Hello and welcome to the program UFO Warning.
In this episode, we're looking at Robert Bigelow.
That's correct. Robert Bigelow.
It's another one of these names that keeps popping up all the
time in ufology. The whole field really seems to
seems to be subject to the 7° of separation.
I mean, you talk about one of these guys and seven more names
pop up. So I thought I'd take a look at
Robert Bigelow today. If you go to Wikipedia, they
actually got a pretty decent article, I think written on him
Tells us that Robert Thomas Bigelow, born May 12th, 1944, is
an American businessman. He owns Budget Suites of America
and is a founder of Bigelow Aerospace.
Pretty wild there. He got a guy that has a hotel
chain and a aerospace company. Bigelow has provided financial
support for investigations of UFOs parapsychological topics
including the continuation of consciousness after death.
Where's the thought? Bigelow grew up in Las Vegas,
NV, attended Highland Elementary School, and was first exposed to
science through a number of nuclear weapons tests conducted
at Nevada National Security Site, about 70 miles northwest
of the city. At age 12, Bigelow decided that
his future lay in space travel. Despite his limitations in
mathematics, he resolved to choose a career that would make
him rich enough that one day he could hire the scientific
expertise required to launch his own space program.
He enrolled in the University of Nevada, Reno in 1962, studying
banking and real estate, and he graduated from Arizona State
University in 1967. From the late 60s through the
90s, Bigelow developed commercial real estate, hotels,
motels, and apartments. In his real estate career,
Bigelow built approximately 15,000 units and purchased
another 8000. For most of his career, he held
on to almost everything he bought, but eventually unloaded
much of his housing stock in the boom years immediately before
the 2008 crash. In 2013, Bigelow reflected on
this. He says people just really
wanted to throw money away so that was lucky.
Bigelow still owns Budget Suites of America, an extended stay
apartment chain founded in 1987. It caters to budget travelers
needing to stay for an extended period.
Its rooms are primarily suites featuring a full kitchen.
Budget Suites owns 3 hotels in Phoenix, AZ, Las Vegas, NV,
Dallas, TX and San Antonio, TX. Now, he tells us, in 1999,
Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace.
Bigelow had indicated he planned to spend up to $500 million to
develop the first commercial space station, with the goal of
the station costing 33% of the 1 1/2 billion that NASA expended
on a single space shuttle mission.
Think of that. A million and a half dollars for
one. A billion and a half dollars for
one space shuttle mission. Bigelow Aerospace has launched 2
experimental space modules, Genesis One in 2006 and Genesis
2 in 2007, and it planned for full scale space habitats to be
used as orbital hotels, research labs and factories.
In 2013. Bigelow indicated that the
reason he went into the commercial real estate business
was to obtain the requisite resources to be able to fund a
team developing space stations. In October 2017, Bigelow
announced that he planned to put an inflatable space hotel in
orbit by 2022. The plan was part of a
partnership with United Launch Alliance and the project was
estimated to cost $2.3 billion. The cost of a three day stay in
the special hotel was estimated at 5 million.
Well, and that's a lot of money for three days.
In April 2016, Bigelow's BEAM module was launched to the
International Space Station on the 8th SpaceX cargo resupply
mission. On March 2020, Bigelow Aerospace
laid off all 88 members of staff and halted operations after 20
years of business in a move that was partially caused by the
coronavirus pandemic. In March 2021, he sued NASA for
just over $1,000,000, alleging he was not paid according to the
contract for product testing and development.
Kind of wonder if some of those products weren't UFO Meta
Material says. In 1995, Bigelow founded the
National Institute for Discovery Science at SNIDS to fund the
research and study of various fringe sciences and paranormal
topics, most notably ufology. The organization researched
cattle mutilation and Black Triangle reports, ultimately
attributing the latter to secretive advanced aircraft
operated by the military. The institute was disbanded in
2004. In 1996, Bigelow purchased Skid
and Walker Ranch, A512 acre cattle ranch located in Utah
that is the site of the purported paranormal phenomena
such as interdimensional shape shifters, for $200,000.
In 2016, Bigelow sold the ranch to Brandon Fugel for $4 million.
In December 2017, Bigelow was reported by the New York Times
to have urged Senator Harry Reid to initiate what became the
Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a
government study which operated from 2007 to 2012, tasked with
the study of UFOs, According to the New York Times, Bigelow said
he was absolutely convinced that extraterrestrial life exists and
that extraterrestrials have visited Earth.
In June 2020, Bigelow founded the Bigelow's 2 for
Consciousness Studies Bics to support investigations into life
after death. In January 2021, the Institute
put up an award of $1 million asking for essays arguing for
existence of life after death. The Institute awarded the 1st
place $500,000 prize to Jeffrey Mishlov, who the 2nd place prize
to PIM Van Lammel and the third prize to Leo Rubiki.
On February 4th, 1965, he married Donna Mona Grammy.
She lived from April 1947 to February 2020.
Born Camden, NJ, they had two children together, Robert
Michael Bobby Bigelow and Rod Lee Bigelow.
In 1992, Rod Lee Bigelow died by suicide, age 24.
In 2011, Robert Bigelow's grandson Rod Lee Bigelow, the
second, died by suicide having suffered from drug addiction.
Diane Bigelow died on February 19th, 2020 of myelodysplastic
syndrome. It's MD's and acute myeloid
leukemia, AML. Well, then it finishes up here.
It says Bigelow has made political donations to
conservative Republican candidates.
Well, I think maybe to Harry Reid too, I don't know.
In July 2022, he donated 10 million to Florida Republican
Governor Don DeSantis, which was the single biggest donation of
his re election bid. Bigelow has contributed over $25
million to groups and causes supporting Joe Lombardo's
candidacy for the Governor of Nevada.
Campaign finance experts believe this may be the most a single
donor has spent on a statewide race in modern history.
In January 2024, he stated in an interview that he had donated to
Donald Trump. Said I gave him $1 million
toward his legal fees. A few weeks ago, I made a
promise to give him 20 million more, and that will be to the
Super PAC. Well, he's an interesting guy.
He's got a lot of money and he's well connected in the UFO arena.
Let's take a look at this next article about Bob Bigelow.
This next article is from Politico.
It's dated December 16th, 2017, titled The Pentagon's Secret
Search for UFOs Funded at the request of Harry Reid, the
program probed a number of encounters military pilots had
with aircraft they believe didn't operate like anything
they had seen before. Now, even those articles a few
years old, I think it's good because it really shows how Bob
Bigelow, employers like him, tie in with this whole deep state
apparatus. I mean, you've got big money
coming in. You've got the federal
government there with all their resources and authority, and
then you got the politics involved and it just kind of
devolves into this mix, this tornado, I think of UFO
research. Nobody really knows where
anything is coming from. You don't have the chain of
custody on these things. And then out of that mix, when
these programs seem to shut down or implode, then you have all
these players that come out. Nobody really knows where they
came in. They say I ran the program,
maybe the Pentagon says, no, we don't know who you are.
Then it comes out that they do know who he is.
Like with Julio Elizondo, say what you want, he's got a
picture of himself and Robert Mueller.
They're over in Afghanistan, I think it was.
So they're connected. They're shadowy.
They're all part of this deep state apparatus fuelled by money
and influence from the outside, fuelled by government resources,
money and secrecy from the inside.
And then when these little programs, like I said, implode,
you end up with these people that were actors in these
programs just kind of just being discouraged all over the place.
We've got Louis, we've got multiple players, all of them
promising disclosure while they're sworn to secrecy.
Really just crazy stuff. The article starts off as says
the Pentagon, at the direction of Congress a decade ago,
quietly set up a multimillion dollar operation to investigate
what what are popularly known as unidentified flying objects.
UFOs. The unidentified aerial farm I
claim to have been seen by pilots and other military
personnel appeared vastly more advanced than those in American
or foreign arsenals. In some cases, they maneuvered
so unusually and so fast that they seem to defy the laws of
physics, According to multiple sources directly involved in or
briefed on the effort and a review of unclassified Defense
Department and congressional documents.
The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, whose
existence was not classified but operated with the knowledge of
an extremely limited number of officials, was a brainchild of
then Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, who first secured
the appropriation to begin the program in 2009 with the support
of late Senators Daniel Anyway and Ted Stevens of Alaska Anyway
of Hawaii, two World War 2 veterans who were similarly
concerned about the potential national security implications,
the sources involved in the effort said.
The origins of the program, the existence of which the Pentagon
confirmed on Friday, are being revealed publicly for the first
time by political and The New York Times and nearly
simultaneously reports on Sunday.
So another one of these programs nobody wants to talk about, even
though it's not classified. One possible theory behind the
unexplained incidents, according to a former congressional
staffer who described the motivations behind the program,
was that a foreign power, perhaps the Chinese or the
Russians, had developed next generation technologies that
could threaten the United States.
Was this China or Russia trying to do something or do they have
some propulsion system we're not familiar with?
Said a former staffer who spoke with Politico on condition and
an enemy. The revelation of the program
could give a give a credibility boost to UFO theorists who have
long pointed to public accounts by military pilots and others
describing a phenomena that defy obvious explanation.
And can fuel demands for increased transparency about the
scope and findings of the Pentagon effort, which focuses
some of its inquiries into sci-fi sounding concepts like
wormholes and warp drives. The program also drafted a
series of what the office referred to as queried and
verified event under evaluation. QUEU reports which pilots and
other personnel who had reported encounters were interviewed
about their experiences. Reed initiated the program,
which ultimately spent more than $20 million through an earmark,
after he was persuaded in part by aerospace Titan and hotel
chain founder Bob Bigelow, a friend and fellow Nevadan who
owns Bigelow Aerospace, a space technology company, and
government contractor Bigelow, whose company received some of
the research contracts. Well, that's interesting.
You start a department from you, Harry, and then kick back some
of those programs to me. That'd be nice.
Yeah, sure. How much money am I getting from
you for RE election? Well, let's see.
Bigelow, whose company received some of the research contracts,
was also a regular contributor to Reed's RE election campaigns.
Campaign finance records show at least $10,000 from the 1998 to
2008. Bigelow has spoken openly in
recent years about his views that extraterrestrial visitors
frequently travel to Earth. He also purchased the Skinwalker
Ranch in Utah, the subject of intense interest among believers
and UFOs. Reed and Bigelow did not respond
to multiple requests for comment.
According to a Pentagon official, the ATIP program was
ended in the 2012 time frame, but it has recently attracted
attention. Remember those articles from
2017 because of the resignation in early October of Louis
Elizondo, the career intelligence officer?
Louis Elizondo is a career intelligence officer who ran the
initiative. In his resignation letter
addressed to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Mad Dog
Mattis, Elizondo said the efforts of his program were not
being taken sufficiently seriously.
The Pentagon official could not confirm Mattis had actually seen
the letter. We tried to work within the
system, Elizondo told Politico in a recent interview.
We were trying to take the voodoo out of voodoo science.
Well, wait a minute. And he's telling Ross Colthart
that there was this small fanatical group of Christians
that weren't letting him look at stuff and were keeping him from
investigating UFOs because they thought these things were
demonic. And meanwhile, they were afraid
that there was another group kind of higher at the food chain
that was Privy to all this information and that was
actually communicating with these things outside the normal
chains of command. And that's what Louis says in
his interview. Even so, the colons elite, these
fanatical Christians, they're the ones that got him out of
here. But that's not what we're
hearing here. Here, he says, we tried to work
within the system. We were trying to take the
voodoo out of voodoo science. Yeah.
He describes scores of unexplained sightings by Navy
pilots and other observers of aircraft with capabilities far
beyond what is currently considered aerodynamically
possible. The sightings, Elizondo told
political, were often reported in the vicinity of nuclear
facilities, either ships at sea or power plants.
We had never seen anything like it.
But in his view, military leadership did not appear
alarmed by the potential threat. If a Russian Bear bomber comes
in near California, it is all over the news, he said.
These are coming in the skies over our facilities.
Nothing but crickets. Shortly after his resignation,
Elizondo was listed as one of the key players in a for profit
company called Wait For It to the Starz Academy of Arts and
Sciences Co, founded by Tom Delong and entertainment mogul
and former guitarist and vocalist for the rock band Blink
182. An April 2016 profile of Delong
and Rolling Stone magazine described his fascination with
theories about extraterrestrial space travel as an obsession.
I was certainly obsessed about getting the Tic Tac videos
posted on his Academy website with his Waterlog watermark
rather all over it. In a video advertising the
company, Delong describes to the stars as a public benefit
corporation, and whatever that means, that has mobilized a team
of the most experienced, connected and passionately
curious minds from the US intelligence community,
including the CIA Department of Defense, who have been operating
under the shadows of top secrecy for decades.
OK, the most experienced, connected and passionately
curious just happened to come from the CIA and the DoD.
Yeah, that makes sense. The founders say they believe
there is sufficient credible evidence of UAP, unidentified
aerophenomena that proves exotic technologies that exist that
could revolutionize the human experience.
And then the article kind of goes on down here a little bit,
talks a little bit about Chris Mellon, a little bit more about
the A Tip program here. It says the Pentagon's A Tip
program marked a 21st century effort to replicate some of the
decades of inconclusive research undertaken by the Pentagon in
the 50s and 60s to try to explain thousands of reported
sightings of unidentified flying objects or UFOs by military and
civilian pilots and the average citizens, particularly in effort
known as Project Blue Book, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And the article kind of devolves into there.
I think the important thing to take from this article is that
we see that Bob Bigelow was right there at the very
beginning. He's had a lifelong curiosity
with this stuff. And then he was the one that got
read to go ahead and get the ATAP program started.
Weird stuff. It's these guys.
It's the same players over and over and over again.
Now I want to go and take a look at a look at another art.
They're kind of expanding on Bob Bigelow and his role in all this
UFO stuff. Now I want to look at this last
article because I think they at least try to tie this whole
thing together with Bob Bigelow, Harry Reid, Louis Elizondo, and
Tom Delong. The article is again from
political.com. It says how Harry Reid, a
terrorist interrogator and the singer from Blink 182, took UFOs
mainstream. The hidden history of how
Washington embraced her fringe field of science.
Written by Brian Bender, again dated 5/28/21.
The meetings began in 1995 at a conference room in an office
tower near the Las Vegas airport.
The group started small. There were a handful of
scientists and engineers. There was ACIA spy.
There was a former Army Colonel and two Apollo astronauts, and
there was a person who had hand picked the group and invited
them to Las Vegas. Robert Bigelow, a Nevada real
estate magnate. He wanted to talk about aliens.
Bigelow, just turning 50 at the time, had made enough money as a
commercial developer opening budget motels across the
Southwest that he could finally indulge the fascination with
UFOs that dated back years to a close encounter his grandparents
had experienced and told him about when he was three years
old. He dubbed the group, somewhat
grandly, the National Institute for Discovery Science.
NIDS, as it took shape and those Las Vegas meetings, was mainly
interested in two topics, UFOs and consciousness after death.
Its members were experts who had gotten used to having their
interests disrespected by their peers.
The group's Co founder was John Alexander.
A retired Army officer who worked at Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico and it published books and articles on
various aspects of Ufology and the paranormal.
Another was Hal Puthoff, an engineer and self-described
parapsychologist. While at the Stanford Research
Institute in the 1970s and 80s had carried out top secret
experiments for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency on
remote viewing, or using the human mind to sense objects or
events far away. One of the professors at
Stanford thought that was all nonsense.
He said he wouldn't let his kids play with my kids because of
what I was doing. Now Hal Puthoff is the guy that
Louis talked about many times with remote viewing and he's all
over this UFO thing, goes on and says collectively.
The group, which also attracted former astronauts Ed Mitchell,
an avowed ufologist, and Harrison Schmitt, who had also
served as AUS senator from New Mexico a decade later, didn't
fret too much about the reputational risk of of talking
openly about whether the government had captured an alien
or retrieved a crashed spacecraft.
For them. That was the point of being
there. There was one person at those
meetings, however, who did have something to lose by attending
Harry Reid, then serving his second term as AUS Senator from
Nevada. Reed had been introduced to
Bigelow by a well known Nevada TV journalist named George
Knapp. Are you starting to see the 7°
of separation here, who had written extensively on the
subject of UFOs over the years and had recently secured some
Russian government documents purporting to shed light on the
topic? Knapp knew from covering Reed's
career that the Senator had a curiosity about the subject.
Reed accepted Bigelow's invitation, but not before
making clear to that his participation, the patient must
remain a secret. Now, I've honored that agreement
for the past quarter century. Until Reed recounted his odyssey
in detail over a series of interviews with me in recent
months. This guy named Bigelow is doing
an event at his conference room and has been inviting a bunch of
people to talk about these unidentified flying objects,
Reed told me in a recent interview.
He had some people with some weird ideas, not scientific, a
few oddballs. I listened to some of their
presentations. That's how I got started.
In its way, Reed's decision to fraternize with the group was as
professionally reckless as anything that might have been
happening outside on the Vegas Strip.
Reed, then 55, had aspirations to lead the Democratic Party.
The stuff being discussed around him was pop culture shorthand
for pure nuttiness. I had my staff.
I had lots of people who said you're going to get yourself in
trouble, stay the hell away from that, Reed told me.
A lot of people said it would ruin my career.
Over the next few years, Reid told me, he went to multiple
such meetings. As Bigelow, Alexander and the
others were publishing obscure journal articles and compiling a
database of UFO sightings. The most influential member of
the group quietly broached the topic with some of his
colleagues in Washington, including former astronaut and
senator John Glenn. Reid ultimately enlisted the
support of a handful of powerful committee chairs, including Ted
Stevens of Alaska and Daniel Anyway of Hawaii to fund hush
hush UFO research inside the Defense Department.
The existence of that program was revealed publicly by
political and The New York Times in mid-december 2017.
One of the program's main beneficiaries was an aerospace
company owned by none other than Robert Bigelow.
Next month, the Director of National Intelligence, acting at
the behest of Republican Senator Marco Rubio, is scheduled to
release a report that collects from across the ground at all
relative material on what officials now call unidentified
aerial phenomena. Of course, we know this article
is 3 years old. Regardless of what ultimately
emerges in this report, as we know, not much.
Whether it's a trove of blockbuster reveals or a
disappointing that I would have to go with the dead part, the
mere prospect has catalyzed a wave of mainstream coverage of
government UFO research from The New Yorker to 60 Minutes.
A bewildering and still highly controversial subject has
achieved a surprising level of public respectability as a
national security concern. Reid had retired by the time his
secret role in the program was revealed, but his willingness to
talk openly now about the subject speaks to a profound
change in the calculus of political and reputational risk.
Far from a blot on his career, Reid sees it as a line to
highlight on his legislative resume, and he has no regrets
about Bigelow benefiting from the program.
I think I have opened the door to people not being afraid to
talk about it, Reid now says. I know that when I first got
involved in this, people in the military were afraid to mention
it for fear of hurting their promotions.
But now the Pentagon has told them they should report all
these things that they see that are unusual.
So we made a tremendous amount of progress.
Yeah. I just wonder how how real they
are on that. And just three years since the
existence of the Pentagon UFO office was made public, the
federal government has become increasingly less cagey about a
subject that was mocked as observed and fearless taboo.
YouTube is now filled with cockpit videos from military
pilots that some verified by the Kentagon of strange encounters
with objects that seem to defy known laws of aerodynamics.
I don't know about. Filled with just this month, a
video taken by the USS Omaha off the California coast in 2019
shows an identified spherical aircraft hovering over the water
before disappearing beneath the waves.
Even Barack Obama has spoken recently about encounters we
can't explain. I think they meant to say
unidentified spherical aircraft. And it goes on.
It says the quarter century saga, stretching from Harry
Reid's first attendance at one of Bigelow's NIDS meetings to
the forthcoming release of once secret documents to know where
those are at, offers a modern case study and how marginalized
ideas can make their way into the mainstream.
Last summer, after a series of classified briefings for
Congress, including Navy pilots giving direct testimony
depending on announced it was creating the Unidentified Aerial
Phenomena Task Force to improve its understanding of and gain
insight into the nature and origins of Uaps.
Yeah, we know how that's gone nowhere.
In a recent public forum, the Navy's top officer said the
military now has a well established process in place to
collect the data and to get to a separate repository for
analysis. More nonsense.
The Pentagon's internal watchdog announced this month that it is
launching its own evaluation to determine the extent to which
the DoD has taken actions regarding unidentified aerial
phenomena. Of course, we know that all came
up with a big giant goose egg. 0.
As far as they're concerned, there are no aliens or
spacecraft or anything like that.
Other public and private entities are embracing a subject
that once would have been fatal to their institutional
credibility. What if invisible aliens exist
among us, already here, but some unseen about human eyes?
Ask a recent blog post from the Northrop Grumman, one of the
Pentagon's largest contractors and a bastion of corporate
orthodoxy. Do aliens exist?
Ask another. Scientists wonder if
extraterrestrial life has visited Earth.
It can sound like a cheesy trailer for a History Channel
documentary, except the scientists are referring to are
working at some of the nation's most elite schools.
Well, you have to wonder, and the article kind of goes down a
little bit, talks a little bit more about the type of work kind
of going on with journalists. And then then it says here it
says if Robert Bigelow and Harriet Reid were the publicity
shy backstage benefactors of modern ufology, Tom Delong would
be its front man. Delong, now a 45, was a founding
member of the pop punk band Blink 182, which had a string of
earworm hits in the 90s and early 2000s.
Delong had been fixated on UFO since his youth, but it wasn't
until around 2015, when he left the band that he decided to do
something about it. He wanted to force the
government to disclose what it knew, and he began recruiting a
team he felt he needed to do it. I don't know how he's forced
anybody to disclose anything when every person he's acting
with is pretty much a government insider.
They didn't take long for the long to emerge as a public
figure in UFO LG circles. In 2016, WikiLeaks got ahold of
emails that showed him communicating with former White
House Chief of Staff John Podesta, a confidant of then
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In one e-mail from 2015, Delong offered to introduce Podesta,
the ultimate Washington insider, to a pair of A level officials
to discuss our sensitive topic. Not long ago, I visited Delong
at his office in a renovated garage a few blocks from the
beach at Encinitas neighborhood of San Diego.
The space was cluttered with the guitars and the other musical
memorabilia, but at least half of the decor was devoted to his
other obsession. It's so gnarly, said Delong, who
still sounds like the California skateboarder of his youth.
There's more to all this. I I personally learned something
where I didn't sleep for three nights.
Hanging on Delong's wall was what might be considered the
medals he's collected in his struggle, a display case filled
with dozens of commemorative coins from his meetings with
generals and aerospace contractors and secret
government agencies. They traced his visits to the
CIA, to the US Navy, to the Advanced Development Programs
division of Lockheed Martin's famously secretive skunk work in
Southern California, where some of the world's most advanced spy
planes were designed. That's amazing.
So we're going to get disclosure from these guys.
You can just almost carve out a straight line from Bob Bigelow
to Harry Reid to Louis Lozano to Tom Delong, to all these
different heads of these aerospace companies, to these
major players in these deep state intelligence agencies.
There's no end to it. And it seems like Bob Bigelow is
a self-made man, seems like a decent guy, came into a lot of
money, use that money to try to leverage satisfying his
curiosity a little bit, but really kind of got sucked into
this whole world of UFO celebrities, or the UFO mafia,
as I call them. What a tangled what we weave.
Until next time. This is UFO warning over and
out.