Ancient Aliens s16e09 Episode Script
The UFO Pioneers
1
NARRATOR: A housewife
who convinced millions
to share their sightings.
LINDA MOULTON HOWE: Coral Lorenzen is one of the earliest people who said there is something serious about these objects in the sky.
NARRATOR: A scientist who uncovered shocking new evidence about a crashed UFO.
RICHARD DOLAN: Stanton Friedman, more than any one other person, opened up Roswell for the rest of the world.
NARRATOR: An astronomer who documented close encounters for the U.
S.
military.
PAUL HYNEK: My father really was convinced that there was just something that was too legitimate to ignore.
NARRATOR: Ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos, author David Childress, and former British Ministry of Defence officer Nick Pope, have come together to examine the groundbreaking work of pioneering researchers, investigators, and whistleblowers who dared to challenge the scientific establishment and changed the world.
POPE: Without Jacques Vallée, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.
NARRATOR: But does the final chapter of their story remain to be written? Will it soon be revealed, once and for all, that Earth is being visited by extraterrestrials? You have to wonder where does this all lead and will we soon come closer to the truth? NARRATOR: There is a doorway in the universe beyond it is the promise of truth.
It demands we question everything we have ever been taught.
The evidence is all around us.
The future is right before our eyes.
We are not alone.
We have never been alone.
I'm excited to be here with you guys talking about the modern UFO phenomenon.
The paradigm has certainly shifted because 20 years ago it was always deny, deny, deny.
So, you know, I think that we are living in incredibly exciting times.
We are.
Absolutely.
And this, of course, is part of a wider interconnected story.
Revelation after revelation from the government itself.
I also would offer that Ancient Aliens has contributed to this paradigm shift where people are now comfortable in telling their stories, their experiences that they've had.
The so-called zeitgeist has changed in our favor.
And I really think that with whatever is going on in the modern UFO phenomenon is directly connected to ancient times.
Well, the UFO phenomenon has been going on for thousands of years with historical texts talking about UFOs.
Even in the Middle Ages you find stories that were printed in what they used to call broad sheets of UFOs, like, for example, in Nuremberg or in Basel.
And they actually have reproductions of what they saw up in the skies.
Clearly, they did not have photographs back then but they had drawings.
And the way these things are being reported today is because we have the technology.
NARRATOR: People have reported strange sightings in the sky since the earliest recorded history.
For thousands of years, such encounters were conveyed through oral traditions, texts and artwork.
But then, in 1839, French artist Louis Daguerre provided humankind with a powerful new technology: the daguerreotype.
It was the first publicly available photographic process, and suddenly people were able to share the exact images they saw with their own eyes.
Just three decades later, the world got its first alleged UFO photo.
The very first photo that we have of a UFO is of a-a huge cylindrical craft over Mount Washington in New Hampshire taken in 1870 right at the very beginning of photography.
DOLAN: You see this cloud formation up at Mount Washington and you see this very obvious cigar-shaped object.
Of course, many UFO reports described cigar-shaped objects.
Is the photograph authentic? And turns out it is.
NARRATOR: As technology evolved over the late 1800s and early 1900s, so did humankind's understanding of many long-held assumptions.
Instead of linking strange events in the sky with the divine, a few inquisitive minds proposed a profound new explanation.
That intelligent beings from other planets, who possess technology far beyond our own, were visiting our world.
One of the first to investigate this possibility was an American writer and researcher named Charles Fort.
MITCH HOROWITZ: People have written about strange lights in the sky before.
But Fort was probably the first person in modern life who assembled the stories into his books in a systematic way.
Fort saw it as his job to poke holes in the straight story of science as it was developing at that time, and it demonstrated that there was a whole world of strange unexplained persistent phenomena.
NARRATOR: In 1919, Fort published his landmark collection of anomalous incidents and strange sightings.
He called it The Book of the Damned.
DOLAN: Now what he meant by that is all of the data that he incorporated and put into that book was damned by the scientific world of-of his time.
That's the whole point.
This was data that no one would look at.
NARRATOR: Today the term "Fortean" continues to be used to describe events that cannot be explained by conventional science.
But it would take 25 years and a world war for researchers to examine Fort's accounts more closely.
So a lot of the modern UFO phenomenon really started during the second World War.
We had a couple of-of things, aspects to this.
The Battle of Los Angeles an amazing event where upwards of 1,400, uh, anti-aircraft shells were fired into the air at something that had been hovering over Los Angeles.
And there's a photo as well.
There's a classic photo - CHILDRESS: It was on the front page of the L.
A.
Times.
- POPE: Yeah.
Then you have these pilots who see strange balls of light called foo fighters, and I couldn't talk about UFOs without, of course, mentioning one word: - Roswell.
- Mm-hmm.
POPE: The military issues a press release which says we've recovered a flying disc.
So you have these events coming thick and fast, but who's collating it all? We should never forget that, uh, maybe we have it easy now.
We have this vast body of work that we can build on, and one of the great pioneers of this subject, who did so much to bring it into the mainstream, was Coral Lorenzen.
NARRATOR: By the 1950s, thousands of UFO sightings were being reported around the country.
But while most dismissed these accounts as little more than curiosity, one woman in Arizona took them seriously: a 35-year-old housewife named Coral Lorenzen.
When Coral Lorenzen was nine years old, she had her first UFO sighting in a playground with two friends.
She stated that the craft reminded her of a parachute without strings.
After her experiences, what she wanted to do was kind of nail this down on a scientific basis not just woo-woo stuff.
NARRATOR: Working out of their home, Coral and her husband Jim founded the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, or APRO, the world's first public investigation of UFOs.
Using little more than her wits and a telephone, Coral collected thousands of unpublished reports from witnesses around the country.
To rule out planes and unusual weather as the cause of the sightings, Coral judiciously cross-referenced these accounts by contacting local airfields and military bases.
BILL BIRNES: What she was able to do was show there were commonalities among UFO sightings, there were things that UFOs did and that observers saw that stretched across different cultures and different parts of the United States.
NARRATOR: Eventually, Coral's organization grew to have thousands of members and collected reports from around the world.
MARDEN: The organization started out small, but as its reputation grew, she was able to attract many scientists and also people in the Air Force from other countries.
NARRATOR: Considered one of the best civilian research groups of its time, Coral Lorenzen oversaw the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization for more than three decades until her death in 1988.
She set up this group with thousands of members, and she was really pulling all this together.
They had representatives in different states in the U.
S.
, in different countries, too.
Of course, APRO as a group, uh, wound up in 1988, I think it was, but, of course, MUFON the Mutual UFO Network is a spin off of APRO.
So she was really cataloging a wide variety of UFO activity all over the world.
What was the reaction back then when she would call the Air Force bases? Would they readily talk to her or would they stonewall her? She hit some brick walls, and people were probably saying in the military, "Who the heck is this?" But she was tenacious.
She was look.
Here's this woman blazing this trail.
Starting almost this whole field of study which-which we now see today.
Nick, can you tell us about your work at the British Ministry of Defence? Sure.
I worked there for 21 years.
And from 1991 through to 1994, I ran their small UFO program.
My job was to research and investigate the phenomenon, to determine whether there was anything of any defense significance, uh, any threat, anything of more general scientific interest.
Were you the first person to have that position or was there somebody before you? Oh, many, many people before me.
Uh, we-we had been looking at this, um, on an ad hoc basis since the second World War, And what were some of the challenges that you were faced with in order to determine what was a valid sighting? I mean, was there a certain protocol to the work you did? Well, there were many challenges, but the-the protocols were actually quite set.
We had a standard methodology very closely modeled on the United States methodologies developed, in part, by Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek.
NARRATOR: In 1948, Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek was working as the professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio State University when he received an unusual job offer.
The U.
S.
Air Force approached him to investigate UFO sightings.
Reluctantly, he joined the special operation which would become known as Project Blue Book.
At the beginning, I think my father thought this would be a few weekends' worth of work just to pooh-pooh some flying saucer reports from, you know, Mrs.
Jones out in Poughkeepsie.
NARRATOR: Despite his skepticism, Dr.
Hynek approached the assignment with an open mind.
As part of his investigations, he pioneered new ways of studying aerial phenomena.
Rather than combing through reports, Dr.
Hynek personally investigated sightings and interviewed eyewitnesses across the country.
Based on his research, he developed a new system to categorize UFO sightings.
He came up with a classification system of close encounters of the first, second and third kind.
A close encounter of the first kind is when you see an object within, say, 500 feet.
A close encounter of the second kind is when there's some kind of physical trace, maybe some irradiated dirt.
A close encounter of the third kind is where you actually have contact with some type of entity.
NARRATOR: Dr.
Hynek's meticulous application of the scientific method in his investigations enabled him to dismiss many alleged sightings as aircraft, meteors or even stars.
But, curiously, of the more than 12,000 UFO sightings Dr.
Hynek's office investigated, 701 remained categorized as "unidentified.
" HYNEK: What my father was fascinated by were this irreducible core of five percent of cases that could not be explained.
There was just something that was too legitimate to ignore.
For many, many years, Hynek really just played the Air Force's party line on UFOs.
But, finally, as you're really getting into the 1960s, 1966 and '67, Hynek makes his public position clear that this is a serious phenomenon.
HYNEK: That set up a really difficult tension because the Air Force was getting more sort of stonewalling in their attitude, and my father really was convinced that there was a phenomena, but really wanted the word to get out.
NARRATOR: But rather than expand the investigation, in 1969, the Air Force abruptly shut down Project Blue Book.
In the years that followed, Hynek became an outspoken supporter of UFO research, publishing numerous books on the subject until his death in 1986.
Hynek became increasingly disillusioned with the Air Force policy on this, and, yes, he was frustrated.
These people have no interest in going public - and saying there might be extraterrestrials.
- CHILDRESS: Right.
And he's privy, as you were, to classified documents and, you know, you have to have a security clearance.
He must have had that, too.
So there were things that he could not talk about.
- Wouldn't you think? - I'm sure that's the case.
He was someone on the inside, and he probably had a deeper understanding of this phenomenon than almost anyone else involved at the time.
And, uh, Jacques Vallée is another fascinating character, a colleague, of course, of Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek and two of the early, uh, giants in this field.
Without Jacques Vallée, Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek, we probably wouldn't be sitting around this table - having this discussion.
- Right.
Jacques Vallée went back into folklore.
He was one of the first to see and certainly the first to popularize that-that parallel between these folkloric accounts and the more modern accounts of UFOs and, specifically, alien abduction.
Half of my family comes from Austria and there are many folkloric tales of fairy folk, where a shepherd either disappears or a shepherd goes to sleep and doesn't wake up for a week even though, in his mind, only two hours have elapsed.
So I think it's wonderful that Vallée looked at those stories and put them into the context of potential extraterrestrial encounters.
Jacques is probably our greatest living scientist and scholar of UFO studies.
He wrote one of the most influential books that figures into the UFO field, which is called Passport to Magonia, where he ventured the theory that folklore all throughout the ages, matches up extraordinarily well with contemporary UFO accounts.
NARRATOR: In 1961, Dr.
Jacques Vallée was working as an astronomer with the French Space Committee when he noticed a mysterious object orbiting the Earth.
This event sparked a lifelong-interest in the UFO phenomenon which he continues to investigate more than six decades later.
Vallée started out in the mid-1960s, working closely with Allen Hynek, doing what you might call standard UFO analysis back then, looking at various sightings.
NARRATOR: While working with Hynek, Vallée boldly proposed a profound new theory to explain UFO sightings and other paranormal experiences.
He argued that many UFOs seem to be manipulating the space-time continuum and suggested they may not have come from another planet but from another dimension.
Dr.
Jacques Vallée was years ahead of his time.
When everyone else was looking at the nuts and bolts of UFOs and their occupants, Jacques Vallée was interested in the interdimensional phenomena related to UFO reports.
HYNEK: Jacques really helped the field accept the idea of truly exotic solutions.
Once you really dig into the UFO phenomena, it's very hard to find one solution that fits all of the cases that have been reported.
J.
Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée, were pioneers in this field and, interesting piece of film trivia, the classic sci-fi movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's an homage to J.
Allen Hynek and Spielberg gave him a little cameo in the movie.
In that wonderful scene where the mothership comes down at the end, he's the guy with the pipe.
CHILDRESS: And, actually, Jacques Vallée is depicted in that movie, too, in a sense.
Isn't he the-the French UFO expert in the movie who then uses music and tones to communicate - with the extraterrestrials? - POPE: Yes, indeed.
And a lot of people don't know this, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's based on the story of one of the great pioneers in this field.
Another pioneer in this field was Robert Emenegger who wrote the book UFOs: Past, Present & Future.
Well, there's a fascinating story about him.
He was basically promised that he would get film footage of a UFO landing at an Air Force Base.
Really? NARRATOR: In 1972, filmmaker Robert Emenegger was hired by President Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.
R.
Haldeman, to produce a documentary film.
The Committee to Re-elect the President wanted to make a scientific documentary that would support Nixon.
A documentary about some secret project that the government's been working on that can be declassified.
NARRATOR: But as soon as Emenegger started on the project, it took an unexpected turn.
HOLCOMBE: Bob Emenegger was asked, "How would you like to make a documentary on UFOs?" And Bob Emenegger was stunned.
He told me at his home, "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.
So Emenegger agreed to do it.
NARRATOR: Emenegger set about producing a documentary that would present the public with authentic footage of a UFO.
But when it came time to receive the sensational materials he'd been promised, the government had a change of heart.
HOLCOMBE: Their White House contact said, "Bob, I hate to tell you, but the film has been withdrawn.
" Bob Emenegger was crushed.
He said, "Why? With everything we've done, with everything that's in place, why would you do this?" And he said, "Watergate.
" GRANT CAMERON: They said, "We can't allow you to use the film.
"You have to do your own version of it.
"Something that might've happened in the past may happen in the future.
" So they did that.
It was a documentary called UFOs: Past, Present & Future.
And they also had a book by the same name.
NARRATOR: Even without the military's footage, the 1974 release of Emenegger's documentary caused a stir among the UFO community.
And many believe the alleged encounter at Holloman Air Force Base influenced a much more famous film.
The documentary is done in 1975.
Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out in 1977.
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.
NARRATOR: On December 14, 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind opens in wide release across America, grossing over $10 million its first week.
But could it have been based on an actual event? This is a fascinating story of a UFO landing at an Air Force base.
And, look, the military themselves maybe can't just come out and say this because, uh, implicit in that admission would be an admission that they lied about this for decades.
But I think, also, that we can handle this, this truth.
A long time ago, people would say, "Well, how do you deal with the skeptics?" One of the pioneers who, unfortunately, is no longer with us 'cause he passed away only a few years ago, is Dr.
Stanton Friedman the nuclear physicist.
POPE: Stanton Friedman was an absolute powerhouse in this field.
Over the course of that career, he gave, I-I goodness, I don't have a figure.
I-it's hundreds I think it's thousands of individual presentations at schools, colleges, um, a-all sorts of different places, and he was a-a crusader, an evangelist for this subject, and I-I couldn't talk about Stanton without, of course, mentioning Roswell.
NARRATOR: As interest in the UFO phenomenon grew, some of the nation's top scientists began their own investigations, including nuclear physicist Dr.
Stanton Friedman.
One of Dr.
Friedman's most significant contributions to the study of UFOs was his research into an incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 when a flying saucer allegedly crashed and was swiftly covered up by the U.
S.
military.
Stanton Friedman's the man who interviewed Jesse Marcel Sr.
who was the most important of the Roswell witnesses.
NARRATOR: Major Jesse Marcel was the head intelligence officer at Roswell Army Airfield.
He and Brigadier General Roger Ramey, head of the Eighth Air Force, were the officers tasked with transporting the debris recovered from the Roswell crash site to Fort Worth, Texas to present to the media.
In his interview with Stanton Friedman, Major Marcel made a shocking admission.
He claimed that General Ramey replaced the real Roswell debris.
BIRNES: Major Marcel explained how they swapped the Roswell debris with radar material from a radar balloon.
And he had to swear that's what he saw.
So the point is that Stanton unearthed a lot of this material and was the first person to make it public.
NARRATOR: Stanton alleged that the military was engaged in a widespread cover up of the existence of extraterrestrial life, a scandal so big he called it the "cosmic Watergate.
" If you pick up a UFO book written in the '50s and if it's got an index, and you think, "Oh, I'll look up Roswell," you won't find it.
It's not there.
The rediscovery of Roswell is really credited - to Stanton Friedman.
- Interesting.
You know, we've actually been working all these years with one of the earliest modern UFO researchers and pioneers that exist.
She's a specialist in cattle mutilations.
She's a specialist in UFOs and Roswell, our own Linda Moulton Howe.
NARRATOR: For more than four decades, investigative reporter Linda Moulton Howe has been researching a potential extraterrestrial presence on Earth.
She has received numerous awards for journalistic excellence including an Emmy for her 1980 documentary on cattle mutilations titled, A Strange Harvest.
Today she is the reporter and editor of the website Earthfiles.
com, which contains an archive of nearly 3,000 in-depth UFO reports.
She's actually waiting to speak with us with a video call.
TSOUKALOS: Hi, Linda.
Good to see you.
Hi, guys.
It's great to see you.
So tell us, please, what got you started in this field? I am a professional TV producer and an investigative reporter.
In September of 1979, I was director of special projects at the CBS station in Denver, Colorado.
And late in that summer, there were headlines in The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News about bloodless, trackless animal mutilations in Colorado and surrounding states.
I wanted to find out what did this mean, "a bloodless, trackless animal mutilation"? This gets me involved, and we do this for my film A Strange Harvest.
There was a classic pattern from case to case to case where these animals have the same tissue taken: ear, eye, tongue, jaw, genitals and rectum.
And those were excisions that really baffled the sheriffs and the veterinarians because the bone where the cut was made glistened like somebody had melted and then polished.
Right.
This would imply some type of external technology.
POPE: I'm wondering in your research with the hundreds of people you've spoken to, not just the ranchers, but fellow journalists, broadcasters, the veterinarians, what is your bottom line conclusions? Who's doing this and why? Well, Nick, there is no evidence beyond the bodies of these animals.
But one of the ranchers told me that one night he saw a round, glowing disc is all he could see put a beam right down into one of his pastures where they had been having mutilations around in a large area.
And in that beam of light, he saw one of his animals.
The sheriff told me this himself.
He said, "I know that the perpetrators "of these bloodless animal mutilations are creatures from outer space.
" And I felt like I had been hit with an electrical shock.
NARRATOR: Creatures from outer space? Could extraterrestrials be responsible for the bizarre animal mutilations that have been reported by ranchers all over the country? But, if so, to what end? HOWE: I have literally interviewed thousands now.
You hear, "I saw this kind of light.
" "I saw this beam lowering an animal to the pasture, and it was mutilated.
" Somebody else saw this animal coming up in a beam of light, and later it was found mutilated.
And what people were describing in the 20th century are what people were describing in the third century or 500 BC or going back in time.
And it's not just the United States.
It's Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, all of Western Europe and going into Eastern Europe.
NARRATOR: According to the FBI, thousands of cattle mutilations have been reported across the U.
S.
since the 1970s.
Linda's pioneering investigations forced those who study the UFO phenomenon to consider a chilling proposition: that extraterrestrial beings aren't just here to observe us.
They may have an agenda for our planet.
HOWE: I think it's important to get across that there are real people who have been afraid to come forward and describe what they actually saw with their own eyes because they didn't have video proof and they don't want to be criticized.
TSOUKALOS: Well, Linda, this has been absolutely invaluable, and we are all so lucky to have you on board with us.
So we thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, Giorgio.
- That was incredible.
- Wow.
That was pretty interesting.
She was like the first dogged reporter, investigative reporter, you know, phoning up people, going to those sites, interviewing people.
Yeah, it-it brings it home that these UFOs have real tangible, physical effects and that means it's not just imagination.
It's real.
By the way, the U.
S.
government is one of the last governments to admit there is a UFO phenomenon.
But now we all actually know that the U.
S.
government has been investigating this since the '40s.
Absolutely.
And records, files, documents, are being declassified and released in record numbers.
In the United Kingdom, for example, we've declassified and released about 60,000 pages of UFO documents, some of which were very highly classified.
And so we get this fuller picture of what's going on.
And now, you know, uh, almost everybody who has had an experience feels compelled to come forward to tell their story.
I mean, this reminds me of one influential person and modern pioneer, Bob Lazar.
Yes, uh, he was somebody who first spoke out in 1989.
DOLAN: Bob Lazar is someone who became famous back in 1989 as a result of a very specific claim that he made.
And that claim is that he worked at a place just south of Area 51.
He called it S4.
He was interviewed by a Las Vegas journalist, George Knapp in a series of very detailed interviews.
We put him on the air, blacked out his face, and he told this incredible story.
KNAPP: Exactly what's going on up there? BOB LAZAR: Well, there's several, uh, actually nine, uh, flying saucers, flying discs, uh, that are out there of extraterrestrial origin.
He said it's a secret that needed to be told to the world, that his life was in danger, and that he was coming forward and, uh, and wanted to tell it.
I could feel my jaw dropping.
Is this real? We left there thinking, "Wow.
If this is real, this is a really big story.
" So we decided, well, let's take the time and get this right.
NARRATOR: Over the next eight months, Knapp conducted a thorough investigation of Lazar's sensational claims.
According to Lazar, before he worked at S4, he as a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory the facility that developed the atomic bomb.
The central question for me was, "Did he work at Los Alamos?" Because if he did, it would at least be plausible that if he worked there in a technical or scientific position, that he could also be hired at a place like S4.
So that's where we focused our attention.
I started calling Los Alamos.
At first, "No.
We have no record of a guy named Bob Lazar.
" I got the phone book from the Los Alamos Lab.
There's his name in the phone book.
I call them back and said, "Hey, he's in the phone book.
" They finally sort of exasperatingly told me, "Yeah, we've got a record of him being here.
" We found Bob Lazar to be credible, um, about his background, his, uh, his scientific training, where he had worked.
NARRATOR: For more than two decades, Bob Lazar's critics claimed there was no evidence of any secret military base in the Nevada desert.
But then, in 2013, a Freedom of Information Act request forced the CIA to finally acknowledge that Area 51 is real.
CORBELL: The story of Area 51 it exploded around the world.
The reason you know about Area 51 is because Bob Lazar and George Knapp on the news, 1989, made it a household name.
That's the reason.
All of that came from Bob Lazar.
NARRATOR: To many researchers, the government's acknowledgement of Area 51 established Lazar as more than a UFO pioneer.
His inside access made him a whistleblower.
My name's Bob Lazar.
I'm known for working at a classified base known as S4 out in the Nevada desert near Area 51, and there we reverse-engineered alien spacecraft.
NARRATOR: But could Lazar's sensational claims be true? Former Air Force pilot Captain David Fruehauf worked at Area 51 from 1979 until 1985.
And while he was never shown any alien technology, he attests that Bob Lazar's account of the facility is entirely accurate.
When I was there, we knew about S4, but we didn't know what they did.
And I know people that had worked for me that after I left there, they had seen Bob Lazar there, and they admitted that to me recently.
Bob Lazar's statements and all the things he had said have gelled now to the point where I think he's very credible.
It doesn't necessarily prove every aspect of Bob Lazar's story, but Bob Lazar said there was an Area 51 and the government then said, "Yeah, okay there is.
" - So it makes one wonder.
- Right.
I mean, look, if Roswell was real, uh, they had to take the wreckage somewhere, and, of course, it stands to reason we'd want to know, uh, can we build these things ourselves? Can we develop this technology? You'd do it somewhere.
What better place than Area 51? And Area 51 today is part of our pop culture.
- I mean, everyone knows about Area 51.
- TSOUKALOS: Right.
I think that anyone who genuinely looks into the UFO phenomenon you have to come away with some belief in it.
There's no getting away from the fact that we are in a stronger position now, in terms of evidence, than we've ever been.
And, actually, when this is accepted, we are going to have to fundamentally rethink our place in the wider cosmos.
Right.
Yes.
Well, gentlemen, this has been a fascinating conversation.
So with everything that we have so far, cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, and also ancient stories that pretty much speak of the same thing, you have to wonder where does this all lead and will we soon come closer to the truth? CHILDRESS: There's an amazing consistency to all of these reports.
And when you put them all in totality, it's just not something you can dismiss.
- Something's going on.
- POPE: It is.
And we're building up to something.
PILOT: My gosh.
POPE: We have military pilots, and radar operators, going on the record with this, government officials who have been involved in these sorts of programs, we have declassification of documents.
CHILDRESS: It seems to be the beginning of disclosure, in a sense.
NARRATOR: Could disclosure, in fact, already be happening with evidence coming from many sources? In December 2020, former CIA Director John Brennan made a surprising statement about UFOs on the Conversations with Tylerpodcast.
I think some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be, uh, unexplained and might, in fact, be a different form of life.
We are living through a remarkable turning point right now in UFO studies.
We don't know what these objects are, but the fact that these objects are documented, backed by evidence, backed by a long record of credible testimony is no longer in dispute.
It's been over 70 years since these early pioneers began collecting data and releasing it to the public and we've really - come a long way since then.
- We should never forget that all these people, whether it's Jacques Vallée, Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek, Coral Lorenzen, Linda Moulton Howe without them we probably wouldn't be in the fortunate position that we are in today.
All of these people went down a path that was, at the time, unheard of, and, in a way, we are standing on the shoulders of giants because through the work of the pioneers and through shows like Ancient Aliens, and now almost everybody who has had an experience feels compelled to tell their story because it has become more accepted, and the so-called zeitgeist has changed in our favor.
Well, I think you're right.
It's been a great conversation with you guys.
It's just-just a fascinating subject, of course.
Yeah, thank you very much for the information, Nick.
And everything that we've talked about today illustrates this disclosure that has been going on for a very long time, and I can't wait to see what the future holds, and I thank you for your time.
- Thank you.
- Thanks, Nick.
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS
LINDA MOULTON HOWE: Coral Lorenzen is one of the earliest people who said there is something serious about these objects in the sky.
NARRATOR: A scientist who uncovered shocking new evidence about a crashed UFO.
RICHARD DOLAN: Stanton Friedman, more than any one other person, opened up Roswell for the rest of the world.
NARRATOR: An astronomer who documented close encounters for the U.
S.
military.
PAUL HYNEK: My father really was convinced that there was just something that was too legitimate to ignore.
NARRATOR: Ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos, author David Childress, and former British Ministry of Defence officer Nick Pope, have come together to examine the groundbreaking work of pioneering researchers, investigators, and whistleblowers who dared to challenge the scientific establishment and changed the world.
POPE: Without Jacques Vallée, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.
NARRATOR: But does the final chapter of their story remain to be written? Will it soon be revealed, once and for all, that Earth is being visited by extraterrestrials? You have to wonder where does this all lead and will we soon come closer to the truth? NARRATOR: There is a doorway in the universe beyond it is the promise of truth.
It demands we question everything we have ever been taught.
The evidence is all around us.
The future is right before our eyes.
We are not alone.
We have never been alone.
I'm excited to be here with you guys talking about the modern UFO phenomenon.
The paradigm has certainly shifted because 20 years ago it was always deny, deny, deny.
So, you know, I think that we are living in incredibly exciting times.
We are.
Absolutely.
And this, of course, is part of a wider interconnected story.
Revelation after revelation from the government itself.
I also would offer that Ancient Aliens has contributed to this paradigm shift where people are now comfortable in telling their stories, their experiences that they've had.
The so-called zeitgeist has changed in our favor.
And I really think that with whatever is going on in the modern UFO phenomenon is directly connected to ancient times.
Well, the UFO phenomenon has been going on for thousands of years with historical texts talking about UFOs.
Even in the Middle Ages you find stories that were printed in what they used to call broad sheets of UFOs, like, for example, in Nuremberg or in Basel.
And they actually have reproductions of what they saw up in the skies.
Clearly, they did not have photographs back then but they had drawings.
And the way these things are being reported today is because we have the technology.
NARRATOR: People have reported strange sightings in the sky since the earliest recorded history.
For thousands of years, such encounters were conveyed through oral traditions, texts and artwork.
But then, in 1839, French artist Louis Daguerre provided humankind with a powerful new technology: the daguerreotype.
It was the first publicly available photographic process, and suddenly people were able to share the exact images they saw with their own eyes.
Just three decades later, the world got its first alleged UFO photo.
The very first photo that we have of a UFO is of a-a huge cylindrical craft over Mount Washington in New Hampshire taken in 1870 right at the very beginning of photography.
DOLAN: You see this cloud formation up at Mount Washington and you see this very obvious cigar-shaped object.
Of course, many UFO reports described cigar-shaped objects.
Is the photograph authentic? And turns out it is.
NARRATOR: As technology evolved over the late 1800s and early 1900s, so did humankind's understanding of many long-held assumptions.
Instead of linking strange events in the sky with the divine, a few inquisitive minds proposed a profound new explanation.
That intelligent beings from other planets, who possess technology far beyond our own, were visiting our world.
One of the first to investigate this possibility was an American writer and researcher named Charles Fort.
MITCH HOROWITZ: People have written about strange lights in the sky before.
But Fort was probably the first person in modern life who assembled the stories into his books in a systematic way.
Fort saw it as his job to poke holes in the straight story of science as it was developing at that time, and it demonstrated that there was a whole world of strange unexplained persistent phenomena.
NARRATOR: In 1919, Fort published his landmark collection of anomalous incidents and strange sightings.
He called it The Book of the Damned.
DOLAN: Now what he meant by that is all of the data that he incorporated and put into that book was damned by the scientific world of-of his time.
That's the whole point.
This was data that no one would look at.
NARRATOR: Today the term "Fortean" continues to be used to describe events that cannot be explained by conventional science.
But it would take 25 years and a world war for researchers to examine Fort's accounts more closely.
So a lot of the modern UFO phenomenon really started during the second World War.
We had a couple of-of things, aspects to this.
The Battle of Los Angeles an amazing event where upwards of 1,400, uh, anti-aircraft shells were fired into the air at something that had been hovering over Los Angeles.
And there's a photo as well.
There's a classic photo - CHILDRESS: It was on the front page of the L.
A.
Times.
- POPE: Yeah.
Then you have these pilots who see strange balls of light called foo fighters, and I couldn't talk about UFOs without, of course, mentioning one word: - Roswell.
- Mm-hmm.
POPE: The military issues a press release which says we've recovered a flying disc.
So you have these events coming thick and fast, but who's collating it all? We should never forget that, uh, maybe we have it easy now.
We have this vast body of work that we can build on, and one of the great pioneers of this subject, who did so much to bring it into the mainstream, was Coral Lorenzen.
NARRATOR: By the 1950s, thousands of UFO sightings were being reported around the country.
But while most dismissed these accounts as little more than curiosity, one woman in Arizona took them seriously: a 35-year-old housewife named Coral Lorenzen.
When Coral Lorenzen was nine years old, she had her first UFO sighting in a playground with two friends.
She stated that the craft reminded her of a parachute without strings.
After her experiences, what she wanted to do was kind of nail this down on a scientific basis not just woo-woo stuff.
NARRATOR: Working out of their home, Coral and her husband Jim founded the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, or APRO, the world's first public investigation of UFOs.
Using little more than her wits and a telephone, Coral collected thousands of unpublished reports from witnesses around the country.
To rule out planes and unusual weather as the cause of the sightings, Coral judiciously cross-referenced these accounts by contacting local airfields and military bases.
BILL BIRNES: What she was able to do was show there were commonalities among UFO sightings, there were things that UFOs did and that observers saw that stretched across different cultures and different parts of the United States.
NARRATOR: Eventually, Coral's organization grew to have thousands of members and collected reports from around the world.
MARDEN: The organization started out small, but as its reputation grew, she was able to attract many scientists and also people in the Air Force from other countries.
NARRATOR: Considered one of the best civilian research groups of its time, Coral Lorenzen oversaw the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization for more than three decades until her death in 1988.
She set up this group with thousands of members, and she was really pulling all this together.
They had representatives in different states in the U.
S.
, in different countries, too.
Of course, APRO as a group, uh, wound up in 1988, I think it was, but, of course, MUFON the Mutual UFO Network is a spin off of APRO.
So she was really cataloging a wide variety of UFO activity all over the world.
What was the reaction back then when she would call the Air Force bases? Would they readily talk to her or would they stonewall her? She hit some brick walls, and people were probably saying in the military, "Who the heck is this?" But she was tenacious.
She was look.
Here's this woman blazing this trail.
Starting almost this whole field of study which-which we now see today.
Nick, can you tell us about your work at the British Ministry of Defence? Sure.
I worked there for 21 years.
And from 1991 through to 1994, I ran their small UFO program.
My job was to research and investigate the phenomenon, to determine whether there was anything of any defense significance, uh, any threat, anything of more general scientific interest.
Were you the first person to have that position or was there somebody before you? Oh, many, many people before me.
Uh, we-we had been looking at this, um, on an ad hoc basis since the second World War, And what were some of the challenges that you were faced with in order to determine what was a valid sighting? I mean, was there a certain protocol to the work you did? Well, there were many challenges, but the-the protocols were actually quite set.
We had a standard methodology very closely modeled on the United States methodologies developed, in part, by Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek.
NARRATOR: In 1948, Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek was working as the professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio State University when he received an unusual job offer.
The U.
S.
Air Force approached him to investigate UFO sightings.
Reluctantly, he joined the special operation which would become known as Project Blue Book.
At the beginning, I think my father thought this would be a few weekends' worth of work just to pooh-pooh some flying saucer reports from, you know, Mrs.
Jones out in Poughkeepsie.
NARRATOR: Despite his skepticism, Dr.
Hynek approached the assignment with an open mind.
As part of his investigations, he pioneered new ways of studying aerial phenomena.
Rather than combing through reports, Dr.
Hynek personally investigated sightings and interviewed eyewitnesses across the country.
Based on his research, he developed a new system to categorize UFO sightings.
He came up with a classification system of close encounters of the first, second and third kind.
A close encounter of the first kind is when you see an object within, say, 500 feet.
A close encounter of the second kind is when there's some kind of physical trace, maybe some irradiated dirt.
A close encounter of the third kind is where you actually have contact with some type of entity.
NARRATOR: Dr.
Hynek's meticulous application of the scientific method in his investigations enabled him to dismiss many alleged sightings as aircraft, meteors or even stars.
But, curiously, of the more than 12,000 UFO sightings Dr.
Hynek's office investigated, 701 remained categorized as "unidentified.
" HYNEK: What my father was fascinated by were this irreducible core of five percent of cases that could not be explained.
There was just something that was too legitimate to ignore.
For many, many years, Hynek really just played the Air Force's party line on UFOs.
But, finally, as you're really getting into the 1960s, 1966 and '67, Hynek makes his public position clear that this is a serious phenomenon.
HYNEK: That set up a really difficult tension because the Air Force was getting more sort of stonewalling in their attitude, and my father really was convinced that there was a phenomena, but really wanted the word to get out.
NARRATOR: But rather than expand the investigation, in 1969, the Air Force abruptly shut down Project Blue Book.
In the years that followed, Hynek became an outspoken supporter of UFO research, publishing numerous books on the subject until his death in 1986.
Hynek became increasingly disillusioned with the Air Force policy on this, and, yes, he was frustrated.
These people have no interest in going public - and saying there might be extraterrestrials.
- CHILDRESS: Right.
And he's privy, as you were, to classified documents and, you know, you have to have a security clearance.
He must have had that, too.
So there were things that he could not talk about.
- Wouldn't you think? - I'm sure that's the case.
He was someone on the inside, and he probably had a deeper understanding of this phenomenon than almost anyone else involved at the time.
And, uh, Jacques Vallée is another fascinating character, a colleague, of course, of Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek and two of the early, uh, giants in this field.
Without Jacques Vallée, Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek, we probably wouldn't be sitting around this table - having this discussion.
- Right.
Jacques Vallée went back into folklore.
He was one of the first to see and certainly the first to popularize that-that parallel between these folkloric accounts and the more modern accounts of UFOs and, specifically, alien abduction.
Half of my family comes from Austria and there are many folkloric tales of fairy folk, where a shepherd either disappears or a shepherd goes to sleep and doesn't wake up for a week even though, in his mind, only two hours have elapsed.
So I think it's wonderful that Vallée looked at those stories and put them into the context of potential extraterrestrial encounters.
Jacques is probably our greatest living scientist and scholar of UFO studies.
He wrote one of the most influential books that figures into the UFO field, which is called Passport to Magonia, where he ventured the theory that folklore all throughout the ages, matches up extraordinarily well with contemporary UFO accounts.
NARRATOR: In 1961, Dr.
Jacques Vallée was working as an astronomer with the French Space Committee when he noticed a mysterious object orbiting the Earth.
This event sparked a lifelong-interest in the UFO phenomenon which he continues to investigate more than six decades later.
Vallée started out in the mid-1960s, working closely with Allen Hynek, doing what you might call standard UFO analysis back then, looking at various sightings.
NARRATOR: While working with Hynek, Vallée boldly proposed a profound new theory to explain UFO sightings and other paranormal experiences.
He argued that many UFOs seem to be manipulating the space-time continuum and suggested they may not have come from another planet but from another dimension.
Dr.
Jacques Vallée was years ahead of his time.
When everyone else was looking at the nuts and bolts of UFOs and their occupants, Jacques Vallée was interested in the interdimensional phenomena related to UFO reports.
HYNEK: Jacques really helped the field accept the idea of truly exotic solutions.
Once you really dig into the UFO phenomena, it's very hard to find one solution that fits all of the cases that have been reported.
J.
Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée, were pioneers in this field and, interesting piece of film trivia, the classic sci-fi movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's an homage to J.
Allen Hynek and Spielberg gave him a little cameo in the movie.
In that wonderful scene where the mothership comes down at the end, he's the guy with the pipe.
CHILDRESS: And, actually, Jacques Vallée is depicted in that movie, too, in a sense.
Isn't he the-the French UFO expert in the movie who then uses music and tones to communicate - with the extraterrestrials? - POPE: Yes, indeed.
And a lot of people don't know this, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's based on the story of one of the great pioneers in this field.
Another pioneer in this field was Robert Emenegger who wrote the book UFOs: Past, Present & Future.
Well, there's a fascinating story about him.
He was basically promised that he would get film footage of a UFO landing at an Air Force Base.
Really? NARRATOR: In 1972, filmmaker Robert Emenegger was hired by President Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.
R.
Haldeman, to produce a documentary film.
The Committee to Re-elect the President wanted to make a scientific documentary that would support Nixon.
A documentary about some secret project that the government's been working on that can be declassified.
NARRATOR: But as soon as Emenegger started on the project, it took an unexpected turn.
HOLCOMBE: Bob Emenegger was asked, "How would you like to make a documentary on UFOs?" And Bob Emenegger was stunned.
He told me at his home, "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.
So Emenegger agreed to do it.
NARRATOR: Emenegger set about producing a documentary that would present the public with authentic footage of a UFO.
But when it came time to receive the sensational materials he'd been promised, the government had a change of heart.
HOLCOMBE: Their White House contact said, "Bob, I hate to tell you, but the film has been withdrawn.
" Bob Emenegger was crushed.
He said, "Why? With everything we've done, with everything that's in place, why would you do this?" And he said, "Watergate.
" GRANT CAMERON: They said, "We can't allow you to use the film.
"You have to do your own version of it.
"Something that might've happened in the past may happen in the future.
" So they did that.
It was a documentary called UFOs: Past, Present & Future.
And they also had a book by the same name.
NARRATOR: Even without the military's footage, the 1974 release of Emenegger's documentary caused a stir among the UFO community.
And many believe the alleged encounter at Holloman Air Force Base influenced a much more famous film.
The documentary is done in 1975.
Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out in 1977.
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.
NARRATOR: On December 14, 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind opens in wide release across America, grossing over $10 million its first week.
But could it have been based on an actual event? This is a fascinating story of a UFO landing at an Air Force base.
And, look, the military themselves maybe can't just come out and say this because, uh, implicit in that admission would be an admission that they lied about this for decades.
But I think, also, that we can handle this, this truth.
A long time ago, people would say, "Well, how do you deal with the skeptics?" One of the pioneers who, unfortunately, is no longer with us 'cause he passed away only a few years ago, is Dr.
Stanton Friedman the nuclear physicist.
POPE: Stanton Friedman was an absolute powerhouse in this field.
Over the course of that career, he gave, I-I goodness, I don't have a figure.
I-it's hundreds I think it's thousands of individual presentations at schools, colleges, um, a-all sorts of different places, and he was a-a crusader, an evangelist for this subject, and I-I couldn't talk about Stanton without, of course, mentioning Roswell.
NARRATOR: As interest in the UFO phenomenon grew, some of the nation's top scientists began their own investigations, including nuclear physicist Dr.
Stanton Friedman.
One of Dr.
Friedman's most significant contributions to the study of UFOs was his research into an incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 when a flying saucer allegedly crashed and was swiftly covered up by the U.
S.
military.
Stanton Friedman's the man who interviewed Jesse Marcel Sr.
who was the most important of the Roswell witnesses.
NARRATOR: Major Jesse Marcel was the head intelligence officer at Roswell Army Airfield.
He and Brigadier General Roger Ramey, head of the Eighth Air Force, were the officers tasked with transporting the debris recovered from the Roswell crash site to Fort Worth, Texas to present to the media.
In his interview with Stanton Friedman, Major Marcel made a shocking admission.
He claimed that General Ramey replaced the real Roswell debris.
BIRNES: Major Marcel explained how they swapped the Roswell debris with radar material from a radar balloon.
And he had to swear that's what he saw.
So the point is that Stanton unearthed a lot of this material and was the first person to make it public.
NARRATOR: Stanton alleged that the military was engaged in a widespread cover up of the existence of extraterrestrial life, a scandal so big he called it the "cosmic Watergate.
" If you pick up a UFO book written in the '50s and if it's got an index, and you think, "Oh, I'll look up Roswell," you won't find it.
It's not there.
The rediscovery of Roswell is really credited - to Stanton Friedman.
- Interesting.
You know, we've actually been working all these years with one of the earliest modern UFO researchers and pioneers that exist.
She's a specialist in cattle mutilations.
She's a specialist in UFOs and Roswell, our own Linda Moulton Howe.
NARRATOR: For more than four decades, investigative reporter Linda Moulton Howe has been researching a potential extraterrestrial presence on Earth.
She has received numerous awards for journalistic excellence including an Emmy for her 1980 documentary on cattle mutilations titled, A Strange Harvest.
Today she is the reporter and editor of the website Earthfiles.
com, which contains an archive of nearly 3,000 in-depth UFO reports.
She's actually waiting to speak with us with a video call.
TSOUKALOS: Hi, Linda.
Good to see you.
Hi, guys.
It's great to see you.
So tell us, please, what got you started in this field? I am a professional TV producer and an investigative reporter.
In September of 1979, I was director of special projects at the CBS station in Denver, Colorado.
And late in that summer, there were headlines in The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News about bloodless, trackless animal mutilations in Colorado and surrounding states.
I wanted to find out what did this mean, "a bloodless, trackless animal mutilation"? This gets me involved, and we do this for my film A Strange Harvest.
There was a classic pattern from case to case to case where these animals have the same tissue taken: ear, eye, tongue, jaw, genitals and rectum.
And those were excisions that really baffled the sheriffs and the veterinarians because the bone where the cut was made glistened like somebody had melted and then polished.
Right.
This would imply some type of external technology.
POPE: I'm wondering in your research with the hundreds of people you've spoken to, not just the ranchers, but fellow journalists, broadcasters, the veterinarians, what is your bottom line conclusions? Who's doing this and why? Well, Nick, there is no evidence beyond the bodies of these animals.
But one of the ranchers told me that one night he saw a round, glowing disc is all he could see put a beam right down into one of his pastures where they had been having mutilations around in a large area.
And in that beam of light, he saw one of his animals.
The sheriff told me this himself.
He said, "I know that the perpetrators "of these bloodless animal mutilations are creatures from outer space.
" And I felt like I had been hit with an electrical shock.
NARRATOR: Creatures from outer space? Could extraterrestrials be responsible for the bizarre animal mutilations that have been reported by ranchers all over the country? But, if so, to what end? HOWE: I have literally interviewed thousands now.
You hear, "I saw this kind of light.
" "I saw this beam lowering an animal to the pasture, and it was mutilated.
" Somebody else saw this animal coming up in a beam of light, and later it was found mutilated.
And what people were describing in the 20th century are what people were describing in the third century or 500 BC or going back in time.
And it's not just the United States.
It's Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, all of Western Europe and going into Eastern Europe.
NARRATOR: According to the FBI, thousands of cattle mutilations have been reported across the U.
S.
since the 1970s.
Linda's pioneering investigations forced those who study the UFO phenomenon to consider a chilling proposition: that extraterrestrial beings aren't just here to observe us.
They may have an agenda for our planet.
HOWE: I think it's important to get across that there are real people who have been afraid to come forward and describe what they actually saw with their own eyes because they didn't have video proof and they don't want to be criticized.
TSOUKALOS: Well, Linda, this has been absolutely invaluable, and we are all so lucky to have you on board with us.
So we thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, Giorgio.
- That was incredible.
- Wow.
That was pretty interesting.
She was like the first dogged reporter, investigative reporter, you know, phoning up people, going to those sites, interviewing people.
Yeah, it-it brings it home that these UFOs have real tangible, physical effects and that means it's not just imagination.
It's real.
By the way, the U.
S.
government is one of the last governments to admit there is a UFO phenomenon.
But now we all actually know that the U.
S.
government has been investigating this since the '40s.
Absolutely.
And records, files, documents, are being declassified and released in record numbers.
In the United Kingdom, for example, we've declassified and released about 60,000 pages of UFO documents, some of which were very highly classified.
And so we get this fuller picture of what's going on.
And now, you know, uh, almost everybody who has had an experience feels compelled to come forward to tell their story.
I mean, this reminds me of one influential person and modern pioneer, Bob Lazar.
Yes, uh, he was somebody who first spoke out in 1989.
DOLAN: Bob Lazar is someone who became famous back in 1989 as a result of a very specific claim that he made.
And that claim is that he worked at a place just south of Area 51.
He called it S4.
He was interviewed by a Las Vegas journalist, George Knapp in a series of very detailed interviews.
We put him on the air, blacked out his face, and he told this incredible story.
KNAPP: Exactly what's going on up there? BOB LAZAR: Well, there's several, uh, actually nine, uh, flying saucers, flying discs, uh, that are out there of extraterrestrial origin.
He said it's a secret that needed to be told to the world, that his life was in danger, and that he was coming forward and, uh, and wanted to tell it.
I could feel my jaw dropping.
Is this real? We left there thinking, "Wow.
If this is real, this is a really big story.
" So we decided, well, let's take the time and get this right.
NARRATOR: Over the next eight months, Knapp conducted a thorough investigation of Lazar's sensational claims.
According to Lazar, before he worked at S4, he as a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory the facility that developed the atomic bomb.
The central question for me was, "Did he work at Los Alamos?" Because if he did, it would at least be plausible that if he worked there in a technical or scientific position, that he could also be hired at a place like S4.
So that's where we focused our attention.
I started calling Los Alamos.
At first, "No.
We have no record of a guy named Bob Lazar.
" I got the phone book from the Los Alamos Lab.
There's his name in the phone book.
I call them back and said, "Hey, he's in the phone book.
" They finally sort of exasperatingly told me, "Yeah, we've got a record of him being here.
" We found Bob Lazar to be credible, um, about his background, his, uh, his scientific training, where he had worked.
NARRATOR: For more than two decades, Bob Lazar's critics claimed there was no evidence of any secret military base in the Nevada desert.
But then, in 2013, a Freedom of Information Act request forced the CIA to finally acknowledge that Area 51 is real.
CORBELL: The story of Area 51 it exploded around the world.
The reason you know about Area 51 is because Bob Lazar and George Knapp on the news, 1989, made it a household name.
That's the reason.
All of that came from Bob Lazar.
NARRATOR: To many researchers, the government's acknowledgement of Area 51 established Lazar as more than a UFO pioneer.
His inside access made him a whistleblower.
My name's Bob Lazar.
I'm known for working at a classified base known as S4 out in the Nevada desert near Area 51, and there we reverse-engineered alien spacecraft.
NARRATOR: But could Lazar's sensational claims be true? Former Air Force pilot Captain David Fruehauf worked at Area 51 from 1979 until 1985.
And while he was never shown any alien technology, he attests that Bob Lazar's account of the facility is entirely accurate.
When I was there, we knew about S4, but we didn't know what they did.
And I know people that had worked for me that after I left there, they had seen Bob Lazar there, and they admitted that to me recently.
Bob Lazar's statements and all the things he had said have gelled now to the point where I think he's very credible.
It doesn't necessarily prove every aspect of Bob Lazar's story, but Bob Lazar said there was an Area 51 and the government then said, "Yeah, okay there is.
" - So it makes one wonder.
- Right.
I mean, look, if Roswell was real, uh, they had to take the wreckage somewhere, and, of course, it stands to reason we'd want to know, uh, can we build these things ourselves? Can we develop this technology? You'd do it somewhere.
What better place than Area 51? And Area 51 today is part of our pop culture.
- I mean, everyone knows about Area 51.
- TSOUKALOS: Right.
I think that anyone who genuinely looks into the UFO phenomenon you have to come away with some belief in it.
There's no getting away from the fact that we are in a stronger position now, in terms of evidence, than we've ever been.
And, actually, when this is accepted, we are going to have to fundamentally rethink our place in the wider cosmos.
Right.
Yes.
Well, gentlemen, this has been a fascinating conversation.
So with everything that we have so far, cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, and also ancient stories that pretty much speak of the same thing, you have to wonder where does this all lead and will we soon come closer to the truth? CHILDRESS: There's an amazing consistency to all of these reports.
And when you put them all in totality, it's just not something you can dismiss.
- Something's going on.
- POPE: It is.
And we're building up to something.
PILOT: My gosh.
POPE: We have military pilots, and radar operators, going on the record with this, government officials who have been involved in these sorts of programs, we have declassification of documents.
CHILDRESS: It seems to be the beginning of disclosure, in a sense.
NARRATOR: Could disclosure, in fact, already be happening with evidence coming from many sources? In December 2020, former CIA Director John Brennan made a surprising statement about UFOs on the Conversations with Tylerpodcast.
I think some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be, uh, unexplained and might, in fact, be a different form of life.
We are living through a remarkable turning point right now in UFO studies.
We don't know what these objects are, but the fact that these objects are documented, backed by evidence, backed by a long record of credible testimony is no longer in dispute.
It's been over 70 years since these early pioneers began collecting data and releasing it to the public and we've really - come a long way since then.
- We should never forget that all these people, whether it's Jacques Vallée, Dr.
J.
Allen Hynek, Coral Lorenzen, Linda Moulton Howe without them we probably wouldn't be in the fortunate position that we are in today.
All of these people went down a path that was, at the time, unheard of, and, in a way, we are standing on the shoulders of giants because through the work of the pioneers and through shows like Ancient Aliens, and now almost everybody who has had an experience feels compelled to tell their story because it has become more accepted, and the so-called zeitgeist has changed in our favor.
Well, I think you're right.
It's been a great conversation with you guys.
It's just-just a fascinating subject, of course.
Yeah, thank you very much for the information, Nick.
And everything that we've talked about today illustrates this disclosure that has been going on for a very long time, and I can't wait to see what the future holds, and I thank you for your time.
- Thank you.
- Thanks, Nick.
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