Original subtitles

[man] I don't know what the hell that is.

[woman] I don't know, man, but no planes ride that low.

[man] What the hell is that?

[Chris Hayes] The Pentagon has confirmed the existence

of the $22 million initiative that studied UFOs

for at least five years, beginning in 2007.

And they released video.

[man] Some people find what we call UFOs terrifying.

Or they just want to dismiss it and say it's all nonsense.

- [woman] I'm not joking. - [man] Way up there.

Look at how it smoothers.

It's really not all nonsense,

but it's not what you think it is either.

[man] They're very large.

[man] Nine feet, ten foot, I don't know.

They look like aliens to us.

They have shiny eyes and... and they're not human.

They're 100%, they're not human.

It turns out there was a UFO program

in the Pentagon secretly studying this for years.

There is something there.

There is something provably there,

and at least initially, it cannot be explained.

[man] When it comes to the UAP problem,

the rules have changed.

I mean, the best evidence is what your government

is doing about it.

Now, just a short time ago, Senator Reid responded to CNN

saying he's, quote, "Proud of this program"

"and its groundbreaking studies."

I'm Gary Nolan.

I'm a professor in the department of pathology

at Stanford University School of Medicine.

And the principal function of my lab

is cancer research, but subcellular cancer research.

So we look at cells in cancer tissues.

When you're trying to understand the basics of something,

really what you're doing is you're tearing something apart

down to its most foundational constituents,

and you're saying, "How do they get put together?"

And we say, "This therapy with this arrangement does well,

and this arrangement, they die." Rules.

It's the basics of science.

Several years ago, some people who are associated

with the CIA and an aerospace company

came to my office one day, unannounced, and they said,

"Hey, we need to talk to you,"

"because people say that you have a blood analysis tool"

"and we're doing complete medical workups of these people"

"who've claimed to have interactions with something,"

"whatever it is, and it was varied, 100 different people."

"But we have all of this medical data,"

"including, like, MRIs of their brains and all the rest."

"Since you have the best blood analysis, we need your help."

And then they started talking about UAP or UFOs,

and I thought it was a joke. I really did.

I actually thought there was some sort

of a candid camera moment.

I was looking around, like, "Okay, well, there's a..."

"There's a bridgeway over there."

"Is there a camera that's looking at me?"

"Am I gonna...?" You know, "Is this a big joke?"

But no, they were very deadly serious.

Well, I mean, the understanding

that we saw, at least with the brain scans

that we had, was that it was random.

Patches of white matter diseases,

dead tissue in the brain.

[Nolan] Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

You know, at first glance, it looks

like multiple sclerosis.

You get these random white matter patches in the brain,

and as those patches progress, people lose more and more

function and control over their body.

These look similar at first glance,

but they were non-progressing.

And multiple sclerosis progresses unless you intervene.

So a few patches become ten patches, and they get larger.

These cases were what we would call acute, non-progressing.

I thought, "This is weird. They all seemed to have this."

At first, we thought it was damage,

but this was, in fact, living tissue.

And so that's something that needs an explanation.

How did a person get all of these lesions

in their brain and they don't have multiple sclerosis?

What happened to them?

[woman] I know I'm a little slow,

but that's not an airplane.

It's not a rocket. Maybe the dragons have been released.

Somebody pissed off Godzilla. I don't know.

What the hell is this?

Whatever it is, it's shaking my house.

Now, as it turned out, the hundred events

that we had, probably about 85 of them

actually, were Havana syndrome patients.

- Havana syndrome. - Havana syndrome.

- Havana syndrome. - [reporter] Covert sonic weapon.

A mystery illness which has affected U.S. diplomats.

[reporter] Can cause dizziness, nausea, even brain damage.

Serious illness called...

What is the Havana syndrome?

[Nolan] So there were situations around the world

where our diplomatic corps

were complaining of noises in their head.

Headaches, rashes, sickness, et cetera.

And it's been generally determined that these are

some sort of energy weapon, which is being used

to harass our diplomatic corps.

I mean, this is known from way back in Moscow

during the Soviet Union.

It's not hard to do.

I mean, take the front mesh off of your microwave and stick

your face in front of it, and you'll find out

exactly what an energy weapon is.

And it turned out that 85 people that we had

actually were Havana syndrome patients.

But that left 15 people on the table.

And we said, "Well, what's special about these people?"

Well, they were all extremely high functioning.

They were all, in many cases, what you would call savants.

Right? They were 130, 140 IQ-plus.

Why? Because these are DoD people.

They were also pilots.

And when you looked at their stories,

they were entirely about UAP.

[man] There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the ASA.

My gosh.

[reporter] The release of U.S. Navy pilots, cockpit footage

and testimony about possible UAPs

has caused a media frenzy.

[man] No distinct wings, no distinct tail.

It seemed like they were aware of our presence

'cause they would actively move around us.

[reporter] This video, captured by a fighter pilot

with a cell phone that shows a metallic object

that you might miss if you blink.

[female reporter] Three key former military officials

set to testify.

[reporter] David Frevor, a former Navy commander

who took video of a UAP.

[David Frevor] As we looked around, we noticed

a white tic tac object with a longitudinal axis

pointing north/south and moving very abruptly over the water.

There were no rotors, no rotor wash,

or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings.

[reporter] Former navy pilot, Lieutenant Ryan Graves,

calls whatever is out there a security risk.

So you're seeing it both with the radar and with the infrared,

and that tells you that there is something out there.

Pretty hard to spoof that.

My particular case,

a couple weeks after finishing my training,

I found myself out in the Middle East,

preparing for combat operations.

We conducted those operations for about four months

and returned back to the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

We started upgrading some systems and doing repairs.

We upgraded radar system, and when we did this,

flying with a more advanced radar,

we'd be seeing objects that were operating in the working areas

that we hadn't seen just that morning.

And that was really the status quo

until we actually left on our workup cycle to join

the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the coast

of Jacksonville, Florida.

And it was there that we filmed the Gimbal video.

We all fly out together, we do our training,

and we fly back as we run out of fuel,

essentially, one by one.

Two aircrew that I know well were returning to the boat

when they picked up radar contact

of four or five objects

that were flying in a wedge or V-formation.

You can hear their excitement in their voice as they try

to understand what they're looking at.

Dude, what's going on, bro?

There's a whole fleet of them.

Look on the ASA. My gosh.

[Graves] And then between that formation and the aircraft was

what appeared to be a larger object.

And that's the object we typically call the Gimbal.

[man] That's not our L and S, though, is it?

[man] That is L and S, dude.

[man] They're all going against the wind.

The wind's 120 knots to the west.

[man] Look at that thing, dude.

[man] But if there's a...

[man] Look at that thing. It's rotating.

When Ryan Graves was flying

off the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the east coast of the U.S.

during an exercise, my job was safety of flight,

and I got this report on the Navy's secret network.

It was an email, and it was addressed

to all the subordinate commanders of this command

called U.S. Fleet Forces Command, a four-star command.

And it was from the operations officer,

a two-star admiral who I knew very well.

And the subject of the email was,

"Urgent, safety of flight issue."

All caps. The body, the text was very short.

It just said, "If any of you have seen what these are,"

"tell me ASAP."

We're having numerous near mid-air collisions

with these, and we're gonna have

to shut down the exercise if we don't resolve this.

And attached was the now very famous "go fast" video.

[man] Oh, my gosh, dude. Wow.

[Gallaudet] This was to every subordinate commander.

So this is about 20 admirals and senior executives

who received it.

The thing is, the next day, that email

was wiped from my computer.

And everybody else's. And no one talked about it.

When I went to monthly meetings with the commander

and all the people who were... received that email,

which I have a problem with because this was

a safety-of-flight issue,

resulting in the pilots... Ryan Graves,

having to mitigate his own safety threats

with no senior officer supporting him,

which is a big problem.

[Graves] We've seen these things being stationary

and moving with the wind.

We've also seen them drifting against the wind

in a very similar manner as well,

that look like just a dark cube inside of a clear sphere.

We've seen them maintain complete stationary behavior

over a GPS location for extended periods of time

in hurricane-force winds.

We don't understand how it's able to perform

those even very basic maneuvers.

We're seeing them in the morning.

We're seeing them in the afternoon.

We're seeing them in the evening.

There's no break in all those behaviors.

And so all that combined is confusing

and doesn't correlate with the technology

that I'm aware of as a fighter pilot.

This story has a way of engulfing you

whether you want it to or not.

I called it my abduction story

because when I first started covering this topic,

I felt like I was being lowered into a rabbit hole.

Couldn't see the bottom, you know, couldn't make out

the creatures that were, you know, gonna show up.

[Bender] I've covered the Pentagon

and national security for more than two decades,

covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

traveled the world, and in that entire time,

I don't think UFOs came up a single time.

All those years...

You know, it was a subject that, you know,

was for movies and science fiction.

Rosenberg. Oh, damn.

The Achilleans are not gonna like this.

This guy was one of the royal family.

I knew it. This is an alien, and you guys are

from some government agency trying to keep it under wraps.

And then, in 2017... things changed.

A recent report by The New York Times

unveiled the existence of a real life X Files department.

[Hayes] The former head of that program, Luis Elizondo,

told the Times the UF program collected video

and audio recordings of reported UFO incidents, including footage

from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft

surrounded by some kind of glowing aura.

[Kean] As a journalist, I'd spent 17 years

reporting on UFOs in a climate in which nobody official

would acknowledge anything about them.

Before 2017, of course, it was just ridicule.

It was just non-engagement, just disinterest, 100%.

And that's why it was so shocking for me to learn

this program existed, because I've been out

in the world campaigning for the government to set up

an agency to study these things.

But actually, there was one.

I got a tip that, "Hey, you know, the Pentagon has"

"this UFO research effort." And it was created,

you know, by then Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.

Here's a senior senator who believes the truth is out there

and, you know, is inserting money

into the Pentagon budget, very quietly,

very secretively, to go do more research on this.

I mean, that only happens in the movies.

But this was a real story.

Our story actually ran the same day as The New York Times.

I think they beat us by, like, an hour or something like that.

It all began when I went to this meeting,

and I sat opposite a table, opposite Lou Elizondo,

and talked to him for about three hours,

all about the program.

I was shown all these documents.

I was shown, you know, performance reviews that he had.

And then the big moment was when I was shown

these three videos that have since become very well known.

These haunting images,

part of a bombshell first admission

by the military of a government program

investigating sightings of UFOs.

[man] Look at that thing.

It wasn't until The New York Times article

came out in 2017 and I saw the video that they released.

Obviously, a strange moment of déjà vu,

until I realized that those were, you know,

my friends' voices.

That's when I realized that this was a problem

that clearly wasn't being resolved.

[Bender] Pilots who come forward, you know, not just

somebody off the street, but, you know, 20-year veterans

flying F18s, trusted with millions of dollars

of taxpayer money and high performance aircraft

coming back and saying, "Listen, we were"

"on this training mission, and we were stalked"

"by these orbs for days."

And it wasn't just the pilots,

but it was the radar operators on warships

that were also part of this flotilla.

So you can't just dismiss it.

[Kean] The videos were not shown to me by Lou in that meeting,

but they were shown to me on a laptop by Chris Mellon.

[reporter] Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant

secretary of defense for intelligence

for Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush,

and had access to top secret government programs.

So it's not us. That's one thing we know.

In 2017, as a private citizen,

he surreptitiously acquired the three Navy videos

and leaked them to The New York Times.

It's bizarre that someone like myself

has to do something like that to get

a national security issue like this on the agenda.

No. [clears throat]

Actually, this... People don't realize

is she was kind of auditioning for me.

I had The Washington Post and Politico

and The New York Times competing for this story.

I didn't want to spend months and months and then find out

that, "Oh, her editors are not going to run it."

Competition is usually a good thing.

The New York Times seemed to be the best opportunity,

but it wasn't as though they found me.

I reached out to them.

[Kean] Chris Mellon became involved with Luis Elizondo

while he was still at AATIP,

which was this Pentagon group that had been studying UAP.

[Mellon] I got invited to a Pentagon meeting

because I was an unpaid consultant

to the Office of Naval Intelligence.

So I still had my security clearances

and found out that we were having incursions

over restricted military airspace on an ongoing,

recurring basis for years.

Dozens and dozens and dozens of incidents

that were not being reported.

NORAD didn't even know this was happening.

North American Aerospace Command

didn't know this was happening, or so they say.

I was blown away. How can this be?

Why do we have an intelligence community

if we're going to let people fly over our country

with strange vehicles and we're not even going to report it?

It was partly like Pearl Harbor,

only absent the consequences.

But they're seeing it on radar, and they're

not reporting it up the chain of command,

which is what happened at Pearl Harbor.

And it was kind of like 9/11, because all these different

government agencies had pertinent information

on this topic that they weren't sharing,

and there was no one place that came together.

I was ashamed, in a sense,

as a member of the intelligence community,

as someone who's part of that, to see the system paralyzed.

Natural reaction was to go through the chain of command.

I had two friends who, by chance, were

direct reports to defense sec James Mattis.

But the bureaucracy... Nobody wanted to touch it.

It was a hot potato. Nobody would take ownership.

[Bender] Christopher Mellon, he's not...

somebody who's gone off the deep end.

He's somebody who worked, you know, at the highest levels

of the Pentagon.

One thing that might drive Chris is that he was among

the most senior intelligence officials in the country,

and he suspects they were hiding things from him.

[Mellon] When I was in the government,

this was an issue that you just didn't talk about.

There was always the risk that you were

going to damage your reputation and,

you know, might affect opportunities

for promotion or jobs and so forth.

So after months of trying to get some kind

of favorable action, it became clear that we either

had to give up and just allowed us to continue,

or we had to go to Capitol Hill and the press.

[reporter] Tonight, CNN has learned the Pentagon

had a secretive program to research UFOs,

like the one Frevor spotted.

The project was called

the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification program.

[Kean] All of this was on the record.

All of this was documented.

And because Senator Harry Reid was involved,

it also gave the story credibility.

It was pretty explosive.

I mean, it was picked up a lot in our media, I think,

maybe even more in the international media.

It was just like this firestorm.

The military spent millions of dollars

to look into UFO sightings.

[reporter] Millions of dollars for the project

were pushed through

by former Senate majority Leader Harry Reid,

but the funding for the project

was so-called "Black Money,"

meaning that was secret money for classified programs.

They just didn't want it talked about.

[Bender] That could be a military threat.

We should be looking at it.

But on the one-in-a-million, billion chance

that it really is ET,

we kind of want to know that, too.

[Mellon] It was a thrilling moment for them.

It was a breakthrough. It was unprecedented.

It was significant.

But I would like to correct the record a little bit.

The New York Times had virtually no impact

on the legislative or executive branches of government.

I thought Congress would be seized with this.

They'll be demanding briefings,

demanding to know what's going on.

That's not what happened, to my great surprise.

Marks a turning point in the history of this issue.

But had it been that story alone,

we wouldn't be having this conversation.

[Mace] If you believe we have crashed craft,

as stated earlier, do we have the bodies

of the pilots who piloted this craft?

As I've stated publicly already,

biologics came with some of these recoveries.

Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics?

Non-human. And that was the assessment

of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to

that are currently still on the program.

[Schwartz] Now, the committee says this could be the first

of several hearings, with some lawmakers saying next

they would like to hear directly from some of the pilots

who have encountered those objects firsthand.

[Mellon] Pilots.

That's what really made the difference.

It was face-to-face with the naval aviators

describing their experiences.

[Graves] When I pursued this, my personal logic was that,

"Hey, I'm representing myself."

"I'm gonna talk. I'm not gonna be wearing uniform."

"I'm not gonna say I'm Lieutenant Graves,"

"and I'm saying X, Y, or Z."

I just wanted to speak as someone that had experiences,

that was talking about them in my own time.

From my perspective, I knew that what I was doing

was well outside the bounds

of what would be considered acceptable behavior

from my command instructor or anything like that.

But I really didn't see any other way

that this was going to resolve itself through the status quo.

Ryan was initially, understandably,

very reluctant to come and speak to members

of the Congress,

and it was a bit of soul searching on his part.

[Schiff] What to me is so intriguing about it is,

in the past, if a pilot saw something,

there wasn't any way of really corroborating.

Was this human error? Was this fatigue on the pilot's behalf?

Was this a problem with the instrumentation?

But now there are any number of documented incidences

where there are multiple instruments

recording something out there.

So it's not just the pilot. It's not just one tool.

There is something there.

There is something provably there,

and at least initially, it cannot be explained.

[Graves] I just knew that I had a responsibility to talk

about what I knew and describe what I knew

and what I didn't know as clearly as possible.

I ended up going to the Pentagon

to kind of start the conversation.

We've transitioned from the Pentagon

up to the Central Armed Service Committee.

We had a closed-door meeting.

I mean, honestly, I was pretty terrified.

Frankly, did not want to go there, if you will.

I did not want to go there.

[Mellon] Ryan was one of the first pilots,

maybe the first pilot to come forward

and brief members of the Armed Services

and Intelligence Committees behind closed doors.

It was pretty clear that this was not

necessarily going to be well received by his colleagues

in his squadron and by other Navy officials,

and yet he decided to do so.

At least I can say at some point in my life

I really, truly pursued something

that I felt I believed in.

You've also, I believe, discussed and know

of many more pilots.

This is just those that you're currently working with.

Is that correct? Can you expand on that?

When we were first experiencing these objects

off the Eastern Seaboard in the 2014 to 2015 time period,

anyone that had upgraded their radar systems

were seeing these objects.

I didn't have a massive, massive interest in UFOs growing up.

Kind of a standard interest that I guess most young people

do with X Files and ET and things in movies.

It was only in 2017 when The New York Times

article came out, that I really...

My interest was really piqued.

And I think at that point, I was hooked, absolutely hooked.

And so I wanted to kind of document

where my mind was going on the subject.

And so I created an Instagram account in early 2023.

I kind of came in at the right time,

where the congressional hearing was happening.

And I think I was one of the only,

if not the only person putting content out in real time.

Mr. Frevor, the Tic Tac incident that you were

engaged occurred in 2004.

What kind of reporting took place after that incident?

None. We had a standard debrief where the backseaters went down

to our carrier intel center and briefed what had happened,

and that was it.

In the UK, they're a lot more reserved,

I think, about the subject,

and we haven't seen much talk from the government at all.

The congressional hearings were just groundbreaking,

because we'd never had anybody, ever in history,

on oath, saying, "These things are real,"

"and these are my experiences" in front of Congress

with the hand up, passing off their experiences

for the world to see live on TV, was just incredible.

We would see these objects being at 0.0 Mach,

that's zero airspeed.

These objects were staying completely stationary

in Category 4 hurricane winds.

These same objects would then accelerate to supersonic speeds,

1.1, 1.2 Mach, and they would do so in very erratic

and quick behaviors that I don't have an explanation for.

Stories are anecdotes, and that's not a bad thing.

I mean, in medical literature, you can write

about a case report, which is an anecdote

of a single individual story,

and that goes into the literature.

There are traditional and standard ways

to get stories as long as there's data associated with it.

Now, let's talk about the science of it.

If you have 100 people who've got the same internal

scarring looking at the brain scans, that's data.

So that's something that needs an explanation.

How did a person get all of these lesions in their brain

and they don't have multiple sclerosis?

Is there a commonality that we can observe?

And there was a couple of reports in the literature

that I found that linked this area of the brain

to intuition, and that was interesting

because I thought, "Well, wait a second."

"Intuition in an area of the brain"

"that has to do with body movement?"

Let's say that you're at a party

and you're walking around the room.

You need to predict where people are moving,

but that moment when somebody does something unexpected,

you have to react to it quickly.

So...

those are life and death moments, as it turns out,

because let's say you're in a forest

and a wolf or a cheetah is jumping out.

You need to be able to know

to make the intuitively correct move.

All the studies that have come since then have said

that intuition, whatever it is that you want to call intuition,

resides in this part of the brain.

I've looked at the data, and I say that there's something

worth studying here.

I'm only here to give you the data.

You guys can argue till the cows come home

what it is.

I'm just telling you what's there.

I'm not coming to any conclusions.

A lot of these pilots don't know what they're seeing.

They don't know if they're from our government,

above their pay grade.

They don't know if they're from adversaries,

state actors, non-state actors, private entities.

So we have to talk about these things and create

an environment where other people are comfortable

and feel safe enough to discuss this very serious issue.

Yeah, that was one of the things that was striking

in having a chance,

over the course of a couple years,

to get to know Senator Harry Reid.

You know, learning from him, number one,

why he was interested in this issue

and why he, some would say, risked his political hide

by creating a UFO program.

I mean, all of his staffers at the time

were like, "Don't do this." Even if it's secret.

"If it leaks out, you're gonna look like a kook."

But he didn't really care.

He talked to some of these fellow senators,

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii,

both World War II veterans,

who were like, almost immediately, "Oh, yeah."

"We should totally look into this."

Ted Stevens said he saw foo fighters

off his wing as an Army Air Corps pilot over Europe.

You know, people would come back and they'd be like,

"We saw those things again, no idea what they are,"

"but they didn't attack us."

"So I guess... I guess we're okay."

And didn't talk about it for 40 years.

[reporter] Democratic Senator

from Ohio John Glenn, who's 62,

is very much a hero in a country that loves

to love a national figure.

[Bender] John Glenn, he said, was another one who was like,

"We absolutely should be doing more research into this."

But again, these were not guys who said this publicly,

because in the, you know, in that era,

you just didn't do that.

Now I think the stigma is changing.

We've managed to get the attention of the government,

both the legislative and executive branches,

and we now have the real prospect

within the next 24 months, say, of finding out possibly

where the origin of some of these things are

or where some of them might be extraterrestrial.

[man] Just random lights in the sky moving.

Like, I'm not the only one seeing...

[man] There are three... There are other people here.

What the [bleep] is this?

[Conway] There's a massive sense of responsibility now.

And I think when I first started posting videos,

it was just whatever I found interesting.

[man] It just keeps on going in circles

and circles and circles.

[Conway] And so now, as I go further along,

every time I see new bits of footage or people

send things to me, I put out less and less and less

and less and less, because I have that responsibility.

So I'm really careful in what I put out.

And now somebody will send me something and I'll ask them,

"Where's this come from? Have you got the original?"

"Do you know where the original came from?"

"Who took the footage?"

There's other footage out there that's better,

that's more compelling, but we don't know who took it.

We can't follow back that chain of custody to somebody

that's super credible on a platform that we can trust.

- [man] Boom. All three. - [woman] What is that?

[man] We are all out here

in the middle of this parking lot...

[interviewer]]

So, AATIP was

the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program...

...which was set up in 2007 at the direction of Congress,

mainly to look into these reports

from military pilots.

AATIP was a very small operation within the Pentagon.

It didn't get very far either.

The senior leadership in the Pentagon

doesn't wanna hear about it.

They don't wanna spend resources on it.

[Kean] It didn't have funding in the later years.

It was just a group of dedicated people

who kept on doing what they were doing before

when they did have some funding.

That entity was kind of transformed numerous times.

It became the UAP Task Force,

and a couple of years there, and that was acknowledged

by the office of the director of naval intelligence

that that entity existed.

And that evolved. It kept changing its name,

you know, and then it became this...

This All-Domain, uh... What is it?

The All-Domain, um...

Advanced... Wait.

[Kean] No, I know what it is. All-Domain...

- What's the R? - The All-Domain...

Anomalous Resolution Office. It's a horrible name.

Acronym is AARO.

Leave it to the Pentagon to come up

with something like that.

[Kean] It's great that it has an easy acronym

because some of the previous names were absolutely insane.

You couldn't even say them and let alone

say an acronym for them.

Fuck the Pentagon with these acronyms.

It's called the UFO office. I mean, come on.

A Pentagon official confirmed this week

that the U.S. government is investigating

more than 650 potential UFO sightings.

A team is examining the 650 cases.

This office is up and running.

I'm working with colleagues to make sure it's fully funded.

So clearly, the Pentagon is taking UFOs seriously.

[Bender] And really, they're supposed to be the focal point

that is researching, not just sightings

made by military personnel that come in,

but also trying to dig into the bureaucracy

and figure out what else do we know,

or what did we know and when did we know it?

This is altogether different, fundamentally different.

Now you've got an organization

that's out in the open with AARO,

enjoys very strong support from Congress.

It has a very wide mandate and a lot of latitude.

It's got a large staff. It's growing.

And you have the support from the intelligence community.

You have direct access

to the deputy secretary of defense

and the director of national intelligence.

Now all the national security agencies,

all the intelligence agencies have to share information

on this topic with this AARO office.

All the puzzle pieces are now on one table,

and you can start fitting them together instead of being

in different buckets spread all over the place.

I'd first like to thank our witness,

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, for testifying here

and in today's earlier closed session

and for his long and distinguished career,

both in the intelligence community

and in the Department of Defense.

Dr. Kirkpatrick, you can give your testimony.

It's a privilege to be here today

to testify on the defense...

defense's efforts to address

unidentified anomalous phenomena.

[Mellon] So Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick is a physicist by training.

In his last assignment, he worked for the space command,

and he worked in their intelligence shop.

He's very well suited and qualified

by dint of his training and background

to lead this effort.

But it's early days, so it remains to be seen

how this is gonna come out and where it's going.

[Burchett] This is an issue of government transparency.

We can't trust a government that does not trust its people.

We're not bringing little green men

or flying saucers into the hearing.

Sorry to disappoint about half y'all.

We're just gonna get to the facts.

We're gonna uncover the cover-up.

And I hope this is just the beginning

of many more hearings and more people

coming forward about this.

Yeah.

I get a little ribbing,

but I don't give a rip, mind you.

I go out to take my dogs out to go to the bathroom

every night in the backyard, and I look at those stars,

and literally, like, the concept of light-years

that comes into play, I always think...

I look at some of those stars,

and the light from those stars literally left that star

before the time of Christ.

So you think in God's vast universe

that there could not be something else?

And to think also, I mean, it's kind of arrogant

on our part to think that we're the best that God can do.

I mean, come on.

Since 1947, the Pentagon's been lying to us about UFOs.

They've covered this thing up from day one.

You look at Roswell in 1947, the military comes out and says,

"We've recovered a saucer."

And then the next day they trot that poor colonel out

holding a hot-air balloon.

And there's no way in hell that they would

have messed that up.

You know, military intelligence

is a whole lot like congressional ethics.

It really just doesn't exist.

What's going to have to happen is somebody's going to have

to walk out with some information

of one of these craft, either on the ground

or flying before they, you know,

commit suicide by shooting themselves

in the back of the head five times.

[Gillibrand] I have legislation for this year's defense bill

to guarantee that AARO, they have access

to special access programs which are typically

compartmentalized and highly classified

to make sure they're actually getting to see

all the previous data, all the previous information.

So all of those SAPs are opened to Dr. Kirkpatrick

and the AARO team to review, to analyze, to understand.

And so hopefully, whatever doors are still closed

will be opened in the next year.

[Gillibrand] This is the first time anyone's seen

an unidentified aerial phenomenon

and reported it to the federal government.

So we want that data so that it can be used

as a holistic review of what is the history.

All of that should be co-located and reviewed scientifically.

The military is not comfortable with bad data,

bad facts or things that they don't know the answer to.

And so that's why Senator Rubio and I and others

teamed up to begin to look at this much more intensely.

[Bender] If you look at the Air Force budget,

a significant share of it actually isn't theirs.

It's the intelligence community's.

And it's for all the secret programs,

but it's sort of budgeted through the Air Force budget.

The Air Force complains that, like,

you look at the Air Force budget and you think,

"Oh, we get the same as the Army and the Navy."

We don't really, because there's this huge chunk

that's the pass-through budget.

It's actually not our stuff.

It's the CIA drone program

and, you know, God knows what else.

We do know that the government spends

billions every year on secret aircraft, drones.

[Bender] I wonder if they don't want to play in this.

Not because they're hiding aliens,

but if AARO is picking around and wants to know

where's all the SAPs, the special access programs

that might shed light on advanced technologies,

and you're the Air Force, you don't want to open that up.

The SR-71 Blackbird Cold War spy plane.

The F-117 stealth fighter. The B-2 bomber.

Those things were secret for 30 or 40 years,

so imagine what they have now.

[Gillibrand] My goal is to make sure that the parts

that are appropriate to be made public are made public.

And that's why we need the public reporting every year.

And that's why we created the office,

'cause we wanted to have a thorough scientific review

of everything that's classified, unclassified,

and publicly available so that we just have more information

and that we have more clarity.

The way the issue came to me was how those pilots were treated,

that they weren't necessarily being believed

or they were being disregarded in some way.

It became a very important issue for me.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

of New York is leading an effort to change the way

the military handles the problem of sexual assault

in the Armed Forces.

Gillibrand points to victims who complain

that too often commanders ignore their allegations.

There's always a correlation.

Military sexual assault has been covered up.

Sexual harassment's been covered up.

These cases often don't see the light of day.

And on the UAP side, it's something the military

didn't want to talk about publicly.

They were addressing it, from my perspective,

in a very paternalistic way that's not validating

that something actually happened to them.

I think it's...

duplicitous and inappropriate.

Ryan, you say that... you know, you wanna get

to a point where people feel comfortable reporting them.

- Do they not? - It's a big risk

to go out publicly on this topic.

At the end of the day,

if you're gonna highlight yourself,

at least in the military aviation communities,

for something like this,

there's very little upside for you.

In the Navy, we deal with problems

after the fact and not before the fact.

We fix things after people die and we write our procedures

and our lessons in blood.

And, you know, I think there's opportunity,

perhaps, to avoid that in this scenario.

[Gillibrand] I've heard many reports that service members

who witnessed unidentified aerial phenomenon

and recorded it on the instruments

that they had available to them

were often disregarded or disbelieved

or retaliated against for coming forward

with information about these sightings.

Those individuals are whistleblowers,

and they should be heard.

[Bender] One of the biggest moves Congress has taken

is to enact this law that includes

a process for people within the military,

within the spy agencies, to come forward to Congress,

but also to the Pentagon AARO office with their testimony.

In other words, if, you know,

they signed a non-disclosure agreement and were told

never talk about this secret program,

you sort of get a get-out-of-jail free card,

you can come forward.

There's supposed to be a process for that

to help Congress unearth

some of these programs that might exist that,

you know, have not seen the light of day.

The UAP task force was refused access

to a broad crash retrieval program.

When you say "crash retrieval," what do you mean?

These are retrieving non-human origin

technical vehicles, you know, call it spacecraft,

if you will, non-human, exotic origin

vehicles that have either landed or crashed.

We have spacecraft from another species?

We do. Yeah.

David Grusch is undoubtedly the biggest whistleblower

that we've ever had in history.

I mean, he's the first official whistleblower

that came forward with the legislation

that came out in the NDAA, and he's saying that,

"I've interviewed all of these people."

"It was my job to interview all of these people."

"I was sent out to do it. I had the clearances."

These people were telling him that they had

firsthand experience with craft and with biologics.

[Mellon] So right now, there are whistleblower cases

happening around this issue.

So anybody out there who may have been involved

in a program-related UAP,

you know, black programs related to this topic,

particularly if they think it may not have been

appropriated by Congress and authorized,

they can now come forward and share that information

in a secure environment without violating the law

or their obligations.

We now have a number

of very senior government officials

with very high security clearances

that are coming forward and basically saying,

"We believe there are secret programs buried deep"

"in the bureaucracy that are hiding"

"either UFO crash materials"

"or, you know, some other sort of exotic technology"

"that we don't think is human made."

And just the simple fact that that's happening,

it's not just people from the fringe.

It's not, you know, people just claiming

that they believe this or that.

These are the people that are entrusted

with the nation's secrets.

Some of them are coming forward and saying,

"Hey, there's more to learn here,"

"and we wanna help you find out."

I think that's remarkable.

[Nolan] Because I helped those people from the government

and the aerospace corporation that showed up in my office

and gave them advice on how to do

the kinds of analysis they wanted to do,

they started coming back to me for more.

A case in point is the Atacama mummy,

which many people know about.

I was brought to help study it

'cause somebody thought it was an alien.

In fact, I have to be honest. I mean, I reached out to them

and said, "You're claiming it's an alien"?

"I can prove or disprove it," at least looking at its DNA,

if it has DNA.

I had two other Stanford professors,

specialists in genetics, a bunch of graduate students,

and I had the world's expert

in pediatric bone disorders on the paper.

That, of course, went worldwide.

And you know what the title was?

"Stanford professor sequences DNA of alien baby."

It was all over the world.

I eventually proved that it was a human stillbirth

with multiple mutations and bone dysmorphias.

My entrée to the UFO community was, you know,

the hated one, you know, the guy who disproved

that it was an alien.

It's one of those weird ones,

but Gary Nolan's a significant character

because the subject has lacked that scientific connection.

So we rely on people like Gary Nolan to say,

"I've seen the evidence,"

"and this is how I've assessed the evidence."

And we need people like Gary to do that for us.

[Nolan] Because I'd gotten a Department of Defense award

for doing ovarian cancer that came about

the same time that I was doing the work,

I was accused of being bought off.

These kinds of conspiracy things that you never live down.

People still... I still see it in Reddit forums

every once in a while.

You know, science can be done on these things

because there's a whole bunch of data on the table.

But once you start looking amongst all the puzzle pieces,

interesting stuff starts to show up.

[Mellon] I was always driven by curiosity.

I was at a boarding school. I was seven years old.

And the headmaster of the school,

one of his neighbors, had taken a home movie

of a UFO from his backyard.

And the headmaster of the school was so excited about this,

he felt we all needed to see this movie.

We all saw a three to five-minute segment

of a massive, golden, disc-shaped object.

And one of the things that was interesting

was clouds look opaque,

generally big cumulus clouds, you know, white.

But when something goes into it,

you see it's actually not very dense. It's wispy.

This is way before computer-generated imagery.

This is Kodak reel-to-reel kind of stuff.

So I don't know how that could have been faked.

And it went into the cloud, eventually disappeared,

and then came out the other side.

I was thunderstruck, and a bunch of us

went running outside looking at the night sky that night

to see if we could see something.

And I started reading every book

I could get my hands on.

It gave me a lifelong interest.

For years, there was virtually no discussion

in mainstream-leading news outlets,

and yet, meanwhile, local papers,

there were thousands and thousands

of reports from small communities all over the world

where people in their community

had had experiences and seen things,

you know, the local doctor or the mayor or...

So there was a huge disconnect between the national media

and the regional media.

And why is there such a paradox?

In 1950, I believe, it was May of 1950,

Enrico Fermi was a nuclear physicist,

one of the fathers of the atom bomb.

He was one of the seminal physicists involved

in advancing research and our understanding

of quantum mechanics and subatomic particles

and so forth.

He continued to visit Los Alamos

after the atom bomb was developed,

during the summers.

He was in the cafeteria

lunching with some other scientists,

and the issue of alien life came up,

and he made this wisecrack, "Well, where is everybody?"

And everybody had a good chuckle about that.

But that has become known as Fermi's Paradox.

If there's life in the universe

and life in our... Elsewhere in our galaxy,

how come we don't see any evidence?

We don't detect any radio signals, et cetera.

The ironic thing is that even as he was saying that,

the director of security at Los Alamos

had his hair on fire because there were

so many UFO sightings right around Los Alamos

at the very same time he's saying it.

I mean, everybody around Los Alamos,

the security people, pilots, scientists,

everybody was seeing these things.

Just a few months before,

there was an overflight of about 100 UAP

over the town of Farmington, New Mexico.

You know, front page news across the states.

And so there's this huge disconnect

with people in the scientific community

saying, "How come there's no evidence?"

And meanwhile, there's these things that could

be alien probes that are swarming all around

the very facility where they're saying this.

[woman] Oh, my God. What is that?

[man] Quick, quick. Like, are you recording that right now?

[woman] Yeah, I'm recording. I'm recording.

What the f... is that?

The cabin was our place

and our little country place.

And we certainly didn't expect anything peculiar

to happen there.

But after that night, I became scared.

I bought a shotgun. I bought a pistol.

I was really strung out.

I hurt. I had been assaulted. And that was obvious to me.

I mean, I had a mark on the side of my head.

I had been rectally injured.

I was obviously the victim of an assault of some sort.

But when? Who?