Original subtitles

UFOs with extraordinary capabilities are present in our skies,

according to a team of former US Government insiders.

This program features military eyewitnesses

describing these unidentified craft for the first time.

In 2017,

this New York Times headline shocked the world.

A clandestine US government program

had been investigating UFOs.

The Pentagon has confirmed the existence

of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program

that studied UFOs, and they released video.

There's a whole fleet of 'em.

My gosh.

For eight years, the secret program

was run by this man, Lue Elizondo.

Time and time again, we were coming up

with these mystery objects,

performing in a way that defies logic.

Frustrated by what he says was a cover up,

Elizondo quit

and joined forces

with an elite group of former government insiders.

We're gonna figure out

how to get to the bottom of it.

Now they have one mission.

To expose what they say is the truth about UFOs.

US airspace is being violated

by vehicles of unknown origin with advanced capabilities.

It was raining UFOs.

I put my entire career and future on the line

because I believe in what I believe in.

Carl Sagan once famously said,

extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

He was absolutely right.

But now we have the proof.

Lue Elizondo is on his way to interview a key eyewitness

to one of the most stunning UFO events in recent history.

We're trying to build a case here for the jury

and so when you're building a case for the jury,

there is nothing more compelling than eyewitness testimony.

They were there, and by the way they're trained observers.

These are people who can think critically.

And this particular pilot has never given an interview

about this incident, ever.

In 2004, this Navy fighter pilot

was training for deployment

aboard the USS Nimitz Aircraft Carrier.

Now a high-ranking officer, this is her first

on-camera interview about the incident.

She wants to keep her identity hidden

due to the sensitivity of what she's about to say.

I wanna make sure that everybody in this room

understands that her identity has to remain protected

at all times, so with that includes when you're writing

notes on email back to executives.

Hey, that was a great interview with.

Don't write that.

Don't put it in there.

Just say the pilot.

Wingman pilot will be appropriated...

So, it's the Wingman pilot.

I still have a security clearance so as a result

we will not be discussing anything classified at all during this interview.

In fact if at any time,

anything is discussed that's classified

we will stop the interview right there and then.

Sure.

Elizondo was still bound by an oath of secrecy,

so he hopes testimony like this

will force the government to acknowledge UFOs are a threat

to national security, and to take action.

Because this issue is such kryptonite

inside the national security establishment,

he needed to figure out a way to do it

so that what he's gathering could be made public.

These are not crazy people that are reporting this stuff.

These are the people that we entrust our security to.

Why don't we just start from the beginning.

We were operating

off the coast of California

in a designated military working area

with our carrier strike group.

We had launched to perform a practice fight

against each other

to rehearse our maneuvers.

On November 14th, 2004,

this pilot took off from the deck of the Nimitz,

as the wingman to a second jet,

flown by her squadron commander.

She soon found herself in the middle

of one of the most significant UFO encounters on record.

It was daylight and-- Oh yeah.

It wasn't in the middle of the night?

Clear blue skies, middle of the day.

Normally fighter pilots

are directed by a radar plane,

known as a hawk eye.

But the two F/A-18 Super Hornets

are suddenly redirected by controllers

on the USS Princeton.

We were interrupted

by a shipborne controller.

Their tone was urgent

and their requests were,

unusual.

This is not an exercise.

This is a real-world intercept.

Didn't have much experience.

I thought maybe it's a drug run or something

coming up the coast of Mexico.

And I thought, wow that'd be cool.

With no information about their target,

as the two jets arrive at the designated location,

they're confused.

My heart sank.

There was something in the water.

There was a churning,

and I went from being sort of giddy, excited,

to thinking, oh my God, now we're on-scene commanders

of a wreck, somebody's crashed and,

aircraft is sinking.

And this is when you notice an object.

We were all clamoring

to get on the radio.

Do you see, in the water,

what the ---is that?

A bizarre craft is hovering

over the churning water.

What does it look like?

No windows.

No flight surfaces.

So no wings at all?

No wings, no?

Smooth, white.

No intakes, no smoke trail.

It looked like a giant Tic Tac.

Give me a rough size.

Maybe 40 feet. Okay, 40 feet, fair enough.

Large enough to scare the hell out of me.

It was so unnerving because

it was so unpredictable.

High G, rapid velocity, rapid acceleration.

So you're wondering: "how could I possibly

fight this?"

We have no ordinance onboard,

unless one of us ram this thing,

which, the way it was maneuvering would have been impossible,

so I stayed in high cover.

The wingman watched from above

as her commander flies directly at the strange craft.

Now Elizondo is on his way to interview

the other pilot in the air that day.

The wingman's commander.

These are reports from military pilots.

They've been in combat, and this is something

that they cannot explain and

it's shaking them up to the point

that they're willing to risk their professional standing

by coming forward and talking about it.

Brother Dave, how are you?

What's up Brother Lue, how you doin' man?

I'm doin' better than I deserve, how you doin'?

Good, boy you live in a castle, man.

I wouldn't call it a castle.

Retired US Navy commander David Fravor

led the Black Ace's squadron,

flying combat missions over the Middle East and Africa.

He now works in the private sector

as an aeronautics consultant.

Commander Fravor is a very rare breed.

He's one of the few folks

that actually run towards danger, not away from it.

Fravor was the wingman's commanding officer that day over the Pacific.

He had that fighter instinct,

so it wasn't surprising his actions on that day.

I really wanted to see what it was.

I mean, if I could have joined right up on it

and got like Blue Angel close,

then I probably would have done that.

As Fravor attempted to get a closer look,

his wingman watched from above.

This object seemed to recognize that

we were there, and went from this very low altitude

to maneuvering in an erratic, very rapid manner.

So hair on the back of my neck is standing up.

I'm thinking I'm gonna be watching a disaster here.

Coming up on Unidentified...

How does the story end?

This rapidly accelerates and it's gone.

The government needed that, discredit this phenomenon,

get your government to do what it's supposed to do, and find out what this is.

Wake up.

This is real, wake up.

Most of my questions are gonna

be focused on the five interrogatives.

The who, what, when, where, how, and why.

Just like we're doing a terrorism or an espionage investigation.

Lue Elizondo may be the most significant

US official to ever claim the UFO phenomenon is real.

For two decades, he served as a counterintelligence

officer for the Department of Defense.

Lue is in many ways an enigma.

Here is a guy who has spent decades, really,

in the intelligence community.

Whether it was the Taliban or it was Al-Qaeda

or it was ISIS, or it was Guantanamo Bay, he had to deal with all of it.

Lue Elizondo has the most insane career you would ever hear.

He started out in special operations with the US Army,

and then he moved his way up into all these shadow organizations,

doing all these...

all that really secret,

crazy stuff you see in the movies.

And then he ended up becoming the guy

that's in charge of all those programs.

Lue is the rare exception,

who was willing to stick his neck out and take risks

that is not usually rewarded in the bureaucracy.

The strategy that most people adopt is to keep their heads down and

go along, to get along, don't draw attention to yourself.

Keep that pension in mind.

And Lue was the guy who was willing to

really engage and stick his neck out

and try to be a change agent.

And he was handling some very sensitive issues.

And he had the kind of savvy

that you need to be successful at that level, because you're really dealing with

areas that are bitter gray areas, oftentimes where there's no clear

authority to get things done.

You have to persuade people, and you've got to be summoned with some character

personality and willingness and ability to engage people.

And Lue had all of those attributes.

Lue is not somebody who

you would think would come up with these fanciful stories about UFOs.

But as I got to know him, as I met with him several times over

a couple of months, I came to believe that he was someone who

had come into this issue,

very skeptical,

and came out of it almost a religious believer,

that, wow, this stuff is really happening.

These are really credible reports from

pilots, from other people that are not wacky.

And so I think he became a convert,

and not just a convert, but someone who felt that it was his

job to try and get more senior leaders

in the Pentagon, to pay attention to this.

In 2009,

Elizondo took over the $22 million dollar

Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,

or AATIP,

that investigated encounters between UFOs

and the US military.

What the hell is that, man?

Look at it fly!

Is this the three reports?

Is this five reports?

We were made aware of many, many,

many, many incidents.

It remains a sensitive number.

Those numbers are increasing on a regular routine basis.

Some of these incidents are very, very recent,

and very compelling.

But in 2017, he made the shocking announcement.

He was walking away from a 20-year military career

and going public.

I had tried in vain to work within the silos

of the organization, but I ultimately left

the Department of Defense

because of my loyalty to the department

and to the secretary, not disloyalty.

For the past year,

Unidentified's cameras have had exclusive access

to Elizondo and his new team

as they track down military personnel

willing to go on the record

with their incredible encounters with UFOs.

You are able to provide a play-by-play

of what actually went down those moments

that you were encountering that Tic Tac.

That's correct.

So all that's gonna be hugely important.

He's meeting with one of the Navy's top former figher pilots

who came face-to-face with a Tic Tac shaped UFO in 2004.

Flying a Navy fighter is probably one of the most

spectacular jobs you could ever have in the entire world.

It's like a rollercoaster times 10,000.

And I got to do it in some semblance

of a tactical airplane for 18 years.

On November 14th, 2004,

Commander David Fravor and his wingman pilot took off

from the USS Nimitz, which was on maneuvers south of San Diego.

I was the commanding officer

of strike fighter squadron 41 the Black Aces.

We flying brand new super hornets.

The nuclear powered USS Nimitz

was the lead vessel of a carrier strike group

that included the destroyers, USS Higgins and Chafee,

the attack submarine USS Louisville,

and the radar-equipped missile cruiser, USS Princeton.

If you asked any senior military officer,

what is the crown jewel of the American military arsenal?

They would say the aircraft carrier battle group.

If we have to go into combat sometime quickly,

it's likely gonna be a carrier battle group

that's gonna be there first

and it's gonna be in action first.

It was an air defense exercise.

Two good guys against two bad guys.

Probably 70 miles, 60 miles off the coast

in the gap between San Diego and Ensenada.

Suddenly, the pilots are contacted

by radar operators on the Princeton.

The Princeton control comes up and says:

"We're gonna suspend training."

"We have real-world tasking."

The pilots are revectored

to a new destination, but aren't told why.

So we start heading off to the west.

The other plane is on my left hand side.

I was the junior pilot

trying to keep up with the senior pilot

in the leader aircraft.

We're looking, we don't see anything on our radars at all,

and we're talking to each other

trying to figure this out.

The Princeton's AEGIS SPY-1 radar system

is powerful enough to

track an object as small as a baseball, at an altitude of

80,000 feet, but the jets are flying blind.

We're trying to see what was out there,

which is difficult when you know what you're looking for.

It's even harder when

you don't know what you're looking for.

So it goes down, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20,

it gets all the way down.

They get to a point where they can't separate us from the blimp.

They call it merge plot,

which means you're in the same space

at whatever you're looking for

and you gotta start looking outside

because the radar can't help you anymore.

Then far below in the water,

they see what looks like a plane crash,

or a submerging submarine.

But the weapons officer in the rear

seat of Fravor's jet spots something else.

I hear, hey skipper, do you see,

and when he says that and as he's saying that,

I notice the Tic Tac.

It's white, it has no wings.

It has no rotors.

I go, holy, what is that?

He goes, I don't know.

According to this leaked summary

of the incident, contact was made here

30 miles off the coast.

70 miles south of the US-Mexico border.

At first, the strange craft

stays close to the surface,

moving unlike anything the pilots had ever seen.

This thing would go instantaneous

from one way to another,

similar to if you threw

a ping pong ball against a wall.

And we start to kind of orbit

'cause now we're gonna watch this thing.

So we start a right hand turn.

And we're going from a clock code,

the object is in the middle of the clock,

and we're at six o'clock,

and we're driving around in circles.

So we get to about nine o'clock

and it's just still doing its little erratic thing,

kind moving around this disturbance in the water,

and I go, hey, I'm

gonna go check it out.

I'll go down there.

As we're coming down nice and easy,

we get to about the 12 o'clock position,

and all of a sudden it goes, verp, and it kinda turns,

and now it's mirroring us and it starts coming up.

Ok. Now it knows we're here.

It seemed to be aware

and it seems to recognize him.

It goes from basically just almost a hover

into a pretty aggressive climb up to our altitude,

so there's a bit of fear

because now you're out there dealing with something

that you have no idea what it is.

It's actually reacting to what we're doing.

I kind pull a nose to where he's gonna be,

and he's coming up, he just rapidly accelerates

beyond anything that I've ever seen,

crosses my nose, and it's gone.

And I'm like, whoa.

The Tic Tac appears to have vanished,

but as the jets streak towards a pre-arranged

rendez-vous location known as the cap point,

the radio channel becomes frantic.

The controller from the Princeton comes up

right as we're doing all this and says,

hey sir you're not gonna believe this.

He goes, but that thing is at your cap point.

According to Fravor,

the Tic Tac accelerated from a standing position

and flew approximately 60 miles in under a minute.

As fast as 3,700 miles an hour.

How did the Tic Tac know the pilot's cap point?

And how did it accelerate so quickly?

You got something that could accelerate

and disappear and then show up 60 miles away.

Kind a bit odd a little cause you go whoa,

we don't have that.

I'm talking, we're flying a,

one of the premiere airplanes on the planet.

What was this?

There was a capability out there.

Don't know where it's from.

Not saying it's from outer space,

but not saying it's from here, either.

Back on the Nimitz, the pilots tell the rest of

squadron what just happened.

The next crew is getting ready.

So we're talking to them about this

and they're like, you gotta be kidding me.

They took us seriously.

And the WSO, the guy in the backseat said,

I'm gonna go find it.

The next jet to launch

had a targeting pod with an infrared sensor and camera.

It jammed the radar

but he got a lock on it

and that's the video that you see.

That doesn't weird you out, I don't know what does.

Coming up on Unidentified.

I have no idea what that thing is.

And it's not acting like...

aircraft.

That's not acting like anything I've ever seen.

Hey guys, how're you?

Good Lou, how are you?

Good.

Hopefully you can shed some light on a few things.

On November 14th, 2004,

two pilots launch from the USS Nimitz

and intercepted a UFO over the Pacific,

south of San Diego.

What does it look like?

No windows, no flight surfaces.

It looked like a giant Tic Tac.

They believe this video, recorded

later that day by a pilot from their squadron,

shows the UFO they saw.

It's one of three Department of Defense UFO videos

Lue Elizondo helped get released to the public.

When the three videos came out,

there was this shock by the world community

that oh my gosh, these are real videos.

This effort that we are embarking on

I think is gonna change the conversation forever.

Now Elizondo is meeting with two leading aviation experts

to analyze the videos,

and see if they can help

explain the pilots extraordinary encounters.

What I'd like to do is go through these videos

very carefully and get your thoughts on these.

The providence on these videos is very well established.

They are genuine DOD military videos.

Retired lieutenant colonel Chris Cooke

is a top gun pilot

who spent a career flying the military's

most sophisticated fighter jets.

Ross Aimer flew commercial

aircraft for more than four decades

and works as a consultant

for the National Transportation Safety Board.

It's the first time the three men have spoken.

So the first video I'm gonna show you

this afternoon was taken in the 2004 timeframe.

The first video shows the Tic Tac

shaped object seen by the Nimitz pilots,

captured by an F-18's infrared camera.

If you looked at it out of context

you'd think, oh this is just another UFO video,

but from my perspective he absolutely captured

what we saw earlier in the day.

The grainy 90-second video

shows the Tic Tac flying slowly,

then zipping away at what appears to be

a high rate of speed.

The altitude is 20,000 feet.

We're in the TV mode now so it's visual.

The display's indicators are familiar,

but image on screen is confusing.

It doesn't appear to have any characteristics

of any normal aircraft that I've witnessed flying.

The experts wonder how the craft

is staying airborne without wings.

No flight control surfaces, I don't see that.

Does not look like an aircraft to me.

Yeah.

But in these images of a fighter jet,

also shot with an infrared camera,

the heat from the engine is clearly visible.

Everything we know about propulsion systems

is they create an intense amount of heat,

so if it was a conventional type aircraft,

you would most definitely see some type of Heat.

IR signature plume Signature, yeah.

behind the airplane.

If you wanna defy Earth's gravitational force,

the way to do it is with either a propeller to mechanically displace air.

Jet engine to compress air

and to create an equal, opposite reaction,

or a chemical explosion like a missile or a rocket.

Each one of those has a telltale signature,

yet here are things that are able to

seemingly effortlessly defy Earth's gravitational force

and maneuver in ways

that are complete contrary

to anything that we would presume should be able to fly.

The ability to fly without wings

or an engine is one of five distinct characteristics

Elizondo's Pentagon team discovered.

Calls the observables.

He considers them the program's breakthrough discovery.

Anti-gravity,

the ability to fly

without apparent means of propulsion, or lift.

Instantaneous acceleration,

the ability to reach a high rate of speed

in a short amount of time.

Hypersonic velocity,

speeds over 3,700 miles per hour.

Five times the speed of sound.

Low observability,

a capacity to cloak or conceal.

Trans-medium travel,

the ability to move through space, air, and water.

Any one of these, mind you, would be an absolute

strategic game changer for any foreign adversary to have.

And yet, here we have things doing all five.

Nobody that I know is aware of

some break though that we've made in technology

that could allow aircraft to do what these reportedly are doing.

Bryan Bender is one of the reporters

who broke the story of the Pentagon's secret UFO program.

These aircraft seem to defy all of the known

aerodynamic properties that we're familiar with.

So, let's let the film keep rolling.

The object the Navy pilot is tracking

suddenly seems to get bigger.

So what just happened there,

what's he doing?

He's changing the zoom.

The object then appears to accelerate rapidly,

disappearing off screen.

That's a significant rate of acceleration

in a horizontal plane off to the left.

That's very fast.

The object appears to perform

a similar maneuver to what the pilots witnessed.

We're all amazed at how fast this thing just

took off and disappeared.

Instantaneous acceleration at this rate

would produce a force of gravity

or g-force so extreme it would crush a human being.

I have no idea what that thing is.

It is not acting like a--

Aircraft.

It's not acting like anything I've ever seen.

Yeah.

If there are vehicles out there,

aircraft that are doing things aerodynamically

that we've never even thought of,

then I think we potentially could have

real trouble down the road.

There was another F-18 that was flying

with Commander David Fravor that day and for the first time

frankly ever, we were able to talk to that individual.

There was some frustration and frankly

there was a little bit of fear.

Lue Elizondo is briefing his team

on new information he's learned

about the USS Nimitz incident.

This elite group of former government insiders

was formed in 2017.

Bound by their conviction,

that the craft in these videos must be investigated.

We can make a difference and do things

because we have the connections and the network

and if we can continue to establish credibility

with people on the hill and the executive branch

we might be able to take this the next step.

Chris Mellon served as

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

Steve Justice was a top aviation engineer

at Lockheed Martin's legendary Skunk Works.

Al Puthoff was a scientist for the CIA.

If you were trying to come up with the A-team

of former high-level government officials

who would come forward on this issue,

you can't really think of a better team.

Lu Elizondo, Chris Mellon, these are guys

who still have security clearances,

still have networks in Washington,

still are in the business if you will.

Chris Mellon who's put his entire family's reputation

on the line to do this.

Steve Justice left a very

lucrative job at Lockheed's Skunk Works to do this.

But by far the most unlikely member

of Elizondo's new team is the man

who brought them all together.

The last show I played

was in front of 100,000 people.

The lights and the pyrotechnics and all that stuff

was going off right behind me

and then they wonder why I'm not doing that now.

So back it up, introduce yourself.

Yeah,

My name is Tom Delonge

a lot of people know me for my band Blink-182,

I started that band when I was 16

but I got to that point where my daughter was two years old

and I was gone for two years straight

and I really really needed a break.

The only other thing I was ever interested in was UFOs.

I was so fascinated with this topic, specifically, because

I think it was like an escape from growing up in a broken family in suburbia,

the idea of who we are

and how we see ourselves and where we're going and where we're from, and

what this is all about.

That all seemed to be wrapped up in this idea of

unidentified flying objects.

And a lot of people would ask.. why?

I said, well, you know, you're dealing with a subject that has science,

that has religion, and it has government secrecy and national

security, and it has

physics and consciousness, there's like, there's like a never ending

rabbit hole in any one of those things.

Delonge walked away from stardom

and dedicated himself to disclosing

what he believes is the truth about UFOs.

I needed to get in the government

and I needed to find the people that deal with this subject

and let them know what I'm thinking of doing.

Delonge says he was able to secure a meeting

with a high-level Aerospace Executive

with deep connections to the military.

All of a sudden out of nowhere I had an opening

and I just go, I am not naive to the subject,

I understand the national security implications

of this subject but I am asking for your help

because I need guidance.

I just need somebody to help me and give me advice

and he leans back and he goes, "okay".

That's when my life changed completely.

Soon Delonge was covertly communicating

with powerful people including General William McCasland,

the former head of a billion-dollar

Air Force research lab

and John Podesta, the former presidential advisor

who once said his biggest regret in the White House

was not releasing the government's UFO files.

Tom called me out of the blue, sort of,

"who is this fellow and why is he calling me"

and we began to chat and I began to chat

with some of the other people he was talking to

and he clearly was

establishing a network of people who had serious credentials.

There are people like me who see this as an incredible

mystery and enigma that needs to be resolved.

Delonge says they were all part of an elite group

of high-ranking officials dedicated to UFO disclosure

but they wanted to remain in the shadows.

Do you think there's a way over time

that we can open up some of these discussions,

declassify material?

We ought to be serious about investigating what's going on

Other countries have done that, other countries

have declassified the information they've had.

He's one of the most tenacious individuals I've ever met.

He got to the highest levels of the US government

to include Podesta.

Hello, South LA.

But in October 2016, on the eve

of the heated Presidential Election,

Delonge was thrust into a media storm.

WikiLeaks released more emails.

The result, it appears, of massive hacks

into the National Democratic Committee,

private email account of Clinton Campaign Chair,

John Podesta, and who knows who else.

Delonge's communications with John Podesta

and others were stolen by Russian hackers

and published online by Wikileaks.

The one rule they had is we will help you

but don't go out and tell anybody who we are,

that's the only fucking rule.

Overnight Delonge found himself at the center

of the decades-old debate about UFOs.

I think a lot of people thought that Tom Delonge

was being used, was being used as a tool.

They'll tell him some stuff that's not true and it'll be

a diversion and we'll fool the Russians or fool the Chinese.

George Knapp is an investigative journalist

who has reported extensively about UFOs.

I'm just going to ask you point blank:

Is Tom Delonge being controlled by a

small group of powerful insiders?

No.

No, no I think Tom DeLonge has plotted out his own course.

He's got some really good advisors who are not part of the government.

All of these events that have happened

are because Tom DeLonge used shoe leather,

knocked on doors, made phone calls.

What Tom has started in the last year is unprecedented,

I think in the history of the study of this field.

By the fall of 2017,

DeLonge had assembled his team.

Then he learned the head of the

Pentagon secret UFO Program

had resigned in protest and wanted to join forces.

It was Luis Elizondo, he was the guy

that I wasn't supposed to know his name ever.

It was the guy that worked at the office

of the Director of National Intelligence.

And they said, but there's one other thing.

There's the first three videos of UFOs

are going to be declassified

for the first time in US history.

Oh my gosh dude.

Wow, what is that?

Look at it fly.

Coming up on Unidentified.

I was at area 51 talking to some guys there,

and I said, you guys, ever seen anything really strange?

And much to my surprise, these guys said, yeah, we see some really strange

stuff here at night.

Building number one is on fire.

The whole outside of the building there was just a huge explosion.

Chris Mellon understands what it means for America to be under attack.

On 9/11, he was one of the highest ranking officials

inside the Pentagon.

I have lived through and survived intelligence failures

including the attack on the Pentagon.

This was a group of 20 guys with no special skills

or capabilities or technology

and they were able to wreck massive havoc on our country.

To me, what is most interesting about this case,

most pilots don't report these kinds of incidents

and more people are bringing information in case it does

which is a sign that, you know, we're establishing

some credibility and some presence.

Now Mellon's out of government,

part of an elite team of investigators,

raising the alarm about what they see

as another potential aerial threat.

What is really motivating me right now

is the Nimitz case.

We had multiple naval aviators

and what they saw in broad daylight

over an extended period of time was corroborated

by the most sophisticated sensor systems,

air defense systems on earth.

Any reasonable person would have to conclude

defies present understanding of what aircraft

are capable of doing, it was clearly something

beyond the pale.

Chris Mellon's is an innocent character.

He's never been very public, his jobs

have sort of demanded him to work behind the curtain.

Mellon hails from one of America's richest

and most powerful families.

The Mellon's made fortunes in oil, aluminum, and banking

and wielded power for generations.

But Chris Mellon found his calling in Intelligence.

Overseeing the budgets for some of America's most secret programs.

I was at the Senate Armed Services Committee

and a report emerged indicating the United States

had lost a nuclear weapon, so they sent me

to try to find out what happened to the missing nuke warhead.

Back when I was a junior person

in the Department of Defense,

we all knew who Christopher Mellon was.

This was a man who had all the secrets.

He is by far one of the most astute and intelligent

individuals I've ever had the privilege to work with.

He is a true legend, a living legend.

He was individual that was highly regarded

as being one of the most proficient

and professional individuals in the department.

Chris Mellon has spent decades working

not only in the Department of Defense

but also with the Senate, but at the highest levels.

One of his large accomplishments being putting

together the Joint Special Operations Command Bill,

which is merging all of our special operations

into one division that reports all the way up

to the president.

It's a major, major piece of legislation.

He truly is a master strategist

and so understanding how government works

and how the intelligence community works

and how congress works, that takes a level of

expertise that you don't find everyday.

Chris Mellon was a former staffer

for the Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill.

He was an intelligence official inside the Pentagon.

In the beginning it was a very opaque sort of process.

In other words, he had something he was working on,

something that was bubbling up

that was going to soon be ready for primetime,

ready to be shared with the public.

Was I interested in talking about it?

And of course I was intrigued

because I cover the Pentagon and anything

from the intelligence world

that may be coming out of the shadows into the light.

I was at Area 51 talking to some guys

there, working in some programmes

and I said, do you guys ever see anything really strange

I was almost embarrassed to even ask about it because of the stigma

surrounding the topic.

and much to my surprise these guys said,

yeah we see some really strange stuff here at night.

The deeper Mellon looked into the controversial

subject the more he began to question

why the government was doing nothing about it.

Here's a guy who presumably would know

or be able to find out

if these sightings were related to some

very restricted military program that

these Nimitz pilots, for example, were not aware of.

And

clearly, Chris doesn't seem to think that these instances were

military aircraft being tested in secret.

He feels so strongly about it that he came out of the shadows

when it's not really in his DNA to do that.

Chris Mellon and Lue Elizondo

weren't the only officials within the government

concerned about a potential threat.

The Pentagon secret UFO unit AATIP was

established by a small group of senators,

including former astronaut John Glenn,

World War II veterans Daniel Inaway and

Ted Stevens.

And former senate majority leader Harry Reed.

It's amazing that an individual

who worked at such a high level for so long

is a majority leader of the United States Senate,

would choose this among all of the myriad of issues

that he engaged on, with all of the challenges

confronting our country today

and this is one that he chooses,

in the twilight of his career, to try to carry forward.

In 2009, Reid sent this letter

to the Deputy Secretary of Defense

arguing America needed to study

the potentially groundbreaking

technology behind these bizarre craft.

Before it got into the hands of our enemies,

Reid requested a small unit

with one of the highest levels of secrecy.

It was the birth of AATIP.

He's making that case and that the strategic implications

are so great that we have to accord it special protection.

This wasn't the first time

the US government studied UFOs.

The Air Force launched Project Blue Book in 1952,

when a rash of UFO sightings put the nation on edge.

This is David Brinkley in the radar room

at Washington National Airport.

On these radar screens last Saturday,

they saw something strange and unusual and at the moment

unexplainable it was not an airplane,

it was not a cloud that nobody knows what it was.

For the next 17 years, the Air Force studied

over 12,000 UFO sightings and found 701 cases

that couldn't be explained

but they concluded the incidents

posed no national security threat

and officially shut Project Blue Book down in 1969.

It wasn't lack of compelling information,

it was actually the result of compelling information.

Ultimately they determined that they needed

to tamp down the concern, the public concern,

in part because during the Cold War

this could create some kind of hysteria

and overwhelm our air defense systems.

So, the government behind the scenes

concluded that they needed to discredit this phenomenon.

Mellon claims Project Blue Book

created a stigma around UFOs

that continues to this day inside the military.

I talk to people in the Pentagon who had relayed

that they were concerned it was gonna make

the Defense Intelligence Agency look bad,

they were more concerned about the optics of it.

I wonder if at some point this is gonna go down

as a historical document where people are gonna look back and say, you know

it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on,

that was heroic.

I was never formally debriefed

and I wasn't taken seriously,

um, for years.

For over a decade,

the accounts of two Navy fighter pilots

of an encounter with an unidentified craft

South of San Diego were dismissed by the U.S. Navy.

If I had been a single seat pilot

and I had encountered it by myself,

I probably wouldn't have said anything.

I wouldn't want to risk my security clearance,

I wouldn't want to risk

people thinking I was a freak or crazy.

You actually get four people that are eyewitnesses

to the performance of this thing and then nothing gets done.

So the frustration that comes out of that is why?

It was not only ridiculed but then the Intel people

didn't seem to be interested in their story.

It was the worst of both worlds.

For months, Lu Elizondo and former

Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Chris Mellon

had been working behind the scenes

to organize a meeting between the two pilots and members of Congress.

If people see the evidence, they'll understand

and they'll find it compelling.

Sometimes it's only by bringing the information public

and bringing to the attention of Congress

that you get action.

Elizondo is driving across the country

and one of the pilots, retired Navy Commander, David Fravor

calls to tell him

the unprecedented meeting has just taken place.

Fantastic and they asked you some hard good questions?

On the record, oh my God, phenomenal.

Fravor tells Elizondo,

that he and his wing man pilot

met in secret with members of congress

responsible for national security.

Holy ---dude.

The Senators don't want their names revealed

because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The press was not informed and the meeting

is not found on any official schedule.

Do you feel positive that it was well received?

Well congratulations, you just made history brother, again.

For the first time in history, the US Senators

will agree for the record on UFOs

affecting US military aircraft and operations.

For Elizondo, this meeting is the first step

in an effort to wake lawmakers up

to a serious threat to national security.

How does this story end?

I have no idea who it was or what it was.

Maybe it's Elon Musk or somebody out there

coming up with some, you know, disruptive technology

that's gonna change our lives like an iPhone.

You know, if you'd show me an iPhone

when I was in high school I would've thought it was vudu magic.

I hope it ends peacefully.

You have to ask yourself, is it ET, or is it Independence Day, you know,

what's the intent?

And right now we don't know.

I promise I will try not to yammer on too long.

I don't think necessarily disclosure as an event,

I think it's a process, and I think that process began.

We trust the American people to know that

there are certain countries that have nuclear warheads

pointed at New York and Los Angeles

that could wipe out millions of people in an instant

and yet

we don't trust American people to know that

there's something in our airspace and we don't know what it is.

There's a lot more I don't know than I do know,

but that's okay.

That's why we have to continue to seek to find the answers,

and collect the data cause ultimately

the data will speak for itself.

I think the public is closer to understanding

the UFO mystery than at any time in my lifetime,

it's astonishing and yeah, it's a little bit scary.

What's worst case scenario?

Have you thought about it?

Well let me tell you, I've thought about it,

I'll tell you already, it's too late, cause it's here.

So, we have a choice, we can live with our heads

buried in the sand and hope it goes away

or we can take our head out of the sand and try to figure out how it works

but it doesn't really care what we think in this room because it's here.

This season on Unidentified.

There's a whole fleet of them, my gosh.

Look at that thing, dude.

Never forget those voices.

You know those voices? I know those guys, yeah.

Elizondo's mission to track down more eyewitnesses.

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes,

I don't know if I would've believed it either.

It was raining UFOs.

Leads him to reveal a disturbing pattern.

They disappeared down off the coast.

I could tell you the lat and long.

I saw it disappear, suddenly it,

it moved... like that, fast.

And to expose an even larger threat.

These UFOs had an intense interest in anything nuclear.

What are they and where are they from?

The beams went down into the weapon storage area

and I'm thinking, oh my God.

Now these objects have a global presence.

Helicopter arrived and they

requested all the data recording.

They didn't want the world to know which is scary.

You don't what else they're covering up.

Unidentified vehicles are operating

at will in restricted airspace, just minutes from the nation's capital.

Thousands of people experience

unidentified flying objects.

What the ---is that thing?

It's time to look into it.

You can't ignore facts.