Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster adds to UFO speculation

Former National Security Advisor and retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster became the latest official to make eyebrow-raising comments about UFOs, now formally rebranded as “unidentified anomalous phenomena” or UAP.

Asked about UAP during a Sept. 6 appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” McMaster stated that “there are phenomena that have been witnessed by multiple people that are just inexplicable by any kind of science available to us.”

McMaster’s intriguing comments come at a critical moment in a growing national discussion about UAP. The Senate is poised to take up the bipartisan Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act, arguably the most extraordinary legislation ever introduced in Congress.

Sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), the Disclosure Act alleges that a decades-long government “legacy program” has secretly retrieved and is attempting to reverse-engineer UAP of “unknown” and “non-human” origin. Not only is “non-human intelligence” formally defined, but the attention-grabbing term appears two dozen times throughout the 64-page legislation.

Astoundingly, the Disclosure Act would also require the federal government to take possession of “any and all” recovered UAP and “biological evidence of non-human intelligence” transferred to private defense contractors.

With multiple seemingly credible sources corroborating the existence of such secret programs, it is imperative that Congress pass the legislation without delay.

The introduction of the Disclosure Act, along with fascinating public comments like those from McMaster, marks a seismic shift in the official tone on the UFO phenomenon.

For over six decades, the U.S. government implemented a formal policy of “debunking,” “ridiculing” and dismissing even the most credible UAP incidents, frequently with demonstrably absurd and unscientific explanations.

But the December 2017 publication of a bombshell New York Times article fundamentally transformed the discourse on this long-stigmatized topic.

Asked in 2020 about seemingly inexplicable, years-long U.S. Navy encounters with UAP, former CIA Director John Brennan made a jaw-dropping statement, suggesting that “a different form of life” might be behind the perplexing incidents.

Over a decade after they were first formally reported, naval aviators’ daily observations of UAP exhibiting amazing flight characteristics off the East Coast remain officially unexplained.

John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence under former President Trump, injected fascinating context into recent military encounters with the UFO phenomenon. In a 2021 interview, Ratcliffe stated that UAP “have been picked up by satellite imagery [and] frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for.”

U.S. intelligence analysts, Ratcliffe continued, have “high confidence” that foreign adversaries such as China or Russia were not behind one of the most extraordinary, best-documented UAP incidents.

Alarmingly, Ratcliffe stated that UAP exhibit “technologies that we don’t have and, frankly, that we are not capable of defending against.”

In late 2021, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson suggested directly that recent military encounters with UAP could have extraterrestrial explanations.

Similarly, the prospect of a sitting high-level national security official openly discussing otherworldly origins for UAP was long unthinkable. But current Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines raised eyebrows in 2021 when she pointedly did not rule out “extraterrestrial” origins for UAP.

Former presidents Clinton, Obama and Trump generated headlines when asked about the phenomenon in recent years. Echoing McMaster, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley said last August that some reported UAP incidents are “really kind of weird and unexplainable.”

Such notable comments from top-level officials align with publicly available data. Sophisticated mathematical analyses of the most recognizable UAP footage and best-documented incidents, for example, corroborate fighter pilot and radar operator accounts of craft exhibiting highly advanced technology. Moreover, several other perplexing UAP videos, in tandem with supporting context and data, stubbornly resist prosaic explanations.

Perhaps most alarmingly, mysterious objects exhibiting seemingly astonishing technology conducted a series of brazen incursions around sensitive U.S. military assets — including nuclear missile silos — in recent years.

In light of these remarkable developments, Congress must get to the bottom of the decades-long UFO mystery and pass the UAP Disclosure Act.

Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as an Obama administration appointee at the Department of Defense.