UAS: One size fits all

FAA warns of 'dramatic' increase in pilot encounters

In a policy statement that took a wrong turn on its way to the 21^st century, the Federal Aviation Administration not only continues to employ “UFOs” as the acronym it wants nothing to do with, it also instructs eyewitnesses to take those untidy reports elsewhere. Take ‘em on over to the National UFO Reporting Center, which lacks the manpower to investigate. Or, if life and property are threatened, call the cops and maybe a couple of rounds from a Glock 22 will fix it. Just don’t bring it here.  

By necessity, however, the FAA has carved out some wiggle room for a more palatable acronym – UAS, for Unmanned Aircraft Sightings. Or maybe it stands for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The terminology appears to be a little fluid.

Either way, according to the FAA, a UAS is “an aircraft that is operated without the possibility of direct human intervention from within or on an aircraft.” It’s so simple and broad, the feds have been using UAS since at least 2009; furthermore, they’ve been producing incident reports for the past 10 years. And if you’re a frequent flyer, you might better pay attention.

Newsflash: Drone owners, legally prohibited from operating more than 400 feet above ground level, are out of control, and maybe one mass-casualty event away from a major scandal. In its most recent UAS Sightings Report, covering July through September, the agency logged 401 related incidents and issued a warning:

“Reports of unmanned aircraft (UAS) sightings from pilots, citizens and law enforcement have increased dramatically over the past two years. The FAA now receives more than 100 such reports each month. The agency wants to send out a clear message that operating drones around airplanes, helicopters and airports is dangerous and illegal.” Etc., etc.

Sifting through the word salad

Among those keeping tabs on the UAS database is Ralph Howard, an investigator with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. Howard number-crunched the FAA stats from July 2020 through March 2021 and felt compelled to share the results with the American Institute for Astronautics and Aeronautics in 2023. Ninety-three percent of the 1,235 cases Howard studied – mostly forwarded to law enforcement by pilots – involved sightings above the legal ceiling; 156 reports, or 13 percent, were at or above 8,200 feet. Twenty percent of UAS sightings were logged as close approaches, coming within 500 feet of an aircraft. A majority of those, or 160, closed to within 300 feet or less. “They’ll say things like, ‘it’s 100 feet from the wingtip,’ ‘50 feet vertically above,’ ‘fast moving eastbound directly opposite us,’ ‘directly above,’” Howard says. “One said ‘20 feet off the wing.’ But most of these aren’t even reported as NMACs.”

In nine cases, pilots were forced to make evasive maneuvers, and six more were reported as Near-Miss Air Collisions, or NMACs, meaning they flashed past too late for pilots to even swerve.

Unfortunately, the spread-sheet entries are light on detail. Dates, locations, times, airport codes, altitude and type of plane involved are all there, but actual descriptions of the UAS are sketchy, with little info regarding shapes and sizes. Only 16 percent of the UAS reports under Howard’s scrutiny go beyond a perfunctory mention of color; of the 197 reports that do, 165 of the interlopers are described as quadricopters, with fixed-wing drones and balloons accounting for most of the rest.

All told, going back 10 years, the FAA has compiled more than 17,000 UAS incidents, padded with so much “word salad” that Howard and SCU have had to use GPT models “to pull out the language to clarify what the heck is going on up there, because some of the altitudes are ridiculous.” The 2024 third-quarter update features 17 encounters over 10,000 feet, one as high as 17,500 feet. And those dizzy heights make the old Army veteran and former state MUFON director for Georgia wonder if something else is going on.

Celebrating negligence

“I’m suspicious that we’ve made it awfully easy to take something a pilot thinks he could conceivably collide with,” says Howard, “and we’ve given him a way to report it without ever using the word UFO.”

The UAS, or drone, controversy resurfaced recently with Wall Street Journal coverage of the unidentified bogeys swarming restricted airspace at military installations in Virginia and Nevada last year. It detailed the much-publicized incursions over Langley Air Force Base, which was targeted for 17 straight days last December, along with news of apparent recon flights over the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Security Site outside Las Vegas. Congressional committees have convened to fret openly about the issue, but the culprits have yet to be identified.

Meanwhile, as blogger Douglas Dean Johnson reported earlier this month, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee – the same body that heard unparalleled UFO testimony from whistleblower David Grusch and fellow veterans David Fravor and Ryan Graves last year – released a list of greatest hits from its 118^th congressional session. It listed 59 accomplishments, e.g. “Investigating Bidens’ Influence Peddling Schemes” and the “Exposing the Biden-Harris Radical Environmental Agenda,” but not word one about its UFO hearings – or of any efforts whatsoever to follow Grusch’s leads about classified projects.

Couple this negligence with Capitol Hill’s inability to add any investigatory language to an upcoming vote on the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act and it’s clear that transparency is off the table for yet another voting cycle. Optimists are consoling themselves with the UFO/UAP hearings scheduled for the House Cyber and National Security subcommittees on November 13. How about calling in Eric Davis and retired admiral Thomas Wilson to testify under oath? No? Woo.

Plan B: citizen activism

With the system failing, a couple of events over the past month are setting the stage for direct action. An international cast of influencers – from familiar names like Lue Elizondo, Richard Dolan and Ross Coulthart, to busy researchers in India, Portugal, Hong Kong and beyond – convened remotely on October 20 for a three-hour, livestreaming pep rally. The idea was to goad listeners across the globe into demanding accountability from their leaders. According to Kevin Wright with the sponsoring New Paradigm Institute, early returns were encouraging:

“We can say conservatively that over 10,000 people watched the event, and there have been over 50,000 views on X and more than 13,000 on YouTube, despite the live stream being taken down following the event for post-production edits.”

But maybe the seeds from a previous gathering, also coordinated by the NPI, could prove even more impactful, especially if spookworld ever hopes to regain control of a credible narrative. A UAP Disclosure Teach-In at Yale University on September 27 attempted to spur college students in the U.S. and abroad to get off the fence and start lobbying.

Working in concert with the upstart Yale Student UFO Society as maybe 100 (mostly) students came and went during the day-long event, speakers offered a crash course on this insanely convoluted topic to the presumably uninitiated. And if, in fact, the Teach-In really was your introduction to the controversy, it’s easy to imagine the snap, crackle and pop of neural circuitry getting fried from input overload.

In less than 90 minutes, for instance, University of Albany physics professor Kevin Knuth rolled out a sweeping retrospective of our relationship with “technologically advanced craft,” along with our impotence as a species to address the phenomena with intellectual rigor. Nuclear surveillance and weapons tampering, transmedium behaviors, crushing velocities, the harnessing, concentration and exploitation of impossible amounts of energy – save for a few nervous chuckles, Knuth’s prosecution of avoidance and denial by establishment science on UFOs’ physics-smashing abilities rendered his audience largely mute. He also swamped them with video testimonials from astronauts and military veterans, none more compelling than a replay of an eyewitness account from retired Peruvian Air Force pilot Oscar Santa Maria Huerta at the National Press Club in 2007.

The whole laundry basket

In 1980, Huerta and his Sukoi-22 attempted to engage a balloon-like, dome-shaped UFO trespassing in a military no-fly zone. At 8,000 feet, he intercepted the bogey with a “wall of fire” that rained more than five dozen 30-mm shells on his target. “The projectiles didn’t bounce off – probably, they were absorbed,” Huerta recalled. Running low on fuel, he broke off the chase at 53,000 feet and returned to base at Arequipa. As if mocking its pursuers, the target returned and parked itself in plain view above the base for the next two hours.

However, Knuth left the interpretive chores to NPI co-founders Jim Garrison and attorney Danny Sheehan, the group’s chief counsel. Both built their arguments in the context of the “existential crisis” being imposed upon Millennials and Gen-Z.

With the planet pumping greenhouse-gas heat into the atmosphere at the equivalent of “two Hiroshima bombs” every second, Garrison declared the nonhuman intelligence behind the UFOs has been asserting itself since the eruption of the nuclear age. Troubled by the “extinction events” threatening Earth’s “unusual biological diversity,” NHI, Garrison promised, is “willing to assist humanity to the degree to which we are open.”

Sheehan spoke with the certitude of government authority, which his lifetime of political activism has often opposed as far back as the Vietnam War.

Five nonhuman species are interacting with Earthlings, Sheehan charged. They abduct the unsuspecting in order to harvest sperm and eggs, and create hybrids who now walk among us. Their function, he says, is to integrate and deter policymakers from their militarized collision course with global catastrophe. Yet, in a sci-fi twist, U.S. weapons tech is beginning to turn the tables by shooting down UFOs and detaining their pilots for interrogation.

Can academia keep up?

“I’m just telling you what it is that the United States intelligence agencies know is going on. OK?” Sheehan said. “And that they’re not telling you about this and they’re concealing the information.

“We have to rise up. We have to organize, we have to educate ourselves about this, we have to have teach-ins at the various universities, just like this.”

Question: The stonewallers hoarding UFO information, be they in officers’ uniforms or tailored suits with pocket squares – are they OK with these sorts of potentially reckless allegations and exhortations flying around? What if these narratives are horribly inaccurate? How much more problematic would a new generation more cynical than the last be? What if Teach-Ins and citizen action actually catch on at college campuses?

Last year in the Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a study approved by the University of Louisville polled 14 disciplines at 144 “major research universities” for a paper titled “Faculty perceptions of UAP.” A mere 1,549 – or less than 4 percent – of the 39,784 instructors queried bothered to participate. Some of the mostly anonymous profs who decided to join the conversation added email addenda like these: “The stigma around the topic is so great that I thought your initial query to participate was spam!” “Tenure might be tricky for you – good luck,” and “The censorship of this topic is ridiculous. The stigma surrounding this topic is negative and even more in academia.”

Nevertheless, the study suggested a significant level of interest among academicians, and that “curiosity outweighed scepticism or indifference” for a majority. More than 64 percent stated it was either “Very Important” or “Absolutely Essential” for academia to play a role in related research.

“I’m skeptical about student-led direct action in the UAP context,” counters Ohio State political science professor Alexander Wendt, long a proponent of UFO transparency. “The issue is too abstract and intangible to really get people’s blood going, and . . . the ‘appetite for literacy’ in this area is still too low.”

In 2008, Wendt and the University of Minnesota’s Raymond Duvall produced a seminal essay that argued “authoritative anxiety” could never accommodate a sober inquiry into the end of anthropocentrism. Yet, for the past seven years, a superficial version of that debate has indeed been underway, even in a largely dispassionate Congress. But how to get academia to openly buy into it remains a puzzle.

“I don’t see the harm in trying to raise consciousness of the issue in whatever way we can, and eventually the extreme secrecy of the USG’s new UAP regime may backfire, as the numbers of official, unexplained cases heads soon toward the 10s of 1000s,” Wendt states in an email. “As that number keeps growing, people may start asking more and more questions, but until then I don’t see any appetite among my colleagues for an engagement with UAP.”

Maybe an airliner collision with a UAS at 17,500 feet would do the trick.