Former U.S. President Barack Obama opened up about his knowledge concerning UFOs on a Monday night segment of the Late Late Show with James Corden, adding fuel to an already packed news cycle concerning the phenomena.
A spate of reports concerning unidentified flying objects (UFOs) has raised questions about who, or what, is responsible and whether they should be regarded as a threat.
During the short segment, Obama was asked if he had a theory on what the unidentified objects could be. He said, “There’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they move, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern and so I think that people still take [it] seriously, trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
The comments by the former president come amid a flurry of reporting questioning the providence of numerous objects, behaving in bizarre manners, that are being observed in the skies by U.S. armed forces, particularly the U.S. Navy.
In a now infamous segment on 60-Minutes, that aired on Sunday, a day before Obama’s comments, former Navy Lt. Ryan Graves stated that his battle group had observed UFOs “…every day. Every day for at least a couple years.”
Success
You are now signed up for our newsletter
Success
Check your email to complete sign up
Commenting on whether what is being observed was technology developed by China, Russia or another U.S. adversary Graves stated, “I am worried, frankly. You know, if these were tactical jets from another country that were hanging out up there, it would be a massive issue.” He continued, “But because it looks slightly different, we’re not willing to actually look at the problem in the face. We’re happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there, watching us every day.”
Christopher Mellon, a Yale graduate and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations in a recent interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo stated, “We have recurring violations of U.S. air space by unidentified vehicles that are very capable, in some cases more capable, than anything in our own inventory. This has been going on for years. The truth is just emerging. We’ve had a massive intelligence failure and we now have a threat, an unknown threat to figure out.”
Sean Cahill a retired U.S. Navy Master-at-Arms joined Mellon on the segment and when asked about the potential threat and our ability to counter it said, “In 2004 I was the Chief Master-at- Arms on board the US Princeton and the technology that we witnessed with the Tic Tac was something that we would not have been able to defend our forces against at the time.”
The “Tic Tac” is the name given to a similar object encountered off the coast of San Diego in 2004 by two Navy pilots stationed aboard the USS Nimitz, Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich and Lt. Cmdr. David Fravor. The object observed was shaped like the famous mint, only it was about the size of a “747.”
A video of the encounter, which was widely released, has been deemed authentic by the Pentagon.
Advanced Aerial Threats
The U.S. government is poised to release a much anticipated report concerning ‘Advanced Aerial Threats’ in June of this year revealing much of what they know, to the public and Congress, about unidentified flying objects or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) as the government refers to them.
On December 27, 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed a more than 5,500 page, 2.3 trillion dollar COVID-19 funding bill that included the “Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal year 2021.”
The act directed a newly formed “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force” to disclose to congress everything the government knows about UFOs.
“The Committee supports the efforts of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force at the Office of Naval Intelligence to standardize collection and reporting on unidentified aerial phenomenon, any links they have to adversarial foreign governments, and the threat they pose to U.S. military assets and installations,” the Act reads.
It continues, “The Committee understands that the relevant intelligence may be sensitive; nevertheless, the Committee finds that the information sharing and coordination across the Intelligence Community has been inconsistent, and this issue has lacked attention from senior leaders.”
The report is to include “a detailed analysis of UAP data and intelligence reporting collected or held by the Office of Naval Intelligence, including data and intelligence reporting held by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.”
While the report is expected to be released to Congress by the end of June it has been widely speculated that only an interim report will be released as the task force was only allotted 180 days to produce the report.
