The White House revealed Wednesday where it now stands on the possible existence of alien life, telling reporters they ‘don’t know’ whether the numerous sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) are proof whether extraterrestrials are real.
‘We don’t know. We don’t have the answers about what these phenomena are,’ National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told a reporter at the daily White House press briefing who asked if the U.S. government believed there ‘may be life outside of our planet.’
Kirby said he didn’t have a position on it ‘one way or the other’ that he could immediately speak to, but did say the government believed ‘there are unexplained aerial phenomena that have been sighted and reported by pilots, Navy and Air Force, that these phenomena have in some cases had an impact on our training ranges, on our pilots’ ability to fly, train, operate and stay ready.’
‘That alone makes it a national security issue worth looking at,’ he added. ‘Unidentified aerial phenomena doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s an honest assessment of what we think about this problem set. And so we’ll see where it goes.’
Earlier in the briefing, Kirby told another reporter that he had ‘no information’ to provide ‘one way or the other’ on the existence of a ‘UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program,’ but admitted the White House takes the issue of UAPs seriously.
‘There’s a whole office at the Pentagon that is stood up to analyze the data, collect reports, collate those reports and forward them up appropriately. And that’s, I think, testament to the fact that we know that in some cases these phenomena have impacted military training, have an impact on military readiness,’ he said.
The reporter pressed Kirby, asking whether President Biden felt claims of the existence of such a program warranted further investigation, and if the White House saw them as credible.
‘If the president didn’t believe that the sightings by pilots were serious enough to be considered, he wouldn’t have wanted the Pentagon to stand up an office to look at this, to analyze the data, to collect reports and provide a system by which we can collate the information and better figure out what we’ve got here,’ Kirby responded.
‘But that work is ongoing. So if your question is do we think we need to be transparent with the American people, of course, we need to be as transparent as we can be. But the truth is… we don’t have hard and fast answers on these things. We are trying to get smarter on it,’ he added.
Kirby’s statements come on the same day that the House Oversight Committee held a hearing concerning the sightings of UAPs and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), which included testimony from whistleblower David Grusch, who testified under oath his life was threatened and that he was instructed to keep quiet about a secret government-run crashed UFO retrieval program.
Another witness told members of the committee he believed ‘something is going on in our airspace.’
Fox News’ Chris Eberhart contributed to this report.