What happened
On 14 August 2020 the Pentagon announced that Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist had, ten days earlier, approved an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The Navy would lead it under the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Its stated mission was to detect, analyze and catalog UAP that could threaten US national security. The move followed a June 2020 vote by the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by acting chairman Marco Rubio, directing the intelligence community to study and report on unexplained aerial vehicles, and came only months after the Pentagon formally released three Navy UAP videos. Rubio framed the concern bluntly: things were flying over US bases that were not American, and it would be worse if they were a rival nation's technological leap. The task force, directed by Brennan McKernan, produced the June 2021 preliminary assessment for Congress. It was the first openly acknowledged Pentagon UAP body since Project Blue Book closed in 1969, and it was folded into a successor group in November 2021.
The original account
The Department of Defense established the UAPTF to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs. The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.
Department of Defense news release, 14 August 2020 (US government work, public domain)
The official explanation
Officials presented the task force as routine threat management: incursions by unauthorized aircraft into training ranges are taken seriously, including those initially reported as UAP. Many in Congress and the Pentagon suspected adversary drones or surveillance platforms rather than anything exotic, and the department did not characterize the phenomena as extraterrestrial. Skeptics noted that the task force mostly inherited Navy pilot reports with limited sensor data, and that its later preliminary assessment attributed the bulk of reports to likely physical objects such as clutter, balloons or foreign systems rather than anything beyond known technology.
The anomalous case
The task force existed because the military had a problem it could not solve with ordinary tools. The Navy's own pilots had reported repeated incursions by unknown objects since 2014, and the Pentagon had just called three such encounters unidentified. Rubio said publicly that the objects were not American and that the government did not know what they were. Reporting at the time indicated that a program like AATIP had continued informally after 2012, which Luis Elizondo had claimed. The task force later told Congress it could explain only one of 144 cases. To those who see a deeper mystery, a formal Pentagon unit chartered to examine the nature and origins of these objects was a quiet admission that the old explanations were no longer adequate.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- DoD release on the establishment of the UAPTF (reproduced) official, theblackvault.com
Sources
- Pentagon creates UFO task force to see if aerial objects pose threat Military Times
- UAP / UFO Task Force Information Released by Pentagon The Black Vault
- All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (history of UAPTF) Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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