UFO investigation launched in Japan after U.S. report designates region as “hotspot” for sightings

UFO sightings should not be ruled out because they could actually be drones or surveillance weapons, say Japanese lawmakers who launched a group on Thursday to investigate the matter. The investigation comes less than a year after the U.S. Department of Defense released a report calling the region a “hot spot” for mysterious object sightings.

The non-partisan group, which counts former defense ministers among its more than 80 members, will urge Japan to increase detection and analysis capabilities unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), more commonly known as UFOs, or unidentified flying objects.

Although the phenomenon is often associated with little green men in the popular imagination, it has become a phenomenon hot political topic in the United States.

The Pentagon said last year was examining 510 UFO reports – more than triple the number in its 2021 file.

Japanese lawmakers hope to align domestic perceptions of UFOs with those of their allies, following several scares related to suspected surveillance operations.

“It is extremely irresponsible of us to resign ourselves to the fact that something is unknowable and continue to turn a blind eye to the unidentified,” group member and former Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said before the launch.

In an embarrassment for Japan’s Defense Ministry, unauthorized images of a docked destroyer helicopter recently spread on Chinese social media following an apparent drone intrusion into a military facility.

And last year, the ministry said it “strongly presumes” that flying objects spotted in Japanese skies in recent years were surveillance balloons sent by China.

In Japan, UFOs have long been viewed as “a hidden issue that has nothing to do with politics,” said opposition lawmaker Yoshiharu Asakawa, a key member of the group.

But if they turn out to be “state-of-the-art secret weapons or disguised spy drones, they could pose a significant threat to our nation’s security.”

“Hotspot” for UFO sightings

The US Department of Defense established in 2022 the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate UFOs, and the following year launched a website to provide the public with declassified information about the mysterious objects.

An AARO report last year designated the region stretching from western Japan to China as a “access point” for UAP sightings, based on trends between 1996 and 2023.

It later concluded, in a 60-page review ordered by Congress, that there was no evidence of alien technology or attempts by the US government to hide it from the public.

Japanese lawmakers will push for the country to create an equivalent to the Pentagon’s AARO and further boost intelligence cooperation with the United States.

Christopher Mellon, a UFO expert and former US intelligence officer, hailed the group’s launch as “remarkable”.

From drones to hypersonic vehicles, the war in Ukraine has shown that “unmanned weapons and artificial intelligence are creating very serious new challenges,” Mellon told Japanese MPs in an online speech.

In December, a US Air Force base was subjected to a mysterious weeks-long drone intrusion, but “we still don’t know where they came from,” he said.

A “UAP effort contributes to our understanding of these types of issues.”

In the US, Congress has shown a growing interest in learning more about detecting and reporting UAPs. A House subcommittee held a public hearing that became headlines last summer featuring a former intelligence officer and two pilots who testified about their experience with UAPs. Lawmakers continued to demand answers and recently held a confidential briefing with the inspector general of the intelligence community.

In September, an independent group of scientists and experts brought together by NASA found no evidence that UAPs are “extraterrestrial” in nature, but emphasized that better data is needed to understand some encounters that defy explanation.

NASA formed the group of 16 experts in 2022 to examine how the space agency can better contribute to scientific understanding of the objects, which have been reported by hundreds of military and commercial pilots.

Eleanor Watson and Stefan Becket contributed to this report.