An astrophysicist who works for a defense contractor reportedly briefed top officials at the Pentagon earlier this year about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth” after materials were discovered that scientists were not able to create themselves.
The program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, is primarily focused on discovering whether any nation, especially enemies of the U.S., have developed cutting edge aviation technology that could threaten U.S. national security.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is the acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told CBS Miami this month that he was concerned about the national security risk of unidentified aircraft flying over our military bases.
“We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours,” Rubio said. “So, that’s a legitimate question to ask. I would say that frankly that if it’s something outside this planet that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity.”
“But the bottom line is, there are things flying over your military bases and you don’t know what they are because they’re not yours and they exhibit potentially technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal, that to me is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into,” Rubio continued.
Rubio said that the Office of Naval Intelligence is the government agency that is in charge of heading the issue and that they’ve been documenting this “for the better part of decade,” as have other countries.
“There is someone flying in the airspace that no one else is allowed to fly in and we don’t know who it is and it isn’t something we have,” Rubio concluded. “We need to know what that is.”
A program called the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” was created under the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2007 and has continued beyond 2017 despite officials saying that the program’s funding ended in 2012. The New York Times reported Thursday:
Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”
The constraints on discussing classified programs — and the ambiguity of information cited in unclassified slides from the briefings — have put officials who have studied U.F.O.s in the position of stating their views without presenting any hard evidence.
Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said 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.”
The Times noted that astrophysicists say that just because earthly explanations are not always readily available for unexplained discoveries that “does not make an extraterrestrial” explanation “the most likely” explanation.