Watch this space
Last month, the Pentagon confirmed that a UFO video — filmed by a US Navy pilot in 2019, and leaked two years later — was, in fact, the real deal. Now, the Director of National Intelligence looks set to reveal yet more previously-classified UFO info, via an unclassified report that’s reportedly headed to Congress in June.
Compiled from files that were previously kept hidden away from the public eye, the report is said to focus on UFO sightings and reported contact over the last few decades, with the aim of determining whether they constitute a threat to the US.
The Pentagon previously announced its plans to make such findings public in July 2020, promising to disclose new discoveries every six months. In December, meanwhile, US senator Marco Rubio backed a formal investigation, telling 60 Minutes: “I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously.”
“I want us to have a process to analyze the data every time it comes in. There (should) be a place where this is catalogued and constantly analyzed until we get some answers. Maybe it has a very simple answer. Maybe it doesn’t.”
Admittedly, it’s likely that many of these publicly-released findings will have fairly boring explanations — the real X-Files stuff will remain locked down in Area 51, obviously — but the announcement marked a breakthrough for alien enthusiasts, who have historically been frustrated by the lack of transparency.
Some have also speculated that, while an outright confirmation of advanced extraterrestrials is unlikely, the imminent report might not completely rule them out, offering a form of “soft disclosure”.
The report (which Deadline reports could arrive as soon as June 1) comes in the wake of increased speculation about UFOs, spurred on by Barack Obama and former US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who recently told the New Yorker that he believed UFO parts were in the hands of defense contractors.
In January this year, the US government also released hundreds of CIA documents about UFOs for the public to download for free, claiming that they contained all of the agency’s information on unidentified flying objects dating back to the 1980s.
Asked why restrictions on UFO-related information are being relaxed now, David Clarke, curator of The National Archives UFO project and lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, suggests that it’s simply because of public pressure. “People have been bombarding the US Navy and Air Force with Freedom of Information requests asking for (the videos) to be declassified,” he told Dazed in 2020. “That’s why they’ve released them.”