Round, spherical or other shapes: the Pentagon screened 650 foreign objects | Sciences

is a bird? Is it a plane? Is he superman? None of the three, it seems. The US government is studying more than 650 potential cases of unidentified atmospheric phenomena, known as UFOs, according to Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon office set up last year to analyze these types of sightings. But the senior official also specified that in none of the cases was anything discovered that indicated extraterrestrial technology, ships from another world, or movements that defied the principles of physics. No visits from distant aliens.

At a hearing before the US Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, Kirkpatrick, director of the Aberrations Resolution Office in All Areas (AARO), admitted that cases of this sort of thing had increased: at the beginning of this year they were numbered. 350. But this is due to the growing interest in ensuring the safety of flying and eliminating the perception of mysterious accidents around them. “Of the 650, we prioritized about half the value as an interesting anomaly and examined it,” the senior official noted.

52% of reports refer to objects described as “round or spherical”; The rest comes in other forms. Among the round objects, they range in size from one to four metres, colored “white, silvery or translucent metallic,” Kirkpatrick noted.

Kirkpatrick’s office is primarily tasked with helping the Pentagon and the US intelligence community identify technologies that other countries might use. A case in point is the Chinese airship that flew over US airspace earlier this year. The High Office noted that in a small number of cases, some of the detected objects could be explained by the technical progress of other competing forces. In this case, the incident is referred to the intelligence services for analysis.

Part of the hearing was held publicly. Another part behind closed doors with its secret content. In the half open to the public, Kirkpatrick showed two declassified videos. In one of them, a flying object appears to emit a jet of thrust. But an examination by AARO investigators concluded that it was just a shadow of the heat radiating from the engines of a passenger plane that was currently passing through the area.

On the other hand, the bureau’s experts were unable to determine what it was about, because they only had the information provided by the video itself, recorded last year in the Middle East. In it, a spherical object can be seen passing through the camera screen of an MQ-9 drone, without showing how it could move.

“It would be nearly impossible to tell exactly that, simply based on this video,” explained the senior official who hoped that as more data became available on this type of episode, it would be easier to resolve.

As he noted, “In our investigation, AARO has yet to find any reliable indications of extraterrestrial activity, out-of-this-world technology or things that defy the laws of physics as we know it.” To date, “most of the UFOs reported by AARO show the mundane characteristics of balloons, (unmanned) atmospheric systems, garbage, natural phenomena, or other things that are entirely explainable.”

In January, a report by the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted that of the more than 500 incidents examined, “many did not provide sufficient detail to determine their nature with a high degree of certainty.” Of those rings, the Pentagon listed 163 attributable to balloons or “balloon-like entities”. A month later, F-22 fighters over American waters shot down a Chinese balloon across the continental territory of that country and Washington accuses it of espionage as its main job.

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