The CIA estimated that the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s accounted for as much as half of reported UFO sightings.
The AARO report spends a half-dozen pages documenting how confusion over subsequent generations of secret US government aircraft appear to have also contributed to the great intergalactic game of telephone of UFO programs inside the government, including modern Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk drones.
AARO investigated one claim where a witness reported hearing a former US military service member had touched an extraterrestrial spacecraft, but when they tracked down the service member, he said that the conversation was likely a garbled version of the time he touched an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter at a secret facility.
There are surely other secret craft still in testing and development now, including the B-21 stealth bomber, which had its first test flight in November and is now in testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California, as well as others we don't know about.
The government can still surprise us with unknown craft-like the until-then-unknown modified stealthy helicopter left behind on the Pakistan raid to kill Osama bin Laden.
Relatedly, the US military has a classified spaceship, the X-37B, that has regularly orbited around the Earth since its first mission in 2010-it just blasted off on its seventh and most recent mission in December-and its previous, sixth, mission lasted a record-breaking 908 days in orbit.
The Pentagon has said remarkably little about what it does up there for years at a time.
There are some puzzling materials-science breadcrumbs wrapped throughout the AARO report.
Fourth and lastly is the category of the truly weird: Scientists at the forefront of physics point out that we should be humble about how little of the universe we truly understand; as Harvard astronomy chair Avi Loeb explains, effectively all that we've learned about relativity and quantum physics has unfolded in the span of a single human lifespan, and astounding new discoveries continue to amaze scientists.
Just last summer, scientists announced they'd detected for the first time gravitational waves criss-crossing the universe that rippled through space-time, and astrophysicists continue to suspect that the universe is far weirder than we think.
Answers here could be almost unfathomably weird-think parallel dimensions or the ability to travel at a fraction of the speed of light.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Mon, 11 Mar 2024 18:13:06 +0000