On the Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program
Our readers are plenty interested in unidentified flying objects. We know that from the huge response to our front-page Sunday article
(published online just after noon on Saturday) revealing a secret
Pentagon program to investigate U.F.O.s. The piece, by the Pentagon
correspondent Helene Cooper, the author Leslie Kean and myself — a
contributor to The Times after a 45-year staff career — has dominated
the most emailed and most viewed lists since.
So how does a story on U.F.O.s get into The New York Times? Not easily, and only after a great deal of vetting, I assure you.
The
journey began two and a half months ago with a tip to Leslie, who has
long reported on U.F.O.s and published a 2010 New York Times best
seller, “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the
Record.” At a confidential meeting Oct. 4 in a Pentagon City hotel with
several present and former intelligence officials and a defense
contractor, she met Luis Elizondo, the director of a Pentagon program
she had never heard of: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification
Program.
She
learned it was a secret effort, funded at the initiative of the then
Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, starting in 2007, to investigate
aerial threats including what the military preferred to call
“unidentified aerial phenomena” or just “objects.” This was big news
because the United States military had announced as far back as 1969
that U.F.O.s were not worth studying. Leslie also learned that Mr.
Elizondo had just resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive
secrecy and internal opposition — the reason for the meeting.
She
spent hours with him reviewing unclassified documents, for the $22
million program operated largely “in the white” (that is, not under
special restricted access), but hidden in the huge defense budget, with
only parts of it classified. A few days later Mr. Elizondo and others
there — including Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted
research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a
contractor on the program, and Christopher K. Mellon, a former deputy
assistant secretary of defense for intelligence — announced they were
joining a new commercial venture, To the Stars Academy of Arts and
Science, to raise money for research into U.F.O.s. Leslie wrote it up
for the Huffington Post with scant details of the program.
I
had known Leslie for years, and she told me this looked like a story
for The Times. I agreed. Leslie and I met with Mr. Elizondo in
Philadelphia on Oct. 31. Three days later, I emailed the executive
editor, Dean Baquet, about “a sensational and highly confidential
time-sensitive story” that I said “involves a senior U.S. intelligence
official who abruptly quit last month” exposing “a deeply secret
program, long mythologized but now confirmed.”
He
alerted Mark Mazzetti, the investigations editor in the Washington
bureau. Leslie and I briefed him in New York on Nov. 7. We assured him
there were no anonymous sources; everyone was on the record. After
discussions in Washington and New York, Helene joined our team. The
Washington bureau chief, Elisabeth Bumiller, would be our editor. On
Nov. 17, we three met Mr. Elizondo in a nondescript Washington hotel
where he sat with his back to the wall, keeping an eye on the door.
Carl
Hulse, The Times’s chief Washington correspondent, was well acquainted
with Mr. Reid and helped arrange an interview for Helene. She flew to
Las Vegas on Dec. 5 and met with the former senator, who confirmed the
program with details, saying, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I
got this going.”
Leslie
interviewed the aerospace magnate Robert Bigelow, who also confirmed
his participation, saying Americans were being held back from serious
research into U.F.O.’s by “a juvenile taboo.” And I interviewed a
prominent skeptic for perspective.
It
was important that we not take anything on faith. This field attracts
zealots as well as debunkers, and many Americans remain deeply skeptical
that the phenomenon exists as popularly portrayed. In draft after
draft, we took pains to let the investigation speak for itself, without
bias.
Helene
met with a Pentagon spokesperson on Dec. 8 for a response to the
information we had gathered. The answer came swiftly. There had been a
program to investigate U.F.O.s, but it ended in 2012 after five years,
the Defense Department insisted.
Our reporting suggested it continues, largely unfunded, to the present. And that’s what we wrote.
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