The Pentagon has categorically denied a report claiming that a whistleblower has, for the first time, revealed the name of an ultra-secret program investigating UFOs.
The whistleblower has named an “active and highly secretive” unacknowledged special access program (USAP) being illegally withheld from US Congress, according to independent American journalist Michael Shellenberger, writing on his Public Substack blog.
‘Immaculate Constellation’ is allegedly the name of a program established by the Department of Defense in 2017 after The New York Times revealed the existence of an earlier UFO investigation effort, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
“The DoD has no record, present or historical, of any type of SAP called ‘Immaculate Constellation’,” Department of Defense spokeswoman Sue Gough said in a statement on Tuesday night after the article’s publication.
Sean Kirkpatrick, former director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told the NY Post’s Steven Greenstreet, “There’s no such thing. I had access to all of the unacknowledged SAPs and reviewed them with the SAPCO director.”
Shellenberger wrote on X, “I stand by my story.”
Described as a “parent” program consolidating UFO observations and data gathered by US military and intelligence platforms, ‘Immaculate Constellation’ is a “strategic intelligence program” that is part of the a “family of longstanding, highly-sensitive programs dealing with various aspects of the UAP ‘problem’,” the unnamed whistleblower told Shellenberger.
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The whistleblower, described as “a current or former US government official,” has allegedly written a report that claims the US executive branch “has been managing UAP/NHI [non-human intelligence] issues without Congressional knowledge, oversight, or authorisation for some time, quite possibly decades.”
The whistleblower’s report is said to describe a number of UFO encounters in detail that are kept in the database, including one incident in which an F-22 fighter jet was “intercepted and boxed in” by three to six orbs and forced to leave a mission area, and another where the crew of a Navy aircraft carrier saw an orange-red sphere with a surface “roiling like the sun” rapidly descend from high altitude to about 100-200 yards (90-180 metres) over the flight deck.
Shellenberger told NewsNation he had been in touch with the alleged whistleblower, but identifying details about their exact role and even gender were being withheld out of fear of reprisal.
“I don’t think that they’re faking it or that they’re lying about their fear,” he said. “This person discovered this material accidentally. This was not something they had expected to encounter.”
In her statement, Ms Gough denied that the Department of Defense had broken any laws by failing to inform Congress about any secret UFO program.
The US National Security Act of 1947 requires that secret military and intelligence operations, including special access programs (SAPs), be reported to relevant senior members of Congress.
“To date, the Department has found no evidence of the existence of any classified UAP program, including any SAP or controlled access program related to UAP, that had not been properly reported to Congress,” Ms Gough said.
She referred to the findings of AARO, the new public-facing UFO investigation agency established by the Pentagon in July 2022.
AARO’s first report, released in March, concluded there was “no evidence that any [US government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.”
“AARO assesses that the inaccurate claim that the [US government] is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part, the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence,” the report said.
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Those individuals include a number of high-profile ex-government whistleblowers who have gone public in recent years, including former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo, who first revealed the existence of the aerospace threat program in 2017, and David Grusch, a former intelligence officer who claimed in June 2023 that the US had retrieved crashed craft and bodies of non-human origin.
The Pentagon has denied their claims and neither men have provided much in the way of evidence such as images or video to back up their testimony, saying it is classified.
In 2020, however, the Pentagon officially released three short UFO videos captured by US Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015 off the east coast of the US, confirming the footage was real and depicted “unidentified” phenomena.
The so-called “Tic Tac” videos were the subject of late 2017’s bombshell headlines that drove renewed mainstream interest in the topic, a series of Congressional hearings and fresh UFO transparency legislation.