The US Pentagon is forming a task force to investigate military reports of unidentified aerial phenomena (aka UFOs). Over the last few years, the New York Times broke news of a similar program in the Office of Naval Intelligence, examined curious videos depicting aerial encounters between Navy jets and UFOs (above), and reported a theoretical physicist's claim that "he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from 'off-world vehicles not made on this earth.'" From CNN:
Members of Congress and Pentagon officials have long expressed concerns about the appearance of the unidentified aircraft that have flown over US military bases, posing a risk to military jets. There is no consensus on their origin with some believing they may be drones potentially operated by earthly adversaries seeking to gather intelligence rather than extraterrestrials.
The Senate Intelligence Committee voted in June to have the Pentagon and intelligence community provide a public analysis of the encounters, following the official Pentagon release of three short videos showing US aircraft encountering these phenomena.
"We have things flying over our military bases and places where we are conducting military exercises, and we don't know what it is and it isn't ours, so that's a legitimate question to ask," the chairman of that committee, Sen. Marco Rubio, told a local Miami news station, WFOR-TV in July.
"Frankly, if it's something from outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we've seen some sort of technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary," he added.
