LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — One of the US government’s premier UFO investigators has stepped out of the shadows to openly discuss his work for the UAP Task Force, an organization created by Congress to evaluate unidentified aerial phenomena.

This investigator isn’t an unknown.  He’s been hiding in plain sight and he spoke exclusively about his investigations with the 8 News Now I-Team’s George Knapp. 

Television viewers know astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor as an intrepid investigator of UFOs and the paranormal at Skinwalker Ranch and on other History Channel programs. Only a handful of people in the world knew that Taylor was leading a double life, secretly working as the chief scientist for the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force.  

“I would say other than the people who already knew on the task force, you’re the first person to figure it out, George,” Taylor said. 

As a scientific prodigy, Taylor earned advanced degrees at a young age and has spent his entire adult life working on classified projects, first for the U.S. Army, then for defense contractors. He wrote a book about how the U.S. government should prepare for alien contact which caught the attention of Jay Stratton, a high-ranking intelligence official who has been involved with each of the Pentagon’s Secretive UFO investigations including AAWSAP, the largest UFO program of all, managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, based at Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas, funded with $22 million secured by late U.S. Sen. Harry Reid.  Stratton worked with AAWSAP, then its successor program AATIP. Later, he took charge of a third effort, the UAP Task Force, long before Congress formally created that team.    

“Jay Stratton, the director of the UAP Task Force asked me if I would be interested in being the chief scientist,” Taylor said. “And I was like, yeah, absolutely. Of course I would.”

One of the primary jobs of the task force was to write a report to Congress summarizing the known evidence about UFOs.  The team had already created a classified briefing consisting of the most intriguing military encounters, starting with the 2004 Tic Tac incident. The task force whittled down a huge database into 144 of the very best cases. Dr. Taylor helped write the final report.

“We picked sources that were, we knew had a chain of custody of the data,” Taylor said. “And out of those 144 to 143 of them, we still couldn’t figure out what they were, where they came from and what their intent was.”

Civilian debunkers have tried to explain away the Tic Tac or Gimbal UFOs as birds or reflected light or far off jet engines, as if military investigators are oblivious to such possibilities.  When The UPA Task Force determined these objects to be genuine unknowns, it wasn’t merely relying on brief video clips.  

“But here’s the thing. A skeptic and a debunker, they take their results by starting from the beginning … by knowing that the result is going to be this. So they change … they take the analysis to lead them in the direction to do that,” Taylor said.

“The data that we had, in many cases, there was more of it than what the general public has and what was released. And so when we say that we had a thing that was from multiple sensors, and it told us multiple things, and we also had eyewitness accounts, audio information, and so on,” he said.

Taylor and the task force spent three years analyzing the 144 incidents, including dozens of bizarre objects that buzzed multiple Navy ships in 2019. Some of them were spheres that swarmed and kept pace with the warships. Others appeared as greenish pyramids.

Task force members were stunned to hear a Navy official tell a Congressional hearing last month that all of these were “drones,” as if the mystery has been solved. Someone had to disregard the work of the task force to make that claim. 

“We had a lot of sensor data on some of them, that, that we couldn’t determine what they are. I mean, if it’s our near peers doing it, that’s scary. But at the same time, we also never found any evidence that it was our near peers doing it,” Taylor said.

The drone conclusion was reached after the UAP Task Force was done, and before the new UFO program ‘AIMSOG’ even started. So, who did it?

Dr. Taylor went into much greater detail about why the ‘drone’ scenario falls far short of explaining the 2019 UFO encounters. And also why so many UFO videos appear to be fuzzy.