NSA Seems to Be Spying on UFOs

No Such Agency’s big ear appears to be listening in on space aliens (or whatever those mysterious objects in the sky are)

For the better part of a century, it’s been a trope among Americans who are interested in Unidentified Flying Objects that the U.S. Government knows the truth about those mysterious lights in the sky, and it’s hiding it from the public. Ever since the UFO phenomenon burst into public consciousness shortly after the Second World War, it’s been widely held that Washington, DC, knows more than it’s saying: The Truth Is Out There (but you can’t see it).

Depending on your preferred conspiracy theory, the Pentagon is hiding dead aliens at a hangar at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, or it’s testing crashed space vehicles at Area 51 in the Nevada desert. It’s easy to dismiss these sketchy stories, not least because UFO sightings have a long habit of happening where the U.S. military tests Top Secret aviation and space technology – and the Pentagon is perfectly happy to let the public (and our enemies) mistake deniable new aircraft for UFOs.

But what if these stories contain at least grains of truth? What if the Pentagon and our intelligence agencies really do know more about the UFO phenomenon than they’ve previously told the public? This week brings a shocking revelation from the Department of Defense that such conspiracy theories indeed involve truths.

Keep in mind that the Pentagon has been inching towards such reveals for several years now. Five years ago this week, DoD revealed that it was investigating what it terms Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAP under the auspices of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. The Pentagon’s interest here was as much about concerns that hostile states like China or Russia possessed advanced technology that DoD couldn’t match as much as any worry about space aliens.

Exactly what the Pentagon discovered through AATIP remains mysterious. In late June 2021, the Intelligence Community issued an unclassified assessment of the UAP issue which left the matter as unclear as ever. In the IC’s estimate, the UAP matter involves “probably multiple types of UAP requiring different explanations based on the range of appearances and behaviors described in the available reporting,” adding that “UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security,” while offering nothing of substance about what UAPs really are.

Based on known drone technology, it seems safe to assume that some (perhaps most) of the reports proffered by military personnel, such as sightings of swarms of UAP around DoD aircraft and ships, can be pinned on foreign technology, not space aliens. Three months ago, the Navy pronounced that all its videos featuring UAP (some of which had been seen by the public) were now classified and off-limits since their release “will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities.”

This week brings a new DoD release through the Freedom of Information Act which opens up a whole new front in the endless “What does Uncle Sam secretly know about UFOs?” debate. Back in July, The Black Vault, which specializes in FOIA requests regarding UAP and related spooky matters, asked the Pentagon for more documents related to UAP. On December 12, DoD responded by releasing seven overwhelmingly redacted pages of documents from U.S. Strategic Command, the combatant command which controls our nuclear arsenal. Even though almost all the pages are concealed, what’s visible is shocking enough.

The release comes from STRATCOM’s Directorate of Intelligence (J2) and consists of two Intelligence Team Activity Reports from 2020, dated July 24 and August 21. These reports are very highly classified – more on that in a moment – and contain revealing hints about what the Pentagon and the IC know about UAP.

The first snippet, from the July 24, 2020, STRATCOM J2 report:

A couple things jump out immediately to the trained spook, aside from the very high classification level (hold that thought). First, UAP here includes the phrase Phenomenology, with is an au courant variation on Phenomena, which was taken by The Black Vault to mean that UAP are real, based on previous AATIP comments. That’s controversial plus outside my wheelhouse.

What’s very much in my wheelhouse is the reference to the UAP JIATF since that’s the DoD/IC term for a Joint Interagency Task Force, which is what the Pentagon and the spooks set up when they need to tackle a difficult challenge with the hush-hush assistance of the full alphabet soup of federal departments and agencies. There are several of these in the U.S. Government, for instance JIATF West (based in Hawaii, which manages counter-narcotics activities in the Pacific region) or JIATF South (based in Key West, which manages the counter-narcotics mission for much of Latin America). It’s quite a revelation that Washington has deemed the UAP issue so important that it needs a “whole of government” approach and therefore set up its own JIATF to deal with this sensitive matter.

Then, in a strange turn of events, when The Black Vault asked DoD for clarification on the UAP JIATF, the Pentagon quickly explained it was all a misunderstanding and there was no such thing (even though its own highly classified document mentioned it):

“That was a simple error in terminology – both ‘JIATF’ and ‘Phenomenology’ — when USSTRATCOM personnel prepared their internal report. There was not a DoD JIATF on UAP,” said Pentagon Spokesperson Susan Gough in an e-mailed statement to The Black Vault. “We began using ‘task force’ or ‘UAPTF’ informally internally shortly before the UAPTF establishment memo was signed on Aug. 4, 2020.”

That’s as clear as mud to me. Let’s now look at the second STRATCOM J2 Intelligence Team Activity Report, dated August 21, 2020:

Note again the reference to the supposedly non-existent UAP JIATF. The “Admiral Richard” mentioned is Navy Admiral Charles Richard, who headed STRATCOM from late 2019 until just last week. This matter was important enough that the nuke boss got the briefing along with his top staff. So did the Secretary of Defense, who in the summer of 2020 was Mark Esper. We have no idea what that highly classified UAP briefing included but it was significant enough that Secretary Esper was “read on” for its contents.

However, the high classification is really the tell. Both snippets are classified TS//SI//TK//NF and, if you know what that means, you grasp the significance.

TS = TOP SECRET, the highest classification level in the U.S. Government, “information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security” per the requisite jargon.

SI = Special Intelligence, which is the handling caveat for intelligence derived from signals intelligence or SIGINT (in the very name of this newsletter, Top Secret Umbra, Umbra is a famous, now former, SI handling codeword); SI comes from the National Security Agency, which “owns” SIGINT for the Intelligence Community.

TK = TALENT KEYHOLE, which is a control caveat for intelligence derived from highly classified technical intelligence platforms, usually spy satellites.

NF = NOFORN, meaning intelligence which is not releasable to foreign nationals and can only be shared with U.S. personnel (unlike a lot of intelligence coming from NSA, which is routinely shared with foreign partners, above all the Five Eyes of the Anglosphere intelligence alliance).

We therefore know that the UAP JIATF’s briefing was highly classified, based on SIGINT from NSA, which was collected by spy satellites – and it’s something the Pentagon doesn’t want shared with even our closest allies. We don’t know what kind of SIGINT was involved. It could be communications intelligence or COMINT, which is the intercept of various modes of communications; or it could be electronic intelligence or ELINT, which is the intercept of various non-human communications such as radar emissions. Together, COMINT plus ELINT equals SIGINT.

NSA knows something important here, but we can’t assess what it is based on two short snippets from STRATCOM. It could be intercepts of alien communications or radar emissions. That’s the little gray men of ufologist imaginations. Or it could be intercepts of communications from hostile militaries testing their advanced drones, which the public thinks are UFOs but really come from China or Russia. In either case, it’s a big deal that the public deserves to know more about.

During my time with NSA, it was a stock joke that crashed UFOs were stored in the basement of Agency headquarters at Fort Meade in suburban Maryland. Nobody believed this was true and it was fun gag to try on anyone who asked too many questions. Some three decades ago, an Agency old timer took me to lunch and regaled me, a newbie, with tales of NSA glory from days of yore. Amid stories of fooling Russians and stealing secrets, he threw in that the Agency possessed an Above Top Secret office that dealt with intercepts of UFO communications. He even said there was a super-secret shop that translated alien languages. I brushed it off as a leg-pull by an old dog close to retirement, something to shock the kids.

Now, I’m not so sure.

Regardless, it would be good if members of Congress ask NSA what it knows here. There’s unquestionably public interest in knowing whether UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin or represent an entirely earthy threat to our national security.