The Media Loves This UFO Expert Who Says He Worked for an Obscure Pentagon Program. Did He?

“The Media Loves This UFO Expert Who Says He Worked for an Obscure Pentagon Program. Did He?” is an investigative article published on 2019-06-01 by journalist Keith Kloor, examining the claims of Luis Elizondo regarding his purported role directing a secret Pentagon UFO research programme. The article was prompted by the premiere of Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation on the History Channel, in which the narrator states that for eight years a clandestine US government programme investigating UFOs was run by Elizondo.³ The Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program (New York Times, 2017-12-16) article in The New York Times had first launched Elizondo into the public eye,¹ where he was described as a former military intelligence case officer² who quit The Pentagon frustrated by what he characterised as a cover-up.⁴ In the show, Elizondo re-investigates Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) incidents he says he learned of while running the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) at the Pentagon.⁵

Kloor’s central finding is that no discernible evidence exists that Elizondo ever worked for a government UFO programme, much less led one.⁶ The Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood confirmed to Kloor that AATIP existed and did pursue research and investigation into UAP,⁷ but stated that Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to AATIP while he worked in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI), up until his resignation effective 2017-10-04.⁸ Sherwood told Kloor he had spoken with OUSDI leadership, including individuals still there from the time Elizondo began working in the office, to establish this point.¹⁸ Elizondo was based at OUSDI from 2008 until his retirement in 2017.¹⁹ The article notes that Elizondo does not appear to have supplied any materials validating his connection to AATIP – no memorandums, no emails, and no paperwork connecting him to the programme.¹⁷ His Luis Elizondo resignation letter to James Mattis (2017-10-04) does not mention AATIP or his role as its director,¹⁶ though it does allude to internal opposition at the Pentagon to investigating UFOs and strongly implies he was leaving because the Pentagon was not taking the threat seriously.²⁹

The article examines conflicting official statements about Elizondo’s role. In December 2017, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White had confirmed to Politico that AATIP existed and was run by Elizondo;¹³ however, Sherwood told Kloor he could not confirm that statement.¹⁴ Kari DeLonge – sister of Tom DeLonge and a spokesperson for To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science – told researcher John Greenewald that AATIP was initially run out of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) but that when Elizondo took it over in 2010 as director, he ran it from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) under the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.¹⁵ Greenewald, who runs The Black Vault archive of Freedom of Information Act documents, had grown increasingly sceptical when his requests and conversations with Pentagon representatives failed to verify Elizondo’s claims.²⁰

The article profiles the network surrounding Elizondo. Elizondo joined To The Stars Academy several days after resigning from the Department of Defense (DoD) in October 2017,⁹ a company co-founded by Tom DeLonge,¹⁰ a musician of Blink-182 fame, who serves as its interim chief executive. To The Stars raised more than $2 million from investors and was originally hyped as exploring the outer edges of science,¹¹ but its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing classifies it as a “Motion Picture & Video Tape Production” concern.¹² Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, works for To The Stars Academy as national security affairs adviser. Fox News coverage did not mention Mellon’s connection to To The Stars Academy, nor that Unidentified was produced by the same company Elizondo and Mellon work for.²⁸ Tom DeLonge claimed publicly that he is the military’s chosen vessel for UFO disclosure.²⁷ George Knapp, a Las Vegas television journalist at KLAS-TV and a vocal defender of Elizondo, purchased 400 shares of To The Stars Academy stock in 2018,²¹ informed his employer, and subsequently placed the shares in a trust to be donated to charity.²²

The article also examines how the news media handled Elizondo’s claims. Helene Cooper, The New York Times’s Pentagon correspondent and one of the reporters on the original 2017 story, described Elizondo on The Daily (New York Times podcast episode on the Pentagon UFO program) as a spooky, secretive figure but completely credible.²³ She acknowledged afterwards that doubts crept in, but said what mattered most was whether the Pentagon’s UFO programme was real.²⁴ Elizondo arranged for the Pentagon to release videos taken from cockpit cameras of F-18 fighter jets just before he quit,²⁵ and subsequently appeared on cable news describing hypersonic, gravity-defying unidentified aerial vehicles that had encroached on military training areas in restricted airspace.²⁶ Public records examined by Kloor show a series of home addresses for Elizondo near intelligence facilities in USA, Puerto Rico, Toa Baja – the site of the surveillance programme known as Echelon – and in USA, Georgia, Grovetown, close to USA, Georgia, Fort Gordon, home of the United States Navy’s principal signals intelligence facilities.³⁰ These records are consistent with a signals intelligence career at OUSDI, but do not corroborate Elizondo’s claims about AATIP. Bryan Bender of Politico and Leslie Kean, a co-author of the original New York Times story, are also mentioned in relation to the wider coverage. The article was published by The Intercept.