U.S. to reveal no evidence of aliens, few answers in UFO report: NYT

The truth is out there but the United States government doesn’t seem to have it.

A highly anticipated UFO report to Congress is expected to offer few concrete answers about the nature and origin of what the government calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), according to officials who spoke to the New York Times ahead of the document’s release.

The unclassified report will acknowledge more than 120 documented military encounters with UAP over the last two decades, senior administration officials told the Times. It will conclude that most of those encounters definitely did not involve secret U.S. technology, and that some of the mystery objects might have been from Russia or China, but many of the encounters remain unexplained.

Additionally, the report is not expected to provide any evidence that the UAP might be alien in origin, the Times reports.

In other words, some of the UFOs are probably foreign, most of them are not secret U.S. technology, there’s nothing to say they’re alien and many of them still can’t be explained.

The findings will come as a disappointment to those who had hoped for the first real proof of alien visitors from space. The unclassified document will not provide any evidence to support that theory, although it will leave the door open for people to speculate about what the government doesn’t know.

The document is also expected to include a classified appendix, the Times reports. Officials said they expect that appendix to fuel more speculation that they are hiding something, although they insisted that’s not the case. They also conceded that there is not enough evidence to rule out aliens as a possible explanation for the UAPs.

The revelations come in the midst of a UFO renaissance in popular culture, which dates back to a 2017 report on the phenomena in the New York Times. That report revealed that the U.S. government had secretly been investigating UFOs for years. It also included leaked footage of navy pilots’ encounters with UFOs, which remain unexplained.

1:38 New UFO video released, shows incident from 2015

The Pentagon changed its tune on UFOs after that report, and started to acknowledge and confirm the authenticity of leaked navy footage over the following years. Officials also started encouraging pilots to come forward and report UAP encounters in restricted airspace, amid concerns that they might pose a security risk.

The Pentagon also launched an official UAP Task Force to investigate the various reports last summer.

Susan Gough, a spokesperson for the Pentagon’s task force, declined to comment on the upcoming report to Congress on Thursday.

“We do not publicly discuss the details of the UAP observations, the task force or examinations,” she told Reuters.

Anticipation has been steadily building up to the report in recent months, with several new revelations only adding fuel to the fire.

Three former navy pilots recently described their own encounters with UAPs in a 60 Minutes special on CBS. Two of the pilots described seeing a jetliner-sized “Tic Tac” hovering over a churning patch of ocean off the coast of San Diego in 2004, during a days-long event surrounding the navy’s USS Nimitz. Another pilot later captured footage of a UAP during that event.

Another pilot told CBS that he and his former squadmates saw UAPs on a near-daily basis while stationed at Virginia Beach on the East Coast from 2014-2015.

Documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell recently released multiple videos from a separate incident involving the USS Omaha and several UAPs in July 2019. Photos showed several glowing triangle-shaped objects buzzing over the warship, and sensor footage captured a strange object moving rapidly before plunging under the water.

1:02 Leaked video appears to show UFO plunging under water off California

Another clip appeared to show multiple UAPs on radar around the Omaha.

The UAP report is expected to echo comments made by former U.S. president Barack Obama, who has spoken about the topic multiple times in recent weeks.

Last month, Obama told James Corden on the Late Late Show that he asked about UFOs after he took office.

“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t exactly know what they are,” he said on the show.

“We can’t explain how they move, their trajectory,” he said. “They did not have an easily explainable pattern.”

Obama later told the New York Times that proof of aliens would likely have sweeping impacts on human society.

“I would hope that the knowledge that there were aliens out there would solidify people’s sense that what we have in common is a little more important,” he said, before adding that the news could prove polarizing. “New religions would pop up, and who knows what kind of arguments we’d get into.”

Although aliens remain the most compelling explanation for UFOs, they are not the only one.

One senior official told the Times that some of the UAPs might be examples of hypersonic technology — something that Russia and China have been looking at in recent decades.

The official said that if some of the objects are hypersonic craft, that would suggest that America’s rivals are well ahead of it in that area.

The official UAP report is scheduled to be delivered to Congress by June 25.

It was mandated as part of a sweeping COVID-19 relief bill passed early this year.

— With files from Reuters