What happened
On Saturday 16 December 2017, The New York Times and Politico published simultaneous reports that the Pentagon had quietly funded a program to study unidentified flying objects. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, born inside the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2007, had spent about $22 million over five years. It was pushed into existence by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and much of the money flowed to Bigelow Aerospace, the company of Reid's friend, billionaire Robert Bigelow. The stories leaned heavily on Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence officer who said he ran the effort and had resigned in October 2017 in protest at official indifference. The Times also published two cockpit infrared videos, later known as FLIR1 and Gimbal, showing Navy jets tracking objects the aircrews could not identify. The Pentagon confirmed the program existed but said funding ended in 2012. Reid responded online that the truth was out there. The weekend's reporting broke a decades-long taboo and set off the chain of hearings, reports and laws that defines the modern UAP era.
The official explanation
The Pentagon's position was that AATIP was a modest, unclassified study that was closed in 2012 when officials decided other issues deserved the money. Critics such as journalism professor Keith Kloor argued the coverage was thinly sourced and gave little room to mundane explanations for the videos, and they noted that much of the funding went to a contractor owned by Reid's friend and donor. Later official work, including AARO's 2024 historical review, described the effort as straying into paranormal topics beyond its stated aerospace-threat mission and found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
The anomalous case
The story's power is that it came from inside the system. A Senate majority leader, joined by senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, had secured real defense money to study the problem, and a career intelligence officer said the work continued after the funding stopped. Elizondo told reporters he resigned because the issue was not being taken seriously despite repeated encounters near Navy carrier groups. The two videos showed objects tracked by military sensors, and pilot David Fravor described a white oblong craft roughly 40 feet long that outmaneuvered his F/A-18. Reporting in 2020 confirmed Elizondo's claim that a successor effort existed. To proponents, the fact that the government ran a secret program for years, and then kept studying the topic, is itself evidence that officials saw something in the data they could not dismiss.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Pentagon Has Confirmed Its $22M Program to Investigate UFOs (Quartz via Nextgov) newspaper, nextgov.com
Sources
- US government admits funding secret UFO programme Al Jazeera
- The Pentagon Has Confirmed its $22M Program to Investigate UFOs Nextgov/FCW (Quartz)
- Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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