Ralph Blumenthal is an American journalist and author. He was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009. [1]
On 16 December 2017, the New York Times featured an article written by Leslie Kean, Helene Cooper, and Blumenthal, which revealed the fact that the U.S. Department of Defense had spent $22.5M on a secret program titled the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that investigated UFOs. [2]
On 5 June 2023, Blumenthal and Leslie Kean reported that former Air Force officer David Charles Grusch claimed that the United States has a secret UFO retrieval program with multiple vehicles of non-human origin as well as records of dead pilots in its possession. [3]
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: CS1 maint: others (link) [4] An unidentified flying object (UFO), or unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP), is any perceived airborne, submerged or transmedium phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. Upon investigation, most UAPs are identified as known objects or atmospheric phenomena, while a small number remain unexplained.
UFO conspiracy theories are a subset of conspiracy theories which argue that various governments and politicians globally, in particular the United States government, are suppressing evidence that unidentified flying objects are controlled by a non-human intelligence or built using alien technology. Such conspiracy theories usually argue that Earth governments are in communication or cooperation with extraterrestrial visitors despite public disclaimers, and further that some of these theories claim that the governments are explicitly allowing alien abduction.
The Roswell incident is a collection of events and myths surrounding the 1947 crash of a United States Army Air Forces balloon near Roswell, New Mexico. Operated from the nearby Alamogordo Army Air Field and part of the top secret Project Mogul, the balloon was intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests. After metallic and rubber debris was recovered by Roswell Army Air Field personnel, the United States Army announced their possession of a "flying disc". This announcement made international headlines but was retracted within a day. Obscuring the true purpose and source of the crashed balloon, the Army subsequently stated that it was a conventional weather balloon.
The Kecksburg UFO incident occurred on December 9, 1965, at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, United States, when a fireball was reported by citizens of six U.S. states and Canada over Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. Astronomers said it was likely to have been a meteor bolide burning up in the atmosphere and descending at a steep angle. NASA released a statement in 2005 reporting that experts had examined fragments from the area and determined they were from a Soviet satellite, but that records of their findings were lost in 1987. NASA responded to court orders and Freedom of Information Act requests to search for the records. The incident gained wide notoriety in popular culture and ufology, with speculation ranging from extraterrestrial craft to debris from the Soviet space probe Kosmos 96, and is often called "Pennsylvania's Roswell".
Robert Thomas Bigelow is an American businessman. He owns Budget Suites of America and is the founder of Bigelow Aerospace.
Gaia, Inc. is an American media company founded in 1988 by Jirka Rysavy in Louisville, Colorado. It owns and operates Gaia TV, a over-the-top subscription video on-demand service consisting of original and licensed alternative media documentaries. While content on Gaia TV initially focused on yoga, mindfulness, and alternative medicine to complement the company's yoga equipment distribution business, the latter's divestiture led to a greater emphasis on content promoting conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. The service has been criticized and deplatformed from social media platforms including Facebook and YouTube for hosting videos promoting vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories such as the Illuminati, UFOs, and Atlantis.
This is a list of alleged UFO sightings in the United States.
Christopher Karl Mellon, is a private equity investor, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and later for Security and Information Operations. He formerly served as the Staff Director of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He is a member of the influential Mellon family out of the Greater Pittsburgh area. Mellon has lobbied for U.S. government investigations into UFO/UAP.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was an unclassified but unpublicized investigatory effort funded by the United States Government to study unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP). The program was first made public on December 16, 2017. The program began in 2007, with funding of $22 million over the five years until the available appropriations were ended in 2012. The program began in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
Leslie Kean is an American investigative journalist and author of books about UFOs and the afterlife.
Luis Elizondo is a media personality and former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and former employee of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation is a History Channel TV series purportedly exposing the US government's secret programs investigating unidentified flying objects (UFOs). It features former military counter-intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, who directed the Defense Intelligence Agency's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and Christopher Mellon, former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Elizondo says that he resigned after he became frustrated that the government was not taking UFOs, which he considered to be a national security threat, seriously enough.
The Pentagon UFO videos are selected visual recordings of FLIR targeting from United States Navy fighter jets based aboard aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2004, 2014 and 2015, with additional footage taken by other Navy personnel in 2019. The four grainy, monochromic videos, widely characterized as officially documenting UFOs, have received extensive coverage in the media since 2017. The Pentagon later addressed and officially released the first three videos of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) in 2020, and confirmed the provenance of the leaked 2019 videos in two statements made in 2021. Footage of UAPs was also released in 2023, sourced from MQ9 military drones.
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is an office within the United States Office of the Secretary of Defense that investigates unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and other phenomena in the air, sea, and/or space and/or on land: sometimes referred to as "unidentified aerial phenomena" or "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP). Its first director was physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, and its current acting director is Tim Phillips who reports to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.
In 2023, David Grusch, a United States Air Force (USAF) officer and former intelligence official, was interviewed by journalists and testified in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing. Grusch claimed that the U.S. federal government maintains a secretive UFO recovery and reverse engineering program and that it is in possession of "non-human" spacecraft along with their "dead pilots". In 2022, Grusch filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) to support his plan to share classified information with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He also filed a complaint alleging retaliation by his superiors over a similar complaint he made in 2021.
Investigation and analysis of reported UFO incidents under the federal government of the United States has taken place under multiple branches and agencies, past and current, since 1947. In spite of decades of interest, there remains no evidence that there are any purported UFOs with extraordinary provenance and, indeed, those identified all have been shown to be natural phenomena, human technology, misapprehensions, delusions, or hoaxes.
Ryan Graves is the founder and executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace and a former F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot with the United States Navy.
On the night of January 20, 1951, multple individuals reported an unidentified cigar-shaped straight-winged aircraft over Sioux City, Iowa. By January 22, papers nationwide publicized had their reports. The incident continues to be discussed in the 21st-century.