Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified (2021) s01e04 Episode Script
Hacked and Leaked
[narrator] There are about
77 million documents
marked as Top Secret or Classified
by the United States government.
Among the most sensitive of those,
relating to top secret UFO programs,
and in particular,
the encounters by US Air Force pilots
with the so-called Tic Tac UFO crafts
in 2004.
By releasing unclassified
United States government reports in 2018,
that include analysis regarding
interactions with the Tic Tacs,
journalist George Knapp changed the game.
I produced a document that was leaked
from the government
that did the first analysis of Tic Tac.
It looked at all the sensor systems
that were in the sky, from the ships,
under the sea,
and they combined all that information
to track the capabilities
of the Tic Tac craft.
And they verified it. It was real.
The same thing was true
for the Gimbal craft.
This information was never meant
to be released to the public.
The military did this analysis
behind the scenes,
classified in a classified program.
The fact that it is now leaked out
has started the debate that we're having
all over the world,
but the proof is pretty solid.
[narrator] How the US government
will respond to these allegations
remains to be seen.
While in the first half
of the 20th century,
the government was still seeking
an appropriate strategy
to deal with UFO stories.
By the end of the millennium
the way had become clear:
to investigate the phenomenon
in absolute secrecy,
and if any information should leak out,
it must be denied,
the trail obliterated,
and evidence confiscated or discounted.
The government insisted that
it's not there, it's not there, not there.
If some undeniable incident occurs,
it's going to make them look very bad.
It's going to increase the kinds
of negative consequences
that would come from it.
[Dolan] The US is great at making up
false news stories
and spreading them throughout the world.
I mean, the CIA is a master of this.
They've done this for decades.
They're very good also at using the media
to scare the public to engage
in certain actions.
They do this all the time.
So they certainly would be able
to do this about UFOs or UAP.
Like, they had the capability to,
if they were to release information,
they could do it in such a way
to maximize fear
to whatever level they want
that would be useful for them.
[theme music playing]
There are many testimonials
from around the world
that information leaks to the media
about UFO incidents are undesirable,
and that they have been covered up.
On the basis of these testimonies,
it can be reasonably assumed
that some of these countries
will have secret agreements
with the US intelligence services
who assist them in suppressing reports
of UFO sightings.
I was every single significant case,
no matter what country,
whether I had asked them
to travel to America,
or whether I traveled to their place,
they said,
"It's funny,
right after the incident occurred,
there were two men in suits
that showed up from some unknown agency
in the US government."
They have men on site at every one
of these locations
that I personally have been.
And they're making inquiries.
They're trying to get
an exchange of information.
They're trying to either
silence witnesses,
get whatever evidence that was gathered
in their country.
So they played a very large role.
[narrator] A prime example is one
of the most remarkable cases
of UFO sightings in history.
[intense music playing]
1966, Westall, Melbourne, Australia.
During the midmorning break
at Westall High School
in Melbourne, Australia,
there were almost 200 children
and school staff outside
in the school grounds.
Suddenly, there was a commotion
among the children outside,
and those looking out the windows,
gazing at the sky.
A disc-shaped UFO was hovering above them.
[tense music playing]
The chemistry teacher quickly took photos.
After some time, the vessel descended
into a nearby pine grove.
My whole vision
was on trying to just look
at what I was seeing in the sky
and take in every single detail I could.
There was a lot of noise apparently,
because the kids were excited.
Some were frightened, whatever.
But I can just remember standing there,
because I'd never seen anything
like that before,
and I wanted to take in
as much as I could
because wow, this was just amazing,
just amazing.
[narrator] Fourteen-year-old student
Marilyn Smith ran to the landing site.
By the time she got there,
the UFO had taken off.
Marilyn's friend Tanya
later fell unconscious
and was taken away by an ambulance.
Witnesses described one big flying disc
and two smaller accompanying vessels.
The larger vessel left behind
a circl e in the grass.
TV crews quickly arrived on the scene.
Channel 9 TV filmed interviews
with students,
and journalists interviewed
witnesses as well.
And then, came the cover-up.
The Channel 9 TV report
was never broadcast,
and no one ever saw
the photographs that were taken.
An interview with a student, Joy Tighe,
in which she described the UFOs
disappeared from the GTV archive.
All this,
after some mysterious plain clothes
officials and soldiers arrived.
When they left,
a lot of the evidence vanished with them.
The grass at the landing site
was quickly cut and restored to normal.
One week after the incident,
the Dandenong Journal claimed
that the situation could not be explained
because there were no witnesses
willing to speak about it.
They weren't allowed
to speak about it anymore.
Even the teachers were warned.
There were government officials
that came and told them
they couldn't speak about it.
And even the news media
that followed the story,
when they went back to look at the files,
all the files were gone.
They were taken.
[Clarke] All we want is an answer.
All we want is for someone to say to us,
that "Yes, we know what
that did happen that day."
"It was a very extraordinary experience,
but something definitely did happen
that day."
"It wasn't in your imagination."
"You weren't on drugs. You weren't drunk.
It happened."
[narrator] More than 50 years later,
witnesses have preserved the images
from the children's memory,
and about how government officials
tried to erase all signs of the incident.
The teacher who took the photographs
had her camera confiscated,
and for a long time was threatened
with having her career ruined
if she ever spoke about the incident.
So this was a government making sure
that this wasn't talked about,
and even the headmaster was shut down,
and that that's what happened.
And we know this happened, we know that.
They were like flying saucers and that's
what we used to call them in those days,
you know, in comic books,
and all that sort of stuff.
That's what they were,
so we called them flying saucers.
[narrator] But the frontline effort
to cover up the incident
by deleting all records,
silencing witnesses,
and confiscating photographs
was not 100% successful.
There is actually evidence.
There was a Polaroid camera,
a guy that shot a photograph of it
two days prior, 17 kilometers away.
And it was performed exactly
like the children said it performed,
right down to the point where it pivots
up like this and rockets away.
[narrator] A young engineer
from the suburb of Balwyn
took the picture of the event
from his garden.
They show a metallic-like UFO
tipped vertically on its side.
The Victorian Flying Saucer
Research Society
very carefully analyzed the photograph,
and they concluded the photo
showed no sign of multiple exposure,
montage, or any other tampering.
The strategy of rapid response
to leaked information about UFO incidents
was established in the 1950s
during Project Blue Book.
Techniques of manipulation and cover-up
were improved over time,
and have since been developed
almost to perfection.
[man] So it's not surprising they were
able to get people on board,
and the institutions.
And then, as things went forward,
they had to deal
with increasing developments,
and research, and evidence,
and they developed more skills.
And they applied everything they had
at their disposal
to keep this issue
from ever formally being confirmed.
That's the Truth Embargo.
[narrator] However, a unique case
of an uncontrollable information leak
about UFO sightings
is the Cash-Landrum incident from 1980,
which could not be entirely discredited,
because the witnesses
took an unprecedented step
of taking the matter to court.
December 29, 1980,
near the small town of Huffman, Texas.
Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum,
and her seven-year-old grandson Colby
are returning home along the road
to Dayton, Texas at night.
When suddenly, a bright light appears
among the trees.
After a few bends further along the road,
a diamond shape appears
about 15 meters high
at a level of the treetops.
Vickie, a devout Christian,
believes it is the second coming
of Jesus Christ.
She and Betty got out of the car
to see the object,
and to welcome Christ.
Flames are shooting from the bottom
of the vessel,
and the car and surroundings
become very hot.
The object lit up the surrounding
pine woods like it was daylight.
I was burning, my skin was burning.
Fire was coming out of the bottom
like a blowtorch.
It lifted up and then
flew over the trees.
That was when we saw the helicopters
come out.
The helicopters?
[Cash] Colby counted 23 of them.
[Landrum] Yes. It seemed that they were
trying to escort the craft somewhere.
It looked like they were about to collide.
The roar sounded like a tornado.
When we got home,
I washed Colby off, and put him to bed.
When the water touched his skin,
he cried out like he had been burned,
as if he had been in the sun too long.
[narrator] That evening, Betty, Vickie,
and Colby suffer from nausea,
resembling symptoms
of exposure to radiation.
And I was too sick to work the next day.
My eyes swelled closed,
and welts appeared on my face and head.
I thought I was going to die.
Vickie came and took me
to the emergency room at the hospital.
They treated me like a burn patient.
Over the next few days, I kept losing
big patches of skin on my face,
and about half of my hair fell out.
They kept me in the hospital over a month
with no improvement.
[narrator] April 1981,
a CH-47 helicopter landed in Dayton
and was greeted by curious townspeople.
The pilot mentions that he had been
in Dayton a year earlier
pursuing an unknown vessel.
But as soon as he finds out
that eyewitnesses to the event
are among the crowd,
he quickly ends the discussion.
In this field that we're in,
they're going to be more witnesses,
but it's still not enough.
It's still not good enough.
So it doesn't matter how much proof
anybody has, it's not good enough.
If it's too mind-blowing or too difficult
to accept as reality,
in a court of law it wouldn't work.
Yeah. There's witnesses.
Oh, yeah. There's evidence.
There's marks, there's um, places,
locations, this and that.
There's stories.
There's books that have been written.
There's, there's more evidence
than we can possibly imagine.
What people have to stop doing
is saying, "Where's the proof?"
Because the proof is already there.
Has the government ever
expressed a willingness
to take responsibility for this thing?
No, and I am mad. I'm mad as hell
and disappointed with the government
of our United States.
[narrator] Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum
eventually sued Bergstrom Air Force Base
for $20 million in damages.
But in 1986, a district court judge
dismissed the lawsuit
because the helicopters involved
had not been proven
as belonging to the US government.
Furthermore,
military officers denied in court
that the United States Armed Forces
possessed a diamond-shaped aircraft
of any kind.
But many years later, Richard Dotty,
a former government agent
of the Office of Special Investigations,
declared that it did exist,
and it was a prototype vessel
from a secret reverse engineering program
experimenting with nuclear propulsion.
A problem with the aircraft
reportedly occurred,
and Cash and Landrum just happened to be
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There's been numerous crashed craft
around the world,
and I believe that that technology
was something
that they wanted to keep secret
for their own purposes.
I think this is why they're doing it
around the world,
because that technology could change
the way that we are living now.
And I believe those
that have this technology
are only going to utilize it
for their own benefit.
So there's lots of reasons why
it suits them to keep this quiet.
Over the years, there have been a number
of instances where leaks have come out,
or at least what seem to be genuine leaks.
One is the Gary McKinnon case.
[mysterious music playing]
[narrator] The case of the most infamous
government database hacker, Gary McKinnon,
is highly significant since it is
the most concrete information we have
about the existence
of a secret UFO program.
[Dolan] He didn't exactly hack in.
That's not quite accurate
to say that he was a hacker.
He created, I think he called it
a Perl script,
where he was able to find sites
within that web
that either had no password
or had "password" as their password.
Cybersecurity was really lax.
But this is the late 1990s.
[narrator] This is why
Gary McKinnon's attempt
to download the photo was unsuccessful.
His connection was able to be intercepted
just in time by the government,
and the photo deleted.
But that didn't prevent the story
from breaking into a blaze of publicity.
February 2001, London.
When Gary McKinnon sat down
at his computer in London
in February of 2001,
to launch what was later described
as "the greatest hack of the century,"
he was inspired by witnessing something
in the night sky at the age of 13,
something that had profoundly
affected him.
Gary had witnessed a glowing, orange shape
moving in a way that left him in no doubt
that he was not observing a natural
phenomenon, or terrestrial craft.
A few months after the 9/11 terrorist
attacks on the New York Twin Towers,
the following message appeared on one
of the Pentagon's computers:
"Your security system is crap."
"I am Solo."
"I will continue to disrupt
the highest levels."
The Pentagon was suddenly
on high alert.
What I was doing was illegal,
but at the time
I felt that it was morally right
in view of getting this technology,
getting it out to the public.
And it was actually easy getting
into the Pentagon.
I scanned for blank passwords.
I'm not some great big computer,
you know, criminal mastermind.
[narrator] Between February 2001
and March 2002,
an unknown assailant calling himself Solo,
in fact, McKinnon's alias,
managed to copy data
from about 100 computers
belonging to various departments
of the US military.
He copied data and passwords for months.
I was looking for evidence
of UFO technology.
And I know that's laughed at
by a lot of people,
but I was working from witness testimony
of a group called The Disclosure Project.
Four hundred military witnesses,
some ex-military,
some still current at the time.
Anything all the way up from radar,
the air traffic controllers,
all the way up to strategic air command,
you know, very credible people.
They all said that, "Yes, UFOs were real.
Yes, they were extraterrestrial."
And in addition to that, rogue elements
of military and intelligence
had captured and reverse engineered some
of the technology,
and they had a free energy technology.
And, you know, in these days
of oil crisis and stuff,
I found that hugely interesting.
I thought it was morally correct
to break the law
in order to get the technology out
to the public.
[narrator] Despite using an alias,
Gary made no other attempts
to cover his tracks.
He wanted what he had learned to come out.
He was arrested by the United Kingdom's
National Hi-Tech Crime Unit
in March of 2002.
We learn that his primary goal
was to discover classified information
about UFOs
from the US Defense Department
and NASA servers.
He successfully engaged
some top secret files,
and they were bigger than that.
And it was strange what he was reporting.
It should have been ridiculous,
except some of this is coming out.
It's just that in, in my own country,
the punishment for unauthorized access
is, you know, six months in prison,
or I think a year maximum.
And I think the US authorities
have been extremely heavy-handed.
And even now, they've got to the point
where I'm officially referenced to
as a terrorist in official
Army training manuals
for combating terrorism
in the 21st century.
I think Gary had it exactly right.
So he saw ships connected
to the US Navy
that were not part
of the United States Navy
of any inventory that we know of.
And something called a ship of a non,
list of non-terrestrial officers,
which was quite interesting.
The real key to the Gary McKinnon case
is how the US tried
to extradite him for more than a decade,
and really tried to ruin his life.
Um, fortunately for Gary, he was not
extradited, and the British government
was able to defend him
against extradition.
[narrator] Clearly, there is a difference
between hacking
into government computer servers
and databases,
and being in receipt of the same
information from a trusted source
within the secret programs themselves.
Even then, we would be just talking about
fragments since government departments
are so skilled at compartmentalizing
their activities and minimizing the risk
of any one potential source or employee
being able to see the whole picture.
When I had a clearance, there were
programs I'd be in where I would have
a lot of information
about a certain thing.
It's like a pyramid.
The more you know, the farther up this
pyramid you go, okay, in clearance.
When you're here,
you see this much stuff.
When you're here at the top,
you only get this little tiny bit. Okay?
And the next pyramid over
of another program
that might be looking at a similar thing
such as a UFO system,
or that's flying around,
they're up at the top too.
They never see your top of your pyramid.
So they don't know the big picture.
That's one way
they can compartmentalize it.
They can keep a secret when they can
when they want to.
So when they really want to keep a secret,
they can do it,
and they compartmentalize it.
[Dolan] When someone claims that he goes
to Mars for 20 years,
and as time regressed,
and age regressed back,
he's able to say that
because it's clearly not true
and he's making up a series of fantasies.
So that's one thing.
Um, but for legitimate information,
we have to ask,
"Well, why does any of it come out?"
Well, in general, we have to say that most
of it never comes out, right?
So most of the information
within that community
is still very tightly controlled.
Absolutely.
[narrator] In the same year
that the British and American authorities
are negotiating the extradition
of Gary McKinnon,
another information leak occurs.
The world learns incredible facts
from 15 pages of notes from a dialogue
between a highly respected scientist
and a high ranking official
in US Military and National Security.
Many refer to this Autumn 2002 event
as "the most significant UFO leak ever."
It all began when three men decided
to draw the attention
of a high-ranking Pentagon official
to a secret UFO program.
I came here to Washington
with a Navy commander
by the name of Will Miller,
and Dr. Steven Greer.
And we were able to get an appointment
at the Pentagon
to talk about what we knew,
or what we allegedly knew,
what we thought we knew.
And went and told our story.
The admiral said,
"Well, I don't know that story."
"I don't know that that's true,
but I will find out."
[intense music playing]
[narrator] October 2002, Las Vegas.
Physicist Eric Davis, a specialist,
among other things,
in advanced military technologies,
arrives at the EG&G building
near the intersection
of Grier Drive and Paradise Road
at exactly ten o'clock in the morning.
Another car then arrives
with Admiral Thomas Wilson,
dressed in civilian clothes.
Wilson, in his fifties
with an extraordinary career
in the United States Navy behind him,
and just a few months earlier,
the Director
of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
He is accompanied by two men
in Navy uniforms.
Wilson gets into Davis's car,
and they spend about an hour talking
in the back seat.
Later, Eric Davis reconstructs
the dialogue into a 15-page document,
containing devastating evidence
about the extent
of government-led UFO cover- ups.
[Wilson] "They weren't going
to let me in the door."
"They wouldn't accept my arguments that
they fell under my statutory oversight
and regulatory authority
as Deputy Director DIA."
[narrator] Wilson describes how he,
an admiral in the US Navy,
was denied access to all
but a fragment of information
about the top secret program,
and that on the list
of people granted oversight,
there was no one from the White House,
or even from Congress,
or any elected official.
It was not a weapons program,
nor an intelligence program.
It was something entirely different.
The private industry is very interested
in UFO technology.
Eric Davis being the employee
of Robert Bigelow
and Robert Bigelow is, of course,
the famous billionaire
who has been investigating
strange paranormal phenomena for decades,
also for the Pentagon.
Eric Davis is an important scientist.
And they'd all
been interested in
"What do
the other corporations know?"
[narrator] As the conversation progressed,
Wilson revealed his concerns over
the work within the top secret program.
[Davis] "What were they then?"
[Wilson] "They were
a reverse engineering program."
"Something recovered
years ago in the past."
"Program manager said
they didn't know where it was from."
"It was technology that was not
of this Earth,
not made by man,
not by human hands."
[Fleischer] So if it's true that
private corporations are in the possession
of extraterrestrial remnants
of whatever origin, whatever kind,
then it is also logical to assume
that other private companies
who want to build that stuff may also be
interested in knowing "What do they know?"
It's just logical.
[narrator] Davis kept asking questions,
but the more questions he asked,
the less answers he got.
Eventually, he began threatening the men,
which ended the meeting prematurely.
[Davis] "Did you deal with it somehow?"
"Turned to Special Access
Programme Oversight Committee."
"I was very angry."
"Result?"
"If I didn't follow their suggestion then
I would not see Director DIA promotion,
get early retirement,
lose one or two stars along the way."
And it was really difficult,
he names the exact department where
he got information about this program.
Eventually, they invite him
to their facility,
but just to tell him that he has
no access, and that he is not in charge.
And they didn't let him inspect the site.
They didn't let him inspect the project.
[narrator] Although Wilson never got
inside the program,
this recording of the interview
contains so many details and names that
most UFO researchers and investigators
consider it entirely credible.
It confirms
there is a deeply classified program
hidden in the network
of the Defense Department,
whose purpose was, and perhaps still is,
the study of extraterrestrial technology.
I think there's some interesting evidence
for this theory that within government
there are different factions.
So government is not a single entity
moving with one single common purpose.
[man] So you have competing groups,
I think, within the government.
There may be one group that wants
all this information to come out,
and they're being fought by another group.
Governments and corporations don't mind me
talking about extraterrestrials,
or the underground facilities.
And they really don't like me talking
about over unity devices
and zero-point energy,
which I had laboratories that were making
these devices as well.
So all day long, I can talk about ETs
because there's no money being made
talking about ETs for them.
And they don't believe anyone's going
to believe this anyway.
They don't care what you know.
They care what you can prove.
That's how this game works.
[narrator] The insiders or whistleblowers
are mostly former participants
in these secret UFO programs.
One such individual was Emery Smith.
As a US Air Force Surgical Assistant,
he claims to have worked undercover
on projects relating to the examination
of extraterrestrial life.
Smith described in detail
how he participated in the autopsies
of extraterrestrial corpses,
and how strictly the program was guarded.
Emery Smith is a good example
of someone who,
when he joined the US military,
was given an option of becoming part
of a black program.
And then, when he did that black program,
he did that side by side
with his normal military service.
Because this is often the way in which,
in the United States, it's done.
Military recruits are basically
given the option
to do some additional work on top
of their regular assignment,
and that would involve extraterrestrials.
[narrator] Kirtland Air Force Base,
New Mexico, 1990 through 1998.
[Smith] There's a facility
called Sandia Labs,
and Sandia National Laboratories
is another, um,
government-controlled corporation
uh, that does a lot of amazing things.
But under that facility, and now,
that's a base inside a military base.
So it's like double security.
And below that,
that building and that little base
is a whole underground facility.
[narrator] Young Emery would enter
the building
through highly sensitive identification
and security scanning gates.
Specially trained dogs were able
to recognize if the person entering
had an infectious or cancerous disease.
Everyone who passed
through the multistage screening
received a special computer tablet
containing all the information
necessary to navigate the underground lab,
and to avoid any paper documents
in or out.
In the early 1990s,
at a special laboratory
where Emery usually dissected
biological tissues
from humans and animal remains,
an arm lay on the autopsy table.
Emery was convinced that this arm
didn't belong to a human
or was of this planet.
[Smith] I was amazed to see this arm
with this hand, with color,
and this blue iridescent field.
It was so beautiful.
And what was so interesting is they didn't
even tell me what I was supposed to do
until I got in there.
They wanted to see
how I was going to react.
and if I would be a good agent
to keep my mouth shut,
and that's all that was for.
And then, I found out later that that arm
was synthetic. It was a fake.
[narrator] Emery, as he claims,
passed the test,
and gradually became a specialist
in autopsies,
retrieving and analyzing tissue samples
from extraterrestrial corpses.
He became part
of the government's inne r sanctum
of closely guarded secrets
on extraterrestrials and UFOs.
There's many different kinds
of extraterrestrials out there
with many different kinds of looks.
The one thing they all have in common
is they all have human DNA in them.
The second thing is they all have a head,
two arms, and two legs.
The five star, you know,
pointed system of the universe,
which is very fascinating.
[narrator] He soon gained the trust
of his superiors,
receiving special permission
to access the laboratory's secret archive.
As he describes it today,
it was so extraordinary
that he became addicted to going there
and discovering information
that was forbidden to others.
[Smith] This is a giant room made up
of eight large pool, like pool tables
about that size, and they were white.
And they you can access this
with your hand or your voice,
and the AI knows who you are.
And you have a band on you,
they know where you're at all the time
inside the facilities.
They know if your heart rate goes up,
they know everything.
So when you're in the library, you can
request anything that has to do
with your project, or a future project,
or extraterrestrial, or craft,
or device that you're going
to be working on.
[narrator] The library gave him access
to all the sensitive
and closely guarded information
relating to extraterrestrial
monitoring work,
and the secret space program.
And it also offered a completely different
perspective on what we perceive
as established and unchanging
in our solar system.
He claims that he even saw
the interstellar highway system.
In effect, a map to the stars.
So the library was just an amazing
concept for me to get in and see things
like the moon, for instance.
There was a great model of the moon
three-dimensionally that you can open up
and look inside, and you know,
the moon turned out being something
I didn't realize what it really was.
[narrator] The question arises:
how it is possible that a person can keep
something so extraordinary to himself
for so many years and why he has chosen
to share it now?
Well, what had happened is
I had to come forward just recently
within the last couple of years
because I was working
with some over unity devices,
and someone leaked
some information at the lab.
And it just got a little scary.
So I have been kept behind the scenes
for, you know, 27 years now,
but I've been coming to events,
and I've been an insider for many
of my colleagues here for over a decade.
I think not everyone within the military
industrial complex supports disclosure.
There are some groups that want to keep
the secrecy for another 50 years.
[narrator] But will their attempts
be successful?
Or is the genie already out of the bottle?
A completely different attempt,
this time not to obtain information,
but to declassify the content
of secret programs,
was leaked to the public in March 2016.
Russian hackers send a phishing email
to John Podesta,
who was, at the time,
Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
Subsequent opening of the Podesta mail
allows the hackers to access
approximately 60,000 private emails.
Many of these, of course, related
to the Clinton presidential campaign.
But some of them related
to something entirely different.
When news emerged that
John Podesta's email had been hacked,
obviously, everyone was interested
in all sorts of different aspects of it.
But the surprising aspect
was apparent communication
between Tom DeLonge
and John Podesta about UFOs.
[narrator] Private emails
from Hillary Clinton's adviser
posted on WikiLeaks
prove that former Blink-182
singer Tom DeLonge did contact Podesta,
undoubtedly with the purposeful intention
of developing mutual cooperation
on release of UFO information.
Tom DeLonge is a very nice guy.
He is deeply involved in the UFO subject.
He's also very familiar with virtually
everything you need to know about it.
And he's had some
very interesting contacts
in the US intelligence community.
[narrator] As well as being
Hillary Clinton's
presidential campaign manager,
John Podesta's abiding interest in the UFO
phenomenon was so well known
that he was nicknamed "the X-Files man"
in Bill Clinton's White House.
The discovery of these emails
reinforced the impression
that Podesta could have been
an active link
between the White House and the emerging
group of government officials
associated with the UFO phenomenon.
I think what you can see
from those WikiLeaks emails
is that Tom DeLonge had been preparing
a huge thing together with John Podesta.
How do you say, this multichannel
marketing approach with books, series,
TV shows, feature film, stuff like that.
And he had the interest of John Podesta.
[narrator] With Hillary Clinton's
defea t to Donald Trump
in the 2016 presidential election,
the proposed link between DeLonge
and the To The Stars Academy
and the Clinton White House
was no longer achievable.
They, therefore, had to select
an alternative plan
to get the information out
via the United States Congress.
I have guided Congress with getting
all the data, all the briefings,
and all the people in various parts
of the government
to brief the senators and congressmen.
We did all that.
It actually leaked a handful of weeks ago
when you saw these articles
in The New York Times and whatever
where it said the Navy
is creating formal mechanisms
for reporting UFOs. That was us.
That was To the Stars Academy.
That was our show. It's on the show.
It's really just following around
what we do at To the Stars Academy.
We deal with the US government
every single day.
I think Tom DeLonge said in a tweet
shortly after WikiLeaks published
those files, those emails, he said,
"You don't know
what you have just destroyed,
the whole mess you have created."
And I think they had a completely
different plan in the beginning.
I think their plan was that
Hillary Clinton would become President,
and that this would somehow
they would somehow work together.
Maybe the intelligence community
is using this
as a way to disclose,
but through the back door.
What I'm trying to say is that
maybe politically the President can't say,
"My fellow Americans, people of the world,
we're not alone."
Because the implication
is that 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
so that the end result is the same.
People end up knowing that this is real
and the information is out there,
but it's done through this third party.
[narrator] In recent years,
it has become clear
that the effort to publicize information
on UFOs
has generated new momentum
since the WikiLeaks Scandal,
despite the results of the 2016 election.
In 2017, The Academy of Arts and Sciences,
with Tom DeLonge and former Pentagon
point man on UFOs, Luis Elizondo,
released three videos from the Pentagon's
secret program archive.
These videos have provided
fascinating new insight
into the extent of contact with
and research on the infamous
Tic Tac UFO craft.
So far, this initiative presents
UFOs, renamed UAPs, as a threat.
But is it not more possible that
technologically unsurpassable craft
that have been flying overhead
for centuries, perhaps even millennia,
are more of a hope than a threat?
The world is bracing itself
for further revelations.
Perhaps a formal acknowledgment
from the highest ranks in government
that Top Secret UFO Programs do exist,
and that they have shown,
as so many have suspected,
that we are not alone in the universe.
We are going to have to help push along
a process in which the people in the world
and governments start
to get more information
and engage this thing until eventually,
they have no choice
but to acknowledge, yes,
there's extraterrestrials here,
and probably even say,
"And there's not a damn thing
we can do about it."
Firstly, we know that
there are more videos,
photographs and videos,
like the videos that we've seen
of the Navy jets chasing UFOs.
So we're going to see more
of those sorts of videos, I think.
Secondly, I think we'll see
more documents,
and I think the other thing we will see
is that more people
who have been involved in this,
either as witnesses
or as people who have been
involved in the program,
they are going to come forward
and speak out.
I think we're seeing what we're seeing now
because of social media
and the digital age, everybody is
sharing information at a rapid rate.
So if something seems like it's changing,
it's because the information is flowing
in a different way now.
You know, this phenomenon is ancient
as far as we can tell from the beginning
of recorded human history,
so we'll see what happens.
[D'Antonio] The military is always
looking for money, um
and they will use that public opinion
to scare the public
so we can get more money to do this.
"We need a space force."
"Let's scare the public into thinking
we need to protect them from"
your choice here.
A, B, or C, asteroids, aliens,
anything, you know?
So that's something that does happen.
This is a road,
and we're not at the end of that road yet.
[closing theme music playing]
77 million documents
marked as Top Secret or Classified
by the United States government.
Among the most sensitive of those,
relating to top secret UFO programs,
and in particular,
the encounters by US Air Force pilots
with the so-called Tic Tac UFO crafts
in 2004.
By releasing unclassified
United States government reports in 2018,
that include analysis regarding
interactions with the Tic Tacs,
journalist George Knapp changed the game.
I produced a document that was leaked
from the government
that did the first analysis of Tic Tac.
It looked at all the sensor systems
that were in the sky, from the ships,
under the sea,
and they combined all that information
to track the capabilities
of the Tic Tac craft.
And they verified it. It was real.
The same thing was true
for the Gimbal craft.
This information was never meant
to be released to the public.
The military did this analysis
behind the scenes,
classified in a classified program.
The fact that it is now leaked out
has started the debate that we're having
all over the world,
but the proof is pretty solid.
[narrator] How the US government
will respond to these allegations
remains to be seen.
While in the first half
of the 20th century,
the government was still seeking
an appropriate strategy
to deal with UFO stories.
By the end of the millennium
the way had become clear:
to investigate the phenomenon
in absolute secrecy,
and if any information should leak out,
it must be denied,
the trail obliterated,
and evidence confiscated or discounted.
The government insisted that
it's not there, it's not there, not there.
If some undeniable incident occurs,
it's going to make them look very bad.
It's going to increase the kinds
of negative consequences
that would come from it.
[Dolan] The US is great at making up
false news stories
and spreading them throughout the world.
I mean, the CIA is a master of this.
They've done this for decades.
They're very good also at using the media
to scare the public to engage
in certain actions.
They do this all the time.
So they certainly would be able
to do this about UFOs or UAP.
Like, they had the capability to,
if they were to release information,
they could do it in such a way
to maximize fear
to whatever level they want
that would be useful for them.
[theme music playing]
There are many testimonials
from around the world
that information leaks to the media
about UFO incidents are undesirable,
and that they have been covered up.
On the basis of these testimonies,
it can be reasonably assumed
that some of these countries
will have secret agreements
with the US intelligence services
who assist them in suppressing reports
of UFO sightings.
I was every single significant case,
no matter what country,
whether I had asked them
to travel to America,
or whether I traveled to their place,
they said,
"It's funny,
right after the incident occurred,
there were two men in suits
that showed up from some unknown agency
in the US government."
They have men on site at every one
of these locations
that I personally have been.
And they're making inquiries.
They're trying to get
an exchange of information.
They're trying to either
silence witnesses,
get whatever evidence that was gathered
in their country.
So they played a very large role.
[narrator] A prime example is one
of the most remarkable cases
of UFO sightings in history.
[intense music playing]
1966, Westall, Melbourne, Australia.
During the midmorning break
at Westall High School
in Melbourne, Australia,
there were almost 200 children
and school staff outside
in the school grounds.
Suddenly, there was a commotion
among the children outside,
and those looking out the windows,
gazing at the sky.
A disc-shaped UFO was hovering above them.
[tense music playing]
The chemistry teacher quickly took photos.
After some time, the vessel descended
into a nearby pine grove.
My whole vision
was on trying to just look
at what I was seeing in the sky
and take in every single detail I could.
There was a lot of noise apparently,
because the kids were excited.
Some were frightened, whatever.
But I can just remember standing there,
because I'd never seen anything
like that before,
and I wanted to take in
as much as I could
because wow, this was just amazing,
just amazing.
[narrator] Fourteen-year-old student
Marilyn Smith ran to the landing site.
By the time she got there,
the UFO had taken off.
Marilyn's friend Tanya
later fell unconscious
and was taken away by an ambulance.
Witnesses described one big flying disc
and two smaller accompanying vessels.
The larger vessel left behind
a circl e in the grass.
TV crews quickly arrived on the scene.
Channel 9 TV filmed interviews
with students,
and journalists interviewed
witnesses as well.
And then, came the cover-up.
The Channel 9 TV report
was never broadcast,
and no one ever saw
the photographs that were taken.
An interview with a student, Joy Tighe,
in which she described the UFOs
disappeared from the GTV archive.
All this,
after some mysterious plain clothes
officials and soldiers arrived.
When they left,
a lot of the evidence vanished with them.
The grass at the landing site
was quickly cut and restored to normal.
One week after the incident,
the Dandenong Journal claimed
that the situation could not be explained
because there were no witnesses
willing to speak about it.
They weren't allowed
to speak about it anymore.
Even the teachers were warned.
There were government officials
that came and told them
they couldn't speak about it.
And even the news media
that followed the story,
when they went back to look at the files,
all the files were gone.
They were taken.
[Clarke] All we want is an answer.
All we want is for someone to say to us,
that "Yes, we know what
that did happen that day."
"It was a very extraordinary experience,
but something definitely did happen
that day."
"It wasn't in your imagination."
"You weren't on drugs. You weren't drunk.
It happened."
[narrator] More than 50 years later,
witnesses have preserved the images
from the children's memory,
and about how government officials
tried to erase all signs of the incident.
The teacher who took the photographs
had her camera confiscated,
and for a long time was threatened
with having her career ruined
if she ever spoke about the incident.
So this was a government making sure
that this wasn't talked about,
and even the headmaster was shut down,
and that that's what happened.
And we know this happened, we know that.
They were like flying saucers and that's
what we used to call them in those days,
you know, in comic books,
and all that sort of stuff.
That's what they were,
so we called them flying saucers.
[narrator] But the frontline effort
to cover up the incident
by deleting all records,
silencing witnesses,
and confiscating photographs
was not 100% successful.
There is actually evidence.
There was a Polaroid camera,
a guy that shot a photograph of it
two days prior, 17 kilometers away.
And it was performed exactly
like the children said it performed,
right down to the point where it pivots
up like this and rockets away.
[narrator] A young engineer
from the suburb of Balwyn
took the picture of the event
from his garden.
They show a metallic-like UFO
tipped vertically on its side.
The Victorian Flying Saucer
Research Society
very carefully analyzed the photograph,
and they concluded the photo
showed no sign of multiple exposure,
montage, or any other tampering.
The strategy of rapid response
to leaked information about UFO incidents
was established in the 1950s
during Project Blue Book.
Techniques of manipulation and cover-up
were improved over time,
and have since been developed
almost to perfection.
[man] So it's not surprising they were
able to get people on board,
and the institutions.
And then, as things went forward,
they had to deal
with increasing developments,
and research, and evidence,
and they developed more skills.
And they applied everything they had
at their disposal
to keep this issue
from ever formally being confirmed.
That's the Truth Embargo.
[narrator] However, a unique case
of an uncontrollable information leak
about UFO sightings
is the Cash-Landrum incident from 1980,
which could not be entirely discredited,
because the witnesses
took an unprecedented step
of taking the matter to court.
December 29, 1980,
near the small town of Huffman, Texas.
Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum,
and her seven-year-old grandson Colby
are returning home along the road
to Dayton, Texas at night.
When suddenly, a bright light appears
among the trees.
After a few bends further along the road,
a diamond shape appears
about 15 meters high
at a level of the treetops.
Vickie, a devout Christian,
believes it is the second coming
of Jesus Christ.
She and Betty got out of the car
to see the object,
and to welcome Christ.
Flames are shooting from the bottom
of the vessel,
and the car and surroundings
become very hot.
The object lit up the surrounding
pine woods like it was daylight.
I was burning, my skin was burning.
Fire was coming out of the bottom
like a blowtorch.
It lifted up and then
flew over the trees.
That was when we saw the helicopters
come out.
The helicopters?
[Cash] Colby counted 23 of them.
[Landrum] Yes. It seemed that they were
trying to escort the craft somewhere.
It looked like they were about to collide.
The roar sounded like a tornado.
When we got home,
I washed Colby off, and put him to bed.
When the water touched his skin,
he cried out like he had been burned,
as if he had been in the sun too long.
[narrator] That evening, Betty, Vickie,
and Colby suffer from nausea,
resembling symptoms
of exposure to radiation.
And I was too sick to work the next day.
My eyes swelled closed,
and welts appeared on my face and head.
I thought I was going to die.
Vickie came and took me
to the emergency room at the hospital.
They treated me like a burn patient.
Over the next few days, I kept losing
big patches of skin on my face,
and about half of my hair fell out.
They kept me in the hospital over a month
with no improvement.
[narrator] April 1981,
a CH-47 helicopter landed in Dayton
and was greeted by curious townspeople.
The pilot mentions that he had been
in Dayton a year earlier
pursuing an unknown vessel.
But as soon as he finds out
that eyewitnesses to the event
are among the crowd,
he quickly ends the discussion.
In this field that we're in,
they're going to be more witnesses,
but it's still not enough.
It's still not good enough.
So it doesn't matter how much proof
anybody has, it's not good enough.
If it's too mind-blowing or too difficult
to accept as reality,
in a court of law it wouldn't work.
Yeah. There's witnesses.
Oh, yeah. There's evidence.
There's marks, there's um, places,
locations, this and that.
There's stories.
There's books that have been written.
There's, there's more evidence
than we can possibly imagine.
What people have to stop doing
is saying, "Where's the proof?"
Because the proof is already there.
Has the government ever
expressed a willingness
to take responsibility for this thing?
No, and I am mad. I'm mad as hell
and disappointed with the government
of our United States.
[narrator] Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum
eventually sued Bergstrom Air Force Base
for $20 million in damages.
But in 1986, a district court judge
dismissed the lawsuit
because the helicopters involved
had not been proven
as belonging to the US government.
Furthermore,
military officers denied in court
that the United States Armed Forces
possessed a diamond-shaped aircraft
of any kind.
But many years later, Richard Dotty,
a former government agent
of the Office of Special Investigations,
declared that it did exist,
and it was a prototype vessel
from a secret reverse engineering program
experimenting with nuclear propulsion.
A problem with the aircraft
reportedly occurred,
and Cash and Landrum just happened to be
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There's been numerous crashed craft
around the world,
and I believe that that technology
was something
that they wanted to keep secret
for their own purposes.
I think this is why they're doing it
around the world,
because that technology could change
the way that we are living now.
And I believe those
that have this technology
are only going to utilize it
for their own benefit.
So there's lots of reasons why
it suits them to keep this quiet.
Over the years, there have been a number
of instances where leaks have come out,
or at least what seem to be genuine leaks.
One is the Gary McKinnon case.
[mysterious music playing]
[narrator] The case of the most infamous
government database hacker, Gary McKinnon,
is highly significant since it is
the most concrete information we have
about the existence
of a secret UFO program.
[Dolan] He didn't exactly hack in.
That's not quite accurate
to say that he was a hacker.
He created, I think he called it
a Perl script,
where he was able to find sites
within that web
that either had no password
or had "password" as their password.
Cybersecurity was really lax.
But this is the late 1990s.
[narrator] This is why
Gary McKinnon's attempt
to download the photo was unsuccessful.
His connection was able to be intercepted
just in time by the government,
and the photo deleted.
But that didn't prevent the story
from breaking into a blaze of publicity.
February 2001, London.
When Gary McKinnon sat down
at his computer in London
in February of 2001,
to launch what was later described
as "the greatest hack of the century,"
he was inspired by witnessing something
in the night sky at the age of 13,
something that had profoundly
affected him.
Gary had witnessed a glowing, orange shape
moving in a way that left him in no doubt
that he was not observing a natural
phenomenon, or terrestrial craft.
A few months after the 9/11 terrorist
attacks on the New York Twin Towers,
the following message appeared on one
of the Pentagon's computers:
"Your security system is crap."
"I am Solo."
"I will continue to disrupt
the highest levels."
The Pentagon was suddenly
on high alert.
What I was doing was illegal,
but at the time
I felt that it was morally right
in view of getting this technology,
getting it out to the public.
And it was actually easy getting
into the Pentagon.
I scanned for blank passwords.
I'm not some great big computer,
you know, criminal mastermind.
[narrator] Between February 2001
and March 2002,
an unknown assailant calling himself Solo,
in fact, McKinnon's alias,
managed to copy data
from about 100 computers
belonging to various departments
of the US military.
He copied data and passwords for months.
I was looking for evidence
of UFO technology.
And I know that's laughed at
by a lot of people,
but I was working from witness testimony
of a group called The Disclosure Project.
Four hundred military witnesses,
some ex-military,
some still current at the time.
Anything all the way up from radar,
the air traffic controllers,
all the way up to strategic air command,
you know, very credible people.
They all said that, "Yes, UFOs were real.
Yes, they were extraterrestrial."
And in addition to that, rogue elements
of military and intelligence
had captured and reverse engineered some
of the technology,
and they had a free energy technology.
And, you know, in these days
of oil crisis and stuff,
I found that hugely interesting.
I thought it was morally correct
to break the law
in order to get the technology out
to the public.
[narrator] Despite using an alias,
Gary made no other attempts
to cover his tracks.
He wanted what he had learned to come out.
He was arrested by the United Kingdom's
National Hi-Tech Crime Unit
in March of 2002.
We learn that his primary goal
was to discover classified information
about UFOs
from the US Defense Department
and NASA servers.
He successfully engaged
some top secret files,
and they were bigger than that.
And it was strange what he was reporting.
It should have been ridiculous,
except some of this is coming out.
It's just that in, in my own country,
the punishment for unauthorized access
is, you know, six months in prison,
or I think a year maximum.
And I think the US authorities
have been extremely heavy-handed.
And even now, they've got to the point
where I'm officially referenced to
as a terrorist in official
Army training manuals
for combating terrorism
in the 21st century.
I think Gary had it exactly right.
So he saw ships connected
to the US Navy
that were not part
of the United States Navy
of any inventory that we know of.
And something called a ship of a non,
list of non-terrestrial officers,
which was quite interesting.
The real key to the Gary McKinnon case
is how the US tried
to extradite him for more than a decade,
and really tried to ruin his life.
Um, fortunately for Gary, he was not
extradited, and the British government
was able to defend him
against extradition.
[narrator] Clearly, there is a difference
between hacking
into government computer servers
and databases,
and being in receipt of the same
information from a trusted source
within the secret programs themselves.
Even then, we would be just talking about
fragments since government departments
are so skilled at compartmentalizing
their activities and minimizing the risk
of any one potential source or employee
being able to see the whole picture.
When I had a clearance, there were
programs I'd be in where I would have
a lot of information
about a certain thing.
It's like a pyramid.
The more you know, the farther up this
pyramid you go, okay, in clearance.
When you're here,
you see this much stuff.
When you're here at the top,
you only get this little tiny bit. Okay?
And the next pyramid over
of another program
that might be looking at a similar thing
such as a UFO system,
or that's flying around,
they're up at the top too.
They never see your top of your pyramid.
So they don't know the big picture.
That's one way
they can compartmentalize it.
They can keep a secret when they can
when they want to.
So when they really want to keep a secret,
they can do it,
and they compartmentalize it.
[Dolan] When someone claims that he goes
to Mars for 20 years,
and as time regressed,
and age regressed back,
he's able to say that
because it's clearly not true
and he's making up a series of fantasies.
So that's one thing.
Um, but for legitimate information,
we have to ask,
"Well, why does any of it come out?"
Well, in general, we have to say that most
of it never comes out, right?
So most of the information
within that community
is still very tightly controlled.
Absolutely.
[narrator] In the same year
that the British and American authorities
are negotiating the extradition
of Gary McKinnon,
another information leak occurs.
The world learns incredible facts
from 15 pages of notes from a dialogue
between a highly respected scientist
and a high ranking official
in US Military and National Security.
Many refer to this Autumn 2002 event
as "the most significant UFO leak ever."
It all began when three men decided
to draw the attention
of a high-ranking Pentagon official
to a secret UFO program.
I came here to Washington
with a Navy commander
by the name of Will Miller,
and Dr. Steven Greer.
And we were able to get an appointment
at the Pentagon
to talk about what we knew,
or what we allegedly knew,
what we thought we knew.
And went and told our story.
The admiral said,
"Well, I don't know that story."
"I don't know that that's true,
but I will find out."
[intense music playing]
[narrator] October 2002, Las Vegas.
Physicist Eric Davis, a specialist,
among other things,
in advanced military technologies,
arrives at the EG&G building
near the intersection
of Grier Drive and Paradise Road
at exactly ten o'clock in the morning.
Another car then arrives
with Admiral Thomas Wilson,
dressed in civilian clothes.
Wilson, in his fifties
with an extraordinary career
in the United States Navy behind him,
and just a few months earlier,
the Director
of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
He is accompanied by two men
in Navy uniforms.
Wilson gets into Davis's car,
and they spend about an hour talking
in the back seat.
Later, Eric Davis reconstructs
the dialogue into a 15-page document,
containing devastating evidence
about the extent
of government-led UFO cover- ups.
[Wilson] "They weren't going
to let me in the door."
"They wouldn't accept my arguments that
they fell under my statutory oversight
and regulatory authority
as Deputy Director DIA."
[narrator] Wilson describes how he,
an admiral in the US Navy,
was denied access to all
but a fragment of information
about the top secret program,
and that on the list
of people granted oversight,
there was no one from the White House,
or even from Congress,
or any elected official.
It was not a weapons program,
nor an intelligence program.
It was something entirely different.
The private industry is very interested
in UFO technology.
Eric Davis being the employee
of Robert Bigelow
and Robert Bigelow is, of course,
the famous billionaire
who has been investigating
strange paranormal phenomena for decades,
also for the Pentagon.
Eric Davis is an important scientist.
And they'd all
been interested in
"What do
the other corporations know?"
[narrator] As the conversation progressed,
Wilson revealed his concerns over
the work within the top secret program.
[Davis] "What were they then?"
[Wilson] "They were
a reverse engineering program."
"Something recovered
years ago in the past."
"Program manager said
they didn't know where it was from."
"It was technology that was not
of this Earth,
not made by man,
not by human hands."
[Fleischer] So if it's true that
private corporations are in the possession
of extraterrestrial remnants
of whatever origin, whatever kind,
then it is also logical to assume
that other private companies
who want to build that stuff may also be
interested in knowing "What do they know?"
It's just logical.
[narrator] Davis kept asking questions,
but the more questions he asked,
the less answers he got.
Eventually, he began threatening the men,
which ended the meeting prematurely.
[Davis] "Did you deal with it somehow?"
"Turned to Special Access
Programme Oversight Committee."
"I was very angry."
"Result?"
"If I didn't follow their suggestion then
I would not see Director DIA promotion,
get early retirement,
lose one or two stars along the way."
And it was really difficult,
he names the exact department where
he got information about this program.
Eventually, they invite him
to their facility,
but just to tell him that he has
no access, and that he is not in charge.
And they didn't let him inspect the site.
They didn't let him inspect the project.
[narrator] Although Wilson never got
inside the program,
this recording of the interview
contains so many details and names that
most UFO researchers and investigators
consider it entirely credible.
It confirms
there is a deeply classified program
hidden in the network
of the Defense Department,
whose purpose was, and perhaps still is,
the study of extraterrestrial technology.
I think there's some interesting evidence
for this theory that within government
there are different factions.
So government is not a single entity
moving with one single common purpose.
[man] So you have competing groups,
I think, within the government.
There may be one group that wants
all this information to come out,
and they're being fought by another group.
Governments and corporations don't mind me
talking about extraterrestrials,
or the underground facilities.
And they really don't like me talking
about over unity devices
and zero-point energy,
which I had laboratories that were making
these devices as well.
So all day long, I can talk about ETs
because there's no money being made
talking about ETs for them.
And they don't believe anyone's going
to believe this anyway.
They don't care what you know.
They care what you can prove.
That's how this game works.
[narrator] The insiders or whistleblowers
are mostly former participants
in these secret UFO programs.
One such individual was Emery Smith.
As a US Air Force Surgical Assistant,
he claims to have worked undercover
on projects relating to the examination
of extraterrestrial life.
Smith described in detail
how he participated in the autopsies
of extraterrestrial corpses,
and how strictly the program was guarded.
Emery Smith is a good example
of someone who,
when he joined the US military,
was given an option of becoming part
of a black program.
And then, when he did that black program,
he did that side by side
with his normal military service.
Because this is often the way in which,
in the United States, it's done.
Military recruits are basically
given the option
to do some additional work on top
of their regular assignment,
and that would involve extraterrestrials.
[narrator] Kirtland Air Force Base,
New Mexico, 1990 through 1998.
[Smith] There's a facility
called Sandia Labs,
and Sandia National Laboratories
is another, um,
government-controlled corporation
uh, that does a lot of amazing things.
But under that facility, and now,
that's a base inside a military base.
So it's like double security.
And below that,
that building and that little base
is a whole underground facility.
[narrator] Young Emery would enter
the building
through highly sensitive identification
and security scanning gates.
Specially trained dogs were able
to recognize if the person entering
had an infectious or cancerous disease.
Everyone who passed
through the multistage screening
received a special computer tablet
containing all the information
necessary to navigate the underground lab,
and to avoid any paper documents
in or out.
In the early 1990s,
at a special laboratory
where Emery usually dissected
biological tissues
from humans and animal remains,
an arm lay on the autopsy table.
Emery was convinced that this arm
didn't belong to a human
or was of this planet.
[Smith] I was amazed to see this arm
with this hand, with color,
and this blue iridescent field.
It was so beautiful.
And what was so interesting is they didn't
even tell me what I was supposed to do
until I got in there.
They wanted to see
how I was going to react.
and if I would be a good agent
to keep my mouth shut,
and that's all that was for.
And then, I found out later that that arm
was synthetic. It was a fake.
[narrator] Emery, as he claims,
passed the test,
and gradually became a specialist
in autopsies,
retrieving and analyzing tissue samples
from extraterrestrial corpses.
He became part
of the government's inne r sanctum
of closely guarded secrets
on extraterrestrials and UFOs.
There's many different kinds
of extraterrestrials out there
with many different kinds of looks.
The one thing they all have in common
is they all have human DNA in them.
The second thing is they all have a head,
two arms, and two legs.
The five star, you know,
pointed system of the universe,
which is very fascinating.
[narrator] He soon gained the trust
of his superiors,
receiving special permission
to access the laboratory's secret archive.
As he describes it today,
it was so extraordinary
that he became addicted to going there
and discovering information
that was forbidden to others.
[Smith] This is a giant room made up
of eight large pool, like pool tables
about that size, and they were white.
And they you can access this
with your hand or your voice,
and the AI knows who you are.
And you have a band on you,
they know where you're at all the time
inside the facilities.
They know if your heart rate goes up,
they know everything.
So when you're in the library, you can
request anything that has to do
with your project, or a future project,
or extraterrestrial, or craft,
or device that you're going
to be working on.
[narrator] The library gave him access
to all the sensitive
and closely guarded information
relating to extraterrestrial
monitoring work,
and the secret space program.
And it also offered a completely different
perspective on what we perceive
as established and unchanging
in our solar system.
He claims that he even saw
the interstellar highway system.
In effect, a map to the stars.
So the library was just an amazing
concept for me to get in and see things
like the moon, for instance.
There was a great model of the moon
three-dimensionally that you can open up
and look inside, and you know,
the moon turned out being something
I didn't realize what it really was.
[narrator] The question arises:
how it is possible that a person can keep
something so extraordinary to himself
for so many years and why he has chosen
to share it now?
Well, what had happened is
I had to come forward just recently
within the last couple of years
because I was working
with some over unity devices,
and someone leaked
some information at the lab.
And it just got a little scary.
So I have been kept behind the scenes
for, you know, 27 years now,
but I've been coming to events,
and I've been an insider for many
of my colleagues here for over a decade.
I think not everyone within the military
industrial complex supports disclosure.
There are some groups that want to keep
the secrecy for another 50 years.
[narrator] But will their attempts
be successful?
Or is the genie already out of the bottle?
A completely different attempt,
this time not to obtain information,
but to declassify the content
of secret programs,
was leaked to the public in March 2016.
Russian hackers send a phishing email
to John Podesta,
who was, at the time,
Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
Subsequent opening of the Podesta mail
allows the hackers to access
approximately 60,000 private emails.
Many of these, of course, related
to the Clinton presidential campaign.
But some of them related
to something entirely different.
When news emerged that
John Podesta's email had been hacked,
obviously, everyone was interested
in all sorts of different aspects of it.
But the surprising aspect
was apparent communication
between Tom DeLonge
and John Podesta about UFOs.
[narrator] Private emails
from Hillary Clinton's adviser
posted on WikiLeaks
prove that former Blink-182
singer Tom DeLonge did contact Podesta,
undoubtedly with the purposeful intention
of developing mutual cooperation
on release of UFO information.
Tom DeLonge is a very nice guy.
He is deeply involved in the UFO subject.
He's also very familiar with virtually
everything you need to know about it.
And he's had some
very interesting contacts
in the US intelligence community.
[narrator] As well as being
Hillary Clinton's
presidential campaign manager,
John Podesta's abiding interest in the UFO
phenomenon was so well known
that he was nicknamed "the X-Files man"
in Bill Clinton's White House.
The discovery of these emails
reinforced the impression
that Podesta could have been
an active link
between the White House and the emerging
group of government officials
associated with the UFO phenomenon.
I think what you can see
from those WikiLeaks emails
is that Tom DeLonge had been preparing
a huge thing together with John Podesta.
How do you say, this multichannel
marketing approach with books, series,
TV shows, feature film, stuff like that.
And he had the interest of John Podesta.
[narrator] With Hillary Clinton's
defea t to Donald Trump
in the 2016 presidential election,
the proposed link between DeLonge
and the To The Stars Academy
and the Clinton White House
was no longer achievable.
They, therefore, had to select
an alternative plan
to get the information out
via the United States Congress.
I have guided Congress with getting
all the data, all the briefings,
and all the people in various parts
of the government
to brief the senators and congressmen.
We did all that.
It actually leaked a handful of weeks ago
when you saw these articles
in The New York Times and whatever
where it said the Navy
is creating formal mechanisms
for reporting UFOs. That was us.
That was To the Stars Academy.
That was our show. It's on the show.
It's really just following around
what we do at To the Stars Academy.
We deal with the US government
every single day.
I think Tom DeLonge said in a tweet
shortly after WikiLeaks published
those files, those emails, he said,
"You don't know
what you have just destroyed,
the whole mess you have created."
And I think they had a completely
different plan in the beginning.
I think their plan was that
Hillary Clinton would become President,
and that this would somehow
they would somehow work together.
Maybe the intelligence community
is using this
as a way to disclose,
but through the back door.
What I'm trying to say is that
maybe politically the President can't say,
"My fellow Americans, people of the world,
we're not alone."
Because the implication
is that 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
so that the end result is the same.
People end up knowing that this is real
and the information is out there,
but it's done through this third party.
[narrator] In recent years,
it has become clear
that the effort to publicize information
on UFOs
has generated new momentum
since the WikiLeaks Scandal,
despite the results of the 2016 election.
In 2017, The Academy of Arts and Sciences,
with Tom DeLonge and former Pentagon
point man on UFOs, Luis Elizondo,
released three videos from the Pentagon's
secret program archive.
These videos have provided
fascinating new insight
into the extent of contact with
and research on the infamous
Tic Tac UFO craft.
So far, this initiative presents
UFOs, renamed UAPs, as a threat.
But is it not more possible that
technologically unsurpassable craft
that have been flying overhead
for centuries, perhaps even millennia,
are more of a hope than a threat?
The world is bracing itself
for further revelations.
Perhaps a formal acknowledgment
from the highest ranks in government
that Top Secret UFO Programs do exist,
and that they have shown,
as so many have suspected,
that we are not alone in the universe.
We are going to have to help push along
a process in which the people in the world
and governments start
to get more information
and engage this thing until eventually,
they have no choice
but to acknowledge, yes,
there's extraterrestrials here,
and probably even say,
"And there's not a damn thing
we can do about it."
Firstly, we know that
there are more videos,
photographs and videos,
like the videos that we've seen
of the Navy jets chasing UFOs.
So we're going to see more
of those sorts of videos, I think.
Secondly, I think we'll see
more documents,
and I think the other thing we will see
is that more people
who have been involved in this,
either as witnesses
or as people who have been
involved in the program,
they are going to come forward
and speak out.
I think we're seeing what we're seeing now
because of social media
and the digital age, everybody is
sharing information at a rapid rate.
So if something seems like it's changing,
it's because the information is flowing
in a different way now.
You know, this phenomenon is ancient
as far as we can tell from the beginning
of recorded human history,
so we'll see what happens.
[D'Antonio] The military is always
looking for money, um
and they will use that public opinion
to scare the public
so we can get more money to do this.
"We need a space force."
"Let's scare the public into thinking
we need to protect them from"
your choice here.
A, B, or C, asteroids, aliens,
anything, you know?
So that's something that does happen.
This is a road,
and we're not at the end of that road yet.
[closing theme music playing]