MYSTERY WIRE — Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is reacting to the newly released UFO report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

Overall Sen. Reid was pleased to see an unclassified report published for the public to read, but made clear this is just a first step.

George Knapp 
Senator, so, it’s finally out, an underwhelming nine pages, at least the public version of the report. What’s your initial impressions?

Sen. Harry Reid 
Well, the government has acknowledged that they don’t know what these unidentified flying objects are. And so when I started talking about this years ago, people made fun of me and even my own staff thought I was crazy in talking about it. But in hindsight, I’m glad I did. Certainly, we now know that there have been, they have 142 sightings, we know they’ve been more than that. And we all acknowledge, they acknowledge that the crafts, whatever you want to call them, are unbelievably technologically something we don’t understand. They leave no vapor trail, there is no light. And they go very, very fast very quickly. And under the present technology that we have, if a human being were in one of these vehicles we couldn’t withstand the G forces. So I’m glad it’s acknowledged. But it’s something that, as far as I’m concerned, this is a preliminary report. And I mean, preliminary. There needs to be a tremendous amount of government resources put into this. So we better understand it. So it’s not some kind of a fringe part of what the government’s doing, they’ve got to dive into this because we and the American people are entitled to know what the hell’s going on.

Back in 2007, then Senator Harry Reid and two senate colleagues quietly initiated a secretive study of UFOs and related mysteries, they had no idea where it might lead.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) hosted the program which was then called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, better known as AAWSAP. The contract for this was awarded to Nevada aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow.

But Pentagon opponents to the program pulled the money after a few years, and a much smaller effort called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, continued some of the work.

Now, an even smaller unit, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, or UAP Task Force, is the lead office investigating government UFO reports.

Mystery Wire will release more of this exclusive interview in the days to come.