The anxiously awaited report to Congress from the Pentagon on what it knows about UFOs is completed. And as hypothesized by this reporter, it provides no bombshells or real answers about the leaked footage of the military’s ongoing encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, more commonly referred to as UFOs.

As my regular readers know, this all started when the Navy admitted that leaked footage from several engagements US Navy pilots had with “UAPs” was authentic. The videos from the F/A-18 Super Hornets cockpit cameras captured what the crew was seeing, and in 2020, the Pentagon declassified the footage. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about what the crew saw that day was how unremarkable it was becoming. In the past 20 years, military pilots have made more than 120 sightings of objects with no apparent signs of conventional propulsion—no exhaust or contrails, and certainly no wings or fins. As we reported last month on these pages, a former Navy pilot said that at one point, such encounters were occurring on a “daily basis.”

In 2007, Congress established the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program Task Force, championed by then-Nevada Senator Harry Reid, charging the intelligence department with determining if the objects really are extraterrestrial in origin or—perhaps worse—advanced military technology being developed by China, Russia, or other potential foes. That program shut down for lack of funding in 2012. But the work resumed last year when then-President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that also required the Pentagon to continue investigating UAPs and release its findings to the public.

That report is scheduled for release in July. However, The New York Times published an advanced copy of the report, and the conclusions are just enough to intrigue everyone and satisfy no one – The report concludes that “there is no evidence that the UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin, but nor can that possibility be ruled out.” 

What the report does say is that the objects are “definitely not American military craft,” but pointedly does not discount the possibility that they could belong to another earthly nation. Both Russia and China are known to be experimenting with hypersonic technology—vehicles and weapons that can move at five times the speed of sound or faster—and certainly, the velocity of the objects seen by American pilots would be consistent with that kind of engineering. But the suddenness with which the objects change directions would—or at least should—cause g-forces that would rip them (or their inhabitants) apart, and the length of time some of them remain traveling at such incredible speeds goes beyond what conventional fuel technology could support.

Those kinds of so-far inexplicable abilities have caught the attention of a lot of people who normally keep their distance from what could be seen as fringe beliefs.

“What is true, and I’m actually serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” former President Barack Obama said May 17 on The Late Late Show with James Corden. During her presidential campaign in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about any classified data that might exist on UAPs and how she would handle it as President. “I want to open the files as much as we can,” she said. “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.” Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is also on the record as wanting more information on UAPs.

More information will surely be forthcoming when the full report drops before the end of July. But if the preliminary leaked report is any indication, it’s best to expect the unidentified aerial phenomena to remain just that unidentified – and even the official report will raise more questions than it answers.

What is the US government still not telling us about what they know about UFOs and our military’s encounters with them? Please reply using the comments below!