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

“Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” is a news article published on 2017-12-16 by The New York Times, authored by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and [Leslie Kean]. It marked the first public acknowledgement by the Department of Defense (DoD) of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP),⁵ a secret programme that had investigated reports of unidentified flying objects for years, drawing on DoD officials, programme participants, and records obtained by the newspaper.² The article disclosed that the programme cost $22 million,¹ embedded within the broader defence budget, with a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011 used for management, research, and threat assessments.¹³ The 2017 Pentagon AATIP UFO Programme Revelation became one of the most significant moments in the modern history of UAP disclosure.

AATIP began in 2007⁸ and was initially funded largely at the request of Harry Reid, then the Senate majority leader, who had a longstanding interest in space phenomena.⁹ Reid was joined in supporting the programme by fellow senators Ted Stevens (Alaska Republican) and Daniel K. Inouye (Hawaii Democrat), both top members of a defence spending subcommittee.¹¹ None of the three senators sought a public Senate floor debate on the matter; Reid described the funding mechanism as “black money” — classified Pentagon budget allocations for secret programmes.¹² Most of the programme’s money flowed to an aerospace research company run by Robert Bigelow, a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Reid.¹⁰ The funding was channelled through Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research on behalf of the programme.¹⁴ Under Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas to store metal alloys and other materials that Luis Elizondo and programme contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.¹⁵

The programme was run by Elizondo, a military intelligence official,³ who operated from the fifth floor of the Pentagon C Ring.⁴ Pentagon officials responding to The New York Times in 2017-12 acknowledged that AATIP had begun as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).¹⁹ The DoD stated it shut down the programme in 2012,⁶ with Pentagon spokesman Thomas Crosson stating that other higher priority issues had merited funding.²⁰ Programme backers, however, said that only government funding ended in 2012 and that officials — including Elizondo, who said he continued working with personnel from the Navy and the CIA — carried on investigating episodes brought to them by service members.⁷ In 2009, Reid had written to William Lynn III, then deputy defence secretary, noting “much progress” and requesting that AATIP be designated a restricted Special Access Programme; that request was denied.²⁴ A 2009 Pentagon briefing prepared by the programme’s director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.²⁵

Working with Bigelow Aerospace, AATIP produced documents describing sightings of aircraft that appeared to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.¹⁶ Officials studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft, including footage of a whitish oval object approximately the size of a commercial plane chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.¹⁷ The Nimitz F/A-18F UAP intercept was among the encounters examined; the article also described the Navy F/A-18F Nimitz encounter video showing an aircraft surrounded by a glowing aura, travelling at high speed and rotating, with Navy pilots heard saying “There’s a whole fleet of them."¹⁸ AATIP researchers also studied people who reported physical effects from encounters with UAP objects, examining them for physiological changes. Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who had previously conducted research on extrasensory perception for the CIA, worked as a contractor for the programme.²⁶

Elizondo resigned from his Pentagon position in 2017-10,²¹ writing in his resignation letter to Defence Secretary Jim Mattis: “Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?"²² Following his departure, he joined Puthoff and Christopher K. Mellon — a former DoD official who had served as deputy assistant secretary of defence for intelligence — in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which was publicly raising money for UAP research.²³ The article drew on a range of external voices to contextualise the programme. Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT, noted that unexplained phenomena are sometimes worth investigating seriously.²⁷ James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and author who frequently examines UFO claims, cautioned that prosaic events and human perceptual traits can account for many such reports.²⁸ The article also situates AATIP within a longer history of official UFO investigation, noting that Project Blue Book, which began in 1952, had concluded most sightings involved conventional explanations but left 701 unexplained, before the effort was officially ended in 1969 following the Project Blue Book termination.²⁹ The 2017 NYT AATIP story publication is widely regarded as a watershed moment in public discourse on UAP, prompting the DoD to confirm, for the first time, the programme’s existence.