Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program

[kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Head of Pentagon's secret ‘UFO’ office sought to make evidence public

The chief of a little-known agency says the Pentagon failed to take his UFO investigations seriously. Then he quit.

By JOBY WARRICK | 7:27PM EST — Saturday, December 16, 2017


The Pentagon is seen in an aerial view. — Photograph: Charles Dharapak/Associated Press.

JUST BEFORE leaving his Defense Department job two months ago, intelligence officer Luis Elizondo quietly arranged to secure the release of three of the most unusual videos in the Pentagon's secret vaults: raw footage from encounters between fighter jets and “anomalous aerial vehicles” — military jargon for UFOs.

The videos, all taken from cockpit cameras, show pilots struggling to lock their radars on oval-shaped vessels that, on screen, look vaguely like giant flying Tic Tacs. The strange aircraft — no claims are made about their possible origins or makeup — appear to hover briefly before sprinting away at speeds that elicit gasps and shouts from the pilots.

Elizondo, in an internal Pentagon memo requesting that the videos be cleared for public viewing, argued that the images could help educate pilots and improve aviation safety. But in interviews, he said his ultimate intention was to shed light on a little-known program Elizondo himself ran for seven years: a low-key Defense Department operation to collect and analyze reported UFO sightings.

The existence of the program, known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was confirmed officially for the first time on Saturday by a Pentagon spokesman. The acknowledgment came in response to media inquiries, which were generated in part by a start-up company Elizondo has joined since retirement. The private company specializes in promoting UFO research for scientific and entertainment purposes.



Current and former Pentagon officials confirm that the Pentagon program has been in existence since 2007 and was formed for the purpose of collecting and analyzing a wide range of “anomalous aerospace threats” ranging from advanced aircraft fielded by traditional U.S. adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters. It is a rare instance of ongoing government investigations into a UFO phenomenon that was the subject of multiple official inquiries in the 1950s and 1960s.

Spending for the program totaled at least $22 million, according to former Pentagon officials and documents seen by The Washington Post, but the funding officially ended 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,” Pentagon spokesman Tom Crosson explained in a statement.

But officials familiar with the initiative say the collection effort continued as recently as last month. The program operated jointly out of the Pentagon and, at least for a time, an underground complex in Las Vegas managed by Bigelow Aerospace, a defense contractor that builds modules for space stations. It generated at least one report, a 490-page volume that describes alleged UFO sightings in the United States and numerous foreign countries over multiple decades.

Neither the Pentagon nor any of the program's managers have claimed conclusive proof of extraterrestrial visitors, but Elizondo, citing accounts and data collected by his office over a decade, argues that the videos and other evidence failed to generate the kind of high-level attention he believes is warranted. As part of his decision to leave the Pentagon, he not only sought the release of videos but also penned a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis complaining that a potential security threat was being ignored.

“Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels, certain individuals in the [Defense] Department remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security,” Elizondo said in the letter, a copy of which was provided to The Post.



The first public revelations of the program came in a video conference aired in October by To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, the firm Elizondo joined as a consultant after retiring from his Pentagon job. The New York Times and Politico reported the existence of the program on their websites on Saturday. The Washington Post conducted several confidential interviews over two months with Elizondo and Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence who also is an officer of the private firm.

Documents provided by the former officials included letters of support by former Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid (Democrat-Nevada), a key backer of the initiative who helped secure funding for the program and sought to ensure a high degree of secrecy. Elizondo said knowledge of the program was limited, even within the Pentagon itself. He said the program had multiple enemies at senior levels of the department, from officials who were either skeptical or ideologically opposed to AATIP's mission.

“I was honored to serve at the DOD and took my mission of exploring unexplained aerial phenomena quite seriously,” Elizondo said. “In the end, however, I couldn't carry out that mission, because the department — which was understandably overstretched — couldn't give it the resources that the mounting evidence deserved.”

It is difficult to draw conclusions about the nature of the unidentified vessels from the videos alone. Experts generally urged caution, explaining that reported UFO sightings often turn out of have innocuous explanations.

A retired Navy pilot contacted by The Post who was involved in a 2004 encounter depicted in one of the videos confirmed that the images accurately reflected his recollection of the events. The pilot would only speak on the condition of anonymity.

Elizondo, a 22-year veteran of the department who has held top security clearance and worked on secret counter-intelligence missions, said he chose to join the private venture because he believed it was the best way to continue the work he was unable to complete as a government employee.

“I left to find an environment where investigating these phenomena is priority number one,” he said.

• Joby Warrick joined The Washington Post's national staff in 1996. He has covered national security, the environment and the Middle East and currently writes about terrorism. He is the author of two books, including 2015's “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS”, which was awarded a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

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Related to this topic:

• No, we haven't discovered alien megastructures around a distant star

• Do we really want to know if we're not alone in the universe?

www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/head-of-pentagons-secret-ufo-office-sought-to-make-evidence-public/2017/12/16/90bcb7cc-e2b2-11e7-8679-a9728984779c_story.html

[Mustang51]

The truth is out there..............

[kiwithrottlejockey]

Dec 19, 2017 7:00:27 GMT 12 Mustang51 said:

The truth is out there..............

Yep....Donald Trump's army of conspiracy theorists will be lapping up everything in those video clips.

They'll no doubt claim it was “deep state” hiding the facts from them.

[ZacYates]

I for one think it makes sense to investigate these things. Maybe not $22mil of sense though!

[kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Former Navy pilot describes UFO encounter
studied by secret Pentagon program

Former pilot David Fravor described the experience at length
after a secret Pentagon program studying UFOs was unveiled.

By ELI ROSENBERG | 21:25AM EST — Monday, December 18, 2017


The Pentagon had a secret program to study UFOs, according to disclosures this week. — Photograph: Getty Images.

FOR MOST of his 18-year career as a U.S. Navy pilot, Commander David Fravor said his mother-in-law used to ask him a question: Had he seen a UFO? For 15 years, the answer was no.

But one clear afternoon off the coast of California in 2004, he says, that changed.

Fravor, the commanding officer of a Navy squadron at the time, said he saw a flying object about the size of his plane that looked like a Tic Tac after a break in a routine training mission. The object moved rapidly and unlike any other thing he had ever seen in the air. He has not forgotten it since.

Fravor's story emerged this week after the Pentagon publicly acknowledged for the first time the existence of a recent program dedicated to studying unidentified flying objects. The funding for what was known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program ran from 2007 to 2012. But officials familiar with it said some of its efforts have continued.

The news of its existence marks one of the most significant disclosures about government research into flying objects — and the so-far-unproven possibility of extraterrestrial aircraft — since Project Blue Book, a lengthy Air Force study of thousands of UFOs that was shut down in 1969. Project Blue Book failed to find “any technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge,” and no evidence of any “extraterrestrial vehicles,” according to the Air Force, though a small portion of the events it studied remain unexplained.

The encounter Fravor described was analyzed by the recent Defense Department program, he said, but its most significant questions — the nature of the object and what it was doing — have also remained unanswered.

Fravor says he is certain about one thing: “It was a real object, it exists and I saw it,” he said in a phone interview on Monday, as he described the sighting, on November 14th, 2004.

Asked what he believes it was, 13 years later, he was unequivocal.

“Something not from the Earth,” he said.

Fravor was the commanding officer of the VFA-41 Black Aces, a U.S. Navy strike fighter squadron of F/A-18 Hornet fighter planes doing an exercise some 60 to 100 miles off the coast between San Diego and Ensenada, Mexico, in advance of a deployment to the Persian Gulf for the Iraq War, he said.

An order came in for him to suspend the exercise and do some “real-world tasking,” about 60 miles west of their location, Fravor said. He said he was told by the command that there were some unidentified flying objects descending from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet and disappearing; he said officials told him they had been tracking a couple dozen of these objects for a few weeks.

When they arrived closer to the point, they saw the object, flying around a patch of white water in the ocean below.

“A white Tic Tac, about the same size as a Hornet, 40 feet long with no wings,” Fravor described. “Just hanging close to the water.”

The object created no rotor wash — the visible air turbulence left by the blades of a helicopter — he said, and began to mirror the pilots as they pursued it, before it vanished.

“As I get closer, as my nose is starting to pull back up, it accelerates and it's gone,” he said. “Faster than I'd ever seen anything in my life. We turn around, say let's go see what's in the water and there's nothing. Just blue water.”

Fravor's plane headed back to USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, but a separate crew that had taken off toward the object began to search for it, tracking it for about a minute and a half and shooting a video, Fravor said.

But Navy superiors didn't seem that interested in the event, so those like Fravor who had seen it, took a ribbing and got Men In Black jokes from their colleagues, and didn't talk about it much afterward, Fravor said.


Former U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornet pilot
Commander David Fravor, right,
with his cousin, Chad Albert.
— Photo: David Fravor.

Fravor, who retired from the Navy in 2006, later shared the story with his wife and children, and some others who'd ask. But nothing really came of it until 2009 when a government official he declined to name contacted him while doing “an unofficial investigation.” Fravor declined to give more details about the official, but said he was later contacted by Luis Elizondo, an intelligence officer who ran the secretive program at the Department of Defense that was just disclosed.

Elizondo, who has since left the government to work for a private company that is hoping to promote UFO research for both scientific and entertainment purposes, is a large part of why the story about UFOs and the government's program are in the news; he quietly arranged to secure the release of three videos of UFOs from the Pentagon, including the one shot the same day and place as Fravor's.

Fravor, who has been talking about his experience to the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, the company where Elizondo is a consultant, said he knows that sharing his story has opened him up to ridicule — most but not all of it good-natured — but believes the incident should be more closely studied.

“I don't think I was a nut-job as an officer in the Navy. I wasn't drunk, I don't do drugs. I got a good night's rest, it was a clear day,” he said. “I think someone should have looked into it. Having talked to some of the other folks, it's a big frustration that it's coming out now and wasn't discussed back in 2004.”

Fravor believes that there could be some benefits from studying his experience.

“This is revolutionary technology to be able to accelerate, go up and down. Think about the advances that would bring to mankind,” he said. “What if it actually starts to get people to think outside the box.”

He said he's been inundated with phone calls since his story was first told on Saturday. Still, the Men In Black jokes continue.

“There is no mercy in my family or my friends,” he said.

• Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

• Eli Rosenberg is a reporter on The Washington Post's General Assignment team.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

• VIDEO: Footage shows encounter between U.S. navy jet and unknown aircraft

• VIDEO: What we know — and don't know — about aliens and UFOs

• The government admits it studies UFOs. So about those Area 51 conspiracy theories …

• Head of Pentagon's secret ‘UFO’ office sought to make evidence public

• Two decades of mysterious Air Force UFO files now available online

www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/12/18/former-navy-pilot-describes-encounter-with-ufo-studied-by-secret-pentagon-program