Pentagon Releases Statement Defending Change in Narrative Regarding the AATIP and UFOs

John Greenewald, Jr. of The Black Vault published a statement last Thursday from Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough which explained the change in narrative recently adopted by the Department of Defense (DoD) regarding the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and UFOs.

That statement read:

At some point in the last couple months you have asked, in one way or another, why some DOD statements about the AATIP program have changed since December 2017 or even since this past Spring. I wanted to provide you with a broad comment regarding the changes.
Myself and my predecessors in my office, as well as our colleagues in the Defense Intelligence Agency and elsewhere in the department, have done our best to provide you and others asking about AATIP the most accurate information we had available to us at the time we responded to your questions. Questions about AATIP have continued ever since this past Spring, becoming more focused and asking for details beyond what was readily available on a program that ended nearly eight years ago, especially as people who had direct knowledge of AATIP have moved to other positions or left the department. As we conducted research to try to answer the continuing questions, we sometimes uncovered new information that changed some of our previous responses. When responding to subsequent queries, we used the new information in our responses to be as accurate as possible with what we now knew.

The statement "was sent en mass to an unknown number of recipients," and meant to clarify a previous statement made by Gough in which she claimed that the AATIP 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."

That statement was contradicted by Luis Elizondo—a former DoD intelligence officer who claims to have been program head for the AATIP, and who currently serves as the Director of Global Security and Special Programs for To the Stars…Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA)—along with former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid; both of whom maintain that the AATIP’s primary focus was the investigation of UFOs.

Elizondo insisted that the “AATIP itself spent its entire time on UFOs,” while former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a statement that “AATIP was my program. 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 purported 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.

Neither the Navy nor the Pentagon has issued a statement denying that what these servicemen witnessed were, in fact, unidentified flying objects.

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