The U.S. Navy is updating guidelines for pilots who encounter unexplained aerial phenomena or unidentified flying objects — known everywhere as UFOs.
Can the U.S. Air Force be far behind?
Politico first reported the Navy’s new stance, and other media outlets have picked up on the report in recent days.
"The Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities," the Navy told political news site Politico. "A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."
Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, which anchors Air Force research and logistics work, has long been associated with UFO lore.
For decades, there were rumors that the base served as a storehouse for the remnants of a UFO or UFOs that allegedly crashed in the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
“Obviously, the Air Force took this seriously to an extent because they had collection and analysis of programs for nearly a quarter of a century, so certainly I took it seriously,” UFO researcher Raymond Szymanski told the Dayton Daily News in 2017.
And in December 2017, the Pentagon confirmed to Dayton Daily News and other outlets that it investigated service members’ claims of reported UFO sightings decades after Project Blue Book, once headquartered at Wright-Patterson concluded.
Szymanski is a former Air Force Research Laboratory Sensors Directorate senior engineer who wrote “50 Shades of Greys: Evidence of Extraterrestrial Visitation to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Beyond.”
Media representatives for Wright-Patterson said Thursday they would look into questions sent by the Dayton Daily News about whether the Air Force could consider making its own changes in guidelines for reporting UFOs.
RELATED: Pentagon had $22 million program to investigate UFOs
A media operations specialist for the secretary of the Air Force’s public affairs desk also took questions Thursday.
About the Author
