Sometime toward the end of this month the military will release a report on UFOs; unless an extension is granted, but even if one is—I’m sure it’s time-consuming work—I expect the report will be delivered before end of year. Some of it, I expect, will be redacted as classified and visible only to congressional intelligence committee members. But a lot of it, I expect, will be “in the clear,” and readable to the general public. I don’t expect very remarkable things to be in that report. Not even the classified stuff. Here I will outline why.

A UFO Is Not an Alien

The term UFO just means Unidentified Flying Object. And it doesn’t even mean “flying,” as anything “in the sky” that is “unidentified” gets designated a UFO. There has been experimentation with other terms, to avoid the stigma attached to “UFO,” as the boundless ranks of the gullible and the crank have too strongly assumed “UFO” means “space alien” (or, occasionally, demon). But the term is perfectly serviceable; there is no need to change it. We ought instead be emphasizing it does not mean aliens. If it appears to be in the sky, and it’s unidentified, it’s a UFO. At least until it is identified. But not everything can be; the data is often simply not good enough nor “re-accessible” to check. But even when we can’t positively identify something, there has to date always been a plausible naturalistic explanation of all available data. So far, no “UFO” event has actually been all that remarkable. Exaggerated stories have made them seem to be; but when you go back to the original, actual facts, not so much.

I wrote on this before in I Saw a UFO. I there discuss what I mean here, as I relate two “UFO” experiences I had (and how they ended up no longer being “UFOs”), and a few other UFO reports that were popular at the time (ditto). UFO reports are a lot like miracle reports: you have to first dig beneath the exaggerations or lies that often accumulate around them, to get at any real data that survives; then you have to compare that real data against known aerial phenomena to ascertain (1) if any match and (2) if any one of them matches more than the others. And that’s it. You don’t have to do any more than that. Never once has this procedure resulted in a poor match with known phenomena; consequently, no miracle story has ever been established as true, or even credible. Some are wholly made up; others are the legendary development from otherwise mundane events. I’ve certainly treated this topic across many examples before (see The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius, Miracles & Historical Method, Theism & Atheism: Miracles, Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them, Resurrection: Faith or Fact?, From Raised to Revenants in the Ancient World, Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!, Everything You Need to Know about Coincidences, The Case for Christ: The Movie!, and so on).

The same outcome is the case for UFOs.

This has been the case case all the way since Roswell: see Philip J. Klass, The Real Roswell Crashed Saucer Coverup (1997); and Karl T. Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (2001). And that was inspired by the then-in-the-news misperceptions of Kenneth Arnold, the first person to claim to have seen “flying saucers,” whose mistake I sleuth in I Saw a UFO, from my own experience of nearly the exact same thing he reported (spoiler: it was a flock of birds; Arnold simply miscalculated how far away they were, then progressively edited his memory over time as he retold his story). Wikipedia has articles on the concept and history of the “Unidentified Flying Object” and a “List of Reported UFO Sightings” and though I haven’t vetted how thorough or gullible they are, you can use those articles as launching points to research individual examples. Likewise, MUFON collects these stories, but is often too gullible to reliably vet them.

The Latest UFO Reports

In the last couple of years a collection of the most recent “official” UFO reports has made the news. This began with the release of a “video clip” of a few recorded UFO events assembled by the U.S. military. It has since been followed up by reporting on what might be in those clips. But rarely have journalists made forensic note of the video clip itself: an edited series of short selections of events, and no commentary. This was obviously created by the military as a training video, which would have been presented with advisory commentary—which might itself have been classified, since we generally don’t want to teach our enemies how to identify, much less create, similar things (or reveal our capabilities to identify them). Some of the material is so obviously identifiable that we can be almost sure this video was created as part of a lecture package to advise personnel on how to identify anomalous visual effects. I think the military well knows what the objects shown are, and has been using this video to train analysts to recognize them. I predict this will be admitted to (either directly or not) in the forthcoming UFO report.

I came to some of my own determinations before consulting what experts have said. But I always recommend going to reliable experts: of particular use is Responding to Claims about Alien UFOs: A Brief List of Resources on the Webby by Andrew Fraknoi, and the work of Mick West, which you can find in The Aliens Haven’t Landed: Why You Should Be Skeptical of Recent Reports on UFO Sightings and his associated video series (Explained: New Navy UFO Videos and its associated Playlist). From these you can learn some general principles. In my 2008 article my focus was on erroneous perceptions caused by the human brain and senses, especially in respect to how our experiences and memories are always constructs, and thus if our brain is not sure what it is supposed to be constructing, it will guess; and thus sometimes it’s wrong. So, I “saw” a flock of seagulls as an ultrasonic formation of spinning footballs, and a landing airliner as a hovering megadisk. And had I not discovered my error, my subsequent memory would have edited these things even more in line with what I “thought” I saw than with what I actually did. This is the first box to check: has a person’s human cognition even correctly modeled what they are seeing or recollecting? If what they saw was “unidentifiable,” odds are the answer is no. Because if their brain had correctly identified what it was seeing, it would have correctly reconstructed it in their experience and memory. The fact that we know that isn’t happening (by the fact of what they saw being “unidentified”) is a strong indicator that what has gone wrong is their cognition, not external reality. Of course that isn’t always the case, but it’s the first most likely cause of a “UFO” sighting and thus the first one you have to rule out before you can rule anything else in.

These new videos, however, introduce a new category of error: instrumentation. Here it is not human cognition going awry, but the video equipment being used to record these events.

As a good example of what I mean, consider West’s analysis of the “blinking triangle” video (Pyramid UFO). He shows that everything going on here is a product of the use and construction of the lens in the camera used to film it: a triangular aperture when out of focus simply always produces exactly this view (and West reconstructs the video with his own instruments to prove it). West identifies the UFO in this case as simply an ordinary (probably commercial) aircraft. The probabilistic logic that applies here I cover in Bayes’ Theorem: Lust for Glory! using UFOs as an example: when we know the most likely cause of a particular effect, and that cause was likely or credibly present, and no evidence ruling that cause out exists, odds are, you’ve identified your UFO. And even if you haven’t, odds are, any better explanation that comes along will be just as mundane. (As I explain in Miracles & Historical Method, the probability of a mundane explanation equals the sum of the probabilities of all mundane explanations, e.g. for UFO reports, P(mundane) = P(meteorites) + P(aircraft) + P(cloud) + P(flares) + P(etc.), such that it is not necessary to have pegged what something is, only the ordered list of things it more likely could be, and when that list’s all-sum probability exceeds “aliens,” you know it’s probably not aliens.)

I did not know the location or angle of this shot when I first assessed it and had pegged it as a video of an emergency light on a life-jacket, which I know blinks in exactly the same sequence (and is often activated by contact with water, so even a merely discarded or lost vest would radiate like this); possibly combined with a known oddity in refraction, which can make objects at sea seem to be hovering above it (called a superior mirage, caused by temperature inversion, which bends light much more sharply than we are used to). West shows the angle is toward the stars, and the structure and sequence and motion and location all better fit an aircraft. He’s right. (He even went on to demonstrate its airspeed and direction of movement after identifying the star constellations appearing behind it.) But what our explanations have in common is the most important lesson here: we both recognized the particular pattern of blinking correlates to known human-made safety devices; the probability that a hovering alien ship would conspicuously replicate this is near zero (because if it was trying to hide, it would simply not radiate light at all); whereas we know an out-of-focus video of such a device would look exactly like this. And that tells us what it is.

Which leads to the next general principle: notice how real UFO videos (that is, ones that aren’t faked) are always out-of-focus or grainy, fuzzy, or in dim light or infrared or other conditions of extreme ambiguity (you can barely tell even what is being imaged). This is a huge red flag. Exactly as with the errors of human cognition, here we already know we should expect difficulty identifying an object, because we are looking at unclear footage. That “UFOs” always only ever show up in ambiguous footage like this is evidence they are not remarkable. Real alien ships endeavoring to be this visible would have been filmed in much clearer conditions by now. Whereas vehicles able to hide from such filming would never even show up under the conditions of these videos. When you make the conditions so bad you can barely discern obvious things, you have by definition made them so bad you won’t even see less-than-obvious things.

This is why, for example, the Gimbal UFO is only shown us in a vague and easily-distorted digital infrared frame, not a normal light image capture. West shows that everything “weird” about it is fully explained by the technology and conditions of filming: it’s just the heat exhaust of an ordinary jet aircraft. The tech all combined (camera type, movement, correction systems) creates exactly this distorted image, complete with imaginary rotating. Which will be less obvious to someone who doesn’t understand that you think is a “solid black object” in that video is not a solid object at all: it’s just heat exhaust, which is so intense it registers as solid black. You are not looking at an object in that video. Insofar as an actual object is behind it (like an ordinary, human-made, jet aircraft), it is almost completely obscured by the infrared radiation from its engine (producing “glare” in the lens of the camera, same as if it were a normal camera and that jet were shining a flashlight into it). You are mistaking the one for the other, because the camera that is being used here can’t distinguish them.

It’s thus important to know how these kinds of cameras work (just as it is important to know how human cognition works in the case of eyewitness testimony or human memory), before you can really assess what it is you are looking at in a video recorded from one. And this means more than just the camera (hence West found he needed to do a lot of videos explaining this point). The rotation of the “object” in the Gimbal video is caused by a whole slew of features in the camera system: its physical rotating mechanism that tracks the object, the internal systems that “correct” for that rotation to keep the horizon steady, the fact that this camera is set to “black mode” so that darker shades represent higher temperatures (rather than what people are used to with IR footage), and (in this case) ordinary computer image sharpening. UFO nutcases produced videos oooing-and-ahhhing over how “alien” it is that the Gimbal object is surrounded by a “cold field” (the bright halo or glow around it, which as I noted, in this mode indicates low rather than high temperatures). But as West shows, that’s just an artifact of the computer rendering this image (it is easily reproduced by just moving the image sharpening slidebar). No actual “cold” field is surrounding the object; the computer has been set to sharpen the contrast between temperatures at boundary points (to make objects easier to see), so the “air” around the plane being tracked is being shown as “colder” and the air behind it (the engine exhaust) as “hotter,” than was actually the case, to make the object easier to track.

This is probably why we are only recently seeing “amazing” UFO videos: the tech has gotten so elaborate, that it is already prone to producing counter-intuitive and perplexing imagery. And this is probably why these videos were edited together by the military for some as-yet-unknown presentation: to explain exactly this. This is probably why the Nimitz FLIR1 “Tic-Tac” UFO video is included in the package. That “UFO” does not actually “zip away” at an incredible speed as everyone talking about it mistakenly thinks; the camera just stopped tracking it. That object (probably just an ordinary aircraft) never changed its speed at all; the camera did. It’s highly unlikely military analysts didn’t figure this out. It had to have been included in the presentation for precisely that reason: to show what that looks like, so analysts won’t be fooled by such effects in future. Failing to take into account the relative motion of the camera also produced the so-called “Omaha” sphere, which additionally was imagined to have sunk into the sea when in fact, actually, it just flew below the horizon—lest we forget the Earth is round.

Which reminds us it’s also important to actually understand physics—and math. West illustrates this with the so-called Go Fast UFO, which is footage of a “ball” (it’s probably a weather balloon) that seems to be zooming above the sea at incredible speed. Again, ambiguous, fuzzy, infrared footage. Red flag. But the military kept in all the image data when they released it. And with that West could calculate the object’s actual speed: 20 to 40 knots. A commonplace wind speed at its elevation. I am fairly certain there is no way the military does not know this, and thus again I am fairly certain this clip was included in their originally “classified” presentation to illustrate exactly this principle to pilots—or, more probably, intelligence analysts, since pilots likely would have mentioned this if it were a common training presentation, whereas analysts tend to be over-cautious about what they talk about with the public even regardless of the actual classifications of material. This is another case like my and Arnold’s gross miscalculation of the distance of some birds: getting wrong how far away something is, completely screws up our sense of how fast it’s going. But all the data is right there in the video. So it’s impossible anyone actually capable of using that data would have been mistaken about this. The pilot who shot the footage could have been; and that’s probably why this video ended up in a presentation. But once any analyst sits down and sketches out the math (which is standard stuff in the military; I did very similar work on battleboards for sonar plotting of targets), it would be obvious what was actually going on here.

Finally, not all UFOs are even FOs at all. I recall seeing video footage (which I can’t locate online now) of a supposed “bright object” that was flying ahead of a military jet with no radar signature, exactly matching its speed and direction, captured on its tracking video camera in normal light, when suddenly it “zipped” away at an impossible speed. It was obviously an ice crystal or piece of dust clinging to the lens of the camera, reflecting sunlight into the camera, which mistakenly registered as a distant flying object. When it finally dislodged, of course it appeared to “zip away” at incredible speed—in fact it was just flying off the lens at the plane’s own speed (i.e. the relative air speed). Other videos have shown “impossible maneuvering” of objects that in fact were just projected lights, not objects at all. Of course if you are using an IR imager, and someone shoots an IR spotlight against the clouds and wiggles it around, swinging the spotlight in every direction, your camera will read this as a distant (and indeed “hot”) object zipping to and fro “at impossible speed and acceleration,” when in fact nothing is even moving: just the IR beam. Anyone fooled by this is just like a kitten trying to catch the laser light you are bouncing across the wall from the other side of the room. It’s thus important to determine if what is being filmed is even an object at all, or indeed, even just something on or inside the lens.

The Nimitz Encounter

In 2004 a series of bizarre incidents occurred during a Nimitz Carrier Strike Group training exercise off the coast of San Diego. A report was generated and published (though as yet not authenticated) that details everything. Assuming the report is authentic—I have my doubts; having read actual military reports, this is not written like one, and lacks the milspec features of a real after-action report, although if it is the “report” of an excitable civilian investigator, that could explain its oddities. Whoever composed it, they essentially reached no conclusions other than that, if an actual vehicle was involved, it’s unknown tech and a problem we need to deal with. But one key problem with this is that at no point was an actual object ever confirmed to be present. The radar data was confused, inconsistent with visual data, and credibly a product of errors in a new computerized radar system being tested at the time. The radar glitches were probably not even related to the visual encounter at all. The coincidence of their occurrence I suspect has only mistakenly resulted in their being assumed to be related.

There is a good summary of all this at The Drive. Which also relates the only part of this whole account that is actually unusual, which was the sole visual sighting:

What the pilots [sent to look] saw as they came within about a mile of the [radar] target was a white, featureless object—no wings, engines, control surfaces, or surface features—that measured roughly 45 feet long and looked like a flying Tic Tac. Commander … Fravor … the pilot in the lead Super Hornet that day, noted that the outer shell of the craft looked like a “whiteboard.” The object was low over the water which was frothing underneath. According to Fravor, it looked almost like the water was “boiling” below the object, which was moving above the water “like a Harrier.” It then started moving at about 500 knots at 500 to 1,000 feet over the ocean. … Fravor then tried to intercept the Tic Tac by diving down toward it but “it appeared to recognize” him and took evasive action. Eventually, it pulled into the vertical and shot away at supersonic speed. … [An hour or two later, a different pilot scanned the area who] didn’t see the white craft, but he did spot a big disturbance on the ocean’s surface roughly 150 to 300 feet in diameter. The pilot noted that [the sea] around this foaming area [was] calm [and as he was leaving] the disturbance [appeared to start] dissipating.

A third sortie found a completely different target, in a completely different place, which produced the FLIR1 video I discussed in the previous section—which was probably of an actual, ordinary aircraft. Again, there was no actual reason to think this had any connection to any of the other incidents. The coincidence of an unknown distant plane tracked by IR during the same six day operation simply caused these “anomalies” to become conflated in everyone’s mind. They just “assumed” it’s the same object. This wasn’t helped by both objects being called a “Tic Tac,” even though there is no overlapping feature to link them—other than a vague oval shape, which is hardly unique to anything; anything from clouds to fuzzily-imaged planes are oval-shaped. This is a common mistake to look out for: mistakenly assuming unrelated events are related, and then trying to “build a narrative” that connects them, and then eventually treating that constructed narrative as “what happened.”

It’s important to note that nowhere in the several days of glitching in the radar system were any of the documented glitches actually connected to the “white object” that was encountered when fighters were scrambled to investigate. That object was only in the general area the fighters were sent to; it was never coordinated with any radar signature, and indeed the fighters’ own radar could not lock onto it. By contrast, many glitching radar signals occurred over several days and over a wide area. They were probably products of a new computer program intended to try and see radar-invisible targets by “reconstructing” a radar signature from disparate data from multiple sources—in effect, they had built a computer that does what the human brain does: guess at what it’s seeing, and “reconstruct” it. That this would be prone to the same cognitive errors the human version is, should not surprise anyone. Notably, the “Gimbal” UFO incident occurred during a test of an upgrade of this same system, producing similar glitching radar data that led to the sortie that then spotted that target (which was almost certainly just a distant jet plane); so this seems to be a problem inherent in the tech the military is using. That they would not want to advertise this problem to our enemies should not surprise anyone either, as anything said about this could give clues as to how to defeat or spoof the system. Thus we hardly need any further explanation for why this aspect of these cases hasn’t been publicly admitted to date.

Robert Sheaffer covers this angle well for The Skeptic. As he aptly puts it:

One could interpret [the sudden appearance of anomalous radar signatures after an upgrade to this system] to mean that the radars had finally gotten powerful enough to detect the UFOs that had long been knocking about. But a more prudent interpretation is that the radars had gotten powerful enough to begin detecting birds, small balloons, insect clouds, ice crystals, windborne debris, and various other things found in the atmosphere. Arguing in favor of the latter interpretation is that these radars are apparently no longer detecting anomalous objects, which itself is extremely significant. It suggests that, in all likelihood, after being puzzled by anomalous objects appearing on the new radar [system], the operators finally figured out what was happening, and no longer are troubled by anomalies.

In other words, this was a shake-out: a kind of calibration test where you run a new system, particularly one designed to be hyper-sensitive, watch everything that goes wrong (like, say, mistaking clouds or even atmospheric temperature-shifts for aircraft), and then fix it. Then you have a working system you can rely on when a real engagement comes along. It’s thus significant that these military UFO radar sightings all came, oddly, during training exercises, particularly when testing new radar systems. A telling coincidence.

This might lead one to wonder whether the white “tac tac” was a secret Navy test of a spoofing technique, perhaps (let’s say) the release of heated gases under water producing a radar-reflecting vapor cloud above, to see how the system responded. The submarine attached to the group “didn’t detect any unusual acoustic information or other anomalies during this whole event, even considering the churning water the craft seemed to cause,” which one might think is suspicious. Shouldn’t they have heard such a thing? Could they be covering up their own spoofing test? Having been a sonar tech, I can say, we could hear a sea event like that—if we were directed to listen for it—but in the middle of a whole carrier group exercise, I doubt it. The screws on the ships alone would overwhelm any ambient churning noise, and since a random churn would have no rhythm (unlike a screw, which has a unit count of blades and a gear differential, and rotates at a detectable frequency—we can see all the harmonics on that, bright as day), it would not be “recognized” by any of our software, nor by anyone “just listening” to the feeds. It would appear as just more static on the screen, like the whole sea is always filled with, much like analog broadcast TV airwaves without a signal are; and to anyone listening, it would simply dissolve into the general din of a million waves and a dozen screws churning away. So I can’t say “not hearing it” is as suspicious as someone might want it to be. Moreover, a submarine isn’t the only vessel operating passive sonar in any such op.

What I can say is that it does not sound like Fravor ever saw any object. What he is describing, to anyone not primed to assume otherwise, is a cloud. White. Featureless. Motionless. Ovoid. Transparent to radar. We already know miscalculating distance wreaks havoc on our ability to correctly judge speed, location, or even movement; and Fravor had no range data (his radar did not detect anything, nor did any other instruments) and (alas) his plane was not equipped with any video recording capability that he remembered to use. If he mistook its distance, he could easily mistake its velocity or whether it ever actually “moved” in response to his own movement—because all objects move in response to our movement: it’s called Galilean Relativity. Just as the FLIR1 “Tic Tac” object “moves” when the pilot’s tracking camera moves, creating the illusion of it speeding away when it never really went anywhere (note that many news reports conflate this with the encounter of Fravor; in fact that video was taken by a completely different pilot at a completely different time and location the same day).

The “frothing sea” detail is probably a red herring and never had any connection to the object. I doubt it was even actually “beneath” the isolated vapor cloud Fravor probably mistook as a vehicle; that’s another common perspectival error too easy to make (seeing two anomalous things and thus mistakenly associating them in your perception). I doubt that the subsequent pilot (who reported seeing this roiling section of sea hours later) was even looking at the same area of the sea. Pilots don’t usually study visual ocean characteristics, so they likely don’t have as much familiarity with random sea changes, and thus probably mistook ordinary phenomena as peculiar (once again, that mistake of assuming “everything we don’t recognize” is “all connected as the same one thing”). And we don’t need to propose weird things like natural gas fountains here. Ordinary variations in sea state could produce such appearances. This is a good example of when you ought to query oceanographers. That shouldn’t be hard for the Pentagon. The Federal Government employs a few.

Fravor’s subordinate and wingwoman we now know was Alex Dietrich, who was with him at the time and saw more or less the same thing. Here there is an anomaly in the reporting. That alleged government “report” of the white tic tac encounter redacts Fravor’s companion’s name but uses male pronouns for them, which is strange. A separate UFO enthusiast group’s report on this event also claims a man, by a different name, was with Fravor at the time instead; and has no knowledge of Dietrich. But that report also claims Fravor recorded video of it, which we know is not the case (as Fravor himself has confirmed, he neglected to activate his helmet cam, and he had no targeting pod), so evidently whoever assembled that report was not working from or producing reliable information (I therefore don’t trust anything in it). And since Dietrich has corroborated it was her who was flying alongside him, I can only assume the “government” report’s author made a strange decision to use male pronouns for her, or the author of that report never spoke with her and only used some kind of written testimony from her and did not realize “Alex” was a woman. (Some news reports imply Dietrich is the one who recorded the FLIR1 video hours later, or conflate both events; neither is correct.)

In any event, Dietrich is recorded to have responded to what Fravor saw, and thus may have been primed to interpret it as he did. The “government” report more or less confirms this, relating that “he” (I assume she?) also reported seeing the “object” and gave much the same description (identical to a smooth cloud), but did not approach it, and remained at elevation while Fravor descended to investigate. That report says this other pilot (again I must assume this means Dietrich) claimed the object was moving at high speed (which indeed matches what Dietrich has said publicly), and actually notes that this conflicts with Fravor’s original claim that it was hovering, which may be a clue: these observers at the very same time must have been making different (and thus erroneous) estimates of the object’s distance, thereby coming to wildly different conclusions about its movement. Neither confirmed it was a solid object or even moving by any objective method. So with no objective record, we have to conclude with the more likely explanation that they simply mistook a cloud for a vehicle, likely because of its conveniently odd and inspiring shape and position, and then mistook their relative movement, and the rest is misperception and edited memory, as “what happened” continues to change in their mind over time (a common problem with human memory). (This document might be Dietrich’s original report, but I cannot confirm that; the only thing it adds are details about the “object’s” relative motion that are largely confused. Later interviews will have been less reliable, as memory alters over time, so those can’t be relied upon in cases involving the unfamiliar.)

This single “visual” encounter is the only unusual thing that happened during that 2004 exercise. And because so little was done to properly record what happened during it, and Fravor and Dietrich were not immediately attended by any properly skilled interviewer, we (and they) will likely never really know what happened. But apart from their claims of that “cloud’s” remarkable “movement,” there is no content to their accounts that even suggests they ever encountered an actually moving or solid object at all. And misestimations of object movement (owing to misestimations of object distance and position) are simply too common to discount here. So it doesn’t really rise to the level of proving anything remarkable happened. And none of the other (video) evidence rises anywhere near the level of this, as all that other stuff is demonstrably mundane, and not verifiably even connected to this incident.

Conclusion

I’m pretty sure there won’t be any evidence of aliens, or even amazing supertechnologies, or any great mysteries in the expected Pentagon report. It might redact some sensitive stuff to avoid exposing mundane military projects (none of which will be spectacular, e.g. we are certainly toying around with lasers, but nothing that would impress Captain Kirk), or details about our sensor capabilities and limitations and anything that might relate to how to thwart or spoof them. Most of what will be in it are soft determinations (like that the Go Fast object was probably a weather balloon or the Gimbal Object was probably some ordinary aircraft that wasn’t sufficiently identified), errors caused by cognitive and sensor illusions (like the confounding Go Fast and Gimbal phenomena I just summarized, or the various Mylar balloons and cloud formations and flare drops and meteorites that have been hilariously reported in the media as UFO sightings), and possibly some real albeit ordinary vehicular threats (ordinary aircraft, especially drones, operated by enemy states, drug rings, or yahoos that were flown in ways, or places, compromising to U.S. security). But I doubt there will be anything truly remarkable in it.

I don’t know if they will be honest and call it like it is and admit Fravor and Dietrich mistook a vapor cloud for a supervehicle, but I also doubt they will conclude it was a supervehicle, or any actual “technology” we should be worried about. And that’s just going by evidence and reason applied to precedent and background knowledge. Human experience and memory are often misconstructed—because they are constructed, and the process constructing them is fallible, and it is at its most fallible when it doesn’t recognize what it is seeing. Just as fuzzy videos create false impressions of what they’ve actually recorded—because they are fuzzy videos. But I look forward to seeing what actually does end up in that report that we are allowed to see. In the meantime, we need to take this as a lesson in critical thinking, and apply the general rules I outlined above to all phenomena “witnessed” or “recorded” throughout history, not just the “aerial” kind.

-:-

Update: The initial public June 2021 report turned out to be essentially useless. It detailed no specific incidents but just described broad statistics and declared insufficient data existed to reach any definitive conclusions. The only telling “between-the-lines” statement in it is the fact that they concluded “in a limited number of incidents, [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena] reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics,” obviously the only UAPs of interest to the UFO community. But they conclude that “these observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis,” in fact, more specifically, “We currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement” (emphases mine). In other words, they are saying no video or other evidence actually indicates any superior technologies at all, leaving all their findings, actually, at “errors,” “spoofing,” and “misperception.” This looks like an admission to pretty much every point I made in my article above.

Second Update: The Congressional hearing of July 2023 was a bust. It added no evidence, but just two testimonies, neither of which corroborating the other, and both of which ridiculous. Congress found no real witnesses or any documentation of their claims. It’s just like Roswell all over again: the same claims, by the same kinds of witnesses, never holding up when real evidence is examined. For an analysis of how to approach continued claims like this, which never get backed up in any real evidence (the keyest of clues), see David Kyle Johnson’s article “Thinking Critically to Evaluate the New “News” about UFOs and Aliens.” My own brief take: all they had were debunked cranks (David Grusch) or fantasy-prone pilots prone to mistaking hallucinations and optical illusions for real events (Ryan Graves), and the like.

Third Update: The subsequent public March 2024 report (only the first volume of more to come) confirms this. They essentially debunk the claims of Grusch and conclude there is “no verifiable evidence that any UAP sighting has represented extraterrestrial activity,” nor any evidence that anyone on Earth is hiding extraterrestrial technology or aliens. Every claim has ready explanations in known causes of misreporting, misperception, and legendary development. As expected.