The New York Times
The New York Times (also referred to in corpus sourcing simply as the New York Times) is a U.S. daily newspaper significant in UAP disclosure history primarily for its December 16, 2017 publication of the article "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program," co-authored by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, which publicly revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), released the FLIR1 ("Tic Tac") gun-camera video of the Nimitz encounter, and introduced Lue Elizondo as its former director — marking the beginning of the modern UAP disclosure era and catalyzing the formal government acknowledgment process that led to Congressional hearings, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and David Grusch's 2023 whistleblower testimony.
2017 AATIP disclosure
The December 2017 article revealed that the Department of Defense had operated a $22 million per year UFO research program from 2007 to 2012, funded at the direction of Senator Harry Reid. The article was published simultaneously with declassified versions of two USS Nimitz UAP incident videos (FLIR1 and Gimbal) and with an extended interview with Luis Elizondo. The article is widely regarded as the opening of the current UAP disclosure cycle, prompting follow-on government disclosures, congressional hearings, and eventually the June 2023 David Grusch testimony.
David Grusch himself identified the December 2017 NYT article as the first moment the AATIP became real to him: "In December 2017, that New York Times article came up that named the AATIP and the AAWSAP — Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program and Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — and I was like, 'Holy shit, wait, that's that guy Lue Elizondo that I heard about.'" David Fravor, the Navy pilot who encountered the Tic Tac in 2004, testified before Congress in 2023 that the 2017 article — and the subsequent removal of stigma from UAP discussion — was directly responsible for creating the legislative environment that produced the Congressional UAP hearings.
Origins of the 2017 article
Hal Puthoff, co-founder of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences with Tom DeLonge, has described his organization as having been "part of what was behind helping Leslie Kean get that story out in the New York Times." Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, was identified as the figure who physically walked gun-camera footage — including the FLIR1 "Tic Tac" video — out of the Pentagon so it could be published alongside the article; Mellon himself did not wish this attributed to him publicly at the time.
AAWSAP and AATIP naming ambiguity
The article introduced a terminological ambiguity that has persisted in public UAP discourse: whether "AATIP" (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) and "AAWSAP" (Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program) refer to the same program or distinct programs with overlapping personnel. Grusch noted that the article used both acronyms, reflecting genuine confusion within the government about which program designation to publicly name. Luis Elizondo has since clarified that AATIP was the official designation he managed, with AAWSAP being a related but distinct predecessor program managed through Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS).
Harry Reid and the $22 million appropriation
The NYT article disclosed that the AATIP program was funded through classified budget earmarks obtained by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who had long advocated for UAP research and had close ties to Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace. Grusch later confirmed via FOIA that Reid had sent a formal request to the Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn seeking one of the most restricted program classifications — a "bigoted waived special access program" — with a by-name access list that included Reid himself, Senator James Inhofe, and Elizondo.
Leslie Kean and the disclosure pipeline
Leslie Kean — co-author of the 2017 AATIP article — had previously written UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010), establishing her as a credentialed UAP journalist before the NYT publication. Her access to government and military insiders who trusted her enough to go on record reflects years of cultivated source relationships in the UAP research community, and her role at the NYT gave those sources their most authoritative public platform to date.
Luis Elizondo credited journalists including Ross Coulthart and the NYT team for breaking the taboo that had made UAP "a professional career ender" to take seriously, stating that the disclosure process had been "a very slow and steady process, a slow march towards ultimately what we hope to be complete disclosure."
2023 Grusch coverage
The New York Times covered David Grusch's 2023 Congressional testimony confirming the existence of non-human technology retrieval programs and non-human biological materials in U.S. government possession, placing the testimony in the mainstream institutional record for the first time. The Times' coverage of Grusch's claims — without the dismissive framing that characterized pre-2017 UAP journalism — reflected the post-2017 shift in editorial posture toward the subject.
Managed disclosure critique
Critics of the 2017 NYT disclosure — including some researchers within the exopolitics community — have characterized the article as a form of "managed disclosure" or "limited hangout": a controlled release of true but incomplete information designed to shape public expectations, normalize the existence of a UAP program while foreclosing inquiry into deeper classified programs, and establish particular individuals (Elizondo, Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy) as the sanctioned gatekeepers of UAP information. Under this critique, the NYT's institutional prestige and the coordinated simultaneous release of the videos were not incidental but orchestrated elements of a deliberate disclosure management strategy.
Relationship to the Censorship Industrial Complex
Separately, in the context of the Twitter Files and the Censorship Industrial Complex, Michael Shellenberger noted that the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the major television networks, and social media companies had coordinated — in the same period Stanford University published guidelines recommending reporters abandon the Pentagon Papers standard for publishing leaked government documents — to agree not to cover leaked materials in the traditional journalistic manner.
Subsequent UAP coverage
The NYT followed the 2017 AATIP article with additional UAP reporting as congressional pressure grew through 2019–2023, including coverage of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence UAP reports, the establishment of AARO, and the Grusch whistleblower allegations. The paper's UAP coverage has been uneven — described by researchers as ranging from genuine investigative journalism to credulous repetition of government talking points — reflecting institutional tensions between the reporters who cultivated disclosure sources and the paper's broader editorial stance toward national security topics.