(The Epoch Times)—Several former and current U.S. military officials described sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) to Congress on Sept. 9 and called on the Pentagon to be more transparent about its disclosures on the phenomenon.
During a House Oversight subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, titled “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection,” several past and present Department of Defense officials testified that they had witnessed UFOs—which the Pentagon now refers to as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)—while serving in the military.
The hearing also featured a new, never-before-seen video of an alleged UFO recorded near the coast of Yemen in October 2024.
Air Force veteran Dylan Borland told lawmakers that he encountered “sustained reprisals” and retaliation from the Pentagon after whistleblowing about an alleged UFO he saw while working at a military base in 2012.
“I saw an approximately 100-foot equilateral triangle take off from near the NASA hangar on the base. The craft interferes with my telephone, did not have any sound, and the material it was made of appeared fluid or dynamic,” Borland said.
“I was under the triangular craft for a few minutes, and then it rapidly ascended to commercial jet level in seconds, displaying zero kinetic disturbance, sound, or wind displacement.”
He continued, “The craft itself was this black, metallic flight paint, but on top of the craft was this gold lava plasma, some type of fluid, going over and around the craft.”
Borland said he was under the craft for roughly two to three minutes before the center light flashed two to three times and then shot off up to “commercial jet level” altitude without making a sound.
He said he felt static electricity all over his body and then detected the “smell of after a thunderstorm or lightning storm” in the air.
Several years after the incident occurred, Borland claimed he was exposed to classified information from UFO “legacy crash retrieval programs” through a sensitive position within a Department of Defense special access program.
He alleged that several intelligence officers approached him, citing misconduct within these programs and the threat of retaliation if they came forward.
Borland accused the Pentagon of “blocking, delaying, and ultimately removing [his] ability to be employed within the [intelligence community]” after he became a whistleblower in March 2023 and filed a complaint with the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.
The Pentagon and its UFO-investigation team, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Alexandro Wiggins, an active-duty Navy operations specialist and senior chief petty officer, described an alleged UFO sighting off the coast of Southern California in February 2023.
The sighting was similar to the “tic tac” shaped UFO that retired Navy Commander David Fravor allegedly saw near the San Diego coast in 2004, which he described to Congress during a 2023 hearing.
“What I observed and what our crew recorded was not consistent with conventional aircraft or drones as they appear on our system,” Wiggins said.
“A self-luminous tic tac-shaped object emerged from the ocean before linking up with three other similar objects. The four then disappeared simultaneously with a high, synchronized, near-instantaneous acceleration.”
He “observed no sonic boom and no conventional propulsion signatures, no exhaust plume, no control surface articulation on the SAFIRE image system.”
The military’s SAFIRE image system is an advanced ultra-long-range thermal imaging technology used on a number of different aircraft.
However, Wiggins said he faced “no pushback at all” after coming forward with his account and encountered no retaliation or reprisals from the Navy or Department of Defense.
“I was treated fair. And I appreciate the Navy itself with assisting me, with coming here to being able to testify,” he said.
While discussing their sightings, the officials called for more transparency from the Pentagon on UFOs.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) emphasized the need for whistleblower protections and accused the Pentagon of lying to Congress about what it knows regarding UFOs.
“We are definitely being lied to, there’s just no doubt about that,” he said.
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) played a video of a flying orb that was struck by what he described as a hellfire missile, but the orb continued its trajectory after being shot.
At the end of the hearing, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who chairs the House Oversight Committee’s “Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets,” said: “We cannot maintain trust in government if we keep American people in the dark.”
The host of the hearing suggested signing a letter to ensure whistleblowers like Borland receive protection when coming forward with allegations about UFOs or reprisals in the military.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
