The Micah Hanks Program

Is the United States in possession of anomalous craft of non-human origin? Has this information been illegally kept from Congress? These are among the questions raised by a bombshell story published in  The Debrief  by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal who, in 2017, reframed the public debate about unidentified aerial phenomena in an article published in The New York Times.  Now, a former intellige...

In the early pre-dawn hours of July 17, 1957, an Air Force RB-47—an aircraft that served at the time as the backbone of Strategic Air Command's bomber fleet—was in mid-flight on a composite mission that included gunnery exercises over the Texas Gulf Coast, when its crew had an encounter with the extraordinary.  This week on  The Micah Hanks Program , we examine the RB-47 UFO incident, and how the...

Between 2008 and 2010, what is arguably one of the most atypical government investigations into the unexplained was carried out by employees with Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) out of Las Vegas, Nevada, as part of a Defense Intelligence Agency effort known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program, or AAWSAP.  This week on  The Micah Hanks Program , we examin...

Since the 1950s, American astronomers and military officials have monitored the orbital space above planet Earth for signs of objects that may represent threats to the United States. However, even prior to the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, strange objects of unknown origin were being detected in orbit above Earth, giving rise to theories about the existence of an alien probe that could have q...

Few perennial mysteries intrigue us more than people who vanish. Throughout history, there have been countless examples of cases involving individuals who went missing under unusual circumstances, many of which were never found. But are there truly any cases that point to extraordinary phenomena that could have been related to people's disappearances? In this installment of  The Micah Hanks Progra...

On June 2, 1964, Charles Davis, a youth living near the town of Hobbs, New Mexico, had been playing outside in full view of his grandmother when a small, top-shaped black object swooped down from the sky and hovered over him, dumping a shower of flames onto the frightened child. Although he said he could feel no pain, Davis was left temporarily disfigured after the incident, and prefers today not...

Since 2017, reports of unusual encounters U.S. military personnel have had with anomalous aerial phenomena have seen renewed debate among the military, the media, and the academic community. Meanwhile, an undercurrent of cases involving anomalous health incidents has also gradually come to the attention of the intelligence community; but could there be a relationship between the two, and if so, wh...

On April 19, 2023, a hearing by the Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities was held that focused on the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and its assessment of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP.  Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of AARO and witness in attendance for the Senate hearing, discussed common shapes of UAP, as well as their flight dynamics and...

In 1957, a wealthy Texas philanthropist and oil tycoon named Tom Slick Jr. was making headlines across the nation. Slick, who had already poured much of his family fortune into the establishment of foundations aimed at exploring various areas of the sciences, was now getting international attention for his plans to launch an expedition in search of a modern mystery: the famous Abominable Snowman o...

In the heart of the Nevada desert is one of the most legendary and talked about locations in the United States... despite the fact that, until a decade ago, it "officially" didn't exist. However, since the late 1980s, the secret Air Force installation known as Area 51 has remained almost synonymous with UFOs, thanks in large part to Bob Lazar, a man who in addition to claiming to have worked there...

By the early years of the new millennium, experts were already sounding alarms about the potential threat that machine intelligence might eventually pose to humanity. As of 2023, following the arrival of AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard—enhanced performance chatbots that many view as little more than party tricks—the race to create genuinely intelligent machines seems to be fully u...

Throughout the mid-1970s, several incidents occurred throughout the United States involving law enforcement encounters with UAP. Involving multiple witnesses to the aerial phenomena in question, some of the incidents also resulted in real-time recordings of police dispatch calls featuring descriptions of the objects police officers sighted. This week, we examine several of these incidents, and exa...

In October 2022, dozens of cattle were found dead under mysterious circumstances on U.S. Forest Service property along Colorado's Western Slope. Although initially believed to have involved wolf depredation, as officials closed the investigation earlier this year, there was no evidence to support the presence of any kind of predator, and the cause of the strange deaths remains unknown.  This week,...

In a recent bombshell scientific paper, Harvard astronomer and head of the Galileo Project Avi Loeb joined forces with Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the DoD's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to make the argument for "physical constraints" they say can be applied to unidentified aerial phenomena.  "Claims of objects exceeding the transonic to supersonic range," the authors argue in the...

Recent incidents involving objects the Pentagon has, to date, refused to identify have renewed debate over excessive secrecy in the United States, especially as it relates to the question of unidentified aerial phenomena. If the government won't release imagery it has of suspected balloons shot down over North America, then what does this say about any truly anomalous imagery in its possession?  J...

Last week, as controversy following the recent downing of unidentified objects over North America continued, President Joe Biden finally spoke out on the matter, defending his administration's decision to shoot down three objects that, to this date, still officially remain unidentified.  The President's remarks offered a rare glimpse at Biden's position on UAP, or what he characterized as "unident...

On Friday, February 10, 2023, a dramatic series of events began to unfold involving the shoot-down of what the Pentagon characterized as an "object" over northeastern Alaska. The White House was quick to comment on the incident, and within just hours, a second object was taken down over Canada, followed by a  third  object over Lake Huron on Sunday. As of Tuesday, none of the objects have been ide...

Recently, a suspected Chinese spy balloon was shot down by a U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor as it drifted over the Atlantic off the South Carolina coast, ending an unusual series of events that placed additional strain on already tense relations between China and the United States. With a payload the size of three school buses, China claimed the balloon was "a civilian airship used for research, mainl...

On November 23, 2019, a FLIR camera system onboard an RC-26B aircraft with the Air National Guard managed to film an unconventional flying object as it passed over Arizona. Displaying no visible means of propulsion or aerodynamic lift, the odd footage has been touted as one of several examples of Department of Homeland Security videos depicting unidentified aerial phenomena.  This week, joining us...

On October 31, 2022, the second installment of a series of reports involving the Department of Defense's ongoing evaluation of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) was scheduled for delivery, and after weeks of waiting, the ODNI report has finally been delivered... and with mixed reception from the UAP community.  This week, we provide a complete breakdown and analysis of what the data in the repor...

For decades, rumors of an alleged film depicting the landing of a flying saucer at Holloman Air Force Base have persisted, following the depiction of a story based on the alleged incident in a 1970s documentary,  UFOs: Past, Present, and Future,  and in a book of the same title by Robert Emenegger. The story emerged after Emenegger was purportedly told he would be given the footage for his documen...

In a recent series of  Wall Street Journal  opinion editorials, columnist Holman Jenkins Jr. has argued that military UAP encounters might be the result of a "secret military laser program", which he suggested might have been tested on active-duty pilots and that the Pentagon "may know exactly what [UAP] are." His criticisms of the topic, and of military personnel who have had such encounters, rec...

As 2022 draws to a close, some have argued that the last twelve months were a "slow year" for developments regarding UFOs, or what the Department of Defense now even more broadly calls "unidentified anomalous phenomena." However, the reality is that this couldn't be further from the truth: 2022 may eventually be seen as a landmark year in terms of developments related to the Pentagon's ongoing inv...

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena have received renewed attention in recent years, following the U.S. government's focus on resolving incidents with anomalous phenomena occurring in air, undersea, and space domains. However, the underlying source of these unusual objects remains undetermined. While one popular theory holds that they could represent extraterrestrial technologies, another interpretation...