USA is developing sensors to detect UFOs
In a recently published 63-page report, the U.S. authorities state that they have found no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence visiting Earth.
The report has examined more than 1,200 incidents from 1945 to the present day.
The report was published an office of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that goes by the name AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), better known as DoD’s office for UFOs—which the USA officially calls UAPs.
The vast majority of sightings have been identified as everything from birds and balloons to falling space debris and secret weapons development programs.
For example, the authors behind the report write that half of all UFO sightings in the 1950s and 1960s could be attributed to test flights of new aircraft types. Concrete test flights of aircraft such as the U2 and the somewhat more recent stealth aircraft F-117 Nighthawk, which have led to a large number of UFO reports, are also mentioned.
“All investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification,” the AARO report reads.
Illustration: U.S. Air Force/DERRICK C. GOODE.
DoD’s dilemma
However, this has not caused the interest in UFOs to disappear, and if the focus is shifted from the thousands of reports from people who believe they have seen something to the researchers and scientists who focus on data and observations, then there may be good news on the way.
Because even if, according to the DoD, there are no signs of visits from space, it is far from all the sightings that have been identified, and the problem for the DoD is that many of the sightings that have been included in AARO’s investigations concern UAPs close to military facilities.
This also applies to reports of luminous objects at nuclear silos, which retired soldiers have talked about in the now famous Pentagon videos, recorded by American fighter jet pilots.
Therefore, the DoD has now started developing a portable sensor system that can be set up in areas with the highest number of reports of UAPs—or what is described as “national security sites”.
The system has been named “Gremlin” and is currently being tested at a military facility in Texas.
“If we have a national security site and there are objects being reported that [are] within restricted airspace or within a maritime range or within the proximity of one of our spaceships, we need to understand what that is,” says Timothy Phillips, acting director of AARO.
Illustration: DOD.
The interest in such a system to detect different objects in the airspace has of course also been strengthened after a number of balloons were spotted over the USA and Canada last year. In one of the cases, it was a Chinese weather balloon that, according to China, had been blown “off course”. The balloon was shot down on 4 February 2023 at an altitude of 18 km, using a missile fired by an American fighter jet.
According to Timothy Philips, the first data from the Gremlin system is already coming in, both inside and outside of the atmosphere.
“It has registered a lot of bats and birds. We are also learning a lot about solar storms,” he said in connection with the announcement of the Gremlin system last week.
Technology from outer space
The DoD is not the first to turn to more solid data.
One of the biggest proponents of collecting that kind of scientific data about the UAP, instead of relying on the sightings we humans observed with the naked eye or filmed with a shaky mobile phone, is Israeli-American professor of astrophysics at Harvard University Avi Loeb.
Among other things, he has argued in the 2021 book “Extraterrestrial—The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” that the object that was named “Oumuamua” could in fact be technology from somewhere else in the universe.
Avi Loeb’s argument is that we need to better adjust the sensors and telescopes we have to be able to pick up objects in the sky such as Oumuamua.
Illustration: Privatfoto.
In 2021, he founded the Galileo project with the aim of building a network of telescopes and cameras that can keep an eye on the sky 24/7. The focus here is somewhat different, as Avi Loeb has been primarily interested in interstellar objects.
In the short history of the project, however, nothing abnormal has been observed in the sky.
