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."

Comments

Re:Not investigating would be negligence

[Pseudonym]

Most people don't know that the term "UFOB" (from which we get "UFO") was itself originally a USAF radar operator term. It referred to anything on a radar screen which wasn't obviously noise and hadn't yet been identified.

ufos in the military != ufos in pop-culture

[Lobachevsky]

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.

Funnily enough

[aepervius]

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...