The last time we checked in on the folks at the Pentagon who have gone almost entirely silent on the matter of government and military investigations into Navy encounters with UFOs, there were plenty of questions left unanswered. One of the key issues was why they seemed to keep changing their story when pressed for answers and how they couldn’t seem to define precisely what Luis Elizondo did or didn’t have to do with their secret UFO program known as AATIP (Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program). One other question was how those three Navy UFO videos wound up making their way into the public eye if all of this was supposed to be so hush-hush.

Now we know the answer and several other new details. The revelation once again comes to us thanks to the work of Investigative journalist Lt. Tim McMillan (ret). This week he has a new article out at Motherboard which includes a report from the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) detailing the results of their probe into how Elizondo got hold of the videos and how they wound up being released. AFOSI has become well known as “the real Men in Black” for the Air Force, and they clearly weren’t pleased with how this all played out.

The new document, obtained from the Air Force Office of Investigations (embedded below), shows that after that New York Times article, AFOSI looked into the classification of the released videos, called “GoFast,” “Gimble,” and “FLIR.” Originally, it found “all three videos were classified” and that, though a declassification request had been made for these videos, it was never granted…

Though his name is redacted, the investigation is clearly focused on Elizondo, who left the Pentagon, spoke to the New York Times, and has since joined DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy. Before leaving his position as an intelligence specialist in the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence’s Office, it was Elizondo who applied for the release of the three UFO videos…

“I did everything I was supposed to do to request the release, and even went above and beyond by also engaging Foreign Disclosure personnel; which I did not have to do by regulation,” Elizondo told Motherboard.

You should click through to read the full AFOSI report for yourself, but the story turns out to be rather convoluted. A few months after the first video went public, AFOSI launched an investigation to see if the videos, which they believed to be classified, had gone through the proper declassification process. We can safely presume that if Elizondo had improperly released classified material they could and likely would have gone after him. But at the conclusion of their investigation, it turned out that the videos were never classified in the first place. They were determined to be “unclassified and for official use only.” So somebody screwed up, but it was almost certainly someone at the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR) and not Elizondo.

But wait (as the saying goes), there’s more. The AFOSI report directly contradicts information that we’ve previously received from Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough. The report specifically identifies Elizondo as having worked on AATIP and adds a flatly stated detail saying that the program “focused research issues on Unidentified Flying Objects.” Both of these details are in direct contradiction to what the Pentagon has told us in the past. But then, virtually everything we’ve learned about AATIP has been cloaked in secrecy from the beginning and we also found out (courtesy of Tim McMillan once again) that they went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the public from ever having access to a lot of this information.

Was this a case of the Pentagon spokeswoman simply not being aware that the Air Force was looking into all of this? Or were they just lying to us? Another nagging question is why it was the Air Force investigating the situation when those were Navy videos, to begin with? As we discussed previously, Elizondo believes that there are still people in the Defense Department with an ax to grind about him taking all of this information public. And that’s the most sensible explanation I can think of.

I remain both hopeful and confident that there are still more shoes to drop in this story. Elizondo has repeatedly said in interviews that he knows and has a lot more information than he’s revealed so far. He can’t just empty the bag, however, because he’s still under multiple nondisclosure agreements and he refuses to violate his oaths. While incredibly frustrating, I can respect that as a former military person myself. But stay tuned. There are cracks showing in this dam, and we may finally get some additional revelations this year.