Blue Book redux?

The Federal Secrets Task Force is about to hit The Wall

Seriously? Can’t ANYbody get this UFO shit right?

In one of the least surprising headlines of the 21^st century, we now know the CIA was lying about 11/22/63. When they assured the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Assassinations Records Review Board, and several federal judges they knew nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the snuff job in Dallas, they likely perjured themselves. But this one came with a showstopper – official confirmation that George Joannides, the secret agent who had been shadowing JFK’s accused killer, was put in charge of obstructing Congress.

Deputy Chief of the CIA Psychological Warfare Branch in Miami, known to a small band of Agency-financed anti-Castro Cubans only by the alias “Howard,” Joannides was the dark world’s hand-picked liaison to the HSCA. From 1976-78, as lawmakers revisited the killings of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., Joannides controlled what Congress was and wasn’t allowed to know. On July 3, some 35 years after his death in 1990, the career spook was exposed as the guy who conducted a master class in information management against the legislative branch.

The release of the incriminating documents marked a big win for former Washington Post investigative reporter Jefferson Morley and fellow sleuths at the nonprofit Ferrell Foundation, who have chased this story for decades. But it was an even bigger feather for Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the House Oversight Committee’s Declassification of Federal Secrets Task Force. Although Trump ordered the declassification of JFK, MLK, and RFK files in January, researchers are crediting Luna for moving the ball.

“The big difference between Luna and the White House is, Luna has actually talked to people,” says Larry Hancock, a member of the Ferrell team. “She’s the one that got the Joannides file, not the White House, because she literally called someone in the CIA with the information that Morley had given her. She said I want this, I know you guys have it, and they responded.

“I would say if she gets the right information, she’s effective and she will go after it.”

Buhht . . .

But Luna’s Truth Train is about to hit the wall.

Formed in February to unpack a slew of conspiracy tropes, from the origins of Covid-19 to the closets of Jeffrey Epstein, the Task Force waded through tens of thousands of JFK documents, many of them duplicates released years before, just to score that one golden nugget on Joannides. But the most consequential issue in the Task Force’s laundry basket – UFOs/UAP – is still ahead. By contrast, it’ll make JFK transparency look like a game of marbles.

Already citing the “stonewalling” and “stovepiping” of data coming from an agency charged by lawmakers in 2022 with facilitating accountability, Luna advocates pulling the plug on the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and recent twists have emboldened her case.

Earlier this month, former acting and deputy AARO director Tim Phillips went on a podcast blitz to issue updates on and frustrations with the agency’s progress. The news wasn’t good. Declaring that many UFO reports were actually mistaken for classified U.S. tech (“my god,” he said in one interview, “they look like Klingon death ships, they’re absolutely amazing!”), the senior National Intelligence Service officer parroted the exhausted maxim about UAP being a cover for real-world military hardware. Conscientious whistleblowers who approached AARO with claims to the contrary, he said, had been suckered by unofficial disinformation psyop fakery called Yankee Blue. Supposedly, the Pentagon ordered it to stop after AARO informed the brass in 2023.

Thanks for your service, now get lost

But in a truly surprising revelation, Phillips appeared to have verified an aspect of what several sailors vouched for during the 2004 Tic Tac encounter off southern California. Participants in that 21-year-old stretch of weirdness have claimed the fleet was visited by a helicopter ferrying unknown players to confiscate documentation of that event. Chief Petty Officer Gary Voorhis said he was ordered to turn over the USS Princeton’s data-recording tapes to visiting plainclothes agents. Over at the USS Nimitz, aviation technician Patrick Hughes says he was ordered to surrender “bricks” of sensor data gathered by an E-2 Hawkeye surveillance plane. Hughes says he never learned the identities of the naval officers who made off with the stash.

In fact, Phillips says, a helicopter did run a sortie to the Nimitz fleet in the Pacific during the exercises that provoked the Tic Tac, but the mission didn’t necessarily involve UFOs. The passengers were scientists with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which had come to fetch a new handheld Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) device they’d been testing with the Third Fleet. They wore black suits. Years later, when AARO tried to locate that ISR data, which Phillips said reportedly involved “anomalies,” the agency came up empty. The whole thing, he added, was “like a comedy of errors.”

Days later, on July 18, Phillips was notified by the Office of National Intelligence that his severance from government service, scheduled for October, was effective immediately. The former Marine Corps lieutenant colonel received no explanation.

Phillips said something else that should’ve gotten a little more attention: AARO welcomed input from the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. “They sent us a PhD dissertation that was superb,” he told podcaster John Michael Godier. “It’s the type of analytical work and rigor we would’ve used as intelligence professionals.”

A pattern of neglect

“That came out of our intentions team,” acknowledges Larry Hancock, who – conveniently enough – is also an SCU researcher. “We’ve been looking at UAP activity from 1945 to 1975 in records almost exclusively curated out of Project Blue Book, and we apply rigorous pattern analysis to try to understand what their intentions may be. We just sent our fourth paper to AARO, because that’s the sort of thing they should be doing, and aren’t. Just like Blue Book did, they’re tackling it case by case by case, one at a time, instead of trying to see the bigger picture.”

SCU’s Intentions Study team has been focused on UFO behaviors that had been evolving in the immediate 30 years after WWII. From their initial surveillance of weapons-grade uranium manufacturing plants and subsequent focus on scanning warhead platforms, to their shift from daytime scrutiny to nighttime monitoring amid “a cluster of electronic transmissions,” UFOs are in dire need of strategic assessment.

But apparently, AARO is only interested in bridges that flow one way.

In 2023, Phillips’ boss at AARO, Sean Kirkpatrick, publicly mentioned receiving a batch of FAA records the civilian agency had ascribed to unidentified anomalous phenomena. SCU co-founder Robert Powell followed that lead with a FOIA request for those documents. The FAA sent him 69 unresolved incident reports from between January and April of ’23. Aside from a couple of sightings resembling people in jetpacks — one (potential) Florida Man was seen zipping over Ormond Beach at 6,000 feet — most were fairly nebulous. But three reports jumped out because they were filed by F-35 military pilots.

Not our job

One in particular – a warplane traveling at 12,500 feet between Arizona and New Mexico on Feb. 27 – raised a raft of expectations because the pilot logged a “radar and visual hit” as their paths crossed, according to the report. “If I’m AARO,” says Powell, “I would contact that pilot immediately and ask for the radar data. Those planes have highly sophisticated sensor systems.”

Powell waited until the slippery Kirkpatrick was gone from AARO in 2024 before reaching out to Phillips. The response Powell got from AARO was like that old joke about roping off the no-pissing section of a swimming pool.

“I said, what have you guys done with that stuff, what have you figured out?” Powell recalls. “(Phillips) said, well, that kinda goes to the back of our list of things to do. He said it didn’t happen over a military operating area or a U.S. military base, so it’s not our top priority.

“I just find that amazing. You think if you detect it over civilian airspace it can’t just suddenly zip from there over to a military operating area anytime they want? That makes no sense.”

Ginning up AARO’s role

Equally flabbergasted, Larry Hancock views AARO language in the proposed National Defense Authorization Act bill as one more snipe hunt.

Given the embarrassing and dangerous gaps to national security revealed by apparently idiot-proof “drone” activity over military installations recently, one would expect the Senate Armed Services Committee to inject code-red urgency into pending NDAA legislation for 2026. Citing the need for the U.S. to reassert its command of “space, maritime surface and maritime subsurface domains,” the Committee is ordering the development and deployment of an “integrated sensing roadmap for unidentified anomalous phenomena” based on AARO’s incipient “Gremlin” technology. Using a network of largely portable telescopic and radar hardware, Gremlin is expected to deliver 2D and 3D images of unknowns to operators in real time.

Historically miserly in sharing details of its unknown reports, AARO will – if the bill passes – be the designated repository for all UAP intercept cases, with North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command put on notice to cooperate. The Committee wants all those records dating back to 2004. It also wants updated intercept inventory briefings twice a year.

Even if the Committee prevails and the database is legit, that doesn’t mean taxpayers will get to see what they’re paying for.

Trust us (again)

“This makes it much more efficient for sucking up data and makes it more efficient for addressing security concerns, but not for the public and not for science. Look, if you’re gonna do this for national intelligence, don’t even screw around with it, just fund the agencies and make sure they’ve got what they need to do the job,” says Hancock. “But if you really want to serve the public interest, you need something in the legislation to give the public access and insight. That goes way beyond AARO and biannual reports – you’ve gotta get an independent group involved.”

In fact, on Wednesday, in an amendment to the 2026 NDAA co-sponsored by Senators Mike Rounds and Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Chuck Schumer is once again attempting to install a presidentially appointed review board – with eminent domain authority – to stand up “an enforceable, independent, and accountable process for the public disclosure of (UAP) records.”

The independent review board proposal has tanked twice before. Hancock is not optimistic.

“This is very familiar to me – it looks exactly like what happened when ATIC (Air Technical Intelligence/Wright-Patterson AFB) was told (in the 1950s) to set up teams we can deploy to the field, we’re gonna issue a national security directive where everybody has to report these (UFO) things and we’re gonna make this serious stuff,” Hancock says. “They didn’t denigrate it, they took it case by case, but we didn’t see the actual files until decades later.

“The legislation is good and serious. But in terms of transparency, I think I’m back in Blue Book, circa 1955.”

Obviously, if AARO cared about its image, Jon Kosloski would make at least a token public show of reaching out to SCU. But as Kosloski told filmmaker James Fox when asked about the way forward last year, “Look, man, I can’t even part my own hair without approval from the DoD.”

Your play, Federal Secrets Task Force. Can’t wait for that UAP hearing and sworn testimony.