A former Pentagon official has said extra-terrestrial life may have approached Earth, following confirmation from the US government this week that it ran a five-year-long program investigating UFOs.
"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone, whatever that means," said former military intelligence official Luis Elizondo said on Monday in an interview on CNN's 'Erin Burnett OutFront'.
"These aircraft – we’ll call them 'aircraft' – are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of," Mr Elizondo said of aerial phenomena the program researched.
The New York Times revealed on Saturday the US Defense Department spent $22 million (AU$31 million) per year of its $600 billion budget on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program, which the department confirmed had commenced in 2007.
Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time, pushed for the funding, according to The New York Times report, with most of it going to aerospace research company Bigelow Aerospace, run by Robert Bigelow, an old friend of Mr Reid.
The US Department of Defense said the covert program stopped in 2012 because the department deemed that funding should go to issues it believed were a higher priority.
Mr Elizondo said the program attempted to determine if any phenomena, observed through radar, eyewitness accounts, or other, posed a threat to national security.
"We have identified some very, very interesting anomalous type of aircraft ... things that don't have any obvious flight surfaces, any obvious forms of propulsion and manoeuvring in ways that include extreme manoeuvrability beyond, I would submit, the healthy G-forces of a human or anything biological."
Mr Elizondo said while the funding stopped, he continued to work from his Pentagon office, according to the New York Times. But he said he resigned in October to protest the secrecy surrounding his line of work.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said while she was unsure whether US President Donald Trump believes in UFOs, she promised to ask him his thoughts on the issue.
When asked about whether Mr Trump would be interested in restoring the program at a press briefing on Tuesday local time, Ms Sanders said, "Somehow that question hasn't come up in our back and forth over the past couple of days.
"But I will check into that and be happy to circle back."
It's not the first time supposed UFOs have been investigated in the US. In 1947, the Air Force began investigating more than 12,000 alleged UFO sightings under 'Project Sign' before it officially ended in 1949.
The short-lived 'Project Grudge' succeeded it and concluded in its sole report in 1949, when it officially ended, that no reported objects were alien.
A study called 'Project Blue Book' which began in 1952, said most sightings involved stars, clouds or conventional aircraft. It was unable to explain a small percentage of incidents but concluded no "unidentified" sightings were "extraterrestrial vehicles". The project ended in 1969.
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