Are UFOs real? A secret Pentagon program sought to find out

Have you seen unexplained lights in the sky? Weird aircraft flying in inexplicable ways?

You might not be the only one.

The Pentagon has acknowledged for the first time that a program was set up in 2007 to investigate service members’ reports of unidentified flying objects, the New York Times reports.

The program had the backing of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as well as former Sens. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii.

“I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Reid recently told the New York Times. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Funding for the initiative, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, ended in 2012, but some officials say it’s ongoing.

Does the existance of the program mean that UFOs are real? Maybe, but it doesn’t mean the objects are from outer space, M.I.T. astrophysicist Sara Seager told the Times. What “people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”

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