noted in relation to the recent Artemis II mission, for example, “In thousands of cases since the advent of nuclear power in the 1940s, credible witnesses (respected police and military officers) and data systems (radar, satellites, sonar, etc.) suggest the enduring presence of highly advanced, intelligently controlled machines of unknown origin. These reports should motivate us to look up at the stars. After all, just as new peer-reviewed studies indicate UFOs were in orbit prior to the satellite age, so we are also seeing new, the energy requirements problem notwithstanding, scientific theories on faster-than-light travel.”
Again, this does not mean that the UFOs seen by the Apollo crews are alien probes or spacecraft. It simply means NASA and the U.S. government do not know what they are. This marks a significant narrative shift away from the traditional NASA/U.S. government approach of describing all UFOs in Space as ice particles, etc. It beckons the possibility of previously released footage of UFOs in Space being reassessed.
Still, this document dump raises a more terrestrial question. Namely, why, being that the majority of the reports released on Friday are not terribly compelling in and of themselves, were these documents/videos held in government classification silos for so long?
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The unwillingness of successive administrations to provide the public with greater information on this topic is troubling. Nor do source and method protections excuse this impulse towards secrecy. After all, whenever a Russian or Chinese pilot flies dangerously near a U.S. military aircraft, the Pentagon normally releases a high-resolution video of the incident within 24 hours.
Put simply, the Trump administration deserves credit for removing the veil from UFOs. It beggars belief that it took so long for this to happen.