Some relevant excerpts from Gideon Lewis-Kraus' 4-30-21 NEW YORKER article entitled "How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously":
In 2007, [Robert] Bigelow received a letter from a senior official
at the Defense Intelligence Agency who was curious about Skinwalker. Bigelow
connected him to an old friend from the Nevada desert, Senator Harry Reid, who
was then the Senate Majority Leader, and the two men met to discuss their
common interest in U.F.O.s. The D.I.A. official later visited Skinwalker,
where, from a double-wide observation trailer on site, he is said to have had a
spectral encounter; as one Bigelow affiliate described it, he saw a
“topological figure” that “appeared in mid-air” and “went from pretzel-shaped
to Möbius-strip-shaped.”
Reid reached out to Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, who
believed he’d seen a U.F.O. as a pilot in the Second World War, and Senator
Daniel Inouye, of Hawaii. In the 2008 Supplemental Appropriations Bill,
twenty-two million dollars of so-called black money was set aside for a new
program. The Pentagon was not enthusiastic. As one former intelligence official
put it, “There were some government officials who said, ‘We shouldn’t be doing
this, this is really ridiculous, this is a waste of money.’ ” He went on,
“And then Reid would call them out of a meeting and say, ‘I want you to be
doing this. This was appropriated.’ It was sort of like a joke that bordered on
an annoyance and people worried that if this all came out, that the government
was spending money on this, this will be a bad story.” The Advanced Aerospace
Weapon System Applications Program was announced in a public solicitation for
bids to examine the future of warfare. U.F.O.s were not mentioned, but
according to Reid the subtext was clear. Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space
Studies, or baass, a Bigelow
Aerospace subsidiary, was the only bidder. When Bigelow won the government
contract, he contacted the same cohort of paranormal investigators he’d worked
with at his institute. Other participants were recruited from within the
Pentagon’s ranks. In 2008, Luis Elizondo, a longtime counterintelligence
officer working in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence
and Security, was visited by two people who asked him what he thought about
U.F.O.s. He replied that he didn’t think about them, which was apparently the
correct answer, and he was asked to join [...].
On October 4, 2017, at the behest of Christopher K.
Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Leslie
Kean was called to a confidential meeting in the bar of an upscale hotel near
the Pentagon. She was greeted by Hal Puthoff, the longtime paranormal
investigator, and Jim Semivan, a retired C.I.A. officer, who introduced her to
a sturdy, thick-necked, tattooed man with a clipped goatee named Luis Elizondo.
The previous day had been his last day of work at the Pentagon. Over the next
three hours, Kean was taken through documents that proved the existence of what
was, as far as anyone knew, the first government inquiry into U.F.O.s since the
close of Project Blue Book, in 1970. The program that Kean had spent years
lobbying for had existed the whole time.
After Elizondo resigned, he and other key aatip participants—including
Mellon, Puthoff, and Semivan—almost immediately joined To the Stars Academy of
Arts & Science, an operation dedicated to U.F.O.-related education,
entertainment, and research, and organized by Tom DeLonge, a former front man
of the pop-punk outfit Blink-182. Later that month, DeLonge
invited Elizondo onstage at a launch event. Elizondo announced that they were
“planning to provide never-before-released footage from real U.S. government
systems—not blurry amateur photos but real data and real videos.”
Kean
was told that she could have the videos, along with chain-of-custody
documentation, if she could place a story in the Times. Kean soon
developed doubts about DeLonge, after he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to
discuss his belief that what crashed at Roswell was a reverse-engineered U.F.O.
built in Argentina by fugitive Nazi scientists, but she had full confidence in
Elizondo. “He had incredible gravitas,” Kean told me. She called Ralph
Blumenthal, an old friend and a former Times staffer at work
on a biography of the Harvard psychiatrist and alien-abduction researcher John
Mack; Blumenthal e-mailed Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, to say
that they wanted to pitch “a sensational and highly confidential time-sensitive
story” in which a “senior U.S. intelligence official who abruptly quit last
month” had decided to expose “a deeply secret program, long mythologized but
now confirmed.” After a meeting with representatives from the Washington, D.C.,
bureau, the Times agreed. The paper assigned a veteran
Pentagon correspondent, Helene Cooper, to work with Kean and Blumenthal.
On Saturday, December 16, 2017, their story—“glowing auras and ‘black money’: the pentagon’s
mysterious u.f.o. program”—appeared online; it was printed on the front
page the next day. Accompanying the piece were two videos, including “flir1.” Senator Reid was quoted as
saying, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this going.” The
Pentagon confirmed that the program had existed, but said that it had been
closed down in 2012, in favor of other funding priorities. Elizondo claimed
that the program had continued in the absence of dedicated funding. The article
dwelled not on the reality of the U.F.O. phenomenon—the only actual case
discussed at any length was the Nimitz encounter—but on the existence of the
covert initiative. The Times article drew millions of readers.
Kean noticed a change almost immediately. When people asked her at dinner
parties what she did for a living, they no longer giggled at her response but
fell rapt. Kean gave all the credit to Elizondo and Mellon for coming forward,
but she told me, “I never would have ever imagined I could have ended up
writing for the Times. It’s the pinnacle of everything I’ve ever
wanted to do—just this miracle that it happened on this great road, great
journey.”
It was hard to tell, however, what exactly aatip had accomplished. Elizondo
went on to host the History Channel docuseries “Unidentified,” in which he
solemnly invokes his security oath like a catchphrase. He insisted to me
that aatip had made
important strides in understanding the “five observables” of U.A.P.
behavior—including “gravity-defying capabilities,” “low observability,” and
“transmedium travel.” When I pressed for details, he reminded me of his
security oath.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a Pentagon project that had
begun as a contractor’s investigation into goblins and werewolves, and had been
reincarnated under the aegis of a musician best known for an album called
“Enema of the State,” aatip was
subject to intense scrutiny. Kean is unwavering in her belief that she and an
insider exposed something formidable, but a former Pentagon official recently
suggested that the story was more complicated: the program she disclosed was of
little consequence compared with the one she set in motion. Widespread
fascination with the idea that the government cared about U.F.O.s had inspired
the government at last to care about U.F.O.s.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
