The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is looking into the 510 new UFO sighting reports that the U.S. government received from around the country. The data was made available as part of the Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) for the year 2022.
The US government has confirmed that there has been a three-times increase in the sightings since 2021. The intent is to increase awareness of airspace and increase opportunities to resolve the UAP incidents. According to the report, 247 new sightings were reported and another 119 were either discovered or reported after the initial assessment period.
According to the ODNI, there has been a decrease in the stigma associated with UAP sightings as a result of a better understanding of the potential threats that it may pose.
The majority of the sightings were recorded by pilots from the United States Navy and Air Force. The report noted that the majority of UAP events continue to take place in restricted or sensitive airspace, raising potential concerns regarding the safety of flight or adversary collection activity. “We continue to assess that this may result from focused attention and guidance to report anomalies, combined with a collection bias due to the number of active aircraft and sensors,” the report added.
Six of the 366 newly identified reports were classified as clutter—birds, weather events, or airborne debris like plastic bags—and 163 were classified as balloons or balloon-like entities, according to the analysis.
In response to the increasing number of such sightings, Nasa established a 16-member team in 2022 to answer these decades-old questions. In October, the nine-month study will begin. During the first public hearing on UFOs in half a century, a high-ranking US defense official had also informed lawmakers that an increasing number of unidentified flying objects had been observed in the sky over the past two decades.
In December of last year, the US Department of Defense stated that such reports had not been investigated. On the other hand, it resulted in hundreds of brand-new reports about strange, unidentified objects, whether they were in space, in the sky, or even underwater.
According to a statement made by Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, “I have not seen anything in those holdings to date that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation, an alien crash, or anything like that,” as reported by Reuters.
