New U.S. documents released on June 12 have revived claims that China and Russia recovered crashed unidentified flying objects and tried to reverse-engineer them. The material is not proof of alien visits, and it does not confirm that either power holds extraterrestrial craft, but it has pushed the issue into the realm of national security in Washington.
Jordan Flowers, chief executive of a foundation focused on releasing information about unidentified aerial phenomena, said in an interview with NewsNation that the most striking part of the new file set is what may be in the hands of America’s rivals. He said there is reason to believe China and Russia obtained wreckage from crashed UFOs and attempted to dismantle it to understand and possibly copy the technology. He linked that view to earlier warnings by David Grusch, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, about Russian and Chinese monitoring of long-running American programs involving unidentified objects.
Flowers cast the issue as a global race, saying, “It’s a race to see who will be the first to reverse engineer it.” He argued that if any country gained a technological advantage from an object it does not fully understand, the security consequences could be severe. Still, none of the claims has been independently verified, and Moscow and Beijing have never publicly acknowledged such programs. The released documents contain descriptions, reports, assessments, and internal discussions, but no definitive conclusion that the objects are extraterrestrial.
The most striking non-China, non-Russia item in the release is a CIA cable dated July 2, 2008, describing a strange incident over Zimbabwe’s main airport near Harare. Witnesses described a disc-shaped object with a hollow center and rotating lights, and the cable says beams of light were seen coming from it before it rose rapidly and disappeared. The report does not say whether radar or physical evidence supported the sighting, but it notes that U.S. officials and military personnel debated whether it was advanced foreign surveillance or something possibly alien, and the incident led to heightened alert among Americans in Zimbabwe.
