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It’s balloons.
It’s a smudge.
It’s Superman!
Is there anything social media naysayers won’t conjure up to dismiss new footage of an unidentified flying object above an overseas U.S. airbase in 2017?
Video of the mysterious floating object – dubbed the ‘jellyfish’ for its dangling tentacle-like appendages – was published last week by investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp.
The release has since unleashed a torrent of wild speculation from armchair debunkers. But there’s good reason not to dismiss this disclosure so easily.
As a journalist covering the UFO beat, I regularly work with Corbell and Knapp who have been behind much of the groundbreaking reporting in this field.
Knapp is a two-time winner of the prestigious Edward R. Murrow journalism award.
In 1989, he famously revealed the still-controversial allegations of Bob Lazar, who claimed he was hired to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial technology at a secret Nevada site near a U.S base – a facility that has come to be known as Area 51.
Corbell, too, has earned his place among pioneering UFO reporters.
In 2021, Corbell obtained, investigated and published multiple pieces of leaked military footage of a spherical object – filmed by the crew of the U.S.S. Omaha – off the coast of Southern California. The oblong orb is seen flying into stiff headwinds before disappearing into the ocean.
Video of the mysterious floating object – dubbed the ‘jellyfish’ for its dangling tentacle-like appendages – was published last week by investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell (left) and George Knapp (right).
The duo have now released six pieces of footage showing potentially unexplainable UFOs over conflict zones in the Middle East.
For decades, the U.S. government has dismissed this journalism as conspiracy until 2017 when the Pentagon confirmed the existence of a long-running secret program that studied these strange occurrences.
In 2023, under growing public pressure, Congress held its first hearings to investigate claims of ex-military pilots who testified under oath on their first-hand accounts of mysterious flying objects encountered around the world.
Now as more and more UFO evidence surfaces, the government has no choice but to be more transparent. And it is in this spirit of openness that Corbell and Knapp step forward.
They hold no theories on what the ‘jellyfish’ UFO is, and – yet again – as no plausible explanations have emerged others have rushed to judgment.
Some proclaim the allegedly military-grade infrared footage recorded from a surveillance blimp shows a smudge on the camera lens – bird poop, perhaps.
The ‘smudge theory’ was soon rubbed out by sleuths who zoomed in on the object revealing that it rotated as it passed over Al-Taqaddum Airbase in central Iraq in 2017.
A lens smear would exhibit two dimensions. Only three-dimensional objects can appear to spin on video.
A second conjecture was that the ‘jellyfish’ is a cluster of balloons. An expert on infrared videos, Dave Falch, has seemingly burst that bubble for now.
Falch, known for his in-depth analysis of such footage, demonstrated through an experiment posted on his Twitter feed that latex balloons are not visible when viewed using infrared.
Another former infrared systems operator has claimed the ‘jellyfish’ might by mylar balloons, but Falch doubts this theory, too, as mylar would likely have a distinct infrared signature.
Falch’s analysis is also supported by the accounts of anonymous first-hand military witnesses, who have spoken with Corbell and Knapp.
Some proclaim the allegedly military-grade infrared footage recorded from a surveillance blimp shows a smudge on the camera lens – bird poop, perhaps.
Another conjecture was that the ‘jellyfish’ is a cluster of balloons. An expert on infrared videos, Dave Falch, has seemingly burst that bubble.
These witnesses, who have been trained to differentiate between harmless balloons, surveillance aircraft, and other, potentially dangerous, airborne objects, to this day cannot explain what they saw.
The world is left with no concrete answers, which can be an uncomfortable position for some.
But if solving UFO mysteries were straightforward, the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence apparatus wouldn’t have found it necessary to announce the creation of an entirely new office in November 2021 – now known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) – to investigate them.
UFOs exist. Get used to it.
There are things in our skies, oceans and outside the atmosphere, which cannot be explained.
What the ‘jellyfish’ UFO footage doesn’t show is what witnesses have reported to Corbell and Knapp: that the UFO is said to have descended into the nearby Habbaniyah Lake for 17 minutes, then re-emerged from the water and accelerated rapidly at a 45-degree angle until it disappeared from the frame.
If those claims are proven true, then the ‘jellyfish’ footage will be another piece of sobering evidence suggesting that the most powerful nation in history does not have technological supremacy and faces a potential new threat.
In 2021, Corbell published leaked footage of a spherical object – filmed by the crew of the U.S.S. Omaha – off the coast of Southern California. The oblong orb (above) is seen flying into stiff headwinds before disappearing into the ocean.
The duo have now released six pieces of footage showing potentially unexplainable UFOs over conflict zones in the Middle East. (Above) A metallic-looking orb flying over an Iraqi city was allegedly caught on video by a US spy plane.
Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe implied as much last year when he conceded that the U.S. government has a responsibility to scrutinize ‘objects that demonstrate technologies that seem to defy the law of physics and capabilities that we don’t have as the world’s superpower.’
The situation is so concerning that Five Eyes – the intelligence alliance comprised of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States report – has published a classified report on the increased frequency of UFO encounters, according to Corbell’s reporting.
Many in Congress, even Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have demanded more disclosure. But worryingly, some in the U.S. government may be turning back the clock on secrecy.
Following the declassification of three UFO videos in 2020, the U.S. Navy has explicitly stated that it will not release any more footage over ‘national security’ concerns. This week the Pentagon issued a statement on the ‘jellyfish’ UAP refusing to confirm or deny the authenticity of the video or whether it has been reported to AARO.
The public should push harder for answers. Whatever the ‘jellyfish’ is – it is, without a doubt, part of a broader discussion about transparency and trust.
As much as the doubters and government censors might wish it away as a smudge, the issue won’t be wiped up so easily.
Author Christopher Sharp is the Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Liberation Times
