---
alias:
- Helene Cooper
- Cooper, Helene
category: Journalists
created: 2026-10-03
location: Washington, D.C.
relations:
- fn: 1
  role: assistant editorial page editor (2004), diplomatic correspondent (2006), White
    House correspondent (2009), Pentagon correspondent
  start: 2004
  type: employed_by
  with: '[[New York Times]]'
- fn: 2
  role: co-author; the Times's Pentagon correspondent assigned to Kean and Blumenthal
  start: 2017-12-16
  type: participant_in
  with: '[[December 2017 New York Times AATIP Report]]'
summary: Helene Cooper, a New York Times Pentagon correspondent and co-author of the
  paper's December 16, 2017 report on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification
  Program, was assigned to work with Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal.
tags:
- Person
- Journalist
- UFO
- NewYorkTimes
updated: 2026-10-03
---

[Helene Cooper](/people/helene-cooper/) was born in Monrovia, Liberia, on April 22, 1966. She joined the *[New York Times](/organizations/new-york-times/)* in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor, became diplomatic correspondent in 2006 and [White House](/places/white-house/) correspondent in 2009, and later became a [Pentagon](/organizations/pentagon/) correspondent. In 2015 she was part of the Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for coverage of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, and she won the George Polk Award for health reporting and the Overseas Press Club Award that year. She wrote the memoir *The House at Sugar Beach* (Simon and Schuster, 2008) and *Madame President: The Extraordinary Story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf* (2017).[^1]

### The December 2017 report

Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote in *The New Yorker* that after a meeting with representatives of the Times's Washington bureau the paper agreed to the story brought by [Leslie Kean](/people/leslie-kean/) and [Ralph Blumenthal](/people/ralph-blumenthal/) and "assigned a veteran Pentagon correspondent, Helene Cooper, to work with Kean and Blumenthal."[^2] Her name appears first in the byline of "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program," published December 16, 2017; the article reported that the [Department of Defense](/organizations/department-of-defense/) "has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012."[^3] The Pentagon officials quoted in the article included spokesman Thomas Crosson, who said the program ended because other priorities "merited funding."[^3] Keith Kloor of *The Intercept* wrote in 2019 that Cooper had described [Luis Elizondo](/people/luis-elizondo/) on the Times podcast *The Daily* as a "spooky, secretive guy."[^4] The sequence of who met whom before the Times assigned her is set out in [December 2017 New York Times AATIP Report](/events/december-2017-new-york-times-aatip-report/).

[^1]: "Helene Cooper." Simon & Schuster author page. https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Helene-Cooper/18871279
[^2]: Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. "How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously." *The New Yorker,* May 10, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously
[^3]: Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean. "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program." *The New York Times,* December 16, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html (full text read through the Internet Archive capture, https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html).
[^4]: Kloor, Keith. "The Media Loves This UFO Expert Who Says He Worked for an Obscure Pentagon Program. Did He?" *The Intercept,* June 1, 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history-channel-luis-elizondo-pentagon/