Immaculate Constellation - My Analysis

 

Last night, on my normal UFO segment on Coast-to-Coast AM, I mentioned something called Immaculate Constellation, which, according to a whistleblower, who is never identified, is a top-secret archive of UFO, well, UAP images. According to the whistleblower, the military and intelligence community are operating a database of videos and images taken from "infrared (IR), forward-looking infrared (FLIR), full motion video (FMV), and still photography of UAPs.

The whistleblower alleged that the Department of Defense created Immaculate Constellation under what's known as an Unacknowledged Special Access Program (USAP) in 2017 after The New York Times reported on an informal Pentagon UAP program known as AATIP.

Reporter Michael Shellenberger of Public said on "Joe Rogan Experience" that in the whistleblower's report, the Pentagon is "illegally" hiding information about this program from Congress.

The whistleblower said that simply printing the name "Immaculate Constellation" could trigger government surveillance of whoever publishes the name using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as probable cause. They won't comment on it, but talking about it will put you in the danger zone. I guess that means I am now in the “Danger Zone,” which sounds like a good name for a podcast or a rock band. BTW: Agents, if you come for me, please don’t crash through the door. I’ll happily open it for you.

DoD spokeswoman Sue Gough, who has been called on many times as UFO and UAP questions are asked, denied on Wednesday, any knowledge of a special access program known as Immaculate Constellation. I’m not sure that this is relevant because if it was a special access program which would also suggest a need to know and she might not have been in the loop. Would a spokeswoman, or spokesman for that matter, be read into every highly classified program? If they are not then they have plausible deniability, meaning that she can say such things as having no knowledge of a program and be telling the truth. Doesn’t mean the program doesn’t exist, only that she doesn’t know about it.

I am reminded that when the Moon Dust was inadvertently revealed in 1986, the Air Force denied that such a program existed. When shown official documents with the name Moon Dust on them, a higher-ranking Air Force officer said Moon Dust did exist but had not been used. Other documents refuted that claim as well. For more precise information on this see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2024/03/aaro-and-beginning-of-moon-dust.html

The point is that the first officer, Lieutenant Colonel John E. Madison, of the Congressional Inquiry Division, Office of Liaison, wrote, “There is no agency, nor has there ever been, at Fort Belvoir, Viriginia, which would deal with UFOs or have any information about the incident in Roswell. In addition, there is no Project Moon Dust or Operation Blue Fly. Those missions have never existed.”

Most of what Madison wrote was the truth. There may well not have been any agency at Fort Belvoir that dealt with UFOs or Roswell, which, course, doesn’t mean that such agencies might not exist at other installations. And he is accurate in saying there is no Project Moon Dust because Moon Dust was the code words dealing with UFO material.

So, Madison wasn’t lying, he just didn’t have access to all the information he needed to properly answer the questions put to him. However, when the documents were presented and properly vetted, meaning the source of the documents was legitimate, Colonel George M. Mattingley, Jr., wrote, “…Upon further review of the case (which was aided by the several attachments to Mr. Stone’s letter), we wish to amend the statements contained in the previous response…”

Cliff Stone

The point is that even people at the highest levels aren’t read into all programs and a denial by Gough that she had no knowledge of such a program doesn’t mean there is no such program.

The real problem here is that Shellenberger has not identified his source. Years ago, decades really, we were presented with documents suggesting a cover up of the Roswell UFO crash. These papers, known as MJ-12, appeared at the home of a UFO researcher. Well, photographic film arrived and when developed, revealed the existence of a special group known as MJ-12 to exploit and direct the recovery of the Roswell UFO.

The trouble with these documents was that we didn’t know who had sent them. We didn’t know where they originated. Finally, we didn’t have the originals which could have been tested. What good would it do to test the paper on which they were printed? We all know that it was photographic paper.

Investigation into the information provided by the MJ-12 documents suggested they had been created in 1984 rather than 1952 as alleged on the documents. In 1984, there was a believe that the Del Rio UFO crash, which in the MJ-12 documents, is mentioned as El Indio-Guerrero crash. But there is no evidence and the lone witness changed so much about it over the years, that it is clear that it was invented. You can read one analysis of the case here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/08/absense-of-evidence.html

The point is that originally the MJ-12 documents caused a stir not only in the UFO community but among the news media and those interested in UFOs. Investigation revealed the flaws and the major flaw was we didn’t know the original source. Without that, we were left with an interesting aside into the possibility of a cover up. Eventually, nearly everyone agreed that the documents were a hoax and that was underscored by the lack of the original source.

That’s where we are with Immaculate Constellation. We have no source and we don’t even have copies of documents suggesting there is something to the claims. At least, MJ-12 had documents, which led to the revelation that it was a hoax. For an in depth analysis see Case MJ-12: Updated.

I’ll note here that for years Stan Friedman held up several documents that related to UFOs that were nearly all redacted. There were only one or two words on a page that could be read. This was proof of the cover up. However, we now have the unredacted versions of those documents and realize that the missing information had nothing to do with UFOs but with intelligence collection methods in certain parts of the world. That information would have been of value to our competitors in the world and was rightly redacted. This merely shows that sometimes, we over react to government secrecy.

We can look to whistleblower David Grusch. He talked of high-level, important people who told him about UFO crashes, but he supplied no names. I can deduce some of those names and while they had once held important posts in the government or were respected scientists, that didn’t say anything about Grusch’s sources other than we have the names. Didn’t prove what they had told Grush, or that Grush overheard, was accurate information, only that they might have said it.

I point all this out because we now have more information about an important government program hidden from the public which, supposedly hides information about UFOs or rather UAP. But we have no way of vetting the information. We have no way of finding corroboration. We just must believe the stories told by this unidentified source. And I ask, “Why?”

Here's something else that hasn’t been considered and that is that this collection of UFO images might not have a thing to do with alien visitation, but is, instead, images of terrestrial craft that have been flying around various locations in the US. It might be that the images are held in secrecy because revelation of them might provide information of intelligence value to our competitors. In other word, national security might have raised its ugly head.

I could go on about other great stories circulating or circulated in the UFO field that intrigued and excited people inside and outside the UFO community that blew up when we finally were able to get to the sources.

Right now, I can’t verify that Immaculate Constellation exists, but then I can’t reject the tale either because the evidence to do that doesn’t yet exist. I can only caution against drawing any concrete conclusions now because we simply don’t have enough information to just either way to justify any conclusion.

David Grusch, UFO Crashes and Analysis (Updated June 12, 2023) (Updated June 13, 2023)

While Canada burns down and it seems that the leaders and former leaders of this country are accused, and in some cases indited, for breaking various federal laws, there are those more interested in crashed UFOs, or as is becoming the more correct term, UAPs. David Charles Grusch, whose credentials have been cited by many as impressive, claimed that the US Government has, in its possession, recovered alien spacecraft and the bodies of the alien crew. Overlooked here is the fact that he also said that he could produce no documents or pictures because of national security. I’ll concede that if he had pictures of aliens or alien spacecraft, that would be a national security issue.

Even without naming names and without the documentation, Grusch had been greeted with enthusiasm rather than skepticism by most of the mainstream media. Few worried about the lack of verifiable sources and fewer still mentioned it. Now, Michael Shellenberger issued his own statement saying that he knew of, at least, a dozen downed alien craft and that every five years we get one or two recovered for one reason and another. An unnamed source supposedly shared this information with AARO but AARO’s response suggests they don’t have access to that information.

Sean Kirpatrick at the Senate Hearing. He would say that he has seen no evidence
of alien material .

Of course, the Pentagon released a statement. Susan Gough told Fox News, “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

That is similar to the statements made after the NASA meeting held on June 7. Several of the participants, when addressing this particular claim, said that they had no knowledge or had seen nothing to suggest that the government or the military had any sort of alien material or recovered craft.

After the meeting, Scott Kelly said, "I want to emphasize this loud and proud.
There is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life
associated with unidentified objects."

And, of course, comes the part that I love. More than one reporter trotted out the stale line about the Roswell UFO crash, claiming it was a “test balloon from Project Mogul.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to those reporters that the Mogul explanation is just another in a long line of lies about the Roswell UFO case. According to the documentation, published by the Air Force, but overlooked by the media, is that the culprit in this, Mogul Flight No. 4, was cancelled. It did not fly and neither does this explanation.

But that does take us to Roswell, where a great deal of this all started. Don Schmitt and I have interviewed many high-ranking individuals about crashed UFOs and some of them have gone on the record. One of the first was Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who, in 1947, was the Chief of Staff of the Eighth Air Force with headquarters at Fort Worth Army Air Field, later Carswell Air Force Base.

Interviewed in 1991, on tape, DuBose mentioned that the debris displayed in General Ramey’s office was not the material recovered outside of Roswell. Skeptics have pointed at the pictures of that debris as evidence for the Mogul explanation. In one of the pictures, we see Thomas DuBose proving that he was there, in the office, when the debris was displayed and identified as the material found outside of Roswell. He explained that there had been a switch, and that this was not the material that had been brought from Roswell. He said, “…actually it was a cover story, the balloon part of it for the remnants were taken from this location and Al Clark took it to Washington… That part of it was a cover story that we were to give to the public and the news and that was it.”

Since the material displayed in Ramey’s office is clearly the remains of a weather balloon and a rawin radar reflector, and since General DuBose said, on video tape, that it was not the debris brought from Roswell, it seems that Mogul is removed as an answer.

General Roger Ramey (left) and Colonel Thomas
DuBose (right) with the alleged Roswell debris.
DuBose would say that this is not the material
brought from Roswell.

Also, in the Army Air Forces in July 1947, was Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Exon, later a brigadier general. He was stationed at Wright Field which would eventually evolve into the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where he would later serve as the base commander. Exon acknowledged, more than once, that unusual material had arrived at Wright-Patterson. He told Don and me, on audio tape, “We heard the material was coming to Wright Field… It was brought into our material evaluation labs. I don’t know how it arrived but the boys who tested it said it was very unusual… [Some of it] could be easily ripped or changed… there were parts of it that were very thin and awfully strong and couldn’t be dented with very heavy hammers… It was flexible to a degree and some of it was flimsy and was tougher than hell and almost like foil but strong. It had them pretty puzzled.”

Exon also said, on tape, “The metal and material was unknown to anyone I talked to. Whatever they found, I never heard what the results were. A couple of guys thought it might be Russian, but the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.”

And to quote just one more officer who was stationed at Roswell in 1947, Major (later colonel) Edwin Easley told me that it was something from space. Oh, not in so many words. During one of the interviews, I had asked him if we were following the right path.

He asked, “What do you mean?”

I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.”

He said, “Let me put it this way, it’s not the wrong path.”

So, the officer in charge of the base security and who served as the Provost Marshal, and later retired as a colonel, said, basically, what was found was from outer space. He was in charge of security at the crash site and for the material, and the bodies, when they were brought to the base.

Here are three officers, two generals and one colonel who were suggesting that Roswell was a cover up and that we had something from space. Project Mogul doesn’t figure into it and offers no real counter to the statements of these men, or a few dozen others who were involved. And even though we used their names and provided copies of the tapes to other interested parties, the story didn’t get all that much traction at the time. Instead, we were attacked as charlatans who believed everything we were told and who cherry-picked the data to make our case.

As an interesting aside, Don and I met with a reporter at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1990s. We met her in a hallway for the interview. She was an intern who told us that her editors didn’t believe in UFOs and therefore weren’t overly interested in the testimony that we had recovered, even though we could name names, provide contact information, and even had limited documentation. The sophisticated reporters and editors were uninterested unless it was to prove they were all too sophisticated to believe in UFOs.

Here today, we are bombarded with stories about crashed UFOs and alien pilots, and the mainstream media seems to be bending over backwards to tell these tales without critical comment. What’s the difference? We could name names and they do not.

David Charles Grusch has said that he talked to several people, respectable people, highly placed people who would be in the jobs to know, that there had been several UFO crashes and that dead alien pilots had been found. He provided no names and said that he wasn’t allowed to provide any documentation. He just could tell us what he had heard.

We are told about his credentials which are impressive, but that doesn’t translate into evidence. It is second-hand testimony without any specifics. Did anyone notice that. He said there were multiple UFO crashes but didn’t tell us anything about them. Isn’t that interesting. The mainstream media has provided Grusch with a platform but hasn’t managed to get any of those specifics.

However, there is another player. Michael Shellenberger is on stage now. He claims that he knew there were twelve alien craft in the possession of the US government. He dodged the questions about the recovery of an alien flight crew. He mentioned that he had talked to multiple sources. He said they were high-ranking military officials, intelligence officers and civilian contractors who verified what Grusch had said. But here, again, he provided no names, no documents but only said that these unidentified people were reliable.

One of the reporters actually said that it was intriguing that there were things that he had left out of the story. I suppose that this means that Don and I should have left things out of the information that we published three decades ago. Maybe they would have listened to us then and followed up on the Roswell case while the witnesses, the dozens of witnesses, were still alive to tell their stories.

Shellenberger did mention a crash around the testing site for the atomic weapons. This might be a reference to Roswell, though it is more likely a reference to the 1945 San Antonio, New Mexico, crash referred to by Jacques Vallee. If it is the Trinity tale, that undercuts the reliability of what Shellenberger has to say because the Trinity story is a hoax.

That we have no information about any specific crashes and given that we have no idea who all these reliable sources are, I worry about the validity of the information. There is another point to be made here.

Several years ago, I communicated with a former Air Force Officer who said that in the early 1950s, he had been assigned to an Air Force communications center. He told me that he had seen classified documents pass through the center that mentioned a UFO crash in Scandinavia. He told me he had seen the documents personally and knew that it was true. He didn’t have copies of the messages because they were, at the time, classified, so he wasn’t allowed to keep them.

The Spitzbergen message sent through the Air Force communications
channels. It shows the officer was accurate in claiming he had
seen a classified message, but it was not the whole story.

I believe him, and if the documents referred to a real incident, that would be even more impressive. However, I do have copies of those documents, and they were released at the same time the Project Blue Book files were declassified. The document outlined the information about the Spitzbergen UFO crash in 1952. The best information currently available is that the story is a hoax, and the original newspaper cited as the source does not exist. It is just another of those stories that dot the UFO landscape.

What this demonstrates is that there are sources out there who can say, without lying, that they had seen official documents about crashed UFOs. The problem is those documents are often among the first to cite the information and it is in later documents that the truth is learned. That officer I communicated with told the truth. He just didn’t know the outcome. I’m not sure that once the hoax was uncovered, that another message, or group of messages would have passed through that communications center. If they did, the officer hadn’t seen them.

There is one other fact that I have just learned about. On Monday, June 12, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Grusch is going to give the last presentation. This is something that is hosted by Dr. Steven Greer, whose CSETI organization once had a list of over 300 UFO crashes. I have been unable to find that list today, though it was once easily available on the Internet.

UPDATE (June 12, 2023) : Here is something that I just learned that has some relevance to the story: STATEMENT FROM DAVID GRUSCH - “I took my job very seriously, and early on, I allowed various individuals that alleged they had information to speak their truth as part of my evaluation process. I have not been mentored by anyone, and my public disclosure has been done independently under my own free will. I emphatically request that Steven Greer cease using my name to promote his personal agenda”

Update 2: (June 13, 2023): David Charles Grusch did not make a presentation at the Greer Press Conference on June 12. Douglas Dean Johnson tells me that he, Johnson, spoke with Grusch colleagues who confirmed that Grusch will not have an association with Greer. This should end the speculation that Grusch will appear on any venue that is associated with Greer. I will note, however, that the information published here about Greer is relevant to the discussion because of the talk of alien spacecraft crashes. And yes, I liked that last little bit of alliteration.)

Back on May 9, 2001, Greer held another event at the National Press Club. Interestingly, he excluded members of the Fund for UFO Research, though I don’t know what the rational for that might have been. However, Greer had made many startling claims then such as, “We have learned from three separate, corroborating sources that since the early 1990s, at least two extraterrestrial spacecraft have been targeted and destroyed by experimental space-based weapon systems.”

Dr. Steven Greer at the National Press
Club in 2013.

One of the claims that caught my attention was, “Multiple new independently corroborating witnesses told us of the crash and retrieval of ET spacecraft in 1947 in New Mexico and in 1948 in Kingman, Arizona.”

Clearly, the first reference is to Roswell but I’m unsure about the second. There has been a report, circulated for years, of a crash near Kingman, but that was in 1953, not 1948, and it is a hoax.

Here’s the point of this brief interlude. Greer is holding another such press conference, and as I say, it will feature Grusch, telling his stories. I had wondered about Grusch’s sudden appearance on the UFO scene with tales of UFO crashes and hidden information. This is, of course, the same drumbeat that Greer has been making for decades. Any association with Greer would raise red flags but in this case it seems to be a false flag. As noted, Grusch will have no association with Greer. (Added June 13, 2023)

Don’t get me wrong, I believe Grusch is telling the truth as he knows it, but without additional information, which we never seem to get, you have to wonder about the validity of it. Without sources, or with others who have been running in these same Ufological circles for years providing some sort of validation for Grusch, you must be skeptical. Had Grusch added just a bit more information, such as location of the crash sites, or the names of some of the witnesses, his revelations would, at least to my way of thinking, have been more plausible. But without that information we are at the same place we were thirty years ago.

Here’s where we are on this. We have no new information, just new faces. We have no documentation, photographs or names of the sources. We are just supposed to believe these anonymous sources but if the last few years have taught us anything, anonymous sources are nearly useless. There is no way to vet them or their information, and often times they are speaking of rumor rather than fact.

The few names we do have are those who have worked with and have known Grusch for years. They validate his character but not necessarily his information, which is a subtle but important point. And one of the names offered, Jonathan Grey, we are told is a pseudonym, which, again, allows for no vetting and does nothing to validate the information.

To my way of thinking, if just one of these new claims could be validated, it would be a great boost to my reporting, and the reporting of Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, and so many others. But while we named names and sources for those who wished to check our work, that hasn’t happened here. So, until we get some better information, I’ll be without a final opinion. I fear this will end up just like so many other attempts to bring this all to a conclusion. We’ll be left with questions but with no one to supply the proper and verifiable answers.