It’s a brand new year, and the Para-Political Journal is here to usher it in with an interesting Exo-Political story that has been getting a lot of positive buzz lately. I speaking of course of recent revelations as revealed in the New York Times and Politico Magazine that from 2007-2012 there was a secret government funded project called the “Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program” (AATIP) whose ostensible mission was the scientific collection and analysis of UFOs. It was created by then Senator Majority Leader, Harry Reid (Nevada-D) along with Senator Daniel Inouye (Hawaii-D) and Ted Stevens (Alaska-R) under the direction of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and allocated some $22 million, which by bloated Pentagon monetary standards is tiny. However, it’s still a substantial sum given by a government that has for the last 50 years claimed that there was nothing to the UFO phenomenon, when the Air Force closed Project Blue Book down. We’ve only learned about the project from a career intelligence officer, who worked as the lead on the project named Luis Elizondo. Much of the money for the project went to Robert Bigelow, who runs a huge private aerospace company called Bigelow Aerospace and a para-normal investigatory organization called N.I.D.S. (National Institute for Discovery Science). You might remember this later organization from its fascinating investigations into the infamous “Skinwalker Ranch”, which Las Vegas news anchor and occasional host of the popular nighttime radio show Coast to Coast AM, George Knapp, has also discussed and written about.

The question is- “What exactly does this ultimately mean or signify in the realm of Ufology?” So far, at least, we don’t yet fully know the answer as the voluminous reports that were supposedly composed during the course of the project’s research haven’t yet been released to the public for scrutiny, and I’m somewhat leery that it ever fully will be quite frankly. Naturally, this would be a real shame to the potential value that this scientific data represents to the field of Ufology in perhaps learning about the phenomenon outside of the usual rumor-mongering or ridicule context in which it quite often resides. However, one shouldn’t be all that surprised if that is the fate of the final reports, since even Luis Elizondo claimed he quit due largely to the excessive secrecy that government agencies have surrounded themselves with in dealing with this issue. For any serious researcher, this is real problem that isn’t going away anytime soon and it usually takes legal action to pry information out that almost always isn’t worth the time and money necessary to do it. My personal hunch about it, as some of you may have already read about in my article on the Secret Space Program Conference, is that the real action is in the private sector. In other words, if the US has indeed recovered ET craft going at least as far back as the Roswell, New Mexico crash of 1947 and Aztec, New Mexico crash of 1948 as declassified FBI documents seem to suggest, it would be well-connected and sophisticated private corporations that would ultimately be tasked with reverse engineering the technology for covert utilization and weaponization before it eventually filtered down into the public domain on a limited basis.

Certainly, whether you believe Col. Philip Corso’s thesis as described in his book “The Day After Roswell” that certain high-technologies we’re familiar with today like integrated circuit chips, night vision, and fiber optics were seeded by ET technology recovered from the Roswell crash or not, were these events to have occurred…it would be the private sector with heavy contract ties to the military that would be tasked with the R&D of these technologies as that is what they’re designed to do in the first place. Interestingly enough, Bob Bigelow is reported to have specially altered and/or expanded his storage warehouses due to his possession of certain metal alloys thought to have come from UFOs. I would agree with other commentators about this story that were this indeed the case…this would clearly be the most important evidence in confirming the existence of an extraterrestrial source for the phenomenon. Before he died back in 2014, I felt that one of the most important researchers in abduction research was Dr. Roger Leir, who I had the opportunity to meet and speak with at the Bay Area UFO Conference. At the conference, he gave an excellent presentation regarding his extensive research into strange foreign objects that he had removed from people over the years that believed they had been abducted and subsequently experimented upon. Check out the talk he gave at the International UFO Congress back in 2012. These foreign objects found in the hands, feet, and other parts of the body of abductees are usually called “alien implants” and have very anomalous characteristics as Dr. Leir soon found in his research post-surgical removal. So, for instance, these metallic implants (often as tiny as a pencil lead or BB) would be surrounded by a biological membrane in an area with significant nerve tissue, thereby overriding the body’s natural tendency to create inflammation in its rejection of a foreign object. In testing the metallurgy, he determined that they often had isotopic ratios of elements not available on this Earth and was even able to pick up certain Hertz frequencies emanating from the implant. I took copious notes during his lecture, but you can also read about it in his books on the subject such as “The Aliens and the Scalpel”. Dr. Leir was a very humble and open-hearted man, and he will definitely be very hard to replace in the study of alien implants given his tireless dedication and expertise.

While some people like David Jacobs sees the abduction phenomenon as an extensive hybridization program of the “Grays”, as they’re known in the alien abduction literature, others like Steven Greer see the entire phenomenon as orchestrated by a highly secret and sophisticated government agency in order to create a climate of fear within the general population so that they can eventually simulate the conditions for a false-flag alien invasion. This scenario was supposedly told to Carol Rosin, who was a close confidant to former Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun. Let’s not forget that it was Nazi scientists like von Braun brought over to the US under Project Paperclip, who created the Apollo V-2 rocket program that would eventually carry US astronauts to the moon in 1969. Or, so we’re told. There’s a lot of conspiratorially-minded people out there, who question whether we ever did go to the moon. Without getting into that particular controversy too deeply at least for now, I find it interesting that what few people talk about are the reports by some of the Apollo astronauts of seeing strange UFOs in their various flights and other weird alien-like structures within our own solar system even. I personally think that whatever the astronauts saw up there spooked them plenty and may explain why NASA hasn’t gone back to the moon since 1974, assuming of course they ever did in the first place, since they found out it was already occupied and they weren’t welcome. Apparently, the Russians got the same message via various incidents in their history.

Without digressing too much further, we’re still left with a rather interesting footnote in Ufology with the discovery of the government funded AATIP that initially would seem to indicate that the Pentagon views UFOs as a potential threat. Certainly, UFOs being seen flying on numerous occasions over ICBM sites would have sparked an investigation even if, as Robert Salas has pointed out, they appeared to be shutting down our nuclear weapons capacity to prevent a nuclear holocaust rather than cause one. Whenever NORAD or FAA radar picks up an unidentified blip on their screen, there is a natural tendency to be both curious and fearful, especially given how fast UFOs have been known to fly. Military jets are scrambled, but they’re clearly no match in their feeble attempts to intercept. In conjunction with the recent revelations about the AATIP, an organization set up for greater UFO disclosure called “To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences” founded by former Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge also released a video shot back in 2004 off the coast of San Diego of a F/A-18 that spotted an oblong-shaped UFO. It makes me wonder- “How many more videos like this one are still being suppressed from disclosure?” Fighter pilots are sworn to secrecy and security oaths by their respective branches and rarely discuss what they’ve seen even in retirement. Even commercial pilots, who have sightings, are threatened to keep quiet by the airlines, the pilots association, and shadowy individuals of unknown intelligence origins known to debrief these pilots and scare them into perpetual silence.

Fortunately, however, more witnesses and whistle-blowers are coming out about what they’ve seen as they enter the winter of their years in many cases. One of the authors of the New York Times piece, Leslie Kean, documented some of the most important of these cases in her book given that it focused on very credible airline and fighter pilots along with witnesses as high up the military chain-of-command as General. When you add to that list esteemed members of the academic and scientific community, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss the entire phenomenon as a misidentification of the planet Venus or flocks of birds as various debunkers have tried to do over the years. So, does this revelation of a government funded project to research and analyze the threat assessment posed by UFOs constitute “disclosure”? Not really. But, it certainly constitutes a kind of “confirmation” that there is still an interest (despite the denials) of this particular phenomenon within the Congress, unacknowledged intelligence community, and certain members in the Pentagon given that, while the funding dried up for the project in 2012, the research and analysis is on-going according to Luis Elizondo who’s gone on to join DeLonge’s circle at “To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science”.