In September 2010, when the Pentagon’s neatly concealed Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was going full throttle, UFOs & Nukes author Robert Hastings assembled a press conference which was unlike anything Washington had ever seen before. With CNN live-streaming, seven retired Air Force veterans, including a missile-targeting officer, a combat crew commander, and a former base commander, converged on the National Press Club to testify about ominous and sometimes-destabilizing UFO activity around America’s nuclear launch control facilities. Their stories were sobering, but even so they represented just a fraction of the 150-plus veterans who went on record with Hastings about events unfolding in restricted airspace above our weapons of mass destruction.

Washington paid no mind, of course, and the media bungled the coverage – CNN didn’t even bother to staff it or follow up. The best the Washington Post could scrape together was a columnist who wrote about how he only showed up to eat free cookies. But it’s hard to believe, considering former AATIP director Luis Elizondo’s statements last month in Huntsville, Alabama, that the Defense Department would blow off those veterans’ eyewitness accounts, given the stakes.

Former intelligence agent Elizondo left a military career in 2017 because the information he was accumulating was being stovepiped by mid-level higher-ups who refused to send it up the chain of command. A generous and accessible public speaker, he capped an hour-long presentation by fielding queries from a surprisingly well-informed audience for another two hours. But the questions he raised – about the imperatives of strategic defense – make De Void wonder if we’re on the verge of a blunder as consequential as Project Blue Book.

Former AATIP director Luis Elizondo, left, and SCU co-founder Robert Powell, right, take a break from last month’s panel discussions in Huntsville, Alabama/CREDIT: Billy Cox

Before plunging into all that, a word or two about Elizondo, who’s been angrily labeled in some quarters as the perfect disinformation agent, given his history with counterintelligence. Yes, he maintains contacts in the Pentagon and freely admits it. In fact, as he told the 125 or so people attending the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies conference, just days before his lecture, one of his former DoD colleagues called to discuss the evolving glasnost surrounding The Great Taboo since the NY Times broke the AATIP story on 12/16/17.

“He said, you know, Lue, it’s funny, because a conversation that I had to have with you, just a year and a half ago, in a vault with in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility), in a TS/SCI (top secret sensitive compartmented information) facility that’s SAP (special access program) cleared and we had to whisper to have this conversation – I can now have this conversation in the open halls of the Pentagon. Imagine that, how far we’ve come.”

It’s also true that Elizondo remains bound by a security oath, and he put his listeners on notice: “It’s not our job to come out and be full disclosure. People tell me all the time, we demand the truth, we deserve the truth. Well, I don’t doubt that. But no offense, but I don’t work for you. I’m trying to do something here that’s for the collective good.”

At least one token of that collective good, he offered, will get a public hearing next month when The History Channel serves up a six-part nonfiction series called “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.” Now, given History’s goofball track record with UFOs – from the “Ancient Aliens” conspiracies to reimagining real-life astronomer J. Allen Hynek as James Bond in “Project Blue Book” – the prospects are a little unsettling, like when you realize you just swallowed a salamander with that last gulp of ice tea. And there’s this: the rock star founder of To The Stars Academy, the private company which has been teasing elements of its research projects over the past year or so to attract crowd-sourced investors, is the “Unidentified” executive producer.

Say what you will about Tom DeLonge’s more reckless UFO assertions (e.g., the hieroglyphics on the crashed Roswell craft are available online), he does understand the promotion business. And in October 2017, when he introduced a truly impressive cast of TTSA board members, including Elizondo, it was clear that celebrity can indeed create alliances outside the reach of ordinary mortals.

Elizondo did his best to assure listeners that TTSA, which has gone quiet about its research over the past year, will make a big bang on “Unidentified” with a load of new material. For instance, “You will see that we even had people from the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) on camera, analyzing,” he volunteered. “… I’ve never seen anything like that in my career. For the record. On camera.”

But exactly how much will “Unidentified” yield about the full scope of the mystery? TTSA’s private-venture setup prompted a listener to note that the company would have the right to patent whatever it learns from UFO technology, meaning it would be under no obligation to share the results of its analyses.

“Sure. You’re right,” Elizondo affirmed. “But the material that’s not ours, that we are stewards of, is again not ours, so we’re not gonna patent something that doesn’t belong to us. Some of these individuals have been very generous and patient with us and have allowed us to analyze their material, allowed us to store that material provided we provide that information back to them. But it is at the end of the day their material.”

Of course, that doesn’t apply to material procured through other means. Which brings us to the heart of Elizondo’s presentation in Huntsville. Ever since going public, TTSA’s point man has talked at length about the “five observables” that distinguish UFO technology from everything else: instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity, low observability or stealth, positive lift or antigravity, and the ability to freely navigate multiple environments, space, the atmosphere, and water. Yes, he said, these things do leave sonar signatures.

Elizondo asked his audience to imagine if a military rival were to command just one of those observables. Better yet, “imagine if we have a craft that can do all five of those – think how terrifying that would be, right? So yeah, it’s incumbent upon us to make sure we avoid strategic surprise by one of our potential adversaries… I think it’s safe to assume our adversaries are doing the same thing.”

But what if they aren’t? What if foreign superpowers have decided that diverting resources to UFOs is a major waste of time? What if, for a moment, we could discount UFOs & Nukes witness-based reports of UAP rendering American missiles inoperable at SAC bases across the Northern Plains during the Cold War? Would we still have reasons to be concerned?

“We tend to define threats as intentional, someone who is out to harm you on purpose,” Elizondo said. But what happens if you stand too close to a jet engine? You go deaf. Is that a threat? What if, as has been reported more than once, you approach a strange light hovering at treetop level “and it looks like (you) got radiation burns. Is that a threat?” Elizondo wonders. “Well, sure, it’s a chemical threat.”

Reaching a consensus on what does and doesn’t constitute a threat would seem a reasonable way to proceed. However, Elizondo reminded listeners that Americans no longer have the luxury of moving forward (assuming they ever did) with the same set of facts. When a listener asked about UFOs busting security around our weapons of mass destruction, Elizondo was not ambivalent. “Yes,” he replied, “we do know for a fact that there’s some strategic interest in our nuclear capabilities, albeit whether it’s nuclear energy, nuclear weapons development, nuclear delivery capabilities – that’s about all I can say.

“If I didn’t have a security clearance I could probably talk more about this, but I can’t. I can’t even speculate. The crown jewel of U.S. defense is its nuclear capability, and the U.S. government is very, very protective of that information.”

This is a sea change from 1969, when the Air Force shut down Project Blue Book by proclaiming UFOs posed no threat to national security. Today, we have Navy footage of UFOs outperforming our frontline warplanes, confirmation of a secret Pentagon research program, and a grownup conversation that couldn’t have been imagined half a century ago. In fact, just yesterday, the Navy issued a statement to Politico indicating it is now “updating and formalizing” the way it handles reports of “unauthorized” incursions into “military-controlled ranges and designated air space.”

Fifty years ago, critics blasted Blue Book because, they charged, the military never should’ve been allowed to take the lead on scientific investigation. Today, the military continues to play by its own set of rules. A private corporation is digging for evidence that may well never enter the public domain. For those who like neither of those options and want more transparency, the man who operates under a selective gag order offers some perspective.

“Until you tell me a UAP has just blown up one of my aircraft carriers, that’s not my priority. From a military perspective, that makes sense, I don’t necessarily agree with it … But at the end of the day, it’s not a national priority because you didn’t make it a national priority, and yes, I’m putting that on your shoulders squarely,” Elizondo told his listeners. “Because you are the people, you are the ones who elect officials, you are the ones that set what the priorities should be.

“So if you’re not doing it, then someone else will do it for you. So if you want this to be a national priority, then you have to engage your elected officials, you are the ones that set what the priorities should be. So if you’re not doing it, then somebody else will do it for you.”

For the record, GovTrack has contact info for every Senator and Representative on Capitol Hill.