7.06.2021
UFOs Were Born Among America’s Cold War Fears
The Pentagon’s latest report is unlikely to shift an old story.
Protesters at a demonstration against conspiracy theorists in Berlin on May 30, 2020. ODD ANDERSEN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
The U.S. Senate is currently awaiting an official report detailing everything the government knows about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). The report is the result of a provision in the $2.3 trillion 2020 appropriations bill that provided coronavirus relief to Americans and avoided a government shutdown. It is expected, among other things, to address the now infamous Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), made famous by reporting in late 2017.
The current UFO-mania centers on a series of sightings made by U.S. Navy pilots or appearing on their sensors in 2004, 2014, and 2015, the video and reports of which were leaked by former U.S. Defense Department official Luis Elizondo. Elizondo’s alleged credibility derives from his claim to have served as director of AATIP. He described the program as “understandably overstretched” and without “the resources that the mounting evidence deserved.” His effort to ignite interest in un- or underreported military sightings has been bolstered by the creation of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA), a research institute co-founded by UFO true believer and former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge, and former CIA official Jim Semivan. Elizondo now works with TTSA in the company of another former U.S. intelligence official, Christopher Mellon. The credentials of both the Navy pilots and the former government officials involved in TTSA have kept these sightings, and the controversy around them, in the public eye for more thanthree years.
Amid the breathless media reporting and calls for transparency, accountability, and the American people’s “right to know,” it is easy to get caught up in the excitement and mystery. Why are the Pentagon and the respective branches of the U.S. military investigating UFO/UAP sightings? Will we finally receive confirmation that aliens are real and visiting us? Or that we’re being surveilled by some advanced aerial Big Brother technology? What is the government hiding from us?
Yet while Elizondo’s 2017 leaks may have come as a revelation to some, the U.S. military complex has been investigating reports of strange aerial phenomena for almost 75 years. Understanding UFOs and UAPs as historically embedded in airborne global war and U.S. national security concerns explains why they are an object of investigation and inquiry, why those investigations continue, and why sightings and witnesses maintain a persistent power to keep the U.S. public engaged and questioning—as it has several times in the past.
U.S. military involvement with the “UFO question” (What are they? Where do they come from?) dates back to the summer of 1947 and the birth of the modern UFO. We can track the modern UFO or “flying saucer” to the pilot and UFO godfather Kenneth Arnold’s ur-sighting in late June 1947. While assisting in a search for a missing military transport plane over the Cascade Mountains in Washington state, Arnold reported seeing nine discrete flying objects zipping about the mountain peaks. He described them as silvery or metallic, fast, and appearing to be intelligently controlled. Arnold made note of the weather, the time, and used objects in his cockpit to estimate size and speed. When he landed, he told his colleagues. Then he told the press.
Arnold’s sighting was followed by a series of copycat sightings. The sightings were first localized in the Pacific Northwest but quickly spread across the continental United States and then around the world. The U.S. Air Force, then the U.S. Army Air Forces, took serious interest in the sightings, given the descriptions it was receiving—that these were aerial technology, metallic, intelligently controlled, and terrestrial.
That Arnold’s sighting takes place and receives the attention it does is no mere fluke of history but rather a deeply contingent event that hinges on its postwar moment. The modern UFO brought together and embodied three specific characteristics of the tensions of 1947.
First, the flying saucers of 1947 represented the technoscientific developments of World War II taken to the extreme. The world wars, and the second in particular, had led to unprecedented developments and progress in the technology and science of warfare. Major breakthroughs were made in submarine technology, aerial technology (manned and unmanned), cybernetic command-control technologies, computing technologies, medical technologies, surveillance and sensor technology, and weapons technology. The appearance of strange, and potentially deadly, objects in the skies was a resonant idea in the wake of the V2 rocket attacks on London and the unleashing of the atomic bomb. These flying disks, many believed, could just be the next step in bomber technology.
1947 was also a pivotal year in the development of the Cold War. Though once allies, the spring of 1947 saw the American-Soviet friendship collapse, articulated in the Truman Doctrine of March 1947, which presented communism as a threat to the American way of life and pressed the need to contain that threat geopolitically. Americans were faced with, as they saw it, a new and alien challenger.
The summer of 1947 also witnessed the creation of the Air Force as an independent branch of the U.S. military. The Allied forces had won World War II thanks in large part to U.S. military support, especially superior U.S. air power. As a result, the U.S. Army Air Forces understood itself as not only the critical element of the Allied victory over fascism but as the foremost offensive power and first line of defense in future wars, which would certainly be airborne.
The Army Air Forces leveraged its military successes and philosophy of aerial warfare to lobby for its existence as an independent branch of the U.S. military (successfully achieved in July 1947) and for the ongoing support of a substantial research budget, meant to contribute to the cutting-edge research and development required to keep the newly created U.S. Air Force the global leader in aerial offensive and defensive capabilities.
The next war, fought between the United States and the Soviet Union, would be airborne and its threat existential, thanks to the newfound power of atomic weapons and the advance of aerial martial technology.
Humanity had been seeing strange things in the sky since the beginning of recorded history, but these developments transformed the UFO into a national security threat—and gave it a catchy acronym to boot. In its earliest days, it was understood to be terrestrial in origin and most likely Soviet. It distressed Air Force command greatly that the Soviets would have a technology so far advanced beyond its own; not only would this present an existential threat to the American public, but it also indicated that the Air Force was no longer the global leader in air power. The Air Force set out to identify (and one day, it was hoped, capture) these unknown aircraft invading American skies.
Over the next two decades, the Air Force would operate a series of investigatory projects meant to respond to sighting reports and identify the potential dangers posed by these objects. When Project Blue Book, the longest and most well-known of these projects, concluded in 1969, the Air Force did not stop investigating sightings made by its personnel. It merely folded those investigations into normal intelligence procedures. It is safe to presume that investigations of credible sightings by its pilots and other staff continue to this day.
The U.S. defense complex’s concern with UFOs has always been one of national security. Given the ongoing pace of development in aerial technologies—surveillance, weaponry, aircraft, and so on—it should be unsurprising that the 21st-century Navy, Air Force, Pentagon, and U.S. intelligence community continue to investigate reports of strange aerial phenomena made by their personnel.
Indeed, even the current centering of Navy pilots as highly reliable witnesses has a historical precedent. Many of the cases investigated in the Air Force’s early projects came from pilots and other military personnel. And reports that came from pilots were treated with a heightened degree of seriousness: Pilots were men, professionals who were experts in their skillset, serious-minded, sober, calm, even-tempered, and not prone to hyperbole or fanciful storytelling. Pilots have historically been treated as among the most credible witnesses. That standard remains in place and supports the ongoing controversy today.
As the release of the new report approaches, the public should temper its expectations about the contents. Similar reports have been organized and released before. Judging by the past, the report will recount the number of cases over the years, their location and frequency, who made them, and what evidence exists. Where cases can be “solved” and the phenomena identified, we should expect detailed accounts; where insufficient data exists to make a positive or “highly likely” confirmation, we should expect to see these phenomena remain “unknown” or “unidentified.” That is not an endorsement of any theory about their origins, alien or terrestrial—simply an acknowledgement of the lack of clear evidence.
And the American public should not expect to see a full, unredacted version. U.S. military investigations have always been matters of national security. Where objects or phenomena have been identified as belonging to foreign nations or adversaries, the defense establishment will keep these cases hidden from view.
Historians are fans of Nietzsche’s principle of eternal recurrence—put more clearly by True Detective’s Rust Cohle: “Time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done, or will do, we’re going to do over and over and over again.” The pattern of public excitement about UFOs certainly repeats itself. But regardless of what the upcoming report holds, the U.S. defense and intelligence complex has always understood UFOs and UAPs as a national security matter. In a world of aerial surveillance and drone warfare, this won’t change anytime soon.
Quelle: FP
+++
Pennsylvania UFOS witnessed by military pilots unsolved despite government investigations
July 23, 1952 – Three F-94 Starfire fighter jets cruised at 644 miles per hour in the skies above Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Fighter pilots reported seeing a silver “large pear-shaped” object with no visible means of propulsion. Two smaller, darker objects also appeared to run circles around the larger craft for approximately 30 minutes.
The alleged encounter 40 miles northeast of Philadelphia was one of 12,618 incidents detailed and investigated by Project Blue Book, a government program to assess the credibility and potential threat of unidentified flying objects.
Six decades later, the U.S. military is once again publicly investigating UFOs, and is due to issue a report to Congress on what it now terms “unidentified aerial phenomenon.” In recent years, fighter pilots and stealth ships have reported strange objects off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Yet hundreds of other phenomena remain a mystery in the skies above Pennsylvania.
For those who have spent years examining such cases, recent disclosures by the military come with much apprehension. James Krug serves as a regional director for the Pennsylvania Mutual UFO Network, teaches astronomy, and runs the Neil Armstrong Planetarium at Altoona Area High School.
Krug suspects the government has released crumbs of information steadily about unexplained phenomena in order to brace the public for a future disclosure.
"I am cautious regarding the pending disclosure from the U.S. military regarding UFOs," said Krug. "On one hand, it does seem like the public is in the midst of a multi-year disclosure to make us more comfortable with the idea of UFOs. Some believe this is intentional, designed to avert panic like that shown when many mistook Orson Welles' 1938 Halloween radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds as a genuine alien invasion."
What will we learn?: Government UFO report finds no evidence flying objects are aliens but does not rule possibility out, reports say
Mullane: Did a space alien invade a New Jersey military base?
Some of the most perplexing Pennsylvania cases came from U.S. military personnel, commercial airline pilots and police officers, and these incidents have attracted the attention of the U.S. military, according to declassified accounts.
An Air Force captain reported two objects in the skies above Elkins Park, Montgomery County, on July 19, 1952, as noted in one Project Blue Book case file. The captain said the objects appeared to fly “four times faster than a conventional aircraft.” The objects had a “faint tinge of red” and made no noise, according to the report.
Months later, an off-duty Air Force Reserve captain saw another object above Allentown.
He was flying at about 10,000 feet in a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, according to Project Blue Book. The object appeared to be following him, he said. "If what I saw was a physical object, the rapidity with which it altered its course was astonishing."
On Sept. 14, 1952, a commercial pilot flying near Olmsted Air Force Base said he witnessed a blue light with “tremendous horizontal speed.” According to Project Blue Book, others on the ground also said they witnessed an object that looked like a watermelon. The base closed in 1969 and is today a Pennsylvania Air National Guard facility located near Harrisburg International Airport.
Declassified records suggest that the U.S. military investigated 12,618 UFO incidents worldwide between 1947 and 1969 and were able to explain all but 701 reports.
The unexplained incidents from Pennsylvania occurred in the following locations:
- Allentown (Lehigh County) – Sept. 13, 1952
- Altoona (Blair County) – July 23, 1952
- Corsica (Jefferson County) – March 26, 1959
- Juniata County – Aug. 27, 1956
- Kutztown (Berks County) – July 9, 1952
- Neffsville (Lancaster County) – Aug. 20, 1952
- Pleasant View (Armstrong County) – May 26, 1964
- Pittsburgh (Allegheny County) – Feb. 11, 1952
- Stroudsburg (Monroe County) – October 2, 1958
- Union County – July 11, 1966
One incident — reported on March 2, 1954 — only lists the location as "Pennsylvania." The July 1952 incident with F-94 Starfire fighter jets over Pottstown also was listed among Project Blue Book's unsolved cases.
Pennsylvania's Roswell
The bright flashing lights were reported in Canada, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.
But when a fire was reported in the woods outside a small town in southwest Pennsylvania, the U.S. military rushed to the scene, according to Associated Press reports from that night.
The incident on Dec. 9, 1965, has stoked dozens of conspiracy theories.
According to media reports, U.S. Air Force Maj. Hector Quintinella dispatched a team for investigating unidentified flying objects to Kecksburg, a small unincorporated town about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
For years, officials said nothing was recovered from the fire scene. Then in 2005, NASA issued a statement that it had studied fragments from Kecksburg, and that the incident might have been caused by a crashed Russian satellite.
The UFO group Coalition for Freedom of Information later filed a right-to-know request with NASA for the records. In response, NASA said it could not find the records. For believers, this was just more evidence of a cover-up.
The military is playing a shell game in changing the way it classifies UFOs now as unidentified aerial phenomena, said Krug.
"Their terminology was recently changed from "UFO" to "UAP," largely to dissuade Freedom of Information Act requests for "UFOs." The military could claim they have little to no information on "UFOs," when in reality, they've simply changed the terminology to something new."
Today, a model of the Kecksburg UFO stands outside the local firehouse.
Outside of official government investigations, thousands of other incidents have been reported in Pennsylvania.
When a UFO makes local news headlines, area residents turn a curious eye to the sky and begin to report more strange objects. Novel skywatchers can see the mysterious in a shooting star, meteor shower or a planet reflecting the light of the Sun.
UFOs are reported somewhere in Pennsylvania at a rate of one every three days, according to a database maintained by the Mutual UFO Network.
Sometimes, they even invade from neighboring states.
On April 18, 1966, the New York Times reported on one incident in which sheriff deputies chased a UFO for 85 miles from Atwater, Ohio, to Freedom, Pennsylvania.
Deputy Dale Spaur, an Air Force veteran of the Korean War, described an "extremely bright object" that was about 1,000 feet in the air and traveling approximately 100 miles per hour.
Another police officer said the object seemed to understand it was being following. "It was a funny thing," Patrolman Wayne Huston told the New York Times. "When the object got too far ahead of us, it appear to stop and wait."
Bucks County experienced what some call a "wave" and others a "flap" of UFO sightings.
In her 2011 book, "UFOs in Pennsylvania," writer Patty A. Wilson says it was "Bucks County Under Siege." It began with four UFO incidents between January and April 25, 2008.
When local police responded to a UFO sighting above a shuttered Mexican restaurant in Middletown, the Bucks County Courier Times and local television news stations covered a series of sightings.
Reports collected by MUFON tend to come from the more populated areas of the state, with more than 2,100 incidents between May 2006 and May 2021.
The most incidents — 226 — were reported in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County during that time, records show. Bucks County came in second with 206 incidents reported to MUFON across 15 years.
More than 100 additional UFO incidents would be reported over the next eight months in Bucks County, and producers from the History and Discovery channels descended on the area to film UFO programs.
A Mutual UFO Bucks County Conference in January 2009 drew more than 700 people to the auditorium of the Bucks County Community College.
At that time, believers said they hoped that a newly elected President Barack Obama would reveal to the world America's UFO secrets.
Others believe the government will use evidence of UFOs to spend more money on the military and take away personal freedoms, said Krug.
In that scenario, he explained, "governments of the world fake an alien invasion, essentially a galactic false flag to use as justification to remove more of our freedoms to keep us 'safe' from this threat from outer space."
Quelle: Courier Times
----
Update: 8.06.2021
.
US Military Report On UFOs: Alien Spacecraft Or Enemy Hypersonic Jets? — WATCH
Later this month, the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) is scheduled to table its much-awaited report on UFOs, whose images have been captured by US Navy pilots on many occasions.
CHINA, RUSSIA OR ALIENS: WHY IS THERE A SUDDEN SURGE IN UFO SIGHTINGS OVER US MILITARY BASES?
A preview of the report, however, rules out the possibility of alien spacecraft or any of the US government aircraft, as seen in those images.
Nevertheless, the high speeds and the movements of these unidentified aircraft have left the US authorities surprised. With both Russia and China working on the development of their hypersonic jet technology, is the US finally finding itself left behind in this technology race?
The Pentagon is slated to release its report on June 25. This would shed some light on the origins of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), popularly known as unidentified flying objects (UFOs). A preview of the report was published by the New York Times last week. It mentions that the origin of the UAPs cannot be conclusively explained by the US military. Besides, the report neither confirms these UAPs as alien spacecraft nor as any military or civilian technology of the US government.
The Search For ‘Alien Aircraft’
The UAPTF was established in August 2020 by the Department of Defence. According to a report published by Popular Mechanics, the aim of the task force was to gather information on the nature and origins of the UAPs and to see whether the national security of the US was threatened in any way.
“The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze, and catalog [UAP] that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security,” Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough was quoted as saying.
Earlier in June 2020, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) had also authorized fiscal support to the UAPTF to look into the origins of the UAPs and the possible threat they may pose to US national security.
John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence mentioned that satellite imagery has captured the sightings of flying objects, whose actions have been found to be difficult to explain. According to Ratcliffe, the objects reportedly moved at speeds exceeding “the sound barrier without a sonic boom”.
Ratcliffe explained that the pressure from the increase in the speed of an aircraft merges into a shockwave. When the plane overtakes the shockwave, moving at a speed greater than that of the speed of sound, the resulting change in pressure causes the sonic boom.
Ratcliffe is of the view, it is highly improbable that the sound barrier can be disrupted by an aircraft, without the creation of the sonic boom in the process. While technological innovations are gearing up to reduce the sonic booms, further research on this subject indicates that removing the sonic boom completely may not be entirely possible.
Russian or Chinese Technology?
It is believed that the US’ arch-rivals Russia and China have been successfully developing hypersonic weapons. In October 2020, a video showed a Chinese Air force H-6N bomber landing at Neixiang Ma’ao air base in China, with what appeared to be a hypersonic weapon system.
Reportedly, China is also working on its Sodramjet engine (standing oblique detonation ramjet engine), which is capable of powering any aircraft to travel at many times the speed of sound, making it possible to reach faraway points on the earth within just two hours.
In October 2020, reports suggested that Russia tested a new hypersonic missile- the 3M22 Zircon. On its launch, traveling at a top speed of Mach 8, or 6,138 miles per hour, the Zircon struck its target which was 267 miles away.
Recently, Russia also announced that work is steadily progressing on its hypersonic fighter jet. According to reports, the Sukhoi Design Bureau of Russia is currently developing a fifth-generation fighter jet, which is expected to be faster than Mach 2.
For the US authorities, the new hypersonic jets being developed by Russia and China may be a real cause of worry. If the UAPs are indeed the versions of the Russian and Chinese hypersonic aircraft, it means that the two countries may have left the US military far behind in the field of advanced technology.
US Navy Videos
In April 2020, the US Navy had released three videos, taken by Navy pilots. In one of the videos dating back to 2004, off the coast of San Diego, two super hornets from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, were asked to investigate mysterious aircraft flying in the area.
According to the operator of USS Princeton, which had been tracking these UAPs then, mysterious flying objects suddenly appeared at 80,000 ft. They then stopped at 20,000 ft and after hovering for some time, they disappeared from radar.
When the super hornets flew to the location of the UAPs, they found two hovering objects. The objects were found close to the surface of the water, one just below the surface, while the second was moving about 50 ft above the water surface. The unidentified object rose to the level of the super hornets but eventually moved away.
A similar unexplained sighting was reported in 2015. In the video, the super hornet fighter had a UAP flying just below it at an incredible speed, much to the surprise of the crew of the fighter jet.
An earlier report by The Eurasian Times said that the sudden surge in the “UFO” sightings over US military bases and naval assets could be attributed to deliberate incursions by enemy spy drones.
The report quoted defense Analyst Tyler Rogoway who established a connection between these so-called “extraterrestrial” phenomena and the military intelligence gathering and large-scale espionage by America’s adversaries.
Quelle: The EurAsian Times