U.S. Senator Sponsors Effort to Create 'Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office' within Department of Defense

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), acting as part of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would create a more expansive military and intelligence program to study UFOs, citing an urgent need to determine whether or not unexplained sightings by military personnel pose a national security threat.

“If it is technology possessed by adversaries or any other entity, we need to know,” Sen. Gillibrand said in an interview with Politico last Wednesday. “Burying our heads in the sand is neither a strategy nor an acceptable approach.”

The program, named the Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office, has bipartisan support and would either replace or absorb the existing Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force.

According to the amendment, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will coordinate to streamline the reporting process by which both government personnel and civilian contractors "report incidents or information, including adverse physiological effects, involving or associated with unidentified aerial phenomena" and facilitate the sharing of data recorded by “each element of the intelligence community and the [DoD]” that “may be relevant to the investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) is the current government nomenclature for UFOs.

The amendment would also require that regular reports, both classified and unclassified, be submitted to Congress.

Sen. Gillibrand said she was motivated to introduce the amendment by the “repeated reports over the last two or three years of these increased sightings by Navy pilots and Air Force pilots.”

“We’ve not had oversight into this area for a very long time,” she said. “I can count on one hand the number of hearings I had in 10 years on this topic. That's fairly concerning given the experience our service members have had over the last decade.”

The senator believes the sheer variety of possible explanations is reason enough to develop the program.

“You have a million questions that must be answered for a million reasons,” she said. “You're talking about drone technology, you're talking about balloon technology, you're talking about other aerial phenomena, and then you're talking about the unknown. Regardless of where you fall on the question of the unknown, you have to answer the rest of the questions. That’s why this is urgent. That’s why having no oversight or accountability up until now to me is unacceptable.”

In addition to the new DoD program, the amendment calls for a civilian "Aerial and Transmedium Phenomena Advisory Committee" comprised of experts appointed by NASA, the FAA, the National Academies of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, the Galileo Project at Harvard University, the Scientific Coalition for Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Studies, the American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics, the Optical Technology Center at Montana State University, the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and "up to five additional members, as the Secretary and the Director jointly consider appropriate, selected from among individuals with requisite expertise, at least 3 of whom shall not be employees of any Federal Government agency or Federal Government contractor.

“You have to have the smartest, most informed minds from the world convening on these issues so you know what you’re up against,” said Sen. Gillibrand.

The senator’s proposed amendment follows a preliminary assessment report on UFOs released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June.

That report provided five potential explanatory categories for UFOs, including "airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG [United States Government] or U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall 'other' bin," and concluded that they "clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security."

Sen. Gillibrand is not alone in addressing the issue of UFOs, and Avril Haines, current Director of National Intelligence, spoke on the topic while attending the Our Future in Space event held in the Washington National Cathedral last week.

“The main issues that Congress and others have been concerned about is safety of flight concerns and counterintelligence issues,” she said. "Always there’s also the question of is there something else that we simply do not understand, which might come extraterrestrially?”

Haines acknowledged that better reporting structures are needed to properly study UFOs, given the concerns highlighted in the recent preliminary assessment report released by her office.

"We were pretty sure that we were not going to get to characterize every single one of these [UFOs] in the various categories that we identified, because frankly we weren’t able to understand everything about it," she said.

A large portion of that is based on the fact that we don’t have a consistent way of reporting this information—we need to integrate a lot of data that we get.
We need to get better at collecting information that’s useful to us from different sensors that are available to us.
And we need to deepen our analysis in these areas, and that’s something that doesn’t surprise you in the way that we approach our intelligence work.

Later in the event, Haines warned of the possibility of "colonial" conflicts in space between the U.S. and its rivals, adding that the U.S. is “committed to protecting access to and explore space for a variety of nations”.

“We recognize how important this is to our collective human prosperity," she said.

Currently, the National Defense Authorization Act, including the amendment proposing the Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office, is on hold until after the Thanksgiving holiday, when lawmakers are expected to resume debate about its many amendments.

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