Senior NOAA Official Working with White House Task Force on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
Emails also reveal the names of key NOAA personnel involved with the former Navy UAP Task Force, but questions about the use of NOAA's satellites in UAP detection remain.
By Dustin Slaughter (@DustinSlaughter)
The United States agency tasked with studying Earth’s oceans and atmosphere and helping to create U.S. policies on climate and space is contributing to a White House-driven effort to analyze unidentified anomalous phenomena, new documents obtained by the UAP Register indicate. The documents identify for the first time an agency and individual assigned to the Biden Administration’s UAP Task Force. The records also identify two individuals from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who were assigned to the Navy’s own UAP study, the now-defunct UAP Task Force.
The emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that a senior official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been liaising with the White House’s UAP Task Force. The task force was announced in February following the unprecedented shootdowns of three unidentified objects and a Chinese surveillance balloon over North America this year. More recently, investigative journalist Ross Coulthart reported for NewsNation that the U.S. military unsuccessfully attempted to intercept a previously undisclosed unidentified object over Alaska just days before the highly publicized shootdowns.
The emails were generated by a news media request from the UAPR in March and later obtained via a FOIA request also filed by this publication.
Mike Hopkins, whose career with NOAA spans over three decades, joined the White House’s UAP Task Force this year in his current role as Director of the National Weather Service’s Surface and Upper Air Division (SUAD). The SUAD manages the development, operations, and maintenance of domestic surface and upper air systems, including radar, aircraft, buoys, satellites, observation sea vessels, and more.
The extent to which NOAA contributes to the White House UAP group’s mission is unknown, and nothing has been made public about the task force’s activities until now. Neither Hopkins nor NOAA responded to repeated inquiries about his role with the White House UAPTF. Hopkins also did not respond to questions including whether the White House UAPTF is utilizing any of the vast amounts of data that NOAA collects daily.
NOAA’s Involvement with Past UAP Efforts
The agency did confirm, however, that it “hosted interested members of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) on a May 2022 visit to a weather balloon field support site in the Washington, DC area, so that task force members could learn about NOAA weather balloon design and operations,” wrote NOAA spokesperson Kate Silverstein in an emailed statement to this publication.
The Navy’s UAP Task Force operated from 2020 until 2021 and thus had folded by May 2022, however; it was replaced by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group which came under the control of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. The AOIMSG has been roundly criticized for being ineffectual and little more than an attempt to appease Congress before lawmakers mandated the creation of a new office; last year, for example, we reported that the AOIMSG lacked reporting and analysis procedures.
The agency officials involved with the Navy’s task force were Mark Mulholland and Thomas Renkenvens, according to one email. Mulholland serves as Chief Engineer for Space Traffic Management and Space Situational Awareness at the Office of Space Commerce and also worked at NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite Data Information Service (NESDIS) while interfacing with the Navy’s UAP effort.
NESDIS states its mission as providing “secure and timely access to global environmental data and information from satellites and other sources to promote and protect the nation's security, environment, economy, and quality of life … as the Nation’s authoritative environmental intelligence agency.”
Renkenvens is the chief of NOAA’s Satellite Products and Services Division. According to the agency’s website, his office “takes data from NOAA polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites and satellites that other organizations operate to develop satellite data products and analyses of environmental hazards [and then] distributes these satellite data products to NOAA programs and field offices, U.S. government agencies.”
Like its current collaboration with the White House, it remains unclear to what extent NOAA assisted the Navy’s UAPTF too. The involvement of veteran agency personnel whose expertise involves satellites and other sensor data suggests that more than weather balloon demonstrations were involved. A former Defense Department official who spoke to this publication under the condition of anonymity was not able to confirm the use of the vast datasets generated by NOAA satellites in the UAPTF’s mission but expressed doubt that the UAPTF would have “routine access to or interest in” that facet of NOAA’s operations, however, citing the UAPTF’s access to higher-resolution systems.
NOAA’s spokesperson also commented on its interactions with the Pentagon’s current UAP effort, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, formed some two years after the Navy’s UAPTF:
“Since AARO's establishment in July 2022, NOAA has collaborated with AARO, on their near-weekly information exchange distribution list, and was involved in the review/approval process for the 2022 ODNI UAP Report to Congress. Both agencies are looking at methods to integrate NOAA data into a more holistic data architecture dashboard.”
NOAA’s Absence from the UAP Mystery
Much of the discussion around the effort to detect and analyze anomalous phenomena in Earth’s oceans and atmosphere has understandably focused on the military and its powerful sensor capabilities. Missing from this conversation, however, is the fact that NOAA operates numerous satellites that are constantly imaging the planet’s surface, not to mention its powerful network of weather radars and other sensors.
NOAA’s massive satellite datasets are derived from 11 agency-owned and operated satellites; including five polar-orbiting satellites, five geostationary satellites, and one deep-space satellite that operates approximately one million miles from Earth. NOAA also operates six additional satellites that are owned by agencies ranging from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the U.S. Air Force. Earth-imaging, weather, and climate data are largely collected to the tune of one petabyte or more of information every day.
The agency’s satellites capture breathtaking (and often lifesaving) data about what’s occurring on Earth’s land and in our seas and atmosphere, often in near-real time. They also boast powerful spatial and temporal resolution and infrared capabilities. NOAA also possesses over a petabyte of raw archival data “covering the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun,” according to the agency’s National Centers for Environmental Information website. Such data, if examined properly, could provide valuable insight into past anomalous phenomena.
You can check out more powerful imagery of NOAA satellite capabilities here.
Apparent Disconnect Between White House and Pentagon on Coordination Around UAP
Another revelation in the emails is the apparent lack of knowledge regarding the existence of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office among some senior-level NOAA officials — including the agency’s liaison to the Biden administration’s UAP effort, Mike Hopkins.
While workshopping a draft statement to the UAPR, Hopkins responds to Smullen’s question about whether Smullen can include the term ‘AARO’:
“Hi Scott
To tell the truth—I’m not sure. I have not heard the term ‘AARO’ used in any of the calls [with the White House UAPTF] I have been involved in…”
This suggests an absence of coordination between the White House UAPTF and the Pentagon’s UAP office.
Regardless of the depth of NOAA’s interest or involvement in the UAP topic, some of its leadership have started urging the scientific community to take the topic seriously, particularly when it comes to under-examined unidentified undersea phenomena. Dr. Tim Gallaudet, a former Deputy Administrator for NOAA from 2017 to 2021, earlier this year authored an opinion piece calling for the ocean science community to undertake a serious study of anomalous undersea incidents.
“Despite major progress in the investigation of UAP by DOD, NASA, and scientific organizations like Harvard University’s Galileo Project and the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, there is no corresponding scientific effort to investigate similar anomalies that have been detected in the world’s oceans,” Dr. Gallaudet wrote.
The UAPR is currently engaged in FOIA litigation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We’re also preparing another lawsuit against a second government agency that will be announced soon. If you would like to learn more about and contribute to our efforts to release UAP-related records from NOAA and other agencies in the future, click here.