Monday, Dec 18, 2017

[0] From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.

[1] This is The Daily.

[2] Today, military footage of flying objects that can't be explained.

[3] A decade of hidden funding in the government budget, a Times investigation discovers a secret program inside the Pentagon to investigate the threat of UFOs.

[4] It's Monday, December 18th.

[5] Helene, you cover the Pentagon for the Times, and my sense is that it's a very secretive organization that holds information tightly.

[6] I assume a lot of your reporting is built around confidential sources, right?

[7] Yeah, an enormous amount of my reporting is built on confidential sources, but usually the tips that I get and the stories that I am chasing tend to be about airstrikes, about things that the military is doing around the world, about North Korea, about Niger, Syria, Iraq.

[8] But recently, I got a tip and found myself chasing a story that took me completely in a different direction than anything I had ever tried to do before.

[9] And after a series of phone calls, I found myself in a nondescript hotel lobby near Union Station in Washington, D .C., with a high -level intelligence source from the Pentagon.

[10] Oh, boy.

[11] I've spent a good portion of, if not all of my career, pretty much remaining in the shadows.

[12] For me, that was more of a professional necessity.

[13] Luis Elizondo, who had just resigned his job at the Defense Department, he's an intel officer, so these are a totally different breed of people.

[14] They tend to be really spooky guys.

[15] They're very secretive.

[16] to be more paranoid.

[17] There was a lot of looking over to make sure nobody was seeing us.

[18] He sat with his back to the wall.

[19] He said because he wanted to see if anybody came in, there was a lot of that kind of stuff.

[20] But when you put all of that aside, what came out of his mouth was absolutely extraordinary.

[21] He sat across the table from me in this hotel lobby and said that he had been running a program at the Pentagon looking into UFOs.

[22] UFOs.

[23] Yeah, that's what I thought.

[24] Can you just explain the name of the program?

[25] Sure.

[26] Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

[27] Why threat?

[28] Well, in Department of Defense, keep in mind, the name of the department is the Department of Defense.

[29] It's a national security organization.

[30] Its job is to identify and, if necessary, neutralize any threats to U .S. national security.

[31] It is a very significant mission of the department.

[32] So typically, missions in the department involve fighting wars.

[33] and identifying threats, whether they be chemical threats, biological threats, missile threats, you name it, any threat du jour, right?

[34] In this particular case, advanced aerospace threats.

[35] This is a program to try to identify UFOs.

[36] Yes, it's a program to investigate sightings of UFOs, particularly among military service members, pilots, Davy pilots, Air Force pilots, and to chronicle them and also to look at the, technology involved in some of the objects, in the hopes of eventually being able to reverse engineer the things that these people believe that they have seen.

[37] These are very, I believe, very compelling videos.

[38] What you're looking at is what the pilots and the control operators are looking at when they're looking at the computer screen during the middle of an F -18 flight.

[39] There's a whole fleet of them.

[40] Look on my assay.

[41] My gosh.

[42] They're all going against the wind.

[43] The wind's a hundred point out from the west.

[44] They're seeing an object that seems to have a force field as they describe it around it that's hovering before it suddenly disappears out of the sky as soon as they think that they're getting a radar lock on it.

[45] That's not our LNS though, is it?

[46] It's not a lot of us, man. But if there's a good thing, it's rotating.

[47] So, Lenton, it sounds like, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program is interviewing American military personnel, including pilots, who have seen things that they can't quite identify, and that that's part of the evidence gathering.

[48] That is part of the evidence gathering.

[49] So what this particular video demonstrates is an object otherwise referred to as a Tick -Tac by some of the pilots.

[50] A small, white craft to the untrained observer might not look like anything but a blurry little dot.

[51] Is that why it's called a tick -tack?

[52] It literally looks like a tick -tack.

[53] It literally looks like a tick -tac.

[54] Yes.

[55] It literally is an object that has no flight surfaces, no apparent type of thrust mechanism, something that is hovering, something that is demonstrating extreme maneuverability, sudden accelerations beyond the G -forces of what we would consider, you know, healthy acceleration and velocities that are very, very compelling to us.

[56] So in other words, it's moving in a way that does not resemble anything human made right something that would be for example sitting in a complete hover and then all of a sudden darts off screen at an incredible velocity that if you don't know what you're looking at it may look like the screen just kind of pans away but in reality that's not the case what you're looking at is is an object that's moving off of the field of view at a very far distance away at an incredible velocity and what do you what do you make of that well speaking speaking to you, not as someone from the Department of Defense, I think it's very curious.

[57] I would submit to you, I haven't seen anything that can do that, and I think many people who've witnessed this would agree.

[58] So these videos are just what's been declassified.

[59] I understand you can't talk about what is classified, but is this just a small percentage of what this program has documented and collected and seen?

[60] Yes.

[61] Yes.

[62] Yes.

[63] Killing, did you believe him when he said this?

[64] Did this seem credible at first?

[65] He's completely credible.

[66] Yes, I did believe him.

[67] The first conversation I had with him at that hotel, we were there for about four hours, I think, and he's sitting and we're going through, and he's showing me documents and pictures and videos and all of this stuff.

[68] It seemed completely credible to me in the moment.

[69] But then I get on the metro afterwards, and I'm thinking, have I just listened?

[70] And the further way I got from the interview, the less believable it seemed.

[71] You know, it's as if you're in this interview and you're hearing this stuff and it makes complete sense to you.

[72] And then you walk away and you're back in the real world.

[73] And, you know, I'm sitting on the metro in Washington thinking, is this actually for real?

[74] So the doubts begin to creep in.

[75] The doubts begin to creep in right away.

[76] But I realized pretty early on, it's not for me to determine whether UFOs exist.

[77] I'm a defense department reporter, this is what I write about.

[78] Once I got my head around that, it sort of made it easier for me to figure out what my reporting objective was.

[79] And that was basically to confirm that there was a program going on at the Pentagon and to find out as much about it as I could.

[80] So where did this program actually come from, this crazy -sounding but real secret government program?

[81] It turns out that it started in 2007 through the former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, who only in January ended a 30 -year Senate career.

[82] Harry Reid has had a long -time interest in UFOs that he got from his friend, Robert Bigelow.

[83] Robert Bigelow is a billionaire aerospace company executive who has had an interest in UFOs for decades.

[84] Do you believe in aliens?

[85] I'm absolutely convinced that's all there is to it.

[86] He's definitely a true believer.

[87] And he has said on TV, and he said to us that he believes that, you know, we're not alone.

[88] He believes that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited this planet.

[89] There has been an existing presence, an ET presence.

[90] And I spent millions and millions.

[91] I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.

[92] Is it risky for you to say, you know, in public that you believe in UFOs and aliens?

[93] I don't care.

[94] And that's sort of where it all started.

[95] Within a year or so, Mr. Reed got the Defense Appropriation Subcommittee to put money into black money into the Pentagon budget to fund a program to look into this.

[96] When you say black money, what exactly does that mean?

[97] So there was $22 million that Harry Reid got for the program in 2007.

[98] He went through fellow senators Ted Stevens and Dan Inouye from Alaska and Hawaii, and they were able to slip this into the Defense Intelligence Agency.

[99] funding.

[100] And that, the funding for the DIA is classified anyway.

[101] So that brings us back to Black Money.

[102] Black Money, as it turns out, is money that Congress allocates for programs that are either classified or they don't want anybody to know about.

[103] Now, we all know that there's a lot of things that the government does that they don't want the average American to know about.

[104] And that's where this comes into.

[105] It's the sort of money that you can't find in a budget line.

[106] When we first went looking for the program, I stupidly thought I could just call up.

[107] the budget from 2007 and look at the defense appropriations.

[108] And I'm not going to tell you how many hours I wasted trying to find it until we finally threw up our hands and gave up.

[109] And it wasn't until I flew to Las Vegas and met with Harry Reid.

[110] And he told me on the record about getting this funding for the program that I really actually believed that it existed.

[111] So this is a very secret and not highly regarded program within the defense world.

[112] So why were these three senators on board, as best you can tell.

[113] Well, Harry Reid said to me during our interview that when he went to Ted Stevens to talk to him about the program, he said it was like pushing on an open door that Senator Ted Stevens was immediately interested in and told him that when he was a U .S. Army pilot back in World War II, he had had an experience where he thought that he was trailed by an object for miles in the air that he never knew what was.

[114] And he thought immediately that this is something that the United States government should be looking into.

[115] But that was never really followed up on.

[116] He told his immediate superiors about it, but it never went anywhere after that.

[117] So like many of these pilots, he'd seen something and didn't quite understand what he'd seen.

[118] Yes.

[119] Why do you think that the man who used to run this program agreed to talk about it publicly with the times?

[120] I think he was frustrated.

[121] The program is secret.

[122] And the people who are operating it tend to be true believers.

[123] And they've complained about excessive secrecy, they say.

[124] And they also complain that in the greater world of the Pentagon, they are laughed at and sometimes ridiculed by people who have, who don't believe that we should be looking into that sort of research or military chain of command who, they say, are afraid of investigating or launching investigations into some of these sightings because they think that that's going to interfere with their promotions once they start becoming known as, you know, a commanding general who's interested in UFOs.

[125] So two months ago, Elizondo got fed up, and he wrote a letter of resignation to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, complaining about the lack of support for the program and saying that excessive secrecy was preventing people from being able to do their jobs.

[126] Look, the folks over at DOD are absolutely some of the finest individuals I have ever had the pleasure and honor to serve with.

[127] As for our secretary, Secretary Mattis, I can tell you from personal experience, he is absolutely one of the greatest leaders this nation has ever had.

[128] The Secretary inherited a department that historically was never really organized or set up to deal with a challenge like this, keeping in mind that the Secretary on a daily basis is dealing with issues from nuclear weapons, potentially in North Korea, to ISIS in Syria, to terrorism in Africa, and, of course, military commissions in Guantanamo Bay.

[129] So in defense of the department, please keep in mind that the phenomena that I was involved with is really hard to identify.

[130] And not only is it hard to identify, it's even harder to define and almost impossible to discuss.

[131] So not only were we trying to figure out exactly what the phenomena is, but at the same time, trying to fight the forces within the department that in some cases stigmatized and delegitimized.

[132] the topic.

[133] Lou, put simply, what is the stigma?

[134] Well, that's a great question, Michael.

[135] I think we're entering an era of actual evidence.

[136] We've reached a moment of critical mass of credible witnesses, and these are witnesses that are in charge of multi -million dollar weapon platforms with, in some cases, the highest level of security clearances under trained observers.

[137] And so when these individuals are trying to report something, hey, I saw this when I was flying, that can be turned around and people say, hey, look, if you're crazy, you know, there goes your flight status, right?

[138] Or all of a sudden now commander so -and -so in charge of this very elite fighter wing will no longer be taken seriously.

[139] In fact, people are going to start to judge whether or not maybe, you know, our friend here might not be a little bit crazy or maybe some loose screws.

[140] And that's always a threat to these people's career.

[141] And let's face it, these people have to pay their taxes, they have to pay their mortgages, they have families, they're putting their kids through school.

[142] and frankly, they're just really good patriots and they want to do the right thing.

[143] And that stigma is pretty powerful.

[144] It stops a lot of people from reporting something that maybe they would normally report.

[145] But you learned in this position you had at the Pentagon that many top American military pilots had seen things that they couldn't explain and in many cases they had caught them on video inside their planes, but that they might have still been nervous to talk about it, right?

[146] Sure, absolutely.

[147] So you resigned because you were leading a program that it couldn't really be discussed inside the Pentagon.

[148] It was that secretive and that wasn't being taken as seriously as you felt it needed to be and should be, and you wanted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to know about it and realize how important it might be and you felt that could only happen from the outside.

[149] Yes, that is absolutely cool.

[150] Correct.

[151] Here's what else you need to know today.

[152] On Sunday, a lawyer for President Trump accused special counsel Robert Mueller of illegally obtaining emails and other records from the president's transition team, the latest in mounting political attacks by Trump and his allies on Mueller's Russia investigation.

[153] In a letter to Congress, the president's lawyer said that the government agency that handed the materials over to investigators did not allow the transition team to review the materials, which the lawyer said should have been shielded by protections like attorney -client privilege.

[154] In a rare statement, a spokesman for the special counsel defended how the emails were obtained, saying they either had the permission of the owner or followed the, quote, appropriate criminal process.

[155] And joining me now is the Secretary of the Treasury, Stephen Mnuchin.

[156] And welcome back to Fox News Sunday.

[157] Great to be here with you.

[158] Thank you.

[159] Can you say flatly that Congress will pass this tax plan this week and send it to the president to sign before Christmas?

[160] I can.

[161] It's a historic moment, and we're excited to be here.

[162] After a series of last -minute changes, Republicans in the White House and Congress say they have the votes to pass a final version of their $1 .5 trillion tax bill as early as today.

[163] And you have no doubt that Congress will pass it this week.

[164] I have no doubt.

[165] This has been a terrific process with the House and Senate working together in conference, and there's a terrific bill that's going to get to the president to sign.

[166] That's it for the Daily.

[167] I'm Michael Barbaro.

[168] See you tomorrow.