Pentagon says it’s received 291 UFO sightings over past year: Warns some craft appeared to display ‘unusual maneuverability’ and ‘high-speed travel’

The Pentagon’s Special UFO Investigations Office has handled at least 291 UFO cases in the past year, according to a report made public late Wednesday night.

Some of these apparently advanced craft appeared to exhibit “performance characteristics,” the Army UFO researchers wrote, including “high-speed travel” and “unusual maneuverability.”

The report caps a hot summer of alien intrigue in Washington, where multiple government UFO whistleblowers have come forward, some publicly, some behind closed doors, with allegations of an illegal UFO crash retrieval program.

The claims – which include “intact and partially intact vehicles,” exotic weapons programs, accusations of witness intimidation and recovered “non-human” bodies – are now being investigated by both federal and congressional authorities.

While that new report concludes that none of the mysteries in the skies of 2023 were the result of secret U.S. programs, the Pentagon’s UFO chief told reporters that a few UFOs showed “worrying” signs of being created by U.S. foreign adversaries .

In fact, the Pentagon’s UFO chief said that “many” of these UFO cases have been referred to law enforcement and, in some serious cases, to U.S. counterintelligence investigators.

“I’m concerned from a national security perspective,” physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the U.S. Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), ahead of his office’s new UFO report to CNN.

“There are some indicators that are concerning and can be attributed to foreign activities,” said Dr. Kirkpatrick, ‘and we are investigating that very intensively.’

The physicist — whose classified work before taking charge of AARO included stints at the Air Force Research Laboratory and the CIA — expressed fears that foreign nations could design spy drones specifically to evade U.S. radar and other detection hardware.

“There are ways to hide in our noise that I always worry about,” Kirkpatrick said CNN.

The annual report published on Wednesday by Dr. Kirkpatrick and his team, included a glossary to aid in the standardization of the once fringe subject of UFOs, now known professionally as UAP, for ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon’.

The glossary defined “UAP threat” as any UAP that demonstrates a national security risk to military “personnel, equipment or information,” as an indication of the priority AARO has placed on the intelligence and espionage risks posed by the phenomenon.

In a now infamous wave of cases, following the identification of a large white Chinese spy balloon last February, military officials identified more potential surveillance platforms in the skies by adjusting the sensitivity of their radar system filters.

“I suspect that filters on US systems previously ignored things that were too slow, too high, or too small to be considered threats,” Brynn Tannehill, a RAND Corporation senior technical analyst and former US Navy aviator, told me. Wired that month.

‘Now that the parameters on the filters have been adjusted, we see more of what was already there in recent years.’

These adjustments to the noise suppression methods of US military radar led to the identification of an object, first spotted north of Anchorage, Alaska, and reported to be the size of a small car.

U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors and F-16s were dispatched by the Biden White House to shoot down the sedan-sized UFO, as well as other UFOs spotted over the Canadian territory of the Yukon and the Great Lakes north of Michigan.

Despite Dr. Kirkpatrick that his office is actively looking for potentially similar cases, the AARO annual report drew a more measured conclusion on Wednesday.

“None of these UAP reports have been positively attributed to foreign activities,” AAROs said unclassified report for fiscal year 2023.

In addition to statistics on the typical altitudes and locations at which UAP has been reported, the AARO has also made an effort for FY 2023 to address the issue of “collection bias” and future plans to better collect space-based and subsea data on UAP.

“The space and maritime domains must be fully integrated into AARO’s processes,” the report said.

Kirkpatrick’s UFO Office plans to work with the U.S. Navy and the National Intelligence Manager for Military Integration (NIM-MIL) to improve the speed and quality of reporting on submarine UAP or sea-to-air transmedium UAP.

“Collaboration with Space Force, US Space Command, NRO (the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees US spy satellites) and NASA is well underway,” AARO said in the report.

In a nod to NASA’s own UAP Advisory Panel, the report made frequent references to the need to better calibrate, or prepare and standardize, military sensors in an effort to obtain the kind of reliable and comparable data needed to support UAP. to research.

Despite the apparent openness and promises outlined in the AARO report, many experienced civilian UFO researchers expressed concern that the agency has overseen a cut in transparency on this subject.

At least one experienced UFO researcher, government open records advocate John Greenewald Jr.described the Pentagon’s new policy as “a strange mix” of “greater excessive secrecy surrounding UAP” and “preaching about ‘transparency.’

Greenewald has noticed new problems in obtaining government data on UFOs through the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the years since the creation of special UAP research mandates internally within the Pentagon.

He identified as particularly concerning one comment from the new AARO report, which expressed the belief that “most UAP is likely to lead to common phenomena.”

‘AARO’s position, and subsequently that of the Department of Defense, is that once the data is fine-tuned and correct, most – if not all – UAP cases will be resolved as ‘normal’. Greenewald posted to X (formerly Twitter).

“This is exactly how Project Blue Book progressed and then ended,” he said, referring to the U.S. Air Force’s Cold War UFO research program.

‘They concluded that most of it was explainable; they convened a panel of scientists to independently look at the findings; and it all ended when the military dropped interest and stopped all funding for over forty years,” Greenewald said.