Helene Cooper

Helene Cooper was born in Monrovia, Liberia, on April 22, 1966. She joined the New York Times in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor, became diplomatic correspondent in 2006 and White House correspondent in 2009, and later became a 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 and 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 "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 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.