Based on recent remarks by Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command, we shouldn’t expect anything of that sort in whatever the government might publish in response to Trump’s forthcoming order.
Photo credit:
US Air Force/Eric Dietrich
Gen. Stephen Whiting, the commander of US Space Command.
Photo credit:
US Air Force/Eric Dietrich
“I can say, personally, I was very intrigued by the president’s announcement,” Whiting told reporters last week at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium in Colorado. “I look forward to seeing whatever data is released. As a space operator with 36 years’ experience who has spent substantial time with space-domain awareness sensors and tracking objects in space, I’ve only observed manmade items, so I’m not aware of anything extraterrestrial apart from comets and similar occurrences.
“I’m very interested in the subject,” he continued. “And if anything is disclosed, I’ll be interested as an American citizen.”
Space Command’s responsibilities include an area of responsibility (AOR) that stretches from the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere out to the Moon and beyond. One of its duties is to track, monitor, and catalog objects in space. Whiting indicated that everything he’s observed in orbit can be attributed to either human-made or natural causes.
“We would follow any presidential instruction to review our records, but I think the term of art now is UAP, and the A stands for aerial, so these refer to objects below the Kármán line (100 kilometers), within the atmosphere,” Whiting said. “I’ve seen some of the same videos and radar data many of you have, and my expectation is that the relevant services and combatant commands will hand that data over. I’m very interested in the topic, but I have no personal experience with those phenomena.”
