In Brief: June UFO News Roundup

​In an interview with Mick West, a former AARO leader confirmed that in areas like Washington, D.C. that had sophisticated surveillance, there were no unidentified flying objects over the past twenty years—everything could be identified. It was only in areas with limited ability to track and detect objects that “unknown” things flew through the skies. In short, UFOs increasingly seem to be a product of limited information about what someone is really seeing.

​In Matt Laslo’s Ask a Pol newsletter today, he presents UFO-friendly Rep. Eric Burlinson’s reaction to the recent Wall Street Journal UFO exposé revealing that the Pentagon had systematically fed its own program leaders fake information about space aliens and recovered flying saucers. When Laslo asked him about it in an interview posted last week, Burlinson offered a shifting response:

“Well, you remember, like, that was my original worldview,” Rep. Eric Burlison exclusively tells Ask a Pol. “What he's saying is probably the case. I think it's the most likely scenario.”
 
Interesting. But that kind of seems at odds with your conversation with folks in the FBI’s UFO unit. Or do you think they’re all just siloed?
 
“Yeah, so I would say, I do think that the people that provided information for that article did not have a full picture of everything that's going on,” Burlison says. “They do not. There's no way they could. But at the end of the day, I think they don't have the full picture.”

​Burlinson appears to say two different things—that he agrees that most of the military UFO claims are the result of deception and mistakes and also that that those exposing the fake program don’t have the “full picture.” You can parse those sentiments in a number of ways to speculate about ways both could be true, but it sure sounds like Burlinson just shifts his language to sound like he’s agreeing with whatever someone says to him without actually committing to a position.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a conspiracy theorist, called the report “bullshit” and told Laslo she would stick by her conspiracy theories, while Sen. Mike Rounds, another UFO enthusiast, told Laslo on Wednesday that the WSJ findings were “common knowledge.” This means that since he had never previously mentioned these findings, which he said were “not secret,” he had himself therefore personally chosen to hide the truth from the public while publicly stoking UFO conspiracies.