The U.S. Department of Defense will disband a group responsible for investigating reported UFO sightings and is instead assigning all of its investigative teams to new teams comprised of Navy, Air Force and Marine units, The Guardian reports.
The Defense Department only announced plans to add the new UFO investigation team in December, according to a letter to Congress from Carl Anderson, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. The letter was dated Friday and contained three new official Defense Department documents that further describe the new UFO agencies: Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) headquarters; AATIP sub-units; and Office of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Investigations (OUAPI).
According to the Department of Defense’s official UFO website, AATIP was created to undertake “a top-to-bottom analysis” of “unidentified aerial phenomena reported to the Government.” Reports of potential UFO sightings were investigated by a multi-agency task force made up of people from multiple branches of the military: all the members of the group were either active duty military officers or FBI Special Agents. Some of those officers previously served in the CIA, a Department of Defense spokesperson told The Guardian.
The new office, called AATIP Special Projects Group (APP), will be led by Navy pilot Lt. Colonel Robert Bigelow. According to The Guardian, he will spend 100 percent of his salary on the “Expanded Office of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Investigations (AATIP).” The Pentagon did not respond to the paper’s request for comment for this story.
UFO investigators criticized the Pentagon for disassociating itself from a UFO investigation program that had only been in existence for three years.
Congressman Ted Poe, who introduced a bill to create a permanent Office of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Investigations, said, “it was sort of pathetic” that a military base was establishing a stand-alone group to do precisely the opposite. “You need everybody working together,” he said.
Read the full story at The Guardian.
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