Are UFOs and aliens real? What is the US hiding?

The word UFO conjures all sorts of images in our minds ¬– flying saucer-like objects, little green men, humanoid-like creatures. But do UFOs exist? Has earth been visited by aliens? If three former United States military officials are to be believed, then the answer is yes. On Wednesday, the US Congress heard from former Defense Department intelligence officer, David Grusch, who worked in a special unit to study UFOs; Ryan Graves, executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, which collects data from people who claimed to have witnessed UFO sightings, along with David Fravor, a former commanding officer of the Navy’s Black Aces Squadron on the matter of UFOs and testified that multiple agencies had withheld information about the mysterious objects for years. The testimony, which has baffled many Congress members and public alike, reflects the captivation that persists over the existence of UFOs and aliens. In fact, 75 per cent of Americans believe there are intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe. But attitudes have changed, and most Americans no longer think aliens are hostile or a national security threat. We delve into the world of UFOs and take a journey on how perceptions around them have changed and what was exactly revealed in Wednesday’s hearing. ‘There are aliens out there’ On Wednesday, a House Oversight subcommittee held a hearing on UFOs in which the three former military officials said that they believe the government knows much more about UFOs than it is telling the public. David Grusch, a former intelligence officer who worked on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, the Office of Naval Intelligence’s group investigating UFO sightings, from 2019 to 2021, can be considered as a credible name. On Wednesday, he told the panel that he is “absolutely” certain that the federal government is in possession of UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena), citing interviews he said he conducted with 40 witnesses over a four-year period. He said he led Defense Department efforts to analyse reported UAP sightings and was informed of a “multidecade” Pentagon program that endeavoured to collect and reconstruct crashed UAPs. He further told the hearing that he knows of “multiple colleagues” who were injured by UAPs. He also said he has interviewed individuals who have recovered “nonhuman biologics” from crashed UAPs. [caption id=“attachment_12923592” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] (From left) Ryan Graves, Americans for Safe Aerospace Executive Director, US Air Force Major David Grusch (retired), and US Navy Commander David Fravor (retired), testify before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing on UFOs on Capitol Hill in Washington. AP[/caption] Ryan Graves, a retired navy pilot and now the founder of Americans for Safe Aerospace, also testified, saying he saw unidentified aerial phenomena off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”. “If everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change,” Graves was quoted as saying. “I urge us to put aside stigma and address the security and safety issue this topic represents. If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety. The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies. It is long overdue.” The third witness at the hearing was David Fravor, a former navy commander. He said that he and three fellow pilots in 2004 had spotted a white Tic-Tac-shaped object hovering below their jets and just above the Pacific Ocean. He added that the technology he and his team encountered defies logical explanation. “The technology that we faced is far superior to anything that we had,” Fravor claimed. “And there’s nothing we can do about it, nothing.” The Pentagon, in response, had denied all claims of a cover-up. In a statement, Defence Department spokesperson Sue Gough said investigators have not discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.” Alien talk The testimony by the three on the presence of UAPs, as they have recently been rebranded, adds to the many people who have had encounters with the third kind. UFOs really took off during World War II, when Allied pilots in both the European and Pacific theatres reported seeing puzzling lights or objects in the sky. They called these curiosities ‘foo fighters’. Then, in June 1947, American businessman and aviator Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine shiny, mysterious craft zipping through the skies near Washington’s Mount Rainier. A few newspapers described the UFOs, as Arnold had seen, as ‘flying saucers’ and soon the term earned its place in everyday language. [caption id=“attachment_12923502” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Graphic: Pranay Bhardwaj[/caption] Between 1948 and 1969, the Defense Department began Project Blue Book, tasked with investigating reports of UFOs. However, the project came to an end in 1969 after a study by the University of Colorado concluded there was no evidence that UFOs came from other worlds, and that most sightings could be explained by natural phenomena, or even hoaxes. However, UFO sightings didn’t end with Project Blue Book. In November 2004, two Navy pilots on a training mission were ordered to intercept a mysterious craft. They saw — and captured on video – an unusual oval-shaped craft, about 40 feet long, hovering over the Pacific Ocean about a hundred miles off San Diego. It streaked away before the pilots could get near. “I have no idea what I saw,” said one of the pilots, Commander David Fravor, at the time. “It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s.” And this wasn’t the end of it. In 2014, US Navy pilots made video recordings of a series of encounters with unidentified craft near Florida and Virginia. One pilot had then said on popular TV show, 60 Minutes, that the craft was difficult to explain. “You have rotation, you have high altitudes. You have propulsion, right? I don’t know. I don’t know what it is, frankly.” Over the years, there have also been several reports of alien abductions. The story of American couple Betty and Barney Hill is perhaps the most memorable; they claimed they were captured and examined by extra-terrestrials in rural New Hampshire in September 1961. [caption id=“attachment_12923522” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Graphic: Pranay Bhardwaj[/caption] The truth is out there For years and years, the idea that aliens had frequented our planet had been circulating among ufologists and the matter was treated as a fringe issue. However, in recent years, this has changed thanks in part to about the Pentagon’s secret efforts to make sense of unexplained encounters by military pilots and from members of Congress. The shift from considering UFOs as science fiction to fact has come about slowly but surely. In December 2017, the New York Times reported the existence of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. While the program wound up, Luis Elizondo revealed that he had continued its work informally with cooperation from the Navy and CIA until his resignation in the fall of 2017. Perhaps, what changed perceptions completely was the April 2021 incident. The US Navy confirmed the video of unidentified objects “buzzing” US warships near California. And from this was born the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)’s “preliminary assessment” of UFO sightings. The report revealed the Pentagon had recorded 144 observations of “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” or UAP, dating back to 2004, but could not determine the origins of all but one, including whether they were atmospheric or extraterrestrial. [caption id=“attachment_12923742” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A still from a US Navy video of a UFO sighting. File Image: US Navy[/caption] Senior officials such as John Ratcliffe, the former director of National Intelligence, has also spoken on the issue. In an interview with Fox News, Ratcliffe had said that the issue was no longer to be taken lightly. “When we talk about sightings,” he said, “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 are travelling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

Even NASA has stepped up investigations into sightings. Last year, the American space agency said it was setting up an independent study program to cover the issue from a scientific perspective. “We will be identifying what data — from civilians, government, nonprofits, companies — exists, what else we should try to collect, and how to best analyse it,” David Spergel, the study team leader, had said. The mystery around UFOs continues and the US government may or may not reveal the entire truth. But as Peter Whitley, a UFO researcher based in Japan told US News, “There now exists a momentous and perhaps historical push for tightly held information about UAP/UFOs to be made public.” With inputs from agencies