Speaking to "60 Minutes" in 2021, former Navy pilot Lt. Ryan Graves revealed that he witnessed UAPs almost daily for two years.
He explained that the unidentified objects could easily be U.S. technology still in development, secret spy technology from another country, or "something otherworldly." He noted that his biggest concern is that it's a national security issue because it could be Russian or Chinese. He noted that the military would take them seriously if they were tactical jets. But as a UFO or UAP, they're unwilling to investigate.
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John Kirby said in a briefing Monday that they were able to uncover that China does have a spy balloon program through the People's Liberation Army and that the program existed in the previous administration, "but they did not detect it."
"Part of the reason why the Chinese balloon was detected is that we've been -- the Pentagon used to be super, super secretive about their UFO program which they called unidentified aerial phenomena," Cooper explained. "And they have been loosening up the secrecy on that. They've opened up some of the classifications. They've been briefing Congress. And when they went back and started looking at this program they realized that they had been tracking -- this program had tracked stuff that they had just sort of classified as stashed away as unidentified aerial phenomena. They looked at it and realized these are actually balloons. They could go back, retroactively, and look and see that there were three that came during the Trump administration, et cetera, et cetera."
So, the intelligence was there all along, Cooper said. It simply wasn't looked at properly or categorized properly.
"What's really interesting is that it appears that the three objects that were shot down beginning Friday are different. Defense officials tell me with some degree of assurance that the first originates — the one that was shot down on Friday over Deadhorse, Alaska... they're doing the recovery effort up there now around Prudhoe Bay. But they think that one is not a balloon because it shattered when it hit the ground. The other two, they say privately, they're more leaning toward thinking are balloons."
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Frank Figliuzzi, who previously ran the counter-intelligence program at the FBI, explained that it's entirely possible that these things were always there and that it isn't precisely an escalation from other countries. He noted that because China's balloon was flying so low and brazenly over the U.S., it might be an escalation.
He also explained that the key piece of the recent report about the spy balloons spotted during Donald Trump's administration is that they were essentially flying blind, so to speak.
"I'm really concerned about the other [objects], not because they pose a threat. They seemingly do not. But because there's a phrase being used by officials in Washington to describe this as 'a domain awareness gap,'" said Figliuzzi. "That is not something I like to hear with regard to national security. Domain awareness gap is we're blind about something. And what we seem to have been blind to — or are blind to is these objects apparently with frequency coming into our territory undetected, then yes, they may have opened the aperture and increased the filter [to these objects]. But as has just been said wait a minute, you mean we haven't in the past seen things that are enough of a threat to have to shoot down? And so we need answers on that before this continues and we need to establish new criteria."
He also noted that there is a lot of stuff floating around in space, much of it commercial, weather, mapping and other tasks.
"And I'm quite disturbed that our intelligence community has not been able to figure out what's a threat, what's not, what belongs to the corporate sector, what belongs to an adversary. That needs to get better fast," he complained.
Cooper agreed with that being a huge problem cited by Gen. Glenn VanHerck, of the U.S. Northern Command, who briefed the press last week on China's balloon. She noted it was a term that didn't go over well.
"It is one of the things that have long since been criticism of the pentagon," Cooper continued. "And that goes back again to this whole, UAP program. The hypersecrecy around that prevented the Defense Department and some intel communities from being as aware as they could have been about what was going on in the skies above. That was a big criticism of the secrecy of that program. That is now starting to open up. But I think we're still seeing the repercussions."
In January, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said that they were investigating 510 different UFO reports. Of those, 247 were UAPs, 144 were "suspicious aerial objects," and "119 reports had been buried in old records from the past 17 years."
See the full conversation below or at the link here.
The US's UFO problem
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Why the UFO problem was ignored for so long
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