It seems a US aviation intelligence office really has put a UFO on its logo

The UFO community is rejoicing after the US National Intelligence Manager for Aviation (NIM-A) revealed a bizarre new logo that appears to recognise what believers have been saying all along. They know that aliens are out there.

The new logo, which is increasingly looking like it might be real, shows several airborne craft, including what appears to be a UFO. Some say it's a hidden coded message, but the design is hardly subtle. There hovering somewhere above the Galapagos Islands is a clip art image of classic flying saucer. If it is real, the NIM-A clearly hasn't seen our advice on how to design a logo).

Created in 2016, the National Intelligence Manager for Aviation (NIM-A) is the US Director of National Intelligence's principal advisor on aviation issues. According to its website, its mission is to "lead intelligence community efforts to identify, analyze and integrate intelligence on threats to the Air Domain". And what has the internet so excited is that it seems the agency is now recognising that this remit includes UFOs.

A new seal on what appears to be the office's official website shows the shape of the northern part of the American continent being traversed by four aerial craft. One is clearly a regular aeroplane. There's some excited debate about what the other three are supposed to represent, but most mysterious of all the unexplained aerial phenomena, hanging out on its own in the bottom left of the scene is a cartoonish flying disc.

As we could expect when UFOs are involved, theories are exploding on Twitter and Reddit. Does the seal contain a coded message? Does it signal public recognition that UFOs of non-Earth origin exist? Does it reveal secret military technology? Some observers are putting a dampener on the whole thing by suggesting that the unidentified flying icon is supposed to be a weather balloon or a drone, while others just think the National Intelligence Manager for Aviation has a wicked sense of humour.

"What does it mean? Notice how it’s down in the corner as if to indicate its presence but that it's not part of our inventory," one person wrote on Twitter. ”Mind is blown. What a time to be alive folks!". Some people have even turned their hand to making their own versions of the seal with a few modifications.

The flying saucer isn't the only UFO that people have questions about, though. Twitter is ablaze with speculation about the identity of the other craft in the logo, particularly the blue delta that's soaring ahead of the other planes. "The warp trail of the triangle is more interesting," one person says, while someone suggests it "looks like that rumored hypersonic Aurora spy plane from the late 80's to early 90's." "The arrows show our aircraft. The 5th object doesn't have an arrow. Does this indicate the fifth object is not ours?" one tweeter wants to know.

Before delving into such detail, though, we've been hoping for some kind of confirmation on whether the website – and the logo – are actually genuine. For the moment, it looks... strange. The website names real military staff but it's clearly unfinished and is full of repeated information and broken links, mobile compatibility is terrible and there are links to "more information" that go to office's Wikipedia entry.

And then there's the logo design itself. Until late on Sunday, there were actually two versions on the site. One had very poorly centred text and has since been replaced with a low-resolution version of a different logo. In both cases, at least some of the icons appear to be from clip art and stock image sites.

Normally, we'd say everything suggests it's a hoax, but the website has a .mil domain, which belongs to the US Department of Defense. The site remained the same all day on Monday, which we would think – and indeed hope – would be ample time for the world's largest military to detect and correct an issue if one of its sites had been hacked

It's beginning to look more certain that the site is real, if unfinished. The Internet Archive shows that the site was live in June with a different logo. But those who think it's genuine point out that various US government departments do have form when it comes to getting imaginative with their seal designs – as we can see in the Twitter posts below.

The truth is surely out there, but if the NIM-A really has added a UFO to its logo a lot of UFO watchers are going to be over the moon. It wouldn´t be the first time a US government department has caused hilarity with a logo design – Space Force's Star Trek-esque logo designs kept us entertained for months. This one might just be a contender for our pick of the worst logos of 2022.

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