© US Navy/KLASUFO captured on Navy radar, nicknamed "Gimbal"
That changed in 2017 when Blumenthal, by that time a retired contributor for the Times, connected with investigative journalist Leslie Kean, who had come across an extraordinary tip.
Kean, who has long reported on UFOs, was able to attend a confidential meeting that October where she learned of a top-secret Pentagon program that had for years operated in the shadows. Its mission? To investigate reported sighting of mysterious objects in the skies.
The discovery was monumental, not least because it directly undermined the government's public position of more than 50 years that unidentified flying objects were not worth studying.
Naturally, Blumenthal was intrigued.
"The government always took the position that there's nothing to this, that these are all hoaxes or hallucinations, but nothing real," Blumenthal told USA TODAY in a phone interview. "This was a pretty good story, I thought - a great story."
New York Times article sets the stage for more revelations
Blumenthal's hunch was right.
Published two months later, the now-famous article uncovering the top secret program headlined "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money'" marked a turning point in the ever-evolving public discourse surrounding UFOs.
Reported UFO sightings have long attracted as many skeptics as they do fanatics. But for those with doubts, there it was in black and white on the front page of one of the nation's preeminent newspapers: The Pentagon had for years thought that reports of craft flying in strange ways were so serious as to merit millions of dollars in funding to study.
What the Times' reporters exposed spread like wildfire, helping to set in motion a series of additional revelations, government hearings and even UFO documentaries that recently culminated in July in some jaw-dropping testimony before Congress about a spaceship crash retrieval program. This week, the Pentagon's new office to investigate UFOs unveiled a new website where the public can access declassified information about reported sightings.
In the years since the Times' article appeared, the harrowing experiences shared by Navy pilots and the revelations exposed by government whistleblowers have continued to lend legitimacy to a topic once confined to the realm of conspiracy theory. Long considered taboo, discussion of UFOs (and the potential interstellar lifeforms many believe could be piloting them) has now entered the mainstream as the push for government transparency strengthens.
"I do think we at The New York Times ... did open doors that had long been closed," Blumenthal said. "I do take great pride in that, that we happened to capture the moment of interest and did change the dialogue."
Intelligence officials go public
But the team of reporters couldn't have done it alone.
Growing disillusioned with the obstinance he faced among the high ranks of the government, Christopher Mellon in 2017 joined a small group of former government officials with security clearances who went public with some of what they knew.
Mellon and others had become concerned over the threat to national security posed by craft routinely observed in U.S. airspace moving in ways beyond the capabilities of any known human technology. Additionally, no central mechanism existed to report and document these sightings of UFOs, which have recently been rebranded as UAP for unidentified anomalous (or aerial) phenomena.
So Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, turned to the press. He was joined in his efforts by Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who resigned and went public in October 2017 after 10 years of running the Pentagon program.
"We just knew our pilots were encountering some very bizarre craft," Mellon told USA TODAY in a phone interview. "We felt it was essential from a security and national defense standpoint to alert the system and wake people up."
Using unclassified documents and on-the-record interviews with former intelligence officers, Blumenthal, Kean and Times' Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper were able to expose the Defense Department's secretive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The bombshell article even included with it the release of videos showing the Navy's encounters with strange objects.
Before The New York Times agreed to the story, Mellon and Elizondo had also joined the commercial venture To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a San Diego-based company co-founded by Blink-182 frontman and guitarist Tom DeLonge.
At its outset, the company had both an entertainment and now-defunct research arm and was instrumental in the production of the History Channel docuseries "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation," which chiefly featured Mellon and Elizondo in its two-season run between 2019 and 2020.
"We decided we're going to make this known, we're going to tell people this is real," co-founder Jim Semivan, a retired operations officer with the CIA, told USA TODAY.
UFO lore extends back decades
Semivan's interest in studying the UFO phenomenon extends back 40 years, and includes one sighting of his own in the 1990s that he declined to describe.
Comment: It was an encounter/abduction-type experience.
Ever since Allied pilots would see so-called foo fighters in the skies over both the European and Pacific theaters during World War II, Americans have for decades been equally captivated by and skeptical of tantalizing reports of flying saucers and little green men visiting Earth.
The Air Force seemed to close the doors on further government study of the phenomenon in 1969 when it shut down Project Blue Book, declaring in no uncertain terms that any reports of UFOs were either hoaxes or misidentified natural occurrences. But many wondered, did the Cold War era program uncover and subsequently cover up the discovery of objects beyond human control, representing a potential threat?
"There's no way it's Chinese, it isn't Russian and it sure as hell isn't ours because these craft, we've been seeing these things for 80 years," Semivan said. "What we have here is something very odd and very unusual."
Fallout from the July hearing
In 2020, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence adopted Mellon's proposal to seek an official report on UAP from the intelligence community. The resulting preliminary assessment released in June 2021 identified 144 military UAP encounters since 2004, a figure which Mellon said has since jumped this year to more than 500 military UAP reports.
The findings are in part what Mellon said spurred Congress to establish the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) focused on receiving and analyzing unidentified phenomena reports, many of which have come from military pilots.
The developments seem to have solved the concern of Mellon and others of craft flying unchecked and unreported through military airspace. But now another issue has arisen: In June, a decorated former combat officer by the name of David Grusch came forward to claim, without presenting evidence publicly, that crafts of non-human origin have crashed on earth and been retrieved by the government for study.
Though Grusch's interview with NewsNation went viral, it was Blumenthal and Kean who once again had the story first. Days earlier, the pair broke the news with Grusch's wild claims about the Pentagon's covert crash retrieval program in an article in The Debrief, a news site focused on coverage of technology and national defense.
The Pentagon has repeatedly denied the existence of such a program.
Grusch, a member of a previous Pentagon task force that investigated UAP, repeated the claims on July 26 before a House Oversight subcommittee, which he said was based on interviews he did with 40 witnesses, many of whom he said are still working in the program.
During the two-hour hearing, Grusch was also joined by two former Navy pilots, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, whose own account of the the now-famous a Tic Tac-shaped object captured on video in 2004 during a flight off the coast of Southern California has become the stuff of legend among the UFO community.
Legal constraints may limit what Grusch is able to discuss publicly about alleged classified programs without, but Mellon and Semivan both said they found his testimony to be credible.
"A claim as extraordinary as that requires exceptional, extraordinary proof," Mellon said. "Yet, there is clearly a substantial basis for these claims. The immense national security and scientific implications warrant additional congressional investigation."
Following the hearing, three Republicans and one Democrat on the House subcommittee sent a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., calling for the establishment of a select committee to investigate UAP further.
Astrophysicists caution hasty conclusions of 'aliens'
However, many astrophysicists caution the public from jumping to the conclusion that any unexplained sighting means aliens on other planets are visiting us. During NASA's UAP hearing earlier this year, experts were clear that even otherworldly explanations aren't likely even in the absence of a natural explanation.
"We must be careful to not inject 'aliens' every time we encounter something we don't understand," David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University, told USA TODAY in an email. "Faced with ambiguous evidence like this, our brains tend to fill in the gaps with whatever we're culturally pre-conditioned to expect."
Semivan readily admits that the phenomenon doesn't fit into the scientific method; it's unpredictable, it has no agreed-upon vocabulary, "yet it's very real," he said.
"What it actually is I think is anybody's guess," Semivan said.
Both Mellon and Semivan anticipated that as bipartisan supports mounts for the military and executive branch to reveal what they know, the public will grow increasingly open and accepting of the idea that UAP - whatever they are - are out there.
"It'll get increasingly difficult to deny that there are intelligent vehicles doing things that we ourselves cannot do in the atmosphere," Mellon said. "I think these kind of changes always take time, and I'm talking about a sea change in our worldview, of our understanding of the universe and our place in it."
Reader Comments
Why would they use "green men" as a worldwide threat and not something like a comet or asteroid?
What happened in 1947?
On March 5, 1947 Byrd gave an interview to Chilean press following the end of Project Highjump to Antarctica. " Admiral Richard E. Byrd warned today that the United States should adopt measures of protection against the possibility of an invasion of the country by hostile planes coming from the polar regions. The Admiral explained that he was not trying to scare anyone, but the cruel reality is that in case of a new war, the United States could be attacked by planes flying over one or both poles. This statement was made as part of a recapitulation of his own polar experience, in an exclusive interview with International News Services. Talking about the recently completed expedition, Byrd says that the most important result of his observations and discoveries is the potential effect that they have in relation to the security of the United States. The fantastic speed with which the world is shrinking – recalled the Admiral – is one of the most important lessons learned during his recent Antarctic exploration," The National Security bill was introduced in the February-March timeframe.
On July 7, 1947 the Roswell event began. The National Security Act was passed later that month and signed into law. This established the CIA, the Dept of Defense, Depts of Army, Navy, Air Force, the National Security Council. The aim of the act was to provide a comprehensive program for the future security of the United States. UFOs became top secret.
So they change the name of UFO to UAP to mark the narrative shift. What is the reason of the shift? Wernher von Braun of NASA in an interview: "“The enemy at first, (Von Braun) said, (to justify our) …space based weapons system… first the Russians are going to be considered the enemy… then terrorists would be identified… then we were going to identify third world crazies… The next enemy was asteroids… [and] against asteroids we’re going to build space based weapons.”
“And the funniest one of all was against what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final card. And over, and over, and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving his speeches for him, he would bring up that last card. ‘And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We’re going to have to build space based weapons against aliens.’ And all of it, he said, is a lie.”
You don't think people have an anthropogenic effect? We cut down forests, drain natural lakes, hold back massive amounts of water, kill off wildlife, make chemicals and dispose of them in places where people will not be able to live around for hundreds of years.
In actuality:
Professor John R. Christy, the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, is one of 1600+ scientists who are attempting to speak out against the idea of anthropogenic climate change. His thorough research, published in Testing Climate Claims 2021 Update, available at www.icsf.ie,refutes climate change alarmism by citing historical facts. Following are key excerpts from his report: Temperatures were higher in the 1930s than today. Between 1895 and 2015, 14 of the top 15 years with the highest heat records occurred before 1960. The temperatures experienced in 2021 were the same as 120 years ago. The number of major tornadoes between 1954 and 1986 averaged 56/year, but between 1987 and 2020 the average was 34/year. Between 1895 and 2015, on average, there has been no change in the number of very wet days or very dry days per month, and the 20 driest months were before 1988. Between 1950 and 2019 the percentage of land area experiencing droughts did not increase globally – the trend was flat. The incidence of wildfires in North America between 1600 and 2000 has decreased substantially. Sea levels rose 12.5 cm per decade for 8,000 years and then leveled off, now they are rising only 2.5 cm per decade.
The EPA’s U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index is a combined measure of how many times there was a period of four or more days of unusually high temperatures in a given percentage of the country.
You see you Christy has deceived you. He is using points of singular weather references to try to disprove climate change. But Climate is a measure of weather over time not a singular event or occasions.
Also glaciers take up more space because water expands as it begins to freeze. It also expands as it warms but it reaches a max expansion of 8% and ice reaches I think 32% max expansion. So the glaciers melting would cause the sea levels to drop. The problem with the glaciers melting is that they are fresh water which dilutes the ocean and that affects the jet stream. The glaciers melting also will cause a massive shifting of weight which could cause volcanic eruptions and more earthquakes.
CO2 is not a pollutant, and it doesn't cause temps to rise. Nope. Nada. In fact, the data shows that CO2 rise follows a warming trend. AGW is a total self-serving farce. At last count, 1600 prominent scientists have risked their careers and reputations to say so. Are they doing it for giggles? No, they're doing it to defend the integrity of their profession. Tim Ball, who passed in 2022, was one of the first to be vocal about it. His work is worth reading.
“The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control the climate.” - Clexit (Climate Exit group) founding statement.
14,400 prominent scientists say that it is happening which makes that the rather large majority.
Man may not control climate but man does have an affect on it.
Human activity is creating life-destroying technology, yes. Something needs to be done about it, yes. The carbon credits scam lets corporations keep creating their chemical pollution as long as they can appear to be earning the right to do so by claiming to be sequestering or reducing carbon emissions (the supposed real danger to life on this planet). It's horrific what human beings are capable of doing if they think it improves their relationship with their God, Mammon.
Carbon credits cost millions of dollars and that money goes to advance third world countries to reduce their carbon output.
Human activity doesn't contribute much to temperature rise, and the level of CO2 is not threatening the planet. So this scam is being perpetrated to help the poor third world countries, is it? Which turnip truck did you fall off of?
I don't expect you fell off any truck. You're most likely a plant working from a list of approved talking points, probably on several blogs at once. Must be boring, unfulfilling work, but maybe it's helping to pay for that boat you've been lusting after or maybe pay down some debt? Regardless of your motivation, it's easy to just scratch the surface of these baseless assertions and reveal the evil intentions beneath. If it's not allowed to stand unchallenged, my theory is that unethical, morally reprehensible, and self-serving bs can be turned to some good. That's my hope, anyway.
Scientists use a metric called Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) to measure the changes in energy the Earth receives from the Sun. TSI incorporates the 11-year solar cycle and solar flares/storms from the Sun's surface.Studies show that solar variability has played a role in past climate changes.
Since 1750, the average amount of energy from the Sun either remained constant or decreased slightly3.If a more active Sun caused the warming, scientists would expect warmer temperatures in all layers of the atmosphere. Instead, they have observed a cooling in the upper atmosphere and a warming at the surface and lower parts of the atmosphere. That's because greenhouse gases are slowing heat loss from the lower atmosphere.Climate models that include solar irradiance changes can’t reproduce the observed temperature trend over the past century or more without including a rise in greenhouse gases.