Pentagon Denies Its 'Secret UFO Program' Investigated UFOs

John Greenewald, Jr. of The Black Vault was informed recently by Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough that the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), first brought to public attention in 2017, was not actually involved with investigating UFOs—or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP), a term coined to combat the stigma attached to UFOs.

“Neither AATIP nor AAWSAP were UAP related,” said Gough in an e-mail to The Black Vault. “The purpose of AATIP was to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapons system applications with future technology projections over the next 40 years, and to create a center of expertise on advanced aerospace technologies."

This information came as a result of the Pentagon wanting to correct the record and clear up some inaccuracies, claimed Gough, and is in direct contradiction to a statement released to the NY Post in March of this year by Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood, who said that AATIP “did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Confusingly, the Pentagon is now claiming that, while what Sherwood said was accurate at the time given the information to which he was privy, it came from a previous spokesperson who had inaccurately represented the AATIP.

“At the time, Mr. Sherwood was repeating the information that had been provided by a previous spokesperson some two years earlier,” said Gough. “That previous spokesperson is no longer with my organization, and I cannot comment on why that person’s explanation of AATIP included that it had looked at anomalous events. According to all the official information I have now, when implemented, AATIP did not pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena; that was not part of the technical studies nor the reports produced by the program.”

This is also contradicted by the testimony of Luis Elizondo—a former Department of Defense (DoD) intelligence officer who claims to have been program head for the AATIP, and who currently serves as the To the Stars…Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) Director of Global Security and Special Programs.

Elizondo maintains that the “AATIP itself spent its entire time on UFOs."

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also pushed back against the Pentagon’s new narrative.

“AATIP was my program,” Reid said in a statement. “One can say whatever, but the truth is it was for only one purpose—to study UFOs.”

This news follows the chain of information slowly released through To the Stars…Academy of Arts & Science and government sources since 2017, when news broke of the Pentagon’s secretive UFO project.

Most recently, five former Navy servicemen came forward to participate in an interview with Tim McMillan for Popular Mechanics, regarding the now-famous 2004 Nimitz UFO encounters. It’s claimed in the interview that, following one of the Nimitz UFO incidents, two “unknown individuals” confiscated all data collected from the encounter.

TTSA also recently announced that it will be partnering with the U.S. Army to “advance materiel and technology innovations.” Prior to that, Luis Elizondo told the New York Times that the results of any studies done on the “metamaterials” which TTSA announced were in their possession last July are still pending, due to the employment of the “scientific method.”

A few months prior to news of the reportedly acquired “metamaterials,” five Navy pilots told the New York Times that unidentified flying objects were an “almost daily” occurrence from the summer of 2014 through March 2015; two of the pilots, Lieutenant Ryan Graves and Lieutenant Danny Accoin agreed to go on record about their experiences with both the New York Times and for the History Channel UFO docuseries Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation—a project created in tandem with TTSA. The pilots’ testimony prompted several senators to request and receive private briefings on the encounters. In response to questions regarding the pilots’ reports, President Trump has gone on record as saying that he does “not particularly” believe that Navy pilots are seeing UFOs.

It is unclear at this time if the president’s statements reflect anything other than a general disinterest in the subject.

The narrative built from those accounts is not without controversy in the UFO community, having received some pushback from researchers. That argument stems mostly from the seemingly cyclical nature of the government’s public interest in UFOs, and the disinformation associated therewith—exacerbated by the presence within TTSA of former intelligence agency personnel in prominent positions. Those long-festering doubts of TTSA’s trustworthiness due to the corporation’s association with the U.S. government are now compounded following the public benefit corporation’s new agreement with the Army.

John Greenewald, Jr. of The Black Vault has done significant fact checking on claims made by TTSA and its representatives, recently publishing a series of statements that show the U.S. Navy never cleared for public release three UFO videos distributed by Elizondo and TTSA, although the Navy did acknowledge the objects within the videos—referred to respectively as “FLIR1,” “Gimbal,” and “GoFast”—were “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Given these discrepancies in TTSA’s statements and their now apparent partnership with the U.S. Army, more people within the UFO community are expressing concerns that the public benefit corporation was created as a massive spin operation to control the narrative surrounding unidentified flying objects. However, the disagreement between TTSA and the Pentagon regarding the AATIP’s activities complicates that opinion, calling into question how much cooperation exists between the public benefit corporation and the U.S. military.

Regardless, as more former and current military personnel come forward to relate their experiences with UFOs, there is little doubt within the community that, if nothing else, the cases being presented have merit.

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