Zac Cichy and Mick West discuss The DNI's Statements on UAPs

What's the significance of the Director of National Intelligence mentioning things coming "Extraterrestrially" while talking about UAPs? Is "UAP" a loaded term now? How should the government better talk about the UAP issue?

Yesterday Zac Cichy and I both watched the "Our Future in Space" talk at the Ignatius Forum. After a brief exchange on Twitter, we decided to have a recorded chat so we could explore out differences with a bit more nuance than tweeting allowed.

Audio file (mp3) version of this video. https://www.metabunk.org/f/Mick%20West%20Zac%20Cichy%20-%20UAPs%20and%20DNI.mp3

Zac is host of the Project Human podcast, currently on Hiatus, but lots of great guests and thoughtful conversation in previous episodes
https://www.projecthuman.fm/

Gillibrand Amendment: https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2021/11/04/senate-section/article/S7808-1

OUR FUTURE IN SPACE: https://cathedral.org/event/our-future-in-space/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWyPk_f8aAA

Avril Haines' Comment on UAPs, 32 minutes into the above.

Yeah, I mean, I think the bottom line is that we don't understand everything that we're seeing. And that's probably not surprising to anybody in many respects. But it is, it was a report that really, Congress asked us to produce a report that assessed what we saw as the threat, essentially, from unidentified aerial phenomenon. And what our sort of best understanding was of the different reports that we had identified and it stretched over from, I think, 2004, through to 2021, the different reports that you identify, that you indicated 144 of them, and we had different categories, as you said, so one of them was airborne clutter and other was natural, you know, phenomenon. Another was foreign adversaries. A fourth one was related to sort of US government or industry developmental programs. And then the fifth one was "other". And that basically indicated that we were pretty sure we weren't going to be able to characterize every single one of these reports in the various categories that we've identified, because, frankly, we were not able to understand everything about it. And a large portion of that is based on the fact that we don't have a consistent way of reporting this information, we need to integrate, frankly, a lot of data that we get, we need to get better at collecting information that's useful to us from different sensors that are available to us. And we have to deepen our analysis in these areas. And that's something that, you know, frankly, probably also doesn't surprise you in the sense that that's how we typically approach our intelligence work. And the main issues that Congress and others have been concerned about are basically safety of flight concerns and counterintelligence issues. But of course, there's always the question of, is there something else that we simply do not understand that might come extra terrestrial? Extra terrestrially?