The U.S. intelligence community said Thursday that the number of UFO reports involving U.S. military personnel is increasing, “enabling a greater awareness of the airspace and increased opportunity to resolve” what is actually being reported.
Roughly half of the new incidents reported in the report had terrestrial explanations, the report said.
The increase in reporting is being partially attributed to the continuing effort to destigmatize the reporting of such incidents and focusing on the potential safety risks they could pose to U.S. personnel.
The report released Thursday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that since its first June 2021 unclassified report on what are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), it is now aware of 510 such reports.
That is significantly more than the 144 incidents reviewed in the initial report, only one of which could be explained.
The new report said the Pentagon’s new office looking at UAP reports has looked at 366 new reported incidents and initially determined that about half of them have “unremarkable characteristics.”
Twenty-six are being attributed to drones, 163 characterized as balloon or balloon-like entities, and six are attributed to clutter.
The report says these initial assessments do “not mean positively resolved or unidentified” but will aid investigators in trying to determine how to explain “the remaining 171 uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports” some of which “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis.”
Video footage released by the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science purportedly shows pilots observing a UFO while aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft.
To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science
The report indicates the increased number of UAP reports is “partially due to a concentrated effort to destigmatize the topic of UAP and instead recognize the potential risks that it poses as both a safety of flight hazard and potential adversarial activity.”
The long-awaited report was originally expected to be released by last Oct. 31, the deadline set in the congressional legislation mandating annual updates to the first-ever unclassified U.S. i
