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Post by swamprat on Dec 16, 2017 17:24:24 GMT -6
BREAKING NEWS: BREAKING NEWS: Secret US UFO Program Revealed - UFO Congress Schedule Posted!
BREAKING NEWS! New York Times Releases UFO Footage From US Government Along With Story About Secret UFO Program! Story Simultaneously Posted On Politico! To The Stars Academy and Bigelow Aerospace Involvement!
Listen to George Knapp and Alejandro Rojas discuss this news on Coast to Coast AM Sunday night,December 17, 2017!
In some of the most important UFO news to be released in years, the New York Times and Politico have posted stories on a secret UFO program ran by the Department of Defense, who worked with Bigelow Aerospace. The program was initiated by Harry Reid who was convinced to undergo the project by Robert Bigelow, and partially influenced by a pro-UFO comment made to him by astronaut John Glenn. Reid told the New York Times he is in no way embarassed by funding this important project. The public first heard of the project during the press conference announcing the To The Stars Academy (TTSA), created by Tom DeLonge. Luis Elizondo, who ran the UFO department, retired in October to join TTSA and revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the progam to look into UFO reports.
See next two posts for the New York Times article.
Read the Politico story here: www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/16/pentagon-ufo-search-harry-reid-216111
See and read more about the video at the To The Stars Academy website here: coi.tothestarsacademy.com/
See the To The Stars Press Confernce and read a transcript at OpenMinds.tv here: www.openminds.tv/watch-tom-delonges-to-the-stars-academy-ufo-press-conference-here/41143
Read more about Alejandro Rojas' appearance on Coast to Coast AM Sunday with George Knapp here: www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2017/12/17
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Post by swamprat on Dec 16, 2017 17:36:01 GMT -6
Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Programby Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean Dec. 16, 2017
WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.
Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.
For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.
The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.
The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.
On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.
Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.
Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”
Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.
While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”
James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O. sightings, was also doubtful. “There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories,” Mr. Oberg said. “Lots of people are active in the air and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.”
Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. “There could well be a pearl there,” he said.
In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.
“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an email, referring to the Department of Defense.
But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.
“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.
U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969. The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.
Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue Book that it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”
Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow. In 2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.
Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol.
“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain.
See next post for Page 2
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Post by swamprat on Dec 16, 2017 17:37:29 GMT -6
N.Y. Times Article, Page 2 The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.
The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, “was one of the easiest meetings I ever had.”
He added, “Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.’” (The Alaska senator had been a pilot in the Army’s air force, flying transport missions over China during World War II.)
During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said had followed his plane for miles.
None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. “This was so-called black money,” he said. “Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it.” Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for classified programs.
Contracts obtained by The Times show a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011. The money was used for management of the program, research and assessments of the threat posed by the objects.
The funding went to Mr. Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the program.
Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, 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. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.
“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program. “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”
The program collected video and audio recordings of reported U.F.O. incidents, including footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves. The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are seeing. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one exclaims. Defense officials declined to release the location and date of the incident.
“Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world on this issue,” Mr. Bigelow said in an interview. “Our scientists are scared of being ostracized, and our media is scared of the stigma. China and Russia are much more open and work on this with huge organizations within their countries. Smaller countries like Belgium, France, England and South American countries like Chile are more open, too. They are proactive and willing to discuss this topic, rather than being held back by a juvenile taboo.”
By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.
A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.
Mr. Elizondo, in his resignation letter of Oct. 4, said there was a need for more serious attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” He expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling Mr. Mattis that “there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”
Mr. Elizondo has 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. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.
In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.
For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”
But, he said, “we have to start someplace.”
www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html
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Post by jcurio on Dec 16, 2017 18:21:37 GMT -6
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Post by jcurio on Dec 16, 2017 18:30:06 GMT -6
By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials. A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied. Read more: theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/7498/secret-ufo-program-revealed?page=1#ixzz51TOsxCFN(page 2) *************** Would have liked to point out the admission of continuing studies on those that are abducted- but I think most of us UNDERSTAND that the “studies” have gone on for many years (probably also black budget). For experiencers who are not highly psi, or informed, this has served to confuse the issue of who was doing the abductions. But instead I point out another conundrum.
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Post by Steve on Dec 17, 2017 6:26:11 GMT -6
This is uplifting and exciting Real News. It is making top headlines on my internet news page. Interesting the money congress appropriated by way of Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada). 2007 was also the same time as when the Mufon Star Team began. I know because I was there! We were told then the money for case investigation collected and research by Mufon was financed by Billionaire Robert Bigalow and the information would be sent to Bigalow.
Was Bigalow the 'Cover' for the government program at least as far as Mufon was concerned? Was it really Bigalows own money to finance the the then new Mufon Star team in 2007, or was Bigalow receiving the money from the Defence department and stating in public it was his as far as the Mufon aspect, to protect the DOD? I do not see any issue doing that if Bigalow did receive the money from congress/defense department. It would be a discrete way to compartmentalize & operate. If true, sure mufon was a very small aspect of the overall research effort.
If Mufon was part of the program indirectly, then wonderful. In the big scheme of things, if Mufon was involved in helping with field investigations, it would have been a very small finger in the hand investigating then. I remember then Mufon was ecstatic to be given the money in 2007 which Bigalow ultimately had to manage. Mufon bookkeeping screwed it up, and the funding from Bigalow stopped. Was Mufon essentially unbeknownst to them, a separate 'observer corp.' of a much larger secret 'Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program' too?
The timing (2007) and the players involved then compels one to ask these questions.
But looks possibly like the other aspects of the defense funding was very impressive if the article is accurate. In the beginning, was the Mufon Star team a small isolated component of the the $22 million spent on the 'Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program'?
The videos of the objects recorded by the FA-18 Super Hornets is impressive, particularly the 'roll' maneuver by the object that wowed the pilots observing.
It is interesting too, contrast this video to the encounter years ago over Iran with a F-4 Phantom when Iran was a friend of the USA. The electronics of the F-18s were not switched off or jammed as with the F-4. The UFO appears to be intelligently controlled, and who or what was controlling it, perhaps did not perceive a threat from the F-18's, or their abilities where so advanced, they were confident they could avoid any problem? It was nice of them to allow us a peek and record the event and satisfy our human curiosity. Beautiful!
The way science is today, scientists being afraid to study UFO's? Yes, they are, as the article states well. But all new serious science anywhere is all grant based. Funny 'Oberg', a long time skeptic and debunker is watching now. Money talks.
Steven
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Post by skywalker on Dec 17, 2017 10:09:18 GMT -6
I was always suspicious of Bigalow's sudden interest in UFOs and his apparent desire to "take over" all of the UFO investigative organizations, but if he were working closely with the government, even as an outside contractor, it would explain why he was so enthusiastic about it. It's not often the DoD officially gets involved in paranormal research so I'm sure he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity while it lasted. It's too bad mufon screwed their chance to be involved in it.
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Post by Steve on Dec 17, 2017 13:33:12 GMT -6
I was always suspicious of Bigalow's sudden interest in UFOs and his apparent desire to "take over" all of the UFO investigative organizations, but if he were working closely with the government, even as an outside contractor, it would explain why he was so enthusiastic about it. It's not often the DoD officially gets involved in paranormal research so I'm sure he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity while it lasted. It's too bad mufon screwed their chance to be involved in it. Hi Sky,
I think Bigalows interest in the phenomenon goes back a long time, apparently to some personal experiences he relates happened to him but keeps the details to himself.
If Mufon was even a tiny recipient of that DOD funding, it says well to me about Bigalow to include mufon in some capacity if that was indeed the case. We don't know at present.
It does not make me suspicious of Bigalow at all. One of the healthy things about stepping back from the UFO issues for a time is how screwed up and tainted most are about conspiracy theory's. The fact that a secret program was operating does lend some credence to some of the less outrageous conspiracy theories. I always assumed when I was in Mufon out there somewhere a government program was operating. Not a monolithic one, but also doing their own investigations quietly in someway too.
When I was on the first Star Team in California, I was told Bigalows desire and interest funding the investigations was a material one. He was a aerospace contractor in Nevada, and hoped to gain evidence and objects that would provide advanced materials ahead of his competitors to use in his own space projects. This wasn't well known, but it wasn't ever kept secret either. Bigalow was open about his motives we thought. I still think he was and is. That's just the way its done ...business and government in the real world, not the paranoid fake ufo conspiracy world clouding real facts.
Go Leslie Kean!
Steven
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Post by swamprat on Dec 18, 2017 10:13:10 GMT -6
Well, as long as you're bring up MUFON....... UFOS AND THE MILITARY: MUFON RESEARCH PROVED GOVERNMENT INTERVENTIONby Roger Marsh, MUFON Director of Communications December 17, 2017
Mainstream media outlets are reporting December 16 that the U.S. Defense Department has been funding the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to study UFOs.
The program, as reported by The New York Times, was run by "military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze."
"The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) has been taking reports from the public for nearly 50 years that clearly supports the idea that the U.S. government never stopped investigating UFOs since ending its Project Blue Book program in January 1970," Executive Director Jan C. Harzan said Sunday.
"While everyone these past few decades keeps saying that the military doesn't talk about UFOs," Harzan said, "we've been noticing the opposite. The military talks to us frequently in the form of retired personnel who come forward with accounts of exactly what happened while on duty in situations where they were told never to speak publicly about the event."
MUFON published a Journal cover story in November 2017 outlining 16 of the best military intervention cases. The Special Assignment Team (SAT) led by Director Chase Kloetzke with staff writer Kerry McClure reviewed multiple cases for the feature.
"We've known all along that the military was conducting UFO research," Kloetzke said Sunday. "It was very apparent from the reports we've acquired from around the country. There were just too many reports. They claim the program ran from 2007 to 2012, but we are convinced it was merely re-positioned these past five years."
Upload the Journal cover story as a PDF - which runs on pages 14 through 19 - at the link below: www.mufon.com/uploads/2/5/2/2/25220163/november2017mufonjournalweb.pdf
The video released Saturday shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. The video was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
"We are conducting analysis on the video released Saturday," Harzan said. "We hope to have an opinion later this upcoming week and will report back on our findings."
www.mufon.com/ufo-news
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Post by jcurio on Dec 18, 2017 16:11:04 GMT -6
May not mean a thing.... other than a few negative thoughts.
Not anything conspiratorial. For sure.
LOTS of things bring up the year 2007 for me. One of them being the mufon forum shut down that year. Is my memory correct on that? (year)
THAT could simply be due to a certain person leaving Mufon, the starz team coming on board, etc etc. The forum was just collateral.
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Post by skywalker on Dec 18, 2017 18:27:39 GMT -6
The forum shut down in 2010.
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Post by swamprat on Dec 18, 2017 19:31:41 GMT -6
Alien Hunter/UFO Skeptic Seth "Shostop" Enters the Discussion!Alien Hunter Reveals the Most Disturbing Part of the Pentagon's UFO ProgramBy Rae Paoletta December 18, 2017
When the New York Times reported Saturday that the Pentagon had spent several years and $22 million researching the possible existence of UFOs, tinfoil hat believers breathed a sigh of relief. The rest of us were surprised, but accepted the news nonetheless because it’s 2017 and nothing makes sense. All that said, an alien hunter-slash-scientist in California tells Inverse that there is something unnerving about this story, but it’s not the UFOs.
“There are a couple examples of really puzzling phenomenon,” SETI Institute Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak tells Inverse. “I mean, I get it, but there’ve always been puzzling cases. There are always plenty of interesting cases, and they make for great television shows. But this doesn’t mean they involve phenomena we’ve never seen before.”
According to the Times, the Pentagon recently confirmed that it had taken part in a partially declassified program to investigate UFOs, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The project — which was launched primarily at the request of former Nevada Democrat Harry Reid — ran from at least 2007 through 2012, though some involved believe it’s still alive in a less organized form.
Reid had apparently been influenced by his friend Robert Bigelow, a billionaire and aerospace entrepreneur who told CBS’s 60 Minutes back in May that he’s “absolutely convinced” UFOs have visited Earth.
According to Shostak, Bigelow’s obsession with extraterrestrials has gone back much longer.
“I know him a little bit; he’s a nice guy!” Shostak explains. “But he’s thought there’s been evidence of an alien visitation for a very long time, as least as long as I’ve known him, and that’s been about 15 years.”
If Bigelow wanted to spend his own money to fund a real-life X-Files, that’d be one thing. But according to the Times, the $22 million appropriated to AATIP — which came from taxpayer money — went to Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace. With this cash, Bigelow hired people to construct buildings to house items that came from supposed UFOs and brought on researchers to study people who said they’d encountered extraterrestrial objects.
For Shostak, what’s “a little disturbing” about the ordeal is that Bigelow, who has collaborated with NASA despite having no scientific background, has received so much money from the project.
“[Bigelow] doesn’t need more money,” he explains. “He’s a very likeable guy, but he’s been convinced all along that we’re being ‘visited.’ And it doesn’t mean [aliens are visiting us] just because a person of note thinks it’s true. The thing that’s a little disturbing about this is that it seems a lot of the money for this study went to Bob Bigelow. I think that if you really wanted to investigate this stuff, the thing to do is to give this to scientists or experts in the field that don’t have a dog in the fight.”
While some of the AATIP mission remains classified, at this point, a few things remain true. One, Harry Reid is good at campaigning on behalf of his friends’ pipe dreams. Two, Robert Bigelow is seriously invested in finding aliens among us. And three, we haven’t found proof of any extraterrestrial beings, as badly as we all want that to happen.
“If the aliens were actually visiting us since 1947, when they made that navigation error in New Mexico, you’d have really good evidence,” Shostak says. “It wouldn’t all be in the hands of the government — and not just the government, our government. If the aliens had bothered to visit any other countries, wouldn’t they have evidence? I find it hard to believe that everybody’s covering it up.
“The bottom line is somebody spent 20 million dollars of your tax dollars to look into this and they didn’t come up with anything.”
www.inverse.com/article/39533-alien-hunter-reveals-disturbing-pentagon-ufo-program
(No, the bottom line is, Seth is PO'd that HE didn't get the money for SETI!)
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Post by jcurio on Dec 19, 2017 2:46:38 GMT -6
The forum shut down in 2010. ******** Great job, Skywalker! (I started posting on mufon forum in 2007) 😉
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Post by plutronus on Dec 19, 2017 5:38:16 GMT -6
Alien Hunter/UFO Skeptic Seth "Shostop" Enters the Discussion!Alien Hunter Reveals the Most Disturbing Part of the Pentagon's UFO ProgramBy Rae Paoletta December 18, 2017
When the New York Times reported Saturday that the Pentagon had spent several years and $22 million researching the possible existence of UFOs, tinfoil hat believers breathed a sigh of relief. The rest of us were surprised, but accepted the news nonetheless because it’s 2017 and nothing makes sense. All that said, an alien hunter-slash-scientist in California tells Inverse that there is something unnerving about this story, but it’s not the UFOs.
“There are a couple examples of really puzzling phenomenon,” SETI Institute Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak tells Inverse. “I mean, I get it, but there’ve always been puzzling cases. There are always plenty of interesting cases, and they make for great television shows. But this doesn’t mean they involve phenomena we’ve never seen before.”
According to the Times, the Pentagon recently confirmed that it had taken part in a partially declassified program to investigate UFOs, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The project — which was launched primarily at the request of former Nevada Democrat Harry Reid — ran from at least 2007 through 2012, though some involved believe it’s still alive in a less organized form.
Reid had apparently been influenced by his friend Robert Bigelow, a billionaire and aerospace entrepreneur who told CBS’s 60 Minutes back in May that he’s “absolutely convinced” UFOs have visited Earth.
According to Shostak, Bigelow’s obsession with extraterrestrials has gone back much longer.
“I know him a little bit; he’s a nice guy!” Shostak explains. “But he’s thought there’s been evidence of an alien visitation for a very long time, as least as long as I’ve known him, and that’s been about 15 years.” . . <<deletia>> . . “If the aliens were actually visiting us since 1947, when they made that navigation error in New Mexico, you’d have really good evidence,” Shostak says. “It wouldn’t all be in the hands of the government — and not just the government, our government. If the aliens had bothered to visit any other countries, wouldn’t they have evidence? I find it hard to believe that everybody’s covering it up.
“The bottom line is somebody spent 20 million dollars of your tax dollars to look into this and they didn’t come up with anything.”
www.inverse.com/article/39533-alien-hunter-reveals-disturbing-pentagon-ufo-program
(No, the bottom line is, Seth is PO'd that HE didn't get the money for SETI!) Swampy, Yep, you've nailed it. It is also my opinion that Seth (I met him at the Cabrillo.edu COTI conference in 2000) is just a cry-baby and for several reasons, one, anything publically ET, has always been his schtic, being the 'official scientific pubic relations expert' on things ET, and then also, SETI is very expensive and is always hunting for money (while never capturing any useful data), then, and this one is the biggie, in addition to Seth being hemispherically clueless re; the ongoing alien presence, the biggie is, if ET are coming here what does anyone need radio SETI for? Why look for evidence of ET way-out-there when they are here? How is it possible that he doesn't know? A freind and one member of my secret (now defunct) group, Allen 'Alien' Tough, (Prof Emeritus, Toronto.edu), as he often referred to himself, at one time, when I asked him why he was looking for ET, or if he had seen or otherwise experienced any form of alien contact?, he said, "No, but I see lots of smoke, and although I can not see any, I know that there is fire somewhere." So Seth Shostak is more than just money hungry and clueless, he is also logically myopic. Then, one might consider that no one gives somebody $20 million for nothing, especially in the science arena. Robert Bigelow is foremost a businessman. Reverse engineering of ET technology is Bigelow's Nr. 1 priority, and a task in which he has performed much. Unlike MUFON investigations which has been ongoing for decades having discovered little or no significant technical ET information over the years, while Bigelow's investigators, when they began to investigate alien exhibitions immediately understood many of the exhibited characteristics, as well as the purpose of craft "glowing auras" (heh heh heh, those newspaper reporters are also clueless babblers, heh heh heh), while the MUFON elite apparently never has understood much, until, the few that can read, likely read explanations in Paul Hill's book, now it seems everyone in MUFON circles are yaking about "plasma" while the news-media is calling it 'glowing-auras', hah hah hah. Another aspect that people don't understand regarding Robert Bigelow's long-term ET interest, is that he is and has been SELLING his scientifically investigated and collected alien behavior information, as well as juicy deductions to the US Military. Shostak and his crowd have nothing to sell. plutronus
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Post by swamprat on Dec 19, 2017 9:52:24 GMT -6
Gee, even LiveScience has joined the chorus!Do You Want to Believe? Government UFO Search Never StoppedBy Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer December 18, 2017
The U.S. government has been secretly investigating unidentified flying objects — UFOs — since 2007. And despite officials' claims that the classified UFO-hunting effort shuttered in 2012 after funding evaporated, the group is still active, The New York Times reported Saturday (Dec. 16).
Known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the initiative was launched by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2007 and operated with an annual budget of $22 million from 2008 to 2011, the Times discovered during a recent investigation.
Pentagon officials revealed that the program existed, but added that it ceased to operate in 2012, the Times reported. HOWEVER, THE FORMER LEADER OF THE PROGRAM SAID THAT AATIP REMAINED ACTIVE IN THE YEARS SINCE; HE CONTINUED TO OVERSEE THE EFFORT UNTIL HE RESIGNED IN OCTOBER — CITING THE DEPARTMENT'S "EXCESSIVE SECRECY AND INTERNAL OPPOSITION" AS THE CAUSE — AND HE WAS SUCCEEDED AFTER HIS DEPARTURE, according to the Times.
Under the program, aerospace experts investigated and described sightings and video recordings of mysterious objects that defied easy explanation; they also conducted tests on people who reported glimpsing UFOs, to see how they might have been affected by the experience, according to the Times.
One video example — the time and date of which was withheld by government officials — showed a fast-moving, spinning and glowing aircraft, recorded midair by Navy pilots in an F/A-18 Super Hornet, the Times reported.
The nascent program was ushered into existence by Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, then the Senate majority leader. His interest in UFOs was piqued by conversations with billionaire entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, whose aerospace company was tapped to conduct much of the research for AATIP's UFO sightings, Reid told the Times.
Reid further explained that he had also spoken about UFOs years earlier with astronaut John Glenn, the Times reported. Glenn suggested to Reid that the government should take a closer look at reports of UFO sightings by members of the military service; these reports were often not widely shared, because people who saw UFOs thought that no one would believe them.
Reid referred to the proposed budget for AATIP as "black money," a special type of budget maintained by the Pentagon for classified programs, and one that was not debated publicly by Senate members, according to the Times.
UFO sightings have been investigated by government agencies since the 1940s, and in January 2016, the CIA released a number of previously classified documents describing some of the most unusual UFO encounters on record, most of which took place in the 1950s.
But belief in UFOs is still widespread; according to a survey conducted in 2012, an estimated 80 million people in the U.S. think that UFOs are real, and 1 in 10 responders claimed to have personally witnessed what they describe as an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
In an interview, the now-retired Reid said that he was "not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry" to have pushed for the investigation of potential threats posed by UFOs, according to the Times.
"I think it's one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I've done something that no one has done before," Reid said.
www.livescience.com/61221-secret-government-ufo-program.html
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Post by swamprat on Dec 19, 2017 14:21:15 GMT -6
Fox News joins the conversation.....'Stunning' Tic Tac shaped UFO encounter by US Navy pilot? 'It was not from this world'Fox News Dec 19, 2017
A retired U.S. Navy pilot revealed the time in 2004 when he encountered a strange object he claimed was “not from this world.”
Cmdr. David Fravor, a Navy pilot for 18 years, said he has come across strange things during his tenure but recalled one encounter on Nov. 14, 2004 that left him puzzled, ABC News reported.
"I can tell you, I think it was not from this world," Fravor said. "I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close."
Fravor said he was on a routine training mission off the coast of California when he witnessed a 40-foot “wingless object” that he described as a Tic Tac, flying at incredibly high speeds in strange patterns.
"I have never seen anything [like this] in my life, in my history of flying, that has the performance, the acceleration [of this vehicle] — keep in mind this thing had no wings," Fravor said. The pilot said controllers on a Navy ship reported “objects dropping out of the sky from 80,000 feet and going straight back up.”
"So we're thinking, OK, this is going to be interesting," Fravor said.
The pilot recalled seeing the object and asking another aviator if he saw the strange aircraft that arrived on the radar.
“We look down, we see a white disturbance in the water, like something's under the surface, and the waves are breaking over, but we see next to it, and it's flying around, and it's this little white Tic Tac, and it's moving around — left, right, forward, back, just random," Fravor said.
Fravor said they flew their planes lower to check the object out but it disappeared before they could get a good look.
"When it started to near us, as we started to descend towards it coming up, it was flying in the elongated way, so it's (like) a Tic Tac, with the roundish end going in the forward direction ... I don't know what it is. I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it," he said.
The pilot said the water also turned blue when it vanished.
The aviators decided to return to their training exercise when a controller informed them the object had returned.
At the same time, Fravor said, an aircraft launched from the nearby USS Nimitz had also picked up the strange object on their infrared channel.
"He gets close enough to see a couple of objects come out of the bottom, and then all of a sudden it takes off and goes right off the side of the screen and, like, takes off," Fravor said.
The pilot said the object’s speed was “stunning” and could not explain what he saw that day.
"I don't know if it was alien life, but I will say that in an infinite universe, with multiple galaxies that we know of, that if we're the only planet with life, it's a pretty lonely universe,” Fravor said.
The object was not investigated following the appearance.
Fravor’s experience followed two reports that were published by The New York Times and Politico this weekend. The reports described a secret multimillion-dollar Pentagon program aimed at investigating “unidentified aerial phenomena” better known as "UFOs." The program began in 2007 and may still be in place.
www.foxnews.com/science/2017/12/19/stunning-ufo-encounter-by-us-navy-pilot-it-was-not-from-this-world.html
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Post by auntym on Dec 19, 2017 14:53:18 GMT -6
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whatwouldyousuggest
Junior Member
I once was...I am again..I always will be....all hail the personal opinion
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Post by whatwouldyousuggest on Dec 20, 2017 23:51:06 GMT -6
I read that. Hope more will come forward but it's nothing we didn't already know..that they were sitting on all this. I still think 'they' are even more in the dark than we are over origins or intent. If you were an intelligent (apparently more so than we-uns) being would you want to talk to our government? Alien VS The Donald.....'I'll tell you right now bug eyes..we can blow up your puny little ships and the whole pack of you...I'll build a wall to keep you out too.' The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it ....once it's been tweeted.
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Post by swamprat on Dec 22, 2017 11:04:21 GMT -6
DeVoidWhat a week!
Posted on December 22, 2017 by Billy Cox
The other day I watched astronomer/Hayden Planetarium director/Carl Sagan “Cosmos” legacy heir Neil deGrasse Tyson lose it on CNN. The topic was the Pentagon’s newly revealed UFO research program. And the flummoxed “rock star of science explanation,” as Tyson was introduced, was so worked up he was practically incoherent.
“The evidence is so paltry for aliens to visit earth, I have no further interest,” he said. “Let other people who care, go ahead. And when you finally find some aliens, bring them into Times Square. No, no,” he corrected himself with coercive chuckling, “there are too many weird people.” Obliging laughter from Tyson’s hosts. “And try not to come back during Comic-Con where the aliens would just blend in,” he continued. “Go to the county fair or something where there’s a uniformity of who’s there.”
Oh yeah. The county fair. Monster trucks and funnel cakes. Blue-ribbon livestock. Those people. Look, the truth is, Tyson is actually cool with space aliens. So long as they know their place, confine themselves to distant shores on the far side of the cosmic ocean, and work the keyboards with SETI radioastronomers. But yo, wait up – he’s still talking:
“—and everybody’s got a high definition video camera on them now. We have video footage of rare things that, you know, happened but no one saw it happen, like buses tumbling in tornadoes. In the day, you didn’t say oh, a bus is about to tumble, let me go back and get my video camera to film this. No, you got your tail outta there. Everybody’s got a video camera. I’m just waiting for images of people visiting … having tea with aliens on the spacecraft.”
Say what?
“Fine, we don’t know what it is, keep checking it out. Call me when you have a dinner invite from an alien.”
Say no more, got it. When it comes to investigating for possibilities in our own back yard, let somebody else do the work.
Nope, this isn’t the sort of sputtering discourse we’ve come to expect from the normally unruffled and eloquent personality scientist. But neither he nor we have ever seen a time like this. The revelation of a $22 million Pentagon study of UFOs. State of the art gun-cam thermal footage with embedded metadata. Captured by F-18 jet fighters and professionally analyzed. An officer with an elite military unit – an eyewitness, to boot – telling global audiences “I have never seen anything in my life, in my history of flying, that has the performance, the acceleration — keep in mind, this thing has no wings.” Plus a lineup of blue-chip advocates for more extensive study, officials who most definitely are not labeling what’s going on as the handiwork of space aliens. People with titles such as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, like Chris Mellon, who recently left the Pentagon.
“Um, you know, that’s speculation,” Mellon responded when asked by a CNN reporter if he was talking extraterrestrials. “I think what we need to do is get serious about finding answers. Speculation is cheap and easy, what we need is more hard data.” Judging from his multiple appearances, this is a guy who isn’t going to shrink from the lights, who understands the media’s role in making people listen or read. “Until the public engages,” he said, “we’re really not gonna make progress and headway. It’s a democracy, people have to be invested and care about it for something like this to be really understood.”
Mellon’s assertion about democracy may need an update, but never mind. America’s traditional stable of talking heads has never been challenged this way before. And that makes it easier to understand why folks like Tyson look off their game. Especially when the former director of that Pentagon Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo, refuses to draw conclusions about the evidence. “We’d rather let the data drive the conclusions,” he told HLN, “(rather than let) our opinions and our conclusions drive the data.” That sounds like, well, jeez, your gig, Dr. Tyson. Science.
When it comes to UFOs, Seth Shostak, like Tyson, is where newsies typically go whenever they want The Reliable Rational Angle. Senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, Shostak has welded his career to the theory that ET will be discovered at a manageable arm’s length, but most certainly not in our own atmosphere. For many in the SETI clique, searching for ET is a zero-sum game, where considering evidence for one is incompatible with weighing evidence for the other. So they tend to avoid the other and resort to the sort of speculation that too often characterizes UFO “believers.”
Their argument usually opens with perfunctory equivocation about how, yes, there are many things we see in the sky that we don’t understand, yes, yes – but that doesn’t mean they’re space aliens. Then they trot out anthropocentric behavioral analogies they use to buttress their degreed perspectives. Like the old saw Shostak regurgitated for Business Insider this week.
“They’re the best house guests ever,” Shostak said of whatever’s going on upstairs. “Because if they’re here, they’re not doing anything … They send a huge fleet of spacecraft, preferably shaped like dinner plates, just to fly around and get people agitated but otherwise not do a thing. It’s a little odd that aliens would come hundreds and hundreds of light-years to do nothing.” Y’know, he’s right? They sure aren’t behaving like the Spanish did when they reached the gates of Tenochtitlan. Go on, Seth: “They don’t try and take any of their land, they don’t bring any disease, they don’t do anything; they just sort of walk around at the fringes of their settlements, leading to puzzling sightings, but that’s it.”
I wonder what this week has been like for these tunnel-visionaries. Did they voluntarily process The New York Times coup? Or will they ingest it only after being drugged, bound, and held hostage to the Ninth Symphony like Alex in “A Clockwork Orange”? This can’t be pleasant.
But this is definitely terra incognita. For the first time in more than a year, I’ve woken up every morning actually looking forward to browsing the news feed to see what kind of legs this thing has. For now, the story is everywhere, NPR, Forbes, NBC, ABC, CBS, Axios, Esquire, Space.com, Fox, Popular Mechanics and everything else I’ve missed. An emboldened reporter from The Hill asks White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders if Trump believes in UFOs, and if her boss intends to restore research funding, which supposedly went lights-out in 2012.
“I feel like I already want to pass on this question,” Sanders replies as the giggles subside, “given that you’ve got aliens sitting among you.” No one knew she was this witty before. “Somehow or another that question hasn’t come up in our back and forth over the last couple of days but I will check into that and be happy to circle back.” She said happy.
Ralph Blumenthal, co-author of the Times story, even took the opportunity to explain his approach. “So how does a story on U.F.O.s get into The New York Times?” he begins. “Not easily, and only after a great deal of vetting, I assure you.” Front-end journalism from other media presses forward. Veteran KLAS-TV investigative reporter George Knapp in Las Vegas scores a sit-down interview with retired Sen. Harry Reid, who instigated the program in 2007.
Knapp also contacts other sources, who tell him “the effort resulted in three dozen thick reports, some of them several hundred pages in length, as well as another three dozen or so technical reports which projected how this kind of exotic technology might usher in a new era of aviation, and what that might mean.” In summary, reports Knapp, “Reid said the study produced voluminous reports, but was canceled because of fears within the intelligence community, fear not only that the story would leak out, but fear based on religious beliefs of those who felt UFOs might be Satanic.”
So even Satan’s doing the war on science thing now. Great.
Reid also referenced the research of UFOs and Nukes author Robert Hastings, who has more than 150 veterans on record discussing the phenomenon’s spooky activity over nuclear weapons facilities. Imagine the White House press corps if the phenomenon’s tampering with our WMD gets any traction: “Sarah, can you tell us if President Trump is trying to sign a deal with UFOs to get them to disable North Korea’s nuclear arsenal?”
Reid even tells Knapp his phone’s been ringing off the hook since the Times story broke, that he’s been fielding calls from members of Congress and business leaders alike. In fact, earlier this week, defense techno-giant Raytheon touted its own critical role in the UFO story by reminding readers that its very own Advanced Targeting Forward Look Infrared sensor — aka AN/ASQ-228 in Navy parlance, installed on carrier-based F-18s — was responsible for acquiring the footage. Stated the chief engineer for Surveillance and Target Systems at Raytheon’s Space and Airborne Systems, “We might be the system that caught the first evidence of E.T. out there.”
So there’s that.
On the other hand, if precedence holds sway, the attention-challenged press will get bored soon enough, revert to form, and start sniffing around for more accessible VIP bedroom scandals. That’s where I’d put my $$$. But if nothing else, at least De Void will look back someday, fondly, at this moment, this week. The week the media broke from covering the same old repetitive dispiriting Beltway fatcat horror show. The week the media swerved off the rez, nodded politely at the same old celebrity authorities, and at least feigned interest in chasing the biggest story of all time.
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15607/what-a-week/#comment-506915
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Post by jcurio on Dec 22, 2017 16:19:12 GMT -6
at that might mean.” In summary, reports Knapp, “Reid said the study produced voluminous reports, but was canceled because of fears within the intelligence community, fear not only that the story would leak out, but fear based on religious beliefs of those who felt UFOs might be Satanic.” Read more: theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/7498/secret-ufo-program-revealed#ixzz521xrj75x******* Great. The fear of Satan immobilizing people in 2017. KNOW YOUR ENEMY.
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whatwouldyousuggest
Junior Member
I once was...I am again..I always will be....all hail the personal opinion
Posts: 121
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Post by whatwouldyousuggest on Dec 26, 2017 11:22:19 GMT -6
I think it's hideous. To even think of 'going there'.....puts direction in peoples minds before they even land and we don't need any help in arriving to wrong conclusions. "Satan" is within not without...he is the inner demon that sometimes gets away and causes normally sane people to slaughter their families or drown their children or poison their elders. Get people to thinking that visitors from anywhere else are satanic and here we go...holocaust time. We are just not stable enough for that...as a breed.
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Post by swamprat on Dec 29, 2017 14:30:15 GMT -6
...and the dialog continues.Mystery over top secret UFO program deepensBy Emma Parry, The Sun December 29, 2017
The mystery of a top-secret UFO program has deepened after government officials claimed there was confusion about its purpose — while experts accused them of backtracking.
The Pentagon last week confirmed the existence of a $22 million program called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) which investigated sightings of UFOs between 2007 to 2012, The Sun reported.
The revelation excited UFO fans around the world as it was the first time the US government had admitted investigating UFOs since 1969.
The organisation’s work was outed by Luis Elizondo when he told The New York Times he ran the shadowy Department of Defence program from 2007 to 2012 and continued to look into the issue until he resigned in October this year.
Two bombshell videos of unexplained UFO sightings by US military personnel — investigated by the AATIP — were also published.
However, when contacted by Sun Online, the spy organisation Defence Intelligence Agency claimed there had been some misunderstandings.
A spokesman said: “There is some confusion about this program and claims about its purpose in press reporting ... the Defence Intelligence Agency has not released any information, files or videos.”
But Department of Defence officials disputed this, saying they did not know what “confusion” the Defence Intelligence Agency was referring to, and stating they had been “clear” about the program’s aims.
A Department of Defense spokesman said: “The AATIP’s mandate, when it existed, was to assess far-term foreign advanced aerospace threats to the United States.”
It is claimed the program ended in 2012, however Mr Elizondo said that he had continued to work with officials from the Navy and the CIA on the program until he resigned from office in October.
UFO experts have claimed that this disagreement could be the government trying to back-pedal because it isn’t “ready or willing” to disclose the information.
Ufologist Alejandro Rojas from Open Minds TV, which is dedicated to extraterrestrial life, said: “It does seem to me like they might be backtracking.
“They haven’t clarified exactly what the confusion is, but I’m not surprised that they are scrambling over this now.
“According to The Washington Post, Luis Elizondo essentially got the videos under somewhat false pretences.
“He claimed he wanted to use the videos for training pilots. He didn’t say he wanted to use the videos to demonstrate that UFOs are real, which is what’s happening.
“I think that’s why the clips are so short and — especially with the second one. There is so little information attached to it.
“I think perhaps they thought just in case somebody gets a hold of this and tries to turn it into a big UFO thing, we just won’t give them much information.
“It puts them in a spot because perhaps they’re not ready or even willing to come out and talk about this.
“And they didn’t intend these videos to be used for this purpose.
“It wouldn’t be the first time the government has tried to spin things in a different direction on this topic.
“But we’ve got Elizondo who led the program going on the record to talk about it — so it’s clear that they were investigating UFOs.”
Sun Online has now lodged a Freedom of Information request with the Defense Intelligence Agency for any other UFO files or videos related to AATIP.
www.foxnews.com/science/2017/12/29/mystery-over-top-secret-ufo-program-deepens.html
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whatwouldyousuggest
Junior Member
I once was...I am again..I always will be....all hail the personal opinion
Posts: 121
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Post by whatwouldyousuggest on Dec 29, 2017 22:21:05 GMT -6
I can't even muster up the indignity to care anymore. So much BS for so long...I still say they're igannant fools
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