The GIldebrand Amendment and MUFON: Time for Team Work

NOV.2021/ Recently, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) submitted an important amendment for inclusion in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act requiring the government to strengthen its investigations of unidentified aerial phenomena, otherwise known as UFOs. [UFO CHRONICLES]  . The Amendment was recently relabeled as SA4593 with significant bi-partisan support. 

This move has led MUFON, and others, to begin to press for a renewed partnership between civilian and government groups in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data related to the UAP's of this era. 

As this site has mentioned previously, once there was a vast partnership between government and private sector professionals and trained amateurs. 

Various projects from wartime surveys of the skies for enemy planes to observing and recording data for lunar explorations and comet tracking had long used this positive partnership.  Then, the paranoia of the cold war and a full scale move into a world of secrets and classified information, heaved the passionate and enthused civilians out into the cold. When this first happened, under Project Grudge and then early Project Blue Book the civilian response was the development of hundreds of UFO groups ranging from "nutjob" guilds watching for "Brothers from Space" to scientifically inclined professionals and amateurs intent on gathering accurately data, recording it and analyzing it. Some of these, such as NICAP, produced far more scientific and detailed reports than PBB could have produced with its limited resources. Yet, these high-quality groups were viewed with suspicion and "Communist seed beds" or as "Nut Cases."

Just as watching the night skies for meteors, comets, and planetary phases requires vast amounts of time and person power - and active networks of trained enthusiasts aided professional astronomers for decades in doing just that - so too, the scope of a truly vast scientific study and investigation of sightings requires a lot of feet on the ground. It is once more time for that partnership mode to be rediscovered and utilized. 

MUFON - the Mutual UFO Network has a large membership, a highly sophisticated field investigator training program, and a framework already in place to aid any renewed government studies in these sightings and the collection of appropriate data along the way. 

It is time for team work once more.