Science & Technology

The Pentagon program’s previous director, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who resigned in October 2017 after 10 years with the program, confirmed that the new task force evolved from the advanced aerospace program…

Mr. Elizondo is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study.

For more than a decade, the Pentagon program has been conducting classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials, according to interviews with program participants and unclassified briefing documents.

In some cases, earthly explanations have been found for previously unexplained incidents. Even lacking a plausible terrestrial explanation does not make an extraterrestrial one the most likely, astrophysicists say…

Public fascination with the topic of U.F.O.s has drawn in President Trump, who told his son Donald Trump Jr. in a June interview that he knew “very interesting” things about Roswell — a city in New Mexico that is central to speculation about the existence of U.F.O.s. The president demurred when asked if he would declassify any information on Roswell. “I’ll have to think about that one,” he said.

Either way, Mr. Reid said, more should be made public to clarify what is known and what is not. “It is extremely important that information about the discovery of physical materials or retrieved craft come out,” he said.

[*Sad trombone coda*]

Correction: July 24, 2020
An earlier version of this article inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid, the retired Senate majority leader from Nevada. Mr. Reid said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades…

It’s standard counterintelligence work, as done by every country with the technological capability to do so. But whenever there’s a particularly bad news climate, the urge to find an outside savior (or, in the case of the Oval Office Occupant and his Media Village Idiot enablers, to shout Look! Over There!) overwhelms our mutual common sense, such as it is…

Leslie Kean, who co-bylines these NYT stories, has made a career of researching UFOs. She's also written a book about the afterlife, she's connected to a former researcher of mystic Uri Geller, & she's praised an otherworldly "academy" by former blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge. pic.twitter.com/CvdUsE6EbZ

— Dan Zak (@MrDanZak) July 24, 2020