Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has addressed the one reason why the country should be concerned about a rising number of so-called ‘UFO’ sightings, and it has less to do with alleged “alien life” than anything else.

In an interview with Fox News over the weekend, Ratcliffe was asked to respond to reports that U.S. military pilots especially have begun to report a growing number of sightings in and around military assets like nuclear-powered warships and other major weapons platforms.

“I know everyone gets caught up on the alien life and all of that, but my concern as the director of national intelligence was, if anyone, foreign adversary, regardless of how you define foreign adversary, have technologies that the United States don’t have, we need to find out more about that,” he said, commenting on a new report from the federal government denoting the increased sightings.

“There’s no visual disturbance, it’s not clutter, or debris, or birds or anything else,” he said. “But objects that demonstrate technologies that seem to defy the law of physics and capabilities that we don’t have as the world’s superpower, you know, our role in the federal government is to provide for the common defense. And we can’t do that if someone else has technologies that are better than we have.”

WATCH:

Here’s a partial transcript of the interview:

RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY, FOX NEWS: I want to move on to one other topic that’s very interesting. There have been an increase in UFO sightings in the past two years a US intelligence report is saying. You’ve pushed for more disclosures about UFO sightings when you were DNI, head of the DNI. I want to know about that. And I also want to know about if there’s any appetite in the government to finally release also the JFK files.

JOHN RATCLIFFE, FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: Well shortly after I became the DNI in June of 2020, I was the first one to publicly acknowledged that there was a unidentified aerial phenomenon taskforce through the Senate Intelligence Committee because I wanted there to be greater transparency to the American people about the number of sightings of things that are unexplained.

And I know everyone gets caught up on the alien life and all of that. But my concern as the director of national intelligence was, if any one, foreign adversary, regardless of how you define foreign adversary, have technologies that the United States don’t have, we need to find out more about that. And what we found was that was Navy pilots and Air Force pilots were discouraged from reporting that, they thought that it would impair their careers. We need to have information if there are technologies out there, and very clearly, as this most recent report reveals, the sightings are increasing, which is a good thing, because that means we’re getting more honest reporting from our Navy and Air Force pilots. But it gives us more information, we need to find out when there are and there very clearly are now hundreds of unexplained sightings, meaning that there’s no natural phenomenon involved. There’s no visual disturbance, it’s not clutter, or debris, or birds or anything else. But objects that demonstrate technologies that seem to defy the law of physics and capabilities that we don’t have as the world’s superpower, you know, our role in the federal government is to provide for the common defense. And we can’t do that if someone else has technologies that are better than we have. So all of this is a very, you know, a good development from my perspective. And I’m glad that they’re pursuing some of the things that I was pushing as DNI.

Your second question with regard to other classified information. You know, I don’t want to disclose conversations with former President Trump, but he did want to declassify the documents surrounding the Kennedy assassination. And there was some pushback at different levels. And ultimately, he made the decision not to do it at that  period of time. But obviously, there’s there’s a lot of documentation out there of different things that I think the American people deserve to know about. 

Notably, Ratcliffe was asked towards the end of the interview point-blank by co-host Pete Hegseth if “alien life” is real, and he refused to answer the question.