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MYSTERY WIRE — One day after talking to a TMZ photographer about UFOs and the highly anticipated UAP report that is supposed to be submitted by U.S. intelligence agencies by June 1st, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told Fox Business he is “not sure they’re gonna come in on time.”

But the clock remains ticking for the Pentagon’s hush-hush program to investigate UFOs and the other intelligence agencies included in the request.

At the Pentagon, it’s called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), and it has been ordered to prepare a detailed overview of the UFO mystery for submission to Congress.

However, as Sen. Rubio mentioned, there are already challenges to meeting this deadline.

The first public mention of the UAPTF came in June 2020 when the Senate Intelligence Committee formally asked the Pentagon for a comprehensive analysis of the UFO mystery.

Over the previous three years, members and staff of key committees had received closed door briefings about startling encounters between the U.S. military and UAPs.

Sen. Rubio has acknowledged to Mystery Wire that lawmakers consider this to be a serious matter.

Late last week, John Ratcliffe, the top intelligence official under former President Donald Trump, explained that the forthcoming report will outline “a lot more sightings than have been made public.”

“Some of those have been declassified,” Ratcliffe said during the interview.

A spokesperson for current DNI Avril Haines told politico.com that “we are aware of the requirement and will respond accordingly.”

Below is the transcript of the UFO discussion between Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo and Sen. Marco Rubio.

Maria Bartiromo 
Senator, I want to turn to unidentified objects in the air, I had an exclusive interview with the former director of national intelligence, john Radcliffe, the other night on Fox News, where I asked him about this upcoming Pentagon report, which you of course have commissioned or encouraged to have a report on these unidentified objects.
Have unidentified flying objects been seen?

Sen. Marco Rubio
We’re sure we have lots of reports about what we call unidentified aerial phenomenon. There are a lot more sightings then have been made public. Sometimes we wonder whether or not our adversaries have technologies that are a little bit further down the road than we thought or that we realized.

Maria Bartiromo
So Senator, what about that? What can you tell us about UFOs?

Sen. Marco Rubio
Well, we have things flying over military installations over military exercises and other places. And we don’t know what it is. It isn’t ours. It isn’t anything that’s registered with the FAA, and in many cases, exhibits attributes of things. We’ve never seen technology, the kinds of technology we haven’t seen before. At least that’s what it seems like. I think you have to know what it is, or we have to try to know what it is. That’s my view of it without any preconceived notions, maybe there’s a logical explanation. Maybe it’s a, you know, something that can be explained away. Maybe it’s a foreign adversary who’s made a technological leap, as you’ve heard the former DNI said, whatever it is, we need to know the answer to it. The problem with this issue is every time you raise it, people get all nervous. Oh, does this mean UFOs and aliens and extraterrestrials? We don’t have to go So far, it’s very simple. There are things flying over national security installations. We don’t know who they are. I don’t know what it is it isn’t ours, we need to find out.

Maria Bartiromo
Well, this is absolutely fascinating. So I mean, from, from my standpoint, when I heard john Radcliffe talk about that, I went and I looked up what you’ve said about the Pentagon report coming up June 1, what do you think we’re going to learn from that Pentagon report on June 1?

Sen. Marco Rubio
Well, first, I’m not sure they’re gonna come in on time to be honest with you, because they miss a lot of deadlines and government on these sorts of things. But we’ll get a report at some point. Second is I don’t know if we’re going to know what I mean, I’m not sure that by June 1, they’ll have reached a hard conclusion about what they’re dealing with. And there may be more questions or new questions than than full answers after the fact. I can tell you it’s being taken more seriously now than it ever has been. And look, there’s a stigma associated with this. All right, when at when a Navy pilot would report that they saw something, they were told, you need to go see the flight surgeon, you know, so to check out your head, you know, make sure you’re not seeing things. So there’s a stigma associated with reporting it, even talking to you about it now, right? I mean, people are going to go and say, Look what these people are focused on when the world is falling apart. So there’s a there’s a stigma associated with it. And that’s, I think, needs to go away. We don’t have any preconceived notions about what this is or isn’t. We just need to know or we need to start we need to start trying to know, I think the first step is to ask the question, if you don’t ask the question, you’re not going to begin to get answers.

Maria Bartiromo
So it’s not necessarily like that we have, you know, little ETs running around aliens, but it could be technology that China or Russia or somebody else has developed that could be ahead of the United States, then that’s even more worrying worrisome to me.

Sen. Marco Rubio
Again, I don’t know it would be very worrisome. I don’t know that to be the case, but we need to start finding out.

Fox Business 3/24/2021