Original subtitles

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[David Fravor] Both airplanes see a disturbance in the water

and a white, 40-foot-long Tic Tac-shaped object.

[Kevin Day] I knew they were something anomalous.

What flies like that?

Nothing I'd ever seen.

It's picked up on radar.

It's real.

Helicopter landed.

Two people got out.

I was asked to get everything in the computer room

that had anything on it.

All of those disks were taken offship.

I started having nightmares.

End-of-the-world type nightmares.

I don't know what it was.

But I know it's real, and I know

it's coming our way.

There was a private organization

funded by a billionaire

that aimed to investigate UFOs.

[Knapp] Really off the charts strange stuff

starts happening.

And that's when AATIP was born.

[Luis Elizondo] There is very compelling evidence

that we may not be alone.

[Greenewald] There were very little things known

about Mr. Elizondo as a person.

Who was he? What was he really doing?

And when the Department of Defense

is saying, "Yeah, the guy on the news,

in The New York Times, he did not lead that program,"

what do you do with that?

Who do you believe at that point?

I'm not a skeptic.

What I am is just... I'm a truth seeker.

Those writers were fed that information purposely.

They wanted that article to get out,

and they found some believers to release it.

Where's the proof?

There is no proof.

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The belief that UFOs exist,

that they are alien in origin,

is just a belief.

People take it on faith.

There is no proof

other than stories,

witness accounts,

anecdotes.

Lot of folks that make the rounds

of the UFO conferences,

they don't have an interest in finding truth.

They're perfectly okay

with this subject being perpetuated

from now till eternity.

They like the fact

that it's conspiracy

that continues and continues and goes on and on.

That's never been my goal. My goal is

I want to find out what the truth is in my lifetime.

So, find out that truth no matter what.

My interest in UFOs actually started

when I was 11 years old.

My God, it's got lights all the way around it.

My mom used to subscribe

to all the tabloid magazines,

so the National Enquirer,

for example.

You know, back then,

there were alien stories.

So I would clip out all of these different stories

about UFOs and aliens

and collect them.

I've always thought,

"Is there something more to this?"

Are these just stories?

Is there some truth to this?

But then one day, out of the blue, there was

some front-page news that happened

where these intelligence analysts

that were from Augsburg, Germany,

they went AWOL from their post.

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What ended up happening was

they went to Florida...

...because they wanted to attend a MUFON conference.

That's where I first heard the word "MUFON."

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"MUFON" stands for

the Mutual UFO Network.

[Ralph Blumenthal] There are people in the private sector

who actually attract UFOs,

and there are countless sightings.

Look at that. It's going behi...

Yes. What the hell is that?

Yo, look how slow it's moving.

I have never seen a UFO,

and yet there are hundreds of thousands of reports.

And there are organizations that track these reports.

One of them is the Mutual UFO Network, MUFON.

Their mission statement

is the scientific investigation of UFOs

for the benefit of humanity.

[Knapp] Independent UFO research is fraught with peril.

It's a swamp. It's a mess.

There's so much information in there that is unreliable,

so many people who make claims that can't be verified.

Whatever it was

moved up and to the left.

Uh, it hovered there for...

probably about 60 seconds.

[woman] There was no sound, that's the funny thing.

-Or-or the lights. -Yeah.

-You know, the usual lights. -No sound, no blinking lights.

[Carrion] When I became the international director

in 2006,

I really had the sincere desire

to make MUFON a more science-based organization.

I rewrote their investigative manual.

I formed their rapid-response team.

I really tried to instill

more ethical behavior

in terms of witness interviewing.

[man] There's so many theories floating around.

No one has an answer.

A lot of it is just speculation.

And just get good data.

This is really strange.

Very strange object in the sky here.

A yellow center.

Looks like it has... it's moving away from me a little now.

[Leslie Kean] For years, when a case would happen,

witnesses would call a local MUFON group

and report it.

But when you look at the investigations,

you'd realize that civilian UFO research organization

could only do so much.

That's why I've always advocated

that we need a government agency

in order to do proper investigations.

Little did I know

that there was this project going on

in the Defense Department.

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification...

Identification Program.

A recent report by The New York Times

unveiled the existence of a real-life X-Files...

[reporter] Tens of millions of dollars for the project

were pushed through

by former Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

A lot of the money went to Bigelow Aerospace

run by a longtime friend of Reid's, Robert Bigelow,

a big believer in UFOs.

I wasn't surprised.

No, actually, at the time, it was sort of a,

"Aha. That's what that was all about."

Robert Bigelow approached MUFON in late 2008.

Bob Bigelow is an interesting person.

I've always sort of thought of him

as sort of the modern-day Howard Hughes.

-A billionaire-- lots of money--

who has a vested interest in the space program

and seems to have, also,

this vested interest in the UFO field.

Correct.

In 2008,

when I was international director,

Robert Bigelow asked MUFON

to submit some scientific papers.

Scientific papers that would project

futuristic technology

that we could glean from UFOs.

You know, some sort of far-out advanced technologies.

[Knapp] $22 million dollars is given to BAASS,

an organization created by Robert Bigelow.

And he advertises online.

He recruits scientists,

private investigators, former cop and military folks.

People with experience

investigating different phenomena,

criminal activity.

People who are good judges of character.

They put together a gigantic pile of information.

When you look at the fact

that $22 million dollars went over to the private sector,

a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace,

and that they produced 38 reports,

you got to ask, "That's what...

Really what $22 million dollars bought?"

Where did that money go?

[Carrion] Well, we submitted some papers in 2008.

He allegedly liked them.

And then in 2009,

Bigelow invited us back to form

a relationship where he wanted to use MUFON

as the investigative arm

for his new company called BAASS.

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January of 2009,

I went to Las Vegas

along with a couple of other MUFON board members

to Bigelow's headquarters.

And we sat down with, uh, Hal Puthoff,

Jacques Vallée,

Robert Bigelow

and a couple other folks

I did not recognize and were not introduced.

And Harold Puthoff was a physicist

who had done work

in this psychological mind expansion experiment,

the PSYOPs operation the CIA funded for many years

and its intelligence gathering.

Jacques Vallée is

one of the first big what we call UFO researchers.

He's a computer scientist,

and he's also an astronomer, and he helped

map the first mapping of Mars.

[Knapp] Those are the same people that were part of NIDS.

We sat down with Bigelow,

and we talked about how we could formalize that relationship.

I had a formal presentation

where I described how MUFON could act

as sort of the rapid-response force

for getting quickly

to what could be described as a major UFO event,

how we could gather evidence.

And then feed that back to BAASS.

Bigelow was offering MUFON something along the lines

of $50,000 per month

over a 12-year contract

with, uh, future expansion,

and he said that it was not his money.

He said, uh, "This is coming from a sponsor."

So I asked him point-blank,

"Who is your sponsor?"

And he said he couldn't reveal that.

That bothered me.

So then I asked Bigelow again, point-blank,

"Is your sponsor a government organization?

Or is it an intelligence agency?"

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He point-blank told me no.

Well, fast-forward to 2017. We find out

that it's the DIA that was behind this.

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The Defense Intelligence Agency.

Honestly, I don't think it makes

a lot of sense that the government

would have an interest in UFO groups

like MUFON other than for, let's say, deception reasons,

psychological reasons,

maybe counterintelligence reasons

for the same reason that, uh, you know,

homicide detectives don't want amateur sleuths

around homicide, uh, scenes.

The government would do it for just one reason,

which is to manage that organization.

The common thread that you can find in this story

from the very early days of UFOs

starting in 1946 all the way till now...

There's one common thread,

and that's human deception.

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[newsman] For 22 years, the government officially

investigated UFO sightings.

Those records, now declassified,

are kept here, in the National Archives.

The files include case records, pictures-- like this one,

which the Air Force labeled a hoax--

and artifacts.

This chrome-plated cylinder, which the Air Force concluded

was probably part of an auto ornament,

was sent to J. Edgar Hoover

by a man in Washakie, Wyoming,

who wanted to know if it was a threat to the national security.

[Greenewald] When I first started looking into UFOs,

I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I went on the Internet, and, you know,

being a 15-year-old kid,

thinking, "Hey, if anybody's gonna tell me

the truth about UFOs, it's the United States government."

And honestly, it's probably

the biggest mistake of my life.

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I grew up fascinated by magic.

And in my mind, the greatest trick of a magician

is to make the audience look at your left hand

so they don't see what's going on in your right.

And I never knew it at the time,

that it would play a role later in my life

researching the United States government connection

to what UFOs were.

And there's a really, really strong connection,

in my mind, between being a magician

and handling the secrets of the U.S. government.

The government doesn't want you to know everything,

so they will create the illusion of something.

That's their left hand,

because they don't want you to know

what's going on in their right.

My belief through my research

is that the UFO subject

was a deception effort

created by intelligence agencies

to kick off the Cold War.

They created the UFO myth

for disinformation purposes.

The origin of all this would be, actually, Roswell.

Classic deception.

If you look at the summer of '47,

Kenneth Arnold had his June 24 sighting.

You had lots of sightings after that

that most people discounted

as, "This housewife saw this"

and, "This farmer saw that."

But they found this material on their property.

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As I come out of the canyon there,

I notice to the left of me

a chain, which looked to me like the tail of a Chinese kite,

going at a terrific speed,

flipped and flashed in the sun,

just like a mirror.

[Kate Dorsch] Kenneth Arnold's sighting takes place

at a very interesting nexus.

We are coming out of World War II,

in this postwar moment where...

we have the atomic bomb.

We think that the Soviets are a decade or more away

from having the bomb.

But our relationship with the Soviet Union is

fast deteriorating.

There is a heightened cultural tension

during this time, where any moment

can be your last.

That these nuclear warheads can be dropped on us, unknowing,

unbidden, with no preparation and no warning.

So people are living in this heightened state of awareness

and intensity and anxiety

on an existential level.

And then enter the UFO.

[John Hayes] I don't know what they saw in '47,

but I'm quite sure it probably was Project Mogul.

But I think if you find that people talk about things

over a period of time, they begin to lose

exactly when the date was.

And there were lots of dummies dropped;

there were 20... about 2,500 balloons launched

during this 30-year period

in New Mexico alone.

[Dorsch] The Roswell story is actually one of my favorites.

It might still be largely apocryphal.

The story is the United States Air Force

and the military was testing

these very, very large surveillance balloons

called Skyhook balloons,

that were highly classified, top secret,

intending to fly them over the Soviet Union

at very, very high altitudes.

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And...

one of these things came down in Roswell.

And some low-level Air Force kid went out to see

what the farmer had reported

and said, "Oh, the-- It's just a balloon."

[Carrion] The story was that they found this balloon.

No big deal.

[Dorsch] The higher-ups at the Air Force found out

that this was being shared,

that the story about the balloon was out,

that we were testing these high-altitude balloons,

and came back and said, "It was not a balloon.

We don't know what it was, but it was absolutely not

a high-altitude balloon.

So whatever you've heard is not at all true."

Because they did not want this in the news.

They did not want the Russians to know

that we were testing these very high-altitude balloons

and were or were not successful.

[Carrion] What really cemented the subject of UFOs

in people's minds in 1947

was when

the 509th Bomber Group,

which was the only atomic unit in the world at the time,

sent out that press release and said, "We captured a UFO."

They put an official stamp of reality

on the UFO subject at that time.

[Dorsch] In the absence of other explanation,

the extraterrestrial thing

gains traction.

You start to see a narrative about aliens.

And, even then,

Betty and Barney Hill are

one of the first abduction stories

that takes place in the 1950s.

[Carrion] At that point, it becomes its own myth.

My mother and I have both had

close encounters of the fourth kind,

also known as abduction experiences.

[Carrion] And if they created the UFO myth,

that means they also perpetuated the UFO myth.

My name is Richard Doty.

I'm a former

intelligence officer for the United States Air Force.

I worked for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations

from 1978 to 1988.

[Knapp] Richard Doty is an interesting character.

He actually was someone who worked on the inside

in disinformation.

Yeah, there is disinformation.

Of course there is. There is-is attached

to every classified project.

It-it comes with the territory.

Yes.

Absolutely.

We did do that, yes.

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We don't call it disinformation.

We call it counterintelligence operation.

Convincing the enemy the...

whatever we wanted them to believe.

If some people tapped into something

or they photographed things

that were being tested at Kirtland Air Force Base,

we have to develop an operation

and convince 'em what they saw

were UFOs.

Which led into the Paul Bennewitz operation.

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Paul Bennewitz

tapped into a highly classified program

at Kirtland Air Force Base.

In the early '80s,

the Air Force was testing drones,

and drones were highly classified.

But on the base,

we had a-a National Security Agency facility

with a high-energy laser.

When a Soviet satellite would pass over the base,

the laser would hit the lens of the camera,

blinding that satellite,

so the satellite couldn't take any pictures.

Paul's seen these things.

Paul photographed these things.

Whatever it was

that Bennewitz was involved with,

he was the subject of considerable interest

on the part of not one but several government agencies.

And that they were actively trying to defuse him

by pumping as much mis-- disinformation through him

as he could possibly absorb.

[Doty] Some of the information that we give

has to be accurate,

because people have common sense.

So you have

to give 'em a little bit of real information

before you throw in the, uh...

the, uh, disinformation.

They believe a little.

And then you add more

and more and more,

and that person opens their mind up and says,

"You know what? I think this is all real."

Maybe the government wants them to be the believers

because what they saw were in fact

our testing crafts.

Paul was a believer.

I became friends with Paul.

He became friends with me.

Over a period of time,

after this was all over with, I sat down

with Paul and tried to convince him otherwise,

and Paul wouldn't hear it.

He said, "You don't have to tell me these things.

I understand it's classified.

I understand you don't have to tell me these.

I believe it was UFOs."

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[Carrion] Somebody's a true believer in UFOs,

you can't convince them otherwise

that this is not alien in origin.

What it really boils down to is it's a religion.

It's a belief system

that-- just like you can't convince folks otherwise that

God doesn't exist

or that Christ didn't exist.

[Doty] The strange part of the Paul Bennewitz operation

was Paul Bennewitz photographed things that weren't involved

in secret government projects.

He photographed UFOs.

He actually photographed a UFO over Dulce, New Mexico.

I didn't-- I didn't lie to Paul Bennewitz.

I had a job to do.

I-I wasn't a maverick.

I just didn't go out and do this on my own.

My supervisors told me, "Listen,

we don't want him to go out to the public,

go on camera and say,

'Hey, I just tapped into a secret laser

on Kirtland Air Force Base.'"

Obviously, we can't have that happen,

So all I had to do was say,

"Well, you know what, Paul?

Maybe what you did see was UFOs."

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[Greenewald] Look, we've established in history

and documents through the Freedom of Information Act,

the CIA and the military complex as a whole

has really aimed to essentially mislead the public

when it comes to UFOs,

tell them something that necessarily is not the truth.

We've seen it time and time again,

through the decades, over and over and over.

As the ranking member

of Terrorism and Counterintelligence,

we have questions.

Uh, it comes down to some of the new infrared radar systems

that we're putting in some of our new jets

are detecting some things out there.

We want to know the information.

And that's why it's important that we take a look at this.

[Greenewald] In the process of us, the general public,

posing that question, hearing

those nightly news stories for 90 seconds

about "this could be alien,"

all of that takes the attention away

from that left hand of the magician.

And that is the classified pieces of technology

that are being utilized, tested

and potentially implemented tomorrow.

Take a facility like

Area 51.

There is this mythology around

a piece of a UFO from an alien spacecraft.

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Some of them are just curious.

They don't know what it's about.

Other people believe that they've been abducted.

Other people believe they are actually aliens

and they want to go out there to hopefully get back home.

[newsman] Now, one million UFO enthusiasts on Facebook say

they'll storm Area 51

because a spaceship crashed there

and then we took the aliens captive to study them.

Is that the problem?

That's one way of thinking.

You can't fly over it.

You can't get near it.

And there's probably a heck of a lot we can't see underground.

There is so much

activity going on out there.

Overhead espionage,

countermeasures against electronic warfare,

paramilitary training.

It's got all these elements

and you throw the UFO lore into it,

you got a lot of ears and eyeballs on Area 51.

[Knapp] It could be drones. It could be test aircraft,

It could be satellites.

It's all the things that people mistake for alien craft,

if that's what you want to call 'em.

We don't know what they are.

[Greenewald] We know that is the ultimate testing ground

for advances in technology.

They talk about,

"Well, we have a prototype. It's not flying.

We're just building a flying prototype now."

It's been flying for years,

out of Area 51, right over these hills.

There are documents to prove it,

and a lot of this material had been squeezed out

of the government via FOIA,

uh, Freedom of Information Act.

You've got all kinds of human activity going on.

Attempts to spread disinformation. That's real.

That's happened. That comes with just about every

advanced secret project, uh, that we have,

that it's standard operating procedure.

Doesn't mean that everything is disinformation.

Another day, yet another new explanation

from the U.S. government

for all those unexplained UFO sightings in the sky

since the 1950s.

This time,

it's the CIA's turn. They say

that many Americans who saw UFOs were really seeing

U-2s,

-America's then high-flying

and highly classified spy planes.

The U-2 and the SR-71 planes

those spy planes could fly way up there.

They don't land in people's yards.

They don't hover over people's houses.

They're not glowing round objects.

They were created to not be seen.

They're spy planes. They fly way up there.

But the CIA says, "Oh, yeah, all those thousands

of UFO reports, that's us."

The problem is that

the data

that makes up the UFO subject

is filled with too much garbage.

It's too muddied.

It's a big landfill, is essentially what it is.

Another one, too! Where?

[Carrion] There's enough muddy data in this subject

that we don't need more...

questions.

Right? We need answers.

-[man] It was a UFO. -[Carrion] What I've noticed

through the years is that, whenever the subject of UFO

wanes in the media,

something happens that all of a sudden

increases interest again.

We saw five lights in a row.

The Phoenix lights, for example.

You have to understand, you know,

if a-- something happens, if an event happens,

there has to be a context to it.

I was kind of excited

when I saw the Phoenix Lights.

I thought it was a competitor.

I thought, "Someone has been doing this work

well before me."

But, to be honest,

I recognized the tech.

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In the '50s,

the Air Force was experimenting with extreme

high-altitude balloons and airships.

And they made dozens and dozens of different designs,

experimented with wings,

all kinds of different shapes of balloons.

And the winner

was, you know, the "V" configuration.

It's the only shape that allows you

to operate successfully in all three aerodynamic regimes,

subsonic, supersonic

and hypersonic.

Well, they're flying balloons up to Mach 10

in the late '50s and early '60s,

and they were flying in at 300,000 feet.

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Our whole program with the big V-shaped airships

is to go higher and higher and higher.

Can you take that

all the way to space

and do away with the rocket altogether?

That's what we've been doing here for 42 years now,

working on the Airship to Orbit project.

We built a series of vehicles for the Air Force,

resulting in the largest one,

called the Ascender 175, in 2004.

The Ascender is the same configuration

as the Phoenix lights, so, naturally,

it looks like that vehicle.

And the way it was described,

how it moved,

it moves like this vehicle.

Since there's no engines on it,

it's doing all this fast maneuvering

and making no noise at all.

It appeared. Your whole brain tells you

it has screamed away.

It's like, "What just happened?"

I'm personally convinced it was not this vehicle,

'cause this was later,

but it's definitely the same technology.

What it tells me

is that the Air Force research on V-shaped airships

continued.

And what kinds of things are they doing with those vehicles?

[Carrion] There's nothing new under the sun.

There's always a precedent to something that happens.

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I think, with the Nimitz event, you have

Navy pilots who said they saw something.

They're usually very good observers

and they have no reason to be lying about what they saw.

I think the question is,

were they being manipulated?

There's a big possibility--

with incidents like the Nimitz,

the Roosevelt encounters,

and quite a few others through the years--

there's a big possibility that is done

by the U.S. military itself.

Now we know that the U.S. Navy says,

"Well, we have no idea what these things are,"

but that doesn't mean that the United States Air Force,

who has been mysteriously quiet

about the whole UAP UFO issue, doesn't know what they are.

The best way to test

whatever classified piece of technology,

whether it be a drone swarm, whether it be

a new radar reflector, whether it be something

that can fly incredibly fast in the sky--

what better way to test it

but against the most powerful Navy

that you can find on the planet Earth?

[Day] So I'm out there doing an exercise.

Um, it's built around the principle of safety.

And to have someone else put a test

on top of that--

another exercise on top of mine--

was highly ill-advised,

extremely dangerous and probably even illegal.

[Greenewald] Can it chase it? Can it catch it?

Can highly-trained Navy personnel

deep under the deck

of the USS Princeton see it on their radar screens?

What can they deduce? What can they find out about it?

What can they see?

Military says that that's not what happened,

but I think that there's a big possibility

all of that is misinformation, and they absolutely

are testing their own technology.

[Knapp] I'm not an engineer or scientist, but there are

all kinds of things that we can't do on this planet.

The Tic Tac video is evidence of an engineering

process that we don't have.

It's technology

that is still beyond our cutting edge, that is in

the kind of things that we are projecting 50 years in advance.

That's how it's been explained to me.

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[Blumenthal] We've heard from top experts in our government

and in the field that the capabilities

of these objects exceed anything known on Earth.

I mean, that's the-the conclusion

that comes through loud and clear.

The other thing is, uh...

In the defense industry, in the government,

in private industry-- the consultants

who are working with the government.

Now, are they all lying to cover up some secret research?

Perhaps.

But certainly,

all the experts we've talked to in and out of the government

say that these things seem to have

capabilities not known on Earth.

If these things are our own government's secret,

you know, weapons, why would they be flying them

in a way that would endanger our own pilots?

If they were secret

Soviet weapons, why would they be flying them

in a way that would possibly collide with our aircraft

and provide evidence that they exist?

It doesn't make any sense.

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I believe that the release

of that 2017 article on the AATIP program--

that was a purposeful release,

just like Roswell.

What AATIP has done,

what Elizondo has done,

what the Navy has done is they're putting

an official stamp of reality on it.

As far as Elizondo is concerned...

I'm always worried

about anyone who has one foot

in the world of government or intelligence.

We checked his records.

We saw his citations

for meritorious service.

You know, all that stuff. You know, official--

Yes.

So I started looking into

Mr. Elizondo's background.

We know for a fact

by his resignation letter that he was the director

of the National Programs Special Management staff

that operated in the office

of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

Now why is this important?

Well, that placed him in an office

that essentially he operated like a ghost.

I was only able

to dig up, through the Freedom of Information Act,

one reference to that office.

And that was in a court transcript

from the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

So essentially he knew about a lot of the highly-classified

and secretive elements going on

within the Department of Defense.

In the beginning of 2018, all of a sudden,

the Pentagon started issuing these contradictory statements,

stating first, "Well, no,

we really weren't dealing with UFOs."

And then they said that they dealt

with anonymous aircraft or-or something anomalous in the sky.

And then all of a sudden, they took it all away,

and they said, "Nope, sorry. We changed our mind,"

stating that AATIP, at this point,

didn't have anything to do with UFOs,

and that Mr. Elizondo didn't head the program.

[Knapp] They can't keep their story straight.

If you had asked them two weeks

before The New York Times story came out, hey,

is there a program called AATIP that studied UFOs?

They'd say no.

And then when it did come out, "Oh, yeah,

okay, we had a program.

Yeah, it might have looked at UFOs."

Then a couple months later, "No, it didn't.

It didn't look at UFOs.

Lu Elizondo had nothing to do with it."

Now they're in the middle of trying to figure out

what they're gonna say next.

When you look at the chronology of how

Mr. Elizondo got those videos cleared

for U.S. government use only, six weeks later,

all of a sudden he resigns.

Then there's a meeting that, that takes that information,

it's given to The New York Times.

Then within weeks, Mr. Elizondo

is on stage in the spotlight

on this new corporate venture.

October 2017, To the Stars Academy announced

that they were going to figure out

whatever these UFOs were.

Hello, I'm Tom DeLonge,

and thanks for joining us live today.

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You had an all-star list of former CIA operatives

and people tied to the intelligence community.

But also the corporate world.

Jim Semivan, Christopher Mellon.

And Doctor Hal Puthoff was at the...

at the capstone of it all.

[Puthoff] Starting as a kid, I've always been interested in

the actual forefront of physics.

And so I've been always involved in

looking at ideas that were

right at the edge.

The CIA descended on my doorstep.

They said, "Oh, have we been looking for you."

Every time there's a problem somebody wants to solve,

they want a physicist

who's had clearances they know they can trust.

And they know the area's so weird

that no other physicists are going to agree

to do anything about it.

Who you gonna call?

There's a history

of questionable characters in this field.

What I call the usual suspects.

All of these characters that maintain government ties.

They do active government research.

And they have an interest in UFOs.

Why?

Now, if there's a subject

that could potentially change the world

how would one approach it?

Especially if the subject contained

Earth-changing technology,

the need to understand a coming tidal wave of information,

and what my partners and I call, again,

"the story of the millennia."

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Tom DeLonge had made

a name for himself in the field of UFOs.

Obviously, he needs no introduction

as being a rock star.

[DeLonge] When I signed my first major record deal,

I took my first check, bought a desktop computer

so I could research the possibility

of intelligent life in the universe.

I don't know Tom DeLonge.

I don't want to speak badly of him, but honestly...

To me he seems to be a useful idiot

in all of this, and I hate to use that term,

but that's sort of like the...

the term for somebody who's being used unwittingly.

I sometimes call To the Stars

science fiction Disney but for adults.

Tom DeLonge is an entertainer.

A... rock star

with a lot of resources.

He is putting attention on this very interesting field

with a lot of celebrity behind it.

You have Tom DeLonge's entrepreneurial background.

Very successful background.

You have a corporation that is aiming

originally to raise $50 million dollars.

I think, and it's not popular to say,

but that money may be

a big motivating factor for these men to come together.

If that doesn't scream PR move--

which is fine, but we have to frame it appropriately--

that-- that's what they were orchestrating

The New York Times to do.

Not necessarily a piece on AATIP or UFOs,

but rather putting the spotlight on an organization.

[Blumenthal] You always look and see, "Are you being played?

Are you being used for something?"

But first of all, we reported what was

absolutely true, that there was a secret program.

There was an unknown Pentagon program.

Tracked UFOs, produced videos.

That was all true.

We were very careful not to lend

ourselves to any promotional effort for

To the Stars.

[Carrion] A lot of the folks that write these articles

or are investigating AATIP,

they are what I call

UFO perps.

They're perpetuators

of the UFO myth.

I absolutely believe it was an op.

I think AATIP w-was an op from day one.

From when it was first incepted.

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[Elizondo] We were brought into the program to identify

some of these phenomena

and, basically, try to collect enough data

where we could make some positive analysis

and identify what these things were.

A lot of folks think that I'm sort of a turncoat

in the UFO field

because I've become what they consider a skeptic.

I'm not a skeptic.

I-I'm not a debunker.

What I am is just, I'm a truth seeker.

I believe there's life in the universe.

Where I differ from a lot of the believers,

is whether that life has come to Earth.

Is it possible? Yes.

Have we possibly been visited in the past? Yes.

Have we possibly been visited now? Yes.

Is it possible we could be visited in the future?

Absolutely.

Cannot discount that.

The universe is too big.

But... it's just a belief.

Right?

Where's the proof?

Well, what do you call proof?

What's your idea of evidence?

What, what's evidence to you?

Evidence is enough information to convince you

that something is true, or at least true to some degree.

We have millions and millions and millions

of people who have seen these things.

We have thousands of events that are unexplained.

Many of them, anyway. We have, uh,

radar and visual sightings.

Every time you have a UFO story,

it's either disinformation

or it's a secret military program.

Well, was the Pentagon doing this stuff

250 years ago?

The craft that were seen back then,

were they secret test planes?

Was that a disinformation campaign run by the CIA?

The fact is that these phenomena predates

the kinds of explanations you're talking about.

It represents something that we don't understand.

Frank Banners' UFO remained

over his farm more than four hours.

His children saw it, his in-laws saw it,

residents of the area saw it.

The police saw it.

It, uh, moved very rapidly,

at any speed or, rather, any direction.

It would go, why, it would change

and go to the right or the left,

and go crossways, um, without hesitating a bit.

It's going over... See, over the mountain.

Whoa!

Shoot.

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Every culture, every continent,

every civilization of the world has reported this thing.

They use different terms for it,

but it's been with us throughout human history.

It's bigger than the CIA.

We don't know what it is.

[Dorsch] There is a separate, really interesting conversation,

like, the hierarchy of...

UFO belief.

I think there are people who see things.

They've been told that if they see something

they should say something.

There is no sound.

-It is... Changing direction.

It's changing directions.

But how do we separate reputable witnesses

from crackpots?

It was hovering up here.

Uh, just below the tops of the trees.

Well, I felt this numbing shock and blacked out.

The guys in the truck said they saw this brilliant beam

come out of the light

and hit me in the head and the chest

and knock me flying through the air.

I think that the trouble comes

with the abduction stuff.

I didn't see any neck.

It looked like it just sit there on the body,

if you could called it a body.

And then just lifted me

off the ground, about...

about the height that... that it was, or they was.

And we went in...

it was, it carried me into the vehicle

or the craft or whatever you want to call it.

Even some of the most ardent,

true-believer,

pro-UFO study scientists

do not make that leap.

And these strange creatures

just sort of floated out.

...and took them inside the spaceship.

And then they believe that they were, apparently, examined.

Under some type of-- of eye or light.

And then, the next thing he knew,

he was back outside again.

A crackpot is somebody who believes

fervently without any basis in scientific fact.

They might be extraterrestrial, but they're not kidnapping us.

This kidnapping story is ridiculous, right?

I find it difficult to accept everything that was said.

However, I believe that they were sincere.

I do not believe that either of them,

at that time, was putting on.

But you know what I'm saying.

There are intelligent people who say, "Hey,

we were out here, they, uh...

We saw them, we talked," and yet there's not one shred

of what they call hard evidence

to support it.

[Dorsch] What makes the UFO so interesting,

is that it is such a scientific object.

And yet how do we articulate

and quantify and figure out

legitimacy and authority, credibility?

[Blumenthal] That's what makes John Mack so fascinating.

The fact that a noted, world-renowned

psychiatrist at Harvard would be so taken

by this idea of alien abduction.

In the past four years, I've worked now

with approximately 90 people who've had these experiences.

It then went to being floated out of my room,

going up into a spaceship, lying on a table...

I was aware that they were putting an instrument

in my neck.

Poking and prodding.

Taking... skin samples.

I was very taken with this story

because I was intrigued myself.

The only thing I knew

that behaves like that is real experience.

This is not the way dreams behave,

this is not the way mental illness behaves,

it's not the way fantasy behaves.

John Mack actually believed

that these people were telling the truth.

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