It’s UFO! (not UAP)
On March 24th of 2016 while campaigning for the presidency of the United States, Hillary Clinton was on the Jimmy Kimmel show talking about the UFO phenomenon. She told Jimmy the term isn’t called UFO anymore, but the latest nomenclature is, Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon or UAP. Like Jimmy, I also prefer the term UFO, for Unidentified Flying Object, because it’s more traditional. But on my website, I changed the acronym to, “Unconventional Flying Objects” reflecting the book, “Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis”, written by a respected NASA scientist, Paul Hill (1995).
(Excerpt from Amazon Books)
Paul Hill was a well-respected NASA scientist when, in the early 1950s, he had a UFO sighting. Soon after, he built the first flying platform and was able to duplicate the UFO’s tilt-to-control maneuvers. Official policy, however, prevented him from proclaiming his findings. “I was destined,” says Hill, “to remain as unidentified as the flying objects.”
For the next twenty-five years, Hill acted as an unofficial clearing house at NASA, collecting and analyzing sightings’ reports for physical properties, propulsion possibilities, dynamics, etc. To refute claims that UFOs defy the laws of physics, he had to make “technological sense … of the unconventional object.”
After his retirement from NASA, Hill finally completed his remarkable analysis. In Unconventional Flying Objects, published posthumously, he presents his findings that UFOs “obey, not defy, the laws of physics.” Vindicating his own sighting and thousands of others, he proves that UFO technology is not only explainable, but attainable.
The term UFO or “Unidentified Flying Object” goes back to the early 1950’s in which US aviator Donald Keyhoe had referenced the term in his book. The term, “Flying Saucers” derived from the June 24th, 1947 Kenneth Arnold citing, in which he had seen multiple objects fly past Mount Rainier, Washington State. Arnold described the objects shaped as “flat like a pie pan”, “shaped like a pie plate”, “half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear”, “something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of convex triangle in the rear, or simply “saucer-like or “, “like a big flat disk”. From these multiple descriptions, the press compressed the term down to, “Flying Saucers”.
The term UAP was actually derived from a 400 page document titled, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” created from Project Condign, a secret UFO study undertaken by the British Government Defense Intelligence Staff (DIS) between 1997 and 2000. The project was released into the public on May 15th, 2006 after a September 2005 Freedom of Information Act was requested by UFO researchers, Dr David Clarke and Gary Anthony.
NARCAP, or the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to the studying UAP’s and aviation safety for the public. Their website was down at the time of the writing of this blog, and their Facebook page hadn’t been updated since November 27th of 2016, so I’m going by memory. One of the things they boasted was, this website was the place where airline pilots could report a UAP sighting. I believe they re-adjusted the Project Condign report name from, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” to their name, “Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon”.
The general thought was, airline pilots, especially commercial airline pilots, had no place they could officially report a UFO sighting, so NARCAP was one place they could report it. But… in the book, “The 37th Parallel”, written by Ben Mezrich about my personal life pertaining to Ufology, Ben found an actual FAA handbook showing there was a place where airline pilots, especially commercial ones, could report a UFO sighting without dire circumstances.
So who do they report sightings to? A government agency? Maybe the FAA themselves? No… The manual clearly states to report the sightings to BAAS, a division of Bigelow Aerospace Company, a private company.
Excerpt from the book, “The 37th Parallel”.
What would conspiracy theorists and the general public think if they realized that, right in the FAA handbook, there was a section on what a pilot was supposed to do when he encountered a UFO? Even more astonishing, the pilot was ordered to report the sighting, not to a government agency, but to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, a sister company to Bigelow Aerospace…
The section describing this is [ 4-4-4, Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) Reports].
For more information on this, see Chapter 22, from the book “The 37th Parallel”, Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, released September 6th, 2016.
Now jump forward to May 28th, 2017, on CBS News 60 Minutes show, Lara Logan interviewed Robert Bigelow founder of Bigelow Aerospace, in which he admits on TV, the UFO phenomenon is real!
(Excerpts from the 60 minutes show, courtesy CBS News)
Lara Logan: Do you believe in aliens?
Robert Bigelow: I’m absolutely convinced. That’s all there is to it.
Lara Logan: Do you also believe that UFOs have come to Earth?
Robert Bigelow: There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence. And I spent millions and millions and millions — I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.
Lara Logan: Is it risky for you to say in public that you believe in UFOs and aliens?
Robert Bigelow: I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.
Lara Logan: You don’t worry that some people will say, “Did you hear that guy, he sounds like he’s crazy”?
Robert Bigelow: I don’t care.
Also in the 60 Minutes news show, this is stated:
The FAA confirmed to us that for years, it referred reports of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena to a company Bigelow owns. He told us he’s had his own close encounters, but declined to go into detail.
So there you have it, not only can pilots report unusual sightings through official FAA guidelines, but the guidelines still referred the objects as, “UFOs”, not “UAPs”! Not only that, but Ben Mezrich’s book, “The 37th Parallel” released information about the FAA reporting guidelines pertaining to UFO sightings, 6 months before the CBS News 60 Minutes TV show went public with it. I wonder if they had read the book?
So let’s drop the UAP term and use the term the FAA and Bigelow Aerospace still use today, UFO; Because any other term would be… just wrong.
Link to 60 Minutes Interview with Robert Bigelow.
60 Minutes Bigelow Interview
Category: In the News, The Z-Files
