US Is Receiving Dozens of UFO Reports a Month, Pentagon Official Says (cnn.com) 59
The U.S. government is receiving dozens of reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) each month. "The office has received approximately 800 reports of unidentified objects to investigate as of this past April, up from 650 reports in August 2022, Sean Kirkpatrick, who heads the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Pentagon told CNN." From the report: The vast majority are benign objects, such as balloons or drones, but some may be the result of America's adversaries trying to spy on the US, said Kirkpatrick. "There are some indicators that are concerning that may be attributed to foreign activity, and we are investigating those very hard," said Kirkpatrick, speaking exclusively to CNN ahead of the release of the annual report on unidentified aerial phenomena.
A portion of the increase in reports comes from the Federal Aviation Administration, which monitors airspace around US airports starting to provide information to the Pentagon. About half of the reports contain enough data that they can be ruled out as "mundane things," such as errant balloons or floating trash, Kirkpatrick said, but 2-4% are truly anomalous and require further investigation.
Asked if the Pentagon could definitively identify a sighting of an unidentified object as belonging to a foreign adversary, Kirkpatrick said that his office is "looking at some very interesting indicators of things, and that's about all I can tell you." But the office, which has more than 40 employees and is expected to grow, can't say that for sure yet. "There are ways to hide in our noise that always concern me," Kirkpatrick said, referring to the extraneous readings picked up by US radars and other sensors. "I am worried from a national security perspective." "The Pentagon is preparing for a flood of new reports as it readies two new portals for submissions: one for historical sightings from current or former government employees and contractors and a second for public submissions of new reports," notes CNN.
"It is the opening of the public portal, still several months away, that Kirkpatrick says could flood the system with 'hundreds, if not thousands' of new reports to sort through."
A portion of the increase in reports comes from the Federal Aviation Administration, which monitors airspace around US airports starting to provide information to the Pentagon. About half of the reports contain enough data that they can be ruled out as "mundane things," such as errant balloons or floating trash, Kirkpatrick said, but 2-4% are truly anomalous and require further investigation.
Asked if the Pentagon could definitively identify a sighting of an unidentified object as belonging to a foreign adversary, Kirkpatrick said that his office is "looking at some very interesting indicators of things, and that's about all I can tell you." But the office, which has more than 40 employees and is expected to grow, can't say that for sure yet. "There are ways to hide in our noise that always concern me," Kirkpatrick said, referring to the extraneous readings picked up by US radars and other sensors. "I am worried from a national security perspective." "The Pentagon is preparing for a flood of new reports as it readies two new portals for submissions: one for historical sightings from current or former government employees and contractors and a second for public submissions of new reports," notes CNN.
"It is the opening of the public portal, still several months away, that Kirkpatrick says could flood the system with 'hundreds, if not thousands' of new reports to sort through."
Intercepted transmission (Score:1, Funny)
Alien #1: "How can humans hope to compete with us, having only two eyes and two hands?"
Alien #2: "Har! I bet they only have two penises!"
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74.
https://www.medicinenet.com/wh... [medicinenet.com]
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Even when they start dropping empty vodka bottles I doubt many will care. Of course, that would be like manna from the sky for some...
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lol could also be sequel(prequel?) for Idiocracy two at the same time. Kill two birds with one bottle.
Told ya so. (Score:1, Troll)
Can't remember who, but some idiot here said it wasn't going to happen, because he thought that if he nitpicked the example I gave that somehow would invalidate the point I made.
Well, look who was right, dipshit.
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When the Pentagon first announced they'll be investigating this stuff, I said they'll get bombarded with reports and wasting time and money.
But now they can get ChatGPT to help them attach each report to a blockchain.
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They can turn all the photo submissions into NFT while they're at it.
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Re:Told ya so. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Pentagon isn't whizzing off a lot of money on these accounts. The office they set up was merely to make Congress STFU. The reports probably go into a database. Only a bot will see them. They aren't something that can be followed up on and DoD has no intention of following up on any reports unless they come from their own personnel and have a lot of verifiable evidence. And they probably need to pose to threat too before DoD will give a flying-rat's ass.
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The office they set up was merely to make Congress STFU
Yes!
Congress is whizzing off money because the UFO issue grabs media attention and makes the discussion about something else besides how ineffective, intransigent, and incapable they actually. Don't think for a second congress does not want to be incapable either. They know if they actually do anything besides pass out borrowed money no-strings attached from the treasury, a constituent might get upset about it enough to not vote for them but everyone is accustomed to 'i can't get anything done and its the
Re:Told ya so. (Score:4, Insightful)
The office they set up was merely to make Congress STFU
Yes!
If the pentagon was really at all interested in the issue they could easily have come up with a system to at least limit the sources or flag better qualified reports for actual review. The source matters - Is this person reporting a licensed aviator? If so What do/did they fly and how high? Do that person have past/current air-force experience, and what did/do they do? Are any of the persons reporting in aviator adjacent roles, ATC operators, radar technicians/engineers etc.. Are there multiple persons who claim to have witnessed the same event?
Yes, this is a silly distraction from one group being hopelessly incompetent - to the point where they can't even elect a house majority leader. The last vote I saw, a democrat had more votes than Gym Jordan, who the front runner, who lost votes since the last tally. But back to the topic at hand..
We start off here with a presumption - that in order to be credible, the person observing must be a licensed aviator, involved with air flight in some capacity, or even better, in the air force.
I don't know exactly where that metric came from, but flying or being involved in it does not make a person an infallible witness. And the evidence so far from the pilots camera recordings hasn't stood up to in-depth analysis. "Witness" David Grusch that said he knew someone that said they saw something. Okay, presumably he knows the people, subpoena them. A common theme is that they don't want to discuss the particulars in public. Grusch knows of a dozen crash sites. Weird that these aliens fly across the galaxy, then can't control their ships once they get here. Fortunately, they appear to all crash far away from populated areas, and have a fondness for the western desert areas of the USA.
Even things like the incredible maneuverability of these devices claimed by some pilots is arguing against them being alien ships, and more likely some atmospheric phenomenon. Unless the aliens are not affected at all be rapid changes in momentum, or the ships have impressive momentum dampers.
I wonder why the aliens don't just announce themselves, most everyone I know would be thrilled, and a lot of anally probed rednecks could strut around and screech "Ah todya so!" Pilots are pretty good observers, but few are analysts. ATC people can verify if an object shows up on radar, but the same goes for analysis of what the thing they saw was.
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That's not entirely true. If its something real there will likely be a lot of corroborating reports. If it's something predictable (e.g. rocket launches, known aircraft, satellites) it will be easy to filter out. If it's something orchestrated you'll likely see patterns appearing within what's left.
I would equate it more to watching the surface of a choppy lake for the telltale ripples from a big fish. Lots of noise, but the stuff you're actually looking for should leave a distinctive "footprint" in the
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That is kind of an ignorant view to take. The accounts should be analyzed for patterns to see if something is happening that may otherwise be missed.
I am not saying they need to send investigators. That is absurd. Run ChatGPT on the reports database from time to time to see if there are any patterns. Very simple and non-dramatic.
Being dismissive of everything is a path to blindness and is caused by arrogance.
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Will Help to Find the Loch Ness Bigfoot, too (Score:2)
"About half of the reports contain enough data that they can be ruled out as “mundane things,” such as errant balloons or floating trash, Kirkpatrick said, but 2-4% are truly anomalous and require further investigation."
Isn't this about the same as it ever was?
"“If it’s a foreign adversary and I got 100,000 people with cell phones who can collect it, well now it makes it really hard for the foreign adversary to do anything,” Kirkpatrick says."
Awfully hard for the Loch Ness Bigfoot to evade, too, one would think. But where one thinks, two don't and will still believe.
"Asked if the US government should have created an effort to handle unidentified objects earlier, Kirkpatrick demurred. He said the new office came “probably at the right time for the right reasons.” But in an acknowledgment of the interest and the mystery of the subject matter, he added, “I think the government as a whole – that includes Congress – should have probably addressed some of this years ago in a more directed fashion.”"
There was congress critter from Nevada who had a slush fund for this for a few years.
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Have you been to the forests of the American north west? The tree line is so thick you could walk 20 feet from a city of Bigfoot (bigfeet?) and see nothing.
No I don't believe it exists but the forest cover is amazing.
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That's only because they didn't rake the forests enough.
If there is a Bigfoot city there, though, we should invade it and take their forest dampening technology.
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Oh I think we do just fine whacking down trees with what we've got, unfortunately.
When I lived in the north east I thought it was interesting when I realized the whole region is a giant forest that we carved roads and buildings out of but anywhere we didn't build something (or farm, etc) is still the original forest. I looked up the satellite map of my childhood home in random suburban smallish city. Houses, roads, downtown. Everything else in between and for miles around is still trees.
I never saw Bigfo
Complete conspiracy theory garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
The news is just reposting braindead shit at this point. Just reading through how these people think radars work makes me sick.
This story reads like conspiracy theory nonsense, where people use their distrust of how things work and their imagination to string together a narrative that justifies something completely false.
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This story reads like conspiracy theory nonsense, where people use their distrust of how things work and their imagination to string together a narrative that justifies something completely false.
Ironically enough I read a significant uptick in sightings as more a sign of acceptance. You were presumed some kind of redneck nutjob admitting you saw a UFO before, because stereotypical assumptions. Now that Government has (kinda) finally admitted that UFO/UAPs (might) exist, more may report.
And distrust of Governments, isn't a theory. The hell is "floating trash" anyway.
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Re:Complete conspiracy theory garbage (Score:4, Interesting)
The idiots can find each other more easily now.
You'd think with everyone having high quality camera phones now that we'd have better than shitty, grainy photos of UFOs now but nope. Still the same "Just believe me!" stories and crappy photos of a black dot.
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The only uptick is in the amount of conspiracy minded people infesting the political scene like hipsters at a music festival. It's possible to both distrust authority and believe that people who report UFO sightings are nut jobs.
If the Government finally stood up and admitted the reality of it, then it sounds like the Government has been hiring expert "nutjobs" on the topic for decades. And paying them a lot of money too. Either we're ALL nutjobs and delusional on the topic, or only some are.
Sure, clickbait alone is enough of a reason for attention whores to start reporting complete bullshit, but in this case the longstanding requirement has been some kind of hard evidence, or you are dismissed. See nutjobs for the reason.
Re: Complete conspiracy theory garbage (Score:2)
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This story reads like conspiracy theory nonsense, where people use their distrust of how things work and their imagination to string together a narrative that justifies something completely false.
Ironically enough I read a significant uptick in sightings as more a sign of acceptance. You were presumed some kind of redneck nutjob admitting you saw a UFO before, because stereotypical assumptions. Now that Government has (kinda) finally admitted that UFO/UAPs (might) exist, more may report.
And distrust of Governments, isn't a theory. The hell is "floating trash" anyway.
Of course UFO/UAPs exist. But it's a wild trip into conspiracy land to automatically assume they are aliens.
And that's my big problem with the current investigations. The people involved are conspiracy theorists of the first order. And they show that when you reach a certain point, you cannot even govern. They can't even elect a speaker of the house, "but goddamit The aliens are here! I know a guy that knows a guy who said that he knows a guy that said he's seen them!"
Next up? Maybe we can have Bigfoo
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Just reading through how these people think radars work makes me sick.
You think that's bad? I know a dude who used to write code for military radar and the mucky mucks literally asked them to count bullet rotations
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>Just reading through how these people think radars work makes me sick.
Yup. I also love how people assume things like photos are perfect records of what was seen. My favorite is some asshole on youtube analyzing the hell out of some compression artifact in a video. "Looky here! That is clearly a missile hitting the building!"
NASA is constantly having to explain how camera optics work and that you have to use artificial color in things like xray images.
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And...as far as the US government is concerned, anything that serves as a sufficient opiate is worth promoting.
Anything to keep them distracted.
They want the Epstein client list? er....Look! UFOs!
Mental health issues are on the rise (Score:4, Insightful)
It's become too easy for crazy people to find encouragement. Self "acceptance" movements are making excuses for obviously pathological behaviors.
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well of course they had radar data to prove it wasnt just light reflecting of the lens, but you know what happened to that data dont you? literal men in black came and took it! and to think! it would have pretty much undeniably proved, at the very least, that a mad new type of aircraft exists! but would you believe those pesky G men always keepin the man down!
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Yea, they figured out that it was the only thing it possibly could have been; a previously unknown type of aircraft that had achieved warp drive using a unshielded singularity as both propulsion and power source, but nobody likes that answer so we just don't talk about it.
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C'mon, it's just a zero point energy module. No big deal.
https://stargate.fandom.com/wi... [fandom.com]
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It was an albino Bigfoot.
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Are there field marks to distinguish an albino Bigfoot from a yeti, or is the determination primarily on geographical distribution?
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As George Carlin once said... (Score:4, Insightful)
George Carlin
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The people who think this tautology is clever are probably not in the half they think they are.
Waste (Score:1)
okay, 2 things... (Score:1)
2. you can buy a remote control UFO on Amazon for $29.99 or generate the footage with AI so we're kinda past all this. Call me when it lifts someone off the ground with a tractor beam in front of 100 witnesses.
It's a shame (Score:2)
These aliens come billions of light-years to Texas to put a probe up some redneck's ass and the government does absolutely nothing.
Think of the assholes.
So? (Score:2)
Is that all?
For a population of 330+ million?
That means that not even 1 in a million people who are alive in the US has ever filed one, most likely.
That means that you're more likely to have been struck by lightning than filed a UFO report.
Should I explain what that means in global terms of those reports actually being anything of actual interest?
Nothing new? (Score:2)
I suspect they've been getting at least dozens of UFO claims per month since the 50s.
just saw one (Score:2)
Geeze, I just saw one a few minutes ago. No, wait, it was just a floater.