A U.S. government program that the Pentagon once claimed to be disbanded caused a stir after it reemerged in a Senate committee report last month under a new name: the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force.
The report revealed how U.S. officials are still actively trying to solve the mysteries of military pilots meeting unusual, unidentified flying vehicles and will make some of its findings public.
The Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force was formed in 2019 for the purpose of studying strange and inexplicable encounters between U.S. military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles or UFOs in a bid “to standardize collection and reporting” of the various sightings.
The program is the successor to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which also investigated UFOs but was dissolved in 2017 due to a lapse of funding. However, the team working on that program continued its work alongside the intelligence community even after it was officially disbanded.
Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who headed the Pentagon program, resigned in October 2017 after a decade with the program. Elizondo, along with a group of former government scientists and officials, remain convinced that objects of unkown origin have crashed on Earth and that these apparently extraterrestrial materials have been the focus of research.
“It no longer has to hide in the shadows,” Elizondo told the Times. “It will have a new transparency.”
Former Senate majority leader and retired Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), who led the push to fund the earlier UFO program, also believes that the studies should see the light of day.
“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,” Reid said.
In an interview with CBS, Sr. Marco Rubio opined that some of the unidentified vehicles may have exhibited technology previously unknown to U.S. authorities. “Maybe there is a completely, sort of, boring explanation for it. But we need to find out,” he said.
“We have things flying over our military bases and places where we are conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is — and it isn’t ours,” Rubio said.
“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,” the senator added.
Source: TheMindUnleased
