Mellon, Chris
: The Debrief,
: The Debrief, : The Debrief, AARO tries to dismiss much of the UAP phenomenon with an implausibly expansive secret-project laundry list, including some projects like the Apollo moon landings, which were never secret in the first place.
As noted above, AARO claims that many UAP sightings were the
result of misidentifications of new technologies that
observers would have understandably reported as UFOs. Observers unknowingly witnessed and reported as UFOs classified
and sensitive programs that AARO assesses most likely were the cause
of many UAP reports
s1smoothed quote correcting AARO grammar
errors etc.: See AAROR, p. 39.
Then AARO lists the Apollo program as one of 28 alleged examples s2pp. 40-45. (See previous comments on Apollo.)
In none of these 28 supposed secret classified programs does AARO cite a single UAP report by date or location (the claims regarding early U-2 spy planes are unsupported by evidence, see above).
Besides the surprising and unsubstantiated AARO claim that the first US satellite in 1958, the open and public Explorer 1, somehow caused UAP sightings, there are the bizarre listings of purported “UAP sighting misidentifications” of secret spy satellites belonging to these programs:
but again AARO does not cite an example of a single UAP sighting reported by people misidentifying any of these spy satellites as UAP. So why are they even listed?
Similarly, AARO lists as causing UAP sightings the various stealth and drone aircraft of:
Yet again, AARO fails to cite an example of a single UAP sighting reported by people misidentifying any of these aircraft and drones as UAP. There are surely some valid examples, but to assert that these programs were a primary source of UAP sightings is unwarranted. Civilian UAP sightings come from all areas of the US, rural, suburban, and urban, not just in the vicinity of US military ranges and bases.
The remaining “secret” projects on AARO’s list are too tedious to go over and include the highly publicized – not “classified and sensitive” – Mercury and Gemini programs that put the first US astronauts into space, and like the Apollo moon landings never caused reported UAP sightings of their space capsules.
AARO makes a point of ostentatiously exposing and knocking down easy strawman claims throughout the report, such as going back to the Blue Book era on the sensational alleged “Navy jet” (no one saw this jet) shooting off a one-pound “metal piece” (no such metal) of a UFO (no one saw) over the Washington, DC, area in July 1952. (s3AAROR, pp. 20, 26; the one-pound magnesium orthosilicate stone actually found was a rare type of aubrite-enstatite magnesium meteorite, although AARO did not do the research to figure that out.)
Another easy strawman that AARO revels in demolishing is the infamous and
long discredited “MJ-12” documents
evidently hoaxed by Air
Force’s own Office of Special Investigations personnel in the 1980s and 1990s (that Air Force role not mentioned by AARO of course) which appears to be an unlawful covert effort to manipulate
US citizens and US public opinion.
Without mentioning the MJ-12 reference in the so-called “1961 Special National Intelligence Estimate” (one of several MJ-12 docs), which would have been a clear tipoff, AARO goes through a showy display of ticking off point after point how badly the document was faked:
AARO found that the document lacked IC
[Intelligence Community] tradecraft standards” and had “significant inconsistencies with SNIE’s … of the [en ]
time period,
including incorrect formatting, inconsistent branding, lack of a dissemination block and
coordination language, loose narrative style, convoluted logic, imprecise and casual language, and … [strangely]
superficial treatment of globally significant [en ] issues
had it really been written in
en instead of being faked in the 1990s. (s4See AAROR, p. 31, plus added MJ-12
hoax background here not mentioned by AARO.) Does this suggest poor USAF
OSI tradecraft?