Aug 16, 2020 I Paul Seaburn

Pentagon is Launching a New Task Force to Investigate UFO Sightings (Again?)

It’s August, which means it’s time for a monthly update to the seemingly never-ending saga of UFOs, the Pentagon, The New York Times, Tom DeLonge and the US Senate. This month our focus is on the Pentagon, which announced it is setting up a task force to investigate UFO sightings both in and out of the military. Feel free to insert your “Wait a minute … don’t they already have one?” here.

“Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist will help oversee the task force, which is expected to be officially unveiled in the next few days, according to the officials. Previous efforts to look into what the Pentagon dubs unidentified aerial phenomena were led by the US Navy as many of the documented encounters involved their aircraft.”

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A still from the USS Nimitz footage

Credit CNN with breaking this story, and no other media sources seem to have anything more to say. CNN itself had no additional clarification or comments from the Department of Defense nor Deputy Secretary Norquist nor the two unnamed sources nor … anybody new. All it had was a rehash of the various ‘blockbuster’ announcements of the past two-going-on-three-how-time-flies years about the Navy UFO videos and the back-and-forth on the existence of the classified Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), begun in 2007 by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, secretly funded by Congress until 2012 and then secretly operated without funding ever since.

Remember all that?

Then a Senate committee hearing in June 2020 revealed the existence of the unclassified but still hush-hush Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force as successor to AATIP, and The New York Times article covering it had quotes about “off-world vehicles not made on this earth” and “actual materials” from these “off-world vehicles” in government possession … which was almost immediately walked back by the authors of the article and Harry Reid.

This has been a busy summer for UFO revelations/non-revelations/controversies hasn’t it?

Which brings us to the latest ‘announcement’. From what little was in the CNN article, it seems to imply that this is a different task force than Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force because it’s under the Department of Defense rather than the Office of Naval Intelligence. Both report directly to the President under separate directors. Seems like there should just be one task force … doesn’t it? That makes too much sense when you’re dealing with the U.S. government and the U.S. military.

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Pentagon

Or is it because there are so many UFO encounters and possible “off-world vehicles” that one task force can’t investigate them all?

This seems to be turning from a potential chance that we’ll finally have some disclosure on UFOs/UAPs/ETs to a ball of confusion (see The Temptations) or the Keystone Cops (see the films of Mack Sennett) or a cover-up (see any book by Bob Woodward). All we can do is keep waiting and pointing out the obvious … we ain’t seen nothing yet (see Bachman-Turner Overdrive).

Paul Seaburn

Paul Seaburn is the editor at Mysterious Universe and its most prolific writer. He’s written for TV shows such as "The Tonight Show", "Politically Incorrect" and an award-winning children’s program. He's been published in “The New York Times" and "Huffington Post” and has co-authored numerous collections of trivia, puzzles and humor. His “What in the World!” podcast is a fun look at the latest weird and paranormal news, strange sports stories and odd trivia. Paul likes to add a bit of humor to each MU post he crafts. After all, the mysterious doesn't always have to be serious.

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