Experts Share Their Thoughts On Pentagon’s UFO Task Force

Shortly after the Department of Defense announced that it would unveil a task force to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena, a couple of experts weighed in on the possible nature of the special unit. Some of them are a bit skeptical about the effectiveness of Pentagon’s mysterious UFO task force.

Recently, officials from the Pentagon confirmed that the agency is forming a special unit tasked with carrying out investigations on the UFO encounters and sightings reported by members of the military.

The task force will most likely focus their investigations on the videos released by the aerospace company To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science. The clips, which were released in 2017 and 2018, focus on the encounters between Navy pilots and UFOs.

After learning about the Pentagon’s special task force, Mark Rodeghier, the president and scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago, welcomed the idea of a government agency carrying out serious investigations on UFO phenomena.

For Rodeghier, the formation of the task force shows the growing interest of government agencies regarding the controversial matter. Despite this, Rodeghier noted that the public would only be able to benefit from the Pentagon’s investigations if the agency decides to share its findings.

“The formation of a task force on UFOs is another welcome development in the recent renewed interest and attention to these reports by government agencies and political actors,” Rodeghier told Inside Outer Space.

“I would hope that as much information as possible is released to the public so we can all be informed on this potentially world-shattering subject,” he added.

Writer and UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer doubts the effectiveness of the task force. For Scheaffer, the unit was only created to satisfy the publicity and controversy triggered by the videos released by To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science.

He believes that once the task force has conducted its investigation on the UFO encounters by the Navy pilots, it will be disbanded.

“I don't think this [task force] is as significant as some people are suggesting,” he told Inside Outer Space. “It's just a response to all the publicity generated by To The Stars leaking the three Navy infrared videos, which the Pentagon later released.”

Meanwhile, space journalist and historian Jim Oberg, who debunked a number of UFO sightings and worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for over two decades, suggested that the Pentagon's interest in UFOs reports has little to do with extraterrestrial reasons.

“I have no doubt that military intelligence services around the world have always been interested in ‘UFO reports' — whether or not a real 'unexplainable' phenomenon is behind a few of them,” Oberg told Inside Outer Space.

“Perceptive observers of the UFO scene over the last two-thirds of a century have noted a telltale feature of the evolution of reports,” he continued. “Their nature has been changing, keeping uncanny pace with the progress in human observation and detection technologies.”