New York Times Casually Drops Another Story About How Aliens Are Probably Realhttps://gizmodo.com/new-york-times-casually-drops-another-story-about-how-a-1844491014The New York Times published a story Thursday night about the likelihood that aliens have visited Earth. The main takeaway? Aliens could be real and the U.S. government has been conducting classified briefings in recent years about things left behind by “off-world vehicles.”
Naturally, the new article appears on the 17th page of today’s paper because everything else here on Earth is fucking bonkers and the existence of aliens barely makes headlines. There is, after all, both a pandemic going on and the frightening rise of a neo-fascist government apparatus helmed by a sociopathic narcissist.
So what does the new article have to say about the possibility of little green men—aside from the ones currently in Portland? A well-funded group inside the Office of Naval Intelligence is actively investigating unexplained encounters between members of the military and unidentified flying objects. And while some of the “materials” recovered by U.S. government sources have turned out to have perfectly innocent explanations, some materials are still a total mystery.
Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude,
“We couldn’t make it ourselves.”Davis says he’s briefed many people in government, including U.S. Senators:
Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
Mr. Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.
Former Nevada Senator Harry Reid, who has long championed the cause of exploring UFOs, told the Times that he believes the U.S. government has alien materials in its possession. Perhaps more disturbingly, he also believes that people in the private sector have materials as well.
“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports—some were substantive, some not so substantive—that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Reid told the Times.
By the end of the article, Reid even notes the possibility of “retrieved craft,” the idea that the U.S. government may have an alien spaceship of some kind in its possession.
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No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Publichttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.htmlDespite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles.
Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.
... For more than a decade, the Pentagon program has been conducting classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials, according to interviews with program participants and unclassified briefing documents.
Mr. Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied.
“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Mr. Reid said in an interview.
... The constraints on discussing classified programs — and the ambiguity of information cited in unclassified slides from the briefings — have put officials who have studied U.F.O.s in the position of stating their views without presenting any hard evidence.
Public fascination with the topic of U.F.O.s has drawn in President Trump, who told his son Donald Trump Jr. in a June interview that he knew “very interesting” things about Roswell — a city in New Mexico that is central to speculation about the existence of U.F.O.s. The president demurred when asked if he would declassify any information on Roswell. “I’ll have to think about that one,” he said.
Either way, Mr. Reid said, more should be made public to clarify what is known and what is not. “It is extremely important that information about the discovery of physical materials or retrieved craft come out,” he said.