Defense Spending Bill Contains ‘Most Significant’ UFO Legislation Since 1960s
- Defense Spending Bill Contains ‘Most Significant’ UFO Legislation Since 1960s
by BRANDI VINCENT, https://www.nextgov.com/
The legislation calls for details on reported health issues connected to UAP sightings, ‘transmedium objects,’ those that hover near military nuclear sites—and more.
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Tucked into the latest, more-than-2,000-page version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2022 is a provision that would mandate the formal establishment of a federal office, organizational structure, and authorities to confront unidentified aerial phenomena, the Defense Department’s modern term for UFOs.
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Members of the United States’ UAP community are celebrating the detailed inclusion, arguing that it goes farther than almost any legislation ever proposed—with a real chance of passing.
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“I think it’s probably the most significant legislation to target this topic since probably 1969, since Blue Book,” Tim McMillan, a retired police lieutenant and writer who co-founded the science and technology news website The Debrief, told Nextgov on Thursday. “In fact, there were a lot of specific things that were named and outlined in the legislation, some of which are still included now, that have not been discussed before.”
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DOD has a long and very complicated history addressing objects in the sky that appear to perform in ways that transcend the capabilities of today’s technology. Still, there are heaps of credible reports spanning decades from current and former military personnel who claim to have seen—and at times been put at risk by—what they’ve perceived as UAP.
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“We need a meaningful collection strategy and innovative and iterative analysis to support it,” former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon told Nextgov via email this week.
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Launched in the 1950’s, Project Blue Book was a codename for the Air Force’s UFO studies, until it was disbanded in 1969. In the 2000s, Congress approved millions in funding to back the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. That effort encompassing UFO sighting-aligned research was unclassified but unpublicized, and existed for less than a decade.
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More recently, after mounting public pressure, the Pentagon released and validated the authenticity of three videos depicting Navy officials encountering a baffling, UAP-type object. At that time last year, DOD also announced its formation of a UAP Task Force to investigate the seemingly unexplainable happenings. The group submitted an analysis to Congress this summer that confirmed there were 144 reliable reports of such phenomena originating from government sources—80 of which involved observations with multiple sensors—between 2004 and 2021. Then, this month, the Pentagon unveiled the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG, as the successor UAP Task Force.
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