‘Otherworld technologies’: Former presidential aide’s CIA claim

A former senior adviser to multiple US presidents has claimed he was briefed on “otherworld technologies” by a top CIA official.

A former senior adviser to multiple US presidents has claimed he was briefed on “otherworld technologies” by a top CIA official in the 1960s.

Harald Malmgren, who served under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, made the eyebrow-raising claim about the alleged conversation with CIA officer Richard Bissell in a viral post on X this week.

“Sixty-plus years ago I was provided highest level classifications to lead DOD (Department of Defence) work on nuclear weapons and antimissile defense,” Mr Malmgren wrote.

“Informally briefed on ‘otherworld technologies’ by CIA’s Richard Bissell (who had been in charge of Skunkworks, Area 51, Los Alamos, etc.) but sworn to secrecy.”

60+ years ago I was provided highest level classifications to lead DOD work on nuclear weapons&anti-missile defense. Informally briefed on "otherworld technologies" by CIA's Richard Bissel (who had been in charge of Skunkworks, Area 51, Los Alamos, etc.) but sworn to secrecy. https://t.co/GcSEDiwPeH

— Harald Malmgren (@Halsrethink) August 19, 2024

Mr Malmgren had been replying to an earlier thread about “above top secret” clearances, in which he claimed to have been told by rocket scientist Lawrence Preston Gise — the grandfather of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — about “his alleged work on reverse-engineering of [UAP] objects” during a conversation in 1963.

His claim coincided with the publication of a long-awaited book by Luis Elizondo, who formerly worked on the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, in which he states his belief that the US government is “in possession of advanced technology made off-world by non-human intelligence”.

Harald Malmgren recalled the alleged conversation with Richard Bissell. Picture: Supplied

Elizondo’s claims have been echoed by David Grusch, a former US intelligence officer turned whistleblower who also went public in June 2023 with allegations of retrieved non-human craft — and even recovered alien bodies.

Mr Malmgren wrote in a follow-up post that he was briefed by Mr Bissell — the architect of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba who stepped down from the CIA the following year — “off the record after his resignation”.

“I am not seeking public confirmation status — just telling my personal story,” Mr Malmgren wrote. “Confirmations will be up to others directly involved, in coming months.”

He added that “I never directly worked on UAPs, nor indirectly used such research in my own work” and therefore “cannot be treated as a source of confirmation of UAP info”.

“What I learned was sketchy, slightly illuminated by Bissell as he felt I needed a heads up in case the subject ever came up in my meetings with presidents or others,” he wrote. “I swore secrecy to him, not under any law.”

He also said he did not know Elizondo or have any connection with his book’s publication.

“I simply thought time has come for the rest of humanity to start thinking about what it means for understanding of the world in which we live,” he wrote.

Whistleblowers claim the US has retrieved crashed UFOs. Picture: iStock

Mr Malmgren’s daughter, former White House adviser Dr Pippa Malmgren, has also made a number of recent comments on the topic of UFOs, or UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena), as they are now known.

“Disclosure is not the problem. Legal liability is,” she wrote in an August 2023 blog post.

“Yes, the new legislation protects the government and now even private contractor whistleblowers. But, there is nothing to protect anyone from the revelation that monies were spent without Congressional oversight or secreted away into secret programs away from Congressional oversight.”

Dr Malmgren suggested that “as the UAP investigation advances, it will not only crack open the black budgets on this particular issue” but also “raises questions about all black budgets and all SAPs (special access programs), regardless of the subject matter”.

“Like [Elizondo], I never looked at this subject until it became impossible to ignore,” she wrote on X last week.

“Here’s the question — what is the cost of asking ‘what if this is true?’ versus the cost of assuming it is not true and being wrong? Real/serious scientists will want to bring all our new tech to bear on this to prove things one way or another. We have to question those who insist on not investigating all this. What is there to lose? Nothing. What is there to gain? Possibly a transformation of our understanding of reality.”

Former Pentagon UFO investigator Luis Elizondo. Picture: CBS

Elizondo, a former high-ranking officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), made headlines in 2017 after going public in The New York Times about his work with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

This secret Pentagon group investigated service members’ reports of UFOs.

His memoir published on Tuesday, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, asserts that “humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species”.

Elizondo, similar to Mr Grusch, claims in the book that a super-secret, decades-long crash retrieval program, operating under an umbrella group of government officials working with defence and aerospace contractors, is “in possession of advanced technology made off-world by non-human intelligence”.

This group, he alleges, has recovered crashed UFOs dating as far back as the infamous Roswell, New Mexico incident in 1947.

Elizondo said AATIP’s ultimate goal was to gain access to this secret program, and that his team eventually got a meeting with its administrators.

“We were told by the people who had the material,” he told The Daily Mail on Monday.

“They sat there and said, ‘We’re happy to have this conversation with you. There’s some things you’re going to need to do if you want more access to it. But we’re happy to give this stuff to you.’”

The US has found ‘no verifiable evidence for claims’ of crash retrievals. Picture: iStock

But Elizondo said these “gatekeepers” tied his team up in red tape and ultimately never handed over the material or provided access.

Elizondo has not backed up his claims with further evidence, claiming it is all classified.

The Pentagon redacted some sections of Elizondo’s memoir to remove classified information via its prepublication review process, but this does not mean the government is vouching for his other claims.

“The public release clearance of this publication by the Department of Defense does not imply Department of Defense endorsement or factual accuracy of the material,” a required disclaimer in the book reads.

In an opinion piece for Newsweek on Tuesday, Elizondo appeared to walk back his claim that he was the head of AATIP, saying rather that he eventually became “one of its key members” and “didn’t run the program entirely on my own”.

The Pentagon confirmed in 2019 that AATIP “did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena”, but Elizondo has accused his former employer of attempting to discredit him for speaking out.

Congress has held several UAP hearings. Picture: Drew Angerer/Getty Images/AFP

In response to questions about Elizondo’s book, a Pentagon spokesperson told NY Post’s Steven Greenstreet AATIP was an unofficial, unrecognised program “that had no dedicated personnel or budget”, and that Elizondo “had no assigned responsibilities for AAWSAP/AATIP while assigned to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI).

Greenstreet has been one of the most scathing critics of what he describes as Elizondo’s “wacky UFO fairy tales”.

“It seems a small group of UFO activists spent years misleading a credulous media and an oblivious Congress,” he wrote last year.

“[Following the 2017 New York Times article] Elizondo … would become a minor celebrity, appearing on prime time cable news, starring in a History Channel series and landing a book deal. And the UFO hysteria, which began with that one New York Times story, has now culminated with Congress taking official action to hunt UFOs. But most of that story was false.”

Facing growing calls for transparency from Congress, the Pentagon established a new UFO investigation agency, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), in July 2022.

However, AARO’s first report, released in March, concluded there was “no evidence that any [US government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology”.

“AARO has found no verifiable evidence for claims that the US government and private companies have access to or have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology,” Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said in a statement after the release of the report.

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Originally published as ‘Otherworld technologies’: Former presidential aide’s CIA claim