Ever since 2017, Americans have been delusional by news reports about UFOs.

The Pentagon has departments investigating them, the Navy has videos of them, and intelligent

adults in national security speak openly of them.

Well, today we're going to break this down and see who is really involved in spreading

these rumors.

As it turns out, that none of that is actually true.

The Pentagon's UFO hunt is coming up today on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

The Pentagon's UFO hunt.

In December 2017, the New York Times ran a story that shocked readers worldwide.

It was the revelation of a Pentagon program called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification

Program, which spent $22 million from 2007 to 2012 investigating UFOs.

Videos were released showing apparently unexplainable thermal images of maneuvering UFOs

taken from US fighter planes.

The internet went mad as people embraced what appeared to be government endorsement

of actual alien visitation.

But then, cooler heads had a chance to look at the reports, and we now view the episode

quite differently.

For it turns out that this whole program was not so much an official investigation of

a genuine phenomenon, so much as it was a singularly successful public relations coup

by a group of lifelong UFO believers and promoters of alien visitation and the paranormal.

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