Man Responsible For Pentagon UFO Program Says 'We Are Not Alone'

Yesterday we saw some of the footage reviewed by the U.S. government's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a secret investigatory program which sought to protect the U.S. from threats from UFOs.

Credit: YouTube/Warrior Poet

Now one of the former Pentagon officials responsible for leading the program has stated his belief that aliens may well have visited Earth, based on the reports he read of aircraft with inhuman capabilities.

Luis Elizondo previously ran the AATIP, which ran between 2007 and 2012 and investigated reports of clashes with unexplained aerial phenomena with a budget of over $20 million (£15m) a year.

"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone," Elizondo told CNN.

"These aircraft - we'll call them aircraft - are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of.

"Things that don't have any obvious flight services, any obvious forms of propulsion, and maneuvering in ways that include extreme maneuverability beyond, I would submit, the healthy G-forces of a human or anything biological."

The existence of the AATIP was finally admitted by the US Department of Defense this past Saturday, after it had been shrouded in secrecy for years.

The AATIP looked to verify reports of strange aircraft, obtained from pilots or technology, and "ascertain and determine if that information is a potential threat to national security."

Among the reports analysed by the AATIP was one from two US Navy Super Hornet fighters who spotted a UFO on a training mission off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

The Pentagon. Credit: PA

Elizondo resigned from the Department of Defense just a few months ago as he was unhappy about internal opposition to the project, and what he believes to be excessive secrecy about what it was trying to achieve.

While the Pentagon has stated that AATIP closed in 2012, the exact nature of why the government terminated the program remains unknown.

The New York Times reported that while the program has been unfunded since 2012, officials have continued to investigate UFO cases for the past five years.

US Senator Harry Reid, who initiated AATIP, said he was proud of the program and what it has tried to achieve.

"I think it's one of the good things I did in my congressional service," Reid said. "I've done something that no one has done before."

Topics: UFO, World News, News, US News, Weird

Chris Ogden

Chris Ogden is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from the University of East Anglia with degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing before completing his NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism. Chris has previously written for the independent culture magazine The Skinny, among other publications.

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