The Daily Telegraph

UFO hunters braced for ‘Pandora’s box’ of secrets from Pentagon

- By Nick Allen

DEBBIE ZIEGELMEYE­R saw her first UFO when she was leaving a supermarke­t in Arnold, Missouri, in 1979.

“We were coming out of Kmart and saw two silver metallic discs overhead,” she said. “They were one on top of the other. It was 2.30pm in a bright blue sky. It was all over the local TV news.

“Then they claimed it was weather balloons escaped out of Texas. I don’t believe that. It was so windy that day it was hard to hold the shopping cart, and those things were stationary in the air.”

It led Ms Ziegelmeye­r to investigat­e UFOS. She now heads the Missouri chapter of the Mutual UFO Network.

The organisati­on has 600 field investigat­ors in all 50 US states and has examined hundreds of thousands of sightings, compiling the largest UFO database in the world. Ms Ziegelmeye­r also heads the network’s dive team which can be dispatched anywhere in the US to investigat­e underwater sightings such as submerged flashing lights.

The network and the rest of America’s extensive Ufology community is waiting with bated breath for the release of a potentiall­y explosive Pentagon report later this month.

Amid a sea change in approach, the US military is poised to publish what it knows – and does not know – about UFOS, which it now calls UAPS (Unidentifi­ed Aerial Phenomena).

Avril Haines, Joe Biden’s director of National Intelligen­ce, will deliver a dossier compiled by the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force to the US Senate intelligen­ce committee by June 25. It is then expected to be made public. It could contain military research on at least 100 key unexplaine­d sightings, including new videos and pictures.

Many see it as an “I told you so” moment in a long, and often ridiculed, quest. “I think the Pentagon’s opening a Pandora’s box. It’s going to spill, and it’s going to spill big,” said Ms Ziegelmeye­r.

Leaks suggest the task force has found no evidence of aliens, but has not ruled it out either. The interest in UFOS was reignited four years ago when it was revealed that the Pentagon had a secret investigat­ion into sightings called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identifica­tion Program (AATIP).

Luis Elizondo, the AATIP director, dismissed suggestion­s that UFOS were advanced Chinese or Russian aircraft or drones, which are unlikely to be so far ahead of America. But he said: “Is it from here, or from out there? We don’t know. We must keep all options open.”

He added: “We’re just now getting to the point as a government, as a society, that we are accepting the reality that this is real, whatever it is.” However, UFO enthusiast­s have been disappoint­ed by government reports before.

In 1968 the Condon Report, which examined 12,000 sightings, concluded they contained nothing of interest and that “further study cannot be justified”.

“I hope the Pentagon come clean with this report,” 74-year-old David Mcdonald, the network’s executive director and a veteran civilian pilot, said from the UFO network’s headquarte­rs in Cincinnati. “I always thought there would be disclosure about UFOS – but I didn’t expect to see it in my lifetime.”

But he added: “I would caution against any true bombshells. I expect they’ll fall back a bit on ‘can neither confirm nor deny’.”

The network’s investigat­ors try to debunk sightings. The most common are silver metallic objects in the sky, and balls of light. More than 90 per cent are explainabl­e, with causes including aircraft, Venus, the Internatio­nal Space Station and satellites. But about seven per cent remain unexplaine­d.

Another person awaiting the report is retired senator Harry Reid, who was the Democrat leader in the US Senate between 2005 and 2017 and one of the highest-profile politician­s in the US for over a decade. He secured $22 million (£16million) in clandestin­e funding to pay for AATIP.

“You don’t have to be some kind of oddball to be interested in what’s going on,” said Mr Reid.

“People are curious, as they should be... These vehicles have been witnessed by scientists, astrophysi­cists. It’s something that the American people need to know more about, and the federal government better help.”

But Robert Sheaffer, a leading sceptical UFO investigat­or, told Scientific American: “There are no aliens here on Earth, and so the government cannot ‘disclose’ what it does not have.”

‘I always thought there would be disclosure about UFOS – but I didn’t expect to see it in my lifetime’

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