The Pentagon Actually Spent $22 Million on a Mysterious UFO Research Program
For those of you X-Files fans who are still hoping to find answers to the truth, there's a team of people working for the government who have been on the job! According to The New York Times, in the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, there was $22 million spent on an Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which includes researching unidentified flying objects.
This funded research took place from 2008 to 2012 thanks to former Senator Harry Reid. The Defense Department has never acknowledged the existence of this program which investigates reports of UFOs, but it was run by a military intelligence official named Luis Elizondo... the real-life Agent Mulder.
Even though funding for the program stopped in 2012, the program is still running. The report says that "for the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties."
Another person involved with all this is Robert Bigelow, who is a billionaire entrepreneur currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space. The report explains his involvement, saying:
Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.
Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.
The people involved with this program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft. There was one video released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane that was chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind—whitish—that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.
You can watch some video footage below:
This is some pretty wild stuff and I love that there's actually a team of people out there looking for answers. Whether or not those answers will ever be revealed is another story. Mr. Reid talks about how proud he is of the program, saying:
“I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going. 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.”
Now just because there are a lot of unidentified objects flying around, doesn't mean they are aliens from another planet looking to destroy us. Sometimes there's an unusual phenomenon that can't be explained. Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T. explains:
“When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously. What people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”
James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer is also one person who likes to debunk UFO sightings, says:
“There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories. Lots of people are active in the air and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.”
Although, he was open to the research being done, and says, "There could well be a pearl there."
Mr. Elizondo, who continued to work on the program after the funds dried up, resigned earlier this year to protest what he characterized as "excessive secrecy and internal opposition." In his resignation letter he wrote, "Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?"
However, before he left Mr. Elizondo made sure there was someone to take his place to continue the effort. The truth is out there my friends, and it's good to know that there are people within the government who are actually looking for answers.