Are flying saucers real? Sorry, we still don’t know. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a much-anticipated report today on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)—also known as UFOs—and the verdict is…impossible to identify. Citing a need for more research, the assessment basically punts on the question, summing up its findings nicely in a single header: “AVAILABLE REPORTING LARGELY INCONCLUSIVE.”
The study looked at 144 accounts of UAPs that have been made over the past 17 years. Upon investigation, one of them turned out to be a balloon. As for the remaining 143 objects? They remain unexplained. “The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP,” notes the document. Fair enough.
The anticlimactic results are likely disappointing to UFO believers such as Steve Bassett, a lobbyist for the Paradigm Research Group who focuses on extraterrestrial life. This report (which he referred to as “the Disclosure event”), would be “the biggest event in human history,” Bassett predicted to Politico in May. “It’s almost impossible to measure it.”
In a way, Bassett is correct: it will be difficult to measure the impact of the findings. Our guess is it will be quite small.
Daniella Byck joined Washingtonian in 2022. She was previously with Outside Magazine and lives in Northeast DC.
