“I know everyone gets caught up on alien life and all of that,” Ratcliffe said, “but my concern as Director of National Intelligence was, if a foreign adversary—regardless of how you define foreign adversary—has technologies that the United States don’t have, we need to find out more about that.”
Radcliffe was the first to publicly acknowledge that there was a UAP task force in place under the National Defense Authorization Act. “I wanted there to be greater transparency to the American people about the number of sightings of things that are unexplained,” he said.
As Director of National Intelligence, Ratcliffe found that Navy and Air Force pilots were discouraged from reporting UFO sightings. “They thought it would impact their careers … But it gives us more information.”
The new DNI report mentions a reduced stigma surrounding the phenomenon.
Since March 2021, 366 new UAP sightings have been reported, a noticeable jump from the 144 cases documented over the previous 17 years. The majority of these 510 cases was reported by Navy and Air Force personnel.
“There very clearly are now hundreds of unexplained sightings, meaning that there’s no natural phenomenon involved, there’s no visual disturbance, it’s not clutter, or debris, or birds ,or anything else, but objects that demonstrate technologies that seem to defy the law of physics, and capabilities that we don’t have as the world’s superpower,” Ratcliffe stated. “Our role in the Federal Government is to provide for common defense. And we can’t do that if someone else has technologies that are better than what we have.”
The DNI report stated that the Department of Defense’s (DoD) newly founded All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) will facilitate UAP detection and identification through close cooperation with all of the DoD’s relevant interagency partners, as well as the Intelligence Community and the National Intelligence Manager for Aviation. One priority is investigating “evidence of possible foreign government involvement with UAP events.”
“All of this is a very good development from my perspective,” Ratcliffe said. “I’m glad that they’re pursuing some of the things that I was pushing as DNI.”
When one Fox host asked, “You’ve seen the intel. Are aliens real?” Ratcliffe replied: “Well, I can’t talk to you about any potential alien life, so I’ll just leave it at that.”
