Investigation of UFO reports by the United States government
Investigation and analysis of reported UFO incidents under the federal government of the United States has taken place under multiple branches and agencies, past and current, since 1947.
In spite of decades of interest, there remains no evidence that there are any UFOs with extraordinary origins and, indeed, those identified all have been shown to be natural phenomena, human technology, misapprehensions, delusions, or hoaxes.
In 2017 The New York Times revealed that $22 million had been spent over the past ten years on an unpublicized Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) funded by the U.S. Congress.
From 2017 to 2020, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) was set up as a program within the Office of Naval Intelligence to "standardize collection and reporting" of sightings of UFOs.
Historian Steven J. Dick wrote in 1998 that although the mass media had spread early interest in UFOs, "it was only when the U.S. Air Force decided to investigate the flying saucer reports that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was recognized at an official level".
[7] Members of the 1953 Robertson Panel worried that "genuine incursions" by enemy aircraft "over U.S. territory could be lost in a maelstrom of kooky hallucination" of UFO reports.
Pope oversaw Great Britain's UFO desk from 1991 to 1994 and maintained that "whatever the true nature of this phenomenon, it raises important defence, national security and air safety issues".
[2] Robert Sheaffer has written that, out of all the reports that Project Blue Book amassed, "none of them amounted to anything significant, or added to our knowledge of any subject, even after more than 50 years of investigation".
There was a request on July 21, 1977, when Frank Press, Science Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, sent a letter to Robert A. Frosch, the fifth administrator of NASA, asking if the space agency could reopen investigations into UFOs.
[5][14] However, on December 21, 1977, Frosch wrote a second letter in response to president Carter in which he "proposed" that "NASA take no steps to establish a research activity in this area [UFOs] or to convene a symposium on the subject".
[15] In 2017, reports in The New York Times, Politico, and The Washington Post revealed that $22 million had been spent over the past ten years on a small and unpublicized Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program funded by the U. S.
[23][24] From 2017 to 2022, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) was set up as a program within the Office of Naval Intelligence to "standardize collection and reporting" of sightings of UFOs.
[35][36] Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist and founder of his own project that aimed to study UFOs wrote, that Kirkpatrick's testimony showed the need for more intentional and high-quality data collection related to UAPs.
[43] Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) reporting requirements were substantially strengthened while any funding of secret UAP retrieval or reverse engineering programs was made illegal as part of the Fiscal Year 2024 Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA, S. 2103) passed unanimously on June 14, 2023 by the Senate Intelligence Committee as draft legislation yet to be brought before the full Senate and House for passage.
[44][45] Also, with broad bipartisan support, Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, has proposed legislation (as an amendment to the 2024 annual defense policy bill) to create a commission tasked with declassifying government UFO documents in an effort similar to the JFK Records Act of 1992.
