Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program (Published 2017)

“Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” is an investigative article published by The New York Times on 2017-12-16, written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. The article disclosed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a previously secret United States Department of Defense (DoD) effort to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs).¹ The DoD had never before acknowledged the programme’s existence and stated that it had been shut down in 2012.² AATIP began in 2007,³ originated within the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),⁵ and was run by Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official, from the Pentagon’s C Ring.¹

The programme was funded at the request of Harry Reid, then the United States Senate majority leader.⁴ Approximately 22 million US dollars was spent on AATIP, an amount described as almost impossible to locate within the DoD’s annual budget of approximately 600 billion US dollars.⁶ Contracts obtained by the Times showed a congressional appropriation of just under 22 million US dollars running from late 2008 through 2011.⁷ The bulk of the funding went to an aerospace research company run by Robert Bigelow, a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Reid,⁸ specifically to Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the programme.⁹ Two further senior legislators – Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat, both top members of a defence spending subcommittee – also supported AATIP.¹⁰ None of the three senators sought a public Senate floor debate about the funding, which passed through the Pentagon’s classified budget.¹¹

The article detailed the range of phenomena AATIP examined. Working with Robert Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the programme produced documents describing aircraft that appeared to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion¹² and others that hovered with no apparent means of lift.¹³ Among the specific incidents reported was a 2004 encounter in which a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, was chased by two United States Navy F/A-18 fighter jets from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego.¹⁴ This formed part of the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter near San Diego. AATIP also collected footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by a glowing aura, travelling at high speed and rotating as it moved, with pilots audible attempting to comprehend what they were observing.¹⁵ Defence officials declined to release the location and date of that incident. Under Bigelow’s direction, Bigelow Aerospace modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Elizondo and programme contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).¹⁶ Researchers also studied individuals who reported physical effects from encounters with unidentified objects, examining them for physiological changes,¹⁷ and spoke with military service members who had reported sightings. Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who had previously conducted extrasensory perception research for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), later worked as an AATIP contractor.¹⁸

The article described a dispute between the DoD and programme backers over AATIP’s status after 2012. While the DoD maintained the programme had been shut down, backers contended that only the government funding had ended and that the effort continued.¹⁹ Officials said that for five years after funding ceased, AATIP personnel kept investigating episodes brought to them by service members while carrying out other DoD duties.²⁰ Elizondo himself resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017, citing excessive secrecy and internal opposition,²¹ in a letter dated 2017-10-04 and addressed to Defence Secretary Jim Mattis.²² By 2009, Reid had judged that AATIP had made discoveries significant enough to warrant heightened security protections,²³ and he wrote to William Lynn III, then a deputy defence secretary, requesting that AATIP be designated a restricted special access programme limited to a small number of listed officials.²⁴ That request was denied.²⁵ A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary prepared by the programme’s director at the time asserted that what had been considered science fiction was now science fact, and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies that had been discovered.²⁶ After his departure, Elizondo joined Puthoff and Christopher K. Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence for intelligence, in To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a commercial venture aiming to raise money for UFO research.²⁷

The article situated AATIP within the longer history of official UFO investigation in the United States. The United States Air Force had begun a series of studies in 1947 that investigated more than 12,000 claimed sightings before officially ending in 1969,²⁸ with Project Blue Book commencing within those studies in 1952.²⁹ The Air Force studies concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft, or spy planes, though 701 remained unexplained.³⁰ Robert C. Seamans Jr., who was United States Air Force secretary at the time, stated that Project Blue Book could no longer be justified on grounds of national security or science. The article quoted external voices including Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not imply an extraterrestrial source, while acknowledging that some unusual phenomena merit serious investigation. James E. Oberg, a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space shuttle engineer and author who frequently examines UFO claims, similarly noted that prosaic explanations account for many sightings whilst welcoming continued research. Reid, who retired from United States Congress in 2017,²¹ stated publicly that he did not know the origin of the objects studied, and that anyone claiming to have answers was fooling themselves, though he expressed no regret for having initiated the programme.