A story about UFOs and a secretive government agency sounds like something from a script for “The X Files,” a science fiction television series. But it’s part of an investigative piece by The New York Times that devotes considerable ink to the Pentagon’s “mysterious UFO program.”What is this program?
UFO investigations are apparently done through the government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The Times was able to uncover information about it through a series of interviews and government document requests. At one point, former military intelligence official Luis Elizondo ran the program “on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze,” The Times reported.
Some parts of the program remain classified.
One of the UFO investigations by the program involved the study of videos of U.S. military aircraft and unknown objects. A Department of Defense video released in August shows a “whitish oval object about the size of a commercial plane” being chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz near the coast of San Diego in 2004,” according to the report.
For two weeks, military tracked the mysterious objects. They “appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up,” according to The Times. READ MORE
