WASHINGTON D.C.- Florida Senator Marco Rubio appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes on May 16 to speak about his push for military reports of UFO or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)
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WASHINGTON D.C.- Florida Senator Marco Rubio appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes on May 16 to speak about his push for military reports of UFO or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) to be taken seriously.
“Anything that enters an airspace that’s not supposed to be there is a threat,” said Sen Rubio to 60 Minutes reporter Bill Whitaker.
Shortly after receiving a classified briefing on UAPs, the senator called for a more detailed analysis. In December 2020 he asked the Pentagon and the Director of National Intelligence to present an unclassified report on UAPs to Congress by June 2021.
In August 2020 the Pentagon established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, with a mission to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.
With that task force in place, service members in the United States military are now encouraged to report any encounters with UAPs.
Former Navy pilot Lieutenant Ryan Graves told 60 Minutes his F/A-18F squadron would see unidentified aerial phenomena in restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach every day for at least a couple years starting in 2014.
Luis Elizondo, a veteran with 20 years of experience in intelligence operations, was the head of a predecessor to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in 2008. That program was shuttered in 2012.
“I'm not telling you that it doesn't sound wacky,” said Elizondo. “What I'm telling you is it's real. The question is, what is it? What are its intentions? What are its capabilities?”
“Imagine a technology that can do 6-to-700 g-forces," explained Elizondo, “that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space. And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity. That's precisely what we're seeing.”
Elizondo said that in some cases there are simple explanations for what people are witnessing. But added that when you have exhausted all the what ifs and you're still left with the fact that this is in American airspace and it's real, that's when it becomes problematic.
”I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,” concluded Sen. Rubio. “I want us to have a process to analyze the data every time it comes in. That there be a place where this is cataloged and constantly analyzed, until we get some answers. Maybe it has a very simple answer. Maybe it doesn't.”