SAUCER STORIES
Bob Bigelow and the Pentagon UFO files
The previous Flying Sorcery column ( FT361:28) introduced you to Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy (TTSA) and all the many wonderful things it proposes to do. Now it’s done something, and all the world has heard about it. Or some of it. The story broke online in the New York Times (and in print in the following Sunday edition): “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program” sang the headline (see FT362:2). The thrust of the article was twofold: that the US Government had admitted investigating UFOs despite denying doing any such thing for nearly 50 years, and spent $22 million between 2007 and 2012 on an unclassified but well-hidden Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), in charge of which was one Luis Elizondo. This gent and his ‘program’ were mentioned in the previous Flying Sorcery column as now being with the TTSA, and he had a couple of surprises for the staid readers of the online Gray Lady: two brief videos, shot from Forward-Looking Infra-Red (FLIR) cameras on board US Navy fast-movers. One, titled FLIR- 1, was identified as being taped from an F/A-18F Super Hornet attached to the USS Nimitz, during an exercise 100 miles (160km) off San Diego in 2004. The military had apparently declined to say when, where, or by whom the other, titled GIMBAL, had been shot. Both showed something blurry as seen in the heads-up display (HUD) of the Navy jets. More on them shortly.
Second, and possibly of greater interest to the average NYT reader, was how AATIP came to be funded. Now, $4.4 million a year out of an annual US defence budget of $600-odd billion doesn’t need your calculator to tell you ’tis but a tiny fraction, even if for a while it would keep you or me from worrying about the cost of claret, Sobranies, and having the Bentley serviced. Besides, every little counts. It seems most of this cash didn’t go to fund the DIA worthies of AATIP, toiling away under Mr Elizondo, “on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.” The project was proposed to the DIA by Senator Harry Reid. He had been approached by Las Vegas billionaire and fervent believer in ET visitation Robert Bigelow of NIDS fame (see pp38-41), who in turn, it seems, had been put up to the idea by none other than Luis Elizondo. Once the cash was forthcoming, the DIA contracted most of the work to a company called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). Some of that money was funnelled to MUFON to carry out field investigations. Mr Reid’s sponsorship of the project was joined by Senators Ted Stevens and Daniel K Inouye. The former died in 2010, the latter in 2012. As far as I know no conspiracist has yet suggested that these two were assisted in their demise because They Knew Too Much, but be patient… Meanwhile, Mr Reid has long been pursued by rumours of corruption, so this cosy arrangement inevitably smells of the pork barrel, if not a veritable barrel of herrings.
Alongside the NYT’s main article was a sidebar featuring the account of Cdr David Fravor of encountering a UFO during that November 2004 exercise. Fravor and (presumably his wingman) Lt Cdr Jim Slaight were diverted from their training mission by an alert from the cruiser USS Princeton. Over the previous two weeks the cruiser’s radar had been picking up ‘objects’ that “appeared suddenly at 80,000ft [24,400m], and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000ft [6,100m] and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up.” Now one of these had turned up in the vicinity. When the two (unarmed) fighters arrived at the given co-ordinates, they had nothing on their radar and no UFO was visible. But then they noticed that the sea below them was churning, and above that was hovering “an aircraft of some kind – whitish… around 40ft [12m] long and oval in shape… jumping around erratically” over the “boiling” waves. Fravor descended toward it, whereupon the object rose to meet him, then abruptly peeled off, accelerating “like nothing I’ve ever seen”. The target thus lost, the two jets were told to fly to a designated CAP (combat air patrol) point. They were still 40 miles (64km) from that when the Princeton told them that their mystery target had already arrived there. When they arrived at the CAP point themselves, the thing had disappeared, and the two Super Hornets headed back to the Nimitz. Two things strike this one-time (aged eight) would-be Fleet Air Arm flyboy. One: note that Cdr Fravor’s plane was not equipped with a FLIR pod, and so the FLIR-1 video that’s been casually associated with his account was allegedly taped on a later mission, sent out four hours afterward from the Nimitz, and may show something absolutely unrelated. Two: why did the Princeton radar operators assume that whatever appeared at Fravor’s CAP point was the same thing they had
tracked earlier (but that had meanwhile vanished from their screens, it seems)? There may be a good answer to this, but we haven’t had it yet.
So that leaves a couple or three more things to chew on. These are: TTSA’s treatment of the videos, and associated matters; what the videos actually show; and what AATIP and BAASS were up to. The last is probably easiest to deal with first. From Luis Elizondo, you get the impression that AATIP was busy investigating UFOs in the ‘ufological’ sense of the term. The DoD was a bit more specific, not to say deflationary: “The AATIP’s mandate, when it existed, was to assess far-term foreign advanced aerospace threats to the United States”, “a wide range of ‘anomalous aerospace threats’ ranging from advanced aircraft fielded by traditional US adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters” – in other words, UFOs as understood in classic aviation jargon. The project – at one point allegedly involving 46 scientists – produced “reams” of paperwork, in the form of some 38 lengthy reports according to Elizondo, including one 490-pager on “alleged UFO sightings in the United States and numerous foreign countries over multiple decades”. Feel like re-inventing the wheel, anyone?
Bigelow spent some of his Pentagon pocket money on refurbishing some of his many buildings in Las Vegas to store “metal alloys and other materials that Mr Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena”. That rather strongly suggests those ‘materials’ were gathered by ufologists (MUFON?) rather than rehoused from Hangar 18 or Area 51. And where are they now? And then AATIP’s researchers “also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes”, which no doubt resulted in yet more reams of paper. In the end, the DIA decided that AATIP had produced nothing substantive and canned it. Elizondo presents this now as a lever for TTSA and ‘disclosure’: “We need to ensure we engage… our leaders, and say ‘Hey, look this is worth investing [in]’... The bigger story here is: ‘Folks we’ve been looking at this stuff for a while and it’s real’, and as a nation we need to decide if this is a national security imperative.” The DIA, like the US Air Force, following the Condon Report 42 years earlier, seems to have concluded otherwise.
TTSA’s evidence for “it’s real” consists at the time of writing of those two aforementioned FLIR videos and a 2017 statement purportedly from one or some of the aircrew involved in the 2004 Nimitz incident. TTAS say the videos were released to them with complete ‘chain-of-custody’ documentation, but so far have failed to publish it, so to all intents and purposes they exist in limbo. TTSA say the GIMBAL video was released to them with the location, date, and other identifying data redacted. The DIA say they’ve released
The bigger story here is ‘Folks, we’ve been looking at this stuff for a while and it’s real’”
nothing from AATIP. Oh. The FLIR-1 video in one form or another has been kicking around the web since 2007, while Cdr Fravor’s story has been out there (on the Fighter Sweep blog) since 2015. TTSA say they have three videos, but the third is yet to appear. So we don’t have TTSA to thank for much. The witness statement confirming Cdr Fravor’s account is likewise questionable. It’s clearly not an original document, since it sports none of the security classifications, rubber stamps, initialled approvals, standard Department of Defense page numbering or other telltales that it’s an official release, not even a letterhead or cover page. It does contain official-looking blacked-out (and sometimes rather pointless) redactions, but they’re clearly the work of a computer, not the standard felt-tip beloved of FOIA censors. It seems that Elizonde acquired the videos from the DIA – or somewhere – to use in ‘pilot training’, and not to promote Tom DeLonge’s crowd-funded fantasy factory. Oh again. And Oh dear.
Now to the videos. GIMBAL comes with a voice track, at best guess an exchange between the crew of the chase aircraft; FLIR1 is from 2004 (we’re told), has no voice track, and ends with the target whizzing off to the left at seemingly enormous speed. Both videos have been intensively scrutinised and analysed by Mick West and other knowledgeable souls of Metabunk.org, even down to the camera arrangements and image paths within the Raytheon FLIR pods (which, nota bene, are gimbal-mounted) hung on the Super Hornets at the time. Tim Printy has also speculated that the videos we see are copies of copies of copies, possibly then recorded on a phone from a TV set, so grim is the quality compared to current IR weapons-grade imagery, which is as sharp as a monochrome hi-def TV. What we get in both cases is an amorphous blobby shape with a flare around it. The IR camera allows the viewer to toggle between displaying the ‘hot spot’ as black or white. In the ‘hot black’ mode there’s a distinct white flare around the central hot spot. Mick West concluded that this was a camera artefact, not a mysterious ‘aura’ as promoted by TTSA, and the apparent rotation of the target image in the GIMBAL video is actually a function of the angle at which the gimbal-mounted camera is operating (as the gimbal rotates, so does the image). Metabunk conclude that the target is nothing more extraordinary than a distant aircraft, its shape blotted out by the over-saturating heat signature. This video’s title leads one to wonder if it’s not a recording of a test of the gimbal mechanism itself. The audio track, noticeably lacking in inter-aircraft military formality, mentions “a fleet” of drones (presumably visible on radar), which adds weight to this speculation.
The supposedly amazing bit of the FLIR1 video comes right at the end, when the target shoots off to one side at apparently enormous speed. ‘Apparently’ is correct, as the camera goes to a 2x zoom at this point and loses its lock on the target. That’s all: there’s nothing unusual about it if one knows what one’s looking at. It’s noteworthy too that in both videos the airspeed of the pursuing aircraft is consistently around 250 knots, and the targets appear to remain at a constant distance. This doesn’t match Cdr Fravor’s account of ‘his’ UFO whizzing off at supersonic speed – and the Super Hornet can hit Mach 1.8 (1,190 mph at 40,000ft) if it needs to. In cold sober fact, there’s no reason yet to suppose that this video has any connection to Cdr Fravor’s sighting – which remains unexplained – or even the 2004 Nimitz carrier group exercise at all.
Altogether this amounts to rather less than the TTAS hype (not to mention the New
York Times) would have us believe, and even less than such luminaries as Richard Dolan and Stanton Friedman seem to think it all means (see sundry interviews on YouTube). So now we wait to see if it means anything at all. Don’t hold your breath, as they say…