American officials and analysts globally are raising alarm about a new Defense Department office that will handle the U.S. government’s examination of unidentified flying objects, warning that the move indicates the military wants to end a brief spell of transparency and shove UFO reports back into a closet under lock and key.
The Pentagon quietly announced the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving that it had formed the esoteric-sounding Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. Working with the intelligence agencies, it serves as the follow-on to a government-wide effort earlier this year to document and analyze reports of encounters with unidentified objects – “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” or UAPs in Pentagon jargon – predominantly from military pilots.
The new office, which reports to the undersecretary of defense for Intelligence and Security, will now oversee the entire government’s study of UFOs, focusing on sightings within restricted military airspace and will also “assess and mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security,” a spokeswoman says.
The Defense Department has since justified the composition of the office as necessary to provide uniformity to the reporting process and subsequent analysis.
But some researchers characterize the Pentagon’s latest move as an “insulting” attempt to run around specific efforts by civilian organizations and leaders in Congress to exercise greater oversight over the government’s study of UFOs.
“It represents a brazen step towards completely stifling the burgeoning demand from both the public and Congress for increased UFO transparency,” says Peter Whitley, a researcher based in Japan and a member of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, which considers itself one of the largest and oldest of its kind. “Clearly, the DOD is attempting to reverse course on this trend and shut the door on further disclosure of any kind.”
Others who follow the issue closely see it as nothing more than a play by the Pentagon to control a subject that should belong in the arena of scientific study – at the expense of proper oversight.
“It is clear that the Pentagon does not want any civilian interference in this,” says Clas Svahn, chairman for the Sweden-based Archives for the Unexplained, among the most comprehensive digital libraries for UFO sightings and investigations into them by governments worldwide. “This is a power struggle over who should have access to UAP information.”
So-called “ufologists” around the world expressed optimism this summer at the congressionally mandated effort led by the civilian Office of the Director of National Intelligence into the government’s handling of UFO sightings. It culminated in a report released in June that offered few exciting conclusions – no documentation of “little green men,” for example – but elevated the reputation of an often-ridiculed subject to one deserving of serious consideration among the world’s most powerful countries.
The Pentagon through the formation of the new office has begun to dash those hopes with what some consider a unilateral power grab. And, indeed, even some lawmakers have expressed concerns of their own.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has sponsored a pending bipartisan amendment to this year’s military budget bill that would ramp up government study of the issue and add more layers of oversight, in addition to determining whether any sighting amounts to a threat from unknown technologies fielded from Russia, China – or elsewhere. It calls for the creation of a new advisory committee composed of experts from civilian agencies such as NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration as well as from academia to strengthen public discourse over the findings.
“While we appreciate the DOD’s attention to the issue, the AOIMSG doesn’t go nearly far enough to help us better understand the data we are gathering on UAPs,” a spokeswoman for the New York Democrat, Lizzie Landau, tells U.S. News. The framework she has proposed “does much more to address the UAP issue while also maintaining public oversight.”
The Defense Department, however, has pushed back on the notion that its supremacy over the issue amounts to anything nefarious and says it can practice transparency on its own.
“This is a chance for us to be much more organized in the way we process these reports,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters this week. “And we will certainly continue to be as transparent as we can about these phenomena and the impact that they may or may not be having on our ability to operate.”
Kirby then tempered expectations about what the public may learn of the newly formed office’s findings.
“I don't want to leave you with the impression that there'll be sort of a regular drumbeat of, you know, of some kind of report that gets posted on a website, you know, every couple months,” he added.
The Pentagon’s approach has deeply frustrated those who have followed the issue closely, particularly after it finally acknowledged that for years it has neglected to adequately analyze its encounters with unknown objects in U.S. airspace.
“This is an end-around to cut the legs out from Sen. Gillibrand in her amendment to the next defense spending bill,” says Robert Spearing, MUFON’s director of international investigations, who is based in Costa Rica. “She wants a government office that utilizes input from civilian organizations. In essence, the Pentagon doesn’t want this.”
Two former defense officials who previously worked on UFO assessments told The Hill in an interview that the latest initiative is woefully underprepared to handle the issue.
“If we want 70 more years of secrecy on this topic, then [the undersecretary for intelligence’s office] is the perfect place to put it. They’ve had four years so far, and we have little in the way of efforts serving the public interest,” Luis Elizondo, the former head of an informal Defense Department unit that assessed military UFO reports, told the paper.
Elizondo isn’t the only expert to question the Defense Department’s assertions that it alone can determine what materials to make public.
“To be ‘as transparent as we can’ means nothing much,” Svahn says. The military’s approach is particularly frustrating “when it comes to observations and reports that are made by Air Force and Navy pilots inside restricted airspace, since they most certainly will be seen as something that could threaten national security.”
“Now,” he adds, “UAPs will only be seen as a threat – and treated as that.”
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