Since 2017, my life has been dominated by efforts to help Congress and the public discover the truth about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), what many still refer to as UFOs. I’ve lost count of the number of cities visited, meetings attended, books read, articles written, media appearances and hours spent on the phone. At the outset, my goal was simply to help our government overcome a glaring intelligence failure. UAP were routinely violating restricted U.S. airspace but these encounters, documented on cockpit videos, weren’t being reported up the military chain of command because of the stigma surrounding this issue. It wasn’t clear if these bizarre craft were Russian, Chinese, extraterrestrial or some combination of the above, but it seemed unacceptable and outrageous that no effort was being made by the intelligence community to alert policymakers or undertake an investigation.

Working closely with former Pentagon official Lue Elizondo and later a group of U.S. Navy aviators, we quickly captured the attention of Congress. We managed to convince them the phenomena were real and America needed to take action to determine the capabilities of these craft and the identity and intentions of their operators. To my surprise and delight, in 2020 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) adopted my proposal to seek an official report on UAP from the intelligence community. The resulting “Preliminary Assessment” arrived in June of 2021. Although it was wildly incomplete, it did identify 144 military UAP encounters since 2004, a figure which has since jumped to over 800 military UAP reports by early 2023. Spurred by growing evidence of the problem, Congress took additional steps, establishing the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

But despite breakthroughs in government transparency about these sightings, there’s one thing the Pentagon and the intelligence community have so far not addressed, and that is whether they have had any direct contact with these objects. There are persistent rumors that the U.S. government recovered “crash materials” from UAP, and even that the government has been working secretly to reverse engineer the technology.

AARO is charged with reviewing all non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) pertaining to UAP; evaluating all historical UAP intelligence documents; and extending protections to anyone who has signed an official U.S. government secrecy agreement related to UAP, thereby allowing them to come forward without fear of prosecution. In one stroke then this new office could resolve one of the greatest government conspiracy theories and most profound scientific questions of all time: Are we alone in the universe?

It’s time they did.

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