Nonprofit policy think tank, originating as Project RAND, a Douglas Aircraft/U.S. Army Air Force research effort formalized in 1948. A declassified Air Force memo that year requested RAND study UFO sightings for technical clues; a 1968 internal RAND report by George Kocher, "UFOs: What to Do?", leaked and argued for taking the extraterrestrial hypothesis seriously. RAND researchers published 2023 analysis finding clusters of UFO reports across most U.S. states, while cautioning against antigovernment conspiracy narratives around the topic. Separate claims tracing RAND's origins to a covert 1942 UFO-retrieval program are sourced only to a single unverified witness account.
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