"This is a historic moment for us, in our country and our military," Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) program to study UFOs, said during an interview on
Tucker Carlson's Fox News show following the report's release.
“The government has formally and officially come out and informed Congress that these things are – A, they’re real – and two, that they’re not ours and that they seem to be performing, at least some of them … in remarkable ways,” he said.
In the public version, the military counted 144 UFO sightings predominantly occurring in 2019 that couldn’t be verified by any terrestrial explanation.
Pentagon relies on the more modern referent: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).