Pentagon to launch task force to investigate potential UFO sightings

UFOs and paranormal sightings have been back in the news a lot more recently – maybe because people have much more time on their hands (or have fled dense cities for the countryside).

Perhaps that’s part of the reason why the Pentagon is setting up a UFO task force, according to CNN and various other news outlets.

According to two US defence officials, the Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist will oversee the task force, although this is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

In June, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to have the Pentagon and other intelligence bodies provide an analysis of these encounters publicly. This was after the official release (by the Pentagon) of three short videos which claimed to show sightings of UFOs.

These videos showed UFOs moving while recorded by infrared cameras – in two, people can be heard reacting to how fast these objects are moving. These encounters were supposed to have happened at least a decade ago, in 2004. In April, Trump said that it was “a hell of a video” and asked whether it was real.

The reports which CNN obtained in June – about the UFOs – described the objects as unmanned aerial systems, which is the term more commonly used by the Pentagon to refer to drone aircrafts. But they weren’t able to identify who was responsible for the flight of the drone, which posed a security challenge.

Last year, the Navy had acknowledged that the videos were real, but hadn’t released them officially until this year because they were worried about misinformation. These UFOs have been observed and recorded by US military aircraft, not anything else.

Luiz Elizondo, the former head of the classified program that recorded encounters with unknown objects, told CNN in 2017 that he did believe “there was very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.” That program is supposed to have been shut in 2012, because there were other agencies which needed funding, but it may feed into the new agency that the Pentagon is supposed to be launching in the coming weeks.