Between 2007 and 2012, the United States defence department ran the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Programme (Attip). Former US senator Harry Reid worked with two other senators to allocate $22-million a year to fund this programme. The objective was to identify the advanced aircraft in US airspace, and that appeared to be defying the laws of gravity as we understand them.
This phenomenon was consistently witnessed by US Air Force pilots but there was no official effort to identify who the “advanced aviators” were until Reid allocated the necessary funds to undertake this analysis.
The former director of Attip, Luis Elizondo, concluded that “the phenomenon is real”, a reference to the aircraft that operated in an unearthly manner.
In December last year, the US defence department declassified two videos recorded by US Navy F-18 fighter pilots, which depicted examples of this “unidentified aerial phenomenon”. This story subsequently featured in the December 16 2017 edition of The New York Times, under the headline “2 navy airmen and an object that accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen”.
The article cited Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight who, in November 2004, during a training mission over the Pacific Ocean, witnessed an object “40 feet long and oval in shape”. Subsequently, Fravor observed that “it accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen” and that he felt “pretty weirded out”. Another video was later released depicting a similar incident.
Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence and a former staff director for the US senate intelligence committee, in an article in The Washington Post, on March 9 2018, responding to Fravor’s statement, wondered whether “America had been technologically leap-frogged by Russia or China” or whether the objects observed were “evidence of some alien civilisation”.
In the article, Mellon laments that the US defence department prefers to treat these “incidents as isolated events, rather than as part of a pattern requiring serious attention and investigation”. He proposes that “if these craft really aren’t from Earth, then the need to figure out what they are is even more urgent”. Mellon also recommends that “it is time to set aside taboos regarding ‘UFOs’ and instead to listen to our pilots and radar operators”.
The South African Air Force has not openly reported any similar experiences with such aerial phenomena but, more importantly, citizens and the media have not put the question directly to the department of defence in Pretoria, an inaction that we should immediately address.
If the advanced aerial phenomenon is real it would suggest that either there is a group of people who have developed technology that can bend the laws of physics as we know them, or we have advanced interstellar visitors who are trying to inform us of their presence.
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