Ancient Aliens s17e03 Episode Script

Official reports of alien craft suddenly retracted.
UFO investigations designed to spread disinformation.
Government whistleblowers forced to conceal their identities.
Over the years, span Ancient Aliens/span has investigated the long history of government attempts to cover up the truth about the extraterrestrial presence on planet Earth.
And now we're going to take a look at what I consider to be the most compelling and revealing examples as we count down my top ten alien cover-ups.
Many people believe that there is strong evidence that aliens have visited Earth, and that for decades, even centuries, governments around the globe have been hiding information that has been classified as top secret.
But is this just a conspiracy theory? That's what many had suggested until finally, in December 2017, spanThe New York Times/span published a front-page headline revealing that the U.
S.
government was funding a secret program to investigate UFOs.
Number ten on my countdown of the top cover-ups AATIP.
On December 16, 2017 spanThe New York Times/span 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.
The article reported that the program had been in operation from 2007 until 2012, and was run by a former Pentagon official named Luis Elizondo, a senior career intelligence officer with top security clearance.
It was Elizondo's job to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects and to measure what threat they could pose to national security.
But while AATIP's funding officially ended in 2012 Elizondo claims he continued to work on the program out of his Pentagon office for the next five years.
And with the help of officials from both the U.
S.
Navy and the CIA.
In October 2017, Elizondo resigned to protest what he characterized as "excessive secrecy and internal opposition.
" I've sat down and had this conversation with Luis Elizondo face-to-face, and it's clear that there is no reason to believe that the Pentagon has any intention of declassifying and releasing any more material.
So he's done some very important work in bringing this story out of the shadows and into the open.
When Elizondo left the Pentagon, he was determined to make AATIP's years of investigation known to the public.
He did so by helping to distribute three videos to the press that were released in conjunction with spanThe New York Times' sensational front-page story.
/span Taken by cameras mounted on Navy jets, they were perhaps the most spectacular and credible UFO videos ever released to the public.
One of the really interesting things about AATIP is how much information hasn't been released.
We hear things that are coming.
I bet you there's a lot more.
In June 2020, the government acknowledged what Luis Elizondo had claimed for years that the UAP investigations have continued uninterrupted but under a new name the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.
As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, this recent disclosure only confirms their suspicions that the government continues to hide the full extent of its UFO investigations.
And that far more incredible revelations are yet to come.
For years government officials denied rumors of a top secret military installation in the Nevada desert.
But in 2013, one of the most significant cover-ups in American history was finally revealed.
Number nine on my list: Area 51.
After decades of secrecy, denials, and cover-ups, the CIA declassifies documents which acknowledge the existence of a top secret military research facility known as Area 51.
This was an historic announcement.
Finally these years of rumors that the UFO community and the conspiracy theory community had been claiming to be true had been validated.
The federal government was forced to acknowledge the existence of the Area 51 base because of a Freedom of Information Act request.
It took them over a decade to actually respond, but in the end they eventually had to admit what everybody already knew, which was that Area 51 did exist.
Since 1955, this top secret base located in the remote desert of southern Nevada has been considered the epicenter of the military's most classified projects from the U-2 spy plane to the F-117 stealth fighter.
But many believe that in the darkest corners of Area 51 lurks an even bigger secret one that hides the ultimate evidence of extraterrestrial contact.
Over the years, there have been a number of claims by people who have been associated with Area 51 who have spoken to journalists or whistleblowers, in which they have stated, quite explicitly, that there is extraterrestrial technology at Area 51.
So the United States began with a policy of lies and denial.
Let's call it for what it is counterintelligence.
UFOs and ETs have been at the top of the counterintelligence list since World War II.
Our government doesn't want us to know the truth.
The cover-ups we've looked at so far have been extraordinary, but what if I told you there was an even bigger one that occurred 1,600 years ago? And it all revolved around which religious texts would be included or banned from the Holy Bible.
In fact, it was one of those banned books that inspired Erich von Daniken to introduce the world to the ancient astronaut theory.
Number eight on my cover-up countdown: the Book of Enoch.
Central Anatolia, Turkey.
The fourth century AD.
A group of 30 clerics from the Christian Church hold the Council of Laodicea, a clandestine meeting to discuss the removal of certain books from the biblical canon.
Among them is the Book of Enoch.
According to many biblical scholars, the reason for this was most likely the controversy over the accounts of fallen angels descending to Earth in order to mate with the daughters of men accounts that the people of the time had taken as fact.
There are references in the scriptures to rebellious angels, who were in trouble with God, came to Earth, found the daughters of men attractive and married them, which is to say had sex with them and produced offspring.
In the Book of Enoch, it actually gives the numbers.
It says 200 angels disobeyed God and came to Earth and mated with human women.
If angels are what we think they are today, these nonhuman entities, what on earth, why on earth, how on earth could there be any interest in a sexual relationship with human women? We must re-understand what these sons of God are.
Indeed, it is recorded in ancient legend that these were some form of humanoid physical beings.
Something extraterrestrial.
We should translate the old texts with modern sense.
Use the word "extraterrestrials" instead of the word of "angel.
" Use a word of, uh, "leader of extraterrestrials" instead of "archangel.
" If you see something is brought to heaven, it's just space.
It's time to wake up to see these things with modern eyes.
Is it possible that stories found in the Book of Enoch are really depicting alien beings coming down to Earth to mate with humans and manipulate our genetic makeup? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes and suggest that the Book of Enoch was removed from the biblical canon in order to cover up the truth about humankind's extraterrestrial past.
there was another secret government program whose purpose, as far as the public was told, was to get to the bottom of the UFO phenomenon.
But was the real purpose to get to the truth or to cover it up? One of the biggest disinformation campaigns ever is number seven on my countdown of the top ten cover-ups Project Blue Book.
A number of high-ranking U.
S.
Air Force generals come together to launch a formal investigation into UFO reports.
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, uh, 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.
According to many researchers, including J.
Allen Hynek's son Paul Hynek, the government never really intended for Project Blue Book to uncover the truth behind the UFO phenomenon in the first place.
But instead set out to debunk it.
The Air Force, their job was to find answers, not the truth.
So, the mission of Project Blue Book was to find and create and cram in as many answers as they could.
The interesting thing, though, even with that impetus to explain away every case they could, was out of the 12,000-odd cases that they officially examined, they admitted they couldn't explain over 700, or five percent, of them.
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? Even though Project Blue Book was terminated in 1969 we've seen with AATIP recently that these government agencies never really go away.
They just sort of morph into another agency.
So clearly the Air Force has admitted they have not stopped studying UFOs.
The mere disclosure of a government program such as Project Blue Book really makes you wonder just how many other top secret government programs there might be.
In 1984, another one of these secret programs was revealed when information on it was leaked to a Hollywood producer.
Number six on my countdown of the top ten cover-ups: the Majestic 12.
Movie producer and UFO researcher Jaime Shandera arrives home to find a manila envelope has been dropped through the mail slot of his front door.
The postmark indicates that it was sent from Albuquerque, New Mexico, but no return address is written on the envelope.
And what he had received was this package right here.
This is the original package, and inside the package there was a roll of film inside this canister.
And this is actually the roll of film that he received.
And this film, when copied properly, produced these eight pages of the Eisenhower Briefing Document.
The Eisenhower Briefing Document is a memo that was allegedly written in 1952 by the first director of the CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, to President-Elect Dwight Eisenhower.
In it, Hillenkoetter writes that sitting president Harry Truman has formed a secret group within the U.
S.
government called the Majestic 12 to examine crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft.
The document that he received basically reported that we had had previous crashes, including the one at Roswell.
The bottom line recommendation to President Eisenhower was that this topic continued to be kept secret.
March 1994 Almost a decade after Jaime Shandera received the Eisenhower Briefing Document, Majestic 12 researchers are shocked when a second roll of film surfaces.
This time it is sent anonymously to a UFO group in Maryland from Quillin's drugstore in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe was among the first to examine these documents.
And she has been conducting research on MJ-12 for more than two decades.
In April 2017, editor and researcher Giorgio Tsoukalos traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico to meet with Linda and find out what she knows about these mysterious documents.
So, if I understand this correctly, somebody at some point took photos of a document that existed in paper form.
Do we know who did this? Who took those photographs? There are people who have served in the military or CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO.
And they are angry, they feel that this story should come out.
This might have been somebody who had this manual in their work, photographed it, maybe right there at the pharmacy, and the rest is history.
Of all the documents that I've ever seen and studied, it is this restricted SOM1-01, Majestic 12 Group Special Operations Manual, that I think is really confirmation.
It goes beyond disclosure because this is April 1954 Majestic 12 Group.
It's the War Office stamp it is real.
And the title: "Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal.
" "Top secret, Majic eyes only.
" And then when you start getting into what is in this book, you have the illustrations and sketches of different craft, UFOs.
I mean, that's incredible.
Did the United States government learn about an alien presence on Earth in the 1940s and devise a top secret committee to investigate this shocking revelation? While government officials continue to insist that the Majestic 12 never existed, those who have researched the documents remain convinced of their authenticity and have found no evidence that MJ-12 was ever discontinued.
ups happened on December 9, 1965, when a bell-shaped object crashed to Earth in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.
At number five on my countdown of the top ten cover-ups: the Kecksburg UFO incident.
Thousands of people watch as a brilliant fireball streaks across the night sky.
And a large object was seen to come down in a wooded area.
And witnesses actually claimed that this strange object, which was described as the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, caused what appeared to be sonic booms.
The phones went off, and all of the volunteer fire departments all around: "We have a plane crash in the woods of Kecksburg.
" Well, there was a man named Jim Romanski, and I had a real privilege to talk with him directly in March of 1998.
Because he was one of only about ten people in this whole saga, who had 15 minutes in the forest, close up, officially as a volunteer fireman walking around and trying to understand, what are we looking at? He said it was like an acorn or a bell.
And on the top, it was copper colored.
And then in the bottom was a band, about four inches wide, and raised up, not carved in, were symbols that went around a portion of this craft.
And he and others said they looked sort of like Egyptian hieroglyph.
Just minutes after the firefighters arrived at the location of the crash, they were met by a convoy of military personnel and ordered to leave.
Suddenly the military entered the area, uh, cordoned it off, and it was even suggested that a very large military vehicle was seen carrying away this object to God knows where.
And the whole thing was essentially hushed up.
Our government tried to explain everything away in Kecksburg as a meteorite, and those men who stood around this object, in that forest, on December 9, 1965 knew it was no meteorite.
They said at the time, this was this big acorn- or bell-shaped craft from outer space.
What was it that was found in Kecksburg? We may never know.
However, we do know what the U.
S.
military found during another famous UFO event that took place in England.
It's one of the most credible firsthand accounts of an alien craft on record.
Number four on our countdown of the top ten cover-ups: Rendlesham Forest.
Rendlesham Forest.
Suffolk County, England.
On December 26, 1980, near an air base leased to the United States Air Force by the RAF strange lights are reported on the horizon, in what appears to be a possible downed aircraft.
Two U.
S.
servicemen are dispatched to the site.
Strange lights were seen about 300 to 400 meters away from an area that was called the East Gate.
And the patrolling officers at the East Gate saw the lights above the forest and they thought potentially it was a downed aircraft or an aircraft in distress.
So two of them, Sergeant Penniston and Airman John Burroughs, went further into the forest.
Once at the so-called crash site, the men observed a strange triangular craft on the ground, approximately three meters wide at its base.
I noticed that there was an inscription on the side of the, uh, aircraft.
I was expecting to find, uh, I don't know, USAF, uh, something like that.
And what I find is glyphs.
Uh, pictorial glyphs making no sense at all.
Then I was running my hand over the side of the craft, it was very warm to touch.
At this time we were getting the feeling of electricity that was just bouncing it was much, much stronger.
There was this feeling of being drawn into it or being pulled into it.
The craft was on the ground approximately, you know, 45 minutes.
And then there was a bright flash of light.
And then the craft just took off out of the area, I mean, it was just out of the area.
The following night, U.
S.
Air Force Colonel Charles Halt led his own search party to the location of this strange encounter.
What they discovered were high levels of radioactivity where Burroughs and Penniston had previously seen the strange craft, and three impact holes in the ground.
While we're walking around, we also notice four or five objects in the sky.
They moved at very high speed, made sharp, angular turns as though they were doing some type of a grid search.
Then one came at high speed, stopped directly overhead, 3,000, 4,000, maybe 5,000 feet, and sent down a concentrated beam about eight or ten feet from us.
We noticed the other object to the south sending down similar beams on Woodbridge Base.
At that point I was thinking, why did I ever get involved in this? How will I ever explain this? In spite of the compelling eyewitness testimony, the Ministry of Defence soon declared the case closed.
Penniston and Burroughs were ordered by their superiors to document the events they witnessed in Rendlesham Forest.
But both men claim they were pressured to leave out certain details of the event, especially those suggesting the craft may have been extraterrestrial.
I had to give this, uh, sanitized story.
There's a lot of detail that was left out.
And truth by omission is not the truth, you know, it's a lie.
They didn't want it to appear like the government was trying to cover it up.
But I clearly felt that they didn't want me to go into all the details.
Now, I did a cold case review for the Ministry of Defence.
I am still subject to the Official Secrets Act.
But I can tell you, chances are these craft were real.
And if they're real, they might actually be extraterrestrial.
in Wiltshire, England is a maze of stone quarries excavated over a century ago, where it has long been rumored that the British government may have conducted secret UFO investigations.
In 2017, I had the opportunity to investigate this site with former British defense ministry official Nick Pope.
The number three cover-up on our top ten countdown: Rudloe Manor.
In England's southwest county of Wiltshire stands.
Rudloe Manor.
On the surface, it appears to be nothing more than a quaint English manor house.
But deep beneath this structure lie an astounding 2.
2 million square feet of vast caverns divided into many smaller chambers.
For years it was home to a group called the Provost and Security Services.
They're kind of like the James Bonds of the British Royal Air Force.
But back in the 1990s, and certainly going back to the 1950s, the Provost and Security Services were heavily involved in UFO investigations.
In 2007, the Ministry of Defence announced that Rudloe Manor was no longer in use by the military.
But if that's true, why are the grounds surrounded by chain link fences, monitored by security cameras, and even protected by guard dogs? To find the answers, in January of 2017, ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos traveled to the protected boundaries of Rudloe Manor.
There it is.
Joining him in his search for the truth was Nick Pope.
We're here.
During your time at the MOD, what did you learn about this place? Or any type of, uh, UFO cases that may have happened around this area? Well, this whole area is rich in UFO sightings.
UFO sightings were investigated by staff based here at Rudloe Manor.
But for years we-we denied it.
We told Parliament, the media, and the public that these things were of no interest, that Rudloe Manor had no involvement in this.
And yet when the files were declassified, - it turned out that people were right.
- Right here? - Right here! - Okay.
And-and so this-this building really was at the heart of Britain's secret UFO research.
And particularly the underground facilities below us.
And the UFO community alleges that that's where the UK keeps its alien hardware.
Crashed UFOs, all sorts of secrets and research and investigation projects went on from, uh, this particular facility.
So then this was basically considered, or is considered the UK's Area 51.
Absolutely right.
Even rumors of, uh, alien bodies.
Alien bodies? Could the ultimate proof of government contact with extraterrestrials be hidden in the tunnels right beneath Nick and Giorgio's feet? While Rudloe Manor is completely inaccessible, another entrance to the underground facilities is found two miles away at the equally secretive installation known as the Corsham Computer Centre, or CCC.
Despite the fact that it, too, is not open to the public, ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos asked Nick Pope to take him to the CCC for a firsthand look at the installation.
- All right.
- Good luck.
Thank you very much.
As a former employee of the Ministry of Defence, Nick did not feel it was appropriate for him to approach the facility himself without clearance.
I'll see you later, Nick.
- Yes.
- Take care.
Here we are.
The CCC.
The lights are on.
And, uh, just like, uh, Nick explained, it's got barbed wire, it is fenced down, it's impenetrable.
Clearly this entrance goes underground.
Within minutes of Giorgio's arrival at the security gate, the crew is met by a military police unit.
Unfortunately, the situation ends with filming being halted.
But why? Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that Rudloe Manor is not only used for secret government UFO investigations, but is housing extraterrestrial technology? And even alien bodies? Whatever's going on down there, it's big.
Still to this day, thousands of people work there.
And yet you can't get any real information about what they're doing.
It's absolutely off limits.
the most famous in UFO history.
And for more than 70 years, the entire world has wanted to know the truth about what really happened that day in the desert of New Mexico.
Number two on our countdown of the top ten cover-ups: the Roswell incident.
In July of 1947, an unidentified flying object crashed to Earth in the desert just outside Roswell, New Mexico.
It is today the most famous UFO event on record in part because it was the Army itself that reported the craft as a flying disc.
July 8th and 9th, the newspaper headlines, "Army Captures Flying Disc Outside of Roswell.
" How did the newspaper get that story? Walter Haut.
He was the official public information officer at the Roswell 509th, who gave the story to the newspaper.
But the military quickly walked back its story.
Within days, the mysterious Roswell UFO was given an earthly origin when the government claimed that the downed craft was merely a weather balloon.
Major Jesse Marcel, the head intelligence officer at Roswell Army Airfield, traveled to Fort Worth, Texas with the debris recovered from the Roswell crash site.
He and Brigadier General Roger Ramey, head of the Eighth Air Force, were scheduled to present their findings to the media.
It came out that President Truman sent orders to General Ramey, "Hold up something.
"Get some Reynolds Wrap out off the fish in your freezer "and hold it up and say that's what you found, not a disc," which is exactly what they did.
And the reporters basically just turned around, went home.
For UFO researchers, evidence that the actual wreckage from Roswell was indeed replaced with a weather balloon can be found within the notorious photograph along with clues as to what was being hidden from the public.
When General Roger Ramey was, uh, posing for photographs with Jesse Marcel in the aftermath of all of this, you can see him very clearly holding a piece of paper.
General Ramey had a document in his hands, the so-called Ramey Memo.
Modern forensic document analysis and photographic enhancement has enabled some researchers to zoom in on this.
And to clarify at least some portions of the text.
What it tells us is astounding.
Some of the phrases in the memo are "victims of the wreck" and "disc which we will ship.
" So, clearly something more than just a weather balloon was involved here, and the memo might just be the smoking gun.
We actually have evidence of an FBI memo that made such a statement that what was recovered was being brought to Wright Field for analysis.
Well, you're not going to bring balloon parts to Wright Field for analysis.
That's not going to happen.
Is it possible that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio is still housing the remains of the object recovered from the New Mexico desert more than 70 years ago? And if so, could they be using the debris to try and recreate extraterrestrial technology? Even now, in the last few years, there have been important UFO sightings around Dayton.
And witnesses, uh, in that area are looking out over Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and, even in broad daylight, seeing unusual craft hovering over the base.
This is a very distinct possibility that's supported by the fact that no jets are released when these UFOs appear.
It's almost as if they know what they are.
Maybe it's because it's one of our own reverse-engineered craft.
You may be surprised that the Roswell in, and I believe this one is undoubtedly the most significant because it has the most serious implications for humankind.
According to former Air Force Commander Robert Salas, back in the 1960s, UFOs shut down one of America's key missile sites.
How does he know this? Well, because he was there.
My number one cover-up of all time: the Malmstrom nuclear missile crisis.
Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana.
March 16, 1967.
Before dawn, sentries and maintenance crews near the base's nuclear missile silos see mysterious lights flying back and forth across the sky.
These lights are so bright that the men on the ground can't identify what they are.
But when one of them takes up a position just outside the base's security fence, a sentry calls his superior to report a UFO.
One of the missiles suddenly went off-line.
And then another and another, until the whole flight of missiles was somehow mysteriously deactivated.
This is highly disturbing because it suggests, in the event that UFOs one day become hostile, our entire atomic arsenal may become completely inoperable.
In June 2019, Giorgio Tsoukalos arranged to meet up with one of the men who was stationed at Malmstrom on the night of this historic UFO event retired Air Force Missile Launch Officer Robert Salas.
While Malmstrom was deactivated at the end of the Cold War, a nearly identical Minuteman Missile facility in South Dakota is still accessible to the public.
- Let's go in here.
- Thank you very much.
So Robert invited Giorgio there to walk him through exactly what he experienced in 1967.
Tell me what happened that night.
I got a phone call from the topside guard.
He's screaming into the phone.
I mean, he's really frightened.
He said, "I got all the guards out here, weapons drawn," and we see this gigantic red-orange object oval shape hovering above the front gate.
And all of a sudden, we get Klaxons, horns.
We both look over at the control panel here.
And, boom, boom, boom.
One right after the other.
All no-go.
I mean, it has to be incredibly startling and disconcerting that someone else with higher technology is able to disable our missiles.
Exactly, and that's how I've come to the conclusion that these were extraterrestrial objects.
Or they were constructed off Earth.
Mm-hmm.
Because we had nothing that could do anything like this either then or now.
And then was there a debriefing or was there a discussion? We were ordered to our squadron commander's office.
And then the guy next to him, he shoved this paper in our faces, "Sign here.
" I said, "What is this?" And he said, "This is a nondisclosure "statement about the incident.
You are never to speak about it to anybody.
" So you were given an order.
We were ordered to sign it, yeah.
And that was it.
Uh, I could not speak about this, and I didn't speak about this to anyone for, uh, about 27 years.
Military officials have never provided an explanation for the missile shutdown.
Was it caused by extraterrestrials? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes but suggest that we may never know the full story because for 50 years the United States military has covered it up.
That concludes my top ten list for the all-time greatest extraterrestrial cover-ups.
But the questions still remain.
Why keep us all in the dark? Do they think it's for our benefit? Or could it be for other reasons? As far as I'm concerned, we the people must continue to search for the evidence and to demand to know the facts.
It may be the only way that we'll finally get to full disclosure.
I'm ready for the truth.
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