Viewers are flocking to the “60 Minutes” YouTube channel after the investigative program’s exposé on UAPs — aka “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UFOs.
Bill Whitaker of CBS News took viewers on a deep dive over the weekend into the issue with Lue Elizondo, former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) member, along with ex-Navy pilots who saw the security threats up close and personal.
“Look, Bill, I’m not, I’m not telling you that, that it doesn’t sound wacky,” Mr. Elizondo said of his experiences analyzing UAPs for the Pentagon. “What I’m telling you — it’s real. The question is, what is it? What are its intentions? What are its capabilities?”
Mr. Elizondo told the reporter that what he saw is jaw-dropping.
“Imagine a technology that can do 6-to-700 g-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space,” he said. “And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. That’s precisely what we’re seeing.”
Former Navy Lt. Ryan Graves concurred.
“I am worried, frankly,” the military-pilot veteran said Sunday. “You know, if these were tactical jets from another country that were hangin’ out up there, it would be a massive issue. But because it looks slightly different, we’re not willing to actually look at the problem in the face. We’re happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there, watching us every day.”
“I never wanted to be on national TV, no offense,” added Lt. Alex Dietrich of a 2004 incident with a UAP.
“I feel a responsibility to share what I can. And it is unclassified,” he told CBS. “I think that over beers, we’ve sort of said, ’Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don’t know that I would have come back and said anything,’ because it sounds so crazy when I say it.”
AATIP was defunded in 2012, but declassification efforts by Mr. Elizondo and a 2017 leak to The New York Times by Christopher Mellon — former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence — allowed the issue to breakthrough into the mainstream media.
“We knew and understood that you had to go to the public, get the public interested to get Congress interested, to then circle back to the Defense Department and get them to start taking a look at it,” Mr. Mellon said.
The “60 Minutes” piece has already been viewed over 1 million times on YouTube in less than 24 hours.
“This past August the Pentagon resurrected AATIP, it’s now called the UAP task force; service members now are encouraged to report strange encounters,” Mr. Whitaker said. “The Senate wants answers.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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