Less official UFO transparency confirmed?

[Originally published on Medium.com on September 11, 2022]

Unfortunately, my prediction of less transparency by the U.S. Navy on the UFO issue seems to come true. But negative outcomes can point to other possibilities.

On September 8, 2022, the Black Vault published the article “U.S. Navy says ALL UAP/UFO are classified and exempt from release.” In the article, John Greenewald describes a two and half year long FOIA effort to get the U. S. Navy to release all of its videos designated with UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or more commonly known as Unidentified Flying Objects, UFOs).

The response Greenewald received from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations was:

The UAP Task Force has responded back to DNS-36 and have stated that the requested videos contain sensitive information pertaining to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) and are classified and are exempt from disclosure in their entirety under exemption 5 U.S.C. § 552 (b)(1) in accordance with Executive Order 13526 and the UAP Security Classification Guide…

And furthermore:

The release of this information will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release.

After listening to the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence (ONI), Scott W. Bray, at the C3 subcommittee hearing on UAP/UFOs in May 2022, I was worried that the ONI had emulated the “Project Blue Book”-attitude toward transparency on the UFO issue. That is, little or no transparency at all.

The UFO phenomena: from stigma to charisma?

One of the founding fathers of sociology, Max Weber, meant that charisma has been the great revolutionary force in history. Charismatic movements often begin in the fringes of society. Is the status of the UFO phenomena transforming from stigma to a charismatic subject with the potential to revolutionise human society?

Adinkra symbol of greatness, charisma, and leadership.

In the following, we will look at Max Weber’s (1864–1920) view on charismatic authority and how the concept might relate to the UFO phenomena and the implications of greater official transparency on the UFO issue. Or as UFO or UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) are re-labeled in the Fiscal Year 2023 Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) (S. 4503), unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena (the UFO-related material is on pp. 87–117 in the PDF-version of S. 4503).

We will return to the IAA, because the language in the bill might very well transform the stigmatized UFO subject into a charismatic and revolutionary force in history. The truth about the UFO issue will eventually be known to the world. However, the central question is how the people will perceive the truth and the consequences of society's cohesion of that perception. 

But first, let us look at Weber’s concept of charisma/charismatic authority and how it transfers to the UFO issue and its existential implications (perhaps needless to mention, but Weber did not discuss UFOs in his body of work).

Some challenges to raise global awareness of the UFO issue

Usually, awareness rising campaigns targets a specific audience. However, regarding the UFO issue, the goal is to raise the awareness of the world’s population and protect people’s mental wellbeing. What are some challenges?

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

There are many strategies and methods you could use to raise the awareness of the world’s population about the reality of the UFO phenomenon and its existential implications. This article will not go into the “how”, but outline some challenges to raise people’s awareness and start having a truly global conversation about the UFO issue. If you have been paying attention to the UFO issue the last five years, then you know the answer to why we need a global conversation is that the UFO phenomenon is real. That fact entails that someone- or something unknown is visiting earth (no, I am not making a logical fallacy).

In a previous article, I argued that a gradual strengthening of a sense of coherence is necessary to increase people’s ability to comprehend, cope with, and make information about the UFO issue and its existential implications meaningful. In the end, the gradual strengthening would likely increase people’s trust in each other, both within and between societies (because the UFO issue would act as a mirror and make us reflect about what really matters in life). One central point with a gradual strengthening of a sense of coherence (SOC) is to decrease anxiety and depression on an individual level and polarization on a societal level. In short, to protect and/or maintain people’s mental and emotional wellbeing.

Can the UFO issue unite the world?

 In large parts of the world, there is conflict and polarization. In the West, more people seem to experience an existential crisis. Could the common goal of understanding the UFO phenomenon and its existential implications increase trust between countries and a sense of meaning among people?

Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash

Our current world order is travelling a precarious path. There are many variables associated with the current tensions and divisions in the world. In this article, however, my claim is that the most relevant variable to address is the lack of trust within and between societies. This general lack of trust has several explanations, but I believe the main underlying reason is that more people experience a low sense of coherence (coined by medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky). The first half of this article describes Antonovsky’s concept of a sense of coherence (SOC) and the second half outlines how SOC relates to the UFO issue.

Sense of coherence (SOC) comprises three elements: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. Antonovsky defined the three elements as:

… a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that (1) the stimuli from one’s internal and external environments in the course of living are structured, predictable, and explicable; (2) the resources are available to one to meet the demands posed by these stimuli; and (3) these demands are challenges, worthy of investment and engagement. (Antonovsky A. Unraveling the mystery of health. How people manage stress and stay well. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987, p. 19)

Historical congressional hearing on UFOs point to less transparency in the future

The headline is referring to the open session of the congressional hearings on unidentified aerial phenomena, or UFOs, held on May 17, 2022. Hopefully, the open hearing was the first of many to come. Otherwise, greater official transparency on the UFO issue may remain a dream.

"Open C3 Subcommittee Hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." Duration: approx. 90 min.

Introduction

The above link takes you to the “Open C3 Subcommittee Hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” that took place on May 17, 2022, at 9:00 a.m. ET (credit for the video to the House Intelligence). The purpose of this article is to make some comments on selected parts from the public hearing on the UFO issue. The selected parts mainly relate to the question of more or less official transparency in the future. For a full understanding of what the congressional representatives asked, and the witnesses answered in the public hearing, you should carefully listen to the open hearing in its entirety (the link above).

For readers unfamiliar with the events of the last three to four years that have led up to the public hearing on May 17, 2022, I refer you to my previous Medium-articles (from 2018 and onward). However, the historical background goes back to at least 1947. You can understand the open hearing without the historical knowledge of the UFO phenomenon (or phenomena), but probably not understand all the implications of the witnesses' answers. One reason I bring up the crucial historical aspect of UFOs is because the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC) do not seem to think the historical aspect is crucial for further our understanding of the UFO phenomenon. I will come back to the DoD’s and IC’s perspective on the historical aspect further down.

What were the themes of the public hearing?

The witnesses referred to above were the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (USD(I&S)), Mr Ronald Moultrie, and Deputy Director of Navy Intelligence (ONI), Mr Scott W. Bray. Mr André Carson, Counterproliferation Subcommittee, chaired the open hearing, which was a bipartisan effort by representatives from The House Intelligence Counterterrorism, and Counterintelligence.

A scientist to direct the Pentagon UFO office

According to researcher Mr Douglas Dean Johnson, a physicist will be the director of the recently formed UFO/UAP office, Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG). If accurate, that may have positive implications for further our understanding of UFOs/UAP. 

First note that Mr Johnson, in his article — which I highly recommend you to read — explicitly says that “The Pentagon has not confirmed” that Sean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., is selected as the director of AOIMSG. Mr Johnson refers to other sources within the Executive Branch who off the record affirm that Dr Kirkpatrick both applied to be the director and that I have selected him to fill the position. I am familiar with Mr Johnson’s research and writing, so, in this case, I feel confident in referring to an article about the UFO/UAP issue with anonymous sources (which regarding to the UFO topic should raise red flags in 9 out of 10 cases).

Dr Sean Kirkpatrick. Credit.

The main reason for referring to Mr Johnson’s article is to “spread the news”. So again, I recommend you to click on the link above and read his article. I will not give the bullet points here.

What I will do, however, is to make some short comments on the decision of the Department of Defense (DoD) to appoint a scientist (a physicist) to direct an elevated UAP office (compared to its predecessors AATIP and UAPTF) and tasked by the U.S. Government (USG) to study the national security threat of UFOs/UAP. People have to realise that the USG takes the UFO issue seriously. The goals, the organizational structure, and the resources of AOIMSG (its extent of authority is unclear) are a sign of that seriousness.

Unknown flying objects over Swedish nuclear plants

[This post is a copied version of my article on Medium.com on January 15, 2022. Therefore, the formatting is off at some places in this post. J. T]

On January 14, 2022, three nuclear facilities in Sweden had simultaneous incursions of unknown flying objects. Reports from Swedish mainstream media are unclear on whether it was drones or something else.

Five days after my article about the need for the European Union to address the UFO and nuclear-weapons connection, incursions of unknown flying objects over three civilian nuclear facilities in Sweden (see map below) were major news in Swedish mainstream media (obviously, there is no connection between the incursions in question and my previous article).

In what follows, I will first summarize the story as reported by some Swedish news outlets, and then make some comments about the reported story. Here you can find a good coverage of the story by The Drive/The Warzone.

The story: drones or something else?

The details of the incursions are still scarce, unclear, and sometimes contradictory in the Swedish news. But the general story seems to be as follows:

Swedish public service television (SVT) report on January 15 that a guard at Forsmark nuclear plant on Friday 14, 2022, at 8:20 P.M. local time, alarmed about a “larger drone” that could “withstand strong winds”. The guard saw the larger drone “fly in over” the Forsmark nuclear plant. When a police patrol arrived to the nuclear plant, they first sighted the larger drone at 8:51 P.M. The police searched the larger drone with a helicopter, but “lost contact with the drone” at 10:10 P.M. According to SVT, the police had “not found any indications of the drone landing inside the protected area of the nuclear plant or that it dropped any objects from the air” (the article by SVT was latest updated at 2:54 P.M., January 15).

Forsmark nuclear plant (right, at the top) is a final repository for radioactive waste. Oskarshamn's nuclear plant had a drone incursion at the same time as Forsmark. Ringhals nuclear plant (left, at the top) also seem to have had a drone incursion at the same time (Friday 14, around 7:00–8:00 P.M.), but the reports are more uncertain than in the two other cases. The distance between Oskarshamn and Forsmark is approximately 475 kilometers (km), and between Ringhals and Oskarshamn approximately 300 km.


Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, report that personnel at Oskarshamn’s nuclear plant, at 7:00 P.M. alarmed about “something that seemed to be a drone flying over the nuclear plant-area”. Aftonbladet also reports that after 9:00 P.M. on Friday 14, guards at Ringhals nuclear plant alarmed the police “after hearing something that sounded like a drone flying over the area”. But after searching for the flying object with a helicopter with no results, the police state that “it is not possible to confirm whether the object was a drone”. Also, the police made a search on the nuclear plant in the south, Barsebäck (left, at the bottom in the map above), after “an eventual sighting of a drone had been made by the personnel” at the nuclear plant. [The formatting is off; it should be a normal paragraph. J. T]

My comments on the story

Even for a Swedish reader, it is hard to get a clear sense of what has happened, when, where, and so on. However, it is crystal clear that more than one incursion of an unknown flying object has occurred in more than one nuclear plant at approximately the same time. The incursion at Forsmark nuclear plant seems to have been the most severe, and the “larger drone” was sighted by people at the nuclear plant (at least one guard) and by several police officers. Whether the helicopter pilot observed the larger done before the police lost contact with it is unclear in the reporting. Neither is there any information on whether military or civilian radar picked up any signals (unlikely if the drone/object never operated on higher altitudes).

The larger drone operating over Forsmark could withstand strong winds. So how strong were the winds at Forsmark on Friday 14, around 8:00 P.M.? I have found no weather data on Forsmark on that day and time-frame. The closest weather station, run by Sweden's meteorological and hydrological institute (SMHI), I found was on an island (Örskär) outside the coast of where Forsmark nuclear plant is located. That weather station recorded winds from 16, 0 meter per second (m/s) to 16, 7 m/s between 6:00 and 9:00 P.M. Between 10:00 P.M. and midnight the weather station recorded winds from 11, 3 m/s to 14, 3 m/s. Since the weather station is more exposed to the winds from the Bothnian Sea than Forsmark nuclear plant, it is likely that the wind strength was less in the area that the larger drone operated. A reasonable estimate of the wind strength at Forsmark nuclear plant on Friday 14, and at the time frame of 8:00 to 10:00 P.M., is between 10, 8 and 13, 8 m/s (that corresponds to 39–49 kilometer per hour (km/h) according to SMHI).

Aerial photo of Forsmark nuclear plant. Credit: visitforsmark.se.

If 10, 8 to 13, 8 m/s is a reasonable estimate of the wind strength, then whatever the object was, it had to have been quite robust. For people who are not familiar with the Swedish climate, I can say that at this time of the year the sun set around 5:30 P.M. at the location of Forsmark nuclear plant. So it was dark outside when the guard at Forsmark sighted (at 8:00 P.M.) the larger drone and when the police searched for it with a helicopter (the search lasted for approx. one hour and ended at 10:10 P.M.). 

Besides the darkness, and perhaps the wind, the visibility seems to have been good in the evening at Forsmark on January 14. In no news reports have I found any details of what people observed (shapes, lights, sound, flight characteristics, etc.) on the different locations of the incursions.

Thus, the data is inadequate (scant and unclear). You cannot draw any certain conclusions about what the unknown flying objects are or are not. Not even in the “strongest” case of Forsmark nuclear plant.

But there are two strange circumstances in this Swedish “drones at nuclear plants” story. The first is, of course, that several nuclear facilities had incursions on the same day and approximately at the same time: the police have confirmed incursions at Forsmark and Oskarshamn’s nuclear plant. Ringhals nuclear plant seems to have had some kind of drone incident, but here the reports are even more scant.

There is, however, another circumstance that I have not mentioned above. During this second week of January, the Swedish Armed Forces has mobilised on the island, Gotland (see map below), because of increased Russian military activity in the area (in the air, sea, and on mainland, for instance, Kaliningrad). Put this situation in a broader geopolitical context of deteriorating relations between Nato and Russia (due to, for instance, Russia’s presence in Ukraine).

The pin shows the island, Gotland. Oskarshamn’s nuclear plant is approximately 120 km southwest of Gotland. Forsmark nuclear plant is between Stockholm and Gävle.

Above mentioned, makes me think that the “UFOs” over Swedish nuclear plants may very well be a coordinated military operation by Russia. Or is the explanation that some Swedish drone-enthusiasts came up with a bold (or foolish) plan (prank) that they could not resist executing? Or is the Swedish military testing its drones and/or the security at the nuclear plants in question? In any case, at the moment, “the larger drone” and the other sighted “drones”, are technically Unidentified Flying Objects or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) (according to me; neither the Swedish police nor the military have used the terms UFO or UAP).

But I believe the most probable explanation to the “UFO” incursions over Swedish nuclear plants is terrestrial. That is, human activity is likely the best explanation of the incursions on January 14, 2022. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable story, and I am not aware of anything similar being reported in Swedish mainstream media (Forsmark has had several drone incidents before, but I am not aware of reports of incidents/incursions on several nuclear plants at the same time).

What remains to be seen is whether the Swedish public will know the whole story and a truthful explanation of what flew over and around several Swedish nuclear plants on January 14, 2022. A safe bet is that we will not. I can only hope that some Swedish investigative journalist will prove us wrong.

Take care!

J. T

The European Union needs to adress the UFO issue

Night lights of Europe. Credit: NASA (CC BY 2.0).

Since December 2017, Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) have gone from ridicule to a matter of national security in the USA. In Europe, the silence in mainstream media and politics is universal. 

The magnitude of attention to the UFO issue in the USA is remarkable compared to Europe. The difference in attention is especially stark in the political domain: no official representative of the European Union has made any comment on the UFO issue. So why the absence of attention on the UFO issue in Europe, and why does it matter?

Before we can explore the questions raised above, we first have to give a crude overview of what has happened with the UFO issue in the USA since 2017. The overview only shows four major events that helped transition the status of UFOs from a fringe topic to a national security issue in the U.S. Congress.

The five nuclear-weapon nations make a joint statement: a UFO connection?

"Nuclear Explosion Made in a Blender" (CC0 1. 0).

On January 3 2022, the leaders of the five nuclear-weapons nations made a joint statement on preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races. You can read the joint statement here:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/01/03/p5-statement-on-preventing-nuclear-war-and-avoiding-arms-races/

Do the joint statement on preventing nuclear war have anything to do with the recent political attention on the UAP issue? I am mainly referring to the political awareness in the US, and specifically to — as of December 2021, passed as law — the amendment of a UAP office within the Department of Defense by U.S Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.