UFOs & UAPs

The GAO located only two government records from 1947 about the event: the 509th Bomb Group’s history for July 1947, which says the "flying disc" was later determined to be a radar-tracking balloon, and an FBI teletype of 8 July 1947 describing an object "resembling a high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector".^[2]

Interest revived in the late 1970s, when researchers interviewed people who had been at or near the base, including intelligence officer Jesse Marcel, who said the debris was unlike a balloon. Other later accounts described bodies and a secret recovery.^[11] These are recollections given decades after the event.

The Air Force’s 1997 report argued that activities spread over many years — balloon tests with anthropomorphic dummies in the 1950s, a 1956 KC-97 crash that killed 11 airmen and a 1959 balloon accident — had been merged in memory into a few days in July 1947.^[3]

In his written statement to Congress in 2023, Commander David Fravor said that controllers on the cruiser USS Princeton had for two weeks been tracking objects that descended rapidly from above 80,000 feet, and that his training flight was redirected to investigate. He described a small white object with no rotors, wings or visible flight controls moving abruptly above a patch of disturbed water.^[10]

Fravor said the object climbed to meet his aircraft and then "rapidly accelerated and disappeared" as he closed on it, and that controllers then reported it on radar at the flight’s pre-arranged holding point roughly 60 miles away, less than a minute later. He wrote that it was "far superior" to anything the US had then or has now.^[10]

Fravor said a crew that launched after his flight recorded the roughly 90-second infrared video. The Department of Defense later authorised its release with two 2015 videos, saying the phenomena "remain characterized as unidentified".^[10],[6]

Grusch, a former intelligence officer who served on the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, said in his statement that he became a whistleblower through an "Urgent Concern" filing with the Intelligence Community Inspector General. He said he was informed of "a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program" but denied access to it, and that his testimony was based on information from others: "I am speaking to the facts as I have been told them."^[12]

Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves described an incident in 2014 in Warning Area W-72 off Virginia Beach in which a pilot in his squadron reported "a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere", and urged better reporting channels for military and commercial pilots.^[13] Fravor repeated his account of the 2004 Nimitz encounter and called for congressional oversight of any programmes holding such technology.^[10]

Under questioning, Grusch said that "biologics came with some of these recoveries" and that they were "nonhuman" — "the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to". Asked whether people had been harmed to conceal the programme, he said "Yes, personally", and that he knew of colleagues who "got physically injured". He repeatedly said the supporting details could be discussed only in a classified setting.^[14]