Inside the Pentagon's shadowy program on UFOs
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.
That 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 Reid's, Robert Bigelow, who is working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.
On CBS' “60 Minutes” in May, Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited Earth.
Working with 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 U.S. 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.
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,” 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, R-Alaska, and Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii - also supported the program. Stevens died in 2010, and Inouye in 2012.
While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 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.”
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 emailed statement, referring to the Department of Defense.
But Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort's government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the CIA. 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?” Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.
UFOs have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the military. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed UFO 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.
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