Is the Pentagon finally admitting UFOs are real? Everything to know
Are UFOs real? It used to depend on whether you were talking to Mulder or Scully but now it looks as though the U.S. government has finally entered the UFO chatroom. The Pentagon has just announced that a new task force will be formed – its mission: to investigate UFOs that have been observed by U.S. military aircraft.
Unidentified aircraft have been appearing over U.S. military bases for quite some time, sparking concern amongst members of Congress as well as Pentagon officials. No one knows quite what they are, whether drones from foreign adversaries seeking to gather intel or visitors from outer space. Let’s take a look at how the U.S. government plans to tackle this mystery and whether it’s a potential extraterrestrial invasion.
Space force task force
The new task force is expected to be officially unveiled in the near future and is currently being headed up by Deputy Secretary of Defense David Nordquist. Other attempts to identify these mysterious aircraft were made by the U.S. Navy as many of the Navy’s own aircraft were there to document the unexplained phenomena.
This is also not the first time the U.S. government has launched a program to investigate the unidentified aircraft. Former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada began a program to study recordings of the aerial encounters in 2007 but was defunded in 2012 to free up resources for higher priority projects. Reportedly, the cost to fund the program was $20 million.
Only a small number of officials were made aware of Reid’s program known as The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. In an interview with The New York Times, Reid stated, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going. I’ve done something that no one has done before.” Reid also revealed that the purpose of the program was to find truth amid “plenty of evidence to support asking the questions”.
Mysterious lights in the sky
The Pentagon released three videos revealing the encounters between U.S. aircraft and the unexplained aerial phenomena. In June, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to have the Pentagon and the intelligence community give a public analysis of those encounters.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Marco Rubio, said in a news interview, “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, so that’s a legitimate question to ask.”
Some speculation of what the aircraft might be are drones as the videos released by the Pentagon reveal flying objects that move in an extraordinarily rapid manner – fast enough to shock the individuals documenting them. One report from 2014 described the unknown aircraft as, “small in size, approximately the size of a suitcase, and silver in color.”
The Pentagon’s official terminology for the unknown aircraft is “Unmanned Aerial Systems” or UAS and is also the terminology used for most drone aircraft. The amazing Pentagon videos were commented on by President Trump in April who called the footage “a hell of a video”.
We want to believe
The three videos obtained by the U.S. Navy were released to the public between December 2017 and March 2018 by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a company founded by former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge. The company’s purpose is to study information about unexplained aerial phenomena.
In early 2017, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency released millions of pages of declassified documents online, many of which include reports of UFO sightings. As of now, there’s no confirmation on the question “are UFOs real?” but the U.S. government is making sure they get to the bottom of it because as we all know – the truth is out there.
