Pentagon did run an X-Files department

IT IS a revelation that will send conspiracy theorists into raptures – the X-Files existed in real life, and were run by the Pentagon in Washington DC.

For the first time, the US Department of Defence has confirmed it ran a programme investigating unidentified flying objects from the fifth floor of the famous office.

The project had a budget of £16million a year and ended in 2012...officially at least.

However, its former leader, military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, has said that when he stepped down two months ago, another Pentagon official took over and the US still examines reported sightings. Mr Elizondo quit because of what he called excessive secrecy.

The X-Files TV series, starring David Duchovny as alien-hunter Mulder and Gillian Anderson as his sceptical sidekick Scully, began in 1993 and is still running.

But the Pentagon’s project was less excitingly named the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Programme.

It ran from 2007 to 2012 with its funding tucked away in US Defence Department budgets worth hundreds of billions of dollars, The New York Times reports.

Pentagon spokesman Laura Ochoa said: ‘It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding and it was in the best interest of the department to make a change.’