Original subtitles

[♪ mysterious music playing]

-I love UFOs.

And the reason I love UFOs is 'cause I don't know

what they are.

-Hollywood has given us three scenarios for our

first contact with an alien civilization...

Invasion.

[explosion]

The radio message from outer space.

[electronic pulse]

And then you have the lone, stranded explorer scenario.

Probably all 3 of them, every bit of that, is wrong.

-Oh my God!

-The truth probably is much more ambiguous and

much more puzzling.

-The US Navy has finally acknowledged that videos

appearing to show UFOS flying through the air are real.

[pilot] Oh, my gosh, dude.

-The lead pilot saw an object zip right by his aircraft.

-It was white, pure white.

It had no windows, no wings.

-Like, what the (bleep) was that?

-In the last few years,

we’ve gone from a point where you couldn’t

touch this subject, to a point where the government

acknowledges the videos of UAP are authentic.

-Now, we have a duty as scientists to explain them.

-More and more scientists feel comfortable

talking about this, and even investigating it.

-Most UAP sightings are explainable.

98% of them.

The 2% is what matters.

-The hope is to find UAPs.

Where are they hiding and why are they here?

-I had had a number of very strange encounters.

They were so intrusive and so physical.

-Alien abduction experiences are a mystery to this day.

-So many times I wondered what they saw in me,

it’s a profound question to have for an entire life.

-Maybe these people have a common brain structure.

Supposedly the government has some things.

Let’s get the data.

-What do they have inside the government?

What do they actually know about UFOs?

And why can’t more be released to the public?

-I think belief is too easy.

I think debunking is too easy.

I think the truth of the matter is way more complicated

and way weirder.

-We get reports every night.

-I don't know what the hell it is.

[overlapping radio chatter]

[♪ theme music playing].

-Americans will soon learn more about UFOs.

The House Oversight Committee will hold a hearing on

Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.

-It is going to be about UAP whistleblower claims.

Sort of the first of its kind.

-If there’s one issue that can bring Democrats

and Republicans together, it’s UFOs.

-The House Oversight Committee will hold a hearing on

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, UAPS...

I prefer to call them UFOs.

We're going to get to the bottom of it, daggummit,

whatever the truth may be.

-I’m about to walk into a congressional hearing and

witness something that I never thought I would see.

It’s the first hearing that we’ve actually had witnesses

to events speak at.

Nothing like this has ever happened before and

we don’t know what they’re going to say today.

I've been writing and reporting on UFOs for over 20 years.

And all during those years,

I was really up against the belief that UFOs aren't real.

Saying UFOs are real does not mean that

they’re alien spacecraft.

It just means these are real, physical objects in our skies,

and we don’t know what they are.

In 2017, I co-wrote a story for the New York Times about a

secret program within the Department of Defense that was

investigating UFOs and no one knew about it.

-The groundbreaking article that Leslie and I and

Helene Cooper wrote revealed a secret

Pentagon unit called AATIP, that investigated these things,

that according to the government,

officially didn’t exist.

[Leslie Kean] The article also included official Navy videos

of unexplained objects that pilots were witnessing.

And we’d never seen anything like that before.

-The New York Times unveiled the existence of a real-life

X-Files Department...

[Leslie Kean] It was an explosive article,

I mean front page New York Times about UFOs.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] That article spurred an

enormous amount of Congressional interest.

They redefined UFO to UAP:

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,

to account for objects that operate in space,

in the air, and potentially underwater.

So Congress recognizes that there is a major

national security risk of unidentified objects passing

through restricted, sensitive airspace.

After learning about AATIP,

Congress formalizes the mission and forms the

UAP Task Force,

which then eventually becomes what we have now,

the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

Leave it to the government to come up with wonderful

acronyms and names.

AARO.

And that is the entity that is now the official government

UFO analysis office.

-So, the 2017 article kind of changed the climate on UFOs.

And then a few years later,

I was introduced to a man named David Grusch.

He was an intelligence official who wanted to come forward with

some very stunning revelations.

So Ralph and l wrote a story for an online publication

called The Debrief and now,

two months after the David Grusch story

was published, a House oversight committee is holding

an open hearing and our article helped pave the way.

People are lining up outside the building to get in.

They flew in from all over the place, even overseas.

How early did you guys get in line?

-Uh, 3:30 a.m., 3:16.

-Incredible! Really? -Yeah.

[Leslie Kean] There are three witnesses being called today,

but the first person that people really want to hear from

is whistleblower David Grusch.

-The subcommittee hearing on

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAPs,

will come to order.

Mr. Grusch...

-Mr. Chairman, ranking members, and congressmen.

My name is David Charles Grusch.

I was an intelligence officer for 14 years.

My testimony is based on information I've been given by

individuals with a longstanding track record of

legitimacy and service to this country.

Many of whom...

[Leslie Kean] David Grusch worked for both the

National Reconnaissance Office

and the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency.

He had very high clearances within those agencies and

he was the representative sent to the UAP task force

when it was in operation.

He started looking into the questions of crashed retrieved

objects within various programs that may have been hidden away.

He told us for our article that he had evidence which he had

gained from 40 people he interviewed at high levels,

that the government,

or some agency within the government,

possessed craft of non-human origin.

[Ralph Blumenthal] He was talking about things that no

country on earth could produce.

Alien spacecraft, I mean, there’s no other way to put it.

[Leslie Kean] He claimed that he could not be shown the craft,

but he was shown documentation, photographs,

and was able to gather very,

very specific information from people directly involved.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] He alleges that the government

is operating a decades-long UFO retrieval and reverse

engineering effort, illegally,

outside of the purview and oversight of Congress.

[Leslie Kean] Oversight was not being provided to programs

which were legally required to have oversight,

and he felt it was his obligation to report them.

-I have taken every step I can to corroborate this evidence

over a period of four years while I was with the

UAP task force

and do my due diligence on the individual sharing it.

I became a whistleblower through a urgent concern filing

in May 2022 with the Intelligence Community

Inspector General.

-Mr. Grusch, why did you come forward on this issue?

-Purely a sense of duty.

I first swore an oath when I was a cadet 18 years ago,

and I still uphold that even out of the uniform.

[Leslie Kean] During the time that he gave the information to

the Inspector General,

he was under oath and the ICIG had ruled that

what he told them was credible and urgent.

-I was informed in the course of my official duties of a

multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse

engineering program.

[Garrett Graff] A lot of eyebrows went up both in the

room and people who were watching that live

around the country.

As someone covering national security in Washington,

I got interested in UFOs,

not as someone who was raised on Star Trek,

but because I began to see serious people talking

seriously about this subject.

UFOs are real, you know,

we know that there are unidentified objects

in our airspace.

Even John Brennan,

the former CIA director, has said, effectively,

"There's weird stuff out there flying around.

We don't know what it is. It puzzles me."

-I figure there can't be that many things that

puzzle John Brennan.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] There's no question that the

government retrieves objects that may have been abandoned or

recovered from adversaries.

[Garrett Graff] The US government has had a UFO crash

retrieval program for 100 years.

UFO in this case though,

doesn't necessarily mean alien spacecraft.

You know, this is how, in World War II,

this unit was able to get its hands on crashed

Japanese Zeros or in the Cold War,

Soviet MIG fighters.

-Dave Grusch is alleging something different, something,

you know, quite more extraordinary.

Evidence of extraterrestrial or off-Earth technology.

I think, you know, he presented as a very credible person

in that he was an intelligence officer,

he had security clearances.

So this isn’t somebody walking in from the outside.

This is an insider.

-You say that the government is in possession of potentially

non-human spacecraft,

do you believe our government has made contact

with intelligent extraterrestrials?

-That’s something I can’t discuss in a public setting.

-If you believe we have crashed craft as stated earlier,

do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?

-Biologics came with some of these recoveries.

Yeah.

-Were they, I guess human or non-human biologics?

-Non-human.

And that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge

on the program I talked to that are currently still

on the program.

[Garrett Graff] Non-human biologics.

Effectively alien bodies.

You know, this is the biggest possible secret that

you could imagine any government really keeping.

[Leslie Kean] To be sitting there and hearing members of

Congress asking these questions in a very serious context

was just astonishing.

-But as I stand here under oath now,

I am speaking to the facts as I've been told them.

I am driven by a commitment of both the truth and transparency.

I'm asking Congress to hold our government to this

standard and thoroughly investigate these claims.

I am hopeful that my actions will ultimately lead to a

positive outcome of increased transparency.

[Leslie Kean] The congressional hearing in July of 2023

isn’t the first time that we've had individuals advocating

for greater transparency and trying to undo the secrecy

involved with the UFO issue.

[Garrett Graff] Across all of human history,

people have seen strange things in the sky.

We see this, particularly In the early years of the

Flying Saucer era,

the late 1940s and early 1950s,

as pop culture and Hollywood movies began to

link the ideas of UFOs and flying saucers with aliens.

And key among that interest was a former military officer

named Donald Keyhoe

-Our first guest on To Tell the Truth

is one of the world's leading authorities on

unidentified flying objects.

What is your name, please?

-My name is Donald Keyhoe.

-My name is Donald Keyhoe.

-My name is Donald Keyhoe.

-Only one of these gentlemen is the real Donald Keyhoe.

[Christopher Mellon] Major Donald Keyhoe is one

of a number of people,

who encountered the UFO issue,

were initially skeptical, but the more they learned,

the more they began to realize there's something going on here.

-Now they do come in sort of different shapes

and sizes, right?

-Uh, the main...

...Most of the sightings describe disk-shaped objects.

[Garrett Graff] Donald Keyhoe was a respected

former military officer.

He gets interested in this subject of flying saucers and

UFOs after being asked to look into it by the editor of

True Magazine,

one of the nation's leading sci-fi and paranormal

magazines of that era.

-Keyhoe had begun as an airplane pilot.

Then a writer.

He began to write for True Magazine.

In 1949, the editor somehow learned that pilots

were reporting strange things in the sky,

that the Air Force was denying it,

and he felt this needed to be looked at.

And Keyhoe, because of his background,

was given the assignment.

-He particularly becomes interested in the case of

Captain Thomas Mantell.

Mantell, a decorated Kentucky Air National Guard pilot,

World War II veteran, is dispatched to investigate the

sighting of a UFO over the skies of Kentucky.

[Garrett Graff] Mantell spots it in the sky and sends back a

series of radio messages.

[Garrett Graff] And then all contact with him is lost.

[reporter] Mantell had crashed 5 miles southwest

of Franklin, Kentucky.

Captain Mantell was killed.

[Garrett Graff] This is probably the nation's first

UFO-related fatality.

It's only years later, the Air Force puts together,

through, you know, various military and Navy records,

that the path of a secret research balloon would have

almost exactly matched the path of the object

that Mantel encountered.

[Linda Powell] But for Keyhoe and many others,

his crash has never been adequately explained.

Keyhoe went to the Pentagon and asked them about this

sighting but he didn’t come away any the wiser.

[Garrett Graff] Donald Keyhoe remained convinced

that the government was covering up the truth.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] There's been a long history of

public perception of coverups and nefarious activities

by the government.

That a very, very credible individuals like David Grusch

are bringing back to the fore.

-Mr. Grusch, are you aware of any individuals

that are participating in reverse engineering programs

for non-terrestrial craft?

-Personally, yes. Mmm-hmm. -Have you seen the spacecraft?

-I have to be careful to describe what

I’ve seen firsthand, and not in this environment,

but I can answer that question behind closed doors.

-Okay. And so, with that being said...

-The controversy surrounding David and his testimony

is that he doesn't have firsthand knowledge.

He has not seen any such craft.

It's all secondhand.

-He would have very legitimate bans on being able

to talk about so-called special access programs that

he was a part of.

It could lead to jail terms if you disclose knowledge of

classified material that you are sworn to protect

and keep secret.

[Shane Harris] The question of whether the government

has already recovered evidence of

extraterrestrial existence and is covering it up.

I mean, that's the part that I'm just really skeptical of.

And even someone like Dave Grusch, who again,

is a very compelling witness by his own testimony

does not have firsthand evidence of what he

claims to exist.

That does not mean that he's lying.

It doesn't mean that he's wrong,

but it's not the kind of evidence that I think the

public is gonna need to really believe that the government is

hiding existence of terrestrials.

-I think everybody wants to see that picture of that craft.

In Grusch's defense,

he had already provided classified details such as

program names, the people allegedly involved,

and the locations of where craft apparently are stored,

in many hours of closed briefings to Congress.

-Is there evidence that there are aliens?

-No, not evidence that would convince a

skeptical scientist, no.

There are people holding their hand up,

swearing to tell the truth in Congress.

That’s not how we establish objective truths in science.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] But it wasn’t just David Grusch

making these allegations.

A former high-level army officer who worked on the

UFO problem for the government,

named Karl Nell also supported Grusch's allegation.

[Karl Nell] Non-human intelligence exists.

Non-human intelligence has been interacting with humanity.

This interaction is not new and it's been ongoing and

there are unelected people in the government that are

aware of that.

David Grusch has said the same thing.

David Grusch cleared for presidentially level material.

So you're looking at people that are in a position to know

this and they're telling you the same thing.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] The Congressional hearing was

fascinating because there were two narratives all about UFOs.

One narrative is that the government is withholding an

extraordinary secret from the American public.

And the other is the fact that military aircrews and aviators

are observing objects, not just with eyeballs,

but with multiple sensors, radar, infrared.

-As we convene here, UAP are in our airspace,

but they're grossly under-reported.

These sightings are not rare or isolated, they are routine.

-Ryan Graves was there because he had been

reporting Navy sightings.

Some of the pilots in Ryan’s squadron had been picking up

strange objects on radar and actually had a near collision

with one of them.

After hearing about these encounters,

Ryan Graves realized that this was a safety issue.

And Commander David Fravor was there as a witness to

the 2004 Nimitz incident, the famous Tic Tac case,

which was one of the best-researched

UFO cases ever.

He was a Navy pilot flying off the USS Nimitz.

They’d been picking up these fast-moving objects on radar.

He described it as like a ping-pong ball

zig-zagging around, no signs of propulsion.

-The Tic Tac object we engaged in 2004 was far superior

to anything we had on time, have today,

or are looking to develop in the next ten years.

-I have a few questions for Mr. Graves.

What percentage of UAP sightings,

in your belief, go unreported by our pilots?

-I would estimate we're somewhere near

5% reporting perhaps.

-So like 95% basically don't report?

-That's just my personal estimate.

In the late 2013-2014 time period,

that's when we first started to notice that there

were other objects in the area with us.

-Frankly, I was scared that someone was going to hit

one of these.

And that's really what pushed me over the edge

to speak publicly about this.

I knew this hearing would be an extremely important venue

to be able to communicate for all these pilots and

military operators that had been reaching out to me

to share what they had been going through.

Folks like Jeffery Nuccetelli,

a former security officer at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

-Leading up to that hearing,

it's hard to describe how I was feeling.

The anticipation,

I've been waiting for this for it seems like my whole life.

To me, it was like watching the biggest Super Bowl ever.

And then Representative Luna brought up

the Vandenberg case...

-My next question would actually be for Mr. Graves...

-And I literally fell out of my chair.

I literally could not believe it was happening.

-Can you please explain to me in detail the event that

occurred at Vandenberg Air Force Base?

-Certainly.

In the 2003 timeframe,

a large group of Boeing contractors were operating

near one of the launch facilities at

Vandenberg Air Force Base.

-I was stationed there in 2003.

At that time it was part of US Space Command and our primary

mission was to develop tests and launch space assets.

Rockets and test technology to defend the country against

incoming ballistic missiles and other threats of that nature.

The day began as a normal day.

I showed up to work and as I pulled in,

I could tell that there was something going on.

Just all of a sudden everyone starts to try to tell me this

story about a real-world UFO event that had

occurred that morning.

-They observed a very large red square,

estimated to be almost the size

of a football field,

approach the base from the ocean and

hover at low altitude

over one of the launch facilities.

This object remained for about 45 seconds or so before darting

off over the mountains.

-Very quickly I realized, you know,

that this is not a joke.

They're not pranking me,

that this is a real event that occurred.

And then sometime after dark,

a radio transmission came in over the net.

“Be advised, we have strange lights over the ocean.”

-My name is Chaz King.

I was on duty the night of the incident.

Probably between 12:00 and 1:00 in the morning,

we were all in the intra-control facility,

which is kinda like a big glass building

that oversees everything.

It started out as, like, a big ball light

over the ocean off the coast.

Everyone kind of was like, okay,

sometimes we have planes fly into the flight line area.

Just got our attention but nothing out of the ordinary

until it started to come towards

our position.

-I was getting ready to jump in my car and head

to that location.

And then just all hell broke loose.

The radio transmissions start to pour in.

People started to scream.

-As it became closer and closer

to our position,

you could no longer see the light.

You could just see a massive object

in the sky.

It stopped and hovered,

right over the coastline.

It was so massive,

it was almost like a football field long.

There was no propulsion systems, no lights,

no audible sounds,

and it just hovered there.

I remember the five of us

looking at each other,

kinda dumbfounded, in disbelief.

There was excitement, a little bit of fear,

a little bit of panic, a lot of chaos.

[Jeffrey Nuccetelli] And that's when it became very

difficult to hear the transmissions.

These are people I'd spent years with.

We were very close,

and they're not people that are easily frightened

or intimidated, and they were frightened and they

were terrified and they were screaming for help over the net.

[Chaz King] After a few seconds we kind of sprung into action.

That's what we're trained to do,

but then it just shot away up the coastline,

seemed like it was a million miles an hour,

like it was shot out of a cannon and then it was gone.

-Was this documented in any official form whether

it was a police blotter?

-Yes, they had official documentation and records from

the event that the witness held over the years.

-So this is the Security Forces blotter,

and this is the actual record of the event.

The title is Patrol Response, Unidentified Flying Object.

So that's how it was officially logged, as a UFO.

[Chaz King] We received a briefing,

the next tour of duty,

that it was an unauthorized aircraft landing.

And I remember all of us kind of looking at

each other puzzled.

One, it never landed.

Two, the airfield wasn’t even open that day.

I know personally, I can’t explain it.

I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.

The way it hovered, to make no sound,

to have no propulsion system.

Our aircraft don’t do that.

[Jeffrey Nuccetelli] At the time,

I didn't know what to think other than,

this is extraordinary.

We didn't have any kind of protocols in place to deal with

an incident like that.

But we upchannelled all the information that we had

to higher headquarters.

And then we would drive around just trying to keep an

eye on the sky.

[Jeffrey Nuccetelli] Me and the people that

experienced the Vandenberg encounters,

we talked about it pretty regularly for a while.

[Chaz King] Having conversations with family members, friends,

“Do you think it was, you know, an alien?

Do you think it was this?”

I can only describe that,

I've never seen anything like it.

You’re always looking at the sky,

wondering will it come back?

What was it?

And then, you know,

20 years later I’d kinda locked it away after being told

to just forget about it.

-Some people believed it, other people didn’t.

And some people got very uncomfortable.

And we realized, people really don't know this is real,

and they think that we're, you know, we're making it up.

After a while I really just quit talking about it.

There was really nowhere to go,

and then I found the Merged podcast with Ryan.

-Welcome to Merged. I’m Ryan Graves.

I wanted to create a platform where pilots and reputable

professionals could discuss this topic,

safe from ridicule.

-I said, this guy seems like someone that I can trust,

that will take me seriously.

And I stayed up all night one night typing up emails.

It took a lot of courage, but I hit that send button,

and I think within hours he replied.

And then things moved very rapidly from there.

Ryan introduced me to some lawmakers,

and then eventually to the investigators at AARO.

So I provided them all the documentation I had,

I gave them additional witnesses that they could

follow up on.

They're looking for historical records that could

back up the story.

And they’re gonna find if there is any radar data.

Vandenberg is covered in cameras.

There might be some video or still pictures.

Hopefully, they can get enough information where they

can try to resolve the case.

-Jeff, thanks for joining me today.

-Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

[Jeffrey Nuccetelli] I ended up being invited onto the podcast,

and I thought to myself,

you know, what are you doing, man?

You're getting ready to go out in front of the whole world

and talk about UFOs.

We want the stigma reduced.

The big shift now are people like you and some of the other

people that are,

have come out in the open and be like,

these events are real.

They're happening.

We're in the fight now.

-One step at a time.

Well, Jeff, thanks for coming on...

[Jeffrey Nuccetelli] I think the more witnesses we can

encourage to come out, especially if they have some

kind of data or evidence,

the stronger position that we will be in to force

the government to disclose.

-Major Keyhoe, you will agree that most people in the

United States don’t believe in flying saucers

from outer space.

They probably hold the view of Columnist Bob Considine,

who wrote that flying saucers are products of,

for the most part,

"pranksters, half-wits, cranks, publicity hounds,

fanatics in general, and screwballs."

-Well I wish I could show him at any time a list of

about 800 witnesses,

some of the big names in aviation,

including up to the rank of Colonel in the Air Force.

If they’re screwballs and incompetents,

why are they still on the job?

[Leslie Kean] In the late 40s and early 50s,

there were sightings across the United States.

It was in the middle of the Cold War,

so government officials were trying to figure out

what these objects were.

-The government set up a series of research programs

charged by the Air Force with investigating UFO claims and

trying to solve the mystery.

First was Project Sign, then Project Grudge,

then Project Blue Book.

[reporter] Project Blue Book investigated 12,518 sightings.

[Garrett Graff] With time, these projects would end up

running for about a quarter century.

-Donald Keyhoe was interested in all sightings.

And of course, the project Blue Book sightings were of

tremendous interest to him.

[Leslie Kean] Project Blue Book would often issue very silly

explanations for cases that did not seem to fit the case.

[Linda Powell] They were birds, the planet Venus, a balloon,

seagulls were favored as being the culprits.

-They ignored lots of cases,

they were not respectful of witnesses.

-And the ridicule that was piled on these individuals

afterwards is astounding.

-Of this great mass of reports,

we have been able, adequately, to explain the

great bulk of them.

-But Keyhoe was very direct in his criticisms of

the Air Force.

-They are simply following orders to explain away all UFO

sightings as quickly as possible when they become

public and deny that UFOs really exist.

-Keyhoe put the absurdity of the Air Force's explanations on

display for all to see and I think by many accounts,

the number of reports actually started to drop because people

didn't want to subject themselves to

the public ridicule.

[Garrett Graff] So Keyhoe becomes the driving force

behind NICAP, The National Investigations Committee

on Aerial Phenomena.

Which becomes the model for civilian

investigation into UFOs.

-Instead of being a subject for ridicule, and a big joke,

actually it’s a serious matter which could affect

the lives of all of us.

[Garrett Graff] NICAP is conducting

its own investigations, talking to witnesses,

as well as trying to put pressure on the

government to release the knowledge that it does

have about the reality of UFOs.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] In many cases,

the Air Force didn't send anybody to investigate.

They just took in reports and stamped an explanation

on these incidents.

Whereas Keyhoe and his organization,

they had investigators around the country that met,

and analyzed a lot of these incidents.

It’s an important counterpoint to the Air Force’s

decades of saying, “Nothing to see here.”

-I think that Project Blue Book started off as a sincere effort

to try to get to the bottom of what this phenomenon was.

But there was a sense in the general public that there was a

coverup going on that they were not telling us the truth

about what they really knew about UFOs.

-In the mid-1960s,

the Air Force decided that it would be prudent to have

an external academic review of UFOs and the UFO cases.

And so in the mid-1960s,

the Condon Committee was formed.

-Dr. Condon, do you hope to find people from outer space

here on earth?

-Well I don’t know for sure but we’ll try to just study the

reports and get as much additional information as we

can to see.

-Dr. Edward Condon was a physicist who had

a track record that was quite respectable.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] In the years and months before

the final report came out,

Condon was on record belittling the topic.

-Before the study even began,

he said in a speech that the government should

get out of the UFO business, there's nothing to it.

He later wrote the authors of UFO books

should be horsewhipped.

[Leslie Kean] Condon is actually on the record saying

that he didn't think the Air Force should have anything

to do with UFOs, but, he said,

“I'm not supposed to make that conclusion for another year.”

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] One of his staff members wrote

a memo that says,

the trick is to make this thing appear objective.

And when the report actually came out,

Condon wrote the top-level conclusion.

[Leslie Kean] He wrote a summary of his own report,

which basically said there’s nothing to any of it,

it’s not worthy of scientific investigation.

Whereas if you read the report,

there are many cases inside of it that were not explained

and were stated as such in the report.

-There are contradictions in this report.

They state in the beginning that all the

evidence is negative,

there is no evidence indicating any reality of

UFOs as devices under intelligent control.

However, in the report itself, you will find numerous cases

which say that these, apparently the object in there

was real and it looks as though it could be a UFO.

[Linda Powell] Keyhoe went all out to try and

discredit the report.

And he undermined confidence in it,

but not sufficient to overturn it.

-The government in 1969 closed its official investigation

of UFOs with Project Blue Book and said,

"There’s no alien craft, you know, in the atmosphere,

end of story."

[Leslie Kean] In 1969, Keyhoe retired,

and NICAP was really never the same without his leadership.

-As for Major Donald Keyhoe himself,

like most of us, he’s never seen a flying saucer.

Which may just make him like a mystic who’s

never seen a ghost.

But one must give him credit.

He has much faith.

[Linda Powell] Keyhoe was always pushing at the door to

try and get disclosure.

He was permanently optimistic it was going to come.

He never changed.

I think his role is historically important.

It shows us how history has repeated itself.

[Garrett Graff] In many ways this feels like the same cycle.

Every 20 years the government comes out with

a new report saying,

“We're definitely sure that UFOs aren't aliens.”

As far as I’m concerned,

the government is not engaged in some

large-scale cover-up of alien spacecraft

and alien bodies.

But it does cover up some chunk of the truth about

UFOs because the government doesn't want to

talk about its own secret research and

development projects or advanced adversary technology.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] But the U.S. government will

now need to reckon with some very serious politicians,

including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer,

and the UAP Disclosure Act.

This is a very serious, very cautious politician proposing

some of the most extraordinary legislation about UFOs that has

perhaps ever been seen in the United States Congress.

-Is there anything else you think that we can do with the

government to encourage and facilitate

more civilian reporting?

-I think we're doing it right now.

-Okay, great.

-I think this hearing is going to show the American people

that their government takes this topic seriously.

[Christopher Mellon] It's easy in theory to say, well,

of course, you know, transparency.

We should put everything out there.

And I lean that way myself, but I don't think we should

blithely assume that it's an easy call.

If you’re the President of the United States,

why do you want to terrify the American public,

the world public, with this information,

when we can't do anything about it?

The markets are gonna be rattled,

and your entire political agenda is probably

gonna be overtaken.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] So with UFOs,

it’s not surprising that there is some level of secrecy.

But in July of 2023,

in a move that nobody really saw coming,

Senator Chuck Schumer,

along with Senator Mike Rounds and a bipartisan group

of four other senators,

announced the UAP Disclosure Act.

[reporter] Schumer is backing legislation that would create a

commission with broad authority to declassify documents

about Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.

-For a number of years,

members of the Senate have questioned whether or not we

were getting all the facts surrounding what was

actually going on with unidentified flying objects.

Senator Schumer and I had decided that what we really

wanted to do was two things.

Number one, provide a central collection facility or

location with the National Archives.

And then second,

we wanted a board of esteemed,

capable individuals that would actually look through

a lot of this material and decide what could be

released to the public and what should,

for national security purposes, be kept private.

-The United States government has gathered a great deal of

information about UAPs over many decades but has

refused to share it with the American people.

That is wrong, and additionally,

it breeds mistrust.

-By allowing for an outside,

independent collection of these records,

we can make progress in terms of dispelling myths

and providing accurate information to

the American people.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] Perhaps most shockingly,

the legislation made references to non-human intelligence.

-Non-human intelligence.

That is what the actual text of that amendment says.

-We’ve gone from a point in which this entire topic

was not taken seriously by the government.

And now Congress is talking about the possibility

of aliens in legislation.

[Leslie Kean] Non-human intelligence was cited in the

legislation at least 18 times or more.

-What's impressive to me is that it appeared at all.

-We knew that the question was gonna be,

“Do you have knowledge of non-human intelligence?”

We haven't seen that,

but at least we tried to put it into statute to say

we want to get that reported in the future.

-The truth may be out there.

But you won’t find it in the annual defense bill.

The intelligence community nixed provisions to declassify

what the government knows about the unknown.

-100%. They just gutted it. The gloves are off, man.

-Unfortunately, we didn't get the whole bill through.

We did get it out of the Senate,

but the House had a different point of view.

They were more concerned about the disclosure of items

that might be sensitive to national security.

And they didn’t want to make a big deal about UAPs.

-You had a very strong amendment for government

transparency on this issue.

Whether you believe my allegations or not,

this is a government transparency issue at large.

I mean, total failure.

It’s one of the biggest failures, probably,

in the history of Congress.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] Despite the House gutting some

of the elements of the Schumer Disclosure Act,

President Biden signed into law a very significant element

of that legislation.

-Basically, we got part of the bill done,

and that was a central location where material

would be archived,

but we didn't get the disclosure board included.

So we’ll continue to work on the issue.

-We will keep working,

I want to assure the American people,

Senator Rounds and I will keep working to change

the status quo.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] We've seen testimony from pilots,

we've seen the videos, we've heard from the witnesses.

We're seeing, finally,

a true interest in addressing this mystery,

solving this riddle, and we should all be intrigued

by the unknown.

-I received a email on the Navy’s secret network.

“Urgent safety of flight.”

The next day, that email was wiped from my computer.

-There’s no doubt that what we saw was the same

type of light formations that were reported and

well-documented from the ground.

-I can remember the apprehension, the helplessness,

abject terror.

-Pilots are scared that if they come forward individually,

they’re out the door.

But if we all go together,

the door’s not big enough to get us all through it

at the same time.