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The US Military Admits It Spent $22 Million Investigating UFOs (boston.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Joosy writes, "Until 2012 the Pentagon had a program, the 'Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program', that tracked unidentified flying objects." An anonymous reader writes:
The Pentagon finally acknowledged the existence of the $22 million program today to the New York Times, while also claiming that they closed the program five years ago. "But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties."
Over the years the program "produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift. Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and U.S. military aircraft." But ultimately, 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 DoD to make a change."
Over the years the program "produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift. Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and U.S. military aircraft." But ultimately, 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 DoD to make a change."
but I wonder how much was spent... covering up what they found.... mouhahaahaaaa!
I saw a documentary on this many years ago.
Have taken over the White House and the Republican Party.
Were the UFO's the Pentagon investigated also known as Unidentified Funding Opportunities? If so, the $22 million investment may well have been a sound decision.
Investigating UFOs advances national security (if they're experimental military aircraft) and science. We should be spending more on such efforts, but we can't afford it. Unfortunately, Republicans are too busy wastefully spending our money and putting our troops in harm's way because of the Republican crusade to exterminate Muslims. The war on Islam (what the Republicans falsely claim is a war on terror) is costing us dearly. We can thank Republicans that we're not safer and that science hasn't advanced.
The cost of a buying, staffing, running and maintaining a single helicopter are probably way more than that.
So, for the last five years it's been operating with zero oversight and effectively unlimited black budget.
The federal government is subsidizing cheese. The government spent $21.8 million purchasing surplus cheese and providing incentives for companies to enter the cheese industry."Government cheese really grates on taxpayers," the report states, showing the report's affinity for cheesy jokes.
In 2014, Ghost Clinics received $35,000,000 in federal reimbursements. Millions of dollars were paid out to 118 “phantom” medical clinics. These were clinics, established by a network of criminal gangs, that never actually existed. They may have been fake clinics, but the government paid out real money and a lot of it.
Alien abduction claims aside, it's virtually certain aliens who have the technological ability to travel to our galaxy also possess the advanced cloaking ability necessary to avoid detection. Yet, this may not even qualify as a top ten government spending boondoggle.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Area 51
Steven Greer's recent documentary is orders of magnitude more comprehensive and informative. And the witness names, positions, ranks, places, times and events are verifiable. As Carl Sagan used to say in his later years, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Well, the extraordinary evidence is here, it is much more than would be required in a court of law, and it is verifiable. But please don't take my word for it. Watch it yourselves. Be prepared to discover your own experience of cognitive dissonance when this doesn't fit in with the model of the world you were conditioned to believe.
There is a book as well. And there are others that make the case very well also in documentary and book form.
An Unidentified Flying Object is nothing more than that. Any UFO could easily be an unidentified military (or even civilian these days) weapon. To choose to never investigate any report because of the association between the acronym UFO and "aliens" in the public mind would be foolishly negligent. A middle ground is essential. Hopefully, this just went full black.
"Initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Reid’s, Robert Bigelow". Just another handout.
$22M is just ten guys' salaries over 50 years.
I saw white spots in the sky in the daytime.
Anybody else?
You can post anonymous.Nobody knows who you are.
They were looking for rocks that could be a hazard to life on earth. Nothing to see here. Move along and quit being stupid.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
The US military budget is $597 billion a year (that's billion, with a 'b').
$22 million spent looking for UFOs means that over the program's lifetime they spent .003% of one year's budget on the program.
Now you can argue that that was money wasted, and maybe its was, but if you're going to complain about the US military wasting money, this program is way down the list. And if it actually found something (and who is to say it hasn't? oooooh), then it would have been very well worth the investment for the military to know that aliens are among us -- knowing whether your country is being surveilled or infiltrated (and by whom) is considered very important to know in defense circles.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Imagine that the USAF investigated a UFO report, and found credible evidence that there was a real flying craft, and that it was of alien origin.
I'd imagine their budget for following up on UFO sightings would suddenly have three zeros added to it. The supposition that this didn't happen proves they haven't found anything of interest.
And the worms ate into his brain.
they DO love wasting money of bullshit.
They were investigating:
1) Possible Russian and Chinese spyplanes and experimental aircrafts.
2) To find out what the public knew about OUR spyplanes and experimental aircrafts.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I remember a video that was going around the UFO community that had them all in a flap. It was a hourglass shaped object, seen hovering and darting around in a vertical posture in dusk conditions around Buenos Aires or something like that. The UFO nuts were saying that there was no such aircraft and it moved too fast to be of human manufacturer. I recognized it though. It was a CL-227 Sentinel UAV. The UFO nuts didn't notice the co-axial rotors around it's waist and misjudged how far away it was, leading them to over-estimate how fast it was moving. As far as I was concerned, the only interesting bit was that I didn't know that any South American nations even had any of them. My training identified them as being Canadian and only in use by NATO members. This is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect the US Air Force to investigate. People see funny lights or objects in the sky, the Air Force needs to find out if it's a mistaken report, a legitimate but unrecognised aircraft, or just possibly another group sending drones into US airspace for intelligence gathering.
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No joke. After WWII Eisenhower couldn't figure out how to keep our economy from falling back into the inevitable recession that resulted from the massive wealth inequality of the 20s and 30s. His solution was the Military Industrial Complex. The theory being that the rich would pay for it (and therefore some money would make it out of their hands and into the general populace) to protect themselves. He talked about feeling guilty about it in his memoirs.
Jokes on him. The Uber rich are global now. They're not tied down by companies anymore. So they no longer fear another nation coming and taking all their stuff. So more and more of that government military money is going to the war profiteers and less to the troops. This is why we had soldiers die from electrocution in badly made buildings in Iraq.
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We have lulled the earthlings into a sense of complacency. Signal the mother ship that it is time to commence phase 2.
Have gnu, will travel.
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
I do not believe that there are any space aliens appearing on our skies. I am skeptical even that any genuinely unexplainable events are being regularly and reliably detected (the usual UFO scenario).
But absolutely I believe the military should maintain an on-going program to record and investigate unusual detections and reports of strange observations by trained personnel. Like listening for extra-terrestrial life with radio telescopes, if you don't look you will never see anything, and in any case this is important even if LGMs (little green men) are not even in the picture.
It could be secret programs of other countries (or even our own) or other sorts of organizations. Could be natural events not yet identified (sprites are good example of strange things that proved quite real). You need to look to see the rare black swan.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
That will probably buy you a typical 5 story office building in an office park, just to show the scale of the money spent here.
UFO in the military means something different than in pop-culture. In pop-culture, it means aliens and flying saucers, and ray-guns, and Martians. In the military, it means an unidentified flying object, including flights by non-cleared personnel like hobbyists or foreign surveillance drones. Every one of our "drones" in Afghanistan would be a UFO to the Afghan military if we didn't seek clearance from them first.
My guess is the name "UFO" wreaked of bad smell over the years and the military just changed the name and defunded the old one. They likely *still* want to investigate any sightings or blips on the radar to record when and where China or Russia are running spy drones over American soil or international waters, and hence whatever personnel are conducting those investigations are still funded, just under a better name than UFOs.
In related news, the U.S. Military has redisclosed that some enemy combatants were harmed during overseas U.S. military operations sometime in the last seventy years.
More likely they put $20 million into a slush fund and just said it was for investigating UFOs because it was funny and might serve a social conditioning purpose. Certainly everyone seems a bit distracted by this story.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
http://www.washingtonexaminer....
Somehow this never gets mentioned in the story here.
I love the bias, Miss Mash.
I LOVE THE CLICKBAIT BIAS.
They would have been right, seeing how the few of them (which survived their epidemic and intercine wars), were wiped out by the subsequent arrival of the white men , and all the war , conquest, and pushing away their population, new disease etc...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
The strangest UFOs I've seen are those "organic" looking objects recorded with border control / military equipment. The fact that many of such equipment uses thermal imaging, causing the object to look/act very strangely and the result is very different than when recording visible light.
Ever since Roswell NM the US government has been quietly studying UFO's or rather they are not really unidentified but identified. But have been very vigilant about not disclosing any of it to the public. Probably because when you do not know how to deal with it, then you don't talk about it.
The article in post fails to mention the New York Times story which has DOD video from an F-18 sensor recording of a UAV they are tracking.
The BBC article posts a link to the CIA declassifying 13 million documents under the CIA's CREST archive.
Enjoy!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Funny how any negative story remotely related to a republican makes sure to call out their name and party. Meanwhile Democrat Harry Reid who requested this research gets a free ride.
Project Blue Book.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
The truest thing I've ever heard is that the one big secret of Area 51 is how they spend their money.
Toys for boys.
Nothing beats a blank cheque like a black CC.
Only a fool thinks they know everything about the universe. Given it's size and diversity, it is highly likely that aliens exist. If they are capable of interstellar travel, it is highly likely that they are vastly superior technologically to us.
So one of two things is going on. The US is/was spending resources investigating possible UFOs which is just rational and prudent. They either have not found anything concrete, or there is a full on MIB situation, in which case, they sure as hell won't tell the world as there would be a massive shitstorm of craziness as people freaked out.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Based on cremer's past statements, he's still using Slashdot to drive web traffic to his website. Interestingly, he recently changed his homepage link to his YouTube page. External traffic is one way to feed the YouTube algorithm.
The amount spent is a rounding error in comparison to other Pentagon spending, while the questions is asks are valid and important and deserve an impartial and fair investigation where the results lead the conclusions rather than looking for answers that fit predetermined desires.
Why is this shit important?
One one hand, we may have unknown machines operating in our airspaces and potentially posing a threat to civilian travel as well as our military and various no-fly-zone targets of interest all over the ground. This makes the investigation a matter of utmost national security.
On the other hand, we have highly trained and vetted members of the military, operating our best technology and entrusted with things like securing, carrying and deploying nuclear weapons. These are the men and women we trust the most. And if they think they are seeing these phenomena, then investigating THAT is also a matter of utmost national security.
There is no way this is not important.
Sig for hire.
Interestingly, he recently changed his homepage link to his YouTube page.
Why is that interesting?
What's interesting is Chris' personality disorders.
The arrival of the "Native Americans" was the end of the Native American Mammal way of life.
Creimer is driving traffic from a website he controls to a website he doesn't control. You can't make money off of YouTube. Unless you're using YouTube to build an audience to drive traffic to the websites that you control. YouTube is much bigger than Slashdot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
until the 11the season of the X-Files is over..
So when a few people see your shaky handheld footage of a nerd convention, they're going to be inspired to buy your Amazon books?
So, Harry Reid funds a pork barrel project for a buddy, and it gets headlines indicating that the DoD wants to look for UFOs? No, no it doesn't. It was simply doing what Congress required it to do. Congress creates the budget, not the Pentagon. Most likely, the only reason it was classified was to keep it from leaking out and embarrassing everyone.
Just another day in Paradise
Three more words
Waste of money
Just another day in Paradise