Kurt Russell played a sentient planet a couple of years ago, but it turns out that his connection to outer space runs much deeper than that. In fact, it was Kurt Russell – one of Hollywood’s best actors – who first reported one of America’s most famous ever UFO sightings, the Phoenix Lights, in between making his best movies.
Thousands of people reported seeing lights over Phoenix on March 13, 1997. It’s one of the most widely reported UFO incidents in history, though only one of those who called it in was a pilot. And that pilot? Kurt Russell, star of The Thing, the MCU, and that sexy Santa movie for Netflix.
The actor told the story on Jimmy Kimmel Live, explaining that he was flying his son to Phoenix when he noticed “six lights in the shape of a triangle” over the airport and mentioned the phenomenon to air traffic control. He said: “[The controller] said ‘do you wanna report this?’. I said: ‘Look, I can’t identify it, it’s flying and it’s six objects’.”
Russell explained that he thought nothing of this encounter ripped straight from the best science fiction movies for the next few years – after all, he had plenty of new movies to make – until he was reminded of the Phoenix Lights in an unexpected way.
“Years later, I come home and Goldie’s watching this show on UFOs and the most reported one of all time was this one in Phoenix,” he said. “On the show, they talked about 20,000 people reporting it and only one general aviation pilot. I said ‘that’s me’.”
The ‘Phoenix Lights’ incident is still the subject of plenty of conspiracy theories, though there is a legitimate explanation. The descriptions of the lights match up to a formation of military planes taking part in Operation Snowbird around an air base in Tucson – around 100 miles from Phoenix.
But it’s definitely more exciting to think that Kurt Russell had an aerial encounter with a real alien spaceship, right? Of course it is.
For more on the star, find out why Kurt Russell is responsible for the penguins in Mary Poppins and learn why Kurt Russell hates filming sec scenes. You can also see whether Ego makes it onto our list of the best Marvel villains and find out more about the Guardians of the Galaxy cast.
Elsewhere, you can get all of the info you need on the 2023 movies still to come, including the Dune 2 release date and the Wonka release date. We’ve also explained why Wonka should have more aliens in it. Kurt Russell would love it, presumably.
The Pentagon “whistleblower” who claimed the US has collected alien UFOs over the years said America retrieved one such saucer from World War II Italian dictator Benito Mussolini after getting a tip from Pope Pius XII.
David Grusch, 36, an Air Force veteran and former intelligence official, claimed the “Vatican was involved” in the first-ever mission of America’s alleged top-secret UFO retrieval program.
Grusch, however, did not provide any evidence for these claims.
“1933 was the first recovery in Europe, in Magenta, Italy,” he told NewsNation Sunday. “They recovered a partially intact vehicle, and the Italian government moved it to a secure airbase in Italy until around 1944-1945”
“The Pope back-channeled that and told the Americans what the Italians had and we ended up scooping it,” Grusch said of the alleged post-war mission.
The so-called whistleblower claimed that the Vatican was “certainly” aware of alien existence and that UFO sightings over Italy during Musolini’s dictatorship were widely known.
The alleged first mission of the US to acquire a UFO came following a tip from Pope Pius XII, the whistleblower claimed.
Grusch, unfortunately, had no solid evidence for his claims, saying the documents and data were classified, but that he should be believed, regardless, because “I have the credentials, and I was an intelligence officer.”
The Vatican did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Grusch is a decorated combat officer who served in Afghanistan and also worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.
He claimed the existence of the UFO retrieval program last week, again, offering no evidence aside from what he has allegedly been told from interviews with intelligence officers.
Grusch once worked on the government’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) task force.
“I thought it was totally nuts and I thought at first I was being deceived, it was a ruse,” Grusch said of the alleged program. “People started to confide in me. Approach me.
“I have plenty of senior, former, intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a program.”
The Department of Defense has shot down Grusch’s allegations, telling The Post that the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office — formerly the UAP task force — “has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
His claims came after the government stepped up its investigations over UFO claims in recent years.
AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick revealed at a public NASA meeting late last month that only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of UFO sightings reported over the past three decades are actually unexplainable.
The agency remains committed to investigating the alleged sightings and claims, including those made by Grusch.
There’s no denying the magic of the holiday season: the look on people’s faces when you give them gifts, the twinkling of red and green lights on every house and evergreen trees, or that mysterious saucer-shaped object whizzing past the night sky at otherworldly speeds and angles.
OK, that last one is a bit of a stretch—but probably not as much as you might think.
First, some context: UFO sightings are the highest during the summer months of June and July. Data provided to The Daily Beast by the UFO Reporting Center found that July 4 takes top spot when it comes to ET sightings “as people tend to misidentify fireworks,” according to Christian Stepien, the technical director of the organization.
That’s about the same as many other UFO reporting databases. These databases also tend to report more sightings during the merriest time of the year: Christmas.
“There’s always Santa Claus and the reindeer.”
— Ron James, Mutual UFO Network
“We do have a slight uptick twice a year in the summer and around the holidays,” Ron James told The Daily Beast. James is the media relations director of Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), one of the oldest and largest organizations dedicated to studying ET sightings.
“There are a few reasons why people might be paying more attention: they might be off work, they’re doing family activities and things they don’t normally do, so there’s more possibilities for people to encounter things,” he said. “Then of course, there’s always Santa Claus and the reindeer.”
MUFON’s media relations director Steve Hudgeons concurs, telling The Daily Beast, “If there is an uptick, I can understand that because there’s a lot of people out during Christmas time shopping and doing things. They might be looking up in the air so I can understand it if there is.”
MUFON isn’t the only UFO organization to notice this holiday trend. Chris Rutkowski, a Canadian UFO researcher with Ufology Research, told CBC Newsin 2020 that over the past three decades of compiling data of UFO sightings, he found a “significant” increase in cases in the holiday season—with 75 sightings occurring on Christmas Day alone over that time. In some instances, they seemed to be of a most jolly origin.
“Most were simply lights in the sky, and yes, some were of a single red light flying overhead followed by a string of others,” Rutkowski said. “But others did not seem to have a reindeer explanation.”
Anecdotal evidence of this surprising holiday trend supports this idea as well, with scores of UFO reports having occurred on or around Christmas Day over the years. While many of them can be logically explained (shooting stars, swamp gas reflecting light from venus, etc.), there are those with more mysterious origins.
Cheryl Costa, an airman first class, spotted what she described as a “bright star-like object zooming from the north” across the sky while she was stationed at a U.S. Air Force base in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, on Christmas Eve 1971. She thought it could have been a meteor or an aircraft before it stopped in its tracks and hovered in the sky for a “minute or two.”
“Then it seemed to dance or dart around before it dashed toward the south at tremendous speed until it winked out,” Costas wrote.
The official National Archives of the United Kingdom even has a collection of holiday-related UFO sightings. For example, during Christmas 1983, there were reports of a pyramid-shaped object with three bright orange lights over the skies of Groombridge, England—and a very similar shaped object over Newport just two years later on the same day. On Christmas Eve 2008, there was a report of 15 “red and flickering” lights in Sussex.
Of course, many reports of UFO sightings have mundane explanations. For example, on Christmas Eve 2011, hundreds of people witnessed a group of Christmas-colored lights zooming across the skies of Germany. The glowing orbs moved with tails of green, red, and white.
Researchers later identified the lights as pieces of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling from Earth’s orbit and bursting into burning fireballs as they hit the atmosphere. Pretty cool, just not the merry Martians you’re probably hoping for.
“Tensions in mission control climbed higher than the star on a Christmas tree. ”
One of the earliest instances of a Christmas ET sighting actually occurred during a NASA mission. It was 10 days before Christmas 1965 when flight controllers received a message from astronaut Wally Schirra Jr. aboard the Gemini 6 spacecraft orbiting Earth.
“We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in polar orbit,” Schirra said according to his memoir Schirra’s Space. “Looks like he might be going to re-enter soon […] You just might let me pick up that thing.”
Tensions in mission control climbed higher than the star on a Christmas tree. What could they have spotted? What if the Gemini 6 crew were in danger? Before flight controllers could respond, Stafford said: “I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit.”
It was then that ground control heard the familiar yet ethereal noises of “Jingle Bells” being played on a tinny harmonica—accompanied by none other than sleigh bells.
“Wally came up with the idea,” Thomas Stafford, a fellow crew member aboard Gemini 6, told Smithsonian Magazine. “He could play the harmonica, and we practiced two or three times before we took off, but of course we didn’t tell the guys on the ground.”
The jingle bells used by astronauts Wally Schirra Jr. and Thomas Stafford during their holiday-themed prank aboard Gemini 6.
As for why Christmas time seems to bring out our inner UFO truther, there are plenty of reasons we can point to. For one, there are simply more people out and about during the holidays than normal shopping, visiting friends and family, or gawking at Christmas lights.
For James and Hudgeons and the rest of MUFON, though, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the UFOs aren’t already there—people are just noticing them more.
“My feeling is that there’s not that there’s an actual increase in phenomenon occurring. It’s more that there’s more people in a position to see and experience things that might already be there pretty much consistently,” James said.
There’s also the physical and psychological factor. Studies have shown that alcohol consumption spikes during the holidays along with ET sightings. Pair that with our annual obsession with a jolly fat man and his flying reindeer, and it could easily lead to drunken visions of sugar plum fairies and dancing lights in the sky where there isn’t really anything at all.
So whether it be Christmas magic, flying extraterrestrials, or you just having one too many egg nogs, there’s plenty of reasons to bundle up and keep an eye out on the stars this holiday season. After all, there’s a good chance you might see something truly inexplicable in the skies—twinkling merry and bright.
The Pentagon’s new push to investigate reports of UFOs has so far not yielded any evidence to suggest that aliens have visited Earth or crash-landed here, senior military leaders said on Friday.
However, the Pentagon’s effort to investigate anomalous, unidentified objects — whether they are in space, the skies or even underwater — led to hundreds of new reports that are now being investigated, they say.
But so far they have seen nothing that indicates intelligent alien life.
“I have not seen anything in those holdings to date that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation, an alien crash or anything like that,” said Ronald Moultrie, under secretary of defense for intelligence and security.
Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s newly formed All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), did not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial life and said he was taking a scientific approach to the research.
“I would just say that we are structuring our analysis to be very thorough and rigorous. We will go through it all,” Kirkpatrick said, speaking at the first news conference since AARO was established in July.
“And as a physicist, I have to adhere to the scientific method, and I will follow that data and science wherever it goes.”
AARO’s mission focuses on unexplained activity around military installations, restricted airspace and “other areas of interest” and is aimed at helping identify possible threats to the safety of U.S. military operations and to national security.
A government report last year documented more than 140 cases of what the U.S. military officially calls “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, observed since 2004.
All but one of the listed sightings – an instance attributed to a large, deflating balloon – remain unexplained, subject to further analysis, the report said.
For the other 143 cases, the report found that too little data exists to conclude whether they represent some exotic aerial system developed either by a U.S. government or commercial entity, or by a foreign power such as China or Russia.
The 2021 report included some UAPs revealed in previously released Pentagon video of enigmatic objects exhibiting speed and maneuverability exceeding known aviation technology and lacking any visible means of propulsion or flight-control surfaces.
Kirkpatrick said several hundred more cases have been documented since then. The exact figure will be disclosed soon, but a senior Navy official said in May the total number of reported cases had already reached 400.
Congress focused on the new Pentagon push in its annual defense policy bill, which it passed this week. The legislation, which has not yet been signed by President Joe Biden, calls for the Pentagon to prepare a report looking at the historical record of the U.S. government related to UFOs, or unidentified flying objects, going back to 1945.
“That is going to be quite a research project,” Kirkpatrick said, acknowledging that Congress sought to ensure that AARO researches all records — even ones so highly classified that few people know about them.
The Air Force conducted a previous investigation called Project Blue Book, ended in 1969, that compiled a list of 12,618 sightings, 701 of which involved objects that officially remained “unidentified.”
In 1994, the Air Force said it had completed a study to locate records relating to the 1947 “Roswell incident” in New Mexico. It said materials recovered near Roswell were consistent with a crashed balloon, the military’s long-standing explanation, and that no records indicated that there had been the recovery of alien bodies or extraterrestrial materials.
As a direct result of social media and the prevalence of cellphone cameras, we’re seeing more and more videos of supposed UFOs. Recently, a woman in the Orlando, Florida area captured photos and videos of a massive craft hovering in plain sight. However, no one else seemed to notice. If they noticed, they showed no sign.
Instagram user Chivonne SayWhat streamed a video of the UFO on Instagram Live. She also posted photos of the craft to her feed. Later, TikTok user Master Xebula shared that video with their followers. In the video, you can tell that Chivonne is a little shaken by the sighting. You can watch it below.
“There is a f**king UFO out here in the middle of the damn sky,” Chivonne exclaims as the video begins. “Everybody is out here riding around like they don’t see this sh*t.”
Chivonne went on to say that a loud boom preceded the UFO sighting by about a day. “So apparently yesterday in Orlando, or central Florida, you could hear a loud boom from five-something in the morning all the way from Jacksonville to Orlando,” she explained.
The UFO in the video looks like a classic flying saucer. It appears to be a massive disc-shaped craft ringed with white lights. While the camerawork and video quality aren’t the best, the craft seems to be stationary.
Floridians have reported a total of 7,513 UFO sightings. The only other state in the Union with more sightings is California with more than 15,000 documented cases.
It sounds like science-fiction. On Jan. 13, 1996, the United States Air Force shoots down a UFO, which crashes six miles from a medium-sized town in southeastern Brazil.
Seven days later, two sisters aged 14 and 16, and a 21-year-old friend spot a tiny, frightened alien with big red eyes, crouching by a wall. They run screaming back to their mother.
The Brazilian police and military capture at least two aliens, one of which scratches an officer, infecting and ultimately killing him, before dying along with its extraterrestrial comrades. The US Air Force confiscates the alien bodies and takes them to an unknown location. A vast cover-up by the Brazilian military, enforced with death threats, lasts for 26 years.
But if it’s all made up, it is one of the greatest works of science fiction in history. Most everyone who hears the witnesses tell their story a quarter century later is convinced they are telling the truth.
Now, a new documentary, “Moment of Contact” (currently streaming on Amazon and Apple TV+) lays out the most convincing case yet that extraterrestrials not only exist, but have visited, and died on earth.
A college professor and amateur ultralight pilot named Carlos de Sousa said he witnessed the crash in Varginha, Brazil on Jan. 13, 1996.
In the film, De Sousa describes the spacecraft as the size of a school bus but shaped like a submarine with white smoke leaking out of a gash in its back. He compares the UFO to a malfunctioning washing machine, rocking and jerking around in the sky.
De Souza says he ran to the site of the crash where he saw pieces of metal, like a thin aluminum foil, spread across the field. He said he picked up a piece of the metal, crumpled it in his hand, and then let it go, at which point it returned to its original shape.
Immediately afterward, he says the military showed up and soldiers started screaming at him to go away.
“Go away! Go away! I’m ordering you,” they yelled, as one officer held a rifle to his face.
Seven days later, sisters Liliane and Valquíria Silva and their friend Kátia Xavier were walking through an empty lot in between two houses when they spotted the creature just eight feet away.
“I was in the front and they were a little farther back,” Liliane, who was 16 in 1996, explains in “Moment of Contact” directed by James Fox.
“Passing by here the graffiti caught my attention. I looked and I saw the creature. It appeared to be suffering from the heat.”
“When Liliane screamed, I looked and felt fear,” said Valquíria, who was 14 at the time. “I looked into its eyes and saw that it was frightened. Just as I was frightened, the creature was also frightened. I saw that it was afraid of us. It was an exchange of fears. It for ours. Afraid of us in the same way we were afraid of it. A being we weren’t familiar with.”
“What I saw stopped me in my tracks,” says Katia, who was 21 at the time. “It glued me to that spot. It had red eyes, oily skin. I couldn’t see an open mouth. Not smiling… Sad expression. Shrunken back. It didn’t have hair. Eyes three times bigger than ours.”
After Liliane screamed she started running away and the two girls joined her.
“What we saw wasn’t human and wasn’t an animal either. Nowadays I do think it was a being from another planet,” says Liliana.
“It wasn’t a man, it wasn’t an animal. What it was, I can’t say,” says Valquíria. “After we ran for a while we stopped and asked what we saw and then we ran to our mothers.
“I came out to meet the girls,” their mother, Luiza, says in the film. “Because mothers have a sixth sense… They were scared and walking slowly and dragging each other.
“We were children of Catholics and thought it could be a demon. That’s why we were so scared,” said Liliane.
Luiza made the girls return and when they got back to the spot, their mother saw the footprint in the dirt, which she drew for filmmaker Fox. It was a round foot with three long toes.
“For 20 days I smelled its smell,” said Luiza. “I couldn’t stand the smell. I don’t know where it came from. I even washed my nose with alcohol and water.
“It was an ammonia smell,” says Katia.
‘I couldn’t stand the smell. I don’t know where it came from. It smelled worse than sulfer.’Luiza Silva, describing the creature’s scent
“No, it wasn’t ammonia,” says the mother. “It smelled worse than sulfur. What a strange smell…I grabbed Katia and said, ‘Let’s get out of here!”
They told their story to the press and were met mostly with ridicule at the time. But the girls have not changed their testimony in the 25 years that passed between the event and the making of the film in 2021.
Six miles away from the crash site, according to the film, the military set up a blockade in a residential neighborhood. Sources say the local fire department, which is under the control of the military police, captured one of the creatures in the morning, and another officer captured a second near where the three girls had seen it later that afternoon.
That was when the creature scratched the young officer, Marco Chereze, who soon grew sick, and sought help at the hospital, according to the film. The doctor who treated him said Chereze spoke openly about what happened because he feared he was dying and was fighting to survive.
Two people who did not participate in “Moment of Contact” spoke exclusively to The Post about senior Brazilian officials who told them about their own encounters with the creatures.
“It was skinny, weak, and fragile,” said Vitório Pacaccini, a civilian UFO investigator who said he was shown a 35-second film fragment of the creature by a senior officer in 2012. “It had brown skin with an oil or grease on the body. It had a big head with red eyes and no pupils. The face was like a reptile, like a frog with strange red eyes three times bigger than ours and three protuberances on the top of its head.”
Pacaccini said the creature was alive but looked like it was about to die.
“It made a little sound,” he said. “Like a bee.”
Patricia Fernandes Silva described two creatures that were nearly identical to the one described by Pacaccini and the three girls. She says the former sheriff of Virginha who learned she was a UFO researcher invited her into an office building in 2014 where he and four other officers interrogated her for hours.
“The whole time they were asking me about my relationship to Varginha but I had never investigated the case. I knew about it, but I had nothing to do with it!”
Finally, the senior officer asked the other officers to leave the room. It was then that he showed her a color photo, shot on film, and printed on Kodak paper.
In the photo, says Silva, were two creatures, one dead, and the other crouched in the same way the three girls had described it. “It had three — I won’t say horns — but three high abscesses on the forehead,” she said.
“He took the picture and said, ‘Are you sure you don’t know anything about this day? Look at the photo!’ I was scared! But I said, ‘No. I had no knowledge.’”
The former sheriff told Silva that his hands had been paralyzed ever since he grabbed the creature by the legs. The man’s hands were cupped, and he struggled awkwardly to pull the photo out of an old newspaper he kept in a transparent folder, she said.
Unlike Pacaccini and the girls, Silva said the eyes of the creature were black, not red. But otherwise, she described identical creatures.
“The mouth was very small,” she said. “The skin of the alive one had a shine, but it was not an oily shine. It was kind of gooey like he just stepped out of a swimming pool. It was wet, damp skin.”
Pacaccini said he has videotaped interviews with at least seven military officers about the encounter that he is keeping in secure locations. After he accused the military of a cover-up, he said hostile drivers on four separate occasions bumped his car on the highway. On the fourth time, two shots were fired at his car. He said he has received hundreds of death threats over the years and, in 2004, he moved to Italy to escape.
“Moment of Contact” comes at a moment of heightened interest in UFOs. In 2017, mainstream news media covered reports by Navy pilots of UFOs — renamed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) — recorded on infrared films.
In May of this year, a Navy intelligence officer said the military had a database of 400 UAP incidents, but no evidence that aliens had ever been found. At the same time, the military has not ruled out that the UAPs are operated by ETs. In June, NASA announced it was joining the military’s investigation into UAPs.
Jacques Vallée, an astronomer and leading ufologist, said members of the public are increasingly starting to believe extraterrestrials are real.
“At the National Cathedral a couple of years ago… the director of the Department of National Intelligence said that this is a subject for science, and not just an intelligence topic,” he told The Post. “A subject for open science. And the subtext was, ‘No more ridicule. This is a real topic and nobody has any explanation.’
“I’m just as puzzled as everybody else,” he added. “And the Air Force is just as puzzled. And the Navy is just as puzzled. The Air Force didn’t say anything. It remembers the good old days and may not want to be part of the dialogue.”
Prince Philip’s UFO investigation could be released following the death of Queen Elizabeth.
The prince developed a fascination with aliens after a bricklayer reported a close encounter with extra terrestrial life at the home of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Philip’s late uncle – but until now, his investigative work into UFO sightings in the UK has remained under wraps.
Philip – who died in April 2021, aged 99 – has been credited with creating a so-called Royal X-Files on the subject of space and alien life.
And the royal family are now facing calls for the investigation to be made public, the Daily Star newspaper reports. The work previously remained a secret during the reign of the queen.
Nick Pope, the ex-Ministry Of Defence official who was in charge of the UK government’s UFO desk between 1991 and 1994, claims that Philip and Sir Peter Horsley – his ex-RAF associate – spent years investigating alien sightings.
He said: “[Philip] kept an eye on developments, subscribed to UFO magazines and newsletters and had witnesses interviewed.”
He also claimed Philip’s interest in the subject was deliberately kept under wraps during the reign of the late monarch as it would’ve caused a stir.
Nick told ‘History TV’: “This is highly sensitive. Here you have the queen’s husband investigating UFOs. Had the news got out it would have caused a sensation.”
Lord Mountbatten – who was assassinated in August 1979 – and Prince Philip are said to have “talked extensively” about the possibility of extra terrestrial life.
And Richard Dolan – an expert on the UFO subject – is convinced that the late monarch was aware of the conversations between Philip and his uncle.
He said: “You have to assume Queen Elizabeth knew.”
AN INCREDIBLY clear photo allegedly shows a disc-shaped UFO estimated to be about 50ft across emerging from a storm before vanishing into space.
The series of images showing the round silver object have caused a stir after they emerged in Mexico and were shown on national news TV.
Car mechanic Juan Manuel Sanchez took the UFO photos which went viral after he shared them on his Facebook.
He claims he spotted the object while trying to take snaps with his mobile phone of an approaching storm.
The clear and high resolution photos appear to show the saucer shape hanging in front of the dark clouds in the distance.
But while the photos have caused a stir, it’s unclear if its camera trick, a natural phenomena, an elaborate hoax, or a genuine sighting of an mysterious object.
Juan however stands by his story and gave his account of the sighting outside his home in Valle Hermoso on August 17 to Mexican television station RDTV.
His wife and one of his co-workers also claim to have seen the mysterious saucer before it shot off into the sky towards space.
The mechanic estimates the object was around 50 feet across and he believes it was around half a mile from his home.
And he hit back at doubters who claim his photo is a fake, saying people had told him they think it was a hubcap or a pan lid.
Juan said he was “in shock” when he first allegedly spotted the object, saying it wasn’t “fear, but something like astonishment”.
The mechanic said he is disappointed he didn’t get a video, but as his camera was in photo mode he simply took the pictures he could before the object vanished.
And he claimed later that night he then saw lights in the sky, and claimed others have told him they have had similar sightings in the area.
Juan admitted he was worried about making his sighting public as he feared the stigma associated with UFOs.
He told RDTV: “It was right there above that house above the cables.”
It’s sad I wasn’t able to get a video
Juan Manuel Sanchez
“I got my mobile phone to film it because it was always a dream to see something like this, this close.”
The mechanic went on: “We were working here outside at the workshop when we saw some very dark clouds- it was cloudy like it is now, a bit more.
“I wanted to film a video but my phone was on photo mode and I got the first picture.
“When we started watching it, it was in one place it wasn’t moving and then as I got the second and third photo it started moving upwards.
“When I changed my phone to video mode it wasn’t possible. As it was going away I could see it more, the disc the shape of a disc.”
Juan denied the photo was a hoax after it went viral in Mexico
Juan lamented: “It’s sad I wasn’t able to get a video.
“There are people who don’t believe- they say it was a lid from a car or a pan of tamales.”
The authenticity of Juan’s photos remain unclear – but he appears convinced he saw something in sky.
And it comes as UFOs are once again taking centre stage across the border in the United States.
Lawmakers, former servicemen, intelligence officials and even former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are now all speaking more openly about the topic.
And it came to a head with a landmark hearing earlier this year on Capitol Hill.
US officials have acknowledged there is something in the skies they cannot explain – and the stigma around the traditionally fringe topic is finally being stripped back.
Is the phenomena previously unknown technology used by the Russians and Chinese, secret US weapons projects, or unknown natural occurrences?
Or perhaps it could be the total misidentification of easily explainable natural phenomena or known aircraft? Or even an example of hoaxes and mass hysteria?
And there is the other option, perhaps its something more alien?
The US’ official stance now is that they do not know – and pressure is growing for more transparency on the topic which is becoming increasingly mainstream.
In Congress, where legislation is drafted, debated and enacted, clear and concise definitions are of paramount importance. As military aircrews increasingly encounter unidentified flying objects (UFOs), lawmakers recently made several striking revisions to the definition of “UFO.” Key among them: The explosive implication that some UFOs have non-human origins.
As first reported by researcher Douglas Johnson, a draft bill approved unanimously by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence rebrands UFOs as “unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena.” Expanding the definition to include objects in space and under the oceans significantly broadens the scope of a muscular new office tasked by Congress with investigating UFOs.
The revised definition of “UFO” also includes “transmedium” objects which, according to lawmakers, “transition between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water.”
In short, members of a key national security-focused committee believe that objects of unknown origin are demonstrating remarkably advanced technology by moving seamlessly between space, air and water. A report accompanying the legislation notes that “transmedium threats to United States national security are expanding exponentially.”
Most strikingly, Congress’s new definition of “UFO” excludes “man-made” objects.
Over the last seven decades, most UFO sightings involved “man-made” objects, such as misidentified aircraft, balloons, satellites or drones. Yet now, according to Congress, “man-made” objects “should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena.”
Moreover, in a congressional directive, objects identified by the new UFO office “as man-made…will be passed to appropriate [Department of Defense and Intelligence Community] offices” for further analysis.
Congress, in short, is forcing the government to focus on objects that are not “man-made.”
Imagine that the new UFO office identifies a highly advanced drone flying in sensitive airspace. Under the draft legislation, regardless of the drone’s origin – be it Chinese, Russian or otherwise – the UFO office must immediately stop investigating and hand the case over to another government entity.
This implies that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee believe (on a unanimous, bipartisan basis) that some UFOs have non-human origins. After all, why would Congress establish and task a powerful new office with investigating non-“man-made” UFOs if such objects did not exist?
Make no mistake: One branch of the American government implying that UFOs have non-human origins is an explosive development.
It is also part of a remarkable shift in official attitudes towards UFOs.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many senior government officials believed that UFOs had “interplanetary” origins. But a series of still-unexplained encounters in the summer of 1952 sparked Cold War national security fears among defense and intelligence agencies. As a result, the U.S. government initiated a campaign to “debunk” and discredit all UFO sightings, no matter how credible. For decades, officials mocked any suggestion that UFOs had extraterrestrial origins.
Not anymore.
In discussions and interviews, NASA administrator Bill Nelson suggested that UFOs encountered by military aircrews in recent years have otherworldly origins. (NASA, it should be noted, is proceeding “full force” on an unprecedented scientific study of UFOs.)
Former CIA Director John Brennan stated that UFOs might “constitute a different form of life.” According to James Woolsey, a fellow ex-CIA director, “something is going on that is surprising to…experienced pilots.”
As Top Gun-trained aviators remain convinced that they observed objects “not of this world,” director of national intelligence Avril Haines – America’s top spy – has not ruled out extraterrestrial origins for UFOs.
After the customary giggles and smirks that still accompany any mention of “UFO” died down, both Clinton and Obama adopted a serious, matter-of-fact demeanor when discussing the topic. Clinton, in particular, scolded a television audience for laughing when a host asked him about UFOs. Of note, former presidents continue receiving the government’s most sensitive intelligence briefings.
Comedian and political commentator Bill Maher, for example, recently theorized that UFOs are intentionally revealing themselves to fighter pilots.
He may be on to something. The geometrically reconstructed flight path of a well-known 2015 UFO encounter off the U.S. East Coast indicates that the object reacted as a Navy fighter jet attempted to sneak up behind it. Importantly, the object’s movement did not suggest hostility as much as a desire to be observed by the aircrew, which ultimately “flew right up to the thing.”
A UFO involved in the now famous 2004 “Tic Tac” incidents appeared on radar at the precise location of a rendezvous point known only to a small group of aviators and radar operators. Ten years later, two fighter jets nearly collided with a UFO hovering at the exact location and altitude of an entrance point to a military training range.
To Maher’s point, some UFOs appear to move and position themselves in ways that make their presence obvious to nearby military aircrews.
With Congress openly suggesting that UFOs have non-human origins, this behavior is particularly intriguing.
The term UFO means “unidentified flying object.” This means even the U.S. Government, which recently has taken great strides into admitting to the existence of these UFOs and promising to investigate the matter more thoroughly, has no idea as to the actual origin of these objects.
They may be extraterrestrial, or they may be from some secret Earth origin. But all that it really takes to call something a UFO is that it is up in the air and unidentified. And sometimes, what is unidentified is in the eye of the beholder. For instance, take what this woman filmed recently in Idaho while out for a drive one night.
Watch Video Below:
@onegreatangel83 Out for a drive an came across this unusual light in the sky. It was mlving faster than a plane and in a weird shape. As we kept eating it, it started breaking apart. This was 10pm mst in Idaho on July 12, 2022#idaho#ufo#whatsinthesky♬ Paradise – Ikson
In the video, a brilliant ball of light streaks across the twilight sky, “faster than any plane.” As she films, it appears to separate into several pieces and continue along its trajectory.
So, what is going on? What this woman actually caught on film was a meteor or a piece of space debris entering the atmosphere. The separation witnessed on this video is from the object breaking apart and catching fire during its descent. This is very common with meteors and other objects that fall to Earth from space.
The American Meteor Society has classified several different levels of meteor activity, based on their relative brightness in the sky. Any meteor righter than the planet Venus is called a “fireball” and they ask that such events be reported to them on their website https://www.amsmeteors.org/.
