Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an initiative launched in 2007 to study reports of UFO encounters was revealed in a recent documentary by Intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, who served as the former director of the said agency.
According to Elizondo, he left the agency because of a lackluster official response of the government to the agency's findings, and their unwillingness to address potential risks from UFOs.
On the documentary titled "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation," which premiered May 31 on the History Channel, Elizondo stated that he is hoping that looking into long-hidden accounts of UFO investigations will encourage people and authorities as well to overcome long-standing stigmas and talk more openly about these bizarre aircrafts, some of which may pose a bigger threat than we realize.
This is not the first time that (that we know of) a US agency had tried investigating these things, in fact, from 1952 to 1969, the U.S. Air Force created Project Blue Book, which investigated more than 12,000 purported UFO sightings. And during Elizondo's tenure at the said agency, observers reported UFOs flying at hypersonic speeds - a couple of times faster than the speed of sound and what's even more strange is that those observers did not observe any other signatures that usually accompany an aircraft flying at such fantastic speeds such as sonic booms.
Elizondo also revealed that these objects were also extremely mobile, traveling so fast that they would have experienced huge gravitational forces, around 400 to 500 G-forces, way beyond the limits of endurance for both humans and any known aircraft. The most maneuverable aircraft in the world is the USAF's F-22 Raptor (the fastest but definitely not maneuverable would be the Soviet Union's MiG-25) and it can pull at around a maximum of 20 G's unmanned, but the human body itself can only withstand at most 9 G's (for fighter jet pilots) "for a very short time", beyond that we either break bones, shift organs, burst blood vessels, loss consciousness or die.
"They don't have engines or even wings, and they are able to seemingly defy the natural effects of Earth's gravitational pull," Elizondo added.
Elizondo is also very objective stating that there was just not enough evidence from all their investigations to concretely conclude that the origin of these UFOs are extraterrestrials however much they defied explanation, although he did present and even more unsettling possibility, 'that a foreign adversary had secretly developed technologies that are "strategic game-changers," unlike anything ever seen before', this scenario was not taken seriously by the government.
He stated that the secrecy shrouding official UFO investigations just makes matters worse, and only reinforces the association of UFOs with "tinfoil hats and ridiculous stories."We trust the American people to know that North Korea has nuclear warheads pointed at Los Angeles, yet we don't trust them with the knowledge that there's something in our skies and we don't know what it is? That seems counterproductive to me," Elizondo said.
