The Pentagon UFO Report – Pt. 2
Two whistleblowers and a rock star reopen old questions, again
“UFOs: Are They For Real?” was my first professional magazine assignment, published in an in-flight magazine of the long-defunct Western airlines ("It's the oooooonly way to fly!").
It was 1979 and UFOs were fully mainstream. Steven Spielberg was riding the wave from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” a blockbuster that combined UFO sightings, alien abductions, the Bermuda Triangle and a secret government research program with J. Allen Hynek’s “close encounters” classification matrix.
Earlier that year, Stanton Friedman’s documentary, “UFO's Are Real,” concluded that the U.S. government had covered up the 1947 crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft in Roswell, N.M. Citizens Against UFO Secrecy was formed to get classified government information regarding UFOs released to the public.
My article was a simple roundup of several UFO sightings by commercial airline pilots. It featured a response by Hynek, the chair of astronomy during my years at Northwestern University.
As reported in “The Pentagon UFO Report – Part 1,” the late Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies in 1973, convinced that UFO phenomena could be studied scientifically. He was criticized by believers for being too cozy with the government, and by skeptics for being too cozy with UFO buffs.
If Hynek was cozy with anything, it was data. He was more interested in analyzing reports and evidence than speculating about the origin of UFOs. He constantly reminded audiences and readers that the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” was only one of many possible explanations.
Hynek analyzed – and debunked – UFO sightings from 1948 to 1969. He wrote that the military had two questions: 1) Do UFOs present a national-security threat? And 2) Where do they come from? Concluding that the answer to the first question was “no,” the Air Force closed Project Blue Book.
Or did they? Within months of Blue Book’s closure, Hynek was secretly hired to consult the Air Force at the same offices – now called the Foreign Technology Division – at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
Many UFO researchers suspect Wright-Patterson has been the heart of the government’s clandestine study of UFOs. The Foreign Technology Division (FTD) continued the mission of the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) to “avoid technological surprise and counter existing and evolving foreign air and space threats.”
J. Allen Hynek signed an appointment affidavit on May 5, 1970 to work for the Foreign Technology Division as a “consultant.” Obtained via Freedom of Information Act by Brian Parks
Five decades later, two whistleblowers and a rock star are asking the exact same questions. UFOs are back in the mainstream and Congress is asking the same questions. Will the Pentagon have a different answer?
Blue Book never closed
On Dec. 16, 2017, the New York Times ran a front-page story entitled, “Glowing auras and 'black money': The Pentagon's mysterious UFO program.” The story revealed that the government had been secretly studying UFO phenomena since at least 2007.
Times reporter Helene Cooper was guided by freelance journalists Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, the latter the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record and niece of 9/11 Commission co-chair Thomas Kean.
The story’s core was news that a $22-million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (ATTIP) had been buried in the 2007 Pentagon budget by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.
ATTIP pursued research and investigation into “unidentified aerial phenomena” – a term developed to shed the stigma associated with “unidentified flying objects.” The Times online version included a 2014 video of two Navy pilots chasing a mysterious object shaped like a massive Tic-Tac mint.
This past May, the New Yorker published a blow-by-blow account of how the Times broke the story: “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously.” The short story is that Chris Mellon, a former Defense Intelligence official, and Luis Elizondo – who had worked for ATTIP (and had just resigned from a career in military intelligence) – were working in league with Tom DeLonge of the punk band Blink-182.
The trio engineered the declassification of Navy videos, connected Kean with the Times and nurtured a public-benefit corporation – To the Stars... Academy of Arts & Sciences – to further promote open discussion of UFO phenomena. To the Stars self-documented its work in 2019’s “Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation,” on History Channel TV.
CNBC’s collage of three encounters with “unidentified aerial phenomena,” declassified and formally released by the Navy in 2020
Elizondo says that even though the ATTIP investigation of UAP encounters by service members closed in 2012, the government is still at it. In 2020, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist announced the formation of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) within the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Are we to believe the government had no interest in UFO phenomena between Project Blue Book’s closure in 1969 and ATTIP’s formation in 2007?
The Foreign Technology Division’s stated mission was to collect intelligence from German, Japanese and Russian aircraft crash debris, aided by German scientists resettled in the U.S. in Operation Paperclip. But the FTD may have continued to study UFOs at Wright-Patterson, evidenced by Hynek’s consulting contract.
Rumors of a top-secret storage area – now often called the “Blue Room” – began to circulate as early as 1965. Barry Goldwater, then a U.S. senator from Arizona, requested access to this secret room from Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay – Goldwater was summarily denied with great furor.
LeMay gave him “holy hell,” Goldwater later told the New Yorker and TV host Larry King, and said, “Not only can’t you get into it but don’t you ever mention it to me again.”
U.S. Senator and 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater tells about the Blue Room at Wright-Patterson AFB on Larry King Live.
Notions that the FTD might be storing the wreckage of alien spaceships got a boost in 1979 with Friedman’s “UFO's Are Real.” In the documentary, retired Maj. Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer at Roswell Army Air Field in 1947, recounted how he helped recover crash debris from the remote ranch and deliver it to an Air Force base northwest of Fort Worth, Texas. The material “was not of this world,” Marcel said.
Leonard Nimoy narrates Jesse Marcel’s Roswell story on a 1980 episode of “In Search Of.”
The Air Force denied any record of a “Blue Room” at Wright-Patterson in response to UFO researcher William Moore’s FOIA request in 1980.
Moore’s The Roswell Incident went on to allege a government conspiracy to withhold the evidence of this alien visitation from the public. That plotline made it to theaters the same year as “Hangar 18” featured Robert Vaughan as a White House chief of staff covering up the truth about a UFO crash in Arizona.
Adding fuel to the fire, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy sued the NSA to release of 239 documents regarding UFOs. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit after reading a top-secret affidavit by NSA Policy Chief Eugene Yeats. The judge ruled, “The public interest in disclosure is far outweighed by the sensitive nature of the materials and the obvious effect on national security their release may well entail.”
The government had its eye on UFOs throughout the 1980s. No one knew that better than the high-ranking White House official who helped guide both Leslie Kean and Tom DeLonge in recent times: John Podesta.
The Podesta Files
Fast forward to 1993. The Foreign Technology Division had finally settled on a new name – the National Air Intelligence Center. A new TV series, “The X-Files,” depicted FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully hot on the trail of a government cover-up of UFO phenomena, complete with a secret Pentagon warehouse for alien artifacts.
John Podesta, new staff secretary for new President Bill Clinton, was a huge “X-Files” fan. He was certainly in a position to know that Laurance Rockefeller (brother of former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller) was lobbying the Clinton Administration to release all government information on UFOs and extraterrestrials.
Rockefeller launched his “UFO Disclosure Initiative” by meeting with Dr. Jack Gibbons, Clinton’s science and technology advisor, about “the potential availability of government information about unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrial life.”
According to documents published by Canadian ufologist Grant Cameron, Gibbons was not aware of any classified UFO information, but offered to explore. He and Rockefeller decided to request declassification of documents relating to the 1947 Roswell crash as a test case. In 1994, a former member of Rockefeller’s team sent a similar request to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Phil Lader.
“Many are convinced that Roswell marks the beginning of government secrecy about UFOs,” Rockefeller told Gibbons. “Whatever the truth of Roswell, a definite statement about it from the government would be very important.”
After months of waiting, Rockefeller got what he asked for – but not what he wanted. The “Report of Air Force Research Regarding the Roswell Incident” declared the debris was from a “balloon-borne research project code named MOGUL.”
Clinton won a second term in 1996 and Pedestal got a promotion to chief of staff. The same year, “Independence Day” depicted Area 51 as a secret facility developing weapons and stealth technology from an extraterrestrial craft retrieved at Roswell.
The CIA came forward with a confession: it had been lying about Area 51 for decades. People weren’t seeing UFOs over the Nevada desert after all – the CIA had been testing top-secret spy planes like the U-2 and SR-71.
National Reconnaissance Office historian Gerald Haines wrote “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90” and the Air Force published “The Roswell Report: Case Closed,” arguing that alien bodies recovered at Roswell were probably misidentified test dummies dropped from high altitudes.
Podesta went on to work as counselor in President Obama’s White House and chaired Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. Based on personal emails hacked and posted on WikiLeaks during that campaign, it appears Podesta met with two whistleblowers and a rock star.
When interviewed for the inaugural episode of “Unidentified,” Podesta said: “We ought to be serious about investigating what’s going on out there. Other countries have done that. Other countries have declassified the information they have.”
Podesta urges the government to declassify its intelligence on unidentified flying objects in mid-June.
The statement echoed one of Podesta’s final tweets the day he left the Obama White House: “My biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files."
Next time: New Disclosures – What the Government Is and Isn’t Telling Us
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Steven Saint Thomas will conduct an online class, “Conspiracy Studies: The Pentagon UFO Report,” on June 27. Click here for details.
