Article by Matt Spivey July 17, 2021 (dailystar.co.uk)
• On June 25th, a 9-page ‘unclassified’ version of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force report was released to the public. According to ‘The Black Vault’ author and podcaster John Greenewald, Jr., the classified version of the report is only 17 pages long.
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?
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.
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.”
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.”
JANAP 146 detailed “Communication Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings [aka CIRVIS].”
“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 MJ Banias March 13, 2020 (vice.com)
• In October of 2019, the US Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, a department focused on military research and development, entered a five-year contract with Tom DeLonges’ ‘To The Stars Academy’ (TTSA) to further its “collection and evaluation of novel materials.” For years, TTSA has been actively collecting ‘materials from alleged exotic sources’, ie: UFO crash debris and materials. Army spokesperson Doug Halleaux explains that the Combat Capabilities Development Command is interested in developing exotic science such as active camouflage, inertial mass reduction, and quantum communication.
• Army Regulation 70-57 exempts it from Freedom of Information Act requests for declassified government documents. So John Greenewald of The Black Vault filed a FOIA Request for all records and emails related to Dr. Joseph Cannon of U.S. Army Futures Command containing keywords such as “TTSA” and “To The Stars.”
• The Army’s response to Greenewald was that they indeed found 29 documents relating to his request. But each and every page is exempt from FOIA. Halleaux said that these documents are exempt from public scrutiny because they pertain to “trade secrets and commercial or financial information [that are] privileged or confidential” including email communications. Halleaux also told Motherboard (Vice.com) that he personally had no idea what the Army and TTSA were up to, and that if he did, he still couldn’t talk about it.
• Halleaux told Motherboard that the government believes the “key technologies or capabilities that [the Army] is investigating with TTSA are certainly on the leading edge of the realm of the possible”. But will the general public see any benefit from this five-year Army-TTSA collaboration? TTSA’s Chief Operating Officer and former Lockheed Martin Skunkworks head, Steve Justice, said that built into the collaborative contract’s language, ‘one of TTSA’s prime objectives is public transparency and commercial applications’, and calls for a ‘two-way sharing of information’.
• Says Justice, “The benefit of the [contract agreement] is to gain access to otherwise inaccessible government laboratories and technical expertise to expose all attributes of unusual materials and share the results. If unusual attributes are found, TTSA may use that information to create applications for public benefit. We cannot speak for any actions the Army might take after studying the results.”
• Chief Content Officer Kari DeLonge (Tom’s sister) said that she could not comment on whether the company had their hands on truly alien materials, but added that, “we are steadfast and dedicated to responsible analysis and reporting without speculation.”
• Perhaps the real question is why would advanced space-faring extraterrestrials keep crashing and leaving their scrap in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico? Are they leaving humanity technological breadcrumbs? Or are they just dumping their garbage on our planet?
The U.S. Army refused to release any records about its deal with Tom DeLonge’s UFO-hunting group To the Stars Academy (TTSA).
In October of 2019, the former Blink-182 frontman’s UFO organization joined forces with the US Army’s Combat
Capabilities Development Command, a research and development body. According to the contract, the government is interested in studying some pretty exotic science such as active camouflage, inertial mass reduction, and quantum communication. In particular, the government is interested in the group’s ADAM Project, which Doug Halleaux, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Ground Vehicle Systems Center described as “a global dragnet for the collection and evaluation of novel materials.” In 2018, TTSA put out a call for individuals and organizations to submit materials from alleged exotic sources as part of the project.
John Greenewald of The Black Vault, a website dedicated to collecting declassified government documents, explained in a recent blog post that the research and reports related to the deal are exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests as per Army Regulation 70-57.
Knowing this, Greenewald instead filed a FOIA Request regarding a copy of all records and emails related to Dr. Joseph Cannon of U.S. Army Futures Command (who is working on the agreement) containing keywords such as “TTSA” and “To The Stars.”
The Army got back to Greenewald telling him that 29 documents were found relating to his request, and each page was exempt from his request. The Army stated that it was not going to release any records. Motherboard reached out to Halleaux, the Army’s CCDC spokesperson, who said that any documents related to DeLonge’s organization would be classified as “trade secrets and commercial or financial information [that are] privileged or confidential.”
In other words, the public can’t know what the Army and TTSA is working on because of corporate and commercial secrets, namely intellectual property and finances. This includes related email communications. Halleaux told Motherboard that he personally had no idea what the Army and TTSA were up to, and if he did, he couldn’t talk about it.
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Article by Jazz Shaw January 13, 2020 (hotair.com)
• Since we first learned of the (Pentagon’s $22 million) ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ (AATIP), we’ve been told that it was a Department of Defense study of UAPs/UFOs, which Luis Elizondo ran before leaving the Pentagon to join the ‘To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences’. Both Elizondo and Harry Reid, the former Nevada Senator who initiated the Pentagon program, have gone on record confirming the UFO program and Elizondo’s role in it.
• Then more recently, DoD spokesperson Susan Gough backtracked saying that Elizondo was not involved with AATIP. Even stranger, Elizondo didn’t come forward to defend his statements. Said Elizondo, “There are elements in the Pentagon that are seriously upset with me for me ‘breaking rank’ in their eyes.” “I think (this disinformation is) a vendetta by a few in the Pentagon. But I think we will all know the real reason this year.”
• In a recent interview with John Greenewald of The Black Vault, Elizondo broke his silence stating, “As the senior ranking person in the AATIP program, I was ultimately responsible for ensuring the efficient and effective operations …performed by the outstanding men and women we had working in the program. My job was primarily to fend off the distractions so the rest of the team could do their job. …This includes fighting for resources, support, and personnel.”
• So why would Susan Gough keep insisting Elizondo wasn’t involved? Was the Pentagon deliberately and knowingly lying about Elizondo? Or was it a case of the DoD having lost the accurate records, as Gough has said? Elizondo suggests that this may have been a case where some in the Pentagon made “a deliberate attempt to confuse, hide, and conceal the truth.” Given the Pentagon’s casual relationship with the truth on this subject, that’s not so tough to believe.
• Toward the end of the interview, Elizondo refers to the recent admission from the Navy that there is at least one more, longer video of the tic-tac UFO encounter – something the Pentagon has repeatedly denied. “I am happy with the fact that recently some Navy former senior officials have come out and admitted there were more videos (of) greater length,” said Elizondo. “Also the Navy’s admission about the reality of UAPs and the fact they are creating new (UAP reporting) policies. … (This) is definitely a step in the right direction. I am not sure I can take credit for it but I like to think I played a small part in it.” “[I]t makes me feel a little vindicated.”
• Elizondo is still under an Non-Disclosure Agreement and doesn’t want to lose his security clearance, so he can’t say more. But perhaps he’s let something slip here. When referencing the “thousands of documents” related to the AATIP program that haven’t been cleared for release, he mentions “videos”… plural. There could be many UAP videos in the Navy’s possession from other incidents, but no one has filed a FOIA request for them. Still, Elizondo is confident that we will see a major disclosure of UAPs/UFOs by the Department of Defense this year.
One of the repeating themes we’ve run across in our coverage of the ongoing story of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)
and the search for information about UFOs/UAP is the disconnect between what the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA) has said about Luis Elizondo and what the Pentagon has had to say about him. If you ask TTSA, Harry Reid (who requested the program initially) or Elizondo himself, he ran the program. If you run the question by the Pentagon, specifically spokesperson Susan Gough, Elizondo had “no assigned duties” in the Defense Intelligence Agency and was not involved with AATIP.
So what’s with that disconnect? It’s a question I asked early on when researching this subject and never found a convincing answer. And the fact that Elizondo himself never seemed to come forward to defend his statements made it seem all the more strange. But now he’s broken his silence. In an interview with John Greenewald at The Black Vault, Elizondo tackles that question and many others. There’s no new documentation coming out of this interview (at least not yet) but at least we get to hear his side of the story. I’m going to include a couple of the more interesting snippets from the interview here, but if you have any interest in the subject I would suggest you click through and read the entire thing for yourself.
First of all, what does Elizondo say his role in AATIP was?
“As the senior ranking person in the AATIP program, I was ultimately responsible for ensuring the efficient and effective operations of the overall effort. However, in fairness, the lion’s work was performed by the outstanding men and women we had working in the program. My job was primarily to fend off the distractions so the rest of the team could do their job. In essence, my job was to catch the proverbial bullets so our folks could do their job without distraction. Not an unusual role for the senior person in any program to assume. This includes fighting for resources, support, and personnel.”
So if that’s the case, how does the Pentagon get the story so wrong? Why would Susan Gough keep insisting he wasn’t involved? Elizondo mentions that he’s kept quiet about this in the past primarily because he was threatened with having his security clearance taken away when he first came out with TTSA and he doesn’t want to lose it. But now he feels he needs to set the record straight.
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Article by Andrew Whalen January 10, 2020 (newsweek.com)
• In the summer of 1973, a Soviet source was working at the Soviet Union’s Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range in present-day Kazakhstan. Also known as “Site 7”, the base was the headquarters for the “warhead checkout unit” with a garrison of Soviet Air Force personnel stationed there. That evening, the source stepped outside “for some air”, looked up and saw a “green circular object or mass in the sky.” The sky was clear with no clouds, and there was no sound. In a matter of minutes, the green circle widened and several green concentric circles formed around the center mass. Then the green mass disappeared.
• The CIA made note of this Cold War-era intelligence at the time. In 1978 the CIA released a heavily redacted, one paragraph version of the full intelligence report detailing the UFO sighting. Recently, John Greenewald of The Black Vault requested a Mandatory Declassification Review of the document and received a more detailed declassified CIA intelligence report on the incident, including rough maps of the facilities, the command hierarchy and personnel estimates. Weapons tested at the facility included experimental missiles, possible laser weapons, and warheads with cartridges loaded with hundreds of metal balls.
• Greenewald drew a parallel between Cold War-era sightings and modern UAP encounters documented by the U.S. Department of Defense. “This is very much similar to the context we see today, with threats on military facilities,” Greenewald told Newsweek in a telephone interview. A May 2019 Newsweek article (see here), first reported by Politico and The Washington Post, revealed that UAPs intrude upon military airspace as often as several times per month.
An intelligence report newly declassified by the CIA sheds new light on a nearly 50-year-old UFO mystery, revealing details gathered from an experimental missile range in present-day Kazakhstan.
The report not only includes unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), but rumored Cold War “laser weapons.”
The UFO sighting took place in 1973 and was first revealed to the public in an “Intelligence Information Report” released by the CIA in 1978. Heavily redacted, the declassified version of the document contains only a single paragraph, detailing an encounter with a UFO at a location called “Site 7.”
The UFO encounter took place in the summer, when the sighting’s source “stepped outside for some air,” taking a break from watching a Canada vs. USSR sports match on TV. It was evening, and the source saw above “an unidentified sharp (bright) green circular object or mass in the sky.”
The UFO spotter believed the object was hovering above the cloud level, though it was a clear sky at the time of the sighting. The source was not, however, able to estimate the object’s diameter.
The sighting got weirder from there: “Within 10 to 15 seconds of observation, the green circle widened and within a brief period of time several green concentric circles formed around the mass. Within minutes the coloring disappeared. There was no sound, such as an explosion, associated with the phenomenon,” the document says.
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Listen to “E130 The Navy Has Admitted That UFOs Exist – Will USOs Be Next?” on Spreaker.
Article by Alex Hollings October 9, 2019 (sofrep.com)
• In September, the US Navy confirmed that while the Navy videos of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (or UFOs) were not meant for release to the public, they were authentic. John Greenewald, Jr of ‘The Black Vault’ website was the man that got the Navy to discuss the videos, leading to the video confirmation. The Navy, however, didn’t know what these phenomenon were.
• Similarly, there is another unusual phenomenon that gets far less attention in the press: ‘Unidentified Submerged Objects’. A ‘USO’ is a catch-all term used to describe anything seen operating beneath the surface of water that defies explanation. Legends of USOs have permeated the maritime community for centuries. Many UFO witness, including military aviators, have suggested that UFOs operate just as well underwater as they do in the sky.
• Christopher Columbus reported seeing a USO sighting during his 1492 voyage to the New World. According to Columbus’ log, he spotted “a small wax candle that rose and lifted up, which too few seemed to be an indication of land.” They soon determined that it wasn’t a light source from land, but had instead come from the sea.
• In 1967, witnesses in Shag Harbor, Nova Scotia Canada, reported a UFO crashing into the harbor’s waters. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched rescue efforts for a ‘downed aircraft’, which turned up nothing.
• Earlier this year, Tylor Rogoway of ‘The War Zone’ website interviewed veteran U.S. Navy submariners, some of whom were SONAR operators with first-hand experience spotting these USO anomalies. That story can be traced back to Marc D’Antonio who, during a ‘courtesy ride’ on a U.S. Navy fast attack submarine, watched as the sub’s sonar operator detected a “fast mover” moving at hundreds of knots under the water in close proximity. Such a scenario of a fast moving, unidentified underwater object spotted by Navy personnel and then disregarded, rings true with veteran American submariners. Said one former submariner, “We were instructed that nothing is ever ‘unknown.” “[So] we usually logged it as seismic or biologic.”
• Such underwater anomalies typically go ignored unless they represent a threat to the vessel or an obstacle to the crew. The ocean is full of man made ships and living creatures. So encountering ‘strange’ objects is just a part of business when you’re operating a fast attack sub. One infamous unexplained ocean phenomena was the “Bloop” – a massive underwater sound recorded in 1997. (see 3:37 minute video of the “Bloop” below) The Bloop sound was so loud that it was recorded simultaneously on underwater microphones located more than 3,000 miles apart.
• As a policy, the Navy doesn’t investigate strange sonar readings, so unusual underwater phenomenon largely go unreported so long as it doesn’t interfere with the mission. But sub-mariner accounts confirm that ‘weird stuff’ is normal in the dark depths of Earth’s oceans. But ‘weird’ doesn’t necessarily mean alien, it just means unexplained… for now.
Last month, the United States Navy confirmed formally that two high profile videos allegedly captured from the nose of an F/A-18 Super Hornet attempting an intercept on an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena were real and notably, weren’t meant for release to the public. The Navy did not suggest that the strange craft shown in the videos was alien in origin, but rather did acknowledge that they truly didn’t know what they were seeing that night in January of 2015.
“I truly thought the official word on these videos would be ‘drones’ or something similar; but explainable,” John Greenewald, Jr, who runs the popular website The Black Vault, told SOFREP at the time. Greenewald was the man that got the Navy to discuss the videos, leading to a landslide of headlines throughout the media in the weeks that followed.
“We have official documents that have surfaced through FOIA that state just that. However, for the Navy to contradict that, and say that this ‘phenomena’ represents something ‘unidentified’ – that’s pretty amazing to me and proves yet again why we can’t lock ourselves into any one way of thinking or assume anything.”
Reports of unusual lights in the sky date all the way back to the beginning of recorded history, but there’s another unusual phenomena that often seems to coincide with these strange sightings that gets far less attention in the press: USOs, or Unidentified Submerged Objects. Like UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects), USO is a sort of catch-all term used to describe anything seen operating beneath the surface of a body of water that defies explanation. Legends of USOs have permeated the maritime community for centuries, and remain a common facet of discussion among UFO researchers to this day. In fact, many UFO witness statements, including those provided by military aviators, have suggested that the unusual crafts they’ve spotted flying in the sky seem to operate just as readily in the far denser medium of water — suggesting that these unusual objects can function beneath the surface of the ocean just as well as they can in the air.
3:37 minute video of “the Bloop” sounds from the Deep Pacific Ocean (‘AS N’ YouTube)
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by Keith Kloor April 30, 2019 (slate.com)
• In December 2017, the New York Times and Politico reported that the Navy’s USS Nimitz battle group encountered a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO off of the coast of San Diego in November 2004. They included video of the incident, followed by video of two other UFO encounters off of the coasts of Florida and Virginia. The Pentagon remained quiet about these incidents. (see NY Times article here)
• On April 23rd the Navy issued a statement to Politico admitting, “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.”
• While the Navy hasn’t gone so far as to admit to any alien-controlled craft, it has changed its guidelines so that sailors and aviators can make UFO reports to Navy authorities without fear of ridicule or reprisal. (see article on new Navy guidelines here)
• This development comes on the heels of a detailed paper that supports the accuracy of of the 2004 incident entitled: “A Forensic Analysis of Navy Carrier Strike Group Eleven’s Encounter with an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle.” The lead author, Robert Powell, mailed the analysis to various congressional committees, intelligence agencies, and branches of the military several months ago.
• The paper reveals that in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 ‘Tic Tac’ incident, a video of the encounter was shared and viewed widely by members aboard the USS Princeton and Nimitz via an internal military email system. Within 12 hours of the incident, a helicopter carrying nonuniformed personnel landed on the USS Princeton (pictured above) and approached Petty Officer Voorhis, who was in charge of the ship’s Cooperative Engagement Capability system, and requested that he turn over all the ship’s radar data, electronic information, and data recordings. Voorhis asked for their ID and was refused. But the ship’s captain soon ordered Voorhis to relinquished all the information, which was stored on magnetic tapes.
• The tapes contained crucial data that would shed light on the mysterious Tic Tac–shaped object. Said Voorhis, “You could literally plot the entire course of the object, you could extract the densities, the speeds, the way it moved, the way it displaced the air, its radar cross-section, how much of the radar itself was reflected off its surface. I mean you could pretty much recreate the entire event with the CEC data.”
• Powell and his colleagues found a 2013 Facebook page for the Nimitz that contains a conversation about the 2004 incident among various shipmates who served together at the time. All those on duty that day recalled it vividly in their Facebook comments; many said they were still befuddled by what they saw and why the data mysteriously disappeared.
• In mid-March 2019, Powell and other authors of the Nimitz incident paper gave a detailed presentation at a conference in Huntsville, Alabama, called the Scientific Conference on Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena. The conference was organized by a group that calls itself the “Scientific Coalition for Ufology” and includes scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The group says it endeavors to take a ‘cold-eyed’ approach to the UFO issue, examining only cases that have hard data and credible witnesses. “We’re looking to stay neutral and build a coalition of like-minded scientists,” says Rich Hoffman, who does information systems work for the U.S. military and was the lead organizer of the event.
• The event’s big draw was Luis Elizondo, a career military intelligence officer who had managed security for the Pentagon’s highly classified $22M Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Elizondo didn’t offer anything new or noteworthy about the UFO program he once led at the Pentagon, although he did say the “effort” was ongoing (and didn’t expire in 2012 as the Pentagon says). Elizondo told the audience that he had remained in close touch with his successor in the program “… who’s still at the Pentagon, who works this effort, very closely…. I don’t mean the past, but actively working this. So it definitely continues. It’s still going. That, too, will come out hopefully soon in a very official way.”
• Elizondo insists that “disclosure has occurred” and that UFOs “are real.” “You now have people at the highest levels of the United States government and international communities of their governments finally taking this (UFO phenomenon) serious, applying real resources, real talent, real expertise to look at this and finally figure out what this is.”
• In late 2018, Elizondo gave a presentation to European UFO buffs in Rome. He mentioned a famous 1952 incident when flying saucers were reported over Washington D.C. and showed a slide of the famous image of the UFOs flying over the US Capitol. Skeptics were quick to point out that this photo was a fake. “It was actually a still [image] from a CGI [computer generated image],” says John Greenewald of the Black Vault. Elizondo apologized for the error on his company’s Facebook page.
• Skeptics have also attacked Elizondo for facilitating the release in 2017 of several video clips of Navy encounters with UFOs, saying that these videos had not been declassified, even though these video clips had been on the internet since 2007. (George Knapp and his ‘I-Team’ have recently proven that the Pentagon did, in fact, authorize those videos’ release.) Online skeptics maintain that these videos only show some sort of classified missile, aircraft or drone.
On the afternoon of Nov. 14, 2004, two F/A-18 “Super Hornet” fighter jets were 30 minutes into a training drill off the coast of Southern California when they were redirected by a Naval radio operator to a “real world situation.” Earlier that day, the USS Nimitz nuclear aircraft carrier and the USS Princeton missile cruiser had detected more than a dozen unidentified objects on their radar screens—what the Navy then referred to as anomalous aircraft vehicles.
The F/A-18s were told by the Princeton’s captain to intercept the closest anomalous vehicle, which was located about 150 miles southwest of the San Diego coastline. When the pilots reached their coordinates, they spotted from an altitude of 20,000 feet a disturbance at the ocean’s surface. One of the pilots, commanding officer Dave Fravor, reported that he saw a white oval or “Tic Tac”–shaped object about 50 to 60 feet in size moving just above the churning water.
Fravor headed down for a closer look. What happened next was “like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he recounted in a 2017 New York Times article. The object accelerated so fast that it disappeared in a blink of an eye. A pilot in the other F/A-18 has subsequently described the episode similarly; he also says he watched as the object zipped around Fravor’s plane before it darted off in a flash.
Meanwhile, according to testimony from Petty Officer Gary Voorhis, who was stationed on the Princeton at the time of the episode, “At a certain point there ended up being multiple objects that we were tracking. That was towards the end of the encounter and they all generally zoomed around at ridiculous speeds, and angles, and trajectories and then eventually they all bugged out faster than our radars.”
Vague details of the incident first came to light several years ago, after the Times and other media outlets reported on it. No human-created military technology had such capabilities, the news stories suggested, so were the mysterious objects otherworldly or a mass delusion? The Pentagon wasn’t saying anything. But now, according to a statement issued on April 23 to Politico, the Navy admits, “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.”
Whoa. That was major news, as was the part about the U.S. military now pledging to update its guidelines so “reports of any such suspected [UFO] incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities.” Politico notes, “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.”
This development comes on the heels of a detailed paper of the 2004 incident that was recently completed and made public by a group of researchers who aimed to demonstrate that the incident actually happened. Titled “A Forensic Analysis of Navy Carrier Strike Group Eleven’s Encounter with an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle,” the paper, which was not published in an academic journal, does not make any claims for the origins of the objects, though it should be stated that all the authors have a long-standing interest in the UFO topic. The lead author, Robert Powell, tells me that he mailed the analysis to various congressional committees, intelligence agencies, and branches of the military several months ago. Whatever the biases of Powell and his fellow authors, there is no denying the body of evidence they amassed via Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with service personnel.
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September 9, 2018 (dailygalaxy.com)
• “Disclosure is not an event, it’s a process,” said Luis Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP). “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.”
• Elizondo left the Pentagon program in October of last year, saying that the government was not taking UFO sightings by the military seriously enough. The Pentagon admitted the existence of AATIP, but claimed it was discontinued in 2012. But in an interview with The (UK’s) Sunday Times, Elizondo reports that the program was never wound up and continued to monitor UFO sightings until as recently as last October when he quit.
• On the northern edge of the Las Vegas sprawl where city meets desert is the headquarters of Bigelow Aerospace, a company that plans to launch and sell its own space stations and build a space hotel and a lunar base. Armed sentries guard the building which may hold exotic “metamaterials” – synthetic materials with composite structures that exhibit properties not found naturally materials – of a crashed UFO spacecraft, according to Elizondo. (see image below) From 2007 to 2011, Bigelow Aerospace, a company founded by Robert Bigelow, 73, an entrepreneur and self-avowed ufologist, was paid $22 million by the Department of Defense.
• Former Nevada Senator, Harry Reid, was the point man in funding the Pentagon program and Bigelow Aerospace. Reid said, “I had talked to (astronaut) John Glenn a number of years before. [Glenn] thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into UFOs, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain.”
• When the existence of the Pentagon UFO program was released late last year, the secret was out. Most questions, such as where the money went, and what Bigelow is closely guarding in Las Vegas, have remained unanswered. The conspiracy website, Abovetopsecret.com, reported that Bigelow approached Mufon in 2008 with a business proposal to buy its database of UFO sightings and archive of evidence, including quite possibly alien artifacts, for $672,000. By November 2009, $334,000 of it had been paid.
• “Captured alloys and material from UFOs — that has to be alien, right?” says John Greenewald of the Black Vault website. “This rivals the Roswell debris going to Hangar 18.”
• “Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world on this issue,” says Bigelow. “Our scientists are scared of being ostracized, and our media is scared of the stigma. China and Russia are much more open and work on this with huge organizations within their countries. Smaller countries like Belgium, France, England and South American countries like Chile are more open, too. They are proactive and willing to discuss this topic, rather than being held back by a juvenile taboo.”
“Disclosure has already occurred. Disclosure is not an event, it’s a process,” said Luis Elizondo, former head of a hitherto unknown government operation called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP). “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.”
On the northern edge of the Las Vegas sprawl where city meets desert, a vast building resembling a giant hangar, the headquarters of Bigelow Aerospace, a company that plans to launch and sell its own space stations and, more ambitiously, build a space hotel and a lunar base, occupies a 50-acre city block . This is the headquarters of Bigelow Aerospace, a company that plans to launch and sell its own space stations and, more ambitiously, build a space hotel and a lunar base. Today, the hangar doors are closed and tumbleweed now blows across the car parks.
The perimeter is secured with razor wire and concrete barriers, and the only staff visible from outside are armed guards, hiding inside what’s speculated to be salvage of a crashed extraterrestrial object –commonly known as a UFO.
Residents of the neat residential streets say security was tightened at Bigelow Aerospace late last year when it was revealed by the New York Times and Washington post that the company was paid by the Pentagon to store parts recovered from crashed “unidentified aerial phenomena” — military-speak for UFOs — exotic materials believed to be alloys that defied scientific analysis and physically affected those who came into contact with them.
Not since 1947, when the US army said it had found a crashed UFO near Roswell, New Mexico, but in fact proved to be a weather balloon had the government come so close to admitting we are not alone in the vast reaches of the Milky Way.
But to date, there has been no retraction of the latest story of Pentagon UFO intrigue. Questioned about the events, the Pentagon has maintained an information blackout, as has Bigelow Aerospace. With no new leads, websites normally regarded as outlets for conspiracy theorists have turned up intriguing new evidence and stolen a march on America’s mainstream media.
The strange story of the salvaged UFOs began with the abrupt resignation last autumn of a senior Pentagon official, reports Nick Rufford for The Times of London. Luis Elizondo was the head of a hitherto unknown government operation called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), run by a team of 12, based on the fifth floor of the Pentagon called C-ring.
In a parting letter to Jim Mattis, the US defence secretary, Elizondo said the government was not taking sightings of unidentified craft by American warplanes seriously enough.
“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue? There remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.” Elizondo’s leaked letter blew the lid off what was, in effect, a clandestine government UFO-watching unit, infuriating the Pentagon’s top brass. In a terse statement, the Pentagon admitted the existence of AATIP without mentioning the UFO connection: the program, it said, was set up “to assess far-term, foreign advanced aerospace threats to the United States”, it said, and was discontinued in 2012 to make way for “other higher priority issues”.
Since then, Elizondo, whose impeccable credentials were confirmed by The Washington Post, has remained largely silent on the subject. But in an interview with The Sunday Times, he reports that the program was never wound up and continued to monitor UFO sightings until as recently as last October, when he quit. In the fascinating video below emphatically states that “disclosure has already occurred. Disclosure is not an event, it’s a process.
5:18 minute video excerpt of Robert Bigelow interview on “60 Minutes”
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