Some UFOs may be hidden from our national leaders
"Our ballistic missile defense people were very concerned."
The following report is by Matthew Phelan, published February 22, 2025 on Mashable:
An unassuming loophole might be giving the U.S. government and its private contractors free rein to withhold evidence of unidentified craft traveling well above our skies — in outer space.
That’s the argument made by former Capitol Hill policy advisor and attorney Dillon Guthrie, published this January in the Harvard National Security Journal, a publication run by Harvard Law School. Guthrie spent three years as a legislative assistant to Senator John Kerry covering national security issues and later worked directly for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He describes this UFO loophole as a kind of “definitional gap.”
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“Congress has redefined what were formerly called ‘unidentified flying objects’ [UFOs] to first ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ [UAP in 2021], and then the following year to ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena’ [also UAP]," Guthrie told Mashable.
As Americans have been learning a lot lately in the age of Elon Musk’s DOGE, the devil is in the details when it comes to the nation's large and complex federal bureaucracies. And an antiquated, mid-century sci-fi concept like “unidentified flying objects” packed a lot of assumptions into one short acronym. That’s a reality lawmakers determined would hinder good faith efforts to seriously investigate more credible cases of UAP reported by U.S. military personnel in recent years.
Did the Navy pilots who witnessed the now notorious 2015 "GoFast" UFO, for example, really see something that was aerodynamically "flying"? Or was it just floating, like a balloon? Was it or any other strange airborne sighting truly a hard physical "object"? Or were these cases all something more amorphous and temporary, like the plasmified air of ball lightning?
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Any U.S. intelligence agency or branch of the military, in other words, that tracked a spacecraft circling (but respecting) Earth's border would be free to legally withhold that incredible hard data from Congress. And dozens of very recent cases like this may very well exist: Last November, the Defense Department's official UAP investigators with its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) disclosed that no less than 49 of last year's 757 cases in their annual unclassified report involved strange sightings of UAP in outer space.
AARO's 2024 report emphasized, however, that "none of the space domain reports originated from space-based sensors or assets; rather, all of these reports originated from military or commercial pilots or ground observers." But, Chris Mellon — formerly a minority staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee and a deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — believes that this lack of sensor data is likely "a failure of reporting."
"Why is it that none of America's unparalleled space surveillance systems captured and reported what these pilots observed?" Mellon asked in an essay for the technology news website The Debrief this month.