WASHINGTON, D.C. — For years, some Americans have believed that their government knew more about unidentified flying objects — UFOs — than they were letting on. While the rumors about whether or not the U.S. government knew about or was investigating UFOs started decades ago, thanks to a new report out this weekend in The New York Times, we know now that the Pentagon was running a multi-million dollar investigation into extraterrestrial flying machines that started during the George W. Bush administration, all in secret.

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space. (NYT)

According to the story in The Times, the program was started at the behest of then-Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had a personal interest in UFOs. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Reid told The New York Times, “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.” The program is said to have cost roughly $600 billion.

While the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program may not surprise a lot of people who had presumed the government would pursue UFO research, perhaps the most interesting development came about as a result of the publication of the story. An unnamed source at the Pentagon told various media outlets yesterday that not only was the reporting in The New York Times accurate, they missed a key development that the Pentagon just found out about a little over a year ago.

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“We were contacted by Meepzax the Destroyer — he’s a member of the Zexri race from the planet Antara. Anyway, he told us that Antara and every planet’s government they have contact with have called off all their exploratory missions to Earth,” the Pentagon official said in an email. “He told us that there wouldn’t be anyone abducted from America again.”

According to the Pentagon official, the issue stems from how earthlings are probed and their intellect examined.

“Meepzax told me that probing tech works in a two-part system,” the official said. “First, they ram a rod up your butt to check your vitals. Then, they insert a probe in your right ear that can read your brain waves. But after Trump’s election, the Antarans were finding that every Trump supporter they tried to probe had their heads so far up their butts that the probes couldn’t be used separately, and they had to revert to older ways of testing their intelligence, like asking them to fold a piece of paper once or to spell the word ‘a.'”

The results of the tests found that Americans just aren’t, on average, smart enough for Antara to continue studying.

“It’s a bummer, but can you really blame them? I can’t,” the Pentagon official writes. “If they can’t tell where to stick the anal probe and where to stick the cranial one, all their data could get mixed up.”

You can read more satire like this every day on The Political Garbage Chute and Alternative Facts.

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