Lockheed Martin, a leading U.S. aerial defense contractor, might have had fragments from a crashed unidentified flying object the Pentagon did not permit former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to see.
"I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials," Reid, 81, who once took credit for securing $22 million annually for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), told The New Yorker.
"And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that. I don't know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me."
Lockheed Martin declined The New Yorker's request for comment.
Unidentified flying objects are no longer mere sci-fi conspiracy theories, as unidentified aerial phenomena reports are being prepared by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence.
Luis Elizondo once led the AATIP, including investigating the mysterious Nimitz encounter that found oval objects resembling a large Tic Tac moving in ways that defied modern aeronautics.
Elizondo considered UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) a severe national security risk and has been speaking out before a government report on UFOs is due to be released in June.
"Mr. Elizondo has spent his career working tirelessly in the shadows on sensitive national-security matters, including investigating UAPs as the head of AATIP," Reid wrote in a recent statement, the New York Post reported. "He performed these duties admirably."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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