A PENTAGON official who ran a $28 million program which investigated the existence of UFOs and aliens says he believes there is evidence that travellers from outer space have already visited earth.

Luis Elizondo oversaw the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which ran for five years between 2007 and 2012, reports The Sun.

“My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone,” Mr Elizondo told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

“These aircraft — we’ll call them aircraft — are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of,” he added.

“These aircraft don’t have any obvious flight services, any obvious forms of propulsion, and are manoeuvring in ways that include extreme manoeuvrability beyond, I would submit, the healthy G-forces of a human or anything biological. Hypersonic velocities, low observability, positive lift, again, seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics.”

He did include a few words of caution about jumping to conclusions, however.

“A lot of the time, when we don’t have a lot of information, we tend to fill in those gaps with whatever we think is logical. And there is still, by the way, a lot that we really don’t know.

"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone" - Fmr. Military Intelligence Official Luis Elizondo ran the Pentagon's UFO Unit https://t.co/vAoV9oMCyB pic.twitter.com/kwPSgEz9C0 — OutFrontCNN (@OutFrontCNN) December 19, 2017

MONEY TRAIL

Officials in the US Defence Department this week acknowledged for the first time that they ran the program.

Parts of their shadowy work — which is still continuing to this day — are classified. But the Pentagon confirmed that audio and video of two US Navy pilots chasing an unidentified flying object near San Diego was investigated as part of the program.

The footage, released in August, showed that the UFO rotated and maintained a “glowing aura”.

The Advanced Aerospace project was set up at the behest of now retired US Democrat Senator Harry Reid. Most of the money for the program went to an aerospace research company run by his close friend — billionaire entrepreneur Robert Bigelow — who is currently working on space engineering projects with NASA.

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Mr Reid confirmed he set up the program, adding: “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going. I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Politico reports Elizondo went to work for the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, co-founded by Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge. It claims it investigates issues involving government secrecy and unidentified flying objects.

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The program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities.

It also reported on aircraft with no visible signs of propulsion, or ones that hovered with no apparent means of lift.

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That included the footage of the fighter jet chase, when the pilots followed the UFO from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Another incident involved a Navy Super Hornet jet following a UFO that emitted a “glowing aura travelling at high speed and rotating as it moves”.

In audio and video, the pilot is heard to exclaim: “There’s a whole fleet of them.”

CHANGING PRIORITIES

Pentagon officials acknowledged the existence of the program yesterday, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years in 2012.

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A spokesman said: “It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the Department of Defense to make a change.”

But Mr Elizondo confirmed that he continued to work with officials from the Navy and the CIA on the program until he resigned from office in October.

He quit in protest over excessive secrecy and lack of resources for the program.

UFOs have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the US, including by the American military.

In 1947, the air force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed UFO sightings before it was officially ended in 1969.

The project concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.

This story was originally published in The Sun and is reprinted with permission.