Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified (2021) s01e02 Episode Script
The White House Cover-Up
[suspenseful music playing]
[narrator] It's been more than 70 years
since the so-called Roswell Incident,
an incident which allegedly involved
the mysterious crashes
in the desert of New Mexico
of three-manned extraterrestrial craft,
close to a U.S. nuclear weapons facility.
Initially, the U.S. military
appeared to confirm the reports.
But then, just as rapidly,
denied them.
Later that same year saw the formation
of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Within it, according to documents
that have now come to light,
was a top-secret UFO monitoring group
code-named Majestic, or MJ-12.
And one of the main reasons
for the creation of the CIA
was, you know,
not just to conduct intelligence,
but to do a lot of covert operations.
And the covert operations were necessary
to find out whether there were
other Roswell's in other countries.
[narrator] Wind forward 70 years,
and, to worldwide astonishment,
a private company, To the Stars
Academy of Arts and Science,
releases footage taken by U.S. pilots,
which appears to show a UFO
caught on camera for the very first time.
The Department of Defense
has since authorized the release
of these unclassified videos.
[man chattering over radio]
[Knapp] I think what's happening right now
is a form of confirmation.
We're getting little bits and pieces
of information from different sources,
and they're basically letting us know
that something really is going on,
that it is worth investigating,
that it is being pursued behind the scenes
by our government,
by our military, and um
and that it's serious.
[narrator] The question is, why has it
taken so long for the U.S. government
to acknowledge the existence
of unidentified flying objects?
What other secrets
about possible visitations
by extraterrestrial life forms
has the U.S. government, with the help
of MJ-12, been keeping from the public?
[theme music playing]
[narrator]
According to newly discovered documents,
the U.S. government strategy
concerning UFOs
started to take shape
in the early post-war years.
Deep in the heart of the newly formed CIA
was a special committee,
known as MJ-12,
responsible for monitoring
any and all UFO activity.
U.S. nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman
devoted more than a decade
to investigating the mysteries
surrounding
the existence of MJ-12.
In his book Top Secret: Majic,
he concludes,
"I am convinced that the documents,
when carefully and objectively examined,
lead to the conclusion that there indeed
was an Operation Majestic-12."
[Dolan] It makes the most perfect sense
that you would need an organization
like MJ-12 to manage this.
You would have to.
You can't just leave it in the hands
of the United States president.
That would be ridiculous.
That would be dangerous.
[narrator]
So who were the members of MJ-12?
Unquestionably, they had to be
an elite group of individuals.
The members of MJ-12
were said to be from, you know,
the military and from private industry
in the worlds of science and so forth.
Well, MJ-12 was an ongoing project.
It still exists behind the scenes.
There are more than 12 individuals
now that it has expanded
to MJ-13, 14, etcetera.
And the minds behind this
still exist on high levels.
They're aware
of the extraterrestrial specimens
and they are also aware that
there were other needs
to update the worldwide community
in terms of the actual
factual basis of contact.
[narrator]
The Roswell Incident of July 7th, 1947
appeared to have been the catalyst
for the formation of MJ-12,
although it was nearly 40 years before any
evidence of its existence came to light,
and even then, it was revealed
in a particularly strange manner.
[intense music playing]
December 1984. Burbank, Los Angeles.
The house of TV producer Jaime Shandera.
TV producer and UFO researcher
Jaime Shandera
discovered a package
with no return address in his mailbox.
It contained only an undeveloped
black and white 35-millimeter film.
Upon further examination,
this appeared to be a microfiche
containing copies of classified
government documents
relating to the existence of MJ-12.
At that time, Shandera was collaborating
with Stanton Friedman and Bill Moore
on a potential documentary project
about the Roswell Incident.
He immediately contacted them
to share this remarkable find.
MJ-12 documents were leaked
in the 1980s and in fact, in later years,
more documents,
which are called the Majestic Documents,
were leaked as well.
There's a lot of them. Like this thick.
These documents, I become persuaded that
they're talking about something real.
[narrator] Among the documents that made
the greatest impression on him
was a memorandum of September 24, 1947
to Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal
confirming the existence of MJ-12,
from none other than the president
of the United States, Harry S. Truman.
Yes, the Truman memorandum
is very important,
particularly his signature,
which was examined by my colleagues.
This is consistent
with other government papers,
that show on the highest of levels.
[narrator] Britain's foremost authority
on governmental action on UFOs, Nick Pope,
believes that inter-government talks
about the existence of UFOs
may have even predated Truman.
My experience is working
for the British government
at the Ministry of Defense.
We did have one interesting document
that did suggest
that there had been a conversation
between Winston Churchill and Eisenhower
during the Second World War to say,
apparently, that this was real,
and that we had better not make it public
because this would be too much
for people to process in time of war,
and it would fundamentally challenge
people's religious beliefs
and perhaps destroy the church.
The document is a testimonial
from somebody who was a scientist
whose grandfather was one
of Winston Churchill's bodyguards.
Apparently, he was present
at that meeting.
[narrator] In 2014,
twenty years after the anonymous package
landed in Jamie Shandera's mailbox,
more documents concerning the activities
of MJ-12 are once again sent anonymously,
this time to Dr. Steven Greer.
Greer has been a celebrity
on the UFO scene since 2001,
when he had held a famous press conference
in Washington D.C.,
in which a number of former
military and intelligence officers
gave evidence about their experience
of UFO phenomena.
He was doing something that was very
important and provided a great service
to the UFO community to put all this
information, names of all these witnesses,
in the public domain
all in the same place.
We are here today to disclose the truth
about a subject that has been ridiculed
and questioned,
denied for at least 50 years.
The men and women who are on this stage
and the some 350 additional
military intelligence witnesses
to the so-called UFO matter,
and extraterrestrial intelligence,
can prove and will prove
that we are not alone.
[narrator] In 2014, without warning,
Greer, like Jamie Shandera,
received documents
from an anonymous source
referring to Project Aquarius,
the U.S. government's top secret
UFO monitoring initiative.
Instigated by the Eisenhower
administration in 1953,
the objective of Project Aquarius
was to glean the maximum scientific
and technological information
from any alien spacecraft.
Project Aquarius and MJ-12
are both contentious subjects.
They came about through leaked documents
that people have argued about to this day.
So, depending on who you talk to,
those are legitimate or not legitimate.
[narrator] While the authenticity
of this document was questioned,
it is astounding in the details
it revealed about contact
with alien life forms
around the time of the Roswell Incident
and afterwards.
In particular, it reported the existence
of an extraterrestrial being, or "EBE",
which allegedly survived the Roswell crash
and was taken to a military facility.
1966, New Mexico, USA,
eye-witnessed account reported
to Project Aquarius.
[dramatic music playing]
Beings from a civilization-based
38,100 light-years distant from our planet
were observing our nuclear advancement
with concern.
Could one of them
survive the mysterious crashes
of interstellar craft?
They called him "EBE",
Extraterrestrial Biological Entity.
The alien was thoroughly questioned
by military intelligence
at a base in New Mexico.
How did they communicate?
Telepathically, and later vocally,
with the language being translated
with the aid of pictographs.
It was determined that EBE
came from a planet
in the Zeta Reticuli star system.
[mysterious music playing]
EBE survived until June 18, 1952,
when he died of an unknown disease.
To this day, the U.S. government
has not officially commented on this case.
It has not confirmed
whether the U.S. Armed Forces had,
according to previous reports,
shot down a spacecraft in 1947,
with an alien being on board.
I think for sure they definitely,
the MJ-12 existed.
Um, how powerful they are,
I don't know today
if it is the same kind
of strength or power.
I think it's, it's kind of transitioned
into different types of organizations
and different types of associations.
[narrator] Throughout the history
of UFO investigation,
the U.S. government strategy of denial
has run into several major obstacles,
two of which are, it cannot control events
outside of military bases.
It has also failed
to destroy the credibility
of compelling and consistent
alien abduction testimony.
One of the most well-known
and documented of these
is the case of Travis Walton.
[intense music playing]
November, 1975.
Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest,
Arizona, USA.
[intense music continues]
The best-known and probably
best-documented abduction
in the history of the UFO phenomenon
takes place in November of 1975.
The attention of some forestry workers
is drawn to an unidentified craft.
One of these workers, Travis Walton,
approaches it.
It has a smooth, shiny surface
that reflects the surrounding trees.
Travis hears complex vibrations
emerging from it.
His friends call out a warning to him
to come back to their vehicle.
Too late.
Travis rises through the air
and, with the craft, vanishes.
He is missing for five days.
No one believes his friends' account
of the incident
and they are suspected of murdering him.
[mysterious music playing]
When he finally turns up, five days later,
he claims to have been taken on board
an alien spacecraft
and placed on a peculiar chair
with many signal lights.
When he sits on it,
the walls disappear,
and he finds himself in the void of space.
And that's not all.
Blue-suited humanoid creatures
with transparent helmets
take him through a giant hangar
to another room,
where three more creatures await.
[Walton] I screamed at them
and yelled all sorts of things,
but I never got
any direct response from them.
Um, I think,
just the entire circumstances
of what was done with me and to me,
uh, sort of sends a message
about their real intentions
that took me years to realize
that they weren't, um,
just collecting humans
in order to dissect them,
or some horrible things,
maybe eat them or some crazy thing.
They were, uh,
most likely,
intervening in what happened to me
to correct severe, extreme damage
that was caused by a burst of energy
that was probably accidental.
Travis walked up to a vehicle,
um, and got too close
to its electromagnetic field,
and it probably
stopped his nervous system.
They took him to help him,
actually, and resuscitate him,
not to, you know, take any body parts
from him or anything like that.
I do not believe the aliens are bad.
I believe that extremely advanced tech
uh technologies, civilizations,
evolve out of what we call evil.
[narrator] What would
a governmental agency like MJ-12 do
when confronted
by such a highly publicized case
as the abduction of Travis Walton?
The strategy was clear:
to ignore, intimidate,
and at the same time,
gather as much information as possible.
[typewriter clacking]
The FBI or the intelligence agencies
did not want to appear to be
taking such a thing seriously.
So if they came to me and tried
to interview me or interrogate me,
it would make it look to
if anybody from the outside,
they were totally accepting it.
And back in those days,
that is not the case.
They wanted people
to stop believing in such things.
The U.S. government
denies the existence of UFOs.
So if UFOs don't exist,
how are these people being abducted?
They're not admitting anything right now.
They know what's going on.
It's best, in my case,
for me to just focus
on dealing with the facts of my case,
and attempts to discredit things,
and expose the people
who are making such accusations
and show that they're the ones
who really need
to improve their thinking ability.
You know, their rationality.
[narrator] Two years after the incident,
and even more damning evidence
of the U.S. government's
attempts to smear Walton
and discredit those
who claim the existence of UFOs,
comes the incredible story
of Terry Lovelace,
a lawyer and former assistant attorney.
[intense music playing]
In June 1977, Terry Lovelace,
a medic at Whiteman Air Force Base,
who will later become a lawyer,
has a life-changing experience
at Devil's Den State Park in Arkansas.
His story begins with a weekend
hiking trip with a friend,
a trip that turns into a nightmare
about which he keeps silent for decades.
[insects chirping]
During the night,
a giant triangular vessel
appears in the sky.
The young men are astonished
at the sight of an object of this size
hovering above their heads.
Terry falls into a drowsy stupor.
When he awakes, another shock awaits him.
[ominous music playing]
I got to my knees and I noticed
that I was in a lot of pain.
Um, joint pain.
Every joint in my body hurt.
And out in this meadow,
this craft that had been
3,000 feet above us the night before
has now descended, and is only
about 30 feet above our heads.
And it's enormous.
And had we camped where I wanted to camp,
we'd have been directly
underneath this thing.
[eerie music playing]
[Lovelace] There were
what I first took to be children.
maybe a dozen, maybe 15,
and they're in pairs, in threes,
and they're walking around this meadow.
And I'm like, "Toby, man,
what the hell are these little kids
doing here in the middle of this forest?"
And he said, "Terry, man,
those ain't no little kids."
"Don't you remember?
They took us, and they hurt us."
[eerie music continues]
And then I had flashes of memory.
And he was right.
They did take us, and they did hurt us.
And I'm looking again,
and I could see that
these were not human beings.
I don't think they intended to kill us.
I don't think that
they were not benevolent,
but I don't think
they were malevolent either.
I recall I was on their exam table,
and I'm screaming,
and I'm filling my lungs with air,
screaming as loud as I can,
but I can't hear anything coming out.
And I heard telepathically in my head,
"Why are you screaming?"
"Stop screaming.
You know we don't hurt you."
"You know we take you back,
stop screaming."
[eerie music continues]
But after years of reflection,
I think that if I could sit down
with one of these creatures,
I think that they would tell me, you know,
"Hey, no hard feelings."
"We're just doing our job, man." You know?
Uh, I think they are examining us
like we examine animals on the Serengeti.
[narrator]
During Terry's hospitalization in 1977,
he received some unexpected visitors.
[Lovelace] My night nurse came in.
And two guys in blue business suits.
And they pulled out badges
and credentials,
and identified themselves as OSI,
United States Air Force
Office of Special Investigations.
And they shut my door
and the older agent
turned on the overhead lights,
and I felt like somebody
punched me in the face.
And I'm like,
"Sir, could you please turn those off?"
And he says,
"Can't work in the dark, son."
And I asked him, I said,
"Sir, am I in trouble?"
And he looked amused.
And he looked over at the captain,
and the captain kind of went, "Heh."
And he said to me,
"Would we be here
if you weren't in trouble, son?"
[narrator] Over 30 years later,
the story of Terry Lovelace
took a further, sinister turn.
In 2012, a routine X-ray of his leg
reveals an embedded piece of metal
the size of a fingernail
with tiny wires sticking out of it.
The discovery brings his memories
of that night flooding back.
Could it be that he had been
under surveillance
by extraterrestrials for all those years?
It is not until 2016
that he speaks openly about it.
You don't need a medical degree
to see this.
Above my knee
is what looks like a computer chip
with two tiny wires
headed up toward my head.
I don't know how far up the wires go.
They took a total of 24 films.
Uh
I was only able
to get my hands on about six.
The rest they claim were destroyed,
but I don't believe that.
The doctor also said,
"There's something else you should see."
And he popped the
another film up on the light box,
and this was a view of my leg
from the side,
and it showed in my calf muscle,
a collection of objects
about the size of Tic Tacs
arranged in a floral pattern.
I asked my doctor, "How can this thing
be in my leg without there being a scar?"
And she said, "It has to be by means
not known to medical science."
[narrator] But when a UFO encounter
is witnessed not just
by one or two civilians,
but by hundreds if not thousands,
the U.S. authorities have their work
cut out to keep the incident under wraps.
Phoenix, Arizona. March, 1997.
An electrical storm appears to
short circuit the city's electrical grid.
As darkness descends,
unexplained bright lights
appear in the night sky.
- [woman 1] Oh, look at that!
- [man 1] Calm down!
- [woman 1] Another one.
- [girl] Stop screaming.
- [woman 1] We're just excited.
- [woman 2] They keep coming.
There's four.
- [woman 1] Whoa, look at them!
- [man 2] I got that one on video.
[woman 1] There's a swarm of them!
Look, three of them.
- [man 2] I got the third one hopping
- [man 1] To your left.
- [man 3] Behind the chimney.
- [man 1] One flared up.
- [man 2] I got four.
- [girl] Another one.
[man 2] Major sighting here.
- [man 3] No, there's five!
- [woman 1] Oh!
[man 3] Another one just showed up.
[woman 1] Whoa.
I can't see how this works.
- How does this work?
- [man 2] Holy
[narrator] The first report of movement
of the giant body in the sky
came at about 6:55 in the evening
from Henderson, Nevada.
The dark V-shaped object
with five bright lights
moved slowly towards the southeast.
Other reports followed,
cumulating at half past ten,
when a series of bright lights
were seen hanging above
the western Phoenix skyline,
before gradually submerging
behind the Sierra Estrella Mountains.
What they were reporting are these large,
black triangles that are able to hover,
and then also travel at very fast speeds,
that's something
That's the sort of technology
that we do not have,
or at least if we do,
the public is certainly not aware of it.
And for this to be happening in the '90s
would be even more extraordinary.
Said that it was time to end months
of speculation on the question,
and investigate the matter
once and for all to clear it up.
[narrator]
Attempting to diffuse public alarm,
Arizona Governor, John Fife Symington,
holds a press conference
at which he jokingly presents
a member of his staff
dressed in an alien costume.
However, in 2007, after leaving office,
Symington confesses that this was
just a way to appease public concern,
and that he remains convinced to this day
that something extraterrestrial
visited Arizona that night.
Thank you.
[applause]
[Symington] I think it was a very, um,
you know,
I think it was a legitimate occurrence
of an unknown origin craft of some sort,
and who knows where it came from.
Inexplicable.
Probably one of the major sightings in,
you know, modern history in the country,
'cause a lot of people saw it
in Maricopa County, I saw it too, so I
I used to work,
when I was in the Air Force,
I worked at Luke in the SAGE Center
there in NORAD.
And so, something like that would go up
the chain of command immediately
to NORAD in Colorado
and then go to the Pentagon.
[dramatic music playing]
[narrator] The turn of the millennium
brought new pressure
for the U.S. Government to come clean
about reports of alien visitations
and abductions.
With the passage of time,
the question repeatedly arises
of whether and when
we will see public disclosure
of the secret U.S. Intelligence programs
monitoring UFOs
by a president of the United States
How much, in fact,
do the presidents themselves know
about secret programs linked to UFOs?
They probably do tell some presidents
more than others,
like Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman,
but other presidents like Clinton,
maybe Ford, what did they know, right?
They never disclosed any UFO information.
So it's clear they don't tell
the presidents everything.
I can't make any definitive statements
on who actually has control of this stuff.
But I can say that I have interviewed
and researched extensively,
presidential efforts, government efforts
to access some of this material,
some pretty high-level people.
And they were unable to get access to it.
So it leads me to believe
that it has gone beyond
Out of the hands of elected officials
and into the private sector.
That, to me, seems to be the most
probable, likely scenario.
[narrator] The CIA has long been concerned
about the risk of incumbent presidents
disclosing information
and jeopardizing the secret programs.
This concern intensified
as U.S. military strengthened its links
with private defense contractors
leading to what President Eisenhower
termed as
"the military industrial complex,"
whose burgeoning influence he warned about
as he departed the White House.
We must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight
of this combination
endanger our liberties
or democratic processes.
Eisenhower wasn't just a president,
he had been a five-star general,
for goodness' sake.
He was a military icon.
Eisenhower was only, like,
able to leak us a little bit of a warning
about the military industrial complex.
So he gave us a warning,
but it, like, helps us to say,
"Okay, we need to look into something."
You know, we look at the laws that
were put in place by the NSA and the CIA,
it's like, people were murdered
for being whistleblowers.
So when Eisenhower warned us in his speech
about the military industrial complex,
I think it was about
as best as he could do at that time.
[narrator] Is it conceivable that even
a U.S. president could be denied access
to the inner sanctum of secret programs?
[tense music playing]
Jimmy Carter, who had personal experience
of a UFO sighting,
wanted to be briefed
about extraterrestrial and UFO contacts,
but it is alleged that the then Director
of the Central Intelligence Agency,
and later himself a U.S. President,
George Herbert Walker Bush,
resolved to keep Carter in the dark.
Since then,
there have been several presidents
who have alluded
to the possibility of alien life.
[President Reagan] This is not enough
to make us recognize this common bound.
I occasionally think how quickly
our differences worldwide would vanish
if we were facing an alien threat
from outside this world.
And yet, I ask you,
is not an alien force already among us?
They're a temporary employee.
They're only there
for four years, eight max.
As soon as they're done with their term,
they're out
and another President comes in.
So why would they tell Donald Trump
all of our deepest secrets
when he could be out in months?
There's no way he's going to be read in
on all of our nation's deepest secrets.
He is just a temporary employee.
[narrator] As we look back to Roswell,
with the benefit of hindsight
and all that's happened since,
what do we make
of the rumors and allegations
which swirled around the most famous
of all UFO incidents?
[man 1] There's a whole fleet of them.
Look on the SA.
[man 2] My gosh!
[man 1] They're going against the wind.
The wind's 120 knots west.
[man 2] Look at that thing, dude.
[narrator] In 2017, the world learns
that the Pentagon,
despite its previous denials,
has continued to investigate UFOs
for decades.
- [man 1] That's not LNS though, is it?
- [man 2] It's not. Hold on, I see it.
[man 2] Look at that thing!
[narrator] This disclosure, accompanied
by the publication of video footage
shot by the US military,
- confirms what many have believed.
- [man on radio] Zero-seven-four-at-twenty.
Maybe, politically,
the president can't say,
"My fellow Americans, people of the world,
we're not alone."
Because the implication is,
the governments have known about this
and lied for it for 70 years.
But maybe there's a way
to just slip it out piece by piece.
[intense music playing]
[narrator] Given the facts
revealed by the breakthrough
2017 New York Times article
about the Pentagon top secret UFO program,
and three videos showing UFOs,
it can be justifiably assumed
that government agencies not only have
their own top-secret programs
associated with this phenomenon,
but are also very sophisticatedly
interconnected through a network
of secret agreements
with private sector entities.
The question is, who controls who?
Who has the decision-making powers.
To put it simply, who's in charge?
It's the defense contractors,
they're pulling the strings
because they're the ones
that get the money, the contracts.
So the deal is, is that we will pay you
to do the research,
and in return you can make it proprietary,
and you can cash in on the technology.
That's the agreement that they make.
We're in a world where really,
corporations run everything.
They control who gets elected.
They determine how long
the person stays in power.
They determine what policies are.
They control the lobbies
that pass laws of every country.
We have a world run by corporations,
or one run by financial concerns.
That's just how it is.
The government says you can have
all the money you want
and you can make it proprietary.
But, you know,
we want to get the information,
but you can cash in on it.
So that's how they work this.
[narrator] There have been attempts
to overturn the government's embargo
on their records of UFO phenomenon.
The most famous of which occurred
in Washington, D.C.
[Robert Wood] The conclusion
I have come to, is incredibly wild.
That those in charge have been
successful in keeping secret
the greatest story of mankind.
The evidence is overwhelming
that Earth is being visited
by intelligently controlled
extraterrestrial spacecraft.
The government has dumped
disinformation and misinformation
into the field for decades.
I have lost faith
in representative government.
I truly think we're in gridlock.
It doesn't work
and so we need to make a change.
You give this committee a lot of reasons
for us to say, "Open those files."
[narrator] Today,
knowledge and information
have a much higher price than oil.
The fundamental question
that has always accompanied the history
of UFO investigation is once again raised.
The million-dollar question is,
who has access to all this information?
Who has access
to all the photographic evidence
that has been gathered
through military channels for decades?
If you are of the camp
that believes that a Roswell occurred
as it initially was stated,
as it occurred,
they recovered something otherworldly,
where did this material go?
And that's the million-dollar question.
Anytime you deal with some
of these very significant folks
in industry, in commerce,
in military hardware
that have input
into these national security agencies,
you're obviously going to have
influence, and movement,
in a direction that they want.
That may or may not be
in the direction that the public wants.
What people are hoping to learn,
what they want disclosed,
is not really located in the government.
It's located in the aerospace industry,
it's located in the private sector.
Corporations run the world,
not governments.
Money runs the world.
Money has control over this information.
The only person that I know
who has come forward
and said that UFOs are real,
that we're being visited
by extraterrestrial, uh, visitors
from elsewhere, is Robert Bigelow,
who, uh, runs Bigelow Aerospace.
And so I'm not aware of other heads
of business who have come forward
and are releasing information
to the public.
[narrator] When questioned
about his views on extraterrestrials
on the TV show 60 Minutes,
Robert Bigelow replies
that he is absolutely convinced
of their existence.
As for their activities on Earth,
he states categorically:
"There has been and is
an existing presence, an ET presence."
"And I spent millions
and millions and millions."
"I probably spent more as an individual
than anybody else in the United States
has ever spent on this subject."
Longtime UFO hunter, Derrel Sims,
recalls Bigelow visiting
one of his UFO Symposiums
and his particular interest
in the possibility of alien implantations.
And so I've been doing that
for quite a while now,
since the late '80s,
and I did the first public
two surgeries in 1995.
And we found evidence
that interested Bob Bigelow and his crew
in the aerospace industry
and his 18 scientists voted
to study my objects that we'd removed,
and they sent them off to Los Alamos
in New Mexico Tech.
Los Alamos determined
that the metals were a rare meteorite.
Very rare.
[narrator] Following the disclosure
in 2017 of the Pentagon's secret program,
The Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program, known as AATIP,
a new player suddenly appears
on the private sector scene
with some fascinating new evidence
of Pentagon monitoring of UFO activity.
It comes from an organization known as
To The Stars
Academy of Arts and Science,
founded by rock star Tom DeLonge
from the group Blink-182,
and it appears to have
some impeccable sources,
at the heart of the U.S. government.
There is a skeptic faction in government,
and there is a believer faction
in government.
The To the Stars Academy
is almost like the believer faction.
They worked in government, they had AATIP,
then they decided that they hit
some problems,
maybe in getting this information out,
or getting the defense secretary
to consider this.
And so they decided to go private.
So I see the To the Stars Academy,
as really a private sector.
Consider it a continuation of some
of the work that was done in government.
For example, by AATIP.
You need some, some, something
like To the Stars Academy,
which is in itself
a really interesting construct of,
I mean, look at the people who work there.
When I saw the team, I was very impressed.
I said, "This has never happened before.
No group like this has ever,
uh, come together
in service to our need to know
in the public domain,
but with that kind
of military intelligence background."
When they made their first
public announcement in October 2017,
they made a very powerful statement,
which was,
"The U.S. military is continuing
to investigate these UFOs."
That was a very significant
and new thing to hear at the time.
[narrator]
MJ-12 apparently no longer exists
in its original institutional form.
Over the decades, this elite guardian
of secrets has not disappeared,
but instead, developed and transformed
into a public-private partnership.
The termination of the AATIP program
indicates the strong influence
of the private sector in the exploration
of UFO phenomenon.
And reports of UFO sightings
continue to accumulate.
Both civilian and military pilots
are coming forward with graphic details
that may eventually shed more light
on this strictly guarded secret.
People are becoming
less concerned and more curious.
Is the time approaching
for the truth about UFOs?
I feel like what we need to focus on
always is the content.
It's the information, that's what matters.
Secondarily, where it's coming from.
But most important, you got
to pay attention to the information.
And if they're giving information
we can use, we should listen.
[narrator] Nevertheless,
the government agencies
are still extremely coy
about releasing information
on their UFO monitoring programs,
for the fear of revealing state secrets
about the extent
of their global surveillance systems,
and encouraging conspiracy theorists.
The vast majority of information
is still being kept firmly under wraps,
and only occasionally,
in a very controlled manner,
being allowed to leak out
into the public domain.
As long as that approach continues,
our opportunities are hindered
to truly learn
if alien life forms could be out there,
waiting to make contact.
Where is it all being held
is the real question.
So is there one person or one group
that's got it all in MJ-12?
Um, I don't have confirmation that
that is the case, but I'm
I think that's the best assumption
we've got right now.
[closing theme music playing]
[narrator] It's been more than 70 years
since the so-called Roswell Incident,
an incident which allegedly involved
the mysterious crashes
in the desert of New Mexico
of three-manned extraterrestrial craft,
close to a U.S. nuclear weapons facility.
Initially, the U.S. military
appeared to confirm the reports.
But then, just as rapidly,
denied them.
Later that same year saw the formation
of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Within it, according to documents
that have now come to light,
was a top-secret UFO monitoring group
code-named Majestic, or MJ-12.
And one of the main reasons
for the creation of the CIA
was, you know,
not just to conduct intelligence,
but to do a lot of covert operations.
And the covert operations were necessary
to find out whether there were
other Roswell's in other countries.
[narrator] Wind forward 70 years,
and, to worldwide astonishment,
a private company, To the Stars
Academy of Arts and Science,
releases footage taken by U.S. pilots,
which appears to show a UFO
caught on camera for the very first time.
The Department of Defense
has since authorized the release
of these unclassified videos.
[man chattering over radio]
[Knapp] I think what's happening right now
is a form of confirmation.
We're getting little bits and pieces
of information from different sources,
and they're basically letting us know
that something really is going on,
that it is worth investigating,
that it is being pursued behind the scenes
by our government,
by our military, and um
and that it's serious.
[narrator] The question is, why has it
taken so long for the U.S. government
to acknowledge the existence
of unidentified flying objects?
What other secrets
about possible visitations
by extraterrestrial life forms
has the U.S. government, with the help
of MJ-12, been keeping from the public?
[theme music playing]
[narrator]
According to newly discovered documents,
the U.S. government strategy
concerning UFOs
started to take shape
in the early post-war years.
Deep in the heart of the newly formed CIA
was a special committee,
known as MJ-12,
responsible for monitoring
any and all UFO activity.
U.S. nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman
devoted more than a decade
to investigating the mysteries
surrounding
the existence of MJ-12.
In his book Top Secret: Majic,
he concludes,
"I am convinced that the documents,
when carefully and objectively examined,
lead to the conclusion that there indeed
was an Operation Majestic-12."
[Dolan] It makes the most perfect sense
that you would need an organization
like MJ-12 to manage this.
You would have to.
You can't just leave it in the hands
of the United States president.
That would be ridiculous.
That would be dangerous.
[narrator]
So who were the members of MJ-12?
Unquestionably, they had to be
an elite group of individuals.
The members of MJ-12
were said to be from, you know,
the military and from private industry
in the worlds of science and so forth.
Well, MJ-12 was an ongoing project.
It still exists behind the scenes.
There are more than 12 individuals
now that it has expanded
to MJ-13, 14, etcetera.
And the minds behind this
still exist on high levels.
They're aware
of the extraterrestrial specimens
and they are also aware that
there were other needs
to update the worldwide community
in terms of the actual
factual basis of contact.
[narrator]
The Roswell Incident of July 7th, 1947
appeared to have been the catalyst
for the formation of MJ-12,
although it was nearly 40 years before any
evidence of its existence came to light,
and even then, it was revealed
in a particularly strange manner.
[intense music playing]
December 1984. Burbank, Los Angeles.
The house of TV producer Jaime Shandera.
TV producer and UFO researcher
Jaime Shandera
discovered a package
with no return address in his mailbox.
It contained only an undeveloped
black and white 35-millimeter film.
Upon further examination,
this appeared to be a microfiche
containing copies of classified
government documents
relating to the existence of MJ-12.
At that time, Shandera was collaborating
with Stanton Friedman and Bill Moore
on a potential documentary project
about the Roswell Incident.
He immediately contacted them
to share this remarkable find.
MJ-12 documents were leaked
in the 1980s and in fact, in later years,
more documents,
which are called the Majestic Documents,
were leaked as well.
There's a lot of them. Like this thick.
These documents, I become persuaded that
they're talking about something real.
[narrator] Among the documents that made
the greatest impression on him
was a memorandum of September 24, 1947
to Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal
confirming the existence of MJ-12,
from none other than the president
of the United States, Harry S. Truman.
Yes, the Truman memorandum
is very important,
particularly his signature,
which was examined by my colleagues.
This is consistent
with other government papers,
that show on the highest of levels.
[narrator] Britain's foremost authority
on governmental action on UFOs, Nick Pope,
believes that inter-government talks
about the existence of UFOs
may have even predated Truman.
My experience is working
for the British government
at the Ministry of Defense.
We did have one interesting document
that did suggest
that there had been a conversation
between Winston Churchill and Eisenhower
during the Second World War to say,
apparently, that this was real,
and that we had better not make it public
because this would be too much
for people to process in time of war,
and it would fundamentally challenge
people's religious beliefs
and perhaps destroy the church.
The document is a testimonial
from somebody who was a scientist
whose grandfather was one
of Winston Churchill's bodyguards.
Apparently, he was present
at that meeting.
[narrator] In 2014,
twenty years after the anonymous package
landed in Jamie Shandera's mailbox,
more documents concerning the activities
of MJ-12 are once again sent anonymously,
this time to Dr. Steven Greer.
Greer has been a celebrity
on the UFO scene since 2001,
when he had held a famous press conference
in Washington D.C.,
in which a number of former
military and intelligence officers
gave evidence about their experience
of UFO phenomena.
He was doing something that was very
important and provided a great service
to the UFO community to put all this
information, names of all these witnesses,
in the public domain
all in the same place.
We are here today to disclose the truth
about a subject that has been ridiculed
and questioned,
denied for at least 50 years.
The men and women who are on this stage
and the some 350 additional
military intelligence witnesses
to the so-called UFO matter,
and extraterrestrial intelligence,
can prove and will prove
that we are not alone.
[narrator] In 2014, without warning,
Greer, like Jamie Shandera,
received documents
from an anonymous source
referring to Project Aquarius,
the U.S. government's top secret
UFO monitoring initiative.
Instigated by the Eisenhower
administration in 1953,
the objective of Project Aquarius
was to glean the maximum scientific
and technological information
from any alien spacecraft.
Project Aquarius and MJ-12
are both contentious subjects.
They came about through leaked documents
that people have argued about to this day.
So, depending on who you talk to,
those are legitimate or not legitimate.
[narrator] While the authenticity
of this document was questioned,
it is astounding in the details
it revealed about contact
with alien life forms
around the time of the Roswell Incident
and afterwards.
In particular, it reported the existence
of an extraterrestrial being, or "EBE",
which allegedly survived the Roswell crash
and was taken to a military facility.
1966, New Mexico, USA,
eye-witnessed account reported
to Project Aquarius.
[dramatic music playing]
Beings from a civilization-based
38,100 light-years distant from our planet
were observing our nuclear advancement
with concern.
Could one of them
survive the mysterious crashes
of interstellar craft?
They called him "EBE",
Extraterrestrial Biological Entity.
The alien was thoroughly questioned
by military intelligence
at a base in New Mexico.
How did they communicate?
Telepathically, and later vocally,
with the language being translated
with the aid of pictographs.
It was determined that EBE
came from a planet
in the Zeta Reticuli star system.
[mysterious music playing]
EBE survived until June 18, 1952,
when he died of an unknown disease.
To this day, the U.S. government
has not officially commented on this case.
It has not confirmed
whether the U.S. Armed Forces had,
according to previous reports,
shot down a spacecraft in 1947,
with an alien being on board.
I think for sure they definitely,
the MJ-12 existed.
Um, how powerful they are,
I don't know today
if it is the same kind
of strength or power.
I think it's, it's kind of transitioned
into different types of organizations
and different types of associations.
[narrator] Throughout the history
of UFO investigation,
the U.S. government strategy of denial
has run into several major obstacles,
two of which are, it cannot control events
outside of military bases.
It has also failed
to destroy the credibility
of compelling and consistent
alien abduction testimony.
One of the most well-known
and documented of these
is the case of Travis Walton.
[intense music playing]
November, 1975.
Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest,
Arizona, USA.
[intense music continues]
The best-known and probably
best-documented abduction
in the history of the UFO phenomenon
takes place in November of 1975.
The attention of some forestry workers
is drawn to an unidentified craft.
One of these workers, Travis Walton,
approaches it.
It has a smooth, shiny surface
that reflects the surrounding trees.
Travis hears complex vibrations
emerging from it.
His friends call out a warning to him
to come back to their vehicle.
Too late.
Travis rises through the air
and, with the craft, vanishes.
He is missing for five days.
No one believes his friends' account
of the incident
and they are suspected of murdering him.
[mysterious music playing]
When he finally turns up, five days later,
he claims to have been taken on board
an alien spacecraft
and placed on a peculiar chair
with many signal lights.
When he sits on it,
the walls disappear,
and he finds himself in the void of space.
And that's not all.
Blue-suited humanoid creatures
with transparent helmets
take him through a giant hangar
to another room,
where three more creatures await.
[Walton] I screamed at them
and yelled all sorts of things,
but I never got
any direct response from them.
Um, I think,
just the entire circumstances
of what was done with me and to me,
uh, sort of sends a message
about their real intentions
that took me years to realize
that they weren't, um,
just collecting humans
in order to dissect them,
or some horrible things,
maybe eat them or some crazy thing.
They were, uh,
most likely,
intervening in what happened to me
to correct severe, extreme damage
that was caused by a burst of energy
that was probably accidental.
Travis walked up to a vehicle,
um, and got too close
to its electromagnetic field,
and it probably
stopped his nervous system.
They took him to help him,
actually, and resuscitate him,
not to, you know, take any body parts
from him or anything like that.
I do not believe the aliens are bad.
I believe that extremely advanced tech
uh technologies, civilizations,
evolve out of what we call evil.
[narrator] What would
a governmental agency like MJ-12 do
when confronted
by such a highly publicized case
as the abduction of Travis Walton?
The strategy was clear:
to ignore, intimidate,
and at the same time,
gather as much information as possible.
[typewriter clacking]
The FBI or the intelligence agencies
did not want to appear to be
taking such a thing seriously.
So if they came to me and tried
to interview me or interrogate me,
it would make it look to
if anybody from the outside,
they were totally accepting it.
And back in those days,
that is not the case.
They wanted people
to stop believing in such things.
The U.S. government
denies the existence of UFOs.
So if UFOs don't exist,
how are these people being abducted?
They're not admitting anything right now.
They know what's going on.
It's best, in my case,
for me to just focus
on dealing with the facts of my case,
and attempts to discredit things,
and expose the people
who are making such accusations
and show that they're the ones
who really need
to improve their thinking ability.
You know, their rationality.
[narrator] Two years after the incident,
and even more damning evidence
of the U.S. government's
attempts to smear Walton
and discredit those
who claim the existence of UFOs,
comes the incredible story
of Terry Lovelace,
a lawyer and former assistant attorney.
[intense music playing]
In June 1977, Terry Lovelace,
a medic at Whiteman Air Force Base,
who will later become a lawyer,
has a life-changing experience
at Devil's Den State Park in Arkansas.
His story begins with a weekend
hiking trip with a friend,
a trip that turns into a nightmare
about which he keeps silent for decades.
[insects chirping]
During the night,
a giant triangular vessel
appears in the sky.
The young men are astonished
at the sight of an object of this size
hovering above their heads.
Terry falls into a drowsy stupor.
When he awakes, another shock awaits him.
[ominous music playing]
I got to my knees and I noticed
that I was in a lot of pain.
Um, joint pain.
Every joint in my body hurt.
And out in this meadow,
this craft that had been
3,000 feet above us the night before
has now descended, and is only
about 30 feet above our heads.
And it's enormous.
And had we camped where I wanted to camp,
we'd have been directly
underneath this thing.
[eerie music playing]
[Lovelace] There were
what I first took to be children.
maybe a dozen, maybe 15,
and they're in pairs, in threes,
and they're walking around this meadow.
And I'm like, "Toby, man,
what the hell are these little kids
doing here in the middle of this forest?"
And he said, "Terry, man,
those ain't no little kids."
"Don't you remember?
They took us, and they hurt us."
[eerie music continues]
And then I had flashes of memory.
And he was right.
They did take us, and they did hurt us.
And I'm looking again,
and I could see that
these were not human beings.
I don't think they intended to kill us.
I don't think that
they were not benevolent,
but I don't think
they were malevolent either.
I recall I was on their exam table,
and I'm screaming,
and I'm filling my lungs with air,
screaming as loud as I can,
but I can't hear anything coming out.
And I heard telepathically in my head,
"Why are you screaming?"
"Stop screaming.
You know we don't hurt you."
"You know we take you back,
stop screaming."
[eerie music continues]
But after years of reflection,
I think that if I could sit down
with one of these creatures,
I think that they would tell me, you know,
"Hey, no hard feelings."
"We're just doing our job, man." You know?
Uh, I think they are examining us
like we examine animals on the Serengeti.
[narrator]
During Terry's hospitalization in 1977,
he received some unexpected visitors.
[Lovelace] My night nurse came in.
And two guys in blue business suits.
And they pulled out badges
and credentials,
and identified themselves as OSI,
United States Air Force
Office of Special Investigations.
And they shut my door
and the older agent
turned on the overhead lights,
and I felt like somebody
punched me in the face.
And I'm like,
"Sir, could you please turn those off?"
And he says,
"Can't work in the dark, son."
And I asked him, I said,
"Sir, am I in trouble?"
And he looked amused.
And he looked over at the captain,
and the captain kind of went, "Heh."
And he said to me,
"Would we be here
if you weren't in trouble, son?"
[narrator] Over 30 years later,
the story of Terry Lovelace
took a further, sinister turn.
In 2012, a routine X-ray of his leg
reveals an embedded piece of metal
the size of a fingernail
with tiny wires sticking out of it.
The discovery brings his memories
of that night flooding back.
Could it be that he had been
under surveillance
by extraterrestrials for all those years?
It is not until 2016
that he speaks openly about it.
You don't need a medical degree
to see this.
Above my knee
is what looks like a computer chip
with two tiny wires
headed up toward my head.
I don't know how far up the wires go.
They took a total of 24 films.
Uh
I was only able
to get my hands on about six.
The rest they claim were destroyed,
but I don't believe that.
The doctor also said,
"There's something else you should see."
And he popped the
another film up on the light box,
and this was a view of my leg
from the side,
and it showed in my calf muscle,
a collection of objects
about the size of Tic Tacs
arranged in a floral pattern.
I asked my doctor, "How can this thing
be in my leg without there being a scar?"
And she said, "It has to be by means
not known to medical science."
[narrator] But when a UFO encounter
is witnessed not just
by one or two civilians,
but by hundreds if not thousands,
the U.S. authorities have their work
cut out to keep the incident under wraps.
Phoenix, Arizona. March, 1997.
An electrical storm appears to
short circuit the city's electrical grid.
As darkness descends,
unexplained bright lights
appear in the night sky.
- [woman 1] Oh, look at that!
- [man 1] Calm down!
- [woman 1] Another one.
- [girl] Stop screaming.
- [woman 1] We're just excited.
- [woman 2] They keep coming.
There's four.
- [woman 1] Whoa, look at them!
- [man 2] I got that one on video.
[woman 1] There's a swarm of them!
Look, three of them.
- [man 2] I got the third one hopping
- [man 1] To your left.
- [man 3] Behind the chimney.
- [man 1] One flared up.
- [man 2] I got four.
- [girl] Another one.
[man 2] Major sighting here.
- [man 3] No, there's five!
- [woman 1] Oh!
[man 3] Another one just showed up.
[woman 1] Whoa.
I can't see how this works.
- How does this work?
- [man 2] Holy
[narrator] The first report of movement
of the giant body in the sky
came at about 6:55 in the evening
from Henderson, Nevada.
The dark V-shaped object
with five bright lights
moved slowly towards the southeast.
Other reports followed,
cumulating at half past ten,
when a series of bright lights
were seen hanging above
the western Phoenix skyline,
before gradually submerging
behind the Sierra Estrella Mountains.
What they were reporting are these large,
black triangles that are able to hover,
and then also travel at very fast speeds,
that's something
That's the sort of technology
that we do not have,
or at least if we do,
the public is certainly not aware of it.
And for this to be happening in the '90s
would be even more extraordinary.
Said that it was time to end months
of speculation on the question,
and investigate the matter
once and for all to clear it up.
[narrator]
Attempting to diffuse public alarm,
Arizona Governor, John Fife Symington,
holds a press conference
at which he jokingly presents
a member of his staff
dressed in an alien costume.
However, in 2007, after leaving office,
Symington confesses that this was
just a way to appease public concern,
and that he remains convinced to this day
that something extraterrestrial
visited Arizona that night.
Thank you.
[applause]
[Symington] I think it was a very, um,
you know,
I think it was a legitimate occurrence
of an unknown origin craft of some sort,
and who knows where it came from.
Inexplicable.
Probably one of the major sightings in,
you know, modern history in the country,
'cause a lot of people saw it
in Maricopa County, I saw it too, so I
I used to work,
when I was in the Air Force,
I worked at Luke in the SAGE Center
there in NORAD.
And so, something like that would go up
the chain of command immediately
to NORAD in Colorado
and then go to the Pentagon.
[dramatic music playing]
[narrator] The turn of the millennium
brought new pressure
for the U.S. Government to come clean
about reports of alien visitations
and abductions.
With the passage of time,
the question repeatedly arises
of whether and when
we will see public disclosure
of the secret U.S. Intelligence programs
monitoring UFOs
by a president of the United States
How much, in fact,
do the presidents themselves know
about secret programs linked to UFOs?
They probably do tell some presidents
more than others,
like Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman,
but other presidents like Clinton,
maybe Ford, what did they know, right?
They never disclosed any UFO information.
So it's clear they don't tell
the presidents everything.
I can't make any definitive statements
on who actually has control of this stuff.
But I can say that I have interviewed
and researched extensively,
presidential efforts, government efforts
to access some of this material,
some pretty high-level people.
And they were unable to get access to it.
So it leads me to believe
that it has gone beyond
Out of the hands of elected officials
and into the private sector.
That, to me, seems to be the most
probable, likely scenario.
[narrator] The CIA has long been concerned
about the risk of incumbent presidents
disclosing information
and jeopardizing the secret programs.
This concern intensified
as U.S. military strengthened its links
with private defense contractors
leading to what President Eisenhower
termed as
"the military industrial complex,"
whose burgeoning influence he warned about
as he departed the White House.
We must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight
of this combination
endanger our liberties
or democratic processes.
Eisenhower wasn't just a president,
he had been a five-star general,
for goodness' sake.
He was a military icon.
Eisenhower was only, like,
able to leak us a little bit of a warning
about the military industrial complex.
So he gave us a warning,
but it, like, helps us to say,
"Okay, we need to look into something."
You know, we look at the laws that
were put in place by the NSA and the CIA,
it's like, people were murdered
for being whistleblowers.
So when Eisenhower warned us in his speech
about the military industrial complex,
I think it was about
as best as he could do at that time.
[narrator] Is it conceivable that even
a U.S. president could be denied access
to the inner sanctum of secret programs?
[tense music playing]
Jimmy Carter, who had personal experience
of a UFO sighting,
wanted to be briefed
about extraterrestrial and UFO contacts,
but it is alleged that the then Director
of the Central Intelligence Agency,
and later himself a U.S. President,
George Herbert Walker Bush,
resolved to keep Carter in the dark.
Since then,
there have been several presidents
who have alluded
to the possibility of alien life.
[President Reagan] This is not enough
to make us recognize this common bound.
I occasionally think how quickly
our differences worldwide would vanish
if we were facing an alien threat
from outside this world.
And yet, I ask you,
is not an alien force already among us?
They're a temporary employee.
They're only there
for four years, eight max.
As soon as they're done with their term,
they're out
and another President comes in.
So why would they tell Donald Trump
all of our deepest secrets
when he could be out in months?
There's no way he's going to be read in
on all of our nation's deepest secrets.
He is just a temporary employee.
[narrator] As we look back to Roswell,
with the benefit of hindsight
and all that's happened since,
what do we make
of the rumors and allegations
which swirled around the most famous
of all UFO incidents?
[man 1] There's a whole fleet of them.
Look on the SA.
[man 2] My gosh!
[man 1] They're going against the wind.
The wind's 120 knots west.
[man 2] Look at that thing, dude.
[narrator] In 2017, the world learns
that the Pentagon,
despite its previous denials,
has continued to investigate UFOs
for decades.
- [man 1] That's not LNS though, is it?
- [man 2] It's not. Hold on, I see it.
[man 2] Look at that thing!
[narrator] This disclosure, accompanied
by the publication of video footage
shot by the US military,
- confirms what many have believed.
- [man on radio] Zero-seven-four-at-twenty.
Maybe, politically,
the president can't say,
"My fellow Americans, people of the world,
we're not alone."
Because the implication is,
the governments have known about this
and lied for it for 70 years.
But maybe there's a way
to just slip it out piece by piece.
[intense music playing]
[narrator] Given the facts
revealed by the breakthrough
2017 New York Times article
about the Pentagon top secret UFO program,
and three videos showing UFOs,
it can be justifiably assumed
that government agencies not only have
their own top-secret programs
associated with this phenomenon,
but are also very sophisticatedly
interconnected through a network
of secret agreements
with private sector entities.
The question is, who controls who?
Who has the decision-making powers.
To put it simply, who's in charge?
It's the defense contractors,
they're pulling the strings
because they're the ones
that get the money, the contracts.
So the deal is, is that we will pay you
to do the research,
and in return you can make it proprietary,
and you can cash in on the technology.
That's the agreement that they make.
We're in a world where really,
corporations run everything.
They control who gets elected.
They determine how long
the person stays in power.
They determine what policies are.
They control the lobbies
that pass laws of every country.
We have a world run by corporations,
or one run by financial concerns.
That's just how it is.
The government says you can have
all the money you want
and you can make it proprietary.
But, you know,
we want to get the information,
but you can cash in on it.
So that's how they work this.
[narrator] There have been attempts
to overturn the government's embargo
on their records of UFO phenomenon.
The most famous of which occurred
in Washington, D.C.
[Robert Wood] The conclusion
I have come to, is incredibly wild.
That those in charge have been
successful in keeping secret
the greatest story of mankind.
The evidence is overwhelming
that Earth is being visited
by intelligently controlled
extraterrestrial spacecraft.
The government has dumped
disinformation and misinformation
into the field for decades.
I have lost faith
in representative government.
I truly think we're in gridlock.
It doesn't work
and so we need to make a change.
You give this committee a lot of reasons
for us to say, "Open those files."
[narrator] Today,
knowledge and information
have a much higher price than oil.
The fundamental question
that has always accompanied the history
of UFO investigation is once again raised.
The million-dollar question is,
who has access to all this information?
Who has access
to all the photographic evidence
that has been gathered
through military channels for decades?
If you are of the camp
that believes that a Roswell occurred
as it initially was stated,
as it occurred,
they recovered something otherworldly,
where did this material go?
And that's the million-dollar question.
Anytime you deal with some
of these very significant folks
in industry, in commerce,
in military hardware
that have input
into these national security agencies,
you're obviously going to have
influence, and movement,
in a direction that they want.
That may or may not be
in the direction that the public wants.
What people are hoping to learn,
what they want disclosed,
is not really located in the government.
It's located in the aerospace industry,
it's located in the private sector.
Corporations run the world,
not governments.
Money runs the world.
Money has control over this information.
The only person that I know
who has come forward
and said that UFOs are real,
that we're being visited
by extraterrestrial, uh, visitors
from elsewhere, is Robert Bigelow,
who, uh, runs Bigelow Aerospace.
And so I'm not aware of other heads
of business who have come forward
and are releasing information
to the public.
[narrator] When questioned
about his views on extraterrestrials
on the TV show 60 Minutes,
Robert Bigelow replies
that he is absolutely convinced
of their existence.
As for their activities on Earth,
he states categorically:
"There has been and is
an existing presence, an ET presence."
"And I spent millions
and millions and millions."
"I probably spent more as an individual
than anybody else in the United States
has ever spent on this subject."
Longtime UFO hunter, Derrel Sims,
recalls Bigelow visiting
one of his UFO Symposiums
and his particular interest
in the possibility of alien implantations.
And so I've been doing that
for quite a while now,
since the late '80s,
and I did the first public
two surgeries in 1995.
And we found evidence
that interested Bob Bigelow and his crew
in the aerospace industry
and his 18 scientists voted
to study my objects that we'd removed,
and they sent them off to Los Alamos
in New Mexico Tech.
Los Alamos determined
that the metals were a rare meteorite.
Very rare.
[narrator] Following the disclosure
in 2017 of the Pentagon's secret program,
The Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program, known as AATIP,
a new player suddenly appears
on the private sector scene
with some fascinating new evidence
of Pentagon monitoring of UFO activity.
It comes from an organization known as
To The Stars
Academy of Arts and Science,
founded by rock star Tom DeLonge
from the group Blink-182,
and it appears to have
some impeccable sources,
at the heart of the U.S. government.
There is a skeptic faction in government,
and there is a believer faction
in government.
The To the Stars Academy
is almost like the believer faction.
They worked in government, they had AATIP,
then they decided that they hit
some problems,
maybe in getting this information out,
or getting the defense secretary
to consider this.
And so they decided to go private.
So I see the To the Stars Academy,
as really a private sector.
Consider it a continuation of some
of the work that was done in government.
For example, by AATIP.
You need some, some, something
like To the Stars Academy,
which is in itself
a really interesting construct of,
I mean, look at the people who work there.
When I saw the team, I was very impressed.
I said, "This has never happened before.
No group like this has ever,
uh, come together
in service to our need to know
in the public domain,
but with that kind
of military intelligence background."
When they made their first
public announcement in October 2017,
they made a very powerful statement,
which was,
"The U.S. military is continuing
to investigate these UFOs."
That was a very significant
and new thing to hear at the time.
[narrator]
MJ-12 apparently no longer exists
in its original institutional form.
Over the decades, this elite guardian
of secrets has not disappeared,
but instead, developed and transformed
into a public-private partnership.
The termination of the AATIP program
indicates the strong influence
of the private sector in the exploration
of UFO phenomenon.
And reports of UFO sightings
continue to accumulate.
Both civilian and military pilots
are coming forward with graphic details
that may eventually shed more light
on this strictly guarded secret.
People are becoming
less concerned and more curious.
Is the time approaching
for the truth about UFOs?
I feel like what we need to focus on
always is the content.
It's the information, that's what matters.
Secondarily, where it's coming from.
But most important, you got
to pay attention to the information.
And if they're giving information
we can use, we should listen.
[narrator] Nevertheless,
the government agencies
are still extremely coy
about releasing information
on their UFO monitoring programs,
for the fear of revealing state secrets
about the extent
of their global surveillance systems,
and encouraging conspiracy theorists.
The vast majority of information
is still being kept firmly under wraps,
and only occasionally,
in a very controlled manner,
being allowed to leak out
into the public domain.
As long as that approach continues,
our opportunities are hindered
to truly learn
if alien life forms could be out there,
waiting to make contact.
Where is it all being held
is the real question.
So is there one person or one group
that's got it all in MJ-12?
Um, I don't have confirmation that
that is the case, but I'm
I think that's the best assumption
we've got right now.
[closing theme music playing]