Pentagon Reveals Secret UFO Program
A still image from a Navy jet fighter's encounter with an unidentified aerial phenomenon.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that the Pentagon has admitted to spending $22 million of its $600 billion budget on a hidden UFO program, known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program.
The Pentagon UFO program was reportedly run from 2007 until 2012, when officials say it was defunded; although supporters of the program claim that it remains in existence, and that agents continue to investigate encounters brought to them by service members, while simultaneously performing their normal duties.
The program was headed by former Department of Defense (DoD) intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, who recently resigned from the DoD to join To the Stars...Academy of Arts and Sciences, a public benefit corporation meant to study unidentified aerial phenomena.
The program, parts of which remain classified, was sponsored by then Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in 2007, who has a strong interest in UFO phenomena.
If anyone says they have the answers, they’re fooling themselves.
— Senator Harry Reid (@SenatorReid) December 16, 2017
We don’t know the answers but we have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions. This is about science and national security. If America doesn’t take the lead in answering these questions, others will.
Reid remains proud of his part in the creation of the UFO program.
"I'm not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going," Reid told the New York Times."I think it's one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I've done something that no one has done before."
The program was created to collect and analyze data from a wide range of "'anomalous aerospace threats"; from advanced aircraft operated by adversaries of the U.S. to commercial drones to extraterrestrial encounters.
Most of the money used for the program went to an aerospace research company ran by Robert Bigelow, a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Reid, who himself said in an interview with 60 Minutes last May that he is "absolutely convinced" of the reality of the UFO phenomenon and that mankind has been visited by extraterrestrials.
Two other congressman, Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI), both of whom are now deceased, approved of the secret program, which was financed through the Pentagon's budget for classified programs.
“This was so-called black money,” said Reid. “Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it.”
The money was used by Bigelow's company, Bigelow Aerospace, to modify buildings held in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Elizondo and program contractors claim were recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Research was also done on people who had reportedly experienced physical side effects as a result of exposure to said materials.
Part of the Pentagon's program included collecting the experiences of military servicemen, and the current release of information included two videos said to have been shot by Navy F/A-18F fighter jets. Two of the jets are said to have encountered an unexplained object in 2004 while stationed aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, California, as seen in the first video; while the date and location of the second video are undisclosed.
A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program by its director stated that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and went on to warn that the United States was incapable of defending itself from the anomalous objects being studied. Senator Reid found the discoveries made by the program to be significant enough to warrant heightened security to protect it, but his request for the special designation was denied.
The limitations placed on the program frustrated those in the government that take the UFO phenomenon seriously, and led to the eventual resignation of Elizondo in October of this year, who wrote in his resignation letter of the need for more serious attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.”
Elizondo joined Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the UFO program, and Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, at To the Stars...Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The corporation is composed of "a team of the most experienced, connected and passionately curious minds from the US intelligence community, including the CIA and Department of Defense," according to Tom DeLonge, formerly of the pop-punk band Blink-182, the organization's president and CEO.
DeLonge has been teasing a big revelation on social media for months, and this admission by the United States government of a secret program to study UFOs would seem to confirm his statements.
The three men are currently involved in fundraising efforts for the public benefit corporation, and have stated publicly that they do not currently believe that unidentified aerial phenomena originate from any terrestrial nation.