In June 2021, the Pentagon released a report confirming that it could not explain more than 140 incidents of flying objects reported by navy officers over the previous two decades.
On 16 December 2017, The New York Times beganpublishing a series of investigative reports confirming what conspiracy theorists had long believed. There was a 'secret programme' hidden within the US Department of Defense that had investigated unidentified flying objects. From offices on the fifth floor of the Pentagon, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) had uncovered remarkable evidence of what it called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), including videos of craft resembling Tic Tac mints that moved with seemingly impossible speed and agility.