Disclosure and the AATIP Program _ Nick Pope.

I'm Nick Pope. I worked for the British government for 21 years at the Ministry of Defence, and for much of the early 90s I ran the UK's UFO programme. My job was to research and investigate the phenomenon and to determine if there was anything of any defence significance or anything of more general scientific interest. Now the biggest story in recent years in the UFO field has undoubtedly been the revelations concerning the existence of the Pentagon's ATIP programme. This was front page news in the New York Times on December 16th, 2017, and really in terms of the story and where it is, it is still a story that continues to unfold. There are fresh revelations it seems every few weeks, and this is clearly the biggest thing to have hit the UFO community for some time. Now there is controversy even about the name of the programme. ATIP has been variously suggested to be either Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme or Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Programme. There are even versions with an extra and in there, and also suggestions that it either evolved from or is essentially the same thing as another programme called AWSAP, Advanced Weapons System Application Programme. When you can't even be certain, or when there's certainly controversy and disagreement about the nature or name of a programme, you know that you're dealing with some fairly shadowy material. In relation to the nature of the programme, there continues to be debate about this. Was this, as the Department of Defence and the Defence Intelligence Agency usually try to characterise it, was it an Advanced Aerospace Threat Programme? In other words, there are some statements from the press office and some documents where they talk about this in terms of it being a programme to assess far-term aerospace threats. Now conventionally, and I speak as someone who's done this sort of thing within government, conventionally when you talk about foreign advanced aerospace threats, you're talking about Russia and China and maybe some other nations such as Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state actors such as ISIS. But if you look at the paperwork that has been declassified in relation to the Pentagon's ATIP Programme, and if you listen to the statements for the people involved in this, Senate Majority Leader, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was instrumental in setting it up, Luis Elizondo, the DIA Korea intelligence officer who ran this, and some of the other people, it's clear that part of this work, at least part of it, if not the whole of it, was concerned not with Russia and China, but with anomalous phenomena, the UFO mystery, whatever you want to term it. So here we have this programme that made front page news in the New York Times, it was also in the Washington Post, Politico, CNN, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, the BBC. This was literally news headlines all around the world that for years, and this is the essential part of the story in one sense, for years, the US government denied having a UFO programme, or at least having one since 1969, when Project Blue Book was terminated. But with the revelations concerning the existence of the ATIP Programme, it seemed that that was not entirely correct, and that there was a programme. So this is an ongoing story. There are a number of strands to this story, and I think possibly the best known strand, because it's such a visual story, are these three apparently declassified videos of US Navy jets chasing UFOs. These incidents have variously been dubbed Gimbal, Go Fast and Tic Tac. They essentially are taken through the FLIR, which is the forward-looking infrared camera, carried by these F-18 Super Hornets, and they show an anomalous object of some sort travelling at apparently phenomenal speeds. And what's interesting about this, as well as some of the flight data which is displayed in the course of these videos being shown, you also have voice on some of them from the pilots, and you can hear these Navy pilots, who of course fly jets capable of travelling at high max speeds, you can hear them getting excited about this, saying things like, wow, look at that thing go. And one of the pilots involved, who's gone on the record, David Fravor, has said, I don't know what it was, but I want to fly one. Now when Navy pilots are getting excited about speeds and manoeuvres of something, you know that you're in pretty interesting territory. So the videos have been an important strand of this story, and there is some dispute and disagreement about exactly how and when and under whose authority these videos, which absolutely seem to be the real thing. And the Pentagon, of course, before the New York Times would run this story, the Pentagon, through the press office, had to confirm that yes, there was an ATIP programme. So there has been confirmation of all this, but exactly when and who and how the release of these videos came about, that's still being debated. But there are other strands of the story too. For example, the suggestion that they had meta-materials. Now these are supposedly, they've been called mystery metals, that's not a helpful term. Everything sits somewhere on the periodic table and is made of the same stuff. However, there are differences in isotopes. And what this means in terms of analysis is that just as you can analyse, for example, a meteorite, you can be certain that it came from space, as opposed to it's just someone's trying to sell you a rock that they picked out of their backyard. Because the isotopic ratios are different. And that's because the elements out of which, the elements and compounds, have been exposed to cosmic rays, cosmic radiation, in other words, that we are protected from on the surface of planet Earth. So you can tell if something's been in space. And apparently these meta-materials that were looked at as part of the work of the AATIP programme, have undergone isotopic ratio analysis and the conclusion is that they have been in space. So that, needless to say, is extremely interesting. Part of the AATIP work, in fact, an awful lot, if not all of the AATIP contract, seems to have been put out into the private sector. What the DoD and the Defence Intelligence Agency seem to have done with this is put it out, supposedly for competitive tender. One report suggests there were two bidders. Another report suggests there was only one. But whatever the truth of that, the contract went to Bigelow Aerospace. Now Robert Bigelow has a long-standing interest in UFOs, dating back to a childhood sighting, but has made some very forthright statements about the reality of this and has said, I don't just believe this to be true, I know this to be true. Now if this is the person who did the AATIP contract for the Pentagon, maybe that's the answer to the question, how does he know this to be true? Why is this not just a belief? Why is Robert Bigelow, in interviews, talking about this in terms of definitive, you can take it to the bank, knowledge that this is true? That's another aspect of this. Of course, putting a programme like this into the private sector has two advantages. Firstly, it makes congressional oversight more difficult. But secondly, it takes a large part of the information outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. Now, you could argue that it's already largely exempt because of defence and national security and intelligence exemption, but having it in the private sector gives you an extra layer of protection because you can also, in parallel with those other FOI exemptions, you can deploy the exemption that relates to privilege, commercial privilege, when something is done and is the propriety information of a private sector entity. So that, again, is a way often, and I've come across similar things and indeed done similar things in the UK, where you run a programme out of the private sector. It sounds counterintuitive, but it actually makes it harder, not easier, to get that information out. So we have this programme, but there continues to be divergence of view about the true nature of the programme. Just in January 2019, I acquired from the DIA's Office of Corporate Communications a letter that the DIA sent to Congress about the AATIP programme and they said, you have asked about this programme. Here is a list of the products produced under the AATIP contract. They went on in their cover letter to Congress to talk about this in terms of it being a programme designed to assess far-term aviation threats to the US. But then they listed, as an attachment to that letter, 38 studies that they'd done, papers that had been written under the AATIP programme. It was nothing to do with Russia or China or Iran or North Korea. It was to do with theoretical physics relating to exotic propulsion systems that would not go, basically, not to build a faster aircraft, but to build a spacecraft capable of viable interstellar travel. There was another paper in there about the Drake equation. The Drake equation is a construct designed to make an assessment of how many communicable civilisations there are in our Milky Way galaxy. If this was a programme looking at Russian and Chinese aviation over the next 40 years, which is the way that some sceptics have tried to portray this programme, clearly they wouldn't be looking at the Drake equation. Why, if you're studying Russian aircraft or Chinese missiles, would you need to know how many intelligent civilisations there are in the galaxy? Clearly it's a nonsense. So we have a fundamental disconnect between what the DIA said to Congress in their letter and what they actually revealed by virtue of the list at attachment, where clearly they were looking at something entirely different. The whole story of how this got out into the public domain is very interesting. In October of 2017, Luis Elizondo, who had run this programme for the DIA, he left the DIA and turned up in a private organisation called the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. This was a think tank put together by the former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge, and he had formed this organisation as part think tank, part research organisation, part lobby group to try to raise awareness of this subject and to try to kick-start a conversation with the American people about the reality of this phenomenon and maybe to try to get more done about it. I think the way I characterise what Tom DeLonge and what the To The Stars Academy seem to be doing is that they seem to be continuing some of the work that was done within government or at government's behest, continuing ATIP, but outside of the DoD and the DIA, and in a way that is more public. What happened was that they, in October 2017, the To The Stars Academy did a launch, which was filmed, and they basically revealed who they were, what their strategic aims were, and that generated some media coverage. Between that time, clearly, they were having discussions with a number of media entities, and some people were acting as go-betweens here. One of the people involved in this story who knew about it was George Knapp, who is a journalist based out of Las Vegas who has links with Robert Bigelow and who has run a series of favourable UFO stories over the years. Another person who was brought into this media handling strategy was the investigative journalist Leslie Kane. Leslie clearly found out about this, was briefed on certain aspects of it, then met some of the people involved, teamed up with Ralph Blumenthal, another journalist who worked for The New York Times, and Helene Cooper, another New York Times journalist. They were also, obviously, in parallel talking to other media outlets, but it was The Times who published first, very closely followed by The Washington Post and Politico. Clearly, there was some coordination here, but The Times got the scoop. When the story was published, it went out jointly under the bylines of Ralph Blumenthal, Leslie Kane, and Helene Cooper. The three of them had gotten the story out, but clearly, they had been talking to people like Luis Elizondo, who went on the record, Senator Harry Reid, who went on the record, but a number of other people associated with the program who did not go on the record. Also, as part of the fact-checking of the story, The New York Times and presumably the other media outlets had to satisfy themselves that this was real. They did that by, for example, not just talking to Harry Reid and Luis Elizondo, but talking to the pilot, David Fravor, who had been involved in one of those military jet chases. Of course, they saw some documentation relating to the ATIP program. They saw, for example, contractual solicitation documentation showing how this had been put out and what the contractual requirements were. But the final confirmation, of course, had to come from the government itself. All this was very impressive, but ultimately, a Pentagon spokesperson through the press office confirmed to The Times and others that, yes, there was an ATIP program. At some stages, press officers have used phrases along the lines of confirming that, in parallel with this work, part of this work included looking at anomalous phenomena. Now, there have been a couple of occasions where that's, I won't say it's been walked back, but it's been omitted from some of the statements that have come out of public affairs at DOD and DIA. But there are other occasions where that statement has been made. So I don't regard it as being disputed that they looked at anomalous phenomena. And my goodness, when you look at the attachment, the letter DIA sent to Congress, it makes it abundantly clear we're not talking about Russian and Chinese aircraft. We're talking about more exotic things. Some people would say fringe science. Some would almost say literally science fiction. But clearly, scientists with papers published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals have been involved in this and have published on this and have contributed to the ATIP work on subjects such as wormholes, warp drive, anti-gravity, stargates, etc. I think, in conclusion, I would say that this is not a done deal. There is still discussion and debate about ATIP. There will continue to be revelations about this program. We have very little paperwork still. I mentioned the contractual solicitation document. We also have a January 24, 2009 letter from Harry Reid to the Deputy Defense Secretary. We have, and I've mentioned this, the letter that the DIA sent to Congress. But apart from that, we still don't have much paperwork. Out of the 38 papers, they're called DIRDs, Defense Intelligence Research Documents. Out of the 38 listed in the attachment to the letter that went to Congress, only around half a dozen have been published. So there's still material to come out there. There's still, an awful lot of internal DOD and DIA and maybe other agency documents that I would expect to exist on the ATIP program that have not yet been declassified and released. Clearly, some of this must still be classified. It's not necessarily easy to get it out into the public domain. People say, well, the American people have a right to know. But once you put the information out, of course, it goes not just to the American people through the media, but once it's out there, it goes to Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, anyone who wants to read it. Once it's out, it's out. You can't get the genie bag into the bottle. So it's not necessarily as simple as it sounds. I know from my own experience that sometimes declassification is very tricky. You have to decide which bits can be released to the public and which information needs to still be classified because, I mean, look, none of us who've been involved in these sorts of programs classify things for fun. It's a darned nuisance. It takes time and it's an administrative burden. We don't do these things because they're fun. We do these things because it's the proper thing to do. The definition, for example, of something like top secret is, and this is not a direct quote, but the sense of it is that top secret information is information the compromise of which would cause catastrophic damage to the national interest. Catastrophic damage might be defined as strategic damage or it might be loss of life or it might be both. So none of us do these things for fun or because they're easy. They're not easy. They're hard. So it's a sensitive topic, all of this, and I hope that more information on this program will come out over the next few months, however long it takes, but I can't guarantee that we'll be involved. And I, of course, worked on a similar program for the British government, but I was not involved in any way with the ATIP program. And although I've met and had discussions with some of the people involved, I have no official involvement in that program. So I can't speak with any authority about what might be out there still to be released and whether it will be released or not. I know from talking to Luis Elizondo that sometimes with this subject in the Pentagon, high level, he and others hit roadblocks. There was pushback from some senior military and civilian people. I don't know exactly who and where, but one reason for that pushback apparently was religious. There are apparently some people in the Pentagon, and I've come across a similar thing in the British government. Some people have convinced themselves that the UFO phenomenon is demonic. There is a phrase in the Bible, I think in the book of Ephesians, and it talks about Satan in terms of, I think the quote is, the prince of the power of the air. And that quote seems to be the reason why a number of people within government have convinced themselves that this is demonic. And therefore, if it's demonic, we shouldn't be studying with it, shouldn't be engaging with it, because it feeds it. I think this is a very difficult and sensitive area, of course, and I don't want to disparage people's beliefs, but it's frustrating to me to find that UFO skepticism is not, as some people might think within government, necessarily rooted in a belief that this isn't a real phenomenon. These people are seemingly quite, you know, happy to admit it is a real phenomenon, but the skepticism comes from the fact that they believe it to be a demonic phenomenon that therefore we shouldn't study. I would like to see people like Luis Elizondo would like to see, people like Christopher Mellon would like to see, other people who've been involved in these sorts of subjects at senior level within the system, within government, we'd like to see more proper, serious scientific research and investigation of this phenomenon. It's in our airspace. It's real. It's undeniable now. There's no longer a debate to be had about is this real or not. I mean, my goodness, we've seen it's real. We've seen the videos of the Navy jets chasing these things. We've heard the pilots talking about this. We've had former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid talking about how and why the program was set up and how more needs to be done on this. I mean, you know, there is no longer a debate about is this real or not. It's real. We need now to get to the next questions. What is this? And what are the threats? What are the opportunities? And when I talk about opportunities, I'm talking primarily about technology acquisition. If there's an intelligence here, if there's a technology, can we acquire that technology? The US, the UK, can we stop the Russians or the Chinese or someone else getting it first? And then we get to the next questions. What's this all about? We have some idea of the capability we're dealing with here, and it's capability that seems to run rings around us. Our jets chase them but can't catch them. Our radar systems track them. Never seen anything like it. So we know, or we know part of, we have a broad idea of the capability. What we really have no idea of is the intention. What's the intent? And you can't say whether there is or is not a threat if you don't know the intent. So this story is huge. It has taken the whole subject of UFOs out of the fringe and into the mainstream. This is no longer a sort of are they or aren't they debate. I mean, I know it's, in one sense, it's a UFO simply means something in our airspace that we can't identify. But the question, is there a phenomenon as opposed to is it all just misidentifications and hoaxes and psychological delusions? That question, I think, and people who've been involved in programs like this for government, I think now is beyond debate. Clearly, the answer to that question is yes, there is something above and beyond misidentification, hoax, and delusion. So that debate's gone. It's yesterday's UFO story. Today and tomorrow's UFO story is what are we going to do about it? What is it and what are we going to do about it? So we are in interesting times. I can't recall an occasion where this subject has, at the highest level, been taken so seriously. I regularly now go on to mainstream TV, news media, for example, and talk about this quite openly. No longer is this the little subject that people whistle the X-Files theme tune to and make funny jokes about. Now politicians, intelligence officers, pilots, these are the sorts of people having a discussion about this phenomenon. So we are in the process of taking this to the next level. The To The Stars Academy are going to continue, clearly, what they are doing. I'm doing similar things in relation, for example, to the declassification and release of the British government's UFO files, many of which I wrote. I'm involved in that release process as a spokesperson and really the public face of it and continuing to have a conversation, I suppose, to have a conversation with politicians, with the media, with the public about what to do about this. Perhaps I'll finish on one important aspect of this. There is, as I speak, ongoing, active, congressional interest in the ATIP program and in the phenomenon more generally. The Senate Armed Services Committee has taken evidence. They've interviewed some of the people involved with all of this. The House Armed Services Committee is involved too. There is, I think, a debate about where within Congress this best sits. But what happens next, I don't know. But clearly, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the House Armed Services Committee are going to take this forward. Whether this results in open public hearings or whether it remains an internal subject of inquiry, I don't know. But the fact that there's congressional interest in this is, I think, an indicator of now the level at which this is being continued. When I say that this subject has been taken out of the fringe and into the mainstream, I don't make that statement lightly. This is now a subject that is not just in the tabloids, it's in the New York Times and the Washington Post. This is a subject that is now not just being discussed at UFO conferences, but it's now being talked about in congressional hearings and committees. So watch this space. There is more to come on this. This is an important and interesting story and a lot of it still lies in the future. Is this disclosure? Well, it's not conventional disclosure. The UFO community talk about disclosure to the UFO community is Disclosure with a capital D. My fellow Americans, people of the world, we are not alone. I don't think you're going to get that. I think disclosure is a more subtle process. Disclosure is this subject favorably discussed and confirmed in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico. Disclosure is this subject acknowledged and discussed in Congress. When people say, when are we going to get disclosure? My answer to the question is, it's happening right now.