The Pentagon's upcoming UFO report, explained

there's a whole fleet of them look on the assay well if there's another thing it's rotating objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are we just have to face the fact that maybe we're not alone in the universe which hurts our ego a little bit and the senate wants answers anything that enters an airspace that's not supposed to be there is a threat my name is brian bender and this is my abduction story i call it my abduction story because sometimes i felt like i was getting sucked into this ufo enthusiast world here is your guide to understanding what's going on with the pentagon and ufos politico started delving into the ufo issue when we reported one of the first stories about the existence of a pentagon ufo research office it's not just they have an office that's looking into this but there's some real experiences that that our pilots are reporting that are getting at least some attention in the pentagon what i came to understand was that even within the military there was a reluctance to look into these things because i think military personnel have been concerned about being labeled you know tinfoil hat wearing kooks if they start talking about ufos but clearly there were enough reports that they really couldn't ignore it since the ufo task force became news in 2017 more politicians are more comfortable than ever talking about unknown objects in the sky we have lots of reports about what we call unidentified aerial phenomenon let's take a quick look back at how this all happened in 1952 the u.s air force launched project blue book to look into ufo sightings but you'll hear more about that later on fast forward to 2008 the pentagon's secret ufo office known as atip was established it wasn't until 2017 when footage of navy pilots witnessing ufos leaked and the existence of the pentagon ufo office became known that the story really started to get interesting by 2019 members of congress were receiving classified briefings about ufos in 2020 the senate intelligence committee led by senator marco rubio decides they want to request a government report on ufos a public report that not only pulls together what the government might know about ufos but more importantly what they're doing to get to the bottom of these mysteries when the advanced aerial threat identification program was created at the pentagon it was given a fairly innocuous sounding military name that way there was no reference to ufos in the summer of 2017 my reporting uncovered that this opposite existed had been given a significant amount of resources and so i started digging to find out the origins of the office also where all that money was spent and it was former senate majority leader harry reid who secured 22 million dollars to establish the ufo's atip program next on our journey we talked to some politicians themselves good morning senator reid how are you i'm doing fine i was the first to get involved in this and much to the consternation of my staff they told me stay the hell away from this it's not anything that's going to help you so at the time it sounds like your political advisors thought that this could be damaging politically in other words if you're associated with this people will think harry reid has lost it it's not just a bunch of weirdos that are thinking about this i think it's people are really curious the more time we spend on this the more people are beginning to understand are you hopeful that some of these very secretive agencies will be willing to to share more of what they're seeing what their what they're gathering what we have to do is understand that there are different levels of transparency i think the administration has an obligation to make sure that what information they have that is important to the security of our country that they make sure members of congress know what's going on one of the biggest challenges not the biggest challenge in this subject is and this is true of any subject but but when it comes to ufos it's kind of on steroids and that is separating fact from fiction from fantasy from theories because there's a million theories and lots of different perspectives on what these things could be or not be something strange happened in the skies over arizona that still hasn't been fully explained five symington was one of thousands who witnessed one of the most famous ufo sightings in recent history he was also governor of arizona at the time making him probably the highest public official to ever report a ufo i met with him at the arizona historical society where there is a new exhibit to the phoenix lights so take us back 1997 your governor of arizona you were on your way home from the governor's office right yes and i've been listening to the news there have been some sightings and said you know i'm i'm going to go take the car and i'm going to try to get to the high ground and take a look and see if i can see these phoenix lights that everybody's talking about i was being a truant i was slipped my detail and i drove i drove my car down and across the 51 and went up into this little park and there are a whole bunch of people it was really dark a whole bunch of people standing around and i just sort of very quietly moved in and turned and looked to the west uh which is where the the bright lights were and then somebody in the in the crowd said oh my gosh look at look at that and so you know i pissed and turned and there it was it was coming right over us you know peak in the background it was really majestic the thing that really was extraordinary was it was absolutely no sound at all no noise i mean and everybody was quiet and it just passed over and no jet engine noise nothing so as as a pilot yourself unlike anything never seen anything like it never imagined no no i keep telling my friends that nothing will really ever be settled until whoever they are decide to land on the white house lawn and get down and say we've come in peace so we know the government has studied ufos and the phenomenon for decades but the last known public investigation was a long long time ago nearly 50 years ago when project blue book wrapped up since then as far as we know the only public effort has been at the project that was started by harry reid i should mention that these days i'm based most of the time in arizona which is the perfect backdrop if you're covering ufos because there's lots of history of sightings in the southwest of america the next step in our guide is to meet the true believers and you start to see it's not your typical tinfoil hat wearing fanatics at least not always two of my guides into this world of ufos have been karen brard who runs the ufo congress which is an annual gathering of all sorts of academic scientists average citizens who want to know the answers as well as alejandro rojas who is a journalist tech writer who spent many years unpacking fact from fiction in the world of ufos so who is supposed to put this together and release it well the congressional language is pretty clear the director of national intelligence has to publish a public report by dean and you know the language is pretty delicious well i mean i think they're gonna lie i don't think they're gonna make stuff oh yeah but they might not they might secretly they might not include a lot of things right right i'm most interested i guess in what the navy will say because they they're the most vested in the whole thing i mean they're it's their fault this has even gotten to this point so what are they going to say i think the government has created a lot of their own problem when it comes to this topic i don't subscribe to the majority of the the conspiratorial ideas and that's due to research after the close of project blue book there was a memo that came out where one of the generals said that's okay uh we didn't need blue book anyway all of the cases that have uh you know are a concern for national security go elsewhere this data goes into these tiny little pockets here and there and so hopefully that will be the result we'll see in this report that they'll be combining the question is okay once they centralize the information the government centralize it will they share it with the academics with the scientists outside the government that might be able to make sense of it right because the government isn't a scientific place but if they can give you know some of the professors some information maybe they would have to get clearance first in order for them to start working on it but at least that's a start finally the last stop on this guide is a former government ufo expert these sightings in government research isn't just contained in the united states of course nick pope has become one of the most credible and well-known researchers on the issue of ufos he worked for many years studying the issue for the british ministry of defense and i met up with him at his house in tucson arizona the second and critical question is do uaps represent a possible threat to the defense of the realm um we could argue never shown a hostile intent however russian aircraft attempting to penetrate the uk air defense region in the cold war never showed hostile intent but they certainly represented a threat um and you don't do anything doesn't mean that you're not and this is it in a nutshell thus the only logical conclusion that we can come to is that we do not know if uaps represent a threat to the defense of the realm this is um defense intelligence science and technology i was a career civil servant in the british government in the ministry of defense so the uk equivalent of the dod in the states i was given a job where my duties included researching and investigating the ufo phenomenon to assess any defense implications i came in really with no baggage no kind of preconceived notions uh really an open mind and i tried to take a data-led approach do you have any sort of guideposts to figure out okay what is credible data there there are a lot of well-meaning people who see ufos who just misidentify things of course i mean that's actually the majority of sightings by a a clear margin we dropped ufo and substituted in uap and this was something that we did in the ministry of defense in the 90s now we didn't invent the term but we adopted it precisely because we wanted to get within the ministry of defense stakeholder engagement if you go in and say boss i'd like some funding for ufos no way if it's like well we've got some things going on in our airspace and we want to do a study into unidentified aerial phenomena it reframes it as a maybe a science problem a defense national security issue having covered the pentagon in the military for a long time i was familiar a little bit with the history of the of the military looking into these unexplained sightings from what i've been reporting very senior people in the u.s government who have the security clearances you would think that would allow them to know about these secret programs they claim they don't know about them one of the things we've tried to do in our reporting is focusing on what the government is doing about them so what kind of taxpayer dollars is being spent to research these things what agencies are involved that leads us to this public report and i think congress's intent there is to try and force the government to be a little more organized about it because there's all these reports in all of these theories conspiracy theories about what the government knows and what it might be hiding usually the government has the answers somebody does they know where the document is they know what the enemy is doing or or at least they have a good sense of it this is like that rare instance where even people who are supposed to know are like i have no idea

Channel: POLITICO

Views: 1,173,649

Keywords: politics, politico, news, capitol hill, congress, UFO, Pentagon, UFOs and the Pentagon, What does the government know about UFOs, UFO Pentagon report, UFOs Marco Rubio, UFO sightings, Navy pilot UFO footage, UFO sightings 2021, UFO conspiracy theory, Are UFOs real?, Nick Pope, Alejandro Rojas, UFO Congress, Are aliens real?

Id: jkVpihz2ayQ

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021