The truth is out there: real X-files team hunted UFOS

Pentagon spent £16m on researchers investigating reports of aliens and weird sightings from 2007-12

THE Pentagon ran a secretive five -year programme to investigate UFO sightings, spending $22million (£16million) before it was shut down due to cost, it has been disclosed. For the first time, the US defence department has acknowledged the existence of the mysterious Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme run from an office in a quiet corner of its sprawling headquarters.

There, between 2007 and 2012, a team of researchers working with experts in Nevada investigated reports of aliens and strange sightings over the American skies – a real life version of the hit television show The X-files.

The enterprise was the pet project of Harry Reid, the retired Democrat senate majority leader. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr Reid told the New York

Times. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

However, although some of the unit’s work remains classified, it is not thought any convincing evidence of extraterrestrials was discovered.

“If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” Mr Reid tweeted. “We do not know the answers but we have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions.”

Documents show how the unit, working with a Las Vegas aerospace company run by Robert Bigelow, Mr Reid’s long-time billionaire friend, investigated sightings of aircraft moving at high speeds with no signs of propulsion or that hovered mysteriously.

Officials with the programme also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft, including one released in August of a white oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two US navy fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Yet in 2012, the programme was seemingly wound up, to the frustration of many. Thomas Crosson, a Pentagon spokesman, said: “It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the department of defence to make a change.”

Some say the shadowy work continues despite the funding being cut off. Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official, who led the unit, claims he continued his research and to work from his office in the Pentagon until October when he resigned in protest at what he described as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.

In his resignation letter to James Mattis, the defence secretary, he reportedly wrote: “Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?”

From 1947 to 1969, the air force investigated 12,000 claimed UFO sightings – 701 remained unexplained.