Later this month the 17 US intelligence organizations are scheduled to release a classified report to Congress on any information they have about UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomena. The term UFO evidentially has too much baggage to be used anymore.

There is also an unclassified report to be issued to the public, both of which were ordered by former President Trump as part of his signing the Covid-19 Relief Bill back in November.

While I am not holding my breathe for any startling news being released to the public, this is the reason you are seeing so many UFO stories in the news. These stories are no longer relegated to the supermarket checkout stands.

The New York Times, “60 Minutes” and even former President Obama have all weighed in on the subject in the last week or so.

“There’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory,” Obama said in an interview with CBS. “They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”

“I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,” the Republican senator Marco Rubio told “60 Minutes”.

Rubio, vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, pushed for the passage of the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021 that was part of the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief spending bill signed in November.

That act ordered government agencies to provide a declassified “detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence”, and “a detailed description of an interagency process” for reporting UFOs. The report must be handed over by 25 June.

“Men and women we have entrusted with the defense of our country are reporting encounters with unidentified aircraft with superior capabilities,” Rubio told the Tampa Bay Times in mid-May.

“We cannot allow the stigma of UFOs to keep us from seriously investigating this. The forthcoming report is one step in that process, but it will not be the last.”

I believe this is why UAPs are in the news. If the intelligence agencies can now say that these objects are a security risk, then there could be plenty of funding to do a more detailed analysis.

Here’s why I am a skeptic on the topic of anything monumental coming out of the Congressional report. For the last 75 years the US government has denied the existence of UFOs. It was swamp gas or a weather balloon.

Today we get gun-camera footage from a $500 billion F-18 military jet that has the same resolution as a 1950’s TV show, meanwhile we have satellites that can read my car’s odometer if I have the top down.

No, like Fox Mulder in the “X-Files” “I want to believe,” but I will harken back to the Watergate-era and “Follow the money” before I take a flier on this disclosure.