Secret Pentagon programme to investigate UFOs may actually exist, experts suggest

Apparently, the US government is still hunting for UFOs.

It’s not an episode of The X-Files – the New York Times reported on a program called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, which was formerly a clandestine government program tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence.

It appeared last month in a Senate Committee Report relating to the upcoming intelligence activities for the next year. While information about its existence is still technically sealed, it could become public knowledge within the next six months.

This program is supposed to standardise reporting of any unknown or unexplained aerial vehicles. For UFO enthusiasts, it may also be time for a dose of reality – the main aim of this program is really to spot any potential threats – from the air – from other countries.

Marco Rubio, who is the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, acknowledged that there were elements of the information collected which couldn’t be neatly explained. But he also said:

Maybe there is a completely, sort of, boring explanation for it. But we need to find out.

A previous version of the program, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, has existed since 2007, according to other sources, as per the New York Times. Luis Elizondo, who formerly worked in the program, confirmed that there will be a new level of transparency for this department going forward and that there is a small group of officials and scientists who do believe that there were “objects of undetermined origin which have crashed on Earth.”

However, the secrecy of the program – which has a high-level security clearance and not much public information – has made it difficult for people who worked there to come forward with information.

In May of this year, the Times reported that Navy fighter pilots reported close encounters with unidentified aerial vehicles, in eight incidents between 2013 and 2019. The Defense Department had previously confirmed that three videos which the Times had published in April, were real.

In June, even Trump himself said he “knew very interesting things” about Roswell, a city in New Mexico which is crucial to the history of UFOs in the US. But when asked whether he would declassify information about them, he said, “I’ll have to think about that one.”