Ancient Aliens s13e01 Episode Script

1 Is the U.
S.
government covering up the truth about alien contact? And if so, why? The government seems to be completely unaccountable to the American public.
They rarely release anything that they know or their findings.
The fact that the U.
S.
government has investigated thousands and thousands of reports leads me to think they know much more than they let us believe.
Could the government have a secret agenda, one known to only a select few, and perhaps dating back hundreds of years? The government's program continues to be deny, deny, deny.
Sometimes, government finds it helpful to sow seeds of disinformation and misinformation to hide the facts about these sorts of programs.
Hillary Clinton was basically saying, "You are going to give me the information I need" to disclose the extraterrestrial presence, "or I'm gonna fire every single one of you.
" People want to know what the government knows, and they ought to know what the government knows.
On December 16th, 2017, The New York Times ran an explosive story entitled "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money':" The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program.
" It was the first time the American public learned of a top secret U.
S.
government project, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, otherwise known as AATIP.
The revelations concerning the existence of the Pentagon's AATIP program are extraordinary.
It is the single biggest ever news in the whole history of the UFO phenomenon.
It's not quite a spaceship in a hangar smoking gun, but it's the closest we've ever been.
I assure you that nothing like this has ever happened in the history of this issue.
This is a milestone.
This is a watershed.
The article reported that the program had been run by a former Pentagon official named Luis Elizondo, a senior career intelligence officer with top security clearance and with experience in everything from microbiology and parasitology to the study of global terrorism.
It was Elizondo's job to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects, and to measure what threat they could pose to national security.
AATIP received these cases from various different channels.
In some cases, reporting would come up through Navy channels.
In other cases, it would come up through Air Force channels.
In other cases, it would come through the intelligence community, and all roads led to our office, regarding the phenomena.
Elizondo played a key role in the government's top secret AATIP program prior to his leaving the government in 2017.
Among the reasons given for his departure was the bitterness he felt that the research he was conducting, and the conclusions that he and his colleagues were reaching, were not being taken seriously by other agencies within the government.
Even Congress, to which AATIP owed its funding, was hard-pressed to give Elizondo so much as a hearing so that his findings could be made part of the public record.
Interestingly, just two months after Elizondo's exit from the government, The New York Times broke the major story, exposing the AATIP program and many of the facts surrounding the government's secret research into UFO activity.
When I read in The New York Times this front page story that the government was running this semi-secret program to investigate, well, aerial phenomena, which is kind of a code word for UFOs, yeah, you know, I thought, "My God, all these years, "you know, people who think that we're being visited "were claiming that the government was, in fact, "possessing some secret knowledge about this.
And, sure enough, they did have this secret investigation.
" For Luis Elizondo, The New York Times article served as a vindication for the years that his research went unrecognized and his warnings unheeded.
For if the UFO activity being recorded was real, so, too, was the possibility that it was being caused by technologies that were not only unknown, but of extraterrestrial origin.
Elizondo, he resigned because he felt the government considered this a joke.
I think that the fact that these folks are out there trying to get the answers that we're all seeking, absolutely fantastic.
And they're getting to top government officials.
And someday, we're gonna get the answers from people like that Not from government, but from people like that.
Luckily for Luis Elizondo, one of the people who took him and his research seriously was musician and UFO researcher Tom DeLonge.
Tom DeLonge, who is most famous for his being the lead in Blink-182.
I've known Tom for a while, and he spearheaded an initiative that's brought together a number of scientists and others to both continue to study the phenomena on the outside, in the private sector, and to raise funds to do that.
His enthusiasm, his passion has driven things forward.
A lot of people were saying, "What does a rock star know about all this?" Let's not forget that sometimes even people in government and military and the intelligence community get a little more starstruck than they should by celebrities.
Tom DeLonge was able to use this to leverage, I guess, access where others had tried and failed.
In October 2017, Tom DeLonge announced the creation of his To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, an organization devoted to the study of UFOs and the possible existence of extraterrestrial activity here on Earth.
When Elizondo left the Pentagon, he was determined to bring AATIP's years of investigation out of the shadows by releasing several of the videos he had collected.
One of them featured this incredible encounter, taken by a fighter jet in Florida in 2015, now known as the Gimbal video.
On December 18, 2017, DeLonge and Elizondo revealed a second shocking video which was released through The Washington Post.
This UFO had been tracked by the USS Princeton for several days over the Pacific Ocean, approximately 100 miles southwest of San Diego.
On the screen, it also says the speed of the F-18 is 250 knots, roughly about 280 miles per hour.
This F-18 can't seem to get any closer to this vehicle, whatever it is.
Now, the F-18's one of the highest technology fighter crafts on the planet.
And it can't catch this thing? When it darts offscreen to the left, it would be going extremely fast.
The g-forces would turn a person inside it into, like, tapioca pudding.
I mean, it would kill them.
In March 2018, a third Pentagon video entitled "Go Fast" was released, and featured yet another unexplained aerial encounter.
But perhaps the most shocking information to come from Tom DeLonge and his To The Stars Academy was Luis Elizondo's claim that Bigelow Aerospace had modified its buildings for the storage of strange metal alloys of unknown origin, also known as metamaterials.
Now, hold, stop the presses right there.
What are these metal alloys? Luis Elizondo has referred to these as "meta materials.
" The implication is that they're not special magical elements, or anything, but they do seem to be materials that have been studied.
According to Elizondo, tests have been run.
The answer has come back: whatever these things were, they came from space.
There was also indications that there were certain polymers that were discovered at crash sites that were unexplained and were reviewed.
You know, for years and years, UFO researchers had talked about crash retrievals of UFOs, or that elements of these objects had been recovered and were being studied.
And skeptics would laugh at these claims.
You know, how ridiculous such conspiracy paranoid fantasies were.
Well, guess what.
Now we have it confirmed.
What are these materials? Are they of this Earth? Are they from an advanced alien intelligence? Were these metals actually taken from crashed UFOs? What are the sources for these kinds of metals? These are the kind of questions that we need to learn the answers to if we're gonna get to the bottom of understanding what the government knows about UFOs.
Is it possible that the U.
S.
military has recovered crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft, and that wreckage from these aircraft is currently being stored and studied by a top-secret team at Bigelow Aerospace? One of the really interesting things about AATIP is how much information hasn't been released.
We hear things that are coming.
There's this report that was written that we're supposed to get to see at some point.
Haven't seen it yet.
And then, are there more videos? We've seen, I think, three videos come out that they've released.
There has to be more.
They were doing this for, like, five years, or maybe even a lot longer than that.
I bet you there's a lot more.
Other secret military programs have been going on for many, many decades.
And it's really just the tip of the iceberg.
Was the U.
S.
government's AATIP program the only one to be investigating extraterrestrial activity? And, if so, how was it started, and why? And was the government seriously concerned that such activity was happening? Or was the bigger concern that the public would find out about it? Washington, D.
C.
, 2007.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada summons Senator Daniel Inouye from Hawaii and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens to a secure room in the Capitol Building for a secret meeting.
He convinces them to lend their support to fund a project researching UFO reports in the interest of national security The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, or AATIP.
Senator Reid was successful in getting money into the Defense Department budget to create a small office to look at what the government knew, and to study some more recent incidents that had occurred, and to delve into the background, and to try to explain what pilots who had encountered strange aerial phenomena couldn't explain.
Without any public debate, $22 million is allocated for AATIP from a black money budget that few people know about or can monitor.
Much of it, I think, was classified.
Much of it was unclassified, but I think people didn't know about the program.
I'm very glad that my friend Harry Reid decided that he would pursue this and sought money for it.
Senator Stevens was genuinely interested in the topic.
But none of them went out and discussed it.
When later asked about his support for the program, Senator Reid said that he was inspired by his friend, retired former senator and astronaut John Glenn.
Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth, told Reid that he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into UFOs.
But there are some who believe that Reid's support owes less to John Glenn than to his friendship with one of the senator's largest campaign contributors: Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace.
Robert Bigelow owned a series of hotels, and he sold it and made a lot of money.
He decided then he wanted to get into space exploration.
He's fascinated by extraterrestrials and UFOs.
NASA was providing insight, as opposed to oversight Which is an important distinction there And his dear friend, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, was convinced by Robert Bigelow to get the government to spend $22 million into this program to investigate UFOs.
It's not a coincidence, to my mind, that he was involved in the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
He builds rockets and planes and who knows what else, and he seems like a perfectly logical person to have been the point man in the private sector for using the information that was gleaned from that project, whatever it was, and we don't know what a lot of it was because it's classified.
At the time, the fact that much of AATIP's research was outsourced to Bigelow Aerospace made perfect sense.
First of all, the company already had a staff of highly qualified aerospace engineers.
And, secondly, an outside company could operate without the kind of public scrutiny imposed on a government-based agency.
Bigelow could operate in total secrecy.
Private companies aren't held to the Freedom of Information Act.
Private companies can do whatever they want to with their funding, and you can't go then and fill out a Freedom of Information Act request.
That's a way to keep things more secretive.
But was the AATIP program's need for secrecy merely designed to keep its UFO findings independent of public scrutiny? Or was there a greater interest in hiding not only what AATIP was finding, but also what those in charge of the program were looking for? In May 2017, Robert Bigelow was the subject of a profile on CBS's 60 Minutes.
The piece was meant to focus on Bigelow's relationship to NASA and his activities in creating life-support habitats for future astronauts.
During his interview, Bigelow revealed to 60 Minutes that he was not only an aerospace enthusiast, but a full-fledged believer in extraterrestrials.
Do you believe in aliens? I'm absolutely convinced.
That's all there is to it.
Do you also believe that UFOs have come to Earth? There has been and is an existing presence An E.
T.
presence.
And I've spent millions and millions.
I've probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.
Is it risky for you to say, you know, in public that you believe - in UFOs and aliens? - I don't give a damn.
- I don't care.
- You don't worry that some people will say, "Did you hear that guy? He sounds like he's crazy.
" - I don't care.
- Why not? It's not gonna make a difference.
It's not gonna change reality of what I know.
Bob Bigelow said, "E.
T.
s are here.
They're right under your nose.
" And he uses the word "E.
T.
" He doesn't beat around the bush.
Robert Bigelow became my hero.
That "I don't give a damn" really was for a lot of people.
It was for every billionaire space jockey out there, whether it's Elon Musk or Branson or Bezos.
But guess what.
None of those people have ever said to a reporter, "You know, I'm pretty sure there's extraterrestrials here.
" Bigelow did.
We must now go and ask the head of Bigelow Aerospace what does he mean that aliens are under everyone's noses.
This story really is begging for somebody to go to Robert Bigelow and say, "Can we now go and see your warehouse?" What a fantastic next step it would be for the world.
Although funding for the AATIP program was quietly ended in 2012, there are those who believe that its focus on the study of recent UFO activity and on the study of extraterrestrial life are still alive and well, although now further hidden under a different agency name.
When the Pentagon grudgingly admitted the existence of the AATIP program, they did a clever thing, and they said that the funding had run out in 2012.
The implication was that the program was no more, but with my knowledge of the way in which these classified sensitive programs are run, pulling the funding part is not the same as terminating the project.
But while some version of the government's AATIP program may still be operating in secret, the same cannot be said for some of the agency's former employees.
And there is one in particular who is not only open to the idea that aliens do exist, he has made it his mission to communicate his findings throughout the world.
When The New York Times story broke, revealing the existence of the U.
S.
government's ultra top secret AATIP program, UFO experts and ancient astronaut theorists had validation for what they knew had been happening for decades: that the government has proof of extraterrestrial visitation and that they have been hiding it from the public.
The investigations were denied during the time of their happening.
And it's really curious that we're always told, "No, these programs are not happening.
" And then, 20 years later, these documents are being released to reveal the fact that these investigations did happen.
My initial reaction to the information that was released in December of 2017 was that this has really been going on for over 70 years.
Although the government's AATIP program was established in 2007, it was by no means the first top secret program designed to investigate UFO activity in the United States.
The first was known simply as Project Sign, and it was set up within the U.
S.
Air Force to investigate unexplained aerial phenomena, such as the event now known as the Battle of Los Angeles.
What's called the Battle of I.
A.
is actually one of the earliest unexplained UFO mysteries in modern our modern era.
Three months after Pearl Harbor, it took place on the early morning of February 25, 1942.
An unknown object appeared over Los Angeles and anti-aircraft guns opened fire on it.
The anti-aircraft guns began barking during a blackout ordered by the IV Interceptor Command at 2:25 a.
m.
1,430 artillery shells were fired at several unknown objects.
Many eyewitnesses on the ground saw this.
There was concern that the Japanese were somehow involved, but there was no Japanese aircraft carrier, no chance that Japanese airplanes could have been responsible for this.
The Secretary of the Navy said to the public, "It was just war nerves.
There was nothing out there, whatsoever.
" Although the U.
S.
Army Air Force officially dismissed the objects seen in the sky as weather balloons, they failed to explain why so many weather balloons would have been floating over Los Angeles in the first place.
In the years following the Battle of Los Angeles, numerous other UFO sightings were reported, including the one widely referred to as "the Roswell incident," in which an unidentified object, referred to in the press as a flying saucer, reportedly crashed on a ranch just outside the town of Roswell, New Mexico, on July 4, 1947.
Within 24 hours, the story changed.
And they said, "We made a mistake.
"It's not a flying disc.
It's just debris from a weather balloon.
" The Roswell incident was probably a major contributor to the establishment of what became known as Project Sign just a couple of months later.
By the time Project Sign was established in 1948, UFO sightings had become so frequent, they could no longer be ignored or dismissed.
Given the fact that there was a Cold War escalating between the United States and the Soviet Union, concerns that UFOs might be spy satellites or foreign-made weapons gave some justification to the increasing paranoia.
Answers needed to be found.
But just as the government's first official UFO program was getting started, it was suddenly and mysteriously shut down.
There was a very big incident during the summer of 1948, when a report went to the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg, and it stated, "This is real.
They're here.
" And Vandenberg closed down Project Sign.
But why would the Air Force Chief of Staff shut down a program designed to study UFOs just after being informed that UFOs were not only real but of genuine concern? There seems to be a pattern of suppression over the last 70 years when it comes to the UFO subject.
And all of these government investigations into UFOs, where they look into it, then they say there's nothing to it.
Then they look into it again, then they're finding that there is something to it.
But they don't want to say what it is.
For the next four years, UFO sightings continued to be reported, so many, in fact, that the government could no longer dismiss them as hoaxes, weather anomalies, or simply the product of mass hysteria.
By March 1952, a number of high-ranking Air Force generals became so frustrated with the military's previous attempts to properly investigate so-called flying saucers that they launched a program that would be the most serious and best-funded to date: Project Blue Book.
Under the command of Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt, this new top secret agency would take UFOs and their potential threat to national security very seriously.
Project Blue Book produced a standard form for people who wanted to report a UFO.
What did it look like? Was there a sound? They even had a chart for people to calculate the angle of elevation.
If UFOs are nothing to worry about, why is the Air Force requesting so much information about the true nature of what the witnesses saw? In January 1953, after gathering hundreds of reported sightings, photographs and interviews, Captain Ruppelt and astronomer Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek prepared and presented their best 23 cases to a CIA-formed panel of scientists led by Dr.
H.
P.
Robertson.
The Robertson Panel concluded that the evidence could all be dismissed as natural occurrences and was not worth the effort of the government.
And it was the Robertson Panel which was the origin for a lot of the propaganda that was put out in the media when it came to UFOs.
They wanted to publicly ridicule the subject, so that people wouldn't want to be associated with it, basically killing all the public interest in this field so they could continue to research these exotic technologies behind the scenes.
In 1969, Project Blue Book was finally shut down on the grounds that there was no proof the unidentified objects posed a national security threat or were of extraterrestrial origin.
But was that really the end of the story or only the beginning? In February 2018, Nick Pope, the former Director of Defence Security at the British Ministry of Defence, traveled to Washington, D.
C.
, to meet with Chase Kloetzke, a registered lobbyist for UFO disclosure and a former program developer for the U.
S.
Department of Defense.
Chase Kloetzke has investigated numerous U.
S.
government secret studies into UFOs and has examined many of the once-classified files pertaining to Project Blue Book.
I've got this Project Blue Book file from the FBI archives.
And the first page I want to really go over with you is this one that indeed reads "UFO fact sheet.
" Okay, so this is basically a summary of the position with regard to Project Blue Book.
- Right, the official statement.
- Okay.
And so, this says, "Since the termination of Project Blue Book, "no evidence has been presented to indicate "that further investigation of UFOs by the Air Force is warranted.
" "Terminated.
" Well, was the program really terminated? That's my question.
Absolutely.
And if it was, what took its place? Well, yes, the Air Force isn't suddenly going to stop being interested in uncorrelated targets in its airspace.
Right, absolutely.
And the second document, I really want you to weigh in on.
It doesn't make sense.
Wow.
12,618 sightings.
That's a lot.
And 701 of them remained completely unidentified.
That's a staggering amount.
These are the cases that were properly investigated, interviewed witnesses, radar tapes were looked at, and still no answers found.
Wait a minute.
Here, look.
Here it is.
At the end of the program, the unknowns drop.
They go from 32 to 19 to three and one.
I smell a rat.
They've cooked the books.
- They can't pull the plug on the program - Right.
if you've still got a high number of unknowns.
So they clearly pushed those cases out of the unidentified column and into the cases that are explained, at least publicly.
This is their way out.
Was Project Blue Book officially shut down because it had simply found no convincing evidence that UFOs were real? Or was it because the government had come to the opposite conclusion, that not only were they real but of extraterrestrial origin, a truth that could be so potentially disturbing, it needed to be covered up even deeper than before? As far as UFO researchers and ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, proof that the U.
S.
government has not only known about extraterrestrial activity on our planet, but has been systematically covering it up for decades, first came in the form of a single roll of 35-millimeter film, anonymously sent to a documentary filmmaker by the name of Jaime Shandera in 1984.
The film, when developed, showed images of an eight-page memo allegedly written in 1952 by the first director of the CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, to President-elect Dwight Eisenhower.
In it, Hillenkoetter informs Eisenhower of the existence of a top secret government think tank that was originally set up by President Harry S.
Truman in 1947.
It was referred to in the memo as MJ-12, initials which stood for a far more mysterious group of men known as the Majestic 12.
The authorization to establish MJ-12 allegedly came from President Harry Truman on September 24, 1947.
This was actually one day after the famous memo in which General Nathan Twining wrote a three-page letter about these flying saucers to another general, talking quite explicitly about their characteristics, the fact that this was real, not visionary or fictitious.
No one anywhere, outside of this group, is to know anything about UFOs, E.
T.
s, crash retrievals, bodies, any of it.
That document identified the 12 people who were MJ-1 through MJ-12.
The first one, MJ-1, was Admiral Hillenkoetter of the Navy.
There were four military people, there were four technical people, and then there were just general government people.
They were the kind of people you'd expect to have been involved in an important top secret program.
While the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents is still being debated, what is known is that, in 1954, Eisenhower thought enough of the UFO phenomenon to order that a new secret military base be set up.
Located 83 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, Area 51 would later become infamous as the most top secret military base in the world.
Area 51 is the secret base of all secret bases.
For a long time, it was the place that we went to to study foreign technology.
During the 1970s and '80s, T.
D.
Barnes worked at the secret base, reverse-engineering captured enemy aircraft, like Russian MiG jets.
What we considered reverse-engineering was was taking a plane or a radar, taking it apart, looking at the electronics, how they built it.
We were all bound by security oaths.
We could not talk.
But is it possible that, in addition to reverse-engineering foreign fighter jets, Area 51 employees were also working on other, out-of-this-world technologies? To my mind, it's also clear that the U.
S.
government has had crashed extraterrestrial technology, and Area 51 would have been the perfect place to reverse-engineer and test that particular information.
In order to insure that the activities at Area 51 and elsewhere were kept hidden from the public, members of the military, and even officers, were sworn to secrecy.
But luckily for UFO researchers and ancient astronaut theorists, not everyone involved was willing to keep quiet.
Some became whistleblowers, who risked everything from public scorn to imprisonment, in order to let the public learn the truth.
Washington state.
June 24, 1947.
Aviator and businessman Kenneth Arnold witnesses nine fast-moving objects flying in tandem near Mount Rainier.
He times them as they fly between two mountain peaks, and calculates their speed to be between 1,200 and 1,700 miles per hour, at least 600 miles per hour faster than the fastest aircraft in existence at the time.
Kenneth Arnold is the guy who actually is credited with coining the term "flying saucer," because what he saw were objects that were flying at some distance from his airplane that were sort of skipping and jumping and wobbling and doing very, very unusual high-speed maneuvers.
So that's where the term "flying saucer" came from.
Although the U.
S.
Air Force formally categorized Kenneth Arnold's experience as a mirage, other reported sightings were not so easily dismissed.
The public was starting to demand answers.
Once the initial sighting happened by Kenneth Arnold, and the Roswell incident took place, there were sightings everywhere around the United States.
They were happening all over the world.
In 1949, retired Marine Corps pilot-turned-writer Major Donald Keyhoe was asked by True magazine to write an article on these numerous sightings.
Although Keyhoe was a skeptic, he spent the next eight months conducting his own research by tapping into his contacts in the Pentagon and the military.
Eventually, he came to a conclusion he would have considered unthinkable: flying saucers were not only real, they were of extraterrestrial origin.
Major Keyhoe was one of the last real military voices, from the time of the Truman administration going into the Eisenhower administration, who was honestly trying to tell the truth.
Keyhoe's article in True magazine shook the nation.
It was not only a solid piece of journalism on the topic of UFOs, but served as a stinging indictment of the U.
S.
military and the government's determination to keep the public in the dark.
That True magazine, it was historic because it went to a heck of a lot of people.
Then, in 1958, Keyhoe went on a program called the Armstrong Circle Theatre, which was a live television program.
"The Enigma of the Skies" on the Armstrong Circle Theatre.
Major, you've seen our report on the Air Force conclusions dealing with the current UFO sightings.
Well, I was excited to hear that Keyhoe was going to debate the Air Force.
And now, Mr.
Edwards, I would like to make a disclosure, something which has never been revealed to the public.
Toward the end of the program, he broke in and said, to the effect, "I'm going to say something that the public has never heard before.
" If the hearings are held, open hearings, I feel it will prove beyond doubt that flying saucers At that point, his sound was lost.
What was Major Keyhoe saying, and who cut him off? Thank you, Major Keyhoe.
It was later discovered that Air Force officials had been stationed in the control booth during the broadcast.
And there are many who still believe that Keyhoe's audio was deliberately cut in order to keep him from revealing top secret information concerning the government's ongoing UFO investigations.
The Air Force was lying.
But why was the Air Force so concerned about the American public hearing Major Keyhoe's statement? What did they have to lose if they were forced to admit their ongoing investigations into UFOs? I wrote this down because I think it's one of the most important historic sentences, and it comes from Major Keyhoe.
"For the past 175 years" That would be 1772.
That would be before the founding of the United States.
"the planet Earth has been under systematic, "close-range examination by living observers from another planet.
" This is nothing new.
These cover-ups have happened for thousands and thousands of years.
Throughout ancient texts, there are references to what I call "misunderstood technology.
" In modern times, you'll hear stories of UFOs and spacecraft, because now we have the language to talk about technology.
Whereas in ancient times, they didn't have any reference to that kind of technology.
So they would have thought this is something that's angelic or from another dimension or god-like.
The fact that the U.
S.
government has investigated thousands and thousands of reports leads me to think that they may know much more than what they let us believe.
Proof of the U.
S.
government's complicity in covering up extraterrestrial activity does not only come in the form of leaked documents and the contents of secret files.
Sometimes the evidence comes from credible firsthand accounts, not from whistleblowers, but from American astronauts.
Everything that NASA does is supposedly aboveboard.
Everything they do, they should tell us about.
We should know about all of their launches and missions and who all the astronauts are.
They themselves are not sharing all of the information.
Most of it is being kept secret.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome.
April 12, 1961.
The Vostok-1 rocket achieves liftoff, and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is heralded as the first human in space.
The event serves as a wake-up call to the United States and NASA, whose Project Mercury program would, over the next two years, launch six of its own astronauts into space.
The Space Race To land a human being on the Moon was on, and mankind was now a space-faring species.
The achievement of putting a man in space was almost a miracle.
Nobody knows what they might see or encounter out there, extraterrestrial spacecraft or even E.
T.
s themselves.
Liftoff.
Although the first five Mercury missions go off without incident Liftoff 30 minutes after the hour.
during the sixth and final mission, astronaut Gordon Cooper reports an unusual encounter.
While aboard his spacecraft, he reports a green glowing object quickly approaching his capsule.
The UFO is also picked up by NASA's tracking station.
But by the time Cooper splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, reporters are told that any questions about the incident are strictly forbidden.
There's no question that NASA actually has protocols in place for how astronauts should deal with and report or not report anomalies.
Now, over the years, there have been astronauts that have kind of broken those protocols.
Gordon Cooper is one who talked a lot about a UFO sighting he had on a Mercury spacecraft.
And that upset quite a few people at NASA.
In June 1965, two years after Gordon Cooper's flight, Gemini 4 astronaut James McDivitt reports seeing a metallic object flying in orbit alongside his spacecraft.
And, once again, the event is quickly covered up.
There have been many stories over the years coming from astronauts of various missions, from Mercury missions, from the Apollo missions, and even from the Soviet missions to space, where astronauts have come out and said that they have seen these UFOs flying around, that they've been followed, that they've seen unconventional aircraft on some of their missions.
There's a story that Buzz Aldrin tells about Apollo 11, where the Apollo 11 spacecraft was followed for many, many hours by an object that was so strange that they actually reported on it through their private channels.
I'm looking out the window, and I see What's that? There's an object that's moving with respect to everything else.
Geez.
It's not supposed to be doing that.
Wonder how far away it is.
If it's a long ways away, it's going mighty fast.
If it's not too far away, it, uh, maybe isn't going very fast.
Wonder what it is.
"Hey, Neil.
Look at this.
" We look at it.
God, what is that? Probably the, uh, upper stage rocket.
Yeah, but didn't we just watch that thing carefully out in front of us, out the window, light its engine and go Well, I guess that's not what we're looking at, 'cause that's a long ways away.
What's the odds that it's some alien or Russian or something else? But we were not about to cancel the Moon mission and putt-putt over there to find out which one it was.
There's been many astronauts that have come forward that have talked about this, so it seems like some of them want to talk about it, and others are either afraid to talk about it, or they've been silenced for some reason.
One person involved with the early space program who did not remain silent was JoAnn Donaldson, a young biomedical engineer at NASA.
In 1972, during the Apollo 17 Moon mission, Donaldson's job was to monitor the astronauts' vital signs and to observe their pre-flight and post-flight recovery.
Ron Evans was in charge of the command module while Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were on the surface of the Moon.
When the command module would orbit the Moon, part of the orbit would take it behind the Moon, what we call "loss of signal" to Mission Control.
Day two, Ron came out from behind the Moon, reported in to Mission Control.
And Gene comes up on the comm link and says, "Hey, Ron, you're not lonely up there without us are you?" And Ron reported back, says, "Nope, I got company.
" Everybody was just kind of taken aback.
It was like, you know, "company"? That itself implies that there was something else up there with him.
Well, Mission Control's first reaction was, "Guys, are you joking?" And Ron says, "No, this is not a joke.
"There is an object flying in formation with me, up here, circling the Moon.
" When Ron reported that the object was leaving his orbit, he calculated that they had been in formation with him for approximately five to five-and-a-half orbits of the Moon.
As far as the public was concerned, nothing out of the ordinary happened.
At the exact moment that astronaut Ron Evans reported he was not alone, NASA officials disconnected the public feed for media outlets.
The following day, NASA ordered a conference call for everyone involved in the incident.
We were all told we're gonna continue on with the mission as if nothing has happened, and do not discuss this anomaly with anyone outside of your command.
After the Apollo 17 crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, JoAnn Donaldson examined Evans as part of the post-mission recovery procedure.
Ron was sitting up on the side of his bunk.
And he goes, "Well, I'm reliving" "what I saw while I was in orbit around the Moon.
"I don't think the Russians had launched "something this big in orbit.
"I estimate this thing was 40, 45 feet long.
It was cigar shaped.
" Now, any cylindrical object like that is not gonna be something that we made.
So what was it? Clearly it was not one of ours.
We trust these astronauts to report back on what they see.
They're essentially scientists that are exploring space on our behalf.
But a lot of people are unaware of the fact that many of our astronauts have spoken openly about UFOs.
Many of them were fighter pilots before they became astronauts, and they have seen craft flying as pilots.
Could it be that they've been pulled aside and told, "This is all you're allowed to say and no more," because NASA is trying to silence these astronauts from telling the truth? Another Apollo astronaut who openly admitted his belief in extraterrestrial contact was Edgar Mitchell, the lunar module pilot for Apollo 14.
In his later years, he claimed many of his colleagues had strange paranormal experiences during their missions, and frequently declared that most UFO phenomena are directly connected to extraterrestrial activity.
I have had no firsthand personal experience, but all the evidence from the research people that I know from both Europe and the United States have investigated all the sightings from dozens of years.
And it's pretty sure it's all true.
I believe that the alien craft, presuming they're reality I think they are, others think they are Have been coming for a long, long time.
As the sixth person to walk on the Moon, Mitchell's opinions concerning UFOs and their connection to extraterrestrial encounters have been difficult to dismiss.
But if otherworldly entities have been making contact with us Not only for decades but for centuries What is their goal? July 20, 1969.
Millions of people around the world are glued to their televisions to watch one of the greatest achievements in human history.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong is about to become the first Earth-born extraterrestrial by stepping foot on the surface of the Moon.
Although Richard Nixon is the current president of the United States, most give credit to the man who held the office six years earlier, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it.
He said, "Because it is there.
" Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it.
But even as Neil Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin were still engaged on their historic mission, Nixon and the team at NASA now faced an even more daunting challenge: What to do next? The Moon mission had gripped the American consciousness as nothing before, and even though a number of return missions had been planned, there was nothing on the launch pad that could top landing a man on the Moon as either a national goal or effective political propaganda.
To this end, in 1972, as Nixon began planning his reelection campaign, the space shuttle program was announced.
It was also during this same time that the president's chief of staff, H.
R.
Haldeman, proposed the creation of a documentary film that would depict Nixon as being fully committed to the development of a number of ambitious science-based programs.
To produce it, Haldeman turned to successful advertising executive-turned-filmmaker Robert Emenegger.
They knew that Bob had made promotional films for the Department of Defense.
So he was contacted and asked if he would come to a meeting in Los Angeles with the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
And they said, "We need a media consultant.
"We'd like somebody to come on board "and make a documentary that would support Nixon, "a documentary about some perhaps secret project "that the government's been working on that can be released or declassified.
" Well, they run around the country being shown all sorts of secret projects.
They went to Wright-Patterson, and they were shown very classified laser experiments.
They were shown dolphins being trained for demolition work.
They were shown dogs being trained for various tasks.
Then they were taken to Norton Air Force Base, which at that time housed the Air Force film depository.
Paul Shartle was the director of the depository.
They were taken into a building where these films were kept.
They were taken into what was known as a clean room, meaning it was free of any bugs, microphones, video equipment, anything.
It was during his meeting at Norton Air Force Base that Robert Emenegger learned that Paul Shartle had a different agenda from that of the president, and a different film in mind than the one that had been initially proposed.
Shartle said, "I'd like to ask you this: How would you like to make a documentary on UFOs?" And Bob Emenegger was stunned.
He told me at his home, he said, "I didn't know anything about UFOs.
" "I was shocked.
"They said if we would make the documentary, "we would be given 600 feet of 16-millimeter film shot at Holloman Air Force Base of a UFO landing there.
" For Robert Emenegger, it was an offer too good to refuse.
Believing he had the full support of both the president and the military, he set about to make the U.
S.
government's first official film on the subject of UFOs.
He quickly recruited Rod Serling, Burgess Meredith and José Ferrer to narrate the film, and the final explosive scene was to show actual footage of an alien encounter.
But when it came time to receive the incredible footage he'd been promised, Emenegger had the government's once-open door slammed in his face.
They had been promised really dramatic footage, said to be completely legit, of a UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base, in 1964, which had alien beings come out, like The Day the Earth Stood Still, essentially.
Out came some kind of a ramp.
Our contingent of humans walked up, met these two EBENs, "Extraterrestrial Biological Entities.
" And then in this doorway was a being unlike the EBENs, and that it was holding a rod that had a spiral that went around the rod, and that this was used to communicate with our team.
This was a film that had four different vantage points.
They were shooting one from the air, three on the ground.
And the craft landed, the aliens came out, and they stored the craft.
All this was on film.
But on the day Emenegger was to be given a copy of the 16-millimeter footage from the Air Force, the filmmaker received an unexpected phone call.
It is one of those like out of a Hollywood feature.
It's supposed to be coming.
A courier is on the way.
They cannot believe it.
It's really gonna happen.
They're gonna see all of this film.
And then another phone call: "We're sorry, the approval has been rescinded.
No film.
" Colonel Coleman from the Pentagon said, "The timing isn't right.
We can't allow you to use the film.
" Bob Emenegger was crushed.
He said, "Why?" And he found out that, "Making a documentary "exposing UFOs as being extraterrestrial would not help the president, but conceivably could harm him.
" Ultimately, Robert Emenegger was forced to complete his documentary without the sensational footage he had been promised.
It was a documentary called Past, Present, and Future.
And they also had a book by the same name.
As written by Robert Emenegger, and directed by Ray Rivas, the documentary proved to be both popular and influential.
Even without the smoking gun footage, it caused a sensation, and was later credited as one of the inspirations behind Steven Spielberg's 1977 blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The Robert Emenegger disclosure effort is what I call it.
I said, "You know, that film, Bob, that's very strange.
" "You know, if it weren't for the location, that's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
" And he said, "What, I didn't tell you?" And I said, "You didn't tell me what?" "I didn't tell you I gave a copy to Steven Spielberg?" And I said, "No, you didn't tell me that.
" So the documentary was done in 1975.
Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out in 1977.
And so, when you see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's the Holloman Air Force Base story, just changed the location.
It's exactly what the story was.
While the alleged alien UFO footage from Holloman Air Force Base has never surfaced, many ancient astronaut theorists believe it still exists, under lock and key.
What I am really truly expecting is that somewhere, from 2018, going forward in the next decade, that finally all of that film is going to be released, and that we will finally enter the true history.
Did the U.
S.
Air Force really have footage of secret meetings between government officials and extraterrestrials? And if so, where is it now? Coming up For decades, American presidents have officially denied that they have received any information that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth.
But considering that the U.
S.
government has conducted at least four major investigations into UFO activity since the 1940s, why has there been so much time and taxpayer money devoted to studying something that the government claims isn't happening? We don't know for an absolute fact what kind of briefings presidents actually receive, when they come into office, about extraterrestrials.
But we do have some indications from some documents that do exist, one of them being the original MJ-12 presidential briefing for President Eisenhower, telling him all about the crash at Roswell.
On November 2, 2005, a document surfaced that was allegedly a transcript made from a recorded presidential briefing held at Camp David in March of 1981.
Present were President Ronald Reagan, CIA director William Casey, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and a mysterious person known only as "The Caretaker.
" According to the document, during the meeting, The Caretaker shared evidence that aliens have been visiting the Earth for thousands of years, and that modern American records of such encounters officially began in 1947, following the Roswell incident.
Certainly, if you look at Ronald Reagan, he's somebody who brought up aliens all the time.
To my mind, what Reagan is communicating is, "Yes, Roswell happened.
Yes, it is significant.
"Yes, there are aliens.
"And we'd better get used to this idea or figure out how to deal with them.
" I, William Jefferson Clinton But it was with the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in January 1993 that many UFO researchers believed they finally had an ally in the White House.
If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know.
So, when Bill Clinton gets into office, he called in his presidential aide Webb Hubbell, and the first two things that he asked for after he was president was who killed JFK and are there aliens.
Clinton knew that there was something up about aliens and UFOs that people were not being told.
In his quest to shed light on the government's secret UFO investigations, President Clinton found an unlikely ally in billionaire philanthropist Laurance S.
Rockefeller, who used his influence to push full disclosure about possible extraterrestrial activities on Earth.
The way it started was Laurance Rockefeller, who was one of the famous Rockefeller brothers, had been shown a documentary on Roswell and was very interested.
So, the election was going on at the time, and he said, "Whether Ross Perot wins or George Bush wins" "or Bill Clinton wins, I'm going to the White House and I'm going to get them to disclose the UFO story.
" In 1993, Laurance Rockefeller began inviting a select group of UFO researchers and ancient astronaut theorists to join him for an important first meeting of what would become known as the Rockefeller Initiative.
In 1993, I got a phone call saying, "Linda, we'd like you to join "a group of your peers at Laurance Rockefeller's ranch at Jackson Hole.
" So, we met.
There were people like Robert Bigelow, now the head of Bigelow Aerospace.
And there were others that were authors and scientists.
One of the people who helped edit the letter on UFO disclosure to the president of the United States was Hillary Clinton.
She was the first lady at the time.
Another person close to Bill Clinton who was an advocate for government investigation of UFOs was John Podesta, who served as the president's assistant in 1993 and became his deputy chief of staff in 1997.
I've had a long career, trying to fight against government secrecy and create more openness.
Right after I left law school, I started working on that at the Department of Justice, then at the Senate Judiciary Committee.
And then when I worked for President Clinton in the White House, I was one of the people spearheading an initiative, to declassify what turned out to be over a billion pages of documents that were resident at the National Archives.
In President Clinton's case, I think he was interested in the phenomena.
He had worked with his then science advisor Jack Gibbons to understand what was going on.
This correspondence starts going back and forth for three years.
Rockefeller is putting immense pressure on the White House to disclose.
Laurance Rockefeller requested that the 1947 Roswell incident be a starting point in the government's disclosure.
They went out and they reinvestigated Roswell.
It came back, and Bill Clinton saw the final report in 1995.
President Clinton's one of the most curious people I've ever met.
I think he wanted to know what the Air Force knew, and got a report back that, in my view, was a little bit unsatisfying.
He was furious, from what I was told.
The Rockefeller Initiative was hoping for a revelation, but the U.
S.
Air Force stuck to its position that a crashed weather balloon caused the Roswell incident.
Clinton goes to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in November of 1995.
He's lighting the Christmas tree, and that's when he gives the famous speech.
He said he gets a letter from Ryan, which I tried to recover in an FOIA.
There is no letter to Ryan.
I think they just made it up.
He said, "Ryan, if you're out there in the audience tonight", here's the answer to your question.
" No.
As far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico.
And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know.
That's why in 1997 the U.
S.
Air Force goes out and does a second Roswell report, spends $20 million on it, because the president was furious.
According to the revised report, the so-called alien bodies that eyewitnesses claimed they saw being pulled from the wreckage were dismissed as being nothing more than crash test dummies which had been tethered to parachutes being used in an otherwise conventional test.
Dr.
Gibbons pressed first the Secretary of Defense Les Aspen, and then the Secretary of the Air Force, to take this matter seriously, to do a review.
The boxes were missing.
The documents were gone.
Nobody knew anything.
And, you know, the the trail kind of went cold.
In 1996, the Rockefeller Initiative was quietly closed, and its participants Frustrated that forces within the government still refused to reveal the truth Went away without the answers they'd hoped for.
The Rockefeller Initiative is considered by some researchers to be the biggest government UFO disclosure story of all times.
The fact that it even existed, that it was sanctioned in any way by the government, that the report was accepted by the White House and people in the government, I think is very, very highly significant.
So it's kind of a very small incremental step forward in the process of disclosure and moving us towards the ultimate answers to the questions that we're all asking.
Washington, D.
C.
July 1996.
Political activist Stephen Bassett becomes the first registered extraterrestrial life and disclosure lobbyist in the United States.
For years, he had been trying to organize a hearing with members of Congress to present evidence that the government was hiding important information from its people.
The extraterrestrial presence, if formally acknowledged, could bring in an age of reform, where the human race could get its act together, because we're running out of time.
As I got into the issue, what I learned is just how dysfunctional the United States government had become.
It is the vast expanse of secrecy and abuse of secrecy in power that is lying at the base of a great deal of our problems.
And so I had one simple fundamental task: formal acknowledgment of the extraterrestrial presence, simple, clean and easy.
Gentlemen, if you could stand and repeat after me? On April 29, 2013, Bassett organized the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington, D.
C.
The objective was to bring together the most compelling evidence of extraterrestrial visits to Earth and convince former members of Congress to take immediate action.
I had wanted to do it since 2001 Bring in 42 witnesses, from ten countries, to testify in the main ballroom of the National Press Club, before six former members of the Congress, five congresspersons, one senator.
And they testified for 30 hours over five days.
It was an amazing event, mostly because of the caliber of witnesses that were brought in, the investigators, researchers.
They don't want you to know that.
Witnesses included John Callahan, former division chief of the Accidents and Investigations Branch of the FAA, the former Canadian Minister of Defence, Paul Hellyer, retired Air Force captain Robert Salas, and many others who had conducted extensive research into the UFO phenomenon.
We live in a cosmos teeming with life.
The fact that some other civilizations are more advanced than we are may be humbling, but that could be a necessary step in our survival.
People are so afraid for their lives, their families, because they have had to sign nondisclosure agreements.
Witness from the U.
K.
, Nick Pope.
Thank you.
Um, you should all have a printed-out copy of my opening statement.
I was one of the witnesses, and I have to say, this was the nearest that we've gotten since, oh, way back to the '70s and the '60s, even, to proper congressional hearings on the UFO mystery.
You did work for the Ministry of Defence in the U.
K.
? That's correct, sir, yes.
I was asked about my experience within the British government's UFO program, and one of the U.
K.
's most high-profile cases, the Rendlesham Forest incident.
In December 1980, there were unexplained reports of a glowing craft in the woods of Royal Air Force Base, Woodbridge.
Burn marks and broken branches were later discovered.
Some have called this incident "Britain's Roswell.
" Even though I've left government, I responded with, "I can neither confirm nor deny.
" I don't think the committee liked my "neither confirm nor deny" response, and they pushed me very hard on that.
Certainly, you've been involved since you left.
Yes, sir, in a private capacity.
What's your opinion, based on all that stuff that you've had access to? Is there an E.
T.
origin to what's obvious sightings of real UFOs? It is a a possibility.
You could tell by the faces, they really weren't quite sure what to think of this yet.
By Wednesday, we have them, you know, standing up, pointing fingers, saying, "We need to open those files.
" It drove things forward.
It took the UFO phenomenon out of the fringe and into the mainstream.
Thousands of people watched it online.
We netcast it so that members of Congress and their staff who were too timid to come down and watch it there, or members of the press that were afraid that they might be seen watching it, could watch it in the comfort of their offices.
Sometime this year, we may just enter a new world.
Thank you so much.
Based on the hearings, four of the six former members of Congress pledged their support to hold a world conference, in conjunction with the United Nations, to address the disclosure of all knowledge of extraterrestrial contact with this planet.
Then, on August 15, 2013, less than four months after the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, the United States government made a shocking admission.
After decades of denying its existence, they finally admitted that a secret base known as Area 51 did exist.
Did the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure force the U.
S.
government to act? While the government acknowledged the existence of Area 51, it still has not been revealed just what it is currently being used for.
And since that disclosure, the perimeter around the base has been extended and security heightened.
Area 51 has to be more secretive now, because you got so many other concerns.
We didn't have computers to worry about, Internet, all that sort of thing that you've got today.
So it's a brand-new ball game as far as security.
While many considered the government's admission of the existence of Area 51 to be a bombshell, an even bigger disclosure was still to come: the declassification of millions of top secret CIA documents.
Bethesda, Maryland.
November 2014.
Stephen Bassett, executive director of the Paradigm Research Group, launches an initiative directed to influence Hillary Clinton.
Based on Clinton's work with Laurance Rockefeller in the 1990s, Bassett believes she could be an ally in getting the government to declassify its UFO files.
That political initiative was begun by sending a full copy of the 30 hours of testimony to every member of Congress, addressing the Rockefeller Initiative, naming names Secretary Clinton, President Clinton, John Podesta, George Stephanopoulos, et cetera, et cetera.
That testimony created a very significant dilemma for the Clinton campaign team.
The political initiative forces the Clinton campaign team, which included Barack Obama He was on the team To speak to the issue.
Are we ready to go win an election in November? Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, is well known for his interest in UFO and extraterrestrial encounters, and according to him, so is she.
Secretary Clinton, likewise, was also kind of interested in the topic, and during the course of the campaign said that, if elected, she would have ordered a more thorough declassification review.
She was very open.
She did not skirt the issue.
She talked about it very openly.
Many believe that had Clinton won, there would have been a seismic shift from the government's long-held policy of secrecy concerning UFO investigations to a new policy of full disclosure.
The system of regulation that creates our secrecy system what's top secret, what's confidential, these lower levels of classification That's regulated and has been since the Truman administration by executive order of the president.
The president sets forward the general rules of classification.
And some presidents have been more forthcoming, wanted less secrecy.
Some have tightened the reins and wanted more secrecy.
It makes a difference.
The CIA and the Pentagon They were worried about Hillary Clinton, Secretary Clinton, all the statements she was making, winning the presidency, and going to the Pentagon and basically saying, "You are going to give me the information I need "to disclose the extraterrestrial presence, or I'm gonna fire every single one of you.
" As this year of 2016 went forward, we all expected that this headline that we've been waiting for that is going to break the protocol, break the policy of denial, was going to happen.
John Podesta was trying to get ready to open up that we're not alone in the universe.
All of that crashed when a different person became President of the United States.
November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected as America's next president.
There would be no disclosure of the secret UFO files.
I've had a number of members of Congress, members of the U.
S.
Senate say to me, "Keep going at this.
" I'm really interested in it, but I can't say anything about it.
" But as a longtime advisor to President Barack Obama, John Podesta still had an ally in the White House, one who would remain there for another two months.
January 17, 2017.
In Barack Obama's last days as president, the CIA posts on its website nearly 13 million pages of agency documents, many of which pertain to UFOs.
It was a very, very big deal, and people were excited.
All of these things were efforts, I believe, to educate people and to move us in a direction that we can accept, as a society, that extraterrestrials are here and have been here for thousands of years.
Investigator Chase Kloetzke and author Nick Pope have been searching for proof that the U.
S.
government has been hiding its interactions with extraterrestrials.
Now they hope to find new evidence among the millions of recently declassified pages.
Well, there's such a lot to go through.
Exactly.
It comes back to the old saying, the best place to hide a book is in a library.
And there are all sorts of gems in here, I'm sure, but, um, how would we ever know? We've got to go through it literally page by page, - line by line.
- Right.
So we're taking a look at this report.
December 1960.
This has come from Detroit, and it's a sighting of unidentified objects in the sky.
"Like a disc," it says, which again, is something I'm sure you've come across in-in various reports, as have I.
Yes, many.
And yet, it has these redactions on it.
And again, the question arises: Why? If this subject is so unclassified and unimportant, why all these redactions? - And this next document.
- Oh, wow.
That's crazy.
Right? Why even bother? Only information is the date.
13 million documents.
If there really was a smoking gun in there, it would be almost impossible to find.
So far, the CIA archive has revealed thousands of reports of sightings of unexplained aircraft.
One report said that, of 1,500 official accounts of UFOs since 1947, an incredible 20% remain unexplained.
But was the release of the CIA online archive another step towards disclosure or a way to bury the truth? When the Pentagon's classified study into UFOs The Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program Was uncovered later in 2017, journalists and researchers rushed to file Freedom of Information Act requests.
Will these files finally explain what the government knows? 11 months after the CIA's archive is released to the public in 2017, The New York Times story reveals the Department of Defense's or Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
As soon as the story breaks, journalists and researchers start filing Freedom of Information Act requests, known as FOIA.
There have now been 1,500 to 2,000 FOIAs on this program $22 million program And the government at this point is saying, "Program? What program?" They're playing the same old game.
"We didn't release those films.
" But they're under so much pressure.
If this keeps up for even four, five or six more months, I do not imagine how disclosure can not take place.
Much of what was undertaken and reviewed still remains in the dark, in classified form at the Department of Defense.
I would hope that they would declassify it and release as much as possible.
- Good afternoon.
- Good afternoon.
When this story broke in The New York Times - Jordan.
- guy by the name of Jordan Fabian from The Hill he asks Sarah Sanders the $64,000 question.
Does the president believe in the existence of UFOs, and would he be interested in restoring funding for that program? Somehow that question hasn't come up in our back and forth over the last couple days, but I will, uh, check into that and be happy to circle back.
Jennifer? As far as I know, she has never come back around, because you can't.
The president has to stay out of it.
They want the community to force the issue.
They want us to force the issue.
And that is why they moved it to Bob Bigelow, who's a contractor in Las Vegas.
It's private industry that will do the disclosure.
History is about to happen at a level that's almost incalculable, extraordinary, unprecedented.
It makes something like the Roman Empire look trivial.
So, just think about that.
The announcement of the extraterrestrial presence, worldwide engagement, open contacts with multiple civilizations.
The revelations about AATIP may be clues that there's an agenda here.
This may be government trying to slowly drip-feed this information out to the public in such a way that there won't be out-and-out panic.
It may be a way of slowly but surely acclimatizing people to the reality of this phenomenon.
The fact that The New York Times published a Pentagon story is extraordinary.
And nobody really cared, so, to me, that means that while we are all talking about that we may be connected to extraterrestrials, that this knowledge is within us.
It's hardwired, so that, hey, if they're coming, it won't be panic because we come from them.
I do think that the world is ready for this knowledge, and I think that it would be the most revolutionary story in the history of mankind.
Has the time finally come when not only the United States government but nations around the world will reveal what UFO researchers and ancient astronaut theorists have long suspected: that extraterrestrial visitation of our planet is not only real, but has been happening for thousands of years? There are many who believe the answer is a profound yes, and that the truth will lead to a greater understanding not only of mankind's past, but of its future, a future that will see humans as the torchbearers of a new generation, and as the extraterrestrial visitors of planets and galaxies far beyond our own.