2017 NYT AATIP Reveal

On December 16, 2017, The New York Times published "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program," by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean. The story, which ran on the front page of the next day's Sunday edition, reported that the Defense Department had spent $22 million on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which "investigated reports of unidentified flying objects," according to officials, program participants and records obtained by the paper. A companion piece the same day, "2 Navy Airmen and an Object That 'Accelerated Like Nothing I've Ever Seen,'" recounted Cmdr. David Fravor's account of the 2004 Nimitz encounter off San Diego, and the Times posted two Navy cockpit videos with the reporting.

The main article said the program began in 2007, largely funded at the request of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid with support from Senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye. Reid described the funding as "so-called black money" that the three senators kept out of floor debate. The paper said the effort was run from the Pentagon's fifth floor by military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who had resigned in October 2017 over what he called excessive secrecy and internal opposition. Contracts seen by the Times showed an appropriation of just under $22 million from late 2008 through 2011, most of it paid to Robert Bigelow's Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors. According to the article, the 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. The article also quoted skeptics, including former NASA engineer James Oberg, who said "prosaic events and human perceptual traits" could account for such stories.

The Pentagon acknowledged the program to the Times, said it had begun within the Defense Intelligence Agency, and said it ended in 2012. Spokesman Thomas Crosson said "other, higher priority issues" merited funding. Elizondo told the paper that only the funding had stopped and that he had kept working with Navy and CIA officials. His role soon became a dispute of its own. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White reportedly told Politico in 2017 that he had led the program, but in 2019 spokesman Christopher Sherwood told The Intercept that Elizondo "had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program." Later accounts identified the formal DIA contract as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP, and debate has continued over whether the AATIP name describes that contract, an informal follow-on portfolio, or both.

The reporting changed the official record. In September 2019 the Navy confirmed that the videos were made by naval aviators and called the objects in them "unidentified aerial phenomena," and on April 27, 2020, the Pentagon formally released three of them. The Pentagon went on to create a UAP Task Force and then the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to take up the subject. Elizondo, former defense intelligence official Christopher Mellon and engineer Harold Puthoff had joined To The Stars Academy, as the article noted, and the three became prominent advocates for government disclosure. Skeptics have challenged that legacy. In a 2024 essay in Scientific American, two UFO researchers called the Times story credulous and argued that its use of the AATIP name compounded the confusion.

The article remained a reference point in 2026. Steven Spielberg has said it renewed his interest in the subject, which he took up again in his film Disclosure Day, released that June. Commentators also revisited its origins: researcher Richard Dolan examined a claim, advanced by Ross Coulthart and others, that Elizondo served as the public face of a controlled-disclosure effort directed by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and argued that competing government factions fit the public record better. Whatever its origins, the December 2017 story is widely treated as the starting point of the modern era of official UAP disclosure.