"Former Deputy DNI on UFO briefing : “They kicked everyone out of the room"
In an interview broadcast on the Shawn Ryan Show on October 3, 2024, the former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Cliff Sims described how briefings on UAPs were conducted within ODNI.
Sims was a Trump advisor during his first election campaign before becoming Special Assistant to the President and Director of White House Message Strategy, and then Deputy Director of National Intelligence.
During the interview, he states that, as many Americans, he was always curious about UFOs :
Aren't you curious about all these things? And the answer is, yeah, when we got there, the first thing I said is, all right, somebody wheel out the bodies like, “I want to see the alien bodies”, and I'm joking about it, but, like, sincerely, we want to know what's what with this. I mean, how can you not be curious?
The tone of the former Trump administration official is refreshing, indeed the subject of UAPs has always been of great interest to the population. It is interesting to note that what some consider to be a conspiracy theory is presented here as one of the first questions asked by a US administration official.
So when we got there, we wanted to know, you know, they call it the UAP program, unmanned aerial or unidentified aerial phenomenon, or whatever they call them now the euphemism for UFOs.
It is worth noting that Sims refers to this program as knowledge widely shared by the intelligence community.
So the people who brief on these programs come to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Now, to be in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, you have to have the highest security clearance that the US government offers. I mean, these people that are in this office see everything. They're preparing the President's daily brief every day, so they are seeing the most sensitive intelligence that the US government has.
Well, we got there, you know, naturally, kind of the senior team wants to be in the room to hear. Let's get the briefing with the director. And they kicked everyone out of the room.
They said we're here to give the briefing to the director. And so even the people who saw all the most sensitive stuff in the US government, that's how sensitive they were about being willing to brief that. And that's about all I can say about it. They are very, very sensitive about who has access to those programs, for sure.
Here we have confirmation that only the highest echelons of intelligence have access to them. Indeed, Sims worked under DNI John Ratcliffe, who made a notable appearance on Fox News in which he said:
We have lots of reports about what we call unidentified aerial phenomenon, and this actually is a program that's been in place for a few years in terms of a task force that has been there under the National Defense Authorization Act.
I actually wanted to get this information out and declassified before I left office, but we weren't able to get it down into an unclassified format that we could talk about quickly enough, but, frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public.
When we talk about sightings, we're talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that, frankly, engage in actions that are difficult to explain, that movements that are hard to replicate, that we don't have the technology for or traveling at speeds that, you know, exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.
There are instances where we don't have good explanations for some of the things that we've seen, and when that information becomes declassified, I'll be able to talk a little bit more about that.
There have been sightings all over the world. And when we talk about sightings, the other thing I will tell you is it's not just a pilot or just a satellite or some intelligence collection. Usually, we have multiple sensors that are picking up these things.
While we are still struggling today to obtain information regarding such recordings, as Daniel Otis showed in his last investigation for CTV, one can only wonder at the extent of information the UAP Program Briefing covers to be restricted to the DNI eyes only.
Full interview: