The U.S. Secretary of State said unidentified objects over American installations 'are not ours' and that he does not know what they are. He stopped short of blaming aliens, and said that if Washington had proof, the president would already be on prime-time TV.
The sentence is short enough to fit on a bumper sticker, and it came from the fourth person in the line of succession to the presidency. “There are things flying over our military installations, and they’re not ours, and we should look into this, be serious about it.”
That was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking on The Katie Miller Podcast in an interview released this week. According to the official State Department transcript, Rubio said plainly that he does not know what the objects are or who controls them - only that the U.S. government does not, and that the question deserves a serious look. It is an unusually direct statement from a sitting Cabinet official, and it is worth reading closely, because what he said is narrower than the headlines it produced.
Rubio was careful to draw a line. “I don’t know who it is, I don’t know what it is,” he said, before adding the “not ours” line. He did not claim the objects are extraterrestrial, and he did not describe any evidence pointing that way. In the same conversation he pushed back on the idea that the administration is hiding proof of alien contact. “If we knew, like, the president would be all over it,” Rubio said, per Fox News. “There would be a primetime address. He would be showing the pictures and the videos.”
He also made a candid admission about his own past. Rubio said that during his years in the Senate, raising unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP - the government’s term for objects that cannot be immediately identified - had been “extraordinarily effective as a diversionary tactic” when he wanted to change the subject with reporters. In the next breath he insisted the topic “is also a very legitimate topic that we should be covering.” He noted that he has handed the issue to a colleague who now leads it inside the government.
The most important word in Rubio’s remark is “ours.” An object that is not American is not automatically alien. As outlets including IBTimes UK noted, the plausible explanations for something unknown over a U.S. base run from a foreign adversary’s surveillance drone, to a classified system the speaker is not cleared to know about, to sensor artifacts and misidentified ordinary aircraft - with an unexplained residue that no one has yet resolved.
That residue is real, and the Pentagon has documented it. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon’s dedicated UAP body, has catalogued hundreds of military reports and repeatedly says two things at once: it has found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology, and a chronic lack of high-quality sensor data keeps a share of cases from being resolved either way. Rubio’s “we should be serious about it” is, in effect, an argument about that data gap rather than a claim about origins.
The base angle is not hypothetical. A former senior defense official has described repeated UAP incursions over U.S. installations, including a stretch in 2023 when unidentified objects lingered over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and fighter jets were relocated. Whatever those objects were, they were treated as a security problem, not a curiosity.
For decades, the political cost of discussing UFOs kept senior officials quiet or dismissive. A Secretary of State stating on the record that unidentified craft over military bases are a legitimate national-security concern reflects how far the official posture has shifted - the same shift visible in the Pentagon’s ongoing declassifications, including its fifth batch of UAP files released on August 7.
What Rubio did not do is as telling as what he did. He offered no evidence, named no origin, and explicitly denied that the government is sitting on proof. His comment is best read as an acknowledgment of an open question, from someone with access to classified briefings, rather than a revelation. The intrigue is genuine, and so is the restraint: something is being seen over sensitive airspace, no one in a position to know has explained it, and the man saying so is careful to say he does not know the answer.
Declassified in 2006, Project Condign examined thousands of sightings over UK airspace and reached an unusual conclusion - the unexplained cases were probably rare 'buoyant plasma', a poorly understood natural phenomenon, and offered no defence value worth chasing.
AARO's overdue annual report rejects claims the U.S. holds recovered 'non-human' technology, then reveals the office is drafting procedures to take custody of and test such material 'should' any ever surface - and sets the evidence bar a specimen must clear.
The UAP Disclosure Act, modeled on the law that opened the JFK files, would set a 'presumption of disclosure' for UFO records and hand the government eminent domain over any recovered technology of unknown origin. Sen. Mike Rounds says he will bring the full version back.
