The US government admits it studies UFOs. So about those Area 51 conspiracy theories …
Official investigations into UFOs may have been confirmed, but there are still plenty of wild theories that remain firmly in the realm of fantasy
For decades, Americans were told that Area 51 didn’t really exist and that the US government had no official interest in aliens or UFOs. Statements to the contrary, official-sounding people cautioned, were probably the musings of crackpots in tinfoil hats.
Well, score one for the crackpots.
The Pentagon has officially confirmed that there was, in fact, a US$22 million government programme to collect and analyse “anomalous aerospace threats” – governmentspeak for UFOs.
As reported by the Washington Post and New York Times over the weekend, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was a rare instance of continued government investigations into a UFO phenomenon that was the subject of multiple official inquiries in the 1950s and 1960s.
For a specific segment of the population that doesn’t need to Google the terms “Paradise Ranch” and “Cheshire cat airstrip,” it was a eureka moment – the first (of presumably many) alien-related secrets that have slipped out of the clenched jaws of the government.