BEYOND BLUE BOOK THE PENTAGON UFO REPORT IN CONTEXT

The US Director of National Intelligence released a ‘Preliminary assessment’ of the UAP mystery (see FT408:2) almost 74 years from the day that Kenneth Arnold’s sighting gave birth to the modern UFO mystery. Running to a mere six pages, excluding the cover and appendices, the brief unclassified summary is the same length as that produced by the British MoD’s Flying Saucer Working Party, with CIA input, at the height of the Cold War. This was used to reassure Prime Minister Winston Churchill after the USAF launched jet fighters to intercept unknown objects on radar over Washington DC in the summer of 1952 (see FT372:35-7).

But while earlier official studies tried to dismiss or debunk the subject, this new assessment breaks new ground by making UAPs, defined as “aerial objects not immediately identifiable”, a potential threat to national security. Despite this paradigm shift, the report received a mixed reception from the UFO disclosure movement, some of whom expected the US to announce it possessed hard evidence of advanced alien technology (see Nigel Watson’s summary in FT408:30).

Inevitably, attention has now turned to the content of a classified appendix that has been seen only by those with security clearance. But intelligence agencies need to protect their secret sources, so it is likely that only heavily redacted versions of this longer document