Mysterious lights in the sky. Unexplainable aerial objects that appear and disappear within a blink of an eye. Secrets that the Government may be keeping. Yes, I’m talking about aliens. Since the Cold War, Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFO’s, have been spotted in the sky all over the country.
Recently, UFO’s have been on everyone’s mind after a whistleblower from the Air Force claimed that the U.S government has a secret program that’s purpose is to retrieve and reverse engineer alien technology back in June 2023. Sparking debate between government officials and alien theorists alike, let’s take a quick look into the history of alien sightings in the United States.
From 1947 to 1969, the U.S Air Force recorded and cataloged sightings of UFOs within a program called Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book recorded over 12,000 sightings across the U.S, including unexplainable objects, lights, and radar readings reported by citizens and officials. However, the project came to an end after the University of Colorado completed a study on the projects and concluded that there was no evidence that the Unidentified Flying Objects weren’t from Earth and could be explained by other phenomena.
“Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” said the study leader, Edward U. Condon in an article from National Geographic. But though Project Blue Book ended, UFO sightings continued to persist. In 1995, a group was formed in Las Vegas, the National Institute for Discovery Science. The small group was formed by a business man named Robert Bigelow.
The group consisted of two former astronauts, Ed Mitchell and Harrison Schmitt, and to everyone’s surprise, U.S Senator of Nevada Harry Reid. Reid spoke out about this decision to join the UFO group saying that he knew going into this, that it would ruin his career. Fortunately, Senator Reid became an integral part of the U.S government’s investigation into UFOs. Twelve years later, the Pentagon created the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2007 with the support of Harry Reid. The purpose of this program was to investigate all the recent sightings in the United States and was run by military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo.
Sightings and incidents went largely unreported in the news for a couple of years, until an article was released by the New York Times in December, 2017. This article “revealed” the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Elizondo claimed that he worked within this program and cooperated with the Navy and CIA until 2017, when he resigned from the program. However, the Pentagon refuted this claim, and said that the program had been disbanded in 2012. Though this program was unclassified, it was also kept unpublicized and secret to most people until it’s reveal in 2017. Greg Porter, a former member of the Secret Service of the U.S Government, explained why the government keeps certain investigations and programs classified from the public.
“The overall reason for classifying information is to protect it from getting into the wrong hands of criminals/terrorists, or to protect it from causing public panic, or to protect innovative military and technological advancements that we as a country have proprietary interest in,” Porter said. He went on to say that though classifying information for these reasons is important, he believes it can also sometimes be used as a political tool to hide certain things by all political parties. Once the information no longer needs protection or won’t cause a public panic, there is a structure and process of declassifying the information to the public. The negative effects of this, according to Porter, is that there is usually public anger and conspiracy theories of why the government withheld and classified the information in the first place.
“So the government is damned if they do, damned if they don’t,” Porter said. “But when given the choice, they’d rather err on the side of caution and classify information, which I think needs to be done in most cases.”
In April 2022, the Pentagon announced that they were creating the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, to investigate certain objects that could potentially be a threat to the U.S. A few months later in June, NASA also announced they were setting up an independent study program to investigate the UFO issue from a scientific approach.
To this day, many sightings and experiences involving unidentified objects have not been unexplained. The government continues to investigate these reports, though they may still be keeping secrets about everything they know. Hopefully one day the public, whether you’re a believer in aliens or not, can get an answer to what really resides in the strange and vast space above us.
