On the Way to Fuller Lodge

What would become one of history’s more interesting conversations began with Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and Herbert York walking toward the dining hall. The topic of discussion had turned to the “Flying Saucers” that had so-dominated public consciousness in the later days of 1949.2 That December, retired Naval Aviator, Donald Keyhoe had drawn on his military contacts to write an article called “The Flying Saucers are Real.”3 His broad argument - that the UFO Phenomenon was a real thing and that the military was withholding information from the public - evolved into a book of the same name published in June 1950.4 Though it’s unclear to what extent Keyhoe’s work contributed to this conversation, it was certainly well-timed as a potential catalyst.  

Later that summer, at least three of the United States’ top physicists were interested enough to have their own sidebar on whether or not the flying saucers were, in fact, “real.” Years later, Edward Teller would recall their early conversation as “superficial” and reaching a general agreement that they were not, though his memory was not exactly shared by the other physicists at the time (more on that later).5

As they continued their walk, they were joined by a fourth physicist, Emil Konopinski. Konopinski had recently read an issue of The New Yorker, where a cartoon in classic New Yorker style had depicted extra-terrestrials stealing all the municipal garbage cans in the city. There had been a rash of garbage can thefts at the time and Konopinski offered the little green men depicted in the cartoon as a plausible explanation. Fermi joked that “it was a very plausible theory since it accounted for two separate phenomena: the reports of flying saucers as well as the disappearance of trash cans.”6

But as physicists are want to do, the conversation soon devolved into physics. There was a lively discussion on whether or not flying saucers, if real, could exceed the speed of light. There were odds assigned. Calculations exchanged. There was the lunch order. And eventually, the conversation switched to other down to earth topics.7

At the Table

By the time the four men had sat down, the conversation had moved on in a way that Enrico Fermi clearly hadn’t. With a lingering curiosity shared by many, he steered his friends right back onto the topic they had started with by suddenly blurting out: “Do you ever wonder where everybody is? Where is everybody?” Edward Teller would recall that “the result of his question was general laughter because … in spite of Fermi’s question coming from the clear blue, everybody at the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about extra-terrestrial life.”8

The conversation that followed formed the basis for what would eventually come to be known as The Fermi Paradox, which is, essentially, the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence for advanced extra-terrestrial life compared to the high likelihood of its existence. Fermi began to opine with a series of calculations on the probability of earth-like planets, the probability of life given an earth, the probability of humans given life, and the likely rise and duration of high technology. Together, they concluded that “we ought to have been visited a long time ago and many times over.”9

But for these men, with the knowledge they had, and the time they lived in, that clearly wasn’t a reality. And that prompted a second, equally important conversation: why? Early thoughts included the idea that interstellar flight is impossible, always judged to not be worth the effort, or technological civilization doesn’t last long enough to make it happen.10 Here, again, Edward Teller recalls a pivot to a light-hearted view of the subject where “the distances to the next location of living beings may be very great and that, indeed, as far as our galaxy is concerned, we [might be] living somewhere in the sticks, far removed from the metropolitan area of the galactic center.”11 There was no definitive conclusion but there was a lively discussion that carried them all the way through dessert.

In the Classroom

One of the more interesting parts of this conversation is that it was never formalized in any academic way. Enrico Fermi never went on to write a paper and “The Fermi Paradox” only entered the public lexicon in 1977. It would ultimately be up to other academics to expand on this informal, lunch-time chat. Most of that expansion happened in the backdrop of a congressional fight over funding for the U.S. “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence” (SETI) program, which some saw as a giant waste of time and money.12

As this idea picked up steam, the Fermi Paradox basically evolved into two expressions:

1. Why are no aliens or their artifacts found here on Earth, or in the Solar System?

2. Why do we see no signs of intelligence elsewhere in the universe?

Of course, for our purposes, that first expression of the Fermi Paradox has been under dispute since the lunch-time conversation that sparked it. Members of the UFO community from Keyhoe on forward have consistently alleged that proof can be found but is deliberately withheld or ignored. But by the standards of the time the Fermi Paradox became the conventional way, the classy way, to engage with the possibility of extra-terrestrial life, wrapped in the safe assumption that we hadn’t found any.

In the History Books

Enrico Fermi died of Cancer in 1954, an outcome that was not helped by his long involvement with nuclear weapon development. The story of the Fermi Paradox and the lunch-time conversation that started it existed as a kind of “urban legend” in the Los Alamos community long after his death. In 1984, Eric Jones, another physicist at the laboratory wrote to the three surviving members to capture their recollection and that forms the basis of our understanding today.13

The story could end there, but there is one additional note that is highly relevant to members of the UFO Community. While Herbert York and Emil Konopinski would not have any further involvement in the extra-terrestrial space, the same could not be said for Edward Teller.

In the 1980’s, Teller would go on to meet and then correspond with a now-famous figure in the UFO Community named Bob Lazar. Lazar’s account of his experience has always been contentious, but, as he describes it, he struck up a conversation with Teller at a lecture in 1982. When Lazar found himself looking for scientific work in 1988, it was Edward Teller who referred him to EG&G “Special Projects” out of McCarran Airbase in Nevada. As Lazar tells the story, this ended up being a job on a U.S. Government reverse-engineering program for recovered extra-terrestrial craft.14

Did Edward Teller know what he was referring him to? Did this even happen? All good questions for a deeper exploration of Bob Lazar’s story and Edward Teller’s later life. But you should note, that of all the surviving physicists weighing in on that fateful lunchtime conversation, only Teller was forceful in characterizing it as “brief and superficial,” only “vaguely connected to astronautics,” containing remarks that were “purely negative,” and containing the “obvious statement the flying saucers [were] not real.”15 None of his colleagues felt the need to make these points.

Today, the Fermi Paradox is often remembered as a clinical, academically detached conversation about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. But to deny its true history – one where four friends had a casual chat sparked by aliens in popular culture - is to deny the impact that a belief in UFOs has had on our actual lives. And the focus on Fermi, and Fermi alone, ignores some of the more interesting historical implications: one where at least some of the participants may have had to wrestle with this conversation, privately, long after lunch.

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Today, I want to take you on a brief walkthrough of our planet and really illustrate for you how unlikely it is that anyone would see a UFO, ever. The fact that we do, and that there are reports in almost every geographic location raise some good questions about how many might be out there, and where. To start:  

The Earth has 510,072,000 km² of surface area.1

70.8% of this area (361,132,000 km²) is covered by ocean.2 These oceans are:

27.0% (137,926,515 km²) territorial waters,3 which are the waters that extend off the coastline of every major country on Earth. The first 22km are called a country’s “territorial sea” and, after that, they can make a maritime claim extending a further 370km past that point. The territorial water held by any one country depends on where it is, what its claims are, and if those claims conflict with anyone else.4

It's important to consider territorial waters because they are the most likely to host local maritime traffic. So, with that in mind, let’s consider a scenario where the most common form of that traffic (fishing boats) were all out, everywhere on Earth, at the exact same time. Assuming the weather was clear (it wouldn’t be), visibility was clear to the horizon (that’s unlikely), and that clarity produced a 20km² box of human sightline (lol!), you’d be able to cover about 59% of these territorial waters on any given day.5

Of course, people sleep, pay attention to their work, and are denied basic visibility by weather conditions at sea, and so the most common circumstances result in this area being largely unmonitored, even with an estimated 4.1 million fishing vessels all over the world.6

A further 43.8% (223,205,485 km²) of the ocean is international waters.7 These waters are so far away from major countries as to basically be unmonitored. It’s hard to get a sense of how vast some of these areas are but the Pacific Ocean, which holds 43% of all of the water on Earth, could fit the United States into it 17 times.8

Here, the most likely traffic are commercial cargo ships. With a global fleet of 50,000, we can again consider a scenario where each one produces a perfect 20km² box of human sightline and where every single cargo ship on Earth happens to be in international waters at the same time.9 And in that scenario, you’d be able to cover about 0.4% of all the international water on Earth, with human sight.10

But, of course, the actual coverage of cargo ships is even worse than this thought experiment might imply, because, unlike the sporadic sailing of a fishing boat, cargo ships travel in well established sea lanes. These “highways of the sea” basically take them across very predictable, linear routes which make them very easy to avoid and further reduce the coverage of this huge chunk of the earth.11

The surface area of the ocean doesn’t do the problem justice because, below that surface, we have to consider how deep those oceans go. Accounting for all of that sub-surface water produces an area of 1.370 billion km³.12 Given the frequent reports of UFOs travelling within and emerging from the Earth’s Oceans, this is actually the most likely place that something exotic would travel if it was seeking to avoid human contact.

What are the odds of detecting anything under the surface? Here we can consider the only vehicles that would have that capability, the military vessels of the world’s combined naval fleets. With 10,525 naval vessels including 505 submarines,1314 all of the naval forces in the entire world would struggle to cover any significant portion of the world’s oceans. Of course, when dealing with military equipment, you stray into the realm of sensor assistance, but even the best Sonar, for example, has a range of about 48 km when actively scanning for targets. So assuming every submarine on earth could take an active approach to scanning under the ocean, they could cover about 4% of it at any one time.15 And that’s not even taking into account the depth limitations of most submarines. All the other naval assets would be limited by their position on the surface and their tendency to stay grouped near the shores of their home country.

Leaving the Ocean, we now turn to the remaining 29.2% (148,940,000 km²) of the Earth’s surface that is covered by land.16 Of this landmass:

8.5% (43,192,600 km²) is uninhabitable.17 This includes glaciers, deserts, dry salt flats, beaches, exposed rocks, and all other places where humans are extremely unlikely to be.

20.7% (105,747,400 km²) is habitable land. This consists of:

• Forest or Jungle (7.9%)

• Livestock, Meat, and Dairy Production (7.3%)

• Unused Shrub and Grassland (2.9%)

• Agricultural Crops (2.2%)

• Human Settlement and Infrastructure (0.2%)

• Freshwater Lakes and Rivers (0.2%)

As you can see, once you leave the shockingly small percentage of our planet that is settled by human beings (0.2%), you find yourself dealing with portions of our landscape where human presence is pretty unlikely. What are the odds of you being in the right farmers field at the right time? (9.5% of the planet) How about the wilderness? (11%). There’s no need to speculate on vehicle traffic or military presence in these areas. The sheer volume of hiding places, even in this “habitable” section of the world, make that pretty much irrelevant.

As a final consideration, we turn to the air above us. 99% of our atmosphere exists within 40km of the Earth’s surface,18 and, taking into account this “atmosphere we care about” we can calculate a volume of 20.530 billion km³.19 Taking into account the highest estimate for the total number of airplanes in the world (passenger planes, cargo planes, and military planes) we come to a number of 39,000.20 If we assume that every single airplane was flying at once, and that every single pilot had a clear visibility of 10km in every direction, we’d be able to cover about 1.5% of the sky at any one time.21

The real world crashes into this estimate as well as there are only about 16,000 airplanes in the air on any given day and, like cargo ships, they travel on very predictable (easily avoidable) major air routes.2223 All but the most advanced military craft would be limited to the lower parts of the atmosphere, and this is to say nothing of the difference between day and nighttime visibility or cloud coverage. Here again, we see the most optimistic scenario really isn’t that optimistic. At the end of even our most hypothetical of days, the sky remains a big place with plenty of places to hide.

So do you need to believe in extremely advanced stealth technology to consider the possibility of covert extra-terrestrial visitation? Not really. And if up until now, you’ve been under the impression that we would almost certainly see anything strange travelling around, well … you might have a blind spot.

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What’s a caucus? A caucus is just a group of like-minded legislators, in either the House or Senate, who come together around some shared policy interest. You might be familiar with some examples from the news like the House Freedom Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, or my personal favorite, the newly-minted Mach 1 Caucus.

Caucuses usually hold legislators from both parties, which makes these groups effective at brokering deals in Washington. Until now, there has never been any congressional group that publicly dedicated itself to UFO advocacy and the mere establishment of this group is a giant step forward for those interested in the file.

As it was announced, the UAP Caucus consisted of six Congressional Representatives:2

But looking at this group seven months later, how’s it been doing? There are some early conclusions that shed some light on U.S. UFO policy and show where the file might be headed. And since I’m from the government and here to help, I’d suggest we start by taking a look at:

Who It Includes …

There’s no way around it – this is a mostly Republican effort. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just that caucuses work best when they function across party lines. While there’s been some significant support from key Democrats in the Senate, that support hasn’t translated into the House or this particular UAP Caucus.

Many UFO advocates have long feared the idea that this file could become a partisan, one-party issue. Investigation and transparency would not be served well by the kind of gridlock that exists on most other issues in the U.S. Congress. But as much as the headlines last summer were happy to report that “UFOs and aliens [are] bringing a divided Congress together,” there’s some reason to believe that’s not true. If it were, you would hope to see a growing, bi-partisan balance from the people joining this signature advocacy group. So far that just hasn’t materialized.

Who It Does Not Include …

We could speculate quite a bit about why certain Congressional Representatives may or may not want to join this group, but I think we could start that with a delicate conversation about Matt Gaetz (R-FL). While Gaetz was technically not included in the list of founding members of the UAP Caucus, he has been present at major UAP Caucus hearings and press conferences all along the way (becoming an official member in March 2024). Why is that a problem? Because in the interest of keeping things politically neutral, Gaetz is a big personality and a controversial figure. In March 2021 Gaetz was embroiled in an investigation into possible sex trafficking.3 By October 2023, Gaetz lead a successful challenge that overthrew a key leader in his own party (Kevin McCarthy).4 This likely had a repellant effect to both Democrats and Republicans when it came to associating with this small group. It’s notable, for example, that key UAP advocates like Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) never signed on. Is that motivated by Gaetz? There’s some reason to believe that’s true. And that’s a shame because Gaetz himself appears to be leading the charge in advocating for UAP transparency, it’s just that he’s leading too many other controversial charges as well.

Size Matters …

The Congressional Black Caucus? 60 members. House Freedom Caucus? 41 members. These are the kinds of numbers that influence policy and make these names show up in the news. But since it’s founding in August 2023, the UAP Caucus has only grown from six to eight members. And while it’s nice to see growth, that number is still not enough to have a substantial impact on a legislative body with 435 House Reps sitting in it.

Speaking of those House Reps, all 435 of them will be going up for election in November 2024. And for a caucus that only has 8 people in it, it’s not great that three of them meet the polling threshold for what’s called a “competitive race.” This notably includes the only Democrat (Jared Moskowitz) whose loss could make this caucus a truly partisan endeavor. Other potential removals would include Nancy Mace and Anna Paulina Luna, whose loss could make this an all-male endeavor. I’ll leave it to your imagination to speculate how an all male, all Republican UAP Caucus might be treated in the press.5

And So Does Experience …

The final headwind facing the UAP Caucus is the overall lack of Congressional experience held by its current (and potentially remaining) members. Simply put, this caucus lacks the kind of heavy hitting lifetime politicians who could make real political headway with this issue. In fact, the longest serving member of the caucus is the aforementioned Matt Gaetz, which carries its own issues. It’s unclear where the block is where it comes to getting more veteran legislators on board, but it is clear that would be a necessary step if the UAP Caucus is going to actually achieve its stated goals of advocacy, transparency, and Congressional engagement on the file.6

In Conclusion

The current state of America’s UAP Caucus is a little more fragile than you might like to see at this point. Even though the last seven months have featured important advocacy letters and positive headlines, the UFO community would do well to prepare itself for mixed results. The best forecast for this group right now suggests there’s still a lot of work to do going forward. And who knows, maybe America’s first UAP caucus won’t be its last.

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For many, this was a big deal. There were high hopes that the intelligence community might loosen up, disclose some historical information, and talk about how that intersected with their modern investigation efforts.

In 2022, those efforts had recently transformed into the “Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group,” and, despite the mouthful, that office was now sitting in a much more prominent part of the DoD with better staffing and funding than its predecessor.2

This hearing was going to feature testimony from Ronald Moultrie (Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security) and Scott Bray (Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence). Both men had been involved on the file since at least 2020 and both had a good understanding of where it was going.3

So, what kind of questions were they asked? Not great ones. There were vague softballs about sensor capabilities, the importance of inter-agency cooperation, and a whole lot of conjecture about how intelligence is good. Perhaps my personal favorite came from Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) when he took a portion of his time to note that:

Most people when they see a video, [they’re] all used to seeing things from a car, seeing things from a sidewalk, very few people have the experience of observing something through night vision goggles at Mach 1.5. So just talk for a minute, if you would, about how radically different observation is at high speed in three dimensions than it is for most of us who walk around and drive cars.

- Rep Jim Himes 49min 16s.

And that is the way it went. For most of it, anyway. Except for five glorious minutes when a junior Congressman from Wisconsin decided to do his homework and give this topic the hearing it deserved.

Preparation H

You see, what every other committee member had in common was that there was no preparation required to ask any of their questions. You and I could have entered that exact same hearing and essentially “wung it” to come up with hard hitting content like “how can your office lead to the prevention of intelligence surprises.”4

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) had a slightly different approach, noting that: “I’m new to this debate. I don’t bring particular UAP expertise but I’ve done basic research – I’ve probably done about 5 hours’ worth of research – so I asked what I thought were basic questions for people that are just modestly familiar with the literature.”5

That might seem like a normal expectation, but it’s not very normal for Congress. Gallagher is a former Marine Corps Intelligence Officer who happened to write a PhD on Cold War history. When compared to the other nine Congressman present at this hearing, that made him the only person with any kind of historical education or intelligence background at all. Most of his counterparts were educated as lawyers, and I’d say when it came to the quality of their output, it showed.6

So where did Gallagher’s “basic research” lead him? I’m going to present you with his four questions below, with context offered by me and the response he received. Here is the result of his effort:

Question #1

Mike Gallagher: As the Chairman mentioned, DoD had an initiative to study UFOs in the 1960’s called Project Blue Book. It’s also been well reported in our briefing, and in other places, that we have more recent projects, specifically AATIP. Could you describe any other initiatives that the DoD or DoD contractors have managed after Project Blue Book ended and prior to AATIP beginning? Did anything also pre-date Project Blue Book?

For Context: The official U.S. Air Force investigation (Project Blue Book) technically ended in 1969. From 1969 until 2008 there was no official U.S. investigation into UFOs. That changed with the creation of the “Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program” (AAWSAP) which eventually changed its name to the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP).

Mike is basically asking what happened during this 39-year gap between officially acknowledged programs. The UFO literature supports a spectrum of possibilities that range from (1) poorly coordinated, informal studies run by different defense agencies, to (2) a sophisticated crash-retrieval and reverse engineering program. The jury is still out, though in 2023 a DoD whistleblower did claim to have significant evidence of the latter.

Ronald Moultrie: I can’t speak to anything that may have pre-dated Project Blue Book. Of course, there’s Roswell and all these things that people have talked about over the years. I’m familiar with Blue Book. I’m familiar with AATIP. I haven’t seen other documented studies that have been done by DoD in that regard… I’m not aware of anything official that was done between [Project Blue Book and AATIP]. Nothing has been brought to my attention.

Question #2

Mike Gallagher: Are you aware of any other DoD contract programs, focused on UAPs from a technological or engineering perspective? And by that I mean, are you aware of any technology initiatives focused on this topic other than [those] focused on individual case investigations?

For Context: One of the leading claims made by UFO literature is that major U.S. defense contractors have been handed recovered UFO material to study and reverse engineer. These programs are said to be administered through benign-sounding defense contracts which would also be shielded from any disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. With this question, Mike is asking if any program like this has been brought to AOIMSG’s attention.

Ronald Moultrie: I am not aware of any contractual programs that are focused on anything related to this other than what we were doing in the Navy [UAP] Task Force and what we are about to launch in terms of [AOIMSG’s] effort.

Scott Bray: Same answer. I’m not aware of anything outside what we are doing in the UAP Task Force.

Ronald Moultrie: Once again, I’ll say ‘no contractual’ or programmatic efforts that are involved. And the reason why I qualify that is … I can’t speak to what people may be looking at [informally] in the Department … I can speak to official programs that we have on the record.

Question #3

Mike Gallagher: It’s also been reported that there have been UAP observed interacting with and flying over sensitive military facilities. And not just ranges, but some facilities housing our strategic nuclear forces. One such incident allegedly occurred at Malmstrom Air Force Base in which 10 of our Nuclear ICBMs were rendered inoperable at the same time a glowing red orb was observed overhead. I’m not commenting on the accuracy of this, I’m simply asking if you’re aware of it and whether you have any comment on the accuracy of the report.

For Context: Mike is referring to one of the most classic cases in UFO history, where, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Robert Salas claims to have witnessed a UFO remotely deactivating our nuclear weapons. This incident occurred in 1967 and Salas began discussing it openly in 1996. The Malstrom incident is often used to discuss the complexity of the UFO file when it interacts with other historical considerations like the Cold War. While Robert Salas has written several books, some of the best coverage of this event comes from a classic work in the community called UFOs & Nukes.

Scott Bray: That data is not within the holdings of the UAP Task Force… I have heard stories. I have not seen the official data on that… all I can speak to is what’s within my cognizance on the UAP Task Force and we have not looked at that incident.

Ronald Moultrie: If something was officially brought to our attention, we would look at it. There are many things that are out there in the ether that aren’t officially brought to our attention… so we could go back and take a look at it but generally there’s an authoritative figure that says ‘there’s an incident that occurred. We’d like you to look at this.’ But in terms of just tracking what may be in the media that says that something occurred in this time in this place, there’d probably be a lot of leads that we’d have to follow up on and I don’t think we’re resourced to do that right now.

Question #4

Mike Gallagher: Are you aware of a document that appeared around 2019 sometimes called the “Admiral Wilson Memo” or “AW Notes” Memo? This is a document in which a former head of the DIA claims to have had a conversation with Dr. Eric [Davis] and claims to have been aware of certain contractors or DoD programs that he tried to get fuller access to and was denied access to. [Are you] aware of that?

For Context: The “Admiral Wilson Memo” is a pretty famous document inside the UFO Community. It’s the record of a conversation held between a defense consultant (Eric Davis) and the retired head of the DIA (Admiral Thomas Wilson). In the memo, Wilson notes that as head of the DIA he was denied access to certain defense programs he believed were involved in UFO crash retrieval. The memo was prepared confidentially for a former astronaut (Edgar Mitchell) who was advocating for UFO transparency at the time. It entered the public after Mitchell’s death in 2016.

Ronald Moultrie: I am not.

Scott Bray: I am not personally aware of that.

Mike Drop

With these four sharp questions hanging out there, a lot of the follow-up coverage understandably focused on Gallagher. Debate lines essentially drew around whether he had used his time to promote unsubstantiated conspiracy theories or whether he had held important DoD officials to account.

What eventually emerged was a view best characterized by Gallagher himself when he told Politico in a follow-up interview that “the quicker DoD can disconfirm certain hypotheses … the better we can focus time and energy on more plausible hypotheses.”7 In other words, clearing up the substantial claims made by almost 50 years of witness testimony and UFO literature might actually help, rather than hurt the investigation. And unless Gallagher had done his homework, we might not have ever learned that the DoD wasn’t particularly interested in that process.

This hearing opened an opportunity to correct that. First, through legislative action that directed the DoD to begin looking at these historical events. And second, through behind the scenes political pressure that saw AOIMSG begin to interview people like Robert Salas. Vague, unprepared comments from your Congressional Reps. would not have produced this result. And in that sense, you have decades of UFO research and Mike Gallagher to thank for moving that ball down the field.

As for Gallagher’s involvement? He’s continued to be a champion for action on the file. A day after the hearing he would remark that “I appreciate this effort to destigmatize the discussion, but until the defense department starts speaking in simple and direct plain English and answering questions, we’re just going to spin everybody up. Or we’re going to be spinning around in circles. So though I started off as a casual observer in this whole UAP debate, now I’m so pissed off that I’m not going to let it go until they answer my questions.”8

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Of course, this is a fictional spy story. I’m not here to suggest there’s a lot we can learn from the tradecraft that shows up in Hollywood blockbusters. But that doesn’t mean you should discount it entirely. One possible explanation for the UFO stories you hear involves a scenario just like the opening to Mission Impossible. One where other human beings use modern technology to “fake” profound encounters with the hope of extracting actionable intelligence. Could it be done? And would there be any reason to believe it already has? Maybe at least some of the government secrecy around this topic has to do with …

Sources and Methods

In 1950, a U.S. Air Force Officer named Edward G. Lansdale arrived in the Philippines. The country was in the middle of a low-grade civil war between the American-backed government and a group of communist insurgents called the Huks. For five years, the Filipinos had trouble making any progress against these insurgents and Landsdale was brought in to stabilize the situation as the Cold War raged on.1

But Landsdale wasn’t quite what he appeared. Even thought he seemed like just another military advisor, he was actually a CIA Officer brought in to lead clandestine military operations in the country. Landsdale’s diagnosis was simple. He felt that “a popular guerilla army cannot be defeated by force alone.”2 And since one of the chief problems in fighting the Huks was your ability to find them, he felt you would have to get creative in flushing them out of the jungle.

One way he chose to do this involved working with local superstitions. When he interviewed peasants in the region, they consistently mentioned widespread fear of a mythical vampire-like creature called the “asuang.” What did he do with that knowledge? As historian William Blum described his approach:

A psywar squad [would] enter a town and plant rumors that an asuang lived in the neighboring hill where the Huks were based, a location from which government forces were anxious to have them out. Two nights later, after giving the rumors time to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way up the hill, the psywar squad laid an ambush for the rebels along a trail used by them. When a Huk patrol passed, the ambushers silently snatched the last man, punctured his neck vampire-fashion with two holes, held his body by the heels until the blood drained out, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks, as superstitious as any other Filipinos, discovered the bloodless comrade, they fled from the region.3

By 1953 the Huk insurgency was dead. It wasn’t bullets that killed them; it was a series of psychological blows that led to their utter dissolution. Landsdale was recognized and promoted by the head of the CIA (Allen Dulles) who then instructed him to “do what you did in the Philippines in Vietnam.”4

Why am I telling you this? Because this is one of the CIA’s greatest ever success stories. The ability to work with local superstition was recognized at the highest levels of the intel community. And the only reason you know about this particular piece of tradecraft was because Landsdale wrote his own book about it. The CIA never mentioned anything about this campaign, nor did they release any documentation. You know about this event because of a disgruntled memoir released long before the CIA clamped down on books that gave away sources and methods.

Back to the Future

One reason for the perceived secrecy on the UFO Phenomenon is that the United States government is convinced that you would freak out if you knew the full extent of the problem. Assuming that the phenomenon is a real thing, you might be inclined to believe that the work of former CIA Officers like Hadley Cantril got the ball rolling on a cover up. That’s a theory that’s covered extensively by a lot of UFO pundits and I don’t think you need me to add anything here.

But in this newsletter, I feel obligated to open you up to some other possibilities which could also include a very uncomfortable extension of the psychological warfare I highlighted above. Substitute vampires for aliens and I think you could perhaps imagine an intelligence agency that takes advantage of local superstitions in the same way. Perhaps a large one might be inclined to mimic the experience of a UFO abduction and ask people questions it would like answered.

Could that be done? Mask technology is now much better than the fictional scenario in the Mission Impossible movies.5 Every intelligence agency on Earth has a history of using mind altering drugs on witting and unwitting subjects. Sound stages are increasingly good and portable.

But why would you want to? Because, as I highlighted in my recent coverage of former CIA Officer John Ramirez, high ranking government and intelligence officials are vulnerable to this deception. In addition to Ramirez’s own description of being abducted, he notes (1) that he encountered about a dozen other “experiencers” across his intelligence career, and (2) that they were unwilling to report it because of the stigma.6

What did Ramirez claim to experience? He indicates that he interacted with beings that were “more like humanoid with a mixture of Sarian. Bipedal, two arms, a head, two eyes, mouth and so forth. They’re flesh and blood and, as far as I can tell.”7 And what did they want? They wanted to relay a somewhat apocalyptic message that suggested:

… it’s humanities responsibility to take care of this planet because [they] live on it to and [they] don’t like what we’ve been doing. You have free will so exercise your free will to take care of your planet because if you don’t, your species may suffer dire consequences if the planet turns against you.8

With that message in mind, is it a stretch that one of these “beings” might ask John for the nuclear codes? You know, to prevent a disaster of our own making? And, if so, what if those beings are actually human beings, in a very achievable disguise, asking on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security?

This opens a conversation and brings us back to an article I published two weeks ago on the need to consider updated polygraph testing for members of the U.S. Intelligence Community. It was my view then that inserting questions about perceived interactions with UFOs could be illuminating and help us understand the extent of the problem being reported by people like John. With the possibility of a foreign intelligence explanation, I think there’s all the more reason to do that.

Ultimately, at least some of the UFO secrecy exerted by the government may be about protecting sources and methods – either for an intel op we’re using or for an op that’s being used on us. And if we’re going to consider possible UFO explanations like extra-terrestrials, ultra-terrestrials, or time travelling versions of us, I think we might as well check in on China and Russia while we’re at it.

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By my count, John has since appeared on 24 podcasts speaking for over 60 hours on the subject. Since he will likely remain a significant figure of discussion for years to come, I thought it might be helpful to round up the things John has said about (1) his career, (2) his professional interaction with UFOs, and (3) his personal interactions with UFOs.

Presented factually and without judgement, let’s begin with:

The Professional Experience of John Ramirez

• John joined the United States Navy in 1973, training as an Electronic Warfare Technician. Over the next six years, he served onboard the guided missile destroyer USS Cochrane and the frigate USS Thomas C. Hart.1 While at sea, he was responsible for monitoring foreign communications, jamming radars, and identifying other ships through microwave signatures.2 He left to pursue higher education at the end of his six-year enlistment period in 1979.3

• John attended George Washington University in Washington D.C. with an interest in qualifying himself for a role with the CIA. He attended GW between 1979 and 1983, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.4

• In 1984, John began his career with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after a year-long application process.5 Over the next 25 years, he variously served in:

  • the Signals Analysis Division, Office of Signals Intelligence Operations, in the Directorate of Science and Technology. John performed an “ELINT” (Electronic Intelligence) role and began his service as a Senior Analyst (GS-8).6

  • the Missile Defense Branch, Defensive Systems Division, Office of Scientific and Weapons Research, in the Directorate of Intelligence.78 In this role, John acted primarily as an analyst for ballistic missile defense radars in Russia.

  • the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) National Counterproliferation Center (NCPC). In this role, John dealt primarily with the use of U.S. spy satellites to prevent nuclear weapons development.

• John held a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information security clearance during this entire period. He retired formally from the CIA on September 30, 2009, exiting service as a GS-15.9

John’s Professional Interaction with UFOs

• Over his 25-years with the CIA, John claims two major career highlights relating to the UFO Phenomenon. Those were:

  • Russian UFO Tracking: “in Russia [their] radars started detecting objects in the sky which caused their alert levels to rise. And they were not satellites that they would normally track and they were not ballistic missiles that we would launch … but they were seeing things that were moving very fast that alerted them to say ‘okay, we need to increase our [defense] readiness.’ So we detected an increase in readiness and when you look back at the signals used by those radars, you can tell they were tracking something.”10 In 1994-95 Ramirez was personally responsible for writing a memo to the Deputy Secretary of Defense (John Deutsch) on this issue.11

  • Mysterious Flying Orbs: John is currently working on an FOIA request with the government which would allow him to provide more detail on a series of flying orbs observed by U.S. spy satellites.12 In general, these included the observation of a series of orbs flying in formation from the Artic Circle into undisclosed locations in Russia.13 In the early 2000’s, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) formed a working group to assess these observations, the results of which are still classified. John ultimately sent two subordinates to participate in this working group who implied to him they had reached an extra-terrestrial explanation.1415

John’s Personal Experience with UFOs

• At about 4 years old (in 1957) John looked through a telescope and “had a profound sense that [he] was not part of this planet.”16 He would later interpret this as a message indicating that “perhaps he got left behind on earth and so even though [he] had an earthly family, his real family was ‘out there.’”17

• At about 6 years old (in 1959), John started to have “a recurring dream of being led into a house for a medical examination.” In his dream, an unknown woman would lead him into a Victorian-era house where he would then be medically examined by a doctor and a nurse in period-appropriate clothing. This happened multiple times and, on inquiry, his parents denied ever taking him to any place that matched this description. John would later interpret these dreams as a “cover experience” that helped process an interaction he was having with “other beings.”1819

• Also at 6 years old (in 1959), John sees an object in the sky while playing outside with his cousins. The object looked like a very large tic tac floating above a nearby treeline. John pointed out the object to his cousins, who, according to him, were unable to see it. The object then floated way.20

• Sometime after these experiences, John found himself in a bookstore with his mother. He recalls seeing a book with an illustration of two primitive human beings holding a modern looking baby up in the sky, illuminated by two beams of light. He asked his mother to buy the book for him but on returning to its location in the store, it had disappeared. John would later interpret this experience as a “download” from a non-human intelligence, implying that they held a role in the development of our species.21

• At about 12 years old (in 1965) John felt compelled to plant sunflower seeds outside of his bedroom window so that “they know where to find me because I wanted them to take me and not bring me back.” He recalls that this prompted an experience where he remembers “many hands pulling me out of bed and taking me to a craft and being held by a being and being laid down on a table to be examined.” John indicates that he is unclear if this was a dream.22

• John has indicated that, at various points in his life, he had experienced sleep paralysis which involved “waking up in that state and seeing a shadow presence in his bedroom.23

• During his adulthood, John experienced several close interactions with what he described as an orange-colored orb and a white colored orb. According to John, he “received messaged from the white colored orb” that “encouraged him to come out and talk about what [he knew].” This communication occurred when John was about 62 (in 2015-16) which prompted him to finish a PowerPoint presentation, clear it for publication with the CIA’s Pre-publication Classification Review Board, and begin presenting it on prominent UFO podcasts.24 This presentation can notably be found on a November 2021 appearance on the Project Unity podcast here.

• When asked what message he feels a non-human intelligence is trying to communicate to him, John has indicated that “it’s not a dire warning. It’s more like it’s humanities responsibility to take care of this planet because [they] live on it to and [they] don’t like what we’ve been doing. You have free will so exercise your free will to take care of your planet because if you don’t, your species may suffer dire consequences if the planet turns against you. [They indicate] that we’re doing things to the planet, but the planet will defend itself. It’s not necessary for planet earth to be viable with humans on it. Planet earth will be viable [even if] there are no humans on it. So it’s more [about] our existence on this planet which we share with these visitors. I call these visitors residents because they’ve been here [longer]. That’s the ultra-terrestrial hypothesis.”25

• When asked what these entities look like, John indicated that: “I don’t like to use the word ‘reptilian’ because people think of snakes or lizards. They’re not snakes or lizards … they’re more like humanoid with a mixture of Sarian. Bipedal, two arms, a head, two eyes, mouth and so forth. They’re flesh and blood and, as far as I can tell, these are the beings I interacted with.”26

• At about 67 (in 2020), John moved to Tucson, Arizona.27 It was after this change, that, according to John, “a being came to me and said ‘don’t worry. We know you moved. We can always find you. We found you [here] and just want to see if you’re okay.”28

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We have people that have very high [security] clearances both today and in the past that did really important work for our government … who have come forward with some claims about the U.S. having recovered exotic materials ... That’s the claim they make. Now, I don’t know if those claims are true or not. What I do know is that one of two things is happening here. Either (1) they’re telling the truth and that is something that would obviously be the biggest story in human history, or (2) we have people in really important positions of government who are crazy... Either one is a big problem, so we’ve got to figure out which one of these two it is.1

An honest assessment of the UFO Phenomenon has to consider that second possibility. As much as we’d like to believe that every member of our government is honest, earnest, and accurate, these people are, after all, human.

So how would you get at the truth? How would you even try and determine if “some people in really important positions are crazy?” It turns out the solution is right in front of us, and it’s never been easier to implement. I think it’s about time we flip the *literal* switch on this problem and start …

Scoping It Out

When you apply to a job in the “Intelligence Community” (IC) you’re going to be subjected to three broad types of tests: a medical test, a psychological evaluation, and a full scope polygraph.2

Of all of these tests, the medical is probably the most standard and self-explanatory. You might not be a good candidate for CIA field work if you’re prone to epileptic seizures. Your employer is just trying to figure out if you have any underlying issues that might disqualify you from certain roles. And that extends here to both your legal and illegal drug use, which might be a problem.

Once that’s covered, attention moves toward your mental health. This seems like the likely step where a government might be able to “determine if you’re crazy” but the method and type of testing they do make that very unlikely. Here the United States uses a type of psychological evaluation called the “Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory” or MMPI-2. This test (which was originally invented in the 1930’s) is designed to ask you about very obvious psychological disorders. Over 567 true or false questions, they’ll drive at your level of paranoia, depression, schizophrenia and the like.3 In that sense, it might be helpful as a basic diagnostic tool but there isn’t exactly room to ask you if you think the government is run by lizard people.

The really good questions come in the third trial you’ll be subjected to: a full scope polygraph. Over a full day, you’ll be hooked up to a polygraph machine (sometimes called a lie detector) and subjected to invasive interview questions. Half the questions are posed from a counter-intelligence lens, where you’re asked about your professional history or willingness to betray the United States. The other questions are posed from a lifestyle lens, where you’re asked about your most intimate secrets to see what could be used to blackmail you. This second half notably includes your sexual habits and has been described as “very uncomfortable” by those who have gone through it.45

Once you’re hired, you’ll need to periodically revisit these tests during pre-scheduled “re-investigations” or randomly if you’re ever the target of suspicion. So when it comes to answering Senator Rubio’s question, could these kinds of tests help?

Enter John Ramirez

Before I tell you anything about John Ramirez, I should make very clear that I’m not saying he’s crazy. I think that John is, at minimum, a very interesting case study on how you should think about this problem.

John Ramirez is a former (now retired) CIA Officer who spent a full 25 years with the agency. Prior to that, Ramirez also had a fruitful 6 years of service with the United States Navy. The breadth of his career was spent in a highly sensitive “SIGINT” (Signals Intelligence) and weapons analysis role.67 When you think about some nameless bureaucrat trying to figure out how to stop Russian missiles from hitting the United States, that’s John – the recipient of several promotions, awards, and, according to him, repeated visits from extra-terrestrial beings.

You see, one of the more interesting points about John is that he claims to have been repeatedly abducted by Aliens since he was a small child. Much of this contact occurred before he joined the CIA and when it came to this famous full scope polygraph interview: “[It] never came up. They basically wanted to know if I was a spy working for a foreign government.”8

But let’s take a step back. What exactly is it that John claims in terms of his experience? Per John:

When I first looked through a telescope, I had this profound sense that I was not part of this planet. That I belong somewhere out there in the stars and that’s pretty remarkable for a four-year-old. But if you talk to experiencers, that seems to be the age when it [starts] and thereafter at five and six.  

I [started to] have experiences of being led into a house by a woman who was not my mother and being examined by a doctor and a nurse and this happened over successive times where I was reassured ‘don’t worry. We’re not going to hurt you. We just want to see if you’re okay. We just want to give you an examination.’

And I’ve had similar experiences throughout my life where, you know, I experience being taken because I wanted to be. I experienced looking through a telescope … and seeing the Andromeda Galaxy and having an instant connection with someone out there and wondering ‘why don’t you pick me up? You left me on this planet. I don’t know why I’m here.’ [And I’ve had experiences] of being taken onboard a craft and being examined onboard a craft and then when I woke up the next morning there were markings on my body that looked like they were examining me.

Even recently, when I moved to Arizona a being came to me and said ‘don’t worry. We know you moved. We can always find you. We found you [here] and just want to see if you’re okay.’9

And how would John describe these beings he’s interacting with? Again, in his own words:

I don’t like to use the word ‘reptilian’ because people think of snakes or lizards. They’re not snakes or lizards … they’re more like humanoid with a mixture of Sarian. Bipedal, two arms, a head, two eyes, mouth and so forth. They’re flesh and blood and, as far as I can tell, these are the beings I interacted with.10

Now that’s a lot. What I have just presented you with is basically the UFO equivalent of a Rorschach test. Some of you will read this account and think that John is mentally ill and should have been immediately disqualified from a position of trust with the government. And if you happen to find yourself in that camp, you should care deeply that John was never asked about it. Not in his full scope polygraph and not in any of the periodic re-investigations he did over a 25-year career.11

But a mature take on this topic also requires me to examine John’s claim at face value. In which case I have this question: “wouldn’t that experience point to an obvious security risk?” Somewhere in the half day of content covering his willingness to cooperate with a foreign government, do you think anyone should have asked him about a foreign species? If, as Senator Rubio indicates, the United States may have “in the past recovered exotic materials and then reverse engineered those materials to make advances in our own defenses and technologies” would we care that a top intelligence official might have been having casual conversations with its owners?12

Of course, I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s tempting to write John off as a statistical anomaly within the CIA – one man with an extraordinary claim in an agency that employs 22,000 people. But that would be underselling the problem. When asked how many employees had discussed similar experiences with him over the course of his career, John indicates that it was “about a dozen.”13 And given the social stigma around this topic, particularly during the years he was in active service, you might expect this figure to be artificially low.

In one instance, John describes an interaction where “this one gentleman, a colleague of mine [at NSA], revealed to me that they’ve actually seen craft land and that beings came out and he and his brother were witnesses to this event. And so he was an active NSA Officer, a SIGINT Officer who did not want that known at NSA. So that’s [one] example. Maybe he felt [that] at NSA [it’s] not good for me to reveal this information.”14

New Plan, Who Dis?

Whether you are inclined to believe accounts like this speak to real experience or mental illness, we should be able to agree that it would, in fact, be good for these people to “reveal this information” to their employer. The mechanism to achieve that is the IC’s full scope polygraph, which, to paraphrase the 2015 New Polygraph Policy, can be used “for anything and everything at any time they choose.”15

This is a prime example of where “UFO Policy” might just become regular policy that influences the inner workings of our government. But taking this issue seriously would require our leaders to consider the following immediate changes:

1. Inserting UFO/UAP interaction questions in the full scope polygraph during your initial IC application.

2. Inserting UFO/UAP interaction questions in the full scope polygraph during your periodic IC re-investigations.

3. Considering a widespread, dedicated “Specific Issue Polygraph” for every IC employee currently in service to ask questions on this issue.

And what might the outcome be of pursuing this policy change? Well first, you should be able to get a sense of how many IC members feel they have seen a UFO, interacted with a UFO, or interacted with what is now called a “non-human intelligence.” One possibility is that these questions and subsequent tests point to a legitimate and underdiagnosed from of mental illness within the IC. But another possibility involves hearing the same answers, the same descriptions, the same patterns, and drawing conclusions, no matter how disturbing those conclusions might be.

As Senator Rubio has characterized some of his own interactions with the IC: “these are credible people that have done and continue to do important work for the country and by law we’re required when they come forward as whistleblowers to take their claims seriously and to investigate them. But we just don’t know. That’s the answer.”16

I’d like to get that answer. And since we’re already asking these people about the kind of sex they have and what they search for on Pornhub, what’s the harm in asking them what they search for in the stars?

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Later that weekend I told her what I thought about the book. I thought it was a really interesting walkthrough of the UFO Phenomenon and, in terms of the evidence it presented, it certainly met my threshold for digging a little deeper. And when I mentioned that I was having trouble finding the kind of balanced news coverage I needed to do that, she said I should write it.

This sounds like the kind of thing your new girlfriend would say at the very beginning of a new relationship. UFOs are a pretty weird and often embarrassing topic to be associated with and I had no expectation that she was being anything other than nice.

But then I started doing some research and we would talk about it on walks. I started writing articles and she would read them. For almost two years before I launched The Other Topic, my first and only audience member was her, and I’m happy to say the reviews were positive.

This experience taught me a wholly unexpected lesson that I want to offer you in what we might call “UFO-adjacent” content. The vast majority of my relationship experience had involved dating people who didn’t respect my time, my goals or, as I came to understand later, me. This behavior actively got in my way and my 20s seemed like they were filled with a constant low-grade conflict that I thought was a normal part of dating.

You know that a house divided against itself cannot stand and I’m not telling you anything new here. But the trap that I wasn’t expecting came later when I found myself in a long-term relationship that involved a lot of polite neutrality. Because of all the conflict I had experienced in previous relationships, I came to mistake this neutrality for support until it became, absolutely, excruciatingly clear that it wasn’t.

That relationship ended and when I found myself in this new one, I still figured polite neutrality was the best I could ever hope for. That’s why I can’t overstate my surprise when I found this other thing called support that actually looks, feels, and acts like support. My girlfriend put her money where her mouth is and, with no particular interest in UFOs, got behind a project that interested me.

And the difference between polite neutrality and support is really what allowed this project to happen. I’m sure I could have done a lot of research and writing on my own, but my girlfriend is the focus group, test audience, copy editor, and art director behind this fledgling endeavor. I’m deeply grateful for her contribution and I think it’s important you know this newsletter is a team effort.  

But why am I telling you this? Because I routinely have conversations with people who tell me they want to write books, start businesses, or consider a significant lifestyle shift that they are not currently doing. The block I tend to hear usually comes from their relationships, which, as described to me, tend to lack the support I’m trying to highlight here. I’m offering you this experience of mine in the event it helps you spot the difference. I wish it had been pointed out to me much earlier in my life.

Anyways, if you’ve gotten this far, I know what you might be thinking: I should marry her, right? Just did. Married her on Saturday. You’re getting this as an automated post while I’m on a road trip for my honeymoon. I’ll be out of contact for about three weeks while my girlfriend wife and I talk about all the ways we hope to support each other’s dreams in the future. Who knows. Maybe she’s into Bigfoot.

The Other Topic will be back to a weekly publication schedule on March 12^th and, if you’re a dedicated reader, I hope you’ll forgive this (ideally rare) break in a publication schedule I take seriously. Until then.

Best,

From Mr. and Mrs. Author

of The Other Topic

P.S. As a thank you to those of you who have stuck with us so far, please enjoy this limited time subscription discount available until March 11th:

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February 13, 2024

Dear Robert,

In 1965, Col. Franklin Matthias sat down for an interview about his time on the Manhattan Project. As I’m sure you know, Matthias had been the officer in charge of the Hanford Site, and, among the many interesting things he had to say, he recalled a particular incident where a Japanese “Fu-Go” balloon bomb successfully knocked out all power to the facility.1

This extraordinary series of events, which involved a small balloon being launched from the tip of Japan, travelling more than 6,000 miles across the ocean, and then blowing up the right power line in Washington State is certainly one of the more interesting anecdotes of World War II. And the idea that America’s Top Secret plutonium production could be “shut down cold” for about three days is humbling, to say the least.2 There’s just one problem. I can’t find any official record of it happening.

You see, aside from this one interview, I wasn’t able to find any document or other witnesses to vouch for this event. Even the U.S. Army’s G-2 Periodic Report on the emerging balloon threat didn’t seem to capture this particular incident.3 In fact, as far as I can tell, it seems like we’re taking Matthias’s word for it and that his word is what ultimately became history.

One of the reasons I’m writing you is that I thought you might have a unique appreciation for the point I’m trying to make. You are an Assistant Professor of History at Washington State, but you also happen to be an “Oral Historian” for the Department of Energy’s Hanford Collection. In an interview you delivered in 2018, you noted how important oral testimonies were to piece together the “rich and complicated story” of Hanford, the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. I guess I’m wondering if you have room for any of the oral testimonies that might be of interest to me?4

I happen to write a Substack Newsletter about a topic that is a third rail to most historians. I’ve found there tends to be outright hostility to any sober discussion of UFOs but three oral testimonies seem to suggest there might be some history happening in the skies above your nuclear site.

Testimonies during the Second World War include accounts of strange radar blips, a floating ball of fire (similar to the “Foo Fighter” phenomenon over Europe) and the sighting of a well-defined flying saucer. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to suggest that each of these three accounts are equally credible, but that’s precisely why I would love to see engagement from academics like you.

You see, this letter is meant to be much less of a “gotcha” than a sincere ask for your perspective. If we’re going to take the oral testimony of a figure like Vincent Whitehead (who claimed to personally bring down a Japanese balloon bomb with a brick),5 why would we not also consider the oral testimony of Lt. (j.g.) Clarence Clem? My view is that, even if you’re inclined toward extreme skepticism of UFO sightings, their interpretation often leads to very real and worthwhile history that we might want to discuss anyway.

For example, the three WWII-era sightings I mentioned above were crucial to forming what is now called the UFO-nuclear hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that humanity’s development of nuclear weapons may have attracted some exotic attention and that could explain the uptick in UFO sightings during and after WWII. Is this hypothesis correct? I don’t know. But I do know it’s currently being discussed in the halls of Congress, and I think that makes the oral testimony that sparked it very valuable.

If you’re comfortable engaging with the subject matter, I would love to hear your thoughts on the rules of engagement when it comes to testimonies like these ones. Is there a credibility threshold at which they should be included in websites, museum displays, or books like yours? And if they don’t meet that threshold, can their connection to current affairs override that? I think it would be fascinating to see where the head of an up-and-coming history professor might be on these issues.

For my part, I’ve done my best to make it easy for academics like yourself to engage. You can find a fully cited narrative summary and a detailed timeline that I hope provides you with some valuable context to work from. With your help, I think we could start an excellent conversation on when precisely UFO history might just qualify as the “regular” history that could end up in a lecture hall at WSU.

Best,

The Author
of The Other Topic

P.S. I have no prior relationship with Robert Franklin and I chose to write him this letter because of his unique qualifications and area of expertise. If you know another historian who might benefit from this conversation, then please:

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Key Events During the Second World War

December 7, 1941: The Japanese Military launches a surprise attack on the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The United States declares war against Japan (December 8, 1941) as well as Germany and Italy (December 11, 1941). This begins U.S. involvement in the Second World War.1

January 19, 1942: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt formally authorizes the United States Manhattan Project which is an effort to produce a nuclear weapon for use during the Second World War.2 While initial discussion about the project began on August 2, 1939, they had remained largely theoretical and designed to compete with a perceived effort by Nazi Germany to produce a similar weapon.3 The entry of the United States into the Second World War now accelerates this effort and prepares the project for an offensive intent.

December 21, 1942: Du Pont de Nemours and Company receives a contract to construct and manage the world’s first plutonium production facility. A site is selected in Hanford, Washington with construction beginning in 1943. This site is being constructed to advance the United States Manhattan Project.4

This event is significant as there are no known UFO interactions in Washington State prior to the introduction of this nuclear facility. It remains the contention of key figures in the UFO Research Community that there is a relationship between the development of nuclear technology and the presence of UFOs.5

October 10, 1943: Construction begins on the world’s first full scale plutonium production reactor at the Hanford Site. The reactor will be called “B Reactor” and represents a substantial advance in the United State’s ability to make fuel for an atomic bomb.6

September 6, 1944: “B Reactor” at the Hanford Site is completed and begins operation. This is the world’s first full scale plutonium production reactor. There will be an additional two reactors constructed (D Reactor and F Reactor) by the time the site is fully completed in April 1945.7

November 3, 1944: The Japanese Military launches the first “Fu-Go” Balloon Bomb into the Pacific jet stream. Each balloon carries four incendiaries and one thirty-pound high-explosive bomb. The intention of the program is to cause fires, damage, and spread panic across the continental United States. Approx. 9,300 balloons will be launched at the United States from Japan until the program is cancelled in April 1945.89

November 5, 1944: A U.S. Navy patrol off the coast of California spots the remnants of a Japanese Balloon Bomb in the ocean. This is the first time the United States discovers and identifies this new Japanese weapon. Between November 1944 and April 1945 there would be approx. 300 discoveries and incidents across the United States. Because the balloons are travelling immense distances with no guidance other than the wind, they are notoriously inaccurate and ineffective. The U.S. Military’s awareness of these balloons will influence their early interpretation of any unknown objects in the air.10 It remains the contention of some academics that any claims to have encountered a UFO during this period were actually the result of the Japanese Balloon Bomb program.

December 17, 1944: “D Reactor” at the Hanford Site is completed and begins operation as the world’s second full scale plutonium production reactor.11

c. December 23, 1944: Unidentified aircraft are observed flying over the Hanford Site on at least two nights beginning around December 23, 1944. It is unclear if these initial observations are made visually or using radar, however, a later report by the United States Fourth Air Force will indicate that unsuccessful fighter intercepts were attempted on at least one of these two sightings.12

These fighter intercepts are conducted from Pasco Naval Air Station which is located about 26 miles (42 km) southeast of the Hanford Site.13 A newspaper article after the war will indicate that “radar was installed at the [Hanford Site] hurriedly when we saw or thought we saw unidentified aircraft operating [in the area].”14 This is presumably a reference to these first sightings in December 1944.

A later statement by a fighter pilot sent on a subsequent intercept in January (Cdr R.W. Hendershot) will describe a single F6F “Hellcat” fighter being sent to intercept these initial radar contacts. At the time of his statement, he can no longer remember the name of the pilot flying the intercepts, but he indicates that radar clocked the objects moving “about as fast as a J-3 ‘Piper Cub’ aircraft” travelling northwest to southeast across the Pasco Naval Air Station. On both occasions, this unnamed fighter pilot was unable to make visual contact.15 For reference, the top speed of a J-3 Piper Cub is 85 mph (137km/h), the top speed of a Fu Go Balloon Bomb is 185mph (298km/h), and the top speed of an F6F Hellcat is 391 mph (629km/h).161718

January 4, 1945: United States Western Defense Command orders that no publicity be released concerning the Japanese Balloon Bombs to prevent public panic.1920

January 15, 1945: A battery of searchlights is moved from Seattle to the Hanford Site. The Thirteenth Naval District instructs fighters at Pasco Naval Air Station to use radar and fighter aircraft to identify anything that flies over the facility. The airspace is declared a “Danger Area” and a “Restricted Area” to prevent all accidental military and civilian flights. Naval Aviators are instructed to intercept and shoot at any unidentified aircraft they find.21

Undated Contextual Note: Further complicating the issue of what exactly is flying over the Hanford Site, U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Agent, Vincent Whitehead begins flying the perimeter of the facility in an unspecified “artillery spotter plane” sometime after his arrival in Spring/Summer 1944.22 For reference, the J-3 Piper Cub was widely used for artillery spotting during the Second World War and it is possible Whitehead’s flights could account for some of the early radar contacts reported during this period.

According to Whitehead, he and another pilot check the fence perimeter of the Hanford Site via these flights “every morning.” On one occasion, he notes that they discover a Japanese Balloon Bomb flying directly overhead which Whitehead claims to have brought down personally from his aircraft by throwing a brick at it. He indicates the balloon crashes 1.5 miles outside of the fence line and is recovered by himself and his co-pilot on landing. The date for this incident is not specified and it is not recorded in any subsequent reporting by G-2 U.S. Army Intelligence.23

Assuming this story is accurate, this suggests that (1) there may have been issues sharing flight and radar information between Pasco Naval Air Station and the Hanford Site, (2) there were definitely issues sharing information on Japanese Balloon Bomb incidents between different military commands, and (3) at least some security incidents around the Hanford Site were withheld from broader military reporting so as not to disclose the top secret purpose of the facility.

Between January 15–23, 1945: Radar at Pasco Naval Air Station briefly picks up an aircraft over the Hanford Site. A single T6 “Texan” training aircraft is sent to intercept but is unable to make contact with anything in the area.24 This training aircraft is likely the plane piloted by Cdr R.W. Hendershot who, in his account, indicates that his intercept took place in an “SNJ” aircraft during the afternoon in response to two radar blips that were “very high” up in the air. The “SNJ” is another name for the T6 Texan.

As with other previous intercepts, Hendershot was unable to make any visual contact with the object he was sent to find but he would later state, that despite his lack of contact, it was his belief that “there was something there.”25 R.W. Hendershot’s account and subsequent written statement is not dated, though its presentation to noted UFO research advocate, Donald Keyhoe, likely places it sometime in the 1950’s not long after these events would have occurred.

Between January 23 – February 15, 1945: On January 9, 1945 a squadron of F6F “Hellcat” fighters from Air Group 50 arrives at Pasco Naval Air Station for ground support training. Lt. Cdr Richard Brown, Lt. (j.g.) Clarence Clem, and Ensign C.T. Neal are three of the Naval Aviators that are part of this training exercise.

On a date that is likely sometime after the intercept conducted by Cdr R.W. Hendershot, the three men receive a call in the Officer’s Club with a request to investigate another unidentified aircraft over the Hanford Site. Brown takes to the air in an F6F Hellcat, Clem positions himself in the Air Traffic Tower to coordinate radio communications, and Neal enters a second F6F Hellcat that waits on the tarmac on standby. During his intercept, Brown encounters an object that he describes as “looking like a ball of fire” hovering directly over the Hanford Site. He chases the object which promptly outruns him and disappears from radar travelling in a northwest direction. On returning to Pasco Naval Air Station, he describes the object as “so bright he had trouble looking at it.” There is no follow-up action taken after this intercept.

There are two additional intercepts that occur prior to the squadron leaving Pasco Naval Air Station on February 15, 1945. The second intercept involves a radar contact that disappears before Neal is able to get airborne to chase it. A third intercept occurs but the details are no longer memorable to the Naval Aviator (Clarence Clem) providing the account sixty-four years later in 2009. None of these three intercepts are acknowledged or written about in the squadron history that follows the war and there is no other documentation that corroborates this account.2627

January 25, 1945: Western Defense Command and Army Commands located at the Hanford Site request that an additional night fighter be based at Pasco Naval Air Station to respond to the recurring appearances over the site.28 It is unclear whether this permanent duty was ever assigned.

February 2, 1945: The first successful processing of plutonium at the Hanford Site is complete. A delivery is made to a representative of the Manhattan Project on February 3, 1945.29

February 12, 1945: The first traces of a Japanese Balloon Bomb appear in Washington State as two unexploded bombs are found 7 miles (11km) north of Spokane, Washington. There will be a further nine discoveries in Washington through the month of February (15^th, 20^th, 21^st, 21^st, 21^st, 22^nd, 27^th, 28^th, 28^th). Most of these discoveries involve finding parts of a balloon on the ground. In one case on the 21^st, a balloon remains airborne after it was reported and in another separate case (also on the 21^st) a balloon is shot down over Suma, Washington by the Royal Canadian Airforce. Only one discovery occurs in proximity to the Hanford Site (February 15 – Prosser, Washington) where an intact paper balloon is found on the ground.30 Prosser is located about 27 miles (44 km) southwest of the Hanford Site.31

February 25, 1945: “F Reactor” at the Hanford Site is completed and begins operation as the world’s third full scale plutonium production reactor. The completion of this third and final reactor makes this the largest plutonium production facility in the world. There are only two other plutonium production facilities in existence, and they are small prototypes located at the University of Chicago and the Clinton Engineering Works in Tennessee. Their potential does not come close to the Hanford Site, which now has a maximum available output of 21 kilograms of plutonium per month.32

March 3, 1945: Paper fragments of a Japanese Balloon Bomb are found again in Washington State. There will be a further seven discoveries of intact balloons or balloon fragments through the month of March (10^th, 10^th, 10^th, 10^th, 13^th, 13^th, 13^th). Only one discovery occurs in proximity to the Hanford Site (March 10 – Toppenish, Washington) where portions of a balloon were found on the ground.33 Toppenish is located about 41 miles (66km) southwest of the Hanford Site.34

March 10, 1945: A Japanese Balloon Bombs strikes a power line between Bonneville and Grand Coulee near Sunnyside, Washington. This knocks out power in the area triggering a backup power system for the Hanford Site. It takes about three days to return to full power which slows plutonium production during this period.

This account is offered by Col. Franklin Matthias, the U.S. Army Officer in charge of the Hanford Site, in an interview conducted in 1965. Notably, there are no traces of this incident present in G-2 U.S. Army Intelligence reports on Japanese Balloon Bombs around the time it is said to have occurred. Assuming this story is accurate, it further suggests that (1) there were issues sharing information on Japanese Balloon Bomb incidents between different military commands, and (2) at least some security incidents around the Hanford Site were withheld from broader military reporting so as not to disclose the top secret purpose of the facility.3536

April 1, 1945: More equipment from a Japanese Balloon Bomb is found in Washington State. There will be a further four discoveries of intact balloons or balloon fragments through the month of April (1^st, 3^rd, 19^th, 30^th). Two discoveries occur in proximity to the Hanford Site (April 19 – Wapato, Washington and April 30 – Moxee, Washington) where portions of a balloon were found on the ground in each case.37 Wapato is located about 44 miles (71km) west of the Hanford Site and Moxee is located about 42 miles (68km) west of the Hanford Site.38

Early April, 1945: The Japanese Military launches the last “Fu-Go” Balloon Bomb at the United States. At the time, there are doubts about the efficacy of the program and production is now limited by the recent destruction of a key hydrogen plant.39 Using a conservative estimate of how long a Fu-Go Balloon Bomb could stay airborne (about 50-90 hours),40 this eliminates the balloons as a potential explanation for unidentified flying objects over the Hanford Site by mid-April, 1945.

April 13, 1945: The Hanford Site completes an additional structure for plutonium production (the B-Plant) and finishes all site construction by the end of April. This now allows the facility to ship plutonium by rail to Los Alamos, New Mexico every five days. In May, the speed of delivery will be increased by moving from rail to guarded truck convoys. In late July, this will be deemed insufficient and the facility will begin direct shipments by air.

To accommodate these increased shipments, the facility (1) runs their reactors above their rated power levels, and (2) reduces the cooling period for irradiated fuel to potentially unsafe levels. Despite these dangerous developments in the spring and summer of 1945, leadership of the Manhattan Project will continue to demand increased production until the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945.41

May 5, 1945: In Bly, Oregon, a Sunday School picnic approaches the debris of a grounded Japanese Balloon Bomb. At the request of the U.S. military, there has been no public acknowledgement of the program to prevent public panic. As they are unaware of what they are looking at, most of the picnic gets close to the debris when the bomb explodes killing the Reverend’s wife and five children attending Sunday School between the ages of 11 and 14. The Revered is the only survivor of the explosion. After this incident, the military breaks its silence and issues public warnings about the balloon bombs and gives instructions not to tamper with them. This is the first time the public becomes aware of the existence of the Japanese Balloon Bomb program.42

May 25, 1945: The last remnants of a Japanese Balloon Bomb are found in Washington State. This final discovery is made in Asotin, Washington which is not in close proximity to the Hanford Site. In total there have been twenty-five balloon bomb discoveries in Washington recorded by G-2 U.S. Army Intelligence. The vast majority of these have been recovered fragments of balloon bombs found on the ground. A further majority (21 out of 25) are not located within close proximity (defined by this author as 50 miles) to the Hanford Site.43

July 16, 1945 - 5:30am: The atomic age begins with the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb at the Alamogordo Bombing Range near Los Alamos, New Mexico.44

c. July 22, 1945 – 12:00pm: In early July 1945, Lt. Cdr Rolan D. Powell is transferred along with 12 other Naval Aviators to Pasco Naval Air Station. The U.S. Navy has selected them to form a new squadron and train for carrier operations in the Pacific.

On a date around July 22, 1945 Powell and his fellow aviators are at the Air Station when a “General Quarters” alarm sounds and they are directed to intercept an unidentified fast-moving aircraft that is now in a holding pattern above the Hanford Site. Six F6F “Hellcats” take to the air and arrive above the site at approx. noon on a clear day. Powell describes seeing a large, oval-shaped, streamlined object that is “pinkish” in color. The object is holding in place at about 65,000 ft and, according to Powell, emitting vapor around its outside edges from what appeared to be portholes and vents. In a later interview, he would speculate that the vapor was being discharged to form a cloud for disguise. In addition to these features, Powell estimated the size of the object as about “three aircraft carriers side by side.” Using the dimensions of a WWII-era aircraft carrier, this would make the object roughly 800 by 270 ft (244 by 82 metres).

All six pilots attempt to climb to co-altitude with the object, but they are limited by the technology of the time. The F6F Hellcat is rated for a maximum altitude of 37,000 ft. According to Powell, the pilots are able to push it to 42,000 ft before their engines begin to fail and fuel consumption gets critical. During this period the object gives no signals and makes no overt moves. After hovering in a fixed position for an additional twenty minutes, the object disappears going straight-up and the six F6F Hellcats return to Pasco Naval Air Station. There is no follow-up action taken after this intercept.45

Significantly, this is the very first account of any saucer-like object in Washington State. However, it should also be noted that this account is only brought to public attention in 1996 well after other significant developments in Ufology.46 There is no other documentation that corroborates this account.

August 6 and 9, 1945: The United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki has been made with the plutonium refined at the Hanford Site.47

August 12, 1945: After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth releases a report called Atomic Energy for Military Purposes which brings the Manhattan Project to public attention.48

August 15, 1945: The surrender of Imperial Japan is announced by Japanese Emperor Hirohito, bringing the Second World War to a close. The formal surrender will be signed on September 2, 1945.

Winding Down After the Second World War

August, 1945 – December, 1946: After the end of the Second World War, the United States reduces the pace at which it is producing and stockpiling atomic weapons. At the Hanford Site, operating power is reduced in all three reactors and one of two chemical separation structures used to finalize production is shut. “B Reactor” is completely shut down in December 1946 leaving only two reactors operational.49 Though not explicitly mentioned, it is likely this coincides with a general reduction in air surveillance and protection around the site during this period.

January 1, 1947: The newly formed U.S. Atomic Energy Commission takes over research and production facilities from the Manhattan Project.50

August 25, 1947: The Manhattan Project officially dissolves.51

P.S. Did you enjoy the detailed look at these classic cases? If you want to see more of this kind of work, please:

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But what does this have to do with UFOs? This isn’t a newsletter about screenwriting and I’m not a screenwriter. But this advice came to mind recently as I’ve been reading through some of the many timelines that the UFO Community seems to produce again, and again, and again. And as much as they may seem valuable for explaining or contextualizing “the Phenomenon,” I was left with one looming, inescapable feeling: these timelines were filled with million-dollar sentences. And I don’t think it’s working.

What Are UFO Timelines Doing Right Now?

Recently, investigative journalist George Knapp compiled a 177-page timeline to support a congressional hearing on “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.” This timeline, which covered a period of 76 years, included entries like this one:

(PUBLIC DOMAIN) - 1952 — CIA Project Moonstruck allegedly studies long range use of frequencies for the purpose of stimulation of the brains of targets. It is claimed these implants were placed in subjects during abductions; unknown if related to UAP phenomenon.1

Now why would this be a “million-dollar sentence?” Because you could break down those 37 words into 9 separate questions that your reader would have to answer to fully understand the entry:

1. What do you mean by long range frequencies?

2. Can long range frequencies be used to “stimulate the brains of targets?” And if so, how?

3. Who or what were those targets?

4. What do you mean by “abductions?”

5. Who or what are you claiming was responsible for those abductions?

6. What are “these implants” and what did they do?

7. When you say “allegedly,” why are we confident this project happened?

8. When you say “claimed,” who is making that claim?

9. When you say “unknown if related to UAP phenomenon,” why is this valuable to a congressional hearing on UAPs?

This is asking the reader to do a lot. Just like a producer trying to figure out how to make your million-dollar sentence work onscreen, many readers here would be trying to figure out how to square that entry in their heads. Some might be willing to accept the whole thing at face value but it’s much more likely they would respond by putting the script timeline down. No need to read further. You’ve provided too little and asked them to do too much.

This is the flaw I see in many UFO timelines. The scope chosen by their authors tends to set up this kind of problem because any individual entry couldn’t possibly hope to provide a satisfactory level of detail. Efforts to identify trends through all of human history (like George M. Eberharts 691-page timeline) might be appealing to committed UFO people, but their tendency to lean on million-dollar sentences are probably repulsive to everyone else.

Is There a Way We Could Be Doing This Better?

When I was an intern in D.C., I got the chance to take a tour of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) training facility in Ashburn, Virginia. One of the standouts of that tour was an opportunity to walk through the reconstructed fuselage of a Boeing 747 that had exploded mid-air (TWA Flight 800).2 My group got to ask a lot of questions about how they investigated and explained this disaster and the NTSB responded with a pretty clear answer: meticulous timelines.

In the view of my instructor, their timeline is what ultimately allowed them to pull all the human interactions and engineering conclusions into one cohesive explanation. The scale was kept tight, detailed, and precise. Each change, no matter how small, got its own distinct entry complete with the necessary context as it became relevant. Thirteen years later and I can still vaguely recall his advice that a good timeline should be answering more questions than it opens.

I’ve never had a chance to apply that skillset in the career I’ve had since, but lately I’ve thought a lot about the opportunity the UFO file presents. Assuming you’re interested in actually getting at the truth, a tight timeline focused on one single incident could present one of the best vehicles for doing that. I believe granular detail might appeal to a skeptical public and I’m a firm believer that we should welcome the conclusions that emerge, whatever they may be.

Next week, I’m going to show you what this might look like using the 1944-45 Hanford Sightings that I’ve profiled recently. No lengthy page counts. No million-dollar sentences. Just four pages and 33 distinct entries that I think present the best assessment in the spirit of the NTSB. I hope you’ll find that the format helps clear up the questions that sometimes emerge from a narrative summary. And if it works, I hope to apply it to as many cases as possible in an effort to reveal what may be a poorly presented truth.  

P.S. The Other Topic is a weekly newsletter released every Tuesday at 9:00am (EST). If you’d like to see content like next week’s Hanford timeline, then:

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The Hanford Site became relevant to UFO research with the growing idea that UFOs might somehow be interested in our nuclear technology. At a high level, the thought was that our development of nuclear weapons during the Second World War is what ultimately attracted their attention and may explain why UFO sightings were so frequent during the post-war period.1 If that thesis is correct, it would stand to reason that any UFOs would have been very interested in the first nuclear production facilities ever built. The Hanford Site is one of these facilities and there are three key UFO sightings during its first year of operation.

In this post, we’re going to look at these sightings as a package, explore some important context, and assess the credibility of the people offering these accounts. By grouping these sightings together, it’s my hope that you’ll be able to see these cases from a slightly new angle and reach an informed opinion about what may be a very underrated part of our history.

Lets start by looking at:

The Manhattan Project

The U.S. government started thinking about nuclear weapons shortly before the Second World War broke out. Even though there was some interest in building one, the project stayed small and theoretical until the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Its entry into the Second World War kicked that effort into high gear and what became known as The Manhattan Project was born.23

The Manhattan Project was going to try and build an atomic bomb using one of two explosive materials: (1) uranium, or (2) plutonium. Ultimately, they ended up pursuing both options with uranium development located at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and plutonium development located in Hanford, Washington.

Construction of the world’s first full scale plutonium production reactor began in Hanford on October 10, 1943. About a year later (September 6, 1944) “B Reactor” was complete and running. At the time, this made Hanford the first and only plutonium production facility in the world.4 Within about three months, unidentified flying objects began appearing over the Hanford Site just as the facility was completing additional reactors and ramping up its ability to make more plutonium.  What followed were three major groups of sightings, some of which could be explained by conventional means and some of which could not.

The Japanese Balloon Bomb Campaign

One of the factors that “muddy the waters” on these UFO sightings is the simultaneous existence of the Japanese “Fu-Go” Balloon Bomb Program. This historically underrated program involved the Empire of Japan launching 9,300 balloon bombs into the pacific jet stream where they were intended to sail across the ocean, reach the United States, explode, and cause fires, damage, and public panic.

Each balloon bomb took about 60 hours to reach the United States and because they were travelling immense distances with no guidance other than the wind, they were notoriously inaccurate. Of the 9,300 launches between November 1944 and April 1945, only about 300 were recovered or observed in the United States.56

Washington State, where the Hanford Site is located, would see about 25 of these incidents over the duration of the Balloon Bomb Program. Most of them involved the discovery of balloon fragments on the ground and only four of these were within 50 miles of the Hanford Site.7 But two notable accounts from the period add color to these statistics. Franklin Matthias, the U.S. Army Officer in charge of the Hanford Site would go on to indicate that a balloon bomb successfully struck a power line near the facility and severely reduced its power for three days.8 Vincent Whitehead, a U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Agent would state that he found a Japanese Balloon Bomb flying over the site while he was in a spotter plane. Whitehead claims that he personally brought it down by throwing a brick at it and recovered the balloon on landing.9

Neither of these accounts are present in standard military reporting during the period and that suggests that (1) there were issues coordinating a response to the balloon bombs at the time, and (2) some security issues at the Hanford Site were deliberately left out of reports so as not to betray the Top Secret purpose of the facility. Those two things should be kept in mind as you form an opinion about the three sightings outlined below.

Sighting #1 – (Cmdr. R. W. Hendershot)

c. Dec 23, 1944 to Jan 23, 1945

The first sighting of an “unidentified aircraft” over the Hanford Site occurred in late December 1944. A second one followed soon after. While a single F6F “Hellcat” fighter was sent out to investigate, on both occasions the pilot was unable to find anything by the time he arrived.

These sightings were clocked by radar moving “about as fast as a [spotter plane]” travelling northwest to southeast across the area. Given the lack of visual confirmation, it’s possible that radar was actually picking up Japanese Balloon Bombs or one of the ad-hoc security flights similar to those flown by Vincent Whitehead. It’s impossible to tell, but a conventional explanation should be considered based on the available information.

In early January, the military responded by moving a battery of searchlights into the area, installing radar at the Hanford Site, and requesting that two night fighters be permanently assigned to intercept any aircraft. To try and further narrow down the objects they were seeing, the airspace was declared a “Danger Area” and “Restricted Area” to prevent all accidental civilian and military flights.

Sometime between January 15^th and 23^rd, radar once again picked up an aircraft over the Hanford Site. Cmdr. R. W. Hendershot was asked to investigate “two radar blips that were very high up in the air.” On a clear afternoon, he flew a T6 “Texan” training aircraft over the facility. While he would later state that it was his belief “there was something there” he was unable to find anything in the area on his intercept. He rotated out of the nearby Pasco Naval Air Station on a different assignment soon after, closing the book on this initial group of sightings.101112

Sighting #2 – (Lt. j.g. Clarence Clem)

January 9, 1945 to February 15, 1945

Lt. Cmdr. Richard Brown, Lt. (j.g.) Clarence Clem, and Ensign C.T. Neal were rotated on to the Pasco Naval Air Station in early January for a short training exercise. One afternoon, while they were sitting in the Officer’s Club, they received a call about another unidentified aircraft over the Hanford Site and were ordered to intercept it.

Brown entered an F6F “Hellcat” and took to the air to investigate. Neal waited in a second Hellcat on the tarmac to support Brown, if needed. And Clem positioned himself in the Air Traffic Control tower to coordinate radio communications during the intercept. According to Brown, he observed an object that he described as “looking like a ball of fire” in a controlled hover directly above the Hanford Site. He chased the object which promptly outran him and disappeared from radar travelling in a northwest direction. On returning to Pasco Naval Air Station, he described the object as “so bright he had trouble looking at it.”

Brown’s encounter with a ball of fire is similar to the “Foo Fighter” phenomenon that was reported by Allied Airmen over Europe during this period. Notably, it’s the first account of a flying object located over the Hanford Site that is unmistakably unknown.

There were two additional intercepts that occurred before the squadron left Pasco Naval Air Station on February 15, 1945. The second intercept involved a radar contact that disappeared before Neal was able to get airborne and chase it. A third intercept occurred but the details were similarly unremarkable. Shortly after, all three men rotated off the base, closing the book on this second group of sightings.1314

Sighting #3 – (Lt. Cmdr. Rolan Powell)

c. July 22, 1945

In early July, Cmdr. Rolan Powell was transferred on to Pasco Naval Air Station to form a new squadron and train for carrier operations. On a date around July 22, 1945 Powell and his fellow aviators were on the airfield when a “General Quarters” alarm sounded and they were directed to intercept an unidentified aircraft that was said to be in a holding pattern above the Hanford Site.

According to Powell, six F6F “Hellcat” fighters took off at approximately noon on an otherwise clear day. On arrival to the Hanford Site, Powell describes seeing a large, oval-shaped, streamlined object that was “pinkish” in color. The object was holding in place at about 65,000 ft and emitting vapor around its outside edges from what appeared to be portholes and vents. Powell estimated the size of the object as about “three aircraft carriers side by side.” Using the dimensions of a WWII-era aircraft carrier, this would make the object roughly 800 by 270 ft (244 by 82 m).

According to Powell, all six planes tried to climb to co-altitude with the object, but they were limited by the technology of their time. The Hellcats were only rated for a ceiling of 37,000 ft. Powell indicated they were able to push it to 42,000 ft before their engines began to fail and fuel consumption got critical. After hovering in a fixed position for about twenty minutes, the object disappeared going straight-up and the six Hellcats returned to base.

Notably, this is the second time an unknown object was visually identified over the site and the first indication of any saucer-like craft operating in the area. This was Powell’s only encounter with a UFO and he rotated off the base not long after.15

Are These Accounts Credible?

While all three sightings are from the same year during the Second World War, not all of them came to light at the same time or in the same way.

R. W. Hendershot is speaking for himself as well as his memory of the earliest intercept attempts by another (unnamed) pilot. His claims are corroborated by other military documents at the time and as neither he nor the other pilot made any visual contact, the burden of proof for his claim is pretty low. It should also be noted that his written account of the experience was provided to noted UFO Research advocate, Donald Keyhoe, likely sometime in the 1950’s when Keyhoe was most active in the field. This means that in addition to the corroborating documents, Hendershot is providing an account not that long after the events in question.

Clarence Clem is speaking for himself as well as his two fellow aviators (Richard Brown and C.T. Neil). Of the three, only Brown is said to have made visual contact with an object and he was deceased at the time that Clem brought this forward. It should also be noted that Clem’s account was provided for the first time in 2009, 64 years after the events he is speaking of. While he did put his name to an on-the-record interview in 2013, unfortunately there is no other document to corroborate Clem’s account and the other pilots are not alive to co-sign his version of events.

Rolan Powell is speaking for himself and does not recall the names of the other five aviators who would have been present at his intercept. Unlike the first two men offering accounts, Rolan had a commercial incentive associated with his story which appears in his self-published autobiography, Living on the Edge: An American war hero's daring feats as a Navy fighter pilot, civilian test pilot, and CIA mercenary. With full disclosure, I haven’t been able to get a copy to assess the overall tone of his other claims in the book but like Clarence Clem, Powell’s account was provided quite late, only coming to light for the first time in 1996 (and restated in a subsequent interview in 2008). These are respectively 51 and 63 years after his claimed event. Unfortunately, there is also no other document to corroborate his account.

So what are we supposed to make of that? Well, it should be clear that the story of UFOs over the Hanford Site is complicated. Some of these claims are unlikely and others more likely to be the product of conventional flight. And while I have an opinion on the credibility of accounts like Rolan Powell’s, I also have to acknowledge that these incidents were occurring in the middle of a war, above a Top Secret military project, at a time when security breaches were not being written down. It may be unrealistic to expect a slew of supporting documents and its possible that these former pilots were attempting to flag an important experience in their last remaining years.

Like many prominent UFO cases, these three remain a little murky. And if you’re trying to form an opinion on what is going on out there, sometimes that’s the perspective you need to hear.

P.S. By grouping these sightings together, this article provides a brand new take on these “classic cases.” Until now, they’ve usually been discussed in isolation and without some of the important context you might need to understand them. If you think this new assessment might be helpful, please:

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The precise nature of Elizondo’s “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (2012-2017) has been hotly contested. While it would benefit from a detailed examination at a later date, what can be said with certainty is that his effort inspired a series of very official successor programs that are not in dispute.

Today, I’m going to walk you through these recent Pentagon UFO programs so that you can understand how the file has evolved and where it might be headed. Join me on this exploration of how to build a very long government acronym as we start with the:

[UAPTF] The “Unofficial” Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force

(September 2018 - August 2020) Approx. 2 years.

In late 2018, an Intelligence Officer named Jay Stratton accepted a job in the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Stratton had recently made the move to a senior executive level and was assigned a pretty standard role assessing conventional threats to the U.S. Navy.1

But in the wake of that New York Times article, UFOs were drawing more and more public attention. Two of the most well-profiled modern incidents involved the Navy and Naval Aviators were now starting to testify behind closed doors to Congress.2

Stratton was one of the only members of ONI with anything approaching UFO experience. In the late 2000’s he had been involved with a formal Pentagon effort to study the issue (the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program - AAWSAP) and he had maintained a connection to Elizondo’s AATIP effort throughout the 2010’s.

With that background in mind, the head of ONI selected Stratton to look into it on behalf of the U.S. Navy. To do this, she granted him “Direct Liaison Authority” (DIRLAUTH) where Stratton was empowered to go seek voluntary cooperation across the government. In Stratton’s own words his effort was considered a voluntary “partnership” and lacked the legal status of a task force. But as more areas of the defense establishment began to play ball, Stratton and others began to informally call their effort “The UAP Task Force” or “UAPTF.”34

Stratton’s work during this period accomplished three major things:

1. He wrote two “Intelligence Position Reports” which advocated for a serious look at the issue. These reports were widely circulated across the defense establishment, with one source noting that they “went viral” inside the intelligence community.5

2. He got the Navy to implement a formal reporting procedure for pilots that encountered UAPs so that the stigma would no longer be a barrier to data collection;6 and

3. He lobbied the major Congressional Defense Committees for help. This resulted in an obscure legislative direction by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which (a) expressed support for his effort, and (b) requested a public report on his findings within 180 days.7

Shortly after the Senate Select Committee’s comments passed through a legislative vehicle called the “Intelligence Authorization Act,” the Pentagon announced the formal creation of a UAP Task Force.8 This upgraded Stratton’s unofficial effort into an official one leading to the:

[UAPTF] The “Official” UAP Task Force

(August 2020 - November 2021) Approx. 1 year 3 months.

The creation of an official UAP Task Force introduced some new variables into this equation. Stratton would remain in charge, and the U.S. Navy would continue to lead the file, but the task force would now report up to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. This nested its results at the top of the Pentagon bureaucracy, where, it would now have some oversight and interest from the Secretary of Defense.

The creation of a legal Task Force also changed Stratton’s staffing capability. Where before he had acted pretty much alone, now the major armed services branches and intelligence agencies could loan permanent staff to his effort. This resulted in a variety of secondments which notably included Travis Taylor (from the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command)9 and David Grusch (from the National Reconnaissance Office).10 It’s still unclear how many other branches participated, though its unlikely the team would have exceeded about 17 people.11

During this period, Stratton and Travis Taylor were chiefly responsible for writing the public UFO report requested by the Senate. This Preliminary Assessment on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena was delivered on June 25, 2021 and while it suffered from tight timelines and some collaboration issues, it was the first public UFO report to be published in over 50 years.12

While efforts continued on above board analysis of modern UFO reports, Stratton also decided to make use of a particular kind of security clearance (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Clearance) held by David Grusch. It is during this period that he assigned Grusch the task of looking into rumors of an alleged “off-book” UFO program designed to recover and reverse-engineer crashed craft. It is from this direction that Grusch would later claim to have found significant evidence of that program’s existence and he would eventually make a whistleblower complaint flagging that effort as operating illegally outside of Congressional oversight.13

While all three of these figures have spoken highly of their time together, the verdict on the quality of the UAPTF is not unanimous. An anonymous DoD official that worked with the task force would later note that he felt “Stratton was a complete nutjob” and that “most of what the task force did was a complete and utter waste of money.” It’s unclear to what extent these comments represent the feelings of all staff, but that figure did note that he spearheaded complaints up the Pentagon’s chain of command and they seemed to have an effect.14

By June 2021 Stratton was out as Director, being replaced by a more cautious bureaucrat named Brennan McKernan.1516 The new UAPTF concluded that one of the errors of its previous leadership was a miscategorization of Chinese spy balloons and other foreign drones as UAPs due to an enthusiasm for the “extraordinary.”17 While the Pentagon now knew this, it wasn’t yet clear to Congress which was trying to make the office even more prominent within the Department of Defense. But their direction in a legislative vehicle called the “National Defense Authorization Act” didn’t specify a name for this enhanced effort, so, armed with this new theory about balloons and drones, the Pentagon opted to choose it for them:18

[AOIMSG] Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group

(November 2021 - July 2022) Approx. 8 months.

One of the more remarkable features of the AOIMSG was that it’s Director was never named. This was the first time the program had left the U.S. Navy and its unclear whether Brenan McKernan stayed on in any capacity. Based on some information provided by the Pentagon, it seems that another defense official (Sean Kirkpatrick) began leading the program in “early 2022” but few details as to its original scope or intent were ever provided to the public.19

With this new structure, the program would now be run directly out of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (Ronald Moultrie) with oversight provided by the Deputy Secretary of Defense (Kathleen Hicks). A separate “Airborne Object Identification and Management Executive Council” (AOIMEXEC) was supposed to act as a vehicle for every other service branch to advise the group on their activities.20

What were those activities? Their advice was supposed to be targeted at (1) identifying objects in the air over military training ranges, and (2) clearing safety of flight issues that might harm military pilots. This scoped down vision got off to a bad start when just one month into its existence, legislation required this office to re-task onto UFOs.21 By the time Ronald Moultrie (representing AOIMSG) and Scott Bray (representing the old UAPTF) showed up to a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, it was clear that Congressional interest was heading toward a broader UFO investigation.

Once again, the DoD was forced to reverse course, and, complying with the 2022 NDAA, they created a new organization with a new name. This time public-facing communication would be better, and, frankly, the name would be to …

[AARO] The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office

(July 2022 - Present)

AARO was announced with a clear mandate and a clearly identified Director (Sean Kirkpatrick). And unlike the previous programs run by the Pentagon, Kirkpatrick was empowered to speak openly about his interest in the topic and his plans for the future.22

Kirkpatrick was himself a practicing scientist with two patents under his belt and in an early interview advocated for strict application of the scientific method. This dovetailed nicely with AARO’s expanded mandate to look at “anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects” to mitigate “any associated threats … to national security.”23 Now, everything was back on the table and it paid off in the early goodwill the office was able to generate.

One of its first acts was to release its 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. While the report did come a little late, it was mostly prepared in the period of transition from AOIMSG to AARO and the public didn’t seem overly bothered by the delay. Its results were largely overshadowed a month later when the Chinese Spy Balloon flap (resulting in the downing of four unidentified objects over North America) kicked off a bigger discussion about UFOs and how, at least some of them, could be explained by conventional means. AARO shined in that discussion and, for a few months at least, its leadership remained largely uncontroversial in UFO circles.

But this office has always been dominated by a tension between the old and the new. And in June 2023 that tension boiled over when a former member of the Navy’s UAP Task Force (David Grusch) went public with allegations of a massive government coverup. According to Grusch, he found significant evidence of an illegal U.S. intelligence program to recover and reverse engineer crashed UFOs. He made formal whistleblower complaints to the Department of Defense Inspector General and the Intelligence Community Inspector General, where the latter deemed his findings both “credible” and “urgent.”24

Thus began a direct conflict between David Grusch and Sean Kirkpatrick, where Grusch said he had debriefed Kirkpatrick on his findings as early as April 2022.25 Kirkpatrick maintained that he was able to see no evidence that supported them, but he also acknowledged that he lacked some information collecting authority (Title 50)26 and had not seen a copy of the complaint submitted by Grusch.27

When the House Oversight Committee held a hearing that substantially talked about Grusch’s claim, Kirkpatrick released a statement that called it “insulting” to the employees of AARO.28 This did not play well with many curious Americans and its unclear to what extent this had an impact on the organization of his office. Shortly after his statement, the effort was once again upgraded from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security to the Deputy Secretary of Defense (Kathleen Hicks).29 By November 2023, Sean Kirkpatrick was out as Director being replaced by a long-time intelligence bureaucrat named Timothy Phillips.30

With yet another leadership change, who knows what the future has in store for the Pentagon’s most recent (publicly acknowledged) UFO program. But at least one article has outlined the priority of Kathleen Hicks … a name change.

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Instead, what I found were real estate agents. A lot of them! That list included some notable figures like Alejandro Rojas (of OpenMinds TV), Robert Powell (of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies) and … David Grusch (of recent whistleblower fame).1 Somewhere in there is a good story I’ve yet to find, but one thing is clear, I’m definitely in the wrong line of work.

You see, I’ve spent the majority of my career working for the government. Not THE government, as in, the United States Federal Government, but more like government(s) which include a major city and state. Aside from a brief internship in Washington D.C., I have no exposure to U.S. national security and I don’t really have any kind of insider knowledge on how the military works.

What I do have is about 12 years of experience in how large, government-funded projects work. And I think as we’re talking about all the recent UFO studies (past and present) that could be a good skillset to bring forward this year. How do I plan to do that?

Can you take a compliment?

I’m relying on your maturity to see that I’m not trying to put down any of the people who don’t share a professional background like mine. I have absolutely no idea how to appraise an antique, but I promise that if I find something in my attic, Martin Willis (of Podcast UFO) is going to be my first call.

I just happened to notice that a lack of government experience has led to some notable podcasters and journalists being taken for a ride. And I’m not here to criticize them. I’m here to offer my background as a resource and complement to their efforts.

One good example of this problem could be found in the early interviews conducted with Luis Elizondo. As the former Director of a Pentagon effort called the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,” Elizondo claims he was blocked from briefing the Secretary of Defense and that’s part of what prompted his resignation.2 The overall discussion of this claim suggested that it was discomfort with the UFO subject that created that block. But someone with a background like mine might have recognized that the type of effort he was running is probably what killed the briefing.

Even though it had the word “Program” in its title, it’s pretty clear from description that Elizondo was actually running an unfunded “working group.” Would the Secretary of Defense take a briefing from an unfunded working group? That’s very unlikely. This has less to do with the military’s attitude on UFOs than it does with how bureaucracies work. So if you’re someone wanting to be informed on this topic and deciding whether or not there is a conspiracy inside the Pentagon, I think you need to be aware of all the “normal” reasons that UFO investigations like this might have floundered.

Specialists V. Generalists

Of course, since that famous New York Times article in 2017, more and more “government insiders” have come forward to discuss this topic openly. But here, again, I need to make a delicate point that brings your attention to another gap.

Working on a government track generally streams you into being a specialist in a very niche topic or a generalist who moves from project to project. This is the difference between maintaining the inter-state highway for 25-years (specialist) or building new transit projects whenever they crop up (generalist).

As far as I can see, most of the people who have come forward so far are specialists with a very intimate knowledge of their portfolio. But because of the track they chose, they would also be insulated from some of the important reasons that decisions are made, money is spent, and legislation is written. I am a generalist with a project background exposing me to all three. So when we’re trying to understand something like “what’s going on with the Navy’s UAP Task Force?” (2018-2021), I’m your man when it comes to talking about the “Task Force” part of that title.

So in that sense, it’s not just that I’m “from the government and here to help.” It’s that I’m from the very high-level part of the government that spends money on big stuff, which exposes me to the ins and outs of how decisions are made. Looking at the year ahead, I hope I can use some of that experience to shed some light on the big questions still lingering inside the UFO Community, and, of course, I hope my readership might include you.

Next week we’ll get started by looking at “what’s up with all these Pentagon UFO programs?” Until then.

Best,

The Author

Of The Other Topic

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What started six months ago as a fun side project has now become a serious endeavor that I’m proud to share with you. How serious? 15 articles, 25,527 words and 318 citations of quality, topical coverage. It’s taken me 100s of hours to produce this (308 says my back of napkin math) and I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed my humble attempt to raise the bar.

I was particularly proud of the 2004 Nimitz Summary (The Nimitz Encounters Something) which was the original spark for this Substack back in the early days of the pandemic. I’ve been immensely grateful to the witnesses and researchers who were willing to speak with me about it and I hope we can continue to work together to poke at the truth (which may or may not … be out there).

With the claims of David Grusch having the biggest impact on the UFO community in 2023, I was also thrilled to see the response to some of the historical digging I did in SECNAV Sees His Own UFO and The Curious Case of Hadley Cantril. While I did my best to get in touch with his circle of advisors to see if any of this new information might be helpful, I wasn’t able to succeed. Certainly, no hard feelings given the small size of this newsletter and how busy those folks must be. But I’m hoping that in the future I can actively contribute as a reliable source of research and information.

Some researchers have gone out of their way to help me get the facts straight and I want to namecheck Dave Beaty and Robert Powell in particular. Both of these men modelled a friendliness and openness that I would hope to pay forward if others reach out to me. I had a good conversation about that mentorship dynamic on Reddit and I think it’s a good bar to hold me to in the future.

While I had originally expected to have some good chats over on #UFOTwitter (UFOx?), that didn’t really happen this year. Most of the quality discussion happened on Reddit where a variety of UFO themed subreddits were happy to engage. But I should also note that my several attempts to bring this content out of the “UFO bubble” and into broader historical, military, or technological subreddits were complete failures. In some cases I was actively blocked (as was the case in r/History) and in some cases there were just no bites (as was the case in r/Navy). I’m still passionate about the need to bring this conversation into the mainstream but there’s clearly still a barrier there that I’m hoping you can help me break down.

One of the more surprising developments was the number of people who reached out to me privately with an invite to a closed Subreddit or Discord community. These people have a passionate interest in the topic that they don’t feel is being served by the current discourse. It’s too early for me to say if they’re right, or if their private research efforts are producing better results, but I have really enjoyed some of the curated conversation I’ve been able to have on topics like improving The Newsweek Credibility Scale. It’s my hope that as people get more comfortable with the UFO/UAP topic, more of these conversations might be able to happen out in the open as well.

On that note, I’m forced to acknowledge another shortfall on my part which was my reluctance to appear on any UFO podcasts. In November, I was given some very kind invites to come on and speak about my work on Hadley Cantril and for the first time I encountered that “ugh” that comes with the idea of putting your face and your name out there on the internet. I had to spend some time looking inward and realize that I needed to get over that if I actually care about having an adult conversation about the UFO phenomenon. To that end, I’m hoping to break the ice and start to be more open to (a) talking about my professional background, and (b) appearing on podcasts that are willing to have me. I’d still like to keep those conversations tight, factual, and informative for an audience that might be new, and I’m currently working on an effort that could be a great starting point over the coming spring and summer.

So where does that leave us at the end of 2023? For me, with a feeling of gratitude for the 141 subscribers that have decided to join me so far. Thank you for your support, and, if you’re feeling particularly festive (or just curious), you might appreciate this limited time subscription discount, available until December 31st:

Get 50% off for 1 year

I’ll look forward to returning with new content for you after a three-week break on January 9, 2024. In the meantime, happy holidays to you and your loved ones. Wherever they may be.

Best,

The Author

Of The Other Topic

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December 5, 2023

Dear Neil,

When Jane Goodall first wandered into the jungle, the conventional wisdom was that (a) primates could not use tools, and (b) they were all vegetarian. Through her binoculars, Goodall found the opposite and changed the way we look at our ancestors and ourselves.1

When considering this anthropological breakthrough, would it have been reasonable to wait for a chimp to build us a barbeque and cook a steak? Goodall had to travel three thousand miles to make that discovery. The chimps were always there, but it took time, effort, and money to collect those observations and push them out to the public. How would that have gone if we killed the idea in its infancy? My limited view of scientific discovery is that it rarely comes to us.

For some time, I’ve been concerned about the culture of embarrassment around UFOs. There’s a dedicated subculture of people who are not ashamed to talk about the possibility of extra-terrestrial contact, but I can’t guarantee that one of them will be in charge of the right Carrier Strike Group at the right time.

What I’ve found with some of the more prominent UFOs encountered by the U.S. military is that shame and embarrassment tend to prevent them being reported up the chain. No reporting means no analysis, no political decision-making, and, crucially for you, no role for civilian scientists.

Consider, for example, the salient facts around the U.S.S. Nimitz’ Encounter with a white “tic-tac”-like object. For at least 10 days in November 2004, a U.S. Carrier Strike Group encountered groups of these things,2 maneuvering at speeds up to Mach 60,3 evading the jets we sent to chase them,4 and, at one point, actively jamming one of their radar systems.5 What was the response from senior leadership? Denial. Indifference. Likely helped along by a healthy dose of fear at being labelled a “UFO nut.”

My best read of the situation is that this fear prevented the incident from being reported, considered in any way by the President of the United States, or interrogated by civilian scientists with a different skillset than the military. If the 2016 movie Arrival showcased the ideal of scientists and the defense establishment working together, then our cultural embarrassment is still keeping us very far away from that fictional outcome. We don’t even bother calling the scientists.

Why is this happening? You’re a thought leader in the scientific field and I’m here to suggest that culture is being shaped by you. In 2017, you appeared on a CNN morning show to discuss the release of three UFO videos by the Pentagon, one of which captures a tic-tac from the incident I highlighted above. In response to this footage, you said: “the evidence is so paltry for aliens to have visited earth I have no further interest. Let other people who care, go ahead. And when you finally find some aliens, bring them into Times Square.”6 Whether or not you meant it to read that way, CNN chose to capture your remarks under the headline “call me when you have a dinner invite from an alien.”7

That’s a shame because you made some very reasonable scientific points. I agree with your view, that “just because you don’t know what it is you’re looking at doesn’t mean it’s intelligent aliens visiting from another planet.”8 And your point on approaching these videos with caution and sobriety is well taken. But the ridicule you used to sandwich this interview makes that very unlikely. Many scientists are still put off by the stigma. And even if they’re not, the non-scientists who might seek their help don’t want to appear foolish, so they don’t. Some of those non-scientists captain aircraft carriers.

Of course, 2017 was a long time ago and I wanted to make sure this interview still accurately captures your thinking. As recently as 2021, you were still lamenting that there’s no good footage of anything alien, saying “if we were being visited by somebody, we would have some good footage... I’m thinking we’d have something better than fuzzy monochromatic video of objects that apparently reveal themselves only to navy pilots.”9

And Neil, this is where you really lose me. Those navy pilots are using the most advanced sensor and recording equipment on Earth. In the so-called “Gimbal video” playing in the backdrop of your CNN interview, that equipment is recording a solid object, with no visible propulsion, no control mechanisms, no heat signatures, flying against the wind.10 Asking for an alien to wave at you from the cockpit is the equivalent of asking a chimpanzee to cook you a steak. This is an entirely unreasonable bar, and one that I can’t help but notice you keep moving.

I’m open to a number of possible explanations for the objects captured in those videos. But an honest assessment includes the possibility of non-human technology alongside anything foreign or domestic. We can haggle on likelihood, but I’m pointing out that the ridicule is not conducive to your stated goal to “not stop” other people from looking into it. You’re a hero to many of these people and if you’re effectively calling it dumb, a lot of them will listen.

So what am I asking you to do here? Do I need you to start banging the UFO drum and declare your unequivocal support for the extra-terrestrial hypothesis? Not at all. But I’d love it if you could treat it as a serious possibility. I think the scientific community would even benefit, broadly, if you were to write out a series of attainable observations that might move you in that direction. For example, I note you expressed an interest in Google Satellite imagery picking up unconventional craft flying over the Earth’s surface. You might be interested to learn that a U.S. spy plane picked one up in 2016, and, if that’s not particularly compelling for you, I’d love to hear what would be.11 All I’m looking for is good faith criteria. Alien dinner guests aren’t it.

Respectfully,

The Author
of The Other Topic

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Today, I’m trying something new by marshalling all the facts I’m aware of into one easy-to-read summary. My hope is that it can act as a layup for any interested journalists who might want to chase the story on their own. With no disrespect to Tim McMillan or Tom Rogan, it’s my hope that big brand names like The New York Times might pick up where they left off and bring the story out to a wider audience. This summary should also be helpful if you’d like to ask specific, targeted questions of your local legislator, which, frankly, I think you should.

Here are the facts:

• The “F-18 Triangle Photo” was taken on an unnamed “U.S. defense platform sensor system”1 mounted to an F/A-18F Super Hornet.2

• Up until this point, many naval aviators have captured images on their personal cell phones from the cockpit of their aircraft.3 The fact that this photo was taken with military technology separates this incident in terms of quality and credibility.

• The F/A-18F is a two-seater fighter jet with a pilot in the front seat and a Weapon Systems Officer (WSO) in the back seat. The WSO is responsible for interacting with sensors and weapon systems on the aircraft and would have been the individual to take this photo while in flight.

• The photo is said to show a clear image of a triangular shaped vehicle, in flight, on a vertical axis. The triangle is reportedly large, equilateral, with rounded edges and perfectly spherical white lights in each corner.4

• The description offered by the two naval aviators is that the triangle emerged from the Atlantic Ocean and accelerated rapidly before disappearing above them.56

• This photo was taken in “late 2019” off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, with the F/A-18F operating from either the U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower or the U.S.S. John C. Stennis—both Nimitz Class Aircraft Carriers that were located in the area at the time.7

• In April 2019, the United States Navy announced new procedures for reporting UFOs.8 It was likely due to this new reporting system that the two naval aviators flagged this incident up the chain of command.

• In Fall 2020, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (UAP Task Force) operating in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) released a position paper on “Unidentified Submersible Phenomena.” This position paper included a copy of the F-18 Triangle Photo and contextual description offered by the two naval aviators.9

• Also in Fall 2020, this position paper was circulated widely for comment through the Department of Defense (on SIPRnet), the National Security Agency (on NSAnet), and the Central Intelligence Agency (on CIA Intelink). Based on similar DoD practices, the purpose of this circulation was likely to see if anybody could identify the technology as ours or a known vehicle belonging to a foreign adversary. One source indicated that the paper “went viral” inside the intelligence community.10

• Two Department of Defense officials and one Intelligence Community official have corroborated details of the position paper and the F-18 Triangle Photo. A further three intelligence officials and one federal law enforcement official confirmed information about the circulation of the position paper.11

• At the time of its circulation, the UAP Task Force was led by Director Jay Stratton,12 the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence was Scott Bray,13 the Deputy Commander of Naval Intelligence was Andrew Richardson, and the Commander of Naval Intelligence was Rear Admiral Kelly Aeschbach.14

• On December 2, 2020, Tim McMillan, an investigative journalist, broke the story of the F-18 Triangle photo in an article titled ‘Fast Movers’ and Transmedium Vehicles for The Debrief. Tom Rogan, a national security correspondent for The Washington Examiner, corroborated McMillan’s sources and story in a December 2^nd piece called Confirmed: Navy's previously unreported 2019 Triangle UFO incident. While picked up on December 3^rd by some international outlets, including The Daily Mail, neither piece of reporting received follow-up coverage in mainstream U.S. media outlets.

• In March 2021, former Director of National Intelligence (John Ratcliffe) indicated that “there are a lot more sightings than have been made public.” These include “objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots … that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.” Ratcliffe, who was the Director of National Intelligence during the period when the F-18 Triangle Photo was circulated, indicated that he had wanted to get more UAP information out to the public before he left office but “we weren’t able to get it down into an unclassified format that we could talk about quickly enough.”15

• It is unclear which, if any, specific Congressional Committees were briefed on this position paper or saw the F-18 Triangle photo. It should be noted that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had received information on prior UAP Task Force efforts. In June 2020, that committee signaled its support for the UAP Task Force in Senate Report 116-233 which included a requirement to submit a formal report to Congress within 180 days. At the time, the membership of this committee16 was as follows:

• A report titled Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena was delivered by the new Director of National Intelligence (Avril Haines) on June 25, 2021. Neither the classified or unclassified version of this report appear to contain any supporting images.

• On November 23, 2021, the UAP Task Force was wound down and transformed into the Airborne Object Identification Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG). This new organization would now operate from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security USD(I&S) nested under the Director of National Intelligence.17 This removed Navy control over the government’s UFO investigation. It remains unclear what happened to the original staff responsible for the “Unidentified Submersible Phenomena” position paper or its contents, including the F-18 Triangle Photo.

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And if you’re looking to take things a step further, you might consider expressing your interest to:

Helene Cooper - National Security Reporter for the New York Times (email, Twitter)

Ellen Nakashima - National Security Reporter for the Washington Post (email, Twitter)

Warren Strobel - National Security Reporter for the Wall Street Journal (email, Twitter)

The best UFO photos come from the military. Just by the nature of their work, you can usually get an accurately attributed image, that is witnessed by multiple people, and that is virtually impossible to edit. But that’s where your problems begin because the very things that make those images so credible also add layers of classification around time, location, and the capability of U.S. technology. This dovetails with some good ol’ bureaucratic discomfort, when, for example, a photo clearly demonstrates you failing at your defense mandate. Long before an entry into conspiratorial thinking, the very human emotion of “not wanting to look bad at your job” will take you a long way to understanding how these images are handled internally.

One of the more prominent examples of this problem can be found in a recent image called the “F-18 Triangle Photo.” Taken in late 2019, the F-18 Triangle Photo purportedly shows a clear, triangular shaped vehicle emerging from the Atlantic Ocean and flying past a Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet. The craft is described as a “massive” equilateral triangle with rounded edges and perfectly spherical white lights in each corner. Based on the description of the pilots, it flew perpendicularly out of the water before rapidly accelerating out of sight on a vertical axis. This occurred in close proximity to one of the United States’ most well-protected military assets (a Nimitz-Class Aircraft Carrier) and it appears, based on description, to have been a total surprise.12

Is this just another ghost story? Some pilot who took a blurry photo on their iPhone mid-flight? Nope. This photo was taken with “a U.S. [defense] platform sensor system”3 and it has been seen and distributed widely inside the government. Three defense officials have gone on the record confirming the details of this photo, but no copy has ever been released to the public.4 Why?

Well, the fact that you haven’t heard of it is probably one. The story detailing the photo only broke in December 2020, just as the national media was focusing on another wave of COVID-19 and a “record number of deaths” that month.5 While the initial coverage offered by Tim McMillan (The Debrief) and Tom Rogan (The Washington Examiner) was admirable, the story ultimately ended up trapped inside the UFO bubble and was not widely picked up by the mainstream press.

And that’s a shame because any journalist would have plenty to go on if they wanted to chase it. The photo was first distributed in a position paper offered on “Unidentified Submersible Phenomena” by the Navy’s fledgling UAP Task Force. And rather than limiting its distribution to the relatively small Office of Naval Intelligence, the paper was circulated widely for comment on SIPRnet (DoD), NSAnet (NSA), and CIA Intelink (CIA). All sources noted their shock that it had been shared so freely, with one saying “in decades with the [Intelligence Community], I’ve never seen anything like this.”6

But why focus on this one photo? Aren’t there plenty of other developments in the UFO space and more images coming to the fore every day? Sure, but they don’t quite represent the “smoking gun” that an image of this caliber would offer to the public. Advancing an adult conversation about UFOs can’t just lean on the volume of reported cases, it also needs precision and detail when that’s available. Rarely has there been such an opportunity to provide that detail and galvanize public attention with an image that everyone agrees exists.

But the main thing holding up the release is a simple matter of classification. While some other Navy photos have made their way into the public eye, they’ve generally been taken by personal cell phones and ultimately marked as unclassified. This photo, taken with a sophisticated camera system mounted to the F-18, would require formal declassification to get out there. Most of the attempts to do this have run into bureaucratic stonewalling or suffered from the leadership challenges inside the Navy (between 2018 and 2020 there were four different Secretaries of the Navy and five different Secretaries of Defense).78

At the time the story was first coming out, one former intelligence official (and active member of the UFO community), Christopher Mellon, captured some of this frustration by noting that:

In the last 48 hours, the public has learned of two stunning incidents captured on film by U.S. Navy carrier pilots earlier this year. One of the cases features a photo of a bizarre flying sphere with a black cube inside that is identical to dozens of other reports by Navy pilots. These strange objects have been shadowing East Coast naval ops since 2015. They sometimes maneuver in formation and have occasionally been reported achieving supersonic speeds.

The other incident produced a stunning, detailed photograph of a massive triangular shaped vehicle that emerged from the ocean and flew vertically, straight up and out of sight, just past a Navy F-18 operating off a U.S. aircraft carrier. These [photos] taken by the pilots should be released to the public as there are no sources and methods to protect and the national security benefits of raising awareness regarding this issue vastly outweigh any conceivable benefit from concealing the information.

It is hard to believe that in the face of such radical and incredible technology, in our vast defense department, we only have a so-called task force consisting of two individuals with no budget who are still being stiff-armed for access to relevant and timely information by the Air Force and other security organizations. By comparison, 60 years ago, in response to Sputnik, America led the space race which led to landing on the moon. Our government needs to wake up and address the far greater technology gap that these and many other incidents are revealing. There is obviously a glaring strategic mismatch between the current task force and the technology that has been identified.

• December 4, 2020 – Statement Read on the Joe Rogan Experience at 37:15

The historical parallel that Mellon draws to Sputnik shouldn’t get lost in the conversation about what this photo could be. Sometimes it takes a very clear public reaction to kick the government into gear. I agree with Mellon’s assertion that the clarity represented by this photo could prompt a similar call to action.

For too long, questions from the public have swirled around what the government does or does not know about UFOs. They are general. They are about legacy events like Roswell. They are easily deflected by bureaucrats and elected officials that might not want to answer them. Here, we have an opportunity to get real specific about a piece of evidence everyone seems to agree is out there. It’s my hope that a new wave of journalists might shine a light on it with the sharp questions and political advocacy it deserves.

So, returning to the original premise, what’s the most compelling photo of a UFO? I haven’t seen it yet. But neither have you. And I think we should.  

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How did this happen? What prompted the UFO mania from outlets like Vice, Politico, and Business Insider? And, in the face of that speculation, why did so many fixtures of the UFO Community not buy into it?

Altitude + Size + Speed

Getting serious about UFOs can lead you to a pretty intimate knowledge of how military radars work. Unlike the all-knowing machines you might see in the movies, radars actually require a lot of human input to clear up the clutter and do their jobs effectively. Want an example? When NORAD was evaluated in 1981, its Attack Warning System was receiving 6,700 sensor hits an hour.1 And without applying some personal judgement, you would only expect that number to get worse as our technology got better and better.

When it comes to the “North American Aerospace Defense Command” (NORAD), staff generally calibrate their radars to look for objects at a certain Altitude + Size + Speed. This allows you to pick up the flight profile of, let’s say, a Russian Tu-95 Strategic Bomber, while ignoring the trash bags, kites, and flocks of birds that sometimes muddy the waters.2

But there is a problem. Because if you have set your radars to look for something the size of a bomber, flying at 45,000 ft, at approx. 440 miles an hour, it means that you have implicitly asked it to weed out an object the size of a bomber, flying at 45,000 ft, travelling slowly with the wind. It’s an understandable judgement call but it leads to the situation we found in 2023: Finding a series of strange objects that we had made “invisible” by choice.

The Five Observables

Ironically, one of the fixtures of the UFO Community who was not on board with an extra-terrestrial explanation was Luis Elizondo.3 As the former Director of the Pentagon’s “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP), Luis had dedicated a significant portion of his career to looking for a moment just like this and you’d think he might be toward the top of the list of people willing to stir the pot.

But as I covered last week, Luis Elizondo is perhaps best known for a set of robust criteria that separate the signal from the noise when it comes to strange objects in the sky. His Five Observables are widely known to the UFO Community, applicable to these strange incursions, and, ultimately, indict almost none of them. As a brief summary, the Five Observables that tend to flag the truly extraordinary UFO cases involve:

1. Positive Lift – The ability to fly without apparent means of propulsion or lift.

2. Instantaneous Acceleration – The ability to reach a high rate of speed in a very short amount of time.

3. Hypersonic Velocity (Without Signatures) – The ability to travel faster than five times the speed of sound (3,700 mph) with no accompanying auditory or physical effects.

4. Trans-Medium Travel – The ability to seamlessly move through space, air, and water.

5. Low Observability – The ability to conceal from visual and sensor observation.45

With all the enthusiasm around these four objects that strayed into North American airspace, there’s rarely been a better time to test out The Five Observables and see what would have happened had they been applied to this UFO flap. The section below walks you through the key characteristics of each object so you can see what this looks like in practice …

The Five Observables Applied

(Incident #1) Chinese-Operated High-Altitude Balloon - Detected: Jan 28, Visual ID: Feb 1 to 4, Shot Down: Feb 4, Recovery Operation: Feb 4 to 17.67

Positive Lift - This object was aloft between 48,000-66,000 ft and conformed to traditional super pressure balloon architecture that could carry it to those altitudes.8 The craft was also observed to have rudders, propellors, and maneuverability that further explained its ability to generate lift.9

Instantaneous Acceleration - This object never achieved significant acceleration. 

Hypersonic Velocity - While its speed was not disclosed, general comments and the flight profile of the object would suggest that it never travelled much faster than the wind.

Trans-Medium Travel - This object was only observed travelling through one medium (air).

Low Observability - The object made no attempt to conceal itself and was photographed clearly several times from the ground and the air. There were also no reports of sensor interference generated by the object.1011

(Incident #2) Alaska High-Altitude Object - Detected: Feb 9, Visual ID: Feb 9 and 10, Shot Down: Feb 10, Recovery Operation: Feb 10 to 18.12

Positive Lift - This object was aloft at 40,000 ft travelling between 20 and 40 mph. While some F-22 pilots indicated that they “could see no propulsion system” and that they could not understand “how it could possibly be staying in the air,” this conclusion was not endorsed on final assessment. National Security Council Spokesman, John Kirby, would indicate that the object was unmanned, did not appear to be self-maneuvering, and was “at the mercy of the prevailing winds.”1314 U.S. officials would later guess the object was “a type of airship.”15

Instantaneous Acceleration - This object never achieved significant acceleration. 

Hypersonic Velocity - This object never travelled faster than approx. 40 mph.

Trans-Medium Travel - This object was only observed travelling through one medium (air).

Low Observability - Some F-22 pilots indicated that the object “interfered with their sensors” but other F-22 pilots disputed this claim. Pilots also disagreed on the shape of the object (which is why a description was never formally released) but all pilots did make visual contact with an object about “the size of a small car.”16

(Incident #3) Yukon High-Altitude Object - Detected: Feb 10, Visual ID: Feb 10 and 11, Shot Down: Feb 11, Recovery Operation: Feb 11 to 17.1718

Positive Lift - This object was aloft at 40,000 ft and resembled a small, cylindrical, metallic balloon (with a tethered payload underneath it).19 A later estimate would suggest it may have been an amateur radio Pico Balloon, whose architecture would clearly explain its ability to generate lift.20 Defense officials also considered a Russian or Chinese origin.21

Instantaneous Acceleration - This object never achieved significant acceleration. 

Hypersonic Velocity - While its speed was not disclosed, general comments and the flight profile of the object would suggest that it never travelled much faster than the wind.

Trans-Medium Travel - This object was only observed travelling through one medium (air).

Low Observability - There were no reports of the object attempting to conceal itself from visual or sensor observation.

(Incident #4) Lake Huron High-Altitude Object - Detected: Feb 11, Visual ID: Feb 12, Shot Down: Feb 12, Recovery Operation: Feb 12 to 16.222324

Positive Lift - This object was aloft at 20,000 ft and appeared octagonal in shape with visible strings hanging off of it.25 A National Security Council spokesman would further indicate the object was unmanned, uncontrollable, and appeared to move with the prevailing winds.26 These characteristics would suggest traditional balloon architecture.

Instantaneous Acceleration - This object never achieved significant acceleration. 

Hypersonic Velocity - This object never travelled faster than windspeed.

Trans-Medium Travel - This object was only observed travelling through one medium (air).

Low Observability - While radar did briefly lose contact with the object between Montana (Feb 11) and Michigan (Feb 12) there is no indication the object tried to conceal itself deliberately.27 On February 12, the United States was able to re-establish radar and visual contact with no reported issues.

As you can see, there are some titillating details in the description above, but nothing that truly points to an exceptional encounter. Even for those who were familiar with the Five Observables, claims of “unknown propulsion systems” or “sensor interference” didn’t stand up to scrutiny when you looked across all five criteria as a package. When I pulled that data into a crude heatmap, you can see that trend even more clearly:

To give you this assessment, I ended up drawing on stories from 20 different legacy media outlets, not one of which mentioned the Five Observables at any time. And that’s one of the biggest problems with this story. The UFO community might be aware of these assessment criteria but the major media outlets that should be informing the public are clearly not.

In that sense, advocating for an adult discussion on UFOs is as much about promoting media literacy as it is about encouraging the media to cover it fairly. Sometimes that means you’ll be able to rule out UFO explanations pretty quickly. But where that doesn’t happen, you might bolster the case and help the public really understand the difference between a balloon and something a little less down to Earth.

P.S. This article gives you the kind of assessment that I wanted to see back in February 2023. Did you find it helpful? If you want to read more quality coverage like this then:

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That all changed when the Department of Defense (DoD) began to re-engage with UFOs in 2008. Now, the most advanced sensors and recording equipment in the world were unmistakably picking up something. Inside the Pentagon questions moved from “who and when” to “what is that” and “how?!”12

Here began a problem of separating the signal from the noise. Even though the United States military was encountering strange objects in its operating areas, it was still possible that they could be explained in some terrestrially conventional way. Foreign adversaries had been known to observe U.S. training exercises and the United States remains at the leading edge of experimental aircraft development.

To try and carve out the truly unexplainable incidents, a DoD team led by Luis Elizondo developed a filtering mechanism that is still widely used today. These “Five Observables,” as they came to be called, were common to many of their most extraordinary reports, had been consistently observed since the 1940s, and seemed to point to a technology that was well beyond our current understanding and capability.3

Filtering UFO cases with these simple, well-defined criteria went a long way to adding credibility to their work, but, ultimately, it wasn’t enough to convince senior leadership to take it seriously. Luis Elizondo resigned as Director of the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP) in 2017, and as he left the Pentagon, he brought his thinking, and the Five Observables out into the public eye.4

While originally popularized on the History Channel’s 2019 TV show Unidentified, the Five Observables have since taken on a life of their own.5 Today, they serve as one of the UFO Community’s most important tools when it comes to deciding which cases to take seriously and which ones to ignore. And if you find yourself with even a passing interest in UFOs, you should know …

The Five Observables

What are the Five Observables? In their most current interpretation, they are:

1. Positive Lift – The ability to fly without apparent means of propulsion or lift.

2. Instantaneous Acceleration – The ability to reach a high rate of speed in a very short amount of time.

3. Hypersonic Velocity (Without Signatures) – The ability to travel faster than five times the speed of sound (3,700 mph) with no accompanying auditory or physical effects.

4. Trans-Medium Travel – The ability to seamlessly move through space, air, and water.

5. Low Observability – The ability to conceal from visual and sensor observation.67

Turning to each of these observables in more detail, we begin with:

Positive Lift

Lift is the mechanical force that holds an aircraft in the air. Generally speaking, an aircraft needs to change its relationship to our surrounding air (by being in motion) and it needs to turn the flow of air in one direction (to generate lift). Our most common aircraft use propellors, jet engines, or chemical explosions to generate motion and a variety of control surfaces, like wings, to generate lift.8

This observable applies when we see an object that is flying with no obvious means of achieving that positive lift. This happens when we don’t see any propulsion mechanism (like a jet engine), we don’t see any control surfaces (like wings), and we don’t see any of the heat signatures that almost all aircraft would generate when going through this process.

Additionally, our technology is still very limited in terms of the kind of flight we can achieve. Flight time is not infinite, and we are effectively unable to bring an aircraft to a complete stop (or hover) mid-air. Objects in this category have been observed hovering mid-air, flying for extremely long periods of time, and often outlasting the jets that are sent to investigate them before they run low on fuel.9

Instantaneous Acceleration

The fastest accelerating aircraft in the world is the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, which was used to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In 12 minutes, the aircraft could go from a dead stop to 3.2 times the speed of sound.10 The aircraft, which could withstand a maximum of 3 g’s during this process,11 is effectively the pinnacle of human achievement when it comes to acceleration. There is no aircraft that’s been able to outperform it and anything carrying a human being has a hard limit of 9 g’s (the maximum number of “Earth Gravities” a human body can sustain).12

This observable applies to objects that seem to be achieving even better acceleration, in many cases from a complete stop. In one notable incident during the 2004 Nimitz Encounters, radar tracked an object descending from 28,000 ft to sea level in 0.78 seconds. This “instantaneous acceleration” (which really means acceleration that is almost too fast to measure) produced a travel speed of 60 times the speed of sound (46,000 mph) with an estimated 5,370 g’s.13 This is well beyond our known technology or the capabilities of a human body.

Hypersonic Velocity

While many aircraft are fast, very few can break the sound barrier without serious assistance. This makes hypersonic flight the domain of the military and experimental scientific craft like NASA’s scramjet program. Even if technology in the private sector improved to the degree where widespread hypersonic flight was possible, those flights would still be limited by the Federal Aviation Administration’s 1973 decision to ban all hypersonic flight over U.S. soil.14

Why did this ban happen? Because any aircraft breaking the sound barrier also tend to be quite noticeable. First, they generate a series of sonic booms when the air around the aircraft expands and contracts along its flight path.15 Second, the aircraft may drop off a deadly amount of energy when it comes to a complete stop (depending on its weight and stopping speed). When assessing the previously highlighted 0.78 second drop in the 2004 Nimitz Encounter, one academic calculated that the object should have produced an impact equivalent to 100 tonnes of TNT or 250 Tomahawk Missiles going off at once.16

This observable applies to objects that appear to be travelling faster than five times the speed of sound (which is the threshold for hypersonic velocity) and that seem to be producing no auditory or physical effects that we would expect to see from anything travelling at those speeds.

Trans-Medium Travel

We don’t really have vehicles that can seamlessly travel between the ocean, our atmosphere, and outer space. Our vehicles tend to be “purpose-built” to operate in the environment we need them too. Anything else would be financially impractical and might not even be possible with our current technology.17

Even though “Unidentified Flying Object” or “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” would tend to imply observation in the air, modern UFOs have been observed travelling seamlessly through space, air, and water.18 This observable applies to objects that seem to demonstrate this trans-medium travel ability, which, to our knowledge, is not possible with any existing aircraft. In addition, the objects demonstrating this capability seem to be able to accomplish it without any obvious physical effects (like a space shuttle burning up on re-entry) or significant changes to speed.

Low Observability

This observable applies broadly to objects that are attempting to conceal their position. The kind of technology required to appropriately camouflage an aircraft, alter its visual profile, passively avoid sensor detection, or actively jam those sensors is limited to only a few militaries in the world. While acknowledging that conventional research and development is making significant progress in these areas,19 the low observability objects in the UFO space tend to be demonstrating an ability far beyond our current understanding.

In addition to this impressive potential, these objects also tend to be concealing themselves in a context that is hard to attribute to any domestic or foreign source. U.S. research and development programs do not test new abilities against uninformed military units.20 When safety and security is assured through a pre-planned test, they still do not tamper with U.S. weaponry in a way that might alter defense readiness, with, say, our nuclear arsenal. Foreign adversaries are similarly disincentivized to deploy cutting edge technology in a way that could risk conflict or ultimately be captured by the United States. In that sense, low observability is as much about the context of the interaction as the difficulty in making an appropriate sensor or visual ID.

Moving Forward (at hypersonic velocity)

It’s likely that the Five Observables will continue to be a significant filter for deciding which UFO incidents deserve the most attention. And while Luis Elizondo can be credited with developing this framework, it’s also clear that it continues to evolve both inside and outside of government.

Recent work by Dr. Kevin Knuth (Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Albany) has gone a long way to clarifying these categories and updating their description to be more technically accurate. And if the recent “UAP Disclosure Act” is any indication, it appears the government is taking that seriously. All Five Observables have now worked their way into pending UFO legislation and if the United States Congress is going to use them to define “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” then perhaps we should too.

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