A UFO somehow ended up on a U.S. intelligence agency logo

A U.S. intelligence agency has removed a tongue-in-cheek logo (or two) from its website following news that it included a flying saucer.

The website for the National Intelligence Manager for Aviation (NIM-A), which advises the head of U.S. intelligence on aviation matters, briefly sported a logo that included a Turkish drone, a Russian fighter jet, and ... a UFO.

Internet archive

The agency has since removed the logo, and has hardly mentioned that its purview includes all threats to aviation—presumably including possible ETs.

The logo, shown above, depicts five “aircraft” flying over the Western Hemisphere. The first aircraft on the right is what looks like a civilian jetliner. The next craft, from the right, is scarlet red and appears to be a Sukhoi Su-57 “Felon”, Russia’s first fifth-generation fighter. The third craft in blue looks like a hypersonic glide vehicle. The fourth craft, with a twin tail connected to the rear and a hint of a push propeller behind the fuselage, looks like a Bayraktar TB-2 drone—the kind used with great success by Ukraine as it struggles to eject Russian invaders.

The fifth craft, presumably hovering somewhere over the Eastern Pacific, is clearly an unidentified flying object, or what the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community also call unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) and more recently unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena. The object resembles a classic flying saucer, with portholes presumably for little green men to see outside.

NIM-A’s mission is to “identify, analyze, and integrate intelligence on threats and vulnerabilities in the Air Domain.” The office’s website identifies threats as terrorism (which would explain the civilian jetliner), hypersonic weapons, unmanned aerial systems, and presumably military aircraft threats. This broad spectrum of threats, from terrorism to high intensity war, is represented on the logo.

That leaves the UFO. The Pentagon has been paying increasing attention to possible UFOs in recent years, after encounters between naval aviators flying fighter jets and strange flying craft were reported on both the East and West Coast of the United States. Navy surface ships have also reported separate encounters with drone-like UAPs off the coast of Southern California. NIM-A was also partially responsible for drafting the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2021 report, Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

It isn’t clear how long the logo was on the NIM-A website, but it was up as early as 5:51 a.m. ET on September 25, as documented by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Within hours of it going viral on social media, the logo was scrubbed from the site sometime between 2:02 a.m. and 4:14 a.m. ET on September 27.

Not only that, but if you look closely, you’ll see variations in the logos used across the old webpage. The logo underneath the “Message from the Executive Director,” the background image, and the logo at the very bottom of the page are all the same, but different from the logo used in the banner at the top of the page. Minor but notable differences between the logos include the UFO, the stars, and the outline of the continents.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which NIM-A advises on aviation threats, told The War Zone blog, “NIM Aviation erroneously posted an unofficial and incorrect logo.” For now, the UFO logo has been replaced with the older logo of the National Air Intelligence Integration Office, the former name for NIM-A, which changed names in 2016. It’s hard to see how they were posted by accident. The flying saucer is prominent and hard to miss.

The swarm of UAP sightings by military personnel over the last 12 years has been unprecedented, as far as we know. While some of the UAPs appear to be human-operated drones, others demonstrate flight characteristics that appeared in contravention of existing aerial technology, including drones.

The official inclusion of a flying saucer on a government agency logo may have gone a considerable way toward putting to rest the “giggle factor” often involved in investigating UFO sightings—or it may have added to it. (Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics)