According to Military.com, the US Congress is expected to enact legislation to create a new organization tasked with quickly responding to UFO sightings, recovering debris from crash sites, and maybe assisting in the reverse engineering of advanced technology. The bill, which issued this week as part of the yearly defense authorization bill, wants to create a new agency to respond to sightings of what the military refers to as unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAPs (UFOs to the rest of us).
UFO reports now handled by a jumbled variety of departments and government entities in the United States, but this law intends to centralize and coordinate these efforts. “Knowing who and what is flying in US airspace is critical to protecting our national security interests,” Representative Ruben Gallego (Democrat-Arizona), a bill sponsor, said in a statement to Military.com. “At the moment, our system for tracking and recognizing UAPs is dispersed across the Department of Defense and other federal departments and agencies.”
One section of the bill that is particularly interesting is the requirement that the Pentagon develop a mechanism to assist scientists and engineers in understanding UAPs that appear to be beyond the “recognized state of the art in science or technology.”
The information might be used in funding proposals for reverse engineering technology to “replicate any such enhanced attributes and performance,” according to the law. Furthermore, the measure attempts to increase openness by mandating the office to publish all of its findings to Congress in yearly reports and biannual briefings to military committees.
Due to a handful of high-profile sightings that received enough media attention to eventually confirmed by the Pentagon, UFO sightings have re-entered the public consciousness in recent years. A US Navy pilot recorded one of the most famous recent sightings on film, which shows a “tic-tac” oblong-shaped object changing direction in the sky in a second.
The item “descended’very swiftly’ from roughly 60,000 feet [18,300 meters] down to around 50 feet [15 meters] in a matter of seconds,” according to the official government report on the incident. The object’s actual nature is unclear, with theories ranging from extraterrestrial visitation to undiscovered Chinese or Russian military technologies. The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a much-anticipated study on UFO encounters this year. Unfortunately, the study was mostly inconclusive, claiming that there was no evidence to prove or disprove that any of the encounters were alien life.
