High StrangenessS


Bomb

Flashback Alienated: Peter Levenda on the alien 'threat' narrative

Ex–Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge
© LeAnn MullerEx–Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge
There has been some Twitter controversy lately over a tweet from Tom DeLonge concerning the UFO Phenomenon and the threat it poses to human life on Earth. It seems that people have definite ideas about all of this, and they do not hesitate to make them known in response. This is my attempt to clarify my own position. I do not speak for Tom, of course, but I do believe that too many assumptions have been made by critics of Tom and of To The Stars that confuse the issue unnecessarily.

First of all, it seems that one of the major criticisms of Tom's position is that he is somehow a shill for the Pentagon or the CIA or some military group or cabal. I have seen the term "war monger" used, as well. If one takes the position that the Phenomenon is dangerous to humans, it stands to reason - according to this critique - that the person taking that position is a government stooge. What is the purpose of being a government stooge, then? Why, it's to increase US government defense spending, of course.

There are a few things wrong with that theory when it comes to the Phenomenon, however.

In the first place, US spending on defense far outstrips those of the next nine countries combined (and that includes China and Russia). No one needs Tom talking about UFOs to have any appreciable effect on the defense budget. The amount of money spent so far by the US government on UFO research is minuscule. If it were to double or triple, it would still be minuscule and not approach the cost of, for instance, the cheapest single line item in the 2017 Defense Budget of $89 million for rolling airframe missile systems (a surface-to-air system for defending ships against missile attacks). If we are not talking about UFO research, though, but defense systems against possible UFO attacks, then we have another problem:

Design

Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies publishes pattern study 1945-1975 military and public activities

uap scu
The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) released the following announcement:

Today, the SCU published the following peer-reviewed study: UAP Activity Pattern Study 1945-1975 Military and Public Activities, by SCU members Larry J. Hancock, Ian M. Porritt, Sean Grosvenor, and Larry Cates. The new study is the third in a series of examinations of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) activity in the post-World War II era.

This new study examined UAP incidents over three decades (1945-1975), revealing a pattern of activity associated with public reports during the study period, and found that reports shifted from high visibility daylight observations at a distance to nighttime close approaches to the observers during the study period. In addition, the focus of UAP activity shifted from the military to the public arena, with increased close approaches to observers. UAP loitering for extended periods near the observers was found to have been observed primarily at night rather than in daylight. Military loitering incidents were reported more frequently from 1949 to 1959, while the public reporting loitering incidents became much more frequent during a short period from 1966-1967.

The nature of the UAP activity also changed over time, from an early period of high visibility - with frequent daylight observations of multiple UAPs (often observed to be disc-shaped) in controlled, interactive flight, with radical maneuvers such as instantaneous acceleration vertically from a hovering position, radar-tracked speeds exceeding 9,000 miles per hour, and 90 degree turns without speed changes. More often noted in military reports were evident activities such as radical speeds and acceleration and maneuvering multiple UAPs during interactive flight. In addition, reports of numerous objects in groups (primarily in the daytime) peaked in 1952 and trended downwards in subsequent years.

MIB

The unexplained: Giant Swedish archive logs paranormal phenomena

AI-generated image
© AI-generated image
Newspaper clippings, books and first-hand accounts of people who said they visited other planets are catalogued in a giant Swedish archive on paranormal phenomena, attracting the curious and researchers from around the world.

The Archives for the Unexplained (AFU) claims to be the world's biggest library of paranormal phenomena, with 4.2 kilometers (2.6 miles) of shelves running underground.

Clas Svahn, 65, and Anders Liljegren, 73, who run the archive located in the southeastern town of Norrkoping, say they are neither superstitious nor believers, but rather "curious investigators of the unknown".

The AFU — the name of both the library and the association that has collected documentation for more than 50 years — is mainly comprised of books, but also more original documents, such as first-hand accounts of paranormal activity recorded on tape and photos of ghosts.

"What we are building here at AFU is depository knowledge," explains Svahn, showing AFP journalists around the 700-square-metre (7,535-square-foot) library.

"We're trying to get as much as we can on... every kind of unsolved scientific mystery that we can find... to make this available for the world."

The library receives around 300 visits each year, by appointment only.

The archives are in the process of being digitalised and many of the documents can already by consulted on a server.

All that is needed is an access code, which the pair are more than happy to share.

UFO 2

The Pentagon's new historical review of UFOs picks and chooses its history

ufo report
A Department of Defense report released March 8 demonstrates that a seven decade-long trend of official obfuscation and deflection on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) continues unabated.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's (AARO) report, a congressionally mandated historical review of U.S. government involvement with UAP, found no evidence of "extraterrestrial technology." While that may be technically accurate, the Pentagon's lengthy report deliberately obscures a critical fact: Official records and public reporting are littered with evidence of unknown craft exhibiting what appears to be extraordinary technology.

In addition to critical omissions and at least one major misrepresentation, AARO's report must be scrutinized for its treatment of Capt. Edward Ruppelt. Ruppelt was the first director of the Air Force's decades-long UAP analysis (and, later, debunking) effort known as Project Blue Book.

Despite citing Ruppelt more than any other individual, AARO's report ignores the countless cases, including many involving simultaneous radar and visual observations, that left Ruppelt and the Air Force thoroughly baffled.

In one July 1952 incident, for example, a ground radar station scrambled an F-94C fighter jet to intercept a UFO. As Ruppelt recounts in his 1956 book, "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects," "the radar operator in the '94 locked on to it, and as the airplane closed in the pilot and [radar operator] saw that they were headed directly toward a large, yellowish-orange light."

Comment: Here's a typical example from the AARO report:
Although many UAP/UFO cases remain unsolved, based on the lack of evidence of the extraterrestrial origin of even one UAP report and the assessment that all resolved cases to date have ordinary explanations, AARO assess sightings and claims of extraterrestrial visitations have been influenced by a range of factors.
The logic behind this sentence is tortuous and misleading. First, it acknowledges that "unknowns" remain. However, it downplays this by engaging in circular logic: "all resolved cases to date have ordinary explanations." Naturally, if there are unknowns, they only cases able to be resolved would be those with ordinary explanations. It is a meaningless sentence.


UFO

Veteran paratrooper reveals British special forces recovered downed UFO in northern England in late 1980s

uk crash
British special forces recovered a downed 'non-human' craft in northern England in the late 1980s, a former UK paratrooper and military intelligence officer claims.

Franc Milburn, a veteran of the British Army's elite Parachute Regiment, tells DailyMail.com he has spoken with a member of the MI6-run unit that conducted the alleged operation.

Milburn said he also spoke to UK Royal Air Force crew who chased and fired on a pair of 'disc-shaped' UFOs that traveled at hypersonic speeds outstripping their fighter jets.

Milburn refused to reveal the identity of his former elite comrade, citing security and his desire to remain anonymous. DailyMail.com will refer to him using the alias 'John.'

But in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Milburn divulged eye-popping details of the story told to him by his ex-Special Forces friend after both had left the Army - saying that he wanted to support recent US whistleblowers' claims of a secret UFO crash retrieval program.

Blue Planet

Forget UFOs, ex-US Navy officer warns of unidentified underwater objects

The tipping point for the collapse of a key Atlantic Ocean current
© HadelProductions/Getty Images
The sightings of so-called unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have received much attention in the past few years, with the US Congress holding a briefing on the issue last year. The Pentagon debunked these sightings, clarifying in a report earlier this month that they have found no evidence of extra-terrestrial technology. But incidents like these, whenever reported, generate huge interest across the world. A retired US admiral has now warned about unidentified submarines saying they pose "real threat" to international maritime security.

Rear Admiral and oceanographer Tim Gallaudet authored a white paper for Sol Foundation, a think tank, in which he mentioned that unidentified submersible objects (USOs) need urgent attention.

Gallaudet also said that these "large lighted craft" could be lurking in the unexplored depths of our oceans.


Comment: The Sol Foundation also published a second paper, "UAP in Crowded Skies: Atmospheric and Orbital Threat Reduction in an Age of Geopolitical Uncertainty", written by Peter Skafish and David Grusch, with input from the rest of the Foundation members. It is available here.


Blackbox

Mysterious 'drones' swarmed Langley AFB for weeks

F-22 Raptor
© USAFA pair of F-22 Raptor stealth fighters turn on final approach to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
Langley Air Force Base, located in one of the most strategic areas of the country, across the Chesapeake Bay from the sprawling Naval Station Norfolk and the open Atlantic, was at the epicenter of waves of mysterious drone incursions that occurred throughout December. The War Zone has been investigating these incidents and the response to them for months. We know that they were so troubling and persistent that they prompted bringing in advanced assets from around the U.S. government, including one of NASA's WB-57F high-flying research planes. Now the U.S. Air Force has confirmed to us that they did indeed occur and provided details on the timeframe and diversity of drones involved.

This spate of bizarre drone incursions deeply underscores the still-growing threats that uncrewed aerial systems present on and off traditional battlefields, and to military and critical civilian infrastructure, issues The War Zone has been highlighting in great detail for years.

"The installation first observed UAS [uncrewed aerial systems] activities the evening of December 6 [2023] and experienced multiple incursions throughout the month of December. The number of UASs fluctuated and they ranged in size/configuration," a spokesperson for Langley Air Force Base told The War Zone in a statement earlier today. "None of the incursions appeared to exhibit hostile intent but anything flying in our restricted airspace can pose a threat to flight safety. The FAA was made aware of the UAS incursions."


Comment: The UAS designation can be applied to a UAP solely based on its size. In other words, if it's a UAP that happens to be smaller than a jet fighter, it may be classified by military observers as a UAS, even though it is technically unidentified.


"To protect operational security, we do not discuss impacts to operations," the statement added. "We don't discuss our specific force protection measures but retain the right to protect the installation. Langley continues to monitor our air space and work with local law enforcement and other federal agencies to ensure the safety of base personnel, facilities, and assets."

Clipboard

Pentagon's flawed UFO report demands congressional action

aaro report
On March 8, the Department of Defense published the most significant report on UFOs in at least two generations — a congressionally mandated historical review of U.S. government involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP.

Unfortunately, the report from the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contains an array of striking omissions and one particularly egregious misrepresentation. The result is a misleading report which, like so much government UFO-related propaganda over seven decades, tells the reader just to move on, nothing to see here.

To start, it makes no mention of how the U.S. government's official investigation of UFOs began. In a landmark 1947 memo, Lt. Gen. (and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Nathan Twining stated that UFOs are "real and not visionary or fictitious." He also described their flight characteristics as including "extreme rates of climb, maneuverability...and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar."

Nor does AARO's report mention the earliest surviving intelligence assessment of UFOs — a late 1948 analysis that found many UFO reports came from observers "who, because of their technical background and experience, do not appear to be influenced by unfounded sensationalism nor inclined to report explainable phenomena as new types of aerial devices."

Citing reports from "trained and experienced U.S. Weather Bureau personnel" from early 1947, the omitted document noted multiple observations of "strange metallic disks" with "a flat bottom and a round top." (Note that these incidents predated by several months the widely-publicized June 1947 incident that catalyzed the "flying saucer" era.)

UFO

US scrapped plans to create program for reverse engineering UFOs, Pentagon report says

Interview
© Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesBipartisan group of House lawmakers interview Ryan Graves, David Grusch and David Fravor
The U.S. scrapped an initiative to create a program for reverse-engineering remnants of alien spacecraft over a decade ago, according to a new report the Pentagon's UFO investigator released in unclassified form Friday.

The report overall found no evidence that any UFOs were reverse-engineered and dismissed whistleblower allegations of such programs as false or misrepresentations of existing national security programs. However, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2012 explored the idea of setting up a program, code-named "Kona Blue," to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial objects of non-human origin but ultimately canned the program for "lacking merit," the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) found.

The report states:
"It is critical to note that no extraterrestrial craft or bodies were ever collected — this material was only assumed to exist by KONA BLUE advocates and its anticipated contract Performers."
The Pentagon delivered the report, a historical record of all U.S. government activity related to what are now termed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) going back to 1945, to Congress last week in accordance with Congressional mandate, Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement.

Comment: Pentagon compartmentalization provides information fences. It need not divulge what it claims it doesn't have.


X

AARO Report: Flawed, unresponsive, clueless, and knavish

aaro report
Before I tear into this report, a few comments about the journals that were provided the report 48 hours before anyone else. @washingtonpost @politico @nytimes I was appalled at the minimal analysis done by each of these prestigious papers. They were obsessed with whether AARO stated evidence of ET had been unearthed and completely ignored that the report failed miserably in answering Congress's question regarding the history of UAP. Instead, it was the journal Defense Scoop that provided some valuable information. They reported that the DOD was developing the capability to help personnel collect real-time UAP data in the field with automated sensor units. I would urge readers to subscribe to their journal. And a welcome thanks to the author of the article @BrandiVincent. It's nice to see a journalist who seeks out important information.

My review of this paper is my own personal view. Nor do I intend my response to reflect negatively on Tim Phillips, the current temporary director of AARO. He has not been in his role for any appreciable time. This review does expose the naivety of those who think that anyone can delve into the UAP/UFO subject for only 18 months and expect to understand its history, the nuances of the information, and the scientific challenges that this subject places on those who study it. The simplistic statement that "we have found no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence" is made by someone who lacks a thorough understanding of the subject matter and has not clearly thought through the scientific requirements to make such a statement. This will be discussed more fully later.

Flawed

Let's begin with the many flaws and errors in this report. Some were trivial but were flaws that any check of a paper should have detected. There are many broken links in the references cited; more than I have bothered to count. References #3, #4, and #6 were broken links. Reference #5 and #6 were combined as "56" instead of "5,6". References #8, #10, and #12 are broken links. There are many more. This poor quality of work is just the harbinger of more to come.

Comment: Dr. Garry Nolan & Ross Coulthart share their own thoughts and criticisms on Matt Ford's show below:


Micah Hanks over at The Debrief adds the following:
Although there were notable exceptions, most media coverage of the new AARO report focused almost entirely on the lack of evidence linking UAP sightings to extraterrestrial technologies, as well as the absence of classified programs involved in the recovery of crashed vehicles of non-human origin.

Also commanding media attention had been revelations involving the existence of a proposed program pitched to the Department of Homeland Security in the 2010s under the codename "Kona Blue," which involved a prospective reverse engineering program for any extraterrestrial technologies acquired by the U.S. government.

According to the AARO report, Kona Blue had been proposed by former members of a DIA program called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program (AAWSAP), whose personnel are identified in the report as some of the main proponents behind ongoing assertions involving secret U.S. government UAP programs.

The report says that AARO investigators found no evidence that extraterrestrial craft or their occupants had ever been acquired by the U.S. military and that Kona Blue was ultimately rejected by DHS leadership due to a lack of merit.
Among the many mistakes that appear in the new report, one of the most glaring appears in references to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his involvement in helping acquire funding for a controversial UAP investigative effort run out of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the early 2000s. The report refers to the Democrat Senator's home state as being New Mexico, whereas Reid was a U.S. Senator from Nevada.
...
Beyond mere problems with dates, AARO's report makes further assertions that Battelle's study, the results of which were published in a report titled Project Blue Book Special Report #14, "concluded that all cases that had enough data were resolved and readily explainable." Quite the contrary, the study actually found that among the UFO sightings categorized within a reliability group of reports deemed "Excellent," only 4.2% had "insufficient info," whereas 33.3% of these cases remained "Unknown."
Despite the number of factual errors that appear throughout the final AARO report, there are nonetheless a handful of intriguing references in it that appear to describe advanced U.S. technologies, although again, few of these have received significant attention in mainstream coverage.

In one example, which describes an individual's account provided during an interview with AARO investigators, the report states that "AARO was able to correlate this account with an authentic USG program because the interviewee was able to provide a relatively precise time and location of the sighting which they observed exhibiting strange characteristics."

AARO concluded the technology mistaken for being an exotic UAP technology by the unnamed witness correlated with DoD tests "of a platform protected by a [Special Access Program]" occurring at roughly the same time. "The seemingly strange characteristics reported by the interviewee match closely with the platform's characteristics," the AARO report's authors state, "which was being tested at a military facility in the time frame the interviewee was there."

"This program is not related in any way to the exploitation of off-world technology," the report's authors emphasize, offering no further details on the technology that is believed to have been mistaken for a test involving an exotic craft.

The report's authors later add that "All the programs assessed to be authentic were or — if still active — continue to be, appropriately reported to either or both the congressional defense and intelligence committees."
As for the private defense contractors who denied any ET tech or reverse-engineering, AARO neglects to mention that it had no powers to either put these executives under oath, or to inspect their premises. They simply took their word for it, despite the fact that, by law, they would be legally obligated to lie to AARO about the existence of such waived unacknowledged special access programs (WUSAPs).

Finally, attorney Danny Sheehan had this response: