The mystery of Changing UFOs: The prize is hiding in the details

By Cheryl Costa

One of the most perplexing of all the UFO shapes is the Changing UFOs category. For a few years now I’ve heard many UFO enthusiasts complain that the Changing category is useless since it really doesn’t define anything, or that the observers are flawed in some way. I must admit that the previous reports of Changing or Morphing UFOs left me with the impression that these were flawed observations.

Then I listened to the radio talk show Coast to Coast AM, as investigative journalist George Knapp was interviewing Jacques Vallee, one of the deans of Ufology. Vallée made a point about Changing UFOs that seem to morph in an effort to confound observers, their cameras and other scientific equipment that the researchers might be using.

A strong case has been made that many UFOs seem to be under intelligent control vs. some random natural phenomena like ball lighting. Another idea is that these unidentified craft might be “living ships with Artificial Intelligence (AI) Consciousness.” The idea is that these living ships detect the thoughts of people on the ground trying to observe them.

I decided to see what the statistical numbers indicate. First, let me preface two important points:

1. Many people have a knee-jerk habit of just seeking out the big UFO numbers. My advice is to not be seduced by big numbers; sometimes the prize is hiding in plain sight but with smaller numbers.
2. Many have a preconceived notion of what a UFO should be like. Remember that although our eyes sense things, seeing really happens in the brain where the interpretation occurs. Any culture with usable telepathy or AI with telepathic functionality could in theory project “what it wants” into your thought process. Now that is the ultimate stealth technology!

Here’s some intriguing data on the “Frequency of Sighting Profile.” For comparison, I selected the most common UFO shape reported: a simple “light” in the sky. The blue line sighting profile from 2001 to 2017 is roughly consistent with most other UFO shapes. There was a slight rise from 2001 through 2007. There is a spike in 2008, which was caused by a documentary about UFOs that was on the Discovery Channel. MUFON was featured in that Discovery show as a national UFO reporting service and thereafter the MUFON data loosely tracked year to year similar to NUFOC. In 2011 through 2015 there is a sharp rise and fall and in 2016 and 2017 have fallen off sharply.

Now look at the red line which represents the Changing UFOs. Note that that the Light shape has sharply changing and huge sighting numbers between the high hundreds through the tens of thousands. The Changing UFO has numbers more or less in the dirt by comparison; with an even string of reports totaling less than 2,100 sighting reports over 17 years.

If we examine the Changing UFO with a finer resolution we can see that it also has a rolling cyclic nature; with an average of about 123 sighting reports per year.

I was surprised where these Changing UFO reports were coming from. California, as you might expect, had 340. Yet it was the next four states that were telling, with a range from 130 to 103: Florida, 130; Washington, 104; Arizona, 103; and Texas, 103. I expected to see a steeper drop in those sighting numbers. Thereafter, the sighting numbers for the Changing UFO dropped very gradually across the various states, which is a very atypical sighting pattern.

I took a peek at U.S. counties for this Changing UFO. Since the overall national sighting numbers for the Changing UFO were barely 2,100, I didn’t expect every county in the country to have a sighting. Using a Forensic Cluster process that I’ve developed I discovered the following with regard to Changing UFO reports.

Only 594 counties of more than 3,000 counties nationally, reported a Changing UFO from 2001 to 2017. Only 319 counties reported more than two. Only 31 counties reported more than 10. Interestingly, only four counties reported more than 25. Clark County, Nevada, reported 26. Orange County, California, reported 41. Maricopa County, Arizona, reported 60 and Los Angeles County, California, reported 79.

I would never have dreamed that from such tiny sighting numbers that such an interesting mystery would reveal itself.

Tom DeLonge Calls Report on UFO Research Firm's $37 Million Deficit a 'Blatant Lie'

By Ranici Aniftos

Tom DeLonge is setting the record straight on a report published by Ars Technica on Monday (Oct. 15). The article claimed that the Blink-182 frontman's UFO research organization, To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, has accumulated a $37,432,000 deficit according to a mid-year SEC filing. 

DeLonge took to Instagram to quickly shut down what he called a "blatant lie." "APPARENTLY, THIS WRITER CAN’T READ," he wrote. "BTW- TTSA never even raised $37m!!? So how in the hell did we spend it?! Lord. I ask all of you that believe in the @tothestarsacademy mission to go write a complaint on their website RIGHT NOW for trying to hurt an admirable effort to help humanity by using negative attacks and—-> lies."

He continued with a statement directly to Ars Technica, noting that the article's author didn't reach out to him or the company for comment. "Mr. Berger apparently did not EVEN READ the filing in its entirety, and clearly did not understand the excerpt of the SEC filing he quotes," he wrote in part. "The approximate $37 million stockholders’ deficit is NOT DEBT as he characterized it but is attributable to stock-based compensation expense. IT IS NOT RELATED TO THE OPERATIONAL RESULTS OF THE COMPANY."

NASA alien news: THIS is how NASA should hunt space for aliens and UFOs - SHOCK report

By Sebastian Kettley

NASA should focus all future missions on the hunt for astrobiological alien life, top scientists have urged in a new report. 

Seventeen scientists representing the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) believe the hunt for alien life is paramount.

In a report mandated by the US Congress, the 17 experts claimed astrobiology needs to be at the forefront of NASA’s research in space.

The scientists labelled astrobiology a “field of rapid change” where technological and scientific progress is advancing the quest to discover alien life.

Their report reads: “In the three years since publication of NASA’s Astrobiology Strategy 2015, significant scientific, technological and programmatic advances in the quest for life beyond earth have taken place.

“Scientific advances have revolutionised fields of astrobiological study, ranging from results from missions focused on exoplanets, such as Kepler, to continuing discovery from existing planetary missions.”

The report further argued growing public interest in astrobiology and life outside of Earth will dictate the course of NASA’s research in the “coming decade”.

Astrobiology is the study of the origins, development and spread of life throughout the universe.

NASA established the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) in 1998 in a bid to focus some of its attention on finding extraterrestrial life in space.

The space agency’s astrobiologists have so far primarily looked at candidates for life in the solar system, such as Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

NASA now is exploring ways to search for life advanced enough to create technology

NASA

In recent years, NASA has found evidence of complex organic molecules in Martian rock, water plumes Saturn’s moon Enceladus and even icy deposits of water on our Moon.

But an ever-growing list of exoplanets discovered far out beyond the borders of our corner of space have expanded the potential number of worlds where life could exist.

Scientists are now hoping to unravel the mysteries of how life begins in the first place and whether these exoplanets have the right conditions for live to thrive.

Towards this goal, the NASEM report encouraged NASA to expand the scope of its research and the boundaries of what exactly constitutes evidence of life.

The report reads: “Planetary environments that may be habitable today or in the past are not necessarily the same as those that could have fostered the emergence of life.

“Evidence from major transitions in environmental conditions from early Earth to today, and an understanding of how they occurred, is critical for the search for life.”

The new report comes in contrast to NASA’s recent efforts to hunt the universe for signs of alien technosignatures – artificially created evidence of life in space.

The search for technosignatures, as opposed to biosignatures, focuses on the detection of radio signals, alien technology but also more obscure markers such as atmospheric pollution on distant exoplanets.

NASA said: “Beyond searching for evidence of just microbial life, NASA now is exploring ways to search for life advanced enough to create technology.

“Technosignatures are signs or signals, which if observed, would allow us to infer the existence of technological life elsewhere in the universe.

“The best known technosignatures are radio signals, but there are many others that have not been explored fully.”

UFO sightings may be falling, but Congress is still paying attention

By Nick Pope

Renewed US interest could produce some fascinating hearings, but the focus should be on the quality not just the quantity of reported sightings 

There’s renewed interest in the UFO phenomenon and it’s coming from an unexpected source: the United States Congress.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is looking into a 2004 incident where US Navy pilots flying with the USS Nimitz strike group encountered, chased and filmed fast-moving unidentified objects. Reliable sources say at least two of the military pilots involved have already been interviewed, and a radar operator was subsequently invited to get in touch.

In parallel, the House Armed Services Committee is taking an interest. Records from April show the committee received a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) briefing on the Pentagon’s UFO project, the cryptically-named AATIP. We know so little about AATIP that there’s even dispute over whether the acronym stands for Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. The very existence of the project caused a sensation, because until the New York Times broke the story in December 2017, the US government claimed it had not investigated UFOs since the 1960s when sightings were looked at in a study called Project Blue Book.

Data from two civilian UFO research organisations show that the number of reported sightings has fallen in recent years. However, there’s no single, global focal point for reports (the Ministry of Defence stopped investigating UFOs in 2009) and statistics will never tell the full story.

It would be better if the phenomenon were assessed and judged not on numbers alone, but by focusing on cases where we have compelling evidence: independently submitted reports from pilots on different flights; visual sightings corroborated by radar; photos and videos regarded as genuinely intriguing by intelligence community imagery analysts. Irrespective of the methodology we use to assess the phenomenon, how can we do so in an even-handed way when the subject has so much pop culture baggage?

Sign up for Lab Notes - the Guardian's weekly science update

Read more

A first step in reframing the debate might be changing the language. The term “UFO” has become as obsolete and baggage-laden as the now largely-defunct “flying saucer”. Both are widely, but wrongly, regarded as being synonymous with “extraterrestrial spacecraft”, when self-evidently all the phrase should mean is something in the sky that the observer cannot identify. When the question “do you believe in UFOs?” is misinterpreted as “do you think we’re being visited by aliens?” then we clearly have a problem.

We addressed this in the MoD in the 1990s by replacing “UFO” with “UAP”, for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It got us increased funding and made a few senior officials take the matter more seriously, because they felt we were looking at a science problem, not a science fiction mystery.

Years later, in 2011, I was one of the briefers at a private gathering in Washington DC, chaired by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta, who has a longstanding interest in the issue. It was reminiscent of an episode of The X-Files and there was even a former CIA director sitting at the back, playing no part in the discussion, but silently taking notes. I briefed attendees on the MoD’s use of the term “UAP” and the message clearly hit home.

During Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for which Podesta was the campaign chair, she occasionally discussed UAPs and in one interview on the Jimmy Kimmel show she corrected the host for using the term “UFO”. We have yet to learn what Donald Trump thinks about UAPs, but his enthusiasm for a Space Force has certainly created a few conspiracy theories.

When it comes to UAPs, truth really is stranger than fiction. It turns out that AATIP was largely the brainchild of the then Senate majority leader Harry Reid, and that much of the work was contracted out to Bigelow Aerospace, run by former budget hotel magnate (and believer in extraterrestrial visitation) Robert Bigelow. A 2009 letter from Harry Reid about AATIP reads like science fiction in places.

Now, some of the people formerly involved with the project – including the DIA official who ran it, Luis Elizondo – have joined a Public Benefit Corporation called To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, fronted by Tom DeLonge, the former vocalist/guitarist and founder of pop punk band Blink-182. Their mission statement talks about creating a consortium “to explore exotic science and technologies … that can change the world”.

If current US Congressional interest evolves into formal hearings, either specifically on AATIP, or on UAPs more generally, I hope they can get past debates about terminology, and avoid getting bogged down in statistical analyses. I have made clear my willingness to testify on the basis that my experience with the MoD might be relevant.

Focusing on the quality of reports and not simply the quantity should result in a far more meaningful assessment of the phenomenon. Irrespective of the outcome, these might turn out to be the most fascinating Congressional hearings in history.

Aliens at the Pentagon: Does the government know we are not alone?

By Susan Leighton

Aliens at the Pentagon is a deep dive documentary focusing on the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program which was the U.S. government’s secret UFO operation that was disclosed in 2017. Join Nick Pope, Britain’s “Fox Mulder” as he takes us on a tour of discovery.

Small Beginnings

Aliens at the Pentagon is the type of documentary that anyone who loves science fiction, The X-Files and anything to do with the exploration of the universe will find fascinating. With a run time of 1 hour and 6 minutes, this video from Reality Entertainment wastes no time in hitting the ground running and exposing you to multiple sources of information out of the gate.

Nick Pope who is a familiar face to fans of the program, Ancient Aliens is our guide on this tour of one of the Pentagon’s most secretive efforts, the now famous Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program or AATIP for short.

Mr. Pope was an employee with the Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom for over 20 years. He actually spearheaded their government UFO investigative unit and is known as the “real-life Fox Mulder.” One thing is for certain, Nick is very knowledgeable when it comes to military strategy and the behind the scenes protocol of public offices.

That is why he is the perfect individual to lead this excursion into finding out if Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon are real or bogus. First of all, we dive right into the history of AATIP which has its roots in Project Sign which morphed into Project Grudge which ended with Project Blue Book.

Blue Book was discontinued in 1969 but ended up getting a reprieve years later in another form when Senator Harry Reid created AATIP at the behest of his friend government contractor, Robert Bigelow. AATIP looked into UAP sightings from 2007 until 2012.

Enter the Seeker

During that time, the man at the center of the agency was Luis Elizondo. Luis was a veteran and a Department of Defense employee who worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency to investigate UFO encounters. For several years, Elizondo ran the program.

In that time, his mission was to determine what UFOs were and what was the technology behind them. Notice who or what was flying the craft never really came into play. Elizondo believed that these vehicles were a viable threat to our national security with good reason.

His tenure saw various bits of information emerge. He was responsible for the Tic-Tac and Gimble videos. These were provided to the New York Times who featured an article that blew the cover of AATIP wide open in December of last year.

The most famous one featured two Navy F-18 fighter jet pilots who had an encounter with an object not of this world. Elizondo also stated that there were “meta materials” that were being tested at Bigelow Aerospace. The conclusion was the fact that based on ionization and exposure to cosmic rays, the materials’ origins were deemed as originating from “beyond earth.”

Perhaps more importantly is the fact that AATIP after numerous investigations into UAP sightings developed a list of identifiable characteristics that were inherent in all reported encounters with UFOs.

• The craft travel at hypersonic velocities.
• They have a low observability factor.
• UAPs have sudden and extreme acceleration capabilities.
• Trans-medium travel abilities such as able to fly into the ocean or out of the ocean.
• Positive lift or what is known as anti-gravity propulsion.

It is believed that UFOs are capable of “metric engineering” space and time. Their exotic propulsion systems warp the continuum creating a “bubble” effect which enables the craft to fly incredible distances.

Conclusions or Smoke and Mirrors?

Now that everything is out in the open and the public knows that our government was delving into the study of UFOs is there a conclusion to be drawn from all of the information that was gathered? Some people say yes while others remain unconvinced.

It is believed that the whistle being blown on AATIP was a deliberate distraction orchestrated to keep us from really getting close to the truth. There are some existing theories that there might be a Majestic 12 group that is so hidden that Elizondo’s efforts couldn’t find them.

This is the under the radar group where many Ufologists believe re-engineering of recovered extraterrestrial craft is taking place.

There is also a school of thought known as the Acclimatization Theory. Basically, over the course of several years, the public will receive random bits and pieces of information about UAPs such as videos and photographs to soften people up to the concept that life on other planets exists.

For those individuals that are the deep conspiracy gurus there is another conjecturing that Aliens at the Pentagon suggests. This one sounds very DaVinci Code. Apparently, the Illuminati have created this entire scenario to engineer their takeover of the government to institute a “New World Order.” In other words, smoke and mirrors.

Classic misdirection like in a magic act. We will let you believe that we have discovered a potential alien threat that doesn’t exist so that you are focused on that possibility and not the fact that a subversive movement is taking place right under your collective noses.

The Takeaway

What does Nick Pope believe the takeaway is from all this newfound knowledge from AATIP’s demise? He chose to quote Luis Elizondo who penned a resignation letter to his superior outlining his frustration and lack of support for his group.

One phrase that sounds like a possible harbinger for the future or at least a thought-provoking statement is this. There is overwhelming evidence that exists proving that there is a potential “existential threat to our national security.”

What makes this somewhat alarming is Elizondo observed during his tenure that phenomenon exists that we can’t explain. Could it be that his statement belies a deep secret that perhaps those visiting us have ulterior motives and not necessarily benevolent intentions? After viewing Aliens at the Pentagon you can’t rule out that possibility.