Immaculate Constellation: Not a New Marian Dogma, But a Top Secret UFO Retrieval Program
They're Out There, And We're Trying to Find Them (On the DL)
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Here at Black Sheep, we’re going to cover some topics that are a bit…fringe. Foremost among these is the growing pile of evidence for the existence of UAPs — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly known as UFOs. Since this is the first time I’m writing about this here, I’ll give a short introduction before getting into Immaculate Constellation.
I think there are two emerging issues — likely interrelated to a degree — the epoch-changing impact of which have not yet been widely grasped. These will both have a profound impact on the future of humanity.
The first — Artificial Intelligence — is obvious. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all seen what it can do. In addition to massive leaps in what large language models like ChatGPT and Grok and Claude can do, we’ve watched AI image generation from text prompts become photorealistic in under two years; AI video is now catching up to that, with digital avatars like the ones created by HeyGen 3.0 looking nearly indistinguishable from real people:
This technology will have a profound impact on the way we work, interact, create, and relate to the increasingly ubiquitous technology at the heart of modern life. I think this may represent the single largest self-created turning point in our history as a species. It will have an impact comparable to the splitting of the atom and the creation of the internet, combined.
The second issue that threatens massive disruption is one that has caught far less of the public’s attention than AI: the increasing disclosure from government whistleblowers about the presence of Non-Human Intelligence on earth, its engagement and interaction with humanity, and the technological artifacts it is leaving behind. No longer referred to as UFOs due to stigma and broadened categorization of the phenomenon, the new term, “UAP,” covers a broad range of events and technological craft in the air, on the earth, and under water, that conventional physics as we understand it cannot explain. The number of sightings and encounters is so numerous that it is impossible to dismiss. Richard Geldreich, a software developer and UAP researcher, is compiling a massive, searchable historical database and timeline of news clippings and reports about UAP sightings going back to the 1940s, and it has thousands of records. In a talk given last summer, Geldrich said:
Until I started going into it...I still didn't believe it was real. And then I started to research the history, and I'm like, wow, there's a lot of history here. I'm...I, after this point, there's something going on. There is no doubt. I, no one could...I'm gonna say this: No one could go through this database and say nothing is happening because there is criminal activity in this data, in, in these raw chronologies. So at the minimum, something happened that hurt people and possibly killed...well, there's human mutilation cases, possibly hurt people and killed them. So it's, it's unethical to ignore this data in my opinion. It's disturbing.
Something is going on, and we do not understand it.
I recognize that to the uninitiated or those operating within certain religious frameworks, this probably seems far-fetched. But I’ve been closely following the developments on this topic for the past seven years, and I can tell you that if what we are witnessing is a psyop, it is the most sophisticated, complex, and long-running psyop of all time. Everything I’m seeing is pointing to this being a closely guarded secret of the military-industrial complex, and that they are losing their grip as more and more insiders seek to expose what has been going on for decades to the public. What begins with the testimony of highly-credentialed individuals with high-level government clearance should end, eventually, with the release of hard evidence.
For now, we have to deal with under-oath Congressional testimony, news articles based on those who have knowledge of events and programs, books, podcasts, and the like. As Mathematician and Physicist Eric Weinstein has said, “There is zero in the way of a persuasive case for aliens based on publicly available hard data, and there is a mountain of indirect evidence of the bizarre that we can’t seem to resolve.”
For a lot of folks, all this talk about UAPs just looks like a pretty unbelievable fantasy. But the risk being taken by those coming forward — men with distinguished records of service and a lot to lose by breaking the stigma of talking openly about what they’ve seen — places a heavy thumb on the scale of credibility. Some have been directly threatened with violence, and there are reports that others have actually been killed to keep these programs secret. In Congressional testimony under oath, Pentagon whistleblower David Grusch directly implied that there were ongoing investigations into criminal violence used in service of keeping these secrets.
Last month, I read Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs, by Lue Elizondo. Elizondo was a career military intelligence officer and counter-terrorism expert who was brought into one of the Pentagon’s secret programs to study the UFO phenomenon, and quickly became one of the leading figures on the topic for the Department of Defense.
In 2017, frustrated by factions within the government working to illegally obfuscate and keep knowledge of UAPs and secret programs to retrieve and reverse-engineer recovered technical craft from the American people and their elected representatives, he resigned his position so he could engage in advocacy for government transparency. The result was a front-page story in the New York Times: Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program. With it came the release of two formerly-classified videos — known colloquially as the “Go Fast” and “Gimbal” videos — taken by American fighter pilots during encounters with UAP. If you’ve never seen those videos, or the “tic tac” video taken during an encounter between FA/18 Hornet pilots doing exercises from the USS Nimitz off the coast of Southern California in 2004, I present them to you here. They are merely the tip of the iceberg.
Elizondo coming forward in 2017 was what brought my attention back to this topic. Seven years later, in his book, he explains in much greater detail how he became involved with the program, who some of the key players were, and some of what he discovered during the course of his work — like the fact that Roswell was a real NHI crash event, from which both materials and bodies were recovered. Elizondo remains constrained by military-grade nondisclosure agreements and classified materials he is not at liberty to discuss with the public. His book had to be cleared through the Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DoDOPSR), and significant sections of the text of the book are redacted to show, contextually, where they censored his attempts at disclosure.
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The cat and mouse game between whistleblower and government censor is a fascinating dance. If they redact too much, they directly indicate that there’s something about this topic they’re working hard to keep secret. If they allow a whistleblower to reveal too much, they lose secrecy that way, as well. Department of Defense censors therefore have to walk a very fine line to avoid tipping their hand.
Since the publication of Imminent, Lue has been on a media tour the likes of which has never been seen in the history of this issue. In what is arguably his most layman-friendly appearance, Lue showed up on an episode of The Daily Show, where guest-host Ronnie Chieng humorously could not contain his enthusiasm and concern over the idea that aliens are among us. What Chieng offered here was something that has been strangely amiss in much of the reporting on this topic: open, emotional, ontological shock. The import of these revelations is strangely being lost on most people in a news cycle full of more mundane, earthly concerns.
What Elizondo has done with his book and his media blitz, one year after David Grusch came forward as a career military intelligence officer who had stumbled upon Pentagon UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs that were operating without appropriate congressional oversight, is break through the stigma. Like an offensive lineman clearing a running lane for a fullback, Elizondo has been using his credibility as a high ranking government official to raze the bastions of resistance to mainstream coverage of this topic.
Which brings us back to Immaculate Constellation.
There are a handful of serious, respected journalists who have dedicated serious time and effort to this topic — Ross Coulthart, Christopher Sharp, and Michael Shellenberger come immediately to mind — and they have become increasingly prolific in their reporting over the past year. Shellenberger, who was pivotal in the release of the Twitter Files, broke the story on “Immaculate Constellation” yesterday (partially-paywalled link):
[E]xisting and former US government officials have told members of Congress that AARO and the Pentagon have broken the law by not revealing a significant body of information about UAPs, including military intelligence databases that have evidence of their existence as physical craft.
One of these individuals is a current or former US government official acting as a UAP whistleblower. The person has written a report that says “the Executive Branch has been managing UAP/NHI issues without Congressional knowledge, oversight, or authorization for some time, quite possibly decades.”
Furthermore, these individuals have revealed the name of an active and highly secretive DOD “Unacknowledged Special Access Program,” or USAP. The source of the document told Public that the USAP is a “strategic intelligence program” that is part of the US military’s family of long-standing, highly-sensitive programs dealing with various aspects of the UAP ‘problem.’”
Public is revealing its name here for the first time.
The new UAP whistleblower claims that the US military and IC database includes videos and images taken using “Infrared (IR), Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR), Full Motion Video (FMV), and Still Photography.” The government whistleblower made their claims in a report provided to authorized Committees of Congress and their staff.
The whistleblower alleges that the DOD created the USAP, called “Immaculate Constellation,” in 2017 after the New York Times published an article describing an informal Pentagon UAP program called “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,” or AATIP.
The report shared with Congress says, “IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION serves as a central or 'parent' USAP that consolidates observations” of UAPs and “by both tasked and untasked collection platforms.”
Shellenberger goes on to report that there is a collection of detailed imagery and sensor intelligence on UAP encounters, and offers a “verifiable chain of custody for UAP IMINT [-quality Imagery Intelligence] collected by U.S. military assets,” that “ensures a high level of confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the data gathered.”
He continues:
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.”
A former IC official confirmed to Public the existence of Immaculate Constellation, “That program is run out of SEC DEF [Office of the Secretary of Defense],” the person said. “They don’t want to acknowledge it’s real.”
The same person 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.”
If that last paragraph is true, just by publishing this article I may be putting myself on government watch list.
Which is absolutely insane.
One story Shellenberger relates is that of an F-22 Raptor — one of America’s most advance fighter planes — being surrounded by “orbs” that forced it out of its patrol area. 3-6 orbs maintained a close distance from the F-22, which could not shake the “boxed in” formation and ultimately had to leave the mission area to avoid collision.
Shellenberger says that in April of 2024, the Pentagon released declassified information about a proposed program called Kona Blue, which was designed to retrieve and reverse-engineer UAPs. He links to this News Nation report on the program, which includes scanned documents.
He references a tweet by former advisor to three US presidents Harald Malmgren last month, in which Malmgren reveals that he is aware of such recovery efforts:
Despite attempts by the DOD to cover up these programs — an official spokesperson denied any knowledge of the existence of “Immaculate Constellation” — Congress has taken a definitive interest. Independent political journalist Matt Laslo reported last month that Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) will be chairing a hearing on UAPs on November 13th.
“I want whistleblowers to feel like they can come forward.” Mace said. “I want people protected. Every American deserves the right to know how their how their tax dollars are being spent and what it’s being spent on. And if it's no big deal, why hide it?”
“I go to these SCIFS, I'll go for a briefing in a classified setting, and ‘Well, we can't tell you,’ because, you know, I'm not read in on it — I don't know the name of the program, I’m not read in on it,” Mace tells Ask a Pol. “How the hell our we supposed to know how much money is being spent on it and where it’s being spent? It's bullshit. And that’s all I have to say. And I don't like bullshit, and that's what we deal with a lot up here. That's a reason to have these hearings: get information, have greater transparency and put the government on the spot, at the end of the day.”
Similarly, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) plans to hold an Armed Services Committee hearing sometime after the November elections. From The Hill:
Gillibrand, who in 2022 helped start the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — created to assess reports of UAP — wants a progress update on the office’s work.
“It’s a priority for me. I think it’s very important that we continue to make things publicly available,” Gillibrand earlier this month told Matt Laslo’s D.C. “Ask a Pol” podcast.
She wants “a progress report on how many unidentified aerial phenomena we’ve assessed and analyzed” and for the office to “give examples of what we have identified and give examples of what we haven’t identified.”
Gillibrand, who chairs the subcommittee under the Senate Armed Services Committee on emerging threats and capabilities, added that she wants AARO “to continue to build credibility.”
Yesterday, Shellenberger went on Rogan’s podcast and talked about what he discovered in the process of reporting on Immaculate Constellation, and Rogan pushes back on the endless promises of imminent disclosure. The full episode is 3 hours long, but here’s a brief clip, courtesy of @UAPJames:
In the conclusion to Imminent, Lue Elizondo makes his plea for the public to wake up and get involved:
My colleagues and I helped contribute to the modern movement for disclosure and will continue to work toward our cause on a daily basis, but now that the cat is out of the bag, the real threat to those who want to keep the truth hidden is you. You—the public—are a powerful force that can be wielded to ensure we have 100 percent full disclosure. It’s important you make your voice heard loudly. Do your part to help usher in a new era for humanity. A new era in which every human knows we likely share this planet and the entire universe with other intelligent life that is far more advanced than us. A new era where all of humanity is united by the profound common bond of being human.
Those of us who are fighting the fight need your help. We need your passion, and we need your support. To do this, I ask you to have frank conversations with your family and friends. Share what you have learned and read within the pages of this book. Let them know that you think it is important to speak openly and seriously about the topic. If there are young people in your family, let them know that the world of science and technology hungrily awaits their imagination, creativity, and intellect. Their hands and minds will build the vessels that will take our species into a new frontier and solve the many problems ahead of us.
Reach out to your elected representatives. They are coming aboard more each day, but we cannot allow them to become lax, or to control the narrative. You, as a citizen of this planet, have as much to say about this issue as they do. Don’t let them ever forget that. If you don’t know who they are, go to https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative.
This fight demands courage. It starts with talking. We can no longer stick our heads in the sand and pretend we are alone in the universe. We know we are not alone.
If we are truly not alone, what does that mean for all of us? Momentum for transparency on this issue is building, and I have a feeling we’re going to find out sooner rather than later.