![]() Even Barack Obama has spoken recently about encounters “we can’t explain.” Just this month a video taken by the USS Omaha off the California coast in 2019 shows an identified spherical aircraft hovering over the water, before disappearing beneath the waves. In just the three years since the existence of the Pentagon UFO office was made public, the federal government has become increasingly less cagey about a subject that was mocked as absurd and feared as taboo YouTube is now filled with cockpit videos from military pilots, some verified by the Pentagon, of strange encounters with objects that seem to defy known laws of aerodynamics. So we made a tremendous amount of progress.” But now the Pentagon has told them they should report all these things that they see that are unusual. ![]() “I know that when I first got involved in this, people in the military were afraid to mention it for fear of it hurting their promotions. “I think that I have opened the door to people not being afraid to talk about it,” Reid now says. Far from a blot on his career, Reid sees it as a line to highlight on his legislative résumé and he has no regrets about Bigelow benefiting from the program. But his willingness to talk openly now about the subject speaks to a profound change in the calculus of political and reputational risk. ![]() Reid had retired by the time his secret role in the program was revealed. Marco Rubio, is scheduled to release a report that collects from across the government all relevant material on what the officials now call “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Regardless of what ultimately emerges in this report-whether it’s a trove of blockbuster reveals or a disappointing dud-the mere prospect has catalyzed a wave of mainstream coverage of government UFO research, from the New Yorker to “60 Minutes.” A bewildering and still highly controversial subject has achieved a surprising level of public respectability as a national security concern. Next month, the director of national intelligence, acting at the behest of Republican Sen. One of the program’s main beneficiaries was an aerospace company owned by none other than Robert Bigelow. The existence of that program was revealed publicly by POLITICO and the New York Times in mid-December 2017. Reid ultimately enlisted the support of a handful of powerful committee chairs, including Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, to fund hush-hush UFO research inside the Defense Department. As Bigelow, Alexander and the others were publishing obscure journal articles and compiling a database of UFO sightings, the most influential member of the group quietly broached the topic with some of his colleagues in Washington, including former astronaut and Senator John Glenn. Over the next few years, Reid told me, he went to multiple such meetings. Knapp honored that agreement for the past quarter century until Reid recounted his odyssey in detail over a series of interviews with me in recent months. ![]() Reid accepted Bigelow’s invitation, but not before making clear to Knapp that his participation must remain secret. ![]() Knapp knew from covering Reid’s career that the senator had a curiosity about the subject. Reid had been introduced to Bigelow by a well-known Nevada TV journalist named George Knapp, who had written extensively on the subject of UFOs over the years and had recently secured some Russian government documents purporting to shed light on the topic. There was one person at those meetings, however, who did have something to lose by attending: Harry Reid, then serving his second term as a U.S. For them, that was the point of being there. senator from New Mexico a decade earlier, didn’t fret too much about the reputational risks of talking openly about whether the government had captured an alien or retrieved a crashed spacecraft. Collectively, the group, which also attracted former astronauts Ed Mitchell, an avowed ufologist, and Harrison Schmitt, who had also served as a U.S. ![]()
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