UFOs now UAPs and France says USA, Russia and China should co-operate on airborne 'security threats'

In 2021, I think we can flip that sentence, and say after the accumulation of military-grade evidence, starting with the June 25 Preliminary Assessment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), how can you not?

Here's a credible wing of the military/intelligence apparatus of the United States - whose governments have publicly pooh-poohed UFOs since the day they said a weather balloon and not a UFO as previously announced had crashed at Roswell, New Mexico - changing its mind.

It's admitting to at least 18 incidents since 2004, recorded using "multiple sensors" and featuring UAPs that could "remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, manoeuvre abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion".

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It says they could be advanced but undeclared military equipment, whether it's theirs, China's or Russia's, but they doubt it.

Whatever they are, the Preliminary Assessment says they "clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to US national security".

This report was a bit of a letdown in terms of sensationalist headlines, but the meagre nine-page document made public was the "unclassified" version.

The ODNI has confirmed that a "classified" report went to the US Congress.

It hasn't leaked yet, but a description of it gleaned from an FOI request showed that it - or an executive summary - is at least 17 pages long.

Not huge, but almost twice the size of the public version.

Either way, the release of the US report seems to have overshadowed a subsequent paper released by a French group, the Scientific Society of Aeronautics and Space.

The society has military members, including two brigadiers-general, as well as scientists and engineers. Its report comes from the organisation's "3AF-SIGMA 2 technical commission" and is titled SIGMA 2 Work progress summary 2021.

The English version is a slim 19 pages.

It roves more widely than the US investigation, looking at UAP reports from around the world.

The group said it began its work in 2013, "by confronting [sightings] with the laws of physics and the theories of standard science" and asking questions about "new theories", making for "a subject barely sketched out".

Like the Americans, the French find much that cannot be conventionally explained.

However they also debunk a major Chilean sighting from 2014, saying an object seen from a navy Cougar helicopter and backed up with radar and infra-red footage was an Iberian Airbus 340 jet, not a UFO. So they are not getting carried away.

The French say they have not investigated Chinese UAP reports "so far", but say CIA archives reveal 1990s meetings between Russian and Chinese experts on the subject.

They also note advanced Chinese into "meta-materials", which are supposedly similar to UFO materials allegedly "recovered" decades ago.

In the lead-up to the US June 25 report, Chinese media reported that the People's Liberation Army was using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse data relating to what it calls "unidentified air conditions".

The French reports said "regular incursions into Chinese airspace" were regarded as "a security problem".

They also looked at Russian government studies, including "very numerous observations of flying or aquatic objects (nicknamed Quakers)" by the Soviet navy as far back as the 1970s.

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The French investigators said they were cross-checking the "electromagnetic signatures" of some "shape-changing" UAPs with known phenomena, such the high-temperature "ionised plasma" in ball lightning.

Even so, the "brutal accelerations" and hypersonic speeds observed could "not be explained" by plasmas of natural origin.

They say their conclusions mirror America's and China's, and that data-sharing would be a good "first step" in finding out what was really going on.

Even if the big three each deny having the technology they all say they are bothered about, there are plenty of insanely streamlined things in the skies already to confuse the public, as our accompanying photographs make clear.

As futuristic as they are, they're a long way from the "gimbals" and "tic-tacs" of the shape-shifting UAPs - which, if real, are moving and turning at such speed as to be unbelievable.

And that's without the sightings of craft that either shoot up out of the water, or plummet down into it without boiling the surrounding water.

So what's going on?

It's possible that the US and China, especially, are simply world-class poker bluffers.

They each know a bit about each other's hand, but their own cards are held so closely that they could be aces or twos.

Or they could be playing poker with the public, slipping jokers into the deck.

It would be wonderful to know what the classified version of the US report says.

But even on what we have, I find it difficult to believe that all of those highly trained jet pilots and radar operators and intelligence specialists are being fooled by flocks of geese or heat inversions or sprite lightning.

The French report ends by asking whether the world is "past the stage of prejudice or disbelief", and starting an era when "scepticism gives way to scientific curiosity in the face of the unknown"?

I'd like to think so.

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