September 26, 2024
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What really happened in the Pentagon’s once-hidden UFO office?
A Department of Defense office investigated UFOs and paranormal activity more than a decade ago, leading to a long saga that leads to today’s Congressional hearings and breathtaking news stories. But the real story appears to be less about an alien cover-up and more about former defense officials pushing their own personal myths.
Historic photo of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.
ClassicStock/Alamy Stock Photo
After a long hiatus in U.S. government-related systematic UFO research, the Department of Defense quietly resumed such efforts in 2008. The program, called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP), received a total of $22 million in funding. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s survival and cancellation after four years have been the subject of Congressional hearings that have highlighted UFO “whistleblower” claims and renewed public buzz about aliens. But the real story is more gruesome than sensational.
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense established an entirely new, independent All-Area Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate military reports of UFOs, now referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). Now, AARO offers the government a unique opportunity to get the UFO problem right once and for all, but not in the way some of the more hardline alien believers would like.
My new office is full. Congressional hearings last year heard claims of what appears to be the recovery of alien technology and a decades-long cover-up of the existence of ETs on Earth. These claims are included in a new book. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s UFO huntThe article, by former military counterintelligence officer Luis Elizondo, is gaining new attention among podcasters and serious news organizations alike.
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Investigating these unverifiable fables about aliens should be done away with as a fool’s errand for AARO, which earlier this year published a historical review destroying this long-running conspiracy theory. office genuine The value from a technical perspective shows how UFO sighting reports can be resolved with modern technology and tools, complementing years of fact-checking and investigation, and how high-tech sensors can be used to track and resolve UFOs in real time. There is a particular thing. Rather than relying on the next-best eyewitness accounts that fill bookshelves and cable news specials.
Government-themed conspiracy theories have been part of the UFO landscape for decades, but recent “whistleblower” testimony to a Congressional committee gives these testimonies unprecedented veracity. was given. But while far from a scientific revolution, as long-time UFO researchers claim, we believe there is an almost religious element to UFOs, including some former AAWSAP insiders. The same core group of supporters is pushing the narrative of hidden alien “inhuman intelligence.” Or an interdimensional being.
Although AAWSAP was officially intended to study future aerospace threats, it was in fact a UFO/paranormal investigation operation, a fact confirmed in AARO’s historical report. Controversy has surrounded the office since a questionable paper was published in 2017 new york times The article identified it as the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP). The acronym soup confusion over this name was further exacerbated by Elizondo, who adopted the AATIP label for his own unofficial follow-on activities at the Department of Defense after the end of AAWSAP in 2012.
AAWSAP’s output includes 38 “Defense Intelligence Reference Documents” prepared by scientists contracted to mogul and UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow, as well as other reports described in two books. It was included. The latter report included an unpublished database of international UFO incidents, investigations and discoveries at the “creepy” Skinwalker Ranch in Utah that Bigelow once owned, and monthly reports allegedly delivered to the DIA. and “10 Monthly Report” on page 494. ” is packed with charts, graphs, and research. There are good reasons to question the quality and objectivity of these reports.
Mr. Elizondo’s efforts, despite countless media and podcast appearances, have not produced any publicly accessible research or artifacts that substantiate his claims regarding the UFO cover-up. Although these may come to light, “AARO’s inaccurate claims that the USG (United States Government) is reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology and hiding it from Congress are primarily based on “Despite the lack of evidence, we believe this to be the case,” the agency concluded in a recent report.
This entire story shows how pseudoscientific thinking can metastasize in a positive feedback loop and ensnare not only scientists with paranormal tendencies but also government officials. . Former AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick lamented this, saying that these officials are tasked with matters of national urgency, and that their responsibilities require a commitment to objective investigation and analysis. said. Some of these officials have gone on record as casting AARO as part of a “cover-up.” In fact, the UFO belief system long ago turned into a type of faith that requires no evidence.
Extraterrestrial life and “high strangeness” (a term first popularized by UFOlogists in the early 1970s to describe certain strange and seemingly absurd elements in some UFO and “alien” encounters) The fact that officials are entrusted with national security matters, harboring beliefs about which there is insufficient evidence, should give pause. As long as America’s adversaries are paying attention to the UFO scandal, they may well see it as yet another way to undermine American institutions. To some extent this reflects the CIA committee’s 1953 warning about the potential exploitation of the genre by the Soviet Union.
On a more positive note, UFOlogy is currently popular among historians trying to understand the world. mythical We report on the nature of the problem and how it relates to waves of historical aviation phenomena. The UFO phenomenon since 1947 has been amplified by how modern media, especially today’s digital media, amplifies the voices of breathless advocates, various fraudsters, and scientists interested in the paranormal. It gained much more gravity than the previous scares and waves. It’s been around for centuries.
Many serious people dismiss UFOs as a special interest or pop culture distraction. Yes, that’s right. But we, along with a growing number of academics, argue that there is much to learn from studying UFO sightings, flapping, and waves. Although we stress that, in our own opinion, UFOs or UAPs do not represent truly extraordinary physical phenomena such as extraterrestrial beings, this does not mean that UFOlogy is not important. We should explore its meaning, rather than ceding it to sensational proponents who employ shoddy methodologies and impose quasi-religious, otherworldly narratives. AARO and the academic community therefore have an important responsibility to generate potentially original and interesting developments in how and why people interpret and respond to what they see in the sky.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. scientific american.
