Buried in all the news this week was another congressional hearing on UFOs.
For some reason, our government now prefers the acronym UAP, which stood for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena until they changed it again Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. So, in other words, an unidentified flying object or UFO, right?
The highlight of this week’s congressional hearing was a leaked military video purportedly taken by a U.S. military MQ-9 Reaper Drone showing a hellfire missile striking sphere-like object in the skies off the coast of Yemen and having little to no effect.
Having lived on the Space Coast for 24 years, I’ve long wondered what the military and people at NASA know about UFOs and have been surprised at the lack of information made available to the public regarding the possibility that we are not alone.
After watching the video, I was dumbfounded. Is this the smoking gun, the proof that so many have longed for? Was this finally proof that an alien invasion was imminent?
I sought out some experts in the field.
Author, researcher and filmmaker Mike Ricksecker, who’s been featured on the History Channel’s “Ancient Aliens and The UnXplained” shows, called the release of the video footage an “astonishing revelation.”
But he had questions similar to mine.
“First of all, why was the drone firing upon the sphere?” he said. “Did someone authorize the firing of the missile or was this simply automatic by the drone?”
I spoke to a family member who served several tours in Afghanistan and he told me there is a chain of command and permission needed before a Hellfire Missile is fired.
“Was there any attempt at communication? Was there some sort of perceived threat and, if so, what was that threat?” Ricksecker added.
“I believe those are the most pertinent questions, but upon seeing this footage we also have to ask ourselves, what sort of technology could cause this result? The Hellfire Missile was designed for anti-armor attacks and is able to destroy any known armored vehicle in the world, and it lost. The target, while it seemed to lose a few bits and veered from its course momentarily, rebounded almost immediately and kept going. That’s not a known technology we have here on Earth … unless something else is being hidden from us, militarily or otherwise.”
Was it finally time to build my bunker in the backyard? Were the monsters really due on Maple Street?
Not so fast, says Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester whose research delves into Theoretical Astrophysics, and in particular the hydrodynamic and magneto-hydrodynamic evolution of matter.
Frank said there are way too many unknowns to make any sort of scientific declaration based on what he described as a “grainy video with blobs on it that comes with a predigested story.”
“If you really want to know what it is, you’ve got to do a proper investigation of it,” he said. “That means knowing what time of day is it? What instrument is being used? Where is the sun when this is happening? Right now that can’t be answered. We’re just given this thing and we’re told it’s an amazing mystery.”
The other thing to take into account, Frank said, was that the object was not moving very fast since Hellfire Missiles are used mainly to attack stationary or slower-moving objects like tanks and helicopters.
But the biggest takeaway from my discussion with Frank was something I hadn’t noticed on the video or even considered. The missile never detonated.
“It’s not like you see the missile hit whatever the thing was and explode in a giant explosion and then the thing propagates away from it like in one of those science fiction movies,” Frank said.
“It looks like it’s a glancing blow right which means that the targeting wasn’t that great. What you see is the missile’s trajectory changes like it it clearly knocks into something and it diverts the path. You see it move, so this is not some kind of super alien technology which is impervious to anything, it kind of behaves like you might expect something to behave if it got a glancing blow from a fast moving object.”
OK, so maybe it’s not from outer space. But what the heck is it?
Florida Congresswoman and chair of Declassification of Federal Secrets Anna Paulina Luna, R-Florida, wants to know as well. She has been calling on the government to be more transparent when it comes to these types of things.
“From Roswell to the coast of Jacksonville, the sightings of UFO’s have rarely been explained by the people who have first-hand accounts of these situations,” she said last year.
“This is largely due to the lack of transparency by our own government and the failure of our elected leaders to make good on their promises to release explanations and footage and mountains of classified documents that continue to be hidden from the American people.”
I’ve only recently come across the term “Peer State Adversary,” meaning a country with similar technology as ours that is adversarial. We used to call them enemies. Anyway, more likely than an alien spacecraft, the object on the video could be a drone operated by one of those adversarial countries. And if that’s the case, Frank explains, the military would have good reason to keep tight-lipped about it.
For example, Frank said, what if a country like China or Iran was testing the camera-spoofing technology of an experimental drone? Our military leaders would not want to tip their hand and reveal to those nations what we know about them.
OK, makes sense.
“As somebody who studies the possibility of life in the universe professionally, I would love if we found aliens,” Frank said. “That would answer the question I’ve been interested in my whole life. But there’s just nothing there to be able to make that giant leap without the right kind of scientific evidence.”
I gotta admit being relieved after speaking with Frank. The bunker can wait, for now.
Contact Torres at jtorres@floridatoday.com. You can follow him on X @johnalbertorres or on Facebook at facebook.com/FTjohntorres.
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This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Leaked UFO video raises big questions: Alien tech or foreign drone test? | Opinion
Reporting by John A. Torres, Florida Today / Florida Today
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