Immaculate Constellation: New Whistleblower Reveals Another Pentagon UFO Program

Journalist Michael Shellenberger broke the news of a new whistleblower who has provided a report to Congress on an illegally concealed Pentagon program called “Immaculate Constellation.” This is a parent program that is designed to “detect” and “quarantine” UFO data from the rest of the DoD. Could this lead to further disclosures during the upcoming Congressional UAP hearings?

Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported that a new whistleblower has revealed the existence of an “active and highly secretive” Pentagon UFO program call “Immaculate Constellation,” which is being illegally concealed from Congress.
We don’t know much about them, and that’s by design. Shellenberger is trying to protect them from reprisals. He only says the whistleblower is “a current or former US government official” and has provided a report to Congress about the program.
A second source, a former US intelligence community official, confirmed the authenticity and existence of Immaculate Constellation, stating: 'That program is run out of [the Office of the Secretary of Defense].'
Schellenberger was “warned that simply printing the name ‘Immaculate Constellation’ could trigger government surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of whoever publishes it. ‘They won’t comment on it, but talking about it will put you in the danger zone. They enforce the secrecy with a lot of vigor.’”
The whistleblower described the program as an unacknowledged Special Access Program, stating in the report that “the Executive Branch has been managing UAP/NHI issues without Congressional knowledge, oversight, or authorization for some time, quite possibly decades.”

Special Access Programs

Broadly speaking, the US has three levels of classification for information: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. In order to access a certain level of classified information, you need the appropriate clearance, and those escalate based on how much damage the information would cause to national security.
But sometimes they want to restrict access even further. The executive order that defined the classification system allows for Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that further restrict access to a small number of individuals and allow for additional security measures.
Going even further, there are two types of SAPs: acknowledged and unacknowledged. If you work for an acknowledged SAP, the details are classified, but the existence of the program itself isn’t. You can put it on your resume. The funding for the program is public, and can be seen in the budget. For example, the Secret Service’s Presidential travel support detail is technically an SAP.
By contrast, with an unacknowledged SAP, the very existence of the program is classified. Knowledge of the program is restricted to the access list, though they still have to submit reports to relevant Congressional committees. And because they’re unacknowledged, their funding is classified or even intentionally hidden in the budget. This type of program is so secret that we only learned about them from an article in defense publication Jane’s Defense back in 2000.
War Zone: “When a SAP is designated as ‘unacknowledged,’ their mere existence may be denied to everyone but a spare few who aren’t a part of the program.”
Jane’s: “Confronted with the unauthorized use of a program name or specific question, an ‘accessed’ individual may deny all knowledge of a program — as he should, because its existence is a core secret, and a mere ‘no comment’ is tantamount to confirmation. The questioner — who may not be aware that an accessed individual must respond with a denial — will believe that denial and spread it further.”
It goes further. The Secretary of Defense has the authority to create waived SAPs, which are a subset of unacknowledged SAPs that are even exempt from the Congressional reporting requirements. The only people that have to be told about waived SAPs are the gang of eight.
Eight members of Congress who are briefed on classified intelligence. It’s the leaders of both parties from the Senate and House, and the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees.
Not only that, but the gang of eight briefings are often only conducted orally, to avoid any paper trails or leaks.

The Database

The whistleblower discovered the program by accident after stumbling across a database containing UAP information: military witness reports, high-quality images and video, and sensor data.
“The verifiable chain of custody for UAP Imagery Intelligence collected by US military assets ensures a high level of confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the data gathered.”
“The multitude of wavelengths collected by these sensors [...] have captured UAP characteristics that are difficult or impossible to observe with the human eye alone. Subtle atmospheric effects associated with UAPs are also visible through the sensors employed by the US military and intelligence agencies.”

Program Goals

“‘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).”
“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.”
Apparently this program is responsible for ‘detecting’ and ‘quarantining’ UAP data from the rest of the DoD.
“The report concludes that ‘the existence of Immaculate Constellation demonstrates the extant capability to detect, quarantine, and transfer UAP and ARV [Alien Reproduction Vehicle] collection incidents before they are observed and circulated within the Military Intelligence Enterprise, thus serving as a means of enforcing internal information security.”

Reactions

The Pentagon denied the report, saying “The Department of Defense has no record, present or historical, of any type of SAP called ‘IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION.’ 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.”
This might be a simple he-said-she-said situation, except there’s one little detail that lends credibility. Interestingly, the Google search trends for the phrase “immaculate constellation” shows effectively zero searches before this article dropped, with one notable exception: June 2023, which is when David Grusch went public. The bulk of the searches came from Dayton Ohio, which happens to be where Wright Patterson AFB is located.
Rogue UAP Insider tweeted “Pay attention to the inclusion of ‘database.’ It would be a shame if Reps. Mace, Burchett, and Moskowitz were to subpoena such a thing, and even if denied based on executive privilege, it would prove that it exists.”
Journalist Saagar Enjeti: “The point is that this report, and others like it from Grusch, are giving Congress the ability to search for very specific types of things through records requests by having names and other details. The historical analogy I would use is, the only reason that we ever learned about many of the shenanigans that the CIA and the FBI were up to under the Church Committee was because some people broke into a FBI facility and stole these documents. From them, we had the names from these CIA programs, like what happened with the Black Panthers, like the LSD experiments, and thus the Church Committee and members of the press were able to use FOIA to actually go and to look for what all that was. If that had not happened, there would be no church committee, and there's no revelations about what happened. That's why the name of this program matters a lot.”

Resources

Shellenberger: Pentagon Is Illegally Hiding Secret UFO Program From Congress, Whistleblowers Allege
Coulthart: Pentagon's UAP program 'Immaculate Constellation' revealed
Daily Mail: Pentagon's secret UFO data retrieval program 'Immaculate Constellation' revealed for first time in new whistleblower report
News.com.au: Pentagon denies report claiming to reveal name of top-secret UFO program ‘for the first time’
Breaking Points: UFO Whistleblower Reveals 'Immaculate Constellation' Retrieval Program
McMillan: Could the Government Really Hide a Secret UFO Program?
CuriousNHI: Immaculate Constellation search history
Michels: Immaculate Constellation searches from Dayton OH
UAP Juan: The key is the clear chain of custody in military captured footage
RogueUAP: It would be a shame if Congress subpoenaed the database
CDSE: Special Access Program Security Refresher Student Guide
War Zone: Special Access Programs And The Pentagon’s Ecosystem Of Secrecy
Jane’s International Defense Review: In Search of the Pentagon’s Billion Dollar Hidden Budgets

Episode 56, posted on October 13, 2024