“There are a lot more UFOs than the public knows,” says former government intelligence officer
A former top intelligence official raised expectations on Friday for a future US government disclosure about what it knows about UFOs.
John Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump, was asked on Fox News by presenter Maria Bartiromo what he knew about unidentified flying objects that have captured people’s imaginations for generations.
“There are a lot more sightings than reported,” Ratcliffe said. “Some of them were disqualified. And when we talk about sightings, we’re talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been captured by satellite imagery that frankly engage in hard-to-explain actions. Movements that are difficult to replicate and for which we don’t have the technology. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom. ”
After saying there have been sightings all over the world, Ratcliffe insisted that reports of “unidentified aerial phenomena” already known to the public are only part of the bigger picture.
“When we talk about sightings, the other thing I will say is it’s not just a pilot or just a satellite, or some collection of intelligence,” Ratcliffe said. “Usually we have a number of sensors that pick up on these things and … some of them are unexplained phenomena and actually there are some more than what have been reported.”
The release is expected to happen sometime between now and June 1, according to Bartiromo. That’s thanks to the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill that Trump signed into law in December, which contained the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 that contained a “Committee Comments” section that addressed “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena . ”
The panel’s guideline stipulates that the report must identify, among other things, any threats posed by unidentified aerial phenomena and whether they can be attributed to foreign adversaries. “The report must be submitted in an unclassified form, but may include a classified annex,” the committee wrote.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed to Snopes that the COVID-19 relief legislation has set in motion a 180-day countdown for the secretary of defense and director of national intelligence to present to Congressional intelligence and military committees the what the US government knows about UFOs.
Ratcliffe, who as national intelligence director from May 2020 to January 20 oversaw the US intelligence community, said officials always look for a “plausible explanation” but sometimes it just doesn’t exist.
“The weather can cause disturbances, visual disturbances. We sometimes wonder whether or not our adversaries have technologies that are a little further along than we thought or imagined,” he said. “But there are cases where we don’t have good explanations for some of the things we’ve seen.”
Avril Haines is now the director of national intelligence in the Biden administration.
The Department of Defense announced in September that then-Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist approved the creation of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force on August 4, and the government group would be led by the Navy under the “knowledge” of the Cabinet. of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
Navy videos were released last year through the Freedom of Information Act that showed UFOs moving at incredible speeds and performing seemingly impossible aerial maneuvers. One of the videos was filmed in November 2004; the other two were filmed in January 2015. The three videos were codenamed “FLIR1”, “Gimbal” and “GoFast”.
In the 2015 videos, Navy pilots can be heard expressing disbelief. All three UFO videos were captured by Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets.
The videos were made public and published due to the efforts of the New York Times , as well as through the efforts of To The Stars Academy, which was founded by Tom Delonge, the founder and lead singer of the bands Blink-182 and Angels & Airwaves.
Ratcliffe said it would be “healthy” for as much of this information as possible to be made public. He also said he wanted to “disclose” this information before leaving office, but noted, “We weren’t able to get it into an unclassified format that we could quickly talk about.”
Ratcliffe is not the only former member of the US intelligence community to speak out about UFOs in recent months.
Former CIA Director John Brennan said in a podcast with US economist Tyler Cowen in December that the videos of Navy pilots “are startling when you look at them.”
Brennan also said that he thinks that “some of the phenomena that we are going to see remain unexplained and may actually be some kind of phenomenon that is a result of something we don’t yet understand and that may involve some kind of activity that some might say constitutes a different way of life.
