As the Pentagon is preparing to release a heavily anticipated report on UFOs, NBC New York’s Chris Glorioso reports on what the feds might finally reveal about the mysterious flying objects — including if they belong to the U.S., another country, or something else entirely.
The upcoming Pentagon report on UFOs is not expected to confirm or deny the existence of interplanetary aircraft visiting Earth. To some, that will render the document a little underwhelming.
But not to Leslie Kean.
Kean is a New York-based investigative journalist who’s been pressuring U.S. officials for decades to come clean about what they know – and don’t know – regarding UFOs. She views the forthcoming report as a major pivot for the U.S. intelligence community, which has traditionally avoided frank discussion of unidentified aerial phenomena.
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“The fact that the report was requested at all, and that it is being delivered, to me is a milestone event,” Kean said.
In 2017, Kean co-authored a New York Times story that revealed the existence of a secret Pentagon program to investigate mysterious aircraft with seemingly advanced technological capabilities. Since then, the Department of Defense has confirmed the authenticity of several images captured by Navy pilots who encountered unexplained objects traveling at high speeds.
“There’s been more activity, it seems to me, around our Navy ships, Kean said. “There’s some kind of strange escalation going on.”
But Kean cautions just because an aerial object is unexplained – doesn’t mean its origin is interplanetary.
“Nobody is saying they are aliens. That’s not the message here. The message is they are unexplained objects,” Kean said. “This is a major intelligence issue that there are things flying around in our skies that we can’t identify in restricted airspace.”
The security risk posed by mystery aerial objects is a major reason prompting the Pentagon’s UFO report. Kean expects around 70 pages of the report to be classified. But she believes the headline will be a simple but profound statement from the federal government.
“I understand that the report is going to declare that these objects are not United States technology. That they’re not ours. And I think that is a really important statement,” Kean said.
The impact of that sort of statement is hard to underestimate. If military pilots are having close encounters with mystery aircraft – and they’re not some sort of experimental American technology - the question becomes, whose technology is it?
“I think the question that is going to be front and center after this report comes out and is also on people’s minds now is, could these be Russian or Chinese?” Kean said.
How Russia and China respond to the report will be monitored closely by the U.S. intelligence community.
The two nations could publicly deny involvement with the mystery aircraft observed by US military pilots. They could also remain silent on the subject. But even their silence will speak volumes.
“It’s going to be a momentous event if it ever does get to the point where it becomes 100 percent clear that it is not Russian or Chinese or American. Then we are in a new world at that moment.”
The UFO report is expected to be delivered to the US Senate Intelligence Committee by the end of June. Members of that committee will be able to read the full classified version. Kean says the report is one of the few topics in American politics that isn’t partisan right now..
“I love the fact that this issue transcends all of that and you can get the most right-wing media and the most left-wing media reporting on it and they will basically say exactly the same thing.”
