Bigelow, just turning 50 at the time, had made enough money as a commercial developer, opening budget hotels across the Southwest, that he could finally indulge a fascination with UFOs that dated back years, to a close encounter his grandparents had experienced and told him about when he was three years old. He dubbed the group, somewhat grandly, the National Institute for Discovery Science.
NIDS, as it took shape in those Las Vegas meetings, was mainly interested in two topics: UFOs and consciousness after death. Its members were experts who had gotten used to having their interests disrespected by their peers. The group’s co-founder was John Alexander, a retired Army officer who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and had published books and articles on various aspects of ufology and the paranormal. Another was Hal Puthoff, an engineer and self-described parapsychologist who, while at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and 1980s, had carried out top-secret experiments for the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency on “remote viewing,” or using the human mind to sense objects or events far away. “One of the professors at Stanford thought that was all nonsense,” he said. “He wouldn’t let his kids play with my kids because of what I was doing.”
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| Bigelow Aerospace founder Robert Bigelow listens to questions from members of the media during a news conference in Las Vegas. |
Collectively, the group, which also attracted former astronauts Ed Mitchell, an avowed ufologist, and Harrison Schmitt, who had also served as a U.S. senator from New Mexico a decade earlier, didn’t fret too much about the reputational risks of talking openly about whether the government had captured an alien or retrieved a crashed spacecraft. For them, that was the point of being there.
There was one person at those meetings, however, who did have something to lose by attending: Harry Reid, then serving his second term as a U.S. senator from Nevada.
Reid had been introduced to Bigelow by a well-known Nevada TV journalist named George Knapp, who had written extensively on the subject of UFOs over the years and had recently secured some Russian government documents purporting to shed light on the topic. Knapp knew from covering Reid’s career that the senator had a curiosity about the subject. Reid accepted Bigelow’s invitation, but not before making clear to Knapp that his participation must remain secret. Knapp honored that agreement for the past quarter-century until Reid recounted his odyssey in detail over a series of interviews with me in recent months.
“This guy named Bigelow is doing an event at his conference room and has been inviting a bunch of people to talk about these unidentified flying objects,” Reid told me in a recent interview. “He had some people with some weird ideas. Not scientific. A few oddballs. I listened to some of the presentations. That’s how I got started.”
In its way, Reid’s decision to fraternize with the group was as professionally reckless as anything that might have been happening outside on the Vegas Strip. Reid, then 55, had aspirations to lead the Democratic Party. The stuff being discussed around him was pop-culture shorthand for pure nuttiness.
“I had my staff, I had lots of people who said: ‘You are going to get yourself in trouble, stay the hell away from that,’” Reid told me. “A lot of people said it would ruin my career.”
Over the next few years, Reid told me, he went to multiple such meetings. As Bigelow, Alexander and the others were publishing obscure journal articles and compiling a database of UFO sightings, the most influential member of the group quietly broached the topic with some of his colleagues in Washington, including former astronaut and senator John Glenn. Reid ultimately enlisted the support of a handful of powerful committee chairs, including Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, to fund hush-hush UFO research inside the Defense Department. The existence of that program was revealed publicly by POLITICO and the New York Times in mid-December 2017. One of the program’s main beneficiaries was an aerospace company owned by none other than Robert Bigelow.
Next month, the director of national intelligence, acting at the behest of Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, is scheduled to release a report that collects from across the government all relevant material on what the officials now call “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Regardless of what ultimately emerges in this report—whether it’s a trove of blockbuster reveals or a disappointing dud—the mere prospect has catalyzed a wave of mainstream coverage of government UFO research, from the New Yorker to “60 Minutes.” A bewildering and still highly controversial subject has achieved a surprising level of public respectability as a national security concern.
Reid had retired by the time his secret role in the program was revealed. But his willingness to talk openly now about the subject speaks to a profound change in the calculus of political and reputational risk. Far from a blot on his career, Reid sees it as a line to highlight on his legislative resume and he has no regrets about Bigelow benefiting from the program.
“I think that I have opened the door to people not being afraid to talk about it,” Reid now says. “I know that when I first got involved in this, people in the military were afraid to mention it for fear of it hurting their promotions. But now the Pentagon has told them they should report all these things that they see that are unusual. So we made a tremendous amount of progress.”
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| Excerpts from a 2009 letter from then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to the Deputy Secretary of Defense regarding the AAITP program |
In just the three years since the existence of the Pentagon UFO office was made public, the federal government has become increasingly less cagey about a subject that was mocked as absurd and feared as taboo; YouTube is now filled with cockpit videos from military pilots, some verified by the Pentagon, of strange encounters with objects that seem to defy known laws of aerodynamics. Just this month a video taken by the USS Omaha off the California coast in 2019 shows an identified spherical aircraft hovering over the water, before disappearing beneath the waves. Even Barack Obama has spoken recently about encounters “we can’t explain.”
The quarter-century saga stretching from Harry Reid’s first attendance at one of Bigelow’s NIDS meetings to the forthcoming release of once-secret documents offers a modern case study in how marginalized ideas can make their way into the mainstream. Last summer, after a series of classified briefings for Congress, including Navy pilots giving direct testimony, the Pentagon announced it was creating the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force “to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs.” In a recent public forum, the Navy’s top officer said the military now has a “well-established process in place...to collect that data and to get it to a separate repository for analysis.” The Pentagon’s internal watchdog announced this month that it is launching its own evaluation “to determine the extent to which the DoD has taken actions regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).”
Other public and private entities are embracing a subject that once would have been fatal to their institutional credibility. “What if invisible aliens exist among us, already here but unseen by human eyes?” asks a recent blog post from Northrop Grumman, one of the Pentagon's largest contractors and a bastion of corporate orthodoxy. “Do aliens exist?” asks another entry. “Scientists wonder if extraterrestrial life has visited Earth.” It can sound like a cheesy trailer for a History Channel documentary, except the scientists they’re referring to are working at some of the nation’s most elite schools.
An MIT researcher, Lex Fridman, who specializes in machine learning, commonly delves into the UFO phenomenon on his popular podcast. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb says he’s confident aliens have flown by Earth. Even Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in America, asked in a recent cover story about UFOs: “Shouldn’t we as scientists choose to investigate and curb the speculation around them?” It answered its own question: “Interdisciplinary teams of scientists should study them.”
The mindset shift inside Congress, in many ways, is the most consequential because of its ability to back up its public discussion with legal mandates and taxpayer dollars. One needn’t believe UFOs are real to recognize that the money that might flow from the Hill very much is.
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| Sen. Marco Rubio listens during a Senate Intelligence Committee nomination hearing on May 5, 2020 |
Rubio, who is widely expected to make a presidential run in 2024, couches his interest in national security terms. “Maybe it’s got a logical explanation,” he recently said. “People want to know, I want to know what it is...There’s stuff flying over the top of our military installations. They don't know who is flying it. They don’t even know what it is. So that’s a problem. We need to find out if we can.”
Perhaps the clearest sign yet that UFOs have entered the political bloodstream for good was the establishment last week of the first-ever political action committee dedicated to “educating the American public and financially supporting politicians who advocate for the full disclosure of information about unidentified flying objects.”
Who really got us here? The story of how this happened features a network of unlikely characters that grew from its original nucleus to include key political insiders, journalists, a banking dynasty heir, a former terrorist interrogator, and even a California rock star, interacting for years in various combinations until they coalesced in a way that created a mutually reinforcing cycle of media coverage and government action. No one is more surprised by what they have accomplished than they are.
If Robert Bigelow and Harry Reid were the publicity-shy backstage benefactors of modern ufology, Tom DeLonge would be its frontman.
DeLonge, now 45, was a founding member of the pop-punk band Blink-182, which had a string of earworm hits in the ’90s and early 2000s. DeLonge had been fixated on UFOs since his youth. But it wasn’t until around 2015 when he left the band that he decided to do something about it. He wanted to force the government to disclose what it knew and he began recruiting a team he felt he needed to do it.
It didn’t take long for DeLonge to emerge as a public figure in ufology circles. In 2016, Wikileaks got hold of emails that showed him communicating with former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, a confidante of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In one email from 2015, DeLonge offered to introduce Podesta, the ultimate Washington insider, to a pair of “A-Level officials” to discuss “our sensitive topic.”
Not long ago, I visited DeLonge at his office in a renovated garage a few blocks from the beach in the Encinitas neighborhood of San Diego. The space was cluttered with guitars and other music memorabilia. But at least half of the decor was devoted to his other obsession. “It’s so gnarly,” said DeLonge, who still sounds like the California skateboarder of his youth. “There’s more to all this. I personally learned something where I didn’t sleep for three nights.”
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| Tom DeLonge, a founding member of the punk rock band Blink-182, has been fixated on UFOs since his youth. |
Hanging on DeLonge’s wall was what might be considered the medals he’s collected in his struggle: a display case filled with dozens of commemorative coins from his meetings with generals, aerospace contractors, and secret government agencies. They trace his visits to the CIA, to the U.S. Navy, to the “advanced development programs” division at Lockheed Martin’s famously secretive “Skunk Works” in Southern California, where some of the world’s most advanced spy planes were designed.
Something else stuck out to me: a framed photo of DeLonge posing with two men, one of whom was Bob Bigelow. The photo was taken in late 2017, shortly after DeLonge established his company, To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a hybrid research and entertainment entity that DeLonge has used to advance his UFO agenda.
“I have a lot of respect for him,” DeLonge told me of his meeting with Bigelow at the Las Vegas headquarters of Bigelow Aerospace, the company he founded in 1999, which has worked for NASA to design living compartments for the Space Station. “He’s a renegade. I love what he’s done. I think he’s just been a tremendous asset in this field of study. We talked a lot about TTSA and what our plans were.”
To the Stars, Academy has since teamed up with the Department of Defense to study “exotic” metals and “beamed energy propulsion.” It has also been lobbying for the new government-wide study on UAPs. But a significant part of To the Stars consists of commercial ventures: lines of movies, books, and video games with paranormal and UFO themes. It is, in effect, an engineered feedback loop between his apparently serious interest in the unknown, and a line of products that benefits from public interest in the mystery. This overt crossing of wires, not to mention his more sensational public claims, has led some skeptics to dismiss him as unserious. Even some of DeLonge’s supporters question whether the profit-driven aspects of TTSA have damaged his efforts to bring mainstream credibility to the issue.
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