'It’s not a question of belief': the film examining government UFO records - The Guardian

But the frenetic, oxygen-sucking rollercoaster of headlines in the Trump administration has overshadowed a cascade of strange evidence released by the government in recent years: in 2017, the New York Times revealed the existence of a shadowy, partly classified government program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which investigated UFO reports from deep within the Pentagon.

Though the government said at the time that the program, which started in 2007 largely at the request of then Senate majority leader Harry Reid, was shuttered due to lack of funding in 2012, the New York Times later confirmed its continued existence as a renamed Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, within the Office of Naval Intelligence.

The barrage of bureaucratic titles couched a startling revelation: for more than a decade, the Pentagon had conducted classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials, based on sightings, video footage, and radar logs by military pilots of “unexplained aerial phenomena” which seemed to transcend existing flight technology – no visible engine at 30,000ft, hypersonic speed.

But The Phenomenon, leaps from the confirmed existence of the government program to an earnest, at times breathless consideration of the existence of extraterrestrial encounters.

The Phenomenon, narrated by actor and voiceover staple Peter Coyote (a veteran of numerous Ken Burns’ projects) speaks to such high-ranking government officials as Reid, who left the Senate in 2017, and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, as well as longtime UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, who inspired the character of Lacombe in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The government program and its known records have rendered the question “do you believe in UFOs?” obsolete, according to the Times’ investigators – “their existence, or nonexistence, is not a matter of belief”.

“Our government and our defense department have publicly acknowledged that this is real and that this is happening.” The observations released by the military seem to suggest advanced military technology, enough to have concerned the Department of Defense – which announced a new taskforce into the matter this August – as well as the Office of Naval Intelligence and members of two Senate committees.