At the beginning of May 2021, the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General announced the launch of a formal evaluation into the Pentagon’s actions regarding ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (UAP). To put it more simply, the Pentagon’s Inspector General is currently investigating the ongoing Navy-led investigation into UFOs. Why? In order to ensure that all that can be done to gather more information is actually being done.

And if you think this news is just another conspiracy theorist’s wet dream and nothing more, why don’t you wait until this year’s summer, when the US intelligence community will deliver a public assessment report on UFOs following an explicit request from the Senate Intelligence Committee. So, what do we know so far?

For years, the US government largely ignored reports of mysterious flying objects seen moving through restricted military airspace—and for good reasons most of the time. From misidentified weather phenomena to aircraft and balloons, many of the UFOs that were spotted were in fact very much part of our world. However, the US government is now slowly beginning to acknowledge that some of the footage of UFOs previously made public—though only a handful of them—is real.

As The Independent mentioned when reporting on the news, a lot has changed since US Air Force general Major General John Samford addressed the issue of UFOs following a sighting back in 1952 in Washington, DC. 69 years later, we now have highly reliable data and witness recordings of the escalated frequency of UFO sightings in proximity to sensitive US military sites, or nuclear facilities in general. Why military sites, and what do we mean by ‘highly reliable data’?

Let me answer the second part of this question before I take you down the rabbit hole of why little green men keep on appearing near Area 51. When the world—mostly the US—started worrying about UFO sightings and alien abductions, unfortunately, it was hard for anyone to look into what they truly were when the technologies needed to do so didn’t exist or simply weren’t developed enough yet. “Modern military radar, satellite, sonar, video, and other sensor capabilities mean that this is no longer a problem,” explains The Independent.

But now that we’ve finally got the right tools to confirm that some UFOs are truly unlike any aircraft used by the US or any foreign country, there’s another element in UFO sighting patterns that just feel too Hollywood-esque for me: why do they tend to happen near US military sites? Well, first of all, most of the high tech equipment I’ve just listed above is used by those same military sites.

Secondly, in June 2019, a team of high-ranking former US defence and intelligence officials, aerospace-industry veterans, academics and others associated with To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science revealed they had been investigating a wide range of these sightings—and advocating more serious government attention.

“All of the nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River—all had dramatic incidents where these unknown craft appeared over the facilities and nobody knew where they were from or what they were doing there,” said investigative journalist George Knapp, who has studied the UAP-nuclear connection for more than 30 years, in an interview with History.

In fact, nuclear-adjacent sightings go back decades, explained Robert Hastings, a UFO researcher and author of the book UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. Hastings said he’s interviewed more than 160 veterans who have witnessed strange things in the skies around nuclear sites.

Classified Navy assessments suggest that one of the reasons why its aircraft carriers and submarines (nuclear-powered and in some cases, nuclear-armed) keep coming across UFOs is an “established synergy.” In other words, UFOs might be seen hanging about those facilities more often than anywhere else for the simple reason that they may show an interest in them in the first place. Who knows, maybe in a couple of years they’ll turn to renewable energy facilities?

Last year, The Debrief confirmed that Navy aviators flying an F-18 fighter jet photographed a triangle-shaped UFO rising out of the ocean and accelerating at high speed to altitude. No nation is known to have aerial platforms anything similar to these as of yet.

As The Independent nicely put it, either “countries or individuals who live on our planet have achieved technological feats that we previously couldn’t have even imagined” or it’s time for us to accept the fact that those phenomena may be coming from elsewhere. So, are you freaked out now? Because I am.