Video: U.S. And U.K. Militaries Say They Don’t Investigate UFOs Anymore — Or Do They?

Iran Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi announced on June 10 that UFOs don’t pose a threat to Iran‘s security. His remark came after an unexplained light was reported over several countries, including Iran, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon and Israel, according to Tehran Times.com. Just last week, several people in the Washington, D.C., area — apparently being vigilant on U.S. security — reported sightings of a UFO after spotting a drone being transported on the Beltway near the capital.

When the U.S. Air Force officially closed its own 22-year investigation of UFOs in 1970 — a probe dubbed Project Blue Book — one of the reasons given for the termination of the study was that no UFOs evaluated by the Air Force were ever considered a threat to America’s national security.

David Clarke describes British UFO files from 1986-1992:

David Clarke describes UFO files from 1987-1993:

The Air Force had also determined and told the public that no UFOs represented any kind of advanced technology beyond current scientific knowledge and that no evidence pointed to the possibility that any UFOs had an extraterrestrial origin.

And yet, military personnel have been telling a different tale in recent years.

“The reason why the military is claiming they don’t investigate UFOs is because they don’t want to respond to people like you,” former Air Force Captain Robert Salas told The Huffington Post last October.

“They don’t want to respond to reporters or to the public as to what the heck is going on, and it’s been going on for so long. They just don’t want to have to answer that question,” Salas said.

Across the Atlantic, Great Britain reacted to Cold War flying saucer sightings in a similar way. In 1950, the Ministry of Defense created a group of scientists and intelligence experts to secretly examine UFO sightings, according to a British National Archives consultant. Even former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at right, wanted to get to the bottom of the flying saucer mystery.

The information gathered by this “Flying Saucer Working Party” stayed secret for 50 years, according to David Clarke, of Sheffield Hallam University, who serves as the official British National Archives consultant for the ongoing release of that country’s UFO files.

Clarke notes how approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings — on either side of the pond — remain unidentified.

“Unidentified, to me, does not mean extraterrestrial spacecraft — it simply means unidentified,” Clarke told HuffPost.

“If you are a military person, certainly since 9/11, an unidentified object in the sky — if it’s reported by a military observer or it’s something on radar — they’re not immediately going to think, ‘Ah, it’s the Martians,’”