For individuals who follow news related to anomalous flying objects, 2023 can be remembered because the yr UFOs got here to Washington, D.C.
Not in the way in which we might all like, though. No, there have been no Tic-Tac-shaped UFOs landing on the White House lawn or big black triangles hovering silently within the air above it. As an alternative, there have been recent bureaucratic offices and government web sites created, pieces of dense laws deliberated over, and hearings. Plenty of hearings.
Throughout the pockets of social media which might be most vocal about UFOs, many thought that this yr would finally bring about disclosure, the revelation of UFO-related truth wherein the U.S. government would finally fess up and reveal what it has allegedly been covering up about unidentified, physics-defying craft and their possible occupants for a minimum of seven many years.
But disclosure didn’t occur. While many sensational claims were made that might, if true, indeed bring about ontological shock and a rethinking of our place within the universe, in the long run none of those was substantiated with little greater than hearsay. As is tradition.
Related: Some UFO records should be released, US Congress says
Government reports and Chinese balloons
The massive UFO yr began on Jan. 12, when the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its long-awaited “2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” The report, produced by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) that was established in July 2022, included over 500 reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, a brand new term that describes unidentified objects or phenomena within the air, under water, in space or that appear to travel between them.
The much-anticipated report analyzed the reports, finding only 171 that remained “uncharacterized,” or unidentified. “A few of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further evaluation,” the report stated. Ultimately, while the report was unable to achieve any broad conclusions about UFOs/UAP, it found that a lot of these sightings “proceed to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat,” meaning they may possibly be related to foreign spy activities.
Just a number of weeks later, on Feb. 1, UFOs took center stage in each Washington D.C. and the news cycle when a big white orb was spotted floating over Montana. The article turned out to be a massive high-altitude balloon operated by China. The looks of such a brazen intelligence-gathering aircraft caused a global stir, and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs eventually issued an apology.
The balloon was eventually shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 5 and recovered by the U.S. military. Within the weeks that followed, several other UFOs were shot down over the northern United States and Canada, a few of which were never recovered and remain unidentified to today — a minimum of publicly.
Soon after, The Latest York Times reported that similar balloons had intruded in American airspace between 2017 and 2021 and that military and governmental leaders were unaware of them in some cases because they were initially mischaracterized as UAP. “Balloons account for most of the unexplained incidents the Navy and other military services have tracked in recent times. The previous incidents, like other unexplained events, were handed over to a Pentagon task force charged with investigating UFOs and other aerial phenomena,” the Times wrote in its report. “Because the Pentagon and intelligence agencies stepped up efforts over the past two years to search out explanations for a lot of those incidents, officials reclassified some events as Chinese spy balloons.”
The furor over the Chinese spy events continued through the early spring, leading as much as the primary public testimony of the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office on April 19, 2023. During that testimony, Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO’s first director, told members of the USA Senate Committee on Armed Services at a hearing in Washington, D.C. that, despite the moderately sensational claims in mainstream and social media concerning possible alien visitation of Earth, his office found “no credible evidence to date of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics.”
As an alternative, most UAP cases “display mundane characteristics of balloons, [uncrewed] aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources,” Kirkpatrick told the armed services committee.
The following month, NASA held the primary public meeting of its independent UAP study group on the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. NASA commissioned the group in 2022 to assist examine data related to unidentified anomalous phenomena and make recommendations on how the agency might higher contribute to the subject.
Throughout the meeting held on May 31, group members laid out a roadmap for the way U.S. government agencies can “use the tools of science to judge and categorize the character of UAPs going forward,” said Nicki Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
While many various potential approaches for accomplishing this were described and discussed, ultimately the group, like AARO before it, reached the conclusion that UAP will remain mysterious without higher data. “To make the claim that we have seen something that’s evidence of non-human intelligence, it might require extraordinary evidence,” said astrophysicist David Spergel, chair of the study group and former member of the NASA Advisory Council. “And now we have not seen that. I feel that is essential to clarify. “
Still, the general public and governmental interest in UFOs by this point had reached such a height that two U.S. Senators, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD), introduced a bill generally known as the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023, or the Schumer-Rounds amendment, which called for the general public release of U.S. government records related to UFOs and/or UAP.
“For many years, many Americans have been fascinated by objects mysterious and unexplained, and it’s gone time they get some answers,” Schumer said in a statement accompanying the bill. “The American public has a right to find out about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena. We aren’t only working to declassify what the federal government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public.”
Allegations get wilder
Undoubtedly, probably the most out-of-this world UFO event of 2023 got here two months after NASA’s UAP study group meeting when, on July 26, three former U.S. military personnel testified to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on National Security on the Border and Foreign Affairs. Two of the witnesses, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, are former U.S. Navy aviators who had previously reported highly publicized encounters with unknown objects in military training airspace which have turn into touchstones for the UFO community by way of credible sightings from reputable, trained witnesses.
However it was the third witness on the July hearing that caused the most important stir. That witness, David Grusch, a decorated U.S. military combat veteran and former Pentagon intelligence officer, told the subcommittee that the U.S. government has operated a “multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program,” together with a disinformation campaign to maintain the general public at nighttime.
Grusch would go on to state to the subcommittee that “biologics got here with a few of these recoveries” and that these “biologics” were “non-human,” in response to individuals with direct knowledge of those crash recovery programs that he had spoken with during his time within the intelligence community.
Naturally, a media feeding frenzy ensued, and Grusch has since turn into a daily talking head on the podcast circuit and television news programs. Evidence for his claims has yet to surface.
A month later, on Aug. 31, the Pentagon’s AARO office quietly unveiled an official government website through which U.S. government personnel can report UFO/UAP sightings “within the vicinity of national security areas” resembling military bases or other U.S. government sites.
NASA’s UAP study team would then go on to release a written report on Sept. 14 that reached similar conclusions to AARO director Kirkpatrick’s testimony in April. “The highest takeaway from the study is that there’s loads more to learn,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a teleconference held after the agency released the report. “The NASA independent study team didn’t find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we do not know what these UAP are.”
The yr in UFOs would ultimately end not with a bang, but with a whimper, when in December the U.S. Congress approved laws containing a portion of the Schumer-Rounds language that ordered that some government records related to UAP should be released.
Nonetheless, many UFO disclosure proponents felt that the ultimate version of the Schumer-Rounds amendment was far weaker than what was originally proposed.
“A very powerful components of the Schumer-Rounds language were dropped — an independent Senate-confirmed review board with subpoena power, skilled staff to get hold of records, and other serious resources,” Douglas Dean Johnson, an independent researcher who writes on various features referring to UAP, told Space.com. “What’s being enacted as a substitute is a modest mechanism that is way less prone to end in the placement, extraction and disclosure of essential UAP-related records that could be tightly held and even long forgotten.”
All of this has happened before. All of this may occur again.
For individuals who have followed the UFO topic for a big period of time, none of those developments should feel recent. The U.S. government has commissioned and/or conducted several UFO studies prior to now, a lot of which reached similar conclusions as those reported by federal studies and agencies in 2023.
So, yes, while UFOs got here to Washington in 2023, ultimately they left the identical way they got here: Shrouded in mystery, tainted by sensationalism, and wrapped within the jingoistic and sometimes paranoid language of national security. The U.S. government, a minimum of outwardly, appears no closer to solving the UFO enigma or revealing what it might learn about these phenomena to the American public.
Yet, anyway. Lots of those behind the present disclosure movement assure us that despite the legislative setbacks, the fight for the reality — it’s on the market — is just starting.
Here’s hoping we see that big black triangle over the White House in 2024.