• Since former Navy pilots and civilians have come forward about the UFOs they’ve witnessed in the skies, and the way the military chose to conceal sightings, there has been a movement to compel the American government to release, under the Freedom of Information Act, further documentation relating to government and military projects and data involving 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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Article by Luke Kenton October 20, 2020 (dailymail.co.uk)
• A documentary film by James Fox, The Phenomenon, released on October 6th has reignited the fire in the UFO community with firm confirmation of the government’s knowledge of still-unexplained ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon’ (UAP), more commonly known as UFOs, Along with some new information as well.
• In the documentary, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Chris Mellon (pictured above), explained how came to possess the three infamous Navy UFO videos. The 63-year-old Mellon said that unnamed Defense Department official met him in a Pentagon parking lot and handed Mellon a package with the three UFO videos captured by Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015. Mellon tells the filmmakers, “This is a case where somebody bent the rules a little bit, and they did so for the larger good, and we’re absolutely all better off because of it.”
• The three videos were the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO seen by Navy pilots off of San Diego in 2004; an anomalous UFO rotating while in flight and a small UFO darting across the water below, taken by Navy pilots off of the East Coast in 2015. Nimitz carrier pilots Commander David Fravor and Chad Underwood both saw the Tic Tac UFO on November 14, 2004. In the January 21st, 2015 video of the small UFO darting across the Atlantic Ocean, a Navy pilot is heard to remark, “what the fuck is that thing?” as it passes below him. (click link NY Times ExoArticle below to see the three Navy videos… again.)
• Mellon shared the videos with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the classified Pentagon UFO program called the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’. (The two men had moved on from government work to become colleagues in “To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences’, formed in 2017 to investigate and promote UFO data.) In late August of 2017, Elizondo worked with the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review to have the three videos declassified.
• On October 4, 2017, Elizondo and Mellon had a meeting with New York Times journalist, Leslie Kean, who also appears in the documentary. Kean was informed by Elizondo about the about the secret Pentagon UFO program, and Mellon showed her the UFO videos on his laptop. This information went on to form what would become the bombshell NY Times article of December 2017 (see ExoArticle here) Kean said she ‘knew this was breaking news for the front page of the New York Times as soon as Mellon informed her about the clips’ existence.
• The Pentagon’s ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ (AATIP) was conceived in 2007 by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and morphed into the ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force’, under the Office of Naval Intelligence, after 2012. Apparently, for over a decade, the Pentagon has been conducting classified briefings for Congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials. The briefings were centered on sightings, video footage, and radar logs by military pilots of ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’ which seemed to transcend existing flight technology – such as an aircraft with no visible engine at 30,000ft, traveling at hypersonic speed.
• The Department of Defense officially released the videos in April this year, nearly two-and-half years after the NY Times report, in order to ‘clear up any misconceptions’ about the video’s veracity. “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’,” the department said.
• ‘The Phenomenon’ analyzes the history of UFO sightings in the US since the 1940s. In the film, Senator Reid claims that the US government has been hiding key details about UFO encounters from the public for years. ”Why the federal government all these years has covered up …everything, stopped it, I think it’s very, very bad for our country.” Reid says that most of the government’s evidence of UFOs still “hasn’t seen the light of day”.
• Reid, however, stops short of confirming other-worldly activity, tweeting in August that “we must stick to science, not fairy tales about little green men”. In the film, Reid tells Fox, “Nobody has to agree why [the UFO phenomenon is] there. But should we at least be spending some money to study all these phenomenon? The answer is yes.”
• The documentary film also goes into the US military’s investigation of UFOs in the late 1940s, as sightings of UFO discs began cropping up in mainstream news reports. The Air Force investigated over 12,000 UFO sightings, ‘explaining’ all but 701 of them. One of those unexplained incidents occurred over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967. Ten ICMB missiles situated underground beneath the base suddenly become inoperative. Similar sightings and results were also reported at nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union and in Great Britain.
• Robert Jamison, a retired USAF nuclear missile targeting officer, told of several occasions having to go out and ‘re-start’ missiles that had been deactivated, after UFOs – mysterious glowing red objects in the sky – were sighted nearby. “If they had been called upon by the President to launch, they couldn’t have done it.”
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Chris Mellon, has revealed that he was the
Commander David Fravor
source who provided the New York Times with the three UFO videos it famously published in 2017.
Mellon, who served in the senior intelligence role under the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, made the bombshell admission in a recently released documentary, The Phenomenon, which is directed by James Fox.
The 63-year-old told Fox that he met with an unnamed individual in the parking lot of the Pentagon months earlier and was handed a package containing three videos of ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’ captured by Navy pilots between 2004 and 2015.
Leslie Kean
‘I received the videos, the now famous videos in the Pentagon parking lot from a Defense Department official. I still have the packaging,’ Mellon is heard telling the filmmakers. ‘This is a case where somebody bent the rules a little bit, and they did so for the larger good and we’re absolutely all better off because of it.’
The three videos went on to form what would become the basis of one of the most significant and
Luis Elizondo
revealing articles about UFOs in recent years.
One of journalists who worked on the story, Leslie Kean, also appears in the documentary.
Kean said she ‘knew this was breaking news for the front page of the New York Times,’ as soon as Mellon informed her about the clips’ existence.
In its bombshell December 2017 article, the Times unveiled a classified Pentagon UFO program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), overseen by the likes of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Harry Reid
Though at the time the government said the program, secretly commissioned in 2007, was shuttered due to a lack of funding in 2012, the Times later confirmed it continued its existence under a new name, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, within the Office of Naval Intelligence.
For more than a decade, the Pentagon had been conducting classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials.
The briefings were centered on sightings, video footage, and radar logs by military pilots of ‘unexplained aerial
Tic Tac UFO
phenomena’ which seemed to transcend existing flight technology – such as an aircraft with no visible engine at 30,000ft, traveling at hypersonic speed.
The Times also released three clips captured by Navy pilots across an 11 year period.
UFO seen off of Florida in 2015
The first of which, known as the ‘Tic Tac’ incident, was captured by F-18 pilot Chad Underwood off the coast of San Diego on November 14, 2004.
The Tic Tac UFO – so-called because of its rounded shape and white color – was spotted by Underwood flying erratically over the Pacific Ocean.
‘fast’ UFO skimming above the ocean off of Virginia in 2015
‘It was going from like 50,000 feet to 100 feet in like seconds, which is not possible,’ Underwood said back in December 2019, breaking his 15-year silence over the encounter.
To this day, officials still have no idea what the recorded object was, with weather phenomenon, man-made craft and birds having all since been ruled out.
Two other videos recorded on January 21st, 2015, were also released.
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Article by Alejandro Rojas July 20, 2020 (openminds.tv)
• The United States Air Force claims that it stopped investigating UFOs in 1969 with the closing of the UFO research program, Project Blue Book. This is the official position in the “USAF UFO Fact Sheet”. But it is a lie. The US Air Force was gaslighting the public to believe that they have no real interest in UFOs. But, as often demonstrated, the government has been taking UFOs seriously for a very long time. And it continues to this day.
• In a memo dated October 20, 1969, Brigadier General Carroll H. Bolender noted that “reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system.” The memo noted that the most critical cases did not go to Project Blue Book at all. First of all, why have an official UFO research program like Project Blue Book that excludes “the most critical cases”? Secondly, why aren’t UFOs that ‘could affect national security’ investigated?
• In 1993, the military modified its ‘no such thing as a UFO threat’ position when the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “OPREP–3 reports containing information relating to unknown objects near US military installations are considered extremely sensitive, and thus not releasable.” So the US military says that it is not interested in investigating UFOs, while at the same time expressing concern about UFOs flying over military bases, including nuclear weapons installations.
• It seems the US and the UK had a similar UFO public relations strategy. In the 1990s, Nick Pope ran Britain’s Ministry of Defense’s “UFO desk.” Pope told the Huffington Post, “We were telling the public we’re not interested, this is all nonsense, but in reality, we were desperately chasing our tails and following this up in great detail.” “To really achieve our policy of downplaying the UFO phenomenon, we would use a combination of ‘spin and dirty tricks,’” said Pope. “We used terms like UFO buffs and UFO spotters — terms that mean these people are nut jobs. In other words, we were implying that this is just a very somewhat quaint hobby that people have as opposed to a serious research interest.” Whenever someone went to the aviation authorities or the police, as soon as they mentioned ‘UFO’ the authorities would immediately lose interest and refer them to civilian UFO groups, regardless of the perceived threat.
• Senator Marco Rubio is the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). In the proposed Intelligence Authorization Act for 2021, the SSCI asked that the Director of National Intelligence in conjunction with the Secretary of Defense put together a report on “unidentified aerial phenomenon [UAP].” The report is to include information from the ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force’. Rubio recently told CBS Miami that he was concerned about “things flying over your military bases… [that] exhibit, potentially, technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal.” “[T]o me,” said Rubio, this “is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into.”
• Why would Senator Rubio assume that the ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force’ would have this sort of information? Luis Elizondo is a former intelligence officer who headed up a previous Pentagon UFO research project called the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, or AATIP. While the DoD claimed that the program ended (in 2012), Elizondo claimed that the program continued even after he had left. Eventually, the DoD admitted that the program existed and still exists. This is the Task Force.
• On July 21st, Elizondo told investigative journalist George Knapp on Coast to Coast AM that he was recently at a meeting having a classified discussion when one of the men present told him he had done Elizondo’s job in the 1980s. “[I]t was very clear to me that AATIP was not the first of its kind,” said Elizondo. “There was an organized effort back in the ’80s to do exactly this as well.”
• Chris Mellon is a former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and a former Staff Director of the SSCI. He and Elizondo are currently featured on the History Channel’s UFO investigation series “Unidentified”. Such efforts to reveal the government’s knowledge of UFOs have resulted in the Navy admitting they took UAPs seriously, investigated UAP incidents, and have begun reporting them to Washington DC lawmakers.
• Mellon says they have several never before seen military cases featured in the HISTORY show’s new season. For example, Mellon relates the story of a NORAD officer who was tracking a UFO on radar. The military was “scrambling every jet they could get in the air.” But when researcher John Greenewald filed a Freedom of Information Act request on this incident, NORAD responded that it had “found no records.”
• Hopefully, mainstream science, media, and academia are beginning to realize that the government has been lying to us about what it knows about UFOs. So how will the government and the military respond to investigative agencies such as Rubio’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence? Will they gaslight the SSCI, like they have done with the public at large since (at least) 1969?
Senator Marco Rubio
The United States Air Force claims it stopped investigating UFOs in 1969. It is a point they love to repeat when inquiries have been made for the last few decades, even when researchers present government documents to demonstrate otherwise. Often in the past couple of decades, instead of answering my inquiries about UFO documents, I am sent the USAF UFO Fact sheet. However, given recent revelations, the USAF fact sheet was wrong, and, as many have demonstrated, the government has been taking UFOs seriously for a very long time.
Nick Pope
According to the USAF UFO Fact Sheet, the USAF program to investigate UFOs, Project Blue Book, was closed because “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security.”
In a memo dated October 20, 1969, by Brigadier General Carroll H. Bolender, the reasons for closing Project Blue Book were outlined. In the memo, Bolender noted that “reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system.”
Christopher Mellon
His note indicates that the most critical cases were not going to Project Blue Book, which begs the question, “what good is it to investigate UFOs without the best cases?” It also implies there were cases, “which could affect national security.”
“Unidentified flying objects” were one of the items listed as something to report.
Eventually, the military replaced CIRVIS with Operational Reporting (OPREP). A document distributed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993 says, “OPREP–3 reports containing information relating to unknown objects near U.S. military installations are considered extremely sensitive, and thus not releasable.”
Sure enough, UFO researchers have found several of these documents. They typically address UFOs incursions over weapons storage areas, including those that house nuclear weapons.
Despite having receipts, UFO researchers are often grouped in with the tin-foil hat crowd. Nick Pope ran the Ministry of Defense (MoD) “UFO desk.” He dealt with these issues from the government side. Pope told the Huffington Post, “We were telling the public we’re not interested, this is all nonsense, but in reality, we were desperately chasing our tails and following this up in great detail.”
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Article by Alejandro Rojas July 10, 2020 (denofgeek.com)
• The team on History’s show ‘Unidentified’ has completely changed the way the public and media view the UFO phenomenon. The public is taking UFOs more seriously than ever. And now the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) is demanding answers and is concerned they have been left in the dark on the issue. It is hard to think of another show that has had such a paradigm-shifting impact.
• The show’s UFO research team is comprised of a rock star, a former executive of a company that develops top-secret aircraft and built Area 51, a former intelligence officer who investigated UFO for the Pentagon, and the former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. They are all part of the umbrella organization known as ‘To the Stars Academy of Art and Science’.
• In season 1, ‘Unidentified’ investigated US Navy jet fighter pilots who chased objects they say exhibited technology well beyond our own, and even caught them on video. They were released to the public via the New York Times in 2017. We saw ‘To The Stars’ members escorting some of these military witnesses to Washington D.C. to share their encounters with lawmakers.
• Cut to season 2 which started July 11th.. On June 23rd, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence called on US intelligence agencies to coordinate and pool their UFO data, or “UAP” unidentified aerial phenomenon as the government likes to call them these days. The committee even calls out an existing UAP Task Force to coordinate the effort and coordinate the future collection of UAP data.
• Den of Geek spoke to ‘Unidentified’ research team member, ‘To The Stars’ member, and former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon (see picture above). Mellon has no doubt that ‘To The Stars’ had a considerable influence on the drafting of the SSCI UAP report request. Said Mellon, “The report requirement 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.”
• “I worked on that committee (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) for over a decade,” Mellon says. “I still know people on the Hill, and so there are some people there who are still there from when I served. And because we worked together and are friends and I don’t abuse the privilege, they were willing to take my calls and listen to what we had to say.” Mellon says senators and their staffers were concerned they had been left in the dark regarding UFOs, which led to the SSCI asking for more information.
• With all of the media coverage the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO and other Navy videos received worldwide, “the Navy [had] to own up to the fact [the UAP issue] was real.” Said Mellon,”[T]hey had active-duty pilots and others going on the record… this report requirement is a recognition that there is something going on with national security ramifications.”
• The SSCI is requiring the intelligence agencies to give us their position on UFOs, implying that some of these agencies have already been involved in UFO research, which the government has always denied. “[H]opefully [all of this] will force the Executive Branch to get its act together and pool all the intelligence, … establish some accountability, and force them to take a position… as opposed to just giving some briefings,” says Mellon.
• Mellon gives a glimpse of other real UFO occurrences recorded by the military to be seen in season 2. “[Y]ou’re going to see new accounts; new cases that have never been aired before. They’re going to add to the picture… and I think they’re going to add to the impetus and the need for Congress to be asking questions. … [A] report of that nature should be able to produce some very interesting findings.”
History’s Unidentified is like no other show on television, and perhaps like no other show that has ever been on TV. It follows UFO researchers in an organization called To the Stars Academy of Art and Science (TTSA), as they investigate credible cases. Reality shows following UFO researchers are common enough, but what is unique about this show is the makeup of the team, which includes a rock star, a former executive of a company that develops top-secret aircraft and built Area 51, a former intelligence officer who investigated UFO for the Pentagon, and the former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Christopher Mellon
The cases covered in Unidentified season one made headlines across the world, including several articles in The New York Times. These cases included testimony from United States Navy jet fighter pilots who chased objects they say exhibited technology well beyond our own. Some of the pilots caught these objects on video.
In the first season of Unidentified, we saw TTSA members escorting some of these witnesses to Washington D.C. to share their encounters with lawmakers.
Unidentified season 2 starts July 11th, and the TTSA team is already making headlines. On June 23rd, 2020, Politico reported that the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) requested that several military intelligence agencies, and the FBI, provide reports on the data they have collected on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP is a more “respectable” term for UFOs). It even calls out a UAP Task Force to coordinate the effort and coordinate the future collection of UAP data.
Den of Geek recently had the opportunity to interview TTSA member Chris Mellon. Mellon is a TTSA team member on Unidentified, and Politico included him in the previously referenced article. Mellon was the former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence mentioned earlier. He also served as the Staff Director of the SSCI in the early 2000s.
Mellon says he has no doubt TTSA had a considerable influence on the drafting of the SSCI UAP report request.
“The report requirement 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,” Mellon tells us.
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Do you know that, recently, Mrs. Susan Gough (PR spokeswoman of the OSD – Office of the Secretary of Defense) allegedly/apparently wrote an email to Mr. John Greenwald (The Black Vault) saying (according to Mr. Greenwald) that AATIP did not investigate UAP (UFOs)? I still haven’t read the original letter but it is something that has to be known.
I expect more information to come out soon, from Mr. Greenwald, perhaps from Mrs. Gough, perhaps from the Navy and from TTSA. Is it a misunderstanding or a fundamental conflict of factual information? Is it a strange strategy to confuse people?
These declarations would have to deny not only Mr. Elizondo’s but also Mr. Jim Semivan, Chris Mellon, H. Puthoff and other serious people (such as Senator Harry Reid), not only knowledgeable about classified information (and intelligence clearances) but also linked to TTSA, credible persons who today – as a whole – guarantee that AATIP did investigate UAPs (UFOs).
Is all of this a confusion or a reversal of policy?
It doesn’t seem to make sense but (if the information shared by Mr. Greenwald is accurate) WHY would this be happening now? Do some persons “in the know” want to lock the cat back after it came out of the box?
Or is Mr. Greenwald’s information not very clear? Or perhaps is this the old pattern of those who try to control what the population knows, using the practice of revelation followed by denial? (However, this revealing was to one or a few individuals only before the denial).
Is it a mistake from Mrs. Gough who doesn’t know all the information? Or has she been told to say that? Is this a strategy from a faction inside those “in the know” because something else is in the offing? Is this apart of an old plan or a new move?
In terms of UFO disclosure, the “powers that be” follow a pattern of revealing and denying information to society as Randy Koppang and Grant Cameron would likely agree. They usually reveal something to one or a few individuals and later deny it after these individuals have been used to deliver a message to society. But this time they would be denying a whole team of intelligence- savy VIPs gathered in TTSA.
A few days before, another letter by Mrs. Gough (in response to an SCU (Scientific Coalition for Ufology request) publicly shared by Mr. Greenwald) stated that the U.S. Navy only had the “source” videos similar in quality and in length of the 3 videos shown to the public through TTSA (“GIMBAL” “GO FAST” and “FLIR 1”). That these were not classified. She doesn’t actually deny that there may be full-length and higher quality “original ” videos somewhere else but seems to be minimizing or trying to minimize expectations from the general public regarding what the U.S. Navy (and, by extrapolation, the Government in general) may have.
What is happening here?
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LINK to John Greenwald’s report in The Black Vault:
Article by Christopher Mellon November 2, 2019 (thehill.com)
• Government paralysis is something we’ve grown accustomed to on domestic matters but, when it affects national security as well, we truly are a nation at risk. Sixty years ago, Americans were shocked when the Soviet Union put Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, into orbit. Congress promptly acted on Americans’ concerns and spurred “the space race”, culminating in a Moon landing twelve years later.
• The U.S. Navy has publicly acknowledged that the vehicles observed and recorded by U.S. Navy fighter pilots (off of both the East and West coasts), which are able to maneuver above 80,000 feet; can hover and then instantly accelerate to supersonic and even hypersonic speeds; and use a means of propulsion and control that does not appear to involve combustion, exhaust, rotors, wings or flaps, are indeed ‘unidentified aerial phenomenon’.
• This shocking announcement has scarcely been noticed by Congress. To date, there have been congressional oversight committee briefings but no hearings, no funds appropriated to study the phenomenon, not even a request for a report or a threat assessment. It appears that Congress has no problem with being kept in the dark all of these years by the military regarding these UFOs. Is the information too radical to process? Is the U.S. government in denial? It would seem a matter of utmost urgency.
• The writer, former Defense Department and US Senate intelligence staffer Chris Mellon, has interviewed numerous active-duty and retired military personnel who have encountered these UFOs. Without exception they express grave concern for their colleagues and near disbelief that our government is not reacting more vigorously. Policymakers should pay close attention to the experiences of U.S. military personnel, investigate thoroughly, and respond effectively.
• Myriad services and agencies including the National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, Air Force and Navy, FBI and National Security Agency, possess a pool of relevant data on UFOs, says Mellon. But we are not analyzing the vast quantity of data already collected by America’s vast ‘sensor networks’. We simply need to implement a strategy for the centralized collection and analysis of this data.
• We have entered a new frontier. Similar to our forebears who settled the Western half of the continent, we must still confront the unknown. But as President Eisenhower said in a speech he gave in 1958 in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, nineteenth century frontiersmen “were not turned back by terror; they did not succumb to the tensions …encountered beyond the fringes of civilization. They moved ahead as companions in adventure, well-knowing that danger is often the inseparable partner of progress and honor.”
In what could be a precursor to further stunning developments, the U.S. Navy has publicly acknowledged that the advanced aircraft depicted in several recently declassified gun-camera videos are UFOs, or what the Navy prefers to call “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” (UAPs). “The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena,” acknowledged Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations, referring to the bizarre vehicles that have brazenly operated in restricted U.S. military airspace.
Christopher Mellon
Strangely, this shocking announcement seems to have scarcely been noticed by Congress or the Trump administration. Is the information too jarring and radical to process? Are U.S. government officials in denial? One can only wonder, given the glaring disconnect between the Navy’s announcement and the limited government actions to protect U.S. military personnel and the nation as a whole.
The vehicles observed and recorded by U.S. Navy fighter pilots seem impervious to altitude or the elements; they are able to maneuver above 80,000 feet; they can hover and then instantly accelerate to supersonic and even hypersonic speeds; they have very low radar cross-sections and use a means of propulsion and control that does not appear to involve combustion, exhaust, rotors, wings or flaps.
Since the Navy asserts these are not U.S. aircraft, we are confronted by the daunting prospect that a potential adversary of the United States has achieved the ability to render our most sophisticated aircraft and air defense systems obsolete. Much like the Japanese reacting to the appearance of Admiral Perry’s steam-powered fleet in Tokyo Bay in the 1850s, it would seem a matter of utmost urgency to determine who is operating these craft, how they work and the intentions of those commanding them.
I’ve interviewed numerous active-duty and retired military personnel who have encountered these mysterious vehicles. Without exception they express grave concern for their colleagues and near disbelief that our government is not reacting more vigorously.
This situation is not altogether unprecedented. Some 60 years ago Americans were shocked when the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Sputnik garnered sustained front-page coverage, however, and Congress promptly acted on Americans’ concerns by approving increased space and defense expenditures and enhanced education programs for math and science. The concerns roused by Sputnik spurred America to enter “the space race.” The nation rallied to the cause and the commitment paid off when astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon a mere 12 years later.
Consider by contrast our government’s tepid response to the latest news about UAPs. Some congressional oversight committees have asked for and received briefings, but none has held a hearing, either open or closed; none has appropriated funds for collection or analysis; none has even asked for a report or a threat assessment. Nor have Congress members expressed concern over apparently being kept in the dark on this issue for years by the executive branch, a situation that changed only after a small private organization — To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, which I advise on national security affairs — made Department of Defense gun-camera footage available to the press and to Congress.
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• Former high-ranking US defense and intelligence officials, aerospace-industry veterans, academics and others associated with ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science’ are asking: ‘why are so many UFOs being reported near nuclear facilities—and why isn’t there more urgency on the part of the government to assess their potential national-security threat?’ Their investigations are the subject of HISTORY’s limited series “Unidentified.”
• In the past century, more than a few UFO sightings have been reported in military contexts. In late World War II, U.S. airmen called the bright orange UFOs flying along the French-German border “foo fighters”. During the Korean War, soldiers claimed that a blue-green light emitting “pulsing rays” made their whole battalion sick with radiation poisoning.
• In the last 75 years, high-ranking U.S. military and intelligence personnel have also reported UFOs near sites associated with nuclear power, weaponry and technology—from the early atomic-bomb development and test sites of the past to active nuclear naval fleets in the present. “All of the nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River—all had dramatic incidents where these unknown craft appeared over the facilities and nobody knew where they were from or what they were doing there,” said investigative journalist George Knapp.
• “There seems to be a lot of correlation there,” says Lue Elizondo, who from 2007 to 2012 served as director of the Pentagon UFO study program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
• Robert Hastings, a UFO researcher and author of the book: UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, says that ‘Nuclear-adjacent’ sightings go back decades. Witnesses to these incidents are often highly trained personnel with top security clearances. In recent years, their reports are being corroborated by sophisticated technology.
• In late 1948, “green fireballs” were reported in the skies near atomic laboratories in Los Alamos and Sandia, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was first developed and tested. A declassified FBI document from 1950 mentions “flying saucers” measuring almost 50 feet in diameter near the Los Alamos labs. Over a dozen workers from the Nevada desert atomic test site told Knapp that UFO activity was commonplace.
• In the 1960s and ’70s, repeated UFO sightings emerged at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, a storage site for nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. At one such sighting in 1967, former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas reported several of those missiles becoming inoperative, or “unlaunchable”, at the same time that base security reported seeing a glowing red object, about 30 feet in diameter, hovering over the facility.
• In December 1980, the US Air Force secretly housed nuclear weapons in 25 fortified bunkers beneath the Royal Air Force base at Bentwaters in Suffolk, England. USAF master sergeant Ivan Barker saw an object on radar having remarkable speed and maneuverability, covering 120 miles in a matter of seconds. He looked out of the window and saw a craft hovering over a water tower. “It was between about 1,500 and 2,000 feet high. The thing was…at least a city block…in diameter,” said Barker. Barker says it was shaped like a giant basketball, with portholes around the center, from which lights were emanating outward. “I was shocked… There was nothing aerodynamic about it. Basketballs don’t fly.” Then in a second it was gone. But Barker didn’t report the sighting to his superiors. “You don’t understand what the Air Force did to people who reported UFOs,” he said.
• Colonel Charles Halt was the deputy commander at RAF Bentwaters that night. Halt led a patrol to investigate the strange colorful lights seen descending into the nearby Rendlesham Forest. He saw a red light moving horizontally though the trees, “obviously under some kind of intelligent control.” A laser-like beam, he said, “landed 10-15 feet away from us. I was literally in shock.” Then the object flew north towards the base. Says Halt, “We could hear chatter on the radios that the beams went down into the weapons storage area.” The Air Force generals closed the case without investigation.
• In recent years, the US Navy has reported several UFO encounters off of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Navy F-18 fighter pilots saw UFOs almost daily for several months between the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2015 along the Eastern seaboard between Virginia and Florida. “Wherever we were, they were there,” said Ryan Graves, an F-18 fighter pilot who holds a degree in aerospace engineering. The objects appeared in three shapes, Graves says—some were discs, others looked like a cube inside a sphere, while smaller round objects flew together in formation. All lacked visible engines or exhaust systems. Some tilted, mid-flight, like spinning tops, as seen in cockpit video. One UFO almost caused a collision by zipping dangerously between two jets. Graves said that the UFOs also appeared in the Persian Gulf.
• In November 2004, Navy pilots and radar operators from the USS Nimitz carrier fleet saw a 40-foot long tic-tac shaped object flying just above the ocean, 100 miles off the coast of California near San Diego. When F-18 fighter jets were scrambled to approach the object, it accelerated and easily outran the supersonic Navy craft.
• Chris Mellon, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence said that a carrier battle group being shadowed by UFOs all the way across the Atlantic to the Middle East “makes an extremely compelling case for the existence of technologies we didn’t think were possible.”
• There is an increasing openness in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill to taking these sightings seriously as potential threats. In April 2019, the US Navy announced that it was updating its guidelines for how pilots and personnel should report unexplained aerial phenomena—making it easier for military members to report sightings to superiors without facing stigma and backlash. And now Congress has taken more interest in these UFO briefings.
• George Knapp says there is more UFO activity now than he has seen in three decades. Knapp notes that personnel at the military facilities, bases, ships and submarines where nuclear weapons are built, tested and deployed “have seen these things”. “Are they all crazy?”
Why are so many UFOs being reported near nuclear facilities—and why isn’t there more urgency on the part of the government to assess their potential national-security threat?
Those are questions being asked by a team of high-ranking former U.S. defense and intelligence officials, aerospace-industry veterans, academics and others associated with To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science. The team has been investigating a wide range of these sightings—and advocating more serious government attention.
Their investigations are the subject of HISTORY’s limited series “Unidentified.”
Throughout history, unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs) have shocked, frightened and fascinated sky watchers. And in the last century, more than a few have been reported in military contexts. In late World War II, U.S. airmen called them “foo fighters”: strange orange flying lights by the French-German border. During the Korean War, some soldiers claimed a blue-green light emitting “pulsing rays” made their whole battalion sick with what, to some, resembled radiation poisoning.
Less known: In the last 75 years, high-ranking U.S. military and intelligence personnel have also reported UAPs near sites associated with nuclear power, weaponry and technology—from the early atomic-bomb development and test sites to active nuclear naval fleets.
“All of the nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River—all had dramatic incidents where these unknown craft appeared over the facilities and nobody knew where they were from or what they were doing there,” says investigative journalist George Knapp, who has studied the UAP-nuclear connection for more than 30 years. Knapp has gathered documentation by filing Freedom of Information Act requests to the departments of defense and energy.
“There seems to be a lot of correlation there,” says Lue Elizondo, who from 2007 to 2012 served as director of a covert team of UAP researchers operating inside the Department of Defense. The program, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), received $22 million of the Pentagon’s $600 billion budget in 2012, The New York Times reported. Elizondo now helps lead To the Stars’ investigations.
The UFO-nuclear Connection Began at the Dawn of the Atomic Age.
Nuclear-adjacent sightings go back decades, says Robert Hastings, a UFO researcher and author of the book UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. Hastings says he’s interviewed more than 160 veterans who have witnessed strange things in the skies around nuclear sites.
“You have objects being tracked on radar performing at speeds that no object on earth can perform,” Hastings says. “You have eyewitness [military] personnel. You have jet pilots.” Witnesses to these incidents are often highly trained personnel with top security clearances. In recent years, their reports are being corroborated by sophisticated technology.
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• ‘History’ (formerly ‘The History Channel’) is set to debut its new six-part docuseries entitled: ‘Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation’. The show basically follows the ongoing investigations by Tom DeLonge’s ‘To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences’ (TTSA), and introduce the Academy members as credible investigators and witnesses. With a former career intelligence officer (Luis Elizondo), a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (Chris Mellon), and multiple jet fighter pilots (David Fravor, et al), it becomes clear that research into what the hell UFOs are is more legit than ever.
• TTSA was formed in the fall of 2017. Elizondo left his Pentagon position and joined the TTSA team saying that the Department of Defense (DoD) was not taking the subject of UFOs seriously enough. They made a name for themselves in December 2017 when their efforts resulted in the New York Times revealing the Pentagon’s ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ (AATIP) and releasing Navy cockpit video of UFO, including the infamous “Tic Tac” UFO from 2004. History’s Unidentified intends to provide insight into AATIP investigations and TTSA’s more recent discoveries.
• The first episode will review in detail this 2004 incident where F-18 fighter jets from the US Navy’s Nimitz carrier group off of San Diego encountered the remarkable maneuvering of a 40-foot long ‘Tic Tac’ UFO. The wingmate of the F-18 piloted by Commander David Fravor when they encountered the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO – who has declined any public interviews thus far – will give her own testimony in the initial episode regarding the incident.
• Unidentified has a similar feel as other investigation focused reality shows. But instead of wild speculation or leaps in logic that strain credulity, Unidentified offers a more grounded perspective on a topic that the general public typically regarded as “out of this world.”
• “Both Chris Mellon and Lou Elizondo are closely involved with what’s going on inside the Pentagon over the course of this last year,” said Executive Producer Anthony Lappe. “They consider that Navy announcement (on new UFO reporting procedures) to be a huge victory for sort of everything they’ve been doing behind the scenes and we were able to chronicle that.”
• Another episode will focus on the 1980 UFO incident on a U.S Air Force base in the Rendlesham Forest, in England. Elizondo says that there will be other astounding cases presented from the AATIP files that have not yet been made public.
The first episode of Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation on History Channel uses a familiar format to deliver an unprecedented investigation. UFO reality shows have come and gone, but what makes Unidentified unique is the credibility of the show’s investigators and witnesses. From a former career intelligence officer, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and multiple jet fighter pilots, it becomes clear that research into what the hell UFOs are is more legit than ever.
Unidentified follows the ongoing UFO investigations of Luis Elizondo and To The Stars Academy (TTSA). Elizondo is a former intelligence officer who resigned in October 2017. That same month, former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge announced the creation of TTSA, an organization focused on researching the unknown with an impressive list of members. Elizondo was on that list. During the press conference announcing TTSA, Elizondo claimed he left his job at the Pentagon because one of his posts entailed researching military UFO cases and he felt the Department of Defense (DoD) was not taking the subject seriously enough.
The following December, the New York Times, followed by Politico and The Washington Post, published articles providing more insight into Elizondo’s former UFO program, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The story garnered headlines around the world and created public interests into the nature of the secretive Pentagon project. History’s Unidentified intends to provide insight into AATIP investigations and TTSA’s more recent discoveries.
Unidentified will be a six-part series. The first episode introduces us to the TTSA team members and covers a fantastic UFO encounter as told by the witness, all of whom were on active duty with the Navy when the contacts took place.
The New York Times article that broke the AATIP story also included details about one of the most exciting AATIP cases. Over several days in November of 2004, the Nimitz Aircraft Carrier Strike Group captured objects on radar that performed unusual maneuvers. During a training exercise, several F-18 jet fighters were diverted to get a closer look at one of the objects. Commander David Fravor got the best view. He describes seeing an object that looked like a 40-foot-long white Tic Tac that performed remarkable maneuvers. This case, also covered by Den of Geek, is reviewed in detail in the first episode of Unidentified.
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According to political scientists Alexander Wendt & Raymond Duvall, who wrote “Sovereignty and the UFO” (published in “Political Theory” in 2008), the functionality of modern sovereignty requires anthropocentrism, i.e. the view that homo sapiens is the maximum expression of intelligent evolution as we know it. If this is so, the presence of extraterrestrials flying around on Earth would place Governments into a quandary. They are supposed to be rational, scientific and modern but also to maintain anthropocentrism. It would seem self-destructive to tell their citizens that there actually are artifacts of non-human intelligence flying around in disregard of the territorial boundaries of modern nations? But that is what has almost taken place recently through former intelligence experts.
The U.S. Navy and Pentagon-DIA is confirming their interest in UFOs in major newspapers and media outlets like the Washington Post, The New York Times, New York Post, CNN, FOX. It’ is HISTORICAL. Qualified pilots and officers are allowed to give their testimonies. Will the U.S. Air Force (USAF) soon follow this greater openness?
According to Wendt & Duvall, the recognition of advanced intelligence is necessary to be accepted as sovereign. However, what if the truly unique, verified, intelligently behaved and unconventional UFOs/UAPs encountered by the U.S. Navy and Army and Air Force are not made from any known country on Earth as hinted by former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) Director Luis Elizondo and by former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon?
The latter expressed: “We know that UFOs exist; this is no longer an issue.” “The issue now is why are they here, where are they coming from and what is the technology behind these devices we are observing.” To me, this requires research of the contact experience and to attempt to make peaceful contacts.
Those current and former U.S. employees engaging in what seems to be a semi-official disclosing (or better yet, an initial-level confirmation), and also that UFOs (UAPs) are real and, moreover, that at least some are not made in any known country on Earth have also been careful to mention that they should be regarded as a potential threat. This is understandable from a military perspective. But is this the only way we should think about them? Or is this the only way the Government knows how to present this issue to the citizenry? And what if they have been here on Earth for much longer than modern nation-states? Were they always a potential threat? Are we – perhaps – more of a potential threat than they are?
UFOs are a worldwide phenomenon. Interestingly, there have been declarations (with a smaller effect than similar admissions within the U.S.) by representatives of UFO research commissions in countries like Chile, Uruguay, Peru, and France in that they research UFOs, even occasionally stating that some of them might not originate in any Earth country. The semi-official COMETA Report from France also comes to mind. But the effect that declarations like this have when originating in the U.S. is much greater. It may encourage other powerful countries to follow suit.
Perhaps China, Russia, and other countries will soon follow.
A UFO case officially researched in Chile
In the article “LUIS ELIZONDO: MUFON’s Exclusive Interview” that came out in the May 2018 issue of the MUFON Journal, researcher Chase Kloetzke asked Mr. Elizondo if they (inside AATIP) learned anything that keeps him up at night. The reply was “I think it’s not necessarily negative.I think we are in the precipice of potentially understanding a new paradigm. You know, mankind, our evolution has been marked by moments of clarity….I believe we are on the precipice of understanding a little bit more of our place in the cosmic neighborhood and I think that should be exciting and thrilling. We must remain cautious and diligent, but I’m not sure we necessarily need to be afraid. Concerned, sure. I’ll buy that. Afraid, I don’t think so.” His personal opinion – like that of Chris Mellon – seems to indicate that we are dealing with non-homo sapiens forms of advanced intelligence.
Mr. Luis Elizondo
Why Now?
Are these almost rotund confirmations of the extraterrestrial (perhaps also ‘multidimensional’ and/or ‘transdimensional’) hypothesis happening after more than 70 years of suppression and ridicule because the ETs have demanded that it is time to reveal the truth? Is it a strategy to find public backing to launch the U.S. Space Force (among other reasons to defend us against some of the ETs)? Is it for humanitarian reasons or to support a weapons program and an elite behind the Military Industrial Complex as some conspiracy theories purport?
The revelation of UFOs (and implied extraterrestrials) may diminish conspiracy suspicions exacerbated by the official denial and disinformation that lasted for decades. And the end of anthropocentrism may go hand in hand with the end of materialism, extreme dualism, Newtonian reductionism.
The current stage of confirmations looks like a preamble to a more official form of Disclosure. If no country on Earth has built the extreme advanced UAPs reported by pilots then it is natural to assume they are built by…extraterrestrials or by intelligent beings other than homo sapiens from Earth.
But if extraterrestrials have been with us for a very long time and this is also officially recognized, what rights will we be able to assign, grant or recognize in them? Definitely, in one way or another, sustaining our anthropocentric stance will be seriously challenged, perhaps after unreasonable resistance from some doctrinaires.
Contact and Implications
When Chris Mellon is asked by the Fox interviewer if there has been an interaction between human beings and these beings (from the UAPs) he responded that he wasn’t aware of it. But the possibility of there being ultra-secret, perhaps, Unacknowledged Special Access Projects (USAPS) in which human interactions with UAP intelligences are monitored or even sought after and maintained through psychic or other means has been a credible ongoing research within ufology.
It may well be that Mr. Mellon is not aware of every covert research program regarding extraterrestrials within the U.S. Government. He probably did not have a “need to know” about this and his innocence/plausible deniability was being protected in order for him to be able to speak to the public candidly without compromising an issue still deemed highly classified and under an initial stage of partial declassification. If so, it would be reasonable to assume that there are more highly covert operations than the ones known by the intelligence assets now working for To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TTSA) and that they would be useful to introduce society to the validation of the reality of truly unconventional UFOs (and later on – inevitably – of extraterrestrial or ‘other’ intelligences).
It may well be that, secretly, the U.S. Government has developed retro-engineered craft still inferior in performance to the so-called “Tic-Tac” and other craft mentioned by TTSA (and soon by the History Channel’s program “Unidentified”). For example, there are some photographs and night vision videos of the alleged TR-3B antigravity flying triangle which suggests such retro-engineering. Can we ignore this and other signs that some level of contact with extraterrestrials – either with them as sentient creatures or with their craft – has already been made at least since 1947?
Not long ago, former AFOSI counterintelligence officer Richard C. Doty mentioned that he was aware of Government research involving the extraterrestrial intelligences themselves. However, he probably knows that there is no way to prove such statements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rES0rY7ah0
Other credible military testimonies regarding secret programs that may come in direct contact with extraterrestrials or “UAP intelligences” are those of Sargeant Clifford Stone and of Sargeant Dan Sherman. Project Camelot Interview to Sargeant Clifford Stone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rES0rY7ah0
Sargeant Clifford Stone
Sargeant Dan Sherman
Are we already capable of communicating with some, all or any of the alleged extraterrestrials?
Can we relate with any of them as friends, allies or constructively? That would perhaps depend whether we share enough of the same psychological nature to produce some of the same cultural universals. Moreover, perhaps we should not call them “non-humans” but instead extend our concept of humanity to match their cognizance. Perhaps the capacity to reason with free will is sufficient.
If intelligent extraterrestrial presences are openly, officially or sufficiently recognized in a socio-political manner, we will need to develop relationships with them. If we cannot do much to stop them from flying around (not only military maneuvers and installations but all over Earth) we would need to expand our concept of sovereignty and make diplomatic efforts to reach agreements with them.
Serious contact experiencer research and surveys like that from F.R.E.E. (The Dr. Edgard Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Encounters) should be very valuable to understand who ‘they’ are, why ‘they’ are as they are and what ‘they’ want. In other words, to answer the questions raised by Mr. Chris Mellon. However, we will need to eliminate the still ongoing taboo (even among many UFO researchers), the taboo of dealing with ET contact or of contacting extraterrestrials ourselves, something that many of my otherwise ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ colleague researchers shy away from.
Dr. Edgard Mitchell Scientist-Apollo 14 Astronaut founded F.R.E.E. to research contact experiences and to assist them when needed.
Summary of theDr. Edgar Mitchell FREE Foundation Academic Research Study on UFO Contact Experiencers & CONSCIOUSNESS
FREE is comprised of 15 Ph.D. academic professors and medical doctors and 10 lay investigators. !!!! If you want to receive a FREE copy of our 120-page Chapter One from our book, send us an email to INFO@EXPERIENCER.ORG. RESEARCH FINDINGS:
1. POSITIVE: The overwhelming number of contact experiences are mainly positive, between 85-95% depending on the question asked. We asked the question of whether their experience was positive, negative, or neutral in more than 25 different questions. Chapter One of our book provides many more details and explanations to this finding.
2. PARANORMAL & NOT PHYSICAL: The Contact Experience is overwhelmingly NOT a Physical/Material Phenomena– instead, it is a Paranormal/Psychic Phenomena. Both Dr. Jacque Vallee, Dr. Allan Hynek, Dr. John Mack, Dr. Edgar Mitchell and many others hypothesized this more than 30 years ago.
3. TRANSFORMATIVE: The Contact Experience is an overwhelmingly Transformative Experience for the Positive. Over 85% of the FREE survey participants, now more than 4,200 individuals, have become: more loving to other humans, more ecological, less materialist, more spiritual, do not fear death, know the purpose of their life, are more consciously aware, less religious, etc.
4. SPACE-TIME: Contact involves manipulation of Space/Time and this, in turn, leads one to hypothesize that this Non-Human Intelligence might be multi-dimensional. This was pointed out more than 40 years ago by Dr. Jacque Vallee (Astronomer and legendary UFOlogist),
The Dr. Edgar Mitchell FREE Foundation was co-founded by the late Apollo 14 Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell.
If you want to receive a FREE copy of the 120-page Chapter One, send us an email to INFO@EXPERIENCER.ORG.
Further Implications
If most extraterrestrial intelligences have a benign, positive, evolutionary effect in our lives (as surmised in the F.R.E.E. anonymous, international survey) we must not treat them all exclusively under the premises of them being a threat. Perhaps we need to think about evolving our views and consciousness first to eventually voluntarily join a cosmic community in which most intelligent species are our friends and only a few our foes.
We must grow up and learn to establish a mutually beneficial and mutually respectful relationship with them.
Perhaps a Space Force may be necessary to defend ourselves against some types of ETs if we want to relinquish the protection that another group of ETs is bestowing on us. But – again – we need to grow up/evolve as a unified peace-loving humanity to learn how to handle the complex and interrelated situation well.
Reassessing our cultural premises will have to come about. It will be major, unprecedented step in history.
Discovering a science that unifies physics with psychic phenomena and with the fundamental role of consciousness will have to come about. Preserving (or even deepening) our spirituality (finding common ground among religions) and developing the sense that all of existence is connected through God, One Mind or Source (even if discovering that human beings have been genetically modified by extraterrestrial beings) will be necessary.
Finding a way to live more dignified lives, with greater human solidarity worldwide, respecting Earth’s life forms and ecosystems will quite likely be required to develop a more open relationship with advanced extraterrestrial societies. We will need to perfect democracies based upon classic liberal principles.
How can we live in peace with ‘them’ (and attain “sovereignty” as a species under their more encompassing planetary expectations) if we cannot live in peace and cooperation among us and are continuously brutally extinguishing animal and plant life on Earth?
As suggested maybe we have lived under the protection of some extraterrestrial associations against a minority that may not respect our relatively independent evolutionary process. Thus finding out who are our friends and foes among different extraterrestrial “civilizations” will be necessary. But who speaks for the entire human family?
Should military institutions only or a variety of institutions and individuals engage in understanding the unavoidable meaning that we are not alone in the universe?
by George Knapp and Matt Adams April 29, 2019 (lasvegasnow.com)
• U.S. Navy officials recently announced that it is changing its policy regarding the reporting of UFOs/UAPs by Navy pilots and personnel (see announcement article). But since a December 2017 New York Times article (see here) revealed a 5-year/$22M Pentagon UFO study program that ended in 2012, along with several videos with images of apparent UFOs, the Pentagon has insisted that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) had nothing to do with UFOs, and it has denied that the videos came from the Department of Defense (DoD). Now, George Knapp’s ‘I-Team’ has learned that this is not accurate.
• The U.S. Navy’s 2004 encounter with a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO off of San Diego; the 2015 incursion by multiple unknowns off the coast of Florida dubbed ‘Gimbal’; and a zippy craft off of the coast of Virginia known as “Go Fast” did, in fact, come from the DoD. “The videos were released by the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense made the decision to release them,” said Lue Elizondo, a former DoD intelligence officer and director of the Pentagon’s AATIP study.
• Before Elizondo resigned from his Pentagon detail, he initiated a process to get the three videos, and many more, declassified for public release. He insisted in a June 2018 interview these UFO encounters were not isolated incidents. “There were many incidents we looked at and we looked at them on a continuing basis,” said former US Senator Harry Reid. Senator Reid confirmed ‘there’s a lot more where these came from’.
• To back up their assertions, the I-Team obtained a copy of the DD 1910 form issued by the Department of Defense office of prepublication and security review, the final step in a multi-step process to have them publicly released. (click here for the DD 1910 form) The request specifies the three videos: Go Fast, Gimbal and FLIR, which was the original name for the Tic Tac encounter. The document shows that authorization for release was granted on August 24, 2017. The I-Team also acquired the DoD directive which spells out how the video release procedure works.
• Since their release, the three videos and the pilots involved in those encounters have been part of several closed door briefings given to Congress, set up by Chris Mellon who formerly worked for the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Department of Defense. High ranking Navy officials claimed to be ‘just as surprised’ at the UFO evidence as congressional staff. The Navy now wants to encourage pilots to report unusual encounters without fear of damaging their careers.
• Mellon, now of ‘To The Stars Academy’, told the I-Team that the Navy officials realized it was “indefensible” to not have a system that allowed more reporting of these incidents.
U.S. Navy officials issued a stunning statement a few days ago. The Navy announced it is developing new policies that will make it easier for pilots and other military personnel to file official reports about encounters with “unexplained aerial phenomena”, otherwise known as UFOs.
What’s behind this dramatic announcement? And is it related to the UFO videos which were made public at the end of 2017?
For the U.S. Navy to issue such a forceful statement about UFOs and the importance of investigating each incident is such an abrupt change. It stands in marked contrast to all the conflicting statements made by the Pentagon in the past 15 months — claims that the secret study sponsored by Nevada Senator Harry Reid wasn’t really about UFOs, that it ended years ago, and that the three videos weren’t really released by the Department of Defense. Suffice to say, those Pentagon statements are simply not accurate.
The U.S. Navy’s 2004 encounter with an object dubbed the Tic Tac UFO. The 2015 incursion by multiple unknowns off the coast of Florida dubbed Gimbal. And a zippy craft aptly known as “Go Fast”.
Two of the three videos were made public in December 2017, released simultaneously by the New York Times and To The Stars Academy. The provenance of the videos has been disputed ever since.
“The videos were released by the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense made the decision to release them,” said Lue Elizondo, a former intelligence officer.
Reporter George Knapp: “So, someone gave this the green light?”
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• The U.S. Navy announced that it is drafting new formal guidelines for pilots and other Navy personnel to report UFO encounters to the ‘cognizant authorities’. This is in response to a series of sightings by Navy pilots of UFOs, particularly the ‘tic tac’ UFO incident involving the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in 2004 when Navy fighter jets were outmaneuvered by an unidentified aircraft that flew in ways that defied the laws of known physics.
• The development comes amid growing interest from members of Congress following revelations by POLITICO and the New York Times in late 2017 that the Pentagon established a $25 million UFO research office, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. That program ostensibly ended in 2012. A statement by the Navy explained, “In response to requests for information from Congressional members and staff, Navy officials have provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety.”
• The Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied — rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction.
• Chris Mellon, a former Pentagon intelligence official and ex-staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said establishing a more formal means of reporting UAPs (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena) would be a “sea change.” “Right now, we have situation in which UFOs and UAPs are treated as anomalies to be ignored,” said Mellon. “[I]n a lot of cases [military personnel] don’t know what to do with that information… They will dump [the data] because that is not a traditional aircraft or missile.”
• Advocates for treating such UFO sightings as a potential national security threat have long criticized military leaders for giving the phenomenon relatively little attention, and for encouraging a culture in which personnel feel that speaking up about it could hurt their career.
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.
The previously unreported move is in response to a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities, the service says.
“There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,” the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. “For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.
“As part of this effort,” it added, “the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft.”
To be clear, the Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied — rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction.
Chris Mellon, a former Pentagon intelligence official and ex-staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said establishing a more formal means of reporting what the military now calls “unexplained aerial phenomena” — rather than “unidentified flying objects” — would be a “sea change.”
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by Jessica Pena March 13, 2019 (tvseriesfinale.com)
• The History Channel, along with A+E Originals, has announced it has ordered a six-episode, one-hour limited television docu-series entitled: “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” to debut in May. The show’s executive producer is Tom DeLonge (pictured above) of the ‘To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science’, along with ‘To The Stars’ team members Luis Elizondo and Chris Mellon who are among its roster of scientists, engineers and intelligence experts. The UFO docu-series will “reveal newly authenticated evidence and footage, interviews from eyewitnesses and former military personnel who have never spoken out before and extensive breakthroughs in understanding the technology behind these unknown phenomena in our skies,” says DeLonge.
• Former DIA military intelligence official Luis Elizondo and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Intelligence Chris Mellon were instrumental in the release of a New York Times’ exposé about the Pentagon’s secret UFO research program, the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, in December 2017, along with several authentic videos of UFO encounters by the US military.
• “This is not a UFO hunting show,” said Eli Lehrer, Executive Vice President and Head of Programming at the History Channel, “but a series that will hopefully provoke a cultural conversation about unexplained phenomena and allow our viewers to ultimately draw their own conclusions. Tom’s curiosity and passion for this subject matter, combined with his team, are the perfect partners to deliver this breakthrough series.”
• DeLonge’s ‘To The Stars’ team also includes retired Program Director for Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks, Steve Justice; renowned CIA researcher and quantum physicist, Hal Puthoff; and retired senior CIA member, Jim Semivan. The team will spearhead the disclosure of efforts being made to change government policy surrounding UFOs, and produce tangible evidence for the existence of UFOs ever assembled.
• “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” will reveal newly authenticated UFO evidence and footage, interviews from eyewitnesses and former military personnel who have never spoken out before, and extensive breakthroughs in understanding the technology behind these Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Says DeLonge, “I think everyone that watches the show will walk away with questions answered and a feeling of, “Wow, I get it now.”
New York, NY – March 12, 2019 – In December of 2017, The New York Times published a stunning front-page exposé about the Pentagon’s mysterious UFO program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Featuring an interview with former military intelligence official and Special Agent In- Charge, Luis Elizondo, who confirmed the existence of the hidden government program, the controversial story was the focus of worldwide attention. Previously run by Elizondo, AATIP was created to research and investigate Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) including numerous videos of reported encounters, three of which were released to a shocked public in 2017. Elizondo resigned after expressing to the government that these UAPs could pose a major threat to our national security and not enough was being done to deal with them or address our potential vulnerabilities. Now, as a part of HISTORY’s groundbreaking new six-part, one-hour limited series “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation(TM),” Elizondo is speaking out for the first time with Tom DeLonge, co-founder and President of To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science and Chris Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Intelligence, to expose a series of startling encounters and embark on fascinating new investigations that will urge the public to ask questions and look for answers. From A+E Originals, DeLonge serves as executive producer.
Says DeLonge, “With this show, the real conversation can finally begin. I’m thankful to HISTORY for giving the To The Stars Academy team of world-class scientists, engineers and intelligence experts the opportunity to tell the story in a comprehensive and compelling way. I think everyone that watches the show will walk away with questions answered and a feeling of, “wow, I get it now.”‘
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• On July 29th, Luis Elizondo, the former career military intelligence official in charge of the Pentagon’s UFO research program from 2007 to 2012 and current member of rock star Tom DeLonge’s ‘To The Stars Academy’, spoke at the annual Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Symposium at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
• Elizondo’s background is typical of a straight-arrow military officer with a distinguished career. He is the son of a Cuban exile who participated in the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Elizondo worked as a bouncer while attending the University of Miami. After graduating in 1995, he joined the Army and trained to be a military spy. Later, at the Pentagon, Elizondo showed no sign of being a disgruntled employee, spending much of his career chasing militants in South America and the Middle East.
• In 2010, Elizondo was made the head of a small group within the Pentagon charged with investigating reports of “unexplained aerial phenomena” – a less controversial term for UFOs. It was an ¬obscure, low-budget initiative created in 2007 at the behest of then-Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and operated jointly by Elizondo and Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace. But the results of their UFO investigations made Elizondo a true believer. Although the Pentagon program was officially shut down in 2012, Elizondo insists it remains ongoing.
• Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017 protesting what he considered lackluster support and unnecessary secrecy. “Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this (UFO) issue?” Elizondo wrote to Defense Secretary James Mattis in his resignation letter, “Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels, certain individuals in the Department (of Defense) remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors, and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security.”
• When Tom DeLonge launched ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science’ in October 2017, Elizondo joined and quickly became its public face. Its mission: to advance UFO research, produce science-fiction-themed entertainment about UFOs and, with luck, glean some insight into the super-advanced technology displayed by UFOs (such as spaceships that can seemingly defy gravity) that the Pentagon keeps ignoring. Over the past year, the Academy claims to have attracted more than 2,000 investors and raised roughly $2.5 million.
• ‘To The Stars Academy’ also boasts such heavy-hitters as Chris Mellon, the former deputy ¬assistant secretary of defense for intelligence during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations who had oversight of the Pentagon’s super-¬secret ‘special access programs’ and highly classified ‘black operations’; Jim Semivan, a 25-year veteran of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service; and Hal Puthoff an electrical engineer who conducted controversial research on psychic abilities for the CIA and the DIA.
• The $22 million Pentagon UFO project marked the first time that the U.S. government admitted to studying UFOs since the Air Force’s ‘Project Blue Book’ was shut down in 1968. Despite Senator Reid’s assertion in an interview with New York magazine that “we have hundreds and ¬hundreds of papers… 80 percent at least, is public,” and Mellon’s statement in Washington Post op-ed, that referred to a “growing body of empirical data,” Elizondo says that much of these “large volumes” of academic studies and data are “FOIA-exempt,” meaning the public is not given access to them.
• There are those in the UFO community who are skeptical of DeLonge’s motives. They believe he simply wants to profit off his UFO-related books, websites and merchandise, and that his antics are part of the business plan.
• As the Academy’s head of Global Security and Special Programs, Elizondo serves as a liaison to the government, including Congress, the Pentagon and the intelligence services. Elizondo thinks that the next six months or so will be pivotal to the success of ‘To the Stars’ when he expects to be able to present more data on UFO sightings. “I’m not worried about credibility,” Elizondo says. “I’m worried about facts.” Reminded that the only facts the public has now are grainy videos, he insists, “There is data. It’s not out yet.”
• Elizondo understands why many remain dubious. “I get it. I’m a career spy,” he says.” “No, I am not running a government disinformation campaign.” “I took a huge risk in leaving a safe job to do this. If this doesn’t pan out, I’ll be working at Walmart.” “But…as crazy as it sounds, this is real.”
“I know what I saw.”
It was late July, and Teresa Tindal, a 39-year-old administrator for a consulting firm, was describing the incident that made her a believer: a round, golden object hovering in the evening sky over Tucson, Arizona. Weather balloon? No way. It could only be one thing: a UFO.
This kind of certainty had brought her—and 400 other people—to the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Symposium, the “premiere UFO event of the year,” according to its literature. They had gathered to talk about extraterrestrials, UFOs and how to avoid being abducted by an alien mothership (hint: yelling at it doesn’t work). “There are too many people that have seen things,” Christine Thisse, 44, a soft-spoken mother from Michigan, told Newsweek.
There were the typical guest speakers giving talks with titles like “Unexplained Disappearances in Rural Areas” and “Report From Mars,” in which a physicist lays out his theory that 75,000 years ago an intergalactic nuclear war wiped out a Martian civilization. And there were famous abductees, like Travis Walton, a former logger whose story of alien captivity became the 1993 movie Fire in the Sky.
But this year offered another attraction—a new, and extremely unlikely, superstar: Luis Elizondo. Seven months earlier, The New York Times had published a front-page story on the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, a “shadowy” initiative at the Pentagon that “investigated reports of unidentified flying objects.” Elizondo, a burly Miami native with a billy-goat beard and colorful tattoos, was the career military intelligence official put in charge of the program a few years after it formed in 2007, until, according to the Pentagon’s press office, it was discontinued in 2012. (Elizondo insists the work is ongoing.) Last year, he resigned from the Pentagon, protesting what he considered lackluster support and unnecessary secrecy—red meat for the X-Files crowd. “Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” he wrote to Defense Secretary James Mattis in his resignation letter.
In the private sector, Elizondo soon found an unlikely ally in his quest for the truth: Tom DeLonge, the former frontman for the pop/punk band Blink-182, the group behind a song called “Aliens Exist.” Turns out DeLonge actually believed it. In 2017, he launched To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, and Elizondo quickly became its public face. The mission: to advance UFO research, produce science-fiction-themed entertainment about UFOs and, with luck, glean some insight into the super-advanced technology displayed by UFOs (such as spaceships that can seemingly defy gravity) that the Pentagon keeps ignoring.
The academy claims to have attracted more than 2,000 investors and raised roughly $2.5 million, and Elizondo found a mostly enthusiastic crowd in Cherry Hill. “Sometimes people may have associated you with being fringe—being out there,” he told the MUFON audience over a buffet dinner. “All along, you were right.” Not everyone was convinced: Some cited a lack of evidence in his presentation. Tindal was suspicious of the Pentagon connection. “It could be a cover for something else,” she said.
But if Elizondo is trying to lend credibility to research on unexplained sightings, why would he partner with a guy whose band had a hit album titled Enema of the State? And why would he choose as a venue a UFO conference teeming with conspiracy theorists?
“We have to start somewhere,” he told Newsweek that day. “I don’t get invited to Stanford or MIT.”
Super Hornets and Tic Tacs
Each year, thousands of people report UFO sightings to various authorities—the police, the Pentagon, radio talk show hosts. By one count, more than 100,000 sightings have been reported since 1905. Nearly all can be explained away as clouds, meteors, birds, weather balloons or some other quotidian phenomenon. Efforts at rational debunking serve only to harden the conviction of the true believers, who are convinced that abundant evidence of alien visitations is hidden in secret military documents—literal X-files—locked away in the bowels of the so-called deep state.
The X-files conspiracy theory is the beating heart of the UFO community—an article of faith among enthusiasts and the basis of almost every call to action on social media (#Disclosure). It is also encouraged by some prominent people, including John ¬Podesta, who lamented on Twitter a few years ago that he’d failed to secure the #disclosure of the UFO files, “despite being President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff.
When Elizondo went public, it gave a sheen of credibility to the conspiracy crowd. His background is typical of a straight-arrow military officer with a distinguished career. He is the son of a Cuban exile who participated in the Bay of Pigs—the failed CIA-¬sponsored plot to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961. Elizondo worked as a bouncer while attending the University of Miami. After graduating in 1995, he joined the Army and trained to be a military spy. Later, at the Pentagon, Elizondo showed no sign of being a disgruntled employee or a loon, spending much of his career in the shadows, chasing militants in South America and the Middle East.
In 2010, he started to run a small group charged with investigating reports of “unexplained aerial phenomena”—a less controversial term for UFOs. It was an ¬obscure, low-budget initiative created three years before at the behest of then-Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Details are murky, but the $22 million program seems to have been operated jointly by Elizondo and Bigelow Aerospace, a Nevada-based defense contractor whose billionaire owner, Robert Bigelow, is an avid believer in UFOs.
Two months before the Times published its front-page story, Elizondo retired from the Pentagon. He shows Newsweek what he says is a copy of his resignation letter, dated October 4, 2017, and addressed to Mattis. The letter expresses some frustration about the lack of attention his program was getting. And it suggests that something he learned at the Pentagon turned him into a true believer. “Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels,” he wrote, “certain individuals in the Department remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors, and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security.”
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. ExoNews.org distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107. Please contact the Editor at ExoNewswith any copyright issue.
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.
raised this with Secretary Cohen, and then Cohen’s office called me and asked me to pursue this and chase it down.”
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Chris Mellon, has revealed that he was the
History’s Unidentified is like no other show on television, and perhaps like no other show that has ever been on TV. It follows UFO researchers in an organization called To the Stars Academy of Art and Science (TTSA), as they investigate credible cases. Reality shows following UFO researchers are common enough, but what is unique about this show is the makeup of the team, which includes a rock star, a former executive of a company that develops top-secret aircraft and built Area 51, a former intelligence officer who investigated UFO for the Pentagon, and the former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
