Article by Jason Koebler May 7, 2020 (vice.com)
• Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has done more than any other lawmaker to support the search for UFOs. “The sad part about it is no one else has done anything,” Reid told Motherboard. “[S]o saying I’ve done more than anybody else is no big deal. There’s no one doing anything, and that’s too bad.”
• Reid was the architect of two Pentagon programs designed to look for and study UFOs and advanced propulsion technologies – called the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program’ (“AATIP”) and the ‘Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program’. Between 2007 and 2012, the DoD programs received $22 million in Congressional “black budget” funding and were run through a partner company, ‘Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies’.
• Since the Pentagon programs became public in 2017 with a New York Times investigation, Reid has given several interviews saying he wants to focus on “science,” not “little green men.” But Reid told Motherboard that he does believe in extraterrestrial life. “The world as we know it today is extremely large,” Reid said. “I think that we as human beings have to be a little short sighted if we think we’re the only species in the entire universe. In the entire universe there is for sure more than one [intelligent species].”
• Reid also said he believes it is impossible to separate studying UFOs from searching for aliens. “We learned with the work that we did that the sightings of aerial phenomenon has not been seen by a couple dozen people, not a couple hundred people. Thousands of people. Thousands of people.”
• “We know that unusual things have happened over decades on a regular basis,” said Reid. [W]e know that in the Dakotas, a missile launching facility had been shut down because of something [hovering] over one of them [and] basically shutting off the power to them. We know the accounts off the coast of San Diego where ships have found these unusual things in the water and it shut down the communications on the ships.”
• Reid continued, “I repeat, now for the second or third time, that people should not be afraid. I think that too many of my legislative friends are afraid to go into this because someone will think that they’re some kind of a nutcase. But I went into it, and I don’t think it hurt me politically.”
• Recently the DoD said that the program had nothing to do with UFOs. Reid has said from the earliest days, this was a UFO program and was always designed to be a UFO program. Reid tweeted that the Pentagon’s release of the three Navy UFO/UAP videos “only scratches the surface of research and materials available.”
• Much of the UFO research was carried out by Bigelow on the infamous Skinwalker Ranch, a paranormal hotspot in Utah. Reid said he has never visited Skinwalker Ranch but that he followed the program while he was a Senator. “I …followed it very closely and talked to people that worked [at Skinwalker Ranch], but …because I was a …member of the Senate… I didn’t feel that it was appropriate for the government to [cover the travel cost]. [S]o I thought well, I’ll just listen to others. But you know there are all kinds of interesting reports about …weird stuff going on up there.”
• Reid says that the Pentagon or NSA should be [investigating UFOs] because he wasn’t sure whether a civilian agency such as NASA could do it. But he does believe to this day that studying UFOs is important government work that should continue to be funded. “Even some of my staff told me to stay away from all this. But… it was something I was interested in, …something that government should be involved in. [O]ther countries are doing it.”
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has done more than any other lawmaker to support the search for UFOs, which he says doesn’t mean a whole lot.
“The sad part about it is no one else has done anything, so saying I’ve done more than anybody else is no big deal,” Reid told Motherboard on the CYBER podcast. “There’s no one doing anything and that’s too bad.”
Reid was the architect of two Pentagon programs designed to look for and study UFOs, unidentified aerial phenomena, and advanced propulsion technologies. These two programs, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program and the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program, had $22 million in funding between 2007 and 2012 through a Congressional “black budget,” and were run through a company called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, which worked on it along with the Pentagon.
Since the programs became public in 2017 thanks to a New York Times investigation and the man who ran the program, Luis Elizondo, Reid has given a few interviews where he’s said he wants to focus on “science,” not “little green men.” But Reid, in an interview with Motherboard this week, said that he does believe in extraterrestrial life.
“I look at it this way,” Reid said. “The world as we know it today is extremely large. It’s so big I can’t comprehend it. And I think that we as human beings have to be a little short sighted if we think we’re the only species in the entire universe. In the entire universe there is for sure more than one [species].”
Though that statement should not be terribly controversial and reflects a viewpoint held by many scientists, it’s not one that has been taken by many politicians, and certainly not by someone who had as much power as Reid did. Reid also said he believes it is impossible to separate studying UFOs from searching for aliens.
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