An article from the American newspaper The New York Times translated by INOSMI .
In the Pentagon's $ 600 billion budget , it's almost impossible to find the inconspicuous $ 22 million spent on the Program to study modern aerospace threats. It was such secrecy that the Ministry of Defense needed.
Over the years, reports on unidentified flying objects have been studied under this program, as evidenced by statements by Pentagon official representatives, interviews with program participants, and documents that the New York Times managed to obtain.
The program was supervised by a military intelligence officer, Luis Elizondo, and the offices of her participants were on the fifth floor of ring C in the depths of the Pentagon's labyrinth.
Previously, the Ministry of Defense has never recognized the existence of such a program, stating that it was closed in 2012. However, its supporters say that, although the Pentagon ceased its funding at that time, the program continues to operate. According to them, the last five years the participants of this program continue to study all cases reported to them by servicemen. In parallel, they perform other duties in the Ministry of Defense.
The mysterious program, which is still hidden under the veil of secrecy, was launched in 2007. Initially, it was funded at the request of a Democrat from Nevada, Harry Reid (Harry Reid), who at that time was the leader of the Senate Majority. This man has long been interested in this phenomenon.
Most of the money allocated went to the accounts of an aerospace research company led by billionaire businessman and longtime friend Reed Robert Bigelow , currently working with NASA to create a self-deploying spacecraft that people could use when they were in space.
Speaking in May in the program "60 Minutes", Bigelow said that he was "absolutely sure" of the existence of aliens, and that UFOs are coming to Earth.
Cooperating with Bigelow, whose headquarters is in Las Vegas, the participants of the program prepared a series of documents describing cases of detection of aircraft moving at great speed without visible signs of propulsion systems, as well as hovering in the air, as if they were not on them force of gravity.
The program participants also studied video recordings of meetings of unidentified objects with US military aircraft.One of these records appeared in August. It shows how two F / A-18F naval fighters from an aircraft carrier "Nimitz" pursue an oval object of a whitish color the size of an airliner. It happened not far from the coast near the city of San Diego in 2004.
Reed, who left Congress this year, said he was proud of the program.
"I'm not ashamed and I do not regret having launched it," Reed said, giving a recent interview in Nevada. "It seems to me that this is one of those useful things that I did when I was working in the congress." I did something that nobody did before me. "
The program was supported by two former senators and a senior member of the subcommittee on defense spending. He is a Republican from Alaska, Ted Stevens and Democrat from Hawaii, Daniel K. Inouye. Stevens died in 2010, and Inouye in 2012.
Robert Bigelow
The astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sara Seager, claims that although we do not know about the origin of unidentified flying objects, this does not mean that they are from another planet or from another galaxy. Without saying anything about the merits of this program, she says:
"When people claim to have seen some unusual phenomenon, sometimes it deserves serious study."However, adds Seager, "people sometimes do not understand that there are often phenomena that science has not yet found an explanation."
NASA's former space shuttle engineer James E. Oberg has written 10 books on space missions, in which he often debunks statements about meetings with UFOs. Such meetings cause him great doubts. "There are many prosaic events and peculiarities of human perception that can explain these stories," Oberg said. - Many people do something in the air and do not want others to know about it. They happily hide under this noise, remaining unnoticed, and even use it as a disguise. "
Nevertheless, Oberg says that he positively assesses the ongoing research. "It is possible that here lies an important clue," he notes.
Responding to questions from The New York Times, Pentagon representatives this month recognized the existence of this program, which was initiated by the Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense. However, they stressed that the program lasted five years and was completed in 2012.
"It was decided that there are other, more urgent priorities requiring funding, and that the Ministry of Defense should make changes to its plans," Pentagon spokesman Thomas Crosson said in his e-mail.
However, Elizondo said that in 2012, only the state funding of the program ended. He gave an interview in which he noted that he continued his work with representatives of the Navy and the CIA. He worked in his office in the Pentagon until October, after which he resigned in protest against excessive secrecy and because of internal opposition.
"Why do not we spend more time and do not make more efforts to resolve this issue?" - wrote Elizondo in his petition for resignation to the Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis. According to him, the work within the program continues, and another person has been appointed in his place, whose name he refused to name.
The United States has been studying UFOs for decades. The US military was also engaged in this. In 1947, the Air Force launched a series of studies, studying more than 12,000 cases of detection of unidentified flying objects. In 1969, studies were officially discontinued.
The leaders of this project, which included a study codenamed "The Blue Book," which was launched in 1952, concluded that in most cases, not UFOs, but stars, clouds, conventional airliners and reconnaissance planes were seen. True, the 701 case never found its explanation.
Robert C. Seamans Jr, who at that time was the Air Force Minister, noted in his memo on the termination of the Blue Book project that it can no longer be justified by the interests of national security and science.
According to Reed, Bigelow instilled interest in UFOs. In an interview Reed said that in 2007 Bigelow told him about a conversation with a representative of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who wanted to visit his ranch in Utah, where Bigelow conducted his research.
According to Reed, he met with the staff of this department shortly after the conversation with Bigelow. He learned that they want to start a UFO study program. After this, Reed spoke with Stevens and Inouye to provide support on Capitol Hill.
"A few years before that, I had spoken with John Glenn," Reed said, referring to the astronaut and former Senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. According to Reed, Glenn believed that the federal government should seriously study the problem of UFOs, turning to the military, in the first place, for the pilots who reported on unknown aircraft, the actions of which they could not explain.
According to Read, the military often did not report to the command about the facts of finding strange objects, fearing that they would be laughed at or subjected to public censure. Reed said that the meeting with Stevens and Inouye "was very easy and simple."
He added: "Stevens said he had been waiting for this moment since his service in the Air Force." (The Senator from Alaska was the pilot of the army aviation and flew on transport planes over China during the Second World War.)
According to Reed, during the meeting, Stevens told him that he was sometimes harassed by strange aircraft of unknown origin, flying after him for miles.
None of these three senators wanted to start a public debate in the Senate on funding this program, Reed said."These were the so-called" black money, "he said," Stevens knew about this, Inuye knew about it, and no one else, it was exactly this secrecy that we needed to carry out this program. "
The New York Times received information that from the end of 2008 to the end of 2011 the Congress allocated about $ 22 million for the UFO study program. This money went to the management of the program, to conduct research and prepare analytical assessments of threats posed by unidentified flying objects.
The funding was received from Bigelow Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and researchers to work within the program.
As directed by Bigelow, his company rebuilt several buildings in Las Vegas, adapting them to store metal alloys and other materials that Elizondo and contractors said were found in places where unknown air objects and phenomena met.
Researchers also interviewed people who claimed that meetings with these objects had some physical impact on them. Scientists studied these people in search of physiological changes. In addition, they talked with the military, who reported on meetings with strange aircraft.
"We were in the position of Leonardo da Vinci, who opened the doors of a modern auto repair shop," said engineer Harold E. Puthoff, who conducted extrasensory perception studies for the CIA, and then worked as a contractor for the program. "First of all, he would try to find out what kind of plastic is stored there, because he could not know anything about the electromagnetic signals that are responsible for its functioning."
Participants of the program collected video and audio recordings of incidents with UFOs. Among other things, they had a recording from the aircraft F / A-18 Super Hornet. It shows how some aircraft, surrounded by a flickering glow, flies at high speed and rotates at the same time.
On the record you can hear the pilots trying to understand what they saw. "Yes there their whole armada!" - exclaims one pilot. Representatives of the Ministry of Defense refused to tell the place and date of this incident.
"On an international scale, we are the most backward country in the world in studying this issue," Bigelow said in an interview. - Our scientists are afraid to be ostracized. And our media are afraid of universal condemnation. China and Russia in this respect are much more open, and they are working on it with the serious organizations that they have. Countries that are smaller, such as Belgium, France, England, and the states of South America such as Chile, also show openness. They are ready to discuss this topic, not wanting to limit themselves to stupid taboos. "
By 2009, Reid decided that the program managed to make outstanding discoveries that require additional protection and appropriate secrecy. "A lot of progress has been made in explaining a number of unusual aerospace phenomena," Reed told Reuters in a letter to William L. Lynn, then deputy defense minister. In this regard, he asked to limit access to this program, increasing its degree of secrecy.
In 2009, the program director prepared for the Pentagon a short report on its conduct. It stated: "What was previously considered science fiction, today is a scientific fact." In addition, the author of the report stated that the United States is not able to protect itself from some discovered technologies. However, Reed was refused a request to raise the degree of secrecy of this program.
Elizondo said in his October 4 resignation letter that it is necessary to take more seriously "the numerous reports of sailors, pilots and representatives of other branches of the armed forces about unusual aircraft interfering with the operation of our weapons systems and showing incredible opportunities that we can appear only in the distant future. "
He expressed dissatisfaction with the limitations imposed on the UFO study program. Elizondo told Mattis that "in the interests of the armed forces and the entire country, it is necessary to ascertain the capabilities and intentions of these facilities."
Now Elizondo supports Putthoff and another former Pentagon chief, Christopher K. Mellon, who worked as an assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. They created a new commercial enterprise called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They openly talk about their efforts and that their company is raising funds for UFO research.
In his interview, Elizondo said that during the work he and his colleagues found out one important thing. Apparently, the devices they study do not belong to any country.
"No state, no department should classify these facts, hiding them from the people," he said. Reed, for his part, noted that he does not know where these objects come from. "If someone says that he knows about this, he fools himself," he said. "We do not know this."
At the same time, Reed said: "But we need to start somewhere."