UFO Taskforce

Isabel Cravens, Copy Editor

After years of public speculation concerning unidentified flying objects in U.S airspace, the Senate committee report has allowed for the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force to report its findings to the public. 

   The new Pentagon task force is responsible for the analyses and information in the UFOs sighted in the U.S.These findings must be made public 180 days after the passing of the intelligence authorization act, which is supposedly in the beginning of June of 2021. 

   Interest in this information has peaked, due to multiple sightings of unidentified aircrafts over American military bases. Just last year, a video the Pentagon released three videos of naval aviators encountering UFOs. 

   Leading this charge on new information are Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, and Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio has stated that his involvement is due to his concern that these technologically advanced objects could be originating from Russia or China. He has also stated that “Maybe there is a complete sort of boring explanation for it. But we need to find out.”

   While foreign  technology is one theory on these objects, Luis Elizondo, the former UFO program chief at the Pentagon, proposes two more. The first theory, which is considered unlikely, is that the technology is in fact U.S. technology that is unknown, due to poor communication. Elizondo then goes on to state that “If it’s not ours [the UFOs] and it’s not another country well, then it’s someone or something else.”

     Prior to the current program, it was disclosed that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was in effect from 2007 to 2017. Elizondo had worked with this program and later resigned in October of 2017, and states that the new task force had evolved from the old  program. 

    Over the course of a decade, these programs have held classified briefings  for government officials and have begun to declassify documents for the public. Reid pushed for the declassification of this knowledge during his time as the senate majority leader, as he believed that UFOs had crashed previously, and the government had retrieved the materials. He proposed that these instances and materials be studied, to gain a better understanding of what was and still is occurring. Some of the previously recovered materials have been found to be man-made. 

    The goal of this new public clarification is to inform on what is already known. Reid has stated “It is extremely important that information about the discovery of physical materials or retrieved craft come out.”

   The information found by the taskforce has become heavily anticipated by many government officials, and those curious about the origins of the UFOs. These findings are speculated to be announced this June, and will be one of the first instances of this knowledge becoming public.