DOD Review Debunks UFOs, Reveals 'Kona Blue' Project

The Defense Department on Friday released a comprehensive review of the nation's classified government programs since 1945, debunking speculation about alien spacecraft but disclosing that the government had at one time considered and abandoned a program, code-named "Kona Blue," to reverse-engineer UFOs.

The new report, ordered by Congress, was compiled by the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and said that there was no evidence about extraterrestrial activity, nor had efforts been taken to withhold such information from the government, reports The Washington Post.

The documentation covered all of the investigations completed from 1945 through the present and included examinations of unclassified and classified archives.

As a result, the report said there was "no evidence that any [U.S. government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.”

Reports about suspected alien spacecraft over the years were shown to have often been about sightings of "ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification," the lengthy new report states.

Meanwhile, AARO did disclose a program, code-named "Kona Blue," that was proposed to the Department of Homeland Security in the 2010s that would have allowed the government to reverse-engineer any extraterrestrial aircraft that would be recovered, reports Politico.

Kona Blue, the subject of several conspiracy theories, was rejected by DHS, which said it was "lacking merit" and no aircraft was recovered, the report said.

"It is critical to note that no extraterrestrial craft or bodies were ever collected — this material was only assumed to exist by KONA BLUE advocates and its anticipated contract Performers," AARO said.

The project had not been reported to Congress, as it was not established as a "special access program, but it was declassified for the AARO review, according to AARO Acting Director Tim Phillips.

Kona Blue was eventually reported to Congress by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in the "spirit of transparency."

Phillips noted that the program sparked several reports of a longstanding U.S. government cover-up, coming from people connected with the project.

"That was reported as 'that’s where they hide bodies,'" Phillips told reporters Friday. "That wasn’t true. The prospective program was never formally approved by leadership and never possessed any material or information.”

Last year, though, retired Air Force Maj. David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified to a House Oversight subcommittee that the government was covering up its efforts to recover and reverse-engineer alien spacecraft.

Critics of the investigation had questioned if AARO would be kept from accessing highly classified material, but the report says the office had a "secure process" that allowed it to work with government agencies to review programs that interviewees identified by code names or description, reports The Washington Post.

As a result, the investigators were granted "granted full access to all pertinent sensitive [U.S. government] programs," and interviewed senior-level executives, scientists, and engineers when companies and contractors were named.

They also had access to records held by the CIA, the Energy Department, and the National Archives, among other government departments and agencies.

The investigators acknowledged that because of popular culture, their work would be received by skeptics.

"A consistent theme in popular culture involves a particularly persistent narrative that the [U.S. government] — or a secretive organization within it — recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains … and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public," the report said.

But there were also government personnel interviewed who claimed to have insight into government involvement in "off-world technology exploitation," when instead they had come across highly classified programs not related to extraterrestrial beings, Phillips said Friday.

"We saw a small group of people who knew each other, who all cited their observations as the purpose for their beliefs or for their observations,” Phillips said.