Almost three years ago, the US government published a report on the "unidentified aerial phenomena" observed in recent years by military pilots.
Are aliens watching us? For the American government, which published a report in 2021 on 'unidentified aerial phenomena,' the mysterious aircraft seen in recent years by military pilots have nothing to do with potential little green men, but rather with very real adversaries of the United States. After decades of secrecy, Congress last year ordered the executive branch to inform the general public about the activities of the Pentagon unit responsible for studying these phenomena, which was entrusted to the US Navy.
This report, placed under the authority of the Directorate of Intelligence Services (DNI), disappointed fans of extraterrestrials, whose enthusiasm had been revived by a report at the time by the very serious American television magazine 60 Minutes, on this subject. Former President Barack Obama had mischievously brought it up again, admitting during a comedy show, that he asked upon his arrival at the White House if there was a secret laboratory where 'we keep extra terrestrial specimens and spaceships.' 'They did some research and the answer was no,' he added with a smile.
What is true – and here I am serious – is that there are videos and images of objects in the sky that we do not know exactly what they are.
added Barack Obama.
The Pentagon released videos taken by US Navy pilots that showed mid-air encounters with what appear to be UFOs. One of these videos - all in black and white - dates from November 2004 and the other two from January 2015. On one, we can see an oblong-shaped object moving quickly which, a few seconds after being spotted by one of the sensors on board the US Navy aircraft, disappears to the left following a sudden acceleration.
In another video, an object can be seen above the clouds, with the pilot wondering if it is a drone. At the Pentagon, these images are taken very seriously. To avoid any link with beings from another planet and to encourage aviators to report these apparitions without fear of being mocked, the military no longer refers to them as 'unidentified flying objects' (UFOs) but as 'phenomena unidentified aerial vehicles.'
Congested airspace
The goal is for military experts and intelligence services to analyse their videos and identify as many aircraft as possible. Global airspace is congested, explains a Pentagon official who requested anonymity. In addition to airliners, it is crossed by military drones which can be American or come from abroad, quadcopters, these small drones with four arms equipped with cameras and sold commercially, sounding balloons used in particular for meteorological forecasts, of which there are thousands of different models, not counting the American military prototypes tested in the greatest secrecy.
Depending on the speed at which military pilots fly, the reflections of the sun, the time, and the weather, it can be difficult to identify the aircraft observed, but it is possible thanks to mathematical analyses and cross-checking of photos taken from different angles etc. The Pentagon does not publish any of these conclusions to avoid giving indications to potential adversaries. But an object that appears on a video to be moving quickly can, after analysing the movements of the ocean, the movements of the device that spotted it and its own movements, end up moving quite slowly.
'The more data we collect, the more we can narrow the gap between identified and unidentified, and the more we can avoid strategic surprises in terms of adversary technologies,' indicated a spokesperson for the US Department of Defence, Susan Gough, in a press release. Because, what worries the military is that these phenomena observed very frequently ('more than once or twice a week', according to the Pentagon official), reflect technologies that the United States does not have. 'Actually, we don't know what it is,' Luis Elizondo, a former soldier who participated in Pentagon work on the subject, said on Sunday.
'What we know is that whatever these aircraft are, they demonstrate capabilities beyond the next generation. And that’s what’s worrying in terms of national security: they can surpass everything we have in our inventory,' he said on ABC. 'To the Pentagon, all this looks a lot like spying on US military training centres. Our aviators train the same way they fight. And if someone is there, trying to identify how we train..., that gives them an advantage,' underlines the Pentagon official.
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