Coming soon – the truth about flying saucers

For UFO enthusiasts, John Ratcliffe’s statement was the answer to their prayers. The one-time director of US national intelligence had just been asked about a forthcoming report from the defence department and intelligence agencies. “Frankly,” he told an interviewer on Fox News, “there are a lot more sightings than have been made public.” The report would include ones from all over the world.

“When we talk about sightings,” he explained, “we are talking about objects that have been seen by navy or air force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for; or travelling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

Ratcliffe emphasised that the government takes reports of UFOs – also known as UAPs – with a pinch of salt. Its general inclination is to ascribe them to weather disturbances or secret technology developed by another country.

“We always look for a plausible application. Sometimes we wonder whether our adversaries have technologies that are a little bit farther down the road than we thought or that we realised. But there are instances where we don’t have good explanations.”

The report stems from the release of three videos by the defence department last April. Showing UFOs spotted by pilots on training flights, they prompted demands from Congress for a more serious approach to the subject.

In August, the defence department created a taskforce to “detect, analyse and catalogue UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to US national security”. When Congress passed a government funding act in December, it included a clause obliging the national intelligence agency and the defence department to issue a report within six months.

According to John Ratcliffe, there are “multiple sensors” around the world collecting information on the subject. In January, the CIA released thousands of documents which, it said, contained all its records about UFOs. They included an eyewitness account of one near Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and a report on mysterious explosions in a Russian town.

But there have been complaints that the CIA is being less open than it claims. The founder of Black Vault, a website devoted to declassified government documents, notes that the agency issued its records in an outdated format which makes them very difficult to go through.

There are doubts, too, about the reliability of Ratcliffe’s statement. His appointment as director of national intelligence by Donald Trump was highly controversial, since he had little experience of the sector.

His only qualification appeared to be unquestioning loyalty to the president. And indeed Trump’s first attempt to appoint him failed, when it emerged that Ratcliffe had exaggerated his experience as a prosecutor in terrorism and immigration cases.

Are UFOs a sign of growing alien interest?

Saucer resources

Some say, yes. Ratcliffe’s statement confirms what many people have long suspected – that there is no shortage of convincing evidence for UFOs’ existence, and governments have been deliberately keeping the public in the dark. The fact that they are now finally admitting the truth shows that alien activity has become too frequent to cover up any longer.

Others argue that the existence of aliens and UFOs is wishful thinking on the part of sci-fi enthusiasts. Most of the “sightings” in the report will have perfectly simple explanations. The astronaut Tim Peake tells of spotting “three lights moving in formation” from the International Space Station. He took them for alien craft; they turned out to be drops of urine leaking from a Russian probe.