Incident date: 2020-11-30 | published: 2020-12-07 | updated: 2021-01-03
The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center), an Israeli think tank that provides publications and policy recommendations to Israeli decision-makers and which conducts specialised research to the Israeli foreign affairs and defense establishment, as well as for NATO, published its Mideast Security and Policy Studies Paper #183 which is about "The Pentagon’s UAP Task Force".
BESA Center executive summary of that paper:
"In June 2020, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence unveiled the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) at the Office of Naval Intelligence — a successor to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). This paper dives down the rabbit hole with Defense Department insiders, scientists, and declassified material to find answers to a host of questions: Are mystery craft near-peer adversary platforms or exotic US platforms? What is the technology behind them? What kind of threat do they pose? What are the geostrategic implications? And what are we not being told?"
The Secretary of Defense's Office stated in a press announcement on August 14, 2020 that "the UAPTF’s mission will be to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security." The UAP Task Force was approved by the DoD’s chief operating officer, Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist and is lead by the Department of the Navy, under the cognizance of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
