The Guardian
Tue 1 Jun 2021

Ex-Senate majority leader Harry Reid on UFOs: ‘We’re at the infancy of it’

Soo Youn

Former senator from Nevada has long been fascinated by UFOs – and has been increasingly vocal on the subject since retiring

Former US Senate majority leader Harry Reid may be retired from Congress, but he still has ideas on how lawmakers should study unidentified flying objects.

A camper with alien and American flags at a desert event in Nevada in 2019. 60 Minutes interviewed a number of credible witnesses about ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’.

A report detailing US military encounters with UFOs requested by the Senate intelligence committee is due to be released in June, although it may be delayed. However, the findings should not be seen as the end of the current investigations into UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), he said.

“Congress should make this an ongoing program. I don’t think the report is going to tell us too much. I think they need to study it more and not just have one shot at it,” Reid told the Guardian.

The former Democratic senator from Nevada has long been fascinated by UFOs and has been increasingly vocal on the subject since his retirement in 2017.

In 2007, Reid joined his colleagues Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, and Daniel Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, to invest $22m in a clandestine Pentagon operation that would be called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The program investigated military reports of UFOs and other inexplicable aerial objects. It was shut down in 2012.

“They had many sightings, hundreds and hundreds of these sightings. I didn’t know if it would be 20 or 40. I was stunned – it was hundreds of them,” Reid said.

AATIP was the predecessor to the current Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, which is expected to release its findings shortly.

The US is enjoying a surge in interest and rapid shedding of taboos regarding UFOs. With scientists and high-profile politicians weighing in on the conversation – including Barack Obama – Reid’s efforts are now more fully appreciated. He compares the current era with that of the Wright brothers and the beginnings of modern air travel.

“I believe it’s just as if we were starting airplanes. Airplanes were not understood very quickly. There’s so much to learn. Technologically, everything today is happening quickly. UFOs fascinate people who are pilots, physicists, because they can’t understand how these UFOS have no vapor trail, no lights on them, yet they can go so fast, so quickly.

“If it was under the technology we have today it would kill the pilots. We’re at the infancy of it.”

When asked about the role of private sector companies and space travel, he expressed admiration for entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who the former senator said he has met “several times”.

“We’ve not talked about UFOs because the last time I met with him we weren’t even talking about UFOs and now we are,” Reid said, leaving the door open for that conversation with the tech mogul.

“The work that Musk has done is really breathtaking and how it has influenced the public forum today … people are fascinated by what he’s doing. We have these spaceships going up and coming back, he fixes them up … sends them back up,” he said, referring to SpaceX’s successful launches of reusable rockets.

Reid also expressed optimism that there are people alive now who may live to see much more commonly available space travel in their lifetimes.

“There’s every indication that there’s going to be a lot more space travel. They’ll have colonies on the moon and we’ll have room beyond that,” he said.
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