China may be to blame for UFOs, says ex-head of Nasa inquiry

Unidentified flying objects are real and may be “unfriendly” advanced technology, the former head of Nasa’s UFO inquiry has said, amid renewed interest in the unexplained phenomena.

Dr Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa’s longest-serving associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, was asked to head up the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena panel last year.

He recently left the US space agency for ETH Zurich, the renowned public university in his home country of Switzerland.

After reading numerous reports, and speaking to witnesses, who have seen strange objects in the sky, Dr Zurbuchen said he remains convinced there is something out there.

He said: “Not only did I talk to pilots, I talked to individuals who had sightings and they were really convinced. I really felt they told me the subjective truth. They were not lying, they were not making things up. I think they were telling me what they saw.

“The fact that there are unexplained phenomena is not a question for me. What they are and what they mean, and how we prove they exist is something that needs more work.

“There could be multiple explanations. If we are looking at technology then it may not be friendly and that is something we should know. It could be technology from other places on Earth and that would be pretty scary.

“It could be a natural phenomenon like luminescent clouds, or something we’ve never seen before, and that would be pretty interesting, or it could be some kind of camera problem that occurs.”

He said it was important to question whether Chinese spy balloons might be to blame, after one was shot down by US fighter pilots in February as it crossed the Atlantic.

“The whole balloon phenomena we cannot ignore because if we ignore what we see then we will suddenly get surprised,” he added.

Although traditionally people who claimed to see UFOs were labelled as cranks or conspiracy theorists, recent testimony from legitimate sources has led to Nasa taking the issue seriously.

In 2021, Lt Cdr Alex Dietrich, a US Navy pilot, went public for the first time to describe how she had seen multiple UFOs while stationed off the coast of southern California on the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier in 2004.

The objects moved impossibly fast, she said, dropping a distance of 80,000ft in less than a second and jumping dozens of miles in seconds, in an incident that was caught on infrared camera and radar.

“It jumped from spot to spot, and tumbled around in a way that was unpredictable,” Lt Cdr Dietrich told 60 Minutes in the US.

“The whole time we’re on the radio with each other just losing our minds.”

‘Pilots were ridiculed’

Cdr David Fravor, also stationed on the USS Nimitz, engaged one of the “Tic Tac”-shaped objects, which he estimated to be 40ft in length. The object disappeared, only to be picked up seconds later on ship radar 60 miles away.

The pilots kept their stories to themselves for more than 15 years after their encounters were dismissed by senior officers.

Dr Zurbuchen said: “The way that the navy pilots were ridiculed I felt for them, it was not done the right way. I’m convinced they were telling the truth about what they saw.

“The most important scientists like Einstein went through a time where traditional science ridiculed them.”

In 2021, the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force released a report into 144 UFO incidents between 2004 and 2021, many of which were spotted by military pilots.

Even though investigators concluded that there was no evidence the objects had come from outer space, or a foreign adversary, they said that most could not be explained

The report authors said there was no doubt that the UAPs were physical objects, rather than optical illusions caused by atmospheric conditions or sensor malfunctions.

‘Advanced technologies’

Investigators found that 18 objects had propulsion systems that could not be explained, and said they would conduct further analysis to determine if advanced technologies were present.

In July, a US Congressional hearing heard claims from former veterans that the US government was concealing a longstanding programme that retrieves and reverse-engineers UFOs.

It was even claimed the government was in possession of “non-human” biological matter. The Pentagon has denied all the allegations.

Prof Greg Eghigian of Penn State University, an expert in the cultural phenomenon of UFO sightings, believes that a perfect storm of events has led to the recent upsurge in interest in “flying saucers”.

“Like most things in history, the answer lies more likely in a confluence of events and trends,” he said.

“The discovery of thousands of exoplanets by astronomers since the 1990s has made life on other planets appear more likely than previously thought and the development of drones has contributed to spikes in UFO sightings.

“The development of new sensors and sophisticated spying technologies has made it possible for militaries to detect anomalies more precisely; it has also made concerns about bad actors surveilling military operations more pressing.

“And speculation about UFOs has always thrived in environments where questions are being raised about the trustworthiness of authorities and experts.”

Keeping it under wraps

Others are more convinced that there is clear evidence of alien life, but believe space agencies and authorities are either choosing to ignore it, or trying to keep it under wraps.

A recent paper, published in the Journal of Astrobiology asserts that there is evidence of “humanoids, bodies, bones, skulls, UFOs and spacecraft wreckage on Mars”.

The authors claimed that the Nasa rover Curiosity has picked up images of what looked like a burial mound of a ‘‘humanoid on a cushion” less than 350ft from what appears to be a crash site.

One of the authors, Dr Rudolph Schild, an astrophysicist with the Center for Astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian, said: “In the mid-1960s, after becoming an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithosonian, I began to hear rumours that the bodies of extraterrestrials and the wreckage from their craft, were under study in a special facility in Building 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

“It was rumoured that a senior colleague with a joint appointment with the physics department at Harvard, had examined the wreckage and seen the bodies. When I questioned him, he became upset and didn’t want to talk about it.”

He added: “The hearings before the US Congress merely affirmed what many of us had known, or at least strongly suspected for decades. The military has acquired extraterrestrial bodies from the wreckage of UFOs.

“It stands to reason that if UAPs and extraterrestrials have crashed on Earth, then it is equally likely they have crashed to the surface of other planets, and that their remains and wreckage can be found on Mars.”

Several missions are now looking for life outside of Earth and Dr Zurbuchen said that he hoped that life would be found in his lifetime.

“I really hope so, I think there is a good chance of finding extinct life and perhaps even life now,” he said. “If we find out life happened at least twice in our solar system then that would be a huge leap forward and suggest there is a good chance it also exists elsewhere.”