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    Default Tic-Tac Event, Disclosure, etc.



    26 Mar 2019 Update from Ryan at "Post Disclosure World".

    More Witnesses emerging, plus more information via George Knapp.

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    United States Avalon Member Valerie Villars's Avatar
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    Default Re: Tic-Tac Event, Disclosure, etc.

    I am including this article here because it does reference the tic tac toe incident. However, the reason I am posting this is the description of this ET, which doesn't match any description I've ever read about.

    The link to the article is here. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/busi...319-story.html

    I did meet some tall, muscular types, but they do not match her description. This was in today's "Times Picayune" but originally appeared in the "Orlando Sentinel" on March 19, 2019.

    "He appeared as if a hologram at first — then solid — suddenly there and clear as you or I, at the edge of the forest behind Trish Bishop’s home in Kissimmee.

    It was a Thursday in March 2013, the glow of the afternoon tucking in for the day behind the trees. He stood tall, at least 6-foot-3, perhaps 220 pounds and certainly muscular, wearing a formfitting tan colored uniform, boots and gloves. He lingered by the crape myrtle tree in the middle of the backyard.

    When he turned around, it was his face, she remembers, that stopped her.

    Bulging eyes jutting so far out of the sockets that Bishop wondered whether he could close them. Skin white as chalk. And a jaw so large, it dispelled any notions the government worker had of the visitor being human.

    “If you compare a human jawbone to his, we would be a chihuahua to a pit bull,” Bishop said.

    Paralyzed with fear, she watched as what she believed to be an alien appeared to climb invisible steps, stopping often to snatch glances at her from where she sat on her back porch, fumbling with her phone to appear as though she couldn’t see him.

    Her finger was pressed on the number “9” to dial for help.

    When he was about 10 feet off the ground, he turned his back to her and pulled himself up — “into a UFO?” she thought — and was gone.

    Bishop sat stunned. “I’ve got a freaking alien in my backyard,” she thought.

    It would be four years before she told anyone her story, before she’d discover the Mutual Unidentified Flying Objects Network, a nationwide organization 50 years old, and file her report under case number 84886 with the local Florida chapter.

    But she worried: Who would believe her?

    These days, more people than you’d think.

    Across restaurants and meeting rooms in the United States, MUFON groups still gather every month to discuss cases like Bishop’s with the enthusiasm that once gripped the nation during the Cold War, when UFO sightings still made a splash on the front page.

    The Space Coast group, made up of some former NASA employees and engineers, has 118 members, the largest in the state. Across the U.S. they number 3,500, with additional offices in 42 countries.

    For many years, they were alone entertaining UFO theories. No more.

    In the past two years, scientists, politicians and professionals have increasingly been willing to touch the taboo subject and perhaps lend a little credence to those who still believe.

    In December 2017, the New York Times uncovered that the U.S. had gone so far as to fund a secret, $22 million, five-year project to study UFO claims.

    Since then, respected researchers, from the chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department to at least one scientist at NASA, have come out with theories, albeit controversial ones, that suggest closer study of the role extraterrestrials may play in certain phenomena.


    What’s changed, said Robert Powell, an executive board member on the non-profit Scientific Coalition for Ufology, is our understanding of the universe. As scientists have discovered more Earth-like exoplanets and begun to delve into the options for interstellar travel — one idea includes using a laser-propelled, microchip-shaped probe — the conversation has been shifting.

    “We still think of ourselves, as a species, as the center of everything,” Powell said. “Once you ...at least start to discuss interstellar travel, you have to admit that, if there is intelligent life out there, then they have to be able to travel interstellar, too.”

    Science weighs in
    The challenge with UFO and alien sightings has always been the lack of evidence. Bishop said she was too scared to take a photo of her alien. Little to no consequential evidence exists in other cases.

    Psychology can explain some of it. Common explanations include a person projecting their unconscious desires onto something, or a predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories informing what a person thinks they saw, said Alvin Wang, a psychology professor at the University of Central Florida.

    People who believe they witnessed something may seek out others who reaffirm that belief, like “being in an echo chamber,” Wang said.

    “People tend to hold on to that particularly if it fits in with their worldview and their belief system that there are other beings that inhabit the universe,” Wang said. “And they get ...confirmation support, when they are members of UFO believers community.”

    Alvin WAng
    UCF Psychology Professor, Alvin Wang, at his on-campus office on February 19, 2019. (Rich Pope / Orlando Sentinel)
    But Bishop stands by what she said she saw. She works a government security job with three area contractors and said she has no reason to lie.

    And she’s on the hunt for ET now. After reporting her case in 2017, she bought three hunting trackers on eBay and set them up in her backyard. They’re motion activated, and sometimes they’ll go off in the night and capture 6,000 images — but there’s nothing in the frame. She once caught a Tic Tac-shaped blur in the sky she believes to be a UFO.

    “I just think it's a belief thing until you actually see them,” Bishop said. “You always gotta wonder.”

    Some people, like Kathleen Marden, have been wondering all their lives.

    It was September 1961 when the then 13-year-old got the call: Her aunt, Betty Hill, and her uncle, Barney Hill, said they’d seen a UFO on their drive through the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

    Betty’s dress was torn and Barney’s shoes were scuffed. There were two hours they couldn’t account for and Barney was sure he’d seen eight to 11 figures dressed in black shiny uniforms that were “somehow not human,” said Marden, who now lives outside Orlando.

    It wasn’t until the Hills were put through a hypnosis session by Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon that their stories of being taken into a UFO and physically examined were revealed.

    “They were interested in the skin, in the skeletal structure, in the joints,” said Marden, MUFON’s director of experiencer research. “They examined their hands, they took their shoes off, they examined their feet, they did tests on them that appear to be testing their nervous systems, as well.”


    Kathleen Marden, holds a picture of her aunt, Betty Hill, and her uncle, Barney Hill, at her home on February 4, 2019. The Hill's account of their alleged alien abduction gained national attention when it was made public in 1965. (Rich Pope / Orlando Sentinel)
    The Hills’ alleged abduction was made public in 1965 — and the story gripped the nation. “Did They Seize Couple?” the Boston Traveler posited. “I Was Quizzed in ‘Space Ship,’” read another headline.

    Marden has dedicated her life to uncovering the truth behind she says was government tampering with the Hills’ case and has written four books about her aunt and uncle and flying saucers. She’s seen the change in perception about UFOs in the public and scientific community first hand.


    “I absolutely do think that there is a shift, that people are giving more credence to this they did in the past,” she said, pointing to the 2017 New York Times story on the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program as the turning point.

    The program was run by military intelligence official Luis Elizondo and put together at the request of then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid. It ran from 2007 to 2012 in partnership with businessman Robert Bigelow’s company Bigelow Aerospace, which studied cases of American military personnel observing unknown objects.


    The only official footage captured by a US navy F/A-18 Super Hornet present at the 2004 Nimitz incident off the coast of San Diego.
    One case in particular garnered attention when it was declassified because videos showed a craft with no apparent propulsion moving at alarmingly fast speeds. It was filmed in 2004 by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets off the coast of San Diego.

    Navy pilot Commander David Fravor, who witnessed the Tic Tac-shaped craft, told the Washington Post in late 2017 that he maintained it was “something not from Earth.”

    Then came Harvard’s astronomy department chair, Avi Loeb, a renowned scientist who Time Magazine named one of the 25 most influential people in space in 2012.

    He, along with colleague Shmuel Bialy, wrote in a publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters that a thin interstellar object seen passing through our solar system called Oumuamua “is a lightsail, flowing in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment.”

    Loeb went a step further, theorizing that, “alternatively, a more exotic scenario is that Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.” The theory has provoked the ire of the scientific community, but Loeb has stood by it.

    Is it aliens, for sure? Loeb can’t say. He just says he can’t find another explanation.

    Oumuamua
    This handout photo released by the European Southern Observatory on November 20, 2017 shows an artist's impression of the first interstellar asteroid: Oumuamua. (M. KORNMESSER / AFP/Getty Images)
    At NASA Ames Research Center in California, scientist Silvano Colombano has gone on record suggesting the space agency look at all explanations in its approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI. Historically, NASA has not weighed in on the issue much, most recently opening a Center for Life Detection Science that is more about finding biosignatures than analyzing alleged UFO sightings.

    But Colombano argued in a March 2018 white paper that the scientific community should be more open about looking at the evidence that is already there, “consider the UFO phenomenon worthy of study” and engage in “speculative physics” grounded in solid scientific theories but with some “willingness to stretch possibilities as to the nature of space-time and energy.”

    Essentially, he said, it was time NASA had a more open mind.

    The Believers
    While science dukes it out, the members of the MUFON’s Space Coast chapter take their places at their monthly meeting in the back room of an old-fashioned BBQ joint in Palm Bay called Memaw’s to discuss what they all believe to be a universal truth.

    Many believers come to the meetings because someone they know saw something they couldn’t explain, or because they’ve nursed an interest in the subject since the days of the Cold War, when UFO sightings and abduction claims spiked. Some say they have seen things. Others put stock in more eccentric theories.

    They are what’s left of a movement that once captured the interest of thousands, inspired books like Carl Sagan’s “Contact,” long-running TV show “The X-Files,” and made Betty and Barney Hill the stars of a 1975 film starring James Earl Jones.


    There are many people like Barbara Stusse, who says her mother saw a UFO in 1947 and kept it from her children for 30 years. Stusse remembers waiting for her copy of the Boston Herald every day for a week in 1965, when the Hills’ story unraveled in three to four pages of newsprint a day.

    “I read that and I thought, ‘I believed it,’ ” said Stusse, 80, who has been coming to MUFON meetings for three years.

    And there’s Bill Fisk, who is always at meetings taking notes. He’s in charge of taking in reported sightings like Bishop’s and trying to explain them. Could weather have played a role? Could the person have dreamed it?

    Fisk, who has been hooked since the moment he saw a light in the sky make a sharp 90-degree turn when he was 9 years old, joined the local MUFON chapter in 2015.


    He went all in, taking 100 hours of online classes over three months to get certified as a field investigator for MUFON. He learned how to read flight plans, how to measure longitude, latitude and cloud altitude, how to use a Geiger counter to measure ionizing radiation.

    Sometimes he gets hoaxes. One man copyrighted an image he took of the sky through a window because he was convinced it was a UFO. Turns out, it was just the reflection of his hotel room’s ceiling light on the glass. Chinese lanterns in the sky are often confused with flying saucers. And one woman even claimed an alien came into her house and had sex with her.

    “A lot of it is that people don’t look up, they don’t pay attention to the sky, the last time they read a science book was in 12th grade,” Fisk said. “It’s just one of those things that sometimes you just have to bring them along, give them the information, the education to do something with what they saw, put it into a framework.”

    Bill Fisk
    Mutual UFO Network Field Investigator Bill Fisk at his home in Palm Bay on February 6, 2019. Fisk was hooked on the subject of UFO phenomena after he saw a light in the sky make a sharp 90-degree turn when he was 9 years old. (Rich Pope / Orlando Sentinel)
    A customer solutions representative for CareerSource Brevard, Fisk works on cases at lunch or after work. He can close most in three to four days, write them off as someone thinking Venus was a UFO, but sometimes he gets one he can’t crack.

    It joins the small percentage of true “unknowns” that can’t be explained by weather phenomena or other means. That possibility keeps him and his colleagues going, always considering each case, always looking up to the sky.

    “I would like to see people accept the fact that there are things they can't explain,” Fisk said. “... I'm not going to stop doing it. [I’ll keep adding] to the database because that's all I can do.”
    "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone when we are uncool." From the movie "Almost Famous""l "Let yourself stand cool and composed before a million universes." Walt Whitman

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    Last edited by Builder; 27th May 2019 at 19:49.
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    Default Re: Tic-Tac Event, Disclosure, etc.

    The New York Times is at it again:

    ‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects

    Quote WASHINGTON — The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

    “These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

    In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

    “Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

    No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.

    But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.

    Videos filmed by Navy pilots show two encounters with flying objects. One was captured by a plane’s camera off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 20, 2015. That footage, published previously but with little context, shows an object tilting like a spinning top moving against the wind. A pilot refers to a fleet of objects, but no imagery of a fleet was released. The second video was taken a few weeks later.CreditCreditU.S. Department of Defense
    Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents.

    “There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”

    The sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior officers from the Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents.”

    Navy pilots from the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” squadron aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in 2015. The squadron began noticing strange objects just after the Navy upgraded the radar systems on its F/A-18 fighter planes.CreditAdam Ferguson for The New York Times
    The program, which began in 2007 and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time, was officially shut down in 2012 when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon. But the Navy recently said it currently investigates military reports of U.F.O.s, and Mr. Elizondo and other participants say the program — parts of it remain classified — has continued in other forms. The program has also studied video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

    Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.” He added that “there are so many other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”

    Lieutenant Graves still cannot explain what he saw. In the summer of 2014, he and Lt. Danny Accoin, another Super Hornet pilot, were part of a squadron, the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va., that was training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.

    Lieutenants Graves and Accoin spoke on the record to The Times about the objects. Three other pilots in the squadron also spoke to The Times about the objects but declined to be named.

    Lieutenants Graves and Accoin, along with former American intelligence officials, appear in a six-part History Channel series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s U.F.O. Investigation,” to air beginning Friday. The Times conducted separate interviews with key participants.

    The pilots began noticing the objects after their 1980s-era radar was upgraded to a more advanced system. As one fighter jet after another got the new radar, pilots began picking up the objects, but ignoring what they thought were false radar tracks.

    “People have seen strange stuff in military aircraft for decades,” Lieutenant Graves said. “We’re doing this very complex mission, to go from 30,000 feet, diving down. It would be a pretty big deal to have something up there.”

    But he said the objects persisted, showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet, even sea level. They could accelerate, slow down and then hit hypersonic speeds.

    Lieutenant Accoin said he interacted twice with the objects. The first time, after picking up the object on his radar, he set his plane to merge with it, flying 1,000 feet below it. He said he should have been able to see it with his helmet camera, but could not, even though his radar told him it was there.

    A few days later, Lieutenant Accoin said a training missile on his jet locked on the object and his infrared camera picked it up as well. “I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,” he said. But still, “I could not pick it up visually.”

    At this point the pilots said they speculated that the objects were part of some classified and extremely advanced drone program.

    But then pilots began seeing the objects. In late 2014, Lieutenant Graves said he was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.”

    He said he was stunned to hear the pilot’s words. “I almost hit one of those things,” the pilot told Lieutenant Graves.

    The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit. It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.

    The incident so spooked the squadron that an aviation flight safety report was filed, Lieutenant Graves said.

    The near miss, he and other pilots interviewed said, angered the squadron, and convinced them that the objects were not part of a classified drone program. Government officials would know fighter pilots were training in the area, they reasoned, and would not send drones to get in the way.

    “It turned from a potentially classified drone program to a safety issue,” Lieutenant Graves said. “It was going to be a matter of time before someone had a midair” collision.

    What was strange, the pilots said, was that the video showed objects accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns — something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.

    “Speed doesn’t kill you,” Lieutenant Graves said. “Stopping does. Or acceleration.”

    Asked what they thought the objects were, the pilots refused to speculate.

    “We have helicopters that can hover,” Lieutenant Graves said. “We have aircraft that can fly at 30,000 feet and right at the surface.” But “combine all that in one vehicle of some type with no jet engine, no exhaust plume.”

    Lieutenant Accoin said only that “we’re here to do a job, with excellence, not make up myths.”

    In March 2015 the Roosevelt left the coast of Florida and headed to the Persian Gulf as part of the American-led mission fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The same pilots who were interacting with the strange objects off the East Coast were soon doing bombing missions over Iraq and Syria.

    The incidents tapered off after they left the United States, the pilots said.

    A version of this article appears in print on May 27, 2019, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Reported Unexplained Flying Objects.

    Related Coverage

    Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program
    Dec. 16, 2017

    2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’
    Dec. 16, 2017

    On the Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program
    Dec. 18, 2017

    People Are Seeing U.F.O.s Everywhere, and This Book Proves It
    April 24, 2017
    Last edited by Builder; 27th May 2019 at 19:52.
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    Default Re: Tic-Tac Event, Disclosure, etc.

    Today The Washington Post is telling us what facts we have to adjust for:

    UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact

    Quote UFOs are not the same thing as extraterrestrial life. But we should start thinking about that possibility.

    By Daniel W. Drezner
    Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.
    May 28 at 7:00 AM

    The term “UFO” automatically triggers derision in most quarters of polite society. One of Christopher Buckley’s better satires, “Little Green Men,” is premised on a George F. Will-type pundit thinking that he has been abducted by aliens, with amusing results. UFOs have historically been associated with crackpot ideas like Big Foot or conspiracy theories involving crop circles.

    The obvious reason for this is that the term “UFO” is usually assumed to be a synonym for “extraterrestrial life.” If you think about it, this is odd. UFO literally stands for “unidentified flying object.” A UFO is not necessarily an alien from another planet. It is simply a flying object that cannot be explained away through conventional means. Because UFOs are usually brought up only to crack jokes, however, they have been dismissed for decades.

    One of the gutsiest working paper presentations I have witnessed was Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall presenting a draft version of “Sovereignty and the UFO.” In that paper, eventually published in the journal Political Theory, Wendt and Duvall argued that state sovereignty as we understand it is anthropocentric, or “constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.” They argued that the real reason UFOs have been dismissed is because of the existential challenge that they pose for a worldview in which human beings are the most technologically advanced life-forms:

    UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility.... The puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is.


    When Wendt and Duvall made this argument, there were a lot of titters in the audience. I chuckled, too. Nonetheless, their paper makes a persuasive case that UFOs certainly exist, even if they are not necessarily ETs. For them, the key is that no official authority takes seriously the idea that UFOs can be extraterrestrials. As they note, “considerable work goes into ignoring UFOs, constituting them as objects only of ridicule and scorn.”

    In recent years, however, there has been a subtle shift that poses some interesting questions for their argument. For one thing, discussion of actual UFOs has been the topic of some serious mainstream media coverage. There was the December 2017 New York Times story by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean about the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was tasked with cataloguing UFOs recorded by military pilots. DoD officials confirmed its existence. Though this story generated some justified skepticism, it represented the first time the U.S. government acknowledged the existence of such a program.

    Then, there were the reports last November about Oumuamua, “a mysterious, cigar-shaped interstellar object [that] fell through our solar system at an extraordinary speed,” according to New York’s Eric Levits. Oumuamua’s shape and trajectory were unusual enough for some genuine astrophysicists to publish a paper suggesting the possibility that it was an artificial construction relying on a solar sail. Again, this prompted skeptical reactions, but even those skeptics could not completely rule out the possibility that extraterrestrial activity was involved.

    Then, on Monday, the New York Times came out with another story by the same reporters who broke the 2017 story:

    The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

    “These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”....

    No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.


    The Times reporters broke new ground by getting pilots on record. What is interesting about this latest news cycle, however, is that DoD officials are not behaving as Wendt and Duvall would predict. Indeed, Politico’s Bryan Bender reported last month that, “The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with ‘unidentified aircraft,’ a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.” My Post colleague Deanna Paul followed up by reporting that “Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer, told The Post that the new Navy guidelines formalized the reporting process, facilitating data-driven analysis while removing the stigma from talking about UFOs, calling it ‘the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.’ ”

    What appears to be happening is that official organs of the state are now acknowledging that UFOs exist, even if they are not literally using the term. They are doing so because enough pilots are reporting UFOs and near-air collisions so as to warrant better record-keeping. They are not saying that these UFOs are extraterrestrials, but they are trying to destigmatize the reporting of a UFO.

    Still, the very fact that this step has been taken somewhat weakens the Wendt and Duvall thesis. This was always a two-step process: (a) Acknowledge that UFOs exist; and (b) Consider that the UFOs might be ETs.

    In recent years, the U.S. national security bureaucracy has met the first criterion. What happens to our understanding of the universe if great powers meet that second one?
    Last edited by Builder; 28th May 2019 at 18:33.
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