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How the Pentagon began to take UFOs seriously

Some fans believe that UFOs have been documented since Biblical times; In "The Spaceships of Ezekiel," published in 1974, Josef F. Blumrich, a NASA engineer, argued that the heavenly vision of the wheels-within-wheels prophet was an encounter not with God but with an alien spaceship.

On May 9, 2001, Steven M. Greer took the lectern at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in search of the truth about unidentified flying objects. Greer, an emergency room physician in Virginia and an avowed ufologist, believed that the government had long concealed its knowledge of extraterrestrial visitation from the American people. He had founded the Disclosure Project in 1993 in an attempt to penetrate the sanctuaries of the conspiracy. About twenty speakers participated in Greer's count for that day. In support of his statements, he provided a 492-page dossier called the "Informative Document of the Disclosure Project." For public officials too busy to absorb such a quantity of suppressed knowledge, Greer had prepared a ninety-five page "Executive Summary of the Disclosure Project Briefing Paper." After clearing my throat, the "Executive Summary" began with "A Brief Summary," which included a series of bullet points outlining what was supposed to be the biggest secret in human history.

Over several decades, according to Greer, untold numbers of alien craft have been observed in our planet's airspace; they were capable of extreme speeds with no visible means of lift or propulsion, and of staggering maneuvers with g-forces that would turn a human pilot into soup. Some of these alien spacecraft had been "shot down, recovered, and studied since at least the 1940s and possibly the 1930s." Efforts to reverse engineer these extraordinary machines had led to "major technological advances in power generation." These operations had mostly been classified as "cosmic top secret," a clearance level "thirty-eight levels" above that usually granted to the Commander-in-Chief. Why, Greer wondered, had such transformative technologies been hidden for so long? This was obvious. The “social, economic and geopolitical order of the world” was at stake.

The idea that aliens had frequented our planet had been circulating among ufologists since the postwar years, when a Polish emigrant, George Adamski, claimed to have met a race of friendly, Nordic-looking Venusians who were disturbed by the domestic and interplanetary effects of nuclear bomb tests. In the summer of 1947, an alien spacecraft was said to have crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. Conspiracy theorists believed that vaguely anthropomorphic bodies had been recovered there and that the wreckage had been entrusted to private military contractors, who rushed to unlock the alien hardware before the Russians could. (Documents unearthed after the fall of the Soviet Union suggested that anxiety over an arms race supercharged by alien technology was mutual.) All this, according to ufologists, had been covered up by Majestic 12, a clandestine and para-governmental organization called by executive order of President Truman. President Kennedy was assassinated because he planned to catch up with Prime Minister Khrushchev; Kennedy had confided in Marilyn Monroe, thus sealing her fate. Representative Steven Schiff of New Mexico spent years trying to get to the bottom of the Roswell incident, only to die of "cancer."

Greer's “Executive Summary” was very elaborate, but discerning readers could find answers to many of the most frequently asked questions about UFOs, assuming, as Greer did, that UFOs are directed by aliens. Why are they so slippery? Because aliens are watching us. Because? Because they are uncomfortable with our aspiration to “arm the space”. Have we shot them? Yes. Should we shoot them? Actually no? Yes, why not? They are friendly. How do we know? “Obviously, any civilization capable of routine interstellar travel could wipe out our civilization in a nanosecond, if that was their intention. That we are still breathing the free air of Earth is abundant testimony to the non-hostile nature of these ET civilizations." (One obvious question seems to have never occurred to Greer: Why, if these spacecraft are so advanced, do they supposedly crash all the time?)

At the press conference, Greer appeared wearing thin-rimmed glasses, a baggy, funeral suit, and a red tie askew at his starched collar. “I know many in the media would like to talk about the 'little green men,'” she said. “But actually, they laugh about it because it's so serious. I've had grown men cry, who are in the Pentagon, who are members of Congress, and they've said to me, 'What are we going to do?' This is what we're going to do. We will see to it that this matter is properly disclosed.”

Other speakers included Clifford Stone, a retired Army sergeant, who claimed to have visited accident sites and seen aliens, both alive and dead. Stone said that he had cataloged fifty-seven species, many of them humanoid. "There are individuals who are so much like you and me who could walk between us and you wouldn't know the difference," he said.

Leslie Kean, a freelance investigative journalist and fledgling UFO investigator who had worked with Greer, watched the act with trepidation. She had recently published an article in the Boston Globe about a new set of compelling evidence regarding UFOs, and she couldn't understand why a speaker would make an unsubstantiated claim about alien corpses when she could be talking about hard facts. For Kean, the corpus of genuinely baffling reports deserved scientific scrutiny, regardless of what was thought about aliens. “There were some good people at that conference, but some of them were making outrageous, grandiose claims,” Kean told me. "I knew then that I had to get away." Greer expected the media to cover the event, and they did, with playful derision. He also hoped that Congress would hold hearings. By all indications, he did not.

Ufologists have perpetual faith in the imminence of Disclosure, an art term for the government's snatched confession of its deep knowledge of UFOs. In the years after the press conference, the long-awaited announcement was apparently postponed by the events of 9/11, the War on Terror, and the financial crisis. In 2009, Greer published a "Special Presidential Briefing for President Barack Obama," stating that inaction by Obama's predecessors had "led to an unacknowledged crisis that will be the biggest of his presidency." Obama's response remains unknown, but in 2011 ufologists submitted two petitions to the White House, to which the Office for Science and Technology Policy responded that it could find no evidence to suggest that any "alien presence has contacted or compromised some member of the human race."

The government may not have been in regular contact with alien civilizations, but it had been hiding something from its citizens. In 2017, Kean was the author of a best-selling UFO book and was known for what she has called, borrowing from political scientist Alexander Wendt, a "militantly agnostic" approach to the phenomenon. On December 16 of that year, in a front-page article in the Times, Kean, along with two Times journalists, revealed that the Pentagon had been running a surreptitious UFO program for ten years. The article included two videos, recorded by the Navy, of what were described on official channels as "unidentified aerial phenomena," or P.A.U. On blogs and podcasts, ufologists began referring to "December 2017" as shorthand for when the taboo began to lift. Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster, has often mentioned the article, praising Kean's work for precipitating cultural change. “It's a dangerous topic for somebody, because you're setting yourself up for ridicule,” he said in an episode this spring. But now “you can say, 'Listen, this is not something to make fun of anymore; there is something to do.’”

Since then, high-level officials have publicly admitted their perplexity about the U.A.P. no shame or apology. Last July, Senator Marco Rubio, former acting chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, spoke on CBS News about mysterious flying objects in restricted airspace. "We don't know what it is," he said, "and it's not ours." In a December video interview with economist Tyler Cowen, former C.I.A. director John Brennan admitted, somewhat tortuously, that he wasn't quite sure what to think: “Some of the phenomena we're going to see continue to being inexplicable and could, in fact, be some kind of phenomenon that is the result of something we don't yet understand and that might involve some kind of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life."

Last summer, David Norquist, Assistant Secretary of Defense, announced the formal existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The Intelligence Authorization Law 2021, signed last December, stipulated that the government had one hundred and eighty days to collect and analyze the data from the different agencies. His report is expected in June. In a recent interview with Fox News, John Ratcliffe, former director of National Intelligence, stressed that the matter was no longer to be taken lightly. “When we talk about sightings,” he said, “we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or that have been captured by satellite images, that frankly carry out actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are difficult to replicate, for those of us who don't have the technology, or moving at speeds that break the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

Leslie Kean is a very calm woman with a no-nonsense demeanor and a nimbus of curly gray hair. She lives alone in a bright corner apartment near the northern tip of Manhattan, where, on the wall behind her desk, is a framed black-and-white picture that looks like a sonogram of a Frisbee. The photograph was given to him, along with documentation of the chain of custody, by contacts in the Costa Rican government; in his opinion, it is the best image of a UFO that has been made public. When I first visited her, she was wearing a black blazer over a T-shirt advertising “The Phenomenon,” a 2020 documentary with surprisingly high production values ​​in a genre known for grainy images of dubious provenance. Kean is headstrong, but unpretentious, and tends to talk about the impact of "the Times story" and the new cycle of UFO attention it has inaugurated, as if she hadn't been its main instigator. He told me, “When the New York Times story came out, there was a feeling of, ‘This is what the UFO people have always wanted.

Kean is always assiduously courteous to the “UFO people”, although he stands out from the UFO mainstream. “It's not necessarily that what Greer was saying was wrong; there may have been extraterrestrial visits since 1947," he said. “It is that you have to be strategic with what is said so that they take you seriously. You don't get someone talking about alien bodies, even though it may be true. Nobody was prepared for that; They didn't even know UFOs were real." Kean is sure that UFOs are real. Everything else - what they are, why they are here, why they never land on the White House lawn - is speculation.

Kean is most at home in the borderlands between the paranormal and the scientific; The latest project of his examines the controversial studies on the possibility of consciousness after death. Until recently, she dreaded the inevitable moment at dinner when other guests would ask her about her work and she would have to mutter something about UFOs. "Then they'd laugh," he says, "and I had to say, 'There's actually a lot of serious information out there.'" His forceful and discreet way of talking about incomprehensible data gives him an air of probity. During my visit, as he perused his extensive library of canonical ufology texts—with titles like "Alien Contact" and "Above Top Secret"—he sighed and said, "Unfortunately, most of them aren't very good."

In his bestselling book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record,” published in 2010 by a Random House imprint, Kean wrote that “the United States government routinely ignores UFOs and, when presses him, issues false explanations. Their indifference and/or dismissals are irresponsible, disrespectful to credible, often expert witnesses, and potentially dangerous." His book is a reminder that this was not always the case. In the decades after World War II, about half of Americans, including many in power, accepted UFOs as a matter of course. Kean sees herself as the keeper of this lost history. In his apartment, a quiet space decorated with a Burmese Buddha and bowls of pearly seashells, Kean sat on the floor, opened his filing cabinets, and disappeared into a drift of declassified memos, barely legible tickers, and yellowing copies of The Saturday Evening Post and the Times Magazine with flying saucer covers and long, serious treatments of the phenomenon.

Kean grew up in New York City, the scion of one of the country's oldest political dynasties. Her grandfather, Robert Winthrop Kean, was a deputy for ten legislatures; on his father's side, he has ancestry from John Kean, a South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress, and on his mother's side, from John Winthrop, one of the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He talks about his family's legacy in rather abstract terms, except when talking about the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, his grandfather's great-grandfather, whom he considers an inspiration. His uncle is Thomas Kean, who was two-term governor of New Jersey and once chaired the 9/11 Commission.

Kean studied at the Spence School and went to college in Bard. She has a modest family income and spent her early adult years as a "spiritual seeker." After helping found a Zen center in upstate New York, she worked as a photographer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In the late 1990s, after a visit to Burma to interview political prisoners, he launched into a career in investigative journalism. She worked at Berkeley radio station KPFA as a producer and host of “Flashpoints,” a left-leaning late-night news program, covering wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and other criminal justice issues. .

In 1999, a journalist friend in Paris sent him a ninety-page report by a dozen retired generals, scientists, and space experts, titled “Les OVNI et la Défense: À Quoi Doit-On Se Préparer?” – “UFOs and defense: What should we prepare for?”. The perpetrators, a group known as Comet, had analyzed numerous UFO reports, along with associated photographic and radar evidence. Objects observed at close range by military and commercial pilots seemed to defy the laws of physics; the authors noted its “easily supersonic speed with no sonic boom” and “electromagnetic effects that interfere with the operation of nearby radio or electrical equipment.” The vast majority of the sightings could be attributed to meteorological or terrestrial origins, or could not be studied, due to paucity of evidence, but a small percentage of them seemed to involve, as the report stated, “completely unknown flying machines with exceptional performance and guided by natural or artificial intelligence. comet had resolved, through the process of elimination, that "the extraterrestrial hypothesis" was the most logical explanation.

Kean had read Whitley Strieber's “Communion,” the 1987 cult best-seller about alien abduction, but until he received the French findings he had never had more than a mild interest in UFOs. “I had spent years at the KPFA reporting on the horrors of the world, injustice and oppression, and giving a voice to the voiceless,” he recalls. When he became familiar with the fullness of the strange episodes, it was as if he had seen beyond our own grim reality and the limitations of conventional thought, and glimpsed an enchanted cosmos. “For me, this transcended the endless struggle of human beings,” he told me during a long walk through his neighborhood. “It was a planetary concern.” He stopped in the middle of the street. Gesturing to a very cloudy sky, he said, "Why should we assume that we already understand everything there is to know, in our childhood here on this planet?"

An editor in the Focus section of the Boston Globe, who had admired Kean's writing on Burma, sheepishly agreed to work with her on an article on UFOs. However, she was sure that anyone who had access to the data and conclusions of the French report would understand why she had left everything else behind. He refused to include any ironic underpinnings in the article, which was published on May 21, 2000, as a direct summary of comet research. "But then, of course, nothing happened," he said. "And that was the beginning of my education in the power of stigma."

Some fans believe that UFOs have been documented since Biblical times; In "The Spaceships of Ezekiel," published in 1974, Josef F. Blumrich, a NASA engineer, argued that the heavenly vision of the wheels-within-wheels prophet was an encounter not with God but with an alien spaceship. In "The UFO Controversy in America" ​​(1975), David Jacobs wrote about a series of "airship" sightings across the country in 1896 and 1897. Spacecraft, by our descriptions, have always displayed capabilities beyond our horizon. technological, and with our own warfare advances they became staggeringly impressive. It is generally accepted that the modern era of UFOs began on June 24, 1947, when a private aviator named Kenneth Arnold, while flying a CallAir A-2, saw a loose formation of nine billowing objects near Mount Rainier. They were shaped like tailless boomerangs or mantas and, he believed, moved at two to three times the speed of sound. He described its movement as that of a "jumping saucer over water." A newspaper headline conjured up "flying saucers." By the end of the year, at least eight hundred and fifty similar domestic sightings had been reported, according to an independent UFO investigator. Meanwhile, scientists claimed that flying saucers didn't exist because they couldn't exist. The Times quoted Gordon Atwater, an astronomer at the Hayden Planetarium, who attributed the spate of reports to a combination of a "mild case of weather jitters" and "mass hypnosis."

Within government circles, the question of how seriously what they renamed “unidentified flying objects” should be taken caused deep conflict. By September 1947, reports of sightings had become too profuse for the Air Force to ignore. That month, in a classified statement, Lt. Gen. Nathan F. Twining advised the commanding general of the armed forces that "the reported phenomenon is real and not visionary or fictitious." The “Twining Memorandum,” which has since gained ecclesiastical stature among ufologists, expressed concern that some foreign rival—say, the Soviet Union—had made an unimaginable technological breakthrough, and launched a classified study, Project Sign, to investigate it. Its officials were evenly split between those who thought the “flying discs” had a plausibly “interplanetary” origin and those who attributed the sightings to rampant misperception. For one thing, according to one memo, twenty percent of UFO reports lacked ordinary explanations. On the other hand, there was no conclusive evidence-the remains of a crashed saucer, perhaps-and, as a Rand Corporation scientist reasoned, interstellar travel was simply not feasible.

But inexplicable things kept happening. In 1948, about a year after Arnold's sighting, two pilots of an Eastern Airlines DC-3 saw a large cigar-shaped light coming toward them at tremendous speed before making an impossibly sharp turn and disappearing into a clear sky. A pilot in a second plane, and some witnesses on the ground, gave compatible accounts. It was the first time a UFO had been observed at close range: the two pilots described seeing a row of windows as it sped past. Project Sign researchers submitted a secret "Estimate of the Situation" memo, which leaned in favor of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But, according to opponents, if they were here, wouldn't they have warned us?

In July 1952, that formal notification nearly took place, when an armada of UFOs violated restricted airspace over the White House. The Times headline sounded like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel: “Flying Objects Near Washington Detected By Both Pilots And Radar: Air Force Reveals Reports Of Something, Maybe “Saucers,” Traveling Slowly But Still they jump”. The Air Force, downplaying the incident, told the newspaper that no defensive measures had been taken, although it later emerged that the military had sent planes to intercept the intruders. Major General John Samford, director of Air Force intelligence, gave the biggest press conference since the end of World War II. Samford, who had the grave face of a law enforcement officer in a John Ford movie, narrowed his eyes as he referred to "a certain percentage of this volume of reports that have been made by credible observers of relatively unbelievable things."

How the Pentagon began to take itself seriously UFOs

The following January, the C.I.A. secretly convened an expert advisory group, led by Howard P. Robertson, a mathematical physicist at Caltech. The "Robertson panel" determined not that we were being visited by UFOs, but that we were being inundated with too many UFO reports. This was a real problem: if warnings of genuine incursions into US soil were lost in a maelstrom of crazy hallucinations, there could be serious consequences for national security: Soviet spy planes, for example, could operate with impunity. The Cold War made it crucial that the US government be perceived as having full control over its airspace.

To stem the flood of reports, the panel recommended that "national security agencies take immediate steps to strip Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been accorded and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired." He also suggested infiltrating and monitoring civilian UFO groups, and enlisted the media in the debunking effort. The campaign culminated in a 1966 television special, “UFO: Friend, Foe, or Fantasy?”, in which CBS host Walter Cronkite patiently relegated UFOs to third-rate oblivion.

Not all members of the military were happy with this stance. Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA's first director, told a Times reporter: “Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe that unknown flying objects are nonsense."

The government maintained a public repository for UFO reports: Project Blue Book, a continuation of Project Sign, which operated at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio. The Blue Book was a poorly funded division headed by a series of low-ranking officers who would have preferred any other position. The program's only continuing presence, and its only in-house scientist, was an astronomer from Ohio State named J. Allen Hynek, a UFO skeptic and former member of the Robertson panel. At first, Hynek took a "common sense" approach; as he later wrote, “I felt that the lack of 'hard' evidence justified the practical 'it just can't be' attitude. 95% of the alleged UFOs actually had a yardstick: unusual clouds, weather balloons, atmospheric temperature reversals. The luminous orbs were attributed to Venus; the silent triangles could be related to classified military technology. (The U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird were often reported as UFOs, a confusion embraced by the counterintelligence community, which was anxious to keep these projects under wraps.) But the remaining five percent, despite the government's efforts, could not be clearly resolved. Hynek, to his surprise, developed a sympathy for people who saw UFOs; they were far more likely to be self-respecting, embarrassed citizens than cranks, pranksters, and "UFO buffs."

However, it was expected to do its job. Beginning on March 14, 1966, more than a hundred witnesses in and around Dexter, Michigan, reported seeing bright lights and large, low-altitude football shapes. Hynek arrived to discover a community in a state of "almost hysteria." At a press conference on March 25, under pressure to avoid panic, Hynek attributed some of the sightings to the moon and stars and others to the spontaneous combustion of decaying vegetation, or "swamp gas." Michiganders took it as an affront. (“Swamp gas” became a common ufological metonym for the condescending obfuscation of the government.) Gerald Ford, a Grand Rapids native and at the time House Minority Leader, called for congressional hearings, “in the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than the one they have given so far.” Now the Air Force. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Hynek recommended that an independent body be created to evaluate the merits of Project Blue Book and ultimately resolve the question of the legitimacy of the O.F.A. In seventeen years, the Blue Book had reviewed approximately twelve thousand cases; seven hundred one of them were still unexplained.

In late 1966, Edward U. Condon, a physicist at the University of Colorado, received $300,000 to carry out such a study. The project was plagued by infighting, especially after the discovery of a memo written by a coordinator noting that a truly disinterested approach would have to allow for the fact that UFOs could exist. That was beyond doubt: his behavior was not compatible with our understanding of universal laws. Associate scientists, the coordinator proposed, should stress to their colleagues that they were primarily interested in the psychological and social circumstances of UFO believers. In other words, the sightings should be understood as metaphors for Cold War anxiety or ambivalence about technology.

The thousand-page “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects,” or the Condon Report as it became known, was completed in the late fall of 1968. Of the ninety-one Blue Book cases selected for examination , thirty of them remained official mysteries. In a "disconcerting and unusual" incident in 1956, a supernaturally fast object was recorded on multiple radars near a US Air Force base in England. One of Condon's researchers wrote that "the seemingly rational and intelligent behavior of the UFO suggests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most likely explanation for this sighting." As Tim McMillan, a retired police lieutenant who writes about UFOs and national defense, told me: “You didn't even need the other seven hundred cases. You just needed one like this to say, 'Hey, we should look into this.'”

Condon, who announced long before the study was finished that UFOs were utter garbage, wrote the summary of the report and its "Conclusions and Recommendations" section. He seemed to be familiar only with the other nine hundred pages of the report. In his opinion, "a careful examination of the data available to us leads us to conclude that exhaustive new studies of UFOs are probably not warranted in the hope that science will advance them." He advised that schoolchildren not be given credit for UFO-related work. Scientists should take their talents and their money elsewhere. Project Blue Book closed in January 1970.

In 1972, Hynek published "The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry," a scathing postmortem on the Blue Book and the Condon Report, and a systematic research project. He wrote that the goal of the Blue Book was not to explain UFOs, but rather to explain them. The Condon Report, which focused on refuting any conjecture about alien spacecraft, was even worse. What was required, instead, was an agnostic approach, not biased in favor of alien spacecraft or weather or Venus. UFOs were unidentified by definition. But, as Kean writes in his book, the Condon Report gave scientists and officials license to look the other way; meanwhile, "the media could enjoy the ride while mocking UFOs or relegating them to science fiction." The Robertson panel had finally achieved its mission: "The 'golden age' of official investigations, congressional hearings, press conferences, independent scientific studies, powerful citizen groups, best-selling books, and newspaper covers." the magazines had come to an end.” Hynek founded an independent organization to continue his research, but he died, aged seventy-five, in 1986, without having altered the course of public opinion.

Once it was clear that UFOs were going to be his life's work, Kean decided to ally himself with the investigative tradition that Hynek had pioneered. Ufologists liked to dwell on certain historic encounters, like the one at Roswell, where any hard evidence that might have ever existed had become hopelessly entangled with mythology. Kean chose to focus on “the really good cases” that had been reported since the Blue Book closed, including those involving professional observers, such as pilots, and ideally multiple witnesses; those that had been corroborated with photos or radar prints; and especially those in which the experts had eliminated other interpretations. One of the cases he studied was that of a grisly incident in England in 1980, known as "British Roswell," in which several US Air Force officers claimed to have observed a UFO at close range outside R.A.F. Bentwaters, in Rendlesham Forest. The deputy base commander made a contemporary audio recording. The details of the incident, as described in Kean's book, are sensational to say the least. Another witness, Sergeant James Penniston, said he got close enough to a silent triangular craft to feel its electrical charge and notice the hieroglyphic designs etched on its surface.

Kean has always avoided the word “disclosure,” but it was clear to her that, despite the Condon Report, the government had concealed a persistent interest in UFOs. In 1976, Major Parviz Jafari, a squadron commander in the Iranian Air Force, was sent in an F-4 jet to intercept a brilliant diamond outside Tehran, near the Soviet border. In a contribution to Kean's book, Jafari wrote that as he approached the object, it "flashed with intense red, green, orange, and blue lights so bright that I could not see its body." He found his weapons and radio communications blocked. US intelligence sources in Iran described the incident in a classified four-page memo sent to Washington. Kean read me an assessment attached to the document, written by Colonel Roland Evans: “An outstanding report. This case is a classic, meeting all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon." He raised his eyebrow and said, "You don't see that written very often on a government document, especially when they tell you they don't care."

In 2002, Larry Landsman, project manager for the Sci Fi Channel (now Syfy), invited Kean to lead a broad "public effort to search for new government records on a well-documented UFO case," which could lead to to a television special. The Sci Fi producers hired lawyers, researchers and a public relations group: the Washington-based company PodestaMattoon. Edwin S. Rothschild, head of PodestaMattoon's energy and environment sector at the time, recalls telling Kean: “Most people may have the idea that there is something out there, but there are also people who think that, If you start talking about it, you could be a nutcase." And he continued: "We had to draw a firm line between the people who would not have credibility and the ones who would".

Kean selected an incident that occurred in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, a rural village southeast of Pittsburgh, on December 9, 1965, in which an object the size of a Volkswagen Beetle purportedly fell from the sky. According to multiple witnesses, the acorn-shaped bundle had been removed from the woods on a flatbed truck while service members patrolled the area with firearms. Kean requested the files from NASA under the Freedom of Information Act, including some that he believed contained information about wreckage recovered at the scene. After an unsuccessful appeal, Kean filed a lawsuit against NASA to force compliance. Rothschild introduced Kean to John Podesta, President Clinton's former chief of staff, who had a known interest in both government transparency and UFOs. The case dragged on for four years, until Kean got a settlement. It received hundreds of largely irrelevant documents. Podesta told me: “There was a true story, and you know that when the boxes are missing in the basement and the dog ate my homework. They refused to admit what had really happened. I was perfectly willing to believe that it was the remains of a Soviet satellite that we did not want to return, but there was nothing to bring clarity, and after forty years there was no plausible reason why they would not confess what they thought it was.

As Kean discovered, the legacy of Cold War paranoia and filibuster continued to haunt the UFO issue. On November 7, 2006, at around 4:00 p.m., a metallic-looking rotating disk was seen hovering about 900 feet above gate C17 at Chicago O'Hare Airport. The object hovered for several minutes before accelerating into a steep incline, leaving “an almost perfect circle in the cloud layer where the spacecraft had been,” as an anonymous witness later said. When the Chicago Tribune published an account of the sighting - no witnesses wanted to testify - it became the most read article on the newspaper's website up to that point. Initially, the Federal Aviation Administration denied having any information about the incident, but pressure from the media brought to light a recorded phone conversation between a United Airlines supervisor and an air traffic controller. On the recording, the supervisor, named Sue, asks, "Hey, have you seen a Frisbee on C17?" The answer is a laugh. “A frisbee… are you looking at frisbees?” the controller asks. Sue replies, "Well, that's what a pilot on the ramp area of ​​the C17 told us." There is a pause. “Do you have Christmas today?” the controller asks, then continues: “I haven't seen anything, Sue, and if I did I wouldn't admit it”.

The F.A.A. He stated that it must be a "perforated cloud", a cirrocumulus or altocumulus perforated with a circular hole, which appears occasionally at subzero temperatures. According to meteorologists Kean interviewed, it was too hot that day for hole clouds to occur. The episode sparked outrage from Kean. As he says in his book: "Those who know the facts of the O'Hare incident continue to mistrust our government, which has shown, once again, that it will avoid dealing with UFO incidents at all costs."

Kean looked abroad for more broadly-treated cases, and didn't have to wait long. On Monday April 23, 2007, an eighteen passenger plane operated by Aurigny Air Services left Southampton, England for a routine flight to Alderney, one of the Channel Islands. The captain, Ray Bowyer, had been a professional pilot for eighteen years. In the previous decade, he had flown the forty-minute crossing of the Channel more than a thousand times. On this particular day, the aircraft took off as scheduled and climbed through a shallow layer of haze before reaching cruising altitude. Bowyer switched to autopilot and got down to paperwork.

At 2:06 p.m., Bowyer looked up to see a bright yellow light directly ahead. He first thought it was sunlight reflecting off the glass vineyards of the Guernsey tomato industry, but the light didn't flicker. Bowyer picked up his binoculars. At tenfold magnification, the yellow glow took on the outline of a corporeal object. It was long and cigar-thin in shape, with sharp edges and pointed ends, like a wheel seen in profile. It was motionless, and radiated a brilliance that was "difficult to describe," Bowyer later wrote, but "he was able to look at this fantastic light without discomfort." Moments later, he saw a second object, which seemed to be moving in formation with the first. The passenger seated behind Bowyer, whose name was not released, stepped forward to borrow the binoculars. Three rows back, Alderney resident Kate Russell looked up from her book, and both she and her husband saw the objects “the color of sunlight”. When the flight landed in Alderney, Bowyer submitted the details to the British Civil Aviation Authority - which has a Mandatory Event Reporting system - including a sketch of what he had seen. In his professional opinion, the objects were each the size of a "reasonably large city." He had time for a quick cup of tea before heading back to Southampton.

Local newspapers made reference to the “X-Files” and the C.A.A. he declined to provide any further information. Within a week of the sighting, the UK MoD concluded that since the reported flight position was in French airspace, final identification was not a British government concern. However, three weeks later, the British ministry released the available documentation, a package including corroborating radar data from an air traffic controller on the nearby island of Jersey and a statement from a second commercial pilot nearby, that he had seen the objects from a different direction.

Ten months later, David Clarke, a known UFO skeptic, along with three associates, published an audit. The "Report on the aerial phenomena observed near the Channel Islands, United Kingdom, on April 23, 2007" was written with the collaboration of dozens of experts in the field -meteorologists, oceanographers, harbor masters- and various institutes French and British ministries, culminating in sixteen prevailing hypotheses, ranked by plausibility. Atmospheric aberrations such as sun dogs and lenticular clouds were largely ruled out, as well as an extremely rare and little-known seismological phenomenon known as "earthquake lights," in which tectonic distress is expressed in auroras, or bluish orbs. The report concludes: "In summary, we cannot satisfactorily explain the UAP sightings."

Shortly after the meeting in Alderney, Kean began working with James Fox, director of the documentary “The Phenomenon”, to organize an event at the National Press Club. She and Fox chose a date that roughly coincided with the first anniversary of the O'Hare sighting. Among the fourteen speakers were Commander Jafari, from the “dogfight over Tehran”, and Captain Bowyer, who was encouraged by Kean to expose the differences he had observed between the official treatment of UFO encounters in the UK and in United States. “I would have been surprised if they told me that the C.A.A. I was going to obstruct an investigation, or be told that what I had seen was something else entirely," Bowyer said at the lectern, contrasting his experience with the O'Hare episode. "But it seems that the pilots in the United States are used to this type of thing, from what I see."

None of the speakers mentioned Roswell, alien bodies, reverse-engineered spacecraft, or government cover-ups. Over the next two years, Kean collected his stories and other reports for his book. In it, he argued that, for security reasons, and to encourage people who see strange things in the sky to speak up, the government needed some kind of centralized UFO agency. Many other countries followed the example of France and declassified and published the UFO files (UK, Denmark, Brazil, Russia, Sweden) or created their own official organizations dedicated to the subject (Peru, Chile). The problem in the United States, according to Kean, was that the discreet initiatives had been driven by interested individuals; there was no single clearinghouse for prominent data. He met with his uncle Thomas Kean to discuss the UFO issue and his proposal to create a specialized agency, in the context of his experience as chairman of the 9/11 Commission. He told me: “Like many Americans, I had an immense curiosity about UFOs. The government has not clarified what it has”.

Kean's book, which was praised by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku as "the gold standard for UFO research," and to which John Podesta had contributed a foreword, grew and expanded his influence. In June 2011, Podesta invited Kean to give a confidential presentation at a think tank he founded, the Center for American Progress. Standing alongside a Johns Hopkins University physicist and foreign military figures, Kean advised the audience - officials from NASA, the Pentagon and the Department of Transportation, along with congressional staff and retired intelligence officials - that the challenge was to “undo fifty years of U.A.P. as folklore and pseudoscience.

Podesta told me: “It wasn't a group of people who came looking like they were going to a 'Star Wars' memorabilia convention, but serious people from the national security arena who wanted answers to these phenomena. inexplicable”. Shortly after the event, he said, a Democratic senator invited him to a meeting. “I thought it was going to be about food stamps and tax cuts or whatever, and the door closed and they said, 'I don't want anyone to know this, but I'm really interested in UFOs, and I know you are, too. are. So what do you know?"

In August 2014, Kean visited the West Wing to meet again with Podesta, then an adviser to President Obama. He had narrowed down his request, proposing that a single person from the Science and Technology Policy Office be assigned to handle the matter. It came to nothing. However, he was a well-known figure in the international UFO circuit and maintained a cordial relationship with the Chilean government's Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (cefaa). He began publishing stories from his archives with uncharacteristic recklessness. Kean's work from this period, published mostly in the Huffington Post, shows signs of agitation and evangelism. In March 2012, he wrote an article titled “UFO Caught on Tape Over Santiago Air Base” (UFO recorded on the Santiago Air Base), which made reference to a video provided by cefaa. Kean described the video as showing "a flat-bottomed, dome-shaped object with no visible means of propulsion... flying at speeds too high to be man-made." He asked: "Is this the case that UFO skeptics have been fearing?"

For the most part, people who do not believe that UFOs represent a meaningful category of study regard the contrary view as harmless curiosity. The world is full of strange and inexplicable convictions: some believe that baring your neck in winter makes you sick, and others believe in UFOs. But a small fraction of non-believers, known as "debunkers," mirror ardent belief with equally ardent doubt. When Kean wrote about the Cefaa video, the debunkers took the opportunity to point out that the object of the case they feared was most likely a housefly or beetle buzzing around the camera lens. Robert Sheaffer, owner of a blog called Bad UFOs, wrote in his Skeptical Inquirer column: "Indeed, the mere fact that a video of a fly looping is cited by some of the world's best UFOologists as one of the best UFO images of all time reveals the utter lightness of the best UFO photos and videos. Kean consulted four entomologists, who mostly refused to make a final judgment on the matter, urging patience with the ongoing cefaa investigation.

“An informed skeptic is a very different thing from a debunker on a mission,” he wrote to me. “There are many out there who are on a mission to debunk UFOs at all costs. They are not rational and they are not informed”. Kean thought they were blinded by fanaticism. Skeptic Michael Shermer, for example, in a review of Kean's book, had idly argued that a wave of silent black triangles seen over Belgium in 1989 and 1990 were likely classified and experimental stealth bombers, despite official testimony to the fact. that any government would be crazy to unleash its latest devices on heavily populated parts of Western Europe.

The tendency to dismiss or overlook inconvenient facts is something that debunkers and believers have in common. A tenacious British investigator has convincingly shown that the Rendlesham event, or Britain's Roswell, probably consisted of a concatenation of a meteorite, a lighthouse perceived through forest and mist, and the strange sounds made by a muntjac deer. Eyewitness reports are subject to considerable embroidery over time, and strings of unlikely coincidences can easily be turned into a hidden pattern by a human mind prone to misinterpretation and hungry for meaning. The investigator had thoroughly demystified the case, and I was disturbed to learn that Kean seemed unfazed by his verdict. When I asked him about it, he just shrugged, as if to suggest that such flowing accounts violated Occam's razor. Although Rendlesham was "complex," he said, it was still "one of the top ten UFO encounters of all time." And besides, there were always other cases. Hynek, in "The UFO Experience," had argued that UFO sightings represented a phenomenon that had to be taken together: hundreds upon hundreds of incredible stories told by credible people.

Many UFO debunkers are openly hostile, but Mick West has a suave and disarming demeanor, only occasionally reminiscent of the performative deference with which an orderly might cajole a patient into putting on his straitjacket. He grew up in a small industrial town in the north of England. His family had no television or telephone, and he learned to read from his father's collection of Marvel comics. He was very good at mathematics and, after buying his first home computer with what he earned on a newspaper route, he became obsessed with primitive video games. As a teenager in the early 1980s, he was fond of science fiction, and was spellbound by a magazine called The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space, and Time. The magazine was full of “true” stories about UFOs and the paranormal: ghosts and menacing creatures from cryptozoology. She used to lie in bed at night, as she wrote in her book "Escaping the Rabbit Hole," "literally shaking with the thought that some alien might come into my room and encourage me to perform experiments on me." The “Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter,” a 1955 case in which a Kentucky farm was allegedly attacked by little green men, was a source of particular terror.

As West gained scientific knowledge, he came to believe that the Kelly-Hopkinsville “aliens” were probably owls. However, instead of curing his interest in the paranormal, this understanding honed it, and he began to take pleasure in the patient dismantling of unsound logic. This practice had, for West, therapeutic value, and as an adult his childhood anxieties manifested only in a vestigial discomfort with the dark. In the 1990s, West moved to California, where he co-founded a video game studio; He is best known as one of the programmers for the hugely popular Tony Hawk franchise. In 1999, the company he worked for was acquired by Activision, and before he was forty years old, he more or less retired. He became embroiled in Wikipedia editing wars on such controversial topics as homeopathy, scientific foreknowledge in sacred texts, and vegetarian lions. Ultimately, he created his own website to combat widespread misinformation surrounding Morgellons disease, a condition with no established medical basis, characterized by a concern that foreign fibers are growing out of the skin. Then he took on the chemtrails theory and took on the 9/11 truthers. As he says in his book: “A small part of the reason I now disparage (and still occasionally deal with ghost stories) is rage at the fear that this nonsense was instilled in me as a child.”

West is a thoughtful and intelligent man. Numbered and lettered lists and light math appear in his emails. Everything he told me was perfectly persuasive, but even an hour on the phone with him left me feeling vaguely demoralized. He supposed Morgellons sufferers and chemtrail hysterics would be grateful to be freed from their unfounded fears, just as he had been freed from the psychic danger posed by farm aliens, and he didn't see why UFO advocates should. be different. He seemed unable to conceive that anyone could find solace in the decentralizing perspective that we are not alone in a universe about which, ultimately, we know very little.

In 2013, West founded Metabunk, an online forum where like-minded collaborators examine anomalous phenomena. On January 6, 2017, another skeptic brought to his attention an article by Kean in the Huffington Post. In the article, “Groundbreaking UFO Video Just Released by Chilean Navy,” Kean wrote in detail about an “exceptional nine minute” movie, shot with infrared cameras from a helicopter, that Cefaa had been studying for two years. West watched the clip with an immediate sense of recognition. He posted the link on Skydentify, a Metabunk subforum, putting forward his theory that the strange formations in the video were "aerodynamic condensation contrails," which he was used to seeing when planes flew over his Sacramento home. On January 11, the community had verified that the alleged UFO was IB6830, a regular passenger flight from Santiago to Madrid.

UFO investigations can only be conducted through the process of elimination, a style of argument that is highly vulnerable to wrong assumptions. In this case, as the Metabunk participants extrapolated, the helicopter pilots had inaccurately estimated the distance and altitude of the UFO, and viable possibilities, such as a commercial aircraft taking off, had been prematurely ruled out. . West was not surprised. Although Kean considers pilots to be "the best trained observers in the world for anything that flies," even Hynek determined, in 1977, that pilots are especially prone to error. (He claimed, however, that "they do slightly better in a group.") As West has written, "you can't be an expert on the unknown."

During one of my phone calls with Kean—pleasant distractions that used to take up entire afternoons—I mentioned that I had been in contact with Mick West. It was the only time I met her that she was in a bad mood. “If Mick was really interested in this stuff, he wouldn't discredit all the videos,” he said, almost pityingly. "I would admit that at least some of them are genuinely weird."

Robert Bigelow was three years old in the spring of 1947, when his grandparents were nearly carried off the road by a bright object in the mountains northwest of Las Vegas. The Nevada desert of the early years of the atomic age was one of the few places where a child could watch nuclear tests or rocket launches from his backyard, and Bigelow's dreams of exploring space were mixed with his curiosity about UFOs. In the late 1960s, in his early twenties, he began investing in real estate - first in Las Vegas, then throughout the Southwest - eventually making a fortune with Budget Suites of America, a chain of motels in extended stay. Later, he founded a private company, Bigelow Aerospace, to build inflatable habitats for astronauts. In 1995, he created the National Institute for the Discovery of Science, which described itself as "a privately funded scientific institute dedicated to the investigation of aerial phenomena, animal mutilations, and other related anomalous phenomena." Among the consultants he hired was Hal Puthoff, whose work in paranormal studies dated back decades to Project Stargate, a C.I.A. program. to investigate how “remote viewing,” a form of E.S.P. at long range, it could be useful in Cold War espionage. The following year, Bigelow purchased the Skinwalker Ranch, a 480-acre parcel located a few hours southeast of Salt Lake City, named after a shape-shifting Navajo witch. Its previous owners had described being scared away by coruscating spheres, bleeding cattle, and wolf-like creatures impervious to gunfire. In 2004, following an alleged decline in domestic paranormal activity, Bigelow closed his institute but kept the ranch.

In 2007, Bigelow received a letter from a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official who was curious about Skinwalker. Bigelow put him in touch with an old friend from the Nevada desert, Senator Harry Reid, who was then the Senate Majority Leader, and the two men met to discuss their common interest in UFOs. he subsequently visited Skinwalker, where, from a double-wide observation trailer on site, he is said to have had a spectral encounter; as one Bigelow affiliate described it, he saw a “topological figure” that “appeared out of thin air” and “went from pretzel-shaped to Möbius strip-shaped.”

Reid contacted Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who believed he had seen a UFO as a pilot in World War II, and Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. In the 2008 Supplemental Appropriations Act, $22 million of so-called black money was set aside for a new program. The Pentagon was not enthusiastic. As one former intelligence official put it, "There were some government officials who said, 'We shouldn't be doing this, it's really ridiculous, it's a waste of money.' And he continued: And then Reid would call them out of a meeting and say: 'I want you to do this. This was appropriated. It was kind of a joke that bordered on annoying and people worried that if all this got out, that the government was spending money on this, it would make a bad story.” The Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program was announced in a public tender to examine the future of warfare. UFOs were not mentioned, but according to Reid the subtext was clear. Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or baass, a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace, was the sole bidder. When Bigelow won the government contract, he came into contact with the same cohort of paranormal investigators that he had worked with at his institute. Other participants were recruited from the ranks of the Pentagon. In 2008, Luis Elizondo, a veteran counterintelligence officer working in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, was visited by two people who asked him what he thought of UFOs.

Bigelow believes, as a source told me, that "there are aliens walking around the supermarket." According to an article by Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick on the Drive website, Bigelow hired researchers to examine Skinwalker's reports of sulfur-smelling dog-like creatures and goblins with long, pendulous arms, as well as activity of UFOs near Mount Shasta. The program appears to have produced little more than a series of thirty-eight papers, all but one unclassified, on the type of technology a UFO could exploit - including papers on the theoretical feasibility of warp drives and "metric space engineering." -time". Bigelow's investigators, convinced that the crash wreckage was hidden in some remote hangar, wanted access to classified government UFO data. In June 2009, Senator Reid filed a request for the program to receive “special restricted access program” or sap status. The following month, Baass published a "Ten Month Report" of four hundred and ninety-four pages. The parts of the report that were leaked to Tim McMillan, along with additional sections I was able to review, dealt almost exclusively with UFOs, and the information provided was not limited to mere sightings; it included a photo of an alleged tracking device that the alleged aliens had implanted in an alleged abductee. As one former government official told me: "The report got here and I read it through and immediately concluded that publishing it would be a disaster." In November 2009, the Department of Defense peremptorily denied the application for sap status. (A representative for Baass declined to comment for this article.)

Shortly thereafter, Elizondo, the counterintelligence officer, was asked to take over the program. Beginning in 2010, he turned a subcontracted study on Utah cryptids into the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, an internal effort that focused on the national security implications of military encounters with U.A.P. According to Elizondo, the program studied in depth a series of incidents, including what later became known as the "Nimitz encounter."

The Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting training operations in restricted waters off the coast of San Diego and Baja California in November 2004, when the advanced SPY-1 radar on one of the ships, the U.S.S. Princeton, began to register some strange presences. They were recorded up to eighty thousand feet in elevation and down to the surface of the ocean. After a week of radar observations, Commander David Fravor, a graduate of the elite Topgun fighter pilot school and commanding officer of the Black Aces squadron, was dispatched on an interdiction mission. Approaching the spot, he looked down and saw a sandbar in the water and, floating on it, an oval white object that looked like a large Tic Tac. He estimated it to be about forty feet long, with no obvious wings or other flight surfaces, and no visible means of propulsion. It seemed to bounce like a ping-pong ball. Two other pilots, one sitting behind him and another in a nearby plane, gave similar accounts. Fravor descended to pursue the object, which reacted to his maneuvers before abruptly taking off at high speed. When Fravor returned to the Nimitz, another pilot, Chad Underwood, was sent to follow up with more advanced sensory equipment. His aircraft's targeting pod recorded a video of the object. The clip, known as “flir1” – for “forward-facing infrared radar”, the technology used to capture the incident – ​​shows for one minute and sixteen seconds a blurred ashen dot on a tan-colored background; in the last few seconds, the dot appears to evade the radar lock and make a quick getaway.

Elizondo's exposure to cases like the Nimitz encounter convinced him that PAUs were real, but the government's willingness to invest resources in the issue remained uncertain. Elizondo repeatedly tried to brief General James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, about the AATIP investigation, and was blocked by his subordinates. (General Mattis's personal aide at the time has no recollection of being approached by Elizondo.)

On October 4, 2017, at the behest of Christopher K. Mellon, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Leslie Kean was summoned to a confidential meeting at the bar of a luxury hotel near the Pentagon. She was greeted by long-time paranormal investigator Hal Puthoff and retired CIA officer Jim Semivan, who introduced her to a stocky, thick-necked, tattooed man with a cropped goatee named Luis Elizondo. The previous day had been his last working day at the Pentagon. For the next three hours, Kean was led through the documents proving the existence of what was known to be the first government investigation into UFOs since the closure of Project Blue Book in 1970. The program The one Kean had spent years pushing for had existed all along.

Following Elizondo's resignation, he and other key AATIP participants—including Mellon, Puthoff, and Semivan—almost immediately joined To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, an operation dedicated to UFO-related education, entertainment and research, and hosted by Tom DeLonge, former frontman of the pop-punk group Blink-182. That same month, DeLonge invited Elizondo onstage at an introductory act. Elizondo announced that they were "planning to provide never-before-published images of actual US government systems, not blurry amateur photos, but actual data and video."

Kean was told he could have the videos, along with chain-of-custody documentation, if he could run a story in the Times. Kean was quick to doubt DeLonge, after he appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast to discuss his belief that what crashed at Roswell was a reverse-engineered UFO built in Argentina by fugitive Nazi scientists, but he was confident. in Elizondo. “It had incredible gravity,” Kean told me. He called Ralph Blumenthal, an old friend and former Times employee working on a biography of Harvard psychiatrist and alien abduction researcher John Mack; Blumenthal emailed Dean Baquet, the paper's executive editor, to say they wanted to break "a sensational and highly classified story that takes time" in which a "senior US intelligence official who abruptly resigned last month" had decided to expose "a deeply secret program, long mythologized but now confirmed." After a meeting with representatives from the Washington, D.C., bureau, the Times agreed. The newspaper assigned a veteran Pentagon correspondent, Helene Cooper, to work with Kean and Blumenthal.

On Saturday, December 16, 2017, his story – “bright auras and 'black money': the pentagon's mysterious UFO program” – surfaced online; it ran on the front page the next day. Accompanying the article were two videos, including “flir1”. Senator Reid was quoted as saying, "I'm not ashamed or sorry I put this in motion." The Pentagon confirmed that the program had existed, but said it had been closed in 2012, in favor of other funding priorities. Elizondo stated that the program had continued in the absence of specific funding. The article did not focus on the reality of the UFO phenomenon - the only real case dealt with at any length was the Nimitz encounter - but on the existence of the covert initiative. The Times article drew millions of readers. Kean noticed a change almost immediately. When people asked him what he did at dinner, they no longer laughed at his answer, but were enthralled. Kean credited Elizondo and Mellon for taking the plunge, but told me, “I never would have imagined that I would end up writing for The Times. It's the pinnacle of everything I've ever wanted to do: this miracle that happened on this great road, great journey."

However, it was difficult to know what exactly AATIP had achieved. Elizondo went on to host the History Channel docuseries “Unidentified,” in which he solemnly invokes his security oath as a catchphrase. He insisted that AATIP had made important strides in understanding the "five observables" of U.A.P. behavior, including "gravity-defying capabilities," "low observability," and "transmedia travel." When I asked him for details, he reminded me of his security oath.

Perhaps not surprising for a Pentagon project that began as a contractor's investigation into goblins and werewolves, and was reincarnated under the aegis of a musician best known for an album called "Enema of the State." ”, AATIP came under intense scrutiny. Kean remains steadfast in her belief that she and an insider exposed something formidable, but a former Pentagon official recently suggested that the story was more complicated: The program she revealed was minor compared to the one she put out. on going. The widespread fascination with the idea that the government cared about UFOs had inspired the government to care about UFOs at last.

A month after the Times article was published, the U.A.P. from the Pentagon was reassigned to a civilian intelligence officer with a rank equivalent to a two-star general. This successor - who did not want to be named, to prevent the UFO madmen from thronging his door - had read Kean's book. He channeled the cascade of media interest to argue that without a process for handling uncategorizable observations, rigid bureaucracies would overlook anything that did not follow a standard pattern. At the height of the Cold War, the government was concerned that the noise from lurid phantoms might drown out signals relevant to national security, or even provide cover for adversary incursions; now, it seemed, the concern was that valuable intelligence would not be reported. (The Nimitz encounter was not the subject of an official investigation until years after the incident, when an errant file found its way to the desk of someone who decided it deserved to be investigated.) “What we needed,” the former Pentagon official said, “was something like the post-9/11 fusion centers, where a guy from the Department of Defense can talk to a guy from the F.B.I. and a guy from the N.R.O., everything we learned from the 9/11 Commission."

In the summer of 2018, Elizondo's successor brandished Kean's article to make this case to members of Congress. According to the former Pentagon official, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee inserted language into the classified schedule of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019, passed in August 2018, that required the Pentagon to continue investigations. “The theme of U.A.P. it's being taken very seriously now, even compared to where it was two or three years ago," the former Pentagon official said.

Activity intensified. In April 2019, the Navy revised its official guidelines for pilots, encouraging them to report U.A.P. without fear of contempt or censure. In June, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia admitted that he had been briefed on the U.A.P. In September, a Navy spokesperson announced that the “flir1” video, along with two videos associated with sightings off the East Coast in 2015, showed “incursions into our military training grounds by unidentified aerial phenomena.” The “unidentified” label had received an institutional imprimatur.

The debunkers were unimpressed by the appointment, and their work continued apace. Mick West dedicated several YouTube videos to his claim that “flir1” shows, in all probability, a distant plane. He argued that the rest of the available evidence of the Nimitz encounter was even more shaky: he suspects that presences picked up by the U.S.S. Princeton were probably birds or clouds, recorded by a newly released and probably poorly calibrated radar system - the U.S.S. Roosevelt, off the east coast, had also received a technology upgrade before a series of similar sightings in 2014 and 2015 - and that the Tic Tac-shaped object Commander Fravor saw was something resembling a target balloon. He has no explanation for what the other pilots saw, but points out that perceptions are subject to illusion, and memory is malleable.

Were our best pilots and radar operators so inept that they couldn't recognize an aircraft in restricted airspace? Or did the government use the word "unidentified" to hide some deeply classified program that a branch of the service was testing without bothering to notify the Nimitz pilots? The former Pentagon official assured me that West "doesn't have the whole story." There is data that he will never see; there is much more that I would include in a classified environment.” And he continued: "If Mick West feeds the stigma that allows a potential adversary to fly all over the backyard, then, great, just because it seems weird, I guess we'll ignore it."

The purpose of using the term “unidentified,” he said, was to “help remove the stigma.” He told me, "At some point, we had to admit that there are things in the sky that we can't identify." Despite most adults carrying exceptionally good camera technology in their pockets, most UFO photos and videos remain maddeningly indistinct, but the former Pentagon official hinted that the government has documentation stark visual; Elizondo and Mellon have said the same thing. According to Tim McMillan, in the past two years, researchers at U.A.P. The Pentagon have distributed two classified intelligence documents, on secure networks, that allegedly contain images and videos of strange sights, including a cube-shaped object and a large equilateral triangle emerging from the ocean. One of the reports addresses the issue of “alien” or “non-human” technology, but also offers a litany of mundane possibilities. The former Pentagon official warned that "unidentified" does not mean there are little green men, it just means there is something there. He continued: "If it turns out that all we've seen is weather balloons, or a quadcopter designed to look like something else, no one is going to lose sleep over it."

Elizondo never made it to Mattis, but his successor managed to get briefings in front of Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defense, as well as the director of National Intelligence, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Armed Services Committee of the Senate and several members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Japanese government officials later disclosed to the media that they had discussed the issue in a meeting with Esper in Guam. When I asked the former Pentagon official about other foreign governments, he hesitated, then said: "We would not have moved forward without informing close allies." This was bigger than the United States government.”

In June 2020, Senator Marco Rubio added language to the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act requesting - but not required - that the Director of National Intelligence, along with the Secretary of Defense, develop "a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reports." This language, giving them 180 days to produce the report, was largely based on Mellon's proposals, and it was clear that this concerted effort, at least in theory, was a more productive and profitable iteration of the original vision. of the AATIP. Mellon told me, "This creates an opening and an opportunity, and now the name of the game is to make sure we don't miss that open window."

However, the former Pentagon official told me, "it wasn't until August 2020 that the effort was really real." That month, Defense Undersecretary David Norquist publicly announced the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, whose report is expected in June. The Intelligence Authorization Act was finally passed in December. The former Pentagon official worries that the appetite for disclosure has been whetted. "The public, I hope, does not expect to see the crown jewels," he said.

West was nonchalant. “They're just UFO fans,” he said of Reid and Rubio. “They have convinced themselves that there is something in it and that is why they are trying to push for it to be disclosed.” The former Pentagon official admitted that there were "a lot of people in the government who are enthusiastic about the subject who watch the History Channel and eat this stuff 24 hours a day." But, he said, the current mood was by no means set by "a small group of true believers."

Virtually all astrobiologists suspect that we are not alone. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Seti Institute, has wagered that we will find irrefutable proof of intelligent life by the year 2036. Astronomers have determined that there may be hundreds of millions of potentially habitable exoplanets in our galaxy alone. Interstellar travel by living things still seems like a long shot, but physicists have known since the early 1990s that faster-than-light travel is theoretically possible, and new research has brought it slightly closer to practice. These advances - together with the deduction that ours is a mediocre or even inferior civilization, which could well be millions or billions of years behind our distant neighbors - have given minimal plausibility to the idea that UFOs have alien origin.

Such a perspective, as Hynek wrote in the mid-1980s, "overheats human mental circuitry and blows the fuses in the mind's protection mechanism." His destabilizing influence was evident. He began interviews with sources who seemed lucid and cautious and who insisted, like Kean, that they were only interested in verified data, and who used the term "UFO" in the strictly literal sense: whether the objects were spaceships or drones or clouds. We just didn't know. An hour later, they would reveal to me that aliens had been living in secret bases under the ocean for millions of years, that they had genetically altered primates to become our ancestors, and that they had taught Sumerians bookkeeping.

Since 2017, Kean has covered UFOs for The Times, sharing the headline with Ralph Blumenthal on a handful of stories. These have stayed away from genre mainstays like crop circles and the Nazca lines, but his most recent piece, published last July, veered into fringe territory. In it, they referred to "a series of unclassified slides," of somewhat uncertain lineage, but apparently shown at congressional briefings, that mentioned "off-world" vehicles and "accident recoveries." Kean told me, in an unusually hesitant manner, however, that he had begun to accept the idea that the UFO fragments had been hoarded somewhere. In 2019, Luis Elizondo had suggested to Tucker Carlson that such debris existed. (Then he quickly invoked his oath of security.) Kean cited Jacques Vallée, perhaps the most famous living ufologist, and the basis for François Truffaut's character in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," who has been working with Garry Nolan, a Stanford immunologist, to analyze alleged crash material. for scientific publication. (Vallée refused to speak about it officially, concerned that it might undermine the peer review process, but told me, "We hope this is the first UFO case published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.")

In the article, Kean and Blumenthal wrote that Harry Reid "believed that otherworldly vehicle accidents had occurred and that recovered materials had been secretly studied for decades, often by aerospace companies on government contracts." The day after it was published, the Times had to add a correction: Senator Reid did not believe that the wreckage had been assigned to private military contractors for his study; he believed that UFOs could have crashed and that, if so, we should study the consequences. When I asked Reid about the mix-up, he told me that he admired Kean but had never seen evidence of any remains, something Kean had never claimed. In our conversation, he left no doubt about his personal assessment. “I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these recovered materials,” he said. “And I tried to get, as I recall, classified approval from the Pentagon for me to go look at the material. They did not approve. I don't know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they didn't give it to me." He told me that the Pentagon had given no reason. I asked him if that was the reason he had applied for sap status for AATIP. He said, “Yes, that's why I wanted you to take a look at it. But they didn't give me permission." (A Lockheed Martin representative declined to comment for this article.)

The former Pentagon official told me he found Kean's evidence insufficient. “There are terms on Leslie's slides that we don't use, things we would never say,” he said. "It doesn't pass the sniff test." But when I asked him if he thought there might be recovered remains somewhere, he took a surprisingly long pause. Finally he said: "I couldn't say yes, like Lue did" -Luis Elizondo- ". Sincerely I dont know". He continued: “There are guys who spent their lives studying things like Roswell and they died without answers. Are we all going to die without answers?

Not everyone needs answers, or expects the government to provide them. In February, I spoke with Vincent Aiello, a podcaster and former fighter pilot, who served on Nimitz at the time of the encounter. He told me that the general impression of the Commander Fravor story back then, thirteen years before it became a news sensation, was that it sounded pretty farfetched, but that the gossip and laughter on the ship died down after a day or two. “Most military aviators have a job to do and they do it well,” he said. "Why pursue the great mysteries of life when that's what Geraldo Rivera is there for?"

The mysteries have shown no sign of abating. In early April, eminent UFO journalist George Knapp, along with documentary filmmaker Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell, best known for their involvement in an ill-fated crusade to "raid" Nevada's Area 51, released a video and a series of photos. which had apparently been leaked from the classified intelligence reports of U.A.P. The video, taken with night vision goggles, shows three aerial triangles intermittently flickering with an eerie glow as they rotate against a starry sky. Kean texted me: “A huge breaking story.” He was trying to get to the bottom of the video, but he doubted any of his sources would be willing to authenticate something this hot. The next day, the Department of Defense confirmed that the video was real, saying it had been recorded by Navy personnel. Mick West argued persuasively that the pyramids were a plane and two stars, distorted by a lens artifact. Kean, for his part, told me he was "just starting to look into the situation," but offered to say that West was "being reasonable." The Pentagon declined to comment further.

The government may or may not care about solving the UFO riddle. But by throwing up his hands and admitting that there are things he just can't figure out, he's loosened his grip on the taboo. For many, this has been a comfort. In March, I spoke with an Air Force lieutenant colonel who said that a decade ago, during combat, he had a prolonged encounter with a UFO, which registered on two of his plane's sensors. For all the usual reasons, he had never officially reported the sighting, but would occasionally bring it up to a close, trusted friend over a beer. He did not want to be named. "Why am I telling you this story?" he asked. “I guess I just want this data to come out; Hopefully this helps someone else in some way."

The object he had encountered was about forty feet long, disobeyed the principles of aerodynamics as he understood them, and looked like a giant Tic Tac. “When Commander Fravor's story broke in the New York Times, all of my colleagues gasped. Even my old boss called me and said: 'I read about the Nimitz and I wanted to tell you that I am very sorry for calling you an idiot.

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