Wall Street Journal - WASHINGTON—U.S. intelligence officials have examined more than a dozen sightings of unexplained aerial objects that displayed no visible propulsion or that used technology beyond the known capabilities of the U.S. or its adversaries, according to a senior U.S. official describing a new report.
The instances were among 144 studied by intelligence officials for the long-awaited report, but weren’t offered as evidence of possible alien activity—though that prospect wasn’t definitively ruled out. Instead, officials said greater technological understanding may be required to determine what was behind many of the unexplained cases.
“Some of those could require some scientific advances on our part to allow us to better understand what it is that we’re observing,” said one of the officials. “It’s clear that we need to improve our capacity to further analyze remaining observations.”
Eighteen of the cases involved objects that displayed patterns of flight not well explained by current knowledge of propulsion and technology, the officials said.
The intelligence report, prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, didn’t resolve the issue of possible alien flight in U.S. airspace, but steered the debate over what the Pentagon calls unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, out of the fringes of conspiracy theory and into official discourse.
The unexplained sightings have been occurring for nearly two decades Some video footage of pilots’ encounters with the unknown aircraft, as well as the pilots’ reactions, has leaked into the public domain.
The Pentagon last summer revived a small, secretive unit called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force to study the encounters.
U.S. military pilots have observed objects moving at hypersonic velocity, more than five times the speed of sound, and conducting maneuvers impossible using publicly known technology, stoking fears of industrial leaps made by adversarial nations.
Both China and Russia are believed to....READ MORE
The Wall Street Journal is an American business-focused, English-language international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The Journal, along with its Asian editions, is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corp.
Comments