North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is a joint military command that monitors the entire airspace of Canada and the United States for anomalous aircraft or space objects, a task carried out at its Cheyenne Mountain facility.1 Christopher K. Mellon has said the United States Air Force (USAF) oversees the United States Space Force (USSF) and possesses far more aircraft and sensor systems than the United States Navy (USN), giving it responsibility for supporting NORAD.2
Mellon has also raised concerns about the completeness of NORAD’s reporting. He said NORAD was not notified of recurring violations of restricted US airspace off the US east coast.3 He said he believed NORAD did not include any of the thousands of “Uncorrelated Tracks” its radars identify each year over North America in reporting to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).4 Mellon said he believed most of these Uncorrelated Tracks are flocks of geese or private aircraft with malfunctioning transponders, but that more serious, unreported cases included instances where US and/or Canadian air forces scrambled fighter aircraft to intercept Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).5
Following the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter, Chad Underwood, the naval aviator who filmed the object, spoke by phone with someone from NORAD shortly after landing.6 According to Luis Elizondo, a NORAD investigator put a few questions to Underwood following the encounter, and no other internal agency investigated it.7 Separately, Willard Miller, a retired US Naval Reserve Lieutenant Commander who attended an April 1997 Pentagon briefing, served on the operations staff of United States Atlantic Command and at NORAD Space Command with Top Secret security clearances.8
During the weekend of 2023-02-04, NORAD used armed force to bring down unidentified objects over American airspace for the first time in its history, beginning with the Chinese Spy Balloon Shoot-Down 2023.9 Marco Rubio said this was the first time NORAD had ever made a decision to shoot down an object over American airspace, and that all three objects downed that weekend remained unidentified.10 The additional objects were detected only because NORAD had increased the sensitivity of its radars following the Chinese balloon incident, part of what became known as the 2023 ‘Balloongate’ Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) shoot-down controversy.11 On 2023-02-10, NORAD detected an unknown car-sized object off the coast near Alaska Deadhorse.12 According to a DEBRIEFED report on the incident, a NORAD general said the object taken down over Alaska USA was not a balloon and that its means of staying aloft was unknown.13 The same report states that when a reporter asked whether the object might be extraterrestrial, touching on Non-Human Intelligence, the general said he was not ruling anything out.14
On 2023-02-11, NORAD tracked a cylindrical-shaped object at approximately 12,200 metres over Canada’s Yukon.15 The object, in what is now known as the 2023-02 Yukon cylindrical object shoot-down, was swiftly taken down with NORAD’s assistance.16 NORAD spokesman Olivier Gallant told media the military had determined what the object was but would not reveal details.17
Whitley Strieber has said some Brazilian investigators have suggested NORAD may have warned the Brazilian Air Force that an object was headed toward the area where it fell during the 1996 Varginha incident.18