MYSTERY WIRE — The long-awaited New York Times article on the government’s involvement in researching everything UFO has been published.
The New York Times article’s authors, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, write at length about information that has been circulating in UFO circles for many years, but which has previously been ignored or unsubstantiated by mainstream media.
Some of the information has been reported previously on Mystery Wire and was discussed this week on the Mystery Wire podcast.
The article’s headline is No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public.
One of the new details is about astrophysicist Eric Davis. The Times reports Davis said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency in March of 2020 and the topic was about retrievals from off-world vehicles not made on this earth.
Davis lived in Las Vegas for years and worked for Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) organization and was also directly involved with Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), created to carry out the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP) contract from the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Before the UAP Task Force there was BAASS – hear from the man behind the once secret program
Davis was also one of the principal investigators looking into strange happenings at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah.
Davis told the Times he gave classified briefings on the same topic to the staff of members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on October 21, 2019 and then the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is led by Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Sen. Rubio has also made headlines recently by talking on camera about his request for funding to run an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) task force at the Office of Naval Intelligence. This was revealed when Sen. Rubio put the language of the request into the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act.
The Times writes that it did ask Committee staff members for comment and got no response.
Lawmakers ask for unclassified UFO report in new intelligence bill
Sen. Rubio was recently interviewed by an investigative reporter who works for the CBS television station in Miami. The reporter, Jim DeFede, asks Sen. Rubio, “Are we alone?” To which, Sen. Rubio gives a lengthy answer:
“Here’s the interesting thing for me about all this. And the reason why I think it’s an important topic, okay. And that is we have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is, and it isn’t ours. So that’s the legitimate question to ask. I would say that, frankly, that if it’s something outside from outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity. But the bottom line is, there are things flying over your military bases, and you don’t know what they are, because they’re not yours. And they exhibit potentially technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal. That to me is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into. And so that’s the premise I begin with.”
It was the Times that brought the new government programs to a world-wide audience back in 2017 when it published an article about the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
AATIP was funded in part because of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).
The Times did speak with Reid for this new article. Reid is quoted as saying, “After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession.”
But it’s what is written in the previous paragraph that is catching many people’s attention. The Times originally wrote that Reid said he believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts.
The Times has since issued a correction to this statement, writing that Reid did not say “that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades” but did say the materials “should be studied.”
Reid also issued his own clarification on Twitter:
Part of Reid’s remarks are worth repeating. While this is not printed as a quote, the former U.S. Senator is saying he believes there have been crashes of vehicles from other worlds.
This goes to the heart of the current discussion happening in the UFO community. The search for proof that the government has material from a UFO crash. Surely this article just added some fuel to this fire.
Mr. Reid is also quoted as saying, “It is extremely important that information about the discovery of physical materials or retrieved craft come out.”
Reid gave Mystery Wire the first interview after the previous Times story in December, 2017. Mystery Wire has reported that Reid tried in 2009 to create a Special Access Program (SAP). Reid said he did it is so AAWSAP and AATIP could gain access to “other programs and materials.”
Sen. Reid has been a big proponent of the government releasing more information to the public regarding UFOs. When Mystery Wire reached out to Sen. Reid for comment on the acknowledgement of the UAP Task Force to which he replied, “I compliment the Senate Intelligence Committee for studying the repeated sightings of unidentified aerial phenomenon.”
Government research into UFOs, now called UAPs, appears to have been on-going for decades. After years of speculation, details about Project Blue Book were released. It ran from 1952 to 1969. Before Blue Book there were projects Sign (1947) and Grudge (1949).
The next known and named project was AATIP. The man in charge of this was the program’s previous director, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who resigned in October 2017 after 10 years with the program.
Elizondo has openly talked about his involvement in this program and now works for To the Stars Academy (TTSA).
Elizondo was recently interviewed by George Knapp on the radio show Coast to Coast. And out of nowhere he recounted a meeting he had where he met the point man for a United States Government UFO program active in the 1980s. This is the first time Elizondo has publicly said anything about this person and program. Below is the transcript from the show:
“George, I’m going to share something with you, and frankly the rest of America, I’ve never shared before. I’m not going to go into specifics, but not too long ago I was brought up into a meeting on the Hill and some individuals, and I won’t say who I was speaking with, but I sat in a room and there was a gentleman, an older gentleman sitting in the corner and he didn’t introduce himself and I certainly wasn’t going to ask who he was because I was being invited by some individuals to have a conversation at the classified level, so I answered their questions. And then the individual came up and he introduced himself to me and he said, “Look, I had your job,” and I said, “Oh, really? From what perspective?” ’cause I had a lot of jobs in the government. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant and he said, “No, I had your job and I had your job (with a particular service, I’m not going to mention what service it was)” and he said, “and I had your job back in the ’80s.” And that struck me. At that point…and he said it in front of other people and those individuals somehow recognized or acknowledged him, KNEW that this guy was obviously very legitimate and he was having a classified discussion right now with myself and many other people and they knew who he was. I didn’t know who he was. That tells me there is at least some sense of legacy, that his issue has perkalted before and been on somebody’s radar at high levels. Now I don’t want to hypothesize any further than that because I don’t know. I wasn’t going to ask him any more details. I wasn’t there to ask him questions. I was there for them to ask me questions, but it was very clear to me that AATIP was not the first of its kind ever. There was an organized effort back in the ’80s to do exactly this as well. Now, how far they got? I don’t know because what was told to me, verbatim was, “We didn’t get as far as you guys.” Now I don’t know necessarily what he meant by that. I don’t know if he meant from a personnel perspective or having political support like we did with Harry Reid and Stevens and Inouye, or if he meant from a budgetary perspective, or if he meant from a findings perspective. I really don’t know, George, but that was true and there were witnesses to that meeting. So that tells me that there has been an interest by at least some folks in government about this topic at least going back to the 80s that I can say I know for a fact because I met somebody who apparently was doing it.”
The Times also wrote about a recent campaign interview of President Donald Trump by his son, Donald Trump Jr.
In this the President said he knew “very interesting” things about Roswell. And added when asked if he would declassify any Roswell information that he would have to think about it.
While it appears to have just been a campaign stunt, it’s still the President of the United States talking openly about UFO’s. He joins an ever-growing list of elected and appointed government officials coming out from the shadows.
