Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is going all in on the belief that UFOs are a threat to national security.
In an interview with CBS News Miami last week, Rubio, the acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was adamant about the danger posed by “unidentified aerial phenomena” — the military’s term for UFOs.
“We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours,” Rubio said.
“The bottom line is that if there are things flying over your military bases and you don’t know what they are because they’re not yours and they exhibit — potentially — technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal, that to me,” said Rubio, “is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into.”
The interview prompted UFO activists to celebrate the attention and credulity given to the issue by a U.S. senator.
“Take a breath to appreciate this moment,” said UFO researcher Richard Dolan. “This is a prominent U.S. senator talking about the serious nature of airspace violations by unknown objects of extraordinary capabilities over places where they are not supposed to be.”
In the interview with CBS News Miami reporter Jim Defede, Rubio entertained the possibility that the unidentified spacecraft could have an extraterrestrial origin, saying that “it might actually be better” if the objects come from outer space rather than from the Chinese or the Russians.
Rubio has not previously spoken so openly about UFOs, but he has taken them seriously in his role as acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Within about a month of taking up that role, Rubio requested on June 17 that the Pentagon issue a report about its “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force.” Rubio’s request formally acknowledged the existence of the task force for the first time.
The senate intelligence committee’s request calls on the military to submit a report in 180 days which includes a “detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reporting,” “an identification of potential aerospace or other threats posed by the unidentified aerial phenomena to national security,” and “an assessment of whether this unidentified aerial phenomena activity may be attributed to one or more foreign adversaries.”
“Our perspective,” said Rubio in his interview with Defede, “is there is someone flying in the airspace that no one else is allowed to fly in and we don’t know who it is and it isn’t something we have.”
“We need to know what that is,” he added.
Rubio’s interest in UFOs follows several revelations in recent years about the U.S. military’s involvement with unidentified aerial phenomena.
In 2017, the New York Times reported on the existence of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which according to its former leader, Luis Elizondo, investigated materials recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena, studied people who said they had encounters with the phenomena, and interviewed members of the military who reported seeing the objects.
In April 2019, the Navy announced they would create formal guidelines for reporting sightings of the unidentified objects after pilots were allegedly upset that their reports were being ignored.
And in April of this year, the Navy released three videos of unidentified aircraft recorded by Navy pilots in restricted airspace during training exercises in November 2004 and January 2015. The objects shown in the videos move at extremely fast speeds without a detected method of propulsion.
Rubio, who ran in the Republican presidential primary against President Donald Trump, is an ambitious politician. That would seem to run up against promoting and investigating UFOs, which is typically not seen as a politically expedient position.
But Rubio seems to honestly believe that unidentified aerial phenomena are a real danger for the U.S. military. Convinced that the objects display technology far beyond the capabilities of the U.S. military, Rubio is betting that it will pay off in the long term to be the first politician to reveal the truth of UFOs.
