The Pentagon has admitted to holding and testing wreckage from UFO crashes in a bombshell Freedom of Information letter, shared with The Sun.

Researcher Anthony Bragalia wrote to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) requesting details of all UFO material, which they hold and results of any tests they had been carrying out on it.

He wrote: "This could include physical debris recovered by personnel of the Department of Defense as residue, flotsam, shot-off material or crashed material from UAPS [unidentified aerial phenomenon] or unidentified flying objects."

Similar sightings have been reported in abundance in previous years, with conspiracy theorists having eagerly engaged in speculation about what kind of creatures could be operating the gigantic oblongish objects.

Californians have spotted a cigar-shaped craft hovering in the sky above the state, akin to previous, similarly-shaped "UFOs" earlier seen in the area.

The puzzling footage showing a rather long dark object emerged on YouTube on 31 January under the caption "UFO over the Pacific" and instantly drew a slew of responses.

Multiple people have reported seeing an odd string of lights at night near Charlotte, igniting talk of UFOs on social media.

Photos shared Saturday on Facebook show what appears to be a string of lights floating over North Carolina's Indian Trail community. The area is in Union County, just southeast of Charlotte.

"Anyone know what these lights were tonight?" Alisa Homewood asked on the "What's Up Indian Trail?" community Facebook page. "No sound at all. They flickered like lanterns, but followed the same exact path up until they disappeared which was odd."

Two Pakistan International Airlines pilots have captured intriguing video footage of an "extremely bright UFO" during a domestic flight. The video has gone viral in Pakistan.

It emerged Wednesday that the pilots saw the strange object during a flight from Karachi to Lahore at around 4pm on January 23. The plane was travelling at an altitude of 35,000 feet when the sighting occurred.

"The UFO was extremely bright despite the presence of sunlight," the pilot said, speaking to Pakistan's Geo News.

One of the flight team began recording the white circular object and the footage subsequently went viral in Pakistan. Several of the country's news networks reported on the mysterious encounter.

In 2008, the United States Defense Intelligence Agency gave $22 million to the exotic science division of Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow's space startup — Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or BAASS — to study "breakthrough technologies" and UFOs. A Debrief investigation, including new unredacted internal documents, illuminates some of the odd history of this secretive program and reveals that some of the government's money was directed to even stranger things than they had in mind.

The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program

In 2008, at the behest of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, then the majority leader, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) funded the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP). According to the solicitation bid, the purpose was to explore "potential breakthrough technology applications employed in future aerospace weapon systems." Though the Pentagon told The Debrief earlier this year that the DIA was not investigating UFOs, significant evidence exists that seems to contradict their position. The confusion may stem from the fact that the project's solicitation document purposefully left out mention of the controversial topic altogether.

"The people putting out the bid thought it would be better that it didn't say flying saucers or unidentified flying objects," former Sen. Reid told The Debrief in an interview. "It was thought by many that it would just draw too much attention, and by it being phrased the way it was, we had somebody from the Defense Intelligence Agency draw out the specs of it. It covered that anyway."

Reid told The Debrief that Bigelow Aerospace applied for the $22 million contract and won because the company had facilities that met the requirements for the project. When asked if Bigelow had been pre-selected for the contract due to his connection to Reid, as well as his preexisting public interest in UFOs, Mr. Reid stated flatly, "No. It was like any other government contract."

"It was put out for bid. And he did the best. He was willing to do more than others. He supplied, for example, a facility... So we put out the bid, but his response to it was the best, and that's how he got it," Reid explained. "He was not pre-selected."

Federal intelligence on extraterrestrial technology — at your fingertips.

By way of the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of the CIA documents on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), as the government calls them — are now accessible via download at the Black Vault, a website operated by author and podcaster John Greenwald Jr.

The CIA claims they have now provided all the information on UAP they have, though there is no way to know that's true.

Thousands of CIA files about unidentified flying objects are now publicly available for download. The agency claims that the trove of documents contains all its information on the unexplained phenomenon.

The documents were published on The Black Vault website, which is run by freedom of information activist John Greenwald Jr.

The downloadable archive is the result of Greenewald submitting 10,000 freedom of information requests over the years and scanning thousands of pages by hand. More than 2.2 million pages have been uploaded to the website.

Some of the reports date back several decades and the CIA claims that the documents represent everything it has on file regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), which is what the US government calls UFOs. However, The Black Vault says there is no way to verify the CIA's claim.

The cache of files has been made available as the clock ticks down on the US government releasing an official UFO report, thanks to a law contained in the Covid-19 omnibus bill.

When President Donald Trump signed the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law in December, so began the 180-day countdown for US intelligence agencies to tell Congress what they know about UFOs.

No, really.

The director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have a little less than six months now to provide the congressional intelligence and armed services committees with an unclassified report about "unidentified aerial phenomena.

"It's a stipulation that was tucked into the "committee comment" section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which was contained in the massive spending bill.

A Harvard professor believes that we were visited by an alien object in 2017.

In his upcoming book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, theoretical physicist Avi Loeb lays out his theory about a peculiar-shaped object that entered our solar system several years ago.

The interstellar object — named "Oumuamua" — was first observed through the Pan-STARRS telescope at Hawaii's Haleakala Observatory in 2017. Researchers determined that it had passed through the ecliptic plane on Sept. 6 from the direction of Vega, a star in the Lyra constellation that is about 25 light-years away from our planet. Just three days later, Oumuamua — Hawaiian for "scout" — began accelerating toward the sun, before it eventually came closer to Earth on Oct. 7, "moving swiftly toward the constellation Pegasus and the blackness beyond," according to Loeb.

Numerous residents of the Hawaiian island of Oahu have been left scratching their heads after a mysterious, glowing, unidentified flying object was spotted both in the sky and in the water.

Multiple witnesses reported the strange sighting to local law enforcement on Tuesday night but officials from the United States' Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) say there were no incidents or accidents involving aircraft in the area at the time.

Some of the bystanders managed to capture footage of the peculiar occurrence, which showed the luminous blue object traveling through the air. In one of the recordings a woman can be heard saying, "Something is in the sky. What is that?"