Did the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program Uncover Alien Visitors?

December 19, 2017 – It is hard to ignore the article that appeared in The New York Times three days ago that described a Defense Department (DoD) program that in the past we were told doesn’t exist. Called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, it was responsible for investigating unidentified flying objects (UFOs). It supposedly shut down in 2012 when annual funding of $22 million ceased. But apparently, UFO investigations by the DoD continue to this day.

What’s so interesting about The Times article is the link to Robert Bigelow, the billionaire who runs Bigelow Aerospace, the company that is building inflatable habitats to use as space stations, space hotels, and lunar, and possibly even future Martian habitats. Bigelow’s company, apparently, has been receiving DoD funds to investigate UFO sightings in lieu of the demise of the former identification program.

Bigelow’s Big Reveal on “60 Minutes” and The Appearance of Luis Elizondo

When interviewed on the CBS news program, “60 Minutes,” earlier this year, Bigelow was unequivocal in stating that aliens are visiting Earth. He even related his own close encounter with a UFO. When asked where the aliens were, he stated they are right in front of our noses. What’s so interesting about Bigelow’s comments and these latest stories in the media is how they appear to have caught us by surprise.

There was a hint back in October, when the Huffington Post published a piece describing the existence of a group of officials and scientists within DoD with what was referred to as“deep black experience” operating “under the shadows of top-secrecy for decades.” One of the group is mentioned in both The Times and Huffington Post articles. His name is Luis Elizondo, described as “a senior career intelligence officer” working with the Army, National Counterintelligence, and National Intelligence. Elizondo is the former Director of Programs investigating unidentified aerial threats for the Secretary of Defense. He had just resigned when the Huffington Post article came out. At that time when asked about unidentified aerial threats, he commented that these unidentified aerial phenomena “did not exhibit overt hostility.” He further stated that the UFO phenomenon was “indeed real.”  Elizondo promised that film would soon be released taken by reliable United States government people to clearly show aerial phenomena referred to as UFOs. The Times article quotes Elizondo stating that UFO evidence his team had gathered displayed“characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory nor in any foreign inventories that we are aware of.”

Project Blue Book

The modern history of UFO sightings goes back to the 1940s with the phenomena described repeatedly by witnesses from all around the world. The sightings coincide with the onset of the Cold War, a time when a global thermonuclear war was seen as a likely future for humanity. Sightings described flying objects that didn’t maneuver in ways any known aircraft of the time could. Some included descriptions of close encounters with beings from these flying objects. Some even reported abductions.

The U.S. Air Force in 1952 launched Project Blue Book to analyze these sightings which eventually totaled nearly 12,000 covering a span from 1952 to 1969 when the program was shut down. Most sightings and encounters were discounted as natural phenomena, stars, planets in conjunction, unusual cloud formations, weather balloons, and lights from approaching aircraft. But some 701 remained unexplained.

Fireflies in Space

There is also the phenomenon that John Glenn encountered outside his Mercury space capsule in his 1962 three-orbit flight which was re-enacted in the movie “The Right Stuff.” Glenn’s UFOS were described by him as “fireflies” hovering, swarming, darting, and dancing around his Friendship 7 capsule for a significant period of time before they appeared to fly away.

In Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” he recreates an event involving traffic controllers and a commercial jet with radar picking up a UFO and the pilots describing a flying object buzzing them before darting away in a manner not consistent with any known technology. Spielberg’s fiction is based on real reported incidents.

And now, in the last few days the Pentagon has released a film it has of a UFO sighting by two U.S. military pilots who describe an object seen at a distance, rotating and then speeding away. One notes that there is a “whole fleet of them.” The other says “my gosh.” Clearly, the pilots are astounded by what they have seen.

And now we are told in The Times, that the materials and objects collected from UFO sightings are in the hands of Robert Bigelow who is storing them in his company’s warehouses.

Why Would Alien Civilizations Visit Earth?

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The Universe has existed more than 13 billion years. Stars and their planets have been around for 12.5 billion years. Our technical civilization is 100 centuries old, a nanosecond of time when compared to the length of time the Universe has been around. On other planetary systems, the timing of evolution leading to a technological civilization could be very different from our experience. A civilization arriving one billion years earlier than us would likely ignore us or be totally unrecognizable should it encounter us. A civilization one million years ahead would equally be incomprehensible to us.

So what would make an advanced civilization drop in on us and give us rare glimpses of them? Radio waves and television signals from Earth are less than a century old. That means traveling at radio wave speed (the speed of light), they have already encountered stars within a hundred light-years of us. An advanced civilization living on a planet within that radius of 100 light-years, let’s say 10 to 20 light-years away, could have dropped in on us if they had mastered the technology to propel spaceships at near light-speed. And they might choose to come to learn about another technological civilization beaming episodes of “I Love Lucy” out into the cosmos. That’s always a possibility.

Maybe these aliens are just happy to have encountered another technical civilization in proximity to them, even one that is well behind them in the development of advanced technologies. In a big cosmos, how easy is it to find a neighbour to talk to? Maybe that’s the motivation if UFOs are indeed the real deal.

Why I remain a skeptic for now

The fact that this information has come out in a year when Donald Trump is President, raises my suspicions about the truth in all of this. Trump is a congenital liar and conspiracy theorist, and one wonders if kindred spirits within the U.S. administration are all coming out of their dark holes to regale us with Trumpian mythology rather than truth.

I know one thing that will convince me. It isn’t to be found in a film the Pentagon releases, but rather in what lies in Bigelow’s warehouse. The public needs to see the evidence to dispel UFO mythology once and for all.