The Pentagon ran a secretive five year program to investigate UFO sightings, spending $22 million before it was shut down due to cost, it has been revealed.
For the first time, the Department of Defense has acknowledged the existence of the mysterious Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program run from an office in a quiet corner of its sprawling headquarters.
There, between 2007 and 2012, a team of researchers working with experts in Nevada probed reports of alien life form and strange sightings over the US skies – a real life versions of the hit TV show The X Files.
“I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in an interview with the New York Times who first reported the story. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”
Thomas Crosson, a Pentagon spokesman said:“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD (Department of Defence) to make a change.”
Some say the shadowy work continues despite the funding being cut off.
Fornmer military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, who led the unit, claims he continued his research and continued to work from his office in teh Pentagon until October when he resigned in protest at what he descirbed as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.
In his resignation letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis, he reportedly wrote: “Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?”
U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969.
The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.
