Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Is the U. S. government

covering up the truth about alien contact?

And if so, why?

JOHN PODESTA: The government seems to be

completely unaccountable

to the American public.

They rarely release anything

that they know or their findings.

GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: The fact that the U. S. government has

investigated thousands and thousands of reports

leads me to think they know much more

than they let us believe.

NARRATOR: Could the government have a secret agenda,

one known to only a select few,

and perhaps dating back hundreds of years?

GEORGE NOORY: The government's program continues

to be deny, deny, deny.

NICK POPE: Sometimes, government finds it helpful

to sow seeds of disinformation and misinformation

to hide the facts about these sorts of programs.

STEVE BASSETT: Hillary Clinton was basically saying,

"You are going to give me the information I need

to disclose the extraterrestrial presence,

or I'm gonna fire every single one of you."

PODESTA: People want to know what the government knows,

and they ought to know what the government knows.

NARRATOR: On December 16th, 2017,

The New York Times ran an explosive story

entitled "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money':

The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program."

It was the first time the American public learned

of a top secret U. S. government project,

the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,

otherwise known as AATIP.

The revelations concerning the existence

of the Pentagon's AATIP program are extraordinary.

It is the single biggest ever news

in the whole history of the UFO phenomenon.

It's not quite a spaceship in a hangar smoking gun,

but it's the closest we've ever been.

I assure you that nothing like this has ever happened

in the history of this issue.

This is a milestone. This is a watershed.

NARRATOR: The article reported that the program had been run

by a former Pentagon official named Luis Elizondo,

a senior career intelligence officer

with top security clearance and with experience in everything

from microbiology and parasitology

to the study of global terrorism.

It was Elizondo's job to investigate reports

of unidentified flying objects,

and to measure what threat they could pose to national security.

AATIP received these cases from various different channels.

In some cases, reporting would come up through Navy channels.

In other cases, it would come up through Air Force channels.

In other cases, it would come through

the intelligence community, and all roads led to our office,

regarding the phenomena.

NARRATOR: Elizondo played a key role

in the government's top secret AATIP program

prior to his leaving the government in 2017.

Among the reasons given for his departure was the bitterness

he felt that the research he was conducting,

and the conclusions that he and his colleagues were reaching,

were not being taken seriously

by other agencies within the government.

Even Congress, to which AATIP owed its funding,

was hard-pressed to give Elizondo so much as a hearing

so that his findings could be made part of the public record.

Interestingly, just two months

after Elizondo's exit from the government,

The New York Times broke the major story,

exposing the AATIP program and many of the facts

surrounding the government's secret research

into UFO activity.

When I read in The New York Times this front page story

that the government was running this semi-secret program

to investigate, well, aerial phenomena,

which is kind of a code word for UFOs,

yeah, you know, I thought, "My God, all these years,

"you know, people who think that we're being visited

"were claiming that the government was, in fact,

"possessing some secret knowledge about this.

And, sure enough, they did have this secret investigation."

NARRATOR: For Luis Elizondo, The New York Times article

served as a vindication

for the years that his research went unrecognized

and his warnings unheeded.

For if the UFO activity being recorded was real,

so, too, was the possibility that it was being caused

by technologies that were not only unknown,

but of extraterrestrial origin.

NOORY: Elizondo, he resigned because he felt

the government considered this a joke.

I think that the fact that these folks are out there

trying to get the answers that we're all seeking,

absolutely fantastic.

And they're getting to top government officials.

And someday, we're gonna get the answers

from people like that--

not from government, but from people like that.

NARRATOR: Luckily for Luis Elizondo,

one of the people who took him and his research seriously

was musician and UFO researcher Tom DeLonge.

PODESTA: Tom DeLonge, who is most famous

for his being the lead in Blink-182.

I've known Tom for a while, and he spearheaded an initiative

that's brought together a number of scientists and others

to both continue to study the phenomena on the outside,

in the private sector, and to raise funds to do that.

POPE: His enthusiasm, his passion

has driven things forward.

A lot of people were saying,

"What does a rock star know about all this?"

Let's not forget that sometimes even people in government

and military and the intelligence community

get a little more starstruck than they should by celebrities.

Tom DeLonge was able to use this to leverage, I guess, access

where others had tried and failed.

NARRATOR: In October 2017,

Tom DeLonge announced the creation

of his To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science,

an organization devoted to the study of UFOs

and the possible existence of extraterrestrial activity

here on Earth.

When Elizondo left the Pentagon, he was determined

to bring AATIP's years of investigation out of the shadows

by releasing several of the videos he had collected.

One of them featured this incredible encounter,

taken by a fighter jet in Florida in 2015,

now known as the Gimbal video.

NARRATOR: On December 18, 2017,

DeLonge and Elizondo revealed a second shocking video

which was released through The Washington Post.

This UFO had been tracked by the USS Princeton

for several days over the Pacific Ocean,

approximately 100 miles southwest of San Diego.

On the screen, it also says the speed of the F-18

is 250 knots, roughly about 280 miles per hour.

This F-18 can't seem to get any closer

to this vehicle, whatever it is.

Now, the F-18's one of the highest technology

fighter crafts on the planet.

And it can't catch this thing?

When it darts offscreen to the left,

it would be going extremely fast.

The g-forces would turn a person inside it

into, like, tapioca pudding.

I mean, it would kill them.

NARRATOR: In March 2018,

a third Pentagon video entitled "Go Fast" was released,

and featured yet another unexplained aerial encounter.

(pilots laugh)

NARRATOR: But perhaps the most shocking information

to come from Tom DeLonge and his To The Stars Academy was

Luis Elizondo's claim that Bigelow Aerospace had modified

its buildings for the storage of strange metal alloys

of unknown origin, also known as metamaterials.

Now, hold, stop the presses right there.

What are these metal alloys?

POPE: Luis Elizondo has referred

to these as "meta materials."

The implication is that they're not special magical elements,

or anything, but they do seem to be

materials that have been studied.

According to Elizondo, tests have been run.

The answer has come back:

whatever these things were, they came from space.

PODESTA: There was also indications

that there were certain polymers

that were discovered at crash sites

that were unexplained and were reviewed.

RICHARD DOLAN: You know, for years and years,

UFO researchers had talked about crash retrievals of UFOs,

or that elements of these objects

had been recovered and were being studied.

And skeptics would laugh at these claims.

You know, how ridiculous

such conspiracy paranoid fantasies were.

Well, guess what.

Now we have it confirmed.

What are these materials?

Are they of this Earth?

Are they from an advanced alien intelligence?

Were these metals actually taken from crashed UFOs?

What are the sources for these kinds of metals?

These are the kind of questions that we need to learn

the answers to if we're gonna get to the bottom

of understanding what the government knows about UFOs.

NARRATOR: Is it possible that the U. S. military has recovered

crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft,

and that wreckage from these aircraft

is currently being stored and studied

by a top-secret team at Bigelow Aerospace?

TAYLOR: One of the really interesting things about AATIP

is how much information hasn't been released.

We hear things that are coming.

There's this report that was written

that we're supposed to get to see at some point.

Haven't seen it yet.

And then, are there more videos?

We've seen, I think, three videos come out

that they've released.

There has to be more.

They were doing this for, like, five years,

or maybe even a lot longer than that.

I bet you there's a lot more.

DAVID CHILDRESS: Other secret military programs

have been going on for many, many decades.

And it's really just the tip of the iceberg.

NARRATOR: Was the U. S. government's AATIP program

the only one to be investigating extraterrestrial activity?

And, if so, how was it started, and why?

And was the government seriously concerned

that such activity was happening?

Or was the bigger concern that the public

would find out about it?

NARRATOR: Washington, D. C., 2007.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada

summons Senator Daniel Inouye from Hawaii

and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens to a secure room

in the Capitol Building for a secret meeting.

He convinces them to lend their support

to fund a project researching UFO reports

in the interest of national security--

the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program,

or AATIP.

Senator Reid was successful in getting money

into the Defense Department budget

to create a small office to look at

what the government knew,

and to study some more recent incidents that had occurred,

and to delve into the background,

and to try to explain what pilots who had encountered

strange aerial phenomena couldn't explain.

NARRATOR: Without any public debate,

$22 million is allocated for AATIP

from a black money budget that few people know about

or can monitor.

PODESTA: Much of it, I think, was classified.

Much of it was unclassified,

but I think people didn't know about the program.

I'm very glad that my friend Harry Reid decided

that he would pursue this and sought money for it.

Senator Stevens was genuinely interested in the topic.

But none of them went out and discussed it.

NARRATOR: When later asked about his support for the program,

Senator Reid said that he was inspired by his friend,

retired former senator and astronaut John Glenn.

Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth,

told Reid that he thought that the federal government

should be looking seriously into UFOs.

But there are some who believe that Reid's support

owes less to John Glenn than to his friendship

with one of the senator's largest campaign contributors:

Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace.

Robert Bigelow owned a series of hotels,

and he sold it and made a lot of money.

He decided then he wanted to get into space exploration.

He's fascinated by extraterrestrials and UFOs.

NASA was providing insight, as opposed to oversight--

which is an important distinction there...

NOORY: And his dear friend, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada,

was convinced by Robert Bigelow

to get the government to spend $22 million

into this program to investigate UFOs.

MIKE BARA: It's not a coincidence, to my mind,

that he was involved in

the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

He builds rockets and planes and who knows what else,

and he seems like a perfectly logical person

to have been the point man in the private sector

for using the information that was gleaned from that project,

whatever it was, and we don't know what a lot of it was

because it's classified.

NARRATOR: At the time,

the fact that much of AATIP's research was

outsourced to Bigelow Aerospace made perfect sense.

First of all, the company already had a staff

of highly qualified aerospace engineers.

And, secondly, an outside company could operate

without the kind of public scrutiny

imposed on a government-based agency.

Bigelow could operate in total secrecy.

Private companies aren't held to the Freedom of Information Act.

Private companies can do whatever they want to

with their funding, and you can't go then and fill out

a Freedom of Information Act request.

That's a way to keep things more secretive.

NARRATOR: But was the AATIP program's need for secrecy

merely designed to keep its UFO findings

independent of public scrutiny?

Or was there a greater interest in hiding

not only what AATIP was finding,

but also what those in charge of the program were looking for?

In May 2017,

Robert Bigelow was the subject of a profile

on CBS's 60 Minutes.

The piece was meant to focus

on Bigelow's relationship to NASA

and his activities in creating life-support habitats

for future astronauts.

During his interview, Bigelow revealed to 60 Minutes

that he was not only an aerospace enthusiast,

but a full-fledged believer in extraterrestrials.

Do you believe in aliens?

I'm 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 E. T. presence.

And I've spent millions and millions.

I've probably spent more as an individual

than anybody else in the United States

has ever spent on this subject.

Is it risky for you to say,

you know, in public that you believe

-in UFOs and aliens? -I don't give a damn.

-I don't care. -You don't worry

that some people will say, "Did you hear that guy?

He sounds like he's crazy."

-I don't care. -Why not?

It's not gonna make a difference.

It's not gonna change reality of what I know.

Bob Bigelow said,

"E.T.s are here. They're right under your nose."

And he uses the word "E. T." He doesn't beat around the bush.

BASSETT: Robert Bigelow became my hero.

That "I don't give a damn" really was for a lot of people.

It was for every billionaire space jockey out there,

whether it's Elon Musk or Branson or Bezos.

But guess what.

None of those people have ever said to a reporter,

"You know, I'm pretty sure there's extraterrestrials here."

Bigelow did.

LINDA MOULTON HOWE: We must now go and ask the head

of Bigelow Aerospace what does he mean

that aliens are under everyone's noses.

This story really is begging

for somebody to go to Robert Bigelow

and say, "Can we now go and see your warehouse?"

What a fantastic next step it would be for the world.

NARRATOR: Although funding for the AATIP program

was quietly ended in 2012,

there are those who believe that its focus on the study

of recent UFO activity

and on the study of extraterrestrial life

are still alive and well,

although now further hidden under a different agency name.

When the Pentagon grudgingly admitted

the existence of the AATIP program,

they did a clever thing,

and they said that the funding had run out in 2012.

The implication was that the program was no more,

but with my knowledge of the way

in which these classified sensitive programs are run,

pulling the funding part

is not the same as terminating the project.

NARRATOR: But while some version of the government's

AATIP program may still be operating in secret,

the same cannot be said

for some of the agency's former employees.

And there is one in particular

who is not only open to the idea that aliens do exist,

he has made it his mission

to communicate his findings throughout the world.

NARRATOR: When The New York Times story broke,

revealing the existence of the U. S. government's

ultra top secret AATIP program,

UFO experts and ancient astronaut theorists

had validation for what they knew

had been happening for decades:

that the government has proof of extraterrestrial visitation

and that they have been hiding it from the public.

TSOUKALOS: The investigations were denied

during the time of their happening.

And it's really curious that we're always told,

"No, these programs are not happening."

And then, 20 years later, these documents are being released

to reveal the fact that these investigations did happen.

My initial reaction to the information

that was released in December of 2017

was that this has really been going on for over 70 years.

NARRATOR: Although the government's AATIP program

was established in 2007,

it was by no means the first top secret program

designed to investigate UFO activity

in the United States.

The first was known simply as Project Sign,

and it was set up within the U. S. Air Force

to investigate unexplained aerial phenomena,

such as the event now known as the Battle of Los Angeles.

What's called the Battle of L. A.

is actually one of the earliest unexplained UFO mysteries

in modern... our modern era.

Three months after Pearl Harbor,

it took place on the early morning of February 25, 1942.

An unknown object appeared over Los Angeles

and anti-aircraft guns opened fire on it.

(rapid gunfire)

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The anti-aircraft guns

began barking during a blackout

ordered by the IV Interceptor Command at 2:25 a. m.

1,430 artillery shells were fired

at several unknown objects.

Many eyewitnesses on the ground saw this.

There was concern that the Japanese were somehow involved,

but there was no Japanese aircraft carrier,

no chance that Japanese airplanes

could have been responsible for this.

The Secretary of the Navy said to the public,

"It was just war nerves.

There was nothing out there, whatsoever."

NARRATOR: Although the U. S. Army Air Force

officially dismissed the objects seen in the sky

as weather balloons,

they failed to explain why so many weather balloons

would have been floating over Los Angeles in the first place.

In the years following the Battle of Los Angeles,

numerous other UFO sightings were reported,

including the one widely referred to as

"the Roswell incident," in which an unidentified object,

referred to in the press as a flying saucer,

reportedly crashed on a ranch

just outside the town of Roswell, New Mexico,

on July 4, 1947.

Within 24 hours, the story changed.

And they said, "We made a mistake.

"It's not a flying disc.

It's just debris from a weather balloon."

DOLAN: The Roswell incident was

probably a major contributor to the establishment

of what became known as Project Sign

just a couple of months later.

NARRATOR: By the time Project Sign

was established in 1948,

UFO sightings had become so frequent,

they could no longer be ignored or dismissed.

Given the fact that there was a Cold War escalating

between the United States and the Soviet Union,

concerns that UFOs might be spy satellites

or foreign-made weapons gave some justification

to the increasing paranoia.

Answers needed to be found.

But just as the government's

first official UFO program was getting started,

it was suddenly and mysteriously shut down.

There was a very big incident during the summer of 1948,

when a report went to the Air Force Chief of Staff,

General Hoyt Vandenberg,

and it stated, "This is real. They're here."

And Vandenberg closed down Project Sign.

NARRATOR: But why would the Air Force Chief of Staff

shut down a program designed to study UFOs

just after being informed

that UFOs were not only real but of genuine concern?

There seems to be a pattern of suppression

over the last 70 years when it comes to the UFO subject.

And all of these government investigations into UFOs,

where they look into it,

then they say there's nothing to it.

Then they look into it again,

then they're finding that there is something to it.

But they don't want to say what it is.

NARRATOR: For the next four years,

UFO sightings continued to be reported,

so many, in fact,

that the government could no longer dismiss them as hoaxes,

weather anomalies,

or simply the product of mass hysteria.

By March 1952,

a number of high-ranking Air Force generals

became so frustrated with the military's

previous attempts to properly investigate

so-called flying saucers that they launched a program

that would be the most serious and best-funded to date:

Project Blue Book.

Under the command of Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt,

this new top secret agency would take UFOs

and their potential threat to national security

very seriously.

Project Blue Book produced a standard form

for people who wanted to report a UFO.

What did it look like? Was there a sound?

They even had a chart for people to calculate

the angle of elevation.

If UFOs are nothing to worry about,

why is the Air Force requesting so much information

about the true nature of what the witnesses saw?

NARRATOR: In January 1953,

after gathering hundreds of reported sightings,

photographs and interviews,

Captain Ruppelt and astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek

prepared and presented their best 23 cases

to a CIA-formed panel of scientists

led by Dr. H. P. Robertson.

The Robertson Panel concluded

that the evidence could all be dismissed

as natural occurrences

and was not worth the effort of the government.

And it was the Robertson Panel which was the origin

for a lot of the propaganda that was put out in the media

when it came to UFOs.

They wanted to publicly ridicule the subject,

so that people wouldn't want to be associated with it,

basically killing all the public interest

in this field so they could continue to research

these exotic technologies behind the scenes.

NARRATOR: In 1969,

Project Blue Book was finally shut down

on the grounds that there was no proof

the unidentified objects posed a national security threat

or were of extraterrestrial origin.

But was that really the end of the story

or only the beginning?

In February 2018,

Nick Pope, the former Director of Defence Security

at the British Ministry of Defence,

traveled to Washington, D. C., to meet with Chase Kloetzke,

a registered lobbyist for UFO disclosure

and a former program developer

for the U. S. Department of Defense.

Chase Kloetzke has investigated

numerous U. S. government secret studies into UFOs

and has examined many of the once-classified files

pertaining to Project Blue Book.

I've got this Project Blue Book file from the FBI archives.

And the first page I want to really go over with you

is this one that indeed reads "UFO fact sheet."

Okay, so this is basically a summary of the position

with regard to Project Blue Book.

-Right, the official statement. -Okay.

And so, this says,

"Since the termination of Project Blue Book,

"no evidence has been presented to indicate

"that further investigation of UFOs

by the Air Force is warranted."

"Terminated."

Well, was the program really terminated? That's my question.

Absolutely. And if it was, what took its place?

Well, yes, the Air Force

isn't suddenly going to stop being interested

in uncorrelated targets in its airspace.

Right, absolutely. And the second document,

I really want you to weigh in on.

It doesn't make sense.

POPE: Wow. 12,618 sightings.

That's a lot.

And 701 of them remained completely unidentified.

That's a staggering amount.

These are the cases that were properly investigated,

interviewed witnesses, radar tapes were looked at,

and still no answers found.

Wait a minute. Here, look. Here it is.

At the end of the program, the unknowns drop.

They go from 32 to 19 to three and one.

I smell a rat. They've cooked the books.

-They can't pull the plug on the program... -Right.

...if you've still got a high number of unknowns.

So they clearly pushed those cases

out of the unidentified column

and into the cases that are explained, at least publicly.

This is their way out.

NARRATOR: Was Project Blue Book officially shut down

because it had simply found no convincing evidence

that UFOs were real?

Or was it because the government

had come to the opposite conclusion,

that not only were they real but of extraterrestrial origin,

a truth that could be so potentially disturbing,

it needed to be covered up even deeper than before?

NARRATOR: As far as UFO researchers

and ancient astronaut theorists are concerned,

proof that the U. S. government has not only known

about extraterrestrial activity on our planet,

but has been systematically covering it up for decades,

first came in the form

of a single roll of 35-millimeter film,

anonymously sent to a documentary filmmaker

by the name of Jaime Shandera in 1984.

The film, when developed,

showed images of an eight-page memo

allegedly written in 1952

by the first director of the CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter,

to President-elect Dwight Eisenhower.

In it, Hillenkoetter informs Eisenhower

of the existence of a top secret government think tank

that was originally set up

by President Harry S. Truman in 1947.

It was referred to in the memo as MJ-12,

initials which stood for a far more mysterious group of men

known as the Majestic 12.

The authorization to establish MJ-12

allegedly came from President Harry Truman

on September 24, 1947.

This was actually one day after the famous memo

in which General Nathan Twining wrote

a three-page letter about these flying saucers

to another general,

talking quite explicitly about their characteristics,

the fact that this was real, not visionary or fictitious.

No one anywhere, outside of this group,

is to know anything about UFOs,

E.T.s, crash retrievals,

bodies, any of it.

That document identified the 12 people

who were MJ-1 through MJ-12.

The first one, MJ-1,

was Admiral Hillenkoetter of the Navy.

There were four military people,

there were four technical people,

and then there were just general government people.

They were the kind of people you'd expect

to have been involved in an important top secret program.

NARRATOR: While the authenticity

of the MJ-12 documents is still being debated,

what is known is that,

in 1954, Eisenhower thought enough of the UFO phenomenon

to order that a new secret military base be set up.

Located 83 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada,

Area 51 would later become infamous

as the most top secret military base in the world.

BARA: Area 51 is the secret base of all secret bases.

For a long time, it was the place

that we went to to study foreign technology.

NARRATOR: During the 1970s and '80s,

T.D. Barnes worked at the secret base,

reverse-engineering captured enemy aircraft,

like Russian MiG jets.

What we considered reverse-engineering was...

was taking a plane or a radar,

taking it apart, looking at the electronics,

how they built it.

We were all bound by security oaths.

We could not talk.

NARRATOR: But is it possible that,

in addition to reverse-engineering

foreign fighter jets,

Area 51 employees were also working on other,

out-of-this-world technologies?

BARA: To my mind, it's also clear that the U. S. government

has had crashed extraterrestrial technology,

and Area 51 would have been the perfect place

to reverse-engineer and test that particular information.

NARRATOR: In order to insure that the activities

at Area 51 and elsewhere were kept hidden from the public,

members of the military, and even officers,

were sworn to secrecy.

But luckily for UFO researchers and ancient astronaut theorists,

not everyone involved was willing to keep quiet.

Some became whistleblowers,

who risked everything from public scorn to imprisonment,

in order to let the public learn the truth.

Washington state.

June 24, 1947.

Aviator and businessman Kenneth Arnold

witnesses nine fast-moving objects

flying in tandem near Mount Rainier.

He times them as they fly between two mountain peaks,

and calculates their speed

to be between 1,200 and 1,700 miles per hour,

at least 600 miles per hour faster

than the fastest aircraft in existence at the time.

Kenneth Arnold is the guy who actually is credited

with coining the term "flying saucer,"

because what he saw were objects that were flying

at some distance from his airplane

that were sort of skipping and jumping and wobbling

and doing very, very unusual high-speed maneuvers.

So that's where the term "flying saucer" came from.

NARRATOR: Although the U. S. Air Force formally categorized

Kenneth Arnold's experience as a mirage,

other reported sightings were not so easily dismissed.

The public was starting to demand answers.

Once the initial sighting happened by Kenneth Arnold,

and the Roswell incident took place,

there were sightings everywhere around the United States.

They were happening all over the world.

NARRATOR: In 1949,

retired Marine Corps pilot-turned-writer

Major Donald Keyhoe was asked by True magazine

to write an article on these numerous sightings.

Although Keyhoe was a skeptic,

he spent the next eight months conducting his own research

by tapping into his contacts in the Pentagon

and the military.

Eventually, he came to a conclusion

he would have considered unthinkable:

flying saucers were not only real,

they were of extraterrestrial origin.

HOWE: Major Keyhoe

was one of the last real military voices,

from the time of the Truman administration

going into the Eisenhower administration,

who was honestly trying to tell the truth.

NARRATOR: Keyhoe's article in True magazine shook the nation.

It was not only a solid piece of journalism

on the topic of UFOs,

but served as a stinging indictment

of the U. S. military and the government's determination

to keep the public in the dark.

HOWE: That True magazine, it was historic because

it went to a heck of a lot of people.

Then, in 1958, Keyhoe went on a program

called the Armstrong Circle Theatre,

which was a live television program.

ANNOUNCER: "UFO: The Enigma of the Skies"

on the Armstrong Circle Theatre.

Major, you've seen our report on the Air Force conclusions

dealing with the current UFO sightings.

Well, I was excited to hear that

Keyhoe was going to debate the Air Force.

And now, Mr. Edwards, I would like to make a disclosure,

something which has never been revealed to the public.

Toward the end of the program, he broke in and said,

to the effect, "I'm going to say something

that the public has never heard before."

If the hearings are held, open hearings,

I feel it will prove beyond doubt that flying saucers...

(audio fades)

HOLCOMBE: At that point, his sound was lost.

What was Major Keyhoe saying, and who cut him off?

(no audio)

Thank you, Major Keyhoe.

NARRATOR: It was later discovered

that Air Force officials had been stationed

in the control booth during the broadcast.

And there are many who still believe that Keyhoe's audio

was deliberately cut in order to keep him from revealing

top secret information concerning the government's

ongoing UFO investigations.

The Air Force was lying.

NARRATOR: But why was the Air Force so concerned about

the American public hearing Major Keyhoe's statement?

What did they have to lose if they were forced to admit

their ongoing investigations into UFOs?

I wrote this down because I think

it's one of the most important historic sentences,

and it comes from Major Keyhoe.

"For the past 175 years..."

That would be 1772.

That would be before the founding of the United States.

"...the planet Earth has been under systematic,

"close-range examination by

living observers from another planet."

TSOUKALOS: This is nothing new.

These cover-ups have happened

for thousands and thousands of years.

Throughout ancient texts, there are references

to what I call "misunderstood technology."

WHITEHEAD: In modern times,

you'll hear stories of UFOs and spacecraft,

because now we have the language to talk about technology.

Whereas in ancient times, they didn't have any reference

to that kind of technology.

So they would have thought this is something

that's angelic or from another dimension or god-like.

(deep whirring)

The fact that the U. S. government has investigated

thousands and thousands of reports

leads me to think that

they may know much more than what they let us believe.

NARRATOR: Proof of the U. S. government's complicity

in covering up extraterrestrial activity

does not only come in the form of leaked documents

and the contents of secret files.

Sometimes the evidence comes

from credible firsthand accounts,

not from whistleblowers, but from American astronauts.

Everything that NASA does is supposedly aboveboard.

Everything they do, they should tell us about.

We should know about all of their launches

and missions and who all the astronauts are.

They themselves are not sharing all of the information.

Most of it is being kept secret.

NARRATOR: The Baikonur Cosmodrome.

April 12, 1961.

The Vostok-1 rocket achieves liftoff,

and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

is heralded as the first human in space.

The event serves as a wake-up call

to the United States and NASA,

whose Project Mercury program would, over the next two years,

launch six of its own astronauts into space.

The Space Race--

to land a human being on the Moon-- was on,

and mankind was now a space-faring species.

BARA: The achievement of putting a man in space

was almost a miracle.

Nobody knows what they might see or encounter out there,

extraterrestrial spacecraft or even E. T. s themselves.

MAN: Liftoff.

NARRATOR: Although the first five

Mercury missions go off without incident...

MAN: Liftoff 30 minutes after the hour.

NARRATOR: ...during the sixth and final mission,

astronaut Gordon Cooper reports an unusual encounter.

While aboard his spacecraft, he reports

a green glowing object quickly approaching his capsule.

The UFO is also picked up by NASA's tracking station.

But by the time Cooper splashes down

in the Pacific Ocean, reporters are told

that any questions about the incident are strictly forbidden.

There's no question that NASA actually has protocols in place

for how astronauts should deal with

and report or not report anomalies.

Now, over the years, there have been astronauts

that have kind of broken those protocols.

Gordon Cooper is one who talked a lot about a UFO sighting

he had on a Mercury spacecraft.

And that upset quite a few people at NASA.

NARRATOR: In June 1965,

two years after Gordon Cooper's flight,

Gemini 4 astronaut James McDivitt

reports seeing a metallic object

flying in orbit alongside his spacecraft.

And, once again, the event is quickly covered up.

There have been many stories over the years

coming from astronauts of various missions,

from Mercury missions, from the Apollo missions,

and even from the Soviet missions to space,

where astronauts have come out and said

that they have seen these UFOs flying around,

that they've been followed,

that they've seen unconventional aircraft

on some of their missions.

BARA: There's a story that Buzz Aldrin tells

about Apollo 11, where the Apollo 11 spacecraft

was followed for many, many hours by an object

that was so strange that they actually reported on it

through their private channels.

BUZZ ALDRIN: I'm looking out the window, and I see...

What's that?

There's an object that's moving with respect to everything else.

Geez. It's not supposed to be doing that.

Wonder how far away it is.

If it's a long ways away, it's going mighty fast.

If it's not too far away, it, uh, maybe isn't going very fast.

Wonder what it is.

"Hey, Neil. Look at this."

We look at it.

God, what is that?

Probably the, uh, upper stage rocket.

Yeah, but didn't we just watch that thing carefully

out in front of us, out the window,

light its engine and go... (imitates whooshing)

Well, I guess that's not what we're looking at, (chuckles)

'cause that's a long ways away.

What's the odds that it's some alien

or Russian or something else?

But we were not about to cancel the Moon mission

and putt-putt over there to find out which one it was.

(chuckles)

WHITEHEAD: There's been many astronauts

that have come forward that have talked about this,

so it seems like some of them want to talk about it,

and others are either afraid to talk about it,

or they've been silenced for some reason.

NARRATOR: One person involved with the early space program

who did not remain silent was JoAnn Donaldson,

a young biomedical engineer at NASA.

In 1972,

during the Apollo 17 Moon mission,

Donaldson's job was to monitor the astronauts' vital signs

and to observe their pre-flight and post-flight recovery.

JoANN DONALDSON: Ron Evans was in charge of the command module

while Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt

were on the surface of the Moon.

When the command module would orbit the Moon,

part of the orbit would take it behind the Moon,

what we call "loss of signal" to Mission Control.

Day two, Ron came out from behind the Moon,

reported in to Mission Control.

And Gene comes up on the comm link and says,

"Hey, Ron, you're not lonely up there without us are you?"

And Ron reported back, says, "Nope, I got company."

Everybody was just kind of taken aback.

It was like, you know, "company"?

That itself implies that there was something else

up there with him.

Well, Mission Control's first reaction was,

"Guys, are you joking?"

And Ron says, "No, this is not a joke.

"There is an object flying in formation with me,

up here, circling the Moon."

When Ron reported that the object was leaving his orbit,

he calculated that they had been in formation with him

for approximately five

to five-and-a-half orbits of the Moon.

NARRATOR: As far as the public was concerned,

nothing out of the ordinary happened.

At the exact moment that astronaut Ron Evans

reported he was not alone,

NASA officials disconnected the public feed for media outlets.

The following day, NASA ordered

a conference call for everyone involved in the incident.

DONALDSON: We were all told we're gonna continue on

with the mission as if nothing has happened,

and do not discuss this anomaly

with anyone outside of your command.

NARRATOR: After the Apollo 17 crew splashed down

in the Pacific Ocean, JoAnn Donaldson examined Evans

as part of the post-mission recovery procedure.

DONALDSON: Ron was sitting up on the side of his bunk.

And he goes, "Well, I'm reliving

"what I saw while I was in orbit around the Moon.

"I don't think the Russians had launched

"something this big in orbit.

"I estimate this thing was 40, 45 feet long.

It was cigar shaped."

BARA: Now, any cylindrical object like that

is not gonna be something that we made. So what was it?

Clearly it was not one of ours.

WHITEHEAD: We trust these astronauts

to report back on what they see.

They're essentially scientists

that are exploring space on our behalf.

But a lot of people are unaware of the fact

that many of our astronauts have spoken openly about UFOs.

Many of them were fighter pilots before they became astronauts,

and they have seen craft flying as pilots.

Could it be that they've been pulled aside and told,

"This is all you're allowed to say and no more,"

because NASA is trying to silence

these astronauts from telling the truth?

NARRATOR: Another Apollo astronaut

who openly admitted his belief in extraterrestrial contact

was Edgar Mitchell,

the lunar module pilot for Apollo 14.

In his later years, he claimed many of his colleagues

had strange paranormal experiences

during their missions, and frequently declared

that most UFO phenomena are directly connected

to extraterrestrial activity.

EDGAR MITCHELL: I have had no firsthand personal experience,

but all the evidence from the research people that I know

from both Europe and the United States

have investigated all the sightings

from dozens of years.

And it's pretty sure it's all true.

I believe that the alien craft, presuming they're reality--

I think they are, others think they are--

have been coming for a long, long time.

NARRATOR: As the sixth person to walk on the Moon,

Mitchell's opinions concerning UFOs and their connection

to extraterrestrial encounters have been difficult to dismiss.

But if otherworldly entities

have been making contact with us--

not only for decades but for centuries--

what is their goal?

NARRATOR: July 20, 1969.

NARRATOR: Millions of people around the world

are glued to their televisions

to watch one of the greatest achievements in human history.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong

is about to become the first Earth-born extraterrestrial

by stepping foot on the surface of the Moon.

NARRATOR: Although Richard Nixon

is the current president of the United States,

most give credit to the man

who held the office six years earlier,

John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory,

who was to die on Mount Everest,

was asked why did he want to climb it.

He said, "Because it is there."

Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it.

NARRATOR: But even as Neil Armstrong

and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin

were still engaged on their historic mission,

Nixon and the team at NASA now faced

an even more daunting challenge: What to do next?

The Moon mission had gripped

the American consciousness as nothing before,

and even though a number of return missions

had been planned, there was nothing on the launch pad

that could top landing a man on the Moon

as either a national goal

or effective political propaganda.

To this end, in 1972,

as Nixon began planning his reelection campaign,

the space shuttle program was announced.

It was also during this same time

that the president's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman,

proposed the creation of a documentary film

that would depict Nixon as being fully committed

to the development of a number

of ambitious science-based programs.

To produce it, Haldeman turned

to successful advertising executive-turned-filmmaker

Robert Emenegger.

HOLCOMBE: They knew that Bob had made promotional films

for the Department of Defense.

So he was contacted and asked

if he would come to a meeting in Los Angeles

with the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

And they said, "We need a media consultant.

"We'd like somebody to come on board

"and make a documentary that would support Nixon,

"a documentary about some perhaps secret project

"that the government's been working on

that can be released or declassified."

Well, they run around the country

being shown all sorts of secret projects.

They went to Wright-Patterson, and they were shown

very classified laser experiments.

They were shown dolphins being trained for demolition work.

They were shown dogs being trained for various tasks.

Then they were taken to Norton Air Force Base,

which at that time housed the Air Force film depository.

Paul Shartle was the director of the depository.

They were taken into a building where these films were kept.

They were taken into what was known as a clean room,

meaning it was free of any bugs, microphones,

video equipment, anything.

NARRATOR: It was during his meeting at Norton Air Force Base

that Robert Emenegger learned that Paul Shartle had

a different agenda from that of the president,

and a different film in mind than the one

that had been initially proposed.

Shartle said, "I'd like to ask you this:

How would you like to make a documentary on UFOs?"

And Bob Emenegger was stunned.

He told me at his home,

he said, "I didn't know anything about UFOs.

"I was shocked.

"They said if we would make the documentary,

"we would be given 600 feet of 16-millimeter film

shot at Holloman Air Force Base of a UFO landing there."

NARRATOR: For Robert Emenegger,

it was an offer too good to refuse.

Believing he had the full support

of both the president and the military,

he set about to make the U. S. government's

first official film on the subject of UFOs.

He quickly recruited Rod Serling,

Burgess Meredith and José Ferrer to narrate the film,

and the final explosive scene was to show actual footage

of an alien encounter.

But when it came time to receive

the incredible footage he'd been promised,

Emenegger had the government's once-open door

slammed in his face.

They had been promised really dramatic footage,

said to be completely legit, of a UFO landing

at Holloman Air Force Base, in 1964,

which had alien beings come out,

like The Day the Earth Stood Still, essentially.

HOWE: Out came some kind of a ramp.

Our contingent of humans walked up,

met these two EBENs,

"Extraterrestrial Biological Entities."

And then in this doorway was a being unlike the EBENs,

and that it was holding a rod that had a spiral

that went around the rod, and that this was used

to communicate with our team.

CAMERON: This was a film

that had four different vantage points.

They were shooting one from the air, three on the ground.

And the craft landed,

the aliens came out, and they stored the craft.

All this was on film.

NARRATOR: But on the day Emenegger was to be given a copy

of the 16-millimeter footage from the Air Force,

the filmmaker received an unexpected phone call.

(phone ringing)

HOWE: It is one of those like out of a Hollywood feature.

It's supposed to be coming. A courier is on the way.

They cannot believe it. It's really gonna happen.

They're gonna see all of this film.

And then another phone call:

"We're sorry, the approval has been rescinded.

No film."

CAMERON: Colonel Coleman from the Pentagon said,

"The timing isn't right.

We can't allow you to use the film."

HOLCOMBE: Bob Emenegger was crushed.

He said, "Why?"

And he found out that, "Making a documentary

"exposing UFOs as being extraterrestrial

would not help the president, but conceivably could harm him."

NARRATOR: Ultimately, Robert Emenegger

was forced to complete his documentary

without the sensational footage he had been promised.

It was a documentary called

UFOs: Past, Present, and Future.

And they also had a book by the same name.

NARRATOR: As written by Robert Emenegger,

and directed by Ray Rivas, the documentary

proved to be both popular and influential.

Even without the smoking gun footage, it caused a sensation,

and was later credited as one of the inspirations

behind Steven Spielberg's 1977 blockbuster

Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

CAMERON: The Robert Emenegger disclosure effort

is what I call it.

I said, "You know, that film, Bob, that's very strange.

"You know, if it weren't for the location,

that's Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

And he said, "What, I didn't tell you?"

And I said, "You didn't tell me what?"

"I didn't tell you I gave a copy to Steven Spielberg?"

And I said, "No, you didn't tell me that."

So the documentary was done in 1975.

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind

came out in 1977.

And so, when you see Close Encounters of the Third Kind,

it's the Holloman Air Force Base story,

just changed the location.

It's exactly what the story was.

NARRATOR: While the alleged alien UFO footage

from Holloman Air Force Base has never surfaced,

many ancient astronaut theorists believe it still exists,

under lock and key.

What I am really truly expecting is that somewhere,

from 2018, going forward in the next decade,

that finally all of that film is going to be released,

and that we will finally enter the true history.

NARRATOR: Did the U. S. Air Force really have footage

of secret meetings between government officials

and extraterrestrials?

And if so, where is it now?

Coming up...

NARRATOR: For decades, American presidents

have officially denied that they have received any information

that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth.

But considering that the U. S. government has conducted

at least four major investigations into UFO activity

since the 1940s,

why has there been so much time and taxpayer money devoted

to studying something

that the government claims isn't happening?

We don't know for an absolute fact

what kind of briefings presidents actually receive,

when they come into office, about extraterrestrials.

But we do have some indications

from some documents that do exist,

one of them being the original MJ-12 presidential briefing

for President Eisenhower,

telling him all about the crash at Roswell.

NARRATOR: On November 2, 2005,

a document surfaced that was allegedly a transcript

made from a recorded presidential briefing

held at Camp David in March of 1981.

Present were President Ronald Reagan,

CIA director William Casey,

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger,

and a mysterious person known only as "The Caretaker."

According to the document, during the meeting,

The Caretaker shared evidence that aliens

have been visiting the Earth for thousands of years,

and that modern American records of such encounters

officially began in 1947, following the Roswell incident.

BARA: Certainly, if you look at Ronald Reagan,

he's somebody who brought up aliens all the time.

To my mind, what Reagan is communicating is,

"Yes, Roswell happened. Yes, it is significant.

"Yes, there are aliens.

"And we'd better get used to this idea

or figure out how to deal with them."

I, William Jefferson Clinton...

NARRATOR: But it was with the inauguration

of President Bill Clinton in January 1993

that many UFO researchers believed

they finally had an ally in the White House.

If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies,

they didn't tell me about it, either,

and I want to know.

BARA: So, when Bill Clinton gets into office, he called in

his presidential aide Webb Hubbell,

and the first two things that he asked for after he was president

was who killed JFK and are there aliens.

Clinton knew that there was something up about aliens

and UFOs that people were not being told.

NARRATOR: In his quest to shed light

on the government's secret UFO investigations,

President Clinton found an unlikely ally

in billionaire philanthropist Laurance S. Rockefeller,

who used his influence to push full disclosure

about possible extraterrestrial activities on Earth.

The way it started was Laurance Rockefeller,

who was one of the famous Rockefeller brothers,

had been shown a documentary on Roswell

and was very interested.

So, the election was going on at the time,

and he said, "Whether Ross Perot wins or George Bush wins

"or Bill Clinton wins, I'm going to the White House

and I'm going to get them to disclose the UFO story."

NARRATOR: In 1993,

Laurance Rockefeller began inviting

a select group of UFO researchers

and ancient astronaut theorists

to join him for an important first meeting

of what would become known as the Rockefeller Initiative.

In 1993, I got a phone call saying,

"Linda, we'd like you to join

"a group of your peers

at Laurance Rockefeller's ranch at Jackson Hole."

So, we met.

There were people like Robert Bigelow,

now the head of Bigelow Aerospace.

And there were others that were authors and scientists.

CAMERON: One of the people who helped edit the letter

on UFO disclosure to the president of the United States

was Hillary Clinton.

She was the first lady at the time.

NARRATOR: Another person close to Bill Clinton

who was an advocate for government investigation of UFOs

was John Podesta,

who served as the president's assistant in 1993

and became his deputy chief of staff in 1997.

I've had a long career, trying to fight

against government secrecy and create more openness.

Right after I left law school, I started working on that

at the Department of Justice,

then at the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And then when I worked for President Clinton

in the White House, I was one of the people

spearheading an initiative,

to declassify what turned out to be

over a billion pages of documents

that were resident at the National Archives.

In President Clinton's case,

I think he was interested in the phenomena.

He had worked with his then science advisor Jack Gibbons

to understand what was going on.

CAMERON: This correspondence starts going back and forth

for three years.

Rockefeller is putting immense pressure

on the White House to disclose.

NARRATOR: Laurance Rockefeller requested

that the 1947 Roswell incident be a starting point

in the government's disclosure.

CAMERON: They went out and they reinvestigated Roswell.

It came back,

and Bill Clinton saw the final report in 1995.

PODESTA: President Clinton's one of

the most curious people I've ever met.

I think he wanted to know what the Air Force knew,

and got a report back that, in my view,

was a little bit unsatisfying.

He was furious, from what I was told.

NARRATOR: The Rockefeller Initiative

was hoping for a revelation,

but the U. S. Air Force stuck to its position

that a crashed weather balloon caused the Roswell incident.

CAMERON: Clinton goes to Belfast, Northern Ireland,

in November of 1995.

He's lighting the Christmas tree,

and that's when he gives the famous speech.

He said he gets a letter from Ryan,

which I tried to recover in an FOIA.

There is no letter to Ryan. I think they just made it up.

He said, "Ryan, if you're out there in the audience tonight,

here's the answer to your question."

No.

As far as I know, an alien spacecraft

did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico.

And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force

did recover alien bodies,

they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know.

CAMERON: That's why in 1997 the U. S. Air Force goes out

and does a second Roswell report,

spends $20 million on it,

because the president was furious.

NARRATOR: According to the revised report,

the so-called alien bodies that eyewitnesses claimed

they saw being pulled from the wreckage

were dismissed as being nothing more than crash test dummies

which had been tethered to parachutes being used

in an otherwise conventional test.

PODESTA: Dr. Gibbons pressed first the Secretary of Defense

Les Aspen, and then the Secretary of the Air Force,

to take this matter seriously, to do a review.

The boxes were missing. The documents were gone.

Nobody knew anything.

And, you know, the... the trail kind of went cold.

NARRATOR: In 1996,

the Rockefeller Initiative was quietly closed,

and its participants--

frustrated that forces within the government

still refused to reveal the truth--

went away without the answers they'd hoped for.

The Rockefeller Initiative is considered by some researchers

to be the biggest government UFO disclosure story

of all times.

BARA: The fact that it even existed,

that it was sanctioned in any way by the government,

that the report was accepted

by the White House and people in the government,

I think is very, very highly significant.

So it's kind of a very small incremental step forward

in the process of disclosure

and moving us towards the ultimate answers

to the questions that we're all asking.

NARRATOR: Washington, D. C.

July 1996.

Political activist Stephen Bassett

becomes the first registered

extraterrestrial life and disclosure lobbyist

in the United States.

For years, he had been trying to organize

a hearing with members of Congress

to present evidence that the government was hiding

important information from its people.

The extraterrestrial presence, if formally acknowledged,

could bring in an age of reform, where the human race

could get its act together,

because we're running out of time.

As I got into the issue,

what I learned is just how dysfunctional

the United States government had become.

It is the vast expanse of secrecy

and abuse of secrecy in power that is lying

at the base of a great deal of our problems.

And so I had one simple fundamental task:

formal acknowledgment of the extraterrestrial presence,

simple, clean and easy.

CHAIRMAN: Gentlemen, if you could stand and repeat after me?

NARRATOR: On April 29, 2013,

Bassett organized

the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington, D. C.

The objective was to bring together

the most compelling evidence of extraterrestrial visits to Earth

and convince former members of Congress

to take immediate action.

BASSETT: I had wanted to do it since 2001--

bring in 42 witnesses, from ten countries,

to testify in the main ballroom of the National Press Club,

before six former members of the Congress,

five congresspersons, one senator.

And they testified for 30 hours over five days.

It was an amazing event,

mostly because of the caliber of witnesses that were brought in,

the investigators, researchers.

They don't want you to know that.

NARRATOR: Witnesses included John Callahan,

former division chief

of the Accidents and Investigations Branch

of the FAA,

the former Canadian Minister of Defence, Paul Hellyer,

retired Air Force captain Robert Salas,

and many others who had conducted extensive research

into the UFO phenomenon.

We live in a cosmos teeming with life.

The fact that some other civilizations

are more advanced than we are may be humbling,

but that could be a necessary step in our survival.

People are so afraid for their lives, their families,

because they have had to sign nondisclosure agreements.

CHAIRMAN: Witness from the U. K., Nick Pope.

POPE: Thank you.

Um, you should all have a printed-out copy

of my opening statement.

POPE: I was one of the witnesses, and I have to say,

this was the nearest that we've gotten since,

oh, way back to the '70s and the '60s, even,

to proper congressional hearings on the UFO mystery.

You did work for the Ministry of Defence in the U. K.?

That's correct, sir, yes.

POPE: I was asked about my experience

within the British government's UFO program,

and one of the U. K.'s most high-profile cases,

the Rendlesham Forest incident.

NARRATOR: In December 1980,

there were unexplained reports of a glowing craft in the woods

of Royal Air Force Base, Woodbridge.

Burn marks and broken branches were later discovered.

Some have called this incident "Britain's Roswell."

POPE: Even though I've left government, I responded with,

"I can neither confirm nor deny."

I don't think the committee liked

my "neither confirm nor deny" response,

and they pushed me very hard on that.

Certainly, you've been involved since you left.

Yes, sir, in a private capacity.

What's your opinion,

based on all that stuff that you've had access to?

Is there an E. T. origin

to what's obvious sightings of real UFOs?

It is a... a possibility.

KLOETZKE: You could tell by the faces,

they really weren't quite sure what to think of this yet.

By Wednesday, we have them, you know, standing up,

pointing fingers, saying, "We need to open those files."

POPE: It drove things forward.

It took the UFO phenomenon out of the fringe

and into the mainstream.

BASSETT: Thousands of people watched it online.

We netcast it so that

members of Congress and their staff

who were too timid to come down and watch it there,

or members of the press that were afraid

that they might be seen watching it,

could watch it in the comfort of their offices.

Sometime this year, we may just enter a new world.

Thank you so much.

NARRATOR: Based on the hearings,

four of the six former members of Congress

pledged their support to hold a world conference,

in conjunction with the United Nations,

to address the disclosure

of all knowledge of extraterrestrial contact

with this planet.

Then, on August 15, 2013,

less than four months after the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure,

the United States government made a shocking admission.

After decades of denying its existence,

they finally admitted that a secret base

known as Area 51 did exist.

Did the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure

force the U. S. government to act?

While the government acknowledged

the existence of Area 51, it still has not been revealed

just what it is currently being used for.

And since that disclosure,

the perimeter around the base has been extended

and security heightened.

Area 51 has to be more secretive now,

because you got so many other concerns.

We didn't have computers to worry about, Internet,

all that sort of thing that you've got today.

So it's a brand-new ball game as far as security.

NARRATOR: While many considered the government's admission

of the existence of Area 51 to be a bombshell,

an even bigger disclosure was still to come:

the declassification of millions of top secret CIA documents.

NARRATOR: Bethesda, Maryland.

November 2014.

Stephen Bassett,

executive director of the Paradigm Research Group,

launches an initiative directed to influence Hillary Clinton.

Based on Clinton's work with Laurance Rockefeller

in the 1990s,

Bassett believes she could be an ally

in getting the government to declassify its UFO files.

That political initiative was begun

by sending a full copy

of the 30 hours of testimony to every member of Congress,

addressing the Rockefeller Initiative, naming names--

Secretary Clinton, President Clinton, John Podesta,

George Stephanopoulos, et cetera, et cetera.

That testimony created a very significant dilemma

for the Clinton campaign team.

The political initiative forces the Clinton campaign team,

which included Barack Obama-- he was on the team--

to speak to the issue.

Are we ready to go win an election in November?

(crowd cheering)

NARRATOR: Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta,

is well known for his interest in UFO

and extraterrestrial encounters, and according to him, so is she.

Secretary Clinton, likewise,

was also kind of interested in the topic,

and during the course of the campaign said

that, if elected, she would have ordered

a more thorough declassification review.

She was very open. She did not skirt the issue.

She talked about it very openly.

NARRATOR: Many believe that had Clinton won,

there would have been a seismic shift

from the government's long-held policy of secrecy

concerning UFO investigations to a new policy of full disclosure.

PODESTA: The system of regulation

that creates our secrecy system-- what's top secret,

what's confidential, these lower levels of classification--

that's regulated and has been since the Truman administration

by executive order of the president.

The president sets forward the general rules of classification.

And some presidents have been more forthcoming,

wanted less secrecy.

Some have tightened the reins and wanted more secrecy.

It makes a difference.

BASSETT: The CIA and the Pentagon--

they were worried about Hillary Clinton, Secretary Clinton,

all the statements she was making, winning the presidency,

and going to the Pentagon and basically saying,

"You are going to give me the information I need

"to disclose the extraterrestrial presence,

or I'm gonna fire every single one of you."

As this year of 2016 went forward, we all expected

that this headline that we've been waiting for

that is going to break the protocol,

break the policy of denial, was going to happen.

John Podesta was trying to get ready

to open up that we're not alone in the universe.

All of that crashed

when a different person became President of the United States.

NARRATOR: November 8, 2016,

Donald Trump was elected as America's next president.

There would be no disclosure of the secret UFO files.

PODESTA: I've had a number of

members of Congress,

members of the U. S. Senate say to me, "Keep going at this.

I'm really interested in it, but I can't say anything about it."

NARRATOR: But as a longtime advisor

to President Barack Obama,

John Podesta still had an ally in the White House,

one who would remain there for another two months.

January 17, 2017.

In Barack Obama's last days as president,

the CIA posts on its website

nearly 13 million pages of agency documents,

many of which pertain to UFOs.

It was a very, very big deal, and people were excited.

All of these things were efforts, I believe,

to educate people and to move us

in a direction that we can accept, as a society,

that extraterrestrials are here

and have been here for thousands of years.

NARRATOR: Investigator Chase Kloetzke and author Nick Pope

have been searching for proof

that the U. S. government has been hiding its interactions

with extraterrestrials.

Now they hope to find new evidence among

the millions of recently declassified pages.

Well, there's such a lot to go through.

-KLOETZKE: Exactly. -It comes back to the old saying,

the best place to hide a book is in a library.

And there are all sorts of gems in here, I'm sure,

but, um, how would we ever know?

We've got to go through it literally page by page,

-line by line. -Right.

So we're taking a look at this report.

December 1960.

This has come from Detroit,

and it's a sighting of unidentified objects in the sky.

"Like a disc," it says,

which again, is something I'm sure you've come across

in-in various reports, as have I.

Yes, many.

POPE: And yet, it has these redactions on it.

And again, the question arises: Why?

If this subject is so unclassified and unimportant,

why all these redactions?

-And this next document. -Oh, wow. That's crazy.

KLOETZKE: Right? Why even bother?

Only information is... the date.

13 million documents.

If there really was a smoking gun in there,

it would be almost impossible to find.

NARRATOR: So far, the CIA archive has revealed

thousands of reports of sightings

of unexplained aircraft.

One report said that, of 1,500 official accounts

of UFOs since 1947,

an incredible 20% remain unexplained.

But was the release of the CIA online archive

another step towards disclosure or a way to bury the truth?

When the Pentagon's classified study into UFOs--

the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program--

was uncovered later in 2017,

journalists and researchers rushed

to file Freedom of Information Act requests.

Will these files finally explain what the government knows?

NARRATOR: 11 months after the CIA's archive

is released to the public in 2017,

The New York Times story reveals

the Department of Defense's AATIP--

or Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

NARRATOR: As soon as the story breaks,

journalists and researchers start filing

Freedom of Information Act requests, known as FOIA.

There have now been 1,500 to 2,000 FOIAs on this program--

$22 million program--

and the government at this point is saying,

"Program? What program?"

They're playing the same old game.

"We didn't release those films."

But they're under so much pressure.

BASSET: If this keeps up for even

four, five or six more months,

I do not imagine how disclosure can not take place.

PODESTA: Much of what was undertaken and reviewed

still remains in the dark,

in classified form at the Department of Defense.

I would hope that they would declassify it

and release as much as possible.

-Good afternoon. -MAN: Good afternoon.

CAMERON: When this story broke in The New York Times...

-Jordan. -CAMERON: ...guy by the name of

Jordan Fabian from The Hill-- he asks Sarah Sanders

the $64,000 question.

Does the president believe in the existence of UFOs,

and would he be interested

in restoring funding for that program?

Somehow that question hasn't come up

in our back and forth over the last couple days, but I will,

uh, check into that and be happy to circle back. Jennifer?

CAMERON: As far as I know, she has never come back around,

because you can't.

The president has to stay out of it.

They want the community to force the issue.

They want us to force the issue.

And that is why they moved it to Bob Bigelow,

who's a contractor in Las Vegas.

It's private industry that will do the disclosure.

BASSETT: History is about to happen at a level

that's almost incalculable, extraordinary, unprecedented.

It makes something like the Roman Empire look trivial.

So, just think about that.

The announcement of the extraterrestrial presence,

worldwide engagement,

open contacts with multiple civilizations.

The revelations about AATIP may be clues

that there's an agenda here.

This may be government trying

to slowly drip-feed this information out to the public

in such a way that there won't be out-and-out panic.

It may be a way

of slowly but surely acclimatizing people

to the reality of this phenomenon.

TSOUKALOS: The fact that The New York Times published

a Pentagon story is extraordinary.

And nobody really cared, so,

to me, that means that while we are all talking about

that we may be connected to extraterrestrials,

that this knowledge is within us.

It's hardwired, so that, hey, if they're coming,

it won't be panic because we come from them.

I do think that the world is ready for this knowledge,

and I think that it would be the most revolutionary story

in the history of mankind.

NARRATOR: Has the time finally come

when not only the United States government

but nations around the world will reveal what UFO researchers

and ancient astronaut theorists have long suspected:

that extraterrestrial visitation of our planet

is not only real, but has been happening

for thousands of years?

There are many who believe the answer is a profound yes,

and that the truth will lead to a greater understanding

not only of mankind's past, but of its future,

a future that will see humans

as the torchbearers of a new generation,

and as the extraterrestrial visitors of planets and galaxies

far beyond our own.

CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS

ou look at the face, it's keeping record

not only of Egypt, but the whole world.

Three, two, one. Let it go.

We're trying to find microbes

coming from the upper atmosphere.

We're gonna recreate

the exact flight path over the Bermuda Triangle.

This is when you experienced this time vortex?

I traveled 100 miles in only three minutes.

DAVID CHILDRESS: Wow!

Every block is bigger than this car.

GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: Insane!

The reason this pyramid is the most magnificent

is what you're about to see inside the Great Pyramid.

TSOUKALOS: This is incredible.

That's historic,

that we've actually seen it.

The possibility that in the past,

we had interactions with an extraterrestrial civilization.

You can't rule it out.

We have an impulse within us

to explore, to discover.

-There is where Area 51 is. -Oh, wow.

What we actually

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