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- For years UFO researchers claimed the US

government was running a secret program

to research and investigate the phenomenon.

Time and time again the authorities denied

everything telling the media and the public

there was no official interest in the subject.

Then in December 2017 came a bombshell revelation.

On this occasion the conspiracy theories were true.

There really was a secret government UFO project

and when the story broke, it wasn't on a UFO

website or a conspiracy blog, it was on

the front page of the New York Times.

My name's Nick Pope.

I worked at the UK Ministry of Defense for 21 years,

and I used to run the British government's UFO project.

Using my inside knowledge of government and my direct

experience of having run a similar program I'm going

to tell the story of the Pentagon's secret UFO project.

It's a big story.

It involves the government, the intelligence community,

and the military industrial complex.

And it's a bizarre story with a colorful cast of characters

that includes not just politicians and shadowy

intelligence community figures but a billionaire

businessman and even a rockstar.

This is the inside story of a UFO program so cleverly

hidden that its title didn't mention UFOs at all.

This is the story of AATIP, the Advanced

Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

To tell the full story of AATIP we need to go back in time.

We need to go back over 70 years to when it all began.

On June 24th 1947 a pilot, Kenneth Arnold,

saw nine strange craft flying in formation

over the Cascade mountains in Washington state

traveling at a speed of well over 1000 miles an hour.

The media got wind of the story and labeled these

mystery objects flying saucers or flying disks.

Further reports came in from other locations in

the United States and from countries all around the world.

What were these strange craft?

What were they doing?

And who was flying them?

Then as flying saucer fever swept across the nation,

in early July 1947, something crashed in

the New Mexico desert close to an Army air field.

The name of this base was Roswell.

Wreckage from the crash was gathered up from a local ranch

by military intelligence officers stationed at Roswell.

Then in an extraordinary turn of events, the US military

reached out to the media and let it be known

that they'd recovered one of these strange craft.

A news release read as follows:

♪♪

At the time, the 509th Bomb Group was the only

atomic bomb capable squadron anywhere in the world.

Roswell was arguably the most strategically important

military base on the face of the planet.

Unbelievably within 24 hours the military issued

a follow up report claiming that the object

had simply been a weather balloon.

Could the military intelligence personnel

at this elite military unit really have

misidentified debris from a weather balloon?

It's stretching credulity to breaking point

especially as the area concerned saw numerous

weather balloon launches and personnel

at Roswell were familiar with what these

balloons looked like when they came down.

Some believe the weather balloon explanation

was a cover story hastily ordered by senior

military officers horrified that personnel

at Roswell had revealed they'd recovered a flying disk.

Some believe this was the beginning of a UFO

cover up that has lasted over 70 years but which

might now as we'll see finally be coming to an end.

After Kenneth Arnold's flying saucer sighting,

after Roswell, and with similar sightings coming

in from all over the US, it was clear that

the government needed to take action.

Military intelligence specialists studied the problem,

theories were formulated, reports were written

but nobody could agree what these objects were.

There were four main theories.

The first was that all sightings could be written

off as mirages, misidentifications, hoaxes, or delusions.

A second theory was that flying disks were secret

prototype aircraft or missiles operated by another

part of the US government.

With information compartmentalized and restricted

to those with a need to know, was it possible

that one part of the government didn't know

what another part was up to?

The third theory was a variation on the second

but suggested these missiles or aircraft

weren't American but belonged to the Soviet Union.

Might the Russians have developed long

range missiles or aircraft?

And could they be probing US air defenses,

gathering intelligence, looking for weaknesses?

It was a terrifying thought.

The final theory began as a minority report

but gained ground steadily.

The theory was that these objects

were extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Whatever the truth, the US government

and military needed to know and fast.

While much of the research and investigation

was done in secret, behind closed doors, military

commanders recognized that if they wanted to amass

evidence they needed to ensure that people who saw

these mystery objects could report them to the authorities.

The United States was about to get the UFO project.

The US government's UFO research and investigation

program operated from 1947 through to the end of 1969.

It ran under three names, Project Sign, Project Grudge,

and most famously of all Project Blue Book.

Project Blue Book investigated over 12,000 sightings

of which precisely 701 remained unexplained.

These included cases where the witnesses were police

officers, military personnel, and pilots.

And cases where visual sightings were

corroborated by radar evidence.

In many cases objects demonstrated speeds and maneuvers

that were significantly in excess of even

the fastest and most capable military aircraft.

Project Blue Book even invented the term UFO

correctly judging that unidentified flying

object sounded more serious and scientific

than flying saucer or flying disk.

Project Blue Book's headquarters was at Wright

Patterson Air Force Base, the very location

where it was alleged that wreckage from

the Roswell crash had been taken and stored.

In 1969, the plug was abruptly pulled.

For some years it had been clear that

the United States Air Force had been looking

for a way out of the program.

They commissioned the University of Colorado

to undertake a study.

From 1966 to 1968, the university ran a project

known as the Condon Committee so called because

it was chaired by physicist Edward Condon

to review the Blue Book data.

The Condon Committee delivered its final

report in November 1968.

It was a damning skeptical assessment of

the UFO phenomenon and it recommended that

no further government resources be used

on investigating the mystery.

The media, the public, and even some of the people

involved with Project Blue Book were suspicious.

It looked like a fix.

The best cases in the Blue Book archives had been ignored

and undue prominence had been given to sightings where

conventional explanations had been found.

These objections were ignored.

And on December 17th 1969, Project Blue

Book was officially terminated.

In terminating the project, the United States

Air Force gave these carefully scripted reasons.

♪♪

The then secretary of the Air Force Robert Seamans Jr.

summarized the position by stating that Blue Book

could no longer be justified either on the ground

of national security or in the interest of science.

Are we really to believe that from 1970 onwards

the US government ignored all reports

of unidentified objects in their air space?

This would be ridiculous.

No government and no air force on Earth could

fail to react if their own pilots saw UFOs

and if their own radar operators tracked them,

all of which was happening.

Project Blue Book may have been terminated

but UFOs didn't go away.

Sure enough the clues were there suggesting that

in parallel with Project Blue Book,

a secret reporting system existed where even

if the public were cut out the military

could continue to report UFOs.

In a memo dated October 20th 1969,

Brigadier General Carroll Bolender stated,

♪♪

The US government's UFO project had gone dark.

The trail had gone cold.

It would be decades before it emerged from the shadows

but when it finally did, everything would change.

For years, after the termination of Project

Blue Book, anyone who asked about UFOs was

told there was no official involvement.

Whether you were a senator, a journalist, or a member

of the public, the answer was always the same.

It didn't matter if you asked your question

to the Department of Defense, the CIA, NASA,

or anyone else, the response was identical.

We're not interested, we don't investigate.

But they did.

In 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid quietly

got together with two like minded colleagues,

both now deceased, Senator Ted Stevens

and Senator Daniel Inouye.

They instigated a program known as the Advanced

Aerospace Threat Identification Program or AATIP.

To add to the confusion about this project it's

also been described as the Advanced

Aviation Threat Identification Program

and the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program.

Irrespective of the title, the brief was clear,

investigate and evaluate all aerial objects

and phenomena that might pose a threat to

the air defense of the United States.

In some cases, such objects might be secret

prototype aircraft, missiles, or drones.

In other cases, they were UFOs.

Harry Reid's interest in UFOs stems from his friendship

with Nevada based billionaire Robert Bigelow

who made his fortune in the hotel business

but who now runs an aerospace company that,

among other things, constructs space station modules

and who's clients include NASA.

Bigelow also owned a sprawling 500 acre property

in Utah known as the Skinwalker Ranch

where numerous UFO sightings and other paranormal

events were witnessed and investigated by

the National Institute of Discovery Science,

a privately funded organization that Bigelow created

to investigate UFOs, the unexplained, and fringe science.

Bigelow also channeled funds to the Mutual UFO Network,

the world's largest civilian research organization.

One of Bigelow's initiatives with MUFON was

to fund the creation of a rapid response team

that was deployed immediately in the aftermath

of a significant UFO incident to interview

witnesses and to recover evidence.

Aside from Robert Bigelow, Harry Reid had

discussed the subject with astronaut John

Glenn who was concerned that UFO sightings

weren't being properly investigated especially

in cases where the witnesses were military pilots

and where the objects were tracked on radar.

He felt that after Project Blue Book was terminated,

pilots were reluctant to report sightings up

the chain of command for fear that they'd be

disbelieved, ridiculed, or even grounded due

to concerns about their state of mind.

AATIP was run from the Pentagon but the program

was owned not by the Department of Defense

but by the super secret Defense Intelligence Agency

officially designated as a DoD combat support agency.

From their website, the DIA mission is described thus,

♪♪

Now here comes an interesting twist in the story.

While the DIA owned AATIP, much of the work

was contracted out into the private sector.

This often happens with specialist projects

where there may be insufficient in house expertise

and leveraging the knowledge and resources

of defense contractors can have considerable advantages.

Whether intended or not it can, for example,

make Congressional scrutiny more difficult

and critically, can take much of the work

outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act.

The UK Ministry of Defense did the same thing

with some highly classified UK defense work.

Especially projects that could be considered

somewhat out there and thus politically embarrassing.

So guess who got the AATIP contract?

Bigelow Aerospace.

Officially at least, AATIP ran from 2007 to 2012.

During that time around $22 million

was spent on the project.

It doesn't sound much when you consider the annual

US defense budget runs to around $600 billion

and that's just the way they wanted it.

It was small enough to fly under the radar

and not attract attention.

And in the murky area of government accounting,

it all depends how you do the math.

$22 million may be the additional cash costs

but if you include the costs of the resources used,

things like military radar systems

and imagery analysis capabilities,

the costs are much higher.

So what exactly did AATIP do?

To answer that question we need to know

something about the man who ran the program.

Step forward Luis Elizondo.

Luis Elizondo is a man who's lived most

of his life in the shadows.

That's until October 2017 when, having resigned

from the US government under dramatic circumstances,

he blew the whistle on AATIP and revealed what much

of the world already suspected, namely that

the the US government was investigating

UFOs after all despite the denials.

So who is Luis Elizondo?

After studying microbiology, immunology,

and parasitology at the University of Miami,

Elizondo joined the US Army wanting to serve his country.

He quickly found that he had an aptitude

for intelligence work and served in a number

of different roles and theaters many details

of which are still classified.

In view of his particular skills and his love

of intelligence work, he soon left the Army

and went to work for the Department of Defense

as a civilian serving in a variety

of posts all around the world.

Then in 2008, his life changed forever when he

was asked to join AATIP which as we've seen had

been set up in 2007 at the instigation

of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

When the director of the program moved on in 2010,

Elizondo took over and filled the post until 2017

when he resigned from government service.

Elizondo decided that his priority in investigating

UFO sightings should be to answer two questions,

what were these things and how did they work?

In other words, what was the technology behind them?

He deliberately set aside the more provocative

questions, who's behind the wheel as he puts it

and what's their intent?

AATIP was beset by problems and controversies.

There was the inevitable struggle for funding,

in a situation where there was intense competition

for limited Defense resources.

And while they tried to avoid terms like UFO,

the phrase had so much pop culture baggage that

AATIP was always going to struggle to be taken seriously.

They even came up against problems from more

senior staff who's personal paradigms and religious

world views were challenged by some of the AATIP data.

That's one of the reasons why in October 2017,

Luis Elizondo decided to resign not just from AATIP

but from the Department of Defense leaving after

a distinguished 22 year government career.

It was a resignation of principle.

Elizondo felt that what he'd learned was too

important to be hidden away.

As he puts it, to do his job properly,

he had to leave.

He had to leave so he could be part of a process

whereby the American people could have a serious

conversation about this subject.

Not about flying saucers and little green men

but about the important defense, national security,

and air safety issues raised by the phenomenon.

On his departure Elizondo wrote a letter of resignation

to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, a man he admires

greatly and under whom he served in combat.

Expressing his dissatisfaction with the lack

of attention more senior Pentagon officials

were giving to the UFO problem.

It's a problem, he says, because these objects

are in our air space, outperform our jets

in terms of speed and maneuverability,

and remain unknown.

To better articulate this point, Elizondo uses

what he calls the muddy boot prints analogy.

Imagine, he says, that each night before you go to bed,

you set your home alarm system.

But each morning when you come downstairs

there are muddy boot prints on your floor.

Sure, you haven't been attacked and nothing

is ever taken but there's still the major question

of who's breaking into your house, how they're

doing it, and what the heck they want.

In the government and the military,

if you're not sure what you're dealing with

it's prudent to assume that there's a threat

and then be relieved if one doesn't materialize.

That's a far better strategy than to assume

a scenario is benign and then be unpleasantly

surprised by something that turns out to be hostile.

That was Luis Elizondo's mindset when he ran AATIP

and that's a big part of why he resigned.

He makes another powerful analogy.

If an unidentified aircraft penetrates US

air space and it turns out to have Russian

markings or North Korean tail markings,

there'd be an outcry and rightly so.

People would be demanding answers from the DoD,

the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security.

But with some of the cases investigated by AATIP,

not only were there no tail markings, there was no tail.

And as Luis Elizondo puts it, in that situation,

it's just crickets, there's an embarrassing silence.

It's all too difficult.

No one wants to deal with it.

So now we know something about this

principled man who ran AATIP.

What of the project itself?

What did they actually do?

And what was it that Luis Elizondo discovered

that led him to go public in an attempt

to raise awareness about an issue he felt

was more important than his career?

The answer to these questions takes us on a journey

into the heart of the US government's real life X Files.

In one sense, the core mission of AATIP wasn't

that different to the mission of Project Blue Book.

Calling the unit a threat identification program

sets things out pretty clearly.

It goes back to the fundamental point that

if there's something in your air space,

you want to know what it is.

And there are few better ways of getting answers

to those questions than analyzing videos,

particularly when those videos come not

from enthusiastic members of the public

sending in grainy cell phone footage

but from Navy pilots who are chasing UFOs

and recording the encounters on film

while further corroboration was provided by virtue

of the fact that some of these encounters were

being tracked on sophisticated military radar systems.

That's precisely the sort of material that AATIP

received and analyzed and when the New York Times

broke the story of AATIP's existence they took

the extraordinary decision to run a second article

in parallel detailing the story behind

one of two videos dubbed Tick Tack and Gimble

that AATIP looked at and which had found

their way into the public domain.

The story that exploded into public domain

in the pages of the New York Times occurred

in 2004 off the coast of San Diego and involved

two Navy air crew, commander David Frevor

and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slate.

Each man was flying a Navy F-18 Superhornet and

in the middle of a routine training flight the pilots

were vectored towards an uncorrelated target that

radar operators onboard the USS Princeton were tracking.

It was the latest in a series of strange radar returns

that the Navy cruiser had detected over a two week period.

And this time commanders were determined

to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Frevor headed toward the mystery object

and spotted it just above the ocean.

The sea was white as if it was boiling.

Suddenly the object accelerated towards

him before veering away.

Unable to see it, the aircraft were vectored

to a rendezvous point some 60 miles away only

to be told by an astonished radar operator that

the mystery object had appeared at the precise

location they were heading for while

the two Navy jets were still 40 miles away.

"I have no idea what I saw", Frevor said.

"But I want to fly one."

"My gosh, there's a whole fleet of them,

look at that thing," another unidentified

pilot loudly exclaims, in a second video.

The footage was taken by an advanced targeting

forward looking infrared pod and in a humorous twist

the makers, Raytheon, rushed out a press release

boasting about how their technology was used

in US government UFO hunting.

Shortly before his resignation from government

service, Luis Elizondo played a part in getting

three videos, Tick Tack, Gimble, and a third video

that wasn't made available with the first

two declassified by the US government.

This was partly to educate the wider aviation

community about something that could be an air

safety hazard and partly an attempt to further

the investigation by seeing whether circulating

these videos more widely might provide some answers.

Might the scientific community, for example,

be able to shed light on encounters that

the US government had been unable to explain?

Luis Elizondo has implied there are dozens more

videos out there and has expressed the hope that

these, too, can be made public in the near future.

One of the most bizarre aspects of the AATIP

story is the allegation that the program was

in possession of mystery metals.

The normally cautious New York Times breathlessly

reported that part of AATIP's budget was spent

on modifying buildings at Bigelow Aerospace

for the purpose of storing metal alloys and other

materials that it was claimed had been recovered from UFOs.

Could this be a reference to the long

forgotten Roswell debris?

This question has yet to be answered

but irrespective of this let's be very clear.

The science is simple.

There are no mystery metals.

In chemistry, everything sits somewhere on

the periodic table so the constituent elements

of any material can be determined.

It gets better than this.

There are tests that can tell whether or not

material has been in space such as those that involve

examining isotopic ratios or looking at ionization.

This will show whether the materials have

been exposed to cosmic rays.

The differences arise because Earth's atmosphere

protects us from these cosmic rays.

These sorts of tests are done on meteorites

to differentiate them from terrestrial rocks.

If any materials were exposed to cosmic rays

it doesn't prove they can from an extraterrestrial

spacecraft, as they might have come off a satellite

or a rocket, but it's certainly narrows things down.

These tests are so obvious to chemists

and material specialists that there's no way

they won't already have been done.

Bigelow Aerospace must know the results of these tests.

These findings will have been briefed back

to AATIP project managers at the DIA.

If there are any anomalies here,

the US government will already know about them.

Luis Elizondo chooses his words very carefully when

discussing the super sensitive aspect of AATIP's

work yet in one sense he's been outspoken

about this aspect of the project.

An aspect that might just be the biggest

smoking gun of all time.

In one interview Elizondo addressed the speculation

about these mystery metals.

He was insistent.

He described them as meta materials.

He said that not only had the isotopic ratio analyses

been conducted but that the results were in.

Incredibly the results showed unique isotopic ratios

that could only have resulted from these materials

having originated from beyond this Earth.

One of the most extraordinary parts of AATIP's

activities relates to the study not of videos

or even metals but of people.

Over the years, hundreds of thousands of UFO

sightings have been logged and investigated.

Some by government programs, others by civilian

research groups such as MUFON.

While many of these sightings involved UFOs

seen at a distance, others have been decidedly

up close and personal.

There are some cases where it's claimed witnesses

got so close to a UFO that there were physical effects.

And sometimes even injury and illness, burn marks,

suspected radiation sickness.

If UFOs are powered as many suspect by some form

of exotic energy source, it's certainly possible

to speculate that getting too close might be dangerous.

And in case anyone thinks this is paranoid nonsense

spouted by conspiracy theorists, it isn't.

It's the official view of the British government.

Case in point, Rendlesham Forest.

This is the UK's best known UFO incident

and it's been called Britain's Roswell.

In December 1980, a UFO landed in a forest

that lies between US military air bases.

There were three nights of sightings and on

the third night the witnesses included

the deputy base commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt.

On the second and third night, the UFO was seen

in the skies directly over the forest and the bases.

But on the first night, a small triangular shaped

craft actually landed in Rendlesham Forest.

Two airmen were sent to investigate,

John Burroughs and Jim Penniston.

They got very close, perhaps too close.

Penniston says he touched it.

For years, afterwards the men suffered health problems,

now we think we know why.

A few years ago, the British government started

declassifying and releasing its UFO files.

There were hundreds of documents on

the Rendlesham Forest incident.

They included a Defense Intelligence staff assessment

of anomalous radiation readings that had been found

at the landing site during the official investigation.

The documents stated that the levels

of radioactivity appeared to be significantly

higher than the average background.

There was a further and much more sinister confirmation.

A more general intelligence assessment of

the UFO phenomenon known as Project Condyle

contained speculation about what had happened

to Penniston and Burroughs as a result

of getting too close to the UFO.

The study's final report had originally been

classified secret UK eyes only,

and under the heading:

The report states:

♪♪

This report had almost certainly come to

the attention of AATIP given that one strand

of the unit's work seems to have involved

identifying people who'd got sufficiently close

to UFOs to suffer physical effects

and examining them for physiological changes.

I'm personally aware of various close encounter

witnesses who have been approached in recent years

by scientists who were vague about exactly who

they worked for but who wanted to subject close

encounter witnesses to a sophisticated array of medical

procedures including blood tests and DNA analysis.

Directly or indirectly it seems likely that these

mystery scientists were working for AATIP

and that the results of these analyses

found their way back to the Pentagon.

What of the science behind these mystery objects?

What is AATIP's research and investigation tell us

about one of the most intriguing questions about UFOs?

How do they fly?

Again, Luis Elizondo, the man who ran AATIP,

has a possible answer and it's a tantalizing one.

Elizondo and his colleagues identified several

characteristics that consistently arise with

the best evidenced UFO cases.

Time and time again one or more of

the following factors arose.

Hypersonic velocities, low observability,

sudden and extreme acceleration,

trans medium travel, bizarrely some of these

objects seem to move seamlessly into and out

of the sea, positive lift. This seems to be a less

provocative way of saying a phrase that sounds

more like science fiction than science fact, anti-gravity.

Despite all of this, Luis Elizondo believes

we're getting tantalizingly close to explaining things.

He thinks a single technology can explain these

various different characteristics displayed by UFOs.

This technology, he believes, involves what he

refers to as the metric engineering of space time.

It involves an exotic propulsion system

that uses very high energy to warp space time

in a very local fashion creating a sort of bubble.

It sounds like something you'd see on Star Trek

but these are the conclusions not just of the man

who ran AATIP but scientists that Elizondo

is currently working with on trying to unravel

the secrets of these mystery craft.

That's what AATIP did.

But how did the story get out?

How did a government UFO program, the existence

of which had been carefully hidden from the public

end up on the front page of the New York Times?

At this point, in this expose of the Pentagon's

secret UFO program, we meet another one

of the colorful characters involved

in this extraordinary story.

Someone who played a major part in blowing

the lid off the secrecy surrounding the program.

The person concerned is none other than Tom DeLonge,

the former singer and guitarist of the rock band Blink 182.

Tom DeLonge isn't the first celebrity to have

developed an interest in UFOs.

Musicians in particular seem obsessed with the subject.

Some, such as John Lennon, had their own sightings.

Others such as Katy Perry and Kanye West incorporate UFO

and alien references into their song lyrics and videos.

But Tom DeLonge did something very different,

he became an activist.

DeLonge formed an organization called the To the Stars

Academy of Arts and Science Incorporated

usually just known as the To the Stars Academy.

It was to be both a lobby group for the ending

of UFO secrecy and an organization that aspired

to reverse engineer some of the hidden UFO

technologies DeLonge believes are locked away

in Air Force hangars somewhere perhaps in locations

such as Area 51 where UFO researchers believe

recovered alien technology is kept.

Tom DeLonge wants to bring such technologies

out of the shadows.

The organization's mission statement articulated

on their website is as follows:

♪♪

It's certainly aiming high.

But for those who might have been skeptical, there was

an early clue that DeLonge was emerging as a serious player.

When Wikileaks published emails from President Obama's

former Chief of Staff John Podesta,

included among them was correspondence

from Tom DeLonge briefing Podesta on his initiative.

DeLonge was pushing at an already open door.

Podesta is a UFO believer and a fan of the X Files and his

occasional UFO themed tweets have been major news stories.

At the time the emails leaked, Podesta was playing

a major role in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

A campaign marked by the extraordinary spectacle

of Clinton going onto the Jimmy Kimmel Show

and correcting the bemused chat show host

when he asked about UFOs, telling him:

♪♪

In an early media interview, Hillary Clinton had said

that if she was elected president she'd do her best

to find out what was going on at Area 51,

the secret site that many associate with

covert government research on crashed UFOs.

Bill Clinton, too, had expressed interest in

the subject when he was president.

DeLonge told Podesta that he was putting together

a team with assistance from General William

McCasland, formerly commander of the Air Force

Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air

Force Base, another site that's been linked with UFOs,

and indeed the location where many believe

that whatever crashed at Roswell was taken.

Another of DeLonge's advisers was Major General

Michael Carey, special assistant to the commander

Air Force Space Command.

A rockstar rubbing shoulders with presidential

chiefs of staff and generals?

Again, it sounds bizarre but today it seems

that strange is normal and whatever the truth

of DeLonge's exact relationship with people

like Podesta, McCasland, and Carey,

the fact of the matter is he did indeed put

together a team of heavy hitters with close government ties.

Members of DeLonge's To the Stars Academy team

include a very credible list of participants.

Jim Semivan, a former senior member of the CIA.

Doctor Hal Puthoff a scientist who's advised NASA,

the DoD, and the intelligence community.

He specializes in exotic propulsion

systems and energy sources.

Steve Justice a retired program director with

the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works where numerous

exotic aircraft have been designed and developed.

Chris Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary

of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and Bush

administrations who also served as the minority

staff director of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

This is the team that Luis Elizondo is now a part of.

The fact that so many of these people have such

close links with government, the military,

and the intelligence community has led

to speculation that the whole venture is

a government initiative in all but name.

It's certainly true that many of these

people were involved with AATIP.

Luis Elizondo ran the program while Puthoff helped write

the bid that landed Bigelow Aerospace the AATIP contract.

Working out the complicated interrelationships

between all these people can certainly be tricky

and sometimes it's difficult to see quite where

the lines are drawn between AATIP, Bigelow Aerospace,

and the To the Stars Academy.

Especially when so many of the players are the same.

On October 11th 2017, Tom DeLonge held a press

conference where he and most of the To the Stars

Academy team unveiled their initiative.

It was an eloquent and passionate exposition

of their mission statement with the clear

implication that many of the world changing

technologies they hoped to develop are going

to be based on things currently being kept

under wraps by the US government.

If those technologies are derived as some believe

from crashed UFOs then we may be talking

about the exotic energy sources and propulsion

systems that we'd need for viable interstellar travel.

That certainly seems to be the aspiration

implied by the organization's name.

Is this the technology that would take humanity

not just to the moon but to the stars?

Do we already have that technology somewhere in

the deep state and is the secrecy finally coming to an end?

For years there have been rumors that there's a UFO

cover up but that some of those involved want to end it.

There are stories about factions within the intelligence

community at war with each other over the UFO issue.

Some want disclosure, others don't.

Are the AATIP revelations the final move

in a struggle that's gone on for over 70 yearS?

Are we finally entering the end game?

The October 2017 press conference generated

significant media coverage but to create

an even bigger impact another heavy hitter

with close ties to government was needed.

The person concerned was investigative

journalist Leslie Kean.

Kean isn't a member of the To the Stars Academy team

but knows or has met most of the key players

and has supported their efforts through her journalism.

She has written extensively about the UFO issue

for the mainstream media and published a best selling

book on the subject which featured statements

from various generals, pilots, and government

officials who'd either seen a UFO themselves

or been involved in official investigations.

John Podesta wrote the forward and as a further

illustration of her insider status, her uncle

is Thomas Kean, the former governor

of New Jersey who chaired the 9/11 commission.

Leslie Kean wrote two articles for the Huffington Post

about the To the Stars Academy but then she reached

out to a long term contact, Ralph Blumenthal

an investigative journalist at the New York Times.

The Times has hardly ever covered the topic of UFOs

but Kean briefed Blumenthal on the To the Stars Academy

and on AATIP and set up a meeting with Luis Elizondo.

Before the Times would publish the story,

they went through a meticulous fact checking process.

This included getting confirmation from Senator Harry Reid

who'd instigated the program, interviewing Luis Elizondo

who'd headed it up, and acquiring documentation

that confirmed the existence of the program

including some of the contracts dealing

with the Congressional appropriation.

There was also a letter from Senator Reid

requesting that AATIP be given restricted

special access program status.

The final piece of the puzzle was provided

when another Times journalist met with the Pentagon

spokesperson who confirmed the existence of the program.

The presses rolled and on December 16th 2017

the New York Times published the twin stories,

one about AATIP and the other about David Frevor

and Jim Slate's spectacular midair encounter

with a UFO captured on film.

When the New York Times first revealed

the existence of AATIP, the Washington Post

and Politico soon followed with stories of their own.

This was followed by news reports and interviews

with some of the key players running

on most of the major TV networks.

Here was the mainstream media, which traditionally

either ignores or ridicules the topic,

giving it extensive, positive coverage.

As often as not it was the science correspondent

writing the story up in the newspaper reports.

But what did the government say?

In writing up their stories, the Times and the Post

approached the DoD and the DIA for comments.

Indeed it was part of the meticulous fact checking process

and the stories wouldn't have been published at all

if the government hadn't confirmed, reluctantly,

that, yes, they had a program.

Once the initial stories had been published,

the flood gates opened.

The world's media besieged these agencies with questions.

So what did they say?

What they always say when asked about UFOs,

as little as they can get away with.

The policy is always the same, downplay everything.

For the record, here are the official statements

that the Pentagon has made.

♪♪

When asked if UFO sightings were still being investigated

despite the claim that funding had been canceled

the same spokesperson had this to say:

♪♪

When the AATIP story broke, UFO skeptics,

particularly the aggressive debunking kind,

were at a loss as how to respond.

Their worst nightmare had just come true.

For years, they'd delighted in portraying people

who claimed the US government was secretly

investigating UFOs as conspiracy nuts.

But these so called conspiracy nuts had turned

out to be irrefutably and demonstrably correct.

The believers had the Navy videos of military

jets chasing UFOs, they had Senator Harry Reid who confirmed

everything and added, "I'm not embarrassed or ashamed

or sorry I got this thing going."

They had Luis Elizondo speaking on the record.

They had the New York Times fact checking

the story by having had sight of some of

the contractual documentation and by speaking

to others associated with AATIP.

Finally, the icing on the cake, they had

the Pentagon confirming the story was true.

So what did the skeptics have?

Not a lot.

There were some half hearted attempts

to explain away the videos in terms

of various mutually contradictory theories

ranging from drones and reflections

through to technical artifacts of the infrared camera.

At times the debunkers appeared to have forgotten

the testimony of the pilots themselves

who confirmed they had visual sightings of the object

as well as the object showing up on film.

When Commander Frevor gave an interview in which

he said the object he chased accelerated like

nothing I've ever seen, debunkers resorted

to the unsubstantiated claim that pilots

don't make very good UFO witnesses.

And they ignored other aspects of the story altogether.

Such as the fact the UFO had been tracked on military radar.

Even astrophysicist and TV personality

Neil deGrasse Tyson got in on the story

with an interview on CNN in which he somewhat

disingenuously described the footage

as fuzzy video before proceeding to restate

his skeptical views about UFOs.

There were other targets when it came to

the wrath of the debunkers.

Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy was described

as a money making organization because it invites

people to invest and become shareholders.

In fact, the organization is classified as

a public benefit corporation and the 63 page

offering circular was not only filed with

the US Securities and Exchange Commission,

it was published on the To the Stars Academy website.

Money making?

Perhaps, but money raising might have

been a less loaded term.

The aim was to allow anyone interested to get

involved in the project so they have a chance

to play their part in bringing technologies they

believe are locked up within government out

of the shadows and into the light of day.

Despite the skeptical criticism, the To the Stars Academy

it seems has been quite open about its operation.

Can the same be said about the government?

When the New York Times published their story

about AATIP, the DoD and the DIA were bombarded

with Freedom of Information Act requests.

After only two or three weeks, well over

a thousand had been received.

The system ground to a halt with FOIA staff

sinking in a sea of paperwork.

It's likely that most of these requests will

be turned down as being too wide in scope

and that many of the rest will be rejected

either under the exemption covering classified

information for national defense or foreign policy,

or if any information is deemed to belong in part

to Bigelow Aerospace under the exemption it pertains

to trade secrets and confidential business information.

If journalists or UFO researchers thought

the Freedom of Information Act would help them uncover

the secrets of America's secret UFO project,

they were in for an unpleasant surprise.

On the question of uncovering AATIP's secrets

and finding out what more remains to be revealed

there's another intriguing possibility.

AATIP was the Pentagon's secret UFO project,

successfully hidden for years from Congress,

the media, and the public.

They certainly had lots of unknowns

and lots of great evidence.

Testimony, technical documents,

analyses, videos, even materials.

But by their own admission, they didn't

have all the answers.

Maybe they had fragments of something that

crashed but from what we know so far,

they didn't have an actual craft.

And they didn't have aliens dead or alive.

Yet, for years, researchers have claimed that's

precisely what the government does have.

Could it be that the reason AATIP didn't have

all the answers is that there was another program

so secret, so deeply buried, so cleverly hidden

that even AATIP couldn't find it?

Luis Elizondo certainly admits this is a possibility.

The US intelligence community is comprised

of 17 separate organizations.

As I know only too well from my own government

experience, there are rivalries and jealousies

between different agencies as they compete

for resources influence and power.

One of the most common ways in which these tensions

manifest themselves is poor information sharing,

especially in the case of highly classified information.

Intelligence officers are understandably

reluctant to talk to one another.

A classic example of this was 9/11 and the 9/11

commission's final report stated that poor

information sharing between the CIA and

the FBI was a contributing factor.

Even though everyone's supposed to be on the same side,

the reality is that people work in silos.

What if the rumors are true?

What if a secret cabal, perhaps Majestic 12,

have known about, managed, and covered up

the alien presence since the Roswell incident in 1947?

Just because the Pentagon set up their own UFO

program in 2007 doesn't mean Majestic 12

would reach out to people they might regard

as the new kids on the block.

And smart though Luis Elizondo and his colleagues were,

if Majestic 12 is real, maybe AATIP didn't find them.

UFO secrecy is like an onion, every time you peel

away a layer, there's another one underneath.

Now we know about AATIP, what else might there be?

And could the revelation about AATIP have

been a deliberate tactic?

The best way to stop people looking for something

is to convince them they've found it.

Now we've found AATIP, much of the UFO community

has stopped looking for anything else.

They think they've found the pot of gold

at the end of the UFO rainbow.

Maybe they have but maybe they haven't.

It's possible that outing AATIP was deliberate,

a clever tactic designed to distract people's

attention from something else.

The UFO community often talks about disclosure,

they even spell it with a big D.

It's the holy grail of ufology.

To true believers, it unfolds something like this.

The White House reaches out to the major TV news

networks and other mainstream media outlets.

They let it be known that the president will address

the nation that evening probably during prime time.

A press conference is dually scheduled and

the president steps forward and begins a speech that

will be heard by almost everyone on the face of the planet

and which will fundamentally alter our knowledge

and perception of who we are and what

our place is in the wider cosmos.

It will be remembered for all time as we remember

other speeches that changed the world.

"A day that will live in infamy",

"I have a dream."

We can't predict exactly what will be said

but this will be its essence:

♪♪

That's disclosure.

It's a nice idea but it's probably never going to happen.

The problem isn't the existence of aliens

the problem is the inescapable implication

that the government has known about this

for decades but lied about it.

It would be a constitutional and legal nightmare

and would fundamentally undermine

the credibility of political leaders.

How could the government get around this?

How about disclosure not with a big D but with a little d.

Soft disclosure as opposed to hard disclosure if you like.

What would soft disclosure look like?

Actually it would probably look pretty

much like what's happening now.

A situation where a group of distinguished government,

military, intelligence, and aviation community

professionals step forward, speak out,

and confirm that UFOs are real.

It's a way of getting the message out without

the government having to do it and having to face

the myriad legal and constitutional consequences that

might result from the open admission of a 70 year cover up.

It's a way of getting everyone to accept the truth

without having to expose a decades long conspiracy

to suppress the biggest story of all time.

Of course UFOs are real, people will say,

I've seen it on the TV news and read it

in my morning newspaper.

That's soft disclosure.

There's a related theory, it's called

the acclimatization theory.

According to the acclimatization theory,

there's an organized government campaign

to drip feed us the truth slowly, piece by piece,

information will be revealed.

Sometimes it might involve the release of documents

and on other occasions it might relate to a whistleblower

or to phots and videos of UFOs.

Proponents of the acclimatization theory

believe the aim is to soften people up

to gradually over a period of decades

embed concepts of UFOs and aliens so deeply

into our awareness that when the reality

of extraterrestrial visitation is finally revealed,

there won't be panic in the streets

but a quiet acceptance.

It won't be run for the hills, it'll be I knew it.

The bottom line is that you don't shock people

by telling them something they already believe.

Are the revelations concerning the Pentagon's

UFO program part of an acclimatization plan?

And if so, is it one of the final moves

before the big reveal?

Might we get hard disclosure after all?

There was to be a final twist in the AATIP story.

In a sense, it was the ultimate irony.

For years, conspiracy theorists had suspected

the US government was lying about UFOs,

covering up the truth about an extraterrestrial reality.

Now with the existence of AATIP in the public domain,

it was suggested there was a different agenda.

Some people claim that the government had made

up the evidence of extraterrestrial visitation.

They suggested that the real aim of all this

was to bring about a false flag alien invasion.

The false flag alien invasion theory postulates

that the Illuminati or whoever people might suggest

is responsible for the UFO cover up are deliberately

creating belief in aliens.

In this bizarre worldview, there are no aliens,

rather the powers that be are manufacturing

a threat that doesn't exist.

A combination of Hollywood special effects

and government propaganda can fake anything you like.

The second coming of Christ or,

some believe, an alien invasion.

It's been claimed that not only do such plans exist

but that the program even has a code name, Project BlueBeam.

Faking an alien threat is what the man who developed

the space rocket, Wernher von Braun, allegedly

described on his deathbed as being the last card,

the ultimate way in which shadowy forces would

make their bid to take over the world.

Because if 9/11 brought us the PATRIOT Act

which many believe was a tool to take away various rights

and freedoms and a fake alien invasion could allow

the Illuminati or whoever these unseen forces

of darkness may be to sweep away not just freedoms

but the entire concept of nationhood.

The world would have to unite to fight the common alien foe.

President Reagan talked about such a scenario

in a 1987 address to the United Nations General Assembly.

And we've seen the scenario play out in movies

such as Independence Day, movies that some believe

are designed to embed these concepts into our awareness

as part of an indoctrination process.

It would literally bring about a new world order.

It sounds like science fiction but if it isn't

the revelations about AATIP may be a sign

that the diabolical plan is about to be put into motion.

When we assess the truth about AATIP,

perhaps we should give the last word not to conspiracy

theorists with their bizarre ideas or to government

press officers with their slick soundbites,

but to Luis Elizondo, the man who actually ran the program.

When he resigned from government service,

he wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis

expressing his frustration.

He wrote:

♪♪

An existential threat?

Coming from a man who ran the Pentagon's UFO project,

that bombshell phrase is probably the most disturbing

statement ever made about UFOs by someone

with inside knowledge of the subject.

It speaks not just to the reality of the phenomenon

but to some deep and terrible secret about

the true nature of UFOs and the true motives

of these mysterious visitors to planet Earth.

[dramatic music]