In Part 1 of this series, we traced the U.S. government's relationship with UFOs from Roswell through Project Blue Book's quiet closure in 1969, and the nearly 40 years of official silence that followed. For decades, the government's public position was simple and unwavering: nothing like Blue Book existed anymore, and there was nothing left to investigate. That position turned out to be false. This part covers exactly how the public found that out, starting with a Pentagon program almost no one outside a small circle of officials knew existed.
What Was AATIP, and Why Did It Exist?
In 2007, at the urging of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Defense Intelligence Agency quietly established the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. Publicly, its funding, roughly $22 million total, was folded into the defense budget without drawing attention, and its stated mission was framed clinically: to study "anomalous aerospace threats," a deliberately bland phrase that avoided the word UFO entirely while meaning essentially the same thing.
Military intelligence officer Luis Elizondo joined the program in 2008 and took over its leadership in 2010, sharpening its focus specifically on cases with potential national security implications. One case in particular would come to define the entire modern disclosure movement. In November 2004, F/A-18 fighter pilots from the USS Nimitz carrier group, patrolling off the coast of San Diego, encountered a smooth, white, oblong object with no visible wings, exhaust, or control surfaces, moving in ways that defied conventional flight physics. Navy Commander David Fravor, one of the pilots involved, later nicknamed it the "Tic Tac," and the incident was captured on infrared camera in a clip that would eventually become known as FLIR1. It's difficult to overstate how central this single case became to everything that followed; nearly every major disclosure figure over the following two decades points back to the Nimitz encounter as a turning point.
There's a genuinely important nuance here that a lot of early reporting on this topic missed, and worth including for accuracy: AATIP is often conflated with a related but distinct program called AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, which operated openly with congressional funding through the Defense Intelligence Agency from roughly 2008 to 2010, and had a considerably larger staff. AATIP, by contrast, operated without a formal congressional mandate, had a much smaller footprint, and continued informally within the Pentagon from around 2010 until 2017, focused specifically on the military angle of the phenomenon. Official congressional AAWSAP funding ran out in 2012, a fact the Pentagon has pointed to since as evidence that formal UFO research ended that year, but Elizondo has maintained he continued investigating cases informally alongside Navy and CIA colleagues for another five years after that.
How Did the Public Find Out About AATIP?
Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017, submitting a letter to then-Defense Secretary James Mattis citing what he described as bureaucratic resistance and institutional reluctance to take the subject seriously. He left with three Navy videos he stated had been cleared for release, and shared them with a small group of journalists. Separately, Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence under both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, independently passed the same footage to reporters, later explaining he felt compelled to force the Defense Department to treat the issue as the legitimate national security matter he believed it to be.
On December 16, 2017, The New York Times published a front-page investigation by reporters Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, revealing AATIP's existence to the public for the first time and embedding the Nimitz FLIR1 footage along with a second clip known as "Gimbal." The story detonated immediately across mainstream media in a way no UFO story had managed since perhaps Roswell itself. It's worth noting the Pentagon's response has never fully aligned with Elizondo's account; officials have publicly stated the videos were never formally cleared for release and that a subsequent review found they weren't actually classified in the first place, a genuinely unresolved discrepancy that still gets debated by researchers today.
Elizondo's public profile only grew from there. He joined To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a new venture co-founded by former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge specifically to research and publicize the UAP phenomenon, becoming its Director of Global Security Programs. Additional Navy pilots came forward in 2019, telling reporters they had encountered unidentified objects "almost daily" during training exercises off the East Coast between 2014 and 2015, adding further corroborating military testimony to the growing story.
When Did the Pentagon Officially Confirm the Videos Were Real?
The next major turning point came in April 2020, when the Department of Defense took the unusual step of formally, officially releasing the three Navy videos itself, including FLIR1, Gimbal, and a third clip known as GOFAST, confirming for the first time on the record that the footage was genuine and that the objects depicted remained officially unidentified. It was a small but genuinely significant shift: for the first time since Blue Book closed in 1969, the U.S. government had put its own name behind authenticated UFO footage rather than leaving the matter entirely to leaked material and secondhand testimony.
What Did the 2021 Government Report Actually Conclude?
Momentum built steadily from there. In June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary assessment covering 144 UAP incidents reported between 2004 and March 2021, primarily by military aviators. The report's central finding was carefully hedged but genuinely notable: of the 144 cases reviewed, only one could be explained with high confidence, as a large, deflating balloon, while the remaining cases lacked sufficient data for a confident explanation either way. The report explicitly noted that some objects appeared capable of remaining stationary against strong winds, maneuvering abruptly, or moving at high speed without any discernible means of propulsion, an intentionally cautious way of saying investigators genuinely couldn't explain what they were looking at.
How Did AARO Come to Exist?
Congress responded to the growing pressure with actual legislative action. The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022 formally mandated the creation of a centralized office to handle all UAP-related reporting and investigation across every branch of the military, and in July 2022, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, became operational, absorbing the responsibilities of an earlier, more limited UAP Task Force. Congress held a public hearing on the subject that same May, a genuinely rare event that would have been unthinkable in Washington just five years earlier.
By January 2023, AARO's total case count had grown substantially, reaching 510 reports dating back to 2004, an increase officials attributed largely to reduced stigma around reporting rather than any actual rise in incidents. Roughly half the newly reviewed cases were resolved to mundane explanations, unmanned drones, balloon-like objects, or airborne clutter, while a meaningful portion remained genuinely unresolved.
What Did David Grusch Actually Claim in 2023?
The single most explosive moment in this entire modern disclosure timeline arrived in June 2023. Journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, the same reporters behind the original 2017 New York Times story, published a report in The Debrief featuring on-the-record claims from David Grusch, a former intelligence officer who had worked with the UAP Task Force and later the National Reconnaissance Office. Grusch alleged the U.S. government was running a secret, decades-long program to recover and reverse-engineer non-human craft, and that the program had deliberately evaded congressional oversight.
On July 26, 2023, Grusch testified under oath before a House Oversight subcommittee, appearing alongside Navy Commander David Fravor, the same pilot from the original 2004 Nimitz encounter, and Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot turned advocate for UAP reporting reform. Under direct questioning from Representative Nancy Mace, Grusch confirmed he believed "biologics," his term, had been recovered alongside some retrieved craft, and stated under further questioning that he understood these biologics to be non-human in origin. He testified he was relaying information from named individuals with, in his words, a long-standing track record of legitimacy and service to the country, rather than claiming direct personal observation himself, and repeatedly stated he could only provide further specifics in a classified setting.
The government's response was swift and direct. AARO issued a statement through spokesperson Sue Gough asserting the office had found no verifiable information substantiating any past or present government program involving the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials. That contradiction, a sworn whistleblower alleging a cover-up on one side, an official Pentagon office flatly denying any such program exists on the other, has defined the shape of this story ever since, and it's exactly where the next part of this series picks up.
In the next part, we'll cover what's happened since Grusch's testimony: the congressional hearings, subpoenas, and declassified document releases of 2024 through 2026, including exactly how much closer, or how much further apart, the two sides of this story actually are today.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was AATIP? AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was a Pentagon program established in 2007 to investigate UFO reports with potential national security relevance. It became public in 2017 after former director Luis Elizondo resigned and shared its existence with journalists.
What is the "Tic Tac" UFO incident? In November 2004, Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz encountered a smooth, white, oblong object off the coast of San Diego that displayed flight characteristics inconsistent with known aircraft. The incident, captured on infrared video, became central to the modern UAP disclosure movement.
What did David Grusch claim in his 2023 congressional testimony? Grusch testified under oath that the U.S. government was running a secret program to recover and reverse-engineer non-human craft, and that "biologics" of non-human origin had been recovered. AARO, the Pentagon's UAP office, has stated it found no verifiable evidence supporting these claims.
When did the Pentagon officially confirm UFO videos were real? In April 2020, the Department of Defense officially released three Navy videos, FLIR1, Gimbal, and GOFAST, confirming the footage was authentic and that the objects shown remained officially unidentified, the first time the government had done so since Project Blue Book closed in 1969.
What is AARO? The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is the Pentagon's official UAP investigation office, established in July 2022 under a congressional mandate to centralize all UFO-related reporting and investigation across the U.S. military.
Read the Full UAP Disclosure Investigation Series
- UAP Disclosure, Part 1: 70 Years of Government UFO Secrecy
- UAP Disclosure, Part 2: How Modern Disclosure Actually Began
- UAP Disclosure, Part 3: Inside the 2024–2026 Hearings
- UAP Disclosure, Part 4: What the Evidence Actually Shows
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