The Pentagon can be quite the tease, especially when it comes to UFOs. They’ve claimed the phenomenon doesn’t exist, that they looked into it and lost interest, and they disbanded the unit they had investigating it. Now The New York Times is reporting the top military office never stopped looking at the skies. They just stopped telling us about it. The program, called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, is not classified, though some subjects contained in it are, but the Pentagon still prefers not to discuss it. A Senate committee has given them 180 days to tease us with more.
The covert UFO program came up in a Senate committee report last month while going over the annual intelligence agency budget. Among the details uncovered, the UFO Unit revealed unexplained Aerial Vehicle sightings had been made by a Navy Intelligence Task Force. Also, ex-advisor Eric W. Davis, told The Times he briefed the Defense Department in March about the retrieval of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.” The Pentagon’s consulting astrophysicist said objects he believed “we couldn’t make ourselves” have been discovered since he began working at the unit in 2007. The former official suggests the vehicles were placed in U.S. government storage.
There have been no publicly documented crash artifacts, but former Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid told the Times “After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession.”
The Senate mandated the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force to “standardize collection and reporting on unidentified aerial phenomenon, any links they have to adversarial foreign governments, and the threat they pose to U.S. military assets and installations,” as part of 2021 spending plans. The committee gave the Pentagon task force 180 days to make at least some of the findings public. The team will continue to update the US Senate’s Intelligence Committee on its research every six months. It is not immediately clear what will be detailed in the reports.
“The Committee understands that the relevant intelligence may be sensitive; nevertheless, the Committee finds that the information sharing and coordination across the Intelligence Community has been inconsistent, and this issue has lacked attention from senior leaders,” reads June Senate Committee Report. “Therefore, the Committee directs the DNI, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of such other agencies as the Director and Secretary jointly consider relevant, to submit a report within 180 days of the date of enactment of the Act, to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on unidentified aerial phenomena (also known as ‘‘anomalous aerial vehicles’’), including observed airborne objects that have not been identified.”
The Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force became public in 2019. It succeeded a Pentagon investigative UFO program that was said to have been disbanded prior to 2017. The program began in 2007 under the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon admits it investigated unmanned aerial vehicles, but maintained their funds dried up in 2012. The New York Times report reveals the Pentagon changed the name of the project and moved it inside the Office of Naval Intelligence. The goal of the task was to determine whether UFO sightings were, in reality, glimpses of advanced technology from rival nations.
Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio agreed with such concerns. “We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is, and it isn’t ours,” Rubio told a CBS affiliate in Miami last week, as per The Times. “I would say that, frankly, that if it’s something from outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity.” Rubio conceded “Maybe there is a completely, sort of, boring explanation for it. But we need to find out.”
The New York Times first broke the news about the Pentagon’s secret UFO Program in December 2017, tracking a lost $22 million amidst the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets. The program began in 2007 with support from Reid, who was Nevada’s senator at the time. The money reportedly went to an aerospace research firm run by Reid’s friend Robert Bigelow. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program produced documentation on aircraft which moved “at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion.”
Former military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who was the program’s director for 10 years before resigning in October 2017, confirmed the new task force evolved from the advanced aerospace program. “It no longer has to hide in the shadows,” Elizondo told The Times. “It will have a new transparency.”
The Navy is on record believing many UFO Freedom of Information Act requests “would cause exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States.” Military encounters with possible alien craft have come under intense scrutiny since several videos were leaked in 2017. In April, the U.S. Navy officially published three videos after clips leaked online. One taped encounter, which was formally declassified in spring, showed a fast-moving unidentified object, nicknamed “Tic Tac,” fall from 60,000 feet to just 50 feet in seconds. The military confirmed the footage is real.
This author is waiting to learn the Pentagon itself, the five-sided structure, is a UFO on its back.