A tranche of UFO videos — including never-before-seen footage — has been quietly released by federal law enforcement.

US Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the country, uploaded 10 videos that appear to show craft moving in strange ways in our skies.

The videos were released on August 9 without warning, a press release or much in the way of context, only to be discovered by UFO enthusiasts and online sleuths earlier this week.

The videos document a fighter jet pursued by an apparently baffling flying orb, as well as something that appears to be a propeller-powered hang-glider, and yet another apparent floating orb, hovering this time near a parked 16-wheeler truck.

But the enigmatic nature of the drop — which offered little detail regarding the times and locations of these sightings, plus more than a few sweeping redactions — has left more questions than answers.

The quiet video drop follows rising tensions within the corridors of power in Washington on the once taboo subject of UFOs. 

Open congressional hearings, federal legislation and even brand new government offices have now been dedicated openly to the investigation of these aerial mysteries, with at least one former senior US intelligence official calling the strange sightings ‘a national security issue.’

The videos were released on a dedicated site for agency records made public via requests under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 

But perhaps most significantly, the release confirms, at least tacitly, the veracity of a heavily-scrutinized, 2013 thermal UFO video leaked to UFO researchers in 2015.

For the first time since that leak, the April 25, 2013 Aguadilla, Puerto Rico UFO video first investigated by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies has now been confirmed by the US government as genuinely unidentified. 

Asked by NBC News, Chris Mellon, a former official with the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, described the release as ‘very significant.’

‘This will help the public understand what our military personnel are encountering all over the world,’ Mellon said. 

‘We’re getting, on the Defense Department side, 50 to 100 [UFO] reports per month — and this is happening globally.’ 

‘It’s happening overseas. It’s happening off the east coast and the west coast,’ he elaborated. ‘This will help people better understand why Congress takes the issue seriously [and] why it’s a national security issue.’

While Mellon praised US Customs’ show of openness and transparency with the official release of these 10 videos,  America’s dedicated community of UFO skeptics were less impressed. 

Mick West, a prolific and dedicated examiner of UFO claims and the owner of the skeptics forum Metabunk, described the videos as ‘mostly not new.’ 

‘And those that are new are not particularly interesting,’ West told the DailyMail.com, noting that several had already been the subject of unofficial leaks to reporters and researchers on the UFO beat.

West, a retired computer programmer and video game designer, described the first of US Customs’ UAP videos as something that ‘looks like a microlight aircraft.’

Several others, he noted, appeared to be ‘ambiguous white dots, […] a balloon or a plastic bag.’

The second video, West said, was the so-called ‘Rubber Duck’ UAP, which the noted skeptic devoted considerable time to investigating on his YouTube channel and in Metabunk’s forum back in 2021. 

West identified CBP video 9 as the ‘infamous ‘Aguadilla’ video,’ which he has argued reveals a thermal signature ‘consistent with a pair of wedding lanterns drifting in the wind.’ 

West has taken the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) to task for errors located in an Appendix to their lengthy report on the Aguadilla case, but at least according to the SCU’s co-founder, engineer Robert Powell, those errors do not undermine the remainder of his team’s assessment.

‘The report does not depend on Appendix L,’ Powell told the DailyMail.com, stating that West did not have an answer for why floating wedding lanterns would veer from west to north, as the Aguadilla UFO is recorded doing in the video’s final moments.

‘The second reason it’s not Chinese lanterns,’ according to Powel, ‘is that Chinese lanterns can’t survive the wind speeds that were occurring that day. The wind speeds were around 13 miles an hour.’ 

‘It’s basically a little candle that sits on these little wires, and you’ve got a very light [plastic or paper] bag around it,’ Powell said. ‘Heavy winds will collapse the outside of your Chinese lantern.’ 

Whatever the mystery of Aguadilla proves to be, US Customs’ 10 videos were not the only agency records quietly released this August under FOIA. 

The agency’s official confirmation of these previously only leaked thermal videos and security recordings were also accompanied by a 389-page PDF document, ostensibly of UAP records held internally by US Customs. 

While the paperwork includes much chaff — news clippings, and already public government reports — the FOIA drop also included internal emails detailing internal deliberations on the law enforcement agency’s UFO cases.

Several agency emails from August 2021, document an exchange between a UFO enthusiast and his superior regarding efforts to comply with spirit of the then-recent congressional legislation on UFOs and the resulting UAP Task Force report.

‘As a pet project, or for fun, do all the research you want,’ the redacted official wrote to the CBP’s equivalent to X-Files FBI agent Fox Mulder. ‘I know this topic is of great interest to you and there’s a ton of information to sift through.’

‘There just isn’t an avenue for any formal research or reporting any type of findings or conclusions,’ the redacted official stressed.

The also-redacted CPB employee responded, ‘T4… I apologize, and took The Director of National Intelligence’s UAP report seriously.’  

But the release also includes over two dozen tantalizing pages that have been redacted in their entirety. 

Per statute, each page lists the legal exemption under which US CBP is permitted to withhold certain records relevant to an open records request. 

The majority of these redactions, in this case, were justified under the b(5) and b(7)e exemptions clauses of federal FOIA law. 

Investigative reporters and open government advocates have dubbed the b(5) exemption the ‘The Withhold It Because You Want To Exemption‘ as its guidelines were even described by the US Justice Department as ‘opaque.’

The b(7)e exemption pertains effectively to law enforcement’s own ‘sources and methods,’ as it withholds details that would ‘disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions’ and other material that officials believe ‘could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law.’

To this end, several of the released videos have notably redacted the majority of the heads-up-display information from US CBP’s infrared or thermal video recordings: which would likely include data on the altitude, bearing and range of these UAP.

All summer long, a sweltering UFO fever has gripped Washington DC, stoked in no small measure by a series of extraordinary claims and revelations from lawmakers, former US intelligence and Navy personnel.

This past June, charges of an illegal, hidden UFO crash retrieval program operating within the shadows exploded across television airwaves and online as made by Air Force and intelligence agency veteran David Grusch.

Soon thereafter, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio revealed he too had been briefed by several other US government officials with top-level security clearances, who professed that they personally had ‘first-hand’ knowledge of UFO programs.

By late July, Grusch was reasserting many of his claims under oath before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, along with Ryan Graves, an esteemed former pilot, and veteran Navy fighter pilot Commander David Fravor, who witnessed the now famous 2004 ‘Tic Tac’ UFO.

In his further comments on the new CPB videos, former DOD intelligence official Chris Mellon hoped that the newly official US Customs videos would spur the Pentagon toward greater transparency itself.

Mellon noted that these mysterious UFO videos highlight ‘the challenges we are facing monitoring and controlling our airspace.’ 

He cited both last February’s infamous Chinese spy balloon affair (and still-as-yet-unidentified UAP), and ‘of course the explosion of drone use around the world,’ as examples of the new threats to US sovereignty posed by the weak official reporting and widespread stigma surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena.

‘I hope that the Defense Department and [US] Intelligence Community are paying attention,’ Mellon told NBC. 

‘They have many videos that are of a similar, unclassified nature,’ he noted, ‘or were, until they — out of nowhere — created this new classification guide.’ 

Echoing comments by Grusch on the legality of the Pentagon’s actions, Mellon went on to express the opinion that the DoD’s new and more expansive classification standards for its own UAP or UFO videos might not be ‘lawful.’ 

‘I don’t think that’s consistent with the executive order governing classification,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘But they are withholding a lot of similar kinds of videos from the public on that basis.’ 

 

 

Newly released data shows that nine Mexican cities rank among the 10 deadliest in the globe in 2022, according to World of Statistics.

The report listed the western Mexico municipality of Colima as the murder capital in the world with 181.9 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

The city is the second largest in the state of Colima and placed first in the list in 2021 with 196.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

Murders are on pace to equal or slightly surpass those figures in 2023, with 512 homicides registered through the first seven months of the year, an average of 73.1 per month, after 887 people were murdered the previous year at a clip of 73.91 homicides a month.

New Orleans, the only non-Mexican city in the list, was ranked eighth with 70.6 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants

The municipality of Zamora, located in the western state of Michoacán, came in second, with 177.7 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants while Ciudad Obregón, the second largest city in the northwestern state of Sonora, recorded 138.2 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

Zacatecas, the capital and largest city of the north-central state of Zacatecas, came in fourth with an average of 134.6 per 100,000 inhabitants and the Pacific border city of Tijuana, across from California, ranked fifth 105.1 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

The cities of Celaya and Uruapan in the central state of Guanajuato placed fifth and sixth, respectively. Celaya registered 99.6 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants and Uruapan followed with 78.3 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

The top 10 list is rounded out by Ciudad Juárez at nine. The border town, located in the northwestern state of Chihuahua and south of El Paso, Texas, registered 67.7 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. It was second in 2019 with 104.4 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

Once a top destination for the Hollywood elite, the beach resort town of Acapulco placed 10th, tallying an average of 65.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

The Guanajuato municipality of Irapuato ranked 13th with 61.60 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants and the city of Cuernavaca in the central state of Morelos was listed in 14th place with 60.2 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

Each of the cities listed in the report are within the Mexican states that the U.S. Department of State has issued travel advisories due to crime and kidnapping.

María del Carmen López, 63, a Mexico-U.S. dual citizen, has been missing since February 9 when gunmen kidnapped her home in the Colima municipality of Pueblo Nuevo.

In June, one of her seven children held a press conference in Los Angeles and pleaded with President Joe Biden to help find her.

She revealed that the kidnappers had sent the family an audio in which the woman can be heard begging to be brought back home.

Her daughter, Zonia López, said her mother asked them to ‘please hurry, act quickly, my children, and give them what they want. My life depends on it.’

AOC dodges question about why she hasn’t visited border since Biden took over despite constantly complaining about migrant issues there while Trump was president

By Claudia Aoraha, Senior Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Updated: 07:47 EDT, 31 August 2023

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Ted Cruz today slammed President Joe Biden for the ‘humanitarian crisis’ at the southern border and urged him to ‘stop hiding in the basement’ and see the tens of thousands of migrants massing there in a bid to reach US soil.

In a scathing speech, a visibly furious Cruz blamed Biden for the over 22,000 illegal migrants who were camping across the Rio Grande river opposite Brownsville, Texas, saying it was ‘his fault’.

The Texas Senator waved his finger at the camera as he said the US has the ‘worst illegal immigration in the history of our country’ and it’s going to get worse now that the Title 42 has expired because of Biden’s policies.

The Republican said: ‘I’m standing here in our southern border with the Rio Grande river right behind me in Brownsville, Texas. Title 42 is going to expire in just a few hours.

‘We are seeing an invasion in our southern border and there are right now over 22,000 illegal immigrants across the river.’

Pointing behind him, Cruz continued: ‘You can see the lights, you can see people camping out, if you look you can see them. They are waiting for Title 42 to expire and then the invasion that we are going to see is going to be massive.

‘We already have the worst illegal immigration in the history of our country and in just a few hours its getting worse. Joe Biden this is your fault.’

During his scathing rant, Cruz also said it was Biden’s ‘fault’ if any of the children illegally crossing the river and into the US were hurt or if any of the migrants were killed while attempting to cross. 

‘The people who are killed crossing illegally, that’s your fault. The women who are sexually abused while crossing illegally, that’s your fault. The children who are brutalised crossing illegally, that’s your fault.’

Cruz added: ‘Come down here President Biden. Stop hiding in the basement, stop pretending this misery is not your fault. Stop it. This is not humane, this is not compassionate, this is cruel.’

For more than three years, Title 42 had allowed the government to quickly expel millions of migrants who illegally crossed the border before they could apply for asylum during the pandemic. 

But now that Biden’s administration are lifting Covid-19 protocols, they are also lifting the rule that restricted migration – a move that has seen tens of thousands of migrants massing on the southern border that many have called a ‘disaster’.

Tens of thousands of migrants, including young children and even babies, are now expected to try and cross into the United States over the coming days.

Minutes after the Title 42 border control measures were lifted on Thursday night, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border not to believe the ‘lies’ of the people traffickers who claim the border is now open. 

‘We have 24,000 Border Patrol Agents and Officers at the Southwest Border and have surged thousands of troops and contractors, and over a thousand asylum officers to help enforce our laws,’ he said. 

‘Do not believe the lies of smugglers. The border is not open.’

Mayorkas and the Biden administration have faced an avalanche of criticism for the scenes at the border, as thousands of migrants gather in the hope of entering the U.S. now the restrictions have ended.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said smugglers were massing in large numbers at the southern border of his country, offering to take migrants to the United States and telling them the border was open starting Thursday.

But Mayorkas on Thursday tried to tell those aiming to cross that it was a bad move. He said now illegal migrants face being barred from entering the U.S. for five years and possible criminal prosecution.

‘Starting tonight, people who arrive at the border without using a lawful pathway will be presumed ineligible for asylum,’ he tweeted. 

‘We are ready to humanely process and remove people without a legal basis to remain in the U.S. 

‘People who do not use available lawful pathways to enter the U.S. now face tougher consequences, including a minimum five-year ban on re-entry and potential criminal prosecution. 

‘Together with our partners throughout the federal government and Western Hemisphere, we are prepared for this transition.’

But Republicans have slammed Biden’s administration for what they call an ‘invasion’.

Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas told Fox News the border situation was a ‘disaster.’

‘The number one threat to our national security is right here in southern Texas, all the way to Arizona,’ he said. ‘This is not the America that I grew up in.’

Democratic congressman Mike Levin of California accused Republicans of playing ‘political football’ with the country’s broken immigration system.

They are more interested in ‘scor(ing) points than actually doing the work to fix it,’ he said.

Chaotic scenes unfolded of migrants scrambling to enter the country on Thursday before Title 42 expired and the new rule went into effect

Thousands of migrants have waded through rivers, climbed walls and scrambled up embankments onto U.S. soil in recent days, hoping to be processed before midnight.

Some migrants turned themselves in to border officials. Others tried to cross undetected.

In Brownsville, where Cruz has been watching migrants mass on the other side of the river, there were dozens of police cars deployed on the US side of the bridge that connects the city to its Mexican neighbor Matamoros.

Earlier on Thursday, groups of migrants crossed the Rio Grande River in chin-high water. Some carried tiny babies and bags of belongings above their heads to make it into Brownsville.

Heavy earth-moving equipment could be seen a little further on, with personnel readying the ground to install barbed wire.

In El Paso, hundreds of people who passed into the country through a legitimate border gate on Thursday had been processed and allowed to lodge their initial asylum claim.

Many others were being held back by Texas National Guardsmen who stopped them from coming through the border.

And there was apparent confusion among rank-and-file border patrol officers about exactly what will happen in the coming hours and days.

‘We don’t know,’ said one when asked how they would handle migrants who made it through.

More migrants – including families with young children wrapped in Mylar blankets – awaited processing while penned between two towering border walls in San Diego, California, across from Tijuana, Mexico. 

In Ciudad Juarez, Agustin Sortomi said he, his wife and two children had tried several times to surrender to US authorities but had been turned away.

‘A lot of people are already coming from there saying that they closed the doors and they won’t let anyone through. I don’t know what to do,’ he said.

‘We haven’t realized our dream. Only God knows when we will.’

Trump first implemented Title 42 in March 2020 as COVID swept the globe. Health officials said at the time the order aimed to curb the spread of the virus in crowded detention facilities. It allowed US authorities to quickly expel migrants to Mexico or other countries without the chance to request U.S. asylum.

But Democrats, public health experts and immigration advocates saw it as an extension of Trump’s quest to block migrants at the border.

Biden, who campaigned on reversing Trump’s policies, kept Title 42 in place and ultimately expanded it.

Migrants have been expelled more than 2.7 million times under Title 42, although the total includes many repeat crossers.

Mexico has generally only accepted certain nationalities – its own citizens, many Central Americans and more recently migrants from Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti. So during the same period, around 2.8 million migrants ineligible for expulsion were allowed into the United States under a process known as Title 8 to pursue their immigration claims in court, which can take months or years.

Even before Title 42 expired, along with the end of the COVID public health emergency, Biden’s administration was grappling with record numbers of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, straining U.S. authorities and border cities.

Republicans fault Biden for easing the more restrictive Trump policies. Biden has blamed Congress for not passing comprehensive immigration reform.

But with the new asylum rule, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other Biden officials have been trying to spread the message that illegal crossers will face consequences, sending troops and thousands of additional personnel to the borer.

“Do not believe the lies of smugglers. The border is not open,” Mayorkas said in a statement.

Some migrants who spoke to Reuters on Thursday said they heard it would be more difficult to enter the country after May 11 and rushed to cross before the deadline. Daily apprehensions rose above 10,000 this week and detention capacity maxed out.

Due to the high volume of arrivals, agents on Wednesday began releasing some migrants without a notice to appear in immigration court where they can make an asylum claim, telling them to report to an immigration office later. 

But late Thursday night, a federal judge in Florida blocked such releases, saying they failed to follow proper regulatory procedures.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection called the ruling “harmful” and said it would “result in unsafe overcrowding” at border facilities.

The Arizona sheriff at the sharp end of the country’s immigration crisis slammed the Biden administration on Thursday, saying it had failed to prepare for the end of Title 42.

‘It’s a cluster,’ Sheriff Leon Wilmot told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

He said Border Patrol detained about 1200 people on Wednesday and were on course to do the same again on Thursday. 

It was part of an expected surge of arrivals by migrants as the U.S. relaxes a tough public health restriction that meant millions of arrivals could be immediately expelled without even making asylum claims.

On Thursday, Yuma Mayor Douglas Nicholls demanded that President Joe Biden declare a national emergency at the southern border. 

And Wilmot said the lack of preparation meant President Joe Biden was unable to enforce existing border laws and said overwhelmed authorities in nearby Cochise County were already releasing people on to the streets without proper processing or court dates.

He reserved particular fury for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and claims that the U.S. was toughening its response.

‘Any good leader that was facing this kind of situation would have stood up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), got emergency funding for ICE, put up shelters in their temporary buildings to accommodate all this, so proper processing could be done,’ he said. 

‘He did none of this. So he doesn’t have a plan. 

‘His plan is obviously intentionally to just allow everybody into this country and try to track down that many millions of people years down the road. 

‘It’s a false narrative that this administration is pushing to the American people.’

On Thursday morning, the extent of the surge was evident in Yuma even before the sun came up. More than 300 people waited in line to register with Border Patrol officers as buses pulled up and departed filled with migrants. 

Many were from Peru. But the arrivals included people from China, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and the African nation of Mauritania.

Wilmot said that made for a security risk not just for his community but communities across the country that had advertised themselves as sanctuary cities. 

Some 4,000 people he said were currently in custody in Yuma, far more than the capacity of local agencies. 

Wilmot has been sheriff of Yuma since 2013, putting him in the frontline of the crisis.

The county has long known as a favorite crossing point, with cartels directing people to the border here for a fee.

The sheriff had been patroling along the border late Wednesday night and suffered a puncture to his Ford Raptor truck.

DailyMail.com caught up with him as he had a new tire fitted the following day and prepared for the end of Title 42.

‘This is on this administration,’ said Wilmot. ‘The president needs to enforce the rule of law. Period.

‘It’s just totally aggravating to see a lack of leadership at the highest level of government.

Sheriffs, he added, were stepping up as much as they could.

‘We’re doing our job. I’ve already told my guys if they trespass on somebody’s property arrest them. 

‘There’s gonna be 100 percent prosecution for anyone that breaks state law.’

Earlier Mayorkas insisted that new arrivals would not receive softer treatment with the end of Title 42. It simply meant migrants would now be processed under Title 8 and a new regulation that meant most people could only enter if they had booked an appointment with an app, he added.

‘Here’s what that means,’ he said. ‘If anyone arrives at our southern border after midnight tonight, they will be presumed ineligible for asylum and subject to steeper consequences for unlawful entry, including a minimum five-year ban on reentry and potential criminal prosecution.’

Don’t listen to the people offering you a path to the promised land, he added. 

‘Know this: Smugglers care only about profits not people,’ he said.