Government Photo Shows ‘Motionless, Cube-Shaped’ UFO
Andrew Daniels, Popular Mechanics | 8 December 2020
The U.S. Intelligence Community has known about the mysterious object for two years. What could it be?
An unclassified image that’s reportedly been circulated among U.S. intelligence agencies shows what appears to be unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), the Pentagon’s term for unidentified flying objects. The object in the photo has been described by U.S. officials as silver and “cube-shaped,” according to a report from The Debrief, which first shared the image.Andrew Daniels, Popular Mechanics | 8 December 2020
The U.S. Intelligence Community has known about the mysterious object for two years. What could it be?
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The leaked photo dates back to 2018, when it materialized in an intelligence report from the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), the Department of Defense’s (DoD) official unit that investigates UAP sightings.
In August, the Pentagon approved the establishment of the task force as the first on-the-books government UFO program since a 2000s-era unit lost its funding in 2012. However, multiple sources confirmed with Popular Mechanics earlier this year that the unit remained active in secrecy after its shuttering. According to The Debrief, the UATPF has briefed government and military officials on UAP matters for the last two years; the newly surfaced image appeared in a report issued by the task force during that time.
The Debrief’s Tim McMillan, a contributor to Popular Mechanics, learned of the photo’s existence from a “defense official who has been verified as being in a position to have access to the UAPTF’s intelligence reports,” he writes. Three other government officials confirmed with McMillan that the photo, which was shared on a secure network used by the U.S. Intelligence Community, comes from a 2018 task force report.
A military pilot reportedly encountered the object while flying over the Atlantic Ocean on the East Coast of the U.S. in 2018 and captured it with their personal cell phone. It’s likely that a backseat weapons system operator on an F/A-18F Super Hornet took the photo of the object, which McMillan calls “inverted” and “bell-shaped,” and describes it having “ridges or other protrusions along its lateral edges, extending toward its base.”
Is the object a research balloon? Probably not, two defense officials tell McMillan.
“Pilots who encountered the object described that, unlike a balloon under similar conditions, the object was completely motionless and seemingly unaffected by ambient air currents,” he writes.
In a July New York Times article, Harry Reid, the former Nevada senator who was instrumental in funding the government’s original UFO program, said he believes
“crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied.” Reid said he came to the conclusion that “there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” according to reports.
In the same Times article, the astrophysicist Eric Davis, who consulted with the Pentagon’s original UFO program and now works for the defense contractor Aerospace Corporation, said that after he examined certain materials, he came to the conclusion that
“we couldn’t make [them] ourselves.” In fact, Davis briefed a DoD agency as recently as March about retrieving materials from “off-world vehicles not made on this Earth.”
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