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Post by swamprat on Dec 8, 2019 17:00:43 GMT
The Silva Record
Lt. Graves & Robert Bigelow Allude to Continuing UFO Events December 7, 2019
By now many people know about the set of events surrounding the Gimbal UFO video. Claims and rumors of many encounters plus multiple unreleased videos from that time frame have circulated, but have those encounters continued? Lt. Ryan Graves and Robert Bigelow have both alluded to that fact in recent interviews.
First, was TTSA’s Chris Mellon referring to a dozen events during the Gimbal encounters or since then? Mr. Mellon said:
In an interview on the Kevin Rose Show, around 36:00, Lt Ryan Graves said:
“Graves: This is a conversation of one of fifty or sixty of seventy pilots on the east coast could have had, and I understand why they didn’t want to – I completely get that, but I’m hoping that by me coming out and talking about it I gave them a little bit of leeway to come out and actually think about it seriously. So, these people that have been seeing these things for a long time, you know and not just in the past five, ten years, but military pilots have been seeing stuff for a long time, I hope that I’m helping give them a voice. And when I went to DC and met with two of the three branches of our government, you know, my perception was that they took it pretty seriously, and they were asking some hard questions to superiors of the Navy that were sitting across from me, and I think that is why we see the reporting system that was put in place by the Navy today.
Rose: Yeah, what is the reporting system now that exists?
Graves: I don’t know. It’s classified. The reporting system is classified, but I do know it exists and I do know from other encounters, or whatever we want to call them, that have happened recently, from some of my friends, that it seems to be working at the very least.”
In an interview with George Knapp available on Mysterywire.com, Robert Bigelow said:
Knapp: You haven’t spoken about it really since all the news broke, but I mean your fingerprints are all over that stuff. You helped make all that happen.
Bigelow: Well, I don’t know about that. I think that the future here is what’s potentially interesting. If these exposures and these exhibitions that are currently ongoing, especially off the East Coast, and they have been pretty heavy for the last five years. If that gets the right … if they continue, and they provide the opportunity for investigation and to create the awareness, not just with the military, but — and government folks — but be able to be sanctioned and confirmed as an actual reality … that this phenomena is real. It actually exists, and we’re actually achieving a confirmation of sorts. Without knowing who, what or why, you know, or where it’s coming from or anything, at least that’s a big step that’s never happened before.
Watch the Knapp/Bigelow interview: youtu.be/kDjObsuz86A
It’s important to keep in mind that we didn’t hear about the Nimitz and Gimbal events until years after the fact. Other military encounters we may never hear about at all. There could be Tic Tac and Gimbal level events happening right now off the east coast or anywhere else, with data/video being captured, and according to these comments we can’t rule it out.
Update #1
Reddit user PewPew84 reminded me of this article written by Chris Mellon where he states:
Because this phenomenon has only recently been acknowledged, little if any effort has been made to use “national technical means” for purposes of identifying or tracking these objects. This is unfortunate since there are massive stores of intelligence data already collected by US intelligence systems that can be accessed and correlated with events such as the interaction of the USS Nimitz Carrier Battle Group with multiple UAPs in November 2004; or the ongoing events in restricted military airspace off the East Coast of the United States.
silvarecord.com/2019/12/07/lt-graves-robert-bigelow-allude-to-continuing-ufo-events/
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Post by jmceiver on Dec 8, 2019 18:28:34 GMT
Thank you. Some really great analysis and information. Wouldn't it be nice if the general public would take a serious interest in this - The Greatest Truth of all Human History.
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Post by swamprat on Dec 8, 2019 20:11:10 GMT
And then.... Sigh.... Who you gonna believe?
The Black Vault Pentagon Changes Past UFO Statement By John Greenewald, Jr. | The Black Vault
Originally Published December 6, 2019
The Pentagon has recently opened up to The Black Vault about the rumored “secret UFO Program,” known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or AATIP.
On December 16, 2017, news of this obscure program was first announced by the NY Times and Politico. Both media outlets reported that UFOs- now being referred to as “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” or UAPs to reduce the stigma surrounding the topic – were the direct focus of this program. However, the Pentagon now seems to have changed their stance.
Claiming they want to correct the record and clear up some inaccuracies, the Pentagon now says AATIP was not a UFO or UAP program.
Original bid solicitation notice posted for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program.
“Neither AATIP nor AAWSAP were UAP related,” said Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough in an e-mail to The Black Vault. “The purpose of AATIP was to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapons system applications with future technology projections over the next 40 years, and to create a center of expertise on advanced aerospace technologies.”
Since 2017, details have been scarce. However, the DoD’s latest position that AATIP wasn’t a UFO program, seems to represent one of their most dramatic about-faces on the issue since the program was first revealed.
The “AAWSAP” Gough refers to is the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program; a contract posted publicly by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) asking for bids from the private sector on August 18, 2008. By the due date of September 5, only one bidder had submitted a proposal, and that was Bigelow Aerospace’s subsidiary known as Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies or BAASS. They were awarded the contract, and according to the NY Times, operated with a $22 million budget. (Note: The Black Vault has not been able to independently verify that budget amount.)
Many researchers, bloggers and journalists within the mainstream media have often confused AATIP and AAWSAP along with the missions of both programs. For example, an anonymous letter by someone claiming to be involved in the project was published by KLAS-TV, and it alleged AAWSAP was studying poltergeists along with other paranormal activity. Another example is a blogger attempting to create a cohesive timeline of the programs, but often confuses dates, facts and figures that have already been established and documented. According to the latest from The Pentagon, none of that is the case as, “[AATIP] was the name of the overall program. [AAWSAP] was the name of the contract that DIA awarded for the production of technical reports under AATIP.”
The titles of those “technical reports” referenced by the Pentagon were released via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to The Black Vault on January 16, 2019; which consisted of a list of thirty-eight documents created under the AATIP program. Mysteriously absent from the topics covered by the Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) was anything directly referencing UFOs or UAPs.
Cover page of Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD) report entitled, “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions.
Topics did include some wildly speculative science, ranging from warp drives to invisibility cloaking. However, there was nothing about unidentified objects flying in the sky or captured on video. Some researchers have theorized this list of research topics was simply an exploration on how UFOs may work or how an alien civilization might traverse the cosmos in order to visit Earth. Conversely, some have remained skeptical, and felt this list may be proof that AATIP (and/or AAWSAP) had nothing to do with UFOs, and only focused on pseudoscience.
The skeptics appeared to be proven wrong, when on May 22, 2019, the NY Post ran the headline, “The Pentagon finally admits it investigates UFOs.” At the time this article was published, investigative journalist Steven Greenstreet with the NY Post had received word from the Pentagon through spokesperson Christopher Sherwood that AATIP, “…did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Understandably, the story then went viral.
However, roughly seven months later, the Pentagon’s stance seems to have changed. Although the statement that was given to the NY Post was accurately reported; the Pentagon now states it was not entirely fact-based.
When asked about the discrepancy, “At the time, Mr. Sherwood was repeating the information that had been provided by a previous spokesperson some two years earlier,” said Gough. “That previous spokesperson is no longer with my organization, and I cannot comment on why that person’s explanation of AATIP included that it had looked at anomalous events. According to all the official information I have now, when implemented, AATIP did not pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena; that was not part of the technical studies nor the reports produced by the program.”
The Black Vault reached out to Greenstreet and the New York Post but they did not respond for comment.
The Pentagon’s new stance conflicts with former Department of Defense (DOD) employee, Luis Elizondo. According to Elizondo he was the director of AATIP, and since coming forward in October of 2017, he’s consistantly maintained AATIP did research UFOs / UAPs. “AATIP itself spent its entire time on UFOs,” said Elizondo in March of 2019 at the first annual Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena (AAP) conference put on by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). “AATIP was a 100% UFO program, period. It was not looking at airplanes.”
In an already confusing saga, the Pentagon continues to deny Elizondo’s role and participation in the AATIP. According to Gough, Elizondo was, “not the director of the AATIP,” and reiterated he had “no assigned responsibilities” within the program.
Currently, Elizondo serves as the Director of Government Programs and Services for To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA), a “public benefit” corporation led by rock star Tom DeLonge, and stars in a History channel series called Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.
In the past, Elizondo has addressed the hierarchy of the AATIP and AAWSAP programs. “It would be disingenuous for me to simply say, well, AATIP is really AAWSAP. Well, it evolved from AAWSAP but it is not AAWSAP,” Elizondo said during an annual Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) conference in July of 2018. “And I think the documentation that is beginning to come out into the public forum, people are beginning to realize that,”Elizondo told the crowd of UFO enthusiasts.
Elizondo did not return a request for comment from The Black Vault.
Although the Pentagon’s change to a previous statement may concern and frustrate a segment of the general public excited about recent UFO developments; hope is not entirely lost. The Pentagon maintains, as of the writing of this article, that the U.S. Navy continues to investigate UAPs, and the three videos that have surfaced in the past two years that have garnered worldwide attention, are still considered UAPs. So the Pentagon hasn’t tried to change or close the door on the whole UFO topic, something should still encourage enthusiasts of the UFO subject.
www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/the-pentagon-corrects-record-on-secret-ufo-program/
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Post by swamprat on Dec 8, 2019 20:18:32 GMT
And then.... Tom Delonge Tweets THIS:
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Post by jmceiver on Dec 8, 2019 20:46:30 GMT
The game of official denial ping-pong continues?
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Post by flatearth on Dec 13, 2019 4:53:32 GMT
A great interview with the pilot involved in the Nimitz encounter. There's a lot going on...
Flat
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Post by swamprat on Dec 21, 2019 1:34:06 GMT
The Pentagon's 'Real Men in Black' Investigated Tom DeLonge's UFO Videos The Air Force's Office of Special Investigations has confirmed that it, too, has determined that the videos show "unidentified aerial phenomena."
By Tim McMillan
Dec 20 2019
Since reports first surfaced in 2017 that the U.S. Navy had been encountering UFOs, the Air Force has been remarkably quiet when it comes to mysterious objects that may be flying around the skies.
Given the Air Force is America’s principal aerial and space warfare branch, and in the 1950s and 60s it conducted the only official investigation into UFOs with Project Blue Book many UFOlogists have found the Air Force's recent aversion to discussing the topic to be particularly odd especially when considering that the Navy has been rather vocal on the issue.
Yet after months of deafening silence, in an official statement, the Pentagon suddenly throw the Air Force into the mix with recent UFO reports. More excitingly, it also mentioned one of the most notorious agencies in all of UFO lore.
Susan Gough, a spokesperson for the Secretary of Defense's office of public affairs, said the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations looked into the release of two videos originally filmed in 2015.
According to the DoD, the objects shown in these videos, originally released by Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy, are considered "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" or "UAP."
"The two 2015 videos appeared in the New York Times in December 2017. At that time, AFOSI conducted an investigation, focusing on the classification of the information in the video," said Gough.
Gough's mention of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations looking into the popular "Go Fast," and "Gimbal" videos is intriguing given it appears to be the first time the Pentagon has revealed the Air Force has indeed been involved in the Navy's UFO encounters.
For many in the UFO community, this comes as especially significant and concerning news considering AFOSI has a long and nefarious history when it comes to UFOs, with many claiming AFOSI are the "real men in black."
By federal statute, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations provides independent criminal investigative, counterintelligence, and protective service operations worldwide and outside of the traditional military chain of command for the Air Force and Department of Defense.
AFOSI is at the center of UFO culture, which most famously comes from the accounts of former AFOSI agent Rick Doty. Featured in the documentary film Mirage Men, Doty and AFOSI allegedly seeded a cornucopia of misinformation on UFOs in the 1980s in an attempt to safeguard classified UFO technology.
From the contentious MJ-12 documents, secret underground alien bases, cattle mutilations, crash retrieval of alien spacecraft, top-secret cooperative agreements and exchange programs with extraterrestrials and the U.S. government, an alien race called "Ebens" (aka The Greys), alien abductions, to the recruitment of once-prominent UFO researchers as clandestine assets of disinformation—virtually every popular UFO legend and conspiracy theory has some connection to AFOSI, because Doty claims he seeded disinformation while at the group’s command.
Doty's accounts aren't the only connections between AFOSI and UFOs. A CIA study published in 1997 detailed how in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA and AFOSI promoted UFOs to cover up the then-classified U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance planes.
According to the study, "Over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights." the report stated. "This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."
Whether or not AFOSI still continues to be involved in UFO incidents today is unknown, although the Pentagon's recent statement suggests AFOSI hasn't completely given up topic.
The Pentagon's sudden mention of AFOSI in connection with the 2015 UFO videos is curious, considering there's never been any dispute these events were all U.S Navy affairs.
Throughout a series of emails chronicling the release of the videos by the DoD, which were obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request, the Navy is listed as the "Original Classification Authority" for these infamous UFO videos. Additionally, Gough said recently, "the U.S. Navy retains custody of the source videos for the 2004 and 2015 sightings."
Given one of AFOSI's roles is security management for highly-classified Air Force programs or SAPs, it would be easy to assume the Air Force’s interest in the 2015 videos was because the objects are actually classified Air Force technology. However, what the Pentagon says was the conclusion of AFOSI's investigation seems to suggest the exact opposite. "The investigation determined the videos were not classified," Gough told Vice.
Of course, the abrupt mention of AFOSI isn’t the only eyebrow raising statement to come out of the Pentagon as of late.
After months of saying the DoD had investigated UFOs within the controversial Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), weeks ago the Pentagon reversed course and now says AATIP was not related to UAP or UFOs and instead, “the purpose of AATIP was to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapons system applications with future technology projections over the next 40 years, and to create a center of expertise on advanced aerospace technologies.”
Part of the confusion or contradictions with the Pentagon’s official stance on UFOs may have arisen from a decision made in September that all UFO related media inquires to the DoD are now being handled solely by the Under Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs office.
“Incursions into military air space or training ranges by UAPs are problematic from both a safety and security concern—for all of DOD, not any one military service,” Gough said. “The investigations into these incidents also involve multiple U.S. government agencies. To ensure consistency in responses to queries submitted to DoD, individual military services and other DoD agencies, OSD (Public Affairs) took the lead in responding to all media queries sent to DoD regarding UAPs.”
www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvg8ea/the-pentagons-real-men-in-black-investigated-tom-delonges-ufo-videos
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Post by mmiller on Dec 21, 2019 22:26:28 GMT
UFO activity continues to leak out during the vietnam war. Never heard anything about ufos during that time. Some really fantastic sightings and encounters.
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Post by swamprat on Jan 10, 2020 0:51:59 GMT
De Void Ex Navy boss stumped by UFOs Posted on January 9, 2020 by Billy Cox
Milestone: This is De Void’s first UFO story to make the Herald-Tribune’s print edition. Please note the direct style, as well as the paucity of adverbs and meaningless tangents.
SARASOTA – America’s former Chief of Naval Operations stated on Thursday that the unidentified flying objects that appeared to have outperformed Navy fighter pilots on videos recorded in 2004 and 2015 remain a mystery.
“I’ve seen the videos and, at least in my time, most of the assessments were inconclusive as to what it was,” said retired Admiral Gary Roughead, following a speaking engagement in Sarasota. “But the whole issue of defense against autonomous vehicles is one that the Department is taking pretty darned seriously.”
Three sets of gun-camera videos – one taken from an F-18 assigned to the USS Nimitz operating off southern California in November 2004, and two more from Super Hornets attached to the USS Roosevelt during maneuvers off Jacksonville in January 2015 – were authenticated as official government footage by the Defense Department last year.
Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead takes questions from a Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning audience/CREDIT: Billy Cox
The target of the 2004 footage, dubbed the “Tic Tac” for its oblong shape, reportedly plunged from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in less than a second, a speed that would have easily destroyed a conventional aircraft. The New York Times broke the story in 2017 and, last summer, in an unprecedented move, the Navy publicly announced it had issued new guidelines for its pilots to report “unidentified aircraft.”
Roughead commanded both the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets before serving as CNO from 2007 through 2011. Booked for a Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning lecture on China’s 21st century military strategy, the Admiral said “there weren’t that many” such events on his watch, but that developing “unmanned autonomous aircraft” remains a priority.
“I think we’re going to continue to see new technology in the form of unmanned systems that will begin to interfere with military capability. And we’re not alone. There’s no question that China and Russia want to plan.
“Without knowing what they may be — are they phenomena or are they vehicles that someone was able to get into place? — I think one of the great challenges that more people looked at is, where would these have come from? And quite frankly, I haven’t spent a lot of time on that issue.”
Retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, who chased the Tic Tac UFO and recounted that experience for The Times, also reported a related mystery occurring simultaneously underwater, beneath the Tic Tac. Roughead said underwater weapons systems pose the next great evolutionary hurdle.
“I remember there was one (UFO), and it may have been after I retired, that seemed to go under water,” he said. “If in fact it was a real vehicle, how did it launch and recover? Because as you know, it’s not an easy thing to get something that can perform extraordinarily well in the air and dive into the water and become something else. What that phenomenon was, I can’t help you out there.”
In fact, Roughead recalled how, in public speeches to defense contractors, he announced the next “game-changing” breakthrough will be submersible military assets, whose power-sourcing could be “more transformative than the autonomous stuff in the air.” He compared the scale of such ambitions to the Apollo moon shots, which will demand “a triad of business, government, and academia coming together.
“The aerodynamics and the hydrodynamics and the strength that’s required to be able to fly and operate at depths, and the power you need to move at high speeds in the air, then how do you convert that power to something under the water – those are huge technological challenges,” he said. “There’s no question in my mind that in the future of warfare, probably long after I’m gone, we’ll see that type of thing beginning to occur.”
Imagine, Roughead said, being able to park military technology at the bottom of the ocean, virtually undetected, at a strategic location, “tell it to go to sleep” indefinitely, and then activate it when needed.
But with a little foresight, he added, investigations into such mind-bending scenarios could be used to build bridges with rivals like China.
“We have to look for opportunities, we have to look for venues where we can bring caring people together to say, OK, there’s a technological issue here, how do we bring the bright minds together,” Roughead said.
“How do we protect our legitimate national security technologies and intellectual property, but still get after some of the hard problems? I think that’s a way for closing some of the gaps down the road and bringing trust between the two.
“The first step for me is, how do you define what it is that we can work on together (to) remove some of the sensitivities and suspicions? Until you have that discussion, you’re not going to make any progress. The journey begins with the first step.”
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15921/ex-navy-boss-stumped-by-ufos/?fbclid=IwAR2jreOMM9H31TyRK0lSiSHYiBg_qCywSOisWjFNLlOR75PIF1jm1yeulpc
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Post by swamprat on Jan 10, 2020 3:38:23 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Jan 12, 2020 17:20:39 GMT
New comments by Nick Pope:
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Post by swamprat on May 5, 2020 20:22:57 GMT
DeVoid
Now, about those radar records.… By Billy Cox Tuesday, May 5, 2020 9:26 AM
Last week’s curious move by the Defense Department to post three now-famous UFO videos which had already been confirmed as authentic by the Navy seven months ago obviously raises all sorts of questions. A cry for help, maybe? Does it signal confusion or schism among the top brass about the need for a more proactive policy? Maybe it was an arbitrary impulse by some low-level nerd tired of coronavirus hogging all the headlines?
We’ll likely never know, but researcher Robert Powell, who was on the trail of the Tic Tac incident long before it had a name, has an additional set of questions. Only, these are for corporate news bigwigs – the BBC, CNN, Forbes, the NY Times, et al – who ran with the non-news press release like dogs with Frisbees.
“The big agencies will at least talk to them on the phone, right?” Powell says from his home in Austin. “So, what kills me is, the media should be asking, OK, if you’ve got these videos, and you’re admitting that you’ve kept them all these years, and you’re admitting they’re unknown, and you couldn’t figure it, well, where’s the radar data? Because that will tell you how fast these things are going and whether or not there’s any possibility they’re manmade. Where’s the radar data?”
Access doesn’t mean beans if you squander it. Last week, Reuters gave Trump some space to rant about how China wants him to lose the election. At the end of the interview, the news agency managed to throw in a question about the Pentagon’s decision to post the F-18 UFO footage. Typically, what Trump said — “I just wonder if it’s real. That’s a hell of a video” — was meaningless. They got him to say something.
Reuters should’ve gone deeper, but they should all go deeper. Before the To The Stars Academy formed in 2017 and helped spur the release of two of those Navy videos to the New York Times, Powell was trying to gets his hands on radar and communications data from the 2004 naval encounter. He queried everybody: the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Office of Naval Research, the Marine Corps, the Naval Air Warfare Center, Naval Sea Systems Command, the Naval Air Facilities Engineering Command, the Naval History and Heritage Command.
When all was said and done, in 2016, not a one of those sources could produce radar data. But the videos were evidently important enough for the military to retain. Weird. But not, evidently, weird enough for the media to ask for the complete set of records, or to demand to know why they’re not available.
By the way, Powell – who went on to publish a 270 page analysis of the Tic Tac Incident with fellow researchers at the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies – will be hosting SCU’s upcoming first-ever podcast, which sounds interesting.
It’s a wild tale about the alleged 1957 explosion of a UFO over the shallows of the Brazilian coastal municipality, Ubatuba. Long story, but the bottom line is, some of the purported debris survived and wound up in the U.S. In 2017-18, Powell got his hands on the material and analyzed its composition. On Wednesday at 3 p.m. Pacific/6 p.m. Eastern, he will discuss the results in a live streaming podcast available at youtu.be/NamnxaADugo
Ubatuba is just one of multiple projects SCU has been working lately. And it’s also worth noting that, in 2015, two years before the Navy videos surfaced, SCU released its analysis of surprising government UFO footage acquired in 2013 by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Known as the Aguadilla video, the nighttime sequence recorded with thermal imaging contains no communications chatter like the Navy vids, and no eyewitnesses have stepped forward to explain on the record what they saw, as some Navy pilots have done with their own encounters. On the other hand, unlike the F-18 images, Aguadilla shows the object interacting with its environment, slicing into the water, and splitting in two as it emerges. Also unlike the Navy footage, Powell was able to acquire radar records, from the FAA. “Plus, it also has a lot more background objects you can reference against it,” Powell says.
So it’s a valuable clip. But it was forwarded to SCU after it became obvious to at least one still-anonymous crew member that, alas, nobody up the chain of command was interested. Not interested in a bogey without a transponder flying so close to the local airport that it resulted in the delay of another flight. Got it. Yet, the CBP argued the original footage was too sensitive to release to the public, and it squashed De Void’s FOIA with a denial in 2016.
Thus, given the Pentagon’s newfound, or at least superficial, glasnost over The Great Taboo, and the videos’ implicit acknowledgement that we have gaping holes in our security perimeter upstairs, De Void has appealed to CBP to reconsider its decision to withhold Aguadilla. Who knows? Maybe there’s more than one contagion in the air these days.
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/
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Post by nyx on May 6, 2020 17:06:16 GMT
The Navy is really jerking around the public.
The Navy puts out a small piece of information with no explanation.
Then the Navy plays with us to come up with our own explanation on little Information.
This is just cruel!
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Post by swamprat on May 28, 2020 2:26:13 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Jun 1, 2020 20:21:51 GMT
DeVoid Meanwhile, in other news … By Billy Cox Monday, Jun 1, 2020
Uhh, yeah. It’s a little hard to concentrate on The Great Taboo right now. Cities on fire like it’s 1967 again. Coronavirus body counts surging into six digits. A new business initiative celebrating Elon Musk. These are things we can’t ignore.
But as time passes, we’ll come to see them as variations of familiar themes. And when that happens, we will find ourselves confronting something genuinely unprecedented, a room-sized gorilla beginning to break its social quarantine, the implications incapable of being wished away. And for that, we can thank the increasingly engaged Fourth Estate – mainstream and outliers alike – in its accelerating quest for clarity. And the blades of inquiry are getting sharper.
Three weeks ago, in what hopefully signals the beginning of old-fashioned deadline competition, Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick at The War Zone scooped the New York Times, by a single day, on the results of a FOIA for UFO incident reports collected by the Navy Safety Center. Both teams of reporters were attempting to acquire official paperwork behind the 2015 “GoFast” and “Gimbal” encounters videotaped by pilots assigned to the USS Roosevelt. Instead, the fishing expedition landed eight previously unknown reports logged by Navy pilots operating along the Eastern seaboard over a 10-year span.
Significantly, records from the Roosevelt encounters were not included. Wonder why? That’s called red meat.
Steven Greenstreet at the New York Post has been circling back into the archives to fill in the gaps of missing history. Most recently, his video chat with physicist and Pentagon UFO research consultant Dr. Eric Davis strayed into terrain that clearly made Davis nervous. So nervous, in fact, that a portion of the interview was deleted from the original clip shortly thereafter.
In the redacted portion of the exchange, Greenstreet wanted to know more about the controversial “Core Secrets” notes that Davis is alleged to have made during his conversation in 2002 with just-retired Defense Intelligence Agency Director Thomas Wilson. In a bombshell of a revelation, the notes indicate Wilson was still pissed about being denied access to a classified program involving The Great Taboo.
Confronted by Greenstreet, Davis held firm to the no-comment stance he assumed when the 15-page transcripts hit the Internet last June. But for the first time, he confirmed the source of the material. “They were leaked out of (Apollo astronaut) Ed Mitchell’s estate,” Davis told the Post, “and there’s nothing I can say about it.”
Unless, maybe, the media keeps pushing.
In fact, a few newsies have grown so tenacious that Luis Elizondo, the retired Army counterintelligence agent who set events in motion in 2017, tells De Void he wishes he’d met one of those journos before leaving the Pentagon to go public with the UFO material.
“I told him, I said dude, if I’d known you four years ago I probably would’ve hired you to come onto AATIP,” Elizondo says, alluding to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which studied UFOs for the Defense Department a decade ago. “He’s got sources that I would’ve gone to my grave thinking there’s no way in hell anybody will know who these people are. But he did.
“And you haven’t seen anything yet.”
Elizondo is referring to researcher Tim McMillan, who has singlehandedly converted Popular Mechanics from a featherweight on UFO matters into a formidable critic. In February, the former police lieutenant latched onto the DoD’s amateurish inability to get its stories straight concerning Elizondo’s duties with AATIP. As a result of McMillan’s reporting four months ago, the Pentagon felt compelled to admit that, yes, the subject of McMillan’s inquiry was, in fact, an information manager for unspecified Special Access Programs.
Well, probably sooner than later, Elizondo predicts, the DoD will produce a more accurate version in order to avoid having to send people to testify under oath. And that, he says, will prove once and for all he’s been on the level since jump street.
“The truth keeps coming out, whether they like it or not,” he says from southern California. “At first it was like, no, you’ve got the name wrong, it’s ‘Advanced Aviation.’ No, it’s not, it’s ‘Advanced Aerospace.’ Then it was ‘But AATIP was never about UFOs.’ Yes, actually it was. ‘Well, the videos weren’t legally released, they were classified.’ No they weren’t, and here’s the documentation that proves it.
“I’ve got no agenda other than to tell the truth. Everything I’ve said can be proved through documentation. You can’t keep a lid on this forever. The Department of Defense realizes the landscape is changing because people are FOIAing the hell out of ‘em now. And the last thing you want to do is get caught red-handed lying to the American people – there are laws and rules against that.”
Technically, yes, but lately, laws and rules in this country seem more like suggestions than mandates. Anyhow, Elizondo plans to leave a few more “Easter eggs” for the press to follow when History’s second season of “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation,” kicks off on July 11. And the former classified ops veteran who was invited in 2008 by then Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence James Clapper to join the Pentagon makes no bones about it – he consults with his former colleagues about what is and isn’t fair game when he puts stuff out there, whether it’s documentary material or an imminent interview on national media.
“What I’ve tried to do from the start is to destigmatize and further legitimize this topic to advance the conversation, to get the government to admit this is real, while at the same time not breaking either my security oath or the trust of the American people,” he says. “And it’s working. Maybe not as fast as some people would like, but if you look at just the last two years alone, we have collectively come further in this one moment in time than in the 70 years before that.”
At the SCU Conference in 2019, erstwhile Army intelligence agent Luis Elizondo acknowledged that UFOs have shown “some strategic interest in our nuclear capabilities.”/CREDIT: Billy Cox
Elizondo says the release of the F-18 videos has created an irreversible momentum, “like a boulder going downhill,” following a path that can, at best, be only partially managed. He compares it to depressing an angled mattress in order to guide the direction of a bowling ball. “If you try to get in front of it,” he warns, “it’s gonna flatten you.”
Nobody wants to get flattened. But the debate is growing so sophisticated that even traditional pillars of American journalism may soon find their reputations pancaked – or deemed irrelevant – by insouciant reporting. Case in point: the May 18 edition National Public Radio’s “1A.”
Amid today’s suddenly target-rich environment, where plenty of insider participants (Eric Davis, anyone?) and military eyewitnesses are speaking on the record, NPR instead gave a platform to guests with bupkis to offer. One of them – Sarah Scoles, author of They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers – prefers to approach the issue with an anthropological filter. The other, utterly marginalized SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, admitted nearly two years ago that his discipline lacks the qualifications to properly assess the UFO conundrum. So public radio wound up delivering a huge platter of empty calories for audiences with the luxury of time to waste.
And then there are the outright curiosities. Take freelance troll Keith Kloor.
Like an Inspector Javert sentenced to purgatory in a never-ending Whac-A-Mole karma, Kloor keeps managing to pop up in mainstream publications in order to hock loogies at UFO journalism. He obviously has no problems scoring gigs. Last year, his byline (“The Media Loves This UFO Expert Who Says He Worked for An Obscure Pentagon Program – Did He?”) appeared in The Intercept, co-founded by Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald. Also in 2019, Kloor landed a piece (“UFOs Won’t Go Away”) in Issues in Science and Technology, the magazine arm of the National Academies of Science.
Two weeks ago, he popped up again, this time in Wired, with an essay titled “Will The New York Times Ever Stop Reporting on UFOs?” Like the preceding companion pieces, Kloor’s work is the latest addition to the tired UFOs-as-hokum genre, with a fixation on Elizondo’s credentials. And he isn’t afraid to burn his sources to accomplish the mission.
Led to believe Kloor planned an objective discussion on the first detailed independent analysis of the so-called Tic Tac UFO incident captured on video by Navy pilots in 2004, members of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies agreed to delay release of their evaluation to coincide with publication of Kloor’s article for NAS. Kloor had attended SCU’s weekend discussion of those results, prior to public disclosure, in 2019. But when Kloor went to press, he also delivered a swipe at those following the evidence to a conclusion that UFOs represent truly exotic and unknown technology. He characterized advocates of those notions as sensationalists who “seem to be working in the great American tradition of P.T. Barnum.”
In slamming the NY Times’ 5/17/20 article on the eight new UFO-Navy reports uncovered through FOIA as “thinly sourced and slanted” – without mentioning The War Zone’s more comprehensive reporting a day earlier, which published online PDFs of those same Navy reports – Kloor actually thought it was significant that the Times didn’t work Elizondo into its reporting. Implying that the NYT might be having second thoughts about Elizondo’s verisimilitude, Kloor cited his appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News interviews, and how “cable news shows still find him irresistible.”
This is beginning to sound like the flailing envy of a man with a sense that the times are passing him by. Maybe Kloor’s auditioning to be a UFO expert on NPR. There’s obviously plenty of room for that voice. Fortunately for the rest of us, investigative journalism is starting to make That Voice sound more like a plea for attention than a rational argument. The marketplace for new ideas moves on.
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/
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