Original subtitles

(ethereal electronic music)

(intriguing electronic music)

(eerie electronic music)

- [Ron] I'm sitting in these rooms alone

with people who have run secret weapons programs,

interrogated terrorists,

protected closely guarded secrets as a profession,

and all I can think about

is getting them to tell me something

they don't want me to know.

(eerie electronic music continues)

- It's gonna take somebody at the executive level to do it,

or there's gonna be an incredible leak somewhere

that somebody's conscience,

and they don't end up committing suicide

by 12 bullet holes to the back of the head kinda thing.

(camera shutter clicks)

- [Narrator] The UFO reality can no longer be denied.

(camera shutter clicking)

The secret has been managed and guarded

by a select few for over 75 years.

Advanced technology, biological

and physical materials have been recovered.

(camera shutter clicking)

They've been secretly studied by compartmentalized factions

within both government and industry.

These claims are not new,

but you are about to see undeniable evidence

and previously unpublished accounts

that make this case stronger than ever before.

(camera shutter clicks)

Somewhere between fact and denial,

you are about to discover an accidental truth.

(explosion blasts)

(people chatter on radio)

(helicopter whirring)

(people chatter on radio)

(helicopter whirring)

(machine beeping)

In 2017, the UFO subject exploded into the mainstream.

- [Pilot] There's a whole fleet of 'em.

(indistinct)

Whoa! Got 'em! (laughing)

Woo hoo! - Roger.

- [Narrator] The New York Times broke a front-page story

about a shadowy government program studying UFOs.

- October 2017, Leslie Kean, who's a notable expert on UFOs,

who was invited to a very private conference in Washington

with Lue Elizondo and some other people,

Chris Mellon, to discuss UFOs.

Lue Elizondo had just submitted his resignation

in October 2017

as the head of this very secretive Pentagon UFO office.

- Program was established.

It was initially called AAWSAP,

Advanced Aerospace Weapons Sensor Application Program,

and very quickly evolved,

morphed into the more common vernacular AATIP,

Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

I was brought in initially to come in

to run the counterintelligence and security piece

for this effort in 2008.

In 2010, I was asked by the former director

to run this program.

The program was then taken out of DIA

and up to the OSD level, of the Secretary of Defense.

- The Pentagon had this secret UFO monitoring agency

which nobody knew about.

- New York Times, Politico and, followed by them,

everyone else covering the UFO subject

suddenly with seriousness,

suddenly talking about encounters by the U.S. Navy

with objects that are supposed to be impossible.

- The government is investigating UFOs.

Well, I almost crashed my car.

- [Narrator] Three cryptic videos were released

that claim to show unknown objects

operating in military airspace

while defying known capabilities of flight and physics.

- There are more of them that have not been released.

These were only snippets, by the way,

and we knew that, but we were happy to get them,

and they caused quite a stir.

- [Narrator] Lue Elizondo made the media rounds

with shocking statements.

- My personal belief is that

there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.

- Our cosmic neighborhood may be a hell of a lot bigger,

and oh, by the way, we might, might have neighbors.

That's a profound moment.

- [Narrator] At the 2018 symposium

of the Mutual UFO Network, behind closed doors,

he went beyond his public statements to drop a bombshell.

- Sometimes people may have associated you

as being fringe or being out there,

and all along you were right.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] One of the pilots who engaged the craft,

Commander David Fravor, chimed in with bold statements

inferring other worldly origins of the mysterious phenomena.

- I believe, as do the other folks that were on the flight

when we visually saw it,

that it was something not from this world.

- You are talking to a pilot

who is looking at you with complete bewilderment

as to looking to you for answers.

They're asking you, "Sir, what was this?"

- Congress is now looking at the possibility

of national security

that the military is now owning up to hours of videotapes

taken by Navy pilots.

There's been a sea change. Things are changing.

People are more open to the idea that,

yeah, maybe we're not alone in the universe.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] We were given an updated phrase

to describe it all:

Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.

- They're calling them UAP sometimes,

sometimes UFOs, sometimes UAP.

It's a kind of a rebranding to a a certain extent

and a redefinition of what the phenomenon is.

- [Narrator] A new group called To the Stars

Academy of Arts and Sciences was introduced.

(exciting music)

- We are To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science,

a public benefit corporation.

- [Narrator] The group was co-founded

by rockstar Tom DeLonge.

- I was working my way through NASA,

the Department of Defense, and various other agencies.

- [Narrator] Its members spoke out,

hinting of unprecedented openness

and straight answers about the topic.

But who are these people really?

Dr. Hal Puthoff, former CIA Operations Officer,

Jim Semivan, a 50-year veteran of NASA,

the CIA, and the National Security Agency.

Steve Justice, former director

of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works,

Christopher Mellon,

former Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

Lue Elizondo,

fresh from a controversial Pentagon resignation.

Was anybody going to share anything

that brought us concrete answers?

- It was the first time I really digested

the enormity of the national security implications

of the UFO subject.

- The CIA and all these people

associated with the Skunk Works

and the other intelligence agencies,

you're not the right people to come out with this,

you're really not, because you're the ones

that have been lying to us for 70 years.

- We haven't trusted these individual agencies ever.

In fact, they've always teased our community.

- We are dealing with insiders.

We are dealing with people who have been in government,

the military, the intelligence community,

have access to classified information.

But those people, all of them, will have to be very careful.

- For us to just go ahead and spew out

to satisfy the idle curiosity of a few, that's not our job.

Our job is to protect this nation from enemies,

foreign and domestic.

- For what it's worth, I see it that they were trying

to make progress on this within government,

they took it as far as they could,

and then they realized that, really,

the only way to move it further forward

was to leave government and do it outside of that.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Some believe that this

new rollout of information

was a cleverly crafted set of events

being orchestrated by hidden hands, an evasive faction,

who has controlled this information for years.

- I'm not a believer in the conspiracy theory

that this is some plot to leak it

to the New York Times and all that.

Too many elements came together completely serendipitously,

and looking back, you can try to make a case

that this was all orchestrated and not at all true.

- I think that this was definitely something

that was organized, thought out long term.

Again, I think they know

and they're trying to get ahead of something.

I use the analogy of a snowball at the top of a hill,

and it starts out really small,

and as it rolls down, it's gonna get bigger and bigger,

and I think they're trying to get ahead of that.

- You can't talk about this subject

with the government background without being the bad guy.

In some people's minds eye,

it just comes with the territory.

- I refuse to discuss anything classified

I took an oath which is, by the way, a lifelong oath.

As I've told people before, don't ask me,

'cause I'm not gonna tell you.

- Lue is in a tough spot,

because he knows a lot of things that...

He came out of the intelligence community.

He probably still, undoubtedly,

still has connections to the intelligence community,

so he can't say everything he knows or has been privy to.

- These people promoting this agenda of UFO openness,

not disclosure, but openness,

they have enemies within that establishment.

So we're not talking about a unified message.

- It's very uncomfortable,

especially if you've lived a life

where anonymity has been your friend.

- We have every right to know the truth,

and it's not okay that they're holding that back.

- It is not a fun place to be.

In fact, if I had any opportunity

for anybody else to stand up and take my place,

I would do it.

- There are a lot of people that want this information out,

and there are a lot of people

that don't want this information out.

The level of pushback

that Harry Reid shared with me on camera

when he tried to launch this investigatory arm

into creating AATIP, he said he got so much pushback

from the intelligence agencies,

that they tried to destroy people.

They really did not want this to happen.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] After the initial media flurry,

the Pentagon promised a report

that might shed some light on the subject.

- Do you expect to see real answers in this report?

What do you think?

- Look, honestly, I don't think so, Jake.

- [Narrator] The public only received a few pages

of inconclusive information.

A more elaborate report was delivered to Congress

behind closed doors.

Freedom of Information Act requests,

known as FOIA requests, were submitted.

The responses received were heavily redacted.

- Three years later, three and a half years later,

no new evidence has come out.

We've got no new videos. Nothing like that happened.

- [Narrator] Congressman Tim Burchett

has become an outspoken crusader against the secrecy.

- The American public deserves to know.

We need transparency.

That's why nobody trusts government.

Nobody trusts either party when it comes down to it.

- [Narrator] Instead of new answers,

we've been given a whitewashing of the past

and further reinforcement of a new narrative

created to fit the day.

(tense music)

The new narrative states that the UAPs

are not ours or any foreign government's;

they display characteristics that defy explanation.

We are committed to determining their nature

and assessing any potential threat.

There was no official government study of the topic

after Project Blue Book ended in 1969,

until the AAWSAP program started in 2004.

- By extracting a lot of the history out,

they're able to make it seem like,

wow, this is a real mystery here.

I don't agree with that.

- I think their new narrative,

I think they have this fear that it's a threat

and the word "threat" kind of bothers me a little bit,

but I understand that, in order to get government attention,

they need to call it perhaps a threat.

- So we have an ongoing situation here.

This is a defense issue, it's an air safety issue,

it's a national security issue.

- It's a valid issue.

There's something flying around in our airspace,

and we don't know what it is

or we're not telling what it is.

- 18 months ago, if you had asked anyone in government

the official line on UFOs,

you would've received a standard response,

rather like this:

"There is no current interest or involvement in this subject

since the termination of Blue Book in 1969.

Nobody in government is researching or investigating this."

- The department writ large is really not interested

in UFOs whatsoever.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] This story leaves a gap of over 35 years

that the government was supposedly not engaged

in the study of the phenomenon.

The media was quick to participate in the news story.

Were they complicit in delivering

this new version of the facts?

- There is a risk of believing the official narrative

too quickly and just reporting it.

- There's many steps to go, and it's gonna take a while,

and they still have a totally compliant media

for the most part.

- I can tell you from my knowledge of the New York Times

that New York Times is not afraid

to confront the government.

- Having been legal counsel for the New York Times

and for NBC News, the people

and the boards of editors of those things

feel themselves to have a certain patriotic duty

as they perceive it

to not reveal anything to the American public

that the national security state people don't want revealed.

- I don't want to be bound

by what Danny Sheen said about his concepts

of what the Times prints and doesn't.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] This new narrative

has become the official story.

It was even stated as fact by Andre Carson

at the beginning of the first Congressional UFO hearings

in over 40 years.

- More than 50 years ago,

the U.S. government ended Project Blue Book,

an effort to catalog and understand

sightings of objects in the air

that could not otherwise be explained.

For more than 20 years,

that project had treated unidentified anomalies

in our airspace as a national security threat

to be monitored and investigated.

In 2017 we learned for the first time

that the Department of Defense

had quietly restarted a similar organization

tracking what we now call unidentified aerial phenomena.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] We've heard all of this before.

The new narrative is really an eerie echo

of 70-year-old events.

- We can say that the recent sightings

are in no way connected with any secret development

by any agency of the United States.

- Aircraft, we'll call 'em aircraft,

are displaying characteristics

that are not currently within the U.S. inventory,

nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of.

- Air Force interest in this problem

has been due to our feeling of an obligation

to identify and analyze to the best of our ability

anything in the air that may have the possibility of threat

or menace to the United States.

- We know that our service members

have encountered unidentified aerial phenomenon,

and because UAPs pose potential flight safety

and general security risk,

we are committed to a focused effort

to determine their origins.

- However, there have been a certain percentage

of this volume of reports

that have been made by credible observers

of relatively incredible things.

It is this group of observations

that we now are attempting to resolve.

- There will be a recognized, concerted effort

to figure this out.

- [Narrator] The old story was repeated almost verbatim

by the current players.

- We're still far from the goal line,

and there is a lot of positions

that they could take along the way

that still will allow them to maintain credibility

and avoid culpability.

- The media and the public want more.

They want answers.

I'm not sure that there are going

to be easy answers to this.

- They're trying to sweep anything prior to 2004

under the carpet, but we won't let 'em,

because we've got all the historical cases,

and those can't go away.

- They're not only whitewashing history; they're denying it.

They're only acknowledging the phenomenon back to 2004.

- The government has a lot to answer for.

You're absolutely right.

The history of the subject has been replete

with misinformation and disinformation.

- It's just a complete coverup.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] What was going on in the time

between the closing of Project Blue Book

and the beginning of the officially announced UFO programs

that we know about today?

Why is it important?

Because in those years is where the truth lies,

a truth that many have gone to great lengths

to conceal, deny, and debunk.

We start by taking a closer look

at the period between 1947 and 2005.

The existence of official UFO research and programs

by the US government in this timeframe

has been staunchly denied.

The facts challenge that position.

In the late 1940s,

the world was recovering from World War II.

The military was reorganizing.

In 1947, the Air Force was being created

as a standalone branch of service.

The Cold War and its strategic questions were looming.

But in the midst of all of this,

the United States Army created what they called

the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit

of the Scientific and Technical branch.

Why did they need that?

(tense music)

Numerous FOIA requests verified the existence

of this Army program.

They state that the unit disbanded

and was folded into Project Blue Book in the '50s.

But the files of this group are not part

of the official Project Blue Book collection,

so where did they go?

During that time there was advanced technology

in the possession of Germany.

Scientists were brought over after the war

to continue the work.

Stories of UFOs and UFO crashes were abundant,

including the famous Roswell incident of 1947.

The late astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell

was given secret information

about events of the time

In this never before seen video, he shares what he was told.

- Individuals at the Pentagon

had been attempting to get into the system

and found out about it,

thus confirming, and had confirmed,

that the Roswell incident was real.

They saw some of the material from a crashed spacecraft.

Some saw bodies from the beings

that were killed in that crash.

There were some that saw a live being.

A live being had been taken away

and was in the system somewhere.

Those were real life incidents that were reported to me.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Many believe in the formation

of a group called Majestic 12, assembled by President Truman

to strategize about how to handle

the information about these encounters and more.

Documents purport to detail the creation

and deployment of this group,

but their authenticity is still a hotly debated topic.

It makes sense, however, that under such circumstances,

just such a group would've been formed.

They would've had control of the subject

and accountability to a select few.

If a decision was made to enact secrecy,

this group would've made it happen.

(tense music)

After years of UFO hysteria and speculation

between 1947 and 1952,

the government finally said

that they were taking the subject seriously.

Enter Project Blue Book,

a public program that was supposed to shed light

on the UFO subject.

Paul Hynek, son of the late J. Allen Hynek, shared this.

- My father was the Chief scientific consultant

working alongside Air Force counterparts,

and it became clear that the role of Project Blue Book

wasn't to look for the truth,

but was to manufacture answers and to tamp down hysteria.

Somebody called it the Society

for the Explanation of the Uninvestigated.

My father had to question whether he should stay involved.

James McDonald, one of his colleagues said,

"Look, you're being played a fool by the Air Force."

And my father thought a lot about it.

He finally decided that having that front row center seat

to all these goings on

and being able to influence things, not control,

was worth the trouble.

But it became increasingly frustrating for him over time

as he saw that the Air Force was not changing their colors.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] J. Allen Hynek was openly frustrated

by the fact he was never given access

to what he knew were compelling events shrouded in secrecy.

It haunted him until his passing in 1986.

Official Air Force statements

regarding the conclusion of Blue Book say,

"Since the termination of Project Blue Book,

nothing has occurred that would support a resumption

of UFO investigations by the Air Force."

But another FOIA request revealed a different story.

A 1969 memo from General Carroll Bolender,

a senior director at Air Force Research and Development,

stated after Blue Book was dissolved,

that reports of UFOs would still continue to be handled

through a standard Air Force procedure

designed for this purpose.

Furthermore, reports of unidentified flying objects

which could affect national security were, are,

not part of the Blue Book system.

- There was the creation

of the Air Intelligence Service squadrons,

which were tasked with going to any spot

in the continental United States within six hours

and picking up debris, fallen pilots,

and also containing information leak.

And so, many people think that that would've been the entity

or the agency that gave birth to the Men in Black.

What seems to be clear is that there was a bifurcation,

that Project Blue Book may have started off

as a serious scientific endeavor,

but as of 1953, it no longer was,

and that it was most likely

the Air Intelligence Service squadrons

that picked up the banner of going out

and trying to find saucers

and then hand them off to people

who would try to reverse engineer the propulsion systems,

et cetera.

- General Arthur Exon described to us

when he was Base Commander

at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1964

that there would be an ongoing joke that the Blue Book,

a two-man team would fly off

in a little single-engine plane in one direction,

and then the actual project

would arrive from Washington on a commercial flight,

they would change back into their uniforms,

and a team of 12 to 15 officers would fly off in a jet

to actually conduct full scale investigations.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Project Blue Book was headquartered

at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,

but some of the other, more secret UFO programs

seemed to have been located there too.

One of these is the mysterious Blue Room,

an underground repository

of recovered technology and debris.

- This is the location, allegedly,

where they brought the bodies and the craft

from the Roswell crash,

and where all of the other crash retrievals and bodies,

kind of like they have a consortium

of where they keep all this.

So you've got the bodies, you've got the craft,

you've got the debris, autopsy reports,

the eight by 10 glossy white, black-and-white photographs,

and the gun camera footage

is all supposed to be kept at the Blue Room,

some type of an underground vault or Building 18

at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

- [Narrator] Senator Barry Goldwater

sought confirmation of this.

- At Wright-Patterson Field,

if you could get into certain places,

you'd find out what the Air Force

and the government knows about UFOs.

Reportedly, a spaceship landed.

And it was all hushed up, quieted,

and nobody ever heard about much of it.

I called Curtis LeMay and I said,

"General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson

where you put all this secret stuff.

Can I go in there?"

I've never heard him get mad,

but he got madder than hell at me, cussed me out,

said, "Don't ever ask me that question."

- [Narrator] Supposedly the contents

of the Blue Room were filmed.

Exhaustive FOIA requests finally revealed

that this film did indeed exist but was destroyed.

(tense music)

Nick Pope, a longtime ex-British government pundit

on the topic denied official investigation of the subject

for years, until he didn't.

- The more interesting UFO sightings are being looked at,

but not under the auspices

of a formerly constituted UFO research program.

- We now know about a government UFO program,

but we might not know about THE government UFO program.

(tense music)

(mysterious music)

- [Narrator] Pope has told a story about a picture

that hung on the wall of his office for years

until being removed.

- The Calvine incident from the United Kingdom

is one of the most intriguing UFO sightings

in the British government's UFO files.

And for some years,

when I was working in Ministry of Defense

main building on this issue,

we had a blown-up, poster-sized enlargement

of one of the photos that was taken.

The story is that two hikers were out

and they saw a large, diamond-shaped UFO.

At one point there was a military jet in the background,

and then the UFO accelerated away.

We had looked at them at the Ministry of Defense.

They'd been analyzed by various

intelligence community imagery analysts.

It was literally a UFO.

The Ministry of Defense embarked on a campaign

to declassify and release its UFO files.

Documents about the Calvine incident emerged,

but the full-size color photos, the negatives,

the enlarged image that was on my wall, gone, disappeared.

There was an effort to see if the original photos

might be in the hard copy file

held at the National Archives,

and apparently the hard copy file will be released

in about the year 2072.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] In an interesting turn of events,

just as we were finishing this project,

the picture appeared.

This is the mysterious Calvine UFO photograph.

The facts around this photograph

strongly suggest an unknown group

that was able to intercept the release of this image

and attempt to stop it.

But who are they?

- Information in government,

and particularly intelligence information,

it's highly classified, deeply compartmentalized.

Everyone works in silos.

The left hand often doesn't know

what the right hand's doing.

- [Narrator] We saw an example of compartmentalization

and the evasion of scrutiny and straight answers

during the recent Senate hearings on UFOs.

- So you're not aware of anything

in between Project Blue Book and AATIP?

- Hasn't been brought to my attention.

- That data is not within the holdings

of the UAP task force.

- There are many things that are out there in the ether

that aren't officially brought to our attention.

- How would it have to be officially

brought to your attention?

I'm bringing it to your attention.

- Probably a lot of leads

that we would have to follow up on.

I don't think we have a resource to do that right now.

- All I can speak to is what's within my cognizance,

the UAP task force, and we have not looked at that incident.

- And then, finally,

are you aware of a document that appeared around 2019,

sometimes called the Admiral Wilson memo or EW notes memo?

- I am not. - You're not.

- I'm not personally aware of that.

- [Narrator] These answers are made possible

by compartmentalization that aids in deniability.

- You can ask the questions,

but who are you gonna ask 'em of?

And you've gotta make sure

you're asking the right people the questions,

because that's another problem.

You can ask questions all day long.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] While we're at it,

what is the Wilson-Davis memo

that Senator Gallagher asked about?

- It's the leak of 15 pages of notes by Dr. Eric Davis

of a meeting he had in 2002

with a retired member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

Admiral Thomas R. Wilson,

and the contents of these notes are absolutely explosive.

- [Narrator] The Wilson-Davis memo was found in the files

of the late Dr. Edgar Mitchell.

- It was the existence of a reverse engineering program

to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology.

- After he learned about the existence

of a deep classified program to study ET technology.

And the fact that he had genuine

legal regulatory oversight over this,

how he was denied access to this program.

- We had retrieved a functioning craft

that was ET in nature.

This is all stated in there,

and that there had been this long,

reverse engineering program,

but it had gone into a corporate company,

and the heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

have no business looking into it.

- The memorable quote in that note

is "technology, not of this Earth,

not made by man, not by human hands."

- And they said, "Nope, you're not read in."

- [Narrator] Admiral Wilson denies the authenticity

of the story.

Dr. Eric Davis plays a significant role

in the programs we are describing here,

the history and the research.

He said this.

"I'm not at liberty to confirm or verify

any aspect of those notes."

- These notes, in my view,

there's no question about their authenticity.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] In a recent presentation to Congress,

MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, presented a slide

pointing out nearly 20 government agencies

that have some program or study of UAP.

There were many.

In 1991, New York Times writer Howard Bloom

released the book "Out There."

In it, he detailed an actual group formed by the Pentagon

to investigate new evidence

related to an extraterrestrial presence.

This group, referred to in the book

as the UFO Working Group,

was led by a shadowy Army colonel

referred to as Colonel Phillips.

It is believed that the mysterious Colonel Phillips

represents a real colonel who is even more of a mystery.

Colonel John Alexander is a central figure

in much of this history.

In 1985, he became the Director

of Advanced Concepts at the U.S. Army Lab.

In 2009, John Alexander spoke at the UFO X-Conference

and was interviewed behind the scenes.

- What I think needs to happen at this time

is not disclosure per se,

'cause I don't think there is much to disclose.

What I think needs to happen

is we need to make it okay, permissible,

for serious scientists

who want to explore these fields to do this.

- [Narrator] Unknown at the time of this original interview,

he had been running a program

exactly like the kind described in Bloom's book.

- A bunch of military, aerospace, and government insiders

started with the Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group.

Now, there's even some evidence

that it existed prior to that.

- I ran a program inside the government.

I had all of the services involved.

I had many aspects of the intelligence community,

had aerospace engineers.

It was at the top secret SCI level,

so everybody had the high clearances.

(tense music)

- They had this meeting at BDM Corporation

in a secure vault room

and said, "We're forming up this group,"

and that was in 1985.

- [Narrator] The real name of the group

was the Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group.

The study topics included advanced detector deployment,

established communication, new materials,

develop a gravity interaction system,

biological controls of processes.

- A, we start by saying it's real.

So, let's be clear.

UFOs are real. Sensor systems pick them up.

(tense music)

UFOs have been around

since, again, the beginning of time

or recorded history as we know it.

It is a global phenomena.

(tense music)

One of the things that will come up in this undoubtedly

is the BASS study or the one that Lue Elizondo said,

came out in the New York Times.

- We spent a lot of time in the analysis piece of this,

getting experts within the community,

both the Department of Defense

and the intelligence community.

- They basically followed the same thing

that I had done 30 years earlier

and found, I think, basically the same thing.

- What we're talking about is something

that is probably not ours or adversarial,

something that we really just don't know where it's from

and may have been, frankly, here for quite awhile.

- The things that they knew about the capabilities of UFOs

were being observed about the same,

really fast, high speed turns, antigravity,

things that just can't happen.

(tense music)

And first of all, every sensor system we have

does pick up UFOs from time to time.

We have hard craft, more than a mile of across,

multi-sensor, I mean absolutely real,

and thousands and thousands of variations in between.

- And UAP observed and interacting with

and flying over sensitive military facilities particularly,

and not just ranges,

but some facilities housing our strategic nuclear forces.

One such incident allegedly occurred

at Malmstrom Air Force Base,

in which 10 of our nuclear ICBMs were rendered inoperable.

- People do look at some of these things,

particularly the incidents with "Faded Giant"

that Bob Salas talks about,

where you had missiles go down, absolutely real.

- I have heard stories. I have not seen the official data.

No official assessment that you've done

or exists within DOD that you're aware of

regarding the Malmstrom incident.

- We have not looked at that incident.

- You're the guys investigating it.

Who else is doing it?

- Studied the hell out of it and end up with have no idea.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] This stunning set of revelations

places John Alexander in the thick of the subject

during the elusive missing years in question.

A request for information on the military background

of Colonel John Alexander

returned an absolute refusal

by the Department of Army Personnel

to even acknowledge Colonel Alexander's military record.

(tense music)

After retiring from the Army,

John Alexander worked at Los Alamos National Labs.

In 1995, Alexander took a position

at a new research group called NIDS,

the National Institute for Discovery Sciences.

NIDS was founded by a Nevada billionaire Robert Bigelow.

- These individuals became friends with Robert Bigelow,

and they became involved with him.

Shortly after that,

another organization was formed, called NIDS,

National Institute of Discovery Science,

and Bigelow funded that,

and it involved all these same people and others.

- [Narrator] Shortly after forming NIDS,

Robert Bigelow bought the famous paranormal site

known as Skinwalker Ranch.

John Alexander was there.

- I was with Bob.

Robert Bigelow owned it,

and I was with Bob the day he bought the ranch,

was the first one to spend the night.

We spent years looking at that.

- [Narrator] He would go on to personally witness events

that led him to startling conclusions

about the complexity of unexplained phenomena.

- There was no single phenomena

that was happening at the ranch.

The stories are so bizarre.

What you end up, though, with is something

that is terribly complex,

maybe more complex than we can imagine.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] It wasn't long before strange reports

of unusual activity at the ranch

attracted the attention of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

- You look at the guys involved, some of them were our,

I mean, talking PhD level scientists.

- [Narrator] Robert Bigelow went on to form

Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Studies, BASS,

as the evolved version of NIDS.

He was quickly rewarded

with a Defense Intelligence Agency contract

to study subjects closely tied to the UAP phenomenon.

According to the original contract,

some of these topics included lift, propulsion, control,

power generation, spatial temporal translation,

materials, structural configuration, signature reduction,

human interface, human effects, and armament.

At one point, BASS brought on MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network,

to help in the study of UFO events around the world.

Richard Lang ran the program inside MUFON.

- Well we put this program together.

Basically what they were doing

is they were paying MUFON for data every month.

At the time that we put this all together,

we didn't know that the DIA was funding this.

I knew, based on some of the conversations I had,

that there was somebody funding it that wasn't Bigelow,

but I didn't know who it was.

I assumed it was some government agency

(tense music)

- [Narrator] The BASS program was called AAWSAP.

It was the precursor program to what we now know as AATIP

Lue Elizondo says he took over

the remains of the program in 2009.

- So the initial focus of of AATIP,

which was really AAWSAP, was very broad.

So imagine trying to shoot a fly with a shotgun, right?

Chances are you'll probably hit the fly,

but chances are you're gonna hit a lot more.

So we quickly realized that we were getting

a lot of information

as a result of this broad focus very quickly,

and we frankly just didn't have the staff

to deal with it all,

so a decision was made early on to focus the program.

The program was renamed to AATIP,

and really use, let's say, instead of a shotgun,

maybe we're gonna use a sniper rifle this time, right?

So, much more focused on what it is

we were trying to collect

and try to digest this elephant one bite at a time.

And so the focus of AATIP was, indeed, the phenomena.

Again, the challenge is where do you start?

- We have got, and we may well get,

interesting information, but we may never get all of it.

- What I'm afraid happens, too,

is that somebody that has this knowledge

passes away or goes on, and then the new person coming in

doesn't quite grasp what's going on.

- One difficulty with getting information from the military

is those who say don't know, those who know don't say.

So, in other words, when someone says that I know everything

about what's happening with the military,

then don't believe it,

because maybe there are things that they don't know.

So I think the mantra here is beware; that is, be cautious.

Don't believe everything you hear from the military.

- These private corporations that are running

the special access programs, they're the mafia.

They don't want anything examining what they do.

They've got the future in their possession.

They've got the most exotic technology

and science imaginable, and they have it.

Why would they possibly wanna share it?

- Anybody that does know the truth, I don't know their name,

you don't know their name,

they are not in the public right now,

they are not speaking to anybody,

they're not not on camera, you don't know them,

- and that's where the dark programs, I think, come in,

the Skunk Works and things like that.

It's where the government and big business

somehow are interlocked that we don't know,

and there's somebody knows.

Somebody's getting that money, and it's going somewhere.

(tense music)

- When it came to investigating the UFO mystery,

a lot of people used to say that all roads

led to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

But in the last few years,

and especially some of the more controversial subjects,

a lot of the roads lead right here.

- [Narrator] Recently declassified documents

now shed light on the other aspects of BASS

and information that may have originated

from some of these older programs.

Since the early 1900s,

there have been reports of crashed UFOs.

For over a century, hundreds of witnesses

have shared their accounts.

- There were 119 alleged crash retrieval cases.

All we need is one to be true,

and its disclosure right there.

All we need is one.

So, some of the cases that come to mind

are certainly 1941, Cape Girardeau, Missouri,

where there were three bodies recovered.

The craft was recovered as well.

It's alleged that the bodies in the craft

were stored not at the Pentagon,

because the Pentagon didn't exist in '41,

but in the basement of the Capitol building

in Washington D.C.

So that's 1941, Cape Girardeau.

Now, move fast forward six years.

You've got July 2nd, 1947.

You've got the Roswell Crash retrieval.

There was a small egg-shaped craft

the size of a Volkswagen with a dome on top.

There were five bodies recovered. One was still alive.

So that's Roswell.

Move forward in 1953. You've got the Kingman.

This is not the crash retrieval,

but it is a forced landing.

There were four beings associated

with that particular retrieval operation.

They were all live.

They did establish contact.

That craft was allegedly brought

to the remote test site in Nevada.

Now, prior to that we've got the '48 Aztec crash retrieval.

This was a 99.9-foot-diameter, dish-shaped craft

that had a kind of a silver outer exterior color.

There were two bodies recovered

on the upper dome of the craft.

In the central part of the rim of the craft

on the interior, there were another 14 bodies,

for a grand total of 16 bodies.

That craft was allegedly brought back to Los Alamos,

reassembled, and then the retrieval operation

or the reverse engineering operation began at that point.

These are some of the retrieval operations

and cases that come to mind

that, if we could get one of these,

the evidence for one of these,

it would push this .eld of ufology forward.

- There's a red line in this whole process

that you're not allowed to cross.

And the red line is, well, the conspiracy line.

The red line is basically crash retrievals.

Because if you acknowledge that there have been retrievals

of this technology, and bodies,

there is no way to avoid the obvious conclusion

that this is a conspiracy.

- The areas of materials recovery,

to the extent that they have been recovered in crashes,

are heavily classified,

so we don't have access to that material.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] We know about programs that have existed

to study and attempt to reverse engineer this technology.

The evidence has been circumstantial at best, until now.

Included in the 2017 media flurry

was an additional story by the New York Times.

- And they took the conversation right to the edge

of crash retrievals, right to the precipice.

If they took one more step, they're going off that cliff.

And we're talking about genuine UFO crash retrievals.

- What we do know, and what we put in the New York Times,

and I'm pretty proud of this

because it was as far as we could go

that was fully documented,

was that a congressional committee's staff

were briefed with slides

referring to material recovery, apparent material recovery

from crashed UFOs off Earth, off planet vehicles.

- They quoted Eric Davis, they quoted Harry Reed,

both very positively about UFO crashes.

Can you imagine what that's like for the New York Times

to talk about UFO crash retrievals?

- [Narrator] Senator Harry Reed was quoted as saying

that materials recovered from off-world craft

were studied as part of the AAWSAP program.

After the story broke, Senator Reed strongly objected

to some of the wording of the story

and demanded a retraction.

The verbiage was changed slightly,

but the Times still sticks by its original reporting.

- The stories in New York Times

were fully documented with named sources.

We didn't put in information that hid the origins.

It was very transparent.

We said where we got the information.

We had the briefing slides.

One was put into a story that we wrote in the Times.

We actually had the slide copied

and pictured in the New York Times.

- [Narrator] Dr. Eric Davis again made an appearance.

This time it was reported that he delivered a presentation

behind the closed doors of Congress,

acknowledging that some materials

were recovered from off-world craft.

Dr. Davis is quoted elsewhere as saying,

"We have crash retrievals and they've been analyzed.

The program was terminated

for lack of progress in reverse engineering."

- Because there's no way at that point that you can pretend,

oh, well, there's something out there,

but we don't know what they are,

which has been the little pretend game

that everyone's been playing all this time.

Elizondo plays that game, 'cause he has to,

'cause he knows how far he's allowed to go.

- I'm not a whistleblower, and as far as a leaker,

I'll be damned if someone's gonna call me a leaker.

'cause a leaker is somebody who takes classified information

and provides it in an unauthorized manner

for the purpose of disclosure.

I've never done that, and I never will do that.

- Do you think the U.S. government has debris

from a UFO in its possession right now?

- Unfortunately, Tucker,

I really have to be careful of my NDA.

I really can't go into a lot of more detail in that.

- Okay.

- But, simply put, yes.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Chris Mellon, former Under Secretary

of Defense for Intelligence,

said in a Washington post op-ed

that the government had not been studying the UFO topic,

and because of his position, he would know if it was.

But when we pressed him on it, he made a stunning statement.

- There's a bonafide issue there, and I understand that.

I was part of a process that was supposedly reviewing

all of the Defense Department special access programs,

and I also...

People don't generally understand this taxonomy,

but there is a world of programs

within the Defense Department

that is entirely separate and distinct

from the intelligence community,

is not shared with the intelligence community.

And to some extent, vice versa.

In addition, there's a group of programs

in the Department of Energy.

And again, those are not generally shared.

So there's sort of three galaxies

which intersect to some degree of

very tightly held programs.

I was very deep on two of the three,

had some access to the third.

But as I've often said to people,

you don't know what you don't know.

And there is a possibility that there was some very small,

tightly held, close little group, for example,

that had some crash debris or something

and was working that, that the rest of the department,

and even we didn't know about

at the special access program oversight committee.

(tense music)

- So now there are reports of perhaps debris,

debris left over from UFOs.

- [Narrator] Even with thinly veiled admissions

from those in the know

and evidence pointing to corporations

having received materials to study,

details about any of these physical materials

have been unverifiable

Recently that changed.

(curious electronic music)

- UFO investigator Anthony Bergalia

finally received a reply

to a Freedom of Information Act request

that he filed back in 2017 pertaining to, quote,

"physical debris recovered by personnel

of the Department of Defense

as residue, shot off material,

or crashed UAP, or unidentified flying objects."

- [Narrator] After two years of going back and forth

and Bergalia's threat of lawsuits,

the DIA admitted that it had documents

responsive to the request on recovered UFO debris

and its analysis, and a program

under which it was administered.

Included in the FOIA release

are reports about a variety of advanced materials.

The report speculated about how they may be created

and what they may be capable of.

One is a well-known alloy called nitinol.

It's a shape-able, memory-retaining titanium alloy.

Nitinol enjoys wide use today in a variety of applications,

but its capabilities bear similarity to the many accounts

about the so-called Roswell memory metal.

- Hey, is it from a crash?

- How do you know about that?

- We heard about it on the radio.

Everybody's talking about it.

- Abracadabra.

- How'd it do that?

- [Narrator] The origins of nitinol

help make a case for stories

of extraterrestrial technology

being recovered and delivered to science and industry.

It was supposedly invented

in a naval weapons research lab in 1959,

but its origins have been traced back even further

to a corporation called Battelle Memorial Institute.

Since the late 1940s,

Battelle maintained a contract to analyze metal samples

provided by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Another is a class of materials called metallic glass.

(computer beeping)

- Transparent aluminum?

- That's the ticket, laddy.

- [Narrator] The material described

in the Star Trek film "Voyage Home"

in 1986 actually exists.

We find upon further research

that the original patents for this type of metallic glass

was initially applied for in 1981

by the Raytheon Corporation.

- These guys in Lockheed and TRW,

McDonald Douglas or Boeing, General Electric, Raytheon.

Look, there's no way they're gonna voluntarily

let this happen.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] There's more.

We now enter the stunning world of metamaterials.

In this recording from an interview

Lue Elizondo gave to the MUFON Journal,

he discusses the finer points of the materials claims.

- [Lue] So it was never about unidentified metal alloys,

any second-year metallurgist will tell you

elements are elements and we can figure it out.

What was actually discussed was certain metamaterials

in which their isotopic ratios at the molecular level

are so unique and so precise, based on the complexity,

that the origins of those materials remain unknown.

- If we do encounter extraterrestrial materials,

they would've isotopic ratios

that are not found on the Earth

because of their exposure to cosmic rays,

different kinds of manufacture.

They would differ from us.

And so that's one way to analyze the fact

that these are in fact extraterrestrial

because they have different isotopic ratios.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] There are more space age materials

described in the reports

that the Defense Intelligence Agency acknowledges.

One type may be used to slow down light

and even bring light to a complete standstill.

Another may induce invisibility by manipulating refraction,

reflectivity, and increasing light absorption.

- Metamaterials allow you to, in principle,

make objects invisible,

in principle allow you to stop light,

in principle allow you to magnify things

beyond what we can do with present-day technology.

We can do that in the microwave range.

We have not yet done it in the optical frequencies.

- [Narrator] Another has the interesting ability

to compress electromagnetic energy.

- Things that we would consider impossible

would become child's play if you have a technology

that is centuries more advanced than us.

- [Narrator] Still another exhibits

a particular tuneable resonance,

which was likely determined during fabrication.

- You see, if these objects come from a civilization

more advanced than ours,

they have mastered the art of manipulating individual atoms.

- [Narrator] The reports on these materials

have something in common.

They all talk about what the materials might do

and their possible uses.

This seems to be an indirect confirmation

that we didn't create them and we're not sure what they do.

(tense music)

- And they have to be analyzed on several levels.

First, they have to be analyzed spectroscopically

so we know what they're made of.

- So let's say that there is,

there are materials that some other civilization has created

and that they have atomic-grade printing

that we don't have today.

The only way to understand it is to de-assemble it

atom by atom.

- [Narrator] Dr. Garry Nolan

is a scientist at Stanford University.

He publicly stated that a new technique

for mass spectrometry that he developed

attracted the attention

of those in possession of UFO materials.

- Well there's one technology that's in my lab

called secondary ion mass spec,

and we developed a company around it,

and the technology for using it

to read biopsy material from patients, right?

And we had a way of labeling the biopsies

with metal tags delivered via antibodies,

and that would light up the tissue

in a way that would tell you something

about the distribution of those proteins

on and or in cancer cells and immune system cells.

And it's a very successful technology

that's worked very well.

It turns out that it was tuned to look at metals,

'cause we were using the metal tags.

And so, when in discussions with Jacques and others

that they said they had these pieces of metal,

I said, "Well, I have an instrument

that's perfectly tuned to look at metals, so let's do it."

- What that stuff consisted of

and why they think it's off planet

and what the testing showed about its, the possibility

that nothing like that could appear on Earth,

that's all stuff we were not able to get access to.

We don't know.

- [Narrator] Upon release of the FOIA request,

there was evidence of internal commotion

inside the DIA and the Pentagon.

- The powers that be.

I mean, there are such people,

I think they realized, all right, you just went,

you went actually as far as you could go,

and in fact you went a little too far.

We're gonna dial it back.

- [Narrator] Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokesperson,

said that although she was aware

of the social media chatter,

the information provided by the DIA

actually relates in some way

to an advanced weapons program and not UFO items.

- If you start with different assumptions

about how something might operate,

you can come up with things

that another equally advanced civilization,

America, let's say, or Western civilization,

doesn't understand how it works.

But that doesn't mean it came from ET.

But I suspect that Freedom of Information Act

is talking about something a little different.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Some of the main players in the material story

were making new statements

that changed previously reported facts.

- Right, this is a counter,

this is "The Empire Strikes Back".

This is what we're seeing.

You're seeing the major Establishment,

which was on the back foot for over three years

because of the offensive of the UFO faction.

They were on retreat.

They've gathered their resources.

They're like, you know, we don't really want,

we can't go any farther than we've gone.

- Harry Reid walked it back

as far as with the New York Times

about Lockheed having artifacts.

And so they get these phone calls.

I mean, why else catch yourself after the fact

and go, "I should have never said that?"

And there's a pattern here.

It always pertains to physical evidence.

- In our New York Times story,

we said that a hangar was built to contain materials.

Okay, we didn't say that materials were obtained

and put in the hangar.

- You did an interview with Jesse Michaels.

In that interview, you laid out some of the materials.

- Mm-hmm.

- Very excitingly, we have parts.

Okay, the parts were a little anticlimactic and small,

but he claims to have much bigger parts

that we can't see due to national security sensitivities.

- But then, when you did the interview with Lex,

you said that you had materials just from Jacques Vallee,

which obviously wouldn't be classified,

and from TTSA, which wouldn't be classified.

- There's two classes of materials

that I've been given by people,

and they're not given by the government or anything.

- So have you studied classified materials,

but you just don't gave them?

- I just shouldn't say anything more.

- You shouldn't say anything about that?

Okay. All right.

- You can put that on there.

I just can't say anything more.

- Right, no, that's fine.

- Might have been an accidental truth moment.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] FOIA responses are based on reacting

to very specific wording.

The FOIA response from the DIA

specifically refers to recovered materials from UFOs

being studied at Bigelow Aerospace.

This is official confirmation

that these studies indeed occurred.

- Bigelow Aerospace is massive.

It's surrounded on most sides by these gigantic vacant lots.

It's surrounded by multiple layers of fencing,

including barbed wire, video surveillance,

24-hour security guards everywhere.

This place is a fortress.

- [Narrator] Multiple reports also seem to confirm

the presence of materials at the facility.

But after the release of the documents, the story changed.

- For years, one of the secret studies

was carried out by BASS, a Las Vegas operation

hidden within Bigelow Aerospace,

documents first reported by the I-Team

show that bass landed a contract with the DIA,

and one of the objectives was to study

so-called metamaterials.

Multiple sources have confirmed to us

there was a weird piece of something at the Bigelow plant.

New York Times reported

that you modified your facility here

in order to house some material from somewhere else.

Did you ever have it?

- We never had any. - Did you ever see any?

(interviewee stammering)

You know, do you see, do you see...

- It's the old "Raiders of the Lost Ark" warehouse scene.

We got our top people working on it,

Who are your top people?

Oh, they're top.

- [Narrator] In March of 2022,

the Defense Intelligence Agency

responded to another FOIA request

that demanded information about the work of AATIP

and its previous versions.

The result was 1,500 pages

that included 38 independent papers

about potential advanced technology.

The authors of some of these reports

are many of the same people

that have been involved in secret UFO programs

all the way back to the late 1960s.

These reports came in the form

of defense intelligence reference documents.

Some of the technologies that were explored include

advanced nuclear propulsion

for manned, deep space missions,

aneutronic fusion propulsion,

pulsed high-power microwave technology,

anti-gravity for aerospace applications.

- I think when talking about extraterrestrial civilizations,

we have to be open to the fact that their technology

is thousands of years more advanced than our technology.

But then the question is, is it possible that we,

that we humans, can also partake

of some of these advanced technologies?

- [Narrator] Space communication implications

of quantum entanglement and non locality,

high-frequency gravitational wave communications.

- I take two objects,

two particles that are quantumly entangled,

and if I do something to this one, this one responds.

And if you separate those two by a foot,

when I do something here, something happens here.

But something even more magical happens

that when I take these objects

and I put them one here

and one at the farthest end of the visible universe,

that direction, 13.5 billion light years,

and I take the other particle,

I put it in that direction, 13.5 billion light years away,

when I do this, this one responds instantaneously.

- [Narrator] Traversable wormhole, stargates,

and negative energy.

- Special relativity says

you cannot break the light barrier,

but special relativity has a loophole.

The loophole is general relativity, the theory of gravity,

whereby you can bend time and space into a pretzel

if you have enough matter and energy,

an energy which we won't have

perhaps for another 100,000 to a million years.

So it's not for us.

Perhaps for an extraterrestrial civilization,

but it's not for us.

- [Narrator] Warp drive, dark energy,

and the manipulation of extra dimensions.

- We have to be open to the possibility

that there are other dimensions and shortcuts,

perhaps shortcuts between different universes.

Now, of course, moving through these higher dimensions

would require a technology much more advanced

than anything we have.

- [Narrator] Concepts for extracting energy

from the quantum vacuum.

- You would have to be a very advanced civilization

to get net usable energy from nothing.

In other words, it's not for us.

That doesn't mean an advanced civilization can't do it.

- [Narrator] Quantum computing

and utilizing organic molecules in automation technology;

technological approaches to controlling external devices

in the absence of limb-operated interfaces.

- Our most advanced understanding of the brain

comes from BCI, brain computer interface.

We can take a chip, put it on the surface of the brain,

have that chip connected to a laptop computer

that then analyzes the impulses of the brain

and deciphers it, and then uses it to control something.

And so you can imagine what we can do today

and then extrapolate to the future.

- [Narrator] Aerospace applications of programmable matter.

- If you could design something atom by atom

and position things atom by atom,

then there's a lot more we could do

with material science than we can do today.

- [Narrator] Ultra capacitors as energy

and power storage devices;

role of superconductors in gravity research.

- Most of what we create today

in even the superconductor areas is basically recipes.

They're not designs.

- [Narrator] Many of these technologies

are beyond the realm of current science.

These technologies are discussed

as if someone knows that they are entirely possible,

even in some stage of successful development.

- I will tell you unequivocally,

if a man like Robert Bigelow were to ask you

to come on board to do something,

man, I would do it without a blink of an eye.

It would be almost reflexive

When did we start?

Let's go.

He's a good man, and he's also a patriot.

- Machinery really does exist.

Does exist.

The problem has been the inability to back engineer.

And I kind of think that some things

require a weightless environment.

(tense music)

(tense music)

- [Narrator] It is generally accepted

that the new narrative broke in late 2017.

It was actually Robert Bigelow

who made spellbinding revelations

before anybody knew that he was involved

in government contracts to study UFOs.

(eerie music)

- Do you believe in aliens?

- I am absolutely convinced. That's all there is to it.

- Do you also believe that UFOs have come to Earth?

- There has been, and is, an existing presence,

an ET presence.

- You have the interview that Robert Bigelow did

on "60 Minutes", really an amazing interview.

This is one of the most knowledgeable people on this planet,

in my view, on the subject of UFOs.

And he is also a billionaire,

and he's also got a lot of influence in this world.

And here he is saying aliens are real,

and indeed they're actually walking among us.

- [Narrator] His unshakeable statement

regarding the reality of an extraterrestrial presence

drew some media reaction.

Its significance did not become clear

until the story of Bigelow Aerospace

and its role in AATIP began to unfold.

- The New York Times came out with a couple of articles,

essentially downplaying any ET component of these sightings,

but also playing down the fact

that they may be Russian or Chinese

and also playing down the fact

that these are advanced U.S. classified prototypes.

Well, if they're gonna play all of those things down,

then I would ask, what gets played up?

Because there's nothing left.

- [Narrator] Confronted with the challenge of weaving

Robert Bigelow's informed beliefs

into the story Chris Mellon had revealed, Mellon said this.

- There aren't many people associated

with the Establishment who are so bold

and willing to make statements like that.

Many of the Navy pilots themselves

who've engaged these craft

go there because they can't conceive

of any other explanation, frankly.

- [Narrator] When Lue Elizondo

was asked about Bigelow's statements,

his response corroborated Bigelow's position.

- He has his own space stations in space.

People will say, what do you mean?

Yeah, he has his own right now in space.

I mean, I don't know who else has done that.

And, by the way, he's done it for a long time.

So give the guy some credit.

He knows what he's talking about.

(tense music)

- They have stated flatly they're not one of ours.

Then the question is, whose are they?

- [Narrator] All of the people involved

in the current narrative

are deliberately stopping short

of identifying the phenomenon

as originating from extraterrestrials.

- We have all these tales going back centuries, millennia

about visitations and strange beings.

Maybe it's a record of visits from alien civilizations.

You can't rule out the fact that, yeah,

maybe we have been visited in the past.

You can't rule it out.

- So you say, one by one, they're not natural phenomena,

they're not weather balloons, they're not U.S. technology,

they're not Russian, they're not Chinese,

they're not optical illusions,

they're not mental illness

on the part of the people who report them,

because these are our most highly-trained experts

who are reporting these things

and they've been caught on, as I said, navy instrumentation.

So what are you left with? Well, no one is going there.

- Our view is let's follow the trail wherever it leads,

let's get the data, the best evidence possible.

There's probably more than one phenomenon at work here.

- [Narrator] They refuse to say the A-word: alien.

Why?

- Assuming that these things are all of alien origin,

for a variety of reasons,

in part because people shut down

and it impedes our progress.

And some of the allies

and people that we need to bring to bear

who are now getting on board wouldn't do so

if we started with the premise that these are aliens.

- I think the word "alien" is a little...

People are afraid of the word "alien."

ET, extraterrestrial, non-humans.

- I'm always concerned about

getting ahead of our headlights, frankly, and talking,

leaping into conclusions.

- For me it's more of the thrill of the hunt.

It's trying to figure out the unknowns.

Because once they're known, they're no longer a mystery.

- What it is no one's admitted yet.

And you've got plenty of video evidence

of Lue and Chris not admitting it,

because they can't say it,

but they've said it in as many ways as you can.

Anybody bright enough to listen

will, as you say, understand the accidental truth.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] During the interview in 2018,

Lue Elizondo gave us an accidental truth.

- [Ron] You've spoken about some of the technologies

that are being studied as a spinoff

of the research you did at AATIP,

things like bending space-time

and Einstein-type possibilities that may unfold.

Is there an interdimensional element to any of this

that you guys maybe explored?

- Other dimensions may absolutely exist.

You look at string theory, look at M-theory.

Dimensions are all around us.

So I think you have to cast a wide net

when you're looking at this,

and that's why I've said before,

whether they're from outer space,

innerspace, or the space in between,

we just don't know, and we need to collect more data.

Is it possible? Absolutely it's possible.

Is it possible they're from the Pleiades? Sure.

Is it possible that they've been here all along

and they're from here,

they're just resonating at a different vibration?

Sure.

- [Ron] It seems like the only question that's answered

in the ones you just posed,

is that rather or not there is an actual they.

- That's a great question.

I don't know if I can answer that.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Few seem willing to officially

pronounce the phenomenon

as originating from extraterrestrials.

There is a willingness to concede

that there might be extraterrestrial involvement.

- What's here is probably just an AI.

Why spend all your time on one little planet

out in the dust spec at the edge of the galaxy?

You send your robots.

- The question is, what's our definition of life?

I think life may exist, may exist,

and I'll caveat that, in all sorts of forms.

I don't think it's necessarily gonna be something

that we might recognize

or even initially even classify as life,

'cause we don't have a full understanding of it.

- [Narrator] There is a growing consensus

that the extraterrestrial hypothesis

doesn't answer all of the questions.

There are multiple phenomena at work

that cannot be explained completely

without looking at other possibilities.

- It may be there's a whole range

of different phenomena at play here.

In fact, I think given the differences

in what's been reported by people, that's quite likely,

that there are many different parallel strands to this.

But whatever is involved, and as I say, I don't know,

I think it does raise important defense,

national security and air safety issues.

- An ET hypothesis, for instance,

is a logical starting point,

if not from here, from where,

until you start talking about, well, what do you mean where?

- We think that an object is solid

and can only be one place at the same time.

But in quantum mechanics,

electrons can be two places at the same time.

In fact, they can be many places.

And this is called the multiverse idea,

the idea that we exist with other universes simultaneously.

- Well, wait a minute.

We're talking about multidimensional realities.

- It doesn't really matter how far you go

at a three-dimensional space and distance,

that there are shortcuts,

and those shortcuts exist as part of the natural universe.

So that is a real-world example

where we know other dimensions may absolutely exist.

- Whether it's extraterrestrial or interdimensional

to me is irrelevant,

because whatever it is clearly has the ability

to manipulate dimensionality.

These things can jump in and out, appear, disappear.

And so, for all intents and purposes, it's both.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] In August of 2022,

Dr. Hal Puthoff released a paper

in which he explored other options

for what may be at work.

He presented concepts such as ultra-terrestrial beings,

the concept that there could be another intelligent race

living with us, inside the Earth, or underwater,

a civilization with advanced technology

that has been here long before us.

Time travelers.

While mainstream science debates the feasibility

of time travel, it still remains a possibility.

- Some people say that the aliens don't come from Mars,

they don't come from a distant star,

they come from a different time.

Well, I'm open to all sorts of ideas

as long as they are testable.

- Our notion of time and space is flawed seriously.

And you're entering issues

where there is no time and there is no space.

- You've got manmade craft,

you've got possible extraterrestrial,

you've got interdimensional,

you've got a preexisting, high-tech civilization

that could have been on this planet for thousands of years.

And when you wrap this all together,

you can see how confusing it is,

because a lot of these things merge.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Some of the phenomena seem to point

to a direct interaction with consciousness.

- Consciousness is interacting in all aspects of it.

And to take it a step farther, going to Max Planck,

suggests that maybe the physical

evolved from consciousness

as opposed to the other way around.

(tense music)

(soft piano music)

- [Narrator] As part of developing new understandings,

it's hard to ignore the so-called "experiencer" phenomenon.

A significant percentage of the population

report having encounters with non-human beings.

These encounters range from enlightening to terrifying.

- Many, many, many people

have had some very strange experiences,

either seeing UFOs,

and not just at night while they were dreaming.

These are not nightmares.

These are often described as more real

than everyday reality.

The people who describe it, and the people are solid,

they come from all walks of life.

- [Narrator] Ralph Blumenthal wrote a book

about the late Harvard psychologist John Mack

called "The Believer."

Mack was one of the first members of academia

to acknowledge the validity of the experiencer phenomenon.

- John Mack investigated these stories

of people who said that this and this happened to them.

And at least Mack, as a psychiatrist,

was able to evaluate their stories,

couldn't prove that this happened or didn't happen,

but at least could say that these people

were solid people and were not mentally ill.

(tense music)

- We interface with whatever this is.

Contactees, abductees,

I think we can create some of the phenomenon itself.

- So I do believe that there are certain individuals

on this planet who are more in tune,

are more intuitive, are more in touch

with the unseen world than the seen world.

- Some of us are able to pierce the veil

and connect with whatever's going on out there.

(soft music)

- [Narrator] Stunning new research by Dr. Garry Nolan

has revealed a trait in the human brain

that may make some people more prone to abilities,

such as heightened intuition, psychic abilities,

and possibly an ability to communicate

in undeveloped manners such as telepathy.

- We have the MRIs of claimed remote viewers,

high-end remote viewers,

and this area of their brain lit up like a Christmas tree.

- [Narrator] The condition has been observed

in so-called experiencers.

Nolan has detected increased activity and development

in a region of the brain called the basal ganglia.

- The thing that got me really intrigued

was that we did have MRIs from experiencers,

but these were high-functioning individuals

that we happened to notice

that an area of their brain had a density in it

that we first thought was damaged,

'cause we were studying damage at the moment,

but then we realized, oh, this is not damaged,

this is living tissue.

And that became sort of a side discovery.

You're left then with, frankly,

what was an even less uniform group of individuals

with such varied interactions,

things that were talking to them,

things that they had gotten close to

and had been damaged and harmed.

There were a couple of people in that group who were harmed,

but of the remaining individuals,

I would say that the majority of them were not harmed.

This area of the brain

that we came to the conclusion at the time

was probably involved in intuition

when we actually looked into it

and then looked into the literature, believe it or not,

people were finding that it had

something to do with intuition,

and that's the basal ganglia.

This area, the caudoputamen, which is,

by many neurophysiologists,

called the brain within the brain.

- [Narrator] What Dr. Nolan has discovered

may represent a leap in human evolution

or even a new variation of homosapien.

- You have to ask the question,

what kind of information is being perceived

and how is it being translated into, let's say,

traditional neurophysiologic pathways?

We don't understand space-time

the way we'd like to pretend we do.

And so, who's to say that there is not

some kind of information transfer

that we just don't necessarily yet appreciate

but evolution has found a way to latch onto.

- [Narrator] The people that we've met since 2017

seem to have some genuine interest

in helping to make humanity more aware of these realities.

Chris Mellon continues to work quietly behind the scenes

to bring about an effective means of disclosure.

- Very much changing within the government,

on the Hill and the executive branch both.

As well, as you can see with the media lately,

it's becoming respectable and legitimate,

and that's so crucial to engaging more minds and more energy

and more resources to getting to the bottom of this.

- [Narrator] Lue Elizondo seems

to have put everything on the line

since going public.

- So if there's an issue where the government

is doing something we don't want to,

then it's up to us as a people to change that.

But it doesn't have to be an adversarial relationship.

I think where we go wrong

is that people oftentimes look at the government,

they say, oh, the government's bad, the government's bad.

- [Narrator] His role in AATIP has been challenged

by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Lue fought back by hiring one of the most effective

and well-known civil rights attorneys

in the field, Danny Sheehan.

- I was contacted by Lue Elizondo and asked to represent him

because he was upset about the fact that the Pentagon,

even after the publication of this

on December 16th and 17th of 2017,

there were officials inside the Pentagon

issuing completely false statements still,

saying, yeah, there's no such thing

as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

- [Narrator] Together, they approached the Inspector General

of the Defense Intelligence Agency

to reverse the Pentagon's failure

to acknowledge Elizondo's position.

- When Elizondo started talking

about this phenomenon publicly,

you can see the Pentagon

had tremendous pushback against him.

They lied.

They said no, he didn't run such a program.

That was a lie.

They said AATIP had nothing to do with UFOs. That was a lie.

- We're, at the same time,

trying to determine what Lue can say,

in light of his security clearances, publicly.

- Not long ago, Elizondo supposedly said to his attorney

that he had seen a flying saucer in a hangar.

That gets out, and the stuff hits the fan.

And Lue had to walk that back too.

What did he do?

He said, "Well, I went to a hangar

that was designed to accommodate exotic materials,

but I didn't see anything there.

I never saw any intact craft."

He was very lawyerly in how he said what he did,

'cause he had to.

- I guess I'm just genetically predisposed

to not trusting government.

And seeing it now, too, it's a joke, it really is.

- [Narrator] MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network,

is the largest and oldest UFO organization in the world.

After over 50 years, MUFON is stronger than ever.

- I'm Ron James. It's March 11th, 2022.

I'm here in front of the White House.

It's been a historic week for the UFO community

and for MUFON the Mutual UFO Network.

We have actually been taking meetings all week long

with key members and staff

of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees

regarding the UAP phenomenon.

- We've been here for three days now, four days,

and have met with about 10 different officials,

congressmen, representatives, staff, and senators.

And we've really had a tremendous welcome.

- [Narrator] Thousands of people over 100 years or more

have challenged the official deception around the UFO topic.

They have been ridiculed and debunked.

Today, they are beginning to be vindicated

but still have not accomplished their goal,

a total end to the UFO coverup.

- There's no way to inform the American people writ large,

all 500 million of us, and ensure that information's

not gonna get into the hands of a foreign adversary.

- Maybe it's that there are some elements of the technology

that has to be kept under wraps

or kept to a limited number of people,

because if you cross the wires, bad things happen.

- This is a version of disclosure,

but is it gonna be the real truth?

And I mean, I don't care about anything

except what the actual truth is.

So we'll see if they can get there.

- They could say, for example, down the road,

well, actually, yeah,

we have had a few reports down the road over the years,

but we kept it quiet, because honestly,

we needed to avoid public panic.

They'll say that.

- At a societal level,

I believe that we are completely ready

to incorporate this new reality.

And if the president were to go on the evening news today

and say, "My fellow Americans,

people of the world, we're not alone,"

I think the reaction would be sort of twofold.

Obviously there would be huge interest in it,

but actually there wouldn't be panic in the streets.

- So to be part of that journey

to uncover and to show links to this advanced civilization,

that would be a great honor, because as a scientist,

you go where the data takes you,

and sometimes the data takes you

to places that are uncomfortable,

but hey, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

- Yeah, I just, I'm gonna get hit on it.

They've told me, they said,

"Man, Merchant, you need to cool this stuff out,

'cause it's hurt gonna hurt us at the polls."

But we'll see.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] We've shown that even today

there is a narrative at work

that has been created to manipulate public perception

about the UFO topic.

We are not alone in the universe.

There are those who have struggled

to keep this truth a secret,

but the proof of the deception serves its own purpose

and tells us much more than ever before.

- I have good news and I have bad news.

The good news is the government's

been telling you the truth.

The bad news is the government's been telling you the truth.

- I mean, just look at Roswell.

There are no 509th Bomb Group members left.

They're all dead.

So according to the government, it's coverup complete.

- All right, then what did I see out there in that field?

- Oh, that.

Why, that was a weather balloon.

(tense music)

(curious electronic music)

(curious electronic music continues)

(curious electronic music continues)