The New York Times

The New York Times is an American newspaper whose reporting has featured prominently in the modern history of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) research. Its most significant contribution was the 2017-12 New York Times Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) disclosure story, a front-page report that revealed the existence of the US Department of Defense (DoD)’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and the role of Luis Elizondo within it.¹

On the afternoon of 2017-12-16, the Times broke the story online, followed within seconds by Politico and then the Washington Post.² The following day, 2017-12-17, it ran two articles about AATIP on the cover of its Sunday print edition.³ According to the Times, Pentagon officials acknowledged the programme’s existence in response to the paper’s questions, confirming that AATIP had begun within the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).⁴ The paper reported that AATIP had investigated reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) for years, drawing on Department of Defense officials, interviews with programme participants, and records it had obtained.⁵ Contracts obtained by the Times showed a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million for the programme, beginning in late 2008 through 2011.⁶ The first two Pentagon UAP videos released by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences were timed for release alongside the Times, Politico, and Washington Post coverage.⁷

The story had immediate consequences inside the Pentagon. On 2017-12-15, acting on information contained in the Times’ inquiry, DoD official Garry Reid notified the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence’s security officer that Elizondo may have misused government systems and might intend to release footage or information obtained during his employment.⁸ Elizondo has said that at the Pentagon’s Christmas party that year, aides told Secretary of Defense James Mattis that the Times was preparing a front-page Sunday story on a secret programme investigating UAP, and asked why Elizondo had resigned.⁹ Times reporter Helene Cooper telephoned Elizondo and told him she had met with a since-departed Pentagon official regarding the story.¹⁰ Elizondo has said that he and his colleagues regarded the paper’s cautious editorial framing of its Tic Tac reporting as excessive, believing the headline should instead have read “We are not alone!"¹¹ Days after the story broke, Fox News commentator Brett Baer said that a lot of people were taking the revelation seriously.¹² The paper’s coverage also touched the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter: shortly before an article on the incident appeared in the Times, a United States Navy (USN) commander telephoned David Fravor regarding a Freedom of Information Act request for material about the encounter.¹³ Fravor has said that a friend later persuaded him to testify before Congress, arguing that he was the one person whose account could not be discredited and would lend credibility to the Times article.¹⁴

In a 2020-07 New York Times interview with Eric Davis on recovered Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) materials, conducted apparently before he joined Aerospace Corporation, Eric Davis told the Times that the US held recovered physical UAP samples.¹⁵ Davis also told the paper that he had given a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency in March 2020, an event recorded as the 2020-03 Eric Davis classified briefing on off-world vehicle retrievals, concerning retrievals from off-world vehicles not made on Earth.¹⁶ Leslie Kean has said that covering UFO crash retrievals has been particularly difficult to get published in the Times, given both the controversy involved and the classified nature of the underlying information.¹⁷ According to In Plain Sight, the Times reported that most resolved UAP sightings proved to be either errant junk such as balloons or surveillance activity, with cases logged in the preceding year, once more data had been collected, found to have ordinary earthbound explanations.¹⁸ The same account records that Times readers were not shown the underlying intelligence report on UAP sightings, and were told this was necessary to protect intelligence collection methods.¹⁹

The paper’s engagement with UAP-adjacent subjects predates AATIP by decades. According to In Plain Sight, in January 1945 the Times reported that Germany had introduced “foo-fighter” balls of fire into the night skies over Germany, racing alongside the wings of American Beaufighter aircraft flying intruder missions over the Reich.²⁰ In 1990, Times reporter Howard Blum revealed what the same account describes as a secret UFO Working Group at the Pentagon, initiated by John Alexander to evaluate UAP sightings and investigate alleged unexplained objects entering Earth’s orbit.²¹ Ralph Blumenthal was a contributor and former staff reporter for the Times.²² The paper’s investigative reach extends beyond UAP matters: Daniel Sheehan acted for the Times during the furore surrounding its 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers leak.²³

The Times has surfaced in UAP-adjacent sources in more personal contexts too. Leslie Kean has said that the only information about her late brother available online was a three-sentence Elliott Budd Hopkins’s New York Times obituary, so short that a search would not have found it even if attempted.²⁴ In a 2011-10-30 op-ed, “A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs” (New York Times op-ed by Mona Simpson), Mona Simpson reported that her brother Steve Jobs experienced something notable just before he died.²⁵ Whitley Strieber’s book Communion, an account of contact with non-human sentient beings, was a Times bestseller.²⁶ Researcher Jacques Vallée cross-checked the trustees, directors, and advisers of major UFO organisations against the Times’ computer database and other references such as Who’s Who.²⁷ In July 1969, Times science reporter Walter Sullivan was among the journalists - including Frank Pearlman of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jules Bergmann of American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Bill Stout of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) News - introduced to an unidentified man personally escorted into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory press room by press-office head Frank Bristow.²⁸ By 2017, when the article documented as the 2017 New York Times article on the Pentagon Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) program was published, the r/UFOs online forum had grown to 70,000 members, according to Jason Samosa.²⁹