A top-secret US government research programme allegedly investigated the health effects of close encounters with UFOs.

The classified study was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program (AATIP) and investigated mysterious aircraft or other unexplained phenomena.

Official documents reveal that investigators studied ‘exotic technologies’ including wormholes, antigravity, invisibility cloaking, warp drives and high energy laser weapons.

Now it’s been claimed that AATIP explored the health ‘consequences’ suffered by people who witnessed UFO incidents.


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MORE: Pentagon and MoD officials feared UFOs were either ‘demonic’ or sent by God, former investigators reveal

Details of 38 papers published during the AATIP probe were released last year, although only a handful of the actual documents have been released to the public.



One of the studies was called ‘Field Effects on Biological Tissues’.

Nick Pope, who was head of the Ministry of Defence’s UFO investigation desk, said this is likely to be the paper which explored the health effects of close encounters.

Pope pointed us to an article published on Las Vegas Now in which Dr Hal Puthoff, a scientist who worked on AATIP, said: ‘We as part of this program looked at some cases that were really good from Brazil.

‘In 1977, 78, it was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a thousand pages of documents all done by the Brazilian Air Force investigative team, 500 photographs, 15 hours of motion film, a lot of medical injuries when people encountered these craft at close range.’

Pope told Metro the statement is ‘confirmation that the Pentagon’s AATIP program looked not only at UFOs but also at close encounters and alien abductions’.

He said: ‘I can’t prove it, but from sources close to this I’m almost certain that part of this work involved getting blood and DNA samples from close encounter witnesses – including at least one and maybe two witnesses to the UK’s infamous Rendlesham Forest incident.

A view of the oval-shaped UFO encountered by US Airforce pilots

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

‘I believe this was done in a way that disguised the fact that this was for a US intelligence program, with witnesses being told that they were participating in a scientific or academic study.’

The world first heard about AATIP following the release of footage showing an encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet and an oval-shaped UFO travelling at astonishing speed.

Earlier this year, the US Defense Intelligence Agency has released documents which exposed some of the work carried during the top-secret UFO research project.

In a letter addressed to a congressional committee chaired by the late Senator John McCain in 2018, the DIA wrote: ‘The purpose of AATIP was to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapon threats from the present out to the next 40 years,’ the letter explains.

A declassified document giving details of the research papers produced by AATIP investigators

And last year, AATIP programme manager Luis Elizondo said he believed there is ‘very compelling evidence we may not be alone’.

He also recently suggested mysterious ‘metamaterials’ which may have come from crashed alien spacecraft are being stored by the American government in specially modified warehouses in Las Vegas.



The AATIP programme was closed down in 2012, although the New York Times reporters that exposed its work believe it is still operational in some capacity.

Pope added: ‘There are clearly extreme sensitivities about human experimentation, and all this is – or should be – tightly regulated after the scandal that followed the CIA’s infamous MK-Ultra mind control experiments. I’m sure the rules were followed, but if AATIP did acquire blood and DNA samples from close encounter witnesses then I’m sure Congress will want to know how this was done and what was concluded. Hopefully this is one aspect of the ongoing Congressional interest in AATIP and in the phenomenon more generally.

‘Physical effects on UFO witnesses was one aspect of the MoD intelligence assessment of the phenomenon known as Project Condign, but officially titled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region. I helped set up this study but had been posted to another MoD division by the time the assessment was completed.

‘One sentence in the final report read ‘The well-reported Rendlesham Forest/Bentwaters event is an example where it might be postulated that several observers were probably exposed to UAP [Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon] radiation for longer than normal UAP sighting periods’. If we can’t study the UFOs themselves, then studying the effects they have is the next best thing.

‘Obviously, that’s got to include taking a very close look at people who claim to have had close encounters, and perhaps even people who say they’ve been abducted by aliens. I told one such individual to give his blood and DNA to a scientist if he wanted, but to be aware that the ultimate ‘customer’ was probably the government. I even joked that if he didn’t want to give his DNA, he should be very careful about accepting a coffee and then leaving the cup behind!’