After two years of constant media buzz following the bombshell announcement in December of 2017 that the Pentagon had been investigating UFOs (or UAPs, as they prefer to call them now), the government dropped another bombshell yesterday. Or perhaps we should call it a “curveball,” as John Greenewald jr. of The Black Vault described it. According to a Pentagon spokeswoman I’ve also worked with in the past, neither the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) or its progenitor, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) were related to investigating UFOs.

Claiming they want to correct the record and clear up some inaccuracies, the Pentagon now says AATIP was not a UFO or UAP program.

“Neither AATIP nor AAWSAP were UAP related,” said Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough in an e-mail to The Black Vault. “The purpose of AATIP was to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapons system applications with future technology projections over the next 40 years, and to create a center of expertise on advanced aerospace technologies.”

Since 2017, details have been scarce. However, the DoD’s latest position that AATIP wasn’t a UFO program, seems to represent one of their most dramatic about-faces on the issue since the program was first revealed.

This caused quite the stir in the ufology community last night as you could probably imagine. Some were pointing out that the language used in Gough’s email seemed carefully worded and left some wiggle room for them. It was noted that the phrase “foreign advanced aerospace weapons system” is somewhat ambiguous because “foreign” simply means “not from the United States” in this context, and that could extend to the rest of the universe, not just “foreign countries” on Earth. But that would seem to be in direct contradiction to the opening statement saying that neither program was “UAP related.”

I’ll get to the possible implications in a moment, but let’s first assume that we should take Gough at her word and say that AATIP had nothing to do with UFOs. As far as I’m concerned, this means that either the Pentagon or the people at To The Stars Academy (most specifically Luis Elizondo) are lying. From the moment that TTSA came onto the scene, they claimed that Elizondo not only ran the AATIP program but that it definitely involved investigating UFOs. In fact, Elizondo said he left government service because of his frustration over the slow pace of those investigations.

However, Susan Gough is the same spokesperson who previously told us that Elizondo wasn’t even involved with AATIP, to say nothing of being in charge of it. According to Gough, Elizondo “had no assigned responsibilities” in AATIP and “was not assigned or detailed to the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

So basically, TTSA is saying that Elizondo ran the AATIP program and that it involved investigating UFOs. The Pentagon is saying he wasn’t even associated with the program and (at least now) it wasn’t investigating UFOs anyway. Both of these things can’t be simultaneously true.

Now let’s get to why the Pentagon would put out this statement. As far as I’m concerned, Elizondo gets the benefit of the doubt here because it’s the Pentagon that’s been changing their story. They’ve been telling reporters from across the spectrum for two years now that AATIP was created at the request of Harry Reid and that they were investigating unidentified aerial phenomena. Heck, they were the ones that came up with the UAP acronym because the term UFO was so loaded. The Navy came out and admitted that the objects in those three famous videos were UAPs because they had no clue what they were. And now we get a 180-degree reversal?

Two possibilities come to mind. The first is that they’ve grown uncomfortable with how close TTSA and others have been getting to uncovering whatever is responsible for all of this activity and they’ve decided to shut down the flow of information and clam up. That would mean that there is no “big D” Disclosure on the horizon from the government and we’re stuck figuring it out on our own.

The other, more disturbing possibility is that the Pentagon actually does know the source of those flying objects, and possibly that they actually are some deep, black bag project of ours, the Russians or the Chinese. That would make Gough’s statement true if the objects really aren’t “unidentified” after all. But it would also demonstrate that a large number of their previous statements were fabrications. I don’t put much stock in this second explanation, though, because it would require such a massive leap in technology that most scientists don’t think is currently within our grasp.

Unless an until the government offers up any further clarification, your guess is probably as good an anyone else’s. But something here simply doesn’t add up as things currently stand.