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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's April 30th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for joining us, John.
--:-- John Bickley: Today, we're talking about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UFOs. After years of denying their legitimacy, the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged a decades-long effort to investigate and explain these phenomena. We're joined by Daily Wire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips to discuss the growing government and military response to UFOs.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Thanks for having me, John.
--:-- John Bickley: Cabot, this is not something I expected us to be discussing, but this really has become a serious topic in Washington over the last few years. You're absolutely right. When a lot of people hear the term UFO, they're tempted to laugh it off as nothing more than a silly conspiracy theory or assume that anyone who publicly addresses the topic must be unserious or, for lack of a better word, crazy. But that stigma has started to collapse in recent years as it's become clear that something is in our airspace.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: That's right, John. And look, when a lot of people hear the term UFO, they're tempted to laugh it off as nothing more than a silly conspiracy theory or assume that anyone who publicly addresses the topic must be unserious or, for lack of a better word, crazy. But that stigma has started to collapse in recent years as it's become clear that something is in our airspace. We'll get to the specifics, but there have now been hundreds of documented UFO cases that have perplexed our leading scientists and military officials. And this is now considered a serious national security threat by lawmakers and the Pentagon.
--:-- John Bickley: In recent years, our government has confirmed that UFOs are real. They're in our airspace. The question now is simply what they are. So all that to say, this is no longer a fringe topic. We'll get into the specifics. But for those who haven't been following all of this closely, how did we get to this point?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, there is a lot to cover. So I'll try and give it as succinct a timeline as possible. For decades, we've heard stories of people claiming they saw a UFO or heard from friends in the military that something unexplained was in our skies. But at best, all you ever saw was grainy camcorder footage. And at worst, you just had to trust the word of these eyewitnesses. And for years, the federal government stayed out of it all, or at least they led us to believe that they were staying out of it all. But we now know they've actually invested hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially more, we'll never really know, into secret Pentagon programs that were investigating UFOs or what they call UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.
--:-- John Bickley: That's the government term for that. First, there was Project Blue Book, a top-secret Air Force initiative that investigated thousands of UFO reports dating all the way back from 1947 to 1969. According to internal documents, the project concluded that most of the sightings involved conventional aircraft or spy planes, but 701 incidents were classified as, quote, unexplained.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But the floodgates really opened in 2017. That's when the New York Times broke a story that the Pentagon had a secret UFO research program called AATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. AATIP was basically tasked with compiling evidence of UFO reports and attempting to investigate and, more importantly, explain them. According to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who for years was pushing behind the scenes for UFO research, much of the funding for AATIP came from so-called black money programs to keep it from the public.
--:-- John Bickley: A growing number of lawmakers have been more vocal on this. What do we know about what they've been investigating?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So again, that question alone could be its own episode, but to keep it brief, they've been investigating UFO encounters reported near military bases, studying service members who say they'd suffered physical effects after encounters with unidentified craft. And according to the New York Times, they even been analyzing quote metal alloys and other materials recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. And perhaps most notably the program also began gathering video and audio recordings of reported UFO incidents, including footage captured by military planes and ships. Now, the vast majority of those videos are still classified, but some have leaked to the general public.
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah, and this is what's really ramped up the public conversation in recent years. Walk us through some of those videos.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, this is where things get pretty crazy. Three videos were leaked in 2017 and 18, showing U.S. pilots tracking craft that behaved in unusual ways, accelerating at incredible speeds and bewildering pilots in pursuit. As the video circulated online, there were questions about their legitimacy, but in 2020, the Pentagon confirmed they were authentic cases of what they called unidentified aerial phenomena.
--:-- John Bickley: In one of the videos from 2015, a craft moving at high speed is recorded flying into strong winds while spinning like a top in a way that pilots said seemed to defy the laws of known physics. Listen to the reaction from the pilots who captured the video.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: My gosh. They're all going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots from the west. I'm a whole thing, dude. But if there's like a thing, it's rotating.
--:-- John Bickley: But the video that got the most attention came from a UFO incident off the coast of San Diego. It was 2004, and the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting training operations 100 miles off the coast when advanced radar systems began picking up, quote, multiple anomalous aerial vehicles over the horizon. Those vehicles were observed on multiple tracking systems descending, get this, 80,000 feet in less than one second and hovering at 20,000 feet for hours on end before shooting back up into the sky and disappearing from radar.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Navy Commander David Fravor was the F-18 Squadron Commander on the Nimitz and was dispatched with his co-pilot and another F-18 to investigate. When they arrived, Commander Fravor said the ocean was smooth, but there was a patch of roiling whitewater where waves were breaking on top of a large object that appeared to be just below the ocean surface. Above that object was a smaller 40-foot-long tic-tac-shaped craft that he described as darting back and forth erratically at incredible speed.
--:-- John Bickley: According to Fravor, the craft had no wings, no markings, and no visible signs of propulsion. Fravor, along with another pilot who was on the mission, spoke with 60 Minutes in 2021, and described what happened when they flew down to approach it.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: The tic-tac still point north-south and just turns abruptly and starts mirroring me. So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up. So it's mimicking your moves. Yeah, it was aware we were there. We want to see how close I can get. So I go like this, and it's climbing still. When it gets right in front of me, it just disappears. Disappears? Disappears. Like gone. We have nothing that goes that fast and just starts climbing at will.
--:-- John Bickley: Seconds after the object disappeared, it reappeared on radar 60 miles away. When Fravor landed, another F-18 squad took off in pursuit of the object and was able to capture it briefly on the plane's imaging system before it disappeared again.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: According to Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, those videos are just the tip of the iceberg. Mellon served under Presidents Clinton and Bush and says the military has hundreds of similar videos and reports that have not been made public and that they show craft with technology far beyond our own, making high-speed turns at a right angle, hovering totally stationary in high winds above the open ocean for hours on end and climbing tens of thousands of feet in seconds.
--:-- John Bickley: These vehicles seem to have unlimited loiter time, which we don't have. Then the acceleration is far beyond anything that we're capable of. There's nothing we can build that would be strong enough to endure that amount of force and acceleration. That's also what we've heard from Lou Elizondo, the man who spent years heading up the Pentagon's UFO research program I mentioned earlier.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Here's how he described some of those craft to NBC News. Over the past several decades, we in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community have been noticing things in our airspace that don't have wings. They don't have cockpits. They don't have even an obvious sign of propulsion like an engine. And yet still, they're able to defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity.
--:-- John Bickley: Now while most of those incidents are classified, one former pilot has gone on the record with the goal of destigmatizing the topic and in his words bringing awareness to what he calls a major national security threat. That man is Navy Lieutenant Ryan Graves, a retired F pilot and flight instructor who says he and his squadron saw similar UFOs every day for months at a time while training off the coast of Virginia Beach.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: As Graves told me, it all started when his squadron upgraded their radar systems and immediately began picking up objects that they assumed could not be real. But then they began appearing on other systems. At first, we didn't think much of it. We didn't think they were physical objects. They were perhaps software bugs or some type of problem with atmospheres that needed to get smoothed out.
--:-- John Bickley: But according to Graves, he and his fellow pilots soon began seeing them up close and personal. According to Graves, the objects looked like a dark cube inside of a clear sphere and at times came within 50 feet of our craft, prompting some missions to be canceled over safety concerns.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: As he and his team began to see them day after day, the craft acted in ways that were hard to explain. Operating from just above the ocean surface all the way up to 30,000 feet. One of the highlights for us was seeing the objects being stationary because there's anywhere from 30 knots to 150 knots of wind up there. So anything stationary is very exciting. But when they would move, they would seem to move without concern for the wind.
--:-- John Bickley: So there was no slowdown in either direction for the wind. They weren't drifting with the wind. They didn't even really seem to accelerate with the wind. They were kind of moving about of their own accord. And keep in mind, Graves was flying the most advanced planes in our arsenal. And he says the craft they observed did things we could only dream of. And even more concerning, the craft would be just outside of our airspace every day, all day.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: They'd be doing these behaviors from the time that we arrive on station until the time that we check out. And then the next guys go out there and they're still out there. So they're doing these behaviors all day. Eventually, Graves says the objects would speed off eastward towards the open ocean, oftentimes well above the speed of sound.
--:-- John Bickley: And according to military officials speaking with the New York Times, these craft have been spotted over the Atlantic on an almost daily basis for nine years now. And it's important to note, reports like this aren't just coming from over the ocean. Similar craft have been documented over the U.S. mainland in virtually every part of the country.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But Graves and other pilots say there was initially little response from military brass due to a lack of reporting mechanisms. We didn't have a way to report this other than just talk about it. And then, you know, what's that really going to do? Our aviation safety reporting mechanisms that we have are not designed for this, of course.
--:-- John Bickley: And they're not even designed for proactive safety intervention. They're designed for after-the-fact data collection for the most part. So the only other option would be to essentially communicate up to chain of command, which was done. But, you know, there's nowhere for that to go and nothing came back to us.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But as the sightings became more common and the stigma around the topic began to fade after the Pentagon confirmed the legitimacy of these UFOs, the Navy took action. In 2019, they created formal guidelines for UFO reports. And since then, the number of documented cases from Navy and Air Force personnel has skyrocketed.
--:-- John Bickley: According to a report from the Director of National Intelligence that was released this January, there have been more than 350 reports filed in the last 14 months alone. Of those reports, more than half were deemed, quote, unremarkable and characterized as high-tech drones or balloons, but 171 were left unexplained. The report said those cases exhibited, quote, unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: What sort of government response have we seen to all these developments? Well, Congress went from barely discussing the matter to publicly calling it a serious national security concern. In 2022, members of both parties in both chambers demanded transparency and more information on federal efforts to track UFOs.
--:-- John Bickley: And this month, the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats held a public hearing dedicated to the threat posed by these objects. Senators heard testimony from the Pentagon's chief UFO investigator, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who gave an update on the government's findings.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: During that hearing, Kirkpatrick confirmed that hundreds of the incidents remain unexplained, and he showed new military footage of spherical UFOs operating in the Middle East. He also offered a breakdown of reports they'd investigated. Specifically, we learned that the majority of craft are spotted from 15 to 30 feet, though Dr. Kirkpatrick confirmed some of them have been documented operating from ground level all the way up to 60 feet.
--:-- John Bickley: One of the leading members on the topic is Democrat Senator Kirsten Gillibrand who led a bipartisan push with Republican Senator Marco Rubio to demand answers. Here she is last month speaking to the Director of National Intelligence during a Senate hearing.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: As recent events have shown, we need more and better sharing between the intelligence community and our military. And the stigmatization of the service members and personnel who come forward with this data is unacceptable.
--:-- John Bickley: As part of that broader effort, last year, Congress required the Department of Defense to establish a special office for investigating UFO incidents. The provision was included in the National Defense Authorization Act and called for the DOD to, quote, evaluate links between unidentified aerial phenomena and adversarial foreign governments, other foreign governments, or non-state actors.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So that could be anyone. It also called for them to look into, quote, the threat that such incidents present to the United States. That new entity is now known as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. And one other note, Congress has also required the Pentagon to deliver within 18 months a historical account of its UFO efforts dating back to 1945, including, quote, any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress.
--:-- John Bickley: In other words, Congress wants them to share their secrets on UFOs. So there's more coming. Well, we'll certainly look forward to that. So now to the million-dollar question, what are these things? So by definition, they are unidentified, so no one really knows for sure.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: We'll go through the leading theories, though. First, many people believe these craft are part of some secret U.S. program and are likely New Age tech being tested by an off-the-books CIA or Pentagon program. But skeptics say that theory doesn't hold water. They point out that ranking members on the Senate Intelligence Committee, along with Pentagon and intelligence officials have publicly called for investigations and transparency on UFOs, which wouldn't make a lot of sense if they were something those same intelligence agencies were trying to keep under wraps.
--:-- John Bickley: And as Lieutenant Graves pointed out in our talk, the fact we're spotting these craft over international waters is important. We have ranges where we do that type of testing, because over the ocean, that's international waters once you get out there. So anyone can park a boat and spy on what you're doing, essentially.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And so, of course, we put our test ranges more inside the continental United States and the desert, and that's how we do our operations. The training areas that we operate in off the eastern seaboard is some of the busiest airspace where we're doing tactical air-to-air combat, things of that nature. So it's not the place where you want to test something that could potentially be an air safety hazard.
--:-- John Bickley: But there are plenty of other ideas beyond that. Some say this is all nothing more than an elaborate government false flag. They point to historical examples of the Pentagon intentionally releasing false information to the public with the hope of distracting people from something more important or eliciting some sort of other response from the public.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And to be fair, there are plenty of examples of that happening throughout our history. But again, something on this scale with this many credible military and civilian witnesses would be difficult to pull off. Others say it could be technology from some foreign adversary like China or Russia. But again, that would require some quantum leap in technology far beyond anything we've seen from either of those countries or any country for that matter to this point.
--:-- John Bickley: And keep in mind, these craft have been documented for decades now. So if it was another country, the question is why have we not seen advances in technology they're using in other areas? To put it simply, Pentagon officials have said if it is another country, that country is decades ahead of anything we thought possible.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So if not those things, what else could it be? There are the, we'll call them non-traditional possibilities. Some say the explanation could be religious and that this could be some sort of spiritual phenomena. And I've been trying to avoid using the word alien, but you just can't have this conversation without mentioning that plenty of folks believe that is the most likely culprit here.
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah. And we should note that while government officials have not come out and announced that we've made contact with ET, they still say they are not ruling out the possibility of extraterrestrial real life and we'll explore every possible avenue.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, whatever it is, I think a lot of people are hoping for some more answers.
--:-- John Bickley: Cabot, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Anytime.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips, and this was a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
