Crunch time on Capitol Hill

Congress is on the brink of passing legislation that could break the military-intelligence stranglehold on the truth about UFOs. Will lawmakers have the resolve to pull the trigger?

As he waits to see if Congress really will have the guts to alter the course of history and authorize an official no-bulljive subpoena-power investigation into UFOs, Robert Powell remembers being “shocked,” in a good way, when the news quietly broke last month. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s blockbuster addition to the National Defense Authorization Act was dead serious — it pitched, among other things, bringing honest brokers into the discussion, including the nonprofit Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU).

SCU had no prior discussions with government types, says executive board member Powell, or even a heads-up that the recipe was in the oven. And yet, on November 4, there it was, a radical proposal to establish a formal UFO investigation office, the Anomaly Surveillance, Tracking, and Resolution Office (ASTRO). If sanctioned, SCU would join ASTRO’s “Aerial and Transmedium Phenomena Advisory Committee.”

That pending Committee is a fast-company list with seriously eclectic cred, i.e., NASA, the FAA, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, Harvard’s Galileo Project, the American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics, Montana State’s Optical Technology Center and the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Merry Christmas.

“I never thought I would live to see it get this far, I really didn’t,” says Powell, co-author of the largely overlooked radar-heavy spadework that exposed how a UFO flew unchallenged over George W. Bush’s Texas ranch in 2008 while F-16 fighters backed off. That brand of informed curiosity at SCU has since produced forensic analyses of some high-profile cases, most prominently from the famed 2004 Nimitz-Tic Tac dustup and the Aguadilla surprise, with video footage capturing transmedium UFO behavior off Puerto Rico in 2013.

Since the erosion of the stigma began in 12/17, multidisciplinary scientists have been flocking to SCU in hopes of bringing experience and intuition to bear on the puzzle. “We’ve got about 170 members now, and about a third have PhDs in everything from physics to chemistry and astronomy,” Powell says. “And we haven’t even tried to recruit people.”

Co-author of UFOs and Government, the granular history of how the U.S. wound up in the Gordian knot it’s in now, Powell says SCU can bring the long view to the table for congressional audiences – if this pending milestone comes to pass. The NDAA awaits a vote, maybe this week. But even if Gillibrand’s add-on survives, getting federal institutions to cooperate on these previously forbidden matters is bound to test the rigor of pols playing the short game.

Ominously, just last week, in what appeared to be a good old-fashioned up-yours to congressional inquiry, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks tried to turn the bipartisan amendment’s flank. Following three-quarters of a century without a coherent policy on UFO incursions into sovereign airspace, just two days before the Thanksgiving holiday, the DSecDef announced the formation of something called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group.

Presented as the successor to the lightweight – and congressionally mandated – UAP Task Force, AOIMSG is the basement-hunchback version of the Gillibrand legislation. Its mission statement, according to a formal announcement, is to coordinate military and intelligence efforts to evaluate UFOs, with zero stated interest in looking at civilian UAP incidents. AOIMSG makes no mention of including a civilian scientific advisory board, no mention of briefings, classified or otherwise, to lawmakers.

At a Monday press conference, the dissembling chores fell to Pentagon press secretary John Kirby, who tried to sell AOIMSG as a routine housekeeping measure. “I can assure you,” Kirby replied to a question about public accountability, “that our intention is to be as transparent about this as we can … given that there will be national security considerations we will have to keep in mind.”

Zzzz. The most interesting language in the AOIMSG directive calls for figuring out how “to prevent or mitigate any risks” posed by UFOs. Prevent or mitigate. Hm. How might we do that? Open fire with classified pulse weapons and get boomeranged to smithereens in broad daylight? Hey, can I please write that press release, please? Anyway, regardless of what happens with the bill, Powell says Capitol Hill still hasn’t gone far enough, not yet.

“In order to avoid another repeat of the past, Congress really needs to take an additional step that they haven’t taken yet. And that is, they need to provide funds for academia to investigate the phenomenon,” Powell says from Austin, Texas, where he is not in academia. “Because I’ve really kind of given up on any hope that the military and our government institutions will ever release all the information they have.”

To wit: In 2010, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program submitted the results of its two-year, $22 million UFO study to the Defense Intelligence Agency, where it’s been closeted in the dark ever since. And that makes the timing of the Pentagon’s unpronounceable AOIMSG hoo-ha suspicious at best, Powell says.

“They waited until the Gillibrand amendment came out before they moved on it,” Powell says. “It’s like, they read the language of the bill and said wait a minute, this is really detailed, we won’t have control of this anymore.

In 2019, Robert Powell, right, and fellow SCU members hosted Pentagon whistleblower Luis Elizondo for a briefing on America’s blackest secret, in Huntsville, Alabama.

“If you look at Lacatski’s book, it went through government review for 14 months,” Powell goes on. “It’s poorly written, you have no real idea what they cut out of it, but you see this enormous appendix, where they list all the reports they completed. And the one I’d love to get my hands on was where they used an engineering software program to estimate flight characteristics and acceleration similar to – and they say so in the book –what we did on the Nimitz case. I would love to see those numbers, but I’m just not optimistic.”

“Lacatski’s book,” aka Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, co-authored by former AAWSAP director and retired DIA officer James Lacatski, provoked a clamor when it was published in October and confirmed what longtime researchers like Mark Rodegier have suspected for years.

“When I read the (New York) Times story in 2017, one of my first thoughts was, did they do a real in-depth scientific investigation, and if so, where’s the report?” says the director of the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago. “And now we learn from the book that yes, they absolutely did do an in-depth investigation. So where is that report? We’re not allowed to see it.”

So far, however, the most bizarre contents of the Lacatski book, subtitled An Insiders’ Account of the Secret Government UFO Program, have “stayed under the radar” of mainstream media coverage, says Rodeghier — and that’s probably a good thing. At least until after Congress takes action on the Gillibrand amendment.

“I’m worried about blowback,” he says. “When it becomes widely known about what’s in there, I will be concerned, because it doesn’t present a lot of good, hard UFO data. They don’t give out a lot of real names, no documents are available for us to look at, and nothing can be checked.

“I knew it was going to include some stuff about Skinwalker Ranch, but it wasn’t clear to me how much of the focus it was going to be until the book came out. And now we learn that Lacatski – he’s thinking forwardly, he’s thinking about threats to national security, but it all starts with Skinwalker Ranch? Which actually has very little to do with UFOs.

“There are lots of problems here, but what’s missing is his thinking, why he would think all that stuff at the ranch would relate to UFOs. I’m not saying it doesn’t – I just want him to tell me what he was thinking back then. Maybe that got taken out, too.”

During the 2008-10 DIA investigation, UFO activity played second fiddle to a wild range of paranormal scenarios bedeviling an isolated ranch in the badlands of northeast Utah, according to Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. Most disquieting are accounts of “dog men” or “shadow people” following researchers home, in what the book likens to a “social contagion,” or a “hitchhiker effect.” SCU’s Powell calls those anecdotes meaningless for purposes of the immediate discussion.

“There’s nothing anywhere in the book to convince me that these wolf creatures or whatever have anything to do with UAP,” he says. “There’s no detailed data to suggest there’s anything like a virus associated with this. If I’m going down that road, I would like to have known exactly when the first guy brought ‘it’ back.

“The book says not only did the guy’s family start seeing things, but that one of his son’s friends started seeing things too. Yeah, well, OK, I wanna know how many friends did he visit? When did he see them? How many of those friends had this experience? How long were they exposed to each other? And there’s none of that. This is really more like a story that someone tells over a campfire.”

Without the release of the voluminous UAP records compiled by the DIA more than a decade ago, speculation over the more sensational elements of a book produced by the former director of AAWSAP is a road to nowhere, and potentially counterproductive for lawmakers already wary of Little Green Men punchlines. Keep your eye on the ball, says SCU’s Powell. America’s teetering democracy may never get another chance like this.

“Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that what we’re dealing with is an extraterrestrial intelligence. Well,” says Powell, “the way we’re positioned today when we make first contact with that intelligence, it’s going to be through a military organization. And I mean, really, who wants a military organization, ours or anyone else’s, to represent planet Earth if and when that happens? It should be more about something that represents the whole planet, because it’s going to impact the entire planet.”

AOIMSG vs. ASTRO?

“I don’t see a reason for them to coexist,” Powell says. “Congress needs to make the decision. Congress needs to say, we will ultimately support the organization that controls the information for dissemination to the public.”