At midday on 1947-07-08, Colonel William Blanchard ordered his base public information officer, Lieutenant Walter Haut, to issue a press release announcing that the Army had recovered a flying disc, part of what became known as the Roswell incident (1947).1 That initial release referred specifically to a recovered ‘flying disc’;2 the Army never in fact used the term ‘flying saucer’, referring to the object only as a ‘disc’.3 According to In Plain Sight, the Army was forced to admit that same year that it had no idea what the flying discs were.4 The same account records that secret Army memos declassified in 1994 likewise referred to the object as a ‘flying disc’.5 Of the 1947 Roswell Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) crash, government investigators initially assumed the craft was from another nation, possibly on a reconnaissance mission, but the Army determined within hours that it had not been made by humans.6 In Plain Sight also records an allegation that a separate craft, said to have crashed at Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948, was retrieved by the military under a cloak of secrecy.7
The Army’s presence in the region predates Roswell: it conducted the world’s first-ever detonation of the Trinity nuclear device at White Sands, New Mexico, on 1945-07-16.8 In 1958 the Army and the United States Air Force (USAF) jointly took over the Avrocar project from Avro, renaming it ‘Project Silver Bug’.9
In the 1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recruited individuals said to possess extrasensory perception (ESP) to help uncover intelligence secrets.10 After the CIA’s own ESP work concluded in the late 1970s, the programme moved to the Army’s base at Fort Meade, Maryland,11 where the Army formally decided to find, train and use remote viewers under Project STARGATE,12 a classified programme run in partnership with SRI International and also referred to as The Stargate Project.13 Recruiters compiled a list of indicators to help identify candidates, including consistent success regardless of the task14 and being well liked by peers while nonetheless regarded as different from the norm.15 Joseph McMoneagle, who came to remote viewing from a background in Army Intelligence technical collection systems16 and retired from the Army holding the rank of CW2 (Chief Warrant Officer 2),17 was one of the programme’s original remote viewers18 and helped the Army locate hostages in Iran.19 Ed Dames, a retired Army major,20 was one of five prototype Army members selected to be trained by Ingo Swann during 1983 and 1984,21 after Harold E. Puthoff told Swann that the Army was funding the training.22 Lyn Buchanan, also a retired Army remote viewer, was part of the Stargate Project,23 as was Paul H. Smith, a former Army major and one of the programme’s principals.24 A later neurological study of UAP experiencers by Garry P. Nolan found that some of the Army’s former psychic spies from the remote-viewing programme shared the same hyperdeveloped caudate-putamen identified in experiencers.25 Craig McPherson, another Army veteran linked to UAP-related claims, served in the Army Infantry in Europe from June 1944 until October 194626 and held the rank of sergeant by his discharge.27
In October 2019 it was announced that the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA) was partnering with the Army to research alleged metamaterials that TTSA’s sources claimed to have obtained from crashed craft.28 Samples known as Art’s Parts were sent to an Army laboratory to test whether they originated from an alien spacecraft,29 under an agreement secured through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between TTSA and the Army,30 which allowed the Army to make its historical data, laboratories and scientists available for the testing.31 According to In Plain Sight, an Army public relations officer said the materials research was of key interest to Army research;32 under the agreement, the Army supplied expertise and facilities to analyse the samples while TTSA supplied the materials themselves, with no financial compensation changing hands in either direction,33 and any invention resulting from a major breakthrough would be jointly owned.34 The same account records that researcher John Greenewald reported via The Black Vault, on 2019-10-18, that the Army had released its agreement with TTSA.35 The Army went on to conduct its own in-house analysis of the material; the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) broadly agreed with the Army’s conclusions but found the structure was not purely a layered magnesium alloy and bismuth.36 AARO ultimately concluded that a sample from an alleged crashed off-world spacecraft, acquired from a private UAP investigating organisation and from the Army, was a manufactured, terrestrial alloy that did not represent off-world technology or possess any exceptional qualities.37
Luis Elizondo joined the Army after college,38 beginning his career at an Army recruiter’s office in Miami, Florida, in 199539 and completing basic training that same year.40 He enlisted as an Army grunt rather than accept an officer’s commission, in order to avoid being assigned to the medical corps against his preference,41 and trained as an Army counterintelligence special agent, an occupational specialty known as 97-Bravo.42 He was recommended by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Seage for a position in the Army’s Great Skills program,43 a long-running Army intelligence programme that recruited young soldiers identified as having special talents and trained and employed them as soldier spies.44 Eugene Lessman was the lead recruiter for classified activities within the Army45 and a Military Intelligence Civilian Accepted Career Program (MICACP) civilian case officer.46 Elizondo’s career would later briefly cross that of Puthoff, whom he first met in person years afterwards at a programme dinner in Roslyn, Virginia.47
Karl E. Nell, a recently retired Army colonel and aerospace executive, served as the Army’s liaison to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2021 to 2022, working there with David Grusch.48 Neill Tipton, who also served in the Army,49 later acted as liaison for the Army’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Task Force and was shown Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) footage by Elizondo.50 The Predator UAV itself began as a joint Army and United States Navy (USN) project before transferring to the USAF in 1996.51 Elizondo has also said that in 2014, an Army Patriot missile battery on the Atlantic coast tracked multiple unidentified objects reaching speeds of approximately 9,700 kilometres per hour,52 and that during his time working Army investigations he was aware of one report on the incident, which the Army later opened under the oversight of its then-director of counterintelligence.53 According to the Department of Defense Inspector General’s 2023 report on the Pentagon’s handling of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Army personnel use the Air Force’s Marauder system to document and report UAP observations because the Army has not developed its own UAP-specific process.54