Government's Secret UFO-Hunting Program Revealed

The U.S. Government has secretly been searching for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) years after it disbanded its official UFO-hunting Pentagon group, according to reports.

Investigations into UFO appearances first began in the 1950s and there have been several programs dedicated to these responsibilities. However, in 2012 government officials put an end to it's most recent initiative, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

Now, it has emerged that the U.S. Government may have secretly continued its efforts to locate UFOs. According to The New York Times, there is a program called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (UAPTF) which has been operating under the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence and although investigations are classified, they may be made public in a few months.

Earlier this year a former consultant for the UFO program mentioned "off-world vehicles not made on this earth" in a briefing to Defense Department representatives. The aim of these investigations is not to discover intelligent life, but to determine whether or not there is a threat to national security.

This is not the first time there have been murmurs of a secret task force. The Times in 2017 disclosed the existence of a task force that investigated sightings of UFOs, though the Department of Defense at the time said $22 million in funding for the group had lapsed after 2012.

A recent Senate report defined UAPTF as a group "which standardizes collection and reporting on unidentified aerial phenomenon, any links they have to adversarial foreign governments, and the threat they pose to U.S. military assets and installations."

The report also directed the task force to "submit a report within 180 days of the date of enactment of the Act, to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on unidentified aerial phenomena (also known as ‘‘anomalous aerial vehicles’’), including observed airborne objects that have not been identified."

Nick Pope, a former employee and UFO investigator for Britain's Ministry of Defense, told Fox News at the time that the request hints that the government may know more than it is admitting and "clearly suggests the committee shares the views of UFO researchers and thinks elements within government know more about UFOs than they're letting on."