ROSWELL, New Mexico — A public report acknowledging UFOs was the easy part, researchers and analysts say.
For the federal government, now comes a much more daunting task as the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and other key players across Washington embark on a major overhaul of how documented encounters with unidentified craft are tracked, organized and analyzed. Exactly how federal officials approach that mission — and how much money and manpower Congress allocates toward it — will make all the difference, specialists argue, and could be the key to future probes yielding the kind of concrete conclusions lacking in last week’s unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) study.
The government’s highly anticipated next steps serve as the backdrop this week as thousands of researchers and paranormal enthusiasts gather for Roswell’s UFO Festival, an annual get-together held here in a town famous for the alleged 1947 crash of a flying saucer just outside its borders.
The event has taken on extra significance and prominence this year and organizers are expecting a record turnout, largely due to the newfound government transparency and the recent UAP investigation headed by the Pentagon and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Here and across the country, the appetite for more information on UFOs has reached new heights. Longtime researchers say the next few months and years will be crucial in determining whether the shroud of secrecy has truly been lifted.
“Will this be carried through? Because this will not be done in a short amount of time. This is going to take years,” Mark Rodeghier, scientific director at the Center for UFO Studies. “Will they continue to move the ball forward and provide the correct resources?”
Mr. Rodeghier and other UFO researchers also argue it’s crucial that the federal government now engage with those “outside the military box” who can bring a purely scientific and technological perspective to the issue.
“If civilian researchers can work on this problem, they will want to say what they’ve found. They’ll want to talk about things,” he said. “If that happens, people build on it. What you want is an ongoing dialogue in the public.”
The government’s UAP study has certainly sparked such a dialogue, at least temporarily. The report examined 144 military encounters with UFOs and could only explain one, which was determined to be a deflating balloon.
Of the other 143 encounters, the report did not draw any firm conclusions on whether the craft could be of extraterrestrial origin, high-tech Chinese or Russian aircraft, or perhaps something as simple as floating plastic bags.
The report did say that at least some of the sightings could involve “breakthrough technologies” that pose a serious threat to U.S. national security, potentially raising the stakes as the federal government continues its search for answers.
But perhaps the most overlooked aspects of last Friday’s disclosure came in a Pentagon statement accompanying the report. In it, Defense Department officials vowed to quickly develop a comprehensive new plan to catalog and analyze UFO encounters.
“This plan will be developed in coordination with various DoD components, including the military departments and the combatant commands, and with ODNI and other interagency partners,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in a statement last Friday.
“The plan will establish procedures for synchronizing collection, reporting and analysis of UAP; provide recommendations for securing military test and training ranges; and identify requirements for the establishment and operation of a new follow-on DoD activity to lead the effort, including its alignment, resources, staffing, authorities and a timeline for implementation,” he said.
In short, say many of those here, the government for the first is going to treat the questions that have consumed them in serious, systematic fashion.
Working out the details
The exact details of the plan are still being hammered out. And it’s also unclear to what extent, if any, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies will work with outside scientists and researchers who have tracked unexplained craft for decades. Defense Department officials did not offer clarity on that point when asked by The Washington Times.
On Capitol Hill, there’s mounting support for continued research into the issue, particularly among key lawmakers who say that last week’s report was merely the beginning of what should be a long-term process to fundamentally reimagine how the U.S. approaches the phenomena.
“This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step,” Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, said in a statement. “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 revamped government research effort almost surely will bring to light a trove of UFO encounters not covered in the federal study. For example, some researchers argue that the report — while a positive inaugural move after decades of flat-out refusal to even discuss the issue publicly — glossed over a host of seemingly credible accounts from military personnel of unidentified craft shutting down nuclear weapons sites or temporarily disabling American weapons.
“The report completely ignores the elephant in the room: Hundreds of reports from military veterans, most of whom I have interviewed myself, involving UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites,” said author Robert Hastings, who has written extensively on UFOs and reports of how they allegedly shut down U.S. nuclear arsenals on numerous occasions.
By focusing the report on just the 144 UAP sightings, Mr. Hastings said, “the new report in effect perpetuates the longstanding cover-up of UFOs.”
“As a result, the current public and media attention focuses on the pilot encounters while cases involving UFOs shutting down our [weapons] remain a taboo subject for open discussion, at least officially,” he said.