Newly Leaked Documents Show Pentagon Program Was Interested in UFOs After All

In a recent article for Popular Mechanics, Tim McMillan traced a path through a byzantine maze of government documents and insider testimony that show the Pentagon’s Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was interested in studying UFOs, despite the recent denials by Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough.

According to McMillan’s research, the Pentagon’s denial is part of a campaign of confusion involving “a dizzying shell game that’s entirely consistent with how black budget intelligence programs are run.”

“What you’re dealing with is the very core of government secrecy and how things they absolutely don’t ever want to discuss are kept hidden away,” said one former AATIP contractor.

Documents retrieved from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, LLC (BAASS), along with the testimony of former AATIP contractors, show that the company was contracted by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to produce technical reports on "exotic and potential 'game-changing' aerospace technologies, and the manner of determining what areas these radical airborne breakthroughs might emerge was through the research of UFOs."

The Pentagon sidestepped the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by outsourcing the research to a private company. Because the information contained in the reports generated by BAASS "is proprietary and cannot be disseminated or used without prior written consent from the Operating Manager of BAASS," government officials were afforded the ability to deny any and all connection between themselves and the research performed by the company.

According to McMillan, "The DIA may have had extensive access to the UFO materials, but because all of the data technically belonged to BAASS, under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, disclosing or releasing proprietary materials provided to the government in confidence is a federal crime."

As a result, the Pentagon is able to maintain that the AATIP did not investigate UFOs, because that duty was largely outsourced to BAASS.

This makes the government denial a technicality, rather than an explanation offered in good faith.

The Pentagon’s narrative has long been strongly 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 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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