Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, has said Russian officials are conducting studies into UFO reports.
The space agency chief said he was aware of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) accounts provided by pilots and that these reports often came back after test flights.
Rogozin said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 news channel that 99.9 percent of all reports were later identified as “atmospheric and other physical phenomena” but also considered that “we might be a subject to some external observation.”
“We can study bacteria, but we can also be studied just like bacteria,” he added, according to the Russian state-controlled TV network RT.
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His comments come amid a flurry of UFO news from the United States, where officials have embraced a more transparent approach to the topic. Defense chiefs say they want to take UFO reports more seriously since they potentially pose a national security threat.
Rogozin said on Rossiya-24: “If we talk about specific facts of the so-called UFO [sightings], which might have taken place on Earth throughout the history of mankind, which NASA speaks about, I would like to say that these studies have been conducted and are being conducted by our Russian Academy of Sciences among others. The facts are collected and checked.”
His comments may have been translated from Russian.
He said he had been in contact with NASA in the past to discuss the UFO reports and that officials there were also of the opinion that “external observation” of flight activity had occurred. The Roscosmos director added that some pilots had taken out a pencil and paper to sketch what they had seen, but he did not describe any particular cases.
Rogozin is a strong supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s regime and of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for which he was criticized by former NASA astronaut and International Space Station commander Scott Kelly as a “shameful stain” on Roscosmos’s legacy.
Last year U.S. defense officials released a report on UFO sightings provided by military pilots, almost all of which were unexplained. The report detailed how some of the objects observed appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics and that there had been near misses with pilots.
Last month, the U.S. held the first congressional UFO hearing in decades with officials reiterating the potential national security implications they pose. Officials said they could not confirm what UFOs were but had not come across any evidence suggesting that they were examples of alien life.
As Rogozin alluded to, NASA has also become more transparent about UFOs. The space agency announced last week that it is commissioning a team to examine the nature and origins from a scientific perspective, starting early in the fall.
In a press release, NASA stressed that there was not yet any evidence that UFOs are “extraterrestrial in origin.”