Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story about the declassification of a government program that hunted for potentially dangerous extra-terrestrial life. Aptly named the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, the program was founded in 2007, receiving an annual budget of $22 million (out of the $600 billion annual defense budget), and being discontinued in 2012. There have been a few takes on Barstool about why they don’t understand why this story hasn’t garnered more attention, I am here to tell you why:

Government programs that look into extraterrestrial life are not new

I will now list all of the previous government programs that investigated the possibility of extraterrestrial life vising earth: Project Mogul aka. Roswell (1947), Project Sign and Grudge (1948-52), Project Blue Book (1952-1969), Project Ozma (1960), University of Colorado Condon Committee (1966-1968), CIA’s Investigations of Paranormal and Psychic Phenomena (~1970-~1980), SETI/HRMS (1976-1993)

Get the point? This is not new. The Department of Defense has to investigate all possibilities of a threat, no matter how unlikely. It should not be surprising that the government spends what amounts to pennies for them ($22 million) to cross all their t’s and dot all their i’s to keep the public safe

The program was stopped for the reason every other program was stopped, they didn’t find anything

If there was any legitimate evidence found by this program, it would not have been cut after five years. Simple as that. All evidence put fourth regarding aliens visiting earth are either personal anecdotes or ambiguous photography. The video of the two Navy pilots is for sure fascinating, but it is no different than any other grainy footage of alleged UFO’s. The Air Force and Navy probably have tons of strange videos, a lot weird things/objects/flying objects are probably captured by military cameras. The issue is usually not unreliable narrators or people trying to purposely deceive, but instead unreliable interpretations of confusing encounters. I wrote about this in a previous blog about why people believe weird things. We WANT to believe, it is ingrained in us to believe this kind of thing. Extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence, and I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but we do not have anything close to extraordinary evidence.

If aliens could make it to earth, they have the tech to remain undetected.

I believe in aliens. They for sure exist somewhere in our universe. They just haven’t been to earth. I have said this before, but: if there are aliens that are advanced enough to surpass the speed of a light (kind of a requirement to make it here), they also have the technology to remain completely undetected by humans. You really think aliens that make it earth are going to be floating around in clunky flying saucers? Every time we see supposed UFO’s they resemble some form of a human aircraft. Did you hear the Navy pilots: “it looks like a drone” Well guess what? That’s probably exactly what it was.