For decades, the American people have been reporting strange sightings in the skies around them. Metallic objects, or simply strange lights, making unfathomable aerial maneuvers at speeds that would render unless the inner workings of any human being.
These objects have moved tens of thousands of feet in fractions of a second, stopping on a dime and turning in an even tighter radius.
The US government is now up against a fairly hard deadline to reveal what they know about the phenomenon, with former specialists now conducting interviews on 60 Minutes in what some feel is an attempt to soften the potentially mind-bending reality of “disclosure”.
Luis Elizondo spent 20 years running military intelligence operations worldwide: in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Guantanamo. He hadn’t given UFOs a second thought until 2008. That’s when he was asked to join something at the Pentagon called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or “AATIP.”
Lue Elizondo: The mission of AATIP was quite simple. It was to collect and analyze information involving anomalous aerial vehicles, what I guess in the vernacular you call UFOs. We call them UAPs.
Bill Whitaker: You know how this sounds? It sounds nutty, wacky.
Lue Elizondo: Look, Bill, I’m not, I’m not telling you that, that it doesn’t sound wacky. What I’m telling you, it’s real. The question is, what is it? What are its intentions? What are its capabilities?
The situation was mind-boggling, if not also a little bit terrifying.
Buried away in the Pentagon, AATIP was part of a $22 million program sponsored by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to investigate UFOs. When Elizondo took over in 2010 he focused on the national security implications of unidentified aerial phenomena documented by U.S. service members.
Lue Elizondo: Imagine a technology that can do 6-to-700 g-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space. And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. That’s precisely what we’re seeing.
UFO theorists have suggested that this information release is possibly part of a larger strategy toward “disclosure”; an even in which the government will be forced to finally admit at least some of what they know on the subject of UFO’s.
