Glowing auras and black money

Ikwipedia

Glowing auras and black money

"Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program" is a front-page article published by The New York Times on December 16, 2017, written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, that revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) — a previously classified $22 million United States Department of Defense program investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) — and published alongside a declassified Navy gun-camera video of the 2004 Nimitz encounter. The article is widely regarded as the moment the UAP subject received the imprimatur of mainstream American journalism and moved out of the stigma zone into serious public and congressional discourse.

Content

The article revealed that AATIP had been established in 2007 at the request of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) with a classified $22 million budget drawn from the Defense Department's "black money" — a small fraction of the department's approximately $600 billion annual budget. The program's named director, Luis Elizondo, had resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017 citing "excessive secrecy and internal opposition" to the program's conclusions; the article quoted his resignation letter as addressed to Defense Secretary James Mattis.

The article reported that AATIP's research was centered at the private Bigelow Aerospace facility in Las Vegas, where alleged recovered materials from UAP incidents were being studied. It described a "glowing aura" phenomenon observed around certain UAP and quoted statements from military personnel about objects exhibiting characteristics inconsistent with known human technology. Reid was quoted confirming he had championed the program because he believed the subject warranted serious investigation.

Publication and accompanying material

The article was published online December 16, 2017 and appeared on the front page of the December 17 print edition. A companion article — "2 Navy Airmen and an Object That 'Accelerated Like Nothing I've Ever Seen'" by the same authors — appeared the same day, presenting the detailed account of commander David Fravor and weapons systems officer Chad Underwood's 2004 encounter with the Tic Tac-shaped object off the coast of San Diego during USS Nimitz exercises. The FLIR1 (Tic Tac) video was released with the articles as declassified Navy footage.

Reception and impact

The article is widely treated as the inflection point for modern UAP discourse. Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and a principal in To The Stars Academy at the time, has stated that the publication gave military personnel and government officials "permission to talk about this" and that the subsequent seven years of disclosure momentum were made possible by the article's institutional credibility.

Within the UAP research community the rollout is analyzed as a coordinated managed disclosure event: information released on specific terms, through a chosen media outlet, with framing that acknowledged UAP reality while avoiding any reference to crash retrievals, biological materials, or non-human contact.

Subsequent reporting

The 2017 article was followed by a second major NYT piece on July 23, 2020, "No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon's U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public," also by Blumenthal and Kean, and by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal's June 5, 2023 article in The Debrief featuring David Grusch — widely seen as the escalation that triggered the 2023 UAP Congressional Hearing.

See also

References