This article was originally posted on The Hill
Congress held a historic hearing on UFOs last July. The hearing, which featured testimony from two former Navy fighter pilots and a former senior intelligence officer, garnered a notable amount of attention and interest not seen on Capitol Hill in years.
In one remarkable exchange, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) described how his office received a “protected disclosure” from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, regarding a January 2023 UFO incident over the Gulf of Mexico. After being stonewalled by the Air Force, he delivered a tense, on-base reminder to the military about “how authorities flow in the United States of America.” The Air Force relented, permitting Gaetz to review sensor data gathered during the encounter.
According to Gaetz, fighter pilots tracked four unknown objects flying in a “clear diamond formation.” Notably, the incident occurred on a training range typically conspicuously free of any airborne clutter.
Still imagery indicated that one of the objects demonstrated capabilities that Gaetz, who has served on the House Armed Services Committee for nearly a decade, was “not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries.”
Radar data, according to Gaetz, showed that the four objects moved in a “very clear formation [with] equidistant” separation.
As Gaetz noted, and further documentation confirmed, the fighter jet’s radar stopped working as the jet closed within 4,000 feet of one of the objects. The jet’s infrared camera malfunctioned too, requiring the pilot to take still images of one of the unknown objects manually.
In a case resolution report published last week, the Pentagon’s UFO analysis office concluded with “moderate” confidence that the object observed by the pilot was a balloon, likely “a large commercial lighting balloon.”
This so-called explanation insults the intelligence of any reader who takes a few moments to review the details of the incident. It did not convince the world’s most prominent UFO skeptic. The pilot’s sketch of the object, described as akin to an “Apollo spacecraft,” bears no plausible resemblance to the design of any known industrial lighting balloon.
I called the Florida-based company that produces the high-end commercial lighting balloons alluded to by the UFO office. According to the firm, it is unheard of that such industrial-grade tethered balloons would spontaneously float away. In a brief video, Emmy-winning lighting designer Matt Ford, who has used the lighting balloons in question, detailed the sheer absurdity of the Pentagon’s explanation.
The Pentagon, astoundingly, would have the American public believe that this seemingly impossible event occurred four times, simultaneously. Meanwhile, dual sensor malfunctions aboard the fighter jet, one of which occurred only in close proximity to the UFO, remain unexplained.
Perhaps most glaringly, the Pentagon UFO office does not address how multiple balloons, separated vertically by thousand-foot increments, could plausibly maintain a “very clear,” “equidistant” diamond formation at high altitudes in strong winds aloft.
Worse yet, the pilot described the lead object as “stationary” or moving “very slowly.” Given the approximately 80 mile-per-hour winds observed at altitude on the day of the incident, the pilot’s observations are incongruous with the Pentagon’s balloon explanation.
Gaetz has rightly stated that the Pentagon’s assessment is “incomplete and does not reflect all of the data I was shown.” Gaetz also called for the public release of the images and radar data associated with the encounter.
The Eglin incident, in short, serves as a microcosm of the many absurd and implausible explanations that the government has offered up over the years for countless UFO incidents.
More recently, the Pentagon released a congressionally-mandated review of U.S. government involvement with UFOs. The report, which is riddled with basic factual errors, omissions and a laundry list of historical distortions, leaves much to be desired. Christopher Mellon, the Department of Defense’s former top civilian intelligence official, took the UFO office to task in a scathing, 16,000-word analysis of the report.
Among the report’s many flaws is an egregious falsehood about a rigorous scientific study that the Air Force commissioned in the early 1950s to look into the thousands of UFO reports that it had received. According to the Pentagon’s UFO Office, this report, by the Battelle Memorial Institute, found that “all cases that had enough data were resolved and explainable.” That statement is demonstrably false. The study in fact characterized as “unknown” fully 33 percent of the UFO cases considered “excellent” — that is, those involving trained or multiple observers and with sufficient information to come to a conclusion. And Battelle employed a particularly high threshold for designating a sighting as “unknown,” requiring a group consensus among the evaluating scientists.
The Pentagon’s egregious misrepresentation of this analysis is of like kind with its so-called explanation for the Eglin Air Force Base incident. In short, the decades-long “nothing-to-see-here” approach to UFOs continues, unabated.
Critically, the Pentagon’s public stance contrasts with internal Department of Defense documents. For example, a directive disseminated last year by the Joint Chiefs of Staff noted that anomalous incidents are occurring around the world, including “in or near the territory…of the United States, of its allies and of its adversaries.”
With unknown objects exhibiting highly unconventional technology brazenly penetrating airspace around nuclear missile silos and other sensitive military facilities, the American public deserves truth, transparency and far more analytic integrity than the Pentagon is currently demonstrating.
Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation. He was an Obama administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Defense.