12:33 Man StuffSquatch Men: Lifestyle

WTF Is Up With All These UFO Sightings?

WTF is a UAP? (Hint: It’s the military’s name for a UFO). In case you hadn’t noticed, the alien action has been pretty intense lately and even our government has openly acknowledged they have no clue what’s going on. We’ve got some thoughts, so pull up a chair and join us as we put on our tinfoil hats and dig into what’s been happening lately.

 

Some UFO history

UFO action really entered the consciousness back in the late 1940’s. Between 1947 and 1969, at the height of the Cold War, more than 12,000 UFO sightings were originally reported to Project Blue Book, a small, top-secret Air Force team set up by the government to scientifically investigate the incidents and determine whether or not they posed a national security threat. The infamous “Area 51” was also founded around the same time after a mysterious “balloon crash” in Rosewell, NM in 1947. Many believe this accident was actually an alien spaceship crash and the remains of the crash were taken to what is now known as Area 51, but the secretive government base still remains shrouded in mystery. One thing’s for certain though, there has been large-scale awareness of supposed alien activity by our government in different ways for a long time. But, it’s only until very recently that the government even acknowledged unexplainable things were going on.

UFO vs UAP

Fast forward to now, In the last few years, kind of out of nowhere, the US government quietly began publicly acknowledging some strange happenings in the skies. In 2022 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an unclassified version of the government's latest report on UFOs. The Pentagon and the peeps at the actually-totally-a-real-group called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (seriously) are now investigating at least 650 incidents of DEFINITELY NOT ALIENS, but “unknown aerial incursions”.

In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sean Kirkpatrick, Director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, called the definitely not aliens, “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “UAPs” and noted they’ve been prioritized for further review and to examine if enough data is available to resolve and explain the cases. Many lawmakers and politicians are hot and heavy on the case because there’s also growing concern that these sightings could actually be unknown types of advanced drones or aircraft operated by our enemies abroad.

Kirkpatrick also said “I should also state clearly for the record that in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics” and that “…the majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrated mundane characteristics of balloons, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources.”

That’s cool and all but the real kicker is that Kirkpatrick made some real noise when he published a widely circulated paper that speculated that a lot of the objects sighted recently that seem to defy the laws of physics or explanation could actually be “probes from an extraterrestrial mothership.” While the Pentagon's new alien lover’s division has received hundreds of new reports in 2022 and can explain more than half of those events, there are still a large chunk of reports and video evidence that remain a mystery — including some in which objects "appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis."

Other reports highlight that the government is just trying to normalize all the craziness and the rise in reports is due to efforts "to de-stigmatize the topic of UAP and instead recognize the potential risks" both as a general aviation hazard and "potential adversarial activity," such as foreign surveillance efforts.”

Face to face with aliens?

In the last few years a few well-respected military pilots have made headlines by detailing their encounters in the media. In 2021 one of the most interesting accounts of UAP action was from a retired U.S. Navy fighter pilot named Alex Dietrich (check out the video on Youtube). While on patrol off the coast of SoCal in 2004, Dietrich described seeing something weird after a colleague spotted something "roiling water below us." He says "It was this sort of roundish, oblong shape, and it didn't have any apparent flight control surfaces. It seemed to be bouncing around and changing course very quickly and in a way that we would not have been able to maneuver our own aircraft or certainly to keep up." While it became big news, there was never any conclusive explanation as to what Dietrich saw. In 2022, former Navy F-18 pilot Lt. Ryan Graves detailed his crazy encounter, (including on Joe Rogan’s podcast), where he describes regular run-ins with “weird black cubes inside of a translucent sphere”. Wild. All of these reports do offer possible explanations of classified technology of our own making but when elite military pilots are being stumped after seeing things up close, you truly have to wonder.

The bottom line? No aliens so far.

While there’s a lot of weird shit going on, much of which cannot be explained, there’s still very little credible evidence that any of this encounters are truly “alien aircraft”. I guess we can only wait to see if the truth really is out there.

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