As the Pentagon's Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force has recently been thrust into the media spotlight after coming under congressional scrutiny, some participants in the US military's efforts to look into UFO incidents have hinted at the possible existence of extraterrestrial evidence.
According to The New York Times, former US Senate majority leader Harry Reid said he believed that "crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred".
"After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession," Reid said as quoted by the newspaper.
Luis Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon's previous UFO-hunting effort, also reportedly belongs to "a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances" who seem convinced that "objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study".
And astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, who has worked for the Pentagon's UFO program since 2007, mentioned examinations that failed to determine the source of materials being studied, which led him to conclude that "we couldn’t make it ourselves".
The newspaper points out, however, that "no crash artifacts have been publicly produced for independent verification", and that some of the recovered objects were later identified as man-made.
