Shortly after footage of multiple UFO sightings was declassified, the Pentagon is about to create a new task force that will investigate those “encounters of the first kind.”
The task force, which should be officialized in a few days, would be under the supervision of the United States Department of Defense, according to sources quoted by CNN. The decision concretizes a request made by the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2020 following the public release of previously classified UFO encounter footage.
In April 2020, three videos, entitled FLIR, GOFAST, and GIMBAL, captured by F/A-18 fighter jets of the U.S. Navy in 2004 and 2015, were declassified by the Department of Defense. Some of the footage had been circulating since 2007. “DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos,” was explained in the statement.
It is not the first time that the Pentagon launches such an investigation. The most famous one was, without a doubt, the probe into the Roswell incident in 1947. What witnesses described as the crash of an alien spaceship in the New Mexico desert was revealed to be “a once top-secret balloon operation, Project MOGUL, designed to monitor the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests,” according to the United States Air Force.
Between 2007 and 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was entrusted with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, with a budget of $22 million. This program funded a total of 38 studies. In July 2020, the New York Times even claimed that the Office of Naval Intelligence never stopped investigating.
Such encounters are taken seriously by the U.S. military and are systematically reported by pilots. “For many years, our aviators didn’t report these incursions because of the stigma attached to previous terminology and theories about what may or may not be in those videos,” Navy spokesperson Joe Gradisher commented.