US Intelligence Report On UFO Sightings Publicly Released
A hotly anticipated US government report on UFOs, also known as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” has been publicly released, revealing what US intelligence agencies know about the mysterious phenomena that have long turned Americans’ gaze to the skies in wonder.
The unclassified report’s release comes nearly a year after the Department of Defense announced it had established a UAP Task Force with a mission “to detect, analyse and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to US national security.”
As part of a provision in former President Donald Trump’s $2.3 billion pandemic relief package, the DOD and Office of the Director of National Intelligence were given six months, which was until June, to deliver the task force’s findings to Congress.
Senator Marco Rubio, who requested the report back in December as acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, reasoned that any evidence of UAPs should be taken seriously and “constantly analysed.”
“I don’t think we can let the stigma keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question,” he said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously.”
The report’s release follows the Pentagon in 2017 admitting for the first time that it had been studying UFOs as part of a program known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Two years later, in 2019, the US Navy confirmed for the first time the authenticity of a series of leaked UFO videos.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which no longer exists, was funded with help from former Nevada Senator Harry Reid, whose jurisdiction included the Air Force testing site Area 51, which is famously known by UFO enthusiasts.
Reid, in an opinion piece published in The New York Times late last month, said he advocated for the program out of concern that national security could be harmed and technical advancement limited if honest conversations on the topic were prohibited or kept in the shadows.
“I believe that there is information uncovered by the government’s covert investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena that can be disclosed to the public without harming our national security,” he wrote.