December 16, 2017: The Saturday the Pentagon's UFO Secret Hit Page One

On Saturday, December 16, 2017, Americans opened The New York Times and found a sentence that sounded like satire. Somewhere inside the Defense Department's roughly $600 billion budget sat a $22 million program that investigated unidentified flying objects.

"Which was how the Pentagon wanted it," the Times wrote.

The story, by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, ran alongside a near-simultaneous Politico piece by Bryan Bender. Together they put a name on something the government had never acknowledged: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP.

Nearly nine years later, we have congressional hearings, a permanent Pentagon UAP office, a records collection at the National Archives, and federal UFO files released in batches. Every one of those threads runs back to that weekend.

A $22 million line nobody could find

The core facts in the Times story came from Defense Department officials, program participants and records the paper obtained.

The program began in 2007, according to the Times, "largely funded at the request of Harry Reid," the Nevada Democrat who was then Senate majority leader. Two powerful appropriators backed him: Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii.

Reid told the Times he pulled both men into a secure room in the Capitol. None of the three wanted a floor debate. "This was so-called black money," Reid said. "Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that's how we wanted it."

Contracts obtained by the Times showed just under $22 million appropriated from late 2008 through 2011. Most of it went to Bigelow Aerospace, the Las Vegas company owned by billionaire Robert Bigelow, a longtime friend of Reid's. Politico added that Bigelow had given at least $10,000 to Reid's campaigns between 1998 and 2008, according to campaign finance records.

Bigelow did not hide his views. He had told CBS's "60 Minutes" that year he was "absolutely convinced" aliens exist, the Times reported.

The man on the fifth floor of the C Ring

The face of the story was Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official the Times said ran the program "on the fifth floor of the Pentagon's C Ring."

Elizondo had resigned that October. In an Oct. 4 letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, quoted by the Times, he asked: "Why aren't we spending more time and effort on this issue?"

He told Politico the sightings were often reported near nuclear facilities, at sea or at power plants. "If a Russian 'Bear' bomber comes in near California, it is all over the news," he said. "These are coming in the skies over our facilities. Nothing but crickets."

Within weeks of leaving, Elizondo had joined To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, the venture co-founded by former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge. Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, joined too. That detail matters, because the private company, not the Pentagon, put the first videos in front of the public.

The Pentagon's version: it ended in 2012

The Pentagon confirmed the program existed, and that confirmation is what made the story history. But it told a narrower story.

"It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change," spokesman Thomas Crosson told the Times. Spokeswoman Dana White gave Politico nearly identical language and said the program "ended in the 2012 timeframe."

Elizondo said only the funding ended. He told the Times he kept working the issue with Navy and CIA officials until he resigned, and that he had a successor he would not name.

That dispute never really closed. In 2019, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough said Elizondo "had no assigned responsibilities for AATIP" while in the intelligence under secretary's office, according to statements published by The Black Vault. Reid later wrote that Elizondo's "involvement and leadership in this program" was a matter of record, the same outlet reported.

"If anyone says they have the answers now, they're fooling themselves."

Glowing auras and metal alloys

The program's paperwork was exactly as strange as the headline promised.

The Times reported that Bigelow's company modified buildings in Las Vegas to store "metal alloys and other materials" that Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters.

In 2009, Reid asked a deputy defense secretary to make the effort a "restricted special access program," writing that "much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings." The request was denied.

Then there was the video. The Times described Navy F/A-18 footage of an object "surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves." One pilot can be heard exclaiming, "There's a whole fleet of them." The paper also cited the now-famous 2004 encounter off San Diego, involving fighter jets from the carrier Nimitz.

Not everyone was impressed. Former NASA engineer James Oberg told the Times "there are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories," while adding, "There could well be a pearl there." A former congressional staffer told Politico the effort produced "reams of paperwork" and "really nothing there that we could find."

What the government later said about AATIP

In 2024, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) published its own history of the program, and it complicates both sides.

AARO says the official program was the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program, or AAWSAP, set up by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2009. The two names were used interchangeably, but "AATIP was never an official DoD program," AARO wrote. After AAWSAP was canceled, the AATIP name stuck to what AARO called an informal community of interest with "no dedicated personnel or budget."

AARO said the contractor produced exploratory papers in 12 science areas that were "never thoroughly peer reviewed." It also said the contractor ran UFO and paranormal research, including at a Utah property owned by the contractor's head, that DIA "did not seek, nor specifically authorize." The program ended in 2012, AARO said, "due to DIA and DoD concerns about the project."

Program veterans dispute much of AARO's framing, and that fight is its own story.

How one article became an era

Here is what that December weekend set in motion, all on the record:

• April 27, 2020: After the Navy had already acknowledged the leaked clips were genuine, the Pentagon formally released three videos, one from November 2004 and two from January 2015, "to clear up any misconceptions by the public." It added: "The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified.'"
• June 2021: The intelligence community's preliminary assessment reviewed 144 reports from government sources and identified exactly one "with high confidence." It was "a large, deflating balloon."
• July 2022: AARO was established.
• December 2023: Congress ordered every federal agency to send UAP records to a new collection at the National Archives.
• May 8, 2026: Following a February directive from President Trump, the Pentagon began posting declassified UAP files at war.gov/UFO, more than 160 files covering over 400 incidents, according to NBC News, with a caution that many "have not yet been analyzed."

Before December 2017, an official U.S. government UFO program was supposed to have ended with Project Blue Book in 1969. After it, the question was no longer whether the Pentagon studied UFOs. It was what the Pentagon knew.

What we know, and what we don't

What we know

• A congressionally funded Pentagon program studied UAP until 2012, with about $22 million appropriated starting in late 2008, much of it going to Bigelow's company.
• Reid, Stevens and Inouye backed it and kept it off the Senate floor by design.
• The Pentagon confirmed the program and later released three Navy videos it still classifies as "unidentified."

What we don't

• Whether any of the "metal alloys" stored in Las Vegas were ever independently tested, and with what result.
• How much official UAP work, if any, continued between 2012 and 2017.
• What the objects in the FLIR, Gimbal and GoFast videos actually were.

The first domino

It is easy to forget how unthinkable this was. A sitting Pentagon spokesman confirmed, on the record, that the Defense Department had spent tens of millions of dollars investigating UFOs, and a retired Senate majority leader said he was proud of it.

Reid called it "one of the good things I did in my congressional service." His critics called it an earmark for a donor's hobby. AARO's history describes a contract whose UFO and paranormal work went beyond its official statement of work. All three can be partly true.

What nobody disputes is the effect. One story turned a taboo into a beat, and every UAP hearing since has started from the door the Times and Politico opened that Saturday.

So here is our question: was December 16, 2017 the beginning of real disclosure, or the beginning of a very well-funded rumor? Tell us which, and why, in the comments.

Sources

• Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program — The New York Times, 2017
• The Pentagon's Secret Search for UFOs — Politico Magazine, 2017
• Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos — U.S. Department of Defense, 2020
• Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume I — All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, 2024
• Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2021
• Pentagon Reinforces Mr. Luis Elizondo Had No Responsibilities on AATIP — The Black Vault, 2019
• Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection (Record Group 615) — National Archives, 2024
• Pentagon releases declassified UFO files — NBC News, 2026