A brief provision accompanying the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act, which was signed last December, called on the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of various pertinent agencies, to produce an “intelligence assessment of the threat posed by UAP and the progress the UAPTF has made to understand this threat.” U.A.P., or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” is the revamped acronym for the perennial enigmas previously known as “U.F.O.s”; the U.A.P.T.F. is a task force that was established to investigate them. The formal announcement of the task force, last August, marked an inflection point in the arc of renewed official interest in the topic. An initial phase of government attention—running from 2007, when Harry Reid was persuaded to set aside twenty-two million dollars of “black money” appropriations for the study of U.F.O.s, through the end of 2017, when reporters for the Times revealed the existence of the secretive program—could be conceivably written off as the self-indulgent work of a small cadre of U.F.O. hobbyists who happened to be in the right place at the right time. The task force’s report, however, would have the imprimatur of the intelligence community, and its very existence was hard to square with charges of hobbyism. The report was expected in the afternoon on Friday, seventy-four years, almost to the day, since a mysterious sighting near Mt. Rainier inaugurated the modern U.F.O. era. As the afternoon progressed without an announcement, U.F.O. enthusiasts speculated that the findings were subject to deliberate delay, lest they rattle the markets. The Director of National Intelligence’s office finally released the unclassified portion of the report just after the close of the business day. Its Web site did not seem to be designed to handle the kind of traffic that U.F.O. news generates, and repeated attempts to download the file met only error messages.
Believers and skeptics hoped for a climactic resolution, one way or the other, to the country’s extended love-hate relationship with flying saucers. But prevailing expectations were low. Assessments of this kind have come and gone before—the British government compiled its own version two decades ago—and the situation has remained perplexing. This particular report was not, by all accounts, being assembled under the most auspicious circumstances: two people, reportedly working part time, had been given only a hundred and eighty days to determine what, exactly, the federal government did and did not know about U.F.O.s.
The initial reaction to the Preliminary Assessment, on U.F.O. Twitter and elsewhere, was one of resignation. The report had not failed to disappoint almost everyone. As the first line of the executive summary put it, “The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP.” More data and more resources were needed. Members of Congress, who had been briefed in recent days on the classified version of the report, called for further study. Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, issued a statement that said, “This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step. The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.” A statement from Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressman from California who heads the House Intelligence Committee, concurred: “We should approach these questions without preconceptions to encourage a thorough, systematized analysis of the potential national security and flight safety risks posed by unidentified aerial phenomena, whether they are the result of a foreign adversary, atmospheric or other aerial phenomena, space debris, or something else entirely.” André Carson, a Democrat from Indiana also on the committee, has already brooked the possibility of a public hearing on the subject, something that last happened in 1966, at the behest of Gerald Ford, then the House Minority Leader. Apparently, the only matter left upon which Democrats and Republicans could agree was the need to keep studying U.F.O.s.
The ultimate recommendation may have been banal, but the document itself, while clinical and reserved, was altogether stranger. Under scrutiny were a total of a hundred and forty-four sightings, all of them taken from military aviators or other “reliable” government sources and systems. The earliest incident dated to 2004—almost certainly the “Nimitz encounter,” in which multiple Navy pilots saw a Tic-Tac-shaped object flying off the coast of Baja California. But the majority of the cases had occurred in only the last two years, since the Navy updated the standard reporting mechanism for U.A.P.s. (The Air Force followed suit, last November, with a pilot program for spooked pilots.) Of this total, only one case could be conclusively explained away, as a “large, deflating balloon.” The remaining reports included eighty that “involved observation with multiple sensors,” i.e., some combination of eyewitness testimony, radar returns, infrared indications, or other electro-optical sources. Even more strangely, eighteen of the incidents involved “unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics”—the varieties of inexplicable maneuverability that have distinguished U.F.O. sightings for decades. It remained unclear whether these made up a subset of those caught by multiple sensors or if all of these more dramatic cases were uncorroborated eyewitness accounts. “Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable [sic] means of propulsion,” the report said. In a “small number of these,” American aircraft processed radio-frequency energy coming from the devices, which could be a sign of radar jamming, and there seemed to be “a degree of signature management”—the use of stealth technologies to mask the U.F.O.’s presence. Perhaps no embalmed aliens had been found in a sub-basement at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, as believers have long speculated, but these findings were hardly trivial.
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