On the morning of 9 June 2026, under a hot sun, a new event followed the release of UFO-related material by President Trump’s initiative, “PURSUE”, outside of the official Pentagon group tasked with handling such materials: the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). During the event, whistleblower David Grusch repeated his claims that bodies of non-human origin had been recovered by US forces.

In my official duties, I was exposed to human and signals intelligence information concerning foreign adversary UAP crash retrieval, exploitation and study efforts, adversary views on US legacy program reverse engineering efforts and US- held audiovisual information related to crash retrieval matters such as the recovered vehicles and the associated biological material.

This is not the first time that Grusch has declared that biological elements were recovered by US operatives. During his congressional hearing, he stated under oath: “biologics came with some of the recoveries”.

During the press conference, he insisted :

One must always be concerned about adversarial disinformation when you’re getting foreign intelligence. But I was able to crossverify this information internally to back up the foreign government’s assertions.

He also stated that the cover-up in place for decades was fueled by misappropriation of funds and evasion of congressional oversight.

“During my investigation, I found slush funds to the tune of billions of dollars for these activities.”

Representatives Burlison and Luna called for President Trump to grant immunity to whistleblowers so that they could give their own testimony regarding the alleged crash retrieval programme revealed by Grusch’s investigation.

Journalist Leslie Kean joined this call, and added regarding worries for national security :

Having served for decades on the staff of congressional intelligence and defense committees, Kirk McConnell, who is standing here today in the back, was present in classified settings when highly credible sources briefed senators, including Marco Rubio, about recovered nonhuman bodies. Unlike legitimate national security concerns that require us to keep advanced technologies of non-human origin secret, that justification should not apply to biological evidence.

Knowledge of the existence of another life form studied and documented by qualified experts should not be considered a threat to national security. By what authority can any institution withhold confirmation of what may be the most consequential scientific discovery in human history? Knowledge that we are not alone does not belong to any government or military. It belongs to all of humanity. Today, I call upon the president to prioritize the declassification and public release of any evidence concerning recovered advanced nonhuman biological entities.

Representative Burlison also stated that he had been informed about the 1996 Varginha case through an FBI report, recently confirmed by a former Brazil defense minister. James Fox, who directed a documentary on the case, also spoke during the conference and declared :

The case occurred in Varginha, Brazil, in 1996 and involves dozens of firsthand reports of UAP and direct contact with living intelligent non-human beings who, according to multiple Brazilian witnesses, were flown out of Brazil to the United States in January of 1996. Recently, the former Brazilian Ministry of Defense, Aldo Rebello, confirmed the incident occurred and stated, “If the US disclosed information on this case, then we in Brazil could do the same.” Mr. President, I am respectfully requesting that you declassify and release all files related to this case and others like it. We, the people, have a right to know. Reality should not be classified.”

Following the press conference, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves stated that regarding the ability of other countries to monitor the alleged US crash retrieval programme and to conduct their own :

There is a lot of documentation from the Soviet Union and Russia, and interest shown in China on these topics as well. Ultimately, if this is a technology tree that we are withholding from our Defence base, and our adversary is willing to utilize that technology against us, then our defenses against these technologies will be inadequate.

Review by Kate Sellier

News Nation dedicated a special edition of its programme Reality Check to the first release event. The speakers were, in turn, Luis Elizondo (former head of the AATIP programme at the Pentagon), Billy Kryzak (imagery analyst), Sam Gerb (researcher under the pseudonym “UAP Gerb”) and Rob Jones.

The discussion centred on a single tension: although the principle of this ‘drop’ was unprecedented, its content was meagre – a point highlighted from the outset by Coulthart, who noted that the 46 videos requested from the Pentagon by Representative Anna Paulina Luna were not included.

Elizondo put things into perspective, reminding the audience that the Department of Defence itself refers to tens of millions of documents potentially involved, and emphasised the legal constraints preventing any disclosure—even by the President—of certain so-called ‘covert actions’. Kryzak examined the most controversial visual evidence published, distinguishing between what constitutes an optical artefact and what defies conventional explanation. Gerb refocused the debate on institutional architecture: as long as the Department of Energy classifies documents as ‘restricted data’ under the 1954 Atomic Energy Act and the AARO retains control over document screening, disclosure will, in his view, remain structurally limited.

The published documents, available at war.gov/UFO, represent the first phase of PURSUE (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters), ordered by presidential executive order in February. The contributions come solely from the FBI, the State Department, NASA and the Department of Defense. Of these 162 published files, 108 contain redactions justified on the grounds of witness protection and the protection of sensitive military sites.

Among the most discussed items are the PR-34 video (Greece, October 2023), in which an object makes several 90° turns at nearly 130 km/h, close to the ocean’s surface, and the images from Apollo 17, for which the government’s preliminary analysis concluded that the three visible points of light were ‘potentially the result of a physical object in the scene’.

The Pentagon has launched a formal investigation into this image. Billy Kryzak offers a more cautious interpretation of the PR-38 video, whose eight-pointed cross shape had circulated as the most spectacular image in the batch: in his view, the star-shaped points are a classic optical artefact caused by light passing through the sensor, and it is the heat trail left behind the object that reveals its size, likely a very hot object shaped like an egg, sphere or tic-tac, as in most of the other videos.

Although ‘transparency’ in both substance and form is invoked for the public, it is interesting to note that there is absolutely no contribution from the Department of Energy, despite being officially listed as a PURSUE partner, nor from the NRO, the NGA, the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, the DHS or the FAA. Nor does any material come from the major aerospace contractors (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, MITRE), or from the DOE’s national laboratories (Sandia, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge). This asymmetry is not an editorial choice: private contractors are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act under the same conditions as federal agencies, and the eminent domain clause regarding recovered technologies of unknown origin held by private entities, present in the original Schumer-Rounds Amendment, had been removed from the final NDAA 2024. It is precisely this clause that Burlison is attempting to restore in his UAP Disclosure Act of 2026.

Added to this is the IRAD (Independent Research and Development) funding mechanism, which allows defence contractors to allocate resources to internal research without providing line-by-line accountability to the contracting government, provided the project has a plausible link to defence. This is one of the main channels through which, according to several whistleblowers, reverse-engineering programmes may have been funded outside public scrutiny. The Burlison amendment explicitly targets this loophole by requiring full accounting of IRAD funds used on any aerospace anomaly.

However, this first batch should be assessed in light of what it foreshadows. The Pentagon has indicated that new files would be published “every few weeks”, as they are declassified. Interagency coordination formally leaves the door open to contributions from the DOE and intelligence agencies. The real test will come in the weeks ahead: will we see documents bearing the letterheads of the agencies cited by the whistleblowers, or of just one of the major aerospace contractors?

So far, no such evidence has surfaced, leaving the published disclosure limited to the portion of the file that the current legal framework actually allows access to. But the operation has only just begun…

22 May 2026: the second batch, and a partial answer to previous questions

Thirteen days after the initial upload, a second batch of around forty documents and videos was added to the war.gov/UFO portal. Ross Coulthart dedicated a special live edition of Reality Check to the event, featuring a new panel: retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet (former Acting Deputy Administrator of NOAA, now a board member of the SOL Foundation and Americans for Safe Aerospace), lawyer Hunt Willis (Chief Legal Officer of the US Disclosure Foundation), FLIR analyst Dave Falch, Billy Kryzak (returning for the second time) and Sarah Gamm (former analyst with the Department of Defense’s UAP Task Force). Coulthart immediately poses the same question as in the first segment: “Where’s the beef?” But the analysis that follows, more technical and political in nature, offers a number of nuances.

The answer to the question posed at the end of the first part is more positive than expected. This time, the DOE, the CIA and the ODNI are contributing, and Sandia National Laboratories is explicitly named in an incident report issued by the operator of the US nuclear warhead assembly plant (PANTEX, Texas), featuring images described as “enhanced by Sandia National Labs”. Three of the major structural omissions from Release 01 are therefore present. Still missing are: private aerospace contractors (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, MITRE), the NRO, the NGA, the NSA, the DHS and the FAA, as well as the other DOE national laboratories (Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge). The legal asymmetry highlighted earlier—the FOIA and the eminent domain clause—therefore remains fully in force.

The most discussed document on the programme is a two-page first-person account, published by the ODNI, signed by a US intelligence official described as a ‘senior US intelligence officer’. It describes a helicopter-borne mission in late 2025 to an unspecified training ground, which Coulthart speculates is ‘either China Lake or the Nevada test range’. The narrative moves on to a large cave discovered near a reported area of activity, a ‘super-hot’ object that rises from the ground and approaches within ten feet of the helicopter before accelerating out of sight, followed by a T-shaped formation of four to five ‘orange orbs’ at 700 feet, which light up and go out in sequence for ten to fifteen seconds. Later, when fighter jets are scrambled from the base, the same orbs reappear above them, follow their flight path at the same speed, and continue to appear intermittently until they land.

Infrared (black hot) image published by the FBI in Release 01 of 8 May 2026. Official caption: “unidentified object below helicopter over western U.S. in September 2025”. This image does not document the T-formation described in the ODNI account (the witness states that they did not take any photographs), but constitutes the only official visual record to date of a comparable incident in the same region and during the same period. Source: war.gov/UFO.

Gallaudet highlights the legal weight of the document:

Sworn testimony in a court of law is used to convict and acquit. So why wouldn’t sworn testimony and statements like this be substantial?

The most incisive observation in the programme also comes from the retired rear admiral:

If we had known – and we do know – what foreign drones and drone swarms look like, as well as our own technology, we would never have released that. We don’t release our own advanced technology. We keep that classified. And we also keep classified what we know about our adversaries. So this is truly unknown and anomalous.

The argument shifts the debate: if these images are published, it is precisely because the agencies concerned are unable to identify them. Gallaudet writes, in a note sent to Coulthart before the programme:

This data leaves little doubt that parts of the US government know that some UAPs are non-anthropogenic vehicles.

The technical panel has a few cautious surprises in store. Regarding video PR-83, Kryzak, Fulch and Gamm agree that it is a Mylar balloon, and video PR-71 is unanimously identified as the balloon shot down over Lake Huron in February 2023. Even more significantly, Kryzak analyses frame by frame a video from Syria that was circulating as an example of ‘instantaneous acceleration’, and shows that the apparent phenomenon likely stems from the sensor losing lock, followed by a shift in the camera angle: ‘It may not be instantaneous acceleration. The system lost lock and it just left the frame.” Coulthart notes that Eric Burlison had suggested, prior to publication, that certain items in this batch would be “easily dismissible in a prosaic way”, raising the suspicion that the administration is deliberately releasing items that can be easily explained by conventional means. Conversely, video PR-67, in which white orbs move around a submarine with what appear to be underwater incursions, is judged by Kryzak to be one of the most convincing: “There is one object that flies down at an extreme rate of speed and dives into the water. ”

Stills extracted from videos PR-71, PR-83 and PR-67 published in Release 02. On the top and in the middle, two cases that the Reality Check technical panel identifies as conventional (shot-down balloon, Mylar balloon). On the third, “multi spherical uap uso near sub in and out of water", judged by Billy Kryzak to be the most convincing of the lot. One of the objects “dives into the water at high speed”. Source: war.gov/UFO.

Hunt Willis refocuses the debate on the ground on legal classification. He emphasises that the definition sections of the UAP Disclosure Act are key to the legislation, because they effectively rule out retroactive attributions of the ‘that’s just a secret platform we’re testing’ variety by establishing the concepts of technologies of unknown origin and non-human intelligence as legally enforceable categories. Willis describes the current situation as a “constitutional crisis on two fronts”: between Congress (Article I) and the executive (Article II) on the one hand, and between the federal government and its citizens on the other.

Alongside these contemporary documents, the second instalment also contains a massive historical section that the mainstream media has so far only touched upon: a 116-page dossier of Sandia Base archives containing the primary documentation of the investigation into the Green Fireballs (1948–1950) in New Mexico, including reports by Dr Lincoln LaPaz, the minutes of two conferences held at Los Alamos attended by representatives of the AEC, the FBI, the Fourth Army and the USAF Scientific Advisory Board, and internal correspondence mentioning Edward Teller and Theodore von Kármán. It should be noted that Coulthart briefly touched upon these. This body of material alone merits dedicated analysis, which we will provide shortly, because it fundamentally alters the public chronology of American interest in the matter.

For now, let us focus on what the second tranche establishes. The process of disclosure continues, its institutional scope is widening, and it is beginning to reach agencies that whistleblowers have been pointing to for years. Above all, it finally meets the most pressing demand from the public and the UAP caucus: visual material. 51 videos out of 64 files, compared to 28 out of 162 in the first batch. None of them constitutes the smoking gun that would impose a new reality, but it is precisely this missing piece that keeps the pressure on the subsequent batches.

Example: PR051

Case PR051, frame by frame, showing a sudden acceleration with no change in the background, ruling out a parallax effect, and occurring several frames after the lock-on to an unusually shaped object was lost; the sensor identified the object as being nearly 5 meters long (16ft).

According to infrared and thermal imaging expert Dave Falch, this appears to be an anomalous object.

In an intriguing Facebook post, Arnaud Saint-Martin, MP (LFI), announced that he will organise the conference on 29 June 2026 in the largest hall of the National Assembly, which seats 250 people, with the support of the Space Studies National Center (CNES) GEIPAN. He will be joined by Pierre Henriet, MP (HOR) and vice president of the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices (OPECST).

The OPECST, “is a joint advisory body to the National Assembly and the Senate. Comprising 18 members of the National Assembly and 18 senators, its remit, as set out in the law, is “to inform Parliament of the implications of scientific and technological choices, with a view, in particular, to informing its decisions”. It thus provides Parliament with the expertise needed to inform long-term policy decisions.”

The Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Study and Information Group (GEIPAN) was created in 1977, and tasked with the “collection, analysis, investigation, publication and archiving of reports of UAP sightings”, under the oversight of “the Ministries of the Economy and Finance, Higher Education and Research, and the Armed Forces,” but “contrary to popular belief, GEIPAN is not a research group focusing on UFOs, extraterrestrial life or other paranormal phenomena.”

The purpose of GEIPAN is to provide scientists with reliable data extracted from thousands of UFO sightings. Following investigation, the sightings are classified according to their level of abnormality and reliability.

M.P. Saint-Martin concludes his announcement with the enticing words, ‘Registration opens soon (there will only be 250 places)’. Sentinel will cover the event as it develops.

Here is the post in full :

‘The Eye of Sauron, flying saucers, orange orbs… Why is the Pentagon releasing classified documents on #UFOs, and what do they say?’ We will take a rational look at the issue during the symposium ‘Research into unidentified aerospace phenomena beyond fantasy’, which I will be organising at the National Assembly on 29 June with my colleague Pierre Henriet, Vice-President of OPECST, in collaboration with GEIPAN (CNES). To my knowledge, this is the first symposium of its kind in the history of Parliament, featuring authoritative experts and specialists. Registration opens soon (there will only be 250 places).

The new webpage, which is hosted under the name “war.gov/UFO”, represents a notable return to a term that had been considered for replacement by UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) in recent years. It will serve as a portal to access newly released documents and videos, and bears the official title of “Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE)”. As stated on the main page:

the Department of War (DOW), with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), is overseeing government wide efforts to expeditiously find, review, identify, declassify and publicly release unresolved UAP-related records and historical documents in the federal government’s possession.

It is interesting to consider how this differs from the current initiative by the National Archives. They have already established a specific page under law to address the disclosure of documents related to UFOs.

This is an unprecedented, historic undertaking that requires coordination between dozens of agencies and the review of tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper, spanning many decades.

The Department of War’s involvement in the release of documents from other agencies, notably the FBI, raises questions about the selection process for what was deemed not to be disclosed to the public.

Given the scope of this task, the Department of War will be releasing new materials on a rolling basis as they are discovered and declassified, with tranches posted every few weeks.

The materials archived here are unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena.

This can occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of sufficient data, and the Department of War welcomes the application of private-sector analysis, information and expertise.

One of the most significant issues with the current official initiative, the All-Domain Resolution Office, was its lack of transparency regarding unresolved cases. The fact that all records show only unresolved cases, even after inquiry, is a major step towards transparency.

DOW will continue to conduct separate reporting on resolved UAP cases, as mandated by statute. Under this Administration, we will pursue the truth and share our findings with the American people.

Several members of Congress have called for the defunding and dissolution of the Department of War’s official investigative body in UFOs, the AARO. In light of this, the Department of War’s response could be interpreted as a counteraction to these efforts.

STATEMENT: "The Department of War is in lockstep with President Trump to bring unprecedented transparency regarding our government’s understanding of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves. This release of declassified documents demonstrates the Trump Administration’s earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency."

-United States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

While the website launch was not without its challenges, with an initial link being broken and the website experiencing high traffic, there is a positive outlook to be had. This could be a significant step towards greater transparency, moving beyond the previous cycle of blurred images and redacted accounts. Pilots and military personnel have publicly confirmed the existence of clear, high-definition pictures captured during recent exercises, which are currently being held by the U.S. The Editorial Board of Sentinel News will provide ongoing coverage of significant developments and insights related to President Trump’s initiative.

Matt Laslo, from ‘Ask a Pol’, a Sentinel News partner in Washington, is the journalist who is not afraid to ask questions about UFOs on Capitol Hill. He has been asking law-makers what they think about President Trump’s announcement of the declassification of UAP files.

On April the 8^th, Laslo asked Senator Kirsten Gillibrand , long-standing member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), what she thought about President Donald Trump’s call for the federal government to make UFO files available to the public. She replied it was great. When asked if the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) would be involved, she said she didn’t know but tweeted the president to ask.

Her aide interjected that ‘it’s redundant,because we already passed it in the NDAA and that stuff has to be made public’.

The ‘NDAA’ he referred to is also called the “Schumer Amendment“, after its co-author, Senate majority Leader (at the time) Chuck (Charles) Schumer. The other author of the bill is Senator Mike Rounds. The bill reflected congressional concern that information about UAPs and Non-Human-Intelligences (NHI) had been withheld from the American public. It aimed at immediate disclosure of US government records regarding UAP technologies and NHI (which were mentioned 24 times in the bill). All records, unless they fell under very particular restrictions, were to be provided to the National Archives, which would create an independent review board.

The bill also provided ‘imminent domain’ which meant that in the name of transparency, all recovered UAPs and NHI ‘biologics’ (bodies or part of bodies) currently in the possession of private contractors would become National property. It is the issue that faced the most push-back and eventually led the bill being rejected and its very watered-down version to be adopted instead. If passed, the bill would have put AARO in charge of overseeing the transfer of data.

On the programme “News Nation ‘ Q&A’ on 26 April 2026, Ross Coulthart strongly contested Senator Gillibrand’s aide’s claim and reminded the audience that the original UAP disclosure bill had been ‘watered down’ in Congress and that what remained of it did not meet the requirements set out by the President on Truth Social, namely that there would be disclosure of UAPs. The new, watered-down version of the 2023 UAP Disclosure Act forms part of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) for the 2024 financial year. It mandates the public disclosure of federal documents concerning “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAPs) and “non-human intelligence” (NHI). It mandates the creation of a centralised public collection at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), with a presumption of disclosure, aimed at bringing to light decades of government knowledge whilst addressing potential threats to national security. The amendment no longer obliges private companies or special access programs to release information or recovered materials. As of April 2026, it is understood that whilst some agencies have released some documents, not all have, and it is unknown what is still waiting to be handed over to the National Archives.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is amongst the most prominent contributors in congress to the disclosure and transparency push about UFOs, as long as it is under the authority of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). She was instrumental in its creation, is committed to making it a more efficient organisation and to keep the conversation in congress in order to reduce stigma in reporting and ensure UAP records are properly disclosed and made available to the public.

Following President Donald Trump’s announcement that the UAP files would be declassified, and the subsequent creation by the U.S. government of the ‘alien.gov’ and ‘aliens.gov’ domain names, very few congresspeople have dared to speak out in public. So, when…

On April 9^th, Matt Laslo asked representative Andy Ogles :

‘Is the White House trolling us by registering Aliens.gov, or is it a genuine signal that UFO disclosure is coming?...

It was a surprise to hear him reply:

“There’s been so much chatter, and there’s so many people coming forward that the administration, President Trump, just wants to lay a baseline and he wants to be honest with it,” Rep. Andy Ogles exclusively tells Ask a Pol UAP. “He likes to break the mold, right? And so being the guy that revealed the truth — whatever the truth is — that’d be historic, right? So, I mean, that’s exactly who President Trump is. There’s some pretty compelling stuff out there. Now, how much of it they release, we’ll see’. He didn’t say what the ‘stuff out there’ is…

There’s someone in congress who’s always happy to talk about UAP’s, though…

On April 10^th, Representative and UAP Caucus chair Tim Burchett didn’t wait to be asked a question and launched into a statement about ex-representative Matt Gaetz’ explosive revelations ‘being crazy’. He was referring to the declaration by Gaetz that he was briefed by a U.S. army whistle-blower about a secret program of alien-human hybridisation allegedly using captured extra-terrestrials and abducted humans from migrant or war-zone communities. The whistle-blower allegedly revealed that there were between six and twelve such facilities in the U.S. Gaetz admitted that he did not verify the information but was later told by White House representatives that the disclosure was ‘anti-christian’. Burchett insisted that Gaetz did not say it was happening for sure, but merely that he was told it did.

The US society is very steeped in Judeo-Christianism, and the idea of hybridisation between humans and extra-terrestrials is enduring in the American mythos. In the Old Testament, the ‘Watchers’, gigantic and powerful beings said to be ‘the sons of God’ interbred with humans, creating the ‘nephilim’.

Matt Laslo moved on with his question:

‘The congressional UAP Caucus has been really outspoken lately on classified info. Is that because you all are banking on disclosure coming from President Donald Trump?’

The UAP Caucus is a focused group within the U.S. Congress dedicated to the study, disclosure and policy development surrounding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

Burchett replied that they are all frustrated and when asked if he thought that disclosure is coming, he expressed doubts: He added that the only chance of success was if someone managed to convince the president to release the information before the other side convinced him of the contrary, and if ‘he pulls a classic Trump and does what he wants to do, which in that case…I would love that’

He added : “I told him, look, it’s so many levels of this thing — you got to peel back that onion. I said we need to get to the bottom of it. He was very receptive.”

Laslo then asked if the White House knew where to look, Burchett replied :

‘I told my liaison at the White House, he was asking me, ‘what do we — what do y’all want to do?’ And I said, ‘well, we need to go meet with the President’ and put him with some people that can tell him where to look and what to ask for.’’

Laslo suggested that UFO files might be held by military contractors, and could be outside the reach of the government. Burchett acquiesced : ‘’That’s why they’ve done it. It’s un-FOIA-able — that’s why I think it’s going to be almost next to impossible unless Trump grants them some sort of amnesty to come forward’‘.

‘FOIA’ stands for ‘Freedom of Information Act’. It is a 1967 US federal law allowing any person to request access to federal agency records, ensuring government transparency. There are exceptions such as national security or personal privacy.

Laslo mentioned that other UAP Caucus members want to replace AARO, while Burchett just wants to blow it up, and Burchett replied : ‘’Yes. I just think it needs to go. And we’ve gotten some blowback. Somebody called the office saying maybe we could restructure it or something. I’m just tired of restructuring the government. We just end up with the same dad-gum thing every time. I just want to do away with it. I just think it’s time’‘

As reported by Sentinel News, Representative Anna Paulina Luna has now called for the defunding of AARO.

In an interview with News Nation on April 17th in which his demeanour was more grave and somber than usual, Burchett confided that he has seen some incredible things and that ‘Americans are ready and they should see this stuff’. He advocates for the public to be able to find out what pilots report to have seen. He mentions that critics will say it is AI, but ‘why would pilots take the risk of losing their credibility and having psychological evaluations for something they are faking? But now we’ve got officers in the Navy seeing these very large objects on sonar travelling at a very high rate of speed. Something that’s exponentially faster than anything we can accomplish. You got to realize that you have an object out there in the ocean that hovers, above the ocean in the air that hovers for could be hours on end. We have nothing with that capability. You’d run out of fuel and then when they take off they just go straight up and the power to do that is something like the energy it takes to fuel Los Angeles. I mean it is that incredible and I just don’t see any reason why our government should be hiding it and I don’t like going into a meeting and an unelected bureaucrat tells us that the president is on a need to know basis. To me, that should be very telling to America that there’s a lot more going on with this behind the scenes than we’re aware’‘.

He goes on to say that some of the information seemed to be reluctantly given in the SCIF (‘sensitive compartmented information facility’), a room with no risk of bugs where top secret information can be exchanged), and that there is a certain amount of arrogance because some people do not want the truth to get out. He thinks Americans should know what the money is spent on. He added that ‘if it was the Russians, they wouldn’t be bogged down in Ukraine. If it was the Chinese, they would own us, more so than now. And what about the Americans? Why in the world would we risk a half a billion dollar high-tech aircraft or a fleet of aircraft or a battleship or something to be around these things and a pilot losing their life when we just saw rightfully so the President spent millions of dollars to rescue a pilot?’.

He goes on to explain that it is difficult to get hold of the material because some of it is not reachable with a FOIA. He also explains that compartementalisation means that information cannot cross channels and therefore cannot be seen by anyone else than those with the right clearance. And when these people die, the knowledge goes. He also deplores that ‘bureaucrats take congresspeople for idiots in SCIF meetings, showing them cartoons to be thought of as UAPs’.

When asked what he thinks what would happen if the president decided to release images or videos that have been classified or say ‘there are technologies we believe very well may be NHI, non-human-intelligence’, he replied : ‘every time we ask for something specific, the military or the war pimps at the Pentagon, the ‘intelligencia’, as I call them, hide behind national security.

If you remember, I had a bill a few years back. It was two pages long to release it. Release everything. And then the Democrat Schumer in the Senate, everybody thought, “Oh, Schumer’s on board with us.” And he wanted to release his 60 pages bill, and it created some structure similar to the Kennedy files. Kennedy was shot over 60 years ago and they still won’t release everything on that. And you know that’s what they wanted to create and everybody was cheering. Oh, Schumer’s on our side. No, he’s not. If he was on our side, he would have pushed to do this years ago.The push is coming from people that haven’t been here very long. and some of our leadership now after they’ve seen some things they want to know.

It’s going to take the president of the United States to step up and say:’This has gone on long enough. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

That would help Representative Anna Paulina Luna, chairwoman of the task force on the declassification of federal secrets a lot. On March 31st, she sent a letter to secretary of war Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon asking for the release of 46 videos of UAPs. They include some spherical cigar-shaped and “Tic Tac”-like objects recorded by U.S. military platforms over war zones, oceans and restricted airspace. The incidents are said to include activity near Iran, Syria, U.S. bases and airports, and a 2023 incident over Lake Huron. As reported by Sentinel News, the deadline imposed was April 14th and was missed by the Pentagon. Luna wrote on social media : “No one from the Pentagon had responded until we reached out, and it appears that someone did not pass the letter to the appropriate authorities. How convenient.”

Yet the Pentagon said in a statement to Newsweek: “The Department of War’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is working in close coordination with the White House and across federal agencies to consolidate existing UAP records collections and facilitate the expeditious release of never-before-seen UAP information’.

Luna said she intends to work directly with War Secretary Pete Hegseth to secure the footage and described him as a close working partner aligned with President Donald Trump’s directive on UAP disclosure. She said she is confident cooperation between her office and Pentagon leadership can produce the requested materials. However, she made it clear that if resistance continues, she is prepared to work with House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer to exercise the committee’s subpoena authority.

On April 21st, Representative Eric Burlison lent support to Luna and his colleagues by giving an interview on News Nation. He describes some of the UFO and how they are capable of immediate acceleration that defies propulsion physics as we understand them. He added ‘we want the American people to see these videos. The American people deserve to know’.

On April 22nd, Burlison indicated how difficult the task is and said ‘I’m totally dubious. I don’t trust this town at all but it still doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try’.

On the same day, Matt Laslo met Tim Burchett who had just left a meeting. Although he was reluctant to give information as it was in a SCIF, he did let a little slip....

‘I’ve been in a couple meetings here. In fact I was in one today. Last week was pretty intense and I’m hoping they’ ll get some more to some more members...’‘

Laslo mentioned that two years ago and last year again, the UAP caucus was not allowed a SCIF room. He asked if things had changed, to which Burchett replied ‘a little bit, yeah, but...’

Laslo asked if ‘today was about AARO‘. Burchett replied ‘there was some of those guys in there’

Laslo pressed on again, asking if they (AARO) had changed their tune at all. Burchett replied :

‘A little. They’re more receptive, but I just don’t - I think they’re limited on - they send the people in there that are limited on what they know. And that’s why they do it. That way they don’t have to lie to us’.

Asked if it felt on purpose, he replied: ‘Oh absolutely, 100%. 100%’.

Laslo asked him if it felt like a new day in Washington, with Trump. Burchett replied:

‘Oh yeah, but you know, Trump doesn’t know the questions to ask, and I think the intelligence people around him are going to try to buffalo him and lead him in a different direction’.

Laslo: ‘yeah? And especially the underlings who you guys are dealing with?’.

Burchett : Absolutely. One hundred per cent.

Burchett’s wish that more evidence should be given to more members of congress was granted, because on April 30th, Matt Laslo asked Rep. Steve Scalise, Majority Leader at the House of Representatives, who is not a member of the UAP Caucus and who has in the past criticised the initiative, if the recent classified meeting was eye-opening, to which Scalise replied :

‘We had a classified briefing that some of us went to. Obviously, you can’t talk about what was discussed at the briefing’.

When Laslo pressed him to say if it was eye-opening, he answered:

‘ Well, you know, whenever you go to a briefing like that, there’s some things you see that are eye-opening. And that’s about as far as I’ll go’.

Obfuscation, cover up, non-cooperation… Senators are even left in the dark about what happens in their own state…

On Friday 11^th of April, Laslo asked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), this question :

‘Do you have any idea what the mysterious craft were that reportedly surveilled Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base?

Barksdale is one of the largest and most strategic airfields in the US, covering 22,000 acres and housing 15,000 personnel. It is home to the Air Force Global Strike Command and the 2^nd Bomb Wing, which includes nuclear-armed B-52 bomber squadrons. In her book ‘Nuclear War, A Scenario’, investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen frequently discusses Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana as a critical component of the U.S. nuclear command structure, specifically concerning nuclear-armed B-52 bombers. She asserted it would be the first base targeted in case of an attack. As reported by Sentinel News, In Early March 2026, multiple waves of unauthorized drones were spotted over the base. They were thought so dangerous that they initiated a ‘shelter-in-place’ order (an official directive issued by authorities during an emergency, instructing residents to immediately seek safety within the building they already occupy, rather than evacuating the area. It is a short-term protective measure designed to create a barrier between people and an outside hazard).

Although it happened in his own state of Louisiana, Senator Cassidy did not know about this event, but he expressed his concern about problems with drones in a more general way, such as drones delivering narcotics into a federal prison in his state. When asked by Laslo if he had an idea if the Pentagon knew what happened in Barksdale, he said he would try and find out. As Laslo mentioned that it had also happened in other air-force bases such as Langley and Arizona, Cassidy replied :

‘There’s enough stupid people out there that it could be totally benign – accepting that stupidity is sometimes not benign, but you have to fear the worst’.

He did not elaborate on what he meant… but true to his word, he has since followed up on the subject and explained on television:

‘Since the beginning of Epic Fury, there’s been an uptake of these nationwide. There’s been five or so at Barksdale from the 9th through to the 15th. One was a hobbyist. The other four, it’s unclear. Two of the drones have been recovered or at least perhaps recovered. They found a drone. They’re not sure it was the one related to the incursion. It’s being treated as a police matter, but of course the Air Force is aware that it might be more than that. And it might just have been probing what the Air Force would do in case they came along. They have recovered two, they’re looking for fingerprints and other things that might give information as to the origins of the drones’.

Another US Senator who’s given very little information about what is happening in his own state, then, but someone knows more than Senator Cassidy, though…

As reported by Sentinel News, on April 22nd, 2026, News Nation host Ross Coulthart interviewed former superintendent inspector general, Ronald Bilak, who witnessed in December 2024 (before Operation ‘Epic Fury’, then, and at the beginning of the so-called ‘New Jersey drone flap’, although Barksdale is in Louisiana, a long way away from New Jersey), some unknown objects over Barksdale, which he filmed. Coulthart reminded us that ‘drones’ that he prefers calling ‘objects’ have been flying over nuclear bases all over the USA for the last 2 years or so now. Barksdale has been the scene of swarms of objects that counter-drone technology has failed to take down. Bilak photographed an object that he estimated to be about 15 feet wide and about 75 feet off the ground. It flew over the base, which is a FAA (Federal Aviation Agency) violation. Twenty minutes later, he saw three objects that he had never seen before. They flashed, went left to right and up and down at hypersonic speeds.

Coulthart asked Bilak if he observed ‘stealth’, which means objects disguising themselves and then literally disappear and reappear, and he confirmed that they would blink and immediately appear somewhere else.

After leaving employment at the base, Bilak worked as a security officer across the road from the base and on March 21st 2026, he saw some other objects, but this time, much more conventional looking. They resembled drones but had no noise. It was just a light that floated very gently, about 2 miles away from where he was standing.

He raised the issue about Senator Cassidy (whom he called ‘Kennedy’ by mistake) getting a report that the army got ‘one, maybe two objects’. How come the army cannot say exactly what they have? And how do they know one of them was a ‘hobbyist’? He adds that there have been no official announcement or arrest following the event, although there is a sign at the entrance of the base saying that it is a drone-free zone and that trespassers would be prosecuted.

Coulthart states that he knows that Barksdale has nuclear weapons and asks Bilak how serious the potential incursion in December 2024 or in March 2026 would be, to which he replied: ‘I think it would be the highest national security infringement as you can get. Like Annie (Jacobsen) says in her book, Barksdale is on top of the list for terrorism. That’s a fact.’ He also added that speaker of the house Mike Johnson lives just an hour from the base and that too should be a cause of concern.

He stated that friends inside the base told him that anti UAS (unmanned aircraft system) was ineffective and more technology was supposed to be brought to the base. Coulthart asserted that the current ‘technology’ is mostly netting thrown at drones. Bilak has not heard that techniques such as lasers or high pulse microwaves were used against these objects

Coulthart summarised that ‘ we’ve got a security breach over one of the most sensitive air force bases in America that I will say definitely has nuclear weapons. There’s a strong link between UAP activity and nuclear weapons. But irrespective of whether these objects are or aren’t conventional drones, the mere fact that they were able to operate over the base with apparent impunity without being able to be brought down by the authorities, that’s a very grave concern’.

Bilak agreed and cited Robert Hasting’s book, UFOs and Nukes, to explain why.

This book is a comprehensive collection of hundreds or recorded incidents of UAPs over nuclear facilities, including many incidents during the cold war.

Coulthart asked him why the December 2024 events (known as the ‘New Jersey drones flap’) were written off by the authorities and explained by President Trump as FAA authorized research drones, but he couldn’t say anything else than he had no idea.

Bilak reasserted that these objects were operating far outside the conventional limitations of modern technology and that he had never seen anything like that, adding ‘The video doesn’t lie’.

Coulthart summarised the different sightings of the same objects in the area but still geographically far enough from each other to doubt the conventional drone hypothesis and asked Bilak how important that President Trump follows up on his promise of disclosing. He replied ‘Well, extremely because I think it’s owed to humanity that we know the truth… I don’t want to live my whole life and not know the truth’.

All the above stories show that the institutions in the know are dragging their feet and using all means possible to delay information being transferred to congress and keep the public in the dark. The road to disclosure is full of obstacles, and it looks like another hurdle is looming in the horizon. On April 14th, House representative Jamie Raskin, top democrat on the house judiciary committee called for Vice-President J.D Vance to invoke the American constitution’s 25th amendment to remove President Trump from office for being allegedly ‘mentally unfit’. This follows President Trump’s social media posts threatening the entire population of Iran of annihilation, and the image of himself portrayed as Jesus Christ. Although debates and hearings have happened in congress, there is no indication yet that it will be followed up by the president’s removal. However, should it happen, this could play in favour of the keepers of the secret, as Donald Trump’s orders might be easier to rescind with the official recognition that he gave that order when he was ‘no longer mentally fit to run office’. Although Trump’s immediate entourage is made of a number of people in favour of disclosure (Vice-president J.D Vance, Secretary of state Marco Rubio, Minister of war Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbart, CIA Director John Ratcliffe), there is no guarantee that they will all be in cabinet after a reshuffle (although Vice President J.D. Vance would become President) and they may be easier to dissuade than President Trump who, to quote Representatives Ogles and Burchett ‘does whatever he wants’.

Finally, due to the unpopular war in Iran, it is suspected that the Mid-term elections in November will play in favour of the Democrats. As Ross Coulthart mentioned recently, the push for transparency is mainly coming from the Republicans. He criticises the Democrats for ‘peddling the issue and not pulling their weight or taking it seriously enough’, adding they needed to show ‘more spine and bottle’. Should the democrats change the balance of votes in congress, the whole issue of transparency and disclosure could lose its momentum, which again would play in the hands of the keepers of the secret.

All this might explain the sense of urgency amongst the advocates of disclosure in congress, and at times also their despondency. It must therefore have been an immense relief when, on April

29th 2026, they heard President Trump reiterate his commitment to releasing the UFO files during a press conference in the Oval Office with the Artemis II crew, as reported by Sentinel News.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen broke Apollo 13’s record for the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth, reaching 252,756 miles, surpassing the 1970 record of 248,655 miles.

After praising the crew members, the NASA representative and talking about the future of space exploration for a short while, a reporter asked President Trump:

Do you have an update on UFO files and what might be... when are we going to see this?

President Trump replied:

‘Well ,I think we’re going to be releasing as much as we can in the near future. For some reason - and I guess it’s just a reason - it’s been in the minds of people for a long time and that is such...

(turning around to his right towards two astronauts and NASA representative) : they want to find out about the UFOs and anything having to do with UFOs or related material. I want to be releasing a lot of things from.. that we haven’t.

I think it’s going to be very interesting to a lot of people. I’ve interviewed people during my first term primarily but I’ve interviewed some pilots, huh... very solid people and they said they saw things that you wouldn’t believe, so... you’re gonna be reading about it.

And he then moved on to another unrelated question.

David Grusch is a highly regarded whistleblower who provided testimony under oath regarding crash recovery operations of alleged exotic craft conducted by the USA outside the control of Congress. He contributed to a highly sensitive US document, the Presidential Daily Briefing, and acted as liaison between the NGA and the UAP Task Force.

He began by informing the audience that, throughout his career, he had served as the Intelligence Integration Division Chief for the Space Security and Defense Program in Colorado Springs. He also provided counterintelligence and program protection support to the clandestine X37B orbital test vehicle, which well-versed him in the conventional craft used by the U.S.

He then stated that the prevalence of UAS in today’s world has contributed to the advancement of the UAP problem due to their similarities.

He explained the struggles he faced :

There were legacy programs tackling this and I’ll call it rice bowls of stove piping, and a lot of that data was not shared with me and my team at NGA, and ironically not even with the AARO office that’s currently been instantiated at the Pentagon.

He then went on to explain that in order to resolve the problems caused by such craft, it would be necessary to have “persistent sensing, rapid attribution resilient networks and decision quality data machine speed”.

He followed this up by reminding the audience of President Trump’s commitment to declassification, but added… “the things we’ ve that we recovered and exploited over the last couple decades”.

The government had decades and decades of information and recovered ... material

and ance again it wasn’t being reported to Congress.

He then blew the whistle and briefed the Senate and House Intelligence committees in a classified environment.

We should be leveraging national overhead enterprise and other parts of our national intelligence enterprise in this topic, but we use it in secret, on the down low, the night job of a certain analyst at NASIC who also works for the legacy program that’s also analyzing this stuff without telling his boss, that’s essentially how the program has dealt with this other the time

Regarding what could happen in the future following Donald Trump’s statement requesting declassification of UFO files, he hoped that a plan could be divised between Marco Rubio, Devin Nunes, Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth.

I think there is a high expectation for the President to deliver, and I think if he does revela everything that I came in contact with, he’s going to go down in history as a great figure.

The US government understands it represents a form of sentient non-human intelligence.

It is true and I want the American people to be conforted that the universe is teeming with life,it seems, and readily available to be explored, and the US government does have a lot of information.

As President Trump explained when White House archives were found at Mar-a-Lago, he considers his own will to be sufficient for the declassification of any record. Following his own counsel, he may decide to allow whistleblowers like David Grusch to speak publicly on all the information the whistleblower has, and to provide definitive material evidence, something which has been lacking as claims have become more extreme.

December 2024

During the interview, Bilak declared :

…when I’d heard about the New Jersey thing, I was like, OK, if there’s going to be a drone flap, Barksdale’s going to be involved.

And I saw, and working with somebody else, you know, that we both know there were multiple reports of other bases.

And I just decided that, hey, unlike everybody else, I had the camera ready. I had my phone camera ready.

The first thing I caught was a giant object that you saw.

It was probably 75 feet (23m) off the ground, which was very concerning to me. This was a triangular object, probably 15 feet (4.5m), if not more.

Didn’t make a noise, nothing. And again, it flew, it had to have flown since it flew over my house, which is it, you know, maybe a mile from the West gate and from the backside of the base.

It had a flown directly over, which as you know, is an FAA violation.

And a 20 minutes later, I’ve seen objects, Ross, that there’s no way to describe these objects as anything that I’ve ever seen in flight pattern before.

They flashed, they moved left to right, they moved up and down so quick that I couldn’t believe what I was saying. And I saw three of them.

And I’ve never seen anything like that before. They were outside the area of the base. They were across from the West gate and across the river in the Shreveport area.

And again, I watched them for three to four minutes there. I filmed them. You see what I saw. I don’t know what I’ve seen. I’m not going to say, you know, but never seen anything like it.

As shown in the video above, ret. Master Sergeant filmed what he described to Ross Coulthart. Furthermore, he stated that he had identified additional witnesses via social media platforms, who had also recorded the events.

…when they blinked, you could see something was there.

It’s hard to explain, but it’s like you could see after the blink, there was a solid object behind that blink.

And then there were three of them and they moved in ways that you just can’t possibly move. You can’t.

no noise, no noise, no propellers, no chemtrail, no exhaust, no nothing, nothing at all.

Ross Coulthart : But you’re quite clear that the objects that you saw and videoed in December of 2024 would clearly not conventional drones.

Ronald Bilak : They were objects that were operating far outside the conventional limitations of modern technology.

The proof is in the video. I mean, that’s that’s all I can say is the proof in the video. I don’t know what they were, but obviously I’ve never seen anything like it.

So you tell me, you know, that’s that’s the whole thing. The video doesn’t lie.

March 2026

A few weeks ago, there was another wave of unexplained sightings near Barksdale Air Force Base. Bilak witnessed and filmed the sightings, but he insisted that they were different from the previous ones and were probably conventional drones.

According to a press release by the Air Force Global Strike Command, published march 31 2026 :

…beginning Monday, March 9, Barksdale AFB experienced several unauthorized drone incursions that varied in duration and number of drones. Out of an abundance of caution in response to the initial event, Barksdale base leadership issued a Shelter in Place order for the morning of March 9 that was lifted that same morning. Operations from Barksdale AFB continue unabated and the incident remains under an active federal investigation.

Senator Bill Kennedy announced that a drone had been recovered, but it was unclear whether it was related to the recent increase in drones spotted above the base.

While the video appears to show unidentified aerial objects, it does not by itself establish the nature or origin of what was observed. The footage has not been publicly and independently verified, and no evidence has been made public indicating the presence of advanced or unconventional technology. In recent years, reports of unidentified aerial phenomena near sensitive sites have increased in the United States and Europe. In some cases, authorities have responded with countermeasures. On December 4, 2025, five drones approaching a naval base hosting French nuclear submarines were shot down. However, the origin of these objects has not yet been publicly identified.

As previously reported by Sentinel News, the disappearance of scientists working on space technologies has forced President Trump to take action. Is it a statistical illusion or a conspiracy?

On August 28th, 2025, 48-year old Steven Garcia left his house in Albuquerque, New Mexico with a gun, and never returned. Mr Garcia was a government contractor with top security clearance at Kansas City National security campus, a major US Nuclear weapons facility with a covert role in US national defense. Like General McCasland, Garcia was working at a very high-level, overseeing all the assets, reportedly worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Rumours of a potential suicide attempt and of mental illness have been squashed, and parallels have been made with the disappearance of General McCasland, also in the same line of work, and with the highest responsibilities, who also left his house with a gun, also in Albuquerque, and never returned.

On April 16th, the Daily Mail published an article about yet another dead scientist. 34-year- old Amy Eskridge, who was working on anti-gravity technology, studied by UFO researchers who explain this is at least one of the ways UFOs can travel the way they do. In 2020, Eskridge announced that she was planning to present novel foundational work regarding antigravity but needed approval from NASA.

Although the US government denies the existence of recovered UFOs, and that work on them is therefore not possible, the many scientists, politicians, military personnel and Intelligence officers who spoke in the film ‘The Age of Disclosure’ asserted that the government is wrong about that. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even explained that the matter is so highly classified that even the U.S. Presidents do not know about the matter because the projects are operating on a ‘need-to-know’ basis’.

In the military and intelligence services, the ‘need-to-know’ is a restriction to access data that is considered very confidential and sensitive. Even if someone has all necessary clearances to be read into highly sensitive programs, they cannot access data that is under ‘need-to-know’ restriction.

Amy Eskridge’s cause of death has been reported as suicide. However, it is claimed that she warned previously that her life was in danger. Since her passing, some details, including an unearthed interview with Eskridge herself and independent findings submitted to Congress have pointed to the possibility that Eskridge’s death was not a suicide and was instead part of an elaborate ‘murder’ conspiracy. Eskridge’s father, himself a retired NASA plasma scientist who-co-founded the ‘Institute of Exotic Science’ with his daughter, rejects the claims of murder and insists that his daughter committed suicide. The institute’s stated mission is to make speculative science available to the public rather than keeping it buried in secret programs.

This brings the number of deaths or disappearances of scientists linked to nuclear, space or UAP research to eleven.

Prior to the announcement of Eskridge’s disappearance, on April 15^th, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked about the ten disappeared scientists, said that she was aware of the reports but could not confirm that an investigation was underway. She promised to seek answers from relevant agencies, and if the reports are true, she expected they will be investigated.

Some of the UAP caucus members have been very vocal about raising concern over the coincidences linking all these cases. Representatives Tim Burchett and Jared Moskowitz suspect foul play and call for serious enquiries and even congressional hearings on the matter. In an interview with News Nation aired on April 17th, Burchett went so far as to say that if we go back far enough in time, it is more than 10 scientists who have died in suspicious circumstances.

Representative Eric Burlison said that the matter had first come to their attention last year when General Matthew Sullivan (not yet added to the infamous list), apparently committed suicide two weeks after being asked for an interview which he did not attend with the UAP caucus. A report was sent to the office of the Inspector General, who deemed it ‘urgent and credible’ and referred it to the FBI. Burlison added that the caucus had reached out to General McCasland twice to interview him about his research on UAPs. He did not answer and mysteriously disappeared. Burlison insisted on the fact that the disappearance of such highly important scientists for national security did not sound right. For instance, the circumstances are too similar. He reminded us that Monica Reza, Stephen Garcia, Anthony Chavez, Melissa Casias and General McCasland went left their home without their phone and vanished.

When it was suggested to him that China, Russia and Iran could be involved because they are the main competitors to the US in the fields of nuclear power, advanced weaponry and space race, Burlison agreed that it is indeed a possibility. He calls for an investigation by top investigators in the FBI and every agency. He also revealed that multiple scientists have reported some sort of threat. He added that this a rallying-call on a bi-partisan basis , and he and his colleagues at congress are urging immediate investigation.

The rallying-call was heard and on Thursday 16th of April, President Trump told reporters that he would order an investigation into the matter.

On Friday 17th of April, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed on X that the White House was actively working with the FBI and all relevant agencies to identify any potential commonalities that may exist between cases involving a number of government scientists and officials who’ve either vanished or died in recent months. Leavitt cited “recent and legitimate questions about these troubling cases” and said “no stone would be unturned” in the multi-agency effort.

In an interview on Sunday 19th of April, retired Brigadier General in the US Air Force and former deputy military representative to NATO Blaine Holt declared that two cases could be seen as a coincidence but he ‘doesn’t buy it’ when it is eleven, and asserted that these are not a coincidences. He said that we need to understand what exactly these scientists were working on and find the common denominator. He also asked why the White House initiated the probe when the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA have failed to do so and are not looking at it as an anomaly. He added that in the executive branch, there is a very big split between who thinks it is a concerning issue and who doesn’t, and he thinks it is very revealing. He didn’t elaborate on that but joined the chorus of voices demanding to treat the matter with the highest level of enquiry.

When asked if foreign involvement could be suspected, co-host Retired U.S. Navy Captain Brent Sadler added that he would not dismiss the possibility but insisted that investigators should follow the evidence. He also believes an investigation should take place because of the high level of similarities between these cases. He deplored that the White House had to be the instigator of the probe rather than any agency.

The affair is gaining momentum, and it has even reached European shores, with ‘Le Parisien’ newspaper, one of the first ones to take the matter of UFOs seriously, reporting on it.

The incident, documented in a report by the nonprofit organization Americans for Safe Aerospace, raises questions about flight safety.

As the aircraft climbed past 14,000 feet (4,260 m), air traffic control urgently ordered it to level off at 15,000 feet (4,572 m), reporting unknown traffic in their sector ahead, two nautical miles (approximately 4 km) away, rapidly approaching. The controller noted that this radar echo had “already appeared intermittently throughout the day.”

A few seconds later, both pilots visually identified an object that was described as an oblong spheroid lacking wings, windows, and navigation lights. They described its surface as metallic and resembling molten mercury. It had a translucent appearance, shifting shape, and seemed to pulsate and vibrate.

The co-pilot estimated that the object was about the size of a Boeing 737. However, the report mentions a length of approximately 40 feet (12 meters). This estimate is difficult to reconcile with that of a 737, which is about 40 meters long. This introduces an inconsistency in the description, likely due to a conservative estimate.

The object initially appeared to be stationary. When the co-pilot initiated an evasive maneuver to the right, the object instantly accelerated along the axis of the aircraft’s left wing and left the area at a very high speed. The entire event lasted less than ten seconds.

The co-pilot estimates the minimum distance to be approximately 500 feet (150 m), yet such proximity constitutes what the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) classifies as a near-miss in flight. Indeed, given the difficulty of estimating trajectories and relative speeds in mid-flight, objects can become hazardous within seconds. Aircraft therefore maintain safety distances of several kilometers between them when at the same altitude, and several hundred meters between different altitudes.

According to the report, the collision avoidance system (TCAS) did not trigger any alerts. Installed on commercial aircraft, this system detects the risk of a collision by interrogating the transponders of other aircraft. However, the absence of an activation does not allow for a conclusion regarding the nature of the object, as not all aircraft are equipped with or identifiable by this type of device.

In their analysis, Americans for Safe Aerospace notes that the co-pilot, a former Marine Corps F/A-18 fighter pilot, has advanced training in visual aircraft recognition, lending credibility to his observation. The presence of two experienced witnesses is also a significant factor.

Air traffic control’s mention of similar activity observed several times throughout the day raises questions. When unidentified traffic appears to be moving through a busy departure corridor, one must ask to what extent crews could have been informed in advance of this activity. Systems exist to alert pilots to potential hazards, including Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs).

While this incident does not allow for a conclusion regarding the nature of the observed object, it does highlight a central aviation safety issue: unidentified objects moving through controlled airspace that exhibit atypical flight characteristics and are not integrated into conventional surveillance and collision-avoidance systems.

However, despite the danger posed by these flights, a recent amendment that would have allowed pilots to officially report their sightings was blocked from coming to a vote in the U.S. Congress due to lobbying by intelligence agencies, according to its author, Representative Tim Burchett.

As Sentinel News previously reported, political pressure in the halls of Congress has been rising following the Department of Defense’s failure to release UAP footage requested by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna via an official letter.

As you remember, I recently directed the Secretary of War…

How good is Pete Hegseth doing, by the way?…

To begin releasing government files relating to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomena….

And I figured this was a good crowd, because I know you people. You’re really into that. I don’t know if I am. So I’m pleased to report today… I thought I’d save it for this crowd. Because you’re a little bit out there, you know, a little bit… That this process is well underway, and we found many very interesting documents, I must say. And the first releases will begin very, very soon. So you can go out and see if that phenomena is correct, you’ll figure it out. Let me know, let me know. But we’ve had a lot of, a lot of questions. It’s something that really captivates the mind.

Since the rally took place in Arizona, Trump’s reference to the crowd’s interest in UFOs probably alludes to the state’s long history of sightings, including the famous Phoenix Lights. Even the governor at the time recently confirmed that these sightings remain unexplained.

Only time will tell if Trump will follow through, but that announcement came after the Department of Defense confirmed that they were in talks with the White House regarding the release of UAP documents.

The Department of War’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is working in close coordination with the White House and across federal agencies to consolidate existing UAP records collections and facilitate the expeditious release of never-before-seen UAP information

-DoW

Director Steven Spielberg was at CinemaCon in Las Vegas this week to promote his upcoming film Disclosure Day.

Nearly fifty years after his film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Steven Spielberg revisits the phenomenon of UFOs and the potential existence of non-human intelligence.

I’ve been curious ever since I was a little kid about what’s happening in the night sky, what’s happening in the sky during the daytime

Referring to the New York Times’revelations in 2017 and the videos “Flir,” “Gimbal,” and “Go fast,” he adds:

“In 2017, I got very curious again.”

“Half a century later, I made Disclosure Day with certainty that there is a lot more truth than fiction to what you’re going to see on June 12.”

“I truly believe that this movie is going to answer questions and cause you to ask a lot of questions.”

Close Encounters of the Third Kind left an indelible mark on an entire generation. The film’s title is based on the classification system created by J. Allen Hynek, a renowned ufologist who was involved in Project Blue Book. Hynek and Jacques Vallée, two of the film’s characters, were real-life ufologists. Close Encounters of the Third Kind incorporates numerous elements that were previously known only within ufology circles and were completely unknown to the general public. Some have speculated that Steven Spielberg had access to classified information. Last month, he addressed this allegation at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival.

“I don’t know any more than any of you do, but I have a very strong suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now, and I made a movie about that.”

“Because no one should ever think that we are the only intelligent civilization in the entire universe. So I’ve been thinking as a kid that we were not alone ... The big question is: Are we alone now? And have we been alone over the last 80 years? Have we been alone over the last few thousand years?”

Like its predecessor, Disclosure Day is likely to leave a lasting impression and help the topic of UFOs become more deeply ingrained in the public consciousness by becoming part of pop culture. This is especially true given that the film’s promotion coincides with pressure from Congress to declassify certain videos. Representative Luna emphasized that the latter will not wait for a briefing at some unspecified future date. Thus, Disclosure Day could very well benefit from official revelations from the U.S. government.

The trailers shown contain strong Christian references…

…whilst The Phenomenon takes on a pagan appearance.

The antagonist represents a group capable of monitoring the population…

…but not hesitating to use unconventional means to achieve his ends.

The film draws on culturally familiar representational conventions…

…but also devises its own ways of showcasing the superhuman abilities of the protagonists, who are the subjects of the experiments depicted in the article’s illustration.

The information being released in dribs and drabs, as well as the rumors of small, large-headed creatures that can transform into deer to hide their identity, is designed to build anticipation. This was allegedly seen in a new trailer that was shown privately during the conference.

Despite the many details revealed in the trailer, Spielberg promises that none of the footage gives away the plot of the third act.

“This movie is an experience, and all you need to get from the beginning to the end is a seatbelt.”

Matt Laslo of "Ask a Pol", Sentinel News’ partner in Washington, is the reporter who isn't afraid to ask questions about UFOs on the Hill. He investigated how politicians reacted to Trump’s claims of disclosure.

Sen. Gillibrand

On April the 8th, Laslo asked Senator Kirsten Gillibrand , long-standing member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), what she thought about President Donald Trump’s call for the federal government to make UFO files available to the public. She replied it was great. When asked if the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) would be involved, she said she didn’t know but tweeted the president to ask.

Her aide interjected that ‘it’s redundant,because we already passed it in the NDAA and that stuff has to be made public’.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the 2024 Fiscal Year included the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, which mandates the public release of federal records concerning "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena" (UAP) and "non-human intelligence (NHI)". It forces the creation of a centralized, public collection at the National Archives (NARA) with a presumption of disclosure, aimed at uncovering decades of government knowledge while addressing potential national security threats.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is amongst the most prominent contributors in congress to the disclosure and transparency push about UFOs, as long as it is under the authority of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). She was instrumental in its creation, is committed to making it a more efficient organisation and to keep the conversation in congress in order to reduce stigma in reporting and ensure UAP records are properly disclosed and made available to the public.

Following President Donald Trump’s announcement that the UAP files would be declassified, and the subsequent creation by the U.S. government of the ‘alien.gov’ and ‘aliens.gov’ websites, very few MPs have dared to speak out in public. So, when…

Rep. Ogles

On April 9th, Matt Laslo asked representative Andy Ogles :

‘Is the White House trolling us by registering Aliens.gov, or is it a genuine signal that UFO disclosure is coming?...

…It was a surprise to hear him reply that there has been so much chatter and that so many people have come forward that the administration, President Trump just wants to lay a baseline and be honest with it. He suggests that President Trump likes to break the mold and would like to be ‘the guy that revealed the truth’ because it’s historic’ and ‘that’s exactly who President Trump is’. He added : ‘There’s some pretty compelling stuff out there. Now, how much of it they release, we’ll see’. He didn’t say what the stuff ‘out there’ is…

There’s someone in congress who’s always happy to talk about UAP’s, though…

Rep. Burchett

On April 10th, Representative and UAP Caucus chair Tim Burchett didn’t wait to be asked a question and launched into a statement about ex-representative Matt Gaetz’ explosive revelations ‘being crazy’. He was referring to the declaration by Gaetz that he was briefed by a U.S.army whistleblower about a secret program of alien-human hybridisation allegedly using captured extraterrestrials and abducted humans from migrant or war-zone communities. The whistleblower allegedly revealed that there were between six and twelve such facilities in the U.S. Gaetz admitted that he did not verify the information but was later told by White House representatives that the disclosure was ‘anti-christian’. Burchett insisted that Gaetz did not say it was happening for sure, but merely that he was told it did.

The US society is very steeped in Judeo-Christianism, and the idea of hybridisation between humans and extra-terrestrials is enduring in the American mythos. In the Old Testament, the ‘Watchers’, gigantic and powerful beings said to be ‘the sons of God’ interbred with humans, creating the ‘nephilim’.

Matt Laslo moved on with his question:

‘The congressional UAP Caucus has been really outspoken lately on classified info. Is that because you all are banking on disclosure coming from President Donald Trump?’

The UAP Caucus is a focused group within the U.S. Congress dedicated to the study, disclosure and policy development surrounding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

Burchett replied that they are all frustrated and when asked if he thought that disclosure is coming, he expressed doubts :

I really don’t think we’re going to get this information. The one shot we’ve got is somebody gets to the President before the other side does and says ‘release it’ and he pulls a classic Trump and does what he wants to do, regardless. Which I, in this case I would love that. Wouldn’t you?

Laslo then asked if the White House knew where to look, to which Burchett replied that he told President Trump where to find the information and that it’s like peeling onions, there’s always a layer underneath. He added that Trump was very receptive.

Laslo suggested that UFO files might be held by military contractors, and could be outside the reach of the government. Burchett acquiesced and added that it was done because it is ‘un-FOIA-able’ and he feels it will be ‘next to impossible unless Trump grants some sort of amnesty to come forward’.

‘FOIA’ stands for ‘Freedom of Information Act’. It is a 1967 US federal law allowing any person to request access to federal agency records, ensuring government transparency. There are exceptions such as national security or personal privacy.

Laslo mentioned that other UAP Caucus members want to replace AARO, while Burchett just wants to blow it up, and Burchett confirmed he wants to do away with it because he’s ‘tired of restructuring government’.

In another exchange with Matt Laslo, he opened up :

Matt Laslo: “What do you make of the Pentagon breezing through your guys’ April 14th deadline?”

Burchett: “See, that’s par for the course, dude. They’re just going to delay, delay, delay until they can get everything covered up.”

“I just don’t have much faith. It’s just got to come from the top. The president’s just got to say do it. Heck, in that 28 days right now for them to cover everything up, it’s got to happen right then.”

Laslo: “Well, now they see they’re working with AARO. What do you make of that?”

Burchett: “I don’t trust them as far as I can throw that dome off the Capitol.”

Whilst all these discussions are happening, some more worrying and pressing events are going on in the U.S. homeland, so…

Sen. Cassidy

On Friday 11th of April, Laslo asked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), this question :

‘Do you have any idea what the mysterious craft were that reportedly surveilled Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base?

Barksdale is one of the largest and most strategic airfields in the US, covering 22,000 acres and housing 15,000 personnel. It is home to the Air Force Global Strike Command and the 2nd Bomb Wing, which includes nuclear-armed B-52 bomber squadrons. Early March 2026, multiple waves of unauthorized drones were spotted over the base. They were thought so dangerous that they initiated a ‘shelter-in-place’ order, an official directive issued by authorities during an emergency, instructing residents to immediately seek safety within the building they already occupy, rather than evacuating the area. It is a short-term protective measure designed to create a barrier between people and an outside hazard.

Senator Cassidy did not know about this event (that happened in his own state of Louisiana) but expressed his concern about problems with drones in a more general way, such as drones delivering narcotics into a federal prison in his state. When asked by Laslo if he had an idea if the Pentagon knew what happened in Barksdale, he said he will try and find out. As Laslo mentioned that it had also happened in other air-force bases such as Langley and Arizona, Cassidy replied :

‘There’s enough stupid people out there that it could be totally benign – accepting that stupidity is sometimes not benign, but you have to fear the worst’.

He did not elaborate on what he meant… but true to his word, he has since followed up on the subject and explained on television that since the beginning of the Epic Fury operation, there have been more events of the kind happening over US military bases. There have been ‘five or so’ over Barksdale from the 9th to the 15th of March. One was a hobbyist and the others are unclear. Two of the drones have been recovered ‘or at least perhaps recovered’ (his body language seemed to indicate he was not told for sure). A drone was recovered but it is not known if it was related to the fly-over. He added that the incident has been treated as a police matter, and they are looking for fingerprints and other clues, but he suggests it could have been a test by someone to see what the Air Force react. He suggested that the Air Force knows it is more than just a police matter.

There is still division within Congress. Some lawmakers openly admit their ignorance, while others speculate that classified information may be released. Meanwhile, U.S. representatives are increasingly doubting the administration’s ability to share secrets with them.

Following the Department of War's failure to release UAP footage as ordered, Representative Luna stated :

“No one from the Pentagon had responded until we reached out, and it appears that someone did not pass the letter to the appropriate authorities.”

Intriguingly, according to Liberation Times, a source declared that :”The Department of War is in receipt of Rep. Luna’s letter and will provide a briefing in the future.”

How can the War Department claim it never received the letter, when a source says a briefing in response to it is currently being prepared?

This is yet another example of the numerous communication problems that have plagued the Department of War’s handling of the UAP case, even as Rep. Tim Burchett has just proposed an amendment to cut funding for the Pentagon’s UFO study group, following its repeated failures. Examples include the numerous delays affecting the official reports that were required by law to be submitted on time, and the factual errors contained in AARO’s historical report.

Luna continues :

How convenient. Nonetheless, we will be getting the requested list. We are not waiting for a briefing at some unspecified future date.

Interestingly, Luna is directly addressing the strategy of creating a briefing rather than delivering the videos directly, a strategy also mentioned earlier.

The Secretary of War is someone I consider a friend and someone who backs the President. The President has authorized the release, so whoever is trying to be cute at the Pentagon can take a hike.

The pressure is now at its peak on AARO, as Burchett’s axe threatens to befall it and Representative Luna won’t settle for just another empty briefing.

Who is Garry Nolan?

Dr Garry Nolan is a professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, holding the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Chair. He earned his PhD under the supervision of Leonard Herzenberg and conducted postdoctoral research with David Baltimore, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr Nolan has published over 360 research articles and holds 50 U.S. patents. His research focuses primarily on the immune system and its complex interactions with cancer. In 2021, he stated that government officials and representatives of an aerospace company had approached him for help in understanding the medical injuries sustained by certain individuals following alleged interactions with an anomalous aircraft. He is also the co-founder and executive director of the Sol Foundation, an interdisciplinary academic foundation focused on UAPs.

While some compare UAP researchers to biologists studying animals in a reserve or zoo, Dr. Nolan prefers the metaphor of a laboratory in which two groups of rats study each other.

“It's not a zoo. It's a laboratory where both sides, at least at this point now, are the rats. I would think that if they are real, they're smarter rats than we are.”

Indeed, it seems that the UAPs are particularly interested in our nuclear capabilities, biodiversity, cognitive responses and social cohesion, while we study their propulsion signatures, composition, behavioural patterns and origin.

Skywatcher Discovery Framework: Technical Field Operations to Scientific Analysis

The Skywatcher programme is a private initiative comprising three groups with different motivations and definitions of success: scientists, the military, and investors. The scientific approach necessitates the publication and peer review of results, which requires open access to the data and methods used to obtain them. The military prioritises strategic dominance and operational security, which necessitate the protection of capabilities and the compartmentalisation of data. Finally, investors seek a return on investment based primarily on the acquisition of intellectual property. They are therefore initially reluctant to engage in ‘open-source’ collaboration.

“This was actually more difficult than I would have imagined, navigating these competing vectors of scientific, military, and venture capital. […] And the issue here is what we did want to be able to do is bring radical transparency for the scientific data.

Nolan starts by setting-out his approach. He insists that he speaks for himself, not as a Skywatcher representative, and that whilst his conclusions are based on data or what he has experienced during Skywatcher events, they remain speculative. His role with Skywatcher was to help them design rigorous scientific experiments that could be reported, and to work out changes for later experiments. The aim is to create a solid base of preliminary data that can be handed over to another scientist so that they can come to similar conclusions.

What is proof?

First and foremost, G. Nolan revisits the concepts of data, evidence and proof to establish a semantic framework.

Data is raw information. It can be obtained from instruments, or it can relate to observations reported by eyewitnesses. While these may be anecdotal, the question arises: how many observations are needed for something to be considered true?

A set of validated data constitutes evidence. Evidence is obtained by ensuring that the data has been collected correctly, irrelevant elements have been removed and it has been placed in context. G. Nolan therefore proposes a multi-sensor approach involving radar trajectory, an infrared thermal camera (FLIR) and visual confirmation. Proof, on the other hand, is convincing, indisputable and reproducible.

“You could read every one of my actually now 360 plus papers and you will very rarely see us claiming in our biology proof. We always say “the data supports”. […] Proofs are really only possible when you set such high guardrails around you or what it is that you're trying to prove that it becomes compelling and undeniable for that there are some objects. So, in other words, it either has to land or you have to shake its hand. So, that would be for many people the only proof that they'll accept.”

According to G. Nolan, we could speak of evidence in the following cases:

1. Physical artefact: the discovery of materials exhibiting non-terrestrial isotopic ratios, or of engineered metamaterials that exceed current manufacturing capabilities, the authenticity of which would be verified by at least three independent laboratories.

2. Biological sample: biological material whose genetic sequencing does not correspond to the terrestrial phylogenetic tree or which indicates artificial synthesis. The sequencing could be evaluated and confirmed by peers.

   In this regard, G. Nolan states:

   “I've never seen a biological sample to date that represents anything that one would claim to be extraterrestrial. The Atacama [skeleton], which we showed was a human girl, to the dismay of some at least. So, I haven't seen anything, but obviously that would be fantastic. Of course, we all know James Fox's work going on down in Brazil with the Varginha episode. I think that's probably the closest that we've seen to any, let's say, verifiable anecdotes so far.”

3. Transfer of information: the communication of verifiable knowledge that humanity does not yet possess (e.g. the solution to the P ≠ NP problem or to the theory of grand unification). Validation would then be based on mathematical proof.

4. Violation of the laws of physics: demonstration of a technology that breaks the laws of physics as we know them under controlled conditions. These characteristics have already been presented by Luis Elizondo, who refers to them as the ‘5 observables’. Validation would then rely on corroboration by various sensors.

The Bayesian model

G. Nolan points out that scientists do not rely on binary thinking: Do you believe it? Is it true / Is it false? Science generally operates within a Bayesian model, which is a statistical approach developed over more than 100 years. It therefore involves placing what is considered to be evidence on a spectrum ranging from 0 to 100% in terms of likelihood.

“There are different frameworks. The so-called Sagan standard of extraordinary evidence, I mean, just evidence. I don't think it needs to be extraordinary. I think we would need our P value, or our probability, to be greater than 99%. Strong evidence is what you would call preliminary data moving towards this. And then just saying raw data.”

G. Nolan thus defines three levels of evidence:

• Probability greater than 99% ⇨ Sagan’s standard (extraordinary evidence). Statistical certainty. Requires a radical shift in the scientific consensus. The anomaly is accepted as a physical reality. (P > 0.99)

• Probability greater than 90% ⇨ Strong evidence (actionable information). The risk of a false positive falls below 10%. Justifies targeted investigations and changes in strategy. (P > 0.90)

• Probability greater than 50% ⇨ Detection (tipping point). The hypothesis becomes “more likely than not”. Insufficient to draw a conclusion, but triggers the deployment of dedicated sensors. (P > 0.50)

For G. Nolan, one of the advantages of such an approach lies in the integration of reports and testimonies from members of the public. Referring to the presentation on citizen reporting networks as data infrastructures, G. Nolan adds:

“Now, this is something that I think would be great to apply to the kinds of data that Robert Spearing just presented because they have the raw numbers to put this into an ingestion system for Bayesian truth where you can look at the priors and the priors basically add up to a probability that gives you a great outcome.”

The Skywatcher experience

Nolan explains that the mission was to uncover and deliver accurate, timely and comprehensive aerial intelligence through evidence-based collaboration with federal, state and local authorities. He insists that Skywatcher is not a governmental project but very much a privately funded initiative gathering special operators, military, intelligence officers, and national security leaders, and himself as a scientist. The end-game for the investors was not intellectual property but proof.

It outlines the four stages of the recommended scientific approach:

• data detection and collection,

• validation of a multi-sensor correlation,

• analysis of flight dynamics,

• production of intelligence data.

Data Detection and Collection

Nolan discusses the equipment used for data detection and collection, as well as the importance of its configuration. He emphasises the importance of avoiding data filtering at source. Devices are often calibrated to detect only objects with similar characteristics (airplanes, missiles, drones, etc.) and filter out all other data before recording it. However, an object that remains completely stationary despite wind pressure should not be excluded from the study’s scope. G. Nolan notes that Chris Mellon had advocated opening the filters. This openness to a broader spectrum enabled the detection of Chinese balloons in February 2023. Similarly, former pilot Ryan Graves, who testified under oath before Congress, noted that UAP incidents near aircraft carriers began after a radar capability upgrade.

Validating a multi-sensor correlation requires cross-referencing telemetry, infrared, optical and ROEM data in order to eliminate false positives. He notes that algorithms are rigid, whereas human perception is adaptive. Experienced pilots can identify unusual behaviours such as formation changes or non-ballistic movements, which detection platforms may filter out.

“The pilot is also a sensor platform, and [...] we treat a pilot visual acquisition as a high confidence trigger [initiating immediate multi-spectral sensor focus on the designated azimuth] to say, okay, now we need to turn everything else on.”

“So, multi-sensor correlation was the objective. We were looking for things that had anomalous flight and something that would move in an intelligent manner, and should we have been so lucky, which we were not, to obtain some piece of technology that might have produced intelligence out of it. ”

“So, at the end of the day, what we ended up with was a very few number of tracks that were not in any way prosaic.”

Analysis of flight dynamics

Here, Nolan uses the immutable laws of physics as a filter. Any capabilities beyond the scope of conventional aircraft will be considered abnormal. This includes instantaneous acceleration exceeding 20 G. For reference, the structural limit of an F-35 is 9G. He also mentions the absence of a sonic boom and ‘cold hypersonics’ (the absence of material heating observed at the leading edge of objects moving at hypersonic speeds).

Generation of intelligence data

Although the data obtained is still being analysed, G. Nolan is very cautious and reserved about the prospect of publication. The diverse nature of the Skywatcher group has undermined the scientific rigour required for such studies.

“We’re still actually analyzing the data. We had, as I said, thousands of tracks, and this is where that triumvirate of groups (scientific versus military versus the capital structure) got things wrong. That the science wasn’t always done in the way that would have been my preference in terms of making sure that all of the instruments were run in the same way at the same time, at least some of the first events. And by the time of the second and the third events, that had been fixed. But time-syncing was not done the way that it should have been done.”

“We have not met the multi-sensored data collection metrics that I would have preferred. We would always get it on one but not the other. And so we couldn’t get the Bayesian inference that allows something there. But now we know what it is that we really need to do, and we’ve identified a group that is known to work with the government that can help us make sure that all of our instrumentation is being set up in the right way, at the right time for further data acquisition with now refined procedures.”

“I think the framework that was worked out remains in place, and the objective is to replace anecdote. But anecdotes should not be thrown away because of the Bayesian utility of them. But I think I've shown you that the multi-sensor correlation is the absolute key.”

Thus, G. Nolan does not believe that Skywatcher must necessarily continue to exist as an organisation. For him, what matters most is the approach to be taken.

And when asked about possible spacecraft landings or close encounters, he replies:

“Nothing ever landed, nor was anything materially collected. And if it was, it was something that I didn't know about. But look, I wish it something was, but the short answer is, if that's a rumor, it should stay as such because it's not.”

The Bayesian model applied to eyewitnesses

Garry Nolan also demonstrates that the Bayesian model can be applied to eyewitness accounts. To do this, we must return to Sagan’s concept of the ‘extraordinary evidence standard’. As a reminder, this corresponds to a level of certainty of 99% (P > 0.99).

“This is where I think it gets interesting: where we approach the bayesian standard. [...] Just by using simple Bayesian inference, by the time you've reached three or four simultaneously measured events or different events, your standard, actually your Bayesian priors go way up. Anybody out there can go do the math. Go ask chat GPT to help you if you want to learn how to do it. It doesn't take very much to do so. And I've run Bayesian analysis on basically several hundreds of anecdotes and what it is that it ends up creating in terms of outcomes.”

Bayesian inference allows G. Nolan to conclude that three sensors simultaneously detecting an anomaly result in a likelihood probability exceeding 99%. He achieves the same level of likelihood with eight trained observers (e.g. pilots) or 27 civilian eyewitnesses.

“When people say there's no evidence, that's because they don't have the knowledge of how Bayesian math operates. And they don't have the kind of scientific training that at least I apply to the problems that I work on.”

G. Nolan thus demonstrates that quality takes precedence over quantity. However, quantity also helps to achieve a sufficient degree of plausibility. It is therefore possible to incorporate accounts from civilian eyewitnesses into a scientific approach.

Analysis of materials

Garry Nolan is unable to provide further details regarding the data collected by Skywatcher, as he is bound by a non-disclosure agreement. He therefore discusses some of the work carried out in his laboratory on materials related to UFOs.

The Ubatuba fragments

He begins with fragments relating to the incident that took place in Ubatuba, Brazil, in 1957, which were given to him by Jacques Vallée.

“It's pretty clear now there's two chains of evidence of different materials that are claimed to come from the same event. One is highly pure magnesium (and Robert Powell and Michael Swords have done an incredible amount of analysis on that magnesium material). This was what was first reported. This material that I obtained through Jacques [Vallée] that we thought was magnesium and has some magnesium in it, actually turns out to be silicon.”

After carrying out atomic imaging using atomic probe tomography, physicists from Stanford’s Department of Physics realised that the distribution of the various silicon isotopes in the sample differed significantly from that found in natural silicon. In its natural form, silicon (Si) consists of three stable isotopes: ²⁸Si (92.2%), ²⁹Si (4.7%) and ³⁰Si (3.1%). However, the Ubatuba sample contains 72.3% ²⁸Si, 16.5% ²⁹Si and 10.9% ³⁰Si.

“First of all, it's nearly entirely like 99.9 percent silicon, the sample itself, only something which is usually made for silicon wafers and not something that was easy to make at the time. And certainly you wouldn't be modifying the silicon isotope ratios. So the wild speculation by one of the scientists over in the engineering department was that: there's less of what is supposed to be there and more of the next one and then more of the next one. There's a process that could do this and that's called neutron absorption.”

When a material is exposed to a high level of neutrons, a nucleus of that element can incorporate an extra neutron. Through this process, the isotope 28Si (14 neutrons) can be transformed into 29Si (15 neutrons), 29Si (15 neutrons) into 30Si (16 neutrons), and 30Si into phosphorus (P). Neutron capture could take place in a nuclear reactor. However, G. Nolan points out that to achieve such an isotope ratio, the silicon would need to be exposed for approximately 10,000 years in a nuclear reactor. G. Nolan demonstrates, with supporting calculations, that such a process yields isotope ratios identical to those of the Ubatuba silicon sample.

“It would require 25 kilo electron volts (keV) over a significant period of time to get the silicon isotope ratios that we achieved. And what is that amount of time? Something like 10,000 years in a nuclear reactor or a level of neutron radiation that is just at least at the time that these were capable of being found on earth. So, does that prove this stuff is alien? Absolutely not. It just says that it’s been engineered in a way that is interesting because it’s the exact ratio you would expect if you were to use this neutron absorption model, but found 40 or more years ago.”

“So it's an observation. It's data. And if I can get somebody else to agree with me that the data was collected correctly, it's not up to me necessarily to explain it, but it's up to us to then say, why? how? how did it get there? Why was it supposedly on a beach in Ubatuba, Brazil? And why is it different than the magnesium material that ended up going through another set of hands?”

G. Nolan points out that it is possible the various silicon isotopes were deliberately combined to achieve this ratio. But if that were the case, why choose a ratio that corresponds exactly to what one would obtain through neutron capture?

Samples from the Trinity site

G. Nolan then presents the study he conducted on samples of material recovered from the site of a suspected crash at the Trinity site. This is a laminated material consisting of layers of magnesium oxide separated by a layer of bismuth.

G. Nolan explains that the presence of bubbles measuring 50 to 80 µm, as well as their shape (rupturing outwards), demonstrate that they formed after the material was manufactured. Their presence is due to exposure to extreme heat following manufacture and originates from the molten material inside. This finding is therefore consistent with an explosion or a crash.

“Of course, we all know Hal [Puthoff]'s proposal that this would fit the idea of a metamaterial or a waveguide. I can't speak to that.”

“We actually did run a bit of a reflection, and it does absorb in the right area. I know that this is the same area where carbon dioxide absorbs, but we did do the controls. And this absorption criteria is due to the object itself. It is not due to just absorption of the FTIR in the air, because I know people have asked me that previously.”

“So it's actually in the range of what Hal [Puthoff] has suggested. It absorbs. What we have not done on the other side is see, well, if it absorbs, what does it emit? So that's one of the next steps that we'll be taking this material.”

Finally, G. Nolan studied the structure of the sample using EBSD (Electron Backscatter Diffraction). This technique makes it possible to map the structure of the grains and their orientation. EBSD imaging clearly shows that the magnesium crystals are positioned perpendicular to the bismuth layers.

“It is not something you would expect to see in a smelting process where people have claimed this is the bottom of a lead smelting system.”

“So what this rules out, and this is from material scientists who've looked at it, rules out rolling and bonding would have crushed the grains. It rules out casting, melting point mismatch between the bismuth and the magnesium. And it's not electroplating because of the reactivity. So those are ruled out.”

“Could have been done by vapor deposition. That's not something that we've really invented until the last 10 years. In bulk, technology at the time was maybe possible, but not to the extent that is seen here. Bulk layering even at this kind of resolution is challenging even today. It's not impossible, but it was not possible back then.”

“So we still need to do some further tests at the interfaces and to look at the transmission modes of this with various input.”

Physical after-effects

When asked about mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), Garry Nolan discusses the analysis of a skin sample that was sent to him.

“Here's something interesting, to this point exactly. So, I was brought the biopsy of an individual who had claimed one of these kinds of attacks, let's say. And the biopsy was of their skin. And so, I brought [...] a block of the skin to a pathologist in my department. And she's a specialist in dermatologic investigations. And what we saw was the top layer of the skin was uninterrupted. And the inflammation was below in the skin where there was damage underneath, as if there had been some sort of signal or energy that manifested beneath the dermal layer. And she said this was not chemical irritation. It wasn't a burn, because a burn would have manifested at the top of the skin. I don't know how you would get this kind of damage this far into the skin. And the reason why we know that it was not some of the things that this other person was just talking about is that there was no evidence of mast cells nearby.”

The skin has two layers: the epidermis, which is an outer layer of epithelial tissue, and the dermis, which is an underlying layer of connective tissue. Below the dermis is the hypodermis, which is mainly made up of adipose tissue (body fat). The hypodermis is inseparable from the skin. Therefore, a skin sample includes all three of these tissues: the epidermis, the dermis and the hypodermis. Nolan explains that the observed lesion was located in the hypodermis, with no abnormalities present in either the epidermis or the dermis. This does not align with a thermal or chemical burn, as these types of burn affect the skin from the surface and spread deeper (e.g. first-, second- and third-degree burns).

Mast cells are immune cells commonly referred to as white blood cells. They play a key role in the early recruitment of other immune cells and activate numerous important inflammatory mediators in the body’s response to infection. Their role in allergic reactions has also been recognised for a long time. An increase in the number of mast cells is often observed at sites of infection or in cases of allergy. The absence of mast cells in the skin sample studied therefore demonstrates that this is not one of the aforementioned cases. Consequently, G. Nolan’s team concludes that the observed damage is likely linked to exposure to a signal or a certain form of energy.

The challenges of the scientific approach

In his presentation, Garry Nolan demonstrates the importance of a rigorous scientific approach to advancing our understanding of UAPs. Using Bayesian inference, he proposes a method that can be applied by other teams around the world, allowing levels of evidence to be presented that meet even the most sceptical expectations.

He reminds us that science does not rest on a binary view of truth, but rather on a scale of certainty. Science advances step by step. The more scientists who confirm hypotheses, the closer we can get to the truth.

It is also important to broaden our fields of study without prejudging the relevance or value of each one. Opening up data collection filters has proven its value. The same must hold true for the disciplines involved in analysing the collected samples or data.

Neutron capture: a process in which an atomic nucleus captures a neutron without decaying. They fuse to form a heavier nucleus.

EBSD (Electron Backscatter Diffraction): a local crystallographic analysis technique based on the analysis of electron backscatter diffraction patterns. It allows for the correlation of crystallographic data with the sample’s microstructure.

FLIR (Forward-Looking Infrared): an imaging technique based on infrared rather than visible light, which enables the detection of heat sources.

Harold (Hal) Puthoff: CEO and Chairman of the Board of EarthTech International, Inc. and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin.

Harold (Hal) Puthoff: President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of EarthTech International, Inc. and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin.

Mast cell: a connective tissue cell that secretes chemicals involved in the body’s defense reactions. Mast cells play a key role in the early recruitment of immune cells and activate numerous inflammatory mediators that are important in the response to infections. Mast cell hyperplasia is thus very often observed at sites of bacterial, viral, and parasitic infections.

Source: Dawicki W, Marshall JS. New and emerging roles for mast cells in host defense. Curr Opin Immunol 2007; 19: 31-8.

P ≠ NP Problem: a conjecture in mathematics, and more specifically in theoretical computer science, considered by many researchers to be one of the most important conjectures in the field, and even in mathematics in general. The Clay Mathematics Institute has included this problem in its list of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, and is offering a million dollars to anyone who can prove P = NP or P ≠ NP, or prove that it is undecidable. This problem is also Smale’s third problem.

Robert Spearing: Director of International Investigations, MUFON

SIGINT: Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence whose sources of information are electromagnetic signals

Atomic force microscope: a high-resolution three-dimensional analytical microscope that allows one to observe the spatial distribution of atoms in a material while determining their chemical nature with a resolution of approximately five angstroms.

Grand Unified Theory: In theoretical physics, a Grand Unified Theory, also known as a GUT (short for “Grand Unified Theory”), is a model of particle physics in which the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear) merge into a single interaction at high energies.

One of the most intriguing discoveries in the scientific study of unidentified anomalous phenomena was published by Nature in late 2025. By studying astronomical plate photography, Drs Beatriz Villarroel and Stephen Bruehl showed that “Findings suggest associations beyond chance between occurrence of transients and both nuclear testing and UAP reports.”

Transients, which are sources of light in the sky whose brightness varies rapidly, have long been described by many UAP witnesses. However, their elusiveness makes them difficult to study, particularly in the present day. Aircraft, drones, satellites, helicopters and even the moon when partially obscured by cloud cover can often be misidentified as UAPs.

To prevent such artefacts in their data, Villarroel and Bruehl used data from a time before satellites and drones were used, and when there was much less aerial traffic. However, for a paper to be accepted as part of the scientific consensus, it must be confirmed by other teams and accepted by the scientific community studying related fields.

Recently, three papers have been published confirming Villarroel and Bruehl’s findings by Bian Doherty, Ivo Busko, and Kevin Cann. However, one paper has been released questioning their results by Watters, Dominé, Little, Pratt and Knuth. Villarroel responded to the latter with an article co-authored with Streblyanska, Bruehl and Geier, which pointed out methodological errors in the critique.

Sentinel News had the opportunity to speak with Dr Villarroel about her team’s publication and its reception within the scientific community.

Sentinel News : As reported by Sentinel News, you recently published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal regarding the possible detection of reflective objects in space prior to the Space Age, which was correlated with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) sightings and nuclear tests. However, this paper was initially rejected on Arxiv. How is that possible?

Dr. Beatriz Villarroel : We published indeed two papers, one in Scientific Reports and one in PASP. There is a big stigma in the scientific community against the topic.

SN : What response did you receive from the scientific community regarding your findings?

BV: I’ve received very mixed reactions. Some are very interested and have started looking into the problem. Others still try to say ”Plate defects!”, but then you ask them ”would you please like to explain why the ’plate defects’ are avoiding the Earth’s shadow?” and they won’t reply.

SN : As the manager of VASCO, could you explain what the project involves and how your paper fits into it?

BV : The project has had a “life”. It was originally designed to look for stars that vanish, not transients. We never found a star that vanished... but we did find thousands and thousands of light sources only visible on one single photo. Then we started observing signs that these transients might be flashes from highly reflective surfaces in the near-Earth space. That is when it got interesting.

SN : Do you plan to publish any more papers on the data you unearthed?

BV : Absolutely. There is a lot to discover in that data. But also in other data from other telescopes, which is something our team also is looking into.

SN : Three papers have been released, confirming different aspects of your work. Could you explain how each one supported your own research?

BV : The Doherty paper uses our sample of 107,000 and replicates the transient-nuke connection as well as the deficit in the Earth’s shadow. Doherty has also discovered that the transient-nuke correlation gets stronger when looking only at the sunlit transients. His transient-nuke analysis is further corroborated by Dr. Janne Sinkkoinens analysis.

The Cann paper finds an anticorrelation between the transient detections and geomagnetic storm activity. There are multiple ways of looking at that anticorrelation, but it’s very interesting and provides further evidence that the phenomenon is real, physical and ties the phenomenon to regions near the Van Allen belts.

Ivo Busko has used Hamburg plate collection to search for transients with a different method -- but arrives at finding the same type of objects, with similar shapes and profiles indicative of being very short flashes. This supports that the transients are real and recorded everywhere in the sky, all over the planet, and are not some “local issue” of Mount Palomar.

SN : Another paper critiqued your sample selection, claiming that your detection could be due to plate artefacts. You published a rebuttal highlighting errors in the analysis. Could you talk us through whether that paper fits the usual back-and-forth between different scientific teams?

BV : While plate defects certainly exist in the data and may indeed concentrate towards the edges of the plates -- as we ourselves discuss in the PASP paper! -- there is no physical mechanism for producing a deficit of emulsion defects specifically within the Earth’s shadow. Random noise on photographic plates have no reason to follow the time-dependent Earth-Sun geometry, or to systematically avoid a well-defined region like the Earth’s shadow. That is the key physical point.

The mentioned critique treats the presence of noise as grounds to dismiss a statistical signal altogether, throwing out the baby with the bath water. It uses same logics to motivate the use of a 20 times smaller sample, which is too small to observe any significant statistical signal, and was created for a different purpose.

Despite all this, my team has performed additional analyses specifically testing whether plate defects create the observed signal. These results will be presented in an upcoming work.

SN : What are your plans for future research?

BV : We want to understand the properties and locations of the objects, and turn the ExoProbe telescope in that direction and see if we can confirm their nature directly. The goal of ExoProbe is to use a network of telescopes to identify and examine such objects in the sky today, and also to carefully study them.

Nothing beats direct detection -- and imagine if we could get a spectrum?

SN : In your opinion, what are the three main obstacles to astronomical UAP research today?

1. Much data is filtered by the military under the context of national security. Take the Vera Rubin-telescope, for example, where all raw data is filtered by the three letter agencies before astronomers get to analyze it, see The Atlantic.

2. Enormous stigma permitting opponents to use “any method” to shut down uncomfortable results, including public attacks and slander. The stigma can damage lives, careers of anyone who believes in open discourse.

3. I’ve noticed certain paternalistic attitudes from some men in this field (but thankfully, almost all of the men I’ve met and work with are just the opposite and genuinely supportive and excited about the science we do together!). Nevertheless, this issue can become a serious barrier for collaboration and friendships. A typical scenario is that a guy friend/collaborator is extremely helpful while one follows his advice or lets him lead. But what happens the day one says “no”, or puts a boundary, and follows one’s own direction? Or if she refuses to let herself be silenced for somebody else’s comfort? Or worse, if she breaks up the friendship or collaboration? The social consequences might be very harsh, especially if the guy feels rejected and decides to retaliate. This might include social influence campaigns and attempts to attack her credibility. Let’s try to create an inclusive work environment where we treasure individuality and freedom of our friends and collaborators.

Contrary to popular belief, the Petrozavodsk incident did not start on 20 September 1977. In fact, it had quietly begun in the weeks leading up to that date.

The Petrozavodsk affair is often presented as an isolated incident, but it is actually part of a more complex reality: a paradoxical history of surveillance and repression intertwined with discreet scientific curiosity about unexplained aerial phenomena in the Soviet Union. A recently published article in Pravda reveals that the USSR’s interest in sightings of flying objects was real, albeit managed in an opaque manner and often exploited for political ends (Platov et Sokolov, Vestnik RAN, vol. 70, n° 6, 2000, p. 509).

As early as the 1940s, the Soviet military had been closely monitoring aerial sightings, driven by concerns for national security and scientific curiosity. The astronomer Felix Zigel, regarded by many as the founding father of Russian ufology, devoted years to collecting eyewitness accounts of sightings. His data partly formed the corpus that Gindilis, Men’kov and Petrovskaya subjected to statistical analysis in 1979. However, when Platov contacted Zigel as part of the SETKA programme, their collaboration was short-lived. Once Zigel realised that the Academy’s scientists were not seeking to validate the exogenous hypothesis, he distanced himself (Platov and Sokolov, Vestnik RAN, 2000).

As early as the 1950s, military officers and engineers organised closed-door conferences on these phenomena, while the Academy of Sciences set up an informal group to process reports. Its own leaders later described this approach as ‘inadequate and ill-conceived’ (Platov and Sokolov, Vestnik RAN, 2000). Unlike the ‘transparency’ displayed by the United States with Project Blue Book, the Soviet approach was characterised by extreme secrecy: information was limited, reports were classified and public discussion was discouraged.

Viewed in this light, the Petrozavodsk case takes on a new dimension. While the official Soviet explanation was that the fallen objects were debris from Kosmos-955, their initial silence on the matter and downplaying of the incident may have been an attempt to conceal other potential explanations linked to secret military technologies. Therefore, the history of the USSR and unidentified aerial phenomena is a history of state secrecy, mutual suspicion and scientific curiosity stifled by the need to maintain an image of power and control. The Petrozavodsk case is therefore not just a mere accident, but a symptom of this complexity.

Contrary to popular belief, the Petrozavodsk incident did not begin on 20 September 1977. In fact, it began earlier and more quietly in the weeks leading up to that date.

From August onwards, residents of Karelia reported seeing unusual lights streaking across the night sky at high speed. The descriptions were similar: multiple points of light moving in formation and leaving trails that lingered for a few seconds before fading away. Some witnesses described a ‘shower of rays of light’ above the city. In several cases, these sightings were accompanied by sounds that could not be identified: whistling, muffled crackling and something between a muffled explosion and a distant clap of thunder. However, these preliminary reports were largely ignored by the authorities and lost in the mass of routine reports that the Soviet bureaucracy processed slowly.

What happened on the night of 11–12 September was different and far more tangible. The Soviet government initially remained completely silent. It was not until three days after the event that information made it past the censorship filter. On 23 September 1977, the newspaper Izvestiya published an article with the headline: ‘Unidentified natural phenomenon: the inhabitants of Petrozavodsk witnessed an extraordinary natural phenomenon’. According to the article, at around 4 am on 20 September, a huge ‘star’ appeared in the night sky, emitting beams of pulsating light towards the ground. The object then slowly moved towards Petrozavodsk, hovering over the city like a ‘huge jellyfish’ and illuminating the area with light beams described as resembling a shower of rain.

The Soviet government initially remained completely silent. Only under pressure from mounting reports and the publication in Izvestiya did an official explanation finally emerge: the debris found was said to be fragments of the Kosmos-955 satellite. This was a convenient explanation that was unverifiable for anyone without access to the launch archives and technical enough to discourage the general public’s curiosity.

The flaws in the official explanation: why Kosmos-955 is not enough

The story could have ended there. There was a rocket launch, a misidentified luminous plume and a population unaware of its own government’s military space activities. However, when Soviet researchers began to cross-check the accounts, something stood out.

The first crack is embarrassing precisely because it comes from within. The January 1978 appendix to the Academy of Sciences’ report explicitly states that sightings were reported before the launch of Kosmos-955. For example, surveillance staff at the seaport of Leningrad reported theirs between 03:00 and 03:25 local time, i.e. one hour before the scheduled launch at 01:01 UTC. Similar reports were made in Medvezhyegorsk, Lukhi, Kovdor, and Palanga in Lithuania during the same time period (Gindilis, Men’kov, & Petrovskaya, 1979). Soviet witness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Many were written hours or days after the events, and this factor alone is sufficient to explain part of the discrepancy. Nevertheless, the fact that the contradiction was raised by the official investigators themselves lends it a status that cannot simply be dismissed.

Then there is the question of geometry. In his initial analysis, L. M. Gindilis noted that the westward movement of the unidentified object called into question the explanation involving Kosmos-955, given that that satellite had been launched in a north-easterly direction. An observation from the Sortavala hydrometeorological station, published in the Krasnoye Znamya newspaper on 8 October 1977, confirmed that the object was moving from north-east to south-west. While a plume trail does indeed drift with high-altitude winds, a movement that is clearly opposite to the launch direction cannot be fully accounted for by wind effects alone.

Gindilis also pointed out that, when considered alongside the expected distance and prolonged hovering above Leppäsyrjä, the observed angular dimensions presented further obstacles to the launch explanation. The ‘hanging’ in the sky described by numerous witnesses, whereby an object approached and then remained stationary for several minutes before moving off again, is physically incompatible with any known orbital trajectory. High-altitude rocket plumes can create convincing illusions of approach due to the effect of perspective, and their angular velocity can virtually stop: this is well documented. However, a five-minute standstill still defies rational modelling.

The geographical inconsistency of the reports as a whole must also be considered. The sightings were reported across a vast area, from Copenhagen and Helsinki in the west to Vladivostok in the east. It is physically impossible for a single plume at an altitude of 100 km, generated 350 km north-east of Petrozavodsk, to be visible simultaneously from Scandinavia and the Russian Far East. These are distinct events that have never been examined individually; they have been absorbed into the collective narrative of ‘the incident’ by the press and collective memory.

The key to resolving these contradictions may lie in Platov’s belated and little-noticed admission.

In a later article, Yuri Platov — a researcher at IZMIRAN (the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation of the USSR Academy of Sciences), executive director of the SETKA-AN programme, and the main proponent of the Kosmos-955 explanation — notes that ‘a number of additional effects accompanying the Petrozavodsk phenomenon were associated with the failed launch of a ballistic missile, carried out in the same region at roughly the same time’ (Platov and Sokolov, Vestnik RAN, vol. 70, no. 6, 2000, p. 512). The hypothesis of two simultaneous launches from separately classified programmes resolves both the chronological anomalies and the geometric inconsistencies in one fell swoop. It also explains why no one within the Soviet apparatus was ever able to piece together the complete puzzle. Each department held only one piece.

The question of the ‘holes in the glass’ remains unanswered. Several residents claimed to have found microscopic fusion craters in their windows. However, no systematic physical investigation has ever been carried out into this alleged damage. The preliminary report by the Academy of Sciences concluded that it was impossible to satisfactorily explain the observed phenomenon based solely on visual observations. The atmosphere of secrecy surrounding the fact that a significant proportion of UFO sightings were linked to military launches, as maintained by the military and the KGB, created an overlap between scientific and esoteric discourse. The origin of these phenomena was simply ignored. The holes in the glass are the clearest illustration of this: when a population has no credible official explanation, it fabricates one — and a spectacular one at that.

The culprit was formally identified years later: The report of the first European conference on space debris (1993).

The main observation from Petrozavodsk is the well-documented phenomenon of a rocket plume, which was likely complicated by a second, classified test conducted simultaneously. Soviet officials were never able to publicly acknowledge this. From a sceptical perspective, what makes this case truly interesting is not the lights themselves, but the institutional cascade they triggered: the failure of compartmentalisation, the proliferation of legends during the information vacuum and, ultimately, a thirteen-year state programme on NEOs based on a misidentified satellite.

The most striking twist in this story is not the glowing jellyfish that was spotted over Karelia. Rather, it is the fact that the Proton upper stage of Kosmos-955, catalogued as debris 77-091B, nearly destroyed the Discovery shuttle fourteen years later. The 1993 European Space Debris Conference (Klinkrad, ESA/ESOC) highlighted that the near-collision of STS-48 with this object on 16 September 1991, at a distance of just 2.59 km, required an emergency manoeuvre of ΔV = 0.6 m/s, performed four and a half hours before the critical moment. This increased the pass distance to 14.8 km. The article confirms the mass and dimensions of 77-091B to be approximately 1,500 kg and 3.8 m × 2.6 m — a substantial piece of equipment rather than a mere fragment — which has been in a near-circular orbit at an altitude of around 540 km since 1977. Thanks to data-sharing agreements between NASA and the ESA — precisely the kind of international cooperation that the USSR had refused in 1977 — a disaster was averted.

The incident unfolded as follows: on the night of 20 September 1977, a Proton rocket was launched from Plesetsk; its upper stage produced a luminous plume that was mistaken for a UFO over Karelia. The Soviet government was unable to recognise the launch as classified and launched a thirteen-year investigation into UFOs. The upper stage remained classified as space debris for fourteen years and, in 1991, nearly caused the deaths of seven astronauts aboard Discovery.

The extraordinary explanation given for this unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) turned out to have truly dangerous consequences... but not the ones imagined in 1977.

Space jellyfish

A space jellyfish is a phenomenon associated with rocket launches. It is caused by sunlight reflecting off the exhaust gases emitted at a high altitude during launches carried out at dusk or in the early morning. While the observer is in darkness, the exhaust plumes high in the sky remain exposed to direct sunlight. This luminous apparition resembles a jellyfish. Sightings of this phenomenon have caused panic and fuelled fears of nuclear missile strikes, leading to numerous reports of unidentified flying objects. In the case of Petrozavodsk, this is the most widely accepted explanation for the lights observed above the city.

From Petrozavodsk to the orbital commons, transparency is a survival imperative.

The Petrozavodsk affair is not just a curiosity of the Cold War. It is a paradigmatic case study whose lessons remain highly relevant today because the conditions that made it possible, state secrecy, the compartmentalisation of information and the institutional inability to share launch data, have not disappeared. In many respects, they have worsened.

This trajectory, from concealment to near-catastrophe, exemplifies a principle that is now widely recognised in the scientific literature as fundamental to space governance. Space debris is a global problem that can only be solved through international cooperation and data sharing, the two prerequisites for establishing an effective space surveillance system. However, some space powers still refuse to share the information they collect, while those that do share it keep part of it secret for reasons of national security. Anti-satellite tests conducted by China, the United States, India and Russia have significantly increased the amount of debris in low Earth orbit. In November 2021, Russia deliberately destroyed its Kosmos-1408 satellite, creating over 1,500 additional pieces of trackable debris and forcing the International Space Station (ISS) crew to take shelter. The paradox is striking: the same space power that refused to admit the launch of Kosmos-955 in 1977 is today intentionally generating debris whose proliferation threatens all orbital actors.

Since 1993, the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) has organised annual meetings on the measurement, modelling, protection and mitigation of debris. This international consensus remains fragile as long as states maintain a culture of secrecy surrounding their launches and orbital failures. The USSR’s inability to disclose the nature of its space activities allowed an information vacuum to flourish, which was immediately filled by non-scientific narratives. This resulted in thirteen years of scientific and military resources being mobilised down a false trail whilst the Proton 77-091B stage quietly continued its orbital disintegration.

Transparency regarding launches, including military launches, must become a binding standard rather than an optional extra. The only coherent defence framework against the risks that nations have introduced into orbit is shared knowledge. No surveillance programme can compensate for the silence of those in the know. The deafening silence surrounding both OceanGate and Petrozavodsk demonstrated what not to do with regard to secrecy policies and the compartmentalisation of information.

By Lucianna Henry

Although naturally of a quiet and humble demeanour, Nick Pope was a very high-profile and respected researcher in the field of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP’s), also known as ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ (UFO’s). Whether you have seen him as a regular contributor in almost 100 episodes of ‘Ancient Aliens’ or in any of the many, many documentaries or news flashes on UFO’s that he contributed to, you will probably remember him best for his passion and eagerness to share his knowledge with you. You might also feel you know him personally, as I do, which is why I refer to him here as ‘Nick’.

Whilst Nick is best known for his on-screen public image, he actually came to the subject of UFO’s when he was appointed as a civil servant to the ‘Flying Saucer Working Party’ (FSWP), colloquially known as ‘the UFO desk’ within the UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) from 1991 to 1994. His role was to assess potential threats linked to Unidentified Areal Phenomena (UAP). At first, Nick was skeptical about the matter but his work and investigations led him to believe that UFO’s are a real phenomenon that needs be be studied and investigated. After leaving the UFO desk, Nick occupied other posts at the Ministry of Defense (it is customary to change post every few years). His final posting in the MoD was to the Directorate of Defence Security. Nick took early retirement in 2006, but when, under pressure from the British public, and to follow the example of the French Government and others, the UK government decided in 2007 to declassify and release its entire UFO files, Nick got involved as a consultant and an official person to release 60,000 pages of documents, now stored at the National Archives.

In 2009, the MoD announced that UFO sightings would no longer be investigated. Nick thought it was a mistake and left the UK vulnerable. He was criticised for his concern about national security risks associated to UFO’s. Yet, since the US recognised (after most of the rest of the world) the existence of UAP’s in 2020, and the subsequent congress hearings where members of the military testified under oath that they had witnessed or experienced close or even very close encounters (in the case of a Navy F18 pilot, as reported By Ryan Graves) with UAP, the idea of national security being compromised with UFO’s has been at the top of the agenda for many governments, and Nick has been vindicated over his concerns on the subject.

One of Nick’s well-known story is the one he related about a poster of a picture from the Calvine incident, a well-known UFO incident that happened next to the hamlet of Calvine, in Scotland in 1990. Two hikers witnessed a small army aeroplane next to a diamond-shaped UFO and took a picture of it. Although the ministry of defense asserted that it was a genuine picture, they did not discuss the affair in public and abstained from comments, which led to allegations of cover-up. Nick mentioned many times in interviews that he had the poster on the wall of his office in the ‘UFO desk’ for a long time but that one day, he went on holidays and when he came back, the poster had disappeared, together with the original six photographs of the incident.The absence of proof led to Nick’s credibility being questioned.

In 2022, he enlisted the help of a graphic artist to help him reconstruct the photograph from his memory, but it attracted criticism because it was seen as a hoax. Years later, David Clarke, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University who, like Nick, had also worked for the ‘UFO desk’, and worked as a curator in Britain’s National archives, found the name of the original investigator of the incident at the Royal Air Force (RAF) base whilst going through the UFO documents. This investigator, who wished to remain anonymous, led Clarke to the former RAF press officer Craig Lindsay who had handled the photographs before they were sent to the MoD. He had kept one of the original pictures, which Clarke was able to have assessed as genuine and show the world, in the process rehabilitating Nick’s credibility about the story. Ironically, Clarke was a fierce critic of Nick’s…

After leaving public service, Nick became more and more involved in talking loudly about the subject and gave conferences around the world, mostly with the History channel ‘Ancient Aliens’ show, proponent of the Ancient astronaut theory, as well as contributed to many films, documentaries and even video games about the subject. He was also often one of the first experts on the UFO subject to be called by news agencies for any UFO-related matter. He contributed to works like ‘War of the Worlds’ ,’The Day the Earth Stood Still‘ and ‘Alien: Covenant.’

In 2015, he appeared in multiple episodes of UFO Declassified on Canada’s History Television, the UK’s Yesterday, and Smithsonian Channel in the United States. He often appeared on the New York Post UFO YouTube series The Basement Office.

Since 1952, when the Robertson Panel in the USA decided on a campaign of discreditation of the subject of UFO’s, their researchers have had to endure ridicule, mockery, attacks, intimidation, and more. It was even worse if they dared question mainstream history, or if they reached some sort of celebrity status, as Nick did. So he was no stranger to fierce attacks, including from fellow UFO researchers, but remained stoical and steadfast in his determination to keep asking questions, and look for the truth even if he knew that some answers could not be found, at least during his life-time. People who knew him well said how nice he was, and also extremely funny.

At Sentinel News, we know he was also generous because when Baptiste Firscourt decided to create the organization, Nick immediately rallied support for it through his own social media network, and Baptiste believes that Sentinel would not have existed without that push right at the start from Nick.

Nick has written six books, some fictional ones inspired by his own investigations, and some factual ones where he shares his knowledge about UFO’s.

Nick met Elizabeth Weiss , an American anthropologist and a professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at San Jose State University in2010 in a chance encounter inside a hotel lobby in San José. They fell in love and married three months later, in February 2011 during a UFO convention in Phoenix, Arizona, famous for the biggest mass-sighting ever in 1997.

They relocated together to Tucson, Arizona in the United States in 2012, where they built a life centred on shared interests in science, nature and exploration.

In 2024, Nick joined his Ancient Aliens co-hosts Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, William Henry, and Jason Martell on the Ancient Aliens LIVE U.S. Tour, where he continued to advocate the hypothesis that extraterrestrials have visited Earth for thousands of years.

On 12 February 2026, Nick published the following social media statement :

A while ago, following some digestive issues, I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Unfortunately, it’s Stage 4 and has metastasized to my liver. While I know that it’s kindness and hope that leads people to suggest healers and supposed miracle cures, and to say things like “fight it”, and “you can beat it”, I’m afraid my diagnosis and my situation leaves no doubt whatsoever: I can’t beat it.

What an amazing adventure I’ve had! A 21-year career at the UK Ministry of Defence, where I got involved in subjects ranging from financial policy to counter-terrorism; from military policing to UAP. And I saved six cows; it’s a long story! The things I’ve done; the places I’ve been; the people I’ve met; and the secrets I’ve been privy to. I wouldn’t have swapped it for the world. And then a second career, where my previous government UAP role brought me to the attention of the world’s media, leading me to become a regular commentator on TV news shows and documentaries, as well as consulting and acting as spokesperson on various UFO and alien-themed movies, TV series and video games. The media called me the real Fox Mulder!

The true highlight, of course, is life with my wonderful, beautiful and incredibly smart wife, Elizabeth. She’s a real-life Agent Scully: a scientist, a skeptic and a redhead. We met randomly in the lobby bar of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San José (she was an anthropology professor at San José State University) in October 2010 and got married 3 months later. We applied successfully for my Green Card and she had me shipped over and imported to the U.S., where a new adventure began, as Elizabeth and I enjoyed wildlife watching at our wonderful home in Tucson, desert hikes, film noir, true crime, country music, Sunday lunches with my in-laws, and much more besides. Recently, we had an amazing one-year adventure in New York City, living 5 minutes from Times Square, and having a wonderful view of the Empire State Building from our apartment window.

We proofread each other’s books and articles (I love commas, hyphens and exclamation points way more than Elizabeth, and managed to win at least a few of those battles), and I’m supporting her in her ongoing fight for free speech, academic freedom, and keeping political correctness, superstition and identity politics out of science and academia. The White House Press Secretary tweeted one of her recent newspaper articles, which shows the huge impact she’s having.

I kept working for as long as I could (right up until last week), with my various film/TV interviews, conference appearances, and live events, including my position as moderator of Ancient Aliens Live - where I think I did 94 shows. Sadly, the time has come where I’ve had to step away from this work.

A lot of people have followed my work on UAP. I’m loath to use the word “fans”, because I’m not a celebrity. But I am a public figure, and many people have followed me on my journey as I’ve sought to keep the UAP subject in the public eye, and to frame it as a defense, national security and safety of flight issue - as well as a fascinating science problem. Some of this work has been public knowledge, but some such work, of necessity, has been done behind the scenes. I hope I’ve helped move the needle forward. But most people, of course, know me through my media interviews and live events. To everyone who’s followed me on my journey, thank you - and good luck with your own journeys. I wish you every success and happiness.

It’s all been amazing, and I’m grateful for the things I’ve done, not mournful for the things that I won’t now get to do.

Per Aspera Ad Astra!

Nick Pope, Tucson, Arizona, February 12, 2026

On April 7th 2026, Nick’s wife Elizabeth published this message:

My heart is breaking -- Nick passed away this afternoon at our home. The last few weeks of his life, even as he suffered, he managed to do a few interviews from home. I was so lucky to have met and to have married Nick. He was a wonderful husband. I loved him dearly.

-Elizabeth Weiss

The many tributes to Nick in the newspapers, television channels, social media networks and podcasts across the world and political spectrum are a testament to how he managed to bring a taboo subject into the mainstream consciousness and contribute to a certain change in society.

As I reminisced after Nick’s death and thought of the many hours I have spent ‘in his company’ during my own search for truth on the UFO matter, I realised that he and all his brave colleagues who risked their careers, reputation and safety have changed the world’s attitude and views. A recent survey showed that 61% of the world population believe that other life forms exist in the universe.

These selfless men and women have also changed me, my views and perceptions of what it means to be human, to live on this planet, and how precious and fragile life, peace and Mother Earth are. Nick and his fellow UFO researchers have inspired me to finally have the courage of my opinions, to join Sentinel News and contribute to the conversation that is going on all around the world about UFO’s and life in the universe. The team of Sentinel News echo my feelings and join me in addressing Elizabeth our most sincere and heartfelt condolences

Many of us are, all four of us, are familiar with very, very credible claims coming from people in a position to know, who say they know, that there has been a contact event, a very explicit, you know, very manifest, obvious contact event.

According to Dr. Skafish, not only him, but the other panelists too, journalist Leslie Kean, former CIA operations officer Jim Semivan and former Senate staffer Kirk McConnell, they all know reliable sources that have confirmed not only that non-human intelligence has landed in the US, but also that the US government has had contact with these entities.

If, as previously reported by Sentinel News, reports of alleged contact with non-human lifeforms have increased recently, the possibility that the U.S. has held talks, or even negotiated a treaty, would imply that the CIA’s cover-up of the UFO phenomenon is far more extensive in both scope and depth.

Nothing that was liminal or elusive, that, you know, something like a landing and an interaction to me, if that happened, that means most likely there was an interaction with something quite like us that does have political interests, that does have probably as law, probably as ethics may be very different from us in which there’s a great asymmetry of power and technology.

As Dr Skafish noted, talks with an organisation that is far more developed than the most advanced country on Earth would probably have been one-sided. In a strange twist of history, non-human intelligence may well have done to the US what the US did to the Native American population.

Such cultural symmetry is not unheard of. In his intriguing book Stalking the Herd, the late Christopher O’Brien showed that cattle mutilations were almost non-existent in India, where cows are revered, while they were extremely prevalent in the US, where cows are used on an industrial scale.

And I don’t know how you narrate that, I mean, while telling the truth, and I don’t know how you narrate it, the way it’s been narrated does, is if it just happened once. I have a very hard time believing that if that happened once, it didn’t happen several times. But the version we’ve all heard is that it happened once.

As is often the case in the study of UAP, the release of a piece of information is often intended to conceal a much larger body of information. As Dr Skafish noted, how can we consider the contact event to have happened only once, with the lines of communication established for the occasion never being used again? Is this to prevent further inquiry into communications and exchanges that could still involve living officials?

The silence that followed Dr Skafish’s remarks was deafening. None of the other panellists confirmed what he had just declared to be a matter of fact, showing how sensitive such discussions still are today.

In an article dated April 2, 2026, it was revealed that scientific teams at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE/SC), have discovered an unprecedented set of asteroid detections. These include hundreds of distant worlds beyond Neptune and 33 previously unknown near-Earth asteroids. According to preliminary data, scientists have discovered more than 11,000 new asteroids. This data has been confirmed by the Minor Planet Center (MPC).

In an article titled “The Rubin Observatory Could Discover Corner Reflectors or Artificial Lights in the Outer Solar System,” Avi Loeb makes the following observations:

“In 2012, I published a paper […] which showed that existing optical telescopes and surveys can detect artificially-illuminated objects comparable in total brightness to a major terrestrial city out to the outskirts of the Solar System. […] This idea is particularly feasible now with the Rubin Observatory.”

“Another interesting class of objects that would follow the inverse-square brightening law are corner reflectors along the Sun-Earth axis. […] The Rubin Observatory or other survey telescopes resemble the eyes of a fly hovering near a lamppost and looking away for reflected light from objects in the dark street.”

“Here’s hoping that the Rubin Observatory will show evidence for either sources of artificial light or a corner reflector. Any such detection will surely make our life on Earth far more exciting.”

Avi Loeb’s predictions have already begun to materialise in terms of available observations that may one day support scientific models, such as the Galileo project.

What exactly is archaeology?

Before we proceed with our analysis of this emerging science, it is advisable to briefly review the fundamentals of the subject: what is archaeology? This subject can be traced back several thousand years, to a time before telescopes were invented. The word ‘archaeology’ is derived from the Greek term ἀρχαιολογία ‘arkhaiologia’, which is derived from ἀρχαῖος ‘arkhaîos’, meaning ‘ancient’, and λόγος ‘logos’, meaning ‘discourse, word, study, science’. More specifically, it is derived from the Attic dialect, the variant of Ancient Greek spoken in the Athens region. Attic is often considered the ‘classical’ form of the language, as it was used by great authors such as Plato, Sophocles, and Thucydides, and served as the basis for the literary language of most of Antiquity.

In other words, archaeology is literally the science of ancient things; moreover, it should be noted that this discipline is not the exclusive domain of Western culture. For example, in Chinese, the modern term is 考古学 (kǎogǔxué), where 考 (kǎo): to examine, study, verify; 古 (gǔ): ancient, antiquity; 学 (xuē): study, science.

Unlike the Greek archaiologia (discourse on the ancient), Chinese emphasizes the act of investigation and concrete verification (考). This reflects a very ancient scholarly tradition, that of “evidential philology” (考据学, kǎojùxué) developed during the Qing Dynasty (17th–18th centuries), in which classical texts were verified by examining inscriptions on bone, bronze, or stone.

As a result, the meaning of the word “archaeology” in the modern sense is, in itself, a form of syncretism between the philosophy of the ancient Greeks—more driven by logos—and Chinese evidential philosophy, which likely emerged through exchanges such as those of 16th-century Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci, who adopted a strategy of cultural accommodation, embracing the scholarly practices of Confucian scholars.

After all, as the saying of Ambrose of Milan goes: si fueris Rōmae, Rōmānō vīvitō mōre; si fueris alibī, vīvitō sicut ibi . Literally: “If you are in Rome, live as the Romans do; if you are elsewhere, live as they do there”.

Modern archaeology and deep space

Let us now return to the 21st century after this brief historical digression. As we saw earlier, the ancients were already fond of studying their own roots. The question therefore arises as to how this can be applied to the conquest of space. The subject is immediately more complex, and for a simple reason: the lack of artefacts. Space archaeology is still in its infancy. On Earth, archaeology has benefited from hundreds of years of expertise, tens of thousands of human artefacts to study, classify, analyse stratigraphy, and so on. But when we start looking up at the sky and observing the heavens, everything changes. Human history – even if we include prehistory – spans hundreds of thousands of years. Space, and thus exogenous potential, is measured in an entirely different unit: eons, where one eon equals one billion Earth years. This science currently finds itself in a sort of temporal paradox that might remind one of the early days of Egyptology.

To quote a famous 20th-century statement by Flinders Petrie:

In few kinds of work are the results so directly dependent on the personality of the worker as they are in excavating. […] Of late years the notion of digging merely for profitable spoil, or to yield a new excitement to the jaded, has spread unpleasantly at least in Egypt. A concession to dig is sought much like a grant of a monastery at the Dissolution : the man who has influence or push, a title or a trade connection, claims to try his luck at the spoils of the land. Gold digging has at least no moral responsibility […] but spoiling the past has an acute moral wrong in it […].

A closer look at the current methodology of space archaeology reveals that professionals use the concept of SETA, or Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts, which was introduced in the 1980s as a complement to SETI, which listens to space in search of signals. This approach is based on the idea that artifacts, unlike radio signals, can persist for millions, even billions of years. It thus circumvents SETI’s major problem: the need for a civilization to transmit a signal at precisely the moment we are listening. The Galileo project, led by Avi Loeb, is the most widely publicized initiative currently embodying this approach.

The search can take several forms: analyzing radar anomalies, looking for artificial light reflections, detecting abnormal heat, or analyzing the chemical composition of soils to find industrial residues. However, this method is far from universally accepted in its current form. Milan Ćirković, a Serbian astronomer and astrophysicist, coined the concept of SETI’s Catch-22, inspired by a 1961 short story by Joseph Heller, which describes an absurd situation where one is trapped in a vicious cycle of contradictory rules. In Heller’s version, a pilot who requests a psychological evaluation to be declared “insane” and stop flying proves, by the very act of requesting it, that he is of sound mind… and must therefore continue his dangerous missions.

What Milan describes with SETA’s Catch-22 is a circular validation rule:

To prove that an object is artificial, one must first prove that it is not natural. But to prove that it is not natural, one must already know what natural looks like—yet this knowledge could be contaminated by undetected artifacts.

The technosignature framework is inherently anthropocentric in nature, as it is designed to detect civilisations that resemble our own but are more advanced. Consequently, it fails to account for complex non-technological biological civilisations or those that operate in radically different ways, such as chemical, biological or quantum without EM emissions.

In her 2001 journal article, ‘The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)’, Jill Tarter, a pioneering figure in the field of extraterrestrial intelligence and co-founder and board member of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), provides insights on this subject.

Intelligence is just as difficult to define as life and impossible to detect at a distance. All searches for extraterrestrial intelligence are in fact searches for extraterrestrial technologies revealed through physical artifacts, energetic particles, or electromagnetic radiation.

Missing Data According to Ross Coulthart

In a program that aired a few days ago on News Nations, Ross, accompanied by Meagan Medick, editorial producer for the news channel, the investigative journalist revisited an incident dating back to May 2023 :

I’d also like to ask about what I personally saw in Huntsville at the Marshall Space Center when I was there for the scientific coalition for the study of UAP’s conference in May of 2023. And what I saw in the company of a former wife of a NASA administrator herself uh and also in the in the company of another individual. Three of us witnessed this.

About eight or nine eggshaped objects, clearly anomalous,emerged from behind the space station as we were watching watching on a monitor and moved across screen. When I confronted and asked the director of the Marshall Space Center about those objects, what the hell were they? I thought they might be Starlink satellites that had just been released. He said,”No, they’re not Starlinks.” He turned and he looked at the young lady who was responsible for the administration of communications with the space station.

She flicked a switch and all of a sudden the screen went dead and up came a sign saying transmission to the space station has been temporarily interrupted. I saw it for myself and I for the life of me can’t explain what I saw other than that it looked suspicious that all of a sudden anomalous objects were showing themselves to us on the screen and a decision was made inside NASA to hide those objects from public view. And as soon as I tried to ask the director of the Marshall Space Center about what it was we saw, you know what he did? He left the room and didn’t come back.

His testimony is that of an observer, not a scientist, and it proves nothing about the nature of the objects in question. However, what he documents is real and verifiable: there is a recurring phenomenon of interruptions in the ISS live feed during the appearance of unidentified objects, captured dozens of times by civilian observers since the 2010s. NASA systematically attributes these to automatic technical interruptions. While this explanation is plausible, it has not been sufficiently independently verified. In the case of Ross Coulthart’s testimony, however, the interruption appears to have been intentional on the part of an employee. Nevertheless, a simple Google search reveals a pattern of causal links between NASA and the DoD, which suggests that the interruptions in question may be part of a standard procedure resulting from the compartmentalization of information.

Swedish researcher Beatriz Villarroel, an astrophysicist at Nordita (Stockholm), is seeking to fill a significant gap in her research with her VASCO and ExoProbe projects. VASCO (Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations) involves a comparison of astronomical photographic plates dating from before 1957 (before Sputnik, and thus before any human presence in orbit) with modern data to identify transients: light sources that appear or disappear without any known explanation. Several dozen candidates have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Villarroel’s work is distinguished by its rigorous approach, which sets it apart from its competitors. Rather than offering sweeping conclusions, it meticulously documents anomalies and proposes methods to test them. His team has also been transparent about the limitations of their work, acknowledging that VASCO transients may have conventional explanations, such as photographic artefacts, uncataloged Soviet-era satellites, or calibration errors. This is not just a sign of humility; it is a reflection of the scientific process as it continues to evolve.

The connection to Coulthart’s testimony is less about mutual confirmation and more about a convergence of issues. If unrecorded objects exist in orbit, regardless of their nature, they require independent civilian observation tools capable of producing data that institutions cannot filter or classify. This is where ExoProbe comes in. This project falls within the scope of space archaeology, not as confirmation of a hypothesis, but as a rigorous detection infrastructure for a science that is still in its early stages.

ExoProbe goes further by being a network of coordinated civilian telescopes actively searching for unlisted artificial objects in near-Earth orbit, using the Earth’s shadow as a natural filter to eliminate known human satellites. The approach is methodologically sound; it produces verifiable data, publishes its protocols, and operates within the peer-reviewed framework that Loeb, paradoxically, has often bypassed.

The Legal and Regulatory Framework of NASA-DoD Protocols

If we take a closer look at the mechanisms and protocols of censorship within NASA—much as an archaeologist or historian might do—this actually reflects the reality of the profession, far removed from the sensationalist headlines in the press. The archaeologist will spend a lot of time in the archives, while the historian will pore over obscure parchments, most often written in dead languages.

But what happens if we apply the same methodology to them? Well, we might find things like Executive Order 13526 of the NASA Information Security Program (14 CFR Part 1203). This program, which coordinates its actions with the Department of Defense, aims in particular to ensure “reasonable coordination and consistency with other government departments and agencies” (14 CFR § 1203.201).

The National Aeronautics and Space Act explicitly grants the NASA Administrator the authority to establish “the security requirements, restrictions, and safeguards he deems necessary in the interest of national security.” In other words, Ross Coulthart’s observation can be supported by the administrative mechanisms of the institution in question.

And to quote J. Robert Oppenheimer (Father of the Atomic Bomb, in 1955):

There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.

Or Leo Szilard (inventor of the nuclear chain reaction):

“The most powerful weapon of the Manhattan Project was not the A-Bomb, it was the SECRET stamp.”

The science historian Alex Wellerstein, a renowned expert on nuclear secrecy, is unequivocally credited with a version of this statement: “The SECRET stamp is the most powerful weapon ever invented.” It appears, notably, in his book *Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States* and features on the homepage of his widely read blog on the subject.

To sum up, an outside observer might say that this represents a paradox: science relies on observable phenomena to formulate theories intended to explain reality. When one analyses the actual nature of the correspondence between the scientists who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory – namely Jack Parsons and Edward Forman, for example – one finds exchanges with Wernher von Braun, the inventor of the V2 rocket, who was himself later transferred to the US via Operation Paperclip. He was appointed director of the Marshall Space Flight Centre, which may seem somewhat ironic and illustrative of the tension between the military’s rhetoric and the reality of scientific collaboration, which requires cooperation between people. Yet the mechanisms of censorship seem rather to slow down our understanding of the UFO phenomenon. On the one hand, the military justifies censorship on grounds of budgets or defence; on the other, this very censorship creates a bottleneck in knowledge.

The great silence of the institutions

The Smithsonian, the British Museum and the Louvre simply do not have a department dedicated to the possibility of space archaeology. Within the framework of traditional archaeology, this concept is immediately dismissed as pseudo-archaeology or science fiction in the vein of ‘Ancient Aliens’. However, voices are beginning to be heard:
Kathryn Denning (Anthropologist and archaeologist, York University): Her work focuses on the ethical and social issues surrounding the search for life in the universe, including the implications of discovering artefacts. She applies a genuine anthropological perspective to SETI and SETA.

NASA – Douglas Vakoch (Archaeologist): This is probably the most official initiative. Vakoch, an archaeologist, led the publication in 2014 of the book *Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication* for NASA. The book explicitly explores how archaeology and anthropology can inform the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Although Douglas Vakoch’s work is also caught in a Catch-22 situation, the book is a kind of study that compares elements such as Mycenaean Linear B with what might constitute an exogenous script, yet without proposing a non-anthropocentric analytical framework…

Among the honourable mentions, we might also cite the article: ‘A call for proactive xenoarchaeological guidelines – Scientific, policy and socio-political considerations’, written by Ben W. McGee, an ‘interdisciplinary geoscientist’ who works as a radiation protection engineer and part-time lecturer at a community college (College of Southern Nevada).

Incidentally, it is curious that the term ‘xenoarchaeological’ might bring to mind an obscure parchment from the Imperial Library of Terra in the Warhammer 40,000 universe; however, the use of ‘exo’ or ‘xeno’ stems from a distinction rooted, once again, in Attic Greek:

Exo (from the Greek exō, ‘outside’): refers to the extraterrestrial origin of the object of study. We use the term ‘exo-archaeology’ to denote the study of material remains originating from somewhere other than Earth, whether these remains are natural (e.g. meteorites) or artificial (e.g. potential probes). The prefix emphasises the origin’s foreignness to our planet.
Xeno (from the Greek xenos, ‘foreign, different’): refers to radical otherness, to that which is fundamentally non-human in its nature, intention and cognition. The prefix emphasises cognitive and technological strangeness, not merely geographical.

A science still seeking its foundations

Space archaeology is a field that exists more in intentions than in protocols. It has a potential subject of study—exogenous artefacts—but does not yet possess the methodological tools to identify them rigorously. Ćirković’s Catch-22 is not a philosophical curiosity: it is the fundamental obstacle that the discipline must overcome before it can claim the status of a fully-fledged science.

What is sorely lacking is what terrestrial archaeology has taken centuries to build: a reference stratigraphy, comparative assemblages, an operational definition of the artefact, and above all an interdisciplinary community including field practitioners—not just astrophysicists dreaming aloud in their Medium articles.
The quotation from Flinders Petrie at the start of this article is not insignificant. In 1904, excavations in Egypt resembled what space archaeology is today: a field of endeavour where enthusiasm and media hype far outstrip method. The difference is that Petrie had artefacts under his feet. Loeb, for his part, still hopes to find some.

This does not mean the approach is without value. Tools are being refined, protocols are emerging, and voices such as those of Kathryn Denning and Douglas Vakoch are finally introducing the anthropological and archaeological rigour the field requires. The Vera C. Rubin Telescope will produce unprecedented data. The question is not whether the discipline will take shape, but how, and whether it will have the patience to lay its methodological foundations before proclaiming its discoveries.
In the meantime, space archaeology remains what it is: a serious promise in a field still under construction. Like any excavation that is just beginning.