The Pentagon’s new push to investigate reports of UFOs has so far not yielded any evidence to suggest that aliens have visited Earth or crash landed here, senior military leaders said on Friday.
However, the Pentagon effort to investigate anomalous and unidentified objects whether they are in space, sky or even underwater led to hundreds of new reports that are now being investigated. But so far they have seen nothing that indicates intelligent alien life.
“I have not seen anything in those holdings to date that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation, an alien crash or anything like that,”
said Ronald Moultrie, under secretary of defense for intelligence and security.
Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s newly formed All domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), did not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial life and said he was taking a scientific approach to the research.
AARO’s mission focuses on unexplained activity around military installations, restricted airspace and “other areas of interest” and is aimed at helping identify possible threats to the safety of U.S. military operations and to national security.
A government report last year documented more than 140 cases of what the U.S. military officially calls “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, observed since 2004.
The report found that too little data exists to conclude whether they represent some exotic aerial system developed either by a U.S. government or commercial entity, or by a foreign power such as China or Russia.
Kirkpatrick said several hundred more cases have been documented. The exact figure will be disclosed soon, but a senior Navy official said in May the total number of reported cases had already reached 400.
Congress focused on the new Pentagon push in its annual defense policy bill, which it passed this week. The legislation, which has not yet been signed by President Joe Biden, calls for the Pentagon to prepare a report looking at the historical record of the U.S. government related to UFOs, or unidentified flying objects, going back to 1945.
“That is going to be quite a research project,” Kirkpatrick said, acknowledging that Congress sought to ensure that AARO researches all records even ones so highly classified that few people know about them.
The Air Force conducted a previous investigation called Project Blue Book, ended in 1969, that compiled a list of 12,618 sightings, 701 of which involved objects that officially remained “unidentified.”
