Former Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration, John Ratcliffe, has claimed there is solid evidence that certain extraterrestrial craft can break the sound barrier without causing a sonic boom and perform extraordinary manoeuvres at breakneck speeds - something impossible to achieve if equipped with human technology.
"There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified", Ratcliffe shared with Fox News, referencing earlier revealed sightings by Navy pilots:
"And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain".
Ratcliffe stressed to Fox host Maria Bartiromo that the sightings, akin to the aforementioned ones, had been registered all around the globe, with alien hunters currently looking forward to the White House meeting its earlier set deadline and issuing an updated report on the out-of-this-world matter and number of sightings to date.
Findings of Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme Still Ahead
Last December, Trump put his signature on a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill requiring government agencies to publish a report in the next six months.
Sen. Marco Rubio, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, tasked the government with including a "detailed analysis of unidentified phenomena data" in restricted US airspace. The latter is encompassed in a highly sensitive government project titled the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme (AATIP).
Ratcliffe said he had hoped to publish the findings before he left office on 20 January, but the preparatory work took quite a lot of time, he said.
"We weren't able to get it down into an unclassified format quickly enough", he remarked.
'Black Vault' Venture
In January, a "treasure trove" of UFO-related documents from the CIA was declassified and saw the light of day thanks to the efforts of journalist John Greenwald Jr and his team.
The campaign to make the documents public dates back to the 1980s and was led by Greenwald, who is currently running the website "Black Vault", where the declassified dossiers can be downloaded by anyone wishing to.
"Around 20 years ago, I had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA", Greenewald told Motherboard, detailing his painstaking effort:
"It was like pulling teeth! I went around and around with them to try and do so, finally achieving it. I received a large box, of a couple thousand pages, and I had to scan them in one page at a time".
Greenwald referred to the landmark documents as the result of 10,000 Freedom of Information requests, asserting that the government agency made it a huge challenge for those interested to get access to the findings.
"The CIA has made it INCREDIBLY difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner", Greenwald told the site.
"They offer a format that is very outdated (multi page .tif) and offer text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a 'search' tool".
"In my opinion, this outdated format makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose", the journalist lamented.