US lawmakers receiving reports of the latest classified UFO briefings say national security officials still do not take seriously reports of high-tech aircraft of unknown origin violating protected airspace. Politico writes about this, citing sources.
Members of the Senate Committees on Intelligence and the Armed Services have received secret reports on new ways of collecting data that the Pentagon should use to investigate UFO reports more thoroughly.
However, some lawmakers want more analysts and surveillance systems to be involved in determining the origin of these unknown aircraft, and not just processing reports of their existence.
One of the legislators, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, called the UFO issue an urgent issue.
“Senator Gillibrand thinks the Department of Defense needs to take this issue much more seriously and act,” one of her aides, who asked not to be named, said. “They have had enough time to implement these important provisions, and they need to show us that they are ready to solve this problem in the long term.”
The congressional briefings come four months after Congress passed a law that would require the Pentagon to create an Office of Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution.
The office, due to be fully operational by June, has been given the authority to use “any resource, capability, asset, or process” to investigate “unidentified aerial phenomena” — UFOs.
According to the legislation, the Pentagon office must develop “an intelligence collection and analysis plan to obtain as much information as possible about the technical and operational characteristics, origins and intentions of unidentified aerial phenomena.”
The bill, signed by President Joe Biden, also required an annual report and semi-annual briefings to Congress, including descriptions of all incidents “involving military nuclear assets, including strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships and submarines.”
In response to Congressional directives, Undersecretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks directed the creation of an Aircraft Control Identification and Synchronization Group to oversee the establishment of a permanent UFO office required by Congress.
Among its tasks is to standardize incident reports across the military, and to collect and analyze more intelligence.
Previously, former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo told the TV program 60 Minutes that “unidentified aerial phenomena” seem to have “much more advanced” technology than anything currently in the known US arsenal:
“Imagine technology that can develop 600 to 700 g-forces, technology that can fly 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar, and that can travel through air, water, and possibly space. And, by the way, it has no obvious signs of movement, wings, control surfaces, and yet can withstand the natural effects of earth’s gravity. That is what we are seeing.”
Elizondo, in his comments, raised the possibility that the so-called UFOs are in fact “a hostile foreign technology that has managed to get around us and elude all 18 members of the intelligence community for several decades.”
