WASHINGTON (CN) — If aliens have visited Earth, Pentagon officials say they’ve got no proof of it.
The Department of Defense on Friday released a report detailing previous investigations and allegations of U.S. government activities related to unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP.
The review covered all official U.S. investigations since 1945, examining classified and unclassified documents.
The report firmly asserts that no government investigation, academic research or official review panel “has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.” It also found no evidence that the government or private companies are reverse engineering alien technology — though officials will provide more detail on that in a subsequent report.
The report likely won’t be received positively by UFO enthusiasts, who would argue: If the government was actually covering up alien life and technology, why would it tell the public?
“It’s the beginning of what is quite clearly a brazen attempt by the Pentagon and the intelligence community to cover up a reality that, frankly, I and an awful lot of people know is real,” said Ross Coulthart, an Australian journalist who has written about UFOs.
The investigation was conducted by the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The office reviewed previous investigations and “claims made by interviewees that the U.S. government and various contractors have recovered and are hiding off-world technology and biological material," Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said.
“AARO has approached this project with the widest possible aperture, thoroughly investigating these assertions and claims without any particular pre-conceived conclusion or hypothesis,” Ryder said in a statement. “AARO is committed to reaching conclusions based on verifiable evidence. As AARO has said before, they will follow the evidence where it leads, wherever it leads.”
Officials concluded that most reported UFO sightings were misidentifications or ordinary phenomena. They also noted that many of the supposed sightings between the 1940s and 1960s involved experimental and operational technology developed amid World War II and the Cold War.
Investigators also said that many of the reports could have been identified if there was better technology available at the time.
The Pentagon refuted pretty much every claim made by UFO researchers, conspiracy theorists and enthusiasts. Those claims ranged from the existence of nondisclosure agreements and the veracity of some leaked documents to assertions that aliens were present during Department of Defense testing.
Alas, the investigation "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,” the report said.
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