For years the Pentagon insisted its secret UFO study programme quietly ended in 2012. Butnewly released Navy recordsobtained through the Freedom of Information Act have reignited the mystery.

The documents reveal that a classified briefing about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, took place in March 2022 at a secure military facility in Washington.

AATIP first emerged publicly in 2017when reportsrevealedthat the United States Department of Defense had quietly funded a programme to study unidentified aerial phenomena, commonly called UFOs. The initiative began in 2007 under the Defence Intelligence Agency and received about 22 million dollars in funding.

The effort was strongly supported by former Nevada senator Harry Reid, who believedunusual aerial encounters reported by military personneldeserved serious investigation. The programme focused on incidents involving aircraft and objects performing manoeuvres that appeared to defy known technology.

Many of these encounters involved Navy pilots who reported observing mysterious craft moving at extreme speeds or changing direction in ways conventional aircraft could not achieve. The best known example is the famous 'Tic Tac' incident involving the USS Nimitz carrier strike group in 2004.

The programme was reportedly run by counterintelligence officer Luis Elizondo, who later resigned from the Pentagon in 2017 and became a public figure in the push for greater transparency on UFO investigations.

Although the Department of Defense later acknowledged AATIP existed, officials maintained the programme had a limited scope and was closed years earlier.

The newly released Navy records tell a more complicated story. Two separate FOIA requests submitted nearly a year apart both produced the same responsive document. It was a chain of emails arranging a 23 March 2022 briefing covering AATIP and another Pentagon office called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronisation Group, known as AOIMSG.

The event was divided into three sessions. One was unclassified and scheduled to last about 50 to 55 minutes followed by a short question session. Two other presentations were classified at the TS SCI level, meaning Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information.

Those classified discussions took place inside a secure facility known as a SCIF located in Roosevelt Hall at the National War College on the Fort McNair campus in Washington.

Source: International Business Times UK