National Security Council spokesman John Kirby acknowledged during a Monday press conference that unidentified flying objects (UFO) and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) are creating difficulties for the U.S. Air Force.
Asked by NewsNation’s Blake Burman during Monday’s White House press briefing if increased sightings of UFOs and UAPs are perceived as a “legitimate issue” for the Biden administration, Kirby explained that the administration is taking the reported sightings “seriously.”
“Yeah, I mean, we wouldn’t have stood up an organization at the Pentagon to analyze and try to collect and coordinate the way these sightings are reported if we didn’t take it seriously,” he said.
Last year, the Department of Defense announced the formation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to analyze and catalogue unidentified objects.
During Monday’s press conference, Kirby noted that some of the UFOs and UAPs have impacted the U.S. Air Force’s training ranges.
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“Some of these phenomena we know have already had an impact on our training ranges for, you know, when pilots are out trying to do training in the air and they see these things, they’re not sure what they are and it can have an impact on their ability to perfect their skills,” he said. “So it already had an impact here.”
According to the Daily Mail, while Kirby insisted that the Pentagon is taking the issue of UFOs seriously, he refused to answer questions regarding recent whistleblower claims, such as David Grusch, a retired senior intelligence officer who claims that the government has been covering up UFO crashes.
“Now we’re not saying what they are or what they’re not, we’re saying that there’s something our pilots are seeing, we’re saying it has had an effect on some of our training operations, and so we wanna get to the bottom of it,” Kirby said. “We wanna understand it better.”
According to The Hill, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has recently promoted a bipartisan bill that would require the government to reveal UFO documents that have not previously been released.
Additionally, the House Oversight Committee is preparing to hold a hearing next week on UFOs in light of whistleblower testimony that claims the U.S. military has recovered the remains of non-human aircraft.
