---
aliases:
  - Helene Cooper
  - Cooper, Helene
category: "Authors & Journalists"
tags:
  - Person
  - Journalist
  - UFO
  - NewYorkTimes
summary: "Helene Cooper, a New York Times Pentagon correspondent and co-author of the paper's December 16, 2017 report on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was assigned to work with Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal."
location: "Washington, D.C."
relations:
  - type: employed_by
    with: "[[New York Times]]"
    role: "assistant editorial page editor (2004), diplomatic correspondent (2006), White House correspondent (2009), Pentagon correspondent"
    start: 2004
    fn: 1
  - type: participant_in
    with: "[[December 2017 New York Times AATIP Report]]"
    role: "co-author; the Times's Pentagon correspondent assigned to Kean and Blumenthal"
    start: 2017-12-16
    fn: 2
created: 2026-10-03
updated: 2026-10-03
---
[[Helene Cooper]] was born in [[Monrovia]], [[Liberia]], on April 22, 1966. She joined the *[[New York Times]]* in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor, became diplomatic correspondent in 2006 and [[White House]] correspondent in 2009, and later became a [[Pentagon]] correspondent. In 2015 she was part of the Times team that won the [[Pulitzer Prize]] for international reporting for coverage of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, and she won the [[George Polk Award]] for health reporting and the [[Overseas Press Club]] Award that year. She wrote the memoir *[[The House at Sugar Beach]]* ([[Simon & Schuster|Simon and Schuster]], 2008) and *[[Madame President]]: The Extraordinary Story of [[Ellen Johnson Sirleaf]]* (2017).[^1]

### The December 2017 report

[[Gideon Lewis-Kraus]] wrote in *[[The New Yorker]]* that after a meeting with representatives of the Times's Washington bureau the paper agreed to the story brought by [[Leslie Kean]] and [[Ralph Blumenthal]] and "assigned a veteran Pentagon correspondent, Helene Cooper, to work with Kean and Blumenthal."[^2] Her name appears first in the byline of "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program," published December 16, 2017; the article reported that the [[Department of Defense]] "has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012."[^3] The Pentagon officials quoted in the article included spokesman [[Thomas Crosson]], who said the program ended because other priorities "merited funding."[^3] [[Keith Kloor]] of *[[The Intercept]]* wrote in 2019 that Cooper had described [[Luis Elizondo]] on the Times podcast *[[The Daily]]* as a "spooky, secretive guy."[^4] The sequence of who met whom before the Times assigned her is set out in [[December 2017 New York Times AATIP Report]].

### Footnotes

[^1]: "Helene Cooper." Simon & Schuster author page. https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Helene-Cooper/18871279
[^2]: Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. "How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously." *The New Yorker,* May 10, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously
[^3]: Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean. "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program." *The New York Times,* December 16, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html (full text read through the Internet Archive capture, https://web.archive.org/web/2023id_/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html).
[^4]: Kloor, Keith. "The Media Loves This UFO Expert Who Says He Worked for an Obscure Pentagon Program. Did He?" *The Intercept,* June 1, 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history-channel-luis-elizondo-pentagon/