WaPo | A new office at the Pentagon is scrutinizing hundreds of reports of unidentified objects in air, sea, space and beyond, senior U.S. defense officials said Friday, and while it has discovered no signs of alien life, the search is set to expand.
The issue has taken on increasing seriousness as a bipartisan group of lawmakers presses the Defense Department to investigate instances of unidentified phenomena and disclose publicly what they learn. Established in July, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is evaluating recent reports and soon could evaluate accounts that date back decades, officials said.
The Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Ronald Moultrie, told reporters during a news conference, the first to discuss the office and its ongoing work, that “At this time … we have nothing” to affirm the existence of space aliens.
The proliferation of drones, including those operated by foreign adversaries and amateur hobbyists, account for many of the reports, officials said.
“Some of these things almost collide with planes,” said Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the new office, who spoke to the media alongside Moultrie on Friday. “We see that on a regular basis.”
The U.S. government employs sophisticated sensors around the globe to collect data, and the office analyzes it for relevant information, they said, declining to elaborate.
While most of the reports the Pentagon investigates are about aerial objects, defense officials are increasingly concerned about unusual activity below the surface of the ocean, in space and on land. For that reason, the Pentagon now uses the term unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, rather than previous descriptions such as “unidentified flying object.”
Moultrie said that, “Unidentified phenomena in all domains … pose potential threats to personal security and operational security, and they deserve our urgent attention.”
Unidentified “trans-medium” objects, he said, is a class of phenomena that would jump between domains, like from the air to the sea. None has been documented yet, Moultrie noted.
The research is likely to expand next year. Congress wrote a provision into the next defense policy bill, which is awaiting President Biden’s signature, that requires the Defense Department to complete a “historical record report” about detailing unidentified phenomena observed and documented by the United States. If approved by Biden, the National Defense Authorization Act will then trigger “quite a research project, if you will, into the archives,” Kirkpatrick said.
Defense officials already are digging through old reports. Kirkpatrick, a physicist and career intelligence officer, said he will “adhere to the scientific method — and I will follow that data and science wherever it goes.” Some past reports, he acknowledged, may be highly classified and not yet known to him.
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