A Pentagon report on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) says US government investigations since the end of World War II have found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
Instead, it said, reports of the UFOs were most likely caused by increased testing of secret spy plane testing in the 1950s and 60s.
The report concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects that had been misidentified.
The report released on Friday followed on from a 2022 Pentagon announcement that its then newly formed All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) had not found any evidence to suggest that aliens had visited Earth or crash-landed here.
Under the United States’ 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, AARO was required to issue a report to congress detailing the government’s historical record relating to “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) since 1945.
It delivered the first of two volumes of that to congress last week, Pentagon press secretary Major General Pat Ryder said in statement accompanying the release of the unclassified version.
“AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology,” the report’s executive summary said.
“Although many UAP reports remain unsolved or unidentified, AARO assesses that if more and better quality data were available, most of these cases also could be identified and resolved as ordinary objects or phenomena,” it said.
The report said that since 1945, the government had funded investigations to determine whether UAPs represented a flight safety risk, technological leaps by competitor nations, or evidence of “off-world technology under intelligent control”.
The report said there was a persistent narrative in popular culture that the government, or a secretive organisation within it, had recovered several “off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains” and operated programs to “reverse engineer” the recovered technology.
“AARO recognizes that many people sincerely hold versions of these beliefs,” the report said.
“The goal of this report is not to prove or disprove any particular belief set, but rather to use a rigorous analytic and scientific approach to investigate past USG-sponsored UAP investigation efforts.
“AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.
“AARO determined, based on all information provided to date, that claims involving specific people, known locations, technological tests, and documents allegedly involved in or related to the reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology, are inaccurate.”
It said additional claims would be detailed in a second volume.
The US military has spent decades deflecting, debunking and discrediting observations of UFOs and “flying saucers” dating back to the 1940s.
The Pentagon said two years ago that its investigation efforts had led to hundreds of new reports, but nothing that pointed to intelligent alien life.
Reuters