We recently looked at the admission from the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) that they had at least one other video of the Nimitz UFO encounter that was classified Secret and a set of slides that are “correctly” marked Top Secret. The latter was described as having the potential to cause “exceptionally grave damage” to the national security of the United States if the documents were released to the public. There are, of course, legitimate reasons for the government and the military to hold certain information close to the vest when national security is concerned, but this revelation set a lot of tongues to wagging. What was this information? And what does it have to do with UFOs?

Over at the Washington Examiner, Tom Rogan (who has been doing yeoman’s work on the entire UFO/UAP subject) has spent some time researching this question. He obviously doesn’t have a copy of the highly classified slides, but he believes we can make some fairly reliable guesses as to where they came from and what sort of information they would contain to justify such a description from ONI.

First, Tom concludes that those slides are probably the ones used to brief both the President and senior congressional leaders last year on all of the Navy UFO information that had been floating around. But what is it about the information that could undermine U.S.intelligence activities, sources and methods?

Here, the ONI is almost certainly referring to active UFO research and analysis programs undertaken by the Navy and other government agencies. Former U.S. government officials involved in those programs have asserted that the UFO research effort is active and growing. I have spoken to other well-informed individuals who assert the same. And, considering that these programs are attempting to ascertain how some UFOs use anti-gravity-enabled means of propulsion to instantaneously accelerate to hypersonic speeds, with little, and sometimes zero, optical/sensor visibility, it’s understandable that the ONI would want to keep their research hidden.

Tom goes on to opine that the “sources and methods” in question are probably some of our most advanced sensor systems. If showing their cards meant exposing how our best sensor equipment operates and the limits of its capabilities, that would be of intense interest to our terrestrial adversaries like Russia and China, no matter whether the UFOs belong to us, them, or somebody… out there. I can’t really argue with that. It makes perfect sense. That’s also why they intentionally degraded and clipped some of the UFO videos we’ve seen. You don’t want to show your hand unless there’s no avoiding it.

But ONI also mentioned protecting “scientific and technological matters related to national security.” What’s that about? More from Tom.

Well, I would confidently venture that this is the nuclear-related UFO concern. Specifically, the proven and sustaining interest in and the ability of some UFOs to detect and interdict nuclear-powered and/or armed U.S. military platforms. The government assesses that this nuclear factor is primarily why the Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and nuclear-powered/nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines interact with UFOs at a far greater rate than other military platforms.

Here’s where Tom and I will probably disagree, at least to a certain extent. Anyone who’s been following this topic for a while is aware of the stories from many countries about UFOs seemingly taking a great interest in nuclear power generation and – even more so – nuclear weapons. But it’s hardly a secret anymore than most of our carriers and other large navy ships are nuclear powered and our fleet has the ability to deploy nuclear weapons. Talking about the UFOs themselves wouldn’t require mentioning whether or not there were any tactical weapons onboard at the time. (For example, there almost certainly weren’t any nukes with the Nimitz carrier battle group during the 2004 incident because they were out on a brief training mission prior to deployment. They didn’t even have conventional missiles loaded on the fighter jets)

Tom concludes with the really big question. If these slides are indeed from the briefings given to Trump and to Congress, what do they say about the UFOs, what they are and where they came from? Tom’s guess is that Congress was told that these objects are most likely “non-U.S., intelligently operated vehicles of unidentified origin, which are judged with high confidence not to be under control of a foreign state or non-state actor.”

In other words, if you rule out the United States, Russia, and China, they were probably made by extraterrestrials of some sort. That’s the answer I’d like to think they got because it may push us a bit closer to some sort of formal admission from the government that we’re dealing with something totally foreign. And not “foreign” in terms of Europe or Asia, but foreign to the Earth.

But even if that’s true, we have no way of knowing whether our military is sitting on a lot more proof that makes such a conclusion less than hypothetical. And even if they are, I remain unconvinced that they would empty the bag entirely for either the White House or Congress. I’d love to be wrong about that, but we’ve been beating our heads against the wall of government secrecy for far too long for me to suddenly become an optimist.