US asks Britain for help tracking UFOs after 800 sightings reported

The Pentagon has asked the UK to share any data it has on UFOs as it steps up investigations into the phenomena – with a task force receiving 800 reported sightings.

A meeting of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, which comprises the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, was held last week to boost cooperation on reporting and analysing unexplained sightings.

Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s UFO task force  – known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)  – said: “We’ve entered into discussions with our partners on data-sharing.

“How do they do reporting? What kind of analysis can they help us with? What kind of calibration can they help us with? What can we help them with? And we’re establishing all of that right now.

“And they’re going to end up sending their information and data to us to feed into the process that we’ve laid out for how we’re going to do all this.”

Dr Kirkpatrick said AARO have now received 800 reported sightings, up from 650 when he gave evidence to Congress last month.

Observed objects were most likely to be spherical in shape, one to four metres in size, and to be seen at altitudes of between 10,000ft and 30,000ft.

He said only 2 to 5 per cent of them could be regarded as “anomalous”.

Need for ‘high-quality data’

Dr Kirkpatrick was speaking at the first public meeting of a Nasa panel set up to study what the US government calls unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

He said Nasa would also expand the scientific and academic relationships it has with institutions in allied countries to “bring them into the fold” of what is becoming an international project.

Dr Kirkpatrick showed a video, which had been previously released, of a metallic orb filmed over the Middle East last year.

He said: “We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent manoeuvres.”

The 16-member Nasa panel, which was established last year, comprises experts from fields including physics and astrobiology.

Some of them have been subjected to online abuse and harassment since they began their work.

Dan Evans, a senior Nasa research official, said: “Harassment only leads to further stigmatisation of the UAP field, significantly hindering the scientific process and discouraging others to study this important subject matter.”

David Spergel, chairman of the Nasa panel, said more – and better  – data must be collected on UAPs.

He said: “If I were to summarise in one line what I feel we’ve learned it’s [that] we need high-quality data.

“The current data collection efforts about UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection.”