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EXIT INTERVIEW: Army Gen. Mark A. Milley has had a momentous — and at times polarizing — four-year run as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Trump and Biden. In the first of a series of articles ahead of the scheduled end of his tenure in October, Gen. Milley sat down with senior Washington Times military correspondent Ben Wolfgang to discuss some of the achievements and controversies of his time as the Pentagon’s highest-ranking military officer.
Some UFO sightings by military personnel are “difficult to explain,” according to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, but the nation’s top general insists he has seen no evidence to back up recent public allegations that the Pentagon has recovered extraterrestrial beings or has engaged in a decades-long cover-up to hide the truth from the American public.
In an exclusive interview with The Washington Times, Gen. Milley acknowledged that some reports of what the government now calls “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP, lack an easy explanation despite serious, ongoing research inside the Pentagon and a growing belief that at least some of the craft could pose a threat to U.S. national security. His comments came less than two weeks after former U.S. intelligence officer David Grusch told Congress under oath that he is aware of “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program,” and even suggested that the Pentagon has been secretly keeping in storage actual alien bodies.
Gen. Milley didn’t address the credibility of Mr. Grusch’s testimony but made clear he’s seen no evidence backing up the extraordinary claims.
“The guy was under oath. I’m sure that he was trying to say whatever he thought was true. … I’m not going to doubt his testimony or anything like that,” Gen. Milley told The Times during a wide-ranging interview in his Pentagon office Friday. “I can tell you, though, that as the chairman I have been briefed on several different occasions by the [Pentagon’s] UAP office. And I have not seen anything that indicates to me about quote-unquote ‘aliens,’ or that there’s some sort of cover-up program. I just haven’t seen it.”
Gen. Milley’s remarks about UAP sightings highlight the changing public attitude toward the phenomena in recent years. Previously dismissed in some quarters as nonsense straight out of a bad science fiction novel, UFO encounters now are very much a legitimate topic of discussion inside the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, in the media, and in the scientific community.
SEE ALSO: Witnesses say UFOs no joking matter; technology poses serious danger
The government concedes that many such sightings cannot be explained. A federal government report released last January examined 366 UFO sightings, including a stunning 247 UAP incidents that took place just between March 2021 and August 2022. Of those, 171 lacked a clear explanation — a reality that Gen. Milley readily acknowledged.
“There is a lot of unexplained aerial phenomena out there. That’s true,” he said. “And they’ve got pilot reports, there’s various other sensors out there, and some of it is difficult to explain.”
“Most of it, actually, they can explain away by a variety of things, like balloons for example — the whole Chinese balloon thing comes to mind,” said Gen. Milley, referring to a suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew over the U.S. earlier this year. Such objects, including weather balloons, seem to account for at least some of the reported UFO sightings.
“They can explain a lot of it, but there is some that’s really kind of weird and unexplainable,” Gen. Milley said. “But I’ve seen nothing to suggest that we, the United States military or the United States government, has in fact recovered any sort of vehicle that is not man-made, or made here on earth, or that there’s any kind of remains … I haven’t seen any of that kind of stuff.”
Still, Gen. Milley said he would not “second-guess” the public claims made by Mr. Grusch in his testimony before a House Oversight Committee panel on July 26, saying that “a lot of people have different perspectives” on a variety of issues in an organization as large as the Defense Department.
‘Insulting’
Other Pentagon officials have taken a much more critical stance on the allegations made by Mr. Grusch, which some lawmakers appeared to take quite literally during the House hearing.
Following that event, Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said the claims were “insulting” to the personnel who are working on the issue.
“I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defense and intelligence community who chose to join AARO, many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail,” he said in a letter published online several days after the hearing.
“They are truth-seekers, as am I,” he said. “But you certainly would not get that impression from yesterday’s hearing.”
The Pentagon said the comments were made by Mr. Kirkpatrick in his personal capacity, not as an official statement of Defense Department policy.
But the remarks reflected a belief in some circles that the House hearing may have done more harm than good by introducing alien bodies, reverse-engineering of spaceships and other seemingly wild ideas into the public discussion of UAP, rather than keeping the focus solely on legitimate claims of mysterious, unexplained objects in the sky.
For his part, Mr. Grusch made the allegations in a serious manner while under oath before Congress and while on national television. A former national reconnaissance officer representative with the Pentagon’s UAP task force, Mr. Grusch told lawmakers that he learned of a years-long government effort to retrieve parts of crashed UFOs and study their technological makeup.
“I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program to which I was denied access to those additional” materials about the effort, he said.
Mr. Grusch also testified that the U.S. has recovered non-human “biologics.” He said he had not personally seen them but learned of their existence from “people with direct knowledge of the program.”
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