Corona Daily 144: Unidentified Flying Objects and Covid

In November 2004, David Fravor, the fighter pilot commander of a large US navy warship saw an object on his radar. He described it as white and oval, like the mint Tic Tac, probably forty feet long. It was hovering above the ocean. A team of fighters took off to investigate. One of the pilots recorded the UFO (unidentified flying object) on an FLIR, an advanced infrared camera.

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On 27 December 2020, Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion Coronavirus Relief and Government Funding legislation. The massive Act is 5593 pages long. Hidden among those pages is a demand that the US intelligence agencies and Defence Department tell the Congress and general public all they know about UFOs. They must report on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, also called “anomalous aerial vehicles”), including observed airborne objects that have not been identified. All documents must be submitted within 180 days (by June 2021) in unclassified form, in other words open in the public domain. A classified annex to the report is allowed as a concession.

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The mystique around UFOs goes back several decades. The CIA holds a massive trove of documents related to UFO sightings over the last 70 years. Various US agencies have been collecting information on UFOs using geospatial intelligence, signals, human intelligence, all information held in secret. The US government was officially very active between 2007 and 2012, with Pentagon running a program to look for threats from space. In the $600 billion annual defence department budget, the $22 million budget for this program was cleverly hidden.

Last April, after the start of the pandemic, the Pentagon officially acknowledged three UFO incidents and released the videos. The first was the 2004 tic tac incident, the other two were from 2015. The Pentagon spokesman said release of these videos didn’t compromise any investigations or sensitive information.

It is not clear what the unidentified objects are. The rational explanation is some kind of drones by earthly rivals (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea?) seeking to gather intelligence, rather than the more exciting extra-terrestrials usually associated with UFOs.

In August 2020, a Navy-led UFO task force was created. Its mission is to detect, analyze, catalogue UAPs (official term for UFO) that could potentially pose a threat to US national security.

Though the deadline is June, already nearly 3000 documents have been declassified. For those who take interest in UFOs, the documents can be found on the black vault website.     

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Several newspapers and TV channels have asked as to why the congress demand for declassifying UFO materials should be part of the Coronavirus Relief legislation. Nobody has answered that question.

Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee has pushed aggressively for systems and transparency. He says the American public deserves the right to know as much as possible and the matter should not be kept secret simply because of the stigma associated with the term UFO. Rubio’s explanation doesn’t answer why the measure was pushed through the covid bill.

On the signing of the Covid bill, Republicans expressed joy saying they had ensured “safeguards to prohibit illegal aliens from receiving payment.” It is possible they took the term illegal aliens in its widest sense.

A senator opposing the bill may offer a clue. Senator Wyden mentions the costs of “digital classification” are ever rising, and now exceed $18 billion a year. $18 billion for keeping information secret. Year after year, the USA keeps increasing the mountain of classified information, spending billions of dollars. The classified information is generally useless for protecting national security as 9/11 showed.

The system of classification and declassification are broken. They are hugely expensive. It is possible this initiative was added to the Covid relief legislation, because it is easier to hide billions among trillions.

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Whatever the answer to the mystery, 2021 is a bonanza for UFO lovers. They can spend their lockdown time reading UFO records from the last seventy years.

Ravi