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By Jake Anderson | Creative Commons | TheMindUnleashed.com
(TMU) – The intensity has been steadily growing over Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), which are, essentially, the 21st-century version of UFOs. In recent years, surprising new reports in typically skeptical mainstream media outfits like the New York Times have carved out a fresh generation of intrigue from a once-taboo issue.
The government has all but acknowledged they are actively investigating UAPs, which suggests the phenomenon may be more than clandestine international or geopolitical military intrigue. Maybe they really don’t know what’s going on.
The website The War Zone is in the process of gathering hazard reports from the United States Air Force and the Navy. Their data, compiled from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, suggests that last year Navy pilots reported a surge in UAP encounters along the East Coast.
The hazard reports are dense in technical language and don’t exactly flow like Close Encounter of the Third Kind, but they do establish that “the concern regarding unknown aircraft operating in the warning areas is clearly growing more palpable.”
Renewed interest in this subject has now made its way to Capitol Hill too, as last week the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in favor of mandating U.S. intelligence agencies and the Defense Department to disclose all records related to UAPs, including any “sensitive” information.
“The Committee remains concerned that there is no unified, comprehensive process within the federal government for collecting and analyzing intelligence on unidentified aerial phenomena, despite the potential threat,” the committee stated, in a draft of its Intelligence Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2021, adding:
“The Committee understands that the relevant intelligence may be sensitive; nevertheless, the Committee finds that the information sharing and coordination across the Intelligence Community has been inconsistent, and this issue has lacked attention from senior leaders.”
The measure hasn’t been adopted by the full Senate yet. If and when it does, the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense will have 180 days to put together a report.
Most UFO/UAP theorists believe the true ‘family jewels’ of classified information on extraterrestrials to be among the most closely and tightly held national security secrets.
However, slowly but surely, the contours of the mystery are coming into sharper focus. Twenty-five new hazard reports obtained by The War Zone provide more encounters of anomalies. However, these accounts are, again, dry and fairly non-specific about the actual UAPs in question.
The War Zone, as well as fellow FOIA maven John Greenwald of The Black Vault, seems to suggest that the volume and presentation of records are being distorted. Collated from the Navy’s Web-Enabled Safety System (WESS) Aviation Mishap, the Hazard Reporting System (WAMHRS), and the Air Force Safety Automated System (AFSAS), 25 reports over six years seems curiously low to some researchers.
According to The Black Vault, the reason may be that there are secret backchannel classified systems that bypass standard reporting protocols, making them invulnerable to FOIA requests.
On June 24, 2020, The Black Vault disclosed “off the record” comments by Major Malinda Singleton, a spokesperson for the Air Force who had been designated as a UAP media contact. Speaking to Susan Gough, spokesperson for the Pentagon, Singleton issued two side notes that she did not intend to be read by the public. She wrote:
“Currently the Air Force is not working any specific guidelines for reporting UAPs. **Side note and off the record – we do have reporting instructions for Unauthorized Air Vehicles/Military Installation Airspace Violation, but that is more in the C-UAS realm. That information is provided via OPREPs on SIPR.”
Singleton also wrote:
“How do we define UAPs, it (sic) would say it is similar to the definition that DoD is already using. ** Side note and off the record – most people I talked to were aware of this term, but again we don’t have the official reporting instruction for it.”
According to The War Zone, this last comment confirms the widespread knowledge of UAPs in the DoD but, more importantly, the previous comment suggests an archive of UAP information that is subject to authorization up the chain-of-command.
John Greenwald of The Black Vault writes, “The reference Singleton added ties into a theory first proposed by Australian researcher Paul Dean. That is, that UFO cases, those that are likely not just misidentified drones or balloons, are made within what is called the Operational Reporting (OPREP) system. Specifically, Dean points out OPREP-3 reports, including subcategories 9F and 9B, as being the most significant.”
Of particular import to Greenwald is that “Singleton also added in her comment that OPREP’s would be located on SIPR or Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. SIPR is a secure system within the Department of Defense (DOD) wherein the data on it is considered classified up to SECRET. In other words, the OPREP’s stored within SIPR are all considered sensitive information and not meant to be released to the public.”
So, in a sense, we’re back to where we started. The government has acknowledged interest in UAPs and we can read some (likely redacted) reports, but the real juicy stuff is probably still classified.
The War Zone claims it is in the midst of continued investigations into this material that they believe will further illuminate UAP/UFO encounters.
In the future, the widespread use of advanced radars, like the Infrared Search and Track Systems, could help to document new UAP cases.
