Nevertheless, three weeks later, the British ministry released the available documentation, a packet that included corroborating radar data from an air-traffic controller on the nearby island of Jersey and a statement from a second commercial pilot in the vicinity, who had seen the objects from a different direction.
Ten months later, David Clarke, a known U. None of the speakers made mention of Roswell, alien bodies, reverse-engineered craft, or government coverups. Over the next two years, Kean collected their accounts, and other reports, for her book. In it, she argued that, for reasons of safety and security, and to encourage people who saw peculiar stuff in the sky to speak out, the government needed some sort of centralized U.
Many other countries had followed the lead set by France, and had either declassified and published U. The problem in the U.
She met with her uncle Thomas Kean to discuss the U. In June of , Podesta invited Kean to make a confidential presentation at a think tank he founded, the Center for American Progress. So what do you know? She had scaled down her request, proposing that a single individual in the Office of Science and Technology Policy be assigned to handle the issue. Nothing came of it. She was, however, a well-known figure on the international U.
She had begun breaking stories from its case files with an atypical recklessness. For the most part, people who do not feel that U. The world is full of weird, unaccountable convictions: some people believe that leaving your neck exposed in winter makes you ill, and others believe in U. When Kean wrote about the CEFAA video, debunkers leaped at the chance to point out that the object in the case they had been dreading was in all probability a housefly or a beetle buzzing around the camera lens.
A tendency to discount or overlook inconvenient facts is a thing debunkers and believers have in common. Eyewitness reports are subject to considerable embroidery over time, and strings of improbable coincidences can easily be rendered into an occult pattern by a human mind prone to misapprehension and eager for meaning. The researcher had exhaustively demystified the case, and I was perturbed to learn that Kean seemed unfazed by his verdict.
Many U. He grew up in a small mill town in northern England. He was very good at math, and, after buying an early home computer with his earnings from a newspaper route, he became obsessed with primitive video games. As an adolescent, in the early nineteen-eighties, he loved science fiction, and was bewitched by a magazine called The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time. Rather than cure his interest in the paranormal, however, this understanding refined it, and he began to take pleasure in the patient dismantling of unsound logic.
This practice had, for West, therapeutic value, and as an adult his childhood anxieties are manifested only in a vestigial discomfort with the dark. In the nineties, West moved to California, where he co-founded a video-game studio; he is best known as one of the programmers behind the hugely popular Tony Hawk franchise. In , the company he worked for was acquired by Activision, and, before the age of forty, he more or less retired.
He found himself involved in Wikipedia edit wars concerning such contentious topics as homeopathy, scientific foreknowledge in sacred texts, and vegetarian lions. West is a thoughtful, intelligent man. His e-mails feature numbered and lettered lists and light math. Everything he told me was perfectly persuasive, but even an hour on the phone with him left me feeling vaguely demoralized.
He seemed unable to envisage that someone might find solace in the decentering prospect that we are not alone in a universe we ultimately know very little about.
In , West founded Metabunk, an online forum where like-minded contributors examine anomalous phenomena. On January 6, , another skeptic brought to his attention a Huffington Post piece by Kean. West watched the clip with an immediate sense of recognition. By January 11th, the community had ascertained that the purported U. In this case, as the Metabunk participants extrapolated, the helicopter pilots had inaccurately gauged the distance and altitude of the U.
West was not surprised. During one of my phone calls with Kean—greatly pleasurable distractions that tended to absorb entire afternoons—I mentioned to her that I had been in touch with Mick West. It was the only time I had known her to grow peevish. Robert Bigelow was three years old in the spring of , when his grandparents were almost run off the road by a glowing object in the mountains northwest of Las Vegas.
In the late nineteen-sixties, when he was in his early twenties, he began to invest in real estate—first in Las Vegas, then across the Southwest—and eventually he made a fortune with Budget Suites of America, a chain of extended-stay motels. Later, he founded a private company, Bigelow Aerospace, to build inflatable astronaut habitats.
The next year, Bigelow purchased Skinwalker Ranch, a four-hundred-and-eighty-acre parcel a few hours southeast of Salt Lake City, named for a shape-shifting Navajo witch. Its previous owners had described being driven away by coruscating spheres, exsanguinated cattle, and wolflike creatures impervious to gunshots. In , in the wake of a purported decrease in domestic paranormal activity, Bigelow shut down his institute, but he kept the ranch. In , Bigelow received a letter from a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency who was curious about Skinwalker.
Bigelow connected him to an old friend from the Nevada desert, Senator Harry Reid, who was then the Senate Majority Leader, and the two men met to discuss their common interest in U. The D. In the Supplemental Appropriations Bill, twenty-two million dollars of so-called black money was set aside for a new program.
The Pentagon was not enthusiastic. This was appropriated. In , Luis Elizondo, a longtime counterintelligence officer working in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, was visited by two people who asked him what he thought about U.
The program appears to have produced little more than a series of thirty-eight papers, all unclassified except one, about the kind of technology a U. Soon afterward, Elizondo, the counterintelligence officer, was asked to take over the program. Beginning in , he turned an outsourced study of Utah cryptids into the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP , an in-house effort that focussed on the national-security implications of military U.
Princeton, began to register some strange presences. As he approached the location, he looked down and saw a roiling shoal in the water and, hovering above it, a white oval object that resembled a large Tic Tac.
He estimated it to be about forty feet long, with no wings or other obvious flight surfaces and no visible means of propulsion. It appeared to bounce around like a Ping-Pong ball. Two other pilots, one seated behind him and one in a nearby plane, gave similar accounts. Fravor descended to chase the object, which reacted to his maneuvers before departing abruptly at high speed. On October 4, , at the behest of Christopher K. Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Leslie Kean was called to a confidential meeting in the bar of an upscale hotel near the Pentagon.
The previous day had been his last day of work at the Pentagon. Over the next three hours, Kean was taken through documents that proved the existence of what was, as far as anyone knew, the first government inquiry into U. The program that Kean had spent years lobbying for had existed the whole time. Later that month, DeLonge invited Elizondo onstage at a launch event.
Kean was told that she could have the videos, along with chain-of-custody documentation, if she could place a story in the Times. The paper assigned a veteran Pentagon correspondent, Helene Cooper, to work with Kean and Blumenthal.
Elizondo claimed that the program had continued in the absence of dedicated funding. The article dwelled not on the reality of the U. The Times article drew millions of readers. Kean noticed a change almost immediately. When people asked her at dinner parties what she did for a living, they no longer giggled at her response but fell rapt.
Kean is unwavering in her belief that she and an insider exposed something formidable, but a former Pentagon official recently suggested that the story was more complicated: the program she disclosed was of little consequence compared with the one she set in motion. Widespread fascination with the idea that the government cared about U.
This successor—who did not want to be named, lest U. According to the former Pentagon official, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee inserted language into the classified annex of the National Defense Authorization Act, passed in August of , that obligated the Pentagon to continue the investigations. Sweden spent years futilely chasing what it thought were Russian submarines off its coast. But when the navy let civilian researchers listen to a recording of the alleged submarine, they figured out it was actually the sound of schools of fish farting.
Former President Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen a UFO while he was governor of Georgia and even filed two formal reports of his observations. As the Cold War intensified in the s, U. Civilians started seeing what they believed were UFOs but were actually secret spy planes, like the U-2, so the government settled on a policy of silence and denial. The very real government stonewalling fed bogus conspiracy theories, which came to dominate the study of UFOs and made the topic even more off-putting to serious scholars.
In recent years, though, a newer generation of activists has been at center of recent high-profile disclosures thanks to a more professional, careful and credible approach. They include people with serious national security credentials like Christopher Mellon, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, and Luis Elizondo, the former Army counterintelligence special agent who led an earlier Pentagon team to investigate UFOs. Instead, they hope it will start something new.
IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. The documents also include reports of a famous incident dubbed the "Welsh Roswell" in , where members of the public reported seeing lights in the sky and feeling a tremor in the ground.
The files come from more than 5, pages of UFO reports and letters and drawings from members of the public, as well as questions raised by MPs in Parliament. They are available to download for free for a month from The National Archives website.
Was MP Michael Howard buzzed by aliens? UFO blamed for driving offence. The National Archives. Ministry of Defence home. Spotters often drew what they saw and sent pictures to the MoD. X Files.
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