Pentagon Now Required to Research Mysterious 1945 UFO Incident at Trinity Nuclear Test Site
19:32 GMT 13.01.2023 (Updated: 16:54 GMT 31.07.2023)
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Pressure has been building on the US government in recent years to provide explanations for the burgeoning number of sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), as well as long-unsolved mysteries going back decades. While many believe them to be alien spacecraft, the Pentagon is more concerned about their likely Earthly origins.
When the US Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last month, it included an unusual amendment, tacked on at the last minute, extending the date range in which its new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was required to look into UAP reports.
US Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who drafted the amendment, told US media on Friday that the probe would be “an important step that will give us a more comprehensive understanding of what we know - and don’t know - about incidents impacting our military.”
The previous language set a start date of 1947, when the infamous Roswell incident occurred in eastern New Mexico. However, the date has now been pushed back to 1945 to include another, less-well-known incident that happened at the Trinity Test Site, where the first nuclear bomb was detonated.
If you fancy yourself a UFO enthusiast and have never heard of the 1945 Trinity incident, don’t fret: neither have most, since the Pentagon reportedly tried to keep it very quiet. Only in recent years has information about it become known, after three witnesses came forward and ended decades of silence.
20 May 2021, 15:05 GMT
Much of the work to bring the incident to light has been done by researchers Paola Leopizzi Harris, an Italian investigative journalist, and Jacques Vallée, the pioneering computer scientist-turned UFOlogist. Together, they published a book in 2021 called "TRINITY: The Best-Kept Secret.”
Talking to the British press at the time, Christopher Mellon, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense, called the duo’s findings a “fresh reason to believe that our government is concealing physical proof of alien technology."
According to their book, on August 16, 1945, just a month after the Trinity nuclear test in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico, two kid cowboys, nine-year-old Jose Padilla and seven-year-old Reme Baca, heard a crash. They reportedly saw an avocado-shaped craft, inside of which were two mantis-like occupants, one of whom was in pain.
The object reportedly struck a communications tower during its descent, and the two boys witnessed the Army trying to remove it.
A third witness, bomber pilot Lt. Col William Brothy, was coming in for a landing at the nearby Alamogordo air base when air traffic controllers asked him to investigate the sudden loss of signal from a communications tower. Brothy’s report describes the damage to the tower, as well as the egg-shaped object and the two boys huddled around it.
17 December 2022, 03:58 GMT
The three kept silent about the incident for decades before coming forth with their story in 2003.
One fragment of the object reportedly still remains - a piece the boys kept hidden under one of their houses. In 2015, Vallée had the fragment analyzed using spectroscopy, but the results were unremarkable: the metal was aluminum alloyed with copper and silicon, and contained isotopic ratios typical of metals found on Earth. Such a material was in common use in the 1940s for parts and casings for combustion-powered engines.
However, as a result of the 2023 NDAA, the Pentagon will now be required to produce a complete report on the incident, as part of a comprehensive timeline of all UAPs along with their explanations - or lack thereof.
A report published on Thursday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed a dramatic increase in UAP reports in recent years, with 366 new or newly identified reports being uncovered in the last two years. In the previous 17 years, just 144 reports had been found.
“The American public can reasonably expect to get some answers to questions that have been burning in the minds of millions of Americans for many years,” Mellon told US media on Friday. “If nothing else, this should either clear up something that’s been a cloud hanging over the Air Force and Department of Defense for decades or it might lead in another direction, which could be truly incredible. There’s a lot at stake.”
