Pentagon's UFO Report Due Today
June 25, 2021
(CNET) People around the world have spotted unexplained and unidentified flying objects for centuries, and for at least the last several decades in the US, many have suspected the government is hiding what it knows about UFOs. The US intelligence community may finally reveal some of those secrets to Congress when it delivers a mandatory, unclassified report that will be available to the public.
There are some caveats, though. Here are some key things to know before the highly anticipated report drops sometime between now and Friday, June 25.
Where did the Pentagon UFO report come from?
For years, pilots and other military personnel have been encountering strange things in the sky that have come to be called "unidentified aerial phenomena." The change from "UFO" to "UAP" is in part a nod to the likelihood that some of the incidents may be explained by technical glitches or environmental phenomena rather than actual tangible objects.
Anyhow, these reports sometimes get back to members of Congress, who then make a push for more investigations and disclosures about those phenomena. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was particularly dedicated to this cause. In 2007 he helped funnel funds to a secret Pentagon initiative, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, that ran through at least 2012. In 2017, former head of AATIP Luis Elizondo announced he had left the government and was joining the private To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences along with former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge.
Elizondo also in 2017 leaked three now famous videos of military encounters with UAP to the media, and in 2020 the US Navy confirmed the veracity of these clips.
It was in the wake of the Navy's acknowledgement of UAP last year that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio added a section to a funding bill requiring the Director of National Intelligence to work with the military and intelligence community to submit a report "on unidentified aerial phenomena (also known as 'anomalous aerial vehicles'), including observed airborne objects that have not been identified."
The request specifically calls out data from the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which is the successor entity to AATIP.
Story by Eric Mack for CNET.
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