John Podesta is a political consultant and former White House official who served as Chief of Staff to President William J. Clinton from 1998 to 20011 and as Counsellor to President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2015,2 and is described as a confidant of both presidents.3 He later served as campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.4 Podesta held top-secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearances in his roles with both administrations.5 He is also the founder of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington DC.6
Podesta has a long record of pushing for the declassification of UAP-related material. As Clinton’s Chief of Staff, he secured Executive Order 12958, which declassified millions of pages of national security documents, including many Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) files.7 In 2002, shortly after leaving the Clinton White House, he supported a lawsuit seeking the release of government records on the 1965 UAP incident at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.8 At a Washington National Press Club press conference, Podesta said he thought it was time to open the books on government UFO investigations, arguing that the American people could handle the truth and that disclosure was required by law.9 On his final day as Counsellor to Obama, in February 2015, he tweeted that his biggest failure of 2014 was, once again, not securing the disclosure of the UFO files.10 While working on the campaign, Podesta said he thought the American people could handle the truth about the issue,11 and in March 2016 said, from the campaign trail, that he had discussed the matter with Hillary Clinton, that people wanted to know what the government knew, and that classified UAP files remained that could be declassified.12 He has since said that not insisting on disclosure of UAP evidence while in the White House is among his regrets.13
The bulk of Podesta’s UAP-related correspondence, revealed in the 2016 email leak, was with Robert Fish, who had worked at classified aerospace facilities. Fish said he had contacted Podesta because it frustrated him that no one was seeking evidence which, from his high security clearances, he knew was held inside government files.14 On 2015-03-05, Podesta replied that it was hard for him to follow the matter up at that moment but that he would keep Fish’s contact details,15 and Fish offered to arrange a phone call or meeting to share specific programme names should Podesta want more detail,16 stressing that the exchange was entirely private and confidential and had nothing to do with the USS Hornet Museum.17 Fish told Podesta that “Fast Walkers” were routinely detected entering Earth’s atmosphere from outer space by Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites,18 and that he had been briefed confidentially on one such object by a DSP operator at a high-security US aerospace facility in California.19 He said the object had been recorded passing a satellite during the run-up to the Iraq War in 1991,20 that it appeared to be under some form of control, though whether “manned” or “robotic” could not be told, and suggested Podesta request the underlying data.21 Fish also relayed an account from a US Air Force non-commissioned officer he knew at the same facility, who flew RC-135 reconnaissance missions from MacDill Air Force Base in Florida to monitor Cuba;22 that officer said the missions were sometimes diverted to track UFOs off Florida’s east coast, which he claimed had a landing and takeoff point in the ocean east of Miami and north of Bermuda, tracked by a distinct electronic signature and filmed on several occasions transitioning between water and air.23 Fish said high-quality film of UFOs was “out there”,24 and argued that “UFO hunters” were looking in the wrong places, since only hard scientific data from reliable instruments, not personal sightings, blurred photographs or crop circles, could ever prove anything.25
Podesta’s most extensively documented UAP-related correspondence, preserved in the Podesta email leak correspondence with Tom DeLonge, was with Tom DeLonge.26 According to In Plain Sight, the leaked emails show DeLonge was in contact with one of America’s most senior private aerospace chief executives, a campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, and two senior, recently retired US Air Force generals, with UAP discussed among them.27 By around mid-2015, according to Jason Samosa, a Podesta staffer suggested a particular individual be considered for “the UFO project”, indicating such a project already existed.28 The correspondence also set out plans for a Google Hangout meeting; according to In Plain Sight, the proposed attendees were DeLonge, Podesta, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works executive Robert Weiss, a Clinton campaign assistant, and retired Major General Michael Carey.29 DeLonge told Podesta that “the General (from Wright Patt R&D)” and he spoke every other day, and that this official believed the United States Department of Defense (DoD) would embrace DeLonge’s project because it was intended to show the positive things people had done on the topic.30 DeLonge also told Podesta he planned to have dinner in September 2015 with commanding officers at Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs to discuss moving his project forward,31 and that he wanted to bring two “important” people to meet Podesta in Washington DC, describing them as principal leadership over the most sensitive divisions of classified science and DOD topics.32 According to In Plain Sight, Podesta was DeLonge’s anonymous “top man” contact in government.33 According to In Plain Sight, a separate leaked email dated 2016-01-24 shows a person identifying himself as “Neil Mcc” responding to a Google Hangout invitation to confirm the time of a proposed meeting.34 Podcast host Jason Samosa said the leaked correspondence describes a meeting involving Neil McCasland, Michael Carey, Robert Weiss and Podesta,35 and that the exchange runs to roughly 35 messages between DeLonge and Podesta’s team.36 Many of those named in the correspondence were connected to the Center for American Progress, Podesta’s think tank.37 Samosa also said that entries in Jacques Vallee’s journals (Forbidden Science) corroborate that the conversations between DeLonge and Podesta’s circle took place.38 According to In Plain Sight, nothing in the leaked emails proves the truth of claims made in briefings by military insiders about alien visitations, purported extra-terrestrial craft crashes, or the recovery of alien bodies.39
Before 2016, Podesta had never heard of Victor Borisovich Netyksho,40 who, together with Fancy Bear, turned hacking efforts on Podesta while operating from a GRU building in Moscow.41 Within hours of Donald Trump’s comments on 2016-07-28, Russian hackers began new efforts against the Democratic Party that led them to Podesta.42 In around October 2016, Podesta re-entered his Gmail password after being prompted by a fake message, unaware it was a phishing attempt,43 and within minutes his private communications began streaming back to Netyksho and his colleagues at Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) headquarters in Moscow.44 Within days, thousands of his emails were leaked on the WikiLeaks website,45 in an episode also indexed as the 2016 GRU hacking of John Podesta’s email and Wikileaks release, the Hack of John Podesta’s emails, and the 2015 WikiLeaks release of John Podesta emails. Podesta and Hillary Clinton talked a great deal about UFOs around the time of the 2016 United States presidential election.46