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Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman said the United States is currently in a "new era" of space activity while giving his keynote speech at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last week.
“This new era comes with new challenges and new opportunities and mandates that we adopt new methods and mindsets to address them. The Space Force, our industry partners, our allies, and inter-agency teammates must collectively pivot to new ways of doing business to keep up with the new operating environment,” Salztman said last Wednesday (April 19) via the Space Force's website.
Saltzman, who is the second-ever chief of space operations for the branch, elaborated on his public statement during a post-speech interview with CNBC.
“The threats that we face to our on-orbit capabilities from our strategic competitors [have] grown substantially,” Saltzman said while appearing on CNBC's Manifest Space podcast, which served as his first broadcast interview since taking over as the Space Force's highest-ranking military official last November. “The congestion we’re seeing in space with tracked objects and the number of satellite payloads, and just the launches themselves, have grown at an exponential rate.”
Saltzman added that he intended "to make sure that we are thinking about our processes and procedures differently." His message came amid a heightened focus on UFO sightings in recent years. In January, a report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed details behind more than 150 previously unexplained UFO sightings among the 366 reported to the Pentagon since March 2021, NBC News reported at the time.
The unclassified report from states that 163 sightings were balloons or "balloon-like entities," 26 reports were unmanned aircrafts or vessels similar to drones and six were either birds, plastic bags or the results of weather events.
The report did, however, specify that “initial characterization does not mean positively resolved or unidentified" in relation to the findings. Nearly half of the 366 new cases were unexplainable and “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” according to the report.
A classified version of the report was sent to lawmakers in Washington, D.C., in adherence with a defense spending bill recently passed by Congress. The majority of new UFO sightings were reported by Navy and Air Force aviators and operators, which brought the total to 510.
The increase in sightings is believed to be "partially due to a better understanding of the possible threats that UAP may represent, either as safety of flight hazards or as potential adversary collection platforms," as well as the "reduced stigma surrounding UAP reporting." Additionally, the increase in reporting sightings "allows more opportunities to apply rigorous analysis and resolve events," according to the report.
In November 2021, the U.S. Pentagon announced plans to launch a new office aimed to track and assess unidentified flying objects spotted in military training airspace. The Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) was launched to work alongside other federal agencies to “detect, identify and attribute” UFOs and "assess, and as appropriate, mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks confirmed in a memo obtained by DefenseOne.com.
In June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary assessment on unidentified aerial phenomena. In the report, the UAP Task Force admitted to receiving reports of 144 unexplained encounters between the U.S. military and UFOs and didn't rule out the possibility of alien connections, though still not explicitly selling the theory either.
In November 2021, a bipartisan amendment was introduced in Congress by New York senator and former Democratic presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand, which aimed to create a more expansive military and intelligence program to study numerous reported UFO sightings of unidentified flying objects by the U.S. Navy and Air Force. The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act establishing an "Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office" with the approval to pursue "any resource, capability, asset, or process of the Department and the intelligence community" to investigate sightings of UFOs or UAPs within the U.S. Department of Defense was being discussed in Congress, Politico reported.
“We’ve not had oversight into this area for a very long time,” Gillibrand said via Politico. “I can count on one hand the number of hearings I had in 10 years on this topic. That's fairly concerning given the experience our service members have had over the last decade.”
The amendment expanded beyond a previous change made to the House version of the bill, as well as other previous public efforts to study UAPs and UFOs.