THE year 2020 has seen revelation after revelation about UFOs and alien life – from Donald Trump’s hints about spaceships landing on earth to the discovery of life on Venus.

And former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope claims this year's extraterrestrial activity is unprecedented, telling the Sun: "All of these stories are fascinating in their own right, but when you put it all together, it’s nothing short of sensational."

Here, he analyses this year’s top 10 UFO stories.

British Government to Release More UFO Files

THE year’s first big UFO story was the shock announcement in January that the MoD was planning to release more top secret X-Files detailing real-life alien encounters.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, it was revealed that unlike previous releases of UFO files, these latest documents would be made public on the GOV.UK website.

The plan was to publish the material by the end of March, but then COVID-19 hit, delaying many planned releases, including this one.

The deadline was changed to the end of the year, but with the pandemic worsening, this looks increasingly unlikely. 

Alien Invasion Fears

TO mark the release of a new TV adaptation of the classic sci-fi story War of the Worlds, an opinion poll published in March revealed that half of Brits believe in aliens and think we should be making plans for an alien invasion within the next 50 years.

Three quarters of those surveyed thought that governments know more about UFOs and aliens than they’re letting on.

Earlier in the year a similar poll revealed that around half of Americans believed aliens had already visited the earth.

UFOs officially exist

For the past three years the world has wondered about the three videos of US Navy jets chasing UFOs.

The New York Times broke the story on 16 December 2017, but some people weren’t convinced the videos were genuine.

They were. On 27 April this year the US Department of Defence issued a statement confirming that the films "were indeed Navy videos".

They stated the phenomena shown in the 2004 and 2015 films – taken on a forward-looking infrared camera – were officially categorized as ‘unidentified’.

A witness to the 2004 encounter, Commander David Fravor, described the UFO’s jamming of Navy radar systems near the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz as being "an act of war".

US Congress Demands Action on UFOs

ON 17 June the powerful and highly secretive Senate Intelligence Committee drafted the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021.

Alongside the usual material that goes into such legislation was a truly extraordinary section under the heading "Advanced Aerial Threats".

In it, the Senators demanded that America’s top spy chief, the Director of National Intelligence, produce a report on UFOs, detailing what the various intelligence agencies know, and coming up with a plan to stop UFOs flying into restricted military airspace.

Intriguingly, the Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris, sits on the committee, and many wonder if this will have a bearing on how President Biden plans to deal with the issue.

In an interview with CBS, Senator Marco Rubio, the committee’s acting chairman, said: "If it’s something outside this planet, that might actually be better than we’ve seen some sort of technological leap from the Chinese or the Russians, or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity’.

President Trump Speaks Out

HE’s been the most controversial and outspoken US president in history, but might he still have one final surprise up his sleeve?

Never before has a sitting president dropped so many hints about UFOs.

At the end of a press briefing In an April press briefing he referred to one of the films of Navy Top Guns chasing a UFO as ‘a hell of a video’ and has also confirmed he attended a briefing on the encounter.

Later in the year, in a Father’s Day interview on his son Don Jr’s TV show Triggered, he responded to a question on Roswell – where UFO enthusiasts believe an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947.

He said: "I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting."

If he does know the truth about aliens, the most likely time for him to disclose would be in the final days of his presidency.

It would cement his place in history and would throw a huge monkey wrench into Joe Biden’s presidency.

Pentagon Sets Up UFO Hunting Unit

IN August, the Pentagon issued a sensational press release, confirming the establishment of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

The top-secret unit was set up in part to meet the Senate Intelligence Committee’s demand for official action.

The task force’s mission is described as "to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security".

Few details of their day-to-day work have emerged.

But in early December a leak from serving intelligence community personnel to media outlet The Debrief revealed that the Pentagon experts hadn’t ruled out an extraterrestrial explanation for the ongoing series of encounters between UFOs and the US military.

Life on Venus

SEPTEMBER brought a shock scientific discovery that made headlines all around the world – news that life had been discovered on Venus. Maybe.

The scientists, led by Professor Jane Greaves from Cardiff University, detected a molecule called phosphine in the hellish Venusian atmosphere.

It’s not clear how such molecules could form through natural processes, so this may be evidence of microbial alien life.

The implications are vast, because if life arose not once but twice in our solar system, life isn’t some sort of one-off cosmic miracle, but a natural process.

It suggests that life should be commonplace in the universe.

In a study published earlier in the year in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists estimated that there might be 36 intelligent civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy.

Given some estimates of how many galaxies there are in the universe, this would suggest there are about 72 trillion civilizations out there.

MoD Withholds UFO Photo for 50 Years

In October, The Sun exclusively revealed a shock government decision to keep the most spectacular photo in the MoD’s UFO files secret for another 50 years, sparking fury from UFO enthusiasts.

The photo – which had been displayed on my MoD office wall for years – showed a vast diamond-shaped craft that had been hovering over the Scottish countryside near Calvine in August 1990, before shooting away vertically at immense speed.

The best representation we have of the actual photo is the result of a collaboration between myself and a graphic artist, and was produced for a Channel 5 TV show.

I’m confident it’s a near-exact recreation, but sadly, the public will have to wait for decades to see the real thing. 

Former President Obama Hints UFOs Exist

ON 30 November, former President Barack Obama gave an interview to US comedian Stephen Colbert, in which he dropped a heavy hint that UFOs were real.

Colbert asked if Obama had ever tried to get top secret information about UFOs when he was president.

Obama confirmed that he had, but replied "can’t tell you" when Colbert pressed for details.

An awkward back-and-forward exchange followed, when the Late Show host said to the 44^th Commander-in-Chief that he’d take his response as confirming aliens were real.

Colbert said: “All right, I’ll take that as a ‘yes’. Because if there were none, you’d say there was none.”

Israel Space Chief Says Alien Exist

ONE of Israel’s most senior and respected space scientists, Haim Eshed, shocked the world in December with claims that there has been an alien presence on Earth.

He spoke about secret bases on Mars and said there was a real-life "Galactic Federation".

He alleged that President Trump had been on the verge of disclosing the truth, when he was persuaded not to, because of the global panic that would result from the revelations.

Just a few days after the story emerged, former CIA chief John Brennan gave an interview where he said the UFO phenomenon might constitute "a different form of life".

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