December 2017 New York Times AATIP Report

The New York Times published "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program" online on December 16, 2017, under the bylines of Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean; its print version ran on page A1 of the New York edition under the headline "Real U.F.O.'s? Pentagon Unit Tried to Know," which Keith Kloor of The Intercept called a "lavish front-page Sunday spread on December 17, 2017."¹² The article stated that "the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find," that the program began in 2007 "largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time," and that most of the money went to an aerospace company run by Robert Bigelow, "a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid's." The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was run, the Times wrote, by the military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who had resigned that October.¹

Publication and the Pentagon's statements

Politico published its own account the same day, "The Pentagon's Secret Search for UFOs," by defense editor Bryan Bender, which stated that the program began in 2009 with an appropriation secured by Reid with the support of Senators Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens and that the Pentagon had confirmed its existence "on Friday" (December 15), the two papers' reports being "nearly simultaneous." The Times placed the start in 2007 and described contracts showing an appropriation of "just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011." Bender wrote in December 2017 that "Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White confirmed to Politico that the program existed and was run by Elizondo," and quoted White as saying that the program "ended in the 2012 time frame"; a Pentagon official told Politico that Mattis's receipt of Elizondo's resignation letter could not be confirmed.²³ The Times piece quoted Pentagon spokesman Thomas Crosson that the program ended because other priorities "merited funding"; Elizondo's account, in the same article, was that the work continued after formal funding stopped in 2012.¹⁴

The Times article reported that Bigelow Aerospace "hired subcontractors and solicited research" and that the company modified buildings in Las Vegas "for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena." It quoted Reid's account that his interest in the subject "came from Mr. Bigelow," that in 2007 Bigelow told him a Defense Intelligence Agency official wished to visit his ranch in Utah, and that he then summoned Stevens and Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol; of the funding Reid said: "This was so-called black money." It reproduced Reid's 2009 request to Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn that the program become a "restricted special access program," a 2009 Pentagon briefing summary asserting that "what was considered science fiction is now science fact," and the statement that Reid's request "was denied." Sara Seager of MIT and James Oberg were quoted as skeptics. The article described Elizondo as having "now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science," a venture that "aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s." It also described a video "released in August" of a whitish oval object chased by two Navy F/A-18F aircraft off the USS Nimitz in 2004. Politico's article identified Mellon as "a former Democratic staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee," reported that the company's website claimed 2,142 investors who had bought "slightly more than $2 million worth of shares" with a minimum purchase of 200 dollars, and wrote that Bigelow was "a regular contributor to Reid's reelection campaigns, campaign finance records show, at least $10,000 from 1998 to 2008."¹³

On June 1, 2019 Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood told Keith Kloor of The Intercept that AATIP "did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena" but that "Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in OUSDI, up until the time he resigned effective 10/4/2017." Sherwood also said he "cannot confirm" White's 2017 statement; White, Kloor noted, had since resigned from the Pentagon amid an internal probe. Kloor added that Bender, Politico's defense editor, "had a recurring role in the first episode of 'Unidentified,'" the History Channel series on which Elizondo and Mellon appeared, "as a kind of authoritative character witness," and that Cooper had described Elizondo on the Times podcast The Daily as a "spooky, secretive guy." Elizondo told Kloor in 2019 that he was working as a government contractor "but it's not what you think it is"; Mellon did not respond to Kloor's request for comment.² On June 13, 2019 Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told John Greenewald of The Black Vault that a 2009 Reid memorandum was authentic and "makes no change to previous statements," adding "DIA administered AATIP, and Elizondo was never assigned to DIA. Elizondo did interact with the DIA office managing the program while the program was still ongoing, but he did not lead it."⁵ Hal Puthoff told The Black Vault that as a contractor and senior adviser he "continued to attend meetings, provide briefings, gain access to videos" under the program; The Black Vault noted that the contracted work began in 2008 and Elizondo's claimed leadership in 2010.⁵ Bender wrote on June 2, 2019 that he expected "a much more definitive statement from the Pentagon" and that The Intercept's "assertions and innuendo" were wrong.⁵

The placement, in sequence

In 2016 Tom DeLonge cold-called Christopher Mellon, who told Bender in 2021: "Tom called me up out of the blue and then through him I met Jim and Hal," meaning Jim Semivan and Puthoff. Mellon, who had kept his security clearance, then met Elizondo at a Pentagon briefing.⁶ In an email from August 2017, reviewed by Politico, Elizondo described a plan for an unclassified "community of interest" database of unidentified aerial phenomena reports. Politico reported that the Washington Headquarters Services declassification division approved three Navy videos "for unlimited distribution" within the government, and that Mellon, Elizondo and "others now in DeLonge's orbit" concluded that this was not enough and "needed to kick up a media firestorm."⁶

Elizondo resigned from the Department of Defense effective October 4, 2017 per the Pentagon; his resignation letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis cited "bureaucratic challenges and inflexible mindsets" (Kloor, 2019), and The Intercept noted the letter does not mention AATIP or Elizondo's role as its director.²⁷ On October 4, 2017, at Mellon's request, Kean was called to a meeting in the bar of a hotel near the Pentagon, where Puthoff and Semivan introduced her to Elizondo, whose last day at the Pentagon had been the previous day, according to the account Kean gave Gideon Lewis-Kraus of The New Yorker. Over three hours she was taken through documents. Lewis-Kraus wrote that Kean "was told that she could have the videos, along with chain-of-custody documentation, if she could place a story in the Times."⁴ Kean later gave "all the credit to Elizondo and Mellon for coming forward."⁴

After Elizondo left the Pentagon he and the other AATIP participants named above joined To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science. At the company's launch event in October 2017 (reported as October 11) DeLonge invited Elizondo onstage and Elizondo announced that the group was "planning to provide never-before-released footage from real U.S. government systems."⁴⁸

Kean telephoned Blumenthal, an old friend and former Times staffer then at work on a biography of the Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack. Blumenthal e-mailed executive editor Dean Baquet to say they wanted to pitch "a sensational and highly confidential time-sensitive story" in which a "senior U.S. intelligence official who abruptly quit last month" had decided to expose "a deeply secret program, long mythologized but now confirmed." After a meeting with representatives of the Times's Washington bureau, the paper agreed and assigned Cooper, its Pentagon correspondent.⁴ Bender wrote in 2021 that Mellon, "by then also a paid adviser to DeLonge's TTSA," acted as Elizondo's "unofficial public relations manager" and "started dangling the story to the New York Times, POLITICO and several other mainstream outlets," over several months; that reporters were shown the videos and unclassified documents on Bigelow's contracts; that the Times "was granted permission to broadcast the videos"; and that Politico "was shown the videos but not provided copies."⁶

The videos

The Times article carried two videos, "FLIR1" and "GIMBAL," captioned "U.S. Department of Defense" and described as "released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program"; the third, "GOFAST," was published in March 2018, according to The Black Vault.⁴⁹ In a 2020 interview for the documentary The Phenomenon, Mellon said: "I received the videos, the now famous videos in the Pentagon parking lot from a Defense Department official. I still have the packaging." He added that "somebody bent the rules a little bit, and they did so for the larger good." Vice reported it could not independently verify the account.¹⁰

Bender wrote in 2021 that reporters "were shown the declassified videos," and quoted Mellon: "A huge breakthrough occurred because the Navy was confirming the videos were authentic and declassified on the Hill."⁶

The Navy's formal position on release changed twice. Sherwood told Kloor in 2019 that the videos were released "for research purposes ... and not for general public release."² On April 27, 2020 the Department of Defense issued a "Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos," which read that the department "has authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, which have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017," and that the aerial phenomena "remain characterized as 'unidentified.'"⁹ A Galileo Project announcement of October 30, 2021 credited Mellon and Elizondo with being "pivotal in bringing about the Pentagon's release and confirmation" of the three videos.¹¹

Later correction and follow-on reporting

In July 2020 Kean and Blumenthal wrote in the Times that Reid "believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts"; the Times appended a correction the next day, and Reid told Lewis-Kraus he "had never seen proof of any remnants" but "was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials."⁴ In June 2023 Kean and Blumenthal published the first account of the claims of David Grusch on the website The Debrief, according to New York Magazine.¹²