Bret Baier’s question was simple: “Are we alone?”

Jay Stratton’s answer was immediate.

“No, Bret, we’re not. Humanity is not the only intelligent life in the universe, nor do we know the intent of the non-human intelligent life that’s here. It’s very concerning.”

Speaking on Special Report ahead of the publication of his memoir, Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life, the retired defense intelligence senior executive connected that statement to more than sixteen years investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena for the United States government. His account encompasses classified military imagery, encounters near nuclear facilities, intelligence reporting, and his own claimed observations of non-human craft and beings.

For Stratton, disclosure begins with a distinction: acknowledging that humanity is not alone does not require releasing every sensitive detail about the technology, the collection methods, or the government’s activities.

“I believe that there may be aspects of this that are so intense that they can’t share it, but they can share with the American people the basic fact that we are not alone. The people can handle that.”

His interview follows the path by which he says he reached that conclusion—from an unfamiliar aircraft in military airspace to a broader account of recovered technology, institutional secrecy, and unanswered questions about intent.

The Intelligence Official Behind the Statement

John “Jay” F. Stratton Jr. retired from the Office of Naval Intelligence as a defense intelligence senior executive after more than thirty-two years of military and federal service. He was the first director of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, an interagency organization tasked with standardizing the collection and reporting of UAP sightings.

His service included operations associated with the Gulf War, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Within the intelligence community, he worked on scientific and technical intelligence, all-source analysis, and congressional briefings. He also served as Naval Intelligence’s senior representative in the creation of the Certified Defense All-Source Analyst program.

In his conversation with Baier, Stratton described joining the Army in 1989 and eventually progressing into the senior executive ranks.

“I never thought joining the Army in 1989 that I would be chasing UAP and working this topic.”

At the Defense Intelligence Agency, he served as chief of air and space warfare in the Defense Warning Office, specializing in emerging and disruptive aerospace technologies. His UAP work subsequently included involvement with the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP, and the UAP Task Force (UAPTF).

Stratton has previously emphasized that this was not a childhood fascination carried into government employment. In an earlier interview reported by KLAS, he explained:

“I didn’t really have a passion growing up. I didn’t have all the books, I didn’t watch all the TV shows, I stepped into a job at the Defense Intelligence Agency where some things came across the desk.”

Those things became the starting point for an investigation that would occupy a substantial portion of his career.

The Video That Changed the Assignment

Asked how he knew humanity was not alone, Stratton took Baier back to his DIA position and the access that accompanied it.

“In that role, I was responsible for emerging and disruptive threats, and also I had access to our most classified programs. I understood where our technology is and where our technology is going, and I also understood the technology levels of the adversaries.”

Then, he said, a colleague brought him a video of a triangular UAP flying over a nuclear missile silo.

“It was flying in ways that I could not comprehend at the time. It was flying in ways demonstrating capabilities that exceeded ours.”

Baier read a description from Stratton’s book:

“A black triangle aircraft, no wings, no tail, no exhaust, no visible propulsion of any kind, as if the fundamental laws of physics simply didn’t apply.”

The encounter, as Stratton described it, presented two immediate intelligence questions: what technology could account for the aircraft’s behavior, and who possessed it?

“I needed to understand this technology and I needed to understand who had it.”

He characterized the object as a threat because of its capabilities, its location, and the absence of information about its origin or purpose.

“This is a threat because it exceeds our capabilities and we don’t understand it, we don’t know the intent, and we don’t know where it’s from.”

The nuclear-site video occupies a foundational place in his account. It was not, he said, an unexplained image considered in isolation from his professional responsibilities. It appeared while he was working to understand advanced aerospace capabilities and potential threats to the United States.

The Files, Images, and Reports Behind the Investigation

Stratton’s public account extends beyond that first video to a body of military reporting and classified briefing material.

Earlier KLAS reporting described a comprehensive classified briefing he assembled using UAP video and photographs collected by the military. According to that report, most of the images remained unreleased, while some photographs associated with East Coast encounters and activity around Navy ships on the West Coast had become public through leaks.

The same reporting identified Stratton as the author of an investigative report on the November 2004 encounter involving the USS Nimitz carrier group and the object widely known as the “Tic Tac.”

Stratton and DIA colleague James Lacatski initially assumed that an existing office must already be examining reports of unfamiliar craft. Their attempt to locate it became part of the impetus for establishing a dedicated effort.

“As we tried to find that office, we found nothing,” Stratton told KLAS.

His description of the classified material also explains a recurring frustration in his public remarks: the difference between what an investigator has access to and what can be discussed outside government.

“It’s frustrating because you know the rest of the story and you can’t tell the rest of the story.”

In the Baier interview, Stratton described the imagery that initiated his investigation, the operational information his teams collected, and the encounters and recovered-craft descriptions covered in his memoir.

“It covers UAP cases over US military bases that haven’t been discussed yet. It gives you descriptions and details of recovered craft.”

“With My Own Eyes”

Baier moved from the origins of the investigation to the question of physical possession.

“Does the United States government have non-human craft in its possession?”

“Yes, it does.”

The next question was whether Stratton had personally seen one.

“I have seen non-human beings and non-human craft with my own eyes.”

When Baier asked him to confirm that his statement included beings, Stratton replied:

“Yes, sir.”

The exchange expanded on a declaration Stratton had already made in The Age of Disclosure, the documentary directed by Dan Farah.

“I have seen, with my own eyes, non-human craft and non-human beings.”

In the television interview, Stratton also described the custody of the craft as extending beyond government facilities.

“Both the defense contractor community and the government have craft of non-human origin.”

He said there was an ongoing effort to capture and reverse engineer the technology, characterizing the competition surrounding it as “a secret Cold War race.”

The interview did not name the contractors or locations involved. Stratton’s emphasis was on the existence of the activity and the strategic importance he assigns to it: understanding technology that he believes surpasses known human capabilities.

A Nuclear Submarine as Bait

One of the most unusual operational accounts concerned an attempt to draw a UAP into an area where military assets could collect information.

Baier quoted a passage from the memoir:

“Our bait would be a nuclear submarine. Draw a UAP in close enough to monitor, track, and if possible, capture or recover.”

Stratton said the operation emerged from several efforts to obtain better information. Eventually, he gained access to a nuclear submarine that could be deployed off the East Coast, alongside a Navy P-3 aircraft equipped for submarine hunting.

“I parked it out there to try and capture information, data on this UAP.”

Asked what happened, he answered:

“And it worked. On their very first mission, a UAP appeared.”

According to Stratton, the P-3 collected data during that mission. He did not say in the interview that the operation resulted in the capture or recovery of a craft.

The Encounter That Never Became an Intelligence Report

Stratton also recalled a telephone call from two admirals and a commander serving as their senior intelligence officer. They reported multiple UAP encounters, including an object above a training building associated with Top Gun.

“Jay, we’ve seen it with our own eyes.”

He said the witnesses described the object as appearing to “phase in” over the building before disappearing just as quickly.

For Stratton, the next step was to formally document what they had seen.

“In order to really understand that information, I need to get it into the intelligence record, so I had to get them debriefed.”

But he said that when the officers arrived at the Pentagon, another officer senior to them intervened.

“Someone who I believe is involved in this legacy program, this historic coverup, the hidden hand as I call it in the book, intercepted them and convinced them that their reputations are on the line if they make this report, and they didn’t make the report.”

Nuclear Weapons and an Ongoing Question

The nuclear connection returned when Baier played an excerpt from The Age of Disclosure. In it, Stratton described repeated activity over restricted nuclear facilities.

“We’ve had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it’s not ours.”

He went further, saying:

“They have both deactivated and activated nuclear weapons with both the United States and Russia.”

Stratton presented the activity as a continuing concern rather than a closed historical subject.

“The UAP activity surrounding nuclear weapons is not a historic issue. It’s an ongoing issue.”

Asked whether the beings were hostile, he did not offer a definitive answer.

“Bret, we don’t know the intent.”

He added:

“Sad for me to say after sixteen-plus years of looking at this for the government and, you know, twenty-plus years of looking at it, we do not know the intent.”

Congress, the President, and the Struggle Over Access

Stratton rejected the suggestion that publishing a memoir replaced the responsibility to brief elected officials. He said he had repeatedly taken the subject to Congress, beginning with Senator Harry Reid in 2007.

“I was one of the first to brief Congress on this topic in the modern era in 2007 when I briefed Senator Harry Reid, and I continued that through the rest of the next sixteen years till I left the government, retired.”

The book, he explained, serves a different purpose:

“It puts everything in context, and it brings it together.”

His concerns about access extend to the presidency. Asked whether President Trump had seen all the relevant evidence, Stratton answered:

“No, Bret, I don’t think he’s seen it. I think he’s still being shielded from the truth.”

He framed reaching the president as a necessary step toward a public acknowledgment.

“We have to work hard to bring the truth to the president because the president that goes to the microphone to tell the world we’re not alone, that’s a monumental moment.”

In an earlier announcement of the memoir, Stratton described his intention to disclose the information available to him within legal boundaries:

“In the book, I break my silence to reveal everything I legally can about my investigations of UAP and non-human intelligent life on behalf of the U.S. government and the profound impact my work had on me and my family.”

The Race to Understand the Technology

The final stakes Stratton outlined were geopolitical.

Asked whether China was attempting to master the technology, he included both China and Russia:

“I think China and Russia are both working on reverse engineering craft of non-human origin.”

His concern is that secrecy and restricted access could leave the United States at a disadvantage in the competition he describes. When Baier raised the disagreement between Stratton’s statements and the conclusions of the Pentagon’s UAP office, Stratton answered:

“Somebody’s wrong, and I think that America’s gonna pay the price if the truth doesn’t win in this situation. The world deserves the truth.”

Full transcript :

RFK 00:01

This group, uh, approached me to talk about UAPs.

Luna 00:06

Oh, really?

RFK 00:06

Yeah. And they, it was a very high level NASA scientist and then a bunch of Navy SEALs and Green Berets who had been on recovery teams.

Luna 00:18

Crash retrieval programs?

RFK 00:19

To g- right.

Luna 00:20

Mm-hmm.

RFK 00:20

And, you know, they, some of the stuff they talked about was crazy, about how they were, actually had figured out how to call some of the, uh, ships in and, and, you know, um, and then, uh, were under orders to destroy them and recover them.

Bret Baier 00:39

That was the Health and Human Services secretary speaking in a recent podcast about meeting with and talking to US military and senior officials involved in hunting down UAPs. Questions about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, continue to spark massive interest from the public. For more insight on these unexplained encounters and reports of non-human life forms, I spoke with retired defense intelligence senior executive Jay Jay Stratton, who has spent more than 15 years investigating UAPs for the US government. We began our conversation on Capitol Hill, where Jay Stratton was one of the first people to brief lawmakers on this topic. Jay, you served in the US military, national intelligence, 30, almost 33 years.

Jay Stratton 01:29

Yes, sir.

Bret Baier 01:29

Long time.

Jay Stratton 01:30

Long time, long career.

Bret Baier 01:32

And you ended up the highest civilian rank.

Jay Stratton 01:35

Yes. I, I moved up from, uh, the regular GS ranks to the senior executive service, which is the highest a civilian can get non-appointed. So it’s a career move and it’s really a boost for, I guess, a statement of my capability over the years in, in that I accomplished what I did and I moved, moved the needle a little bit, enough to get recognized.

Bret Baier 01:56

But I mean, you served on battlefields and you served in the Pentagon. You served in the national intelligence community.

Jay Stratton 02:03

You know, I, I never thought joining the Army i- in 1989, that I would be chasing UAP and working this topic. It’s a, it’s a amazing career to have. Almost 33 years. Uh, over 16 of those were investigating UAP and non-human intelligent life on behalf of the US government. I, I really feel like it’s been a monumental shift in the culture. Look at that thing, dude.

Bret Baier 02:29

The Pentagon has begun declassifying and releasing records about UAPs on a rolling basis now. This follows recent directives from President Trump. Jay Jay Stratton was a central figure in the government’s investigation into these sightings and encounters. His new book is called Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth about Non-Human Intelligent Life. It comes out tomorrow. Why’d you write this book?

Jay Stratton 02:54

This book is very important to me. I wanted to get the word out to the people. I, I’ve been working behind the scenes for the last 20 years, uh, to get us where we’re at today in this disclosure movement. So it’s very important that people understand the, the, the main point is that the world deserves to know the truth about the UAP topic and the presence of non-human intelligent life.

Bret Baier 03:18

I’ve read it. It’s a page-turner. There’s a lot in there that I haven’t heard before. Uh, you led the government’s hunt for this for 16 years. Simple question. Are we alone?

Jay Stratton 03:32

No, Bret, we’re not. Humanity is not the only intelligent life in the universe, nor do we know the intent of the non-human intelligent life that’s here. It’s very concerning.

Bret Baier 03:42

So you say that, but how do you know?

Jay Stratton 03:45

Bret, let me take you back to where it started. I was at the Defense Intelligence Agency as the chief of air and space warfare. In that role, I was responsible for emerging and disruptive threats, and also I had access to our most classified programs. I understood where our technology is and where our technology is going, and I also understood the technology levels of the adversaries. And it was during that period that a colleague brought to me a video of a triangular UAP flying over a nuclear missile silo, some of our most secure airspace, and it was flying in ways that I could not comprehend at the time. It was, it was flying in ways demonstrating capabilities that exceeded ours.

Bret Baier 04:26

Well, let me read that part from the book. Quote, “A black triangle aircraft, no wings, no tail, no exhaust, no visible propulsion of any kind, as if the fundamental laws of physics simply didn’t apply.” Take me to that day in your life. Som- somebody hands you that video taken near this nuclear weapon storage site and, and what do you see? What do you do?

Jay Stratton 04:49

Well, it’s very telling, because in that position with the Defense Intelligence Agency, I was uniquely qualified to, to identify anything flying in the airspace. So when I’m watching something as an airspace engineer that’s demonstrating capabilities that I don’t understand and can’t comprehend, that was eye-opening and moving for me. I needed to understand this technology and I needed to understand who had it.

Bret Baier 05:11

And you considered it a, a threat?

Jay Stratton 05:13

Absolutely, Bret. This is a threat because it exceeds our capabilities and we don’t understand it, we don’t know the intent, and we don’t know where it’s from.

Bret Baier 05:20

Well, let me just cut to the chase. Does the United States government have non-human craft in its possession?

Jay Stratton 05:26

Yes, it does.

Bret Baier 05:28

And have you seen one with your eyes?

Jay Stratton 05:32

I, I have seen, uh, non-human beings and y- non-human craft with my own eyes. Uh-

Bret Baier 05:38

Non-human beings too?

Jay Stratton 05:40

Yes, sir.

Bret Baier 05:41

Where are these craft now? I- are they being reverse engineered? Does the government have them? Is it private companies that have them? What, what, where, where is this stuff?

Jay Stratton 05:51

Bret, both the defense contractor community and the government have craft of non-human origin. There is an ongoing program to-

Jay Stratton 06:00

Capture and reverse engineer this technology, and really we’re in a secret Cold War race to do that.

Bret Baier 06:06

Why haven’t we heard about this? Why, you know, all of these releases from the government, we have these videos, and some of them are very compelling-

Jay Stratton 06:15

Yeah

Bret Baier 06:15

... others not s- so much. And people say, “Well, I wanna see the real stuff.” Why haven’t we seen the real stuff?

Jay Stratton 06:23

Well, the people who have had this 80-year monopoly on the topic believe that the secret is so intense that the American people cannot handle it. I believe that there may be aspects of this that are so intense that they can’t share it, but they can share with the American people the basic fact that we are not alone. The people can handle that.

Bret Baier 06:41

In the book, you write this, “Our bait would be a nuclear submarine. Draw a UE- AP in close enough to monitor, track, and if possible, capture or recover.” So basically you used a US nuclear submarine as bait. Explain that.

Jay Stratton 06:57

I worked on several, uh, efforts to do this, and it culminated when I had access to a nuclear submarine that I could put out, uh, off the East Coast, and I had a, a P-3, uh, a Navy submarine hunting with, with a lot of different equipment on it, and I parked it out there to try and capture information, data on these, on this UAP.

Bret Baier 07:16

What happened?

Jay Stratton 07:17

And it worked. Uh, on their very first mission, a UAP appeared and the P-3 worked to, to collect on the, and data was collected on that, on that mission.

Bret Baier 07:26

You write in the book, “We’ve had four UAP encounters in the past week.” This is from two flag officers. There’s something else.

Jay Stratton 07:31

Oh, yes.

Bret Baier 07:31

Two flag officers and a commander witnessed a UAP hovering over one of our facilities. That was the call you got from, from Top Gun.

Jay Stratton 07:39

Yes, Bret. I got a phone call from two flag officers, two, two different admirals, and a commander who was their senior intelligence officer. And they said, “Jay, we’ve seen it with our own eyes.” So these, these guys are the cream of the crop, and they saw a UAP phase in, was their own words, over the training building on, on the compound, and it just disappeared as fast as it was there. Then the, the rest of the story, or the more important part of the story is, in order to really understand that information, I need to get it into the intelligence record, so I had to get them debriefed. They came to the Pentagon and a senior officer, someone senior to them, someone who I believe is involved in this legacy program, this historic coverup, the, the hidden hand as I call it in the book, intercepted them and convinced them that their reputations are on the line if they make this report, and they didn’t make the report.

Bret Baier 08:32

Is that why we haven’t seen more of this? You write in the book, “These people don’t play games, Jay.” Uh, somebody talking to you, a friend. “They’ve done worse than threaten people to keep their secrets. They’ll do it again.” A friend pulls you into his office, tells you this. What does he mean, does worse than threaten?

Jay Stratton 08:50

Throughout history, Bret, uh, the secrets sometimes are so impactful to our national security that steps have been taken to remove the problem.

Bret Baier 09:04

And the people.

Jay Stratton 09:05

And the people.

Bret Baier 09:06

When I first saw you, you were in, um, the, the documentary Age of Disclosure. Um, and here’s a clip from that, and it raised my eyebrows about Secretary Rubio as well.

Jay Stratton 09:18

We’ve had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it’s not ours. They have both deactivated and activated nuclear weapons with both the United States and Russia. These are otherworldly things that are performing maneuvers that have, haven’t been seen. The UAP activity surrounding nuclear weapons is not a historic issue. It’s an ongoing issue.

Bret Baier 09:43

In this book, you go farther than even the documentary went. You’ve been advising the White House since the president ordered the files released. You think he’s seen all the real evidence? Do you think he’s in the brief?

Jay Stratton 09:55

No, Bret, I don’t think he’s seen it. I think he’s still being shielded from the, the truth, and, and we have to work hard to bring the truth to the president because the president that goes to the microphone to tell the world we’re not alone, that’s a monumental moment.

Bret Baier 10:10

If an adversary cracks this technology before we do, what happens? Do you think China is trying?

Jay Stratton 10:17

I do. I think China and Russia, uh, are, are both working on reverse engineering craft of non-human origin.

Bret Baier 10:23

The Pentagon’s own UFO office says it found no evidence of extraterrestrials. You say that they’re here. Somebody’s wrong.

Jay Stratton 10:31

Somebody’s wrong, and I think that America’s gonna pay the price if, if the truth doesn’t win in this situation. The world deserves the truth.

Bret Baier 10:41

Critics say, if this is real, why put it in a book that you’re selling? Why not say to Capitol Hill, “I’m here. This is what I know. Let’s talk about this.”

Jay Stratton 10:51

Well, I’ve briefed Congress numerous times. I was one of the first to brief Congress on this topic in the modern era in 2007 when I briefed Senator Harry Reid, and I continued that through the rest of the next, uh, 16 years, uh, till I left the government, retired. The book, it, it puts everything in context, and it, and it brings it together. It’s evergreen. It covers UAP cases over US military bases that haven’t been discussed yet. It gives you descriptions and details of recovered craft. Yeah, yeah.

Bret Baier 11:18

But, you know, everybody’s asking here-

Jay Stratton 11:19

Yeah, yeah

Bret Baier 11:20

... are they hostile? What-

Jay Stratton 11:21

Ah. Bret, we don’t know the intent. Sad for me to say after 16-plus years of looking at this for the government and, you know, 20-plus years of looking at it, we do not know the intent.

Bret Baier 11:31

Well, Jay, we appreciate you talking to us today.

Jay Stratton 11:33

Thank you, sir.

Bret Baier 11:34

Thank you.

Jay Stratton 11:34

I appreciate you having me here.

A November hearing takes shape

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer wants to revive plans for a hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, after a September proposal fell victim to changes in the congressional calendar. Speaking to Sentinel’s partner Ask a Pol outside the Capitol on September 16, 2026, Comer said organizers had been aiming for the third week of September. “Well, they keep canceling days on us,” he explained. “So we’ll, we’ll try to pick it back up in November.” Ask a Pol reported that Speaker Mike Johnson had canceled the final two weeks of the September session.

Comer described the anticipated post-election session as an opportunity: “I think it’ll be an aggressive lame duck period.” But neither the subject nor the witness lineup had been settled. Asked what the hearing was supposed to cover, he answered, “I don’t know that we ever agreed on a topic.” Laslo also raised an earlier discussion concerning scientists, but Comer directed detailed questions to Representatives Tim Burchett, Anna Paulina Luna and Eric Burlison: “Burlison more than anybody.”

The project therefore remains a proposed hearing rather than an announced event with a confirmed agenda. Comer nevertheless made his position clear: “I’d like to have another one. I think there’s demand for it. It’s just getting good witnesses in is always a challenge.”

Potential witnesses to a helicopter encounter

One possible avenue emerged in an October 10 New York Post report. Burlison told the newspaper he would explore whether intelligence personnel who witnessed a reported encounter near an undisclosed West Coast military base could testify publicly. According to an FBI report, the incident occurred during a helicopter mission in late 2025. Witnesses described orange orbs flying alongside the aircraft, numerous smaller objects moving against a mountain backdrop, and one approaching object splitting in two.

Some witnesses have already met members of Congress behind closed doors, according to Burlison, but have not shared all the encounter’s video footage. He identified one witness as a career official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who is not publicly known. Bringing such personnel into an open hearing presents a particular challenge: “There’s some people that are working for the agency that having them come forward publicly may expose other things,” Burlison said.

Burlison’s remarks identify potential witnesses, not a confirmed connection between that encounter and Comer’s proposed hearing. “That’s a good place to explore and I’m happy to look into that to see if that’s a possibility,” he told the Post.

Why firsthand military testimony matters

The July 26, 2023, hearing provides a precedent for putting military experience directly into the public congressional record. Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, retired Navy Commander David Fravor and former intelligence officer David Grusch appeared before an Oversight subcommittee. Before their testimony, Chairman Glenn Grothman asked: “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” All three answered affirmatively.

Firsthand testimony allows lawmakers to question witnesses about their own observations, duties and reporting procedures. Graves opened his statement by saying, “I have experienced advanced UAP firsthand.” He described how his squadron’s detections progressed from suspected radar errors to correlations with other sensors and visual identification.

For organizers, the purpose was to hear from people rather than rely solely on institutional briefings. “We’re going to have witnesses who can speak frankly to the public about their experiences,” Burchett said ahead of the 2023 hearing.

Access restrictions and congressional resistance

The obstacles extend beyond finding a date. At the 2023 hearing, Burchett described opposition encountered during preparations: “We have run into roadblocks from Members, from the intelligence community, the Pentagon.” He also said an amendment he proposed to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization legislation would have brought airline pilots’ sighting reports to Congress. “But I was told that the intelligence community did not like that,” he said, “and the amendment was not even heard in committee.”

Luna identified another barrier: obtaining access to classified information. “We were even denied access to a classified briefing in a SCIF prior to this hearing,” she said in July 2023, referring to a secure facility used for classified discussions and difficulties arranging temporary clearance for Grusch. In prepared remarks for the September 9, 2025, hearing, she described further restrictions involving special access programs. According to Luna, the Defense Department told committee staff that access was limited to designated defense committees, while other members required approval from the chairs and ranking members of those committees.

Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz has likewise framed access as an oversight issue. In his prepared November 13, 2024, opening statement, he described questions from citizens and legislators being met with “stonewalling and responses of ‘I can’t tell you.’” He called for transparency “within reasonable national security limits” and said agencies “must maintain open lines of communication with Members of Congress.”

Protecting witnesses

Witness participation presents another roadblock, particularly for serving military personnel. In her September 2025 prepared remarks, Luna said military pilots had explained why they would not speak publicly: “Out of fear that speaking out would cost them their flight status, and potentially their careers.” She added, “We cannot protect our airspace if our best-trained observers are silenced.”

Graves described similar concerns under oath in 2023. “The stigma attached to UAP is real and powerful and challenges national security,” he told lawmakers. “It silences commercial pilots who fear professional repercussions, discourages witnesses.” For the potential intelligence witnesses discussed by Burlison, the additional question is how to describe their encounter publicly without exposing sensitive aspects of their work.

However, this leaves one question unanswered: what about the eyewitnesses to the alleged non-human craft described in the UAP Disclosure Act texts? With the release tomorrow of “Out of the Shadows”, the book by former UAPTF director Jay Stratton, could this be the first step towards witness testimony from those who have encountered these craft at military installations? Dr Lacatski, who coordinated the UAP investigation within the Defence Intelligence Agency, stated that the US had gained access to the interior of one of these crafts. However, he refused to answer when asked whether he had seen it himself. With hearings having taken place behind closed doors for years, when will the heart of the matter finally be addressed directly and publicly?

In a discussion released by the Sol Foundation on October 8, 2026, Peter Skafish, co-founder of the foundation, spoke with Marik von Rennenkampff to review developments concerning advanced platforms. Their exchange reveals a new confidential avenue for witnesses to submit information related to unreported programs, retrieval operations, and reverse-engineering activities.

“There’s enormous, enormous opportunity in that,” Skafish says, adding: “It’s gonna take courage. It will take a clever strategy for anyone wanting to do it. It will take legal protections, but it can produce results.”

Marik von Rennenkampff underscores the exceptional nature of the protection being discussed. He considers that the immunity mechanism, described as a “safe harbor,” shows that the White House is taking allegations of unreported UAP programs seriously. “This waiver … signals that the president, the administration of the White House is taking these allegations of unreported UAP programs and specifically unreported retrieval and reverse-engineering programs so seriously,” he says.

Federal-level protection

Rennenkampff questions the exact scope of the measure. He notes that Department of War authorities fall particularly within the Title 10 framework, whereas the most sensitive allegations frequently concern the intelligence community, the CIA, and activities governed by Title 50. His question is direct: could an additional protection specifically cover intelligence structures?

Skafish replies that the key would not lie solely in the public memorandum, but in a broader executive directive. “It’s really the executive directive that governs this,” he explains. He says he was informed by a person who helped draft it that the directive is classified: “I found out from the person that helped draft it that it’s classified.”

According to Skafish, the directive was designed to cover all relevant information, regardless of which part of the administration holds it. “If there’s intelligence community information, if there is Department of War information, if there was federal law enforcement information, wherever it resides, that nothing is exempt,” he says. He also calls for an attempt to obtain the document: “Someone should start trying to FOIA that.”

No agency outside the framework

Peter Skafish believes the text was not designed to create loopholes that would allow certain intelligence agencies to avoid the process. “I don’t think this was crafted to create exceptions that would allow certain agencies in the intelligence community to kind of wriggle out of this,” he says.

He explains that he attended a meeting bringing together senior executive-branch officials and general counsels from several departments and agencies. “I think that was a response to one of the meetings I was in,” he says, before predicting parallel clarifications from the various administrations.

For Skafish, the decisive question is not which agency an individual works for or once worked for, but whether that person can access an appropriate reporting channel. “I think it doesn’t matter which agency someone is employed by or was employed by,” he says. “They have multiple points of contact where they can come in and bring information.”

Guiding witnesses

Skafish acknowledges that access to these procedures may be difficult. “It’s gonna be tough for people to navigate how to go in,” he says. Nevertheless, he indicates that the Sol Foundation can guide people seeking to enter the official process.

He sets a clear boundary: “We do not want classified information. We are not taking classified disclosures. We will refer you to an attorney for that.”

Skafish says this guidance may involve the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI. “Due to our participation in the UAP Science Advisory Council, we know how to refer people to the appropriate points of contact in the ODNI and/or the FBI,” he explains.

A call for witnesses

Skafish states that the agencies involved are seeking information and witnesses. “Both agencies want that information. They want witnesses,” he says. He adds that the U.S. executive branch views this information as falling within its authority: “The executive branch feels that they have a right to it.”

The message to people holding relevant information is clear: they can turn to institutional channels rather than transmit classified material to outside organizations. For Skafish, the executive branch expects the cooperation of those who may have knowledge of unreported programs or information: “People must comply with this. So if there’s information, they want it.”

The exchange between Peter Skafish and Marik von Rennenkampff therefore places potential witnesses at the center of an initiative to collect information on UAP. The existence of a classified executive directive, the announced extension to military, intelligence, and federal agencies, and referrals to the ODNI or FBI form, according to Skafish, the elements of a system designed to bring forward information long kept in the shadows.

However, there is no guarantee that this will not become another “catch and kill” operation organized by the U.S. administration, following whistleblowers’ stated distrust of existing procedures. Whistleblower Dylan Borland said at the Stockholm conference that the current level of whistleblower protection was “0.0%.” The Sol Foundation is now putting its reputation on the line to convince whistleblowers to provide their information through authorized channels. Hopefully, that information will ultimately be made public.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, described being approached about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) during the presidential transition, before he entered the Trump administration.

Kennedy was sworn in as the department’s 26th secretary on February 13, 2025. He was talking with Anna Paulina Luna, chairwoman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.

“During the transition, I was living in Palm Beach, and this group, um, approached me to talk about UAPs.” He described the group as including “a very high level NASA scientist and then a bunch of Navy SEALs and Green Berets who had been on recovery teams.” Luna responded, “Crash retrieval programs,” and Kennedy answered, “Right.”

Kennedy then recounted claims about operations involving unidentified craft. “Some of the stuff they talked about was crazy about how they were actually had figured out how to call some of the, uh, ships in,” he said, adding that they “were under orders to destroy them and recover them.”

Kennedy also said the group wanted him to communicate its information publicly: “They wanted me to go public on that.” He explained his reluctance by referring to the criticism already directed at him: “I just thought I already got so many counts against me,” before mentioning “conspiracy theories.”

This revelation followed Luna’s account of the questions her task force addresses. “We’re asking the questions that people wanna ask but are too embarrassed or afraid of being judged for asking,” she said.

Kennedy added later: “But I have had briefings once I got in there, and it’s pretty... A lot of this stuff is really, really crazy,” referring to his entry into the administration.

Luna described a “massive declass effort” and emphasized the role of presidential support: “Having the president on board with these declassification efforts is incredibly important.” Her explanation focused on making information available rather than prescribing a public conclusion. “Our job is not to tell you what to believe,” she said. “It’s just to present you with evidence and ensure that there’s transparency.” Kennedy responded, “Yeah. Absolutely.”

These groundbreaking claims by Kennedy show that secret briefings have been ongoing for years, while the rest of the population has been denied access to this level of information.

Who gave the order to shoot down UFOs as standard operating procedure? Considering the possibility that these could be man-made or piloted by non-human intelligence, were any diplomatic considerations taken into account? Why brief RFK Jr. and ask him to be their spokesperson?

One can only wonder who provided such briefings. One of the few groups that fit the description is Skywatcher, a company that claims to be able to summon UAPs. Its personnel, such as Jake Barber, have declared that they were involved in crash retrieval operations.

What information from the briefings Kennedy described could ultimately become available through those declassification efforts?

Rep. Luna commented: “People will say a lot, but can you prove it? What is the actual data prover? Can you actually bring forward tangible evidence?”

That’s indeed the question.

Full transcript :

Sec. Health RFK Jr. 17:39

I really love what you do ‘cause you’re not attacking people. You’re not being mean-spirited. Do you have any personal friendships on the other side of the aisle?

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna 17:48

I do. I do. I’m actually fairly close with Jared Moskowitz, who’s a Florida Democrat, which is ironic because we connected actually separately on the task force that I chair. So I’m the chair of the task force on declassification of federal secrets on House oversight, and, um, for the UAP stuff specifically, and that’s kind of how we initially connected.

Sec. Health RFK Jr. 18:08

You got, you got all the great issues.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna 18:10

I do, and you know what’s funny is, um, when we first got the task force, a lot of people were like, “Are you sure they’re not trying to set you up to fail?” And I said, “Well, even if they did try to set me up to fail, they chose the wrong time because with all the declass coming out of the White House, it made the task force...” You know, they’re trying to paint it as kooky to one of the hottest task force in Congress right now. And so our hearings when we do them, there is a lot of interest, I think, and I always tell people we’re asking the questions that people wanna ask but are too embarrassed or afraid of being judged for asking. And we’ve had a lot of great wins as a result of it.

Sec. Health RFK Jr. 18:41

Yeah. It’s so interesting ‘cause, you know, during the transition, I was living in Palm Beach, and this group, um, approached me to talk about UAPs.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna 18:53

Oh, really?

Sec. Health RFK Jr. 18:54

Yeah. And they... It was a very high level NASA scientist and then a bunch of Navy SEALs and Green Berets who had been on recovery teams.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna 19:05

Crash retrieval programs.

Sec. Health RFK Jr. 19:07

To g- right.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna 19:07

Mm-hmm.

Sec. Health RFK Jr. 19:07

And you know, they... Some of the stuff they talked about was crazy about how they were actually had figured out how to call some of the, uh, ships in and, and, you know, um, and then, uh, were under orders to destroy them and recover them. Um, but, um, I thought, you know, they wanted me to go public on that, and I just thought I already got so many counts against me- ... conspiracy theories and this, the last-

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna 19:37

Well, you know, so there’s... You know, I think in just like in any, any field of study, right, like you can... People will say a lot, but can you prove it? What is the actual data prover? Can you actually bring forward tangible evidence? And what’s been cool is, you know, we’ve pushed a massive declass effort, and having the president on board with these declassification efforts is incredibly important. And, and this does tie into also kind of, I guess, like the food industrial complex is what I’ll, I’ll call it. Um, but you know, specifically on these topics, we... Our job is not to tell you what to believe. It’s just to present you with evidence and ensure that there’s transparency.

Sec. Health RFK Jr. 20:10

Yeah. Absolutely.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna 20:10

It’s a phenomenal concept for the federal government, I guess.

Sec. Health RFK Jr. 20:14

But I have had briefings once I got in there, and it’s pretty... A lot of this stuff is really, really crazy.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna 20:22

I know. It, it definitely kind of puts in perspective. You know, I always tell people social media is not real life. Go out and look at the sky and kind of see how little you are in the, in the realm of things in perspective.

Star-like points, recorded on old photographic plates but absent from subsequent observations: this is the starting point for two studies posted on arXiv in September 2026 by a team that includes astrophysicist Beatriz Villarroel and quantitative analysis researcher Stephen Bruehl, following their previous study, as reported by Sentinel News, and published since then in Scientific Reports.

The first, Modeling Palomar Transients: Constraints from Reflection Geometry and Orbital Altitude, published on September 4, seeks to estimate the physical properties these sources would possess if they were solar reflections produced by objects near Earth. The second, Earth-Projected Clustering of Historical Optical Transients, posted online on September 8, examines their geographic distribution. Both studies draw on a catalog of 107,875 candidates from the first Palomar photographic survey. The significance of the studied population lies in its age: the selected observations predate Sputnik, which would rule out satellites and human debris—to which many similar flashes are now attributed.

In an interview with Ross Coulthart for Reality Check, Villarroel and Bruehl present these results as successive steps in an investigation into a phenomenon that remains unexplained. Their collaboration aims to determine whether the candidates correspond solely to the imperfections expected in photographs that are several decades old, or whether some belong to a real population of light sources. The researchers cite a combination of clues: point-like images that are sometimes narrower than those of stars, clusters and alignments, a decrease in the number of candidates in the area corresponding to the Earth’s shadow, and temporal associations with nuclear tests. They also recently published a paper in Scientific Reports, where they use machine learning to clean up their sample from false detections, resulting in a stronger association with nuclear tests for higher probability transients.

Villarroel describes a relatively flat object that rotates and becomes visible only when its geometry allows for reflection. The range of sizes in the cases studied extends from centimeters to about three meters, but these figures do not necessarily reflect the size of the underlying object, which could be larger, less reflective, and have multiple surfaces.

In the interview, Villarroel presents the absence of features within the Earth’s shadow as her strongest argument against an exclusively photographic explanation: “There is no reason why features would know where the Earth’s shadow is,” she explains in essence, emphasizing the temporal dependence of the Sun–Earth geometry.

Concentrations at Nuclear Test Sites

The geographical study compares the 11,418 machine learning-filtered candidates to 23,814 control locations distributed across 5-by-5-degree cells, with each control matching the time and general direction of an actual plaque. Of the 137 cells where at least five candidates are expected, sixteen show a significant excess after Bonferroni correction: nine form a cluster in the eastern Pacific, four cover part of southern Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico, and three are isolated.

The top-ranked cell has 690 candidates compared to 182.2 expected, while a cell in the Gulf region contains 258 compared to 14.4 expected; fourteen of the sixteen cells show an excess from multiple plates. A second method groups the 897 highest-scoring candidates into six clusters, four of which fall within a cell showing an excess, with no identical match for Arizona and New Mexico, whose reference centers are 377 kilometers apart.

231 candidates are observed within a one-day window before and after a nuclear test: 203, or 87.9%, are associated with Castle Yankee, the 13.5-megaton thermonuclear test on May 4, 1954, and appear the previous night in the projected regions of the eastern Pacific. The remaining 28 are linked to tests in Nevada, including 24 associated with the March 12, 1955, test, “Hornet,” with one candidate on the night of the test and 23 on the following night.

The researchers do not limit themselves to the hypothesis of an artificial origin: they examine icy fragments, natural bodies with a small reflective metallic surface, and dusty plasma phenomena in the magnetosphere. Regarding natural objects, the authors discuss the difficulty of maintaining a specular surface, the expected distributions near the ecliptic, and the possibility that a low-reflectivity body could remain invisible as a trail while producing a flash on a small facet. They find dusty plasmas difficult to reconcile with the inferred reflective surfaces, and then, among the models considered and under the assumption of a common origin, favor a scenario involving non-human intelligence capable of accounting for the various clues.

At the end of the interview, Villarroel expresses a stronger personal conviction: “I think what we’re seeing is some kind of surveillance system,” while Bruehl also supports the idea of non-human monitoring. The two scientists also link these statistical findings to UFO sightings in Sedona, White Sands, and Tampico, raising the possibility of astronomical validation of the statistical studies conducted among ground-based witnesses for over 75 years.

Both studies construct a coherent interpretation of reflections originating from sources near Earth and describe geographical concentrations as well as nuclear associations. As noted by the authors, there are other astronomical archives that could allow for further correlation of the identified statistical links, paving the way for a more comprehensive modeling of the UAP phenomenon on a global scale.

Dr Robert McGwier recently released an internal document demonstrating the genuine interest of the U.S. executive branch in the issue of UAPs.

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has appointed Jonathan R. Jeffries as its PURSUE Designee, meaning he is the official responsible for overseeing the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters programme within the agency. The unclassified memorandum, dated 28 September 2026 and signed by Jeffries, instructs all NRO personnel and programmes to report all cases relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) immediately.

This designation provides a name and role for the NRO’s PURSUE interface. Russ J. Jeffries, who has more than thirty years of experience in space- and airborne platforms, electronic warfare, systems design, and program acquisition and execution, is director of the Mission Integration Directorate. The NRO is a U.S. space intelligence agency responsible for developing and operating reconnaissance systems to meet national intelligence needs, among other things.

A particularly noteworthy passage is as follows:

UAP is any abnormal phenomena with respect to known physics, current technology, or known human technology sources that may suggest non-human origins of material, object behaviors, information, or communication. This includes formerly used terms: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, Unidentified Flying Objects, aliens, extra- terrestrials, and Non-Human Intelligence.

It is extremely rare for official U.S. documents to refer directly to the term ‘extraterrestrial’, even as a hypothesis.

The memorandum establishes a specific reporting chain. Personnel must submit information regarding PANs either to the NRO’s PURSUE coordinator or to the dedicated email address. These reports are then reviewed by the PURSUE Working Group, who are responsible for determining appropriate actions and coordinating the response with the relevant offices, including the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

The text also provides an alternative channel for confidential reporting to the NRO Inspector General’s Office. It reiterates that pre-existing non-disclosure agreements remain in effect, except in communications with authorised AARO or PURSUE representatives. Classified or sensitive information must be transmitted exclusively through authorised systems and must not be made public. AARO specifies that classified information must not be submitted via its public portal, but rather through secure channels.

The appointment of Jonathan R. Jeffries and the establishment of these transmission channels puts PURSUE at the centre of the NRO’s internal procedure for UAP reports. One might wonder what role the AARO will play now that the executive branch has a direct tool for declassification and data collection.

Six years after its launch and one year since its final form was established, I feel it is important to provide an update to everyone who has been following our work over the years.

I established the initial version of the organization, named at the time “Explorer Lab” on 12 December 2020 in response to the absence of channels for disseminating information about the emerging science of UAPs, which was frequently criticised and marginalised. From the outset, I wanted to make information freely accessible to prevent it from being used as a commercial tool. Even today, none of our content is paid for, sponsored, or subject to advertising.

Although I thought this initiative would be welcomed by a community seeking such a platform, I created Explorer Lab without any support. In retrospect, the fact that so many contacts turned their backs on me at that time should have been a lesson, but unfortunately it wasn’t, and it cost me several years as I repeated the same mistake.

However, you will find fellow travellers along the way who will support you, and you will recognise them easily: they never ask for anything, and they will support you as soon as you start to falter.

In this first update letter, I would like to thank everyone who has helped me over the years by volunteering their professional expertise.

Our community continues to grow, with almost 900 people currently on our Discord server and dozens of volunteers stepping forward every time a new project is launched.

As our academic projects begin to take shape, I would like to express my gratitude to the current pioneers in this field: Drs Bohlander, Djahanchahi, Kayal, Knuth, McGwier, Szydagis, Vallée and Villarroel. I would also like to acknowledge the contributions of those who came before them and have sadly passed away. It is a privilege to see so many of us come together in this largely unexplored field.

The Sentinel Center Association is now fully established as we inaugurate our new editorial board, deploy our network of detectors and lay the foundations for our publishing house. Whatever the future may hold, the Centre will remain an independent entity dedicated to the systematic, high-resolution monitoring of the environment and the media, capable of serving as an intermediary between individuals, institutions, and governmental and non-governmental organisations.

In conclusion, I would like to acknowledge once more the invaluable contribution of all the volunteers who make the association what it is today.

On 1 April 1957, the BBC’s Panorama programme devoted three minutes of primetime airtime to the annual spaghetti harvest in a Swiss valley. The programme explained that the mild spring and the disappearance of the spaghetti weevil had led to a particularly bountiful crop. The presenter was Richard Dimbleby, the most respected journalist in Britain at the time and renowned for his coverage of royal funerals and coronations. The programme was such a success that the BBC was inundated with calls from viewers asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees.

Nineteen years earlier, on 30 October 1938, Orson Welles presented his adaptation of The War of the Worlds to CBS in the form of fake news bulletins. The print media, a direct competitor to radio for advertising revenue, was quick to amplify the story of a national panic which, on the scale described, probably never actually took place.

Closer to home, on the night of 9 June 2018, seven French video artists led by Arnaud Thiry from the AstronoGeek channel, alongside Defakator, La Tronche en Biais, Hygiène Mentale and Un Monde Riant, created a fifty-metre crop circle in under two hours in a field in Sarraltroff, in the Moselle region, with the farmer’s complicity. This followed in the footsteps of a tradition of nocturnal land art established in the 1990s by John Lundberg’s British collective Circlemakers. Over the following two months, they filmed the ‘specialists’ authenticating their creation as extraterrestrial, measuring in Bovis units what their pendulums told them and communing with the energies. Umberto Molinaro, described by Le Républicain Lorrain as ‘the pope of crop circles’, declared on camera: ‘This crop circle is so elaborate that a human being could not have made it.’ Gilles Munsch, a secondary school mechanics teacher and author of the VECA Report as early as 1993, was the only observer to conclude, without prior knowledge and on the spot, that it was a human creation. He remains a largely underrated figure in French-speaking research into crop circles, and at Sarraltroff he applied the method he had formalised twenty-five years earlier.

These three cases, which have since become textbook examples, share a simple dynamic: a hoax spreads by latching onto a reputation for reliability and then survives in the collective memory, despite being refuted. Spaghetti, Martians and crop circles make us smile today because they cost nothing other than a suspension of disbelief.

In Paris, on 28 April 2026, a French website published its fifty-third ‘scientific article’ on the Bayesian analysis of a corpus whose fictional nature the author had admitted in April 1993. It is this second, more low-key and infinitely more instructive case that forms the focus of the remainder of this article.

A History of Ummo

The Ummo affair began on 14 January 1966 in Madrid, when José Luis Jordán Peña, a telecommunications engineer and active member of the Spanish Society for Parapsychology, called Fernando Sesma Manzano, an Esperanto teacher and leader of the Amigos del Espacio. This was a group that regularly met in a bar on Calle Aduana to study UFO phenomena. With his voice distorted by a homemade device, Peña posed as an emissary from the planet Ummo, which he claimed was orbiting around the star Wolf 424. He announced that a research team had reportedly landed discreetly in La Javie, in the Basses-Alpes, on 28 March 1950. A few weeks later, typed letters bearing a distinctive seal intended to prove their authenticity began to arrive at the addresses of recipients whom Peña had carefully selected from the Spanish UFO community.

Over the next twenty-two years, Peña produced an unparalleled body of work in the history of UFO hoaxes. He wrote several hundred letters, some of which ran to several dozen pages, containing detailed descriptions of the planet Ummo and all its inhabitants, including their physiology, political philosophy, cosmology, ideophonic language, tetravalent logic, metaphysics, and religion. To anchor the narrative in reality, he staged physical events: a flying saucer bearing the Ummite insignia appeared above Aluche on 1 June 1967; a whitish disc was observed in San José de Valderas; and fragments of polymer were recovered in Santa Monica. Peña himself admitted in 1993 that these fragments were made of polyvinyl fluoride, a material patented by DuPont in the United States in 1947 (Jordán Peña, J. L., ‘UMMO: Otro Mito que Hace CRASH’, La Alternativa Racional, no. 29, ARP – Sociedad para el Avance del Pensamiento Crítico, Summer 1993). )

The hoax spread beyond Spain from the late 1960s onwards. It became one of the most hotly debated cases in European ufology, thanks in large part to Antonio Ribera’s book UFO: Contact from Planet Ummo, published in 1973. However, it is important to emphasise from the outset that Peña did not create an ordinary hoax; he wrote a work of art. Regarded as a literary work, the Ummo corpus deserves a place in the history of great fictional hoaxes of the 20^(th) century, alongside the Voynich Manuscript or, more directly, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges — a 1940 short story in which a fictional encyclopaedia of an imaginary world gradually infiltrates and replaces reality. Jacques Vallée explicitly suggested that the authors of Ummo had drawn inspiration from Borges, and this comparison sheds more light on the nature of the work than any factual debate over its authenticity could.

The ‘white coat’ bias

However, it is when the project begins to recruit practising scientists that the affair takes on its unique dimension. We can draw a comparison with the story of the Cottingley Fairies.

In July 1917, two cousins, Elsie Wright (aged nine) and Frances Griffiths (aged sixteen), borrowed their eldest cousin’s father’s camera. They returned half an hour later with a photographic plate on which Frances appeared behind a bush, surrounded by four dancing fairies. The case gained credibility through the involvement of Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote a book about it in 1922 called The Coming of the Fairies. Elsie Wright confessed to the hoax in 1981 and again in 1983, revealing that the fairies were cardboard cut-outs based on illustrations from Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published in 1914. This information is held at the National Science and Media Museum. Frances Griffiths, her cousin, maintained until her death that the fifth and final photograph, ‘The Fairy Bower’, was genuine. This lingering doubt carries as much weight as the confession; it hints at the mechanism that the Ummo affair would bring to its logical conclusion.

From 1968 onwards, Ummo operated using the same method, but with an added degree of sophistication. The scientific authorities recruited did not merely lend their names to the case; they incorporated it into their own work. Jean-Pierre Petit, a young magnetohydrodynamics researcher at the CNRS at the time, became aware of the Ummo letters in the late 1960s and began incorporating some of their concepts into his own models.

In the acknowledgements section of his 1995 article ‘Twin Universes Cosmology’, published in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science, Petit went so far as to thank a ‘Professor Oaxiiboo F’ – that is to say, an Ummite – by name. This gesture is unusual and merits careful consideration. By doing so, Petit effectively makes the Ummites co-authors of his scientific work. The distinction is subtle, but it elevates the ‘white coat’ from a peripheral to a structural role. They become part of the narrative.

This manoeuvre produces the circular validation effect that is the hallmark of the ‘white coat’ bias in the Ummo affair: a heterodox scientist validates a heterodox text by incorporating it into their heterodox theory, and each element supports the others without any being tested independently.

The same logic can be seen in the cosmological aspect of his work. Since 1977, Petit has advocated the Janus theory, which he explicitly links to the Ummite corpus via the motif of twin universes. In 2019 and again in 2022, Thibault Damour — recipient of the 1996 Einstein Medal and a tenured professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques — provided detailed technical criticism of the theory. Damour demonstrates, with supporting calculations, that the two Bianchi identities imposed by the model’s bimetric structure require two conservation equations for the two sectors of matter. However, the Janus model uses only one equation at a time, depending on the context under consideration. Based on this technical objection, which the relativity community has never abandoned, the model is formally invalidated in general relativity, as far as the published literature is concerned.

The Science of Ummo

The strength of the objection raised by Ummoists against any sceptical interpretation of the case can be summed up in a single sentence: however much one may claim it is a hoax, several pieces of physical and cosmological information contained in the letters have proved to be accurate. One must concede that this objection contains a grain of truth because it is sincere and not entirely false. However, it is not entirely correct either, and it is precisely this gap between the two that makes the case so challenging.

The claim most accessible to the non-specialist reader concerns the stellar origin of the Ummites. The initial letters, dating from 1966, state that the planet Ummo orbits the star Wolf 424 and provide a distance of 3.68502 light-years between the star and the Sun. However, the actual distance to Wolf 424 is 14.2 light-years, which represents an error by a factor of four. Furthermore, Wolf 424 is a close binary system comprising two red dwarfs (M5.5V and M7V), with an orbital period of 15.5 years and a semi-major axis of 4.1 AU. It has been catalogued since 1967 under the designation FL Virginis due to its eruptive activity, a fact that is never acknowledged in the letters. To date, no planets have been detected there, and the habitability constraints around M-type dwarfs (habitable zone at 0.02–0.05 AU, tidal locking and exposure to stellar flares) render the hypothesis of an Earth-like planet in this system highly improbable. Subsequent letters attempt a retroactive correction by referring to a distance of 14.6 light-years, but this is inconsistent with the binary system. No real visitor from that region could have made both these errors simultaneously. Peña himself admitted in his 1993 confession to having chosen Wolf 424 at random.

Other claims require case-by-case examination but often follow the same pattern: a genuine scientific fact accessible to any well-informed 1960s researcher is incorporated into a body of work and then presented retrospectively as a Ummite prediction. The episode involving the Norwegian cargo ship in 1934, which was used for ionospheric research (the experiment involved transmitting radio waves from the ship into the upper atmosphere to study the reflective properties of the ionised layer, which was key to all long-distance radio communications and would have signalled our presence to the Ummites), is a historically documented event that can be found in any maritime archive from that period. The Pioneer anomaly — the deviation in the trajectories of the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes — was not identified until around 1980, but has since been resolved by attributing it to the thermal radiation pressure of the probes themselves (Turyshev et al., Physical Review Letters, 2012). However, the proposed mechanism has no connection with the cosmological explanations put forward in the letters, yet the website ummo-sciences.org continues to devote analyses to it as late as 2026. The community treats this issue as open, despite it having been closed by the scientific community. The concept of twin universes, which is central to Ummite cosmology and was adopted by Petit in his Janus model, emerged at around the same time as Andrei Sakharov’s 1967 publications on CPT-symmetric two-universe cosmology. In 2004, Jacques Vallée wondered whether the letters might be a direct allusion to the work of the Soviet dissident. Magnetohydrodynamic propulsion was an active field of research in the United States and the USSR during the 1960s. Tetravalent logic, presented as an Ummo innovation, is recognised in the internal debates of the Ummo-Sciences forum itself as a variant of Saul Kripke’s modal logic.

The polyvinyl fluoride found in the Santa Monica fragments illustrates the mechanics with almost cartoonish clarity. Although it was presented at the time as an ‘alien’ material because it could not be found in Franco’s Spain, it is in fact a polymer that was patented by DuPont in 1947 and marketed under the name Tedlar since 1961 — that is, before the first letters. The rarity of the material in Spain in 1966 proves that it was terrestrial, not extraterrestrial; a well-informed forger could exploit this to create something that his targets would be unable to verify on the spot.

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

Disgrace by association of information.

It is precisely this combination of serious elements and documented errors that makes the case elusive to conventional sceptical criticism. This dialectical problem is brilliantly exemplified by the case of Robert Lazar. Since 1989, the American whistleblower has claimed to have worked on reverse-engineering extraterrestrial spacecraft at a facility called S-4 near Area 51. However, Lazar appears to have fabricated part of his CV, as neither MIT nor Caltech have any record of him studying there. As for the propulsion system he described, which he claimed was based on a stable isotope of element 115 (moscovium), the existence of this element was confirmed in 2003, but its alleged properties were contradicted: its known isotopes decay within a few hundred milliseconds, in stark contrast to the stability Lazar claimed. Nevertheless, some details are accurate. For example, an article in the Los Alamos Monitor from 1982, predating his notoriety in ufology circles, presents Lazar as a physicist employed at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. His presence within the Los Alamos community is independently documented.

The Lazar case is problematic for critics precisely because it combines truth and falsehood. The most straightforward response is to dismiss the entire account by highlighting inconsistencies in his CV. In the Anglo-American legal tradition, this strategy is known as ‘falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus’, meaning ‘false in one point, false in all’. Coined in late 17^(th)-century English treason trials, the maxim was denounced by John Henry Wigmore, author of the seminal treatise Evidence in Trials at Common Law ( §§ 1008–1015), as ‘absolutely false as a maxim of life’, and modern legal doctrine has reduced its significance to that of a permissive inference: a witness may have lied on one point without this automatically invalidating the rest. This position has been confirmed by US federal case law, notably in Kadia v. Gonzales in 2007. In his judgment, Justice Richard Posner echoes Wigmore’s characterisation of the maxim as ‘primitive psychology’. Disrepute by association disregards this doctrinal precaution precisely: a partially false witness drags down with him fragments of information that are not false in his downfall. There is a symmetrical counterpart to this process which is even more dangerous: a body of evidence, part of which is sound, is deemed, by association, to be sound in its entirety. It is this second version that applies to Ummo.

In Revelations, published in 1991, Jacques Vallée delivered his verdict on the subject of alien contact. Alien Contact and Human Deception, is arguably the most accurate account of the subject to have been produced. According to Vallée, the scientific content of the Ummo letters is ‘well-informed but unremarkable’, ‘comparable to the scientific references in a well-researched science fiction novel’, and ‘plausible in the 1960s, but dated by 1990s standards’. This description treats the matter seriously without trivialising it. An excellent science fiction novel by authors such as Lem, Borges or Egan is not something to be scorned. It is a cultural artefact that deserves the same consideration as any other coherent work of the imagination. While the defenders of Ummo were right to appreciate this body of work, they were mistaken to classify it as authentic documents rather than a kind of collective fan fiction. The distinction is minute, yet it changes everything.

Only at this point does it become possible to revisit the central argument in their defence without being dismissive: ‘several pieces of information have proved to be accurate’. This argument is valid if we replace ‘accurate’ with ‘plausible and consistent with the state of the art available at the time of writing’. However, it is false if by ‘accurate’ we mean that they anticipated subsequent discoveries. The decisive test is this: can we identify a single Ummite assertion that was not accessible in the contemporary scientific literature, and which has subsequently been proven correct? Based on the current state of public analysis, the answer is no. The opposite, however, is well documented: Wolf 424 has been ruled out; the Pioneer anomaly has been explained by other mechanisms; and astronomical predictions regarding the positions of other planets in the solar system have proved inaccurate. The corpus contains serious scientific material because it was written by a well-educated man who was up to date with current events in his time. As far as public analyses allow us to judge, it contains no information that could not have been obtained without contact with extraterrestrials.

The Confession and Survival of the Myth

On 2 April 1993, Peña received a letter from the Ummites, sent from Cuba, suggesting that his friend, Rafael Farriols, should question him about his role in the case. The letter has not been authenticated, and its origin remains a mystery, but it served as a catalyst. Peña replied on 8 April 1993, admitting to being the author of most of the UMMO letters since 1966. A few months later, in the summer of 1993, he publicly explained the mechanics of the hoax in an article entitled ‘UMMO: otro mito que hace CRASH’, published in issue no. 29 of the Spanish sceptical magazine La Alternativa Racional. In the article, he wrote, ‘I decided to create a myth called Ummo, embellishing it with a fake landing and fake evidence. I recall obtaining sheets of polyvinyl fluoride that were so resistant to tensile stress and temperature that they were catalogued by NASA — they were virtually unknown on our peninsula.’ The hoax was almost flawless. I launched it by means of anonymous letters embellished with pseudoscientific information, thereby arousing the expected interest”.

A second letter, dated 8 April 1993, contains a sentence that deserves to be read very slowly because in just a few words it encapsulates the essence of what Peña thought he had learnt from his experience. ‘I’m sorry to say it, but the lie can only be undone from a well-established scientific perspective.’ Peña ultimately believed that believers could only extricate themselves from the system through science. While he probably underestimated the capacity of community-based ecosystems to constitute an alternative form of science, his statement remains true in principle: as long as a body of work is treated as a text to be interpreted rather than an object to be verified, it cannot be refuted.

Seventeen years later, in November 2010, Peña reaffirmed his admission in a private letter to Ignacio Darnaude, one of the Spanish researchers most deeply involved in the case. He added that he had worked ‘with a North American organisation’. Some defenders of Ummo interpret this reference as a sign of a partially state-sponsored origin, but it has never been corroborated. However, it aligns with a hypothesis proposed by Vallée in his book Revelations (1991), which suggests that the letters may have originated from the Soviet intelligence services. This is due to the presence of cosmological theories in the corpus that are similar to Sakharov’s work, some of which had not been published. This could have been a means of covering their tracks or of recruiting gullible individuals among Western researchers interested in ufology. While the hypothesis remains unproven, it is not implausible. The operational mechanics of state-sponsored UFO disinformation have been documented in cases such as the Bennewitz affair, in which AFOSI created a false alien mythology for a civil engineer from 1979 onwards to neutralise his radio intercepts at Kirtland Air Force Base. Another example is Project Serpo, which was launched by the same operator, Richard Doty, in 1983 and again in 2005. If Ummo follows a similar pattern, it would be the European version: more sophisticated, text-based and probably less traceable. An internal email sent by Tim Cooper, a former insider in the American intelligence community, in 2009 is explicit about the general modus operandi. Disinformation aimed at the Soviets was routine practice for the CIA and the Air Force. It was designed to force opposing intelligence services to spend considerable sums investigating paper jobs. In this interpretation, Ummo would be one of these particularly successful paper jobs.

However, regardless of the exact origin of the dossier, the events that followed Peña’s confession were unprecedented in the history of UFO hoaxes. The Ummo community did not disband. It continued. Even better, it became institutionalised.

The Ummo Trap and the Sunk-Cost Fallacy

Thirty-three years after the 1993 confession, on 28 April 2026, the website ummo-sciences.org published its 53rd ‘scientific article’. The title is ‘How to analyse the Ummo dossier using Bayes’. Written by Rémy Galli, the article is presented as an introduction to a series that will use Bayes’ theorem to evaluate the potential origins of the corpus. Previous articles by Galli have compared Ummo cosmology to John Wheeler’s Geometrodynamics (as set out in his 1962 eponymous book), Robert Charroux’s The Book of Betrayed Secrets (published in 1965), recent data from the James Webb Space Telescope, the Drake equation and the cosmic radiation observed by the Pioneer probes. Ummowiki.fr, launched in August 2017, serves as a collaborative encyclopaedia containing around a hundred specialised entries. Each term in the Ummite vocabulary has its own entry, including definitions, canonical instances, and internal debates. Controversies between authors are documented with a seriousness that rivals that of an academic wiki. On the website and within the wiki, the word ‘aveux’, when referring to Peña’s confession, is consistently enclosed in quotation marks.

At the time of writing, the same community is organising an internal video conference symposium intended to discuss the coherence of the latest theoretical developments with authors and readers of the corpus. This is the mechanism’s furthest logical extension: a UFO hoax that has established its own academic meetings.

The theory that enables the community to preserve the authenticity of the corpus while acknowledging the initial fraud is that of the ‘relayers’. Peña suffered a severe stroke in 1988, followed by several more between 1988 and 1993, leaving him partially disabled. Supporters of this theory argue that the production of letters continued after the stroke, which they claim proves that other manipulators took over. This theory has the remarkable epistemological property of being unfalsifiable: it preserves the idea of extraterrestrial intervention while acknowledging that some of it was a hoax. It can also adapt indefinitely to the corpus’s dubious elements by attributing the untenable to Peña and the valid to the intermediaries. No future confession will be able to close the case because any new confession will be treated as just one intermediary’s confession.

This is the central mechanism, symbolising the excesses of ufology. The Ummo trap is the process by which a literary hoax becomes its own scientific institution, complete with journals, a peer-review protocol, a technical vocabulary, internal orthodoxies, documented schisms, and a body of work that can no longer be challenged from outside the community without the challenger having first been validated by it. At this stage, the system protects itself; the critical vantage point is no longer accessible because doing so would require the community to acknowledge its errors — that is to say, to invalidate sixty years of intellectual investment.

The probability of such a collective renunciation is close to zero. The Ummo trap is the symmetrical inverse of dishonour by association. Whereas dishonour by association discredits a witness through their proven errors, the Ummo trap validates a text through the investment of those who study it. Both distort the verification process. To be defused, both require an external, neutral mechanism that no isolated community can produce itself.

This is demonstrated, by contrast, by the fate of the Cottingley affair. It took sixty-six years for the Yorkshire fairies to be exposed. However, when Elsie and Frances confessed in April 1983, their confession was accepted by the community of people who had once been interested in the case. Elsie Hill wrote to the British Journal of Photography and Geoffrey Crawley published his analysis, after which the matter was laid to rest. In 2026, no Cottingley enthusiast wrote a scientific article on the internal consistency of the photographs, nor does an ‘ummowiki’ on the fairies exist. The difference does not lie in the quality of the debunking, which was trivial in both cases. It lies in the ecosystem that was built up during the period of belief. Unlike Cottingley, no internal journals, specialised vocabulary, hermeneutic debates or successive generations of analysts were developed. Once the confession had been made, there was nothing to protect. Ummo, on the other hand, spent thirty years building a substantial cathedral, and Peña’s confession came at a time when it was too substantial to abandon.

It is precisely this accumulated substance that makes Ummo unique. This should also give us pause for thought beyond the field of ufology, as it is a model of what can happen to any epistemic community deprived of external arbitration.

Transparency as an antidote

The three pitfalls lead to the same question: who controls the verification process? The ‘white coat’ bias conveys authority without justifying it. Disgrace by association can result in unjust disqualification. The Ummo trap allows entry without testing. All three disrupt the authentication process and operate in spheres where there is no public, neutral body available to adjudicate between competing claims. The Cottingley case was eventually resolved because the relevant community had not established an alternative institution. In contrast, the Ummo case remains unresolved precisely because such an institution has been established. The problem in each of the two cases is the absence of a verifying authority whose legitimacy is broad enough to bring the matter to a close with its decision.

This issue is directly relevant to the ongoing investigation into unidentified aerospace phenomena in the United States, which reached a turning point in 2023 with the Grusch affair and is now entering a new phase following the parliamentary passage of the UAP Disclosure Act in 2025–2026, sponsored by MPs Tim Burchett and Eric Burlison. The structural risk facing the UAP ecosystem is the proliferation of Ummo-style enclaves. As official disclosure is delayed, communities form around partial eyewitness accounts, uncertain documents, and partially verifiable testimonies. Each community develops its own internal validation protocol. Ultimately, an excess of incompatible interpretative frameworks renders the landscape of the issue unreadable, as none of them have a procedure for acknowledging their own errors.

The law on the declassification of UAPs establishes a framework within which the truth, whatever it may be, can be articulated. Mechanisms such as statutory protections for whistleblowers, regulated declassification, independent audits, authorised review committees and access for elected representatives to classified information are tools that make validation possible. Without them, the UAP dossier risks becoming ‘ummised’ – producing its own reviews within its own agencies using its own vocabulary, orthodoxies and judges, and engaging in circular reasoning.

It is perfectly legitimate to love the Ummite corpus. It is a cultural artefact of rare richness, and the scientific curiosity it has aroused in two generations of Spanish- and French-speaking readers is a gift in itself that will never fade. Bob Lazar rightly enjoys a great deal of goodwill within the ufology community. Whether to classify them as genuine institutions is a matter for debate, and such a discussion is in no way demeaning to those who have loved the Ummite corpus. In fact, acknowledging that one loved a subject for what it was and not what it claimed to be is the most valuable intellectual exercise that a case of this kind can inspire in its readers. As Peña wrote in April 1993, falsehood can only be unravelled from a well-established scientific perspective. However, science can only be consolidated through institutions that allow for critical distance. Transparency is not just a slogan; it is the invisible infrastructure that stops communities believing that today’s falsehood will become tomorrow’s truth simply because enough people believe it.

As we bring this dossier to a close, the contrast between the energy expended over fifty-eight years to internally validate a body of work whose author has confessed to its fictional nature, and the energy that could have been mobilised through public investigative procedures such as sworn hearings in the US Congress, parliamentary inquiries in the US and Europe, and the public inquiry by GEIPAN in France, is thought-provoking. The difference between a community of observation and a community of devotion lies in where we direct our efforts.

Translation by Kate Sellier

The UAP Constraint Hypothesis proposes that several observed patterns in UAP activity — reduced visibility, engagement behavior, caution, geographic distribution, and apparent restraint — may be better explained by operational constraints rather than by benign intention alone. Under this framework, behavior is treated as an indicator of the limits shaping operational decisions, not as proof of motive.

Constraint does not imply technological weakness. It refers to any practical limit shaping operational choices: logistics, risk tolerance, exposure management, mission priorities, replenishment, recovery, communication limits, or the need to preserve scarce assets. The hypothesis therefore argues that observed behavior may reveal limits in how capabilities can be deployed, rather than the absence of capability itself.

To understand current UAP activity, present-day incidents must be placed within a longer historical pattern. The early atomic period provides a useful baseline because it captures the emergence of recurring UAP reporting across military, public, and atomic-warfare contexts during a time when the United States was rapidly developing nuclear and strategic defense infrastructure.

Visibility, Reporting Peaks, and Operational Footprint

Across 1945–1975, UAP reporting fluctuates, while visibility shifts from overt daylight displays toward lower-visibility night-time exposure — a pattern documented in the UAP Activity Pattern Study 1945–1975 Military and Public Activities. Yet the underlying operational footprint does not expand in proportion to reporting peaks.

Visibility is only one indicator, but when reporting peaks do not coincide with a clear expansion in operational footprint, alternative explanations must be considered. The pattern does not suggest omnipresence or a large, deployed force. It is more consistent with staggered activity: a small, resource-bounded presence controlling when, where, and how it exposes itself, as described in UAP Operational Presence 1945–1975.

This distinction matters because widespread geographic activity is often misread as scale, and technological superiority as operational freedom. That creates the illusion of an actor being able to appear anywhere, do anything, and operate without practical limits. This misinterpretation shapes how we think about long-term intention and possible future action.

Constraint vs. Capability

The strategic implications are significant. Any assessment of intent depends first on understanding operational presence. A limited footprint may reflect constraint, and constraint shapes behavior. The observed cautious, non-escalatory posture may not simply indicate benign intent; it may also reflect operating limits. Current restraint should therefore not be assumed to predict future behavior, especially if those limits change.

If visibility is managed, then low visibility does not necessarily mean low activity; it may indicate engagement management. Higher visibility does not necessarily mean a surge in numbers; it may reflect a change in operational behavior.

The key distinction is between reporting intensity and operational scale. What changes is not necessarily the number of UAP, but the conditions under which they are seen.

For example, the 1952 Washington D.C. wave produced a spike in public and military reports — greater visibility — yet the same period does not show a corresponding increase in multi-site incursions, broad geographic saturation, or clear evidence of a larger deployed force. Reports came from a wider domain, including public, standard military, and atomic-warfare sources, but the activity remained staggered rather than overwhelming.

The same staggered profile appears in late-October to early-November 1975 incursions at Malmstrom, Minot, Wurtsmith, and Loring. These high intensity periods involving the northern tier atomic warfare sites show an operational preference, or requirement to focus on one site at a time, a similar pattern to previous engagements around military facilities.

Across three decades, the footprint appears small, deliberate, and resource-bounded.

Adaptation, Engagement, and Risk Management

Early post-war years (1947–1952) show overt daylight displays, close approaches, and high-visibility maneuvers. By the mid-1960s, the wider data suggest a changed profile: activity is increasingly night-time, distant, and marked by controlled illumination. On this reading, the change is adaptation, not absence.

Changes in visibility occur alongside changes in engagement type: fewer overt displays, more night-time exposure, and more controlled engagement. One possible interpretation is that the presence adapted, in response to human engagement, reducing exposure while continuing activity. Intentions need not have changed; operational practice may have adapted.

This pattern is consistent with a strategically cautious actor managing risk. When challenged, the observed behavior does not appear escalatory; it more often suggests withdrawal, disengagement, and later return once immediate risk has reduced.

Some observers, including military pilots, have described certain encounters as appearing playful. While such interpretations are inherently subjective, the underlying behaviour remains noteworthy. The same actions could reflect observation, signaling, capability testing, demonstrations of superiority, or other operational objectives that remain poorly understood. Historical context is also important. The late 1940s and early 1950s appear to contain more interactive encounters than later decades. If a return to more overt engagement were observed, it could indicate a shift back toward an earlier operational posture. Regardless of interpretation, these encounters generally remain consistent with a cautious approach when considered alongside the wider pattern of observed activity.

Given their likely technological superiority; inferred from observed speed, acceleration, and other performance characteristics, any operational model must account not only for advanced technology but also for access to substantial energy resources. These indicators point less to technological weakness than to operational constraint: a resource-bound presence, possibly operating far from home and far from reliable supply chains.

Operational Constraints and Alternative Explanations

Constraint is not the only explanation for a limited operational footprint. Highly advanced systems often favor efficiency, precision, and minimal deployment over scale.

A small visible presence may therefore reflect optimized mission design rather than an inability to deploy larger numbers. Similar behavioural patterns may result from very different underlying causes. A limited operational footprint could reflect resource constraints, deliberate efficiency, strategic caution, or cultural preference. Distinguishing between these possibilities remains difficult because each can produce many of the same observable outcomes. The challenge is therefore not simply identifying patterns, but determining which mechanisms best explain them.

While deliberate economy remains a plausible explanation, the broader pattern of caution, adaptation, and apparent withdrawal following increased human engagement is arguably more consistent with some form of operational constraint, although strategic and cultural factors may also contribute to the observed behaviour.

A human analogue would be an early crewed mission to Mars: technologically advanced but operating under logistical, operational and safety constraints that shape every decision. Each decision weighs mission objectives with catastrophic failure. Even small mistakes quickly snowball into major consequences when operating on the edge of one’s limits.

We cannot assume non-human intelligence behaves like us, but we often ignore the possibility that even UAP operating with advanced technology may still operate under constraints. Throughout history, humans have confused technological superiority with operational freedom — a mistake still being repeated.

If we incorrectly assume UAP operators can operate with impunity, be anywhere, and do anything, then we naturally assume that their current benign posture reflects long-term intent. While this may be true, it cannot be assumed. Constraints affect behavior, and constrained behavior can mask long-term intentions.

We may be observing an early phase — one in which constraints limit exposure until conditions change.

Signposts and Future Phases

To determine likely future direction, we must look for signposts: changes in behavior or posture that signal a new phase and illuminate long-term intention.

The tension between assumed advanced technology, observed caution, and reduced visibility is not a contradiction; it is an indicator. When viewed through the lens of constraints, this apparent inconsistency begins to make sense.

Prediction depends first on understanding past behavior — how UAP activity has changed over time, how those changes relate to current activity, and what they may indicate about future posture. Important historical insights are often lost when attention focuses only on the latest incidents or the push for disclosure.

The strategic value of behavioral prediction is increasingly recognized by governments. China, for example, has publicly discussed the use of artificial intelligence and large-scale data analysis to identify patterns within UAP reporting. Regardless of conclusions, the effort illustrates growing recognition that understanding behavioral trends may have security implications.

Related Research Papers

This article draws on a wider sequence of 1945–1975 studies examining UAP activity across the United States atomic warfare complex, broader military and public reporting, indications analysis, and operational presence. Together, these papers provide the research base for the article’s discussion of visibility, reporting peaks, operational footprint, and constraint.

• UAP Pattern Recognition Study 1945–1975: US Military Atomic Warfare Complex — March 2023

• UAP Indications Analysis 1945–1975: United States Atomic Warfare Complex — August 2023

• UAP Activity Pattern Study 1945–1975: Military and Public Activities — January 2024

• UAP Indications Analysis 1945–1975: Military and Public Activities — May 2025

• UAP Operational Presence 1945–1975 — March 2026

For readers interested in the wider analytical framework, the book UFO Intentions — Decoding the Patterns provides a broader synthesis of the patterns, indicators, and intentions analysis drawn from this research program.

Closing Reflection

Across three decades, UAP activity shows recurring patterns of visibility management, cautious engagement, and operational constraint. These patterns challenge assumptions that advanced technology implies unlimited capability or benign intent. The UAP Constraint Hypothesis reframes behavior as evidence of limits rather than motive, offering a more disciplined foundation for prediction.

As new data emerge, the key question becomes: What signposts will indicate that the operational phase is changing?

Hi AARO,

A few heartfelt words from an ordinary citizen in a small but very beautiful country on the other side of the pond.

Citizens of other countries are also affected by the UFO phenomenon and want to understand what we are seeing in our skies.

The digitization of historical material is extremely important. Open and transparent access to that digitized material is equally important. China understood the importance of preserving cultural and scientific heritage and, apparently, began a project some years ago to digitize every astronomical photographic plate archive it could access. It quickly completed the digitization of plates from observatories within China and is now reaching out to photographic plate archives in many smaller countries. At least some of this digitized material is publicly available for download. The rest I don’t know.

We now know that these plates contain information about events that were far easier to observe in the historical sky than they are today. By combining China’s own digitized astronomical material with plates from the many observatories it has now helped digitize, including data that are still not publicly accessible, China has everything it needs to control Disclosure on its own terms. It can happen any moment.

You can do this too. Instead of placing digitized material behind proprietary commercial subscriptions, make everything you digitize publicly available. In addition, there is no need for closed AARO meetings with civilian scientists or for confidential/undisclosed contracts. If you wish to fund civilian scientists studying the UFO phenomenon, my suggestion is to do so through public calls, with clearly defined criteria and conditions, and to list all civilian scientists and groups who receives funding on your website. I have noticed that many civilian scientists in our community are vulnerable to stigma and the disapproval of their colleagues. They want nothing more than to have their work acknowledged by you so that they can defend its legitimacy within the scientific community. However, without transparency, this can easily become problematic.

Let us take one small step toward transparency. That way, no one needs to worry about conspiracy theories spreading. What we need is transparency and openness.

You can do this for humanity — for people all over the planet. Make every archive you digitize publicly available through your website.

Blessings,

Beatriz Villarroel.

Editorial Note

Shortly after publication, Sharyan Menné, AARO’s Chief of Intelligence Collection, responded to Dr. Villarroel, the exchange is reproduced below :

Sharyan Menné : Thank you for sharing such a thoughtful and well-considered message, Beatriz! I genuinely appreciate the time, care, and curiosity behind it. Your suggestions are insightful and raise important questions about how we preserve knowledge, strengthen collaboration, and create the conditions for meaningful scientific progress.

AARO’s work is not intended to be placed behind firewalls and, wherever possible, is meant to support transparency, collaboration, and the broader goal of advancing understanding. It’s part of why I love working here :)

I think that’s fundamentally important: meaningful discoveries depend not only on asking the right questions, but also on building the transparent systems, partnerships, and processes that make answering them possible- together! It’s encouraging to connect with someone who shares such a genuine passion for discovery and the pursuit of understanding. Thank you again for reaching out! Hope to chat soon.

Dr. Villarroel : Thanks a lot, Sharayn. I really appreciate your very kind note. I look forward to AARO officially responding to the different points raised in my message! I'm worried about the effect of AARO on civilian science as it's a small field, and just would hope some of these points can be clarified.

Sharyan Menné : Happy to chat :) I’ll DM you an email address.

Dr. Beatriz Villarroel is a researcher in astronomy at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) in Stockholm. She leads the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project (www.vascoproject.org) and the EXOPROBE project.

CREATION OF AARO

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was created in July 2022 was created by congressional mandate as part of the National Defence Authorization Act 2022 to address the growing number of UAP reports, with the idea that the public would have full transparency and would get to hear the results of their investigations.

AARO is meant to organise the collection and reporting of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) incidents across the Department of Defence (DoD)’s special use airspace (SUA), as well as the collection and reporting of anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged, and transmedium objects. AARO is to identify and reduce gaps in operational, intelligence and counter-intelligence capability and to recommend policy changes, whether regulatory or statutory, to reduce those gaps.

The organization is also supposed to aim to increase communication between the military and the Intelligence community (IC) over unidentified marine and aerial craft that could threaten U.S. forces and military bases or spy on sensitive facilities. The establishing legislation empowered the office to review records as far back as 1945 to determine if federal government or contractor UFO programs were in existence that may have shielded information from either the White House or the US Congress. Dr Sean Kirkpatrick led AARO from its inception in July 2022 till December 2023.

As reported by Sentinel News, the ex-director of the All-Domain Anomalies Resolution Office (AARO), Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, who resigned from his post in December 2023, addressed on April 9^th 2026 the National Capital Area Sceptics (NCAS) in Arlington, Virginia at a press conference. At the end of his talk, he said he would take questions for five minutes. Admiral Tim Gallaudet, one of the beacons of the disclosure movement and highly credible witness who testified about the phenomenon under oath in Congress in the November 13^th 2024 UAP hearings, was in the audience and took the opportunity to ask Kirkpatrick a question. The following exchange happened :

Tim Gallaudet : ‘Sean, I respect you, we both have decades of government service together in intelligence and DoD. I’m gonna ask you point blank and put you on the spot on something. After my 2024 UAP hearing testimony in front of congress, you tweeted a response about my statement regarding AARO where you said I came and visited AARO and I was bitter because I didn’t get a job and that you believe that it was because you didn’t hire me because I was prone to conspiracy theories and that you checked with some of my bosses on that statement. It’s well out there, you tweeted it, and ultimately, you know, I didn’t go visit AARO when you were there. It was after you left. I was invited by Mike Washel, the Navy Intel rep who asked me to come there and that’s what I spoke about during my hearing. And of course I didn’t look for a job, he invited me, and for me to actually go for a GS14 job after having been an undersecretary of commerce, that’s kind of preposterous, I would say. At the same time, when you said you checked with my bosses, I had my bosses, two two-stars, four four-stars and a secretary of commerce who I’ve all spoken with and you never really checked with them. So ultimately your statement there was an outright lie and I want to ask you what you have to say about that’.

Sean Kirkpatrick : ‘I’d say that was not an outright lie because Mike brought you in, you sat in my office and we had this conversation about’...

Tim Gallaudet: ‘You weren’t there, you had left, it was Phillips’ ...

Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘And the position you were looking for was an SCS position’

Tim Gallaudet: ‘I was not asking for a position. Remember Mike brought me in. He asked me to come’.

Someone in the assembly, probably an organiser: ‘Let me just ask you because time is going to be short. We want to shed any light on the issue itself’.

Someone else: ‘Exactly!’

Tim Gallaudet: ‘Well, good point No, no, ultimately so it’s really clear that you have been executing a misinformation/disinformation campaign about this. This whole slide(show) captures it. And I know you can’t acknowledge it because whoever you’re on the payroll with won’t allow you to. That’s my statement’.

Sean Kirkpatrick : ‘Ok, well, that’s a great statement that has absolutely no bearing from reality. So okay...’

And he looked away to signal the end of the matter.

Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, U.S. Navy (ret) is a career oceanographer and technology consultant who served as the acting Undersecretary and Assistant Secretary of Commerce, acting and Deputy Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Oceanographer of the Navy. He is a research affiliate for Harvard University’s Galileo Project and an Advisory Board member for ‘Americans for Safe Aerospace’ (ASA). He seeks to elevate the scientific study of undersea and transmedium UAP to a national research priority.

In his News Nation Q&A program on May 3^rd 2026, Ross Coulthart lent his full support to Admiral Tim Gallaudet. He explained how he had extensively checked his credentials and character in the past and the words used by people he asked were consistently ‘exemplary’, ‘honourable’, ‘truthful’ and ‘honest’. The public has had plenty of examples of Gallaudet’s exemplary character, but you might like to revisit this Sentinel News article.

Coulthart was also able to confirm that Gallaudet’s version of events was correct, because he was the one who broke the news that Kirkpatrick left AARO to join the Oakridge National Laboratory. He knows for sure that Kirkpatrick’s last day at AARO was on 01.12.23. Tim Gallaudet’s visit at AARO was on 31.05.24, five months later, with Tim Phillips then acting director of AARO. Coulthart reiterated that Gallaudet had been invited via his intelligence and navy contacts and never sought employment. He added that as a retired rear admiral and the man who used to operate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the idea that he was looking for a job at a much lower level in AARO is ridiculous.

He added that there was a broader context of a long running feud between people like Admiral Gallaudet and Dr Sean Kirkpatrick and that Kirkpatrick had been caught with alternative versions of the truth on several occasions. As an example, he mentioned that Kirkpatrick has previously denied being at a Skinwalker Ranch briefing. But Brandon Fugal, the billionaire owner of Skinwalker Ranch was able to publicly prove him wrong. In an X post, he made the following statement : ‘On April 19^th 2018, my team from Skinwalker Ranch was asked to provide a confidential briefing in Washington D.C. to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the U.S. Armed Services Committee. Sean Kirkpatrick was at the head of the table and it lasted 2.5 hours’. He attached a photograph showing Kirkpatrick at the end of the boardroom table. Brandon Fugal also recounted the story in more details to Ross Coulthart.

If you have followed the UAP topic over the last few years, you know that Dr Sean Kirkpatrick has a complex relationship with the truth, but in case you don’t, here is a short history.

A LITTLE HISTORY

AARO came in a long line of other programs studying UAP :

• Project Saucer (1946/1947-January 1948)

• Project Sign (January 1948 – February 1949)

• Project Grudge (February 1949 – August 1949 and July 1950-March 1952)

• Project Twinkle, (April 1950-March 1951)

• Project Stork (March 1952 – May 1955)

• Project Bear (Late 1951-Late 1954)

• CIA Study group (1952)

• Project Blue Book (1952-1970)

After 1969, the U.S. government’s official line was that it did not investigate UFOs. This was until a shattering article appeared in the New York Times on December 16^th, 2017, in which whistleblower Luis Elizondo revealed that he headed a program studying UAP. The pandemonium that ensued forced the government to admit the existence of the following secret programs:

• The ‘Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program’ (AAWSAP) which became The ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, (AATIP) from 2007 to 2012, headed by Luis Elizondo;

• The UAPTF from 2017 to 2021, used to collect data on military UAP sightings;

• The ‘Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group’ (AOIMSG) (2021-2022).

THE THORNY PROBLEM OF DAVID GRUSCH

In June 2023, Retired Air Force veteran David Grusch appeared on News Nation with Ross Coulthart and made the extraordinary claims that the US Government and some private companies have retrieved non-human vehicles and bodies and that they have retro-engineered some of the vehicles. He also alleged that some people have been threatened or even murdered for the information to remain secret.

On April 19^th, 2023, Kirkpatrick testified on the mission, activities, oversight, and budget of AARO in an open hearing in front of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee. He explained that AARO was only about 9 months old, spent mostly on re-organising the collection of data and methods of analysis, etc. He emphasized the importance of scientific rigour and asked to be patient about results as it would take a long time to go through all the data. So it was surprising to hear him say:

‘I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as ‘anomalous.’ The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena, or other readily explainable sources. While a large number of cases in our holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with these cases. Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution, and I will not close a case that we cannot defend the conclusions of’. He added : ‘I recognize that this answer is unsatisfying to those who in good faith assume that what they see with their eyes, with their cameras, or with their radars is incontrovertible evidence of extraordinary characteristics and performance. Yet, time and again, with sufficient scientific-quality data, it is a fact that UAP often, but not always, resolve into readily-explainable sources. Humans are subject to deception and illusions, sensors to unexpected responses and malfunctions, and in some cases intentional interference. Getting to the handful of cases that pass this level of scrutiny is the mission of AARO’.... By its very nature, the UAP challenge has for decades lent itself to mystery, sensationalism, and even conspiracy. For that reason, AARO remains committed to transparency, accountability, and to sharing as much with the American public’... I should state clearly for the record that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extra-terrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics’.

Note that the use of the term ‘extra-terrestrial’ instead of ‘Non Human Intelligence’ (NHI) means that Kirkpatrick and AARO are avoiding the possibilities of intra-terrestrials (from within earth, like the oceans) and ultra-dimensional beings.

On July 26^th 2023, David Grusch testified in congress under oath and reiterated all his claims. This was after an extensive process of testifying behind closed doors to members of the congress and after the IGIC (Inspector General of the Intelligence Community) judged his whistleblower claim ‘credible and urgent’

Kirkpatrick immediately responded with : ‘’To be clear, AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse-engineering program for non-human technology,” and added : “I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defence and Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO, many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail’’.

THE (IN)FAMOUS AARO REPORT

MARCH 2024

Although he left AARO in December 2023, Kirkpatrick helped deliver a historical report in March 2024. Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said that AARO conducted a “rigorous analytic and scientific approach to investigate past U.S. government-sponsored UAP investigation efforts and the claims made by interviewees that the U.S. government and various contractors have recovered and are hiding off-world technology and biological material. “To date, AARO has found no verifiable evidence for claims that the U.S. government and private companies have access to or have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology,” Ryder said. “Also, AARO has found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology,” he added.“

THE EXPERTS’ RESPONSE

The report was strongly criticised by many serious experts but we will bring you only a few reactions.

Robert Powell, executive board member of The Scientific Coalition for UAP studies (SCU) issued a scathing statement, that we encourage you to read, but here is a quick summary.

He states that this ‘flawed report’ was done in a very short time by people who do not have an understanding or knowledge of the UFO matter and is full of errors. They wrongly described the ‘Kenneth Arnold sighting’, one of the most famous in the world history of UFOs. They gave wrong project names and dates, and wrong data. They made assumptions with ‘maybe’ or ‘likely’ rather than prove things.

Powell reminds us that Congress wanted a compilation of the history of UFO/UAP from approximately 1945 and onwards. Yet early in the paper, AARO states that the goal of the report is “to investigate past U.S. Government (USG)-sponsored UAP investigation efforts and the claims made by interviewees that the USG and various contractors have recovered and are hiding off-world technology and biological material.”

Powell goes on saying that a huge amount of the UAP history was ignored, like the Foo Fighters of WW2, for instance, which occurred in 1942, preceding the ‘Kenneth Arnold sighting’ by 5 years. He adds that ‘The AARO paper does not deal with the government involvement in any of the major historical UFO/UAP cases. Instead, it only covers Roswell because it matches up with AARO’s stupor arguing against captured ET craft’.

Powell mentions that numerous historical cases were not included in the report and he lists seven in particular that were investigated by the military and should definitely have been part of the report. He also notes that nothing was mentioned by AARO about the numerous cases above bases with nuclear weapons. He also notes that no mention was made of the Tic-Tac, Gimbal and the Go-fast, and that non-sensical statements were made about events around the Manhattan project, deploring a lack of logic and critical thinking between events and explanations.

He states: ‘The more that I read the paper, the more that it is clear that this is not a paper about the history of UFO/UAP but a paper trying to do whatever is needed to strike back at the conspiracy crowd’. He adds that AARO reiterated the conclusions of the Robertson Panel and the Condon report dismissing the idea of UFOs without saying that they had been engineered to discredit not only the subject but also the witnesses. Finally, as for AARO’s statement that ‘We have found no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.” he replies that it cannot be validated if a proper definition of ‘evidence’ has been established.

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, who has long advocated for UAP transparency and instigated the New York Times and Washington Post articles with Luis Elizondo issued a damming very detailed analysis of the report. We strongly recommend that you read it for yourself but as it is very long, we have condensed it for you.

For starters, Chris Mellon brought up some unusual oddities. He wondered why the report was presented months before it was expected and if it was because Kirkpatrick wanted to close it with its many errors rather than leave it open to correction by his successor. He also remarked that Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) did not sign the report off and therefore spared herself and her office ‘considerable embarrassment’, because he asserted that ‘This is the most error-ridden and unsatisfactory government report I can recall reading during or after decades of government service’. Mellon adds that ‘the AARO report (AAROR) is pervaded by hundreds of unfortunate errors and absurdities involving the history, science, and facts presented in its 63 pages, with ‘dozens –or more– errors on some pages’, starting with the table of contents which is a list of errors in itself. Some unclassified information was left out of the report, including some UAP videos.

Mellon points out an irregularity: The Department of Defence (DoD) Public Affairs invited some selected press outlets (including the New York Times and the Washington Post, that leaked the three videos of the ‘Tic-Tac’, the ‘Gimbal’ and the ‘Go Fast’ that Mellon himself provided them in 2017) for a pre-brief on the report. These outlets then repeated the report and its mistakes to their audiences without calling on scholars and experts such as Jacques Vallée, or Robert Powell who could have pointed to the many mistakes. He adds that it is typical of the stigmatized history of UAP press coverage since World War II. Outlets that specialise on the UAP subject like ‘The Debrief’ were not invited. None of these experts were consulted in order to draw AARO’s conclusions either. He is concerned that the press has a tendency to ‘conflate the UAP topic generally with allegations the government has recovered off-world technology’. He emphasizes that ‘the UAP issue is distinct and critically important regardless of the truth about allegations of recovered extraterrestrial, nonhuman technology’ and regrets that AARO was asked to investigate that allegation.

He adds that the public deserves transparency about UAP, particularly with the growing number of drone-like aircraft that defeat the military and force some of their equipment to be moved to other locations. This shows that the subject of UAP should be taken seriously for national defence purposes. He explains that the system of classification and secrecy is such that very little information can be shared and this causes situations that endanger national security.

Mellon explains that the Congressional legal mandate required that this AARO historical report present the history of UAP and “relating to” UAP, meaning the history of UAP sightings and investigations as recorded in US Government records. However, AARO instead presented a summary history of the records of flawed U.S. Government (USG) investigations of UAP. There are some other points of law that were deliberated ignored or by-passed in order to present a different picture than that required. For instance, all the attempts of obfuscation, cover-up, manipulation of the public, incorrect reports on the subject by the intelligence community were omitted. Some agencies with known investigations or activities relating to UAP were left out of the report. He also noted that the role of the 1953 ‘Robertson Panel’ that was intended to cover-up and ridicule the subject and caused the huge stigma that still exists today was not in AARO’s report, as mandated. And some well-known and documented operations of disinformation and manipulations of civilian UAP enthusiasts on behalf of the Air Force were also omitted.

Mellon also explains that the regulations, set-up by the previous body of UAP investigation, the UAPTF had a very strict code of secrecy and the only thing that could be shared with the public would be an increase in UAP sightings. There could be no mention of place, time, kind of UAP or anything else. Apart from telling the media and the public that the program exists and its mission, the Pentagon is not even allowed to say that the rest of the information detained is ‘classified’. He questions the need of this excessive classification and argues that the videos of the ‘Tic-Tac’, the ‘Gimbal’ and the ‘Go-Fast’, which he released with the New-York Times and the Washington Post articles, by becoming available to law-makers, advanced national security. Yet, this over-classification is generally acceptable as being a major problem, and he adds : ‘As Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said in a letter to Congress in 2022, “Over-classification of government secrets both undermines national security by blocking the intelligence community’s ability to share critical information and erodes the basic trust that our citizens have in their government.”

Mellon notes an extraordinary assumption on AARO’s part. They claim that Project Manhattan, that built the first atomic bomb caused ‘sightings’ and ‘erroneous UAP reporting’. That is despite the fact that the project ended on December 31^st 1946, so would not explain the sightings of the modern UAP era started in June 1947. Also, Project Manhattan did not launch any special aerial vehicles of any kind that could be ‘misidentified’ as UAP, and there is no evidence of outside civilians ever mistaking the Project Manhattan and successor operations for UAP. However, people from inside the project reported sightings and recorded hundreds of them. Many of the UAPs reported by scientists and military personnel were described as either “green fireball phenomena” or flying “disks”. The issue was such that the project’s scientists and security officials set up an ‘organized plan’ across the area with instrumented UAP tracking stations and networks.

The Senior Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) made a catalogue of 209 recent ‘Unknown Aerial Phenomena’ sightings and instrument tracking in and around Los Alamos area. He sent the report to the agency director in Washington DC, with a letter stating:

“… the frequency of unexplained aerial phenomenon in the New Mexico area was such that an organized plan of reporting these observations should be undertaken…”... “The observers of these phenomena include scientists, Special Agents of the Office of Special Investigations (IG), USAF, airline pilots, military pilots, Los Alamos Security Inspectors, military personnel, and many other persons of various occupations whose reliability is not questioned.”

The sightings recorded inside Project Manhattan often matched those seen at the same time by civilians. Yet, AARO only mentions the civilians ‘awed by technology they do not understand because it is classified’ and leave the meticulously recorded sightings from within the project out of their report.

AARO likewise blamed the unknowing civilians’ lack of understanding of new technology for seeing seemingly anomalous phenomena around the first satellite and moon missions. They report that the missions were classified so the sightings could not be explained to the public. Mellon argues that only a few elements were classified, hence the live TV moon landing. He also finds the idea that human eyes could see small objects in space and by the moon ridiculous. AARO also explains that the explosion of sightings from the 1940s to the 1960s is due to new experimental technology that civilians did not know about, adding that it is understandable that people could mistake these technologies for something other worldly. They explain that typical erroneous UAP sightings like flying saucers most likely come from rocket launches. So basically, people who had seen the Apollo mission and the moon landing thought a flying saucer and a rocket were the same object.

Mellon also notes that AARO missed 64,000 pages of the Project Blue Book, the longest running project studying UAP, and therefore could not present the cases on these pages in their report. And the records that they talked about where press releases of the time (which reported the lies they were told) Mellon reminds us that all the Project Blue Book files are available to the public on a website and in the National Archives.

AARO claims “More than half of the UFO reports investigated in the 1950s and 1960s were assessed to be U.S. reconnaissance flights” and “that UFO reports would spike when the U-2 was in flight” Mellon estimates that it would mean over 5,000 U-2s mistakenly misidentified as UFOs or alien spacecraft! Yet, contrary to what AARO says, there was no ‘spike; in numbers of purported U-2 ‘UFO’ sightings, and in fact there was not one single reported case. Mellon adds that there were never that many U-2 flights anyway.

Mellon relays Jacques Vallée’s stories from his published diaries for 1957-1969, p 101 where he and Dr J.Allen Hynek, Scientific Consultant on UAP for Project Blue Book, went to Chicago to meet The project’s chief Captain Hector Quintanilla. He claimed that a U-2 was reported as a UFO in 1951, whilst on its way to the Soviet Union. This could not have been the case as the U-2 was first flown in 1955, and the first one to go to the Soviet Union was in 1956. The lie would have originated from the Air Force as a ruse towards the CIA for their own purposes.

Mellon explains that Project Blue Book often ‘successfully’ solved sightings by civilians by dismissing them because they did not procure enough data. Ordinary people would just report on lights or objects in the sky but without some more scientific data like speed, position etc, Blue Book did not investigate them. The officers’ dismissive and disparaging attitude towards the witnesses also tended to discourage reporting and encourage stigma.

Mellon explains that the roles of J Allen Hynek and Edward Rupelt as serious investigators was ignored but that they were expected to debunk ideas of ‘recovered alien craft and extra-terrestrial beings’. Yet, despite acknowledging this deception ploy, AARO repeated the Air Force’s public position and simply states that the Air Force “determined” that “there was no threat to national security, no evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles and no evidence submitted to, or discovered by, the USAF that sightings represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge’’.

AARO claimed that there was a 40-year gap when UAP were not investigated, from the end of Project Blue Book till 2009. It is not true, and Mellon sites a number of cases that were well-known, but none as famous as the Tic-Tac from the Nimitz case. This is one of the cases that led to the eventual formation of AARO itself years later. Although there was no official project studying UAP cases, they were still investigated by various divisions and by AAWSAP and AATIP. It is extraordinary that AARO do not mention the case. Likewise, they do not mention the famous and very well documented case of Rendlesham Forest in the UK in 1980.

AARO also explained the materials recovered at Roswell as debris from ‘Project Mogul’, a project using balloons equipped with microphones and flying at high altitudes in the hope of catching distant signals emitting from nuclear testing detonations in the USSR. Mellon explains that it is not possible as the balloon launch was cancelled and the balloon was recycled for another later launch. It never got lost and was fully recovered. Also, without ever giving details of one single sighting, AARO report that most of them are due to some ‘secret programs’ that had nothing secret, like the Apollo missions. But they also give lists of real secret satellites, stealth aircraft and drones.

On December 2^nd, 1952 in a memo titled ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’, CIA Assistant Director H. Marshall Chadwell wrote to Gen. Walter B. Smith, that ‘Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and travelling at high speeds in the vicinity of major US defence installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles. As Mellon explains: The obvious and logically deducible conclusion of these incursions was that they must be the work of either an advanced, unconventional foreign enemy (the Soviet Union) or potentially extraterrestrial intelligence. Chadwell later confirmed that his and his colleague’s conclusion was that the UFO had an extra-terrestrial origin but that the Robertson panel overturned the conclusion. AARO take great pains to contradict the findings of the memo.

Mellon provides a table of identified cases planted by the Air Force to the Robertson panel as ‘the best 12 cases of unidentified UAP’. They were so easy to explain prosaically that the panel dismissed them immediately. This was used to debunk cases to the public.

Mellon remarks that AARO do not mention the famous‘Intelligent UFO Motions’ study by Major Dewey Fournet and presented to the CIA Robertson Panel that validated the extra-terrestrial hypothesis.

According to Mellon, the CIA Special Study Group of (August) 1952 is perhaps the most error-ridden in the entire AARO Report (pp. 16-17), as it appears just about everything is completely wrong, even the dates and the names of CIA personnel and Group members, and omission of bombshell facts.

AARO omitted to mention one of the most well-known UAP events in history: The Washington flap. On two successive weekends, the 19^th - 20^th and 26^th- 27^th of July 1952, some UFOs famously flew over the Capitol in Washington. Air Force jets proved unable to stop the UFOs and President Truman, dissatisfied, asked for an investigation about the Air Force’s handling of the matter. AARO made many mistakes, including not saying the president ordered the investigation but instead said it was ordered by the CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence, and gave a wrong name, as they did for most of the people involved in the study. Mellon cites a catalogue of errors too long to repeat here but we can mention that AARO did not report that the report concluded that ’’Air Force’s Project Blue Book UAP effort failed all 4 stages of the intelligence process — Failed at Intelligence Collection, Failed at Analysis, Failed at Production, Failed at Dissemination’.

Mellon describes a long story of in-fighting, treachery, inadequacy and deception that ends up showing that although the Air Force was aware of a real threat from UAP, it misled the CIA about it. None of this well-documented story was reported by AARO. He explains at length the smoke and mirrors used to fool the ordinary citizen who would read the report, unveiling the tactics used to hide the number of cases or put them in categories that will not alarm the public. But with many years spent in the Intelligence community at the highest level, Mellon could not be fooled by the omission and manipulation of data and figures in the report and was able to reveal what AARO tried very hard to hide: 314 unidentified cases out of 510 cases! This represents a formidable 62% unexplained/unidentified’. Mellon goes on uncovering a lot of obscure data difficult to work out for the non-initiated and declares: ‘each year or so, the total cumulative number of unidentified anomalous UAP reports increased (from 143 to 314 to 600). That suggests that each year or so the added new reports with supposedly better “quality of data” were more unexplainable not more resolved with the better data’.

He added that like with Project Blue Book, the better the data gets, the more difficult it is to explain the sightings . AARO also share too little data for scientific scrutiny, verification and critic. Mellon asserts that AARO is behaving just like Blue Book did: in order to ‘get rid’ of the UAP problem, and he exposes in great length the various tools of the trade to do so. Mellon also remarks that despite many scientists having seen UAP, AARO do not mention them.

Mellon reminds us that AARO’s two key conclusions, as presented at the top of its report’s Executive Summary, state:

AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.

AARO has found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.

He then launches into many questions as to the definition of ‘evidence’ and as none was provided by AARO, he hypothesised a few of them.

Contrary to Congress’s mandate, AARO does not mention the issue of ‘stigma’, actively sponsored by the Air Force and the CIA, as well as other agencies, and documented with testimony by active members of the Intelligence Community (IC) operating against civilians and politicians, spreading disinformation and fake documents to maintain stigma and fear.

Mellon also questions why AARO did not find ‘non-disclosure agreements (NDA)’ when it could. He relates the story of military personnel who had to sign an NDA after witnessing a UAP.

Mellon then asks the important question : ‘Is AARO a science project or an Intelligence Organisation?’. He explains that although they claim to apply both scientific and intelligence analysis, they actually dismiss intelligence reports such as sightings when they cannot explain them with today’s science. So any object seen moving with not-yet-understood physics are rejected as ‘not credible’. As Mellon argues, if these objects represent an advanced technology, possibly extra-terrestrial, we cannot afford to dismiss the reports just because we do not understand that technology. Yet it is what AARO does. He reminds us that Dr Hynek exposed the Blue Book policy of ‘It can’t be: therefore it isn’t’, and adds:

‘This is why Dr. Kirkpatrick claims there is no “credible” information of craft demonstrating capabilities that defy our current scientific understanding: “AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics’’. This, despite the testimony of Navy squadron Cmdr. Dave Fravor and his colleagues who were involved in the Nimitz incident, backed by dramatic radar-infrared-electro-optical data recordings. AARO does not even mention the Nimitz case or its investigation anywhere in its “complete”, “thorough”, and “accurate” Historical UAP Report.

Mellon reminds us that the ‘Tic-Tac’ UAP observed by three highly-trained pilots and their weapons systems operators, and multiple radar operators and technicians ‘demonstrated almost-instantaneous high g acceleration; achieved hypersonic speed without a sonic boom; showed no evidence of friction or plasma or obvious propulsion, despite the extreme velocities it achieved (estimated peak 90,000 mph in 12 miles going from 0 to 145,000 mph to 0, all in 0.78 seconds, at 5,000 g’s acceleration). The estimated 47-foot wingless white “Tic Tac” shaped craft also thus seemed to survive g forces far greater than any aircraft, rocket, or missile of that size built by man. The tough Navy squadron commander of the Black Aces could not find a terrestrial explanation for what he and his colleagues observed and he has made that clear in sworn testimony to Congress. Is this not relevant?

He adds:

‘What aspect of this case should be thrown out as “not credible” and why? Why are we even bothering to ask pilots to report UAP if we do not deem them credible? Why is this case not viewed as compelling, albeit not absolutely conclusive, evidence of the presence in Earth’s atmosphere of vehicles that are so far advanced we cannot understand or replicate their performance? What evidence would AARO accept – and is AARO going to employ an unspoken rule of today’s academic science that does not see a science of tomorrow, and therefore arbitrarily says it must not have happened, because we don’t understand what was reported’.

Kirkpatrick and AARO conveniently ‘forgot’ to mention these famous UAP that the navy admitted they could not identify, because they must have known their smoke and mirrors couldn’t stand up to scrutiny. If they had had a solid scientific explanation, they would have put it in their report. Kirkpatrick much prefers talking to an audience eager to hear UAP debunking.

And that takes us back to where we started, at the Sceptics Association conference, where Admiral Gallaudet confronted Dr Kirkpatrick. If you remember, the AARO report that we have discussed above dates March 2024. Kirkpatrick had already left by that time, but yet, in April 2026, although he had not been researching the matter for over two years, Kirkpatrick brings up new unfounded explanations about the ‘Tic-Tac’ and the ‘Gimbal’ (also known as a‘cube in a sphere’) that he ‘forgot about’ in the report. What follows below perfectly illustrates Chris Mellon’s point.

BACK IN THE SCEPTICS CONFERENCE

Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘Most sightings and associated narratives, especially the ones that made it into the public domain, always failed to account for some of the more obvious explanations: Radar reflection cubes and calibration spheres. Another one of my favourites. The sensor, phenomenologies, testing configurations. Now I’ll talk about some sensor phenomenologies real quick. So, a radar, most of you know how radars work, right? Sends pulse out, gets reflection, pulse comes back, collects it. But today there’s an algorithmic engine behind it. There’s a fusion engine. They are AI driven things that are accelerating how we take that data and turn it into information.

What happens when a brand new radar waveform is tested and it goes against an object that’s semi-transparent to the radar? Maybe I get a missing pulse. Maybe I get only one out of every five pulses depending on what it is that it’s reflecting off of. And when I see that, if you look at how the fusion engines then interpret that missing information, it tries to extrapolate to the next data point. And when it does that, you get really exciting things like,’ ‘hey, that object accelerated from 0.5 MK to 2 and a half Mach in, half a second’. But it’s not until you pull the raw data out and you look at each individual pulse train in that pulse train you understand ‘oh well it missed these data and now if I go and I simulate that in the fusion engine I can recreate that effect’. That happened a lot and it really happens when you’re testing new waveforms like when DARPA tests new waveforms, which happened on the Nimitz. It’s very exciting. Radar reflection cubes and calibration spheres. We use those to calibrate our radars. That’s what they’re for. They’re basically balloons with corner cubes in them and we launch them and we shoot radars at them. We get the returns off them. We use them to calibrate, set those up. It’s awesome. So, there’s a little known, declassified, CIA program from the late 80s, I think, maybe in the 90s. And this declassified program was essentially taking radar reflection cubes, calibration spheres, sneaking them up underwater off the shore of adversaries and popping them out of the water and sitting back and watching what happens: ‘ How many? what are their radars? What whether they turn on? What’s their response time?’ Right. Really cool. Why wouldn’t somebody do that to us?

This is where Admiral Gallaudet intervened:

Tim Gallaudet: ‘Sean, may I ask a question here? Nice to connect with you in person for the first time. Uh, but about the Nimitz... I’ve met all four pilots who had visual observations of the contact. And, how do you explain that?’

Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘I explain it by a couple of different things. One, because I’ve spoken with them as well, and we’ve decided we’ve actually determined that the water underneath the main object that was being observed uh, was welling up, not down, which means the object came out of the water, not into it. It wasn’t pushing down. There was no propulsion associated with it. So, there’s a couple of things here. One, you’ve got a really cool optical illusion called ‘parallax’ that pilots are prone to. I am certain that played into this since we’re talking about 2004. It’s a long time ago for people to remember. We’ve got actual data observations that suggest whatever this thing was came out of the water and not propulsing over it. And then we have the radar. Lots of people like to point to the radar. The radar was actually being tested by DARPA on a new calibration. It was going through its shake and bake and all those anomalies were from that radar. So, can I say that 100%? No. But it sure as hell is a lot more convincing and realistic than a bunch of aliens’.

Tim Gallaudet: I’m not claiming aliens, but it came out of the water and then it also trajected to the CAP point. And these are trained aviators...

(The ‘CAP Point’ that Gallaudet is talking about is a highly secret meeting point in the air space, only known by the individuals involved in the operation. Yet, as testified by Commander David Fravor, the Tic-Tac positioned itself at the CAP point, 60 miles away in less than a minute).

Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘I understand that they’re trained aviators, but they’re also trained aviators that are prone to optical illusions like everybody else. And there’s no data that suggests that that thing went from point A to point B. It’s only a visual report. Right?

Someone else: ‘They can look at things like hydro state, hydraulic stuff from the water?’

Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘That’s what I had them recreate for me. What they saw on the water was an up-welling, not a down-welling. From where the object came out.’

Someone: ‘What object?’

Sean Kirkpatrick (pointing towards Tim Gallaudet and obviously reluctant to reply): Uh... the tic tac.

Someone else: But could it have been anything else?

Sean Kirkpatrick: No, it couldn’t have been anything else.

Tim Gallaudet: ‘Well, so Sean, I respect you immensely. My name is Tim Gallaudet, retired admiral, former NOAA administrator (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration). Having a PhD in oceanography, I don’t have any other explanation geophysically for what they observed in terms of that. But yeah, fine if that’s what’...

Sean Kirkpatrick: I wasn’t suggesting it’s geophysical. I’m suggesting that it is probably one of these calibration spheres that pops out of the water. And could it have been from somebody else? Absolutely. Because as I said, late 80s we declassified the CIA program. There is absolutely no reason to believe that somebody else wouldn’t do that in our test ranges and we would not know it because our SOSUS network is not all that great. So...

(Sound Surveillance System - SOSUS) was the original name for a submarine detection system based on passive sonar developed by the United States Navy to track Soviet submarines).

Tim Gallaudet: ‘Wow. Okay, this is a great thing to bring up here in public because if our SOSUS range and our West Coast training range...

Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘in the early 2000s’...

Tim Gallaudet: ‘are being infiltrated by adversaries like the Chinese, that is a really important talking point, wouldn’t it?’

Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘Yeah, exactly right’.

Tim Gallaudet: ‘Why is Congress not investigating that?

Sean Kirkpatrick (sarcastically) : ‘Oh, that is a fantastic question. Why don’t you ask them that?’

The audience laughs...

Tim Gallaudet: ‘I like that. Yes, exactly right’.

Why aren’t they doing that as opposed to other things? So look going through all these things is difficult especially the farther back in time you go which brings me to that next major data point. There’s an inverse correlation between how far back in the past an event occurred and the amount of data available to actually analyze it. Right? So the farther back in time you go the less data there is to analyze which means everybody can speculate all they want. You’re never going to actually know. And that is a problem, right? And I told Congress ‘you can keep asking me about the Nimitz all you want, but until somebody has actual raw data to analyze, visual reporting is not evidence. It is a starting point for an investigation that requires data and more evidence’.

Someone asks a questions which we can’t hear...

Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘So what Ryan described to us was a sphere with a cube in it. So a sphere with a cube in it is a calibration sphere. That’s what he described’.

Same person: ‘But that’s something that the general public wouldn’t know!’

Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘That’s exactly right. And yet he should know that as an aviator, right?

And the conference goes on with disparaging stories about pilots, witnesses, and congress.

THE FIGHTER-JET PILOT COUNTER-ATTACKS

The ‘Ryan’ Kirkpatrick mentions and belittles is none other than F18 pilot Ryan Graves who, on July 26^th, 2023, testified in congress about a UAP described as a cube in a sphere splitting two F18 Super-Hornets. A trained pilot known to be very analytical, Graves explained that these sightings are not rare, they are actually routine, seen most days by pilots. These objects have no visible engines/jet plumes, appear to reach hypersonic speeds, flew at multiple elevations ranging from just above the ocean to 35,000 feet, and appear to be able to perform very quick accelerations and turns that human pilots would not survive. They are often seen at very high altitudes of around 30,000 to 35,000 feet (approximately 9 km to 10.5 km) and sometimes in category 4 hurricanes, without moving. In January 2024, Kirkpatrick, after leaving AARO, said that the ‘cubes in spheres’ UFOs were ‘likely next generation spherical drones that move very accurately.’ (notice that he gave a different explanation at the Sceptics conference).

This casual assessment was highly criticised, not least by Ryan Graves himself, who strongly disagreed with Kirkpatrick, arguing about the following points:

Impossible Kinematics: Graves has ruled out common drones, stating that the objects observed by his squadron showed impossible capabilities, such as remaining stationary during category 4 hurricane winds.

Performance Inconsistency: While Kirkpatrick points to emerging drone technology, Graves argues that the speed and manoeuvrability of the objects he witnessed far exceed any known drones.

Timeline Inconsistency: Graves reported these incidents as occurring frequently, sometimes daily, around 2014-2015, whereas the technology Kirkpatrick references is often from much later.

Safety Risk: Graves noted that these objects flew between F-18 jets and were close enough to cause safety concerns, arguing that a foreign adversary would not likely be testing drones in this manner in restricted US airspace without detection.

Ryan Graves founded ‘Americans for Safe Aerospace’, a website dedicated to civilian, commercial and military pilots and ground personnel as well as sea-faring witnesses to reported sightings of UAP in the sky or in the sea (Unidentified Submerged Objects – USOs). Anyone who has witnessed something they would like to report, you can do so in complete confidentiality.

But Kirkpatrick has more to say about the object:

In July 2024, Marik Von Rennenkampf, journalist at the Hill and contributor to ‘News Nation’ reported on an exchange he had with Kirkpatrick when he questioned a few irregularities he noticed coming from either Kirkpatrick or AARO.

One of them was the fact that Kirkpatrick explained that the strong, highly anomalous infrared signature in the ‘Gimbal’ video is likely due to a ‘glare’ reflection from the sun, which could not be the case as the film was taken at night. Kirkpatrick also made the assertion that the anomalous ‘stepped’ rotation in the ‘Gimbal’ video was due to an image compression.

Von RennenKampff wonders how the AARO director could know so little about the most famous and recognisable UAP footage in the world. ‘Gimbal’ is one of the three videos leaked with the New York Times article, with that of the ‘Tic Tac’ and the ‘GoFast’. Von Rennenkampff said: ‘Similarly, Kirkpatrick endorsed a deeply flawed NASA analysis of the well-known ‘GoFast’ video, stating: ‘GoFast’ was actually explained by NASA panel. They did a nice job of pulling that apart’. But after I highlighted the study’s glaring errors to Kirkpatrick, he told me ‘I haven’t looked at NASA’s analysis’.

Von Rennenkakpff is not only a journalist specializing in UAPs. His conclusions are informed by years spent as an analyst with the US Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Non-proliferation. You can see his detailed analysis of the ‘Gimbal’ here.

Von Rennenkampff goes on saying that he attempted to clarify several things with Dr Kirkpatrick but in particular, why AARO grossly misrepresented the first truly scientific study of UAP. Although Battelle in the ‘Project Blue Book Special Report No 14’ found that 33% of the highest-quality UAP reports with sufficient data to evaluate were ‘unknown’, AARO, in Volume 1 of its ‘Historical Records Review’ falsely claimed that Batelle’s scientific analysis found that ‘all cases that had enough data were resolved and readily explainable’.

ENTER THE WHISTLEBLOWERS

Sentinel News has reported on several occasions on the frustration among lawmakers towards AARO and Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, not least with the allegations of retaliation coming from whistleblowers. The ‘whistleblower protection act 1989 ’ is a U.S. federal law protecting federal employees and applicants from retaliation for disclosing illegal or improper government activities, including mismanagement, waste, abuse of authority, or danger to public health. It prohibits retaliatory personnel actions and is enforced by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).

AARO has a responsibility to take depositions from whistleblowers and protect them from retaliation, but that is not what the house representatives and senators were hearing from whistleblowers behind closed doors. They had already heard David Grusch, the most famous whistleblower during his congressional hearing testimony under oath in July 2023 claim that he suffered brutal retaliation to hurt him both professionally and personally for reporting on his own findings that he was actually missioned with. He added that he was fearful for his life and when asked if he knew of anyone murdered, he said he had to be careful what he said but he directed the people with the knowledge to the relevant authorities. He also mentioned that other colleagues had been at the receiving end of similar treatment. In 2022, David Grusch became the first government official in the history of the United States to file an Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) complaint. The Inspector General found his complaint to be ‘credible and urgent’ for congress and a summary was immediately submitted to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Congressional Intelligence Committees, The JPSCI and SSCI. Grusch provided his testimony behind closed doors.

On October 31st 2023, in an off-camera round-table with the press, Kirkpatrick declared :

‘I currently have no evidence of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial UAP program. We do have a requirement by law to bring those whistleblowers or other interviewees in who think that it does exist, and they may have information that pertains to that. We do not have any of that evidence right now. And why should they come to us? Well, they should come to us because, well, it’s in law that we are the authorized reporting authority for them to come to, they are protected under the Whistleblower Act that they extended those protections to last year’s legislation and we have the security mechanisms by which to anonymously and confidentially bring them in, hear what they have to say, research that information and protect it if it is in truly classified. And if it’s not classified, then we can validate that as well’.

In 2023, Ross Coulthart, who was the first to introduce David Grusch to the public, even before his hearings, explained: ‘David Grusch has admitted to me that he circumvented going to AARO because he didn’t trust AARO. He didn’t trust Sean Kirkpatrick. He went directly to the Congress and the Inspector General. And the reason he did that was because he did not have faith that his allegations would be properly investigated. We’ve got a situation now where the legislation mandates that AARO should be being administered and answerable to the Secretary of Defence. Instead, it’s being kept within the office of the Undersecretary of Defence, Intelligence and Security, which is the very agency inside the Pentagon that Lou Elizondo and others are telling me is responsible for part of the cover-up’.

As Coulthart reported, there actually was a very obvious effort by AARO to make it difficult for whistleblowers to come forward, because it had no website, no telephone number and no email address. The AARO Tweeter page did not tweet anything. David Grusch is not the only whistleblower who didn’t trust AARO. Coulthart said that some were coming to him, asking how they could report their evidence, and he recommended that they should go to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Committee, the Inspector General of the Defence force or to the Senate Intelligence Committee with their evidence. But mistrust can be contagious and this is why although some of them have gone directly to congress, others have gone to journalists such as Ross Coulthart (Jake Barber, Don Paul Bales, Col John Blitch and others who have wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals), as well as Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp of the ‘Weaponized’ podcast (Matthew Brown).

As reported by Ross Couthart at the beginning of this article, Kirkpatrick left on December 12^th, 2023.

On November 7^th, 2023, in a Politico article, Kirkpatrick had declared : “I’m ready to move on. I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do,” adding that he still wants to finish a few tasks, including wrapping up the first volume of a historical review of the unidentified anomalous phenomena issue, before leaving (see chapter five).

Yet, on January 19^th, 2024, in an article by the Scientific American, Kirkpatrick gives a different version of the reasons for his departure:

‘After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel and working with them to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena, our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative.The result of this whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same, was a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims—as if we didn’t have anything better to do’.

He proceeded to deconstruct and ridicule David Grush’s testimony, saying it had been ‘told and retold by a small group of interconnected believers with possibly less than honest intentions’.

He argues that it is impossible that no president, no intelligence officer or member of congress knew about any covert program. He goes on to say that the idea of a covert program of retrieving and reverse-engineering UFOs is a narrative propagated by AATIP, Robert Bigelow and Senator Harry Reid. He said that tax payer money was inappropriated for research at Skin Walker Ranch.

He added that AARO’s historical report (that was being prepared at the time) will demonstrate that ‘many of the circulating allegations described derive from inadvertant or unauthorized disclosures of legitimate U.S. programs or related R&D that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial issues or technologies’.

He goes on to say how important AARO’s mission to understand what pilots witness is, but says that the media drive the stories faster than the science and peer reviews can validate them. He criticises the public and some members of congress for accepting stories without scientific evidence. He criticises those who bring their evidence via sensationalist claims rather than go to AARO (a clear reference to whistlebowers who went to journalists such as Ross Coulthart, Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp).

He ends by praising the AARO team and the quality of their work. It is the very same team that assembled the historical report that was so strongly criticised by the experts in Chapter five.

In November 2024, Jon Kosloski was appointed as new director of AARO after Tim Phillips. It raised hopes and optimism that he would change the existing modus operandi but Kirkpatrick had got there first...

In an interview with Donald Trump Junior, Ross Coulthart gave us a glimpse of what it was to succeed Dr Sean Kirkpatrick:

‘I’m talking, Don to scientists inside the program and these witnesses, who are military people who’ve actually worked at the highest level of the military, including one of them who’s worked in ‘Deltaforce’* and they’re talking exclusively for the first time about their knowledge of these programs, their first-hand role in the recovery of what they say and know are alien vehicles. They haven’t done this willy-nilly, they have actually done the right thing: they have given the Pentagon the information. This is the real kicker here. I can tell you with their authorisation that they took this information to Dr Sean Kirkpatrick of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon’s UFO office. He knew about this and yet he told congress something different. That’s something that should be investigated. They told me they presented definitive evidence including imagery of UAPs to Dr Sean Kirkpatrick of AARO and he did nothing with it, and Don, this is a real concern, and something I would urge your dad to order an investigation into. Please, the public has the right to know this. When Dr Jon Kosloski, who’s a good guy, I am told, who’s taken over AARO, when he came into the job late last last year, he couldn’t find, when he was approached by the same team who came to him to tell him the same information, he couldn’t find that information inside the Pentagon’s UFO office. It had disappeared! And so the very office that has been set up by the defence department to investigate this issue and to supposedly to give you and me and the general public the truth about what the government really knows about UAP, it would appear the information somehow got ‘lost’.

* The 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta (1st SFOD-D), also known as Delta Force is a special operations force of the United States Army under the operational control of JSOC. The unit’s missions primarily involve counterterrorism, hostage rescue, direct action, and special reconnaissance, often against high-value targets. It is one of the forces that are tasked with performing the most complex, covert, and dangerous missions directed by the president of the United States and the secretary of defense.

In February 2025, Tim Burchett introduced the UAP disclosure act (UAPDA), as part of the final National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2026. He also introduced H.R.5060 - UAP Whistleblower Protection Act. It would have made it easier for whistleblowers to come forward with their stories without fear of intimidation or retaliation but as explained by Ross Coulthart, they were blocked in congress at the behest of the defence aerospace industry, those very same that allegedly hold UFOs and have reverse-engineered some of them.

On September 9^th 2025, during a House oversight committee hearing on “Restoring Public Trust through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection” in which Representative Anna Paulina Luna calls Kirkpatrick a ‘documented liar’, witnesses raised allegations that AARO ignored sighting reports from witnesses as well as reports of intimidation or retaliation.

U.S. Air Force veteran Jeffrey Nuccetelli testified in his opening statement that “Transparency is the foundation of truth. Without it, witnesses like us are dismissed. Protect the witnesses. Many stay silent out of fear for their careers, reputations, and the safety of their families’’. After reporting on a sighting, he said : ‘The witnesses to this event were threatened and intimidated afterwards. They were told to keep quiet and think about what they were reporting’. You can read Jeffrey Nuccetelli’s full testimony here.

Chief Wiggins pleaded for “Reporting-without-stigma protection, without retribution. Sailors need to know that reporting UAP encounters will not harm their careers. Congress can help by reinforcing witness protection and by directing the relevant office to maintain confidential destigmatized channels for service members who step forward with data.” You can read Chief Wiggin’s written statement here.

In a very powerful speech, whistleblower and U.S. Air Force Veteran Dylan Borland testified : ‘ I’m a federal whistleblower, having testified to both the ICIG and AARO with direct firsthand knowledge of and experience with craft and technologies that are not ours and are reportedly operating without congressional oversight. Because of my direct knowledge of the reality of certain legacy UAP programs, my professional career was deliberately obstructed and I have endured sustained reprisals from government agencies for over a decade...

At the end of March 2023, I agreed to meet with AARO, following the suggestion of other federal officials, believing it was what our nation required of me. I had reservations about AARO due to assessments they were reporting publicly at that time as a “misrepresentation” of the truth. Because of these concerns, I did not share sources and methods information to protect current and former federal personnel who had firsthand exposure to “technologies of unknown origin.” I did not want anyone to face further retaliation beyond what they had already endured.

After David Grusch testified under oath in the summer of 2023 and provided historic disclosure, I was then asked to go to the ICIG, and I did so in August 2023. It was very clear early on during my intake interview, which was video recorded under oath, that their objective was solely to assess just how much I know, not to move forward with an investigation based on new information. The aftermath of that IG complaint still troubles me to this day.

Since my ICIG complaint, I have been prevented from resuming my prior employment and can confirm I am still blacklisted from certain agencies within the Intelligence Community. In addition, multiple agencies attempted phishing attacks to assess what I had divulged to the Inspector General, including being asked to disclose details of my ICIG complaint during a CI polygraph for a position entirely unrelated to UFO/UAP matters in November 2024. As I sit before you today, I and many other whistleblowers have no job prospects and no foreseeable professional future in a nation all of us came forward to defend. Numerous individuals have come forward in various ways to reveal the truth of the UAP reality as patriots and defenders of our nation. Yet many feel discarded, isolated, and hopeless, separated from the country they serve. Efforts to rectify the situation for all whistleblowers have been difficult and troubling, and to my fellow whistleblowers and officials who have encountered these programs, I offer my apology that you are in this position.

Dylan Borland’s full written statement is available here.

Investigative journalist George Knapp, who was also testifying under oath didn’t hold back on what he thought:

‘They (AARO) invited people to come forward, service members who knew or saw things and had experiences. And I can tell you that the people that I have talked to who went through that are deeply disappointed. There was a guy named Bob Jacobs who was a lieutenant attached to Vandenberg in 1964. His unit would record missile tests. They recorded all of them. On one of these particular tests, a UFO comes out of nowhere, zaps what looks like a laser beam at what would have been a nuclear dummy, a nuclear weapon, and disabled it. And he is called into the commander’s

office. Uh, two guys in suits clip that film footage out that shows the UFO, and he’s ordered to never talk about it. He comes forward to AARO. He heeds the call thinking he’s doing his duty as an American to tell that story and they completely dismissed him. They made up a story that they had tracked down the original footage and there was nothing like that in it. Well, there was no original footage. It had been taken away the day the footage was recorded. He’s deeply disappointed’.

He goes on:

‘People like Bob Sallas who had worked at a nuclear ICBM base who saw UFOs flying over the base and these missile silos were taken down. He went to AARO too and was completely disregarded. It almost looks like AARO operated as a counter intelligence operation to get people to come in, tell their stories, and then discredit all of them. I can’t imagine that any whistleblower or witness will ever go to AARO again because of what happened under the first director (Kirkpatrick), who’s now long gone, but still seems to act as the spokesperson for that organization’’. You can read George Knapp’s full testimony here.

Mr Biggs, addressing Anna Paulina Luna: ‘I would say, Madam Chair, maybe at some point we need to really dig deep into AARO. And I would encourage us...’

Anna Paulina Luna: ‘Oh, I’d be happy to send maybe a subpoena to Mr. Kirkpatrick’.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR AARO?

As of yet, this subpoena has not been served. But in March 2026, Luna announced that she was recommending to the Chairman of the Department of Government Efficiency Subcommittee known as DOGE (now run by Representative Tim Burchett) that AARO should be completely disbanded and defunded.

As reported by Sentinel News, Tim Burchett previously mentioned that he was ‘tired of restructuring government’. He was referring to the massive ‘shake-up’ he introduced in DOGE after he took over. Burchett has many times said that his primary objective is to identify and stop money waste wherever it is, and it is his main reason to be in the UAP Caucus.

And so it is that on April 6^th 2026, Tim Burchett presented a bill to not just defund AARO but shut it down all together within 60 days. Its functions would be redistributed across the military branches and would stop any centralised successor. It has not been passed yet but is currently being reviewed by the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

A GIANT LEAP FORWARD

It is tempting to go on and on about Kirkpatrick and AARO’s alternative take on the truth, because there are many more examples, but I do not need to, because, as reported by Sentinel News, on Friday May 8^th, 2026, as recently indicated by President Trump, the department of war released its first tranche of UAP documents, showing that there was plenty of evidence of a cover-up on the part of AARO and NASA.

Kirkpatrick responded to the first release with this statement:

“There’s nothing unexpected in their release. And without any analysis or context, it will only serve to fuel more speculation, conspiracy and armchair pseudoscience, particularly from the playhouse politics theatre company”.

Whist NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman used a different, more appeasing style:

“I applaud President Trump’s whole-of-government effort to bring greater transparency to the American people on unidentified anomalous phenomena. At NASA, our job is to bring the brightest minds and most advanced scientific instruments to bear, follow the data, and share what we learn. We will remain candid about what we know to be true, what we have yet to understand, and all that remains to be discovered. Exploration and the pursuit of knowledge are core to NASA’s mission as we endeavor to unlock the secrets of the universe. “

Social networks were abuzz with reactions, and here are just a few from the main actors:

Rep Eric Burlison:

08.05.26: ‘Every previous president dismissed or openly mocked the UAP topic. President Trump is choosing transparency. What dropped today is just the tip of the iceberg; I anticipate that much more compelling disclosures are coming’.

11.05.26: ‘Regardless of where you land on UAPs, one thing is undeniable: The era of simply dismissing the conversation and hiding everything behind classification walls is starting to come apart’.

13.05.26: “This was the low hanging fruit. Apollo 17 photos. Pilot accounts. Predator drone footage. More is still classified, and I’ve seen some of it. If the administration doesn’t release it, I will, under Speech or Debate.”

REP TIM BURCHETT:

09.05.26: ‘I do want to thank President Trump for keeping his word to me personally. We had a long conversation and I brought that up to him and he said he was going to get it throughout and dad gummit, he kept his word but I want to warn people though this early stuff that we’re seeing is not all of it, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. But trump’s having to fight, you know he’s having to fight the deep state. And it’s just... the next files will be tougher to get. But I suspect he’ll get them because he is Trump and he knows how to work this thing. And there’s going to be more questions’.

10.05.26: ‘I think there’s going to be some misinformation they’re going to put out too in this next group of files, which you’ll obviously be able to see some of this stuff obviously and it is a balloon or some of this other stuff. I’ve seen some of these videos. I’m wondering why the heck they’re even putting them out’.

(This is the same tactic exposed by Chris Mellon above where alleged UAP incidents can be easily explained and therefore people just do not take the matter seriously and debunkers use these examples to perpetuate the culture of ridicule).

Rep Anna Paulina Luna:

08.05.26: ‘The American people deserve transparency, accountability, and access to information regarding UAP’s and disclosure that the government has kept hidden from the public for decades. This is a massive first step in the right direction’.

08.05.26: ‘Let history reflect that Sean Kirkpatrick is a documented liar, deep state shill, and having a very bad day. He was lying to the American people and intimidating witnesses. He was the FORMER director of AARO’

AN UNEXPECTED TURN

On May 15^th, 2026, In a Sol Foundation video with Peter Skafish and Avi Loeb, Anna Paulina Luna stated that she actually liked the new AARO Administrator Jon Kosloski and revealed that when he introduced himself ‘recently’ to her and numerous members of the congress, he had apologised for Kirkpatrick’s behaviour and the way he had engaged with congress. But she still insisted that whilst she liked Kosloski, she still believed that AARO was intentionally set up to block, stonewall, and suppress information and no longer needed to exist as she and her colleagues had a good relationship with the FBI and could work with them instead. She did not say why they had only recently met with Kosloski when he has been in his post since August 2024.

The same day (May 15^th, 2026), Luna dismayed the UFO community with a post in which she announced a turn that no-one expected:

‘Finished review of 40+ videos set for declassification out of @depofWar in coming weeks this am. We are standing with the NEW and very QUALIFIED Director of AARO who now has my full support and has proven through action that he is working in good faith on declass efforts’.

The message was accompanied by a photograph of Jon Kosloski, framed by Anna Paulina Luna herself and Eric Burlison.

As previously reported by Sentinel News, the sentiment in the UAP Caucus and the UAP community at large towards AARO has been one of on-going mistrust, despite a rise in hope immediately after the arrival of Kosloski in August 2024. So why this sudden change of heart? Luna’s message hints that AARO have shown good will in providing the videos she asked for in her letter.

There has indeed been a show of goodwill, because the second release of documents and videos happened on Friday, May 22^nd, sooner that most people expected. Here are a few reactions :

Rep Anna Paulina Luna Luna expressed her satisfaction that Congress received the specific videos requested, though she emphasized that there is still much more to be seen and highlighted the ongoing resistance from within the intelligence community.

Tim Burchett and Lue Elizondo warned that alphabet agencies are actively blocking Disclosure—and the CIA is intentionally pushing misinformation in recent releases.

Tim Burchet said ‘The truth is @realDonaldTrump wants total disclosure but the Deep State is trying to block him. My money is on Trump’.

Marik von Rennenkampff notes that many videos lack critical information because essential symbology—such as camera orientation and flight data—has been redacted, limiting their analytical value. However, he highlights two specific cases from the release: A video showing a spherical object manoeuvring through clouds and a Military Testing Range Incident: A late 2025 event involving senior intelligence officials who observed bright, reddish-orange orbs in close proximity to their helicopter, which appeared in a T-shaped formation, corroborated by infrared sensor images.

Von Rennenkampff argues that, based on his analysis of 80 years of records and consistent patterns in object capabilities, he is convinced these objects demonstrate advanced technology that must be taken seriously as potentially interdimensional or non-human intelligence.

For a comprehensive view of the major English-speaking newspaper headlines on the event, take a look at Sentinel News’s partner Matt Laslo’s Ask-A-Pol’s page.

Ross Coulthart:

26.05.26:

‘There are certainly videos in the release of these last few days which do suggest anomalous phenomena. They do show what we call the five observables: instantaneous acceleration, going from naught to extreme speeds in the blink of an eye. They’re tuning corners without stopping. These are things that normal human technology, prosaic human technology can not do. People are starting to use the word ‘alien’ word. This is non-human. But the Trump administration, what they’re doing is : they’re saying to the public ‘we’re going to let you be the judge. We’re going to let you make the judgment yourself’ and what I fear is they’re kind of playing with the public a bit because I know from my own sources, they have absolutely categorical ‘wipe the floor’ evidence that shows beyond any whatsoever doubt that we are indeed being visited by non-human intelligences and the United States government has known this for decades. Why it’s kept that secret, I don’t know but it’s breaching trust with the American tax payer, the public, unless they’re told the full story. The one that’s still to come out’.

Interviewer : ‘So the President and the White House often call themselves ‘the most transparent in history’, but you’re essentially saying they could go a step further. Do you want them to go a step further? The public seems to think that they should, right?’.

RC: ‘Yes, Sir, I do. and I think they may - will be considering doing that. There’s a lot of speculation. I’m hearing from people inside the administration that The Trump administration is indeed soliciting advice about how to tell the public that we’re not alone. There are consultations taking place with spiritual leaders. I’m now able to confirm that there was some speculation a couple of weeks ago about a group of pastors but it turned out it wasn’t directly related to the White House. But there are religious leaders that have been consulted by the White House. I’m aware of people in the administration who’ve reached out and I have actually spoken to people myself who have asked what I think would be the anthological shock for the public and I told them that frankly I think the biggest shock for the public would be the sense of a betrayal of trust if the government doesn’t follow through and tell the whole story. We’ve had some astonishing allegations in the last few weeks. We’ve got an allegation of course long standing from people like David Grusch, the very reputable whistleblower who came forward to us on News Nation three years ago. David referred to the existence of a covert retrieval and reverse-engineering program involving alien technology. That bear in the room is still not answered and the other allegations including one from Lue Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon’s UFO program. He’s talked about hybridization programs that he’s been told about from within the intelligence community’.

Interviewer: ‘Ross, is there any concern that this over-dumping of files and videos and documents, is sort of diluting the water in terms of what’s important for the public to take away, meaning that there’s just so much happening, this oversaturation that it’s hard for us to even tell what’s new, what’s important and for us to actually really grasp how important it all is?’

Ross Coulthart: ‘Everybody I speak to tells me that they think that the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community (IC) are trying to bore us into submission. That they’re hoping the public will just shrug their shoulders and go ‘oh yeah, hum hum...’ and go away. I don’t think there’s a genuine intention from within the pentagon and the Intelligence Community to release this information which would go further, but I’m told President Trump and his team are genuinely thinking about making a full candid disclosure so we can only hold our breath and hope that the President follows through with his genuine promises of transparency’.

A TWIST IN THE TALE

On Friday May 22^nd, 2026, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that she was resigning from her post. As per the government’s website, the Director of National Intelligence serves as the head of the Intelligence Community (IC), overseeing and directing the implementation of the National Intelligence Program budget and serving as the principal advisor to the President, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to national security. The U.S. Intelligence Community is a coalition of 18 agencies and organizations, including the ODNI. The IC agencies fall within the Executive Branch, and work both independently and collaboratively to gather and analyze the intelligence necessary to conduct foreign relations and national security activities. Gabbard’s title — Director of National Intelligence — was created in response to public outrage over the intelligence community’s failure to prevent 9/11.

A TALE IN THE TWIST

Due to her role as the overseer of all intelligence matters, Tulsi Gabbard was instrumental in the release of the UAP files. She also admitted that she believed in the possibility of extra-terrestrials.

In April 2025, Tulsi Gabbard established a task force called ‘The Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) to investigate the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations, the origins of COVID-19, Crossfire Hurricane, the Biden Administration’s domestic surveillance, Anomalous Health Incidents (AHI), and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

James Erdman III, a current senior operation officer at the CIA working on joint duty at the DIG was tasked with the investigations related to the origins of COVID, anomalous health incidents (including the ‘Havana Syndrome’) , and UAP.

On May 13^th, 2026 , Erdman testified to the Senate Homeland Security Committee and described how the CIA obstructed his investigations. Although he was testifying about the corruption he witnessed around the COVID matter (namely the cover-up that COVID-19 was created by a Chinese laboratory and did not come from animals), some of the tactics used by the CIA and IC were used for the UAP investigation too. He declared under oath that the CIA was refusing to provide him with the information that he was tasked to look into, and that analytic standards had been violated. He also stated the Congress oversight was by-passed and revealed that the CIA was illegally monitoring the computer and phone usage of the DIG personnel and that CIA employees lost their job after collaborating with the DIG. And he stated that 40 boxes of JFK files and MK Ultra files being prepared for public release, as per President Trump’s orders, were taken by the CIA. Erdman raised the alarm over the CIA overstepping the mark about presidential directives.

In a June 3rd, 2026 podcast, Jeremy Corbell expressed his anger about the CIA spying on the DIG : ‘The CIA was spying on whistleblowers in the UAP field. Everybody I brought in to the dig, they were spying on their phones and computers and listening in. And I brought them in because they told me that they would be absolutely protected under whistleblower law. It is the most illegal thing’.

Tulsi Gabbard publicly denied that the CIA had ‘raided’ her office but Anna Paulina Luna, Chair of the house on declassification, confirmed that the documents (that the CIA had previously denied existed) had been taken from the ODNI by the CIA and not returned. Luna and Chairman Comer sent a request of ‘preservation of documents’ to John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA at the White House. She explained that the CIA does not have jurisdiction to work against the President’s order. She added that the fact that this happened when both the President and John Ratcliffe were out of the country seems to be ‘a coup’.

Meanwhile, Eric Burlison has been at work. After the first release of UAP files, he declared:

‘The first batch of UAP files released was just the low-hanging fruit. The deeper investigation is into the partnership between government agencies and private contractors like RAND, MITRE, and Lincoln Labs’.

True to his word, he has followed up on this.

What are ‘Rand’, ‘Mitre’ and ‘Lincoln Labs’? They are part of what is called ‘FFRDC’s (Federally Funded Research and Development Centers). They are private non-profit entities that receive privileged access to classified facilities, sensitive data, federal programs, and government funded research.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory is one of the oldest FFRDC in the country, founded in 1951 to build the SAGE air defense network.

On May 7^th, 2026, Burlison sent a letter to Lincoln Labs asking them to submit a 1952 recording from the Beacon Hill Study, labelled “flying saucer talk,” with Edward J. Ruppelt listed as the briefer, as it appears to be a potentially significant historical record bearing directly on the federal government’s early handling of unidentified aerial - or anomalous phenomena - related matters. He added to also include all elements relating to UAP : audio recordings, motion-picture film, transcripts, briefing materials, memoranda, correspondence, technical reports, accession records, inventories, metadata, classification guidance, and declassification review records.

The MITRE Corporation is one of the largest and most influential FFRDC’s in the USA. On May 22^nd, 2026, Burlison transmitted legislative interrogatories and production requests, specifically for the purpose of seeking answers regarding MITRE’s potential custody, control, analysis, transfer, destruction, or withholding of records related to UAP, anomalous aerospace or undersea events, recovered materials, technologies of unknown origin, and alleged legacy crash-retrieval or reverse-engineering programs.

As often cited by Rep Tim Burchett, private entities have been entrusted with UAP material because they can escape the ‘Freedom of Information Act’ that allows citizens to demand information from the federal government. However, private organisations do not fall under this obligation and therefore, all materials and documents are kept out of public scrutiny.

As per Burlison : “If you really want to hide something from Congress, you don’t put it in a government file cabinet. You hand it to a private contractor. That’s why my investigation is following the trail into RAND, MITRE, Aerospace Corp, MIT Lincoln Labs, and the Northrop Grummans of the world”.

On May 31st, 2026, In a post on X, Burlison said:

‘MITRE is now moving to comply with my formal demand for UAP records dating back to 1930.My 10-page interrogatory asks them to preserve everything, designate a senior official, and produce all unclassified records within 45 days. If the Pentagon hid UAP materials in private contractor networks, the American people deserve to know’

THE PRESS CONFERENCE

On June 9th 2026, a press conference outside the Capitol in Washington took place. The speakers were Film maker and UAP investigator James Fox, Representatives Anna Paulina Luna, Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Jared Moskowitz, Scott Perry, journalist Leslie Keane, and whistleblower David Grush.

They gave a brief summary of what the situation was and appealed to President Trump to give orders for full disclosure and guarantee full immunity to whistle blowers. David Grush reiterated his claims that the USA have retrieved non-human vehicles and non-human intelligences.

You can read about David Grush’s claims here.

Rep Eric Burlison finished with : ‘ We want to see if any individuals have any information. Do not be afraid to come to a member of Congress. We will protect you and we will make sure that the truth is out there. Thank you’.

It was a veiled manner for Burlison to tell would-be whistleblowers NOT to go to AARO.

You can view the special video of Sentinel News on the press conference here.

PURSUE RELEASES

As promised by President Donald Trump, the department of war started releasing some UAP data. Some of the documents and videos show again that AARO - and NASA - have not been completely honest about the phenomenon.

You can view the releases on : www.war.gov

First Release:

• New UFO Declassification Website Launched Following Presidential Announcement by Baptiste Friscourt

• New declassification website launched by Baptiste Friscourt

• Has ‘Disclosure Day’ arrived? by Alban Deschamps

Second Release

• Analysis of the new Pentagon videos by an expert

• Videos analysed by an expert. CIA compromised

Third Release

• Red Orbs in the American West , byAlban Deschamps.

Fourth Release

• New military videos

• U.S. Military Test Grounds Regularly Penetrated by Unknown Platforms by Alban Deschamps

• New Pentagon UFO videos

• First clear videos declassified by the Pentagon

• Department of War Releases Clear UFO footage for the first time By Baptiste Friscourt

AARO LOOSES ITS GRIP…

As the UAP Caucus makes steady progress and establishes itself as the champion of UAP transparency, AARO is gradually losing a grip on the situation and the narrative. It is not the first time that Congress by-passes AARO….

The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 118-31, Sections 1841-1843) required the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to establish the ‘‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection.” The law required that by October 20, 2024, each federal agency review, identify, and organize each Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) record in its custody for disclosure to the public and transmission to the National Archives.

As per the published guidance:

‘The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Records Collection will consist of “copies of all Government, Government-provided, or Government-funded records relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence (or equivalent subjects by any other name with the specific and sole exclusion of temporarily non-attributed objects).”

Agencies must identify all UAP records that exist in any format. Agencies must make digital copies of these records and prepare them for transfer to NARA by the deadline established by the act. NARA will only accept the digital versions of UAP records.

Publicly releasable copies of UAP records transferred to NARA will be made available online in the National Archives Catalog. NARA will provide an online finding aid that will be integrated with the Catalog.

Agencies will continue to manage the original source records in their custody according to the NARA approved disposition schedule. Temporary records will eventually be destroyed. Permanent records will eventually be transferred to NARA, even if a copy has already been transmitted as part of the UAP collection.’

As yet, despite the deadline, not all agencies have fully complied, and the information is trickling rather than pouring, but some of the data can be seen on the NARA site. This information is therefore escaping AARO’s oversight and tendency to be ‘economical’ with data release.

NEW INITIATIVE BY THE WHITE HOUSE

On June 14th, in a post on X, professor Avi Loeb wrote:

‘I was tasked by the White House, AARO, ODNI, the FBI, and the Intelligence Community to lead and assemble a team of scientists and experts for a new UAP Science Advisory Council. The council includes Prof. Carol Cleland: anomaly identification; Dr. Richard Cloete (@RichAC2020): data analysis and AI tools; Dr. Omer Eldadi: data management, AI, and human psychology; Dr. Tim Gallaudet (@GallaudetTim): oceanography; Ross Howard: communication; Dr. Devesh Nandal: numerical analysis and astrophysics; Prof. Garry Nolan (@GarryPNolan): molecular biology and materials science; Dr. Regina Sarmiento: data analysis and AI-assisted data management; Dr. Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer): the study of anomalies; Prof. Peter Skafish: anthropology; Prof. Matthew Szydagis: instrumentation and data collection; and Dr. Jennice Vilhauer: quantitative psychology. This constitutes an amazing A-team of exceptional scientists and experts’.

On July 20th, Professor Loeb wrote in ‘Medium’ that he was visited by someone from ODNI who asked him: “Would you be willing to establish and lead a new advisory council for the U.S. Government on the science of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena?’’. He wrote: ‘There was no doubt in my mind that I should accept this role. As a U.S. citizen, I feel obligated to help ODNI and the Pentagon fulfil their mission of protecting national security. Moreover, if one in a million UAP happens to have a non-human origin, this will constitute the biggest cosmic discovery ever made by humanity’.

He explains that the request is unusual as governments do not tend to ask civilian scientists for help, or to admit that the best sensors1 in the military are unable to explain the objects in the sky, especially if they assume that they are from adversary nations. He adds that the council has already submitted a request for more than 50 items of information concerning past incidents and possible related materials. The council’s scientific analysis and findings will be shared publicly on the website https://uapsac.com/.

The new council is a multidisciplinary team of expert researchers assembled to supply scientific guidance to the U.S. government’s new interagency UAP Governance Board. The aim is to help agencies determine whether unexplained sightings pose national security threats or represent major new discoveries.

Many were surprised by the inclusion in the council of Michael Shermer, a noted skeptic, but Professor Loeb explains : ‘I also included a skeptic to make sure that there are no biases in the analysis and to make sure that the conclusions reached are beyond any doubt’.

No doubt well aware of the mistrust surrounding AARO, Professor Loeb declared: “My leadership style promotes transparency and trust. This is why I was the longest serving chair, for three terms of 3 years, in the history of Harvard’s Astronomy department,”

He goes on:

‘The council will process only unclassified information. This is intentional as it allows scientific analysis, methods, and conclusions to be shared publicly. Classified access goes through the UAP Governing Board and relevant agencies, which the council advises.The council is not starting with a conclusion. Unknown does not mean extraterrestrial, but it also should not be explained away without evidence. The task is to reduce uncertainty by improving the quality of the data.The nature of UAP is a detective story and we should resolve it by collecting new clues that were not recognized before. I will do my best to overcome the anti-science sentiments expressed too often by believers and skeptics. The future can be better than the past. History does not have to repeat itself.The best is yet to come. Stay tuned!’

Sentinel News will stay tuned indeed and will endeavour to report on the new council’s findings.

A GLIMMER OF HOPE FOR WHISTLEBLOWERS

On July 21st, Fox News reported these exclusive news:

‘President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to waive prior nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) for former government employees and contractors cooperating with unidentified anomalous phenomena investigations. President Trump recently directed the Department of War and the intelligence community to allow former government employees or contractors, that have relevant information about the disclosure of UAP, to come forward to meet with designated government representatives — AARO or the President’s UAP taskforce, ‘PURSUE’ — and have their prior NDAs abrogated,” a senior administration official said, with AARO referring to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon office established to investigate UFOs and other unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs)’.

Whilst this is most certainly a show of goodwill from President Trump , one must remember that there is already a whistleblower protection act in place that seems to have been of little effect for a number of whistleblowers, especially if they went to AARO for protection, as reported above. The wording was disappointing, as Fox New’s reported the order was for ‘former government employees and contractors’, so leaves out all the current employees.

However, the acting director of national intelligence, Mr. Aaron Lucas, wrote the following. “President Trump is delivering on his commitment to unprecedented transparency. With non-disclosure agreements no longer standing in the way, current and former government employees and contractors with relevant UAP information can come forward through clear channels. ODNI.gov will soon issue guidance to ensure the intelligence community swiftly and consistently implements the president’s directive.”

So the question is : Is the order for former or current and former employees? For most of them, it doesn’t matter anyway…

Astrophysicist Eric Davis, who has long worked on the UAP subject has expressed in the past that he would say everything he knows if his NDA was waived. On July 22nd, he had a number of exchanges with UFO researcher Jo Murgia and assessed that “Trump’s order did not forbid committing acts of official or unofficial off-books retaliation against whistleblowers.” He added that ‘Trump’s order (which doesn’t add value to the same NDA waiver language already in a previous NDAA that was enacted into law) isn’t about sharing classified UAP information with the public. It’s about sharing classified information with AARO and PURSUE in a classified setting. Trump did NOT issue a SF-312 NDA waiver for us whistleblowers to reveal classified information to the public. BTW, Hal Puthoff and I already shared our classified UAP information with @RepLuna‘s task force, AARO, a certain law enforcement agency, and I shared my information with the SSCI (twice) and the SASC….In other words, the earlier SF-312 NDA waiver in an earlier enacted NDAA and Trump’s waiver order of yesterday DO NOT ADDRESS the protection of whistleblowers from government or unofficial off-books retaliation or impose serious consequences upon those who commit acts of retaliation against whistleblowers.

Sentinel News discusses the matter here.

FINAL WORDS ON DR SEAN KIRKPATRICK

Despite the initial intention by Congress to obtain valuable help from AARO to achieve transparency, the opposite has been true, and whistleblowers, politicians and members of the public are not he only ones to be frustrated.

In a Question & Answer session on June 14th 2026, Ross Coulthart did not hold back on what he thinks of Dr Kikpatrick:

‘At some stage in history, the ignominious performance of Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick will be commemorated as the last gasp of the gatekeepers. I’m sorry. Sean Kirkpatrick is a gatekeeper. He’s somebody who’s working inside the legacy program. As we revealed exclusively on Reality Check, even before he left his job in AARO, he was given a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. That ties him directly into the legacy program. Sean Kirkpatrick is a gatekeeper. He’s somebody who’s working inside the legacy program. As we revealed exclusively on Reality Check, even before he left his job in AARO, he was given a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratories that ties him directly into the legacy program. Sean Kirkpatrick is a gatekeeper.

He’s one of those who’s read in to the program and his job all the way along with AARO - and that’s why the defense department appointed him - was to hinder, delay, obfuscate and it is to the eternal credit of the UAP caucus in Congress and to the efforts of good people inside Arrow that he has been consigned to the dustbin of history and he will be remembered eventually as the deceitful anti-disclosure gatekeeper. I’m sorry. He’s a lying scoundrel and he really does deserve to be exposed, and eventually he will be. All he’s done all along is lie and deceive. I was talking to somebody just this week and I know this person presented very detailed evidence of the legacy program to Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. Everything that he gave them was ignored, swept under the table. Kirk Patrick’s role at AARO was essentially to hinder any revelation that might give the public any chance at all of obtaining any scintilla of evidence about the legacy program’.

THE SECOND AARO REPORT

As we are writing the last lines of this article that focussed mostly on AARO and Dr Kirkpatrick’s unusual relationship with the truth, the second report by AARO has finally arrived, after a delay of more than six months. You will find the analysis of this report in Baptiste Friscourt’s article.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) received 319 reports of UAP related events. Of those, 284 feature UAP-related events occurring during the reporting period.

AARO resolved 114 of the 319 UAP reports, each attributable to various prosaic objects such as balloons, birds, satellites, aircraft, UAS, and a single instance each of a rocket launch and a manned jet pack. Pending review and director authorization, AARO’s analytic team recommends the closure of three additional cases.

AARO transferred 191 of the 319 UAP cases to its active archive pending the future discovery of corroborating data sources. The active archive is a category of UAP reports with insufficient data to assess whether the performance characteristics of the underlying event are consistent with those of natural phenomena or exceed the known state-of-the-art for technological systems.

These three passages appear to suggest that there are 202 cases which remain unexplained following investigation, of which 191 are pending further information.
These three excerpts are scattered throughout the text. As the AARO is responsible for collecting and resolving UAP cases, the official wording used here is questionable. It is almost as if this specific wording was created to prevent the actual number of unexplained cases from being clearly interpreted.

The fact that 191 of these 202 cases are ‘pending the future discovery of corroborating data sources’ is similar to the approach taken by France’s GEIPAN. The number of unexplained cases can vary between 30% and 3%, depending on the scale of reliability and strangeness applied to the data.

As UAP sightings are rare, it is even rarer to have several witnesses present at the time of a sighting, let alone a data collection platform. Even if the event is exactly the same, the reliability of the witnesses is reduced by sheer luck because other cases have different witnesses and data. This does not mean that the less reliable cases did not happen, but rather that there are fewer, more reliable cases because they have multiple sources of data.

Strategic Threat

AARO received and analyzed several reports describing UAP in or near national security sites or critical infrastructure. Some narrative reports were suggestive of phenomena whose performance characteristics exceed the known state-of-the-art within a given domain. No technical data accompanied these reports. If validated, the attendant phenomena underlying these reports may represent a currently unmitigated threat vector.

One might expect the AARO, which is jointly managed by the ODNI and the Pentagon, to be the office most actively engaged in strategic issues relating to UAPs. Recent studies published by the SCU suggest that the AARO is particularly interested in these sites. However, the AARO found no supporting data during its investigation, which seems strange given that their report states that strategic US sites are over-represented in cases of suspicion because they are more closely monitored than the rest of the territory.

One might question the scope of their investigation, given that they state that ‘no technical data accompanied these reports’ without subsequently describing their own efforts. The following sentence acknowledges the prevalence of the danger, stating that if the phenomena underlying these reports are validated, they may represent an unmitigated threat vector.

AARO received 50 reports from the Administrator for Nuclear Security and Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission regarding unmanned aerial systems (UAS) incidents near U.S. nuclear infrastructure, weapons, and launch sites, a 177.8 percent increase over the 18 reported in AARO’s FY 2024 annual report. None of these incidents were reported as UAP.

Twenty-six incidents persisted for under one hour, with the shortest recorded at approximately two minutes. The other 21 incidents occurred over durations of unreported lengths. The reports contained descriptions of UAS morphologies ranging from small hobbyist-sized UAS to larger multi-rotor models. Quadcopters were the most reported morphology.

The terminology used here raises questions once again: the nuclear safety administrator has reported 50 cases of unmanned aerial system (UAS) sightings. The AARO states that these were not reported as UAPs, as they were reported as UAS... yes, indeed.

Could these cases be among those that the AARO considers to have been explained, which would skew their statistics? No classification information is provided.

Aviation Safety

Two UAP reports described electronic or avionic interference as attributable to UAP in proximity to an operational aircraft. AARO has not yet rendered a determination on whether, and to what extent, the reported effects are attributable to UAP.

Ever since the Mantell incident in the United States in 1948, in which a fighter pilot died while pursuing a UAP, the dangers posed by these advanced platforms have been well known. This was even officially confirmed in the British Ministry of Defence’s Condign Report in 2000. Flight safety has been at the heart of the issues surrounding UAPs, as Sentinel News has reported numerous times.

It is concerning that the report raises this possibility yet the AARO, despite all its investigative resources, is unable to draw any conclusions or cite specific cases. Given the six-month delay, it cannot be said that they lacked the time to reach a conclusion.

Curiously, the same report states that ‘no reports indicated a flight safety concern during this reporting period’. One might question whether the authors read their own report.

Maritime Encounters

The single maritime domain UAP case AARO received involved a report from U.S. Navy assets operating off the coast of Virginia. The report described approximately 100 airborne UAP and two, likely uncrewed, surface systems. AARO is actively investigating this event in coordination with the reporting unit.

Since 2018, waves of unexplained objects emerging from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have made headlines on numerous occasions. However, AARO only mentions one case, off the coast of Virginia.

What about the cases of the Omaha, in New Jersey, and in Colorado? Is the US defence establishment turning a blind eye, conducting test operations involving new technologies on their own troops, or are these sightings the result of attempts at intimidation by foreign actors?

On 29 June, MPs Pierre Henriet and Arnaud Saint-Martin brought together researchers, engineers, military personnel and public officials to put France’s legacy of UAP research into perspective and highlight its significance.

As members of the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices (OPECST), Pierre Henriet (Horizons) and Arnaud Saint-Martin (LFI) sought to give a voice to those who study the phenomenon seriously and to take stock of research into it in France.

In turn, the speakers were able to present their views and their work during three round-table discussions:

• Research into UAPs: history and contemporary issues

• Official work on UAPs by GEIPAN and the Air and Space Force

• From GEIPAN to the Pentagon: current developments and responses from the authorities

UAPs: a matter of popular belief?

The subject is not new and continues to divide society. Pierre Lagrange, a sociologist of science and associate researcher at EHESS, has been studying the subject for over thirty years. He explains that, ever since its emergence in the United States, the subject has been framed incorrectly.

“This debate is often presented as the emergence of a popular belief, an irrational phenomenon. It is, in fact, a debate that reflects the emergence of a belief in the beliefs of others.”

In fact, Orson Welles did not cause a panic in 1938. Pierre Lagrange’s research demonstrates that this was a fabrication by the media and elites the following day.

“We always seek to isolate belief, credulity, this section of the public which is deemed irrational. Yet the real problem is our obsession – quite literally – with finding credulity and irrationality. ”

Over the last four centuries, Western society has been built on the idea of elevating itself, of distinguishing itself from so-called ‘savage’ peoples. The drive towards modernisation has led Western society to distance itself from what it considers irrational. This has shaped how the UAPs are viewed. But over time, society and science have evolved. And the debate has shifted from treating the phenomenon as a matter of popular beliefs to framing it as a conspiracy theory.

UAPs: is this issue taken seriously?

“To the question ‘Are UFOs a serious subject?’, the French government has long since responded in its own way by prioritising communication with the public without, however, neglecting the military and scientific implications.”

Jérôme Lamy

Jérôme Lamy, a sociologist at the CNRS, and Dominique Pinsolle, a historian at the University of Bordeaux, have undertaken a socio-historical study of GEIPAN (Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena) since January 2026.

Three key factors have emerged from this:

• A civic dimension

  It is important to address citizens’ concerns, which are often amplified and perpetuated by the media. Here, the uncanny is seen as a threshold of unease linked to a need for explanation;

• A scientific approach

  GEIPAN’s raison d’être lies in providing a response based on the scientific method, enabling a rational explanation of unknown or unusual phenomena. GEIPAN’s work follows a process of rationalisation that draws on judicial methods;

• National defence

  This aspect was less significant in the early 2000s but has gained increasing prominence in recent years, as demonstrated by the changing nature of media coverage of GEIPAN.

When it comes to the notion of strangeness, Jérôme Lamy points out that it is not GEIPAN’s role to generate new knowledge.

‘The various stakeholders interviewed are relatively unanimous in our survey. It is not appropriate to compare GEIPAN to a conventional research laboratory that would produce new, peer-reviewed knowledge within a scientific field governed by standards of truth-finding—such as the replication of experiments. ”

What response is given to the public?

GEIPAN is an indispensable institution in the study of UAPs. Frédéric Courtade, director of GEIPAN, was accompanied by one of the investigators, Gilles Munsch, to present the structure of this organisation as well as how it operates. Established by the CNES in 1977, the Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (GEIPAN) is responsible for collecting, analysing and archiving unidentified aerospace phenomena, whilst keeping the public informed. To carry out its mission, GEIPAN relies on a team of 16 specially trained volunteer investigators, CNES’s in-house expertise, a committee of experts and various government departments.

This mission to provide information, combined with a commitment to transparency, has led GEIPAN to make public all 3,368 cases studied, of which:

• 28 per cent are fully identified phenomena (Case A),

• 38.8 per cent are probably identified phenomena (Case B),

• 30.1 per cent are unidentified phenomena due to a lack of data (Case C),

• 3.1 per cent are phenomena that remain unidentified following investigation (i.e. 106 Case D cases).

(GEIPAN statistics – 26 June 2026)

At a time when the United States is striving for greater transparency, France has had, for nearly 50 years, a structure in place for analysing reports from the public and professionals in the civil aviation sector, which draws on government services and a multidisciplinary committee of experts.

However, GEIPAN’s role is limited to case studies. When a case remains unexplained despite solid investigative evidence, it is classified as a ‘D’ case.

A member of the audience asks who determines the research activities that are intended to fill this gap in scientific and technical knowledge.

“As far as research is concerned, that falls outside my remit. GEIPAN does not carry out research. Research is entrusted to universities and the CNRS. There is no ufology programme at the CNES. It is not the CNES’s role to conduct research.”

Frédéric Courtade

The response from the Air and Space Force

This opportunity to report an observation of a strange or anomalous nature is not limited to civilians. Colonel Mathieu Courtaban, deputy director of CAPCODA, and Captain Jérémy Moyal were also present to outline the Air and Space Force’s response.

CAPCODA’s aim is to merge all radar detections—whether civilian or military—across the national territory and to establish a recognised and intelligible air situation, in order to monitor all objects flying over French airspace and, where necessary, intervene in the event of uncertainty regarding the level of threat that a particular object might pose. Consequently, CAPCODA operates on two levels:

• It supports GEIPAN’s investigations by providing this available radar data;

• As part of the surveillance of the national territory, and when an object presents a level of uncertainty or is unidentified, the unit may initiate a verification operation.

“Reports from our own crews account for only a small percentage of the air traffic taking place over national territory. And in my view, we are looking at fewer than one report per year from Air Force crews.”

“The modernisation of our radar network, particularly our military radar network, enables us to detect targets that are increasingly small and travelling at ever-lower speeds. This has led to a significant increase in the number of sorties by our fighter aircraft, which mostly go out to identify objects that ultimately turn out not to be threats at all, that is to say, regularly flocks of migratory birds detected at very high altitudes or a whole host of balloons, some of which – without giving away any secrets – feature Mickey or Minnie Mouse heads in eastern Paris. ”

Mathieu Courtaban points out that, in addition to civilian and military radars, CAPCODA can also rely on a satellite-based surveillance radar that enables it to detect objects in the highest layers of the atmosphere.

To the best of my knowledge, in my time at CAPCODA, we are not aware of any incidents that we have been completely unable to identify, particularly those exhibiting kinematic characteristics and changes in direction that appear, at first glance, inexplicable.

The study of ‘D’ cases

Since 2008, the 3AF (French Aeronautical and Astronautical Association) has had a committee dedicated to studying UAPs, the SIGMA2 Commission, which is responsible for the scientific and technical analysis of unexplained ‘D’ cases (according to GEIPAN terminology), whether French or foreign. This committee works in collaboration with the CNES, the Directorate General for Armament and also the civil aviation authorities.

It comprises around thirty people, covering a wide range of expertise: civil and military pilots, a rear admiral, an astronaut, a doctor, a psychologist, engineers from industry and the public sector, and specialists in electromagnetism, missiles, directed-energy weapons, air defence, and radar, optical and infrared.

According to Luc Dini, chair of the SIGMA 2 Commission:

“We are, unequivocally and clearly, dealing with physical phenomena that can be observed and recorded.”

During his presentation, Luc Dini outlined the commission’s modus operandi. To do so, he drew on a case he received from the CEFAA (Chile) in 2017. This emblematic case, observed from a Cougar helicopter, was resolved by SIGMA 2, which identified the unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) as an Airbus A340 with its contrail.

Luc Dini also mentioned a case dating back to 2007 in the Channel Islands, based on a pilot’s visual account corroborated by a radar track spanning several hundred metres. This case remains unsolved to this day and is still being investigated by the commission. The SIGMA 2 Commission has also examined metal samples and vegetation associated with PAN sightings.

Whatever case the SIGMA 2 Commission receives, it endeavours to characterise the observed phenomena and objects, and to determine the physical laws governing them. Rather than going into detail about Luc Dini’s presentation, we invite the reader to consult the SIGMA 2 Progress Report published in June 2021.

Luc Dini concludes his presentation with two recommendations:

We need more records to be able to explore the subject in greater depth and better characterise unidentified aerospace phenomena. One recommendation, therefore, would be to establish links between databases – particularly with the CNES database, which contains more technical data. This would also encourage pilots and air traffic controllers to provide their own accounts. Many do not dare to do so.

Observe, document, understand

The real challenge is not just that of the unexplained. It is also a challenge of observation, data collection and managing uncertainty.

Philippe Ailleris

Philippe Ailleris has been a Senior Project Controller at the European Space Agency (ESA) for 28 years. During his presentation, he emphasised the importance of improving observations and instrumentation relating to the study of the sky. The increase in aviation and space activities has led to a rise in reports across Europe. However, these phenomena remain particularly difficult to study due to their unpredictable nature and the resulting lack of available data. A scientific study cannot rely solely on eyewitness accounts or on a video taken out of context.

The more instrumental measurements we add – and the more independent sensors we use – the greater the scientific value. […] The more numerous, independent and well-documented the data are, the easier it becomes to understand what has been observed.

Philippe Ailleris concludes by emphasising the need to continue observations, improve data quality and carry on with research.

Science does not progress by accepting all hypotheses, nor by systematically rejecting them. The challenge is not to defend extraordinary conclusions but to improve our ability to study unusual phenomena with an open mind, rigour, method and a critical approach.

Improving data analysis

For Michael Vaillant, data scientist and founder of UAP Check, the creation of a scientific committee would enable a shift from passive data collection to proactive observation on the one hand, and the creation of a database that can be utilised by the scientific community on the other. Such a scientific committee would safeguard the interests of both defence and science. Michael Vaillant also proposes the creation of a European equivalent to GEIPAN. This would require standardisation of the data collected, making it more readily usable for research.

Today, every country, every organisation and every base has organised differently what they call ‘unidentified cases’, with protocols that do not align. In the United States, the ‘unknown’ takes one form; in France, it takes another; my ‘unknown’ is not necessarily your ‘unknown’. If we want to organise science on an international scale, we need to be talking about the same ‘unknown’.

France and the world: the international situation

Baptiste Friscourt, correspondent for The Debrief and founder of the territorial observation association Sentinel Center, focused more on how institutions communicate about these phenomena and on the observed impact on the public. He draws on the wave of sightings in Belgium that took place between 1989 and 1991. During this period, there were more than 2,000 sightings, sometimes with several dozen reports from civilians and law enforcement officers on a single day. F-16s were dispatched on several occasions in an attempt to intercept them. On three occasions, the pilots managed to lock onto the targets with their radar for a few seconds before the targets changed position and extremely rapid acceleration broke the lock. On 16 December 1989, the Minister of Defence, Jean-Pol Poncelet, confirmed that the so-called UFOs were in fact nothing more than lights from a nightclub reflected by the clouds. Two days later, Colonel De Brouwer, Chief of Operations for the Air Force, contradicted this version and stated that “ground operators had observed unexplained radar echoes displaying extremely variable speeds, bearing no relation to the speeds of commercial airliners or military cargo aircraft”. Beyond the evident contradiction in official communications, the Belgian wave demonstrates that, during such significant events, the public does not panic.

Baptiste Friscourt also revisited the issue of European coordination.

For several decades now, MEPs have been questioning the European Commission about UAPs. The Commission’s response is consistently the same: this falls within the national responsibility of the Member States, not the European Union. However, they are perfectly willing, for example, to use the Horizon programme to launch a research programme on the subject.

Furthermore, he points out that specific tools for pilots already exist within EASA, the European Aviation Safety Agency, but that pilots’ reports are classified as secret in all countries except Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

These reports reveal that communication and positions are often contradictory at the level of individual states and authorities. Indeed, several reports made public (Airprox, the Condign project, etc.) detail situations or recommendations concerning the safety of pilots and their aircraft. However, when Members of the House of Lords question representatives of the Ministry of Defence about UAPs, the Ministry of Defence responds that this does not constitute a matter of national defence.

Several countries communicate publicly on this subject. Spain undertook a massive declassification of military reports as early as 1991. Italy publishes an annual report on the number of objects encountered and the investigations carried out. Brazil has experienced numerous cases, some of which have been very well documented, notably by Jacques Vallée. In Uruguay, the air force has been investigating the subject since 1979. The Chilean army has had a permanent study group on the subject since 1997. China has enlisted the civilian population to help detect the phenomenon and claims to have successfully intercepted at least one object. Numerous testimonies from Russian military personnel and pilots are available from the period prior to the war in Ukraine. There is a striking similarity in the way the United States and Russia communicate on this subject. And Japan has indicated it is ready to collaborate with any other nation seeking to investigate the matter.

Baptiste Friscourt therefore raises the question of how French authorities are communicating on this subject.

This account is corroborated in the United States by Dr Mc Gwier, who, whilst on a mission aboard a nuclear submarine, observed a huge craft passing alongside the submarine and forcing it to surface. This was also confirmed by Admiral Gallaudet. As France has the second-largest exclusive economic zone, it would be interesting to ask our submariners whether they have encountered the same objects.

Echoing Mathieu Courtaban’s statements regarding reports made to CAPCODA, he states:

During my investigation for The Debrief, I was able to contact French military pilots, particularly within the naval aviation forces, who confirmed that there were sightings of these unexplained advanced platforms [at a rate of] three to four cases a year within their unit. When I asked them why they did not report the information to CAPCODA, they said the risk to their careers was too great. Civilian pilots gave me exactly the same answer. What is very interesting is that this is a perceived risk. […] When I asked them what might change the situation, they said: the fact that a member of the general staff were to state that there is a need to report these objects to higher authorities.

Finally, he points out that research programmes are already underway at universities in France and across Europe, and that others are in the pipeline at major research institutes. He adds that some programmes have the capacity to set up specific observatories to gather reliable data that meets academic standards. He cites the example of the IFEX programme at the University of Würzburg, led by Professor Hakan Kayal with the support of the army.

Is France ready?

Sylvain Maisonneuve served as a ministerial adviser for almost five years. This experience enabled him to identify four structural weaknesses in the workings of power concerning the issue of UAPs:

• the holistic yet granular analysis we apply to events abroad,

• our conformist mindset, which makes it difficult for us to think outside established frameworks,

• our regulatory framework, which requires first to define and categorise an issue before addressing it,

• the complexity of data collection.

Whilst preparing his book, *UFOs: The Declassified Investigation*, published in 2025, he explains that he approached several ministers, but none of them regarded the subject as serious, credible or worthy of study. This was not due to negligence, closed-mindedness or anything of the sort; it was simply that they did not even consider the topic themselves. However, Sylvain Maisonneuve believes that the ‘weak signals’ stage has long since been passed. This is borne out by the comments of John Brennan, Director of the CIA under Obama; Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence under Biden; and John Ratcliffe, the current Director of the CIA. In light of the ongoing declassification in the United States, what is the status of France’s preparedness on this issue?

To build on the discussions initiated by the symposium, Sylvain Maisonneuve proposes launching a rapid-response mission. This would be a fact-finding mission lasting considerably less than the commissions of inquiry, which generally run for a period of six months. It would enable us to review our governance, our tools and our data collection processes (both civilian and military), as well as our strategic monitoring.

We must not adopt a sensationalist, doomsday or military perspective, nor should we jump the gun and start speculating on the origin and nature of the phenomenon. The priority is already to be able to characterise it, document it in order to understand it, and form our own opinion. And I believe that, in the land of Descartes, this is the best we can do.

A first step

All participants welcomed the initiative by MPs Pierre Henriet and Arnaud Saint-Martin. The latter confirmed that this symposium was indeed a first step forward on the subject.

A number of recommendations arising from this symposium will also be put forward to highlight the collaborative work that has taken place today. And I think that perhaps this initiative will inspire others.

Pierre Henriet

Notable among the audience was Jacques Vallée, whose work was unanimously praised by the 250 people present in the auditorium. He is the author of numerous books on the subject and has devoted many years to documenting and studying UFOs.

Many of the cases mentioned by the speakers have been studied and documented by him. Dominique Filhol, director of the film *Valensole 1965*, and Alexandre Sheldon-Duplaix, a naval historian, were also present. Several specialist media outlets had also made the trip.

The entire symposium has been uploaded to Arnaud Saint-Martin’s YouTube channel (videos 1, 2, 3 and 4). The media outlet Exomagazin has also posted a video of the entire symposium, complete with transcripts in several languages.

The document is titled ‘ODNI-UAP-D001’. It contains no imagery, radar readings or analysis. Written in May 2026 by an officer on active duty, it concerns events dating to late 2025. Therefore, six months elapsed between the event and its recording in writing. The author remains anonymous, and the reference to USPER in the file name indicates the redaction policy applied to US nationals.

Upon its release, the text recounts a night of close encounters involving orange orbs just metres from a helicopter and luminous formations trailing fighter jets. However, this account has a counterpart, and that is where the story becomes interesting.

One night at a testing range

In the early evening, while it was still light, the officer took off from a Joint Operations Centre with a colleague and two pilots. Their mission was to investigate the muffled explosions that had been heard in the mountains of the firing range on previous nights, which had coincided with reports of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). They were searching for debris – anything that might explain the orbs.

For several hours, the helicopter flew at a very low altitude along the mountain range. Each time they spotted debris on the ground, it turned out to be the remains of rockets accumulated over years of weapons testing. As they flew past, the crew noted the entrance to a large cavity, the bottom of which they could not see; they recorded its position and continued.

After dropping off and refuelling, just as they were planning to return, the operations centre reported radar echoes in the same area where the activity had been observed. The crew changed course. What followed took over an hour.

The witness describes four incidents. First, a ‘super-hot’ object was spotted on the FLIR by a ground crew. This object then split in two before disappearing. Second, a swarm of countless orange spheres against a mountainous backdrop. Two large orbs lighting up near the rotor and being joined by others in a vertical formation for ten to fifteen seconds before fading in reverse order. Orbs lighting up above fighter jets in flight and matching their speed and trajectory several times right up until landing.

The account ends with the pilots being ‘virtually speechless’ and a brief debriefing before they head home.

Taken in isolation, this is an eyewitness account. It is a meticulous account: the narrator consistently specifies who sees what and through which channel. He himself observes with the naked eye. The pilots use NVGs and FLIR. The ground crew communicate by radio.

The narrator maintains this hierarchy of sources from start to finish, and credit must be given where it is due. The most spectacular elements of the first episode — the ascent from the ground, the approach to within three metres and the passage beneath the aircraft — are explicitly attributed to the radio, while the narrator himself expresses doubts about what he saw.

The account is interesting, but the problem lies elsewhere.

The classified counterpart

On 8 May 2026, the first instalment of the PURSUE programme already included this case. In a different form.

It was a three-page document marked ‘SECRET//NOFORN’ at the top and bottom of each page and entitled ‘USPER Statement about UAP Sighting’. It is not an account. Rather, it is a chronological log, timestamped to the minute, of the type produced in a federal investigative report. It covers the same mission, helicopter and witness. It has also been freely available on war.gov since its publication.

When the two texts are compared side by side, the difference is striking: the classified report is more cautious, precise and comprehensive than the version intended for publication. Whenever the two versions differ, it is the public version that oversimplifies matters.

The first example concerns the central scene of the first episode. The published account states: ‘The pilots observed it through NVGs and saw it split into two, with a smaller object emerging before it accelerated out of sight.’ The pilots saw the object split.

The report describes the same moment as follows: Having arrived on the scene, the helicopter searched the area using FLIR, NVGs and the naked eye, but did not locate the orb. It found nothing. It was the ground observation post that tracked the object and described it by radio. Then, one sentence later, the report states that the co-pilot had reported seeing something emerge from the two objects under NVG. The co-pilot. A single man reporting an observation that the rest of the crew had not made in an aircraft that had just failed to locate the target.

In the official report, the failure to locate the object has disappeared and the co-pilot has become ‘the pilots’. Nobody lied: the co-pilot’s observation is real. However, its evidential value has changed as the document has changed.

The second example is even more telling. At 22:33, the official report identifies a formation of orbs to the east, moving towards a neighbouring town whose name has been redacted. At 22:52, it places five or six of the orbs above a village. However, the published account places the entire event above the mountains and the firing range. The nearby residential area has vanished.

The public version of the account omits precisely what would make the matter political.

These two discrepancies are not isolated. The same pattern is evident in relation to the purpose of the mission, the distance of twenty miles, the existence of footage, and the fighter jets. In each case, three versions coexist: the report, the account and the public’s perception.

One event, three accounts. On the left is the SECRET//NOFORN-classified official report, published on 8 May 2026. In the centre is the testimony submitted on 22 May. On the right is what was retained in the official statement and subsequently by the press. All documents are freely available at war.gov/UFO.

A few clarifications on these lines are in order, because they deserve it.

The twenty miles, which are repeated everywhere as proof of an unattainable speed, are, in the report, a visual estimate relayed by radio from a ground observation post. The published account does not mention them at all; the witness only writes, ‘We briefly pursued it, but broke off, unable to match its speed’. It was the official note accompanying the file that reintroduced the figure, and it was the press that turned it into a fact.

Next is the test. The report notes that, earlier that same day, an office — the name of which has been redacted — carried out a test at the site. The nature of this test has also been redacted. We do not claim that it explains the explosions that prompted the mission. However, we acknowledge that readers of the minutes may ask this question, whereas readers of the published account cannot, as the test is not mentioned there.

Finally, the images. The published account simply states: ‘I didn’t take photos.’ This is accurate, but very incomplete. In his comments at the end of the transcript, however, the same witness reports that the pilots said they were recording. He adds that many of the sightings were above the helicopter and therefore outside the field of view of the FLIR camera. Therefore, there is video footage from that night. However, it has not been published and the account makes no mention of its existence.

As for the fighter jets, the press reported that they were scrambled to intercept the objects. Both documents say the same thing: five aircraft were already in the air on a training mission and the operations centre requested their assistance. A training flight became an interception. It’s just semantics. It transforms an incident into an emergency military response.

Thirty-two images, no source

That leaves the imagery. The PURSUE file contains thirty-two infrared sensor photographs, divided into two series and published as early as 8 May. These photographs are generally presented as documenting the event.

However, none of them contain any metadata regarding their origin. The only available date is that embedded in the image by the sensor itself. For the twenty-four images in the main series, this shows 31 December 1999.

This is not a date. It is the factory default setting of an unset clock.

However, the embedded times are consistent: a continuous sequence of eleven minutes from 18:10:00 to 18:21:02. There is, in fact, something instructive to be seen here. Up until 18:19:06, the reticle displays a wide field of view and the images show virtually nothing. At 18:19:19, the operator narrows the field of view and two dark objects appear in sharp focus near the crosshairs. In thermal imaging, this phenomenon is known as ‘black-hot’: the hotter an object is, the darker it appears.

With a sensor set in this way, very dark objects are very hot objects. This is consistent with the ‘super-hot’ mentioned in the report.

Therefore, the sequence appears to be an observation post acquiring and zooming in on a target.

However, a government body that publishes imagery devoid of any provenance data, with a timestamp showing 1999, and without captions linking the files to the narrative they are supposed to illustrate, is producing material that can be interpreted as anyone sees fit. That is what happened here.

What remains once everything has been stripped away

At this point, the reader might conclude that nothing remains. That everything dissolves into the estimates of a ground-based observation post, the inaccuracies of a report, and the carelessness of a news dispatch. However, this would be jumping to conclusions. Conversely, it would be to commit the very error we have just documented: substituting one’s preferred narrative for the actual record.

Certain observations run through all three versions without a single word being changed.

The chain of transmission does not distort them. These observations are reproduced identically in the official report, the published testimony and the press. Several are based on independent sensors.

The splitting of the object is confirmed twice, via two channels: the FLIR from the ground station and the co-pilot’s NVGs. The sequential lighting up and subsequent extinguishing of the orbs in reverse order was observed five times during the night, both with the naked eye and through binoculars. This was described in identical terms in both documents. The geometric formations and thermal signature did not change during the flight.

However, these observations prove nothing regarding the nature of the objects. The file contains no usable radar data, images of the close encounters or any analysis. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office maintains that there is no evidence to suggest an extraterrestrial origin, while acknowledging that many cases remain unresolved. Sean Kirkpatrick, its former director, deemed the first batch of PURSUE data to be unremarkable and predicted that, without analysis or context, it would merely fuel speculation.

On this point, he was right. However, not in the way he envisaged.

What this case really reveals

The raw testimony was cautious. The witness prioritised his sources, distinguishing between what he had seen and what had been reported to him. He also highlighted his own doubts regarding the sequence of events he remembered. The official report was even more so.

It is not the testimony itself that has been distorted. Rather, it is the layers surrounding it. For example, a published account reclassifies an individual observation as a crew observation and omits a test flight, a second aircraft and populated areas. It is a report that transforms a radio estimate into performance data. It is a news dispatch that invents a take-off in response to an alert.

None of this is a lie. Everything is online, and every link in the chain is verifiable. This is precisely what is most troubling: it took just fifteen days for the public record of a transparency programme to produce a narrative that no longer matches its own documents.

What remains after everything else has been stripped away is significant.

And no one has yet explained it.

These two sentences should be able to stand together. This is why this dossier deserves to be read rather than merely recounted.

However, this case raises a broader question. Witnesses describe an incursion into US airspace — particularly concerning above a military test site — with no successful interceptions.

Since 2018, the United States has faced challenges to the protection of its forces and strategic sites from advanced platforms whose capabilities raise questions. Could these be ‘blue-on-blue’ tests of American prototypes, pushing the limits of their conventional forces’ capabilities? Or are they attempts by China or Russia to destabilise public opinion in a geopolitical landscape undergoing reorganisation? Or are these craft of an even more mysterious origin?

Perhaps an examination of NASA’s documents will shed light on the matter. The director recently stated that the agency does indeed possess imagery and astronaut testimonies showing unidentified objects, which contradicts what the agency claimed just a few years ago.

The Majestic 12 documents have held a special place in UFO mythology for forty years. In February 2026, a new piece of evidence added fuel to the fire.

The context was favourable: the third batch of declassified UAP files had just been released, debate on disclosure was more active than ever, and several influential figures were publishing their own analyses.

Against this backdrop, Ross Coulthart interviews Jonathan Caplan, a British lawyer with over fifty years’ experience in high-profile document fraud cases, from the Barings collapse to the Maxwell scandal. Caplan applies the same forensic approach to the UAP files as he does to his litigation cases: each piece of evidence must prove its own authenticity, and a single credible signature on a document is never enough to substantiate a body of evidence. The 834021 stamp must be examined within this framework, not as blanket validation.

“J12 Logic” puts forward his ‘834021’ argument within this media context.

An anonymous researcher writing under the pseudonym ‘MJ12 Logic’ on Substack noticed that certain Majestic documents bore a stamp in the bottom right-hand corner bearing the identification number ‘834021-’ followed by a page number. The researcher had the simple yet ingenious idea of searching for this number on the CIA’s FOIA portal. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a US law enacted in 1966 that requires federal agencies to make their declassified documents public.

This search yielded 345 pages relating to Operation Paperclip, declassified on 22 June 2022 and bearing the same ‘834021’ stamp as their report number.

‘MJ12 Logic’ argues that, since these markings were part of the numerical classification, registration, and routing systems used by US intelligence agencies in the 1940s and 1950s and these systems had not been publicly documented for decades, it would have been extremely difficult for an outsider to reproduce them convincingly.

This is genuine archival research, not merely anecdotal evidence or speculation. The response within the ufology community has been enthusiastic. On 2 March 2026, Whitley Strieber (author of Communion) stated on his website, Unknown Country, that MJ12 Logic had ‘broken the cover-up by proving that the Majestic 12 documents are genuine’.

What do these documents contain, and how credible are they?

In order to be intellectually honest, it is necessary to acknowledge that not all Majestic documents are of equal value. Stanton Friedman, the main advocate for these documents, has always distinguished three foundational documents from the rest: the Eisenhower Briefing Document of 1952 (a presidential briefing on Roswell and MJ-12), the Truman-Forrestal Memo of 1947 (presidential authorisation for the programme’s creation), and the Cutler-Twining Memo of 1954 (an internal reference to an MJ-12 meeting; this is the only document ‘found’ at the National Archives). These three documents are distinguished from the heterogeneous mass of later documents received by Tim Cooper and Don Berliner. In 1994, Berliner, an aviation journalist, received an anonymous roll of film containing SOM 1-01, a special operations manual allegedly linked to MJ-12. Friedman has publicly dismissed several of Cooper’s documents as ‘emulations’, or later rewrites of authentic documents. He is therefore not arguing that the entire corpus is authentic, but rather that the first three documents are authentic and that the criticisms levelled at the secondary documents are insufficient to invalidate them. Argument 834021 follows this line of reasoning by demonstrating the consistency of the foundational documents with authentic CIA filing systems, thereby bolstering their credibility.

This approach, which assesses the evidential value of each document rather than validating or invalidating a corpus as a whole, is in line with that advocated by Jonathan Caplan. One rarely mentioned detail greatly weakens the ‘insider’ argument. The 345 pages of CIA report 834021 concern communist propaganda during the Korean War and are not related to UFOs. Although pro-authenticity, the website majesticdocuments.com itself acknowledges that this document ‘has only a tenuous connection to the MAJESTIC programme’. The stamp is shared, but the subject matter is not.

This merely proves that they share a reference number. However, if the forger had access to genuine Paperclip documents, as claimed by those suggesting government disinformation, they could have simply copied these numbers onto their forgeries.

In any case, the entire Majestic corpus is heterogeneous. Most of the documents originate from the Tim Cooper collection, which contains the majority of documents bearing the 834021 stamp.

The linguistic analysis that cast doubt on the Majestic documents

In 2007, Dr Michael Heiser, a linguist specialising in Biblical Hebrew, commissioned Dr Carole Chaski to subject the MJ-12 documents to a computational authorship attribution analysis. Chaski is not a figure from the world of ufology: a graduate in linguistics from Brown University, she is recognised as one of the world’s leading experts in forensic linguistics. Her proprietary method, validated as being over 90 per cent reliable, is admissible as evidence in US federal courts under the Daubert standard.

The principle is simple yet powerful: every author possesses unconscious ‘syntactic fingerprints’ – patterns of sentence construction that persist regardless of the subject matter. By comparing the disputed documents with authentic writings by their alleged authors, it is possible to determine whether the same person wrote them.

Seventeen Majestic documents bearing an identifiable signature were put to the test. The result is unequivocal: only one passed the authorship test, meaning that only one was likely written by the person whose name appears on it. This document contained no reference to extraterrestrial bodies or non-human technologies.

The most troubling detail of this case is not the result itself, but its suppression. The study had been carried out partly at the request of Stanton Friedman and Robert and Ryan Wood, the most ardent promoters of the MJ-12 documents. The findings were communicated to them directly by Heiser and by Chaski herself. Yet neither Friedman nor the Woods ever mentioned these results in their books, lectures or online publications. When researcher Kevin Randle questioned Friedman on the matter, Friedman claimed to have addressed the issue in the reissue of his book Top Secret Majic. Upon verification, however, Chaski’s analysis does not appear there.

When contacted years later by another researcher, Chaski said she was astonished that anyone still took these documents seriously: “But they know they’re forgeries,” she said, referring to Friedman and the Woods. Ahead of a UFO conference in 2008, she had even phoned Heiser to express her fear that Bob Wood might misrepresent her findings to the audience.

This study does not focus on stamps, date formats or file numbers: it tackles the problem from an angle that forgery cannot circumvent. One can copy a CIA file number onto a forged document. One cannot reproduce the unconscious syntactic structures of an admiral or a CIA director without computational tools and a reference corpus that no one, in the 1980s or 1990s, would have had the means to compile.

The human cost of disinformation by AFOSI

To gauge the impact of this type of operation on the ground, one need only recall the case of Paul Bennewitz. This physicist and engineer from Albuquerque, whose company supplied equipment to NASA and the Air Force, had begun intercepting genuine electromagnetic signals from the neighbouring Kirkland base in 1979. Rather than asking him to stop, AFOSI inundated him with a false alien mythology fuelled by agent Richard Doty and ufologist Bill Moore. (The text of Moore’s speech acknowledging this disinformation was published in MUFON 1989 International UFO Symposium Proceedings.) Bennewitz was eventually committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1988, convinced that his house was being watched by aliens. He died in 2003. The fake MJ-12 documents originated in this operational climate, and the first known mention of ‘MJ Twelve’ appears precisely in a disinformation document intended for Bennewitz in 1981.

Timothy Cooper’s email

Beyond linguistic analysis, another account has served to undermine the whole structure. Timothy Cooper, an American ufologist responsible for circulating dozens of ‘secondary’ MJ-12 documents in the 1990s, is one of the central figures in this now-contested body of work. According to Cooper, his father was trained by the OSI in 1949 and held security clearance for the UFO programme at Air Defence Command headquarters between 1957 and 1963.

In 2009, Timothy Cooper wrote an email to Robert Hastings in which he explained that all the documents (without exception) are forgeries. And that ultimately, after having been “willingly led to believe” by Friedman and Woods in the authenticity of these documents, he had come to share his father’s view: that they were disinformation intended for the Russians to make them waste time and money looking away from their secret projects. A common practice during the Cold War.

Here is the gist of it:

----- Original Message -----

From: timxxxxxxxxxx@xxx.com

To: hastings444@worldnet.att.net

Sent: Friday, 3 April 2009 10:24 pm

Subject: Re: My new article on MJ-12 and Serpo

Read your posting and as one who was foolishly taken in by the MJ-12 fantasy (which is what it is) I heartedly agree with your assessment. My father was trained by the OSI in 1949 and held a UFO Program clearance at ADC headquarters from 1957 to 1963 that allowed him to read and duplicate the most sensitve [sic] UFO-related material and never once believed there was a secret cabal group operating by that name. Since ADC was the primary consumer of all military UFO sighting reports while LeMay was Chief of Staff it is unconceivable that government intelligence or the military for that matter as my dad would put it would deliberately hide or mislead senior ADC intelligence officers of an alien threat from the sky and, at the same time, send their intercept pilots into harms way without being briefed of the possible dangers. The MJ-12 documents, and I mean ALL of them (including SOM 1-01), are a hoax and those who promote them as reality know this[,] or should know this. I showed him a copy and he said it was disinformation for the Soviets as the CIA and AF routinely did these kind of things all the time to get the Russians to spend enormous sums of money to investigate this and other “paper” jobs. As regards Serpo... pure science fiction but good science fiction.

As an unwitting dupe in this charade (I must confess I was willing to be led into believeing [sic] it by Friedman and the Woods), I have since distanced myself and have ceased association with Collins after the book EXEMPT FROM DISCLOSURE (which, I might add, was poorly edited and had my name as co-author air brushed out at my insistence) was released. My only inclusion in the book amounted to Collins taking a speculative piece I wrote for the internet back in 1999 about James Jesus Angleton which he unilaterally edited into the book and was not a co-author in any real sense.

By the way[,] I have your book and found it precise and very informative. If my dad were still alive today he would have confirmed for you some of the incidents you cite but earlier incidents as early as 1963. He was always coy when the subject came up but his Special Citation upon his retirement reflected he knew what ADC was up against.

Thanks for the e-mail.

Tim Cooper

timxxxxxxxxxx@xxx.com

It is interesting to note that Cooper’s positive comment regarding the book UFO & Nukes shows that he does not entirely disapprove of the subject of UAPs, only the MJ-12 documents. However, he has made no further public statements on the matter and has since remained permanently silent.

The ‘pro-MJ-12 community’ and its website majesticdocuments.com have simply ignored this statement and do not even reference it. Just like Dr Chaski’s study.

Cooper is not, incidentally, the only one to have made this sort of admission. As early as 1989, at a MUFON conference, ufologist Bill Moore – one of the three men behind the public release of the MJ-12 documents in 1987 – publicly acknowledged having participated in disinformation operations targeting Paul Bennewitz and other researchers, in collaboration with Richard Doty.

In conclusion

From a methodological perspective, argument 834021 remains the strongest put forward by defenders of the MJ-12 documents over the years. It demonstrates a bureaucratic consistency with the filing systems actually used by US intelligence in the 1940s and 1950s.

But this consistency is precisely what a skilled forger would produce. Richard Doty (a former special agent with the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations) himself acknowledged that the disinformation systematically mixed authentic elements with fabricated content. AFOSI agents operating out of Kirkland had access to the actual filing systems. And Chaski’s analysis shows that documents bearing this type of marking were most likely not drafted by their supposed authors, regardless of the number stamped in their bottom right-hand corner.

The number 834021 proves that someone was familiar with the correct filing system. It does not prove that that person was the legitimate author of the content.

Jonathan Caplan reaches the same conclusion from a legal perspective: genuine disclosure will not happen, neither under the Trump administration nor under any other. The agencies may eventually agree to classify an object as ‘anomalous’, but they will never acknowledge the existence of retrieval programmes, non-human material or biological morphologies. Everything else, in his view, is a charade. And in the meantime, the ufo community is wearing itself out debating anonymous documents sent by post forty years earlier.

Forty years after Shandera, we are still feeding Majestic’s mills, fists clenched, whilst the secrets of disclosure and their guardians continue to sleep soundly.

Update, July 2026

Five months after the publication of Argument 834021, Wood Enterprises (the publishing arm of Robert and Ryan Wood, the main promoters of the MJ-12 documents since the 1990s) released a new newsletter containing some 1,100 pages drawn from the US National Archives, explicitly presented as a ‘roadmap for investigation’ intended for Congress and NARA.

Two observations are worth noting.

Firstly, a significant rhetorical shift. The Woods’ statement, “This release is not presented as final proof. It is presented as a roadmap for investigation”, marks a retreat from their previous claims. In the space of a few months, the pro-authenticity narrative has shifted from “the cover-up has been broken ’ (Whitley Strieber, March 2026) to ‘here are some avenues to explore’ (Wood, July 2026). No one is admitting to this backtracking, but it is evident.

Secondly, a surprising fact: the Wood newsletter makes no mention whatsoever of the 834021 argument. The main long-standing defenders of the MJ-12 documents have therefore not incorporated this ‘discovery’ into their own public arguments. Either they consider it too flimsy to be brought before Congress, or they themselves have reservations about its actual significance. Neither interpretation strengthens the thesis put forward by MJ12 Logic.

In this interview with Australian journalist Ross Coulthart on News Nation/Reality Check, Mike Gold discusses the limitations of the Cassini mission, the burden of scientific stigma, and the strategic issues surrounding space exploration.

A NASA mission that is often misunderstood

Mike Gold is an American lawyer with a passion for space, and a NASA mission that is often misunderstood. As a space law specialist, he has established himself as a key figure in bridging the gap between public institutions such as NASA and private companies in the sector.

Throughout his career, he has helped shape the rules governing the growth of commercial space exploration and international collaborations. Today, he is recognised as an influential figure in legal and strategic matters relating to the development of the space industry.

At Bigelow Aerospace, he has overseen the legal and strategic aspects of projects such as the BEAM inflatable module tested aboard the International Space Station, and the Genesis I and Genesis II demonstrators.

Notably, Bigelow Aerospace, founded by Robert Bigelow, established its subsidiary BAASS (Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies) in 2008 in response to a tender from the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency). This involved a study of UAPs and a request for work on advanced space technologies, as well as the production of various scientific analyses.

The UAP component attracted media attention due to its link with the AAWSAP (Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Programme). The DIA administered this programme until it was officially discontinued in 2012.

Mike Gold played a central role in developing the Artemis Accords at NASA. These set out the principles of international cooperation for lunar exploration and the strategy for commercialising low Earth orbit.

In the interview, the American lawyer explains that the independent study group on UAPs was not responsible for investigating the agency’s historical archives. Its primary role was to determine whether these phenomena warranted a dedicated scientific programme, and to identify the technical resources that NASA could mobilise. In his view, this distinction was largely misunderstood by the public, who were hoping for a thorough reanalysis of the images and videos accumulated over several decades.

Nevertheless, Gold considers the creation of this team to be a significant step forward. For the first time, NASA officially recognised that UFOs could be a legitimate subject for scientific study. In his view, this recognition marks a first step towards normalising the subject within space research.

The former official believes that the NASA report was not intended to provide definitive answers, but rather to pave the way for future research. However, he regrets that no second phase of the study was launched immediately following the report’s publication.

The real obstacle: scientific stigma

During the interview, the legal expert repeatedly emphasised the weight of the stigma that still surrounds UAPs. He claims that many researchers fear that studying these phenomena could harm their academic careers, publications or funding.

He cites the case of physicist Maaneli ‘Max’ Derakhshani in particular, who lost his post after publicly defending the need to study anomalies observed in space archives. Gold states that several members of the NASA working group had received threats from colleagues.

He also revisits the historical influence of the 1952 Robertson Committee, whose recommendations are said to have played a lasting role in fostering a climate of ridicule surrounding UFOs in scientific and media circles.

For Gold, this culture of discrediting is now the main obstacle to research. He believes that asking a scientific question should never be equated with taking an ideological stance.

Reviewing NASA’s archives

The former NASA official is now involved with the Disclosure Foundation, an independent organisation that aims to resume analysing the US space agency’s public archives. The plan is to systematically search for anomalies in photographs from the Apollo missions, the International Space Station, and other space programmes.

Gold explains that this approach will build on the work of astronomer Beatriz Villarroel in particular. He also refers to the famous Apollo 17 photographs showing a triangular object, as well as other images frequently cited by researchers working on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

According to Gold, the objective is not to prove an extraterrestrial origin, but rather to identify anomalies that warrant further scientific investigation.

Despite not having access to classified documents, Gold believes that the public archives already contain sufficient data to advance the research. Future commercial lunar missions could also provide an opportunity to test certain hypotheses directly in the field.

Transparency, declassification and international cooperation

The interview also touches on recent declassification campaigns in the United States. Mike Gold believes that, although this process is progressing slowly, it marks a significant shift in the way institutions now deal with the subject.

He notes that several partner countries in the Artemis agreements, including France through the CNES, already have organisations studying unidentified aerospace phenomena. However, he regrets that NASA still does not have a permanent office dedicated to this issue, and he calls for greater international cooperation to pool observations, given that the phenomenon extends well beyond US borders.

In his view, better data sharing would improve our understanding of these phenomena while also strengthening public confidence in scientific institutions.

UAPs: a strategic challenge in the race to the Moon

In the final minutes of the interview, Michael Gold broadens the discussion to include geopolitical issues. Against a backdrop marked by the rapid development of military drones and competition between the United States and China, he believes that UAPs are not merely a scientific matter, but also a matter of national security.

In his view, any anomaly observed near strategic facilities should be thoroughly investigated, regardless of its origin. He also believes that if truly groundbreaking technologies were to emerge, the states capable of understanding them would gain a decisive advantage.

This line of thinking ties in with his vision of the new space race to the Moon. For Gold, lunar infrastructure will be a key factor in the 21st-century geopolitical landscape.

The former official concludes by stating that scientific transparency, international cooperation, and space exploration are three aspects of the same challenge. He believes that those countries which achieve sustainable mastery of the lunar environment will enjoy a significant strategic advantage in the decades to come.

The chosen theme, ‘Humanity at the Edge of Discovery’, formed the basis for a day of panel discussions on UAP, which brought together elected representatives, former intelligence officials, scientists, and witnesses.

During the forum, the Disclosure Foundation presented awards to four parliamentarians in recognition of their efforts to promote transparency regarding UAPs: Anna Paulina Luna, Eric Burlison, Tim Burchett and André Carson. NewsNation, was one of the few mainstream media to report on this event.

André Carson: reflecting on the first hearings

Representative André Carson (Democrat, Indiana), known for chairing the first modern-era public hearing on the subject in the US Congress, emphasised how far the issue had come in three years – from being a marginalised and ridiculed topic to one addressed in a bipartisan and bicameral manner. As a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), he immediately tempered this enthusiasm with a national security warning: any technological advance, real or supposed, is of interest to adversaries such as China, which he believes constitutes a plausible argument for withholding information. When asked about his Muslim faith, he stated that the subject did not trouble him and that he saw in it an echo of certain religious traditions.

Anna Paulina Luna: Amnesty as a Lever

Representative Anna Paulina Luna (Republican, Florida), who chairs the House task force on the declassification of federal secrets, offered the most concrete information during the segment. She stated that she is collaborating with the White House, specifically Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, on a scheme offering immunity to individuals with information about recovered materials or ‘biologics’. She describes this amnesty as potentially ‘full-fledged’, provided the credibility of those concerned is verified first. She states:

‘Well, that’s why we have to offer amnesty and bring those people in. If someone can point to a location programme, then they will look. I’m hearing that they’re 100 per cent sure, and on the back end, they’ve tried to follow up on leads, but haven’t found anything yet.”

Luna also mentioned the discovery of MKULTRA files at the CIA alongside archives linked to the Kennedy case, which are currently being declassified. She announced that a report would be published in November.

Mike Rounds: A Call for Scepticism and Science

Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican representing South Dakota in the United States Congress, emphasised the credibility of Navy pilots who had reported unidentified objects and suggested that the administration’s caution was primarily driven by a desire to safeguard sensitive capabilities rather than to conceal information. He refocused the discussion on striking a balance between transparency and maintaining a technological edge over China and Russia, while avoiding taking a definitive stance on the nature of the observed objects.

The Witness and the Cost of Testifying

US Air Force veteran and former military police officer Jeffrey Nuccetelli recounted incidents that took place at Vandenberg between 2003 and 2005 during missile defence launches.

His case, known as ‘Vandenberg Red Square’, was cited by Luna during the first public hearing alongside those of David Grusch and Ryan Graves. He testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee in September 2025, as documented by DefenseScoop. In an interview with Reality Check, he described an incident in which he observed a luminous object with two other people. He also spoke about the personal consequences he had faced for speaking out, including threats against his family, a break-in at his home, and messages left prior to his hearing. He used this to make a plea for amnesty and support for witnesses.

Representative Eric Burlison was also present, and emphasised the historical significance of the Kennedy Room and praised the efforts made so far, with a special mention for Avi Loeb, whilst referring to the new popular terms “plasma orbs” and “plasmoids”.

The central claims in the dossier — the wreckage recovery programme, biologics, and non-human intelligence — are supported only by witness statements and the 2023 AARO UAP report. Therefore, as well as continuing to call for the declassification of documents, members of Congress are focusing their efforts on protecting whistleblowers. Whether this amnesty will materialise, whether evidence can be securely provided by witnesses and whether these initiatives will find support in other countries remains to be seen.

A civil society initiative along these lines is worth mentioning. On 4 July 2026, two whistleblowers — Dylan Borland, a US Air Force veteran who gave evidence under oath to the House Oversight Committee in September 2025, and Matthew Brown, a former national security official behind the Immaculate Constellation dossier — launched Vanguard Enterprise, a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting whistleblowers from the national security apparatus, public education, and lawful disclosure.

Since the establishment of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), hundreds of documents and videos have been released, even though the ‘smoking gun’ that many UFO conspiracy theorists were expecting was nowhere to be found. Despite critics claiming that the new documents were just another attempt by the US administration to bury the topic in useless archives, and that the videos showed nothing but a blur of pixels, the Department of War has steadily continued its declassification work. The clearest footage found in the 4th release is shown below.

DOW-UAP-PR030, Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2023

The United States Central Command submitted a report of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) consisting of 10 seconds of video footage from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in 2023.

Video Description:

• 00:01-00:05: No content.

• 00:06-00:07: Two areas of contrast transit the sensor field-of-view. The first enters the field-of-view from the bottom right and exits from the top edge of the frame. The second, relatively smaller area of contrast enters from the top and exits the bottom of the frame.

• 00:08-00:10: No content.

One of the highest-resolution images ever released appears to show two objects. One is cross-shaped with a blinking red light and could be a drone at altitude crossing the platform’s downward-facing field of view.

Immediately after the first object exits the FOV, another object zooms from the top of the picture.

DOW-UAP-PR109, Unresolved UAP Report, Eastern United States, 2015

The United States Navy Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) transferred this media to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022. The video contains 21 seconds of footage likely captured by an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in 2015.

Video Description: No formal data handling practices for UAP-related records existed at the time this media was reported to the UAPTF. This media was digitally altered before being reported to the UAPTF, and is presented as it was received by AARO.

• 00:01-00:08: No content.

• 00:09-00:11: An area of contrast becomes visible near the center of the screen, The area of contrast transits the sensor field-of-view, moving from right to left before exiting from upper left corner of the frame.

• 00:12-00:21: The footage repeats at a slower playback speed.

This video is one of the strangest in the collection; this elliptical shape is used by very few modern platforms, yet it has been spotted by numerous witnesses over the decades.

DOW-UAP-PR107, Unresolved UAP Report, Eastern United States, 2020

The United States Northern Command submitted a report of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) consisting of 28 seconds of video footage from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in 2020.

Video Description:

• 00:01-00:02: No content.

• 00:03-00:11: An area on contrast enters the sensor field-of-view from the top right of the frame. The sensor pans to track the area of contrast, which repeatedly leaves and re-enters the sensor field-of-view.

• 00:12-00:16: The sensor zooms out and in.

• 00:17-00:23: The sensor pans to track the area of contrast, which repeatedly leaves and re-enters the sensor field-of-view.

The camera is struggling to keep the object in the frame, while its shape is similar to #pr109.

Missing Data

Although these videos show the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to declassify UFO data, as indicated by the file category title on the Pentagon’s website, three key pieces of information are missing: flight data, operator testimonies and air traffic control records.

Without flight data, it is extremely difficult to determine the speed and direction of movement of these objects; yet such intrusions are generally characterised by the performance of the objects involved. The absence of operator testimonies means that contextual details are missing from the observation, and the lack of an air traffic control situation report means that we do not know whether other objects were in the vicinity.

Nevertheless, the significant improvement in the visual quality of the declassified videos suggests a concerted effort by the Pentagon to comply with the President’s instructions.

Titled ‘UAP Operational Presence, 1945–1975’, the study focuses on assessing the behaviour of UAPs and the resource constraints they faced.

Drawing on Sparks’ database of ‘unknown’ cases from Project Blue Book, supplementary archives from NICAP, and four previous SCU publications, the study’s authors — Ian M. Porritt, Larry J. Hancock, and Sean Grosvenor — analysed a total of 1,163 UAP reports.

Ian M. Porritt is a Massey University graduate. He specialises in analysing technical data for research and development purposes. He contributes his expertise to various organisations, including the SCU, and is collaborating on the Galileo project. Larry Hancock graduated from the University of New Mexico with degrees in history and cultural anthropology. He has conducted research and written books on the history of the Cold War and national security issues. He has spent his career in technical education, IT, communications and technology marketing. Sean Grosvenor is a forensic consultant and a former member of the Illinois State Police. He advises several organisations on investigations and intelligence assessment and has been involved in efforts to study advanced forms of non-human intelligence.

The authors aimed to identify behavioural patterns, operational rhythms, and potential resource constraints associated with the presence of non-human intelligences (NHI).

While these databases list cases that remain unexplained after conventional explanations have been ruled out, this does not necessarily mean that every report reflects the involvement of NHIs. The authors therefore focused on patterns that recurred across numerous cases, comparing them with concepts drawn from strategic analysis and human intelligence, such as the logic of reconnaissance, operational constraints, and deployment patterns.

For methodological clarity, the possibility of undisclosed human technology is not treated as a viable explanatory model. Between 1945 and 1975, no state possessed the propulsion physics, deployment reach, or operational consistency required to account for the observed signatures.

Strategic Focus on Nuclear Infrastructure

The data show that during the early years of the nuclear weapons programme and missile and aircraft testing, the small number of US military installations involved in atomic warfare recorded UAP activity that was four to eight times higher than that of all other military sites combined. While this was not the sole focus of UAP activity, this trend continued in subsequent years.

The study identifies several multi‑day activity surges coinciding with major U.S. atomic warfare developments, including 1949–1951 (atomic weapons facility expansion), 1952 (national wave), 1957 (ICBM deployment), and the October–November 1975 Northern Tier incidents.

A Small, Resource‑Constrained Reconnaissance Presence

During these periods of increased activity, the available data shows no clear evidence of sustained and simultaneous operations across multiple sites. Even when several incidents are reported on the same day, the reports are often separated by several hours and great distances.

If a larger concurrent multi-site operation had been underway, even if many went unobserved, the resulting pattern would differ markedly from the tightly sequenced, single-site progression that appears in the record. A concurrent operation, even under low observability, would be expected to produce at least some overlapping or partially simultaneous activity across facilities.

Across the 11,322 days in the 1945–1975 study period curated data set, only 27 days showed more than two U.S. military-related reports occurring on the same day, and only seven days exceeded three.

The 1975 Northern Tier events — spanning 27 October to 12 November and involving four strategic atomic warfare facilities — provide the clearest example: UAP activity progressed in a staggered sequence from one site to the next rather than appearing at multiple locations simultaneously.

The activities of the UAPs are characterised by a constant presence interspersed with short periods of planned intensification. This contradicts the hypothesis of a sustained, large-scale presence, suggesting instead that they are a small, mobile reconnaissance force operating with limited resources.

However, the authors point out that this apparent restraint should not be taken as an indication of their full potential capability or benevolent intentions. It may simply reflect their current limited resources.

Behavioral Adaptation Over Time

By the mid-1960s, UAP operations had shifted from highly visible manoeuvres in broad daylight in the late 1940s to predominantly night-time and low-visibility operations.

UAP operations transitioned from highly visible daylight maneuvers in the late 1940s to predominantly nocturnal, lower‑visibility profiles by the mid‑1960s.

This trend is very clear. Manoeuvres carried out in broad daylight accounted for over 60 per cent of reports between 1945 and 1949. However, this figure declined steadily, accounting for just 5 per cent of PAN activity by 1975.

Notably, UAP lights went dark whenever interceptors approached and reacted once the aircraft departed. This behavior implies the lighting was deliberate control and either designed to allow themselves to be ‘seen’ in a limited way, illumination was mission-critical (the task required it) or craft-dependent (the operation of the craft requires it), yet switchable to evade detection. […]

Whether the illumination served a mission function or was intended to signal presence, the behavior implies that UAP visibility is selective, not passive. The operators allowed themselves to be seen at a distance yet avoided close engagement, consistent with both a controlled presentation of visibility (or an unavoidable presentation of visibility) and a clear reluctance to be intercepted.

Selective visibility control appears to indicate both operational restraint and potential vulnerability. However, history of military engagements suggests that UAPs appear to be able to avoid harm even under attack. This suggests that some other concern is in play regarding the long-term shift to more nighttime operations.

Coordinated Intelligence Behavior

During peak activity periods, reports span multiple states and air defense sectors, suggesting a pattern of coordinated reconnaissance rather than isolated anomalies. In other cases, reports involve multiple objects or formation flight, indicating coordinated group activity, though still confined to one region at a time.

The absence of broad geographic saturation or daily simultaneous incursions argues against a largescale, sustained presence. Although limited concurrency cannot be ruled out, the lack of clear multi-site overlap, even during the busiest national waves, strongly reinforces the assessment that NHI operations were likely conducted at a modest scale, expressed through staggered, region-to-region movements rather than broad parallel coverage.

Consistent monthly report counts and observed staged development further support a continuous operational presence. Despite diversity in reported NHI descriptions, the stability of behavioral patterns across indicators suggests coordination by a single operant group rather than multiple independent actors.

Long‑Duration Operational Continuity

The authors of the study argue that the factors identified — small-scale deployment, likely resource constraints, a continuous presence spanning three decades and rapid withdrawal in the face of interference — would require a stable operational base.

Together, these strands of evidence indicate a near-continuous yet low-intensity deployment: a stealthy, cyclical rhythm of mobile assets from a local hub or covert base.

A specific behavioural pattern?

This study is limited to operations carried out on the mainland territory of the United States. The authors point out:

UAP activity during 1945–1975 was also reported globally, in Europe, South America, and elsewhere, and simultaneous activity in other regions could indicate a larger global deployment capacity than is visible in the U.S. subset. While not included as part of this study, independent analyses of the 1954 European UAP wave (e.g., Vallée 1969; Michel 1958; Clarke 2015; Ballester Olmos) consistently describe a sequential, region-by-region progression rather than broad concurrent activity.

Sightings intensified in one area for several days before diminishing and reappearing elsewhere, a structure consistent with staggered deployments rather than simultaneous multi-zone operations. However, no global assessment has been made to determine if global region-to-region reports are staggered or concurrent, this additional assessment will increase our understanding of the wider operational presence.

The authors therefore acknowledge that only a large-scale, global study covering several time periods spread over several years or decades would be able to reveal:

• Long-term trends in deployment intensity

• Shifts in geographic focus

• Whether NHI may favor permanent bases or fly-in/fly-out mission profiles

This approach would provide a strong framework for assessing the scope, pacing, and evolution of UAP activity. It also enables analysts to distinguish between localized reconnaissance, global monitoring, and strategic engagement patterns, critical for evaluating resource commitment and operational intent.

Such a study would require the creation of a curated and harmonized global UAP database, rich in metadata, standardized classifications, and precise timestamps. It would enable analysts to confirm the behavioral pattern observed in the United States or to reveal a different operational profile.

About the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU):

The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies is a nonprofit interdisciplinary research organization dedicated to the scientific investigation of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). SCU is composed of scientists, engineers, former military and intelligence professionals, and law enforcement experts.

On 12 June 2026, the Department of War published the third batch of PURSUE documents on its war.gov/UFO portal. The press focused mainly on the images: six videos of ‘orbs’ produced by the FBI in 2026 based on eyewitness accounts, including several artist’s impressions. Three days earlier, on 9 June, former intelligence officer David Grusch, alongside a bipartisan group of elected representatives and several prominent figures – including Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Tim Gallaudet, Leslie Kean and A.P. Luna – called on the steps of the Capitol for the declassification of files that were still being withheld.

In response to a question, Grusch also referred the audience to a specific document: an Australian assessment classified as secret in 1971, signed by the head of Canberra’s nuclear intelligence branch, which he claims documents “the US cover-up of the facts and the CIA’s involvement”. Available since 2023 at the National Archives of Australia, it also features in the body of documents that Washington is currently declassifying under Section 1842 of the NDAA. We shall return to this.

From this collection, one document in particular deserves closer attention than the others. Code-named Western U.S. Event, DOW-UAP-D077, it is signed by Jon T. Kosloski, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). It is probably the most methodical memorandum of the lot. Its value lies less in what it reveals than in the way it distinguishes between what is established, what is ruled out, and what is left open.

Six agents, a ‘mother orb’, red orbs

Dated 5 June 2026 and ranked first among the four cases listed on the portal, the memo summarises a report dating back two and a half years. In October 2023, over the course of two days, six federal judicial police officers, operating in pairs near a sensitive national security site in the American West, reported at dusk ‘orbs that launch other orbs’ (D077, p. 1). Each pair described, from a different angle, objects with the same characteristics.

The pattern is repetitive. A luminous orange ‘mother orb’ appears to produce smaller red orbs, one after the other, several times over the course of a few hours. The mother orb appears for one to two seconds, releases a cluster of two to four red orbs, then disappears. The red orbs follow trajectories that the witnesses consider abnormal: horizontal movements that appear coordinated, apparent changes in altitude. They remain visible for a few seconds, except for one, which remained stationary above a ridge ‘for several hours’. The whole phenomenon is described as ‘silent’.

One detail sets the tone. In a footnote, the AARO specifies that the descriptive vocabulary is that of the witnesses, reproduced verbatim ‘in order to preserve the integrity of the narrative accounts’. Indeed, ‘orbs’, ‘mother orb’ and ‘red orbs’ are consistently placed in quotation marks. The Bureau does not adopt these words as its own: it quotes them. Where the AARO writes ‘orbs’ in quotation marks, the public commentary, for its part, refers to plasma: at the Capitol on 9 June, Grusch spoke of a continuum ranging from ‘bipedal’ life to a ‘conscious life form based on plasma’. This typographical caution, a constant feature of the AARO’s work, is in itself indicative of how a serious agency handles a witness account.

The gap in the data

The AARO identifies the gap straight away. The officers did not collect any ‘video footage, photographic images or other technical data ’ (D077, p. 2) during the incident. Everything rests on the account. However, the Bureau points out that visual estimation of the distance, size, speed and direction of objects without reference points, at night, is constrained by intrinsic ‘biological and perceptual’ limitations.

This point is worth emphasising, as it contradicts the impression created by the release itself. The videos posted online are not footage of the event: they are reconstructions produced by the FBI in 2026 based on witness accounts from 2023. The file therefore contains no instrumental data. What we are watching is not the phenomenon itself, but a visual representation of its description.

Despite a thorough analysis, doubts remain.

Then comes the hard work. The AARO cross-referenced the accounts with commercial and military flight logs, radar data, spatial estimates and ADS-B data, before reviewing the hypotheses.

The exhaust plume from a military aircraft has been ruled out: the aircraft were flying too high, and the hypothesis does not fit with the silence, the hovering, or the apparent ‘launch’ of orbs. Drones are considered unlikely: a duration of several hours exceeds the endurance of standard multirotor drones. Foreign intelligence activity is deemed ‘highly unlikely’, as the kinematic profiles deviate too greatly from known adversarial systems. Natural causes – whether meteorological or astronomical – are ruled out due to the clear sky, the variety of viewing angles and the persistence over several hours, which neither a meteor nor a satellite reflection would produce.

This leaves two possibilities on which the Bureau has not reached a conclusion. The first is prosaic: infrared decoys. Flight logs confirm that military aircraft were operating in the area and deploying them during an exercise. The position of the phenomena, their apparent direction and the time of observation are highly consistent with radar and ADS-B data, to the extent that the AARO estimates that approximately 60 per cent of the activity ‘can reasonably be attributed to military aircraft’ (D077, p. 3).

The second line of inquiry is more uncomfortable, and a hasty account tends to overlook it: an American capability that had not been de-conflicted (i.e. not cross-checked against known friendly assets). The Bureau reviewed programmes run by the Pentagon and the intelligence community to verify whether the time, location and characteristics described corresponded to an American system. Its conclusion is mixed: certain characteristics match known military technologies, but the records do not allow for their presence at the scene to be established, and no single capability explains the whole phenomenon. ‘Plausible, but inconclusive’, it states.

One detail illustrates the hierarchy of evidence. The agents, whom the AARO deemed to have ‘professional knowledge of the visual characteristics of military flares’, stated that the phenomena did not display these characteristics. The Bureau nevertheless maintains the partial attribution, noting that the specific decoys carried on that day differ from standard illumination decoys. Faced with six expert witnesses, it is therefore the flight logs and radar that are decisive, not visual impressions.

Around 40 per cent remain unexplained. For this portion, radar and ADS-B show no known aircraft in the estimated line of sight from the ground. And one case defies all explanation: the red orb that remained stationary for several hours, ‘physically incompatible with the burn time and rate of descent of any known military flare’ (D077, p. 3). It is on the basis of this residual evidence alone that the AARO puts forward the hypothesis of ‘unrecognised technology’. But it does so without any real basis: a provisional hypothesis, by process of elimination, ‘not supported by technical data or material evidence’ (D077, p. 4). Put forward, and immediately withdrawn.

What tips the case towards further investigation rather than closure is a combination of factors: the consistency of the accounts when viewed from multiple angles, the agents’ familiarity with the operational environment, and the similarity to other sightings in the same region. The AARO states this bluntly, and that is the whole point of the report: it does not draw a conclusion; it documents an uncertainty that it refuses to resolve. A stationary red orb that no one can explain, and not a single step taken to investigate further.

Gemini: a major dossier, minor details

One might object that, within the same release, there is a body of material reputed to be more robust and serious: the debriefings of Mercury and Gemini astronauts, nearly 1,900 pages of technical transcripts (NASA-UAP-D015 to D022). Whilst one might have expected them to provide the smoking gun that has remained beyond the realm of folklore, reading these pages brings one back down to earth, and that is precisely what makes them interesting.

Truly anomalous elements are rare, and almost always resolved by the crews themselves. The words that send shivers down the spine of ufological literature turn out, at first glance, to be false friends: the “saucer” of Gemini 5 (D020, p. 178) is a table saucer to which Cooper compares the diameter of a column of flame; the “unidentified” of Gemini 4 (D018, p. 96) simply refers to a difficulty in closing a hatch. The only three truly consistent threads are, too, prosaic. The “fireflies” of Mercury (D015, p. 201)—those luminous particles that caused Glenn to rotate his capsule 180 degrees to examine them—turn out to be nothing more than paint or other particles detached from his own spacecraft. The large object spotted during re-entry by the Gemini 5 crew (D020, p. 191) is attributed by Conrad himself to their own jettisoned equipment, such as a retro pack or an adapter, burning up. And the zodiacal light that McDivitt and White photographed before dawn (D018, p. 121) is a well-known astronomical phenomenon. As for the most famous case – the cylindrical object with an arm that McDivitt is said to have observed on Gemini 4 – it is simply absent from the text of these debriefings. Taken at face value, the official astronaut dossier is not the repository of the unexplained that one might imagine: it is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a matter of engineering banality. And it is this observation, more than any anecdote, that deserves to be added to the record.

The fate of the famous “bogey” sheds light on the reverse mechanism – the one that creates the unexplained. The word does not appear in any of the eight technical debriefings; not once. The famous exchange, “I’ve spotted a bogey at 10 o’clock, at altitude”, attributed to Borman on Gemini 7, appears only in a compilation sent to Congress and the White House in 1998 (USG-UAP-D001, p. 36). However, on the same page, when questioned by Houston, Borman says he has ‘several confirmed sightings’, but immediately adds that he has ‘the booster in sight’: the jettisoned Titan II stage, accompanied by co-orbiting ice and debris, providing the standard explanation. The transcript thus contains elements that put it into perspective. This is a textbook example of a UFO ‘theory’ constructed from decontextualised fragments, and the thread linking the space programme to a decision made in 1953.

1971, 1953: the root of the suspicion, and the Robertson Panel

The origin of the instinctive mistrust now surrounding every orb has yet to be understood. It was Grusch who identified the documentary source, in response to a question. He referred the audience to ‘an Australian assessment dating from 1971, formerly classified as “secret” and now declassified’, held at the National Archives of Australia, recommending that they read pages 7 to 16; the document,

in his view, by the ‘head of the nuclear branch’ documenting ‘the concealment of facts by the United States and the involvement of the CIA’.

The document exists. It is a minute paper from the Australian Joint Intelligence Organisation (NAA: A13693, 3092/2/000), signed on 27 May 1971 by O.H. Turner, head of the nuclear branch. But it must be read for what it is. Turner merely signs a sober cover note, which forwards two attached documents ‘compiled from official reports and statements by the CIA, the US Air Force, congressional hearings and the Project Blue Book archives’. The sensational claims attributed to it by the disclosure movement actually appear in the summary of the attached report. It states that the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, “in the context of the Robertson Committee meeting held in mid-January 1953”, allegedly pressured the US Air Force to turn Project Blue Book into a public instrument of “debunking”; and that by erecting “a façade of ridicule”, the United States sought to cover up ‘the real American programme aimed at developing craft capable of mimicking the performance of UFOs’.

What is well-established and verifiable is that, in January 1953, the Robertson Panel recommended a public policy of ‘debunking’ the phenomenon, an episode that Sentinel News has already recounted in detail. The scepticism described by Turner in 1971, and invoked by Grusch in 2026, stems from this documented decision.

What the state sought to play down, the present day is playing up again

The third release came out on 12 June 2026. On the same day, Steven Spielberg’s film Disclosure Day was released in cinemas. The plot follows a whistleblower determined to reveal the existence of non-human life. The film’s tagline, picked up by the press, proclaims that the truth ‘belongs to 7 billion people’: almost exactly the same phrase heard three days earlier on the steps of the Capitol, where journalist Leslie Kean asserted that the knowledge of our non-solitude ‘belongs to all of humanity’.

There is something profoundly unsettling about this full circle. In 1953, a scientific panel recommended managing the public’s perception of the phenomenon to restore it to the realm of ordinary. Seventy-three years later, the filmmaker who has most enduringly shaped the collective imagination of extraterrestrials is releasing a disclosure film on the very day the government publishes genuine files, using a vocabulary that fiction and the disclosure movement now share almost word for word. What the state sought to play down, the times are now playing up again.

What remains is the stubborn fact, as recorded by the AARO: a red orb that hovered motionless for several hours above a ridge, which no known hypothesis can explain, and which no measurements can account for.