Pentagon secretly funded £16MILLION investigation into existence of UFOs and aliens for five years

THE US Government secretly funded a £16million programme which investigated the existence of UFOs and aliens, it emerged last night.

Officials in the Defense Department have acknowledged for the first time that they ran the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program for five years, between 2007 and 2012.

Parts of their shadowy work – which is still continuing to this day – are classified. But the Pentagon confirmed that audio and video of two US Navy pilots chasing an unidentified flying object near San Diego was investigated as part of the program.

The footage, released in August, showed that the UFO rotated and maintained a “glowing aura”. The Advanced Aerospace project was set up at the behest of now retired US Democratic Senator Harry Reid.

It was run by military intelligence official Luis Elizondo on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring - deep within the building’s maze – in Washington DC.

Most of the money for the programme went to an aerospace research company run by billionaire entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA.

The program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities.

It also reported on aircraft with no visible signs of propulsion, or ones that hovered with no apparent means of lift.

That included the videoed fighter jet chase, when the pilots followed the UFO from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Another incident involved a Navy Super Hornet jet following a UFO that emitted a “glowing aura travelling at high speed and rotating as it moves”. In audio and video, the pilot is heard to exclaim: “There’s a whole fleet of them.”

Mr Reid confirmed he set up the program, adding: “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going.

“I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service.
I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Pentagon officials acknowledged the existence of the program yesterday, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years in 2012.

A spokesman said: “It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the Department of Defense to make a change.”

But Mr Elizondo confirmed that he continued to work with officials from the Navy and the CIA on the program until he resigned from office in October.

He quit in protest over excessive secrecy and lack of resources for the program.

UFOs have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the US, including by the American military.

In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed UFO sightings before it was officially ended in 1969.

The project concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.