The Daily - Monday, Dec 18, 2017

There was military footage of unidentified flying objects that couldn’t be explained, and a decade of hidden funding in the defense budget. A Times investigation discovered a shadowy secret program at the Pentagon that looks at the potential threat of U.F.O.s. Guests: Helene Cooper, who covers the Pentagon for The New York Times; Luis Elizondo, an intelligence officer who led the program inside the Pentagon. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Duration: 20m
Broadcast on: 18 Dec 2017
Audio Format: other

Guests: Helene Cooper, who covers the Pentagon for The New York Times; Luis Elizondo, an intelligence officer who led the program inside the Pentagon. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply, see CapitalOne.com/BankGuy, Capital One NA. Member FDIC. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barber. This is the Daily. Today, military footage of flying objects that can't be explained. 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. It's Monday, December 18th. I mean, you cover the Pentagon for the Times, and my sense is that it's a very secretive organization that holds information tightly. I assume a lot of your reporting is built around confidential sources, right? 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. 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. 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. Oh boy, I've spent a good portion of both, not all of my career, pretty much remaining in the shadows. For me, that was more of a professional necessity. 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. They tend to be really spooky, guys. They're very secretive. They tend to be more paranoid. There was a lot of looking over to make sure nobody was seeing us. He sat with us back to the wall. He said because he wanted to see if anybody came in, there was a lot of that kind of stuff. But when you put all of that aside, what came out of his mouth was absolutely extraordinary. 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. UFOs? Yeah, that's what I thought. Can you just explain the name of the program? Sure, advanced aerospace threat identification program. Why threat? Well, the Department of Defense, keep in mind, the name of the department is the Department of Defense. It's a national security organization. Its job is to identify and, if necessary, neutralize any threats to US national security. It's a very significant mission of the department. So typically, missions in the department involve fighting wars and identifying threats, whether they be chemical threats, biological threats, missile threats, you name it, any threat to your right, in this particular case, advanced aerospace threats. This is a program to try to identify. Yes, it's a program to investigate sightings of UFOs, particularly among military service members, pilots, Navy 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. These are very, I believe, very compelling videos. What you're looking at is what the pilots and control operators are looking at when they're looking at the computer screen during the middle of an F-18 flight. 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. 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. That is part of the evidence gathering. So what this particular video demonstrates is an object otherwise referred to as a tic-tac by some of the pilots, a small white craft to the untrained observer might not look like anything but a blurry little dot. Is that why it's called a tic-tac? It literally looks like a tic-tac? It literally looks like a tic-tac. Yes, it literally is a 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

Transcription truncated.