6,625 total views, 6 views today
Chapter One: What are UFOs?
For decades people have looked up and reported strangely shaped vehicles in the skies that supposedly perform propulsion abilities that cannot be replicated through known human technology. The United States (U.S.) and United Kingdom (U.K.) militaries referred to obscure anomalous vehicles as ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (2017-2022), although historical popular culture better knows them as UFOs – ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’. For the understanding that these objects might not be human made, as unbelievable as that might seem, we in this series refer to UFOs as ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena’ (UAP). A note on the anomalous terminology – it was in the summer of 2020, amidst the turmoil of Covid-19, that myself and others began contacting various people in government (and formerly in government) about pushing forward terminology which would be more representative of the unidentifiable phenomena. While the better known terminology of UFOs was globally widespread, its use was stigmatised and would kill any serious form of mainstream conversation outside of fringe UFO groups.
The use of ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ was consequently implemented from 2017-2022 by a man called Jay Stratton and was the very symbol of the UAP initiative. However, we felt the use of ‘Aerial’ left open the possibility for terrestrial, explainable, mundane explanations – which was taken advantage of by pseudo-sceptics. Similarly, even the usage of ‘Aerospace’, ‘Aviation’, and ‘Airborne’ could be attributed to ‘Chinese Drones’ and/or misidentified planes, balloons and Seagulls. This is not what the reportedly extreme technology represented, in fact, the unknown objects were something else entirely. The technological craft and devices that have been reported by military pilots represented something radical, something extreme, and ultimately something ‘alien’ to us. Therefore, I felt it was important going forward to push those working the problem to incorporate terminology which considered the possibility of non-human technology. Thus, in my activism efforts, writing efforts, and within this book series I advocated the official use of ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena’ to replace ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ as the terminology for UAP. In late 2022, it happened. Congress passed legislation which forced both the Department of Defense (DoD) and NASA to incorporate ‘Anomalous’ for UAP. A small victory for our efforts and for myself personally, but ultimately this would set a precedent. By the beginning of 2023, we had saw the end of the UAP initiative and welcomed the age of anomalous. But the world of UAP and UFOs didn’t start recently, no, this is an age long phenomenon and one which deserves serious consideration.
Unidentified Flying Objects
The original UFO terminology was established during the United States Airforce’s (USAF) study of the phenomena back in the 1950s to replace the redundant and more definitively extra-terrestrial term of ‘Flying Saucers’. When the saucers started being reported on mass in America during the mid-20th Century, a reluctant panic within the U.S. military was soothed over through official denial. But no amount of posturing and obfuscation could stop the objects from appearing across the country, and also the world. Amazingly, the military started seeing these anomalous objects during World War 2 and while the reported shapes and occupants varied, one thing remained the same – advanced technology. This was their ability to out-perform, out-manoeuvre, and instantly disappear from the on-looking scopes of any fighter jet sent up against them. They moved without discernible means of propulsion, without any means of thrust or lift, but moved nonetheless, and moved like nothing we could ever hope to replicate. The technology being reported was so advanced that it was alien to us.
But whose technology did this belong to? Was this Russia, China, or something else entirely? That is the question we need to seriously ask ourselves. But how can we even begin to ask these types of questions with such stigma associated to the topic? Our widely held scientific understanding of physics allows for no credible debate on anomalous phenomena, primarily, as the standard for proof exceeds the standard of evidence. For 75 years the sceptical claim was that there was no proof of extra-terrestrials here on Earth in UFOs, despite the fact the proof which did exist was dismissed out of hand by those same people within the scientific community. The evidence of UFOs was assigned mundane explanations by debunkers, misreported by tabloid journalists and obfuscated by those in government. Despite our rejection of them, the encounters occurred again and again, over and over, year after year, decade after decade in every country on Earth.
Thousands upon thousands of people have reported seeing anomalous vehicles shaped such as ‘Flying Discs’, ‘Tic-Tacs’ and ‘Cubes’, which somehow performed amazing abilities. People has even provided videos and photos to support their encounters and their experience. But it is never enough. The psychological strive to dismiss the phenomena is a human subjective need, a psych-social defence mechanism and one which we all participate within. As a society, we collectively call out to the pseudoism of debunkers and sceptics to ease our cognitive dissonance around UAP. A ‘Flying Disc’ becomes a camera glare, a ‘Cube’ becomes a radar reflector, and a forty-foot-long cylinder becomes a seagull. Suddenly, an obvious and present phenomenon becomes mundane and trivial.
The truth is buried and the dismissive debunking of anything extra-terrestrial is heralded as scientific rigour. However, the real unscientific endeavour here is that both debunkers and believers automatically assign UFOs as extra-terrestrials simply because we have no societal concept for non-human intelligence/technology other than ‘space-aliens’ from another planet. However, we should consider this to be a ridiculous notion from start to finish as we haven’t even begun to openly investigate the anomalous phenomena, and yet, here we all are collectively imposing hypothetical barriers of evidence to dismiss investigating UFOs in the first place. The pseudo-sceptic / debunker starting position is always:
‘We already know UFOs can’t be extra-terrestrials because of the vast distances between star systems so what’s the point in investigating? Clearly the people reporting UFOs are crazy.’
This is an old counter-intuitive argued position that still persists in modern day theoretical debates when UFOs are begrudgingly brought up in the mainstream. A position which uses the pre-emptive extra-terrestrial conclusion as a means to not investigate in the first place. Which is simply bad science. It has been said before that the issue of UFOs is one that stops thinking minds from actually thinking, and instead focuses energy into emotion, subconscious need, and false rationale. Maybe this angst-induced subject opens up a conversation that most scientists are not ready to have (particularly astronomers) and perhaps the stigma of a non-human intelligence is mortifying for our collective ego.
Sadly, Ufology (amateur UFO research) regarding the phenomena has been drowning in a pool of discernment, credulity and psychological stigma. Worse still, the entire mainstream perception of unidentified anomalous vehicles has become focused on one solitary, unhelpful outcome, that of extra-terrestrials. In reality, the phenomena might be more complex.
Considering UFOs
Can we forget about aliens, forget about the extra-terrestrials from ‘planet Zeno’ and forget anything we think we know about UFOs? Can we simply reset Ufology? Reset how the mainstream stigmatises UFOs and start over? Can we demand a genuinely sceptical and scientific approach to the unidentified anomalous phenomena? One that holds both ‘believers’ and ‘debunkers’ to account for poorly applied research methodologies. Might we be forgiven for asking the difficult question of UAP/UFOs? Can we ask the only question that matters, that weird question, that extremely stigmatised question – what are UFOs?
In an obscure way, I’ve always been looking for a very specific answer these last few years, although strangely enough, maybe I’m not looking for the existence of life on other planets. Maybe it’s more a question of technology, the great beyond, other mysterious realities and unseen worlds that one day might free us from our dogmatic scientific barriers. After all, we are all confined prisoners of this subjective reality and bound by the most current scientific knowledge within any given point in history.
We follow the laws which direct us, influence us, and demand our deterministic obedience. To break free from excessive conservative conversation we must be willing to roll the dice and take a chance on what we do not understand, ask questions that haven’t been asked before and think differently about a topic shrouded in excessive stigma, mystery and unverified lore. Conservatism is the enemy of progression, and we should dismiss it with regards to this vital issue. This Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena book series sets out to tell the story of both modern day UAP and historical UFOs that started in 1942. We will examine the case reports and the radical anomalous technological abilities that have been reported throughout history.
Another major theme of this book is human consciousness and the interlinking anomalous phenomena – I wanted to examine the how and the why. I wanted to know if the two variables are mutually exclusive, or if humans and the anomalous have a symbiotic quantum relationship. The existence of UAP means more to me than simply looking to the stars and wondering about our place within it, maybe it should mean we wonder about our place without it. What are humans to the anomalous? What is our relationship? Do we influence them? Do they influence us?
We simply do not know.
‘They’ – whoever or whatever they might be, are a genuine modern-day mystery for us humans, set in an era of transition that proceeded the Second World War and before hyper advanced artificial intelligence technology would allow us to determine objective reality beyond reproach. The anomalous phenomena are a source of great intrigue and at the same time, a source of great uncertainty, maybe even an unspoken collective fear, a source of impossibility and impracticality whilst also being a possible technological answer to many of our existential issues that threaten our existence as a species on this planet.
For less than a hundred years we have been engaged by something anomalous, something that comes and goes at will, something that displays incredible propulsion abilities, that travels through space, time, low atmosphere and the world’s oceans without issue, and without any form of resistance. These vehicles can make a 90 degree right angled turn, they engage military personnel, civilians of all background, with race, age, sex and culture being no barrier. It was, and still is a technology that we cannot reproduce in the early 21st century, never mind the mid-to early 20th century when they are said to have first appeared. And yet, the reports came through in the thousands, year after year, decade after decade, and still, we as a species struggle to psychologically accept the objective reality. We do not know who or what they are, however, we do know what they can do.
UAP technology
There are currently five acknowledged technological abilities that UAP display – also known as the five ‘AATIP’ observables (1), which have been reportedly displayed by the ‘Tic-Tac’ vehicles that engaged the USS Nimitz in 2004 (2). We might expect other undisclosed abilities to be added in the years to come (The ability to change structural shape during travel – ‘Trans-Morphia’, etc).
1). Hypersonic Velocity (without signatures)
2). Anti-Gravity
3). Instantaneous Acceleration
4). Low Observability
5). Trans-Medium Travel
These five are the core makeup of what anomalous technology can do, as stated by Luis Elizondo – the confirmed former Director of the Pentagon’s UAP program – also known as The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) (3), (4), (5). As stated already, a good example of this technology in use would be the ‘Tic-Tac’ vehicles (plural). As reports state, the vehicles displayed abilities of hypersonic velocity, anti-gravity, instantaneous acceleration and possibly even ‘retro-causality’ (the ability to know where the fighter jet would be before it was), all noted from within the 2004 USS Nimitz incursion case (2).
These unique abilities were displayed by a forty-foot white ‘Tic-Tac’ object that manoeuvred without wings or propellers, rocket thrust or any other means of obvious propulsion – a radical technology we didn’t have in 2004 (or at time of writing in 2018, and in 2021). Unidentified aerial vehicles, such as that of the ‘Tic-Tac’ or the other now famous UAP – the fuzzy looking black and white ‘Flying Disc’ type shape that was captured in the January 2015 ‘GIMBAL’ video, are historic in the world of UFO/UAP research. These were the first genuine videos of something unexplainable, verified by the U.S. military and still to this day, remain unexplained and officially classified as ‘Unidentified’. Think about that for a minute – how can aerial vehicles in today’s age of advanced military surveillance, with radar and microscopic camera facilities, be unable to identify an aerial vehicle as it engages nuclear strike groups?
‘GIMBAL’, not to be confused with the ‘Tic-Tac/FLIR1’ video, was also confirmed as a genuine Navy video by the Department of Defense (DoD) in April 2020 (6) and was classified as ‘Unidentified’ by the DoD. It must be said that such technology should be further classified as something ‘Unidentifiable’ given the extreme capabilities we simply cannot reproduce. More appropriately, UAP should transcend the stigmatised unidentified label, and thus be officially referred to as ‘Anomalous’ – a genuine terminology for potential ‘non-human’ technology and even intelligence. The recent military and navy cases that have made front page headlines do not tell the full story of these anomalous objects that out-performed the most sophisticated fighter jets ever built by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) contractors of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. As any UFO historian will tell you, the UAP problem didn’t start and finish with the three declassified UAP videos that were released to The New York Times and POLITICO in 2017.
When researching this issue, we scoured back through tens-of-thousands of civilian reports spanning the 20th and early 21st century, thus giving us an idea of the sheer volume of potentially anomalous encounters. For example, the national UFO reporting centre (7) and the Mutual UFO Network (8) receive an estimated 10’000 reports annually. Now that is not to say that is how many genuine unidentifiable craft are engaging civilians annually, but it is a direct observation of how many clear-cut reports of ‘Flying Discs’, ‘Spheres’, ‘Triangles’, ‘Cubes’, ‘Cylinders’, ‘Pyramids’, ‘Orbs’, and anything else flying at incredible speeds in a way which simply isn’t aerodynamic as we understand it.
Without question, the reported technology of these anomalous vehicles is beyond what we can replicate today in the early 21st century, however we have no specific government acknowledgment of these civilian reports, only military cases from recent years. We might advise anyone to take some time and look at the reports that go back to the 1940s. The same objects that are being reported by navy pilots to this very day you will find throughout history in civilian reports, and in the reports of Project Bluebook (the U.S. government program that studied UFOs in the 1950s). For these UFOs have a 70-year history that span back to the ‘Foo Fighters’ and ‘Ghost Rockets’ of the World War Two era, and more specifically, to the first nuclear bomb that was detonated in the New Mexico desert on the 16th of July, 1945 – just a few months prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan. Almost by direct correlation, the UFO/UAP issue and nuclear age seemed to be intimately correlated with many associated encounters between anomalous technology and nuclear facilities (9) (10).
This is not to say that strange unidentifiable phenomena weren’t reported throughout history prior to the 1940s, or that the nuclear connection was the beginning of incursions, but the intensity and dimensions of what was being seen dramatically shifted in the 20th century. The birth of the ‘Flying Saucer’ age had been secreted into our reality and was instantly associated prematurely as being spacemen from another world. Additionally, the UFO/UAP issue in early 1950s America became so frequently common that it became part of the pop culture. A space-age mythology that has its roots in fact, not fiction. Most significantly, it was the July 1952 incursions over Washington D.C. by unknown objects that outran fighter planes (11), (12), and forced the U.S. government to charge the Airforce with taking seriously the phenomenon.
Project Bluebook (1952 – 1969) was created on the back of previous investigation programs, Project Sign – originally called Project Saucer (1947 – 1949) and Project Grudge (1949) whose mandate, it was believed by multiple researchers, was to act as public relation management rather than a scientific investigative body. When one looks through the case files of Project Bluebook (13), it becomes clear that there was something significant in the skies over America. Whatever they might have been was irrelevant, the fact was, something was there, and that something was being reported over and over. What was certain is that the conclusions of the USAF didn’t match the data that was being reported, and seemingly this was intended as a way to deceive the public. Dismiss, downplay, ridicule and ignore was the policy when it came to UFOs and ‘Flying Saucers’. A policy which stretched through the 20th century and right up to the start of AATIP, Elizondo, Mellon and the ‘Golden Age of UFOs’ or ‘UAP Initiative/Revolution’ which ran from December 2017 to 2022.
◆◆◆
Conclusions
The UAP initiative set out not only to ask the UFO/UAP question, but also to change the dynamics of how UAP are considered. The idea was to implement UAP terminology, to engage mainstream media, to build a social media network platform which could hold a credible conversation free of conspiracy, poor research methodology, and finally, to create a form of narrative free activism that would push governments and media to take seriously the issue after seventy years. Our extended team has spoken with journalists, media organisations, scientists, astronomers, physicists, intelligence agents, directors of national security programs and political figures, all in the hope of trying to answer the one thing that matters above all else. We try to propose hypothetical answers and more importantly hypothetical questions as we ask, ‘What are UAP?’ To answer this question is easy, in fact it is a long and complex and difficult to answer. However, it is a question that we will try to investigate the best we can within this series of semi-autobiographical research articles. As a starting point, we can and will say this;
“… we simply don’t know what the phenomena is right now, however, we must seriously consider that UFOs/UAP may or may not specifically be extra-terrestrial in origin, but they certainly might be alien to us. Not unidentified, but unidentifiable. Anomalous.”
◆◆◆
References
(1). Daugherty, G. and Sullivan, M. (2019) These 5 UFO Traits, Captured on Video by Navy Fighters, Defy Explanation | HISTORY. [online] www.history.com. Available at: https://www.history.com/.amp/news/ufo-sightings-speed-appearance-movement [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(2). Cooper, H., Kean, L. and Blumenthal, R. (2017) 2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’. The New York Times. [online] 16 Dec. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.amp.html [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(3). Cooper, H., Blumenthal, R. and Kean, L. (2017a) Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program. The New York Times. [online] 16 Dec. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.amp.html [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(4). Bender, B. (2017) The Pentagon’s Secret Search for UFOs. [online] POLITICO Magazine. Available at: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/16/pentagon-ufo-search-harry-reid-216111 [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(5). McMillan, T. (2020) Inside the Pentagon’s Secret UFO Program. [online] Popular Mechanics. Available at: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30916275/government-secret-ufo-program-investigation/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(6). United States Department of Defense. (2020) Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos. [online] U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. Available at: https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Releases/Release/Article/2165713/statement-by-the-department-of-defense-on-the-release-of-historical-navy-videos/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(7). The National UFO Reporting Centre. Available at: http://www.nuforc.org/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(8). The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). Available at: https://www.mufon.com/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(9). Hastings, R. (2008) UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. Author House.
(10). CNN (2010) Ex-Air Force Personnel: UFOs Deactivated Nukes. [online] www.cbsnews.com. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-deactivated-nukes/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(11). Holson, L.M. (2018) A Radar Blip, a Flash of Light: How U.F.O.s ‘Exploded’ Into Public View. The New York Times. [online] 3 Aug. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/science/UFO-sightings-USA.amp.html [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
(12). Maccabee, B. (2018) The Legacy of 1952: Year of the UFO Paperback – 29 July 2018. First ed. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
(13). Fold 3. ‘Project Bluebook Files.’ Ancestry. Available at: https://www.fold3.com/search?keywords=Gorman&general.title.id=461:Project+Blue+Book+-+UFO+Investigations [Accessed 26 Oct. 2022].
◆◆◆
