History Channel's Travis Taylor Revealed to be Chief Scientist for 'UAP Task Force'

Travis Taylor (pictured here) was recently revealed to be the chief scientist involved with the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force. *(8 News Now)*

Aerospace engineer and optical scientist Travis Taylor, who has appeared on popular History Channel productions Ancient Aliens and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, was revealed to be the chief scientist for the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) during an interview this month with George Knapp for 8 News Now in Las Vegas.

Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) is the current government nomenclature for UFOs.

“Other than the people who already knew on the task force, you’re the first person to figure it out, George,” Taylor said of his position.

It was Taylor’s book, An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion, which reportedly caught the attention of Jay Stratton, whom Knapp described as "a high-ranking intelligence official who has been involved with each of the Pentagon’s secretive UFO investigations."

One of those investigations being the UAPTF.

In 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee, led at the time by Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), included a directive in their Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 ordering the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)—in consultation with the Secretary of Defense—to create a report regarding “unidentified aerial phenomena.” That bill led to the creation of the UAPTF, the group responsible for creating the much-anticipated preliminary assessment report on UFOs released in June of 2021.

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

In contrast to a recent hearing held by the House Intelligence Subcommittee, which some thought leaned too heavily into prosaic explanations—such as drones—to explain UFO sightings by military personnel, Taylor emphasized that the vast majority of sightings in the UAPTF report were truly unexplained.

“We picked sources that we knew had a chain of custody of the data, and out of those 144 [cases presented in the report], 143 we still couldn’t figure out what they were, where they came from, and what their intent was,” he explained.

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 take the analysis to lead them in the direction to do that. And 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 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...

“We had a lot of sensor data on some of them that we couldn’t determine what they are," he added. "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.”

The inconsistency between Taylor’s testimony and what was presented at the hearing by Scott Bray, the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, and Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, has led to questions regarding exactly where the Pentagon received the information they used to debunk a few of the cases presented.

“The drone conclusion was reached after the UAP Task Force was done, and before the new UFO program [Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group] even started. So, who did it?” Knapp asked.

What other sources the Pentagon might have used in their determination are unclear, although a few within the UFO community have speculated that they were swayed by popular skeptics like Mick West, who has been an outspoken critic of the evidence presented of unidentified flying objects having been encountered by military pilots.

That evidence largely consists of three unclassified videos publicly released by the Department of Defense (DoD) in 2020, a series of photographs published by Mystery Wire, and a video released by filmmaker Jeremy Corbell

Those videos and photographs are joined by testimony from former fighter pilot Chad Underwood, five former Navy servicemen, and five Navy pilots, all of whom claim to have experienced anomalous phenomena during their time in the military.

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