♪ suspenseful, dramatic music ♪
♪
♪ intense, intriguing music ♪
[David Fravor] Both airplanes see a disturbance in the water
and a white, 40-foot-long Tic Tac-shaped object.
[Kevin Day] I knew they were something anomalous.
What flies like that?
Nothing I'd ever seen.
[George Knapp] It's picked up on radar.
It's real.
[Gary Voorhis] Helicopter landed.
Two people got out.
I was asked to get everything in the computer room
that had anything on it.
All of those disks were taken offship.
[Day] I started having nightmares.
End-of-the-world type nightmares.
I don't know what it was.
But I know it's real, and I know
it's coming our way.
[John Greenewald Jr.] There was a private organization
funded by a billionaire
that aimed to investigate UFOs.
[Knapp] Really off the charts strange stuff
starts happening.
And that's when AATIP was born.
[Luis Elizondo] There is very compelling evidence
that we may not be alone.
[Greenewald] There were very little things known
about Mr. Elizondo as a person.
Who was he? What was he really doing?
And when the Department of Defense
is saying, "Yeah, the guy on the news,
in The New York Times, he did not lead that program,"
what do you do with that?
Who do you believe at that point?
[James Carrion] I'm not a skeptic.
What I am is just... I'm a truth seeker.
Those writers were fed that information purposely.
They wanted that article to get out,
and they found some believers to release it.
Where's the proof?
There is no proof.
♪ intense, dramatic music ♪
♪
♪ pulsing, intriguing music ♪
♪
The belief that UFOs exist,
that they are alien in origin,
is just a belief.
People take it on faith.
There is no proof
other than stories,
witness accounts,
anecdotes.
Lot of folks that make the rounds
of the UFO conferences,
they don't have an interest in finding truth.
They're perfectly okay
with this subject being perpetuated
from now till eternity.
They like the fact
that it's conspiracy
that continues and continues and goes on and on.
That's never been my goal. My goal is
I want to find out what the truth is in my lifetime.
So, find out that truth no matter what.
My interest in UFOs actually started
when I was 11 years old.
[woman] My God, it's got lights all the way around it.
[Carrion] My mom used to subscribe
to all the tabloid magazines,
so the National Enquirer,
for example.
You know, back then,
there were alien stories.
So I would clip out all of these different stories
about UFOs and aliens
and collect them.
I've always thought,
"Is there something more to this?"
Are these just stories?
Is there some truth to this?
But then one day, out of the blue, there was
some front-page news that happened
where these intelligence analysts
that were from Augsburg, Germany,
they went AWOL from their post.
♪ dramatic, ominous music ♪
♪
What ended up happening was
they went to Florida...
...because they wanted to attend a MUFON conference.
That's where I first heard the word "MUFON."
♪ pulsing, dramatic music ♪
"MUFON" stands for
the Mutual UFO Network.
[Ralph Blumenthal] There are people in the private sector
who actually attract UFOs,
and there are countless sightings.
[man] Look at that. It's going behi...
Yes. What the hell is that?
Yo, look how slow it's moving.
I have never seen a UFO,
and yet there are hundreds of thousands of reports.
And there are organizations that track these reports.
One of them is the Mutual UFO Network, MUFON.
[Carrion] Their mission statement
is the scientific investigation of UFOs
for the benefit of humanity.
[Knapp] Independent UFO research is fraught with peril.
It's a swamp. It's a mess.
There's so much information in there that is unreliable,
so many people who make claims that can't be verified.
[man] Whatever it was
moved up and to the left.
Uh, it hovered there for...
probably about 60 seconds.
[woman] There was no sound, that's the funny thing.
-Or-or the lights. -Yeah.
-You know, the usual lights. -No sound, no blinking lights.
[Carrion] When I became the international director
in 2006,
I really had the sincere desire
to make MUFON a more science-based organization.
I rewrote their investigative manual.
I formed their rapid-response team.
I really tried to instill
more ethical behavior
in terms of witness interviewing.
[man] There's so many theories floating around.
No one has an answer.
A lot of it is just speculation.
And just get good data.
[man] This is really strange.
Very strange object in the sky here.
A yellow center.
Looks like it has... it's moving away from me a little now.
[Leslie Kean] For years, when a case would happen,
witnesses would call a local MUFON group
and report it.
But when you look at the investigations,
you'd realize that civilian UFO research organization
could only do so much.
That's why I've always advocated
that we need a government agency
in order to do proper investigations.
Little did I know
that there was this project going on
in the Defense Department.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification...
Identification Program.
A recent report by The New York Times
unveiled the existence of a real-life X-Files...
[reporter] Tens of millions of dollars for the project
were pushed through
by former Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
A lot of the money went to Bigelow Aerospace
run by a longtime friend of Reid's, Robert Bigelow,
a big believer in UFOs.
I wasn't surprised.
No, actually, at the time, it was sort of a,
"Aha. That's what that was all about."
Robert Bigelow approached MUFON in late 2008.
Bob Bigelow is an interesting person.
I've always sort of thought of him
as sort of the modern-day Howard Hughes.
-[applause] -A billionaire-- lots of money--
who has a vested interest in the space program
and seems to have, also,
this vested interest in the UFO field.
Correct.
In 2008,
when I was international director,
Robert Bigelow asked MUFON
to submit some scientific papers.
Scientific papers that would project
futuristic technology
that we could glean from UFOs.
You know, some sort of far-out advanced technologies.
[Knapp] $22 million dollars is given to BAASS,
an organization created by Robert Bigelow.
And he advertises online.
He recruits scientists,
private investigators, former cop and military folks.
People with experience
investigating different phenomena,
criminal activity.
People who are good judges of character.
They put together a gigantic pile of information.
[Greenewald] When you look at the fact
that $22 million dollars went over to the private sector,
a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace,
and that they produced 38 reports,
you got to ask, "That's what...
Really what $22 million dollars bought?"
Where did that money go?
[Carrion] Well, we submitted some papers in 2008.
He allegedly liked them.
And then in 2009,
Bigelow invited us back to form
a relationship where he wanted to use MUFON
as the investigative arm
for his new company called BAASS.
♪ intense, pulsing music ♪
January of 2009,
I went to Las Vegas
along with a couple of other MUFON board members
to Bigelow's headquarters.
And we sat down with, uh, Hal Puthoff,
Jacques Vallée,
Robert Bigelow
and a couple other folks
I did not recognize and were not introduced.
And Harold Puthoff was a physicist
who had done work
in this psychological mind expansion experiment,
the PSYOPs operation the CIA funded for many years
and its intelligence gathering.
[Diana Walsh Pasulka] Jacques Vallée is
one of the first big what we call UFO researchers.
He's a computer scientist,
and he's also an astronomer, and he helped
map the first mapping of Mars.
[Knapp] Those are the same people that were part of NIDS.
[Carrion] We sat down with Bigelow,
and we talked about how we could formalize that relationship.
I had a formal presentation
where I described how MUFON could act
as sort of the rapid-response force
for getting quickly
to what could be described as a major UFO event,
how we could gather evidence.
And then feed that back to BAASS.
Bigelow was offering MUFON something along the lines
of $50,000 per month
over a 12-year contract
with, uh, future expansion,
and he said that it was not his money.
He said, uh, "This is coming from a sponsor."
So I asked him point-blank,
"Who is your sponsor?"
And he said he couldn't reveal that.
That bothered me.
So then I asked Bigelow again, point-blank,
"Is your sponsor a government organization?
Or is it an intelligence agency?"
♪ exciting music ♪
♪
He point-blank told me no.
Well, fast-forward to 2017. We find out
that it's the DIA that was behind this.
♪ dramatic, intriguing music ♪
The Defense Intelligence Agency.
[Carrion] Honestly, I don't think it makes
a lot of sense that the government
would have an interest in UFO groups
like MUFON other than for, let's say, deception reasons,
psychological reasons,
maybe counterintelligence reasons
for the same reason that, uh, you know,
homicide detectives don't want amateur sleuths
around homicide, uh, scenes.
The government would do it for just one reason,
which is to manage that organization.
The common thread that you can find in this story
from the very early days of UFOs
starting in 1946 all the way till now...
There's one common thread,
and that's human deception.
♪ lively, upbeat music ♪
♪
[newsman] For 22 years, the government officially
investigated UFO sightings.
Those records, now declassified,
are kept here, in the National Archives.
The files include case records, pictures-- like this one,
which the Air Force labeled a hoax--
and artifacts.
This chrome-plated cylinder, which the Air Force concluded
was probably part of an auto ornament,
was sent to J. Edgar Hoover
by a man in Washakie, Wyoming,
who wanted to know if it was a threat to the national security.
[Greenewald] When I first started looking into UFOs,
I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I went on the Internet, and, you know,
being a 15-year-old kid,
thinking, "Hey, if anybody's gonna tell me
the truth about UFOs, it's the United States government."
And honestly, it's probably
the biggest mistake of my life.
♪ slow, intriguing music ♪
♪
I grew up fascinated by magic.
And in my mind, the greatest trick of a magician
is to make the audience look at your left hand
so they don't see what's going on in your right.
-[gasping] -[applause]
And I never knew it at the time,
that it would play a role later in my life
researching the United States government connection
to what UFOs were.
And there's a really, really strong connection,
in my mind, between being a magician
and handling the secrets of the U.S. government.
The government doesn't want you to know everything,
so they will create the illusion of something.
That's their left hand,
because they don't want you to know
what's going on in their right.
[Carrion] My belief through my research
is that the UFO subject
was a deception effort
created by intelligence agencies
to kick off the Cold War.
They created the UFO myth
for disinformation purposes.
The origin of all this would be, actually, Roswell.
Classic deception.
If you look at the summer of '47,
Kenneth Arnold had his June 24 sighting.
You had lots of sightings after that
that most people discounted
as, "This housewife saw this"
and, "This farmer saw that."
But they found this material on their property.
♪ tense, dramatic music ♪
♪
As I come out of the canyon there,
I notice to the left of me
a chain, which looked to me like the tail of a Chinese kite,
going at a terrific speed,
flipped and flashed in the sun,
just like a mirror.
[Kate Dorsch] Kenneth Arnold's sighting takes place
at a very interesting nexus.
We are coming out of World War II,
in this postwar moment where...
we have the atomic bomb.
We think that the Soviets are a decade or more away
from having the bomb.
♪
But our relationship with the Soviet Union is
fast deteriorating.
There is a heightened cultural tension
during this time, where any moment
can be your last.
♪
That these nuclear warheads can be dropped on us, unknowing,
unbidden, with no preparation and no warning.
So people are living in this heightened state of awareness
and intensity and anxiety
on an existential level.
And then enter the UFO.
[shutter clicking]
♪
[John Hayes] I don't know what they saw in '47,
but I'm quite sure it probably was Project Mogul.
But I think if you find that people talk about things
over a period of time, they begin to lose
exactly when the date was.
And there were lots of dummies dropped;
there were 20... about 2,500 balloons launched
during this 30-year period
in New Mexico alone.
[insects trilling]
[Dorsch] The Roswell story is actually one of my favorites.
It might still be largely apocryphal.
The story is the United States Air Force
and the military was testing
these very, very large surveillance balloons
called Skyhook balloons,
that were highly classified, top secret,
intending to fly them over the Soviet Union
at very, very high altitudes.
♪ soft, mysterious music ♪
And...
one of these things came down in Roswell.
And some low-level Air Force kid went out to see
what the farmer had reported
and said, "Oh, the-- It's just a balloon."
[Carrion] The story was that they found this balloon.
No big deal.
[Dorsch] The higher-ups at the Air Force found out
that this was being shared,
that the story about the balloon was out,
that we were testing these high-altitude balloons,
and came back and said, "It was not a balloon.
We don't know what it was, but it was absolutely not
a high-altitude balloon.
So whatever you've heard is not at all true."
Because they did not want this in the news.
They did not want the Russians to know
that we were testing these very high-altitude balloons
and were or were not successful.
[Carrion] What really cemented the subject of UFOs
in people's minds in 1947
was when
the 509th Bomber Group,
which was the only atomic unit in the world at the time,
sent out that press release and said, "We captured a UFO."
♪
They put an official stamp of reality
on the UFO subject at that time.
[Dorsch] In the absence of other explanation,
the extraterrestrial thing
gains traction.
You start to see a narrative about aliens.
And, even then,
Betty and Barney Hill are
one of the first abduction stories
that takes place in the 1950s.
[Carrion] At that point, it becomes its own myth.
My mother and I have both had
close encounters of the fourth kind,
also known as abduction experiences.
[indistinct chatter]
[Carrion] And if they created the UFO myth,
that means they also perpetuated the UFO myth.
♪
My name is Richard Doty.
I'm a former
intelligence officer for the United States Air Force.
I worked for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations
from 1978 to 1988.
[Knapp] Richard Doty is an interesting character.
He actually was someone who worked on the inside
in disinformation.
Yeah, there is disinformation.
Of course there is. There is-is attached
to every classified project.
It-it comes with the territory.
Yes.
Absolutely.
We did do that, yes.
♪ slow, suspenseful music ♪
We don't call it disinformation.
We call it counterintelligence operation.
Convincing the enemy the...
whatever we wanted them to believe.
If some people tapped into something
or they photographed things
that were being tested at Kirtland Air Force Base,
we have to develop an operation
and convince 'em what they saw
were UFOs.
♪
Which led into the Paul Bennewitz operation.
♪ soft, hypnotic music ♪
♪
Paul Bennewitz
tapped into a highly classified program
at Kirtland Air Force Base.
In the early '80s,
the Air Force was testing drones,
and drones were highly classified.
But on the base,
we had a-a National Security Agency facility
with a high-energy laser.
[beeping]
When a Soviet satellite would pass over the base,
the laser would hit the lens of the camera,
blinding that satellite,
so the satellite couldn't take any pictures.
Paul's seen these things.
Paul photographed these things.
[Bill Moore] Whatever it was
that Bennewitz was involved with,
he was the subject of considerable interest
on the part of not one but several government agencies.
And that they were actively trying to defuse him
by pumping as much mis-- disinformation through him
as he could possibly absorb.
[Doty] Some of the information that we give
has to be accurate,
because people have common sense.
So you have
to give 'em a little bit of real information
before you throw in the, uh...
the, uh, disinformation.
They believe a little.
And then you add more
and more and more,
and that person opens their mind up and says,
"You know what? I think this is all real."
Maybe the government wants them to be the believers
because what they saw were in fact
our testing crafts.
[insects trilling]
Paul was a believer.
I became friends with Paul.
He became friends with me.
Over a period of time,
after this was all over with, I sat down
with Paul and tried to convince him otherwise,
and Paul wouldn't hear it.
He said, "You don't have to tell me these things.
I understand it's classified.
I understand you don't have to tell me these.
I believe it was UFOs."
♪ slow, dramatic music ♪
♪
[Carrion] Somebody's a true believer in UFOs,
you can't convince them otherwise
that this is not alien in origin.
♪
What it really boils down to is it's a religion.
It's a belief system
that-- just like you can't convince folks otherwise that
God doesn't exist
or that Christ didn't exist.
[Doty] The strange part of the Paul Bennewitz operation
was Paul Bennewitz photographed things that weren't involved
in secret government projects.
[shutter clicks]
He photographed UFOs.
He actually photographed a UFO over Dulce, New Mexico.
I didn't-- I didn't lie to Paul Bennewitz.
I had a job to do.
I-I wasn't a maverick.
I just didn't go out and do this on my own.
My supervisors told me, "Listen,
we don't want him to go out to the public,
go on camera and say,
'Hey, I just tapped into a secret laser
on Kirtland Air Force Base.'"
Obviously, we can't have that happen,
So all I had to do was say,
"Well, you know what, Paul?
Maybe what you did see was UFOs."
♪ soft, tense music ♪
[Greenewald] Look, we've established in history
and documents through the Freedom of Information Act,
the CIA and the military complex as a whole
has really aimed to essentially mislead the public
when it comes to UFOs,
tell them something that necessarily is not the truth.
We've seen it time and time again,
through the decades, over and over and over.
[Mark Walker] As the ranking member
of Terrorism and Counterintelligence,
we have questions.
Uh, it comes down to some of the new infrared radar systems
that we're putting in some of our new jets
are detecting some things out there.
We want to know the information.
And that's why it's important that we take a look at this.
[Greenewald] In the process of us, the general public,
posing that question, hearing
those nightly news stories for 90 seconds
about "this could be alien,"
all of that takes the attention away
from that left hand of the magician.
And that is the classified pieces of technology
that are being utilized, tested
and potentially implemented tomorrow.
[insects trilling]
Take a facility like
Area 51.
[birds chirping]
There is this mythology around
a piece of a UFO from an alien spacecraft.
♪ soft, tense music ♪
[Donna Tryon] Some of them are just curious.
They don't know what it's about.
Other people believe that they've been abducted.
Other people believe they are actually aliens
and they want to go out there to hopefully get back home.
[newsman] Now, one million UFO enthusiasts on Facebook say
they'll storm Area 51
because a spaceship crashed there
and then we took the aliens captive to study them.
Is that the problem?
That's one way of thinking.
[Greenewald] You can't fly over it.
You can't get near it.
And there's probably a heck of a lot we can't see underground.
[newswoman] There is so much
activity going on out there.
Overhead espionage,
countermeasures against electronic warfare,
paramilitary training.
It's got all these elements
and you throw the UFO lore into it,
you got a lot of ears and eyeballs on Area 51.
[Knapp] It could be drones. It could be test aircraft,
It could be satellites.
It's all the things that people mistake for alien craft,
if that's what you want to call 'em.
We don't know what they are.
[Greenewald] We know that is the ultimate testing ground
for advances in technology.
[Joerg Arnu] They talk about,
"Well, we have a prototype. It's not flying.
We're just building a flying prototype now."
It's been flying for years,
out of Area 51, right over these hills.
[insects trilling]
♪
[Knapp] There are documents to prove it,
and a lot of this material had been squeezed out
of the government via FOIA,
uh, Freedom of Information Act.
You've got all kinds of human activity going on.
Attempts to spread disinformation. That's real.
That's happened. That comes with just about every
advanced secret project, uh, that we have,
that it's standard operating procedure.
Doesn't mean that everything is disinformation.
Another day, yet another new explanation
from the U.S. government
for all those unexplained UFO sightings in the sky
since the 1950s.
This time,
it's the CIA's turn. They say
that many Americans who saw UFOs were really seeing
U-2s,
-America's then high-flying -[whirring]
and highly classified spy planes.
♪
[Knapp] The U-2 and the SR-71 planes
those spy planes could fly way up there.
They don't land in people's yards.
They don't hover over people's houses.
They're not glowing round objects.
They were created to not be seen.
They're spy planes. They fly way up there.
But the CIA says, "Oh, yeah, all those thousands
of UFO reports, that's us."
[Carrion] The problem is that
the data
that makes up the UFO subject
is filled with too much garbage.
It's too muddied.
It's a big landfill, is essentially what it is.
-[woman] Another one, too! -[woman 2] Where?
[Carrion] There's enough muddy data in this subject
that we don't need more...
questions.
Right? We need answers.
-[man] It was a UFO. -[Carrion] What I've noticed
through the years is that, whenever the subject of UFO
wanes in the media,
something happens that all of a sudden
increases interest again.
[woman] We saw five lights in a row.
[Carrion] The Phoenix lights, for example.
You have to understand, you know,
if a-- something happens, if an event happens,
there has to be a context to it.
♪
[John Powell] I was kind of excited
when I saw the Phoenix Lights.
I thought it was a competitor.
I thought, "Someone has been doing this work
well before me."
But, to be honest,
I recognized the tech. [chuckles]
♪ gentle, mysterious music ♪
♪
In the '50s,
the Air Force was experimenting with extreme
high-altitude balloons and airships.
And they made dozens and dozens of different designs,
experimented with wings,
all kinds of different shapes of balloons.
And the winner
was, you know, the "V" configuration.
It's the only shape that allows you
to operate successfully in all three aerodynamic regimes,
subsonic, supersonic
and hypersonic.
Well, they're flying balloons up to Mach 10
in the late '50s and early '60s,
and they were flying in at 300,000 feet.
♪ tense, mysterious music ♪
Our whole program with the big V-shaped airships
is to go higher and higher and higher.
Can you take that
all the way to space
and do away with the rocket altogether?
That's what we've been doing here for 42 years now,
working on the Airship to Orbit project.
We built a series of vehicles for the Air Force,
resulting in the largest one,
called the Ascender 175, in 2004.
The Ascender is the same configuration
as the Phoenix lights, so, naturally,
it looks like that vehicle.
And the way it was described,
how it moved,
it moves like this vehicle.
Since there's no engines on it,
it's doing all this fast maneuvering
and making no noise at all.
It appeared. Your whole brain tells you
it has screamed away.
It's like, "What just happened?"
I'm personally convinced it was not this vehicle,
'cause this was later,
but it's definitely the same technology.
What it tells me
is that the Air Force research on V-shaped airships
continued.
And what kinds of things are they doing with those vehicles?
♪
[Carrion] There's nothing new under the sun.
There's always a precedent to something that happens.
♪ soft, somber music ♪
♪
I think, with the Nimitz event, you have
Navy pilots who said they saw something.
They're usually very good observers
and they have no reason to be lying about what they saw.
I think the question is,
were they being manipulated?
[Greenewald] There's a big possibility--
with incidents like the Nimitz,
the Roosevelt encounters,
and quite a few others through the years--
there's a big possibility that is done
by the U.S. military itself.
Now we know that the U.S. Navy says,
"Well, we have no idea what these things are,"
but that doesn't mean that the United States Air Force,
who has been mysteriously quiet
about the whole UAP UFO issue, doesn't know what they are.
The best way to test
whatever classified piece of technology,
whether it be a drone swarm, whether it be
a new radar reflector, whether it be something
that can fly incredibly fast in the sky--
what better way to test it
but against the most powerful Navy
that you can find on the planet Earth?
[Day] So I'm out there doing an exercise.
Um, it's built around the principle of safety.
And to have someone else put a test
on top of that--
another exercise on top of mine--
was highly ill-advised,
extremely dangerous and probably even illegal.
[Greenewald] Can it chase it? Can it catch it?
Can highly-trained Navy personnel
deep under the deck
of the USS Princeton see it on their radar screens?
What can they deduce? What can they find out about it?
What can they see?
Military says that that's not what happened,
but I think that there's a big possibility
all of that is misinformation, and they absolutely
are testing their own technology.
[Knapp] I'm not an engineer or scientist, but there are
all kinds of things that we can't do on this planet.
The Tic Tac video is evidence of an engineering
process that we don't have.
It's technology
that is still beyond our cutting edge, that is in
the kind of things that we are projecting 50 years in advance.
That's how it's been explained to me.
♪ slow, gentle music ♪
♪
[Blumenthal] We've heard from top experts in our government
and in the field that the capabilities
of these objects exceed anything known on Earth.
I mean, that's the-the conclusion
that comes through loud and clear.
The other thing is, uh...
In the defense industry, in the government,
in private industry-- the consultants
who are working with the government.
Now, are they all lying to cover up some secret research?
Perhaps.
But certainly,
all the experts we've talked to in and out of the government
say that these things seem to have
capabilities not known on Earth.
If these things are our own government's secret,
you know, weapons, why would they be flying them
in a way that would endanger our own pilots?
If they were secret
Soviet weapons, why would they be flying them
in a way that would possibly collide with our aircraft
and provide evidence that they exist?
It doesn't make any sense.
♪ pulsing synthesizer music ♪
♪
[Carrion] I believe that the release
of that 2017 article on the AATIP program--
that was a purposeful release,
just like Roswell.
What AATIP has done,
what Elizondo has done,
what the Navy has done is they're putting
an official stamp of reality on it.
As far as Elizondo is concerned...
I'm always worried
about anyone who has one foot
in the world of government or intelligence.
[Blumenthal] We checked his records.
We saw his citations
for meritorious service.
You know, all that stuff. You know, official--
Yes.
[Greenewald] So I started looking into
Mr. Elizondo's background.
We know for a fact
by his resignation letter that he was the director
of the National Programs Special Management staff
that operated in the office
of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Now why is this important?
Well, that placed him in an office
that essentially he operated like a ghost.
I was only able
to dig up, through the Freedom of Information Act,
one reference to that office.
And that was in a court transcript
from the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
So essentially he knew about a lot of the highly-classified
and secretive elements going on
within the Department of Defense.
In the beginning of 2018, all of a sudden,
the Pentagon started issuing these contradictory statements,
stating first, "Well, no,
we really weren't dealing with UFOs."
And then they said that they dealt
with anonymous aircraft or-or something anomalous in the sky.
And then all of a sudden, they took it all away,
and they said, "Nope, sorry. We changed our mind,"
stating that AATIP, at this point,
didn't have anything to do with UFOs,
and that Mr. Elizondo didn't head the program.
[Knapp] They can't keep their story straight.
If you had asked them two weeks
before The New York Times story came out, hey,
is there a program called AATIP that studied UFOs?
They'd say no.
And then when it did come out, "Oh, yeah,
okay, we had a program.
Yeah, it might have looked at UFOs."
Then a couple months later, "No, it didn't.
It didn't look at UFOs.
Lu Elizondo had nothing to do with it."
Now they're in the middle of trying to figure out
what they're gonna say next.
When you look at the chronology of how
Mr. Elizondo got those videos cleared
for U.S. government use only, six weeks later,
all of a sudden he resigns.
Then there's a meeting that, that takes that information,
it's given to The New York Times.
Then within weeks, Mr. Elizondo
is on stage in the spotlight
on this new corporate venture.
October 2017, To the Stars Academy announced
that they were going to figure out
whatever these UFOs were.
Hello, I'm Tom DeLonge,
and thanks for joining us live today.
♪ pulsing music ♪
You had an all-star list of former CIA operatives
and people tied to the intelligence community.
But also the corporate world.
Jim Semivan, Christopher Mellon.
And Doctor Hal Puthoff was at the...
at the capstone of it all.
♪
[Puthoff] Starting as a kid, I've always been interested in
the actual forefront of physics.
And so I've been always involved in
looking at ideas that were
right at the edge.
The CIA descended on my doorstep.
They said, "Oh, have we been looking for you."
Every time there's a problem somebody wants to solve,
they want a physicist
who's had clearances they know they can trust.
And they know the area's so weird
that no other physicists are going to agree
to do anything about it.
Who you gonna call?
[Carrion] There's a history
of questionable characters in this field.
What I call the usual suspects.
All of these characters that maintain government ties.
They do active government research.
And they have an interest in UFOs.
Why?
[DeLonge] Now, if there's a subject
that could potentially change the world
how would one approach it?
Especially if the subject contained
Earth-changing technology,
the need to understand a coming tidal wave of information,
and what my partners and I call, again,
"the story of the millennia."
♪ quick, thrilling music ♪
[Greenewald] Tom DeLonge had made
a name for himself in the field of UFOs.
Obviously, he needs no introduction
as being a rock star.
[DeLonge] When I signed my first major record deal,
I took my first check, bought a desktop computer
so I could research the possibility
of intelligent life in the universe.
[Carrion] I don't know Tom DeLonge.
I don't want to speak badly of him, but honestly...
To me he seems to be a useful idiot
in all of this, and I hate to use that term,
but that's sort of like the...
the term for somebody who's being used unwittingly.
[DeLonge] I sometimes call To the Stars
science fiction Disney but for adults.
Tom DeLonge is an entertainer.
A... rock star
with a lot of resources.
He is putting attention on this very interesting field
with a lot of celebrity behind it.
[crowd cheering]
You have Tom DeLonge's entrepreneurial background.
Very successful background.
You have a corporation that is aiming
originally to raise $50 million dollars.
I think, and it's not popular to say,
but that money may be
a big motivating factor for these men to come together.
If that doesn't scream PR move--
which is fine, but we have to frame it appropriately--
that-- that's what they were orchestrating
The New York Times to do.
Not necessarily a piece on AATIP or UFOs,
but rather putting the spotlight on an organization.
[Blumenthal] You always look and see, "Are you being played?
Are you being used for something?"
But first of all, we reported what was
absolutely true, that there was a secret program.
There was an unknown Pentagon program.
Tracked UFOs, produced videos.
That was all true.
We were very careful not to lend
ourselves to any promotional effort for
To the Stars.
[Carrion] A lot of the folks that write these articles
or are investigating AATIP,
they are what I call
UFO perps.
They're perpetuators
of the UFO myth.
I absolutely believe it was an op.
I think AATIP w-was an op from day one.
From when it was first incepted.
♪ slow dramatic music ♪
♪
[Elizondo] We were brought into the program to identify
some of these phenomena
and, basically, try to collect enough data
where we could make some positive analysis
and identify what these things were.
A lot of folks think that I'm sort of a turncoat
in the UFO field
because I've become what they consider a skeptic.
I'm not a skeptic.
I-I'm not a debunker.
What I am is just, I'm a truth seeker.
I believe there's life in the universe.
Where I differ from a lot of the believers,
is whether that life has come to Earth.
Is it possible? Yes.
Have we possibly been visited in the past? Yes.
Have we possibly been visited now? Yes.
Is it possible we could be visited in the future?
Absolutely.
Cannot discount that.
The universe is too big.
But... it's just a belief.
Right?
Where's the proof?
[Knapp] Well, what do you call proof?
What's your idea of evidence?
What, what's evidence to you?
Evidence is enough information to convince you
that something is true, or at least true to some degree.
We have millions and millions and millions
of people who have seen these things.
We have thousands of events that are unexplained.
Many of them, anyway. We have, uh,
radar and visual sightings.
Every time you have a UFO story,
it's either disinformation
or it's a secret military program.
Well, was the Pentagon doing this stuff
250 years ago?
The craft that were seen back then,
were they secret test planes?
Was that a disinformation campaign run by the CIA?
The fact is that these phenomena predates
the kinds of explanations you're talking about.
It represents something that we don't understand.
[reporter] Frank Banners' UFO remained
over his farm more than four hours.
His children saw it, his in-laws saw it,
residents of the area saw it.
The police saw it.
[man] It, uh, moved very rapidly,
at any speed or, rather, any direction.
It would go, why, it would change
and go to the right or the left,
and go crossways, um, without hesitating a bit.
[man] It's going over... See, over the mountain.
Whoa!
Shoot.
♪ exciting, percussive music ♪
♪
[Knapp] Every culture, every continent,
every civilization of the world has reported this thing.
They use different terms for it,
but it's been with us throughout human history.
♪
It's bigger than the CIA.
We don't know what it is.
[Dorsch] There is a separate, really interesting conversation,
like, the hierarchy of...
UFO belief.
I think there are people who see things.
They've been told that if they see something
they should say something.
[man] There is no sound.
-It is... -[woman] Changing direction.
[man] It's changing directions.
But how do we separate reputable witnesses
from crackpots?
It was hovering up here.
Uh, just below the tops of the trees.
Well, I felt this numbing shock and blacked out.
The guys in the truck said they saw this brilliant beam
come out of the light
and hit me in the head and the chest
and knock me flying through the air.
[Dorsch] I think that the trouble comes
with the abduction stuff.
[man] I didn't see any neck.
It looked like it just sit there on the body,
if you could called it a body.
And then just lifted me
off the ground, about...
about the height that... that it was, or they was.
And we went in...
it was, it carried me into the vehicle
or the craft or whatever you want to call it.
Even some of the most ardent,
true-believer,
pro-UFO study scientists
do not make that leap.
[woman] And these strange creatures
just sort of floated out.
...and took them inside the spaceship.
And then they believe that they were, apparently, examined.
Under some type of-- of eye or light.
And then, the next thing he knew,
he was back outside again.
[Dorsch] A crackpot is somebody who believes
fervently without any basis in scientific fact.
They might be extraterrestrial, but they're not kidnapping us.
This kidnapping story is ridiculous, right?
I find it difficult to accept everything that was said.
However, I believe that they were sincere.
I do not believe that either of them,
at that time, was putting on.
But you know what I'm saying.
There are intelligent people who say, "Hey,
we were out here, they, uh...
We saw them, we talked," and yet there's not one shred
of what they call hard evidence
to support it.
[Dorsch] What makes the UFO so interesting,
is that it is such a scientific object.
And yet how do we articulate
and quantify and figure out
legitimacy and authority, credibility?
[Blumenthal] That's what makes John Mack so fascinating.
The fact that a noted, world-renowned
psychiatrist at Harvard would be so taken
by this idea of alien abduction.
In the past four years, I've worked now
with approximately 90 people who've had these experiences.
It then went to being floated out of my room,
going up into a spaceship, lying on a table...
I was aware that they were putting an instrument
in my neck.
Poking and prodding.
Taking... skin samples.
[Blumenthal] I was very taken with this story
because I was intrigued myself.
[Mack] The only thing I knew
that behaves like that is real experience.
This is not the way dreams behave,
this is not the way mental illness behaves,
it's not the way fantasy behaves.
[Blumenthal] John Mack actually believed
that these people were telling the truth.
♪ dramatic music ♪