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America's Intelligence Agencies Have 180 Days to Reveal 'Detailed Analyses of UFO Data' (cnn.com) 154

Posted by EditorDavid from the six-lunar-cycles dept.
CNN reports: When President Donald Trump signed the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law in December, so began the 180-day countdown for US intelligence agencies to tell Congress what they know about UFOs.

No, really.

The director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have a little less than six months now to provide the congressional intelligence and armed services committees with an unclassified report about "unidentified aerial phenomena." It's a stipulation that was tucked into the "committee comment" section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which was contained in the massive spending bill. That report must contain detailed analyses of UFO data and intelligence collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI, according to the Senate intelligence committee's directive...

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed the news to the fact-checking website Snopes.
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America's Intelligence Agencies Have 180 Days to Reveal 'Detailed Analyses of UFO Data' More

America's Intelligence Agencies Have 180 Days to Reveal 'Detailed Analyses of UFO Data'

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  • This is huge. Hopefully they dump a trove that will keep investigators busy for years. Glad I recently renewed my Fortean Times subscription. .. haha autocorrect tried to change Fortean to Fortran.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Malifescent ( 7411208 )
      Do you really believe that aliens would travel light-years to our planet just to play "Tag" with our Air Force?

      • Re:woah! (Score:5, Funny)

        by alvian ( 6203170 ) on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:19PM (#60922518)
        Yes. Teenager from technologically advanced civilization going out for a joyride on backwards part of space. Drinking some beer and laughing at dumb Earthlings.

        • Re:woah! (Score:5, Funny)

          by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:33PM (#60922566)
          *PanGalactic Gargleblaster

        • Wasn't that the basic premise of the Pixie's song "motor way to roswell". Alien dude out on a holiday checking out the sites on earth and crashes the saucer and "ended up in army crates".

          The idea of UFOs being just young dudes roaring about in hotted up saucers, doing wheelies and burnouts far away from Dad is a pretty amusing one.

          • Re:woah! (Score:5, Funny)

            by NotTheSame ( 6161704 ) on Sunday January 10, 2021 @08:08PM (#60922878)

            I liked the explanation in HHGTTG:

            "Unfortunately I got stuck on the Earth for rather longer than I
            intended," said Ford. "I came for a week and got stuck for
            fifteen years."

            "But how did you get there in the first place then?"

            "Easy, I got a lift with a teaser."

            "A teaser?"

            "Yeah."

            "Er, what is ..."

            "A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They
            cruise around looking for planets which haven't made interstellar
            contact yet and buzz them."

            "Buzz them?" Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making
            life difficult for him.
            "Yeah", said Ford, "they buzz them. They find some isolated spot
            with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul
            whom no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in
            front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making
            beep beep noises. Rather childish really." Ford leant back on the
            mattress with his hands behind his head and looked infuriatingly
            pleased with himself.

            http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~hqi/d... [utk.edu]

        • Oops
          What?
          I just placed my beer on the FIRE button. Oh well, we can always find another planet.

          It does make you think that if spacetravel is possible for a species with highly centralized decision making then it is not such a big jump to make it possible for smaller agents. The big step is the first one.

      • I prefer to think of it like driving by where the would have normally filmed Jersey Shore. You know, try to get a firsthand look at the train wreck.

      • Do you really believe that aliens would travel light-years to our planet just to play "Tag" with our Air Force?

        Why not? If you're trying to gauge how advanced a civilization is, wouldn't you test your machines against there's? This isn't Star Trek where they try to keep things quiet until the right moment [wikipedia.org].

        • If they're capable of crossing interstellar distances, then their machines are so much better than ours that there is no comparison. Not unless FTL travel is actually something really simple we've just managed to completely miss. They might for some reason want us to realize just how badly outclassed we are (joy-riding alien frat-boys?), but they're not testing how ours stack up.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by robi5 ( 1261542 )

          there's?

      • "Do you really believe that aliens would travel light-years to our planet just to play "Tag" with our Air Force?"

        No, the real goal they traveled a billion light-years, was to get to Buttfuck, Idaho and put a probe up a redneck's ass, science, you know.

      • Re:woah! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by irving47 ( 73147 ) on Sunday January 10, 2021 @08:35PM (#60922980) Homepage

        Do I really believe scientists from a major city would travel into the back-woods of a national park or other wilderness and sedate a creature with a long probe, take blood and tissue samples, and then put a tracking device on it, before sticking it right back where it was?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by robi5 ( 1261542 )

          Usually, the animal has no inkling that it carries a tracking device, and that it was put in by someone from a major city. Especially because they camouflage themselves; the animal gets sedated etc.. So the analogy is pretty good. An alien civilization that analyzes us as wildlife is as far ahead of us as we are ahead of the Earth's other animals.

          • Usually, the animal has no inkling that it carries a tracking device, and that it was put in by someone from a major city. Especially because they camouflage themselves; the animal gets sedated etc.. So the analogy is pretty good. An alien civilization that analyzes us as wildlife is as far ahead of us as we are ahead of the Earth's other animals.

            Blood and tissue samples, and trackers, seem kind of irrelevant. If aliens are interested in our biology, they can get just about as much information from sampling non-humans on Earth. If they're interested in studying how we think, act and socialize, learning about our culture, organization and knowledge level -- which seem like the interesting thing when dealing with a cooperative, adaptive, tool-making species -- they can get a lot more from our communications and information systems. You can't study bea

      • Do you really believe that aliens would travel light-years to our planet just to play "Tag" with our Air Force?

        If any such thing did happen, I think it will more likely not the aliens who have made the trip, but their machines.

      • If I could travel intergalactically, I would find a planet just entering a stone age, with them trying to start a fire. I would pull out a lighter and create flame in my hand. I am now their civilizations' god.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        You know what https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] I kind of would accept the logic of an advanced society being enthralled by the development of a more primitive society. The more advanced the more likely they are to be very interested.

        For a start, stop and think, in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars and trillions of worlds, how often does a species end up in that transition state between primitive and advanced, primitive means pretty much no fire and advanced means existing on MORE than one world, a

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kisai ( 213879 )

        Everyone's going to be disappointed. Then it will go "It was Aliens, but the government killed them."

        I have two guesses.

        A) Most UFO data is simply things are easily explained, like noise and reflections. This is especially specific to aircraft since you don't really have a point of reference in the air.
        B) Anything that is a confirmed UFO, likely also isn't aliens, but space junk.

        Like it's very likely that any aliens that exist, ignore us (be it some kind of alien prime directive, or they don't see us as any

    • Glad I recently renewed my Fortean Times subscription. .. haha autocorrect tried to change Fortean to Fortran.

      Fortran, eh?

      I bet you believe GOD IS REAL... UNLESS DECLARED INTEGER.

    • If we were to get a Fortean rain of frogs, surely it would have been in 2020.

    • This is truly the end. American minds have degenerated into an abyss of conspiracy theory and excrement.
      • Investigation of anomalous phenomena, outliers in the data, is not a conspiracy theory. And Fortean Times is British.

      • I know! Its almost as bad as the prepubescent obsession with the every minute by minute aspect of some spoiled Royals lifestyle. Like anyone on this side of the pond gives a shit if Kate wipes with her left hand or her right.

    • The FORTRAN times? Now there's something I have trouble believing exists.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      DoD: Dear Congress, we don't have the faintest of fuzzies about what are UFOs. Here's our videos, have fun, pop the corn BEFORE watching the videos.

    • So they release pages with headers and footers and black out 90% of the page leaving a few indefinite articles and prepositions. Nothing to see here (literally). Not like it hasnt happened before.

  • I love the smell of burning desperation in the AM (Score:3, Funny)

    by shanen ( 462549 ) on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:07PM (#60922446) Homepage Journal

    I just love the smell of burning desperation in the morning. I am only vaguely curious which of Trump's flying monkeys thought this was a good idea.

    However, in the larger context of the Fermi Paradox, I'm increasingly pessimistic about any positive resolution. It's not that I think positive outcomes are impossible, but that the odds seem stacked against homo sapiens. The claim of sapience seems highly strained. If there are intelligent aliens betting quatloos on our long-term survival, the bookies must be rapidly cutting the payout on the extinction side. (I'm still betting on a bioweapon as the end. I'm seeing Covid-19 as just a "mostly harmless" and accidental proof of concept.)

    • Re:I love the smell of burning desperation in the (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DeVilla ( 4563 ) on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:24PM (#60922536)

      I just love the smell of burning desperation in the morning. I am only vaguely curious which of Trump's flying monkeys thought this was a good idea.

      I don't mean to interrupt your kicking a few Trump supporters while they're down, but I believe this was part of the pork in the COVID stimulus bill from the House. So this is because House leadership felt we needed to know about aliens ... because COVID. I guess it wouldn't have been worth passing a COVID relief bill with out aliens.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by shanen ( 462549 )

        I'll bet 10,000 quatloos it was a Trumper who oh-so-desperately wanted to change the subject to (illegal) aliens and their dirty secrets. It even worked! Just look at the hot story on Slashdot!

        (Reply predicated on your reply being some sort of joke I couldn't understand because my humor is so weak. If you really are a Trumpist, then you should get help. ASAP. Anyone who is still defending Trump has a mental hygiene problem in the most optimistic case.)

      • The misconception is the Covid relief bill was a bill drafted tk deal specifically with Covid. Unfortunately this is the normally scheduled SPENDING BILL that the media lied to you about calling it a Covid Relief Bill. Just because they added covid relief stuff into the spending bill does NOT make it exclusively a covid bill. Annual and Bi-annual spending bills are how they reauthorize the Army (read your constitution and the 2yr limit on standing Armies). The easiest explanation would be as absurd as you

      • So this is because House leadership felt we needed to know about aliens

        More likely because some random member of the House cared and decided to spend a little political capital to add it, and no one cared enough to remove it. House leadership may not have even noticed it if no one raised a question about it after some subcommittee added it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by alvian ( 6203170 )
      My bet is on aliens out there but lack of interest. They lost interest in expending their time and energy finding other intelligent species after meeting a dozen or two of them. Maybe they still might be interested in meeting species that's dramatically different but we humans probably doesn't meet that criteria.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shanen ( 462549 )

        My theory is somewhat different. I doubt that naturally evolved intelligence driven by the blind watchmaker of evolution can compete with actual intelligent design of artificial intelligence. Therefore the aliens are AI. Then my analysis forks. If the AIs were malicious and driven by some kind of insane growth strategy, then they would have consumed the galaxy already. Maybe the universe. Therefore they are not malicious and might be curious about the various paths evolution follows. On that theory I'm quit

      • OR... given our own history with Australia, we could be a penal colony, LOL. The entire galaxys vagrants where those born in bondage are just as subject to the sentence carried out on the parent. That would explain why they never stop to say hi. Its like being on the interstate and realizing you have to get gas inside 6mile (or parts of Ft Lauderdale). You pay at the pump, and get the hell back on the road as fast as possible. :-)

    • Your pessimism seems well founded. But providing the raw observations, without interpretation by superiors, is often useful to detect the _real_ underlying scientific facts or physical events. It's very awkward when a system or network problem has been occurring for years and always passed over because the people doing the monitoring have been taught not to report them.

    • You do realize that bills originate in the House, right? Or did you miss Saturday morning cartoons?

      • Spending bills must originate in the house, but the Supreme Court has approved the Senate erasing them and writing whatever they want.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          I think it is even worse that it has become customary for the executive side to prepare future budgets. NOT their job. The president is supposed to report on how the money appropriated on the initiative of the HOUSE was spent and how well the objectives were achieved. No business even hinting how much money he wants next year. At least not in the American Constitution as written (and amended).

          Creative interpretation by partisan so-called Justices is a different problem. But I recently reviewed my favorite s

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      The funny thing is that we are in the middle of pandemic, at least 6 months from having significant number of persons immunized, and the US is about to dumb another half trillion dollars in welfare, and the most important priority of the US is declassification of the bogus fantasies of the incel crowds only hope for sex, alÃen anal probes.

      • UFOs are absolutely real - every time we see something in the air we can't explain, which is surprisingly frequently, that's a UFO. Unidentified Flying Object - the name makes very clear that there's no assumptions of aliens, regardless of how popular culture has reinterpreted it.

        Personally I suspect aliens have better things to do than tease primitive species such as ours, but who knows, maybe a few of the thousands of UFOs seen every year actually are aliens. I wouldn't bet money on it, but who knows -

    • My friend, let me introduce you to the CRISPR usage method called the gene drive.

      CRISPR kits allowing the creation of a gene drive by any good lab assistant, are available starting at $150.

      It takes just one guy, in his home, to alter the genes of all humans in a way that causes our extinction. In fact it may already have happened.
      And you thinking this is not believable and unlikely, because you don't have the time to properly research it right now, is not exactly making that less likely.
      Of course it can be

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Lol. If you see a bunch of weird identical men or woman show up one day, go ahead and fuck them, but make sure you screw somebody that's not them as well. Then we'll be fine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shanen ( 462549 )

        Unfortunately I mostly agree with you. My current speculation is that the main thing stopping such a madman (so far) is that the sequencing equipment is still pretty expensive.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by robi5 ( 1261542 )

        How does he alter the genes of all humans while in his home? Needs physical access, no? And what the heck is a gene drive? Is it more like a hard drive or like a blood drive?

    • Back maybe a couple of years ago when the Navy F/A-18 FLIR footage came out, the article said that there were some high ranking congressmen interested in the UFO phenomenon and they weren't Trumpers, either. I seem to recall some kind of office created in the DoD specifically to collect/study this, which is partly why the F/A-18 footage got released.

      Anyway, details aside I think this has been something that pre-dates Trump and whatever conspiracy theories his followers believe in and probably has some non-

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by robi5 ( 1261542 )

        if a crash occurred the device can be recovered

        By who? If it was West Coast, then the recipient party would be the US (and after all, US pilots saw the phenomena), but who's the challenging party? B/C for China or Russia, recovering their wrecks from a West Coast crash would be one of the least straightforward things.

        • Some DoD skunkworks project operating out of Groom Lake with the engineering goals of tactical aerospace supremacy (speed, handling, evasion) as well as range and endurance.

          I wouldn't ever see Russia or China testing a military technology against US military forces in our sphere of influence. It's tantamount to war and the Pacific coast is a logistical nightmare for deployment and recovery. I doubt Russia has the rubles for its development and their platforms for deploying it far from home are limited.

  • Well thank goodness then.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Real Dr John ( 716876 ) on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:14PM (#60922492) Homepage

    ...for the Space Force! Whew, I was worried we could have been defenseless.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Best of the current candidates for the funny mod, but sorry, I never get mod points to give.

    • No alien invader would dare attack a planet with satellite image analysts! It is the ultimate defensive shield.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        No alien invader would dare attack a planet with satellite image analysts! It is the ultimate defensive shield.

        I thought that's what space junk is? Which would explain why they move so erratically.

    • ...for the Space Force! Whew, I was worried we could have been defenseless.

      You mean, the Star Force [ourstarblazers.com]?

    • Wait, are they wearing the right color camo for space operations, if they stand out they're sitting ducks!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Trump is afraid the mother may come to take his hair back to Moppitar.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        Trump is afraid the mother may come to take his hair back to Moppitar.

        That's too fucking funny.

        Hey I read your table-ized A.I paper - very interesting work. Thank you.

  • It could just say that there's no credible evidence that non-human aliens have visited the earth or nearby space.
    • At this point this is true. There is no reason to touch this civilization with a ten foot anal probe. We are good race, but until we gain a unique skill there is a 400 mile long between us and Zenu, because it is clear earth lawyers would be a threat to the universe.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Yeah, but you are dealing with people who default to 'aliens' any time you don't have an explanation for how a sensor malfunctioned.

    • Who said anything about aliens? I though we were talking about UFOs. Those could be anything - from unexplained atmospheric phenomena, to foreign experimental aircraft, and yes, maybe even aliens.

      There's tons of such Unexplained Flying Objects spotted every year, and the military has taken an active interest in them since at least the days of the cold war. Maybe they're looking for aliens - but my money is on their primary concern being that some of them are foreign experimental aircraft belonging to a p

  • So they want all the reports of Unidentified Flying Objects? "so i saw a bird on my left when i was about to leave, it was flying" "can you tell us what species it was?" "no... why should i have cared?" "UFO! confirmed!"

  • Spoiler alert (Score:4, Funny)

    by wyattstorch516 ( 2624273 ) on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:50PM (#60922622)
    It's a cookbook.

  • [ Release of UFO information as part of COVID-19 relief and general US Government funding ... ]

    Never overestimate the ability of politicians to keep their eye on the ball.

  • Unidentified Driving Objects.

    Like drunk uncle Jimmy last night.

    (That's how meh this is to me. Call me when they are *identified* as extraterrestrial.)

  • Among all the bullshit one gets from politics are they the ones who now want to bring us findings on UFOs?!

    Well, perhaps politics can spend some time to find God, too. One can always hope ...

  • https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/23... [cnn.com] Conclusion from Snowden was that either 'nothing is there' or 'evidence is dug in real deep. Here is the episode: https://thejoeroganexperience.... [thejoeroga...rience.net]

  • Several prominent youtube science channels have informed me that it's impossible for aliens to visit earth - so I guess that's checkmate UFOs.

  • I love reading comments on these kind of articles. It lets you know who actually believes in science, and who's seen too many Star Trek shows.

  • Just an FYI about video (Score:3)

    by kfh227 ( 1219898 ) on Monday January 11, 2021 @07:47AM (#60924760)

    Alot of the video systems the air force would have on planes are hihgly classified. You'll never see those videos because it would reveal out capabilities. So those grainy black and white videos that have been released already by the air force are probably all you'll get. Maybe more videos but don't expect anything crazy.

    And keep in mind. Remember all those UFO videos from 20 years ago that were kinda grainy and not everyone had video cameras? Well, today EVERYONE has a video recording device that is probably 20x better in their pocket. AND EVERYONE HAS ONE.

    Ever consider that UFOs are not real?

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