Original subtitles

[pensive music playing]

[Woods] What I saw that night, I can never forget it.

Ellsworth Air Force Base, November 1977.

[narrator] At the time, Mario Woods served in the Air Force

on the Security Police Response Team

in the 44th Missile Security Squadron.

That night in mid-November, Mario and his new partner, Michael Johnson,

were guarding a nuclear launch facility in a remote area of Ellsworth Air Force Base

in rural South Dakota.

The weather was freezing, the sky was clear.

[Woods] And I just happened to look to the east and I see these lights.

I didn't hear any motors whirring or nothing. I go, "That's awful strange."

So I thought, "What could that be?"

All of a sudden this idea comes into my mind.

Sometimes at sea, they would use lights

instead of radio communication to talk to a sister ship.

And I just went "blip, blip, blip, blip, blip" like that.

And all of a sudden the lights went off, the lights went on,

lights went off, lights came back on.

I go, "Wow, that's interesting."

[narrator] Mario called his partner outside and repeated the exercise.

The lights in the sky blinked back again.

When Mario tried a third time, the lights in the sky turned off and stayed off.

[Woods] I said, "Well, I guess the show's over."

And he didn't say anything. He just turned and started to walk back in.

[narrator] Hours later, just after midnight,

their flight security controller received a call.

There was a major security breach detected at the November 5 nuclear launch site.

Mario and his partner headed off to investigate the CID 4 perimeter alert.

They arrived to a scene that would change the course of Mario's life.

[Woods] So we arrived at site just a few moments before 1 a.m.,

and there sat in front of us,

or up on top of November 5,

an object that was the size of a Walmart building,

sitting 10 feet in the air directly on top of a blast door

of November 5 missile site, a Minuteman II

one-point megaton weapon missile site.

Sitting motionless, quiet, no whirring motors, no anything.

There's no cockpit. There's no access. There's no writing.

All I saw was like an electrical discharge on the exterior

of this gargantuan vehicle.

And it was a vehicle.

So as we got closer to this thing, Michael Johnson never said a word.

We pull up at a 45 degree angle.

There's no way that I'm going on that site.

The fear just came out of nowhere. The--

Whatever fear I can describe was just everywhere for me.

You know, we're humans. We can be afraid too, right?

Something greater than us, naturally, it's gonna invoke fear.

Uh...

When we pulled up, I remember saying, "That's the object we were seeing."

No comment from Michael Johnson, none whatsoever.

All of a sudden, the light became so bright.

[tense music playing]

Dust particles moving through the cabin like in slow motion.

Out of nowhere, this black ball, it just shot out of nowhere,

and it came right down in front of the hood.

It just went right, left, up, down, stationary,

moved, and then just went...

...psssstz, and it was gone.

I kept saying, "Michael, Michael, what's going on? What's wrong, man?"

No answer. No nothing.

I just sensed it.

And here, there's these--

There's four beings, there's three small and one tall behind the three,

and they just approached me.

They didn't-- They weren't walking. They were just gliding.

And I hear in my mind, in my body, "Do not fear."

The clearest resonance of a sound that I can't--

I can't even describe how clear it was.

All of a sudden, I was-- I guess I was just out, completely out.

And it was a flash. I opened my eyes, gasping for air,

which was fine, and I was in total blackness.

And I said, "Michael," I said, "where are we?"

And now all of a sudden, it's after 6.

So we had five hours of complete blackness.

[narrator] Mario and his partner were found miles from where they disappeared.

There were no tire tracks or footprints in the deep mud surrounding the vehicle.

[Woods] Can't just let it go. You have to have an answer to the why.

[theme music playing]

[King] In December 2017, a bombshell report dropped in theNew York Times,

written by Leslie Kane, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper

that exposed a secret UFO program

running in the Department of Defense called AATIP:

the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

This program had been involved in studying military UAP cases,

three of which were documented with leaked videos from Navy pilots

who had run into these anomalous craft off both the east and west coast.

[pilot 1] That's not an L&S, though, is it? It's not--

[pilot 2] That is an L&S, dude.

- [pilot 1] Well, if there's-- - [pilot 2] Look at that thing!

This article marked a watershed moment for the field of ufology,

where suddenly there was hope that more serious conversations about UFOs

would reach the mainstream.

[Chase] So the 2017 New York Times article

marked the beginning of a remarkable push

for greater transparency around the UFO issue.

And this was really significant for two reasons.

The first was that this was the first time

that we were seeing UFOs being taken seriously

in a major media outlet like the New York Times.

And the second was that the release of this article

actually coincided with the release of three videos

that had been taken by Navy pilots

that seemed to show these extraordinary objects

that they were encountering in the skies.

And one of these videos was from one of the most remarkable incidents on record,

the Nimitz incident.

[ominous music playing]

I was off the coast of California flying a training exercise with my squadron.

We launched on November 14th, 2004,

expecting to practice our air-to-air maneuvers.

And so we were surprised and alarmed when we were interrupted

and asked to divert to some real-world tasking.

I think that the air traffic controllers on the other ship who were directing us

thought that they had a glitch in their radar.

They were seeing these strange tracks, these strange hits.

And so when we merged and were able to pick up a visual tally on this object,

which we now affectionately refer to as the Tic Tac,

I think that everybody was surprised that there was something "there" there.

[King] What Navy pilots Alex Dietrich and Commander David Fravor saw that day

was truly anomalous.

It was a giant white craft, the size of a school bus, and shaped like a giant Tic Tac.

There were no visible means of propulsion, no flight surfaces, no exhaust.

According to our physics, this thing shouldn't have been able to fly.

But it wasn't just flying.

It was making crazy hairpin turns, stopping on a dime,

and shooting off at insane speeds

that would kill any human pilot.

But even more stunning is the fact that the Tic Tac

was tracked dropping from 80,000 feet in the air,

which is about two and a half times the height of your average commercial flight,

down to the surface of the ocean in 0.78 seconds.

That's 30,000 times faster than our fastest planes.

[Elizondo] David Grusch is an Air Force combat veteran

who also was a 14-year senior intelligence officer

with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency

and the National Reconnaissance Office.

So at NGA, David Grusch was tasked with the UAP portfolio

and to act as the liaison for the UAP Task Force.

The head of the UAP Task Force gave him the initiative

to go and find out what the United States government knows about UAP.

He goes around and starts talking to colleagues.

And it turns out that some of these colleagues that were just across the aisle from him

in different cubicles

actually had some exposure to these programs directly

or knew others who had worked on this program.

What he uncovered is a decades-long UAP crash-retrieval program.

And he did this by talking to many witnesses.

He says there are over 40, of people who have direct exposure to the program

or who have worked directly on that program.

Do you have any personal knowledge of people who have been harmed or injured

in efforts to cover up or conceal these extraterrestrial technology?

Yes, personally.

[Iandoli] The congressional UFO hearing that was put forward by the Oversight Committee

was extremely interesting, but it was also very profound and historic,

because for the first time in history, you had US service members

coming forward with their firsthand UFO experiences.

I have experience in advanced UAP firsthand

and I'm here to voice the concerns

of more than 30 commercial aircrew and military veterans

who have confided their similar encounters with me.

[Iandoli] You had Lieutenant Ryan Graves there.

The Tic Tac object we engaged in 2004 was far superior to anything that we had on time,

have today, or are looking to develop in the next 10 years.

[Iandoli] You had Lieutenant Commander David Fravor.

I was informed in the course of my official duties

of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program.

[Iandoli] And David Grusch.

And it was really good because you had the two pilots,

Ryan Graves and Commander Fravor, who have utmost credibility,

and all of their claims can be substantiated by supporting evidence.

[King] I made it a point to be at the congressional hearing

because this felt like a historic moment.

For the first time, you had whistleblowers under oath

talking about not just the government and military cover-up,

they were also talking about recovered craft and even bodies.

Nothing like this had ever happened before.

If you believe we have crashed craft, stated earlier,

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

As I've stated publicly already in my News Nationinterview,

biologics came with some of these recoveries. Yeah.

Were they, I guess, human or nonhuman 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.

-[Iandoli] The big surprise in that hearing was David Grusch -[tense music playing]

because he made some really big claims

regarding recovered craft, nonhuman intelligence,

recovered occupants, nonhuman biologics,

and he did it all under oath.

And even when congressional staffers

had tried to gain access to that information

through having a meeting with David Grusch, they were blocked and not able to.

And I can only imagine that if that's happening, it's because somebody doesn't want

David Grusch to have that conversation with Congress.

Mr. Grusch, as a result of your previous government work,

have you met with people with direct knowledge, or have direct knowledge yourself

of nonhuman origin craft?

Yes, I personally interviewed those individuals.

[intriguing music playing]

The momentum coming out of the hearings was like nothing that we had ever seen before.

For the very first time, we had members of Congress taking the UFO issue seriously.

We heard from Senator Marco Rubio, who told us that multiple whistleblowers

had already spoken to the Senate Intelligence Committee

and had confirmed many of Grusch's claims about crash-retrieval programs.

And sweeping new legislation was proposed by Senators Chuck Schumer and Michael Rounds

in order to create greater transparency around the UAP issue.

[Iandoli] In the UAP Disclosure Act,

there's a lot of really interesting indications

of what that language is trying to propose,

specifically because of the directness of the language they use.

And they define terms like "nonhuman intelligence" very specifically,

which is repeated over 20 times in the language.

They're talking about crash-retrieved objects

that originate from nonhuman intelligences.

They're talking about putting together a panel of nine people from different areas

to actually disclose to the American public

what they find regarding UFOs and nonhuman intelligence.

[King] Unfortunately, just as it felt like we were making some real progress

with the disclosure movement, it hit some major setbacks.

In December 2023, a small group of congressmen blocked the UAP Disclosure Act.

Notably, those congressmen were representing and had major ties to defense contractors

that were in districts where some of these projects were allegedly held.

A few months later, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO,

which is ostensibly in charge of investigating reports of UAPs,

released an historical report in which they denied that their investigation

had uncovered any evidence that such secret programs exist.

AARO has also denied having heard from any whistleblowers

with direct knowledge of the programs alleged by David Grusch.

[Woods] I testified for four hours and 19 minutes to the minute.

Everything they requested, I relayed and answered truthfully

and got nothing back in return

as so stated and so promised by them.

So two weeks later, when the congressional hearing occurred

with Sean Kirkpatrick, as he testified before Congress,

he stated that there was no evidence of any type of extraterrestrial vehicle

or any abnormal vehicle

or what have you concerning our nuclear program and what had happened.

I really took issue with that because I know what I saw.

[Iandoli] There are a number of indications that point in the direction that AARO

isn't necessarily trustworthy.

We've had several AARO reports that have been completely underwhelming.

They don't seem to be transparent in their reporting

and how they're coming to their conclusions.

They're lacking providing the data that they're supposed to be reporting on.

And we know from several witnesses who have spoken to AARO

that their testimony hasn't been taken seriously.

And it doesn't seem like AARO has followed through

and done a full investigation on those incidents,

including Robert Salas, Mario Woods, and many others

who have given their testimony to AARO,

and either AARO followed up on it and is not reporting on their findings

or they didn't follow up at all.

[Woods] I felt like my four hours and 19 minutes

probably went into the trash can or File 13,

or it was buried with many others.

[Chase] The fight for UAP transparency is ongoing,

but I also think that it's important that people recognize that

we don't need to wait around for the government to give us the answers.

The UFO phenomenon is part of our reality.

It's not something that the government can lock up in an underground bunker somewhere

and keep from us.

It's everywhere and it's happening all the time.

[Madden] What I find most problematic about the notion of UFO disclosure

is that people will only think of it in terms of

gaining information from the government

and not an occasion to rethink things at a very fundamental level.

And I think those are two independent questions. Right?

And I don't think the one need be answered in order to begin the other one.

I think we have what we need to accept that there is something about the world

that we're not quite getting and that should occasion a new kind of reflection.

[King] Behind the headlines and all this infighting in Washington,

something real is going on here, something extraordinary.

The fact that we're not alone in the universe, it's paradigm shifting.

It's huge.

It could be the biggest story in human history.

So why aren't more people talking about this?

Have you faced any retaliation or reprisals

for any of your testimony or anything on these lines?

It was very brutal and very unfortunate,

some of the tactics they used

to hurt me both professionally and personally, to be quite frank. Yeah.

There's a lot of stigma around the phenomenon

and that stigma has largely been generated by social engineering,

some of it probably intentional.

The unintentional part is because people are made nervous and uneasy

by coming face to face with things they don't understand.

It makes them want to push it away.

And intentional social engineering exploits this part of the human psyche.

And for example, when you see things

being turned into laughing stocks on the television

or sneered at, that's almost always intentional social engineering

on the part of somebody.

[Masters] A lot of the stigma that surrounds this subject

has to do with a manufactured campaign,

an institutionalized campaign to keep people

from talking about it, especially scientists.

Scientists were used in this divide-and-conquer strategy

where Project Grudge, Project Sign, Project Blue Book,

were meant to sort of quell interest in this

and to stigmatize people that "believed" in it,

people that had sightings, people that had abduction experiences.

So we're really dealing with this cultural hangover of sorts

where we were forced by these institutionalized agencies

to not talk about this, to not be interested in it.

And unfortunately, we have to fight to overcome that.

If we take the UFO question seriously--

And not just the craft, but the individuals inside.

--it could really help shift us into a new realm

of understanding humanity as a whole.

I think we should all just stop, acknowledge that it's real,

and that it's much more than cockpit videos.

But we first have to get past the stigma

and start to recognize that this is real

and recognize we can learn a lot from it.

[pensive music playing]

[King] Once we allow ourselves to really consider the reality of the UFO phenomenon,

the question naturally arises:

"What's the nature of the intelligence behind this phenomenon?"

People that entertain these questions and go down that line of inquiry,

often they experience profound shock

when they realize that the answers to these questions

could be much, much more complex than they think.

[Strieber] The nature of the visitors is a really interesting question.

What are they? Where are they from?

And how do we find the answers to that out?

We look at how they relate to us and what is the deposit of information in our memories

about our relationship with them.

This is how we find out what they are.

[Chase] When I first started looking into UFOs, I came into it

with many of the same default assumptions that many people have.

Basically that if UFOs are real and they're not human technology,

then they must be aliens.

I mean, that's the only way I'd ever seen it portrayed in the media and elsewhere.

And yet when you start to really dig into the data,

you start to recognize that the extraterrestrial hypothesis has a lot of flaws.

[King] The modern UFO phenomenon has been going on for at least 80 years,

but many people would suggest that it's been going on a lot longer than that.

People have reported strange lights in the sky or odd beings for centuries.

Also, UFOs seem to be everywhere on this planet.

If you look at a map of major UFO hotspots,

those UFO hotspots are largely in population centers.

So wherever there are people looking up at the sky, they find UFOs.

This would suggest that there's a much more local presence

and even maybe an omni-presence on this planet,

which when you think about it

is probably more than the extraterrestrial hypothesis can account for.

But perhaps the biggest clue that UFOs might not be extraterrestrial in origin

could be the beings themselves.

[Masters] There is some variation among these beings

that are described in association with the UFO.

And more often than not, they're described as human.

Human-looking, human-like, humanoid.

You have different variants. You have short Greys, tall Greys,

ones that look like hybrids between them and ourselves.

But all of these, importantly, are upright-walking hominins.

They would be classified as us in the same way that our ancestors were upright-walking.

With close-encounter cases, you often have these humanoid beings.

And debunkers have used that for years to say,

"Well, you know, if there were really extraterrestrials visiting Earth,

what are the chances that it would be humanoid?"

[Masters] It's highly unlikely that you would get the same morphological form

on a different planet.

And at the same time, people often forget that the universe

is about 14-and-a-half billion years old.

So the likelihood that we would have something that looks and acts so much like us

that evolved in the same way and at the same time,

but is just slightly more advanced than us is very unlikely.

[Elizondo] There's also this trend of people coming away from these experiences

with dreams, or being given prophetic visions or prophecies

that are very terrestrial in nature.

These are about nuclear de-proliferation.

These are about the environment and taking care of the planet.

Even sometimes extremely traumatic encounters

lead to people having this new-found care for the planet,

a new-found care for their communities in ways that maybe they didn't have before.

And so it's very odd that you would see ET

caring so much about us, caring for the planet.

Why do they care so much about what happens here with us, to us?

[Chase] Another clue that we have

that the extraterrestrial hypothesis doesn't account for all the data

is that these types of encounters have been going on

potentially all the way back to the dawn of human civilization.

But it's only in the last 80 or so years

that we've started to think of them as extraterrestrials.

How we think about these things changes over time and across cultures.

And it actually makes a lot of sense that in a space-faring age

that we would look at UFOs

and assume that they were spacecraft coming from other planets.

[King] We're so used to thinking of the UFO phenomenon

in extraterrestrial terms that it can be difficult, even jarring,

to adjust to the idea that we could be sharing our planet with these strange beings.

But with the numbers that we see and the amount

of cases that there are throughout history,

that might actually be the case.

This is what's called the ultra-terrestrial hypothesis.

[Bishop] The ultra-terrestrial hypothesis

is the idea that there are other intelligent humanoid beings

living on the Earth.

And they have been for thousands of years, and they're just hidden from us

and live in a different space than we do,

whether underground or in an inaccessible area.

And they appear to be alien to us

because they have followed a different evolutionary path.

It's definitely possible that we are sharing the planet with nonhuman intelligences.

But the idea that they're so close is very alarming to people

because if we were to have the realization

that they're right here, we'd throw a lot of people off.

[Chase] One of the most compelling pieces of data that we have,

that we might actually be sharing this planet with nonhuman intelligences,

is that many of these unidentified craft

are seen coming into and out of the water,

something that's become known as transmedium travel.

[King] The idea that there might be highly advanced intelligent species

living in our oceans actually isn't as absurd as it sounds.

Seventy-one percent of the Earth's surface is covered by oceans.

Humans may live on land, but Earth is a water world,

and we know shockingly little about the oceans.

Less than 25% of the seabed has been mapped to modern standards,

and less than 5% of the ocean's volume has been explored.

We know significantly more about the surface of the moon

and even about the surface of Mars

than we know about our own oceans.

If there is an intelligent species living in our oceans,

it's entirely possible that we don't even know that they're there.

[Chase] Tim Gallaudet is a retired rear admiral in the Navy

and also used to be the Navy's oceanographer.

And more recently, he's become a part of the Sol Foundation,

where he actually wrote a white paper about unidentified submersible objects.

In this paper, he talked about this really fascinating case from the 1960s.

It was a joint exercise between Canada and the

United States off the coast of Nova Scotia.

And what Navy divers reported to see during this exercise

were two unidentified craft on the seabed.

And even more remarkably,

they claimed to see nonhuman beings operating on this craft and trying to fix it.

And allegedly, film actually exists of this encounter.

And although this remarkable footage has never been made public,

when someone like Tim Gallaudet

references this sort of a case in a paper like this, we have to ask ourselves why.

[intriguing music playing]

[King] There's another way to think through the idea that UFOs

might not be from another planet,

but from right here on Earth.

Some have hypothesized that these craft and

beings might be coming from another dimension.

This is often described as something like existing in a plane of reality

that's on a slightly different frequency, like radio waves,

where we can only tune into one station at a time.

It's been argued that this could explain why this phenomenon is often described in ways

that suggest that it is both physical and non-physical, both here and not here,

and how they seem to be able to appear out of thin air and disappear just as quickly.

[Chase] Of all the hypotheses about the potential origins of the UFO phenomenon,

the interdimensional hypothesis is by far the least understood

and the hardest to grapple with.

The reason for that is that although they're fundamental

to several different theories and hypotheses about the structure of the universe,

we don't have any solid proof that other dimensions actually exist,

and there isn't even any solid consensus on what other dimensions would be

or how they would operate even if they do exist.

[King] The thing that makes the interdimensional hypothesis so appealing

is also the same thing that makes it ultimately meaningless.

We don't really know what dimensions are,

or how they work, or if they even exist at all,

and so the interdimensional hypothesis is vague and flexible enough

that it can hold any sort of concept that you build on it.

And who knows, maybe some of those ideas will turn out to be correct.

But for now, anything that we say about other dimensions is mere speculation.

There's nothing you can really hang your hat on.

[Chase] Another wild hypothesis that's been gaining traction over recent years

is the extra-tempestrial hypothesis,

and this is basically the idea that UFOs are us coming back from the future.

And there's one person who's really done a lot of work to flesh this idea out:

an anthropologist by the name of Dr. Michael Masters.

[Masters] A lot of what I study as an anthropologist

is the way humans have evolved over the last 6-8 million years,

since we stood upright

and started to diverge from the common ancestor with chimpanzees.

And over that time, there's a number of craniofacial changes

that are consistent with what we would expect to see

in our descendants if those trends continue.

Namely, we have encephalization, an increase in brain size.

We have increased neurocranial globularity,

which is an increase in the width of the skull.

We have big, round heads that, along with our chin,

is a characteristic of anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens.

And those traits together are just the trade-off of the brain and face.

So our brains have gotten bigger, expanded mediolaterally,

our frontal lobes move forward, and in association with that,

our mid-and-lower face has retracted and gotten reduced.

Our teeth have gotten smaller. And if that trend continues,

we'd expect to have bigger, more rounded heads,

and even reduced and more retracted faces.

So in looking at the biological evolution of our species,

it makes sense to connect the past, the present, and this perceived future,

since these beings are most commonly described

with those same characteristics we would expect to see

with the continuation of the same trend.

[King] Something that's really interesting about the extra-tempestrial hypothesis

is that it could help us answer one of the

most perplexing questions about these beings,

which is, why do they look so much like us?

Maybe the answer is that we share an evolutionary lineage.

But that's not the only mystery that the

extra-tempestrial hypothesis could help us answer.

[Masters] There's a lot about this phenomenon

that seems to indicate that time is involved.

We don't fully understand time yet.

We know that it emerges from something fundamental,

but we don't yet know what that fundamental aspect of this universe is

that time emerges from.

But if we look at these crafts, a lot of contact experiences

involve missing time, distorted time.

There's a number of cases that I mention in

my second book, The Extra-Tempestrial Model,

where you have grass growing at a very rapid rate

as someone's running from one of these UFOs.

The trees around Travis Walton's abduction

sites in proximity to the craft that took him

grew faster than the trees farther away,

even though they were planted at the same time.

Corporal Armando Valdez in Chile from 1977 aged five days in the 15 minutes

that his men were in the same position as he moved closer to this craft,

as indicated by his watch that read five days in the future and his beard growth.

So there's all these indications that the space-time metric is being engineered.

That space and time are moving at a different rate

in association with these machines.

So we have to wonder: If they can manipulate time,

could they use that technology to go back through time?

[Chase] Many people would argue that time travel isn't possible

because it seems to present us with some irresolvable paradoxes.

One example of a paradox like this is the grandfather paradox.

This is the idea that someone might go back in time

and perhaps stop their grandfather from meeting their grandmother.

But then that begs the question, who went back in time to make that happen?

But we do have some models of the universe that might allow time travel to exist.

And one of these models is called the block universe.

[Masters] The idea of the block universe, or

the landscape time, as it's oftentimes known,

is the idea that all moments from the very first instance of matter

coming into creation in this universe

to the last moments where that matter disappears from this universe,

all time and all space is one massive block.

So if you move through time in this way,

you're not able to change anything because the past is already there.

It's already structured in a certain way.

You can visit it, you interact with it, but you don't change anything.

So a lot of people get hung up on this idea that you can change the past.

In the block universe, you can't.

[King] While people can argue about whether time travel is possible or not,

the reality is we don't even know what time is.

It's one of the most difficult problems in all of physics.

Considering that we don't even know how time works,

how it functions, or what it fundamentally is doing,

maybe time travel is possible.

[Chase] The problem with all of the existing

hypotheses for the origin of the UFO phenomenon

is that none of them seem to fit entirely.

It doesn't seem like there's going to be any one answer that really fits.

So how do we move forward from here?

[Strieber] What is this?

Are we talking about extraterrestrials, time travelers,

ultra-terrestrials, inter-dimensionals?

What are we talking about? The dead?

All of the above?

Let's keep the question open.

That's where the exploration is.

The frontier is facing what we don't know as an actual unknown.

And instead of filling the unknown with a bunch of beliefs and suppositions.

[Elizondo] As we look at all of these seemingly disparate hypotheses,

there are two routes that you can take.

You could say no to all of them.

At the same time, you could say yes to all of them.

And that tends to be my approach.

I like to say yes, because when you say yes, you broaden the field,

and you're able to collect more information,

and you're able to go down this path without putting a noun on it.

Because when you put a noun on it, you put a limit on it.

And the problem is that as we study these cases,

any limit that we set up, it just blasts through that limit.

[Bishop] The weirdest thing I could think could be true about the UAP phenomenon

is that it's all true.

And that's hard to put your mind around, but that's me at this point.

I don't like to filter anymore.

[King] None of the hypotheses for the origins of UFOs are entirely satisfying.

They all have flaws, which has caused many people

who've spent a lot of time studying the phenomenon to come to the conclusion

that what we're dealing with likely doesn't have

one explanation, but many explanations.

It's like when you're taking a test in school and you don't know the answer,

so you just fill in the bubble next to "all of the above."

And that's not a bad strategy when you find yourself in a situation

like the situation we find ourselves in with regard to this phenomenon.

And that answer could very well turn out to be correct.

But when we do that, we need to recognize that hedging our bets

isn't the same as knowing the answer.

[Chase] Because none of the hypotheses totally fit the data,

it suggests that there's something fundamental

that we're not getting right about the UFO phenomenon.

We need new models and new frameworks to think about this.

And one of the most exciting new frameworks

comes from a philosopher named Dr. James Madden.

[Madden] Okay, so let's talk about the moniker "unidentified flying object."

I think when people in the past have talked about the UFO,

they have been primarily questioning

the unidentified and the flying part,

and they've left out the object part.

I would like to counsel against that.

So, what a lot of philosophers have claimed, going all the way back to Aristotle,

and more recently people like Graham Harman have argued,

if you have attributes distinct from your parts,

if you are able to persist through changes in your parts,

and if you have control of your parts,

then that thing is an object in and of itself.

It's not merely an aspect of something else, it has being of its own.

Interestingly, if we take that seriously,

then it seems like it's not only things that

are smaller than us that we have to recognize,

but it's also things that are much larger than us.

[King] The UFO phenomenon rarely behaves in the way we would expect

if these were simply beings coming from somewhere

for reasons more or less like our own.

In many cases, they don't even appear to be structured craft at all,

at least not in the way that we think of them.

Reports range from tiny lights high up in the sky

to fiery objects that are as big as a football stadium.

There often aren't obvious beings or pilots associated with these objects either,

and when there are, they almost never behave in ways that make any kind of sense to us.

It makes you wonder if there's some bigger picture that we're missing.

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[Madden] An example that Harmon likes to use is with a pizza shop.

Okay, so let's say we've got a local pizza chain that we go to,

and the people who work at the restaurant, the equipment, the customers,

if you separated us out of that environment

of being put together, we're not gonna get the pizza.

You only get the pizza

when these things are all put together into one thing that's working together.

So we could say then the pizza restaurant has powers,

it has attributes, it has aspects

that are not just aspects of its parts.

Also, the pizza restaurant will survive a complete replacement of all its parts.

Like, all the equipment over time can be replaced. right?

The management could come and go.

All the workers could come and go.

All the customers could come and go, but we could still say

we have the same pizza restaurant.

And finally, we have to admit that there's a kind of control

that the pizza restaurant has over its parts.

We all behave differently when we're at the pizza restaurant than we're at the library.

And so there's a kind of effect that the pizza restaurant has on us as parts of it.

Well, if that's the case, and I think it is,

then we've got to say the pizza restaurant is an object.

It's a thing in its own right. It has a kind of life of its own.

It's doing its own thing.

Now, let's think about the corporation that owns the pizza restaurant.

Once again, I think we could say it has attributes its parts don't have.

It will persist through the replacement of those parts,

and it controls all the things involved in it to some degree.

You and I, if we work for the corporation, are gonna behave differently

because we work for the corporation.

We're not really in control of that thing.

So it looks like we're gonna have to say

something on the scale of a corporation is an object.

And now think of what we just did there as our scale got bigger.

It got bigger in terms of space, it got bigger in terms of time.

Well, we might push this further, and we might think,

"Well, what about not just the corporation,

but the economy that the corporation participates in?"

It looks like now the economy is starting to look like an object in its own right

that's sort of running us from top down.

And then some other philosophers, one I have in mind is Timothy Morton,

makes the point that not only the economy, but the environment,

or something like global warming,

or all the plastic in the world, seems to be doing stuff,

seems to be doing stuff beyond our control

that has effects on us, that has a persistence that goes beyond us.

And Morton will make the case that some of

these objects are what he calls hyperobjects.

And hyperobjects are objects that operate at such grand scales

that human beings cannot really grasp them.

So we only see or encounter these hyperobjects at their very edges.

I can't encounter the economy directly, but I can encounter my paycheck.

I can encounter whether or not I can buy a home.

Or similarly with the environment, I can't grasp the environment,

but I can grasp the blizzard that I had to drive through,

or the strangely warm day in the middle of the winter.

We encounter something like a craft,

or we encounter something like one of the Greys.

And I'm trying to make the case that that is just like the pizza restaurant.

It's an encounter with this much broader thing that goes beyond our ken.

I'm suggesting that we think of the UFO as the unidentified flying hyperobject.

Maybe what we're encountering with the UFO

is in fact a singular thing operating at scales of time and space

beyond what we can actually deal with.

[Chase] Most people who spend any time exploring the UFO phenomenon

find that the more they learn, the less they know.

And honestly, what could be more exciting than that?

[Kripal] I love UFOs precisely because we don't understand them.

If we had an explanation that worked, there wouldn't be much to talk about.

As an intellectual or someone who claims to be an intellectual,

I'm interested in questions. I'm not really that interested in answers,

because answers is where you land and it's where you stop thinking.

And the UFO is so interesting to me

precisely because none of these theories really work.

[King] How do we even begin to process

a phenomenon that's so good at evading our understanding?

I'd suggest that the only way that we're going to find out any answers

is to take seriously the accounts of the people

that have experienced the phenomenon themselves.

[Strieber] There is an extraordinary conversation going on

about UFOs and technology and weapons,

but not the experience, not the actual experience of being face to face with this,

because basically the military doesn't want to deal with that.

And the scientific community has no idea how to deal with it.

The result is our response so far is incoherent.

It becomes coherent when our social, cultural, scientific worlds

begin to understand how to integrate

the material that is being left by the close-encounter witnesses in the culture.

Because unless we do both together,

the technology, the beings, and the encounters,

we will never get a coherent picture of what's going on.

[Chase] It can be really easy to overlook experience or narratives

because they're just so weird.

They're full of absurd and often contradictory details that just don't make sense.

And a lot of people find that it's just easier

to go about their lives under the illusion

that they have things more or less figured out.

[King] There are so many situations on record where people see a UFO

and then for whatever reason, it triggers a precognitive experience,

or they believe that they see a ghost, an apparition,

or experience poltergeist activity.

And sometimes all of these things happen

in what the paranormal researcher John Keel used to call window areas:

places where the boundary between the normal and the paranormal

seems to be thinner.

So let's take a look at a case that involves everything I just mentioned and more.

A case involving UFOs and other phenomena

among multiple generations of a family over decades,

which eventually led them all to a very special ranch.

We brought the crew down to East Texas to hear about this incredible case

that's never been public until now.

[Courtney] When I was a kid, my grandma would take me out in the yard

and we'd look at the constellations and watch the stars,

and she'd teach me about the Big Dipper and the North Star.

And it was something that we'd look forward to every night.

And not just because I got to stay up late, but

because I got to learn things and observe.

One night we're out and we're looking at the stars

and then next thing we know we see a star that wasn't there the night before.

And it was really bright. It didn't look like any of the other stars that we had seen.

It wasn't moving like a plane or a satellite.

So as we're looking at this object in the sky,

it starts to not only get brighter as we observe it,

it starts to change colors.

And it's not changing colors the way that you would see a star twinkling.

It was more dramatic than that, almost like it was signaling us something.

Once we noticed it, it was like it noticed us.

And then as we're trying to make sense of it,

it then immediately just takes off clean across the sky from west to east

and then just stops on a dime.

The biggest feeling at the moment was probably just sheer astonishment.

I just had no classification for it.

It was just something I had never seen.

After we saw the UFO together, she opened up and told me about

other anomalous experiences that she had seeing UFOs

as a kid and that she saw them pretty often

and that she even saw them with some other family members.

[Hazel] Once when I was about 11, my younger sister, we were in the front yard,

and she was standing up like frozen like.

And I saw the object coming down,

and I thought it was gonna get my sister.

And I started throwing sticks at it, but it didn't help any. It just kept coming.

I was angry, because it shouldn't have been there.

[Courtney] She didn't necessarily see it as something overtly threatening,

that it was something that happened and it was a part of our reality and that,

frankly, not everyone believes it,

even though it does happen.

[Hazel] Sometimes when I see this object in the sky, I would feel safer.

I don't know why, but it never bothered me.

[Courtney] At that time, I didn't know what a UFO was.

I never heard of any of her experiences.

But once we saw that together,

it opened up the ability to have this conversation with her about it.

And part of me just thinks that maybe it was something that she knew was out there

that she wanted to make sure that I had the opportunity to witness and experience.

I mean, my grandma would talk about all sorts

of anomalous experiences and she'd talk about

having dreams or visions and seeing something unfold.

Sometimes she'd have a dream about something that happens in your life and calls you,

and then whatever she dreamed is really happening.

And, look, I don't know how or if it's connected to UFOs in any way,

but I can tell you that people in my family today

and going back multiple, multiple generations,

that people have precognitive dreams and that they dream of something

or have a vision of something, and that something comes true with precise detail.

And it's not until I got older that I realized

that that wasn't the norm for most people.

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When our family was brought from Africa, they were brought up to Houston County

and they were bought by the family

that used to own this property that we're sitting on.

And so we had been looking for this land for a long time

because I had ancestors who had died there during slavery.

My grandmother even picked cotton there as a kid,

but we kind of had lost where this location was.

And so it was a significant part of our family history

to be able to tie the whole story back together.

After my son was born, I kind of went on this rabbit hole

of trying to build out my family history

and find all of my ancestors and trace them all the way back to slavery.

And I knew where pretty much everyone was,

with the exception of an ancestor who had died during slavery on a plantation.

Then one day my son, who was about 3 at the time,

had a dream, and he woke up in the middle of the night

and he was almost in a trance-like state.

And he said, "I saw my grandfather."

I'm thinking he's talking about my wife's dad

'cause he had just come and stayed with us.

"You saw Papa Willie?" He's like, "No, it was my grandfather."

I'm like, is he talking about my dad? He's like, "No."

I said, "Who did you see? What was he doing?"

He said, "He was my grandfather and he was in the house and the house was on fire

and he couldn't get out.

And he was sad because he wanted to see you.

And he said that he had something he wants to tell you, but he died in the fire."

And when he said that to me, I immediately just started crying

because I knew who he was talking about.

And my great grandfather was a Southern gentleman,

a leader in the church and a leader in the community.

And he did die in a house fire shortly after I was born.

And he never got to see me in the hospital.

And so for him to tell that story at 3 years old,

you know, we never introduced the concept of great, great grandparents.

We never told him this story.

He's barely articulate, but he's explaining something that we know is true.

But at that moment, I knew who it was.

I knew he had a message for me, but I also still

felt like I didn't want him to come to me

and present himself to me, because I still think that would freak me out.

And so I knew it was real and I knew it was there.

And it probably wasn't for another seven months

before, you know, I got up the courage to ask him to tell me what he wanted to tell me.

And so fast forward to Father's Day,

I found myself at the cemetery in front of his tombstone.

So I just said, "Hey, I'm here. I heard you had something you want to tell me.

What do you want to tell me?"

And I just hear, clear as day, "buy the little red house."

And that was all I heard, "buy the little red house."

We were looking for real estate at the time, a vacation home.

But it turns out we had one little listing of a little red house

on some acreage not too far away from that cemetery.

So I reached out to my realtor and told him, "Hey, take everything else off the list.

The only thing I want to look at is this little red house.

Like, I don't know what is up with it, but I need to look at this little red house."

Our realtor set up a date for us to go look at the property.

And, I mean, it was, like, way out in the middle of nowhere.

You gotta drive miles down a dirt road to get there.

And when we get there, he says, "Oh, wait, I think we're at the wrong place."

And I'm like, "Why do you say that?"

He said, "Because my GPS says we're at a cemetery."

And I'm like, "A cemetery?"

And he showed me, and he showed me the name of the cemetery.

And I just instinctively knew at that moment

where we were, because I had always been told

that the name of the family who owned our family as slaves, and that if we ever found

that cemetery, we would find where our ancestors were buried

and also find the place where they lived.

And we get up to the property and we knock on the door,

and then the guy answers

and says, "Sorry, I don't know what y'all are doing here. This place is not for sale.

This must be a mistake. I'm not looking to sell this place.

You might want to go talk to a neighbor or talk to someone else."

Kind of knew in the back of my mind where we were,

and so I asked him, "Is there a creek that runs in the back of the property?"

And he was like, "Well, yeah, there is."

And I was like, you know, I named the creek and I said, "Is it this creek?"

And he was like, "Yeah, it's actually that creek."

And he's like, "How do you know that?"

And I told him a story about how my grandmother used to pick cotton on a place

along this creek, and they had to follow the

creek all the way back to our family's property.

And that struck up a conversation between us,

and we talked for a while, and eventually he let us tour the property on a ATV.

He still said, "Look, I'm still not selling,

but if you want to go back there and see and just confirm." He let us do that.

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Maybe a couple of weeks later, to our surprise, our realtor reaches out and says

the guy decided that he actually wants to sell us the place.

And he wrote me this beautiful handwritten

letter and basically said that after meeting me

he felt compelled to sell us this place and that he wanted me to be able to spend time

with my son there and build those memories together.

After this kind of wild series of events, I'm now the owner, and my grandmother is also

the owner of the land where our family was once enslaved

and where she once picked cotton.

And I don't really know how to explain it, but I felt like we were led there.

And so you can imagine, I mean, this ranch, at least to us, is a special place

and it has an energy, and you can feel it.

And we've had a history in our family of anomalous experiences

and they still continue at the ranch.

For most people, they see a door swing open or they turn around

and an object is moved or missing.

They see it as a scary experience.

And frankly, at first I did too.

But now, especially if I'm at the ranch, I see it a little differently.

It's almost like I recognize who or what that might be

and what type of message they may be trying to communicate.

And by and large, I think that they're happy that we're there

and that they are glad that we're stewarding the property.

I hope a future for my sons where these types of gifts

and experiences aren't ostracized

and aren't frowned upon and aren't demeaned and negated

and, you know, all the other negative words

that come along with it,

and that we can start to normalize this,

because it is normal, and it is something that a lot of people experience.

But if we all stay silent about it and we don't lean in and listen

and uncover these beautiful stories and mysteries that are, I think,

waiting in many families, then we're doing our children a disservice.

The future I want for my sons is I want them to know that anything is possible.

And in the meantime, I'll just cherish the time that I have with my son

as he's approaching that age that I was

when my grandmother started teaching me about all of these things.

And we'll be at the ranch looking up at the stars together.

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