John Ratcliffe — Fox News / Maria Bartiromo interview on UAP (March 19, 2021)
- Speaker: John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence (just out of office), interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on Fox. ~3.5 min clip.
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/wL1_TT7gAVA
- Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio download → Whisper (speech_to_text_remote.py).
- Primary for ratcliffe-dni-uap-statements. His measured, on-record acknowledgment ahead of the June 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment: “a lot more sightings than have been made public,” multi-sensor, “difficult to explain,” “we always look for a plausible explanation,” does NOT assert ET.
- NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript; verify quotes against audio before load-bearing citation.
You have seen in your role the most intelligence that anybody has seen other than the president as the director of national intelligence, and I’ve been wanting to ask you this next question for a while. I want to ask you about UFOs, unidentified flying objects. The Pentagon is going to come out with a report by June 1st, and in the $2.3 trillion omnibus appropriations legislation passed in January, it includes the Intelligence Authorization Act, money for the Pentagon to continue investigating UFOs, John, we’re going to get this report June 1st. Can you tell us, have unidentified flying objects been seen? Well, sure. We have lots of reports about what we call unidentified aerial phenomenon, and this actually is a program that’s been in place for a few years in terms of a task force that has been there under the National Defense Authorization Act. But as you correctly point out, Maria, there’s now a report that will be issued by the Pentagon, by the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence. I actually wanted to get this information out and declassified before I left office, but we weren’t able to get it down into an unclassified format that we could talk about quickly enough. But frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. When we talk about sightings, we’re talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for, or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom. In short, things that we are observing that are difficult to explain. And so there’s actually quite a few of those, and I think that that information is being gathered and will be put out in a way that the American people can see. We always, when we see these things, Maria, we always look for a plausible explanation. Whether it can cause disturbances, visual disturbances. Sometimes we wonder whether or not our adversaries have technologies that are a little bit further down the road than we thought or that we realized. But there are instances where we don’t have good explanations for some of the things that we’ve seen. And when that information becomes declassified, I’ll be able to talk a little bit more about that. Can you tell us where it was seen? Actually all over the world. There have been sightings all over the world. And when we talk about sightings, the other thing I will tell you is it’s not just a pilot or just a satellite or some intelligence collection. Usually we have multiple sensors that are picking up these things. And so again, some of this are just, they’re unexplained phenomenon. And there’s actually quite a few more than have been made public. So I think it’ll be healthy for as much of this information to get out there as possible so that the American people can see some of the things that we’ve been dealing with. Okay. Well, that is pretty extraordinary. We so appreciate that, that you’re talking to us about this. Can this year get any weirder? Pandemic, shutdown, UFOs, John Ratcliffe, it’s great to see you. Thank you so much.