Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on Oct. 11, 2018. (Yuri Kochetkov/AFP via Getty Images)
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Dmitry Rogozin, the director-general of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, said that some sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), colloquially referred to as UFOs, could be attributable to extraterrestrial intelligent life.
Rogozin said in a Russian televised interview, aired on June 11, that the Russian Academy of Sciences had been investigating and gathering information about UFO sightings. About 99.9 percent of the sightings were determined to be atmospheric or other physical phenomena and were unrelated to any kind of potentially intelligent life, he said.
“But we accept that such phenomena could exist,” Rogozin also noted, according to a translation by Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik.
He also said he has read and viewed reports by Soviet test-pilot veterans, about what they witnessed during flights in the 1970s.
“What we’re talking about usually took place during the first test fights,” he said, according to a translation by state-controlled media outlet RT. He said he had also received similar information from the United States’ space agency NASA, the outlet reported.
The Russian space agency chief acknowledged that some people support the idea that human beings may be the objects of observation by other intelligent life forms, similar to how humans study microbes.
Rogozin’s comments come about a month after a public U.S. congressional hearing was held on UFOs, the first such hearing in over 50 years.
Scott Bray, the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, showed lawmakers two videos of UFOs but said he did not have an explanation for the objects seen in the videos.
“There are a small handful [of events] in which there are flight characteristics or signature management that we can’t explain with the data we have,” he said. “Those are obviously the ones that are of most interest to us.”
The hearing came after a nine-page report (pdf) released in June 2021 said that a designated task force within the Pentagon, the UAP Task Force, identified 144 UFO sightings from 2004 to 2021 but could only explain one of them. Bray said that since the release of that preliminary assessment, the UAP Task Force database “has now grown to contain approximately 400 reports.”
Bray noted that some of the reports involved incidents where U.S. military aircraft picked up radio frequency energy from the UAPs, but none of these detections suggested that they were “non-terrestrial in origin.” He did not comment in the hearing about whether any of the remaining reports suggested evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Select Republican lawmakers were vocal in criticizing the hearing, and alleged that Democrats were trying to distract from tangible issues facing Americans such as inflation and a declining oil reserve; and that the Pentagon was withholding information from Americans and wasn’t providing “real answers to serious questions.”
The public hearing was followed by a private session of the committee when lawmakers could hear classified information.
When asked at the public hearing about whether the United States has any sensors underwater in the ocean to detect submerged UFOs, Ronald Moultrie, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, did not respond to the question but said the matter would be “more appropriately addressed in [the] closed session.”
Gary Bai contributed to this report.
