(NewsNation) — The U.S. government has reported an increase in military sightings of unidentified objects in the sky.
On Wednesday, Congress received the 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — what most people would call UFOs.
The declassified report shows a big increase in reports of UAP from U.S. military personnel. A preliminary report including 144 UAP reports over 17 years, from November 2004 to March 2021, was delivered to Congress in June of 2021.
The latest report, however, has 510 UAP reports as of Aug. 30, 2022. Of those, 247 were new reports and 119 were discovered or reported after the initial report but occurred during the time frame it covered.
The report focused on the 366 new reports and found 26 were initially characterized as unmanned aircraft systems (drones), 119 as balloons or balloon-like objects, and six as clutter, which includes things like birds, airborne debris or weather events showing up on equipment.
That leaves 171 with no explanation, and the report clarified that an initial characterization does not mean a case is positively resolved. The report also noted “some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis.”
The majority of reports came from Air Force and Navy aviators who witnessed UAP while working and reported them through official channels, and many lacked enough detail to be definitively characterized as UAP.
In a statement, the Pentagon said it is taking the threat posed by UAP seriously. “The safety of our service personnel, our bases and installations, and the protection of U.S. operations security on land, in the skies, seas, and space are paramount. We take reports of incursions into our designated space, land, sea, or airspaces seriously and examine each one.”
The government does not track civilian reports of UAP, including those reported to the FAA by commercial airlines. Instead, the FAA directs them to report such sightings to the nonprofit National Center for UFO Reporting Center.