U.S. intelligence agencies will supply Congress with an updated report on UFO sightings in the past year.
Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, has until Monday to submit Congress with its first annual unclassified update on Unexplained Aerial (UAP) Phenomena, the new term for UFOs, that covers any new sightings in the preceding year as well as any previously unreported incidents.
It remains to be seen what the UAP report says, if anything, regarding whether any of the events are of alien origin or if they are the result of foreign opponents flying very advanced, hypersonic espionage vehicles.
According to The New York Times, many an older group of unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAPs, are still officially classified as unexplained, with insufficient data analysis to draw conclusions.
"There is no single explanation that addresses the majority of UAP reports," U.S. Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough said. "We are collecting as much data as we can, following the data where it leads, and will share our findings whenever possible."
The most recent incidents under review are attributed to a combination of foreign surveillance, including relatively routine drone flights, and airborne clutter like weather balloons, according to a report published last week by The Times, citing U.S. officials familiar with a classified analysis that was scheduled to be given to Congress on Monday, Oct. 31.
The intelligence office conducts its study along with a recently established Pentagon division known as AARO, short for the cryptically called All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
The first of these defense-intelligence UAP reports to Congress, released in June 2021, examined 144 sightings by US military aviators going back to 2004, the majority of which were recorded with a number of different devices.
One occurrence was ascribed to a large, deflating balloon, while the remainder was determined to be beyond the government's ability to explain without more investigation.
In May of this year, senior defense intelligence officials testified before Congress that the number of UAPs formally cataloged by the Pentagon's newly constituted task force had risen to 400.
At the time, they stated that there was no evidence that any of the sightings were of alien spacecraft, but the majority of the UAP allegations remained unsolved.
Among them were movies provided by the Pentagon of unexplained aerial objects sighted by Navy pilots that displayed speed and maneuverability beyond known aviation technology but without any obvious means of propulsion or flight control surfaces.
While this is going on, the general public's interest in UFOs is only going to grow. Just last week NASA announced the names of the 16 members of a new group charged with researching UAPs. Midway through 2023 is the planned release date for their report, which is based on declassified data.
