Just days after the New York Times released the first public report of a top secret Pentagon UFO program, the former program head publicly declares he believes in UFOs.

The former head of a top secret Pentagon UFO program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) went on CNN Monday night and declared “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.”

Luis Elizondo ran the AATIP program from 2007 to 2012. The purpose of the program, according to Elizondo, was to identify any unusual aircraft and their potential threat to national security.

CNN’s Erin Burnett: “So, what did you find?”

Luis Elizondo: “Well we found a lot.”

Elizondo’s revelation came just two days after the New York Times released the first public report of the existence of the AATIP program.

Democratic Senator Harry Reid of Nevada is credited with requesting the initial funding for the program back in 2007. The AATIP has an annual budget of $22 million according to the article. Also according to the NY Times, the Defense Department has claimed the program was shut down in 2012. Backers of the program claim it still exists and Elizondo himself says he retired in October.

Much of the material the AATIP program analyzed came from military encounters with unusual objects. In one video a Navy fighter jet tracked the unusual movements of an unidentified object off the coast of Southern California. The fighter pilot, Cmdr. David Fravor, spoke out Monday to ABC News and said:

“I can tell you, I think it was not from this world… I’m not crazy, haven’t been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I’ve seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close.”

Earlier this year Chile released a nine minute video of an encounter with a UFO. The CEFAA – the Chilean government agency which investigates UFOs, studied the video for two years before releasing it in January of 2017.

The Chilean video shows an infrared recording of an encounter between a Chilean Naval helicopter and the UFO. The passengers of the helicopter first spotted the object with the naked eye. They then confirmed with two radar stations that neither station could pick up the object on radar. The pilots turned on an infrared camera, tracked it for the next nine minutes and observed behavior that seemed inconsistent with modern technology.

Stay tuned for more updates from Citizen Truth as this story develops.

Have you ever had a UFO encounter? What else could the government be hiding?