Are There Aliens At Area 51? Is It A Conspiracy Theory?
A brief provision accompanying the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act, which was signed last December, called on the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of various pertinent agencies, to produce an intelligence assessment of the threat posed by UAP and the progress the UAPTF has made to understand this threat. U.A.P., or unidentified aerial phenomena, is the revamped acronym for the perennial enigmas previously known as U.F.O.s; the U.A.P.T.F. is a task force that was established to investigate them. The formal announcement of the task force, last August, marked an inflection point in the arc of renewed official interest in the topic. An initial phase of government attentionrunning from 2007, when Harry Reid was persuaded to set aside twenty-two million dollars of black money appropriations for the study of U.F.O.s, through the end of 2017, when reporters for the Times revealed the existence of the secretive programcould be conceivably written off as the self-indulgent work of a small cadre of U.F.O. hobbyists who happened to be in the right place at the right time. The task forces report, however, would have the imprimatur of the intelligence community, and its very existence was hard to square with charges of hobbyism. The report was expected in the afternoon on Friday, seventy-four years, almost to the day, since a mysterious sighting near Mt. Rainier inaugurated the modern U.F.O. era. As the afternoon progressed without an announcement, U.F.O. enthusiasts speculated that the findings were subject to deliberate delay, lest they rattle the markets. The Director of National Intelligences office finally released the unclassified portion of the report just after the close of the business day. Its Web site did not seem to be designed to handle the kind of traffic that U.F.O. news generates, and repeated attempts to download the file met only error messages.