There's Evidence Of Alien Life Reaching Earth, Ex-Pentagon UFO Official Says

A former Pentagon official who led a recently revealed government program to research potential UFOs said Monday evening there is compelling evidence alien life reached Earth. Luis Elizondo said in an interview on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" that evidence stopped him from ruling out the possibility that alien aircraft visited Earth.

"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone," Elizondo said.

Elizondo was reportedly part of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which began largely at the behest of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada. According to reports, Reid helped with the funding for the program after speaking to a friend and political donor who owns an aerospace company and who believes in the existence of aliens. In a statement Monday, Reid defended the program.

"I'm proud of this program and its ground-breaking studies speak for themselves," the statement read. "It is silly and counterproductive to politicize the serious scientific questions raised by the work of this program, which was funded on a bipartisan basis."

Elizondo told the New York Times he resigned from the Department of Defense in October over the excessive secrecy surrounding the program and internal opposition to it after funding for the effort ended in 2012.

"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," Elizondo said of objects they researched.

Elizondo said they identified "anomalous" aircraft that were "seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics."

"Things that don't have any obvious flight services, any obvious forms of propulsion, and maneuvering in ways that include extreme maneuverability beyond, I would submit, the healthy G-forces of a human or anything biological," Elizondo said.

A New York Times report on the government UFO study included a pair of videos of pilots commenting on something mysterious they were seeing. One of the pilots, retired Cmdr. David Fravor, told CNN that he witnessed an object that looked like a "40-foot-long Tic Tac" maneuvering rapidly and changing its direction during a flight in 2004.

"I can tell you, I think it was not from this world. I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. After 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close," Fravor told ABC News Monday. "I have never seen anything in my life, in my history of flying that has the performance, the acceleration — keep in mind this thing had no wings."

However, Ryan Alexander of Taxpayers for Common Sense called the program a waste of money during CNN's "The Situation Room" on Monday.

"It's definitely crazy to spend $22 million to research UFOs," Alexander said. "Pilots are always going to see things that they can't identify, and we should probably look into them. But to identify them as UFOs, to target UFOs to research — that is not the priority we have as a national security matter right now."

After Elizondo stepped down from the Department of Defense, and joined To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, a consortium of scientists, aerospace engineers and creatives. The organization released U.S. military videos of unidentified aerial phenomenon on Saturday. The footage can be viewed on the group’s website or YouTube channel.