Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence. Pentagon officials will not discuss the program. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation's intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was "to standardize collection and reporting" on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days. Mr. Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied. "After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports " some were substantive, some not so substantive " that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession," Mr. Reid said in an interview. Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, "We couldn't make it ourselves."