By Dana Sanchez
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the U.S. government has information about UFOs that it has been hiding and covering up for years.
Reid, 80, served as a Nevada senator from 1987 to 2017. While in office, he sought to continue funding a Defense Department program called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification that had had been discontinued.
In the new documentary, “The Phenomenon,” director James Fox asked Reid if there’s some evidence on UFOs that still hasn’t seen the light of day, Huffpost reported.
“I’m saying most of it hasn’t seen the light of day,” Reid replied.
“There’s more than one up there,” Reid said, adding that he believes UFOs may have interfered with U.S. weapons.
The film examines the history of UFO sightings in and outside the U.S. with new details about encounters involving U.S. Navy pilots. It also details a 1967 report about how 10 missiles became inoperative over a U.S. missile base at the same time that a UFO appeared above the base.
The Pentagon studied recordings of UFOs in a classified program, launched at the request of Reid in 2007 that ended in 2012 due to lack of funding.
Luis Elizondo, the former head of the classified program, told CNN in 2017 that he thinks “there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone. These aircraft — we’ll call them aircraft — are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of.”
Elizondo said he resigned from the Defense Department in 2017 to protest the secrecy surrounding the program and the opposition to funding it.
“They did everything they could to stop the program from going forward … they wanted nothing to do with this … Nobody has to agree why it’s there. But shouldn’t we at least be spending some money to study all these phenomena? Shouldn’t we study this stuff? The answer is yes,” Reid said.
Instead, Reid said, “the federal government all these years has covered up, put brake pads on everything, stopped it. I think it’s very, very bad for our country.”
Elizondo described the documentary as setting “a new benchmark for disclosure” and “the most accurate and informative documentary ever made about UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena),” according to “The Phenomenon” website.
The “unwarranted stigma” around UFOs has “prevented the government and academia from taking this important topic seriously,” said Chris Mellon, former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in Defense Department.
“The rapidly increasing number and quality of land and space-based sensors is making the UAP issue impossible to avoid,” said Mellon, whose voice is also included in the documentary.
In August 2020, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. Navy was overseeing a new task force to investigate “unexplained aerial incidents” that have been observed on several occasions by U.S. military aircraft.
The new task force — the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) — will report to the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
“The Department of Defense and the military departments take any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace very seriously and examine each report,” the Pentagon said in a press release. “This includes examinations of incursions that are initially reported as UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) when the observer cannot immediately identify what he or she is observing.”
