Harry Reid

Career

Harry Reid (December 2, 1939 – December 28, 2021) was a Democrat from Nevada who served in the U.S. Senate from 1987 to 2017. Born in Searchlight, Nevada, he began his public career as Henderson's city attorney and later sat in the Nevada Assembly. He led the Senate Democratic caucus from 2005 to 2017 and was Senate Majority Leader from 2007 to 2015, which placed him at the center of the chamber's budget and defense appropriations.

Reid is best known for health-care and financial reform legislation, but his name became attached to ufology in December 2017, when the New York Times revealed that the Pentagon had run a classified study of unidentified aerial phenomena. Reid's role in that story is the reason he is in this archive.

The Pentagon program

The program was the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which began in 2007 within the Defense Intelligence Agency and was funded at about $22 million over five years. According to Wikipedia's AATIP article, Reid started the effort at the urging of his friend, Nevada billionaire Robert Bigelow, with support from Senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye. The main contract went to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, which produced a 494-page report on alleged sightings that has never been publicly released.

A 2009 letter from Reid to the Deputy Secretary of Defense backed the effort and recommended a special access program for parts of it, according to Reid's Wikipedia biography. Reid later described the program as one of his proudest accomplishments in Congress. The Pentagon's official position is that funding ended in 2012, a claim that former official Luis Elizondo and later reporting have disputed, since the work reportedly continued in successor efforts.

Statements and the correction

Reid's public remarks went further than the official record. In 2021 he told The New Yorker that he had "been told for decades" that Lockheed Martin held some retrieved UFO materials. He said he could not confirm this himself and that when he sought Pentagon approval to examine such fragments, "they would not approve that." The claim is secondhand, and Reid did not name his source, as reported in Salon's reprint of the interview.

His statements about crashes were also corrected. In July 2020 the New York Times appended a correction to a July 23 story after it had said Reid believed "crashes of vehicles from other worlds" had occurred. The paper revised the text to say he believed "crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred," a more cautious claim, as Mediaite reported.

Assessment

The existence and funding of AATIP are well documented, and Reid's sponsorship of it is not in dispute. Skeptics, including Benjamin Radford and Robert Sheaffer, argue that the sightings the program examined most likely reflect misidentified aircraft, contrails, or other conventional phenomena, and no primary document has been published showing otherwise. Reid's own UFO claims, including the Lockheed fragments, remain unverified secondhand accounts. His legacy in ufology rests on the funding decision, not on evidence of non-human technology.