USA: The Pentagon opens a website for reporting UFOs – News – WDR – News

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is the name of the agency that has been in the United States since last year and is part of the Department of Defense. In recent years, Congress has put increasing pressure on the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to better explain the increasing sightings of unidentified flying objects.

Pilots risk revealing secrets

Information about these sightings is published on the now live website – this also includes photos and videos. There should also be the option to report sightings directly via the site. This function is primarily aimed at military personnel, such as pilots. It should now be easier for them to report on phenomena observed in the sky without risking the problems of revealing secrets.

Experts suspect that many unidentified flying objects are military test objects: drones, missiles or aircraft. The new website aims to provide citizens and the US government with a better overview of reported cases. The Deputy Secretary of Defense had already described the dilemma at a hearing in May last year: “On the one hand, the US military wants to be transparent to the public, but on the other hand, some military information must be protected – that is, kept.” Secret.”

Alleged UFO recovery program

Just in July, a former military man from the Pentagon claimed under oath that the Department of Defense had had a program to recover and examine crashed UFOs for decades. The head of AARO has rejected this, saying his agency has found no evidence of “non-human technology.”

Volunteer researchers from Lüdenscheid

Hans-Werner Benniger has been researching UFO sightings on a volunteer basis for 50 years; There is no government institution for this purpose in Germany. In the early 1970s he founded the Society for the Investigation of UFO Phenomenon (GEP) in Lüdenscheid. According to its statements, the association distances itself from esoteric methods and the appropriation of the topic by extremist right-wing groups. Benniger cannot imagine that all cases reported in the United States will be investigated; There will likely be too many cases and the effort will be too great.

“We check what the airspace looked like. Was there conventional air movement. What were the meteorological conditions? Should the astronomical situation be reconstructed at the time of observation? Of course we cannot always interpret observations 100%, but we use probabilities.”

In 2018, for example, a woman told the association that there were several oval objects in her photos of a rainbow. The association was able to prove that the objects were reflections of internal lighting because the images were taken through a glass plate. In August 2023 alone, the association received 33 new reports of foreign objects, which are under investigation.

“The inhibition threshold for reporting has decreased.”says Hans-Werner Benniger. “We communicate with eyewitnesses who saw something amazing 20 years ago. We also record such cases. Maybe you cannot investigate them after such a long time, but we document them.”