Sen. Marco Rubio said during an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that so-called “UFOs” are a real subject that can’t be ignored by lawmakers any longer because they pose a serious threat to U.S. national security.
Rubio’s comments to the television news magazine follow an eyebrow-raising report last week during a segment on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” The host featured a video clip captured by sailors aboard a U.S. Navy warship in the summer of 2019 showing an “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” or UAP, as they are now called, being tracked for a distance above the ocean before disappearing into the water.
Carlson’s guest, intelligence expert Tom Rogan, commented that the unidentified craft, which was seen off the coast of San Diego, appears to be “intelligently controlled” and that the Pentagon has data going back decades on such phenomena but in the past often dismissed such sightings as technical glitches.
In his interview with “60 Minutes,” Rubio, a Florida Republican who is the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that colleagues are mixed in how to respond to such sightings ahead of a highly anticipated Defense Department report due next month that is supposed to provide new information on the subject.
(Video: Fox News)
That said, he also urged his fellow elected leaders to take the issue more seriously.
“Some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kinda, you know, giggle when you bring it up. But I don’t think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question,” he said, adding that no matter where the mysterious craft are coming from — a rival power or from another civilization — they are violating U.S. airspace and coming into close proximity with American military assets with impunity.
As such, he said the U.S. needed to put more resources into finding out more about them.
“I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,” he told the newsmagazine. “I want us to have a process to analyze the data every time it comes in. That there be a place where this is cataloged and constantly analyzed until we get some answers.”
He added: “Maybe it has a very simple answer. Maybe it doesn’t.”
Rogan told Carlson that the Office of Naval Intelligence is the lead agency handling data collection and analysis on various sightings, many of which have been witnessed and tracked by U.S. Navy pilots, warships, and nuclear-powered ballistic missile subs.
When he was acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in December, the Florida Republican called on the Pentagon to declassify UAP reports. As a result of his efforts, the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force was given until June to produce a report on its findings.
In a recent interview, Luis Elizondo, a career U.S. intelligence officer who once ran the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program which was established by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in 2013, called the absence of more information regarding UAP sightings an intelligence failure beyond the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“Let’s just go down the rabbit hole here for a second and let’s just assume this is some sort of adversarial or foreign technology that, several decades now, has managed to leapfrog us and evade all 18 members of the intelligence community despite our best human intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence…that would be an intelligence failure that would eclipse just about anything else this country has ever faced, especially if this has occurred for decades,” Elizondo told the New York Post earlier this month.
Rubio, like Elizondo, has access to most if not all of the classified data on the sightings, which makes his warning about taking it seriously even more significant.
“Imagine a technology that can do 6-to-700 g-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space,” Elizondo told “60 Minutes.”
“And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. That’s precisely what we’re seeing,” he added.
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Jon is a staff writer for BizPac Review with 30 years' worth of reporting experience, as well as an author and U.S. Army veteran. He has a BA in political science from Ashford University and an MA in national security studies/intelligence analysis from American Military University.
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