June 25, 2021 — The Department of Defense report on UAPs (UFOs) has been released.
An outcome of the report is a DoD order to “develop a plan to formalize the mission”:
The Debrief: “Pentagon told to ‘formalize’ its investigation of UFOs, possibly expand UAP task force” Moments after the long anticipated UAP report was released to the public, the Department of Defense has been tasked to expand the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force’s efforts to improve their mostly inconclusive findings. (See official statement, “Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Assessment”, June 25, 2021)
Curated links to coverage of the report:
Politico: “Government report can’t explain UFOs, but offers no evidence of aliens”
USA Today: “‘Important first step’: Highly anticipated UFO report released with no firm conclusions”
NBC News: “UFO report: Government can’t explain 143 of 144 mysterious flying objects, blames limited data”
BBC News: “UFO report: US ‘has no explanation’ for sightings”
CNN: “US intelligence community releases long-awaited UFO report”
Reuters: “US report on Pentagon-documented UFOs leaves sightings unexplained” A senior U.S. official, asked about the possibility of extraterrestrial explanations for the observations, said: “That’s not the purpose of the task force, to evaluate any sort of search for extraterrestrial life.”
ABC News: “Few answers in unclassified UFO report” “…we have no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation for them – but we will go wherever the data takes us,” said a senior U.S. government official.
The Verge: “Everything You Need to know about the Pentagon’s UFO Report”
The Debrief: “Government Releases Highly Anticipated Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” The report states that a majority of incidents that were examined “probably do represent physical objects,” noting that they were detected by multiple sensors [and] also visual observations…
New York Times: “US Has No Explanation for Unidentified Objects and Stops Short of Ruling Out Aliens” The nine-page document essentially declines to draw conclusions…
The New Yorker: “The Unexplained Phenomena of the UFO Report” A new intelligence document examines a hundred and forty-three sightings that might have been caused by errant balloons, foreign drones, or “Other” — a reserved way of saying aliens. (June 26, 2021)
Historical perspective: Astronomer Carl Sagan did not believe in alien encounters but he believed aliens existed among the billions of worlds that lay beyond our solar system. And like John Mack, he felt that communicating with such life could have a positive, unifying effect on humankind:
“I think its one of the most fascinating questions that humans have ever asked: Are we the only kind of intelligent life that there is in the universe, or are there others, evolved under different physical circumstances, with different bodies and different ways of thinking with whom we can communicate? Its the ultimate attempt at deprovincialization, and I think its a very good objective for the human species at this critical moment when we are in this halting and tentative and not fully successful way trying to bind up all the peoples of the Earth into what we clearly are – one species and one planet. The very thought of there being other beings, different from all of us, can have a very useful, cohering role for the human species.” — Carl Sagan (“Carl Sagan on the search for intelligent life outside our solar system” CBC News, 1988) |