Tag: Bryan Bender

Two Intelligence Insiders’ Plan to Get the World to Pay Attention to UFOs

Article by Alejandro Rojas                                   October 23, 2020                              (openminds.tv)

• The news has been ablaze with UFO headlines. The US government has been forced to seriously confront the UAP/UFO issue. In fact, The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has requested a public report from the Director of National Intelligence on what has been done thus far with regard to Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.

• This focus on the UFO phenomenon was the result of a string of media events: a tweet by Sky Hub founder Steve McDaniel followed by a Danny Silva blog; an article by Leslie Kean in The Huffington Post in May 2016; Open Minds UFO Radio interviews of Bryan Bender and NY Times writer Leslie Kean in the summer of 2017; a blockbuster NY Times article in December 2017; a Washington Post op-ed in March 2018; an article by Politico’s Bender in June 2019; a History Channel show; and finally the US Navy authenticating Navy cockpit video of UFOs, admitting that they are for real, and issuing Navy personnel guidelines for reporting them.

• The focus of all of this media attention over the past four years has been former Senate intelligence analyst Chris Mellon and former Pentagon intelligence officer and head of its UFO program, Luis Elizondo. (both are pictured above with Tom DeLonge) It began with Elizondo’s difficulty in being granted a meeting with defense officials to reveal unexplained craft. It would end with Mellon and Elizondo invited to Capitol Hill for high level UFO briefings. “They couldn’t any longer deny it… when they had active-duty pilots and others going on the record,” said Mellon.

• In the documentary “The Phenomenon”, Mellon says his professional interest in UFOs arose from early claims by astronaut Gordon Cooper. Cooper was a part of the famed ‘Mercury Seven’, the first seven US astronauts to go into space. Prior to this, in 1951, Cooper’s squadron of jet fighters had chased a group of round objects that could stop mid-air and make instant 90 degree turns. In 1957, Cooper and his crew at Edwards Air Force base filmed a saucer-shaped object land on a dry lake bed and then take off again. The Air Force sent a courier to collect it. Cooper never saw the film again.

• Just prior to the end of President Clinton’s second term, Clinton told his Secretary of Defense, Michael Cohen, to investigate Cooper’s claims. Cohen assigned the matter to Chris Mellon, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations for The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mellon would later become the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for the Senate Committee. Apparently, Mellon wasn’t satisfied with the records that the US Air Force kept on UFOs, including Cooper’s. He was told that most of them had been removed in order to “clean up” or “save space”. Mellon’s curiosity was piqued.

• Mellon retired from the government and joined a UFO monitoring system called UFODATA. Then he learned about the existence of a Pentagon UFO program. The UFO topic “was something that I had always been interested in,” said Mellon. “So, I was surprised to see they had anything organized at all.” Mellon quickly offered to assist Elizondo to help get data of the Nimitz Strike Carrier Group encounter with a UFO/UAP to the Secretary of Defense. The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not want to escalate the issue. “People were still afraid to touch it and afraid to let the secretary even be exposed to the issue,” says Mellon. Even with Mellon’s connections to senior officials in the Department of Defense, they were unable to secure a meeting with the Secretary of Defense.

• Mellon and Elizondo began to consider more drastic measures – to take their information directly to the media and the public in order to force Congress to take some action. They invited Leslie Kean to Washington on October 4, 2017. “I went down and went to Washington, and we spent three or four hours together,” says Kean. “Luis had resigned (his) position literally the day before we met.” “I was shown the videos… (and) was shown documents about Harry Reid’s involvement. [T]he story was kind of laid out for me at this meeting.” “I realized at that point that it was a New York Times level story, given the documentation that was available for the program and for the people involved and everything else,” Kean continued. “And so that’s how it all started.”

• The world was introduced to Mellon and Elizondo on October 10, 2017, with the press conference launch of Tom DeLonge’s ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science’. Elizondo and Mellon had joined ‘To the Stars’ team of former high level UFO investigators. The announcement was accompanied by Kean’s article in The Huffington Post. Still, no one seemed to take notice of Elizondo who claimed that he ran a UFO program despite the government telling us for decades they had no interest in the topic.

• Then in December 2017, Kean along with co-writers Ralph Blumenthal and Helen Cooper, published a blockbuster NY Times article revealing that the Pentagon had run a secretive UFO program from 2007 to 2012 called the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ (AATIP). The article’s primary source was Elizondo who claimed AATIP did not end in 2012 and that it continues to this day. The Times article also included two videos allegedly showing infrared camera footage from Navy F-18 fighter jets of a UFO, which Mellon had clandestinely received from an anonymous DoD official in a parking garage. (see previous ExoArticle on this)

• On March 9, 2018, Mellon wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post (see previous ExoArticle here) asking ‘Why Doesn’t the Pentagon Care? “Senators and staffers have been kept in the dark,” said Mellon. “There’s some important unanswered questions here.” Soon thereafter, the US Navy announced new formal guidelines for Navy personnel to report UFO encounters. “There’s no doubt in my mind that that report requirement (by the Navy) would not be in there, wouldn’t exist if we had not been engaged in bringing witnesses forward and advocating this and writing about it and so forth,” said Mellon.

• Mellon called upon Congress to require an ‘all-source study’ by the Secretary of Defense, and promoted research into new forms of propulsion that might explain how these vehicles achieve such extraordinary power and maneuverability, as it pertains to national security. “[H]opefully (this attention) will force the Executive branch to get its act together… establish some accountability and force them to take a position in black and white, as opposed to just giving some briefings.”

• In less than three years, Mellon and Elizondo’s strategy has resulted in the US government admitting they take UAP seriously, reversing their decades-long denials of the fact, and the Senate Intelligence committee taking notice by asking for more information. “It’s a tremendous step forward,” said Mellon. “Regardless of what the phenomenon turns out to be in the end. At least now we can have some faith that a serious effort is going to be made to hold and analyze the data, probably implement a new collection strategy… So it has a lot of potential ramifications, all of them positive.”

 

                        Luis Elizondo

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) has requested that the Director of National

                          Chris Mellon

Intelligence organize research into Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP – aka UFOs) and provide a public report on what has been done thus far. It is an extraordinary move that further legitimizes a topic that has historically been relegated to mythological stories like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. However, the public did not know that there were those in the US military and intelligence communities who took the issue seriously and wanted more to be done to figure out what those UFOs are.

              Leslie Kean

“We have an intelligence community for a reason, partly to support our military, partly to avoid strategic surprise, and the intelligence community was failing on both counts,” former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon told OpenMinds.tv in a recent interview. “The intelligence community was completely unresponsive, completely dropping the ball. I mean, it could be Russian, it could be Chinese, it could be something else.”

                    Bryan Bender

Mellon served for ten years as a Staff Director of the SSCI. From 1998 to 1999, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations, and from 1999 to 2002, he was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
In a recent interview for a documentary called The Phenomenon, Mellon says his professional interest in the topic of UAP began with a request by astronaut Gordon Cooper.

Cooper was a part of the famed Mercury Seven, the first seven US astronauts to go into space. He claims to have had two UFO incidents. The first was in 1951. He claims his squadron of jet fighters chased a group of round objects that could stop mid-air and make instant 90 degree turns. He also claimed that in 1957 a crew he managed at Edwards Air Force base filmed a saucer-shaped object land on a dry lake bed and then take off again. He reviewed the film and reported it. The Air Force sent a courier to collect it. He never saw the film again.

            the ‘Mercury Seven’

According to Mellon, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Michael Cohen, tasked him to investigate the matter.

“Astronaut Cooper had spoken with the President,” Mellon says in The Phenomenon. “At a cabinet meeting, he raised this with Secretary Cohen, and then Cohen’s office called me and asked me to pursue this and chase it down.”

“The Air Force colonel that I spoke with got very frustrated, and when I asked him what happened to all of these records,” explained Mellon. “He said, ‘Well, that was all cleaned up or thrown out to save space.’ Something like that. It sounded ludicrous, but that’s what he told me.”

Mellon’s interest in the UFO topic was the focus of an article in The Huffington Post in May 2016 titled Is There a UFO Cover-up? A Government Insider Speaks Out. The article was written by Leslie Kean and was about Mellon joining a group of scientists interesting in developing a UFO monitoring system called UFODATA.

Kean was also one of The New York Times authors, along with Ralph Blumenthal and Helen Cooper, who broke the news in December 2017 that the Pentagon had run a secretive UFO program from 2007 to 2012 called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The article’s primary source was Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who claims he retired to get more attention to what he felt was important information regarding UFOs. He also claimed AATIP did not end in 2012 and that it continues to this day.

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Admiral: UFO Encounters Occurred During ‘Finite Period’

Listen to “E78 8-25-19 Admiral: UFO Encounters Occurred During ‘Finite Period’” on Spreaker.

Article by Alejandro Rojas                     August 16, 2019                   (rdrnews.com)

• On July 19th, Politico’s defense editor, Bryan Bender, moderated a panel at the Aspen Institute’s annual Aspen Security Forum, in Aspen Colorado. Bender has been following the recent UFO developments at the nation’s capital, and he broke the story regarding the US Navy developing new guidelines for reporting UFOs.

• Four-Star Admiral Philip Davison (pictured above at the forum), the commander of the US Indio-Pacific Command, was also on the Aspen Security Forum panel. When an audience member asked Admiral Davidson about the recent UFO reports, Davidson replied that the UFO events occurred during “a finite period,” according to a tweet from Bryan Bender. This indicates that the Admiral is aware of issues surrounding the UFO activity beyond what has been reported in the news. What does he mean when he says that the encounters were during “a finite period?”

• Navy pilots have briefed lawmakers and military leadership on two separate encounters with UFOs: one that occurred over several days in November of 2004 off of the coast of San Diego when, after seeing odd objects on radar, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group scrambled its jets to engaged an object described as looking like a 40-foot long white ‘Tac Tac’. The second encounter was off of the East Coast during 2014 and 2015, when radar from the USS Roosevelt carrier strike group picked up odd readings, and Navy pilots described a ‘clear ball with a cube in it’ passing in-between two fighter jets. Navy radar also picked up similar readings over the Middle East.

• Is this span from 2004 to 2015 the finite period Admiral Davidson was talking about? Could there be even more Navy UFO cases that the public is not aware of? Bender thinks Davidson might have suggested that Navy pilots only spot UFOs occasionally, and it isn’t something that happens a lot. Tyler Rogoway of The Drive’s War Zone said that Davidson’s comment that UFO activity ceased after 2015 seemed accurate, noting that Navy pilot Ryan Graves never specifically says they encountered UFOs in the Middle East, only radar signatures.

• Rogoway also notes that in both of these instances, cutting edge radar sensor technologies were deployed, which “may point to the possibility that these events were tests of highly exotic and secret technology belonging to the US military or even deployed by its adversaries.” “[If Navy] aircraft… were testing new sensor technologies, the possibility would exist that someone else was testing how these sensors would react to their next-generation propulsion technology,” suggesting that the technology allowing craft to perform “flying maneuvers that shatter our perceptions of propulsion, flight controls, material science, and even physics” was developed right here on Earth.

• Last May at the McMenamins UFO-fest in McMinnville Oregon, the Navy pilot who encountered the “Tic Tac” UFO off of San Diego in 2004, David Fravor, told his audience that he thought he might have encountered secret advanced military technology. However, as the years went by and this technology never came to light, Fravor began to doubt that idea. He felt that he would have heard something about this new development if it indeed existed.

• When the subject of UFOs of extraterrestrial origin was broached at the Aspen conference, the defense reporters and industry insiders who made up the majority of the audience just laughed. It is obvious that the military community is not ready to take the topic of extraterrestrial UFOs seriously. Rogoway called this reaction from his colleagues “disgusting.” However, the conspiracy-minded could very well say that both Admiral Davidson and Tyler Rogoway are seeding doubt as part of the Navy’s UFO investigation strategy to steer the press and the public away from aliens as a genuine explanation for these UFO sightings.

 

During a panel at last month’s Aspen Institute’s Aspen Security Forum, an audience member asked Admiral Philip Davidson about reports of UFOs. Davidson replied that the Navy has new UFO reporting guidelines and that the UFO events occurred during “a finite period.”

This information comes via a tweet from Politico’s defense editor, Bryan Bender. Bender has been following recent UFO developments at the nation’s capital. He broke the story regarding the U.S. Navy developing new guidelines for reporting UFOs, and appeared on the History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.

Bender moderated a panel at the forum on Friday, July 19. However, on Thursday, he tweeted: @AspenSecurity asks @INDOPACOM commander about Navy reports of UFOs. Chuckles all around but Adm. Phil Davidson responds that there is now a reporting process for these unexplained sightings and says the encounters were during ‘a finite period.’”

Four-Star Admiral Philip Davison is the commander of the U.S. Indio-Pacific Command. What I find interesting is that he was aware of the UFO issue, and apparently more than just the recent news about new reporting guidelines. But, what did he mean when he said the encounters were during “a finite period?”

History’s Unidentified revealed that Navy pilots involved with two separate incidents briefed lawmakers and military leadership. The first encounters occurred over several days in November of 2004. The Nimitz carrier strike group caught odd objects on radar. The Nimitz scrambled jets and Wing Commander David Fravor engaged an object he described as looking like a 40-foot long white Tac Tac. After a short time, the object darted off at an incredible speed.

  Tyler Rogoway of “The Drive”

The second set of encounters covered on Unidentified were similar. In this case, it was the USS Roosevelt carrier strike group that encountered odd radar readings off the coast of Florida in 2014 and 2015. At one point, a UFO described as a clear ball with a cube in it passed in-between two jets. According to the show, the objects followed the USS Roosevelt to the middle east.

These encounters span from 2004 to 2015. Is that the finite period Davidson was talking about? Could there be even more Navy UFO cases that the public is not aware of?

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UFOs Exist and Everyone Needs to Adjust to That Fact

by Daniel W. Drezner                      May 28, 2019                     (washingtonpost.com)

• UFOs have historically been associated with crackpot ideas like Big Foot or conspiracy theories involving crop circles, and consistently dismissed. But as more military pilots come forward to describe encounters with unidentified flying objects, government officials reluctantly acknowledge that UFOs (or “UAP”s) do exist. At this point, authorities are trying to destigmatize the reporting of UFOs while adamantly refusing to say that these UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin.

• Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall authored a paper entitled: “Sovereignty and the UFO”, published in the journal Political Theory, which argues that state sovereignty is “constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.” They argue that the real reason UFOs have been dismissed is because it challenges the worldview in which human beings are the most technologically advanced life-forms. “UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility.” So if humankind is the most technologically advanced life form, then in order to preserve this premise, UFOs cannot be of an extraterrestrial origin. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is.”

• Wendt and Duvall’s paper makes a persuasive case that UFOs certainly exist, even if they are not necessarily ETs. For them, the key is that no official authority takes seriously the idea that UFOs can be extraterrestrials. As they note, “considerable work goes into ignoring UFOs, constituting them as objects only of ridicule and scorn.”

• In recent years, however, there has been a subtle shift that poses some interesting questions for Wendt and Duvall’s argument. Discussion of actual UFOs has become the topic of serious mainstream media coverage. The government acknowledged the existence of a Pentagon program to study UFOs. A noted astrophysicist claimed that the ‘asteroid’ Oumuamua could be of artificial construction relying on a solar sail. Military pilots came forward in December 2017 and then again in May 2019 relating their encounters with UFOs on both the West and East Coasts of the US. No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects are extraterrestrial, though even skeptics cannot completely rule out the possibility that extraterrestrial activity is involved.

• So the government and mainstream media are not behaving as Wendt and Duvall would predict. Politico’s Bryan Bender reported that, “The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with ‘unidentified aircraft,’ a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.” Deanna Paul of the Washington Post wrote, “Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer, told The Post that the new Navy guidelines formalized the reporting process, facilitating data-driven analysis while removing the stigma from talking about UFOs, calling it ‘the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.”

• As the stigma against the existence of UFOs wears off, will Earth governments face the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations as the origin of these unexplained UFOs?

 

The term “UFO” automatically triggers derision in most quarters of polite society. One of Christopher Buckley’s better satires, “Little Green Men,” is premised on a George F. Will-type pundit thinking that he has been abducted by aliens, with amusing results. UFOs have historically been associated with crackpot ideas like Big Foot or conspiracy theories involving crop circles.

The obvious reason for this is that the term “UFO” is usually assumed to be a synonym for “extraterrestrial life.” If you think about it, this is odd. UFO literally stands for “unidentified flying object.” A UFO is not necessarily an alien from another planet. It is simply a flying object that cannot be explained away through conventional means. Because UFOs are usually brought up only to crack jokes, however, they have been dismissed for decades.

One of the gutsiest working paper presentations I have witnessed was Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall presenting a draft version of “Sovereignty and the UFO.” In that paper, eventually published in the journal Political Theory, Wendt and Duvall argued that state sovereignty as we understand it is anthropocentric, or “constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.” They argued that the real reason UFOs have been dismissed is because of the existential challenge that they pose for a worldview in which human beings are the most technologically advanced life-forms: “UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility…. The puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is.”

When Wendt and Duvall made this argument, there were a lot of titters in the audience. I chuckled, too. Nonetheless, their paper makes a persuasive case that UFOs certainly exist, even if they are not necessarily ETs. For them, the key is that no official authority takes seriously the idea that UFOs can be extraterrestrials. As they note, “considerable work goes into ignoring UFOs, constituting them as objects only of ridicule and scorn.”

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Politicians Support Congressional Hearing on UFOs

by Alejandro Rojas                    May 17, 2018                       (denofgeek.com)

• On April 12th, 2018, the political journalism source Politico held an event marking the launch of their space news briefs. Representative Ami Bera (Democrat, California), a ranking member of the subcommittee on space for the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, admitted that UFOs piqued his interest and suggested congressional hearings on the topic.

• “It definitely piques interest. It gets people engaged,” agreed Randy Hultgren (Republican, Illinois). The CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration Mary Lynne Dittmar added, “If there really are things buzzing around in the skies that we don’t understand, then we should take a look at it.”

• Ever since the New York Times broke a story in December that the U.S. government has taken the UFO issue seriously, the topic has reached a higher level of credibility. “You hear these reports. We have been hearing them for decades from many credible people,” Politico Defense Editor Bryan Bender told the panel. “Other countries take it more seriously. They have government researchers who, in the open, not in secrecy, try to explain the unexplainable. Should we be doing more?”

• Not since the 1950s have government officials felt comfortable discussing the topic of UFOs in public.

 

During a discussion which included members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology held by Politico, politicians admitted the issue of UFOs piqued their interest, and one of them says he has suggested congressional hearings on the topic.

Ever since the New York Times broke a story in December that the U.S. government has indeed taken the UFO issue seriously, despite decades of claiming otherwise, the topic has reached a higher level of credibility. The story detailed a secretive UFO research group at the Pentagon that had been in operation since 2007. 22 million dollars were spent investigating “aerospace threats,” and the former head of the program, Luis Elizondo, says they received “many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.”

In an interview I was able to facilitate for the International UFO Congress, Elizondo said, “So that leads then to the next question if it’s not ours and it’s not theirs then whose is it? I don’t know who’s it is, that’s why we’re asking the hard questions.”

On April 12th, 2018, Politico held an event marking the launch of their space news briefs. In December, Politico had released their version of the Pentagon UFO study within hours of the New York Times article. The article was written by Politico Defense Editor Bryan Bender, who is also one of the authors of Politico’s weekly space briefs. At the recent event, Bender brought up the issue of UFOs.

Bender introduced the topic in a panel with his fellow space briefs reporter and co-moderator, Jaqueline Klimas, Representative Ami Bera (Democrat, California), Randy Hultgren (Republican, Illinois) and President and CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration Mary Lynne Dittmar. Dittmar is also an advisor to the space council set up by President Trump to advise him on space policy. Both Bera and Hultgren are members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Bera is a ranking member of the subcommittee on space.

“You hear these reports. We have been hearing them for decades from many credible people,” Bender told the panel. “Other countries take it more seriously. They have government researchers who, in the open, not in secrecy, try to explain the unexplainable. Should we be doing more? Or is this just crazy sci-fi stuff that is a waste of time?”

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