The first Congressional hearing addressing UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) in more than fifty years, yielded very few answers. The main takeaway from the hearings was that, while most sightings could be identified, a number of events have defied all attempts at explanation.
Unlike the last Congressional public hearings into the issue in 1966, when the Air Force dismissed the sightings as “swamp gas,” the government now acknowledged that the more recent observations involved unknown objects that were observed on video, radar, and other sensors.
We have been following for several years the reports from Navy pilots of UFOs, or in military parlance UAPs (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena), including several particularly well-documented events from 2004 and 2015, observed by pilots flying off the aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt.
In 2019, radar images and video from the LCS USS Omaha show unidentified objects swarming around the ship, visible on several sensor systems. In the same area and over the same period five US Navy destroyers and one cruise ship also reported swarms of unidentified objects.
Each of these events occurred in the Pacific, off the Channel Islands, not far from San Diego.
What did the Navy pilots and radar observers see?
So what did the Navy pilots and radar observers actually see? In the Congressional hearings, Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, sought to dispel the notion that UAPs might be extraterrestrial aliens, noting that no organic or inorganic material or unexplainable wreckage has ever been recovered, and no attempts have been made at communicating with the objects.
“We have detected no eliminations within the UAP task force that…would suggest it’s anything non-terrestrial in origin,” he said.
Several analysts have argued that the most likely source for the UAPs is terrestrial. Last year, Tyler Rogoway, writing in The Drive observed:
We may not know the identities of all the mysterious craft that American military personnel and others have been seeing in the skies as of late, but I have seen more than enough to tell you that it is clear that a very terrestrial adversary is toying with us in our own backyard using relatively simple technologies—drones and balloons—and making off with what could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation. While that may disappoint some who hope the origins of all these events are far more exotic in nature, the strategic implications of these bold operations, which have been happening for years, undeterred, are absolutely massive.
More recently, Adam Kehoe, also writing in The Drive, notes:
After intense public speculation, stacks of official documents obtained via the Freedom Of Information Act, ambiguous statements from top officials, and an avalanche of media attention, it has now been made clear that the mysterious swarming of U.S. Navy ships off the Southern California coast in 2019 was caused by drones, not otherworldly UFOs or other mysterious craft. Raising even more questions, a similar drone swarm event has occurred off another coast, as well. These revelations came from top Department of Defense officials during a recent and much-anticipated house hearing on UFOs.
More than drones and balloons
Nevertheless, the mystery of the UFOs/UAPs is more complex than drones and balloons. Rogoway also writes:
Before I move forward, I must state that just because I believe the evidence is compelling that many of the bizarre encounters with mysterious objects in the sky as of late, and especially those that the U.S. military is experiencing, emanate from peer-state competitors, not another dimension or another solar system, there are certainly well-documented cases of seemingly unexplainable events that have nothing to do with this type of capability. In other words, our conclusions do not come even close to answering the question of UAPs or UFOs as a whole, especially in terms of the many unexplained incidents in decades past.
The Channel Islands and UFO sightings
One element that the sightings mentioned had in common was their proximity to California’s Channel Islands. Indeed, UFOs have been sighted off the Channel Islands for more than sixty years, long predating modern drone technology.
Marik von Rennenkampff writing in The Hill observes that On Dec. 16, 1953, the aeronautical engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson and his wife watched as a UFO with no apparent control surfaces or engines hovered for several minutes in the vicinity of Santa Cruz Island. The object then accelerated rapidly out of sight.
Unknown to Johnson, a Lockheed flight test crew, which included the company’s chief aerodynamics engineer, chief flight test engineer and two highly experienced test pilots, observed the same object while flying northwest along the Los Angeles coastline.
Unsurprisingly, Johnson and the flight crew’s descriptions of the incident are meticulously detailed. Most importantly, Lockheed’s engineers and pilots explicitly ruled out a cloud formation as a plausible explanation for the incident.
Nonetheless, the Air Force, freshly charged with discrediting and “debunking” all UFO sightings, concluded that five of America’s most credible observers were fooled by a small cloud.
Largely unknown in aviation history, Johnson was a firm believer in the existence of “flying saucers.” In a letter informing the Air Force of the Channel Islands encounter (and another UFO sighting two years earlier), Johnson writes that the incidents left him “more firmly convinced than ever that such devices exist.” According to Johnson, the 1953 encounter helped him win “some highly technical converts in this belief.”
Importantly, the Lockheed engineers’ and pilots’ descriptions of the December 1953 incident refer to another credible sighting over the Channel Islands. In 1951, one of the company’s top test pilots, Roy Wimmer, “sighted some lights over Catalina [Island]” that reportedly “stood still for a while and moved around” before disappearing. The parallels to the movement of the “drones” that recently followed U.S. warships are noteworthy.
A decade after the Lockheed encounters of the 1950s, a Navy photographer captured video of a UFO moving slowly over Catalina Island. Digitally enhanced footage shows that the object appears to lack control surfaces or obvious means of propulsion, bearing an intriguing resemblance to the strange craft observed by naval aviators in 2004.
Now, with Congress forcing the government to take the UFO phenomenon seriously for the first time, investigators must consider whether the objects that followed Navy warships are linked to the long history of inexplicable – yet highly credible – encounters in the waters off southern California.