As Congress investigates extraordinary claims that extraterrestrials have sent super-speed spacecraft into the Earth’s skies, a onetime NASA leader testified the American space agency should join the search for UFOs around the world.
Mike Gold, formerly NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Policy, told the House of Representatives that NASA could play a pivotal role in mapping the flights of suspected UFOs and helping track down their origins.
The House this week convened a televised hearing, reviewing incredible reports of potential UFO sightings by U.S. military and civilian pilots, titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.”
“This hearing is intended to help Congress and the American people to learn the extent of the programs and activities our government has engaged in with respect to UAPs—and what knowledge it has yielded. That includes, of course, any knowledge of extraterrestrial life or technology of non-human origin,” said Nancy Mace, Chair of the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, upon opening the hearing.
UAP is the current American military term for a UFO.
With witnesses at the hearing recounting tales of extraterrestrial fliers whizzing through American airspace, and of U.S. defense commanders trying to hide these flights by stigmatizing those who viewed them, the scenes that played out inside the Capitol could one day be transformed into a new episode for the cult tv hit “The X-Files.”
“The truth is out there,” Gold told the House, stealing a line from “The X-Files.” He called on Congress to step up funding so that NASA could deploy its ground- and space-based telescopes, astrophysicists and spaceflight wizards, and links with scholars engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, to launch a powerful all-out campaign to track and understand Unidentified Flying Objects.
Luis Elizondo, a onetime intelligence officer who helped run one of the Defense Department’s UFO tracking units – but later split with the Pentagon to write a book on these once-secret operations – told Congress: “UAP are real. Advanced technologies not made by our government – or any other government – are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe.”
The U.S. government, he added, has captured and reverse engineered some of the advanced alien UAP technologies.
“Although much of my government work on the UAP subject still remains classified, excessive secrecy has led to grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel, and the public,” he declared, “all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos.”
A video of the UFO hearing posted on YouTube has already been viewed 380,000 times.
Just weeks earlier, while promoting his new book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for U.F.O.s, Elizondo told The New York Times the Defense Department had conducted a year-long security review of his manuscript to check whether he had leaked any classified information, but finally cleared it.
“Pentagon clearance does not imply endorsement,” two Times reporters wrote in their review of the otherworldly memoir.
He expressed a growing fear in the book that the extremely sophisticated technology of alien spacecraft he monitored as a high-ranking military intelligence officer might one day threaten the future of the human race.
“Elizondo wrote that the craft and ‘the nonhuman intelligence controlling them present, at best, a very serious national security issue, and at worst, the possibility of an existential threat to humanity,’” the Times reported.
“Whoever controlled such technology,” Elizondo dramatically predicted, “could control the world.”
Back at the hearing, Gold told the House: “NASA has a vast archive of data, much of which could be relevant to unraveling the mystery of UAP. NASA could create an artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithm that would review all agency archives to search for anomalous phenomena in the air, space, and sea.”
“The results of such a search could then be shared with … relevant defense and intelligence agencies, and the public at large.”
He added that as NASA digitalizes its vast treasure house of imagery, that could push forward research on potential UFOs spanning over a half century.
The world’s premier space agency could likewise reach out to its partners across the continents to seek updates on their own investigations into UFOs, he said.
As NASA becomes integrated into the American investigation of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, he said, the data collected by NASA should be open to all.
The agency could share its discoveries with the nation and the planet, said Gold, who was awarded NASA’s Outstanding Leadership Medal in 2020.
“When NASA studies celestial objects and phenomena, planets, black holes, and galaxies, it does so with equipment that has been developed specifically for such tasks,” he said. “Therefore, it’s worth considering building instruments tailored to study the UAP phenomena.”
Two years ago, Gold was appointed to NASA’s just-established UAP Independent Study Team, alongside leading U.S.-based astrophysicists, astronomers, aerospace engineers, and AI experts.
The team advised, in a report published last year, that NASA’s fleet of Earth observation satellites, and its ground-based telescopes, could be linked up in a vast array to track suspected UFOs.
NASA’s advanced network of sensors, the group added, could be augmented by commercial satellite constellations that provide high-resolution imagery and by independent phased array radars that already track more than 20,000 space objects speeding through low Earth orbit.
The team also proposed that NASA adopt “modern crowdsourcing techniques, including open-source smartphone-based apps that simultaneously gather imaging data and other smartphone sensor data from multiple citizen observers.”
As the program expands, they said, “collection efforts from radio and optical astronomy that are designed for techno-signature searches should be expanded from the Earth’s atmosphere to the whole solar system,” even as artificial intelligence agents are deployed to sift through the expanding reams of space data.
The new legislative probe into the realm of UFOs, and into earlier, secrecy-shrouded government campaigns to track flight vehicles that seem to far surpass the globe’s leading-edge technologies, comes just months after the Department of Defense released its congressionally mandated report on the same topics.
“Since 1945, the U.S. government has funded and supported UAP investigations with the goal of determining whether UAP represented … evidence of off-world technology under intelligent control,” the Pentagon revealed.
The Defense Department “found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.”
It similarly found no evidence for claims the government has been reverse-engineering alien technologies.
The defense leadership also posited there is a myth that has been spiraling across pop culture for decades that the “government – or a secretive organization within it – recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, that it operates a program or programs to reverse engineer the recovered technology, and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public.”
This myth has taken flight via books, tv programs, movies, and a Big Bang of Internet coverage of UFOs, the Pentagon added.
An American race over the past eight decades to develop a never-ending sequence of increasingly sophisticated missiles, spacecraft, jet fighters and drones has likely fed into cascading UFO sightings.
The rapid-fire expansion of the World Wide Web is sparking an explosion of new content on extraterrestrial spacecraft, the Pentagon said, along with a skyrocketing number of Americans polled who say they believe UFOs are of alien origins.
“Aside from hoaxes and forgeries, misinformation and disinformation is more prevalent and easier to disseminate now than ever before,” the Pentagon added, “especially with today’s advanced photo, video, and computer generated imagery tools.”
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