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The Department of Defense isn’t ready to give up on UFOs just yet. This week, the Pentagon announced the formation of the new organization called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group,(AOIMSG) tasked with investigating reports of UFOs (or as the Pentagon prefers to call them, UAPs) in sensitive areas.
According to the Pentagon’s press release, the AOIMSG will act as UFO aggregator of sorts, synchronizing efforts across the Defense Department and the broader U.S. government to “detect, identify and attribute,” objects in what the government defines as Special Use AirSpace.This rarefied air includes military operation areas, firing ranges, and other areas restricted for national security reasons.
“Incursions by any airborne object into our SUA [Special Use AirSpaces] pose safety of flight and operations security concerns, and may pose national security challenges,” the Pentagon said in its press release. “DOD takes reports of incursions—by any airborne object, identified or unidentified—very seriously, and investigates each one.”
The AOIMSG acts as a successor of sorts to the U.S. Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.
For anyone who’s blocked out the past few years, suffice it to say UFOs are having a moment. Over the past years, video footage of tic tac-shaped objects flying from at incomprehensible speed and interviews given by U.S. Navy pilots and others members of the government describing the alleged encounters captured the public imagination lead to surging interest, including among a handful of U.S. lawmakers.
The Pentagon, which itself has a colorful history of UFO investigation, has spoken more publicly about UAPs as well, though as the language from the AOIMSG shows, it’s eager to frame the issue less in terms of Roswell Greys and more towards national security.
The AOIMSG formation comes less than six months after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its nine-page “bombshell” report examining 144 reported UAP sightings. Considering you aren’t reading this in the middle of an all-hands-on-deck galactic arms race or an unprecedented global effort to unify under one collective society, it’s probably clear the report did not confirm the existence of intergalactic alien life.
Instead, it mostly confirmed what was already made public and left the mysterious identity of the objects largely unknown. (Just one of the 144 UAPs cited in the report was explained outright.)
The report claimed with a high degree of confidence that the majority of citings were indeed physical objects and believes 21 of the reports may have featured objects demonstrating advanced technical understanding unknown to the U.S.
The report also fanned the flames of theories the UAP could have been created by “foreign adversaries” who could pose a national security risk. Unsurprisingly, the report also called for more funding as well.
Several months later,according to officials cited by the New York Times, another intelligence report, this one classified, found no evidence the UAP’s identified by the navy pilot was alien in origin and determined the vast majority of cases weren’t part of the U.S. military or advanced government projects.