US Acknowledges UFOs, UAP, But Denies Aliens

The Pivotal Year: 2017

• December 16, 2017: The New York Times published a bombshell article titled "Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program".

  • This article revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a previously secret $22 million Pentagon program that investigated UFOs from 2007 to 2012.

  • It also released three now-famous declassified US Navy videos: "FLIR," "GIMBAL," and "GOFAST," showing pilots encountering objects with incredible speed and maneuverability.

• Admission: The Pentagon was forced to admit that AATIP was real and that the videos were authentic. This was the first official acknowledgment that the U.S. military was taking these encounters seriously.

The Major Shift: 2020-2021

• April 2020: The Department of Defense officially released and declassified the three Navy videos, stating they were released "in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that had been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos."

• June 2021: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a landmark report titled "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena".

  • This was a report to Congress, mandated by law. It analyzed 144 reports of UAP from 2004 to 2021, most of which came from U.S. Navy pilots.

  • Key Admissions:

    • All but one of the 144 incidents remained unexplained.

    • UAP "clearly pose a flight safety issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security."

    • They found "no evidence" the sightings were secret U.S. technology or from a foreign adversary like Russia or China, but could not rule out extraterrestrial origins as one of several possible explanations.

Continued Admissions and Hearings: 2022-Present

• May 2022: Congress held its first public hearing on UAP in over 50 years. Officials from the Pentagon testified that the number of reported UAP incidents had grown to over 400.

• July 2022: The Pentagon announced the formation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a new office tasked with tracking and investigating UAP sightings across all domains (air, sea, space).

• February 2023: The U.S. military shot down several high-altitude objects over North America, one of which was a Chinese spy balloon. This event heightened public and governmental concern about unidentified objects in sensitive airspace, further fueling the push for UAP investigation.

• July 2023: A former intelligence official, David Grusch, testified under oath before a House Oversight subcommittee. He made extraordinary claims that the U.S. government is in possession of a covert, multi-decade UAP "crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program" and has recovered "non-human biologics." The Pentagon has denied these claims, but Congress is continuing to investigate.

Summary: What Was Admitted and When

In conclusion: The U.S. government finally began admitting that UFOs/UAP are real and unexplained starting in 2017, with major confirmations and reports following in 2020 and 2021.

They have never admitted that these objects are extraterrestrial. The official position is that their origin is unknown. The recent admissions are about transparency regarding a mysterious and potentially threatening phenomenon, not a confirmation of alien life.