​Pentagon releases bombshell UFO report ​

There is no evidence the US government has encountered aliens or that officials possess extraterrestrial technology, a new report released by the Pentagon has found.

The report delves into historical and famous UFO reports to analyse theories the government was reverse engineering alien spacecraft that had crashed in the country.

It concluded many of those so-called sightings of what are now officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, were likely new human technologies that “observers would have understandably reported as UFOs”.

In the report tabled to congress on Friday US time, the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office found pop culture “most likely” influenced the public perception of a conspiracy to hide the truth.
 

“A consistent theme in popular culture involves a particularly persistent narrative that the USG — or a secretive organisation within it — recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, that it operates a program or programs to reverse engineer the recovered technology, and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public,” the report states.

“AARO recognizes that many people sincerely hold versions of these beliefs which are based on their perception of past experiences, the experiences of others whom they trust, or media and online outlets they believe to be sources of credible and verifiable information.” 

Hundreds of reports remain unsolved, the report states, but it says if more and better quality data was available “most of these cases also could be identified and resolved as ordinary objects or phenomena”.
 

In recent years the Pentagon has poured money into UFO research and released several declassified videos as part of its investigations into the aircraft.

In 2019, Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough confirmed two videos of a fast moving object flying past US fighter jets were “part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years”.

For the new report, officials interviewed 30 people who claimed to have knowledge of government secrets but the document states many of their claims were debunked through research of past programs.

The well-known Roswell incident of 1947 is addressed in the 67-page document, which has gone down in folklore as one of the most famous UFO conspiracies.

US Army officials announced at the time they had come into possession of a “flying disk” among debris in the New Mexico desert, but soon retracted that statement. 
 

It was officially explained as the wreckage of a military balloon which used dummies to test how pilots ejected from aircraft.

The Pentagon’s report found the Roswell incident likely stemmed from Project Mogul, a Cold War program aimed at securing Soviet intelligence through the use of sensor-carrying balloons.

“A crashed balloon associated with Project Mogul outside of Roswell, New Mexico, is assessed to be the source of early UFO claims,” it found.
 

Overall, the report concluded some of the sightings from the 1940s, 50s and 60s could be explained by the testing of new technologies such as spy planes, satellite launches and the country’s space program.

It also found no evidence former personnel had been threatened with nondisclosure agreements to prevent them from leaking secrets about aliens to the public.

A 2021 survey found 41 per cent of Americans believed humans have seen an alien spacecraft, up from 33 per cent two years earlier.

The Pentagon, in its report, stated it was not trying to dismiss honest beliefs but was working only with empirical evidence to review the information at hand.