♪ peaceful, otherworldly music ♪
♪
[newsman] It is very rare
for thousands of people seeing the same light at the same time.
[Fife Symington] I always refer to it as otherworldly.
That was the feeling, you know, when you watch this thing
go over and you think, "Oh, my God, you know what?"
"Otherworldly" really describes it.
[Kate Dorsch] What makes the UFO so interesting is it is
such a scientific object.
But how do we separate
reputable witnesses from crackpots?
[George Knapp] 95% of it is bullshit,
but if the other five percent
is true, it would be the biggest story of all time.
The implications are enormous for everyone.
[Ralph Blumenthal] If these things are
our own government's secret weapons,
why would they endanger our own pilots?
It doesn't make any sense.
[Michael Smerconish] Are we on the brink
of full disclosure about visitors from outer space?
[Kevin Day] Imagine if disclosure happens,
and all of a sudden, the entire world
starts experiencing these things.
I think there's something about to happen.
And I think the world needs to get prepared for it.
I really do.
[Greg Eghigian] For most people in history
who have had a sighting of a UFO,
those reports are pretty brief.
There's not a lot of narrative to it.
"So I was walking the dog, saw something weird
in the sky, couldn't figure it out,
weird blue light," that's it.
There are then, however, people, of course,
who tell more elaborate things, truly mysterious experiences.
[interviewer] He didn't communicate anything to you
while you were taken back into the ship?
[Eghigian] They start to question
their worldview, their concept of reality.
♪ dramatic music ♪
♪
♪ fast, mysterious music ♪
♪
[Eghigian] The thing about the UFO phenomenon,
is it really a tale
about stories and story-making?
Finding a way to turn this stuff into a coherent
narrative is at the heart
of, I think, humanity. We want to do that.
My name is Greg Eghigian.
I am professor of history at Penn State University.
I teach a lot on the history
of madness and mental illness
and psychiatry, history of science, as well.
When I was a kid growing up,
I got diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.
And I was very sickly, and there were times where I,
literally, I couldn't move.
I was really kind of isolated.
And I began
reading a lot.
The whole UFO thing really fascinated me.
I would sit there and scour over the images
of a flying saucer,
like the way people used to look at album covers or something.
I had this voracious appetite for UFOs.
I thought I was gonna become an astronomer.
But as high school ended,
I went to college.
I kind of lost interest in the topic.
Only recently, I was at a conference...
uh, talking with a friend and colleague of mine
who was working on...
some stories in Europe after World War II
about how, particularly in Germany, right after the war,
there was a kind of almost a renaissance
of interest in the occult.
And I asked her offhand, "Did you come across anything
about UFOs?" 'Cause I'm sure there's
tons of people who've written about it.
Lo and behold, what do I find?
I find that no academic historian since
the 1970s had ever really
looked at the history of UFOs.
The people who looked at it
were sociologists, psychologists,
folklorists.
But nobody from my tribe...
[chuckles] ...the historians.
What's so striking about the phenomenon
is so many of the core elements...
they were all basically minted by
the first five years of the phenomenon.
And then there's just a new riff.
They're variations on a theme.
[reporter] Now they say that it's
balloons like this one that have been
mistaken for flying saucers.
[reporter 2] In 1955, aliens supposedly terrorized
a family farmhouse in Kelly, Kentucky.
[reporter 3] Nine disc-like objects flying
at a speed of approximately 1,500 miles per hour
near Mount Rainier, Oregon.
[man] I looked up, and right over my head, virtually, uh,
it was a rim of lights in the shape of a triangle.
[man 2] I'll be t... I'm gonna tell you something, honey.
I don't know what the hell it is.
[woman] It's rotating.
[man 2] Oh, good God.
[stammers] There's always things like that going on.
Uh, flying saucers, and we've
had other things, you know.
But now we've got some things that really fly, and Russia
put up the first one if I'm not mistaken.
[Eghigian] So a good example is the idea that
the military/government
knows what's going on
and isn't sharing that information.
[Knapp] They've lied about it for so long.
They've diverted money
from legitimate national security programs
into keeping this thing going
and keeping it secret for a long time.
[Eghigian] There's different versions. One is,
they're scared of creating a mass hysteria,
mass panic.
[John Greenewald Jr.] People were scared.
People did not know what it was,
who was powering them.
And that really fueled, I think, the CIA's concern
that they had to squash it.
[Eghigian] There is the story that, no, they're actually
in cahoots with the aliens themselves.
Or there's just the-the plain, old, simple idea that,
well, they're not sharing the information about this
because these are secret weapons that they're using.
That theme, we're seeing it play out right now, right?
[Greenewald] Now, what's really strange is
that The New York Times referenced metal alloys
that were being housed in specially designed buildings
within Bigelow Aerospace's headquarters.
Fill in the blank to define whatever
these metal alloys were, but the implications were there.
[Knapp] There have been, you know,
a number of these reports over the years about crashes,
where bits and pieces of strange material
were collected.
Those reports are... that I've seen...
have varying degrees of credibility.
But people that I know, the people
who have worked in these programs, think it's real.
[Harry Reid] I know that there's a lot of talk about Lockheed
having things in there, some special warehouse.
I've never seen them.
I've not been invited to see them.
So, at this stage, there's no evidence for me.
[Greenewald] That, to me, could be potentially
the biggest aspect
to this entire story, and yet The New York Times,
they just drop that bombshell in one line and move on.
Why would you do that?
Let's just say that there were these mysterious metals
retrieved from UFOs.
Would you give them
to the private sector, number one?
But number two, would you give them to a warehouse that anybody
that's off the Las Vegas Strip can drive up to?
In the realm of government secrecy,
none of that makes sense.
[chuckles] Hi.
We did some follow-up for The New York Times
about crash-retrieved objects in July of 2020.
Very reputable sources
have told us they believe
indeed there are materials that are in the possession
of possible aerospace companies
or special secret-access programs.
My colleague Ralph Blumenthal
and I were privy to briefing slides
that were actually used by the Department of Defense program
to brief all kinds of people in which they reference
anomalous aerial vehicles that have been retrieved.
They call them crash retrievals.
And they even use the word "off-world"
to describe that these are, you know,
possibly off-world vehicles.
[Gary Voorhis] It could be any of the major players: Lockheed,
Northrop.
I have a feeling that
there's gonna be a huge boom in tech in the next ten years,
due to the fact that we're understanding a lot more
of this reverse-engineered tech.
[reporter] The full U.S. Senate Intelligence Commission
report on this phenomenon
is due out before the end of the month.
That's right, there have been narratives about...
crashes and bodies...
back since 1947,
and... there's no way to know, if something is
that secret, you know,
whether it actually happened or not.
[Dorsch] The narrative is that the military has truth
and is hiding it from you.
To some degree, it is even less about...
flying saucers and aliens
and some extraterrestrial threat.
It's that whatever it is,
the military knows.
And they're hiding it from you.
And that's the part that's really scary.
[Eghigian] As a historian, when you look back
at when people first started talking
about having contact with aliens...
the stories that completely
dominate the UFO scene,
even into the middle part of the '60s...
are a very different set of stories.
Those are stories about people meeting
aliens out in a field somewhere.
They look like us.
They typically speak our language or they speak
to me telepathically, and they come here
with this basic message.
We're here to help you.
We're here to warn you
about nuclear weapons,
and, you know, stop killing each other.
[man] We don't feel as paranoid
about the future, about our place.
I don't, I don't think we're afraid of...
as much as we used to be.
[Eghigian] And when people have these encounters,
they come back and they say this was
one of the most wonderful experiences of my life.
I hope I get to see them again.
The interesting thing to me, though, is that...
these stories are out there, but
for well over almost two decades,
they make almost no mark
in popular culture.
[Kean] Well, it's not the area that I focused on.
And I chose not to focus on it because
the angle that I was taking in my reporting was to try
to get credibility for the subject,
and I knew that that was not the way to go.
Whether it was true or not, it didn't matter.
You know, even if it were all true,
that was not the first step
in terms of getting people to accept this.
[Eghigian] I remember very, very vividly
stories about the Hills.
Their story absolutely riveted me.
I couldn't stop reading,
even though I couldn't get to sleep
properly every night as I was reading it.
[Kean] I'm not writing it off.
The problem with it is it's very hard to prove it.
[Eghigian] There were many other cases,
some remarkable stories
in the '50s and the '60s and the '70s.
But they're not something
that gets a lot of attention.
And then suddenly you hit the early 1980s,
and bam! [chuckles]
Everything is about alien abduction.
[reporter] Creatures with large heads and huge dark eyes
who usually appear in the middle of the night
and often perform sinister medical experiments.
I've had eggs removed from my ovaries repeatedly.
[woman] My mother and I have both had close encounters
of the fourth kind, also known
as abduction experiences.
So what's been happening is, we're being transported
aboard a UFO of some sort, a craft.
We've undergone physical examination,
mind scan process, and reproductive processes.
They're creating a hybrid race between humans
and extraterrestrials.
[Eghigian] So the question then, to me, becomes:
why are they interesting now?
Why does this become something fascinating?
And there I think you have to start
looking at things that are going on in popular culture,
but things that are going on in society.
Technological changes,
and you have a whole host of things.
One of the things that becomes a very big part
of public discussion
starting in the 1960s,
into the 1980s,
is a focus on home invasions.
Starting with basically Truman Capote's
-In Cold Blood. -[gunshot]
This case becomes sort of this one pivotal moment,
where people start to say this could happen
to anybody.
The Manson Family killings become
a kind of a flashpoint
for talking about these things.
This is also, by the way, the age of hijacking.
When people talk about encounters
in, say, the early '60s,
the encounters overwhelmingly were outside.
"We were outdoors or in my car."
By the time you get into the 1990s,
the majority of people say,
"My encounters are in my bedroom."
I'll be laying down on the bed, and whichever
direction I'm facing, they will be behind me every time.
[Eghigian] I'm not saying that people
are just making things up.
That's not my point.
All of this seems to lie in this idea
of a traumatic experience.
And it's interesting to me that,
that trauma, that term "trauma," when does that
start to really become part of the public conversation
about experiences that are terrifying?
Well, it's, it's there, already being talked about
after World War II in the wake of the Holocaust.
It's being talked about in the 1970s
and the feminist movement,
about women who are victims
of domestic abuse.
But it's of course
institutionalized in 1980
by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
with the invention of the post- traumatic stress disorder.
And that's exactly when you get John Mack.
[Blumenthal] I love books, and so,
everywhere I go, I look for books,
especially vintage books.
In 2004, I was a correspondent in Texas and I picked up a book.
I think it might have been in Larry McMurtry's town
in Texas, where he runs a lot of book shops.
The whole town is devoted to Archer City,
which became, you know, Last Picture Show.
So I picked up a book called Passport to the Cosmos,
which was a book by John Mack.
[reporter] Passport to the Cosmos is Dr. Mack's
newest book. Quite simply, it's about people
who claim they've been abducted by aliens.
[Diana Walsh Pasulka] John Mack,
who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard researcher...
...in the '80s wrote the book
Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.
That's not an easy topic for an academic because
it could ruin your career.
[Blumenthal] He was very eminent in his field
and he had a very distinguished career
writing about Lawrence of Arabia.
He had been written up many times in The New York Times.
He was an expert in childhood development.
He had written a book on nightmares.
He had written a book on, uh, teenage suicide.
He had been on Oprah.
He was, you know, famous.
Infamous in some circles at Harvard
but very, very well-known.
What the source of this is,
what... who these beings are, where they come from,
what creates this intelligence...
uh, I don't know, but there's something
profoundly important going on here
that is authentic and real.
John Mack is a pivotal figure in this history.
He has a kind of recognized legitimacy
that most people in the UFO community did not enjoy.
So the idea is, if someone like him is interested
in this topic and feels there's something worthy
to look at, we've got to look at that.
[Charlie Rose] Do you, as an intelligent person
who's investigated it, believe...
I don't know of a better word...
think it happened to them?
Nothing in my 40 years of working with people
prepared me for this phenomenon.
In spite of all the criticism that I may be
taking it too seriously or...
uh, believing this really happened,
there isn't a single case where anybody has found
another explanation of what an individual has reported.
[Blumenthal] The Harvard psychiatrist who's researching
alien abduction. I thought
he'd make a great story for The New York Times.
I was thinking about calling him up for an interview.
And then literally a few days later,
I picked up The New York Times and I saw his obituary.
I was shocked.
He was run over and killed by a hit-and-run driver,
a drunk driver in London.
I thought it was very strange.
The Internet was already well along, so there were
suspicions and allegations by people
that he'd been assassinated.
[Eghigian] There's no question, like a lot of famous people
who have worked in the UFO area,
whenever they die,
particularly an untimely death,
there are people who come forward and say
this is part of the conspiracy.
The Men in Black narrative.
Again... it's a common kind of thing
that you see take place.
[Blumenthal] The most common rumor was that
another person named John Mack
was run down at the same time,
so that shows that John Macks
were targeted, and it's not true as far as I could, uh,
determine, there was no other John Mack run over.
[Brandon Harris] This is happening on the heels
of the popularity of The X Files television show,
with a sort of burgeoning interest
in alien culture.
The early days
of the Web allows people
who have an interest in aliens and UFOs
to find each other more easily.
Where conspiracy theories
or myth can take hold
and find purchase with a group
of people that can spread it more widely.
[Blumenthal] It really was sadly much more simple than that.
He was run over and killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver
in London. He looked the wrong way
and died almost immediately.
Well, I mean he was a psychiatrist,
so he was an expert scholar
of-of the human mind and psyche,
and he found that these people were eminently normal.
There was nothing to distinguish them,
except for the fact that
they came to him telling
of these extraordinary experiences.
And went from the white light hitting me
to then being paralyzed
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.
[Eghigian] John Mack tells us in interviews
when you look at what he talked about.
His first response was, "This is nonsense.
This is utter nonsense."
But what really struck him as he looked more at this,
the people seemed legitimately upset.
I'm remembering what they did to me.
I don't want him doing that to her.
And I... And I just blurted, "Don't touch her.
Don't take her. D-Don't do those things to her."
[Eghigian] They were telling stories
that were consistent with one another
though these people had never met one another.
They would hear that another person
had had the same experience.
They would become very much disturbed
because it meant they couldn't dismiss it as a dream.
They couldn't dismiss it as their private mental illness
or fantasy, and that, to a psychiatrist...
at least to this psychiatrist... was very powerful.
It was a broad cross section of humanity.
Men, women, blue-collar people, professionals,
psychiatrists also, doctors,
lawyers, politicians
and children as young as two years old
who would tell stories about little men
who took them up into the sky.
And he realized, of course,
that these children were not reciting
stories from books they had read
or movies they had seen. They were two years old.
They were not mentally ill. He was convinced of that
because that was his field.
They were not delusional.
They were not deluded.
They were not looking for publicity.
On the contrary, they were horrified
by what they think had happened to them.
They were traumatized, often to the point
of shaking and crying when they revealed these encounters
in sessions that he had with them.
He didn't communicate anything to you
about why you were taken back into the ship?
I just remember being able to see that light again.
[Blumenthal] Basically,
he could not find any other explanation
other than what the people said had happened to them.
♪ intriguing, tense music ♪
[Mack] In these cases, these people
have been examined by myself. They've been
tested psychologically.
They are of above-average intelligence.
They are of sound mind. They've been shown
as of sup-superior mental functioning by the testers.
So the-there is not indication
of any kind of psychiatric condition
that can account for this that I've been able to find.
Because they don't want to believe it's true.
They would rather believe it's a dream
or a form of mental illness than that this is something real
because it's so shattering to their notion of reality.
[Pasulka] If you look through John Mack's book,
you see these people have these contact experiences.
There was always some type of incredible event,
and then they understood it to be a real thing.
There are experiences from hundreds of years ago
that look similar to what people experience today.
One of the best examples of that has to be Teresa of Ávila,
who is a doctor of the church,
and she was the Italian nun in the 1500s.
She had this experience
that is very well-represented in Western art.
And it's represented in statues and paintings,
and it's this experience where, if you looked at it,
you would see her in kind of ecstasy.
And you see this angel.
There's a very famous statue
by Bernini in Rome
where there is an angel carrying this dart.
And, you know, it looks like Eros, right?
The god Eros with the dart who's gonna get you,
and, you know, you're gonna fall in love.
But if you actually read her report of it,
it looks nothing like her actual experience.
She says, "This is not a normal angel.
But usually if I see an angel, it's imaginative.
It's, you know, something in my head.
But this thing's actually real. Right?
This thing's, like, fleshy. It is right there."
"And it's short.
You know, it's three feet.
And it's fiery. It's all on fire.
And it has this prong,
and it's-it's, you know,
thrust the prong into my bowel."
You see this time and time again
in history with people who have these experiences and sightings,
what are called contact experiences.
And then what happens is
that there's an interpretive framework around that
that the Church then declares
as what happened.
The interpretation then gets done
after the experience.
That's what's called religion.
And then it's represented.
Like, you can say
that pop culture back then were paintings and statues.
♪ intense, dramatic music ♪
Teresa has her event,
and it gets changed, right?
It can become something completely different
than what she actually wrote about.
We decided we're only gonna look at these parts
because we can only deal with those parts.
[Eghigian] John Mack is unusual and important
because when he encounters the alien abductees,
he says, "I-I could start to question their worldview."
"Their cosmology," is what he called it. "Their reality."
He said, "But I started to come to believe
that I was being called on to embrace
their experiences as something that challenges me."
If this is a real experience...
that is, some kind of entities, beings,
intelligences are entering our world
and affecting hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions of people, according to polls...
then this is something really worth looking at.
So, that's what I've been trying to do,
is get people at least to look at it.
Think about it.
Once you kind of get hit in the face with this
and there's a connection you can make to it
where you just realize this is too big to turn away from.
And it can just grab you.
That's what it feels like.
And I'm the same way, you know,
so I understand it.
I never went to formal school. Actually,
I went to Burma, and I was documenting
a lot of human rights abuses in Burma
in the '90s, basically.
[overlapping shouting]
[screaming]
And when I came back,
I was invited to go on a public radio show.
And then I started working with the producer of that show,
who was really interested in what I had,
and I was eventually hired to work at this radio station.
I was curious, but no more than your average person.
I mean, I never, ever would have imagined
that I would ever be professionally involved.
What started the whole thing was, I was sent a report in 1999
from a colleague in France
called the COMETA Report.
It was a 90-page study on UFO data
by a group of very distinguished people in France.
Generals, admirals, police chief,
scientists, engineers.
They were only looking at official cases,
pilot cases, military cases. Then they spent
three years studying all these official cases,
and they came out with this 90-page study
which basically said
that the best hypothesis
for all this data they observed was
that we were being visited by extraterrestrial vehicles.
And I was just absolutely fascinated by it.
I thought this is a massively huge story.
This was the first time I went out on my own,
pitched the story, and it was published
in the Boston Globe, and that was sort of what launched me
on this journey, and from that moment on,
I was... I was, like, hooked.
[Knapp] I'm not a UFO guy. It wasn't my thing.
I was chasing the mob in those days,
but this got my attention.
I was hooked on it.
[Kean] There was a huge outpouring of excitement
from the UFO community because
I don't think a journalist
had ever taken it seriously enough
to publish a long story
in a major publication like the Boston Globe.
[Knapp] Suddenly, my phone starts ringing off the hook.
People are calling. They're giving me
tips about UFOs, and I realized
that this topic touched the pulse of the public
in a way that I had never considered before.
♪ intriguing, dramatic music ♪
[Kean] I started going to some conferences
so I would meet members of the UFO community.
And then I was actually introduced to Budd Hopkins.
[Eghigian] Budd Hopkins is a guy who already, in the early '80s,
had become quite famous.
The evidence suggests beyond any doubt,
as far as I'm concerned, that we're being visited
by some kind of... some form of intelligence
which is higher than ours
and some kind of technology which is higher than ours.
We keep it at arm's length conveniently,
but it does upset more and more people
as they see the evidence for it.
[Kean] Budd Hopkins was a very well-known artist
before any of this came into his life.
He was an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor.
♪ intriguing, tense music ♪
The reason this whole thing started
for him was because he had a sighting himself.
I was fully convinced that the Air Force had said
they were balloons or something or other.
I never knew what. And I accepted that.
But then, when we saw
this thing flying around, I was very aware that,
okay, there's something up there that has not been explained.
[Kean] He saw a disk-shaped object in the sky,
and it turns out other people had seen the same thing.
And then he's in the liquor store one day
'cause he liked to have his evening Scotch.
The guy in the store just started talking
about this landing of a UFO
that had happened in New Jersey.
And he said that there had been beings that had come out,
and there were marks on the ground.
And he wrote about it in the Village Voice,
a paper in New York City.
And it took off,
and he just got so many letters from people who said,
"I've seen things like this, too."
And I concealed deliberately
certain details about the UFO... its color,
certain details about the weather condition...
because I wanted to...
I-I was convinced that there were other witnesses,
and I wanted to have some way of checking their veracity.
And, in fact, we got
something like seven or eight other witnesses
who were right about these missing details.
And so I knew, all right, these things are flying around.
♪ pulsing, intriguing music ♪
He ends up meeting John Mack.
And he introduces Mack
to some of these folks who say these things.
[Hopkins] I handed him 20 unopened letters
that I had not looked at myself, had not read them,
not opened them, from people
who obviously were writing in because they felt
they'd had experiences. And I said, "John,
you open these, read... these letters. You read them."
And he called me the next day
to say he was quite astonished by this.
[Blumenthal] Budd Hopkins trained himself
to hypnotize people, but he was an artist,
and, as he said, nobody cares what an artist thinks.
But John Mack
made people think twice
about the whole subject.
[Eghigian] Mack was interested in this idea
that you wanted to focus on the experience.
♪ gentle, intriguing music ♪
When they talk about him going native,
it does seem to me what any good
treatment professional, any therapist would do.
You try to put yourself in the position
in a sympathetic way,
even maybe empathetic way
of looking at problems and issues
through the experiences and lives
of the people you're treating.
[inhales deeply]
[grunts]
[speaks indistinctly]
-They're horrible. -[Hopkins] Who's horrible?
-They are. -[Hopkins] Who's "they"?
I don't want to talk about it.
Right.
He had won a Pulitzer Prize,
the biography of Lawrence of Arabia.
John Mack did identify with Lawrence.
The person who had a conflict between his inner life...
very, uh, intellectual... and his outer life,
obviously mobilizing Arab tribesmen
against the Ottoman Empire.
A very action-filled life.
[shouting]
No prisoners! No prisoners!
Hyah!
Charge!
[Blumenthal] He said many times, John Mack,
that he identified with his struggles.
And he tried to emulate Lawrence's methods
because Lawrence was a master statesman, too.
Very politically savvy.
John Mack was in similar circumstances.
You know, pillar of the Harvard establishment,
interested in, you know, aliens and UFOs.
♪ intriguing, dramatic music ♪
[Mack] Either we try to shrink the phenomenon
into something where it...
as far as I can tell, it won't fit,
or we're gonna have to stretch our notions of the possible.
John really had a lot at stake given his position at Harvard
and his credentials and, you know, all of that.
[Blumenthal] First of all,
Harvard was really no stranger to anomalous research.
I mean, William James, the father of psychology,
was attending séances
and writing about paranormal events
a hundred years ago.
But something
about John Mack's manner had put them off.
He was a little too popular.
Academia will never forgive... [laughs]
...professors who spend their lives writing,
you know, obscure papers that never get any attention.
Then this guy comes along, and he writes a best seller
after trying to get peer-reviewed, you know,
-and being rejected. -[Eghigian] Harvard ends up
doing an investigation
into his research practices.
In the end, he is
allowed to continue his career.
This is also part of that history
of the flying saucer UFO phenomenon,
that whenever an institution
that is recognized as respected,
whenever they grant this stuff
some sort of legitimacy as a topic
that is worthy of conversation, worthy of investigation...
...it is credibility.
[Knapp] During that same period of time, Bob Bigelow
is starting to put the pieces together
for the National Institute for Discovery Science, NIDS.
♪ quiet, intriguing music ♪
[Lara Logan] Do you imagine
that in our space travels,
we will encounter other forms of intelligent life?
You don't have to go anywhere.
-You can find it here? -Yeah.
-[laughs] -[Knapp] He and I would meet,
and during those years, he would share with me
things that he was financing,
the kind of research that he had funded.
He was, at that time, providing financial support
to a number of really distinguished academics
and researchers.
People like Budd Hopkins.
And eventually
Dr. John Mack from Harvard.
[Greenewald] When you look at those connections, right,
and everybody seemingly is more and more connected,
uh, into this story,
you see them all essentially gel for decades together,
and they just keep popping up
in the same programs or the same stories
or the same objectives.
Why is that?
Is it that they're just all buddies and friends
and they have this budding interest
in the same things?
Or maybe there's something else being played out
at this point that keeps them all together?
-♪ -[dialogue inaudible]
[Dorsch] I want to be generous, but
if there's anything we've learned,
there is money and a certain kind of prestige
in being at the forefront of this.
Thank you.
[Eghigian] From the very beginning,
there are drivers of this.
There are people who take up a role
kind of self-appointedly.
[chuckles] They take up this role that,
"I am going to be
a campaigner."
-[applause] -For a time,
they are the bright,
shining stars in all this,
but they ultimately fall away,
and new people take their place.
[applause]
There's never been
some central institution,
a central agency or a group of people
who concertedly try to keep this thing alive.
♪ pulsing, dramatic music ♪
But there's always been this kind of interest
at an individual level.
I think you can go so far as to say some people
really understand themselves as crusaders for truth.
[Richard Doty] In 1947, two craft crashed in New Mexico.
They collided,
and one crashed near Corona, New Mexico,
which is public record.
The second craft crashed way out west
of Magdalena, New Mexico,
and that wasn't found until two years later.
But the one that crashed in Corona,
they also found a live alien.
That live alien was named Eba,
and he was transported to...
It was a ma... a male.
He was transported to Los Alamos, where he...
he lived out his life.
He died in 1952,
but during that time period that he was with us,
he told us a plethora of information
about what they have learned about the universe
and what their technology is.
Their technology is probably, uh, estimated
to be about 50,000 years ahead of us.
They did have some tools and some material in the craft
that the Air Force was able to
and U.S. intelligence community was able
to retrieve and reverse engineer.
[sighs] I don't know that I necessarily have much
to say about that except, like, at risk of...
I don't want to impugn anyone's character,
but in the sort of post-Brexit, post-Trump era
of social media and fake news,
there is something dangerous
about allowing uncritical narratives
that undermine public trust
in really fundamental institutions
like the United States military
and our intelligence communities.
♪ tense, dramatic music ♪
[Kean] We have to move in a way that's very credible,
that can penetrate the status quo
and can get through to senators and congressmen and scientists.
I've always advocated.
I started working on this in the year 2000,
and one of my initial points to advocate for was that we need
a government agency in order to do proper investigations.
Somebody who's interested in UFOs
writes a story about UFOs.
Well, there's a plot for you.
There's a dastardly plot.
Of course she's interested in UFOs,
and of course she helped, uh, get that story on-on the paper.
Is she supposed to cover stories she's not interested in?
[Kean] It was Puthoff, Mellon and Jim Semivan,
who was in the CIA for many, many years.
And I had known Puthoff for a very long time,
and I had known Chris Mellon also.
They knew that I was a journalist
who took this seriously,
so they were interested in just bringing me down
and telling me about the program.
A secret UFO program has just been revealed.
The military spent millions of dollars
to look into UFO sightings,
and those videos are now being made public.
[newsman] Christopher Mellon served
as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
for Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.
In 2017, as a private citizen, he surreptitiously acquired
the three Navy videos Elizondo had declassified
and leaked them to The New York Times.
It's bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself
has to do something like that
to get a national security issue like this on the agenda.
[Knapp] Chris Mellon is one of the wealthiest
people in America.
He devoted himself to a life of public service,
working for Senate intelligence committees
and then at the Pentagon. He doesn't need the money.
He's not out to besmirch his family's reputation,
his own reputation
by engaging in some kind of disinformation plot,
fooling the American public.
He's there 'cause he wants to know.
[Eghigian] To the Stars... Academy
and the people involved in that
have definitely assumed the driving role.
They are, in many ways,
the kind of now center of gravity
for this stuff.
I really don't know the inside story.
I mean, I just know that they have moved on.
♪ dramatic, intriguing music ♪
And I think people like Chris Mellon, Lue Elizondo
are working to try to get as much as they can...
You know, to have the influence to try to get
as much as can be released released.
Having members of Congress briefed,
speaking to all kinds of people to keep the ball rolling.
I don't know.
It's just a slow process, unfortunately.
But it's unpredictable.
[Eghigian] The thing that defines
the UFO is this elusiveness, right?
There's a French sociologist who makes a really good point
about UFOs.
The thing that makes UFOs so interesting
isn't that they appear; it's that they disappear.
The thing that's frustrating for so many
is the very key to why it's so mesmerizing.
It's the disappearance.
[man] There goes one. Now they're back to two lights.
Oh, there it goes.
Boom. All three.
[woman] What is that?
[newswoman] I want to take you straight to NASA headquarters.
Let's just listen and see what might be happening.
♪ slow, gentle music ♪
♪
And a picture there that you can see
the first powered controlled flight
on another planet,
so cause for celebration.
We've been flying on Earth for just over 100 years,
and now we're-we're gonna go to another planet and fly.
It's crazy.
[Blumenthal] You don't need science fiction anymore.
[laughs] Reality is really exciting enough.
I mean, it sounds quaint today to pick up books
about voyages to Mars.
We've vastly outpaced the science fiction of the '50s.
[Kean] It's just a different world now,
and there's a level of openness
and now an acceptance of the reality.
We've had some big events in the past
where, you know, there were hundreds of witnesses
where the government would still just not comment
or ignore it or say it was planes flying in formation.
Today, that could not happen.
The next big line
to be crossed is when there is an acknowledgement that
it definitely is not from any country on Earth.
♪ loud, dramatic music ♪
♪
[man] My gosh.
[Barack Obama] There's footage and records
of objects in the skies
that we don't know exactly what they are.
We can't explain how they moved,
their trajectory.
They did not have an easily explainable pattern.
[Kean] If Russia, China and America
all got together and said, "We're gonna acknowledge this,
that this doesn't come from any of our countries."
I don't know if that's ever gonna happen,
but I think that's the direction we're moving in.
[Eghigian] The thing about the UFO phenomenon is
it's just not a phenomenon.
It has always been
shrouded in mystery.
There are people who view this stuff
as a puzzle that can be solved.
We just need to put the pieces together.
And then there are people who see these as mysteries,
and mysteries are never solved.
I think that's what John Mack felt.
It was a mystery that was just going to constantly be there
because what we do as human beings is work through them.
[Blumenthal] There's two huge mysteries,
I think, uh, out there. One is:
Are we alone in the universe?
The second mystery is: What happens after we die?
And maybe they're related.
Those are the two big mysteries.
[man] Have you seen this image captured
by the Hubble Telescope
of the farthest ever view of the universe?
Every dot is a galaxy.
[Eghigian] It's fantastic.
But, on one hand, it makes you feel small,
makes us feel really tiny.
But you're also sort of caught up with this sense
that there's something bigger out there.
Carl Sagan used to say we are all made of star stuff, right?
We are all made of this cosmos, and so there's a sense
of being connected to something that is bigger than us.
♪ tense, dramatic music ♪
♪
♪ dramatic music ♪
♪