After Decades of Dismissal, NASA Finally Studying UFOs
On the heels of the first public UFO hearing on Capitol Hill in more than 50 years, NASA has just announced it will form its own independent team to study UFOs, or UAPs as the government now calls them.
Writing in a release, NASA says it will study, “[O]bservations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena – from a scientific perspective”
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’S associate administrator for science added, “We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s the very definition of what science is. That’s what we do.”
For context and perspective, we talked to Nick Pope who served at the UK’s Ministry of Defense covering UFOs for years.
“Well, this NASA announcement is groundbreaking,” Pope said. “I very much welcome it, I think it’s long overdue, and I think it’s very interesting — you could read it a number of ways. Firstly, you could say that this was just filling an obvious gap that the military and intelligence community are actively researching and investigating as a result of congressional interest — and more than interest of course, it’s in the Defense bill, so it’s a mandate.”
“So you could just say that well, they want a science plan in all of this NASA is logically the place to do it. But there’s another way that you could interpret it: NASA doing their own inquiry is arguably a sort of statement that they don’t perhaps have confidence in the way that the DoD and intelligence community are moving ahead, and they want to do it their own way and use their own resources and capabilities,” he said.
This is a major break from the past for the space agency, which has avoided any serious discussion of aerial phenomena for decades. So why is it doing this and why now?
“This is a complete 180-degree turn,” Pope said. “NASA previously said, ‘[W]e are looking for extraterrestrial life, but its a scientific search, we are not, as part of that, looking at UFOs. We are not interested in UFO sightings. We have not investigated and will not.’”
“And now it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, we better take a look at this.’ So, either they realized that they’d been missing a trick, or the doubters are correct when they say, ‘Come on, they were always in this game, now they’ve got to be open about it.’ But either way, this is a dramatic u-turn. You can’t overstate the importance of this, because they were absolutely adamant that they were not going to touch this subject, and now, here they are at the heart of it,” Pope said.
Pope has been involved with UFO studies for nearly 30 years looking at the bigger picture. What does this announcement mean? Could this lead us to disclosure?
“This is vindication, this announcement is really, I think, a validation of what a lot of people know, suspect, believe — depending on who they are and what access they’ve had — and it’s another piece of the puzzle,” Pope said. “I think four or five years ago, nobody would have realistically thought we’d be where we are now. I mean, it’s just revelation after revelation; the existence of the Pentagon’s AATIP program, the US Navy videos and photos of these, classified briefings in Congress, a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, public hearings, open hearings, in congress, and probably more to come — and now this NASA announcement. All I can say is, ‘my goodness, what’s next?’”
The team will begin their study this fall and it should last about nine months.
John Warner IV Discusses the State of UFO Disclosure
Over the past several years, the disclosure movement has taken some interesting turns as videos of UFOs (or UAPs) tracked by the Navy have been made public. With esteemed media outlets reporting on the matter, and credible Navy pilots coming forward to describe their experiences, motley groups of researchers, celebrities, and government insiders have banded together to steer the narrative.
Within that group is Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, who also happens to be a member of one of the most highly influential families of bankers and politicians in American history.
Mellon first announced his role in the recent alleged disclosure movement through his involvement with To The Stars Academy, a bizarre amalgam of scientists, intelligence officials, and former Skunk Works engineers led by eccentric rockstar Tom Delonge.
While Mellon’s rhetoric around the UFO/UAP topic has been relatively conservative and pretty much what one would expect from a former intelligence bureaucrat, his cousin John Warner IV has recently begun to discuss his views on the subject from a more radical perspective.
Warner IV is the son of former Sen. John Warner III who served as Secretary of the Navy from 1972 to 1974 in the Nixon administration. During his storied career in military and politics, Warner III married Catherine Mellon, before divorcing and starting a second marriage with the immensely famous Elizabeth Taylor.
Needless to say, Warner IV was privy to a stimulating upbringing, rubbing elbows with famous movie stars, top military brass, royal families, and banking moguls, including his grandfather Paul Mellon who was a fox hunting buddy of the legendary Gen. George Patton. In fact, this is one of the relationships in which Warner IV says he was given his first drips of disclosure about UFOs.
According to Warner IV his grandfather was cold and distant from his mother, but the two shared a male bond that led to some interesting conversations, especially regarding his time in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s.
“He said, ‘I was with Patton at the end of the war in Czechoslovakia… I was with Patton in Pilsen and we went into a warehouse and looked at all the Wunderwaffe stuff. You know rocket works, V2, maybe some V3 parts, the Flugelrad with the jet engines and all this stuff. And you know I saw this big disc aircraft,’” Warner IV said his grandfather told him.
“And I said, ‘Oh, is that the Flugelrad with the BMW jet engines?’ and he was like, ‘No…no’ and that was the end of the conversation,” Warner IV said.
