Blurred lines, continued … – Sarasota Herald-Tribune (blog)

Blurred lines, continued … – Sarasota Herald-Tribune (blog)
Source: Google UFO

That fine line between mere curiosity and bona fide security-grade puzzle will be up for debate when the Florida MUFON chapter hosts a symposium in Orlando on Aug. 26-28. More specifically, expect an update on the status of an ongoing investigation into the Aguadilla UFO incident over coastal Puerto Rico in 2013.

For newcomers, Aguadilla is fascinating – and bewildering – on a number of levels: First, the mystery left behind beaucoup metadata embedded in the margin frames of a high-tech infrared Wescam camera. And it was visually captured by Customs and Border Patrol agents on nighttime lookout for airborne drug runners. For nearly four minutes, they tracked this flying object as it skirted an airport, dropped to deck, entered the sea at speeds calculated at more than 80 mph, and apparently split in two as it re-emerged from the water.

When should classification regulations yield to a transparent examination of universal mysteries?/mindfulorg

The Customs agents took the encounter up the chain of command. After superiors blew it off, one of the agents forwarded the video to the Mutual UFO Network. MUFON Florida state director Morgan Beall put together a team to analyze the footage; last year, his ad hoc Scientific Coalition for Ufology posted the results online. In order to establish the provenance of the footage – as well as to check for discrepancies between the government video and the one analyzed by SCU – De Void filed a FOIA with Customs. Customs confirmed the Aguadilla footage was, indeed, theirs. But they declined to release it because doing so risked exposing the agency’s methodologies, with results that could be, in its official-reply word, “catastrophic.” Nevermind that SCU team member Robert Powell posted similar publicly-circulated Customs videos showcasing surveillance operations that tracked known targets containing the same sort of metadata as Aguadilla. And nevermind that the “catastrophic” footage was posted on YouTube in 2014, is wreaking havoc with more than 388,000 views, and has yet to be yanked by authorities.

What gives? SCU team member and symposium speaker Rich Hoffman has a foot on each side of the security conundrum. A longtime MUFON member, he works for By Light, an IT defense contractor for Air Materiel Command headquarters at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. He also belongs to the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, which initially passed on examining the Aguadilla footage due to the uncertainty surrounding its classification status. But so far as he knows, there has been no pushback against the unnamed sources who leaked the Aguadilla sequence.

“To me,” he states in an email to De Void, “the real issue here lies in dealing with a reluctant and hesitant witness who requires an NDA [nondisclosure agreement] and limited sharing and then getting a team assembled with the best experts you can get … My presentation is seeking to address the question of how we go about handling future video clips or leaks like this as a UFO community at large.”

The “disclosure” crowd will likely be disappointed in Hoffman’s take on how hard to press for information on UFOs/UAP. “Defense industry partners protect the government as well as our citizens through contracts,” he writes. “They have limitless funds to do research and more flexibility than most bureaucrats experience in the government. As such, they are more capable of hiding information from the public. They are protected from FOIA requests. They can shield prying eyes …” And when it comes to tech, he says, leaks have real-world consequences. “As it is right now, the Chinese UAVs look amazing[ly] alike to ours. Gee, I wonder how that happened.” Furthermore, Hoffman notes the Aguadilla footage belonged to the feds, not the flight crew, whose names he doesn’t know.

That said, there’s this: “We were told that this [footage] had been shared with Air Force Intelligence who stated that they were not in the UFO business and suggested that they contact a UFO organization.”

Talk about your Catch-22. When the source did, in fact, seek outside analysis, “I think that the video leak caught CBP off guard,” Hoffman reasons. “I also think that they have not had an incident like this before and that it is not common for a government clip from their aircraft to be openly shared. While they would not investigate the object or care much about what it was, as they stated in the FOIA, the concern is that other videos should not be distributed regardless of whether it had a mothership hanging above the base. There are usually policies or protocols in government that address video release. I think the crew was likely ignorant of this and focused on the nature of the object being proof of UFOs.”

So if the properly concerned CBP crew had just shut up about seeing and filming something they couldn’t identify, would the country have been better served? Where does science and basic human curiosity fit in? Are we smart enough to think our way out of this jam?

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