2020’s Still Wacky: Someone Slipped ‘UFO Disclosure’ Countdown into COVID Relief Bill

If you thought that we were going to get out of 2020 without at least one more truly zany story, I’ve got some bad news for you.

This has been the year of the pandemic, mostly, but some of the other stories that have popped up in its shadow have been truly ridiculous.  Murder hornets and monoliths come to mind, with the former being handled via a giant vacuum, and the latter getting a gingerbread makeover for Christmas.

Now, with only a few scant hours left to go, we’ve discovered that someone added a “UFO disclosure” line into the pork-packed coronavirus relief bill.

President Trump’s signature Sunday on the $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief and government funding bill started a 180-day countdown for the Pentagon and spy agencies to say what they know about UFOs.

The provision received very little attention in part because it wasn’t included in the text of the 5,593-page legislation, but as a “committee comment” attached to the annual intelligence authorization act, which was rolled into the massive bill.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said in the comment it “directs the [director of national intelligence], in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of such other agencies… to submit a report within 180 days of the date of enactment of the Act, to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on unidentified aerial phenomena.”

The report must address “observed airborne objects that have not been identified” and should include a “detailed analysis of unidentified phenomena data collected by: a. geospatial intelligence; b. signals intelligence; c. human intelligence; and d. measurement and signals intelligence,” the committee said.

Now let’s all hope that this is the weirdest thing we have to deal with in 2021.