US Defense Department creates task force to investigate UFOs

The United States Department of Defense confirmed Friday evening the creation of a task force to analyze and understand the "nature and origins" of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenons (UAP), also known to the public as unidentified flying objects.

The Department confirmed in a press release yesterday that Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist approved the establishment of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) on Aug. 4. The Department of the Navy, under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, will lead the UAPTF.

The mission is to detect, analyze, and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to national security.

"The safety of our personnel and the security of our operations are of paramount concern," the DOD wrote. "The Department of Defense and the military departments take any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace very seriously and examine each report."

UAPTF's findings could be made public within the next six months, The New York Times reported.

In June, the Senate intelligence committee addressed UAPTF's activities in their Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 under "Advanced Aerial Threats," casting public light on the shadowy agency. The committee's bill seeks to standardize the collection and reporting of UAP-related information and data gathered by the task force, which includes the release of a report "submitted in unclassified form" within 180 days of the Act's enactment" to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees.

This agency appears to have assumed the role of another UAP-hunting government group that was reportedly disbanded in 2012. Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program formed in 2007 until it ceased operations when its $22 million budget lapsed, Live Science reported. The purportedly dissolved and once-covert program's effort remains underway—renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence—where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and UAPS.

From the 1950s into the 1980s, pioneer programs such as the Air Force's Project Blue Book and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena have also researched UAP appearances in the US.

UAPs have garnered increased attention over the past year, following the federal government’s confirmation of several videos, filmed in 2004 and 2015, that have been circulating online and propagating conspiracy theories. The footage was not authorized to be released to the public in the first place.

In December 2017 and March 2018, three widely-spread videos of UAPs were published by the public benefit corporation To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which was co-founded by Tom Delonge, the vocalist and guitarist for Blink-182.

The first video, titled the “GIMBAL footage,” shows a 2004 encounter near San Diego between a Navy fighter jet and a UAP.

Joseph Gradisher, the spokesman for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, confirmed the three videos in a statement to The Black Vault, a blog dedicated to declassified government documents.

“The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena,” Gradisher told the website.

Gradisher told TIME that he hopes that his classification leads to UAP's being “de-stigmatized."

“The reason why I’m talking about it is to drive home the seriousness of this issue,” Gradisher said. “The more I talk, the more our aviators and all services are more willing to come forward.”

However, Gradisher could not speculate what the subjects of the videos were, but he noted that unidentified objects are usually proven to be drones and not extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The Navy did not release the videos to the general public, Gradisher also stated, telling TIME that the his branch is aware that the 2004 video was shared and posted online by a crew member, but could not account for how the other two videos were released.

In response to Gradisher’s statements reported across news outlets, the Stars Academy of Arts and Science stated in a Facebook post: “The U.S Navy has officially acknowledged that UFOS are real and violate American airspace.”