How the Pentagon investigated UFOs, or paranormal Disneyland for $22 million.
This could be a story about aliens. But it is, as usual, about billionaires and their friendship with politicians.
What was going on there! Balls of light, moving objects, huge wolves, sinister forces that surrounded the researchers. And even an encounter with a creature resembling a huge pig with spikes on its back and a beaver's tail. Aliens? And where!
Everyone has heard about UFOs, but only in the last few years can you read about flying saucers or aliens on popular websites, without looking into the nooks and crannies of the Internet. "The Pentagon is secretly tracking UFOs," "Rzeczpospolita" reported in December 2017. "The Pentagon has published recordings of UFOs. We may not be alone," the polsatnews.pl portal reported in 2020, and these are just two examples of many.
This wave of interest in aliens began with a text published in the New York Times in 2017. It revealed that the Pentagon, although officially downplaying reports of unidentified flying objects, was secretly investigating them with great interest. The involvement of official American authorities in serious UFO research and confirmation from the world's largest newsrooms have allowed millions of people to assume that perhaps something is up. And although the New York Times' text is still behind a paywall, probably most people interested in world news today know at least that the Pentagon investigated UFOs and confirmed that such a phenomenon actually exists.
Meanwhile, larger and larger holes appeared in the original story, revealing the true history of American paranormal research. This story turns out to be much more mundane, but no less intriguing.
Secret by confidential
On December 16, 2017, the New York Times published the article Glowing Auras and "Black Money": The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program. The text reported the story of former counterintelligence agent Louis Elizondo, who claimed that in the years 2007–2017 in the Pentagon there was a secret AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) program aimed at analyzing reports of UFO sightings, understanding the essence of this phenomenon and examining whether it constituted it poses a threat to national security.
The program was supposedly initiated by the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. The implementation of the program was undertaken by an entrepreneur from the aviation industry, multimillionaire Robert Bigelow - also a friend and one of the sponsors of Harry Reid's election campaign, to whom the senator donated $22 million to investigate UFO sightings. The program was to be officially closed in 2012, but its director Louis Elizondo, who eventually revealed the whole matter to the press, continued its work until October 2017, when he left his position in protest at the downplaying of the topic by the military authorities.
Along with the former counterintelligence agent's revelations, three recordings of unidentified objects made by the American military were leaked to the press. The story would probably end there, because similar leaks have happened in the USA before. This time, however, Senator Reid admitted that such a program had actually been carried out, and the Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of the recordings. This was enough for this incredible story to spread around the world - even though it was false from the very beginning.
The New York Times article is now iconic, but the same story was also published in Politico magazine under the title The Pentagon's Secret Search for UFOs. Some commentators quickly pointed out the inconsistencies between these accounts - the dates of the program launch, its name, and the reason for and year of closure did not match. Moreover, other contradictory information appeared: once a Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed Louis Elizondo's role as project director, other times her successors stated that until the end of his employment at the Pentagon, Elizondo had no official duties related to AATIP. On the one hand, the agent claimed that the program lasted until 2017, and the Pentagon consistently maintained that it was closed in 2012.
The mounting questions had no clear answers. In June 2019, The Intercept magazine stated that two years after the New York Times article, it was not possible to clearly confirm whether the program in question existed at all, and if so, whether Elizondo was actually its director.
What's haunting the Skinwalker Ranch?
The breakthrough came in October 2021 with the publication of the book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders' Account of the Secret Government UFO Program. Already in the foreword, Senator Harry Reid, the political patron of the secret program, states that although the memorable article in the New York Times did a lot of good for UFO research, it also distorted the history of the entire project.
The book's authors included people actually involved in the program, including its director, nuclear physicist James T. Lacatski (Louis Elizondo mentioned an earlier director, but did not name him). According to them, the secret program operating in the Pentagon was called not AATIP, but AAWSAP (Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program), and UFO observations were only a fragment of his interests. The main measures were focused on investigating various anomalies allegedly occurring on the so-called Skinwalker Ranch. This is a property in Utah about which strange stories have circulated - not only UFOs, but also crop circles, animal mutilation, the presence of ghosts, werewolves and Bigfoot were allegedly observed there.
The Skinwalker Ranch belonged to the above-mentioned millionaire Robert Bigelow, an enthusiast of UFOs and paranormal phenomena. Bigelow privately financed research on the ranch by a group of eccentric scientists from 1995 to 2004. In 2005, these researchers wrote a book in which they presented a whole range of incredible events observed at the ranch. The book fell into the hands of Lacatski, who was then working for the Department of Defense intelligence.
Lacatski became interested in the ranch, visited it in the company of Robert Bigelow, and is said to have had his own inexplicable experience there. He then concluded that the ranch was a habitat of anomalies that needed to be scientifically investigated for the benefit of the United States. So Robert Bigelow convinced his friend Senator Raid (also a UFO believer) to launch a secret research program.
But how to convince official American authorities to spend taxpayers' money on research on UFOs, ghosts and werewolves? It's best not to mention UFOs, ghosts and werewolves. This is exactly what happened, and in 2008, a competition was announced for a program aimed at "understanding physics and engineering and their applications in relation to foreign threats in the long term until 2050." Only one company entered the competition, the owner of which was, unsurprisingly, Robert Bigelow.
Paranormal Disneyland
When everything was officially approved and the Pentagon turned on the dollar tap, program director James T. Lacatski assembled a team of researchers and installed them at the Skinwalker Ranch, which the authors called Paranormal Disneyland due to the abundance of anomalies occurring there.
What was going on there! Balls of light, moving objects, sounds of unknown origin, huge, bulletproof wolves, sinister forces that surrounded the researchers, destroying their health and making life miserable not only on the ranch, because they followed their victims to their homes, thousands of miles away. The most moving accounts certainly include the encounter with a creature resembling a huge pig with spikes on its back (like dinosaurs had) and a beaver's tail.
Soon the first reports began to flow to the Pentagon. The discoveries were said to be "shocking" and so sensitive that Senator Harry Reid decided to protect them from potential enemies in the Department of Defense and from the attention of Russia and China, which allegedly had their own, similar programs. Already in May 2009, Reid applied for the program to be given the status of "special access", which would effectively hide it and limit the group of people informed about it to a few people. Reid's application was rejected, and funding for the program was discontinued earlier than initially expected - in 2010, the source of public money dried up.
Two years later, the program was officially closed. And where in all this is Louis Elizondo and the AATIP UFO program that the New York Times described in a piece we've all heard about? The book's authors claim that AATIP was merely a pseudonym invented for Senator Reid's request for special status for the AAWSAP program in order to conceal its actual name. There was no separate UFO research program. There was only Paranormal Disneyland AAWSAP, for which a total of $22 million was allocated.
Elizondo himself appears only once in the book, when in 2009 he is invited by one of the band members to a joint dinner and tells how his supernatural intuition and ability to farsight (recognizing the properties of a distant or invisible object that is supposedly felt with the mind) saved in Afghanistan, his life and that of his people.
UFOs land in the mainstream
How did a story about a secret investigation into Paranormal Disneyland haunted by pig-beaver-dinosaurs appear in the New York Times as a story about the Pentagon's investigation into reports of UFO sightings? The authors of the 2017 text included journalist Leslie Kean, who has been writing about UFOs for decades and is convinced of the reality of this phenomenon. When asked why she only mentioned UFOs and omitted other bizarre reports, she replied that the purpose of the report was to lend credibility to the UFO phenomenon. That's why she focused on this, putting aside descriptions of phenomena that people are not yet ready to accept.
The reconstruction of the true story was presented by investigative journalist Steven Greenstreet in a series of reports written for The New York Post. Based on leaked documents and statements from participants, Greenstreet believes that a group of UFO enthusiasts and eccentric scientists, with the help of millionaire UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow, convinced another UFO enthusiast, Senator Harry Reid (whose election campaigns Bigelow has supported for years), to organize an official program and public funding for the investigation of Paranormal Disneyland, and the investigation of UFO sightings was only a modest part of the entire enterprise. From the beginning, this group misled Pentagon officials about the real goals and research being actually conducted under the program.
When the first reports began to flow, more and more difficult questions began to be asked behind the scenes. By applying for "special access" status, Senator Reid attempted to suppress Paranormal Disneyland, but his application was rejected and backfired. Instead of hiding the program, he drew attention to it. And when Pentagon officials finally realized what the program actually did, they turned off the dollar tap, hoping the corpse would never fall out of the closet.
Only Louis Elizondo took advantage of the opportunity, appropriated the program's nickname and contacted journalist, UFO enthusiast Leslie Kean. He told her a partially made-up story, from which she again removed some of the paranormal elements, leaving only the UFO sightings. And that's how we came across the story about how the Pentagon seriously investigated UFOs, which is still uncritically repeated to this day.
The media are also in no hurry to report the true version of events, because the attention of the public interested in UFOs is already focused on the new revelations of whistleblowers. An intriguing story about alien visits clicks much better than doubts and critical voices.
Skeptics ask, the saucers keep flying
You might ask: who cares about the truth of a story reported seven years ago in the New York Times? Perhaps she should. Because if today people write about UFOs more often and more seriously than before, let's be clear: all this interest is based on this original text, which significantly increased the credibility of the UFO phenomenon and research on it. (Since then, there has even been an alleged whistleblower who claims that the Americans not only recovered the flying saucers from the crashes, but also has the bodies of their pilots.) Along the way, working groups to investigate UFOs were initiated in the Pentagon, and recently even a separate institution, AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office). NASA also announced its involvement.
The New York Times piece is now a thing of the past, but as Steven Greenstreet rightly asks in his report, "Where would we be today if it had been truthfully reported in 2017 that Senator Harry Reid had repaid his sponsor by donating $22 million from taxpayer money to investigate UFOs, ghosts and werewolves at Paranormal Disneyland?” And it doesn't end there, because the UFO story continues and continues to gain momentum, with the tone set by the same small group of well-placed enthusiasts. People who go public today as independent journalists, former military personnel, civilian contractors, and even whistleblowers are deeply interconnected, and their involvement with UFOs and other paranormal activities can be traced back decades.
So has the small but powerful UFO lobby manipulated the media, the Pentagon and Congress to push their narrative? Doesn't this sound too unlikely to be possible? It may seem so, but Americans have a history of similarly eccentric research. During the Cold War, they led the Stargate project, which attempted to use paranormal abilities to see and feel at a distance to conduct espionage against the Soviet Union. There was once a First Earth Battalion, composed, like the X-men, of soldiers with various superhuman skills - the famous film The Man Who Stare at Goats with George Clooney was based on this story.
It is also worth recalling that Americans love UFOs and millions of them are convinced of the reality of this phenomenon - politicians, journalists and military personnel are no exception. Therefore, the next time another American whistleblower, general, scientist or politician presents shocking information about flying saucers, alien bodies or visitors from parallel universes, it is worth taking a closer look not only at the story itself, but also at who is telling it and why.
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