A sweeping review of reported UFO sightings by federal agencies that was ordered by President Trump in 2017 will culminate with no more than 25 percent of reported reports being placed into various categories for investigation.
The memo from the White House and guidance issued by the Pentagon, obtained by The Daily Beast, asked agencies to prepare guidance on how they would separate UFO reports from their existing or future funding for higher priority missions.
The memo said that among those categories will be:
-Unidentified Flying Objects
-Unidentified Unidentified Aerial Vehicles
-Unidentified Aerial Encounters
-Unidentified Flying and Unmanned Vehicles
-Wings, a vehicle about an airplane with nothing on it
-Radar
-Radar encounters
The memo said that as part of its objectives, the organizations would, “identify and categorize additional types of perceived or experienced phenomena reported by affected members of the public (including anomalous report types not listed previously; such as unclassified phenomena that do not meet the AUSAET criteria); identify reporting formats that should be adopted to better serve members of the public; enhance how incidents or sightings of unidentified objects are reported, and link UFO reports to specific mission priorities.”
The intent is to improve the system and keep the public informed. Since 2001, about 70,000 people have sent in UFO reports to the Defense Department, with the vast majority of those reports coming from the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom.
“For some time, we have been concerned about the volume of UFO reporting to various agencies,” a U.S. military official said in an email. “In order to increase the reliability of reports and improve the quality of the reports we receive, we are undertaking a research project to improve the quality of reports to ensure we are using the most effective methods to investigate these reports that meet the expected standards and requirements.”
The experiments have been running for the past 18 months and are likely to continue at least through the end of the year.
Alexandra Deabler is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. who writes about foreign policy and technology. She earned a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Miami and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia.