Source: Metro.com

The classified study was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program (AATIP) and investigated mysterious aircraft or other unexplained phenomena.

Official documents reveal that investigators studied ‘exotic technologies’ including wormholes, antigravity, invisibility cloaking, warp drives and high energy laser weapons.

Now it’s been claimed that AATIP explored the health ‘consequences’ suffered by people who witnessed UFO incidents.

Details of 38 papers published during the AATIP probe were released last year, although only a handful of the actual documents have been released to the public.

One of the studies was called ‘Field Effects on Biological Tissues’.

Nick Pope, who was head of the Ministry of Defence’s UFO investigation desk, said this is likely to be the paper which explored the health effects of close encounters.

Pope pointed us to an article published on Las Vegas Now in which Dr Hal Puthoff, a scientist who worked on AATIP, said: ‘We as part of this program looked at some cases that were really good from Brazil.

‘In 1977, 78, it was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a thousand pages of documents all done by the Brazilian Air Force investigative team, 500 photographs, 15 hours of motion film, a lot of medical injuries when people encountered these craft at close range.’

Pope told Metro the statement is ‘confirmation that the Pentagon’s AATIP program looked not only at UFOs but also at close encounters and alien abductions’.

He said: ‘I can’t prove it, but from sources close to this I’m almost certain that part of this work involved getting blood and DNA samples from close encounter witnesses – including at least one and maybe two witnesses to the UK’s infamous Rendlesham Forest incident.

‘I believe this was done in a way that disguised the fact that this was for a US intelligence program, with witnesses being told that they were participating in a scientific or academic study.’

The world first heard about AATIP following the release of footage showing an encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet and an oval-shaped UFO travelling at astonishing speed.

Earlier this year, the US Defense Intelligence Agency has released documents which exposed some of the work carried during the top-secret UFO research project.

In a letter addressed to a congressional committee chaired by the late Senator John McCain in 2018, the DIA wrote: ‘The purpose of AATIP was to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapon threats from the present out to the next 40 years,’ the letter explains.

And last year, AATIP programme manager Luis Elizondo said he believed there is ‘very compelling evidence we may not be alone’.

He also recently suggested mysterious ‘metamaterials’ which may have come from crashed alien spacecraft are being stored by the American government in specially modified warehouses in Las Vegas.

The AATIP programme was closed down in 2012, although the New York Times reporters that exposed its work believe it is still operational in some capacity.