The US Department of Defense announced late Tuesday that it will create a new group to investigate information about the presence of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in restricted airspace.

The formation of the new group comes after the US government released a report in June citing 144 observations that lack sufficient data to determine the nature of registered UFOs.

The new group will be called the Flying Object Identification and Synchronized Management Group and will be overseen by US military and intelligence representatives.

Under Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks said in a separate statement that the presence of unidentified aerial phenomena in restricted airspace poses a potential flight safety risk and raises concerns about US national security.

The new group, which will succeed the US Navy’s Unidentified Air Phenomena Task Force, will work on detecting, identifying, describing, and mitigating any associated threats, the Pentagon said.

The US military has been playing down UFO sightings for decades, even though such records have been recorded since before the 1940s.

Source: with agencies