The Pentagon, headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, has been associated with running secret programs to investigate unidentified flying objects or UFOs in the past.?
Although the Pentagon claimed that it had shut down the program after running it for several years, new reports indicate that it has just been renamed and that it still exists.
As per a recent report by The New York Times, the secret military program has just been renamed ¡°and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence.¡± The report indicates that studies on encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles are still ongoing.
Though the program is not classified in itself, it does curtail to several classified matters. The NY Times report mentions that the renamed program was spotted in a July Senate committee report. The report was to outline the spending on the nation¡¯s intelligence agencies for the coming year.
Under the report, the program was listed as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, with an aim to ¡°standardize collection and reporting¡± on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles.¡± The program was meant to report ¡°at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act,¡± says The NY Times report.
A section within the report titled "Advanced Aerial Threats" mentions the efforts by a Naval Intelligence task force to monitor "unidentified aerial phenomenon."
The efforts, however, were less concerned with extraterrestrials than other nations. The team specifically looked for any threats that any such aircraft may pose to US military assets and installations.
"I would say that, frankly, if it's something from outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we've seen some technological leaps on behalf of the Chinese or Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity," Senator Marco Rubio said in an interview with CBS.
"We don't know what it is, and it isn't ours," Rubio said. Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Rubio is now campaigning for the unclassified release of findings. He intends to make a detailed analysis of intelligence and FBI data public, in a hope that someone may help ID the mysterious objects.