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

money well spent

[gbjbaanb]

but I wonder how much was spent... covering up what they found.... mouhahaahaaaa!

Re:money well spent

[hairyfeet]

To be fair lets say, just for the sake of argument, that they found that there was alien spacecraft flying over our heads. Now what do you think the public would say when the PTBs announced "There are alien spacecraft that have visited us. they are superior to our technology in every way and if they decide to be hostile we have absolutely no chance...have a nice day."

You would have the excrement hit the bladed cooling device at the speed of light, riots, religious whackos doing all kinds of crazy shit, the destruction would be epic. Remember the line from MiB? "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."

Re: money well spent

[c6gunner]

I know, that's pretty much what happened when the white man showed up in the Americas. Excrement hit the leaf-fan, natives running every which way, medicine men screaming about the end of the world. Total chaos.

Not investigating would be negligence

[RhettLivingston]

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.

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.

Re: Not a bad way to spend money

[quantaman]

But the money wasn't spent investigating anything... from TFA:

"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 Reidâ(TM)s, Robert Bigelow"

If Pentagon staff can continue doing the video analysis in their spare time, most of that $22M was wasted on a friend of a politician.

If this were real, it wouldn't be a problem. This seems to be an instance of something being a secret not because of defense but to hide corruption.

My interpretation is that everyone involved was sincere. What probably happened was something like Bigelow really believed in UFOs and wanted to study them so he went to Reid and asked for the money and mandate (so he could get military folks to talk to him) and Reid agreed. As for Bigelow's company doing the project I don't know how the bid would have been done, but I'm guessing the intersection of companies who could competently do the work and people who would take is seriously is not very large.

I don't have a fundamental objection to a little government money going to studying UFOs, it's massive longshot but a huge payoff, and smart people doing weird stuff can generate unexpected spinoffs.

Of course the risk is the whole thing becomes a BS factory where believers trying to justify the project start skewing the evidence and feeding the conspiracy theorists.

So what?

[Jeremi]

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.

Re: So what?

[ScentCone]

On behalf of everyone who's experienced something that doesn't have a conventional explanation... go fuck yourself.

Have you ever noticed how hostile are the people who don't want anyone to point out they've imagined stuff? The closer a person gets to the threshold of admitting they've grasped onto a phony supernatural or extraterrestrial explanation for something, the angrier they get at everyone else who rolls their eyes because they've already figured out it was phony. Based on your anger, you're now very close to finally admitting that to yourself.

Re:So what?

[swb]

Even without taking into consideration the notion of aliens, flying saucers or any similar phenomena, this program makes sense if it helps sort out problems in radar imaging, remote sensing or pilot training/target identification.

Even if you think this $22 million was wasted "because UFOs don't exist", you have to admit that a military program to explain simultaneous failure of radar systems is money well spent if some natural or other phenomenon can be identified as tricking both sensing networks and pilots.

Even without that kind of hard-headed practical purpose, why *not* have some kind of office to investigate weird aerial incidents, especially if they are backed by pilot testimony, radar data, FLIR imagery, etc. It's not like it would take a ton of money, especially measured in military scales.

Re: So what?

[ScentCone]

I'm perfectly capable of stating what needs to be said without getting angry

I know, it's like smoking, right? You could quit any time but you just don't want to. That little outburst was just for fun, I guess.

$22M proves they didn't find anything.

[FrankSchwab]

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.

UFOs do not automatically mean aliens!

[morethanapapercert]

You see something in the sky, you report to the Air Force or FBI. They have a duty to investigate it if it seems at all like a credible sighting. They are responsible for the safety of the public after all, and need to at the very least, confirm that the sighting is no threat. Further, the Air Force and the Armed Forces in general, have to know that they don't always have complete intelligence about the actions and capabilities of hostile and potentially hostile countries and groups. For most "lights in the sky" that are spotted, the VAST majority are terrestrial aircraft or terrestrial phenomenon. The term UFO properly means just that the witness couldn't recognize 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.

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...