By Shania Pagan
Do you believe in aliens? Could there really be extraterrestrial life forms trying to make themselves known to us? What about sightings of flying saucers in the sky?
Thanks to a COVID-19 relief spending bill, U.S. intelligence agencies might have no choice but to tell the public what they know about unexplainable aircrafts seen and recorded over the years.
On Dec. 27, former President Donald Trump, approved the spending package that required the director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to publicize a report detailing all information the government has on unidentified flying objects.
Trump approved the package as a 180 day countdown began, which gave officials until June to deliver the details. However, due to levels of security clearance, it’s said to be an extremely difficult task.
Christopher Mellon, the former Staff Director of the U.S Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, claimed in an interview that a Navy task force established to gain information on unidentified aerial phenomena, was “denied access to pertinent information by the Air Force, which was disappointing but expected.”
This increased interest in UFOs is due to a recent declassification of videos taken by Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015. The footage shows unidentified objects flying in the Earth’s atmosphere. The declassified videos were leaked in 2017, but until April of 2020, the Pentagon neglected to comment on them.
The Pentagon re-released the footage, stating that it was declassified to show that it in fact was legitimate, and to “clear up any misconceptions made by the public.” There was still no explanation as to what the objects were.
This bill requires detailed exposure of satellite images, eavesdropping equipment, and “all unidentified aerial phenomena reporting for the federal government, regardless of which agency acquired the information.”
Florida senator Marco Rubio, was one of the people ushering the commissioning of the UFO report. In a recent interview with Fox News, he stated that “We don’t know what it is, it isn’t ours, it isn’t anything that’s registered with the FAA -Federal Aviation Administration- and in many cases, exhibits attributes of technology we haven’t seen before.”
Although there are possibilities of logical explanations, such as the objects belonging to foreign adversaries, there haven’t been any solid conclusions from government intelligence agencies.
The current U.S Department of Defense spokesperson, Susan Gough, declined to address the public’s concerns for the lack of information, stating that “We do not publicly discuss the details of the UAP -Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task force- observations, the task force or investigations.”
In 2019, nearly 2 million Americans RSVP’d to the event of “storming Area 51” on Facebook, with the hope of finding out what the government was hiding in the intensely protected U.S Airforce facility. It never actually ended up happening, and only 150 people really showed up to “break in.”
Some may say this is all due to a lack of cooperation from the government, others may see it as a good agency protecting confidential information. In the end, no one -outside of the Pentagon and the highest levels of government- really knows if the UFO sightings are alien life or advanced technology from foreign countries. The report in June, might shed some light on what’s been kept secret.