Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee said this week that there are unidentified flying objects regularly flying over U.S. military bases.
Rubio was flying out of D.C. from the Reagan National Airport on Monday when a TMZ reporter stopped him to ask about a provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2021, that the U.S. will disclose what it knows about UFOs. Rubio said, “Well for me the whole thing was this, and that’s why we put that language, and look people think about space aliens, for me is there’s stuff flying over military installations and no one knows what it is and it isn’t ours.”
“For me that’s logical, you want to know want to know what it is and that’s common sense right,” Rubio added. “Stuff’s flying over the top of your most sensitive installations and it’s not ours and no one knows whose it is, you should find out what it is and tell us.”
Asked if people should be concerned about the potential of a hostile alien threat, Rubio said the worry now is “stuff flying over our facilities and we don’t know what they are.” Rubio said there could be a logical explanation to the phenomena being observed over military bases, but as to whether the phenomena pose a threat, Rubio said “I would take it one step at a time.”
The provision of the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act states the director of national intelligence (DNI) must work with the secretary of defense to create a comprehensive report of what the U.S. government knows about these unidentified flying objects, designated by the government as unidentified aerial phenomena and commonly referred to as UFOs. The report is due by June 1, 2021.
In an interview with Fox News on Friday, President Donald Trump’s former DNI John Ratcliffe said there are a lot more UFO sightings than have been made public and that he tried to complete the UFO disclosure before leaving office, but was not able to move the information into an unclassified format quickly enough.
Ratcliffe said, “When we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for, or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”
In his own interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday, Rubio said, “We have to know what it is, or we have to try to know what it is. That’s my view, without any preconceived notions. Maybe there’s a logical explanation, maybe it’s something that can be explained away, maybe it’s a foreign adversary who’s made a technological leap, as you heard [John Ratcliffe], the former DNI, say. Whatever it is, we need to know the answer to it.”
Rubio and Ratcliffe’s comments come as the Pentagon has already declassified some details about UFOs, including declassifying footage of Navy pilots’ interactions with the aerial phenomena.
An American Airlines pilot recently reported seeing a “long cylindrical object” flying over his airplane during a flight to Phoenix, Arizona.