♪ eerie music ♪
[man] This is the video, it's called the Kumburgaz video,
which is a close-up of a craft.
So close that you can see the occupants.
It is 100% real,
and I was there as that was filmed.
[camera shutter clicking]
[newsman] The Pentagon now confirms the existence
of a secretive UFO program investigating reports
of unidentified flying objects.
[Diana Walsh Pasulka] I remember, when I woke up
the day it came out, it was a bombshell, right?
That's what it was.
[John Greenewald Jr.] This is it.
This is when the government and the military is gonna come out
and reveal the truth behind what these UFOs are.
[man] I believe, as do the other folks
that were on the flight, that it was something
not from this world.
[Leslie Kean] The question,
"Do you believe in UFOs?"
really doesn't make any sense.
There's no issue of belief there.
-[woman] Those are aliens! -[man] Look, they're stopping.
[woman] Literally, what the actual [bleep] is going on?
[Pasulka] You have people experiencing something
that they don't quite understand.
[man over radio] My gosh! Look at that thing!
[whooshing]
[Kevin Day] When this whole thing started,
I tried to tell people about it.
I was really frustrated, because no one seemed to care.
This thing almost killed me, man.
♪ pulsing, dramatic music ♪
♪
[wind whistling softly]
♪ pulsing, suspenseful music ♪
♪
[George Knapp] The UFO world's just crazy.
Everybody has their own turf.
♪
[door bell tinkles]
I chose to move to Las Vegas on a coin flip.
Just flat-out luck that I happened to be
in the right place at the right time
and got to meet the right people.
Investigators say they're having a tough time identifying
the four people killed in a plane crash in Arizona today,
because there isn't much left to ID.
I've done thousands and thousands of stories.
In Mississippi, a man says he's killed
at least 60 other people
and wants to be given the death penalty.
I've won two Peabodys.
[newsman] George Knapp has the story for us.
Residents of the exclusive
Siena Village Golf Course community
have got to be shaking their heads in disbelief
right about now because of a prostitution ring
that has allegedly been operating
right under their noses.
But I will always be the "UFO guy."
In some cases, it does appear
that various government officials
have withheld information about UFOs from the public.
Wherever I go-- I'm in a grocery store,
I'm in a restaurant, I'm in a bar,
I'm standing at a urinal--
people want to come up and talk to me about UFOs.
These days, the locals use these old airstrips
to race dragsters and the old hangars
as an industrial park.
But 42 years ago, this is where it all began--
the birthplace of what some have called the "Cosmic Watergate."
[Greenewald] A key player
in this entire story is a journalist by the name
of George Knapp.
His name now is really connected to the AATIP story.
We've been working on this story for a long time,
and we'll tell you right up front
that it's going to be hard to swallow at first.
George has contributed immensely to the UFO field
for quite a few years.
That's because George is able to gain access
to reports, sometimes official documents,
-and key players. -[Harry Reid] You know, George,
I'll have to look at this.
I have heard about this exact story.
[Knapp] I will tell you this: 95% of it
is bullshit.
But the other five percent
is really interesting.
And if it's true,
it would be the biggest story of all time.
If it is true.
If even a little bit of it is true, it's gigantic.
The implications are enormous for everyone.
[beeping]
[Mike Wallace] The Air Force has said, time and time again,
"All but a small percentage of these reports
of unidentified flying objects
have been definitely attributed to natural phenomena
that are neither mysterious nor dire."
End quotes.
That's the top Air Force intelligence men
and scientists under contract sent the secret documents
to the commanding general of the Air Force,
saying that whatever these things were, they were real.
And they have been spending a lot of money
investigating flying saucers.
If they don't exist...
why the money, why do the intelligence teams rush out
every time there's a sighting?
There was a white, glowing object in the sky.
It might have been a spaceship, it might not have been.
I would say, since it did appear
to approach us, it might have been.
[man] It was the strangest thing that I've ever seen.
By far, the strangest I've ever seen
in a few years of reporting.
[woman] I just saw the round front,
and I could see the light on either side.
And then the red light was sort of casting a glow
over the whole thing, so it looked like...
a round disk.
I wasn't afraid.
I... I just wanted to stay there
and keep my eyes glued to it; I couldn't leave.
[woman 2] And then it seemed to just go together,
make a ball
and fly out into that field,
and it was a great big, huge, yellow glow out there.
♪ eerie, chiming music ♪
♪
-[Knapp] Hi. -[waitress] Hi.
-Would you like some coffee? -Some coffee? Coffee, please?
Yeah. Thanks.
I was a debate coach in the Bay Area,
and I met these bartenders from Las Vegas,
and they were the craziest people I'd ever met.
♪ upbeat, rhythmic music ♪
They told me, "You know,
we know a guy in television in Las Vegas.
You should go there. You can break into television."
That was 1979.
♪
I drove a cab for a couple of months,
and I was terrible at it.
[horn honks]
All I knew was where the airport was,
and I knew where the Strip was.
I had no idea
about the Nevada nuclear test site.
Or the secret programs that were out there.
I certainly had no idea
there was a place called Area 51.
[camera shutter clicking]
I look at it, and I realize--
and I was cocky at the time-- what this field needs
is a good investigative reporter.
I'll have this wrapped up in, like, six months.
[newsman] Have UFOs been given a fair shake
by science, journalism and the government?
George Knapp joins us now with part one
of the cover story series, "UFOs: The Best Evidence."
I banged away at this story for decades.
There is now a staggering amount of information on this subject,
collected not by crackpots
but by respected, mainstream, level-headed people.
We stopped at Edwards Air Force Base
to record video for a future project.
Edwards has a distinct relationship
with its more mysterious cousin in Nevada, Area 51.
And then, bam, The New York Times
does this story-- it changed everything.
[newsman] A recent report by The New York Times
unveiled the existence of a real-life X-Files department.
The Pentagon tells us the program received
more than $20 million dollars for its work, which included
analyzing reports from military pilots
of encounters with unknown objects
that appear to defy the laws of physics.
[Knapp] A couple of weeks before the story came out,
I had heard it was gonna happen, and, of course, by that point
I'd been sitting on some of this information
for a number of years.
I go: Well, why can't I break this story?
I've been sitting on this.
I've been, you know,
I've kept my word.
I want to do it.
So I get a call from...
Harry Reid.
He gently sort of let me know, you know,
"You're not The New York Times."
[Greenewald] There is a secret UFO program
inside the Department of Defense--
on the front page of The New York Times.
[Knapp] The New York Times is not pro-UFO.
This is not something
they like to cover on a regular basis.
If I do the story, it's just the UFO reporter doing the story.
It would fall with a thud,
and nobody would pay attention to it.
So I backed off.
"Yeah, go ahead."
We're still feeling
the reverberations.
There's now a report
that will be issued by the...
by the Pentagon,
uh, by the Secretary of Defense
and the Director of National Intelligence.
I actually wanted to get this information out
and declassify it before I left office, but...
when that information becomes declassified,
I'll be able to talk a little bit more about that.
[Kean] The Department of Defense has been studying UFOs
since 2007-- that's what the story was.
The actual article was really based on things
I'd learned from the director of the program and...
interviews that we did
with other players involved with AATIP:
the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
[Knapp] I'm aware that the organization
was up and running.
I didn't know what the program was called.
I had never heard the name AATIP,
and I didn't know who Lue Elizondo was.
I knew there was somebody who was working on this stuff.
[Greenewald] Mr. Luis Elizondo
talked about running a program that dealt with
unidentified aerial phenomena, or UFOs.
The Pentagon was interested in it,
they were investigating it, and he was the guy that led it.
According to Mr. Luis Elizondo, AAITIP looked at videos.
When a military pilot saw something
that he couldn't explain, AAITIP was gonna come aboard
and try and figure it out.
[Keen] It was originally instigated
by the Defense Intelligence Agency,
and Harry Reid, the senator from Nevada,
was very instrumental in setting it up.
[man] You guys ready?
Yes, we're rolling.
[Reid] When I was asked by a reporter
from The New York Times,
I said: I'm happy to do an interview with you,
but I want some ground rules.
We're not gonna be talking about little green men.
I will only talk about scientific issues.
And I recognize that...
what I got started here was kind of taking a chance.
But I think it's paid off.
[Hayes] The remarkable admission by the Pentagon
came as a result of reporting by The New York Times,
pretty august publication.
[Knapp] This is not birds.
It's not somebody else's plane.
It's picked up on radar. It's real.
Can you imagine
the steps they had to go through to sell that story
to the editors about UFOs?
Tough sell.
[Kean] I don't think most people realize what's involved
in putting together a story like this.
[Greenewald] This was one of the most exciting things
that had come out in a long time.
The entire basis of all of my research
up until that point
was proving that the U.S military
did have an interest in UFOs.
And this man,
and what he did, was that smoking gun.
[Luis Elizondo] For nearly the last decade,
I ran a sensitive aerospace threat identification program
focusing on unidentified aerial technologies.
It was in this position I learned
that the phenomena...
is, indeed, real.
I was shown three videos
that had come from the Department of Defense
and also the documents that showed
that the videos were legitimate.
[Knapp] I've never said this before in public,
but this report,
the executive summary of the Tic Tac incident,
started at the Navy.
There was an initial investigation
after the incident itself back in 2004.
The commander of that carrier strike force,
that carrier group, didn't want to delay
going to the Persian Gulf, so whatever information
was gathered back then got tossed into a drawer
and closed, and it was gonna be forgotten.
And then a couple years later, some people in the Navy
renewed the investigation.
It bounced around
inside the Pentagon and the intelligence community
and then ended up at AATIP.
♪ tense, dramatic music ♪
♪
[Day] I've been gravely concerned
about what happened for...
I guess 15 years ago this week, 2004.
And when it first happened, I was
trying to tell people, you know?
My chain of command and, uh, others.
But no one seemed to really believe me,
and it really, really bugged me.
And it started manifesting in nightmares.
[clears throat] I didn't know what the hell to do, you know?
I wasn't really prepared for that day.
Our command on USS Princeton.
We were the air defense commander
for the Nimitz strike group.
Anything that flies,
as soon as I gain it on radar, I'm actively trying
to figure out what it is. Is it high and fast?
Is it low and slow? Is it on a commercial air route?
We put all these little pieces of the puzzle together
to come up with an identification.
In, uh, 2004, we were off the coast of California
doing a standard training cycle,
and I noticed these really strange tracks
off the coast of Catalina.
Those things were up at 28,000 feet.
They were kind of in a loose group,
and they were all tracking down 100 knots,
28,000 feet towards the south really, really slow.
Usually, something that high going that slow
is gonna fall out of the sky.
You can't create enough lift to stay airborne,
so I-I knew they were something anomalous.
I was up in the CIC, in combat information center,
and I was scanning a position on watch
called antiair warfare coordinator,
AAWC.
And that position is the-the guy that actually presses the button
to shoot a missile if you have to.
You know what, all of our systems are automated,
but they're not automatic,
so it's a person like myself
that has to take all the pieces of information
and actually use my brain
and tell everyone else what the identification is.
Man, I'm telling you, it's probably the only air contacts
that I've ever detected and tracked on SPY radar
that I was never able to identify.
And I still want to make that identification.
That's why I'm here today.
[elevator whirring]
I think it's difficult for some of the guys,
but I've never had a problem talking about it.
I can only tell you what I know.
Ironically, I didn't even see any of that.
I didn't see The New York Times.
I didn't know anything about it.
And then out of the blue, I get a message
from Kevin
telling me that one of our shipmates
has come out to talk about the event.
He-he didn't even have to say what event. I already knew.
Like, the event event?
I kind of went numb, like...
People are actually gonna believe us now.
I was on the USS Princeton CG-59.
It's a guided missile cruiser.
I was a computer technician, so I handled all the mainframes,
data recording.
All the systems run
off of my system.
We were seeing flying objects,
uh, that we were tracking on the radar,
which is why we call them "tracks."
And they were...
They were just flying due south at 100 knots,
on and off for seven days.
They'd just appear, disappear.
After the third day, I got an idea
that it might be close enough to just barely see it
through these big, huge binoculars
attached to the side of the ship. They're called Big Eyes.
It was basically just a dot on the horizon
at the right bearing and the right altitude.
And I was just waiting to see if it moved
or did anything, and sure enough, it did.
At a certain point, it moved over to the side,
and then just gone.
[Day] I became concerned.
So, Cap comes down to combat. I say, "Hey, sir,
you know, we've been tracking these things
for a few days now,
and I strongly recommend that we get an aircraft
to launch and intercept it."
[clears throat]
And none of us were prepared for what happened
when that.... when that happened.
[Ralph Blumenthal] This was not the usual New York Times story.
All along, the UFO debate
has been whether these things are real or not real.
In other words, are they a figment of the imagination?
Are they some psychological phenomenon
that has no physical reality?
And what was most interesting in the reporting
that Leslie and I and Helene did for The New York Times
was that the most highly trained observers
that exist, Navy pilots...
The government spends millions of dollars training them.
[chuckles] They are not mentally deficient.
They're tested for psychological aberrations.
These people are trusted with the most powerful weapons
in our arsenal.
They've seen them with their eyes.
[David Fravor] Both airplanes see
a disturbance in the water
and a white, 40-foot-long Tic Tac-shaped object.
The controller starts talking to us. He says,
"Hey, sir. We've seen these objects.
We need you to go investigate. We want to know what these are."
They got to a point where they say,
"Hey, merge plot."
[Day] He gets into the merge plot position,
which is basically two objects
in the same vertical piece of sky.
A two-dimensional display now looks like one object.
[Fravor] As we're looking around,
we look to the right,
and we see white water.
What we see is this white Tic-Tac-looking object
just above the surface of the water
pointing north-south,
and it's going north, south, east, west.
It's just erratically moving
forward, back, left, right, at will.
I go, "Dude, do you see that? What is that thing?"
We're looking down at this thing,
and I said, "I'm gonna go check it out."
So I start driving around,
just in a nice, easy descent.
As I'm coming down,
the Tic Tac starts coming up.
I'm like, "Well, this is getting interesting."
[Day] All of a sudden, we hear on the radio, "Oh, my God!
Oh, my God! I'm engaged! I'm engaged!"
And whatever that object was,
the thing seemed to recognize him,
and it actually got in a dogfight with him.
[Voorhis] The target started moving left and right
at very jagged angles,
and then it would disappear
off the screen, come back onto the screen.
[Fravor] It's kind of starting to cross my nose,
and it starts to accelerate.
And within less than a second,
it crosses right in front of me. Just goes "poof," and it's gone.
[Day] I can tell you the reaction on the ship
was total befuddlement.
Total be...
But we didn't know what to think.
What flies like that? Nothing I'd ever seen.
Not even close.
After that happened, I was... My mind changed a little bit.
I decided, "Yeah, these are probably...
UFOs that I'd always heard about."
Uni-Unidentified flying objects.
♪ slow, intriguing music ♪
I went up to a machine that's called the RD-390,
and it records all of our external communications
onto an optical disk.
Just in case something like this happens,
an investigator can go back,
play it back and figure out what the hell happened, right?
Well, I went back up to combat.
And all the comms were gone.
And I could tell by looking at the lead technician--
I'm not gonna say what his name is,
'cause I'm hoping he'll still come out--
I could tell by looking at him that he knew what had happened,
but he couldn't tell me.
The whole thing kind of got swept
under the carpet pretty quickly
by the strike group commander
and even by my own captain,
which kind of pissed me off, actually.
We were completely defenseless against these things.
[Voorhis] All that data gets reported
down in our computer room
on optical disks.
Helicopter landed.
Two people got out.
Then, 20 minutes later, I was asked
to get all the tapes.
Get them all. Everything in the computer room
that would have had anything on it.
And so I had to bring all the tapes down there,
and those guys were in there.
♪ dramatic, intriguing music ♪
They had civilian clothes.
You know, no men in black
or any weird things like that,
but nondescript civilian clothes that...
Just like me and you are wearing now.
All of those disks were taken.
Uh, that was given to my chain of command
and then given to somebody that brought them offship.
[Knapp] This is all supposed to keep secret.
None of this material was being made public.
The problem that's been
since the beginning is, "This is my information,
and you can't have it."
And the people who have it consider it to be theirs
and don't want to share.
Not with the Air Force, not with the Navy,
not with the CIA. It's theirs.
And, uh, it's sort of for the purpose
of plausible deniability.
If they didn't want it out, they wouldn't have released it.
It took a number of years,
but somebody in the Navy made it possible.
[Blumenthal] Well, after the December 2017 story,
which was a bombshell,
we continued working on it.
Took us a year and a half
to come up with a-a good follow-up.
And the other story we came up with
was that in 2015,
the Roosevelt had encounters between Navy pilots
and UFOs, which, incidentally, Helene, our other partner,
she was actually embedded on the Theodore Roosevelt
for a story on its mission in the Gulf.
[Kean] The incidences at the Roosevelt...
There were lots of sightings
of these very strange kind of smallish objects
of different types,
and a lot of them were picked up on radar.
They were different. They weren't, like,
these Tic Tacs that were buzzing around.
But they could pick them up just for long periods of time.
[pilot] Well, if there's--
[Kean] We had
two pilots that went on the record.
We spoke to five others
who would not put their names on the record.
Again, they're all afraid to talk about it publicly,
and it was
very difficult to even get two to talk to us.
The Navy says it still doesn't know what the objects are,
and officials aren't speculating.
A Navy spokesman simply confirming to CNN
the objects seen in the various clips
are unidentified aerial phenomena,
or UAPs.
The conversation has finally moved, folks,
from the fringe.
So, congratulations. You succeeded.
For some folks, the-the article that came out
in The New York Times
is the very first time
they've ever actually even considered this topic.
♪ slow, dramatic music ♪
[Knapp] After the New York Times story comes out,
we start producing stories about AATIP,
the program that Lue Elizondo worked for.
I traveled to Washington to meet with Senator Reid.
It was like a secret agent thing.
I changed hotels, I changed cabs.
Because I knew that Senator Reid was very sensitive.
I was just trying to be cautious.
[Reid] George and I have
been interested in this for a long time.
And, for decades, we've shared information.
[Knapp] He was gonna help me understand
the bigger picture on this.
So, had the meeting with Senator Reid.
And, you know, I had a general idea about AATIP.
I didn't know that there had been another program,
that it had started out as something else,
that it had been AAWSAP.
And I was shown the contract
for the creation of AAWSAP,
the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program.
That was the name of the program that was created by the DIA,
the Defense Intelligence Agency.
[Reid] It was dark money, black money.
Even members of Congress don't know it's there.
Because there would have been such criticism.
"Why are they studying flying saucers?"
We wanted to make sure that it was put out to bid,
and it was.
[Knapp] They let out a contract.
BAASS is the company that got contract.
$22 million dollars is given to BAASS,
Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Systems,
an organization created by this guy,
Robert Bigelow.
I've seen so many crazy stories about him.
♪ funky, upbeat music ♪
[newswoman] Meet Robert Bigelow,
a real estate developer who made his fortune building...
[newswoman 2] Bigelow Aerospace is going
to expand its current operation...
[newsman] An acronym for Bigelow Expandable
Activity Module.
[newswoman 3] Those are the big dreams
one local business owner has.
[Knapp] Robert Bigelow
is a billionaire Las Vegas businessman.
At one point, he had more hotel rooms than the MGM Grand here.
-Everybody knew Bob. -[newswoman 4] He's more at home
on the Vegas Strip than at America's space agency.
[Reid] Bob Bigelow is a very conservative Republican,
so, on political issues, we didn't agree on much.
But he was a self-made multi-multimillionaire.
He spent
a number of years of his life
being inquisitive of what this is all about,
and he has the money to play around with it a little bit.
[Lara Logan] Do you believe that UFOs have come to Earth?
There has been and is an existing presence,
uh, an ET presence.
And I spent millions and millions-- I probably spent more
as an individual than anybody else in the United States
has ever spent on this subject.
[Kean] Robert Bigelow has been a really important figure
for years and years on UFOs.
He develops
technology for traveling into space.
[Greenewald] You have these guys
like Branson and Musk
trying to tap into this commercialization
of space travel and space exploration.
It's a very small list of names.
You can count Robert Bigelow up there as well.
[Logan] NASA has partnered with Robert Bigelow,
who's an unconventional figure in the aerospace world.
He's obsessed with aliens and UFOs.
[Blumenthal] We did report in our 2017 article
Bigelow saying that he believed in aliens,
that, I mean, he-he believes that.
Do you believe in aliens?
I'm absolutely convinced. That's all there is to it.
We felt it was only fair to give his full context.
Because, if we hadn't, someone would say,
"Oh, yeah, Bigelow believes in aliens.
You didn't mention that."
So we-we said, "Yes,
he's made statements in the past."
[Logan] 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 the reality of what I know.
[Knapp] I know the guy.
And I know about BAASS.
I mean, Bob Bigelow announced it
on my radio show.
[Bigelow] The mission for this company
is to pursue exotic, novel technologies.
As you know, George, there's probably nothing more difficult
that you could tackle than this kind of a problem.
♪ low, eerie music ♪
♪
[Greenewald] Bigelow has a very interesting history
that predates the AATIP story.
[Knapp] A number of years before BAASS,
he made up his own UFO organization called NIDS,
the National Institute for Discovery Science.
1995,
he puts this together
and brings a number
of really distinguished academics,
couple of guys who had worked for the CIA.
There were two astronauts.
A colonel who had done his own attempts
to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery
from inside the Pentagon.
[Greenewald] NIDS aimed to investigate
claims of the paranormal,
not only UFOs but some other things.
[Knapp] 1995, Bigelow puts NIDS together.
Spoke to that first meeting
in 1996,
made a presentation.
And my jaw is dropping at--
looking around the room at who these people were.
That's when Skinwalker Ranch enters the picture.
♪ rhythmic, hypnotic music ♪
♪
[Reid] A lot of the stuff on Skinwalker Ranch
is very, very, um,
difficult to understand.
You know, there have been things reported up there
for generations.
[insects trilling]
♪ soft, eerie music ♪
♪
[Greenewald] We know that Robert Bigelow wanted to
investigate Skinwalker Ranch.
That ranch is a 480-acre ranch
that's located in Northeastern Utah
in an area known as the Uintah Basin.
For decades now,
there are stories after stories
about all of this paranormal activity happening on the ranch
and around it.
♪ pulsing, dramatic music ♪
♪
In fact, some of the legend dates back
more than 15 generations into Native American lore.
And they talk about a shapeshifting witch
known as the skinwalker.
The Native Americans, they wanted to avoid
that area altogether because of what they were seeing in the sky
and on the ground.
[Knapp] In the mid-1990s, uh,
a family move into the property.
[Bigelow] I spent quite a bit of time talking to Terry Sherman.
And he was the owner.
He and his wife and two children lived there.
They operated the ranch,
and they had a phenomenal
diversity of encounters.
[Knapp] Really strange stuff.
Off the charts strange.
Balls of light.
[man] There's no flashes to it.
It's just a solid light.
[woman] It won't make any sound either.
The ground would shake.
[rumbling]
They would hear
these disembodied voices speaking in languages
they didn't understand.
It's like a haunted house
with UFOs.
♪ booming, mysterious music ♪
♪ haunting, eerie music ♪
And then the animal mutilations start.
♪
The rancher, I think, at first felt
that somebody was trying to drive him off the property.
There was an article in a newspaper.
A local newspaper had done a story about it.
'Cause the rancher's trying to figure out
what the heck is going on.
By the time that Bigelow hears about it,
they were scared.
They were so messed up.
They had been through psychological hell.
They wanted out, so Bigelow went up,
met with the family
and Bigelow offers to buy the property.
[Bigelow] Terry and I made a deal,
providing he would stay on.
Because I need somebody there,
in addition to... he had backyard...
literally backyard knowledge.
There was an episode with-with the ranch manager after Terry.
I hired some other folks, some-some wonderful people.
♪ low, dramatic music ♪
♪
[John Alexander] I was
32 years with the military in various forms.
Spent most of the time in special operations intelligence.
I got to higher and higher levels in the government.
I had met a number of people who were interested in UFOs.
The opportunity came along for Bob to buy the ranch.
I was with him
the day he bought it,
and I was first one to spend a night up there.
[Knapp] John Alexander's a counterintelligence guy.
He's, like, an actual "man in black" guy.
He's interested in these topics
and just wants to get to the bottom of it, like we all do.
[Alexander] We set up NIDS,
the National Institute for Discovery Science,
and started, uh, exploring it.
Cameras 24/7
and looking out at the events
at the ranch.
♪ rhythmic, eerie music ♪
♪
Just amazing phenomena would absolutely occur
and... totally beyond explanation.
Frequently, things
would happen just off camera,
as if it knew where it was.
[birds chirping]
Other things happened
that should have been on camera that weren't.
Very strange place.
♪ soft, hypnotic music ♪
♪
[Chris Marx] I'm not a UFO guy.
I'm not a, you know-- a huge paranormal guy.
I had just
returned from a two-year tour in Iraq.
So I didn't really know much about any of that.
I got my first marching orders
to go to Skinwalker Ranch.
We were primed that we would be
some sort of a paranormal investigative team
and document these events
that seemed to be taking place on the ranch.
We were advised to document
anything that was out of the ordinary,
anything that seemed...
anomalous.
I went out a lot by myself,
taking a lot of pictures.
[camera shutter clicking]
[Marx] I knew the ranch,
in those six years, probably better
than anybody else, from
every cave there is,
to the valleys, to the river area.
♪ slow, suspenseful music ♪
♪
[Marx] There was constantly a feeling
of being watched.
Almost like a presence of something you couldn't see.
[Alexander] The phenomena,
whatever "it" was-- absolutely in control.
It seemed to know how
we were going to respond
before events occurred.
[Marx] It started slow,
by somebody just banging on the door,
or opening the door,
and then you would go out, and there's nobody there.
Or somebody, it sounded like, had a stick
and went around the metal skirting
of the headquarters, 360.
When you go out, there's nothing.
But the crowning event was, it was about 10:30 at night,
and I was writing a report.
[birds chirping]
And I hear the front door being thrown open.
-[door opens] -You can clearly hear
-somebody behind me. -[footsteps]
You can not only hear it, but you could also feel the ground
move. You could feel the vibration of the ground.
And whatever thing that was
walked through the entire house,
-opened the back door... -[door opens]
...and then, you could hear him walk down the stairs.
[footsteps]
You could see the stairs individually move.
I stopped,
at some point, trying to find a smoking gun.
I just wanted to document as well as I could.
[Knapp] Skinwalker Ranch--
poltergeist activity, weird creatures--
all in one area.
[Greenewald] We know about Robert Bigelow
and his connection to Skinwalker Ranch.
And he just happens to be the guy
who was awarded the contract for AAWSAP,
which turned into some kind of UFO research program.
♪ slow, suspenseful music ♪
[Knapp] In July of 2007,
a guy in Washington,
at the DIA-- he's a physicist,
a rocket scientist-- writes a letter
to Robert Bigelow, and he says, uh, "Hey, I'm so-and-so.
I work for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
I've heard about the Skinwalker Ranch.
I'd like to visit the property and see it for myself."
Writes this letter to Bigelow, Bigelow gets it.
He calls Harry Reid.
♪ dramatic, suspenseful music ♪
[Reid] One day, Bigelow called me.
He said, "I got the damndest letter.
I want you to see it."
And so, I read the letter, and I said,
"Now this is something I think is interesting.
It came from a reliable source."
I said, "I don't know the man, never heard of him."
But I said, uh, "I will contact him."
After meeting with him several times,
I called Bigelow, and I said,
"I think you should give this guy permission
to go to your Skinwalker Ranch."
[Knapp] Bigelow invites the guy out.
They fly together to the ranch.
They're there for maybe hour, hour and a half.
Within ten, 15 minutes of being on the property,
this guy has an experience,
and it seems to have been tailor-made for him.
Something appears in this room,
and it's something that only he can see.
♪ suspenseful, eerie music ♪
♪
He goes back to Washington.
He meets with Reid again,
tells him about it, Reid arranges
a meeting in a SCIF under the Capitol,
a secure facility.
And the scientist meets with Reid
and Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens,
and they talk about,
should we put some money together and study this?
[Reid] In short, this is one
of the easiest sells I ever had to make
because Ted Stevens immediately said, "Good.
When I was in the Army Air Corps,
I went up one time, and there was a vehicle
off to my left.
I would go up and down."
And did everything he could to shake that object,
and he couldn't.
And he asked some people on the ground,
"What was that?"
And they said, "We didn't see anything."
So he said, "I'm in favor of this."
So that's where we got the $22 million dollars.
[Knapp] Stevens said, "Yes,"
Inouye said, "Yes,"
Reid says, "Yes," and it was a done deal.
Signed it in September of 2008, and they were off to the races.
♪ fast-paced electronic music ♪
Bigelow recruits scientists, private investigators,
former cop and military folks,
and then, they start investigating cases.
Boots on the ground, interview the witnesses,
collect physical evidence,
put it together in reports.
[Kean] And he hired out
a whole lot of scientists and experts to work
on various aspects of this issue,
and papers were written by them.
[Knapp] 38 papers to look at aerospace
and scientific breakthrough technologies
50 years in advance.
Can we duplicate what we've seen UFOs do?
Can we, in 50 years, create a plane that's invisible?
Can we go through a wormhole?
They put together a gigantic pile of information,
99% of which the public has not seen.
So, I-I released a couple of 'em.
"Detection and High Resolution Tracking Vehicles
at Hypersonic Velocities."
This is by Dr. Bill Culbreth at UNLV.
2009, that was pie in the sky.
That's far off in the future.
Now, we know in the last couple of months,
Putin has boasted they've got hypersonic missiles that cannot
be stopped.
Bill Culbreth writes the paper 11 years ago
that says, "Here's what our capabilities are.
We need to get started on this."
There's no UFO that's mentioned in that report.
But it is talking about objects that travel really fast,
and how do we track 'em.
You can see how that could be applied to the study of UFOs.
♪ fast-paced electronic music ♪
♪
[seabirds calling]
♪ slow, eerie synthesizer music ♪
♪
[Day] A part of me's still on watch.
I was a TOPGUN graduate, senior air controller,
had 18 years sea time.
This encounter profoundly affected me.
I went through some really hard times because of it.
I had changed.
It changed me, and everyone around me noticed it.
I started having nightmares, um,
of the eschatological type,
like end-of-the-world type nightmares,
um, out of the blue.
I didn't know what was causing it,
but it started to affect my work,
it started to affect my marriage.
I ended up losing everything I had.
Your worldview is shattered,
and I thought maybe I was even going crazy.
♪
I'd actually returned back to my hometown
back in Cave Junction, Oregon,
and I was volunteering at the local golf course,
working in the kitchen.
It was December 17, 2017.
CNN was on TV.
[Brian Todd] He saw the object,
waves breaking over it, and says
he saw something hovering above it.
[Day] Story comes on-- the Tic Tac video.
[Fravor] It looks like a 40-foot long Tic Tac
with no wings.
Some of this was gonna be hard for me.
[clears throat]
That moment rocked me.
They showed the same video that I had in 2004.
I knew in that moment. I knew in that moment that
I had to talk, I had to speak up.
If you think about it,
since 2004, up to the present,
the number of cases reported by Navy pilots
and radar operators has... has definitely increased. Why?
[Day] No, not at all. I'm not angry
With my government, I don't hate my government.
I support my government.
I don't hold anyone responsible
for what happened to me personally.
I don't have those feelings. Instead,
what I do feel is, I want to figure out what this thing is.
And I think they want to be found.
And we're gonna go find 'em.
♪ slow, mysterious music ♪
[Reid] I am totally in favor
of doing all the exploration we can on the world
beyond our world.
We must remain curious.
Intellectually, we need to do everything we can
to try to figure things out.
I know
that people, when I got started in this,
thought that I was going in an area I shouldn't have.
"What the hell's he doing on this?"
But as time has gone on, even my wife,
who wondered why I was so involved in
unidentified flying objects, said to me a few months ago,
"You're not looking so bad now."
I am confident,
and I am cautiously optimistic
that in the next year,
we are gonna have a fundamentally
different conversation than we're having today.
I think there's gonna be additional fidelity,
uh, to-to a lot of the things that have come out recently
that are-are... are gonna help us, um,
have a better understanding of what it is
-we're actually seeing here. -[applause]
[Greenewald] Throughout the decades,
when it comes to the field of ufology,
you see people at the top, which are considered the leaders.
Based on the New York Times article,
Luis Elizondo is one of those people.
The day it was released,
I had filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests
to try and get more information from the Pentagon,
from the Department of Defense.
♪ pulsing, dramatic music ♪
The Pentagon gave me a "no records" response
to my original request.
Now what's really strange about that is,
I gave them Mr. Elizondo's name.
And he said, "Nope, we got nothing."
So I started drilling down, looking into
Mr. Elizondo's background.
[camera shutter clicking]
He didn't have any background.
There were very little things known
about Mr. Elizondo as a person.
Who was he? What was he really doing?
Why is the Pentagon saying,
"That is not what this program was.
There was no UFO aspect to it"?
And then, all of a sudden, they said,
"Mr. Elizondo had no assigned responsibilities
on the AATIP program."
The guy that you've been seeing on the news,
and nearly every publication on the planet
that we call Earth, he did not lead that program.
What do you do with that?
Who do you believe at that point?
♪ pulsing, dramatic music ♪
♪