Pentagon creates new office to probe UFO reports

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon is creating a new office to investigate unidentified flying objects amid concerns that after broad probes it cannot explain mysterious sightings near highly sensitive military areas, foreign media reported.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, working with the US director of national intelligence, ordered the new investigatory body to be established in the US Defense Department´s intelligence and security office, the Pentagon said late Tuesday.

The group will lead an effort to “detect, identify and attribute objects” in restricted airspace, as well as mitigate any threats to military flights. The announcement follows the release of a report in June that failed to provide explanations of 143 sightings of strange phenomena by military pilots and others over the past two decades.

The report frustrated some inside the intelligence community who believed more analysis and research should have been done to try to categorize and explain the phenomena. Releasing a report that said the sightings were unexplained further drove theories that the videos or pictures could be visitors from space, a theory that few in the U.S. government take seriously.

"Incursions by any airborne object into our SUA pose safety of flight and operations security concerns, and may pose national security challenges," the Pentagon said in a statement. The Defense Department "takes reports of incursions -- by any airborne object, identified or unidentified -- very seriously, and investigates each one," it added.

The new office was dubbed the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), the successor to the US Navy´s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. It will be overseen by a panel of experts from the military and intelligence community.

A mostly classified official review of UFO reports released in June determined that most of around 120 incidents over the past 20 years could be explained and had nothing to do with unknown or secret US or foreign technology.

But it could not explain some beguiling reports and videos made by military personnel. Last year, the Pentagon released a still inexplicable video taken by navy pilots of objects moving at incredible speeds, spinning and mysteriously disappearing.

China´s July test of a globe-circling hypersonic vehicle that was able to launch a separate missile while traveling at more than five times the speed of sound alerted Washington that Beijing might have technologies the United States has yet to develop.