A former top intelligence official raised expectations on Friday for a future disclosure by the US government about what it knows about UFOs.

John Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump, was asked on Fox News by host Maria Bartiromo what he knew about unidentified flying objects that have captured people’s imaginations for generations.

“There are many more sightings than are reported,” said Ratcliffe. “Some of them were disqualified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been captured by satellite images that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Moves that are difficult to replicate and for which we don’t have the technology. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom. 

After saying that there have been sightings around the world, Ratcliffe insisted that reports of “unidentified aerial phenomena” already known to the public are only part of the bigger picture.

“When we talk about sightings, the other thing I will say is it’s not just a pilot or just a satellite, or some collection of intelligence,” said Ratcliffe. “Usually we have multiple sensors that pick up these things and … some of them are unexplained phenomena, and there are actually a few more than what has been publicized.

Disclosure is expected to happen sometime between now and June 1, according to Bartiromo. That’s thanks to  the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief  and the government funding bill that Trump signed into law in December, which contained the   Senate  Intelligence  Committee’s  Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021  that contained a “committee comments” section that addressed “unidentified aerial phenomena . 

The panel’s guideline stipulates that the report must identify, among other things, any threats posed by unidentified aerial phenomena and whether they can be attributed to foreign adversaries. “The report must be submitted in an unclassified form, but may include a classified attachment,” the committee wrote.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence  confirmed to Snopes  that the COVID-19 relief legislation has set in motion a 180-day countdown for the secretary of defense and director of national intelligence to present to congressional intelligence and military committees the What does the US government know about UFOs?

Ratcliffe, who as director of national intelligence from May 2020 to January 20 oversaw the US intelligence community, said officials are always looking for a “plausible explanation” but sometimes it just isn’t there.

“The weather can cause disturbances, visual disturbances. We sometimes wonder whether or not our adversaries have technologies that are a little further along than we thought or imagined,” he said. “But there are cases where we don’t have good explanations for some of the things we saw.”

Avril Haines is now the director of national intelligence in the Biden administration.

The Department of Defense  announced in September  that then-Deputy Secretary of Defense  David Norquist had approved  the creation of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force on August 4, and the government group would be led by the Navy under the “knowledge” of the Cabinet. of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.

Navy videos were  released  last year under the Freedom of Information Act that showed  UFOs  moving at incredible speeds and performing seemingly impossible aerial maneuvers. One of the videos was filmed in November 2004; the other two were filmed in January 2015. The three videos were codenamed “FLIR1”, “Gimbal” and “GoFast”.

In videos from 2015, Navy pilots can be heard expressing disbelief. All three UFO videos were captured by Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets.

The videos were made public and  published  due to the efforts of the  New York Times  , as well as through the efforts of To The Stars Academy, which was  founded  by Tom Delonge, the founder and lead singer of the bands Blink-182 and Angels & Airwaves.

Ratcliffe said it would be “healthy” for as much of this information to be made public as possible. He also said he wanted to “disclose” this information before leaving office, but noted, “We weren’t able to get it into an unclassified format that we could quickly talk about.”

Ratcliffe is not the only former member of the US intelligence community to speak out about UFOs in recent months.

Former CIA director John Brennan said in  a podcast with US economist Tyler Cowen  in December that the videos of Navy pilots “are mind-boggling when you look at them.”

Brennan also said that he thinks that “some of the phenomena that we’re going to see remain unexplained and may actually be some kind of phenomenon that is a result of something that we don’t yet understand and that may involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different way of life.