NASA recently announced that they will be joining the Pentagon in the search for answers about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO)/Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Per their press release, scientists involved in the study will rigorously identify available UAP data, determine how best to collect future data, and learn how NASA can use that data to advance the scientific understanding of UAPs (nasa.gov).

The NASA study

Interestingly, the NASA press release doesn’t bear the acronym UFO anywhere. Instead, they get UAP out front and center with the title of the release: “NASA to Set Up Independent Study on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” From there, ‘UAP’ and ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ are used ten times. Perhaps this is their way of saying UAP is the new scientifically correct term.

The omission of the term ‘UFO’ could be for several reasons:

  • NASA believes the term UAP is the more established scientific term and description.
  • NASA wants to distance itself from the lore and stigma that goes along with the term ‘UFO’.
  • NASA believes that allocating $100,000 toward the study of UAPs, a mere 0.0004% of their $23.3 billion overall budget, is more palatable to taxpayers and lawmakers than $100,000 toward the study of UFOs.

Expected to take about 9 months to complete, the NASA report will be made public. Whether that public report will include all collected data and conclusions, and whether it will be redacted or not, remains to be seen.

Mystery shapes

In March 2022, Freedom of Information Act activist John Greenwald published a classified government report on the shapes of UAPs on his website The Black Vault. Despite being made publicly available through his FOIA request, all relevant information about the actual shapes of UAPs was redacted.

This is not uncommon when it comes to acquired military and government reports on UAPs. Indeed, while they can claim to have been transparent in making their reports public, the reports are often so heavily redacted that little to no usable information can be discerned. Will this be the case with NASA’s study? Will they make their data publicly available in real or near-real time, or will they release either a heavily redacted or a shortened version of their report in 9 months?

Another example of missing public information on UAPs comes from the May 2022 UFO Congressional hearing, the first of its kind in over a half-century. Two Pentagon officials, Scott W. Bray - the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence - and Ronald S. Moultrie, - the Defense Department’s Under Secretary for Intelligence - testified under oath and addressed mostly generic questions from a room full of Congressmen. The pair were there are representatives of the new Pentagon organization tasked with tracking UFOs: the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG for short.

The hearing was hailed as a transparent forum where nothing is being hidden from the public about UAPs. However, this also marked yet another double-talk hallmark in the long history of UFO lore. While the televised hearing allowed officials to truthfully proclaim that the new Pentagon task force to investigate UAPs is going to be transparent and open to the public, Bray and Moultrie were quick to admonish Congressmen that certain questions could wait until a closed session to be addressed. Nothing from their closed session was made available to the public.

So, one must wonder if NASA’s new study on UAPs will really be public, or if it will just be more UFO double-talk that hides away the information that is relevant to the public’s interest.

The Day After Roswell: the bureaucratic machine

In the controversial book ‘The Day After Roswell’, released in June 1988, retired Colonel Philip J. Corso recounts what he says happened throughout the military and government after a UFO and aliens were recovered by the Army at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. In the book, Colonel Corso recounts the type of language that those in the know could identify as covering up actual UFO evidence. According to Corso, this bureaucratic burying of military involvement with recovered UFOs became so deep and complex that anyone searching for the truth was faced with a nearly impossible task. However, there were those who could still read between the lines of statements, projects, and funding requests to see them for what they really were.

The recent Congressional hearing on UFOs was potentially rife with such clues as detailed in ‘The Day After Roswell’. For example, when Deputy Director Bray was asked if AOIMSG has examined any UFO wreckage that it has come across, his response was, “The UAP taskforce doesn’t have any wreckage that isn’t consistent with being of terrestrial origin.”

That sort of answer is the exact type of bureaucratic machine double-talk that Colonel Corso described as typical with the UFO phenomenon. Does Bray’s answer mean that a UFO was not recovered by the Army at Roswell? No, it does not. Does Bray’s answer mean that the Army is not in possession of a UFO? No, it does not. Does Bray’s answer mean that none of our military branches are in possession of a UFO? No, it does not. Even if AOIMSG has examined UFOs in possession by private entities or specific branches of the military, then Deputy Director Bray’s response is still consistent with the technical truth. However, that answer falls far short of public disclosure about what the government knows about UFOs.

The hangar

At the end of the Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, there is a famous scene where a military soldier wheels around a crate amongst a massive warehouse of thousands, if not millions of other crates. The warehouse represents Hangar 51, a military installation in Nevada, and the scene insinuates it is a repository for incredible mysteries such as the Ark of the Covenant and the UFO remnants from Roswell, New Mexico. The facility is so massive, that the task that anyone would face if they were trying to locate something specific would be astronomical in scale.

We now have UFOs being officially investigated by the Pentagon and NASA, with both claiming transparency to the public. If any actual revelations from these historic events become openly revealed, only time will tell. Or, perhaps, they will only serve to bury the truth of UFOs deeper beneath a growing pile of data, organizations, press conferences, and leaked footage of military encounters. The crates of proof continue to pile up in the Hangar, waiting for someone to discover what is out there.