The nine-page Pentagon report says UFO incidents remain difficult to decipher, with no confirmed alien sightings.

Story by Adela Cruz

After decades of denial, the U.S. government has finally broken silence on the topic of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), more commonly known as UFOs.

The unclassified report by The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) admitted to and confirmed 114 UFO reports.

Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, submitted the preliminary assessment on UFO sighting allegations to Congress on June 25, 2021. The report attempted to determine if UFOs pose a threat to national security and to better understand the phenomena of UFOs.

So, now what?

Out of 114 alleged UFO sightings between 2004 and 2021, the Pentagon successfully identified one as a large deflating balloon. The rest remain a mystery.

UFO reports can be questionable because of limited information and reporting inconsistencies. For these reasons, the ODNI report on UFOs primarily focused on first-hand experiences from military personnel. According to the assessment, many UFOs appeared to show advanced technology and unusual flight movements: appearing to remain stationary in the air, moving against winds, maneuvering abruptly or moving at considerable speed.

Because UFOs show these various behaviors in the air, the report said that there are probably different types of UFOs with different explanations.

It concluded that future explanations will fall under five potential categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. Government or U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catch-all “other” bin.

After an examination of the nine-page report, extensive detail seems missing.

Why didn’t they include details and descriptions from first-hand testimonies of military personnel? What hard evidence did the ODNI use to confirm the UFO allegations?

Casey Dreier, chief advocate of The Planetary Society, an organization dedicated to advancing space science and exploration, does not believe the Pentagon would leave out information on aliens if they had found supporting evidence for alien phenomena because of funding motivations.

“I have never known any point in history when the military-industrial complex has walked away from an opportunity to scrape up billions of extra dollars for itself,” Dreier said. “The fact that they’re not [requiring more funding], means there is a strong suggestion that nothing [alien related] is happening.”

The assessment does not confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life, so media groups and concerned citizens have taken it upon themselves to debate whether the confirmation of UFOs means aliens exist, Dreier said. This leads to anti-scientific conclusions, he said.

ODNI also produced a classified report that wasn’t released to the public for national security reasons, Dreier said. He believes this report talks about foreign adversary systems, and said the government has been incredibly open in its acknowledgments for this type of report.

“One of the most important outcomes of the report is that it encourages service members to report things that they don’t understand,” Dreier said.

The government has a history of omitting incidents from reports or not disclosing certain details, only to release a different story years later.

One of the most well-known examples is the Roswell incident of 1947, one of the first UFO-related cases initially omitted by the U.S. Air Force.

In July 1947, rancher W.W. Mack Brazel found mysterious wreckage on his property in New Mexico, 75 miles from Roswell. A press release by the Roswell Daily Record stated that the Roswell Army Air Force had recovered a “flying disk.” The following day, a new press release by Roswell Daily Record stated it was a weather balloon, not an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

For decades, many believed the government had changed accounts of the Roswell incident. They were right, just not in the way they expected.

In 1994, the Air Force released a report saying the object was, in fact, not a weather balloon. It was wreckage caused by a top-secret spy project Project Mogul.

“[We] get behavior [from the government] that doesn’t look above board, but not because they are hiding aliens, but because they may have something far more prosaic to hide,” Dreier said.

The most mundane explanation for the government choosing to withhold information is national security.

The government couldn’t initially reveal the nature of the object from the Roswell incident because the Air Force was testing conventional cameras and microphones to spy on other countries.

Sorry! No aliens.

“The scientific community wants nothing more than to find life beyond earth. [Critical analysis] is not because we are dismissive, or not excited about the idea of aliens — it’s just the opposite,” Dreier said. “When you want something to be true you must subject it to the most vigorous critical investigation so that you’re sure it’s, without a doubt, real.”