I’ll bet you a box of donuts that you didn’t see that headline coming, did you? And yet this isn’t some piece of satire, but actual news from the United States Congress. For quite a while now, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has been stalled in the Senate as some of the members battled over various pet amendments they wanted to see included or rejected. But on Monday night, the Senate used a couple of procedural maneuvers to shelve those questions and pass a version of the NDAA to send to the House. There will likely be a bit more horse-trading going on, but the bill is expected to be sent to the President in short order.

Most of the bill deals with the normal funding for our military and intelligence communities as it does every year. But one highly interesting element of it is a sweeping directive to replace the Navy’s UAP Task Force with a new, permanent office that will investigate incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP, or UFOs as they have traditionally been known) and correlate that information to gain a clearer understand of these strange objects that have been recorded in our skies, out in space, and even under the water. Much of the language in that portion of the bill was submitted by Democratic New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who has spoken of the urgent need to accomplish this work. The UAP Task Force was recently absorbed by a new DoD office going by the awkward acronym of AOIMSG, as we discussed here recently, but this new entity will likely either absorb both of them or work in conjunction with the new office.

The language in the latest bill isn’t all identical to the previous amendment, however. And a couple of the changes were rather remarkable. You can read a full breakdown of all the UFO language in this report from Douglas Dean Johnson (the first person to break the news), but he features one new set of marching orders for our defense and intelligence agencies that I wanted to highlight here today. It involves, as the title of this article suggests, instructions for the Department of Defense to attempt to access and study any breakthrough technologies that the UAP might possess and determine if we can replicate them. In other words, they are seriously talking about reverse engineering a UFO. (Emphasis added)

The [Gillibrand-Rubio-Gallego] text also requires the director of the Pentagon UAP office to supervise development of a “science plan to develop and test, as practicable, scientific theories to account for characteristics and performance of unidentified aerial phenomena that exceed the known state of the art in science or technology, including in the areas of propulsion, aerodynamic control, signatures, structures, materials, sensors, countermeasures, weapons, electronics, and power generation,” and to try “to replicate any such advanced characteristics and performance; and provide the foundation for potential future investments to replicate any such advanced characteristics and technology.”

The language mandates that the Secretary and the DNI “shall ensure that each element of the intelligence community with data related to unidentified aerial phenomena makes such data available immediately” to the UAP office.

I will confess that I was reading portions of those paragraphs aloud to my wife last night and I told her that I feel like we’re all living in the midst of a science-fiction movie. I have certainly worn out the word “remarkable” when describing this legislation.

It’s been clear since the revelations of 2017 surrounding the AATIP program and the subsequent formation of the UAP Task Force that the government is taking the reports of our military pilots seriously. They have seen too many of these strange objects, frequently in our military’s restricted airspace, and watched them perform in ways that we are unable to replicate. That fact could represent either a national security threat or a tremendous opportunity. Very possibly both, depending on who you ask.

But now the government is taking the discussion to another level. Not only are they once again publicly admitting that the UFOs are real, but they are seriously looking at trying to retrieve materials from one of them and attempt to duplicate the advanced technology they seem to possess. (That’s assuming we don’t already have some in our possession, hidden away at a classified base at Wright-Patterson or some other location. The jury is still out on that question as far as I’m concerned.)

Assuming the NDAA is signed with the current language intact, all of this action could be happening within the next six months. After that, Congress will receive regular briefings on the findings of the new UAP office multiple times per year and there will also be public hearings and reports on information that doesn’t wind up being classified. How long will it be before human beings are producing their own tic-tacs? (I mean the flying ships, not the candy.) In any event, all I can say is that it’s a very exciting time to be alive.