XPost: alt.ufo.reports, sci.skeptic, sci.military.naval
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From: area18@cnn.com

WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense Department
budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program was almost impossible to find.

Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.

For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified
flying objects, according to Defense Department officials,
interviews with program participants and records obtained by The
New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official,
Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep
within the building’s maze.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the
existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012.
But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for
the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For
the past five years, they say, officials with the program have
continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service
members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department
duties.

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in
2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of
Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority
leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space
phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research
company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of
Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA
to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.

On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was
“absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have
visited Earth.

Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program
produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that
seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of
propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.

Officials with the program have also studied videos of
encounters between unknown objects and American military
aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval
object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy
F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the
coast of San Diego in 2004.

Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud
of the program. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got
this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in
Nevada. “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.”

Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending
subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K.
Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr.
Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.

While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an
astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin
of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or
galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena,
sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But,
she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is
that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”

James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the
author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O.
sightings, was also doubtful. “There are plenty of prosaic
events and human perceptual traits that can account for these
stories,” Mr. Oberg said. “Lots of people are active in the air
and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk
unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.”

Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. “There could well be
a pearl there,” he said.

In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this
month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as
part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that
the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.

“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues
that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD
to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in
an email, referring to the Department of Defense.

But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the
effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then
on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials
from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his
Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to
protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal
opposition.

“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr.
Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis.

Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a
successor, whom he declined to name.

U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in
the United States, including by the American military. In 1947,
the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more
than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially
ended in 1969. The project, which included a study code-named
Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most
sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy
planes, although 701 remained unexplained.

Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the
time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue
Book that it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of
national security or in the interest of science.”

Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow. In
2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that
an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached
him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he
conducted research.

Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his
meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a
research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens
and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol.

“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid
said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio,
who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he
thought that the federal government should be looking seriously
into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members,
particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could
not identify or explain.

The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of
command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they
would be laughed at or stigmatized.

The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, “was
one of the easiest meetings I ever had.”

He added, “Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since
I was in the Air Force.’” (The Alaska senator had been a pilot
in the Army’s air force, flying transport missions over China
during World War II.)

During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being
tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said
had followed his plane for miles.

None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate
floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. “This
was so-called black money,” he said. “Stevens knows about it,
Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted
it.” Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for
classified programs.

Contracts obtained by The Times show a congressional
appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008
through 2011. The money was used for management of the program,
research and assessments of the threat posed by the objects.

The funding went to Mr. Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace,
which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the
program.

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in
Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials
that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been
recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also
studied people who said they had experienced physical effects
from encounters with the objects and examined them for any
physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to
military service members who had reported sightings of strange
aircraft.

“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave
Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff,
an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory
perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for
the program. “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this
plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the
electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”

The program collected video and audio recordings of reported
U.F.O. incidents, including footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super
Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing
aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves. The Navy
pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are seeing.
“There’s a whole fleet of them,” one exclaims. Defense officials
declined to release the location and date of the incident.

“Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world
on this issue,” Mr. Bigelow said in an interview. “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.”

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such
extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security
to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the
identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional
aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to
William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time,
requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access
program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its
director at the time asserted that “what was considered science
fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was
incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies
discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was
denied.

Mr. Elizondo, in his resignation letter of Oct. 4, said there
was a 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.” He expressed his frustration with
the limitations placed on the program, telling Mr. Mattis that
“there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent
of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the
nation.”

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former
Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a
deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new
commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and
Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their
venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.

In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government
colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied
did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not
something any government or institution should classify in order
to keep secret from the people,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects
had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now,
they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”

But, he said, “we have to start someplace.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program- ufo-harry-reid.html?src=trending

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