This official photograph shows a craft moving at incredible speeds that was spotted by two US Navy pilots over the Atlantic

UFO investigations carried out by the Pentagon and British Ministry of Defence were hampered by the religious beliefs of senior staff, former employees have revealed.

Two men who worked on secret UFO programmes on both sides of the Atlantic said their work received ‘pushback’ from high-ranking officials who feared fast-moving objects glimpsed in our skies were either ‘demonic’ or divine.

Luis Elizondo, who headed up the US Defense Intelligence Agency’s secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), spoke out about his work in a New York Times article last year.

Footage of an encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet and an oval-shaped object with no exhaust, wings or tail travelling at incredible speeds was later released to illustrate the sort of sightings investigated by the AATIP.


Luis Elizondo, former head of the AATIP (Picture: UFO Congress/YouTube)

The project shut down in 2012 after allegedly amassing information on other aircraft which appeared to move extremely quickly without seeming to have any visible form of propulsion such as a jet engine – or hover in the air without techniques of generating ‘lift’ such as rotor blades.



This investigation was contracted out to Bigelow Aerospace, whose founder once told CBS 60 Minutes he was ‘absolutely convinced’ that aliens are real and that our planet has been visited by UFOs.

Officially, this project was shut down so the cash could be ploughed into other projects.

But Elizondo, a former intelligence officer who ran AATIP, has told Las Vegas Now that his study also received ‘pushback’ from The Pentagon because some top-ranking officials ‘opposed it on religious grounds’.

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Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator for the Ministry of Defence, told us that he encountered the same sort of attitude when working in the UK.

‘I was aware that Pentagon pushback on UFO research was in part due to the religious belief of some of those involved,’ he said.

‘It was an odd irony that UFO investigations were being hampered because some people’s belief in God meant that they either didn’t believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life or that they regarded UFOs and extraterrestrials as demonic.

‘The fact that some people regard UFOs as demonic seems to have its roots in the biblical description of Satan as being ‘the prince of the power of the air’ from Ephesians 2:2.

‘Luis Elizondo says that he came up against religious pushback from senior staff when he ran the Pentagon’s UFO program, and I saw some evidence of this at the MoD too.’

Bigelow Aerospace headquarters outside Las Vegas (Photographer: John B. Carnett

Provider: Popular Science via Getty Images)

The project was also referred to as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program.

The US Department of Defense has not released any files relating to the project, which did not explicitly state that it related to aliens but instead focused on studying 12 areas of interest including lift, propulsion and stealth techniques, as well as ‘human interface’ and ‘human effects’ – which is believed to mean investigators spoke to people who had encountered UFOs.

‘What this tells me is that the Defense Intelligence Agency looked at some UFO sightings as part of a wider intelligence assessment of the threat from next-generation aircraft, missiles and drones,’ Pope added.

‘Embedding this work in a weapons and aviation program is a logical move, but raises the question of whether the real concern was Martians or Russians.’



A spokesperson for the Department of Defense inside the Pentagon recently confirmed the AATIP project had shut down in 2012, although the New York Times reporters that exposed its work believe it is still operational in some capacity.

Replying to a letter sent by the website Black Vault, she wrote: ‘The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program ended in 2012. It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change.’