President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon and other federal agencies to begin releasing government files related to UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena — called UAP — in February 2026, following years of pressure from Congress, military whistleblowers and the public.

Congress formally mandated UAP investigations through the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2022. The Pentagon's official UAP investigative body, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, now carries a caseload exceeding 2,000 reports dating back to 1945. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed this figure earlier this year.

The cases were submitted by military personnel, pilots and government employees describing aerial objects that could not be explained as known aircraft, drones or weather phenomena. Governments in Japan, France, Brazil and Canada also have their own formal UAP investigation programs.

Yet modern research universities remain almost entirely absent from this conversation. No major university has established a dedicated UAP research center. No federal science agency offers competitive grants for UAP inquiry. No doctoral programs train researchers in UAP methodology. The gap between what governments openly acknowledge and what universities are willing to study is, at this point, difficult to explain on purely intellectual grounds.

I have navigated this gap while conducting my own UAP research. My work developing the temporal aerospace correlation tool, a standardized framework for correlating civilian UAP sighting reports with documented rocket launch activity from Cape Canaveral, is currently under peer review at Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies.

Designing that framework meant making methodological decisions without community standards, without institutional funding and without the professional infrastructure many researchers in established fields take for granted. What is missing is not interest or data — it is the shared scaffolding that turns isolated curiosity into cumulative science.

Stigma is measurable

The most rigorous evidence for the gap between faculty interest in UAP and faculty willingness to study it comes from peer-reviewed studies by Marissa Yingling, Charlton Yingling and Bethany Bell, published in the scholarly journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Across 14 disciplines at 144 major U.S. research universities, 1,460 faculty responded to their 2023 national survey. Most surveyed believed UAP research was important. Curiosity outweighed skepticism in every discipline that was part of the study. Nearly one-fifth had personally observed something aerial they could not identify. Yet fewer than 1% had ever conducted UAP-related research.

The gap was not explained by intellectual dismissal, but it was in part explained by fear. Researchers were not primarily deterred by intellectual skepticism because they doubted the topic's merits. Instead, they feared they might lose funding, face ridicule from colleagues or find their careers quietly derailed. Faculty reported being told to "be careful."

A 2024 follow-up study found that roughly 28% said they might vote against a colleague's tenure case for conducting UAP research, even when they personally believed the topic warranted study.

Historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities suppress anomalous questions not because those questions are unanswerable, but because they fall outside the boundaries the community has collectively decided are worth investigating.

Sociologist Thomas Gieryn called this suppression "boundary work," referring to the active process by which scientists police what counts as legitimate science.

For UAP researchers, the data and tools to study the phenomenon exist. What may not exist is social permission to use them without professional consequence.

Creating an academic discipline

Academic disciplines do not emerge spontaneously. They require dedicated journals, agreed-upon methods, graduate programs and professional societies.

The history of cognitive neuroscience demonstrates how disciplines emerge. Before the 1980s, researchers at the intersection of neuroscience and cognitive psychology faced resistance from both parent disciplines.

These fields achieved mainstream acceptance only after targeted funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, new brain-imaging tools and the gradual formation of academic programs that created career pathways for researchers. Researchers at the nexus of these fields did not wait for central questions to be resolved. They built infrastructure, and the infrastructure made progress possible.

UAP studies as a discipline is developing some of these elements, but largely outside universities. The Society for UAP Studies, a nonprofit of scholars and researchers, operates Limina as a double-blind, peer-reviewed journal and has convened international symposia drawing researchers from physics, philosophy of science and the social sciences. But a nonprofit scholarly society without tenured faculty does not constitute a discipline.

To turn UAP studies into a recognized academic field would require three things.

First, funding. The Yingling studies found that competitive research grants would do more to unlock faculty participation than any other single factor. Without grants, researchers cannot hire students to assist them, maintain instruments or sustain the multiyear projects that produce meaningful results.

Second, shared methodological standards — these would entail agreed-upon procedures for collecting, recording and evaluating UAP reports — would mean findings from one research group can be compared and built upon by others.

Third, institutions could publicly affirm that they will evaluate appropriately rigorous UAP scholarship on its scientific merits during tenure reviews. Several universities have already done this for gun violence research and psychedelic-assisted therapy studies.

These are not isolated examples. Research into near-death experiences and adverse childhood experiences followed similar trajectories, moving from being a professional liability to mainstream legitimacy after the removal of institutional barriers.

The international comparison

This gap in UAP scholarship is unique to the United States. France's GEIPAN, a dedicated investigation unit within its national space agency, has operated since 1977. It has publicly archived approximately 5,300 French UAP cases, of which about 2% to 3% remain unexplained after rigorous analysis.

In 2020, Japan formalized UAP reporting protocols for its Self-Defense Forces, the branch of the Japanese military responsible for national defense. By June 2024, more than 80 lawmakers had formed a parliamentary UAP investigation group that by May 2025 had formally proposed a dedicated UAP research office to the defense minister. Canada launched its own multiagency UAP investigation survey in 2023.

None of these actions has produced a corresponding response from American research universities. Universities provide independent, peer-reviewed analyses that government programs structurally cannot.

The University of Würzburg in Germany became the first Western university to officially recognize UAP as a legitimate object of academic research in 2022, when it formally added UAP investigation to its research canon. Researchers at Stockholm University and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden have been actively publishing peer-reviewed UAP research since 2017, most recently in Scientific Reports in October 2025.

Congress has passed legislation, the Pentagon is reporting on its investigations, and the president has directed federal agencies to begin releasing records. So the question no longer is whether governments take UAP seriously — it is whether universities will follow, and which ones will get there first.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 2021, there was an upsurge in peculiar sightings reported, thanks to people with smartphones or other video gear that captured these strange glimmers in the sky. 

Could these unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) be satellites, technology deployed by foreign governments, falling space junk or maybe even floating specialty balloons or purposely faked unidentified flying objects (UFOs)? 

Or could they be, well, aliens? What if Earth has been on the receiving end of extraterrestrials speeding in from Alpha Centauri who found themselves lacking brake fluid and crashed into New Mexico?

Many of these objects are ultimately identified. Others, however, remain mysterious. 

Nonetheless, in 2022, UAP will get more attention from both the scientific community and the federal government, experts told Space.com. 

Related: 9 things we learned about aliens in 2021

Coordinated effort

In June 2021, the U.S. military and intelligence community issued a report on UAPs. It was followed by congressional urging to establish a formal office to carry out a "coordinated effort" on collection and analysis related to UAP. 

"Our national security efforts rely on aerial supremacy, and these phenomena present a challenge to our dominance over the air. Staying ahead of UAP sightings is critical to keeping our strategic edge and keeping our nation safe," Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said on Dec. 9, 2021, when announcing the inclusion of her UAP amendment in the $768.2 billion National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden on Dec. 27.

Although the new office within the Pentagon, called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, will not explicitly focus on the search for alien life, it will be tasked with providing a full spectrum of intelligence, as well as scientific and technical assessments, related to UAP. 

One of the new UAP office's responsibilities will be to implement a plan to "test scientific theories related to UAP characteristics and performances," Gillibrand said in a statement.

So, what now?

For one thing, there's a concerted effort to build UAP-spotting hardware and to decide where it will be stationed. This year could be a turning point in the study of UAP/UFOs.

UFO detection

One potential major development in 2022 will be UFO detection, according to Mark Rodeghier, scientific director of the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago. 

"The effort to detect, track and measure the UFO phenomenon in the field, in real time, has recently entered a new phase," Rodeghier told Space.com. "The technology has gotten better, software tools have improved and the current interest in UFOs has attracted new, qualified professionals.

"While one can't predict how soon we will gain new, fundamental knowledge about UAP/UFOs, I believe that these efforts are very likely to succeed and set UFO research onto a new foundation of reliable, physical data," Rodeghier added. "And as a consequence, we will have even more evidence — as if it was needed — that the UFO phenomenon is real and can be studied scientifically."

One upcoming initiative, called the Galileo Project, will search for extraterrestrial equipment near Earth. It has two branches. The first aims to identify the nature of interstellar objects that do not resemble comets or asteroids — like 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to visit the solar system. The second branch targets UAP, similar to those of interest to the U.S. government.

"The Galileo Project's data will be open to the public, and its scientific analysis will be transparent," said Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who is spearheading the project. "The related scientific findings would expand humanity's knowledge, with no attention to borders between nations."

The Galileo research team includes more than 100 scientists who plan to assemble the project's first telescope system on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in spring 2022. 

"The system will record continuous video and audio of the entire sky in the visible, infrared and radio bands, as well as track objects of interest," Loeb said. "Artificial intelligence algorithms will distinguish birds from drones, airplanes or something else. Once the first system will operate successfully, the Galileo Project will make copies of it and distribute them in many geographical locations."

The truth is out there

An outlier in all the UAP and UFO chatter — that is nonetheless attracting some attention within the scientific community — is the possibility that UFOs are actually human time travelers.

"The human time travelers model to explain UFOs has been gaining traction over the last couple years," said Michael Masters, a professor of anthropology at Montana Technological University. 

Masters is the author of the 2019 book "Identified Flying Objects," which examines the premise that UFOs and aliens may simply be our distant human descendants using the anthropological tool of time travel to visit and study us, as members of their own hominin evolutionary past.

"I think people are starting to realize that it makes a lot of sense in the context of how these ships operate, how they can achieve such incredible accelerations and decelerations if they are manipulating space-time in their own reference frame in and around these craft, and if we can take seriously the description of beings seen in association with them, how they are ubiquitously described in such human terms, regarding their behavior, technology and morphological form," Masters told Space.com.

Masters appreciates that the UFO/UAP topic is being taken seriously by a broader group of professionals in various fields. 

"The more we continue to whittle away the stigma that has surrounded this subject for so long, the faster we may begin to understand the nuances of this mysterious phenomenon," he said. "Further reducing the stigma will hopefully also mean that more scientists and scholars will continue to enter the conversation without fear of retribution or shame being cast upon their existing research program, which can only help to advance our knowledge farther and faster."

Thanks to the official acknowledgement of the reality of these objects, Masters said, "the conversation can now move on from 'Are these real?' to 'What are they, and from where, or potentially when, are they coming?'"

Lack of coordination

Currently, there is a lack of coordination among organizations involved in UAP detection equipment, but that may change this year, said Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) in Austin, Texas.

"I believe that will improve as we go into 2022," he said.

A number of SCU members are involved with the Galileo Project, and the organization has partnered with several groups, including UFODATA, the UFO Data Acquisition Project (UFODAP) and UAPx. 

"UFODAP already has a working model that has been sold into the marketplace and is reasonably priced in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, depending on the accessories desired," Powell told Space.com. "This system has already been used by a group known as UAPx to collect data. Our goal is to coordinate these activities in a way such that we use a system with standardized equipment set to collect data."

But before that happens, Powell said, the groups need to plot out exactly what that equipment is trying to measure and verify that the system can achieve that goal. 

Challenges ahead

"These are exciting times, as there are a growing number of groups focused on UAP detection and study," said Kevin Knuth, an associate professor of physics at the University at Albany and vice president of UAPx, which intends to incorporate a network of distributed sensors that interested parties can host locally to contribute to UAP spotting.

Still, there are some challenges involved with the interaction of various groups, he said.

"While some coordination among groups might be beneficial, especially in the context of efficiency, the fact that we currently know precious little about UAPs implies that the potential for discovery is higher if the groups begin by working independently, trying different equipment and procedures and watching in different places," Knuth told Space.com. 

As lessons are learned and the results are made public, the various groups will begin to adopt equipment and procedures that have been demonstrated to be fruitful, he added.

 "For this reason, it is probably not wise to coordinate the groups at this time," Knuth said. "Instead, as we learn more about how to best observe and study UAPs, communication across groups — facilitated by the sharing of data and publishing of results — will lead to improvements in general. This is the benefit of independent scientific studies."

Taking a broader view, Knuth said the scientific groups are planning on publishing peer-reviewed scientific papers. The upshot will be further advancement of the scientific studies of UAPs "while encouraging and compelling more scientists to get involved in studying what could very well be among the most important discoveries in human history," he said.

Leonard David is author of "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" (National Geographic, 2019). A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. 

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook. 

There is a spaceship that looks like a flying saucer in Roswell. Thousands of motorists drive past it every day, and hundreds of people go inside. It's on North Main Street in this southeastern New Mexico city, its metal skin gleaming as it basks in the glow of the sun. Its neon lighting burns into the retinas of those who view it throughout the evening, and it's rather hard not to admire. After all, aside from its striking looks, who doesn't crave a burger every now and then? That's right: This spacecraft is one of the city’s McDonald’s restaurants. 

So why is the building shaped that way? It's not that far from the site of a mysterious incident that took place in 1947 — the day when a rancher discovered debris scattered around his sheep pasture, prompting speculation that an unidentified flying object, or UFO, had crashed there.

In June, or possibly early July 1947, William Brazel woke up for a normal day's work on the J.B. Foster ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico, 75 miles (120 kilometers) north of Roswell, when he made a shocking discovery. He found on the ranch "a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks," Brazel said in an article published on July 8, 1947, in the Roswell Daily Record.

Related: Blue UFO soars over Hawaii before crashing into the sea

Brazel hadn't heard of flying saucers — at least not yet. Sightings, however, were coming in thick and fast around that time. On June 24, pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine unidentified objects "flying like a saucer would across water" near Mount Rainier, Washington. Arnold estimated that the objects were flying at around 1,200 mph (1,930 km/h), Arnold was reported as saying in the East Oregonian; but at the time, there were no known craft that could reach those speeds. The Air Force also said it had no new experimental planes or guided missiles that would fit such a description, according to a U.S. Department of Defense report. That story became front-page news, and the term "flying saucer was born, despite Arnold describing the flying objects as crescent-shape," according to New Scientist.

The country soon became gripped, as Brazel discovered, by the sightings. By July 7, policemen and astronomers were reportedly being harassed for further reports, this time by people from New York and other eastern U.S. states; that was also the day Brazel decided to take action. He hand-delivered a box of accumulated debris, which he'd gathered with the help of his wife and two children, to Sheriff George Wilcox of Roswell, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

By now there was talk of a reward for anyone who recovered one of these unidentified flying objects. In the Roswell Daily Chronicle, Brazel is said to have "whispered kinda confidential-like" that his find may be one of the flying disks, so an equally intrigued Wilcox contacted Colonel William Blanchard, the commanding officer of the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), who sent agents to the site to gather the remaining material.

What happened next would cement the idea that the debris represented the remnants of an alien spacecraft. According to David Clarke's book "The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-Life Sightings," published by Bloomsbury in 2012, the RAAF's public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release on July 8: "The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disk through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County."

This was reported in the Roswell Daily Record along with the news that Major Jesse A. Marcel was the group intelligence officer dispatched to the scene. He had gone with Counter Intelligence Corps officer Sheridan Cavitt, but on his way back took a detour to his own home. There, he whipped out a couple of boxes of debris that he popped into the trunk of his car and showed to his 10-year-old son, Jesse Jr. One of the objects was said to have hieroglyphic-like markings, something that stuck in the mind of the young boy, according to a report in The Guardian.

But just as quickly as excitement of the find grew, the Army took swift action in debunking the story. The very next day, shortly after government scientists began to arrive at the scene, officials claimed that the debris was actually from a crashed weather balloon, and Marcel was asked to be pictured at a press conference with the debris. And that was that, case closed — or so everyone thought.

But interest began to grow again. In 1978, nuclear physicist, author and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman interviewed Marcel, who said that the discovery made 31 years earlier was not from this world, and that the government had ordered him to keep quiet. Friedman revisited the incident and sought other witnesses, and his work inspired Charles Berlitz and William Moore to write "The Roswell Incident," published in 1980. Their conclusion was simple: There had been a huge cover-up. 

The flying saucer conspiracy begins 

Other things were happening in the world at the time. Notably, the sci-fi films "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" had just been released; studies have suggested that sightings and belief in UFOs rise when popular films and TV shows make their debut, The Times reported in 2009. Nevertheless, testimonies about that day in 1947 were forthcoming, and they continued to come for many years.

Glenn Dennis called a hotline shortly after an episode of "Unsolved Mysteries" featuring the Roswell incident aired in 1989. He suggested that a friend who worked as a nurse at the Roswell Army Air Field saw three alien bodies, according to TIME Magazine. But the real bombshell moment came in 1994. Could it be that the debris really was from an alien craft?

According to the U.S. Air Force, no. The weather balloon story was not true, but it wasn't to hide the fact that little green men had visited Earth. The wreckage was actually that of a classified project that flew microphones on high-altitude balloons to pick up the sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests. Called Project Mogul, it was said to have run between 1947 and 1949. What's more, the balloons were claimed to have been made up of unusual material — the type that could easily be confused for a UFO. So, case closed? Not at all. 

"The ever-changing accounts gave rise to uncertainty," Kenneth Drinkwater, senior lecturer in psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K., who specializes in the anomalous and paranormal, said in an email. "The first message that went out was unclear. Then they changed the message, and it led to suspicion that something was going on and being covered up. It gives rise to a feeling that something is being hidden from the general population, leading to speculation of possible conspiracy and possibly alien technology."

With such mixed messages, the Roswell files remain open in the eyes of many.  Investigators also place great value on the testimonies of those who were there, many of them respected military personnel. "Every member of Blanchard's senior staff, with a single exception, suggested the craft was of alien origin," Kevin D. Randle, a retired lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Army Reserve who served in Vietnam and Iraq, told All About Space, a sister publication to Live Science. "Major Edwin Easley, the base provost marshal, told me, when asked if we were following the right path — meaning extraterrestrial — that it wasn't the wrong path."

The "single exception" is Cavitt, the retired lieutenant colonel of the Air Force who accompanied Marcel to the debris site. His careful testimony suggested that nothing untoward happened. He said he had never been threatened by anyone in government and that the debris wasn't extensively scattered. Yet, UFO investigators say that if the wreckage was Project Mogul, then this testimony doesn't ring true. Mogul arrays were big, so the debris field would have been large.

"Everyone agrees that something fell at Roswell, but there is no terrestrial explanation," Randle told All About Space. "Project Mogul fails because the documentation tells us that flight number four — the alleged culprit — was cancelled. It did not fly. All other explanations have failed, too: It wasn't an aircraft accident, not a rocket from White Sands and not a regular weather balloon."

Over the past 40 or so years, there have been new claims and fresh leads, adding to the mystery and keeping the Roswell files very much alive. UFO investigator Calvin Parker, for example, recently spoke of his time with Marcel before he died in 1986, claiming that Marcel revealed that he had hidden three pieces of metal from the crash site in the top of his home's water heater. They have never been recovered, however.

Many UFO investigators are keen to stress that they don't take every testimony at face value. Randle previously said that the credibility of Dennis must be discounted because of inconsistencies, and he told All About Space that the accounts of military personnel are not simply accepted just because of their background. "There are some military witnesses who have been discredited as inserting themselves into the tale," Randle wrote in an email. Likewise, there are civilian witnesses who are compelling.

"There are some very creditable civilian witnesses, such as Brazel and Frankie Rowe," said Randle. Rowe is certainly an interesting case. She was told of the crash by her father, a firefighter, who described creatures he had seen. According to Randle, Rowe said she was shown debris from the crash site, but had been told to stay quiet by the state. She says there was evidence her phone had been tapped. But of all of the witnesses, perhaps too much weight is being put on Marcel's account.

"If Marcel was standalone, then there would be some real problems here, but he is not. There are many credible witnesses — men who achieved high military rank, men and women who were prominent in their communities — who believe the craft was alien," Randle said. "We have attempted to eliminate the fakers from those who had information to provide. We have been taken in, for a time, by some of those fakers, but in the long-run it was we who investigated the case that removed many of those fakers, though based on evidence and not a belief there is no alien visitation. The point is that Marcel was backed up by other high-ranking officers and many civilians who were part of the case. Marcel told [us] what he had seen and done, and there was little embellishment in his testimony."

Randle appeared in the documentary, "Roswell: The First Witness." It follows the investigations of former CIA operative Ben Smith into Roswell, and a key part of the series is a journal found in Marcel's possessions that was initially thought to have been written by him.

Speculation continues: Was the craft of alien origin?

It turned out that the journal — which consisted of quotes, lyrics and jokes — could be dated to the time of the Roswell incident, but the handwriting didn't match Marcel's. Smith pondered why the former army officer retained the journal, and there was speculation over whether it may have contained a code. If it did, however, it could not be deciphered by even the best of minds, according to the documentary. 

Smith also sought to discover what was written in a document held by Brigadier General Roger Ramey, Eighth Air Force commander, during the press conference. It was captured in a photograph taken by Star-Telegram reporter J. Bond Johnson, and ufologists have long wondered whether the words they struggle to make out refer to "victims of the wreck." As Smith found, however, even the best technology could not sufficiently clean the document enough to make the words readable, and they remain a source of debate.

Related: Flying saucers to mind control: 22 declassified military & CIA secrets

There were other interesting explorations in the documentary series. A body-language expert examined video interviews of Marcel and said it appeared that he was telling the truth, at least as he saw it. Experts including aviation crash investigator David Soucie were also taken to examine the crash site. Interestingly, the wind currents in the area were found to be inconsistent with a lightweight balloon crashing in the way that was described. 

As the documentary continued, more evidence emerged. Crucially, there was a taped interview conversation between Marcel and author Linda G. Corley in which the military man discussed the items he found in 1947. "I found all this stuff and I was told to keep my mouth shut," he told Corley. "I held on to this premium for 32 years without saying anything at all. See, I was an intelligence officer. I handled intelligence and security for the base. I still hold an allegiance to my country, the vow that I took to keep my mouth shut about everything that might encroach on military secrets."

Just as compelling was an account from the family of Patrick Saunders, the 509th adjutant who is likely to have known about the whole event. He had apparently told people that it wasn't a weather balloon, but something similar to a jet fighter, that files were destroyed or changed and that the world wasn't ready for the truth because it would cause social upheaval. Were the "beings" friendly, he was said to have pondered.

This kind of testimony — particularly the first-hand testimony of Marcel that was chronicled in Corley's book, "For the Sake of My Country" — ensures the incident remains open. The fact the U.S. government admitted there was a cover-up in 1994 only continues to add fuel to the fire. 

Yet Drinkwater says failure to provide physical evidence means anecdotal accounts have spread misinformation, and he remains in doubt. "Colonel John B. Alexander offers an excellent insight into the myths and possible conspiracies connected to UFOs, the Roswell incident, the government involvement and so on," Drinkwater said. "I think it's more about a sense of reality and how it can be swayed emotionally. I'm dubious about the nature of a secret operation where many might not have known about the goings on at their level."

Roswell is a town that will be forever linked to one of the greatest mysteries of all time, and we may never truly reach a consensus on the truth that is out there.

More inexplicable sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) will be released for public scrutiny in June — including a UFO that broke the sound barrier without producing a sonic boom. 

Speaking on Fox News, the former director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said Saturday (March 20) that the sightings are "difficult to explain." Ratcliffe, who served in the Trump administration, said he'd hoped to declassify the reports during his tenure but that they will be released by the Pentagon by June 1. 

It's not the first time the military has released strange reports, and even videos, of UFOs, known in military parlance as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). In April 2020, the U.S. Navy released three videos appearing to show aircraft flying faster than the speed of sound. And Senate intelligence reports reveal that the Pentagon is still on the hunt for UFOs or UAPs. But check your excitement, Fox Mulder — the military is generally more concerned about whether UAPs might be secret aircraft or weapons developed by other nations than it is about finding evidence of ET in our midst. 

According to Newsweek, Ratcliffe said the upcoming Pentagon report will include more sightings and reports of objects moving in seemingly impossible ways or breaking the speed of sound without an accompanying sonic boom. The unexplained sightings occurred all over the world, he said, and include events picked up on automated sensors and not just by human eyes. 

"There are instances where we don't have good explanations for some of the things that we've seen," Ratcliffe told Fox News. 

The report and declassification is required under the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2021. 

However, the sightings may not even represent advanced Earth technology. Debunkers have suggested that the apparent extreme speed of the aircraft in the videos released in April 2020 could be an optical illusion called parallax. This effect occurs when an object close to a camera lens appears to be moving, sometimes quite quickly, as the camera moves, just because it's closer to the lens than objects in the background. (A video example is available at SyfyWire.) Thus, the objects in the video could be as mundane as passenger planes or weather balloons. Some of the sudden movements in the videos may be artifacts of the camera zooming or sharpening the image, Vice reported. 

There are also declassified experimental aircraft that can do things like break the speed of sound without the enormous "crack" of a sonic boom. NASA's X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology aircraft, which is under construction and not yet in flight, is designed to fly faster than sound without making more than a gentle thump to listeners on the ground. It's unknown if governments have similar, secret technology in testing or use.

Whatever the to-be-released videos show, it's a time of unprecedented document release around UFOs. In January, the CIA unveiled three decades' worth of documents about mysterious incidents reported to or investigated by the agency.

Originally published on Live Science.

If you are perplexed, befuddled and bewildered about reports of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and possible visitations of alien spacecraft, you can take action with do-it-yourself sky-monitoring gear.

Given the low cost and high capability of today's consumer-grade technology, you too can be at the ready to document out-of-the-ordinary events.

Enter the world of Sky Hub, a global network of smart sensors designed to snag digital signatures of anomalous events. This crowd-sourced network of smart trackers with "edge processing" uploads data of unusual phenomena to a Sky Hub Cloud.

The driving forces empowering the Sky Hub initiative center on the rapid growth and evolution of machine learning for streamlining the analysis of large datasets and the increasing affordability of artificial intelligence (AI)-ready hardware. These advancements can be harnessed to probe the ongoing, baffling behavior of UAP and unidentified flying objects (UFOs) reportedly crisscrossing the skies. 

Related: 7 things most often mistaken for UFOs

Work in progress

The mission of Sky Hub is clearcut: Connect a network of civilian-owned sensor arrays, use machine learning to catalogue anomalous events, and share this data with researchers. The group itself consists of dedicated volunteers.

The Sky Hub system is a work in progress, said Christopher Cogswell, chair of Sky Hub's science advisory board. The group encourages individuals to join, but early adopters should be aware that the system software is currently in alpha, and hardware changes are still possible. 

The ultimate goal is building and hosting a worldwide, digital UFO database that anyone can access under a Creative Commons License using Sky Hub's open-source software.

"I have long been interested in why certain technologies or scientific concepts were readily accepted by society … while others become flashpoints," Cogswell told Space.com. Looking for UAP/UFOs "is not only an opportunity to make this something interesting, but also useful," he added. "There are lots of reports of objects in the sky that we don't know how to categorize that I think are interesting and worthy of study."

Public participation

Cogswell said that Sky Hub currently has 12 operational units. Most are in the United States, but there are some in the United Kingdom and one in Brazil. For the most part, the units are standard, using a fisheye lens camera and other hardware. Suggested specifications, such as a microcomputer built for machine learning and AI, are posted on the Sky Hub website.

"We don't want to run before we can walk," Cogswell said, but new ideas are always welcomed. The cost to assemble a Sky Hub unit for deployment can range from $600 to $1,000. "We're constantly trying to find cheaper alternatives. We want Sky Hub to be accessible to people," he said, "and having the public be part of this project with us is a worthy goal." 

So far, Sky Hub equipment has captured meteors, imaged the International Space Station and even spotted flocks of birds, what appears to be a drone, and a paraglider. "We're open to those in other fields that can use Sky Hub where optical measurements and characterization can be useful," Cogswell said.

In diving into the UFO/UAP situation, "we are looking at this from a serious but skeptical perspective," Cogswell said. "In my opinion, there is something interesting happening here that's worth investigating. You can't deny that there are people who still make reports of UFOs every year. If it's all fake, in my mind, that's almost more interesting. How did something untrue become such a social phenomenon like this?"

Related: UFO watch: 8 times the government looked for flying saucers

All-sky searching

"There have been several such projects over the years to attempt to record UFOs," said Robert Sheaffer, a noted writer on the topic and a UFO skeptic. There are already numerous networks of meteor cameras set up today across the United States and other countries, he told Space.com.

For example, the American Meteor Society maintains an extensive all-sky camera registry. In addition, many astronomy groups and private observatories operate their own sky cameras to record meteorological phenomena and meteors, Sheaffer pointed out.

Sheaffer's take-home: "The people setting up UFO cameras apparently do not realize that there are already extensive automated camera networks all across the globe. But somehow astronomers' cameras do not record UFOs, just meteors. Those setting up 'UFO cameras' are fooling themselves if they think they will record objects that astronomers' cameras do not."

Technology demonstrators?

Point of fact: In August of last year, the Pentagon announced the formation of a UAP task force to gain insight into the nature and origins of UFOs. The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAP that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.

Concerning the UAP situation, Scott Miller, chair and professor of aerospace engineering at Wichita State University in Kansas, offers an interesting point of view.

"I have been trying to follow the UAP stories. I suspect many sightings are still related to secret, not necessarily classified, aircraft activities, Miller said. "Interestingly, I strongly suspect all of the major defense contractors, and many new ones, have expanded their abilities to rapidly prototype vehicles."

Miller's view focuses on contractors eager to attract U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) dollars by building and flying their own technology demonstrators. "There are likely lots of non-government funded vehicles that have, are, or will be flying," he said.

Cool new things

There are some UAP sightings that are very interesting, and potentially not related to new secret aircraft, Miller said. "However, keep in mind that if we had seen an early Have Blue stealth fighter back in the '70s, we would have said there is no way it's an airplane."

The famous Navy "Tic Tac" UAP videos are interesting and perplexing, Miller said, but there are a number of things he's confused about. 

"Specifically, why is it only the Navy that has seen the Tic Tacs? I believe the Air Force and Marines fly in the same airspace," he said. "Also, I think all of the Navy sightings were from F-18 E/F Super Hornet models. Is there something about the systems in these E/F series aircraft that facilitates a UAP sighting, for example, radar signal processing glitches, etc.?"

The aviation world, Miller suspects, is at a cusp. "We have the potential to design, build and fly new vehicles in months, not years. The aircraft won't necessarily be ready for production, but they can be used as technology demonstrators. I expect companies and DoD have looked at lots of cool new things," he said.

For more information on Sky Hub and the "how-tos" for constructing your own detection/tracking equipment, go to https://skyhub.org/.

Leonard David is author of the recently released book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for SPACE.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Space dotcom, Facebook or Google+. This version of the story published on Space.com. 

Three videos of midair military interactions with UFOs, previously released without official permission by a UFO research group, were declassified and shared online today (April 27) by the U.S. Navy. 

The footage, captured by U.S. Navy pilots years ago, shows mysterious, wingless aircraft traveling at hypersonic speeds, with no visible means of propulsion. UFO research group To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science published the clips in 2017 and 2018; at the time, those videos were allegedly declassified, Live Science previously reported. However, in September 2019, Joseph Gradisher, a spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare said that the footage had not been cleared for official release. 

Today, the three clips — "FLIR," "GOFAST" and "GIMBAL" — appeared for the first time on the Naval Air Systems Command website, available to download through the Freedom of Information Act.

Related: Flying saucers to mind control: 22 declassified military & CIA secrets

In releasing the videos, the U.S. Navy officially acknowledges that its pilots encountered so-called unidentified aerial phenomena, according to the military news website Military.com. 

The three sightings, which took place in November 2004 and in January 2015, were recorded by F/A-18 Hornet fighter pilots during military training exercises in restricted airspace. Unlike fighter jets, the airborne enigmas had "no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume," Navy pilot Lt. Danny Accoin said in the 2019 History Channel documentary series "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation."

Department of Defense officials decided to release the videos after determining that the footage "does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena," Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough said in a statement.

To the Stars Academy, founded by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge, shared the Flir and Gimbal clips in December 2017, and shared GoFast in March 2018. Though a video description claimed that all three clips had "been through the official declassification review process of the United States government and approved for public release," the footage had not been properly declassified and should not have been shared publicly, Gradisher said in 2019.

There is as yet no explanation or identification — official or not — for the mysterious aircraft that the pilots recorded.

• 9 strange, scientific excuses for why humans haven't found aliens yet
• UFO watch: 8 times the government looked for flying saucers
• Greetings, Earthlings! 8 ways aliens could contact us

Originally published on Live Science.

A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence said the Pentagon needs a real-life Fox Mulder.

Writing in The Washington Post, Christopher Mellon argued that the military is shrugging off its duty to investigate weird UFO encounters reported by members of the U.S. Navy and Air Force. In December, the Defense Department released two declassified videos showing pilots exclaiming over strange aircraft that seemed to accelerate rapidly with no obvious means of propulsion. The unidentified flying objects, which look like dark and light blobs on the videos, were about 40 feet (12 meters) long and could supposedly dive thousands of feet in a flash.

Mellon, now retired from government after a career in both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidential administrations, is an advisor to the private firm To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a research company that aims to "bring transformative science and engineering out of the shadows." The company just released a declassified video taken from a Naval F/A-18 aircraft that appears to show a swiftly moving "anomalous aerial vehicle" off the U.S. East Coast. In the audio, the pilots express awe at the speed of the object. [Flying Saucers to Mind Control: 22 Declassified Military & CIA Secrets]

One asks what the object is, using an expletive.

The New York Times also reported in December that the Defense Department spent $22 million between 2007 and 2012 to investigate UFOs. The contractor paid to do the work, Bigelow Aerospace, stored metal alloys from unidentified aerial objects in a warehouse in Las Vegas, the Times reported. Luis Elizondo, who ran the program, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, now directs global security and special programs at To the Stars.

In the wake of the December New York Times story and the release of the bizarre videos, reactions were mixed. Some, like Robert Sheaffer, a writer and UFO skeptic, argued that the whole Pentagon program was the pet project of a few true believers who came up with little to show for all their efforts (and that the owner of Bigelow Aerospace was a major donor to former Sen. Harry Reid, who spearheaded the establishment of the program). Others pointed out that the chain of custody of the videos was unclear, making it possible that they'd been altered at some point.

Mellon, however, wrote that strange sightings are well-known within defense and intelligence circles but that nobody wants to be ridiculed for drawing attention to the unexplained phenomena. The craft do not have to be alien to be worthy of investigation, he wrote. They might be examples of advanced technology from foreign militaries, which would be alarming in its own right.

"A truly serious effort would involve, among other things, analysts able to review infrared satellite data, NORAD radar databases, and signals and human intelligence reporting," Mellon wrote in The Washington Post, referring to the radar databases of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

The $50 billion annual intelligence budget could cover these efforts, Mellon said.

"What we lack above all," he wrote, "is recognition that this issue warrants a serious collection and analysis effort."

Original article on Live Science. 

Believers in aliens visiting Earth's friendly skies via Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) couldn't ask for more: A secretive government group backed by federal "black money," a talkative former U.S. military intelligence official, fighter-jet video of odd objects doing out-of-this-world maneuvers and a space mogul purportedly housing leftovers of unidentified aerial craft.

It all has the feel of sliding open a top drawer in a new "X-Files" TV episode. 

Yes, "the truth is out there," a maxim made all the stranger by reports last month by both The New York Times and Politico Magazine of the secretive Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, or AATIP for short. Along with the reporting, a video was released by the Department of Defense showing a 2004 encounter near San Diego involving two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an unknown object. [UFO Watch: 8 Times the Government Looked for Flying Saucers]

Behind the scenes

AATIP was originated by then-United States Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who garnered taxpayer dollars to start the program in 2007, along with the support of the late senators Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). 

But behind the scenes is Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace, a Harry Reid political donor in Nevada. A hefty chunk of the AATIP's $22 million budget over five years was reportedly given to Bigelow's company to hire subcontractors and carry out research for the program. 

Now toss into the mix Luis Elizondo, the former intelligence officer who ran the AATIP, which initially was under the wing of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He resigned from the job last October, advising CNN post-departure that it was his personal belief "that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone." 

Elizondo also told CNN that the craft studied by AATIP "are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of." [7 Things Most Often Mistaken for UFOs]

Turning point

Jan Harzan, the executive director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), sees the eye-opening reporting as a "turning point in the study of UFOs." He said his organization is excited about the events beginning to unfold "and feel[s] the public and everyone on this planet should be as well."

MUFON has been investigating and researching the UFO phenomenon since 1969, Harzan said. The group's analysis of over 100,000 UFO reports over the past five decades has shown three things to be true, he has stated:

1. UFOs are real

2. UFOs represent extremely advanced technology 

3. Tremendous breakthroughs will happen if we make it safe for our scientists and engineers to study this phenomenon unimpeded. These breakthroughs involve the fields of propulsion, energy, communication, biology and consciousness, to name just a few. 

The recently released fighter-jet camera video of craft off the coast of San Diego "is just the tip of the iceberg," Harzan said. "Our military vaults are full of such videos and data on these objects. Now that the spill gates have been opened a little, it is time for the rest to come out in an orderly fashion," he added, "and in so doing make it safe for our scientists and engineers to study this phenomenon without fear of ridicule or retribution, but with funding provided by Congress and private industry." [UFO Watch: 8 Times the Government Looked for Flying Saucers]

No national security threat

The new revelation about the AATIP is evidence that the U.S. government has been researching and taking this issue seriously for decades, despite claiming no interest in the phenomenon since 1969, said Alejandro Rojas, spokesman for the Scientific Coalition for Ufology (SCU). 

Indeed, between 1952 and its termination in 1969, the U.S. Air Force's official UFO-investigation program, known as Project Blue Book, came to the following set of conclusions: No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as "unidentified" are extraterrestrial vehicles.

Advanced technology

Rojas endorses the scientific study of the UFO phenomenon and believes that all information regarding unidentified aerial objects should be released so that the data can be properly analyzed by the scientific community.

"Remember, the 'U' is for unidentified, not alien," said Rojas, who is also director of operations for Open Minds Production. 

"We don't know what these things are," Rojas told Space.com. "Just because we get uncomfortable with the idea of aliens does not mean we should not investigate when the people who pilot our most advanced technology say they encounter something that outclasses their aircraft. It would be highly negligent not to investigate." 

Another striking point in the recent disclosure, Rojas added, is that the incidents "are very similar to events that have been recorded by the U.S. Air Force and other governments for decades."

Tone of evidence

There is one head-scratcher: Why release this information now? Some see it as a trial balloon to take the pulse of citizens' reactions. Is the public being set up for the really big news about alien visitors?

"I can't say I know why things are coming out at this time," said Stanton Friedman, a retired nuclear physicist and a long-time investigator and lecturer on the UFO phenomenon.

"I appreciate the courage of those former officials who came forth," Friedman said. He criticized debunkers who advocate listening for alien signals "but ignore the tone of evidence of alien visitors."

Small program, little to show

Robert Sheaffer is a writer and one of the leading skeptical investigators of UFOs.

In his summary of recent events, Sheaffer notes that Robert Bigelow has been a strong believer in UFOs and alien visitors all his life. He was a campaign contributor to Sen. Reid and some of Reid's causes and persuaded Reid that the military budget ought to include funds for the study of UFOs. 

The AATIP is a small program by Pentagon standards, Sheaffer said; it ultimately spent just $22 million over five years. 

"Who knew it apparently only takes three senators to set up a secret Pentagon project?" Sheaffer said.

Funding for the AATIP activity was discontinued in 2012, Sheaffer said, "because it was not producing any results, just reams of paper, although the investigation is reported to still be continuing, but without funding, if that is possible."

"They have only released two very blurry infrared videos of objects that appear to be distant jets, without sufficient information to do a really good analysis of them," he added. "So, ultimately, all you have are a few UFO believers in and outside government who were able to get away with funneling a few million Pentagon dollars to themselves for UFO research, and have very little to show for it." [Ten Alien Encounters Debunked]

UFO artifacts

Sheaffer said that what is really interesting is the statement in The New York Times story that, under Bigelow's direction, the aerospace company "modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena." 

If that's true, Bigelow supposedly has actual artifacts from UFOs, Sheaffer said, "and in fact has such a large quantity that he needs to modify his buildings to accommodate them? That is just utterly bizarre. We need an explanation of exactly what buildings were modified at federal expense, and what do they contain?" he said.

Purpose of the program

"Threat identification is obviously an important task," said Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.

"But the fact that this program was initiated at the request of Senator Reid — not the Air Force — suggests that national security was not the paramount motivation here," Aftergood said. This impression, he said, is reinforced by the fact that a constituent of Sen. Reid (Robert Bigelow) received funding through the program.

"It is somewhat dismaying to see how quickly 'unidentified' aerial phenomena are publicly interpreted and portrayed as UFOs of possibly extraterrestrial origin," Aftergood concluded. His advice: "Collectively, we should all be becoming more intelligent and more perceptive, not more stupid and gullible."

Serious study

"It is complicated, and I am still trying to make sense of things," said Mark Rodeghier, president and scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago, Illinois.

The center was started by Hynek, who served as the astronomical consultant to Project Blue Book. Hynek himself was initially dubious of the whole UFO business, but after culling through hundreds of reports by witnesses, he became convinced UFOs were worthy of serious study.

In broad terms, the outing of the AATIP and its investigation of military UFO sightings "confirms something that has been believed for many years … that these sightings are still happening," Rodeghier said. "We just were not learning about them." 

Blip in UFO history?

Rodeghier said he hopes the core of AATIP information that has been gathered can be released to the public and made available for scientific analysis. 

"It would be extremely disappointing and frustrating if these reports are not released for scrutiny. We need high-quality data about UFOs to do better science," Rodeghier said.

"If those reports are never released, all of this is going to be blip in UFO history," he added. "But even if it's only a blip in history, it's still a darn interesting blip."

Leonard David is author of "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet," published by National Geographic. The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel series "Mars." A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

The former head of a secret government program to investigate UFO sightings told several media outlets that extraterrestrial life may exist. Simultaneously, the public benefit corporation he is affiliated with has raised more than $2.2 million to research "exotic technologies" affiliated with "unidentified aerial phenomena."

"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone," said Luis Elizondo, the person who formerly managed the Pentagon Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, in an interview with CNN.

Elizondo said the program had found "a lot" of strange aircraft while it was in existence. "These aircraft — we'll call them aircraft — are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of," he said. [Related: Navy Pilot 'Pretty Weirded Out' by 2004 Encounter]

In a separate interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Elizondo added that his remarks don't necessarily mean the craft were extraterrestrial, as his focus was more on learning about any potential problems with national security.

"If you're asking my personal opinion from here, look, I've got to be honest with you, I don't know where it's from. But we're pretty sure it's not here," Elizondo told NPR. "Now does that mean it's 'out there'? Whether or not it's Russian or Chinese inside, or little green men from Mars, or frankly, your neighbor's dog, I wanted to purposely steer away from that [speculation], because I wanted to focus on truly the raw science: What were we seeing, and did it pose a threat to national security?"

Elizondo resigned from the Defense Department program on Oct. 4, writing in his resignation letter that there needs to be more attention paid to "the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities," according to The New York Times. 

Fundraising for "aerial phenomena" research

Elizondo and two other former Defense Department officials — Christopher K. Mellon and Harold E. Puthoff — have created a venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which aims to investigate "exotic science and technologies", according to its website.

"We believe there is sufficient credible evidence of unidentified aerial phenomena that proves exotic technologies exist that could revolutionize the human experience," the organization's website states. The company has fundraised more than $2.2 million from nearly 2,500 individual investors.

Elizondo's remarks come amid recent revelations that the U.S. government had a secret, $22 million program to seek out UFOs that ran between 2007 and 2012. The Times reports the program is still ongoing, although the Defense Department said a lack of funding shut the effort down.

Also, in recent days, Navy pilots reported that they spotted a UFO during a training mission off the coast of San Diego in 2004. "It accelerated like nothing I've ever seen," said Cmdr. David Fravor in an interview with the Times, adding that he was "pretty weirded out." To the Stars references these reports frequently on its website.

To the Stars' mission is to examine science that was "suffocated by mainstream ideology and bureaucratic constraint," the venture's website says. It plans a fusion of science, aerospace and entertainment to "work collectively to allow gifted researchers the freedom to explore exotic science and technologies," according to the website.

E.T. hunts by governments (and pop culture)

While the evidence for intelligent extraterrestrial life is still far from firmed up, the U.S. government has searched for UFOs across several other programs. Those include Project Sign (in the 1940s), Project Grudge (in the 1940s and 1950s) and the more famous Project Blue Book, which was dissolved in 1969. In 2016, the Central Intelligence Agency released many classified documents related to UFOs.

Meanwhile, independent projects such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Breakthrough Listen keep their ears open for radio signals that could be explained by intelligent alien life. (Breakthrough Listen was recently in the news because it listened for signals from an interstellar object that entered our solar system, but that search came up empty.)

Scientists also search for alien microbial life. NASA, for example, has an astrobiology program seeking to learn the ways in which extreme microbes could survive on icy moons such as Europa (a water-spouting moon near Jupiter) or Enceladus (which has dozens of water geysers and orbits Saturn). Searches for past life continue on Mars, with the upcoming Mars 2020 rover designed to directly cache samples where purported Martian microbes might have lived.

Alien life has also resurged in popular culture lately. The "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" franchises each premiered several movies in theaters in the past few years. In 2017 alone, "Star Wars" fans got to see "The Last Jedi" while Trekkies got an entire new TV series called "Star Trek Discovery." Meanwhile, the 2016 movie "Arrival" explored what could happen after aliens arrive at Earth.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. 

The U.S. Department of Defense had a secret program to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects, and former Navy pilots in the program say they had a stunning encounter with a UFO in 2004.

The New York Times tells of the mission of Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight, who were in training over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at the time. They got a strange call from a radio operator. The military had been tracking strange aircraft in the region for about two weeks, the operator said. Sometimes, these flying objects made sudden maneuvers, dove tens of thousands of feet or even hovered, according to the reports.

Asked to investigate, Fravor and Slaight eventually spotted one. About 40 feet (12 meters) long, it was hovering 50 feet (15 m) above the ocean, the Times report says. (Fravor added that the object appeared to be causing a sort of boiling or bubbles in the ocean, as the rest of the water looked calm.) [10 Alien Encounters Debunked]

Fravor descended, the object ascended to meet him and then it veered suddenly. "It accelerated like nothing I've ever seen, he said an interview with the Times, adding that he was "pretty weirded out." A few minutes later, the object disappeared, he said.

Fravor returned to his carrier ship, where people mocked him for what he saw, he told the Times. His superiors didn't look into the matter, and Fravor moved on to other things in his career, such as serving in the Persian Gulf as air support during the Iraq war.

Fravor's account includes a video — one of several recorded as a part of the program. The video shows a small object skirting from side to side and circling in view of the camera. The Times added that observers also underwent tests after their "encounters," to see how the experience had affected them.

"I can tell you, I think it was not from this world," Fravor added in a separate interview with ABC News. "I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close."

The news comes amid news that the U.S. government has been searching for UFOs, in secret, since at least 2007. While the Department of Defense says the program was shut down in 2012 due to a lack of funding, the Times further reported that this program is still active.

The program was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and had an annual budget of $22 million between 2008 and 2011. (By contrast, the budget of NASA as a whole was roughly $18.4 billion in fiscal year 2011.)

This isn't the first time that the government has looked into accounts of mysterious objects. In 2016, the Central Intelligence Agency released many previously classified documents that talked about unusual incidents, most of which occurred in the 1950s.

While the scientific evidence for UFOs is inconclusive, many people still want to believe. A 2012 survey said an estimated 80 million people in the U.S. believe in UFOs. Further, 1 in 10 respondents said they had seen UFOs for themselves.

In the Times interview, Fravor added that shortly after his encounter, he spoke with another pilot about what he saw. He told the pilot he had no idea what it was. "It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s," he told the Times, adding, "I want to fly one."

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. 

Alien spacecraft and little green men remain elusive figures in the latest trove of official UFO files released July 12 by the United Kingdom government.

There's no smoking gun anywhere in the 6,700 pages, which represent the ninth collection of government UFO files made public by the U.K.'s National Archives in Kew. But the new batch, which contains documents dating from 1965 to 2008, is full of interesting tidbits nonetheless.

For example, the files recount the story of a hotel owner on the Welsh coast who said she spotted a UFO in 1977. She claimed to see an object the size of a minibus fall from the sky and land in a field at the back of her property.

As she watched, two "faceless humanoids" clad in silver suits emerged from the mysterious craft, unnerving her so much that she asked the local authorities to investigate. [10 Alien Encounters Debunked]

Somewhat surprisingly, they did. An officer from a nearby Royal Air Force base checked out the field, and other military personnel made some inquiries locally to get to the bottom of the mystery.

While the investigation didn't produce any definitive results, it did zero in on one likely explanation, said David Clarke, senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University and author of the book "The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-life Sightings" (The National Archives, 2009).

"It turned out that they suspected, as a result of this investigation, that someone had been involved in a practical joke, and that they'd borrowed a firefighting suit that had been on display in a local shop," Clarke said in a video produced by The National Archives to accompany the new release of UFO files.

"It was sort of white with a big black visor over the face," Clarke added. "This person had been walking around in this suit late at night, and maybe this had been what caused some of these weird sightings."

The new batch of documents also reveals what it was like to work at the U.K.'s UFO Desk, a Defence Ministry organization that assessed UFO reports for intelligence value before it shut down in late 2009.

The job wasn't quite as exciting as it perhaps sounds, according to a document written by a UFO Desk officer.

The idea of investigating unidentified flying objects "tends to suggest to the public that there are top secret teams of specialist scientists scurrying around the country in a real life version of 'The X-Files' …. [but] this is total fiction," the officer writes.

In reality, much of the work consisted of performing Internet searches, the officer added, according to National Archives officials.

The files also reveal a healthy dose of skepticism among governmental UFO investigators in the U.K. For example, in a 1978 briefing, one officer throws cold water on the thought that aliens may have visited our planet many times in the recent past.

"One is driven to the conclusion that a visit to an insignificant planet, such as the Earth, of an uninteresting star (the sun) would probably not occur more than once in 1,000 years or so, even if one assumes that every intelligent community makes, say, 10 launches a year," Clarke said in the video, reading the officer's report and paraphrasing his reasoning.

"He basically says that, therefore, claims of thousands of visits in the last decade by alien spacecraft to planet Earth is just too large a number to be credible," Clarke added.

This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

An airplane passenger videoed a mysterious oval white object flying over Seoul, South Korea, April 7. The video has been lighting up the Internet since, and of course many people are offering extraterrestrial explanations.

As is de rigueur these days, the UFO clip was uploaded to YouTube, where it has been viewed millions of times. Some comments say it's clearly an extraterrestrial spacecraft; others insist it's a fake. Still others say it's neither but instead is a real object — such as a plastic bag in the wind, a parachute seen from above, or a drop of water on the window — that simply looks strange from that angle.

Aside from the anonymity of the cameraman, the video raises some red flags about its authenticity. For one thing, the video is not complete; it has been purposely edited to leave some information out. We know this because it begins in progress, with the UFO already well in frame, in the lower right-hand corner. The video camera didn't suddenly turn on to capture that scene; there must be at least some video that was recorded the first few seconds of the camera being turned on or the cameraman pointing the camera out the window. This type of selective editing is common among UFO hoax videos.

There's also the fact that the cameraman waits almost seven seconds before he mentions the UFO to his companion. It's clearly present, and it would be hard to keep your reaction to yourself if you were watching while you were videotaping.

Perhaps most strange, even though he clearly spots the UFO, the cameraman makes no effort to follow the object after it zooms up and out of frame; instead he videotapes more or less the same area of sky for the remaining 10 seconds of the clip. [Video of UFOs Swarming Over Las Vegas Is for the Birds]

While these internal clues suggest something's not right with the video, the question remains: Was it a real object? Some of the most popular explanations don't fit the facts. A plastic bag, for example, would be unlikely to reach that altitude (and would not appear that large), and a parachute could not move as seen in the video.

The best earthly explanation for the UFO is that it's a droplet of water on the outside of the window being pushed up by airflow coming from under the fuselage. This would explain why the UFO is out of focus: because it's close to the lens. It would not, however, explain why the UFO appears to maintain a constant shape. Droplets of water, especially when subjected to high pressure, tend to deform and leave droplet trails as they move across a smooth surface. This one does not.

Then there's the fact that the light and shadow pattern on the blurry white object doesn't change as it moves. It's almost as if the UFO intentionally maintained exactly the same angle toward the camera the whole time — not impossible, but highly suspicious.

Absent a terrestrial explanation, we turned to Derek Serra, a Hollywood visual effects artist who has analyzed previous UFO videos. Serra said he finds several elements in this South Korean UFO video that "scream fake," including that "the motion blur was done by an amateur," he told Life's Little Mysteries. "When the camera zooms in a bit, and when the UFO flies off screen, you can seen 'ghosting' of the image. Actual motion blur of real, three-dimensional objects creates a smooth gradient, not a stuttered ghosting like we see in this video. It is something we make sure we do right when working on shots for TV and film."

Though all signs point to a hoax, it's possible that alien spacecraft technology is so advanced that the spacecraft have the sneaky ability to appear on our cameras looking exactly like faked video images.

This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.

Several videos have surfaced online that supposedly show a UFO hovering over an Islamic shrine known as the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem's Temple Mount some time after midnight on Jan. 28. The videos have sparked a furious debate about whether we finally have evidence of UFOs.

As a veteran investigator of many UFO photos and videos, these images strike me as highly dubious, and all signs point to a hoax.

Why are the Jerusalem UFO videos suspicious? SPACE.com's sister site, Life's Little Mysteries, counts the ways:

First, no one knows who took the videos. In UFO reports, as in police investigations, anonymous reports are usually a red flag that something's bogus. There are very few legitimate reasons why a genuine witness would not want to be identified. (For example, fear of reprisals from gang members or the mafia; though it seems unlikely that the aliens threatened anyone to keep quiet.)

If you were one of the first people in the world to capture some of the most amazing video footage of a UFO taken in the past decade, why would you post it anonymously on YouTube instead of either submitting it to professional analysis, or making money by selling it to CNN or MSNBC? (In fact, there's some speculation that most or all of the videos were actually posted by a single person, which would guarantee a hoax.) Surely at least one of the videographers -- or someone working with them — would have come forward in the past 10 days to sell their story to a newspaper or tabloid. Suspicious.

Second, not only do we not know who took the footage, but no one other than the videographers reported having seen the lights. The Dome of the Rock is one of the most famous and important religious sites in the world, and there are well over a million people in Jerusalem at any given time—many of them religious tourists near the Temple Mount. It's probable that there were thousands of people in the area at the time, yet no one else reported seeing or videotaping the bright light? Very suspicious.

Third, though one woman can be heard in a videotape saying that the mysterious light was so bright that "you can almost hardly look at it," the object does not seem to reflect any light from the gold-plated dome below it. This is very mysterious indeed, and strongly suggests that the "UFO" light was digitally inserted into the scene. (Note also that a generic light would be among the easiest "UFOs" to fake; you don't need to worry about drawing or animating spaceship windows or wings or shadows on the craft itself.) Super suspicious.

Then there's the strangely small size of the supposed alien aircraft, which can be roughly determined by comparing it to the size of the Dome over which it hovers. The UFO appears to be no more than about fifteen feet long, which seems awfully small for a spacecraft that presumably made it across the universe for its camera cameo.

For anyone who still sees a UFO through the sea of red flags, there's the video analysis that shows evidence of fakery. Robert Sheaffer, a longtime skeptical UFO investigator and author of the Bad UFOs blog told Life's Little Mysteries that, "the original Jerusalem UFO has now been definitely shown to be a hoax. Effects of the video processing software are clearly seen. The hoaxer used Motion Tile effects with edge mirroring to introduce camera shake into the video. You can see the mirroring effects along the edge of the video. This proves that the video did not go directly from the camera to YouTube, that it made a stop in between inside a sophisticated video editing software suite. Once you start editing it like that, a skilled hoaxer can put practically anything in it."

The Jerusalem UFO videos have created much controversy since they first appeared, with many believers vigorously defending the videos as real. They dismiss skeptical explanations such as these, but do not offer any better analysis. In science, of course, it's not enough to simply criticize a theory or explanation — critics are expected to put forth a better solution that fits the facts.

The appearance of the UFO over Jerusalem is ironic; for many, belief in UFOs is based on faith, not evidence.

Benjamin Radford is managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and author of Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries. His web site is: www.RadfordBooks.com.

Life's Little Mysteries is a sister site of SPACE.com.

It seems likely that a mysterious set of UFO lights that appeared over Phoenix, Arizona last year made an unexpected reappearance over New Jersey on Monday night.

Strange lights appeared over New Jersey's Morris County on the evening of Jan. 5, according to a local TV station's report. The bright red lights were first noticed in the night sky by an eleven-year-old girl, who pointed out three lights grouped together, and another pair some distance away. The lights moved silently and slowly, then disappeared one by one. 

The girl's mother, Cindy Hurley, said it was "unsettling...something you've never seen before, and a very strange pattern." Paul Hurley, a pilot, said he was baffled: "I've been in aviation for 20 years and never seen anything like it." The local airport didn't report anything unusual on radar, and police fielded calls from alarmed residents.

Clues about the identity of the New Jersey UFO can be found in a case of identical, mysterious lights seen over Phoenix last year.

Phoenix Lights Revisited

On April 21, 2008, hundreds of Phoenix residents called police and local news media to report bright red lights hovering silently over the city. They changed shape after a while, moving from a triangular to rectangular configuration, then disappeared one by one. As in the New Jersey case, the local airport reported that nothing appeared on radar scans of the area.

So what were they?

The fact that the two cases are identical in virtually every way suggests that the same UFO appeared. (Of course since UFOs don't have registration numbers painted on the fuselage, it's impossible to be certain, but eyewitnesses reported seeing the same thing.)

In the Phoenix case, the UFO became an IFO, an Identified Flying Object. The 2008 Phoenix Lights case was a hoax, created by road flares tied to helium balloons. The hoaxer admitted it, and eyewitnesses reported seeing him do it.

In both cases, all the evidence points to a hoax: The lights moved independently like floating objects, not fixed lights on an aircraft; they moved together in the same direction as the wind; they did not show up on radar; and the lights extinguished in exactly the pattern we would expect from flares, going out one by one.

And isn't it interesting that red is the most common color of road flares?

But wait, there's more ...

Possible confirmation of the hoax hypothesis came from another New Jersey eyewitness, one who got a closer look at the lights than the Hurley family. In a call to the police, the man reported "balloons with these five lights flying over right now."

It's not surprising that eyewitnesses, including a pilot, could not identify the objects, since most people have not seen road flares tied to balloons in the night sky. There's no reason a pilot, or anyone else, would recognize it: The lights literally were nothing they had ever seen before — but not necessarily anything extraterrestrial.

Will someone come forth in the following days admitting their copycat prank? Possibly. While some hoaxers do it for the notoriety, many just do it for fun, eagerly watching the news reports quoting excited and baffled eyewitnesses. Of course, the conspiracy minded don't like simple explanations. For some it's easier to believe that an alien spaceship caused the lights than a hoaxer with flares, helium balloons, and some free time.

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Benjamin Radford is managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer science magazine. His books, films, and other projects can be found on his website. His Bad Science column appears regularly on LiveScience.