PA EST AOI Mgmt Sync Group 05-16-23 (FOIA 22-F-0249)

--With assistance from Henry Meyer
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2. Pentagon Forms a Group to Examine Unexplained Aerial Sightings
The announcement follows a report that failed to clarify strange phenomena observed by military pilots and
others over the past two decades
New York Times Online, Nov. 24 (0008) I Julian E. Barnes
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon on Tuesday night announced a new group to investigate reports of unidentified
aerial phenomena in sensitive areas, work that will be overseen by both the military and the intelligence agencies.
The group will lead an effort to "detect, identify and attribute objects" in restricted airspace, as well as mitigate
any threats to military flights.
The announcement follows the release of a report in June that failed to provide explanations of 143 sightings of
strange phenomena by military pilots and others over the past two decades.
The report frustrated some inside the intelligence community who believed more analysis and research should
have been done to try to categorize and explain the phenomena. Releasing a report that said the sightings were
unexplained further drove theories that the videos or pictures could be visitors from space, a theory that few in
the U.S. government take seriously.
Kathleen H. Hicks, the deputy defense secretary, said the new group would be called the Airborne Object
Identification and Management Synchronization Group. It will be overseen by an executive council made up of
the under secretary of defense for intelligence, the director of the Joint Staff and senior officials from the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence.
The group will focus on special-use airspace, which includes military operations areas, firing ranges and places
restricted for national security and other uses. In a memo, Dr. Hicks said unidentified aerial phenomena in special-
use areas represented a potential safety issue for military pilots and raised "potential national security concerns."
In June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report that reviewed unidentified aerial
phenomena seen since 2004, noting that 143 remained unexplained. Of those, 21 reports, involving 18 episodes,
possibly demonstrated technological know-how unknown to the United States, such as objects moving without
observable propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of Russia, China or
other terrestrial nations.
Government officials said privately that there was no evidence of Russian or Chinese advance technology in use,
much less space-traveling aliens, in the information collected. But the officials acknowledged that the
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