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June 26, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

13:35

Special - Washington UFO Report

A short special - reaction from Nick Pope to the just-released Washington intelligence report on UFOs, released to media on Friday, June 25...

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	Hello, it's Howard in London at the Home of the Unexplained.
	I just wanted briefly, and this is not a full-size edition of The Unexplained, just to add my contribution to the debate that has already started about the UFO report that was released in Washington on Friday.
	The report, I think, has disappointed a number of people in the UFO community simply because we appear to come out of this interim report with as many questions as we went into it.
	I don't know what a lot of people were expecting.
	I don't think any of us thought they would say, yes, hands up, aliens exist.
	But I think maybe some of us were expecting a little more.
	The way that CNN reported it, and I'll just read some words from their website.
	They said the U.S. intelligence community has released its long-awaited report on what it knows about a series of mysterious flying objects that have been seen moving through restricted military airspace over the last several decades.
	In short, the answer, according to Friday's report, is very little.
	But the intelligence community's release of the unclassified document marks one of the first times the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged that these strange aerial sightings by Navy pilots and others are worthy of legitimate scrutiny.
	The report examined 144 reports of what the government terms unidentified aerial phenomena, only one of which investigators were able to explain by the end of the study.
	Investigators found no evidence that the sightings represented either extraterrestrial life or a major technological advancement by a foreign adversary like China or Russia, but acknowledge that is a possible explanation to it.
	There's an awful lot more to read about this.
	There are reports online.
	I was surprised and shocked at the mainstream media having teed us up to expect this report.
	When it came out, a lot of the mainstream media either really had it low down the agenda or here in the United Kingdom didn't cover it at all, which I think is interesting.
	Now, this is a work in progress.
	This is an interim report.
	But I thought just at this stage, and I'm going to do more about this, of course I am, on future editions of The Unexplained here online and on the radio.
	I wanted you to hear the thoughts recorded on Saturday of Nick Pope, former MOD UFO man.
	Let's just hear what he thinks about this report.
	And there will be a regular edition of The Unexplained coming soon.
	Certainly anyone in the UFO community who's expecting this to be displayed is going to be extremely disappointed.
	But I think this was always on the cards.
	This was always going to be a fairly dry report written by, or drafted certainly in the first instance, by some career intelligence analyst who's going to be very, very cautious in their wording.
	But the key point here is that this is a preliminary report.
	So this should not be seen in any way as the U.S. government's definitive take on this subject.
	And indeed, they say, frankly, they don't have one because reading, well, explicitly and implicitly, the answer in the report is we don't know what these things are.
	So of course the follow-up point is, well, go and find out.
	Yes, it is.
	And one of the things they said is that we need to have better data collection.
	Now, fine, that's okay.
	But surely these things needed to have been considered before now.
	And to say we don't know what these things are, I don't think it's quite enough.
	I don't think they hazard a guess clearly enough about this.
	In other words, we come out of this with as many questions as we went into it.
	Absolutely.
	Yes, you go through the report and frankly, it's almost like a buzzword bingo of UFO theories.
	We go through sort of weather phenomenon and radar glitches and atmospheric phenomena of some sort.
	And then teasingly, they just use the phrase other to describe, I suppose, some of the more exotic possibilities.
	I mean, you know, there's no mention at all of extraterrestrials and aliens, except that implicit coverage that it falls into the category of other theories.
	But no, I mean, again, one of the other important points that it did, I think, strike the right note on is to say, look, there is not going to be one single neat solution to the UFO mystery.
	A lot of different things possibly going on here.
	Some of it might be Russia and China, for example.
	And that is, again, something that's going to excite Congress.
	So I think a lot of people who would count themselves to be within the UFO community and those who are observers like I am will be asking the question, what is going to happen next?
	You know, this report, I feel, was anticlimactic.
	It wasn't helped by the fact that, of course, it was released on a day when in the United Kingdom we had the news about Matt Hancock, health secretary, and his issues.
	And in the United States, there was the sentencing of Derek Chauvin.
	So simultaneous with the breaking of this news, there was massive news on both sides of the Atlantic, which meant this didn't get much coverage at all.
	In fact, the breakfast news that I listened to in London on Saturday morning didn't mention it.
	So, you know, that's where we're at.
	So I think a lot of us want to know what is going to be done next, if anything.
	Well, yes, let me answer that.
	But before I do, I think I want to circle back on the point about the timing of this, because what you said is extremely interesting.
	Now, obviously, I don't think anyone had visibility of what was going to happen in the UK, but certainly it's been known for some time that June 25th was going to be the day of Derek Chauvin's sentencing.
	And it might, if I'm being cynical, fall into the category of a good day to bury bad news.
	Doubly so, because of course this was a classic, I think the phrase that I used when I was in government was a sort of Friday afternoon dump and run.
	You dump a report into the public domain that's a little bit awkward, that you don't really want to engage on, and then everyone, you know, you in government, but a lot of the media and a lot of the public, just sort of go off for their weekend.
	So always interesting to watch what a government's trying to slip out on Friday afternoons, but doubly so when it does look as if it's been timed to kind of happen at the same time as what they know is going to be a stratospherically huge story.
	But a lot of people had high expectations of this and a lot of people are now feeling disappointed and I can understand why they're feeling disappointed and a lot of people I think will be asking questions of their congress people in the United States, of their lawmakers.
	They will want to know how are you going to pursue this and if you say you need to be gathering data in a better and more comprehensive way, how are you going to make that happen?
	Well they are going to make it happen and the report does say we need to have better data collection.
	We need, for example, to make sure that although the focus has been on the US Navy, the considerable resources of the United States Air Force are brought to bear on this and that pilots that see things and radar operators that track things are reporting them because we've got to have the data in the first place.
	But I mean, I think the real issue here is, as you say, what happens next?
	And this report should be a springboard for future action.
	And Congress will see it as such.
	And to be fair, Office of Director of National Intelligence in the report say this is only a preliminary report.
	So they are working on it as we speak.
	They are trying to gather.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	We have a definite timeline about this.
	We knew this was coming out in June.
	It was supposed to be coming out on Thursday.
	And as you say, they released it on Friday.
	And we both had the same feeling as to why that might have been.
	I think people need to have some sense of a timeline now.
	Yeah.
	Well, this is a holding reply.
	This is a classic government holding reply.
	A sort of, well, this is our initial view, but we need to drill down into it deeper.
	And we're on the case.
	Now the emphasis will shift to the Senate Intelligence Committee that's been taking the lead within Congress on this.
	And they will have to formally respond and say how satisfied or not they are with this.
	And then there have already, as you've probably seen, been some rumblings from various people in Congress that they were hoping for a bit more and that this is a little bit vague.
	And clearly there's an issue here that they need more clarity on.
	But I think if they then want to put down a firm deadline for when part two of this report, and this is literally the way it should be seen, we've had part one, now part two.
	If the Senate Intelligence Committee want to put a deadline on that, let them do so.
	Okay, so this is definitely not an issue that is going to be, you know, like a can kicked down the road, pushed into the long grass, forgotten about.
	This isn't going away.
	Oh, it's absolutely not going away.
	No, because the report, even though in some senses it's vague and disappointing, it says enough of the right things to get the attention of people in Congress, but also other people in leadership positions across the administration who maybe haven't thought about this or seen much of what's been going on over the last three and a half years.
	They will be reading this and saying, hey, look, we've been missing a trick here.
	There's something in U.S. airspace coming dangerously close.
	I mean, they absolutely explicitly frame this as, for example, an air safety issue and talk about the near misses and then go on to say it may also be a national security issue.
	So this will not just be left to wither on the vine.
	There will be follow-up from Congress.
	They will make sure that the UAP task force, for example, is better resourced to do its job, has better access across the U.S. intelligence community and the military to do its job.
	So things will be happening, but the media and the public may not necessarily get visibility, full visibility of that.
	And of course, this is part one.
	There's also a classified annex already out there.
	So this isn't quite the bad news story that the UFO community might be waking up over this weekend and thinking, gosh, we didn't get what we wanted here.
	Okay.
	That's interesting.
	And do you believe, maybe you know, that these things, the events that prompted some of this, that's the Tic Tac reports, etc., is this stuff still happening?
	Is it still being reported?
	Yes, it's still going on both with military pilots and with commercial airline pilots too.
	And there are one or two little clues and hints in the report that we are not talking about radar glitches and camera anomalies or weather phenomena, that we are talking about solid craft with a technology behind them.
	So inevitably, this focuses back on three possibilities, Russia, China, or something else.
	There was a suggestion, wasn't there, in this report, about the craft being almost robotic in the way that they behaved.
	Well, I think one of the things to look for moving forward, and there was a report the other day that the Chinese government are already doing this, is looking for patterns in the phenomenon.
	The Chinese are using AI.
	The report or some of the associated paperwork does talk about algorithms and things.
	So we've got a lot of data on this.
	And this reference, by the way, to I think it's 144 cases that they've looked at.
	I mean, forget that.
	That's just the tip of the iceberg.
	I mean, there are many, many more sightings out there.
	And in the first instance, I think one of the things is let's take stock of what we already have.
	Do you believe in your heart of hearts that if they had an inkling now, or if they get an inkling in the future, or maybe some elements of government and military have an inkling that this is perhaps extraterrestrial, extra-dimensional, whatever it is, do you believe we would be told, we the people?
	I'm not sure it would come as a formal announcement, and I think they would dance around it and use all sorts of bureaucratic language to describe it, as they do in the report, just under this vague heading of other.
	But I think as we move forward and as Congress is continually going to be briefed on progress here at a classified level as well as an unclassified level, if it turns out that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is under serious consideration or other exotic hypotheses too,
	interdimensional, whatever it may be, I think it will leak, frankly, because I think various people will feel so strongly about it that they will let it slip.
	Look, the US government hasn't taken aliens off the table.

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