It shows the existence of a two-tier scientific culture, of which the upper tier would be a domain for clandestine R&D, unknown to democratically elected authorities.

Many investigators and whistleblowers in the United States have, over the last 40 years, called attention upon unacknowledged scientific and technical programmes being carried out in various publicly and privately funded laboratories and research centres, affiliated to military and intelligence agencies, in “exotic” areas that are officially not regarded as deserving of serious attention in civilian institutions such as universities. The existence of such programmes, now being proven, would demonstrate the existence of a two-tier scientific culture in the US at least, if not in the rest of the world, of which the upper tier would be a domain for clandestine R&D, unsupervised by, and unknown to, democratically elected authorities. If only for this reason, finding out the truth about the situation is of great value to society.

What do we know about the long suspected “special access” programmes hiding within the American military-industrial-intelligence complex and what is backed by material evidence?

Among the first whistleblowers, who emerged in the 1980s (1989 in his case), Bob Lazar is noteworthy because of the extensive information he provided in videotaped talks about research he had carried out in Area S-4 close to the since notorious Area 51 in the Nevada desert’s atomic testing range, around the dry Groom lake riverbed.

Lazar claimed to have being recruited by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), through defence contractor EG&G, to work as part of a team on a highly classified project which involved examining and reverse engineering a 52 feet wide saucer-shaped craft that he quickly realised was not built by humans. He further explained that it was made of some unknown ceramic-like material, could sit three small sized (3 feet tall) crew members and was powered by a hitherto undiscovered super-heavy element, eventually identified as number 115 on the periodic table, which generated its own gravitational field and enabled the craft to reach fantastic speeds. Lazar further explained that the retrieved space vehicle was being test flown in Area 51/S-4 although neither its materials nor its propulsion systems could be figured out or reproduced. However, he warned that the US military had somehow gotten hold of a substantial quantity of Element 115, stored at Los Alamos and intended for weaponisation. His report was supported by well connected investigators, including John Lear, son of the Learjet inventor and a veteran CIA operative who testified that he was also exposed to covert research into “alien” technologies.

Lazar’s testimony (retraced and updated in a recent documentary by Jeremy Corbell entitled Bob Lazar, Area 51 and Flying Saucers) was one of many that were more or less publicised in the following decades despite stubborn denials from official quarters. In 1997, former Pentagon intelligence officer (foreign technology desk) and White House staffer Colonel Philip Corso’s bestselling book, The Day After Roswell, purported to lift the veil on much of the clandestine research pursued since 1947 by various branches of the federal government and compartmentally outsourced to defence contractors such as Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Martin Marietta, Northrop, Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics and others. However, the results of those advanced investigations remained largely undisclosed, although Corso alleged that major technical breakthroughs such as microtransistors, superconductors, fibre optics, Kevlar and night vision goggles had been developed through reverse engineering of alien materials. Since then aeronautics engineer Edgar Fouché, who reports having worked for the Aurora Project at Area 51 which built the secret Tr3-B triangular mercury plasma fuelled spacecraft, Dr Robert Wood from McDonnell Douglas, Corey Goode, Wlliam Tompkins also formerly at McDonnell Douglas and the more controversial Dan Burisch, are among the alleged “insiders” who have blown the whistle on various “black” programmes. Some like Goode claim to have served on an SSF (Secret Space Fleet), a branch of the US Navy which began operating in the 1960s or 1970s under the Solar Warden code name. Their accounts have been extensively reported and analysed by veteran researchers such as Linda Moulton Howe as part of her Earthfiles series, Paola Harris, Dr Steven Greer (in his widely publicized Disclosure Project) and Dr Michael Salla, co-founder of the Exopolitics Institute.

Additionally, in June 2017, a 47-page top secret briefing document was leaked and analysed by various experts. It appears to be a briefing dictated by a member of the clandestine MJ-12 agency (set up to deal with UFO related issues in 1954) for Dr Philip Morrison, an eminent MIT physicist. It contains detailed descriptions of alien craft and their recovery, transcripts of communications with alien beings and spells out the measures taken by concerned agencies to keep the entire subject secret, even to the highest elected authorities.

Back in 2007, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, in which Area 51 is located, and who then chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, set up a new study group with the support of fellow Senators, Inouye and Stevens, under the name of AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) at the suggestion of his friend, billionaire Robert Bigelow, chairman of Bigelow Aerospace, a contractor to NASA which conducted research on UFOs and collected substantial evidence of the extraterrestrial presence.

Senator Reid wished to gather information on the secret work being carried out outside the purview of Congressional authorities and got an appropriation of $22 million for a five-year budget. The investigations were entrusted to Bigelow’s aerospace research division and coordinated by Earthtech of Austin, Texas, an R&D centre in frontier areas of science headed by Dr Harold Puthoff, formerly at Stanford Research Institute. AATIP under the stewardship of high-ranking intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, commissioned a still unissued 490-page report and collected 38 classified papers from a number of universities and research centres reflecting some of the goals pursued at the behest of the DIA (as Defense Intelligence Research Documents or DIRD) and other military intelligence bodies.

AATIP remained unknown to the public until both the New York Times and the Washington Post on 16 December 2017 published articles about it with the mandatory sceptical rumblings. They both, however, provided online links to a film taken in 2004 by Super Hornet jet pilots from the USS Nimitz, off the coast of Southern California, of a fleet of extremely fast flying objects, exhibiting performances far beyond the abilities of the most advanced aircraft, whose shapes suggested “tictacs” which became their moniker.

Physicist Jack Sarfatti, formerly at San Diego State University, has gone on record to say he is doing research on the propulsion system of the “tictac” by studying “alien” recovered metamaterials in the custody of Dr Puthoff’s Earthtech. The existence of those materials of non-earthly origin has been officially confirmed.

In January of this year a Freedom Of Information Act request from Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists against Government Secrecy, led to the release by the DIA of the list of titles of above mentioned 38 government-funded research reports gathered by AATIP as part of the process to “read in” on a need-to-know basis, officials in the military and civilian administrations. They include two papers leaked earlier by Corey Goode, respectively entitled Traversable Wormholes, Stargates and Negative Energy (number 8 in the list) and Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra-Dimensions (number 19). Others are dedicated to invisibility cloaking technologies, propulsion systems from space vacuum, anti-gravity, space communication based on Quantum Entanglement and Non-Locality, programmable matter, negative mass propulsion and other such topics not publicly recognised as being within the realm of realistic possibilities.

Cynics who alleged that all this is speculative mumbo-jumbo amounting to a waste of public money did not consider that the disclosure from AATIP seems to be what the CIA calls a “limited hangout”: i.e. a superficial glimpse of a much larger secret cloaked in “plausible deniability”.

Since the alleged closure of AATIP in 2012, a private initiative called TTSA (To the Stars Academy) has been set up with the participation of some of the staffers of AATIP, including its former director Luis Elizondo. TTSA is working with retired military and civilian officials to further disclose the extensive and long-standing secret military R&D pursued between government agencies and private contractors involved in what is commonly called the Deep State. Its executive director Tom DeLonge has produced a new documentary series for the History Channel relying on military insider testimonies and entitled Unidentified.

How much more time and effort will it take for certain agencies in the US government to confess to the many ominous or mind-boggling secrets they have kept from the public, often in violation of constitutional principles and legal norms and procedures?