The U.S. military’s history of encounters with unidentified flying objects goes back to World War II. One of the first major UFO sightings came in 1942, when anti-aircraft batteries around Los Angeles opened fire at objects in the sky that they thought were Japanese aircraft. The Army determined later that a lost weather balloon had caused a false alarm.

Later in the war, pilots with the Army’s  415th Night Fighter Squadron reported seeing strange discs of light over Germany, which they dubbed “Foo Fighters” — a term that came from the Smokey Stover firefighter cartoon.

And two years after the war ended, a high-altitude balloon meant to monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. Based on an Army major’s comments, the local newspaper reported that a “flying saucer” had been recovered, giving birth to the modern phenomenon of UFO sightings.

While both military and civilian observers have pondered these encounters for decades, the Pentagon’s focused efforts to find out what UFOs are only started gaining momentum in 1947, when the Air Force launched Project Blue Book.

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Over the next 22 years, the Air Force investigated 12,618 sightings of UFOs, of which 701 remained unidentified when the service closed the project in 1969.

The Air Force ended Project Blue Book after the University of Colorado determined that none of the UFOs investigated by the service had posed a threat to national security; none of the UFOs showed evidence of technology that was more advanced than modern science; and investigators found no evidence that any of the UFOs were extraterrestrial craft, according to the Air Force.

With the military no longer looking into sightings of unidentified airborne objects, the task of investigating UFOs fell to local law enforcement.

But years later, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) helped to secure Congressional funding for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, which investigated unidentified aircraft sightings for the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2008 until 2012.

“The purpose of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapon system applications, with future technology projections over the next 40 years, and to create a center of expertise for advanced aerospace technologies,” said Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough. “The goal was to help understand the threat posed by unconventional or leap-ahead aerospace vehicles and technologies that could have national security implications for the United States.”  

The Defense Intelligence Agency awarded a contract to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, LLC, which worked with academics and scientists to provide a total of 38 technical reports between 2008 and 2012 that looked at several issues associated with unidentified aircraft, including their methods of propulsion and power generation as well as their armaments, Gough told Task & Purpose.

But in 2009, a review determined that the reports from AATIP were “of limited value” to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the program ended when its funding expired in 2012, Gough said.

For the next six years, the Defense Department did not have a formal program to examine reports of unidentified aircraft, she said. During that time, the military services dealt with reports of UFOs the same way they did with reports of other safety or operations security incidents.

The U.S. military got back into the business of investigating unidentified airborne objects in August 2020 when then-Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist established a task force to detect, analyze, and catalog reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — a new term for UFOs. The task force fell under the Navy’s office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security.

“The Department of Defense and the military departments take any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace very seriously and examine each report,” an August 2020 Defense Department news release says.

The new task force was not a continuation of AATIP, Gough said. Since naval aviators had filed most of the reports of unidentified aircraft sightings, the Department of the Navy had taken the lead in investigating UFO incursions into military training ranges and designated airspace starting in 2018. The Defense Department began taking steps the following year to formalize the Navy’s work tracking unidentified aircraft.

By the time the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force was established, the Pentagon had already released three unclassified videos in April 2020 that showed three separate encounters between Navy pilots and UFOs: One in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015. The War Zone had also revealed that Navy pilots filed eight hazard reports between 2013 and 2019 about encounters with unidentified aircraft in restricted airspace off the East Coast.

Separately, in November 2004 two Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz reported seeing a strange aircraft shaped like a Tic Tac that disappeared in front of two aircraft. Radar from the cruiser USS Princeton detected the aircraft 60 miles away just seconds later.

And in July 2019, several unidentified aircraft swarmed Navy ships off the coast of California that were later determined to be drones.

Since President Joe Biden took office, the Defense Department created the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG, in November 2021 to ultimately replace the Navy’s UAP Task Force. The Group was later renamed the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, in July 2022.

Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick was named director of AARO, which falls under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Kirkpatrick was unable to provide a statement for this story, Gough said.

“It is vital to our national security and the safety of our military personnel that we maintain awareness of anomalous objects in all domains,” Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security Ronald S. Moultrie wrote in a July 2022 memo. “We must also keep pace with the development and employment of novel technology by our adversaries. In doing so, we are committed to providing maximum transparency while safeguarding classified information and controlled unclassified information. The establishment of the AARO is a significant step forward in developing the capabilities and processes that are necessary to achieve these goals.”

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have spoken out about the need for the military and intelligence community to work together to determine what UFOs — now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — really are.

“The January ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] UAP report included more than 360 newly-identified reports, of which 163 were characterized as balloon or balloon-like entities and 171 were left uncharacterized,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said in a statement to Task & Purpose. “I will continue working to ensure our armed services listen to our operators about the threat UAPs pose to our national security and to maintaining American air supremacy.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) released a video on Tuesday saying that reports of unidentified aircraft were dismissed for a long time because they were associated with UFOs and aliens.

“That’s not’s not my concern,” Rubio said in the video, which he shared on Twitter. “My concern is that some other country has developed a capability to monitor and enter our airspace and that we are not prepared to identify it. We’re looking for airplanes. We’re looking for missiles. We’re not looking for objects that don’t fit that criteria. And strategic surprise is the way a lot of wars start, and it’s the way a lot of wars and conflicts are lost.”

Following the recent shoot downs of a Chinese spy balloon and three other objects that have yet to be identified, Biden has directed National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to put together an interagency team to look at whether any policy changes need to be made regarding how the United States detects and analyzes unidentified aircraft, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday.

Kirby also said the U.S. government is taking more of a Scully than Mulder approach to the UFO issue: “I don’t think the American people need to worry about aliens, with respect to these craft,” he said.

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After nearly one year of brutal conflict, Russia has failed to subjugate Ukraine or shatter the NATO alliance, Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday. 

“In short: Russia has lost,” Milley said during a news conference in Brussels. “They’ve lost strategically, operationally, tactically, and they are paying an enormous price on the battlefield.”

But in the next breath, Milley made clear that the war in Ukraine is not yet over by saying that the international community will continue to support the Ukrainians until Russian President Vladimir Putin “ends his war of choice.”

With that said, history has shown that conflicts tend to continue long after one side has lost. Both Germany and Japan fought on for years during World War II even though they no longer had the ability to achieve victory.

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Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last year, up to 200,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded, according to the New York Times. The Dutch open source group Oryx recently estimated that more than 1,000 Russian tanks have been destroyed and another 547 Russian tanks have been captured by the Ukrainians.

Currently, the Russian military has regained the initiative in Ukraine and started launching a new offensive in Luhansk, which is in eastern Ukraine, according to the Institute for the Study of War think tank in Washington, D.C.

“The commitment of significant elements of at least three major Russian divisions to offensive operations in this sector indicates the Russian offensive has begun, even if Ukrainian forces are so far preventing Russian forces from securing significant gains,” ISW wrote in its Feb. 8 assessment of the conflict.

It would be more accurate to say that Russia is losing the war rather than it has lost, said Luke Coffey, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C.

“Ukraine is clearly on the front foot,” Coffey told Task & Purpose. “As more Western weapons pile into Ukraine, Ukraine only gets stronger. And as Russia has to dig deeper into its ancient stockpiles of older tanks and armored vehicles, Russia gets weaker.”

However, Coffey cautioned that the conflict could last for years unless the United States and its partners begin providing Ukrainians with weapons they need to win the war — including F-16s, A-10s, and Army Tactical Missile System rockets, or ATACMS.

Russia claims to have mobilized 300,000 new troops, Coffey said. Even if the actual number of conscripts that have been mobilized is far fewer than that, the Russians will still be able to throw tens of thousands of new troops into battle.

“There’s no indication that Russia is willing to give up or go to the negotiating table,” Coffey said, adding, “2023 will not be a year at peace.”

Russia’s population also stands at roughly 142 million, and that is more than three times the size of Ukraine’s population of about 43 million, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.

That means Russia can take terrible losses and still overwhelm Ukrainian forces, said Phillip Karber, a Marine veteran and national security analyst, who spent 190 days as an observer on Ukraine’s front lines.

Karber said his sources in Ukraine have told him that the Ukrainians are killing 20 Russians for every one of their own troops slain. At that rate, a Ukrainian rifle platoon can inflict heavy casualties on the Russians, but the platoon will no longer exist after a month of fighting.

“The bleeding is horrendous on the Ukrainian side and the only way to stop it is to give them the goddamn ATACMS,” Karber told Task & Purpose. The units are getting battered. The guys are shattered. You have units that are down to 10 guys that started with 30 or 40.”

Karber also urged the United States and its allies to provide Ukraine with the type of military aid it needs to end the war quickly, arguing that Ukrainian democracy is at risk the longer the conflict drags on.

“Democracies don’t handle long wars well,” Karber said. “Nobody does, but it’s hard on democracies. What happens in a long war: You either lose the war or you lose the democracy — or you lose both.”

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The Air Force has been chalking up kills the past two weeks as its fighter jets shot down a Chinese spy balloon followed by a series of unidentified flying objects over the United States. But no matter whether the F-22 or the F-16 fired it, the missile taking down all these mysterious visitors has been the same: the AIM-9X Sidewinder. 

The AIM-9 is a family of heat-seeking, air-to-air missiles that have an estimated 270 aircraft kills to their name, according to a 2004 Air Force press release. Though there are several variants of the missile, it generally weighs about 190 pounds, is approximately 9 feet long, and has a diameter of about 5 inches, according to the weapon’s fact sheet. The AIM-9X is the latest iteration of the AIM-9 and can be fired from most U.S. military fighter jets, including the F-15, the F/A-18, F-35 and, as proven by recent events, the F-22 and F-16. 

The Sidewinder dates all the way back to the first successful test firing of the AIM-9A prototype in September 1953. In the years leading up to that, many U.S. military planners were focused on developing radar-guided missiles that could hit large Soviet bombers from as far away as possible. But a team of engineers led by Dr. William McLean at Naval Ordnance Test Station China Lake, California tried their hands at developing a more nimble weapon that could help fighters strike a wider range of targets and close the performance gap between the Navy’s primary fighter, the F9F Panther, and its Eastern Bloc opponent, the MiG-15.

The AIM-9 was relatively cheap to develop, partly because it was built with many “off-the-shelf” parts that already existed, explained military historian James Young in a 2021 history of the Sidewinder.

“Taken together, these factors meant the Navy’s ideal missile might be a cheap, easy-to-use weapon that both markedly increased fighter capability and required minimal technology for employment in conventional conflicts,” Young wrote. 

Earning stripes

While the AIM-9’s 60% kill rate in testing and early operations such as the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis showed great promise, the Vietnam War exposed the missile’s shortcomings. North Vietnamese fighter pilots figured out how to outmaneuver the missile, Young wrote, and American aircrews were undertrained on both the Sidewinder’s capabilities and on dogfighting enemy aircraft like MiG-17s. The 60% kill rate promised before the war fell to about 10 to 15% by the end of 1968.

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The Air Force and Navy both worked to improve the missile’s performance through various technical upgrades, but the Navy showed the greatest gains in performance by improving the training of its aircrew through efforts like the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School (better known as Top Gun). By the end of 1972, “the Navy’s Phantom II-Sidewinder combination became so deadly that NVAF MiGs began circumventing combat,” Young wrote.

So began a long win streak for the Sidewinder, which continued to improve through technical upgrades such as the release of the AIM-9L and AIM-9M. Sidewinders fired from U.S. Navy F-14s destroyed two Libyan Su-22s in 1981, helped the Israeli Air Force dominate Syrian MiG-21s and MiG-23s over Lebanon in 1982, and arguably saved the United Kingdom’s air war against Argentinian Mirage IIIs and other aircraft during the 1982 Falklands War. The Sidewinder continued to prove its worth during the Gulf War, where it shot down Iraqi MiG-21s, MiG-23s, and even a Mi-8 helicopter. 

But why is the U.S. military still using the missile now, almost 70 years after its first successful test? Part of the answer is that it still works, especially after all the technical upgrades that make the current AIM-9X a much more capable beast than its ancestors. Indeed, when Boeing won a contract in 2010 to support Sidewinder operations through to 2055, Air Force spokesperson Stephanie Powell said in a press release that the missile’s relatively low cost, versatility, and reliability made it “very possible that the Sidewinder will remain in Air Force inventories through the late 21st century.”

Balloon popper

McLean and his team of China Lake engineers may not have suspected back in the 1950s that the weapon they designed to take down nimble enemy aircraft would be used to destroy relatively static balloons or UFOs at the edge of space. In fact, when an Air Force F-22 pilot used an AIM-9X to destroy a Chinese spy balloon at about 60,000 feet above the Earth last week, it may have been the first time a Sidewinder ever reached such distant heights.

“I don’t know that they’ve tested an AIM-9 at that altitude,” the commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, Gen. Glen VanHerck, told reporters on Feb. 6. 

Another option to destroy the balloon was the AIM-120, a radar-guided missile, but the decision to use the AIM-9 instead “goes back to safety considerations and effectiveness,” VanHerck said. “You know, the AIM-120 has a significantly-larger range, a significantly-larger missile warhead.”

The AIM-9X was considered to be a more safe but equally effective option compared to the AIM-120, VanHerck explained. Still, the AIM-9X can cost about a third to half a million dollars a pop, according to Department of Defense budget documents. 

Are there less expensive options for bringing down these balloons and UFOs, such as the cannons aboard Air Force fighter jets? Probably not without considerable safety risks. For example, the balloon was so high up that even the F-22, with its maximum ceiling of around 65,000 feet, was reaching the edge of its capabilities, as our colleagues at The War Zone reported. 

That high up, closing to gun range with the balloon would have added unnecessary risk to the mission. The shells fired from such a gun run would likely cause only small holes in the balloon before flying for miles below, where “their kinetic energy alone” would be dangerous to anybody on the ground, The War Zone wrote.

If the current pace keeps up, the AIM-9X will have quite a few more kills to its name, though it is still unclear what exact kinds of aircraft were killed. Either way, the Sidewinder has proved once again that it is not going by the wayside anytime soon.

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The U.S. military launched another airstrike in Somalia last week in support of Somali army forces who were engaging al-Shabaab militants. 

Twelve al-Shabaab militants were reportedly killed in the strike, which occurred on Feb. 10 roughly 28 miles southwest of the town of Hobyo, which is approximately  290 miles northeast of the Somali capital of Mogadishu, according to U.S. Africa Command. 

U.S. Africa Command declined to provide further information about what units or assets were involved, but the airstrike is the latest mission carried out by the U.S. as part of its enduring presence in Somalia and East Africa. Last month, on Jan. 25, U.S. forces “conducted an assault operation” that killed Bilal al-Sudani, an ISIS leader in Somalia. That came just a few days after airstrikes on Jan. 20 and Jan. 23 against al-Shabaab — a terrorist group with links to al-Qaida — forces. While no U.S. troops were on the ground for either of those strikes, the Jan. 20 strike reportedly killed more than 30 al-Shabaab militants. 

In September 2019, a large group of al-Shabaab militants attacked an airfield guarded by New Jersey Army National Guard soldiers, in what was described as the “largest battle against al-Shabaab militants since Operation Gothic Serpent,” the 1993 operation to capture the Somali leader Mohamed Farrah Aidid, which resulted in the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident. Last fall, an Army doctor was awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received during a 2020 ambush by al-Shabaab forces in the village of Jana Cabdalle, in southeast Somalia. In that incident, Lt. Col. Daniel Brillhart and other U.S. and Somali forces “endured stiff enemy resistance while manning the fighting positions during the attack and providing medical treatment to over two dozen friendly casualties, which ultimately [allowed] the element to fight their way back to friendly lines without further losses.”

The U.S. presence in Somalia, at least in the context of the Global War on Terror, dates back to 2007. In late 2020, the roughly 700 U.S. personnel deployed there were withdrawn to other points in East Africa. Airstrikes in the county, though, continued throughout 2021 until May 2022, when a small number of U.S. troops were redeployed to Somalia, although not to be “directly engaged in combat operations.”

Throughout 16 years in Somalia and East Africa, though, the U.S. presence has rarely captured many headlines. Still, it’s a reminder that even if the National Defense Service Ribbon has been retired for now, the Global War on Terror, be it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, or elsewhere, is not yet over.

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