Original subtitles

peaceful, otherworldly music

[newsman] It is very rare

for thousands of people seeing the same light at the same time.

[Fife Symington] I always refer to it as otherworldly.

That was the feeling, you know, when you watch this thing

go over and you think, "Oh, my God, you know what?"

"Otherworldly" really describes it.

[Kate Dorsch] What makes the UFO so interesting is it is

such a scientific object.

But how do we separate

reputable witnesses from crackpots?

[George Knapp] 95% of it is bullshit,

but if the other five percent

is true, it would be the biggest story of all time.

The implications are enormous for everyone.

[Ralph Blumenthal] If these things are

our own government's secret weapons,

why would they endanger our own pilots?

It doesn't make any sense.

[Michael Smerconish] Are we on the brink

of full disclosure about visitors from outer space?

[Kevin Day] Imagine if disclosure happens,

and all of a sudden, the entire world

starts experiencing these things.

I think there's something about to happen.

And I think the world needs to get prepared for it.

I really do.

[Greg Eghigian] For most people in history

who have had a sighting of a UFO,

those reports are pretty brief.

There's not a lot of narrative to it.

"So I was walking the dog, saw something weird

in the sky, couldn't figure it out,

weird blue light," that's it.

There are then, however, people, of course,

who tell more elaborate things, truly mysterious experiences.

[interviewer] He didn't communicate anything to you

while you were taken back into the ship?

[Eghigian] They start to question

their worldview, their concept of reality.

dramatic music

fast, mysterious music

[Eghigian] The thing about the UFO phenomenon,

is it really a tale

about stories and story-making?

Finding a way to turn this stuff into a coherent

narrative is at the heart

of, I think, humanity. We want to do that.

My name is Greg Eghigian.

I am professor of history at Penn State University.

I teach a lot on the history

of madness and mental illness

and psychiatry, history of science, as well.

When I was a kid growing up,

I got diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.

And I was very sickly, and there were times where I,

literally, I couldn't move.

I was really kind of isolated.

And I began

reading a lot.

The whole UFO thing really fascinated me.

I would sit there and scour over the images

of a flying saucer,

like the way people used to look at album covers or something.

I had this voracious appetite for UFOs.

I thought I was gonna become an astronomer.

But as high school ended,

I went to college.

I kind of lost interest in the topic.

Only recently, I was at a conference...

uh, talking with a friend and colleague of mine

who was working on...

some stories in Europe after World War II

about how, particularly in Germany, right after the war,

there was a kind of almost a renaissance

of interest in the occult.

And I asked her offhand, "Did you come across anything

about UFOs?" 'Cause I'm sure there's

tons of people who've written about it.

Lo and behold, what do I find?

I find that no academic historian since

the 1970s had ever really

looked at the history of UFOs.

The people who looked at it

were sociologists, psychologists,

folklorists.

But nobody from my tribe...

[chuckles] ...the historians.

What's so striking about the phenomenon

is so many of the core elements...

they were all basically minted by

the first five years of the phenomenon.

And then there's just a new riff.

They're variations on a theme.

[reporter] Now they say that it's

balloons like this one that have been

mistaken for flying saucers.

[reporter 2] In 1955, aliens supposedly terrorized

a family farmhouse in Kelly, Kentucky.

[reporter 3] Nine disc-like objects flying

at a speed of approximately 1,500 miles per hour

near Mount Rainier, Oregon.

[man] I looked up, and right over my head, virtually, uh,

it was a rim of lights in the shape of a triangle.

[man 2] I'll be t... I'm gonna tell you something, honey.

I don't know what the hell it is.

[woman] It's rotating.

[man 2] Oh, good God.

[stammers] There's always things like that going on.

Uh, flying saucers, and we've

had other things, you know.

But now we've got some things that really fly, and Russia

put up the first one if I'm not mistaken.

[Eghigian] So a good example is the idea that

the military/government

knows what's going on

and isn't sharing that information.

[Knapp] They've lied about it for so long.

They've diverted money

from legitimate national security programs

into keeping this thing going

and keeping it secret for a long time.

[Eghigian] There's different versions. One is,

they're scared of creating a mass hysteria,

mass panic.

[John Greenewald Jr.] People were scared.

People did not know what it was,

who was powering them.

And that really fueled, I think, the CIA's concern

that they had to squash it.

[Eghigian] There is the story that, no, they're actually

in cahoots with the aliens themselves.

Or there's just the-the plain, old, simple idea that,

well, they're not sharing the information about this

because these are secret weapons that they're using.

That theme, we're seeing it play out right now, right?

[Greenewald] Now, what's really strange is

that The New York Times referenced metal alloys

that were being housed in specially designed buildings

within Bigelow Aerospace's headquarters.

Fill in the blank to define whatever

these metal alloys were, but the implications were there.

[Knapp] There have been, you know,

a number of these reports over the years about crashes,

where bits and pieces of strange material

were collected.

Those reports are... that I've seen...

have varying degrees of credibility.

But people that I know, the people

who have worked in these programs, think it's real.

[Harry Reid] I know that there's a lot of talk about Lockheed

having things in there, some special warehouse.

I've never seen them.

I've not been invited to see them.

So, at this stage, there's no evidence for me.

[Greenewald] That, to me, could be potentially

the biggest aspect

to this entire story, and yet The New York Times,

they just drop that bombshell in one line and move on.

Why would you do that?

Let's just say that there were these mysterious metals

retrieved from UFOs.

Would you give them

to the private sector, number one?

But number two, would you give them to a warehouse that anybody

that's off the Las Vegas Strip can drive up to?

In the realm of government secrecy,

none of that makes sense.

[chuckles] Hi.

We did some follow-up for The New York Times

about crash-retrieved objects in July of 2020.

Very reputable sources

have told us they believe

indeed there are materials that are in the possession

of possible aerospace companies

or special secret-access programs.

My colleague Ralph Blumenthal

and I were privy to briefing slides

that were actually used by the Department of Defense program

to brief all kinds of people in which they reference

anomalous aerial vehicles that have been retrieved.

They call them crash retrievals.

And they even use the word "off-world"

to describe that these are, you know,

possibly off-world vehicles.

[Gary Voorhis] It could be any of the major players: Lockheed,

Northrop.

I have a feeling that

there's gonna be a huge boom in tech in the next ten years,

due to the fact that we're understanding a lot more

of this reverse-engineered tech.

[reporter] The full U.S. Senate Intelligence Commission

report on this phenomenon

is due out before the end of the month.

That's right, there have been narratives about...

crashes and bodies...

back since 1947,

and... there's no way to know, if something is

that secret, you know,

whether it actually happened or not.

[Dorsch] The narrative is that the military has truth

and is hiding it from you.

To some degree, it is even less about...

flying saucers and aliens

and some extraterrestrial threat.

It's that whatever it is,

the military knows.

And they're hiding it from you.

And that's the part that's really scary.

[Eghigian] As a historian, when you look back

at when people first started talking

about having contact with aliens...

the stories that completely

dominate the UFO scene,

even into the middle part of the '60s...

are a very different set of stories.

Those are stories about people meeting

aliens out in a field somewhere.

They look like us.

They typically speak our language or they speak

to me telepathically, and they come here

with this basic message.

We're here to help you.

We're here to warn you

about nuclear weapons,

and, you know, stop killing each other.

[man] We don't feel as paranoid

about the future, about our place.

I don't, I don't think we're afraid of...

as much as we used to be.

[Eghigian] And when people have these encounters,

they come back and they say this was

one of the most wonderful experiences of my life.

I hope I get to see them again.

The interesting thing to me, though, is that...

these stories are out there, but

for well over almost two decades,

they make almost no mark

in popular culture.

[Kean] Well, it's not the area that I focused on.

And I chose not to focus on it because

the angle that I was taking in my reporting was to try

to get credibility for the subject,

and I knew that that was not the way to go.

Whether it was true or not, it didn't matter.

You know, even if it were all true,

that was not the first step

in terms of getting people to accept this.

[Eghigian] I remember very, very vividly

stories about the Hills.

Their story absolutely riveted me.

I couldn't stop reading,

even though I couldn't get to sleep

properly every night as I was reading it.

[Kean] I'm not writing it off.

The problem with it is it's very hard to prove it.

[Eghigian] There were many other cases,

some remarkable stories

in the '50s and the '60s and the '70s.

But they're not something

that gets a lot of attention.

And then suddenly you hit the early 1980s,

and bam! [chuckles]

Everything is about alien abduction.

[reporter] Creatures with large heads and huge dark eyes

who usually appear in the middle of the night

and often perform sinister medical experiments.

I've had eggs removed from my ovaries repeatedly.

[woman] My mother and I have both had close encounters

of the fourth kind, also known

as abduction experiences.

So what's been happening is, we're being transported

aboard a UFO of some sort, a craft.

We've undergone physical examination,

mind scan process, and reproductive processes.

They're creating a hybrid race between humans

and extraterrestrials.

[Eghigian] So the question then, to me, becomes:

why are they interesting now?

Why does this become something fascinating?

And there I think you have to start

looking at things that are going on in popular culture,

but things that are going on in society.

Technological changes,

and you have a whole host of things.

One of the things that becomes a very big part

of public discussion

starting in the 1960s,

into the 1980s,

is a focus on home invasions.

Starting with basically Truman Capote's

-In Cold Blood. -[gunshot]

This case becomes sort of this one pivotal moment,

where people start to say this could happen

to anybody.

The Manson Family killings become

a kind of a flashpoint

for talking about these things.

This is also, by the way, the age of hijacking.

When people talk about encounters

in, say, the early '60s,

the encounters overwhelmingly were outside.

"We were outdoors or in my car."

By the time you get into the 1990s,

the majority of people say,

"My encounters are in my bedroom."

I'll be laying down on the bed, and whichever

direction I'm facing, they will be behind me every time.

[Eghigian] I'm not saying that people

are just making things up.

That's not my point.

All of this seems to lie in this idea

of a traumatic experience.

And it's interesting to me that,

that trauma, that term "trauma," when does that

start to really become part of the public conversation

about experiences that are terrifying?

Well, it's, it's there, already being talked about

after World War II in the wake of the Holocaust.

It's being talked about in the 1970s

and the feminist movement,

about women who are victims

of domestic abuse.

But it's of course

institutionalized in 1980

by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

with the invention of the post- traumatic stress disorder.

And that's exactly when you get John Mack.

[Blumenthal] I love books, and so,

everywhere I go, I look for books,

especially vintage books.

In 2004, I was a correspondent in Texas and I picked up a book.

I think it might have been in Larry McMurtry's town

in Texas, where he runs a lot of book shops.

The whole town is devoted to Archer City,

which became, you know, Last Picture Show.

So I picked up a book called Passport to the Cosmos,

which was a book by John Mack.

[reporter] Passport to the Cosmos is Dr. Mack's

newest book. Quite simply, it's about people

who claim they've been abducted by aliens.

[Diana Walsh Pasulka] John Mack,

who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard researcher...

...in the '80s wrote the book

Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.

That's not an easy topic for an academic because

it could ruin your career.

[Blumenthal] He was very eminent in his field

and he had a very distinguished career

writing about Lawrence of Arabia.

He had been written up many times in The New York Times.

He was an expert in childhood development.

He had written a book on nightmares.

He had written a book on, uh, teenage suicide.

He had been on Oprah.

He was, you know, famous.

Infamous in some circles at Harvard

but very, very well-known.

What the source of this is,

what... who these beings are, where they come from,

what creates this intelligence...

uh, I don't know, but there's something

profoundly important going on here

that is authentic and real.

John Mack is a pivotal figure in this history.

He has a kind of recognized legitimacy

that most people in the UFO community did not enjoy.

So the idea is, if someone like him is interested

in this topic and feels there's something worthy

to look at, we've got to look at that.

[Charlie Rose] Do you, as an intelligent person

who's investigated it, believe...

I don't know of a better word...

think it happened to them?

Nothing in my 40 years of working with people

prepared me for this phenomenon.

In spite of all the criticism that I may be

taking it too seriously or...

uh, believing this really happened,

there isn't a single case where anybody has found

another explanation of what an individual has reported.

[Blumenthal] The Harvard psychiatrist who's researching

alien abduction. I thought

he'd make a great story for The New York Times.

I was thinking about calling him up for an interview.

And then literally a few days later,

I picked up The New York Times and I saw his obituary.

I was shocked.

He was run over and killed by a hit-and-run driver,

a drunk driver in London.

I thought it was very strange.

The Internet was already well along, so there were

suspicions and allegations by people

that he'd been assassinated.

[Eghigian] There's no question, like a lot of famous people

who have worked in the UFO area,

whenever they die,

particularly an untimely death,

there are people who come forward and say

this is part of the conspiracy.

The Men in Black narrative.

Again... it's a common kind of thing

that you see take place.

[Blumenthal] The most common rumor was that

another person named John Mack

was run down at the same time,

so that shows that John Macks

were targeted, and it's not true as far as I could, uh,

determine, there was no other John Mack run over.

[Brandon Harris] This is happening on the heels

of the popularity of The X Files television show,

with a sort of burgeoning interest

in alien culture.

The early days

of the Web allows people

who have an interest in aliens and UFOs

to find each other more easily.

Where conspiracy theories

or myth can take hold

and find purchase with a group

of people that can spread it more widely.

[Blumenthal] It really was sadly much more simple than that.

He was run over and killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver

in London. He looked the wrong way

and died almost immediately.

Well, I mean he was a psychiatrist,

so he was an expert scholar

of-of the human mind and psyche,

and he found that these people were eminently normal.

There was nothing to distinguish them,

except for the fact that

they came to him telling

of these extraordinary experiences.

And went from the white light hitting me

to then being paralyzed

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.

[Eghigian] John Mack tells us in interviews

when you look at what he talked about.

His first response was, "This is nonsense.

This is utter nonsense."

But what really struck him as he looked more at this,

the people seemed legitimately upset.

I'm remembering what they did to me.

I don't want him doing that to her.

And I... And I just blurted, "Don't touch her.

Don't take her. D-Don't do those things to her."

[Eghigian] They were telling stories

that were consistent with one another

though these people had never met one another.

They would hear that another person

had had the same experience.

They would become very much disturbed

because it meant they couldn't dismiss it as a dream.

They couldn't dismiss it as their private mental illness

or fantasy, and that, to a psychiatrist...

at least to this psychiatrist... was very powerful.

It was a broad cross section of humanity.

Men, women, blue-collar people, professionals,

psychiatrists also, doctors,

lawyers, politicians

and children as young as two years old

who would tell stories about little men

who took them up into the sky.

And he realized, of course,

that these children were not reciting

stories from books they had read

or movies they had seen. They were two years old.

They were not mentally ill. He was convinced of that

because that was his field.

They were not delusional.

They were not deluded.

They were not looking for publicity.

On the contrary, they were horrified

by what they think had happened to them.

They were traumatized, often to the point

of shaking and crying when they revealed these encounters

in sessions that he had with them.

He didn't communicate anything to you

about why you were taken back into the ship?

I just remember being able to see that light again.

[Blumenthal] Basically,

he could not find any other explanation

other than what the people said had happened to them.

intriguing, tense music

[Mack] In these cases, these people

have been examined by myself. They've been

tested psychologically.

They are of above-average intelligence.

They are of sound mind. They've been shown

as of sup-superior mental functioning by the testers.

So the-there is not indication

of any kind of psychiatric condition

that can account for this that I've been able to find.

Because they don't want to believe it's true.

They would rather believe it's a dream

or a form of mental illness than that this is something real

because it's so shattering to their notion of reality.

[Pasulka] If you look through John Mack's book,

you see these people have these contact experiences.

There was always some type of incredible event,

and then they understood it to be a real thing.

There are experiences from hundreds of years ago

that look similar to what people experience today.

One of the best examples of that has to be Teresa of Ávila,

who is a doctor of the church,

and she was the Italian nun in the 1500s.

She had this experience

that is very well-represented in Western art.

And it's represented in statues and paintings,

and it's this experience where, if you looked at it,

you would see her in kind of ecstasy.

And you see this angel.

There's a very famous statue

by Bernini in Rome

where there is an angel carrying this dart.

And, you know, it looks like Eros, right?

The god Eros with the dart who's gonna get you,

and, you know, you're gonna fall in love.

But if you actually read her report of it,

it looks nothing like her actual experience.

She says, "This is not a normal angel.

But usually if I see an angel, it's imaginative.

It's, you know, something in my head.

But this thing's actually real. Right?

This thing's, like, fleshy. It is right there."

"And it's short.

You know, it's three feet.

And it's fiery. It's all on fire.

And it has this prong,

and it's-it's, you know,

thrust the prong into my bowel."

You see this time and time again

in history with people who have these experiences and sightings,

what are called contact experiences.

And then what happens is

that there's an interpretive framework around that

that the Church then declares

as what happened.

The interpretation then gets done

after the experience.

That's what's called religion.

And then it's represented.

Like, you can say

that pop culture back then were paintings and statues.

intense, dramatic music

Teresa has her event,

and it gets changed, right?

It can become something completely different

than what she actually wrote about.

We decided we're only gonna look at these parts

because we can only deal with those parts.

[Eghigian] John Mack is unusual and important

because when he encounters the alien abductees,

he says, "I-I could start to question their worldview."

"Their cosmology," is what he called it. "Their reality."

He said, "But I started to come to believe

that I was being called on to embrace

their experiences as something that challenges me."

If this is a real experience...

that is, some kind of entities, beings,

intelligences are entering our world

and affecting hundreds of thousands,

perhaps millions of people, according to polls...

then this is something really worth looking at.

So, that's what I've been trying to do,

is get people at least to look at it.

Think about it.

Once you kind of get hit in the face with this

and there's a connection you can make to it

where you just realize this is too big to turn away from.

And it can just grab you.

That's what it feels like.

And I'm the same way, you know,

so I understand it.

I never went to formal school. Actually,

I went to Burma, and I was documenting

a lot of human rights abuses in Burma

in the '90s, basically.

[overlapping shouting]

[screaming]

And when I came back,

I was invited to go on a public radio show.

And then I started working with the producer of that show,

who was really interested in what I had,

and I was eventually hired to work at this radio station.

I was curious, but no more than your average person.

I mean, I never, ever would have imagined

that I would ever be professionally involved.

What started the whole thing was, I was sent a report in 1999

from a colleague in France

called the COMETA Report.

It was a 90-page study on UFO data

by a group of very distinguished people in France.

Generals, admirals, police chief,

scientists, engineers.

They were only looking at official cases,

pilot cases, military cases. Then they spent

three years studying all these official cases,

and they came out with this 90-page study

which basically said

that the best hypothesis

for all this data they observed was

that we were being visited by extraterrestrial vehicles.

And I was just absolutely fascinated by it.

I thought this is a massively huge story.

This was the first time I went out on my own,

pitched the story, and it was published

in the Boston Globe, and that was sort of what launched me

on this journey, and from that moment on,

I was... I was, like, hooked.

[Knapp] I'm not a UFO guy. It wasn't my thing.

I was chasing the mob in those days,

but this got my attention.

I was hooked on it.

[Kean] There was a huge outpouring of excitement

from the UFO community because

I don't think a journalist

had ever taken it seriously enough

to publish a long story

in a major publication like the Boston Globe.

[Knapp] Suddenly, my phone starts ringing off the hook.

People are calling. They're giving me

tips about UFOs, and I realized

that this topic touched the pulse of the public

in a way that I had never considered before.

intriguing, dramatic music

[Kean] I started going to some conferences

so I would meet members of the UFO community.

And then I was actually introduced to Budd Hopkins.

[Eghigian] Budd Hopkins is a guy who already, in the early '80s,

had become quite famous.

The evidence suggests beyond any doubt,

as far as I'm concerned, that we're being visited

by some kind of... some form of intelligence

which is higher than ours

and some kind of technology which is higher than ours.

We keep it at arm's length conveniently,

but it does upset more and more people

as they see the evidence for it.

[Kean] Budd Hopkins was a very well-known artist

before any of this came into his life.

He was an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor.

intriguing, tense music

The reason this whole thing started

for him was because he had a sighting himself.

I was fully convinced that the Air Force had said

they were balloons or something or other.

I never knew what. And I accepted that.

But then, when we saw

this thing flying around, I was very aware that,

okay, there's something up there that has not been explained.

[Kean] He saw a disk-shaped object in the sky,

and it turns out other people had seen the same thing.

And then he's in the liquor store one day

'cause he liked to have his evening Scotch.

The guy in the store just started talking

about this landing of a UFO

that had happened in New Jersey.

And he said that there had been beings that had come out,

and there were marks on the ground.

And he wrote about it in the Village Voice,

a paper in New York City.

And it took off,

and he just got so many letters from people who said,

"I've seen things like this, too."

And I concealed deliberately

certain details about the UFO... its color,

certain details about the weather condition...

because I wanted to...

I-I was convinced that there were other witnesses,

and I wanted to have some way of checking their veracity.

And, in fact, we got

something like seven or eight other witnesses

who were right about these missing details.

And so I knew, all right, these things are flying around.

pulsing, intriguing music

He ends up meeting John Mack.

And he introduces Mack

to some of these folks who say these things.

[Hopkins] I handed him 20 unopened letters

that I had not looked at myself, had not read them,

not opened them, from people

who obviously were writing in because they felt

they'd had experiences. And I said, "John,

you open these, read... these letters. You read them."

And he called me the next day

to say he was quite astonished by this.

[Blumenthal] Budd Hopkins trained himself

to hypnotize people, but he was an artist,

and, as he said, nobody cares what an artist thinks.

But John Mack

made people think twice

about the whole subject.

[Eghigian] Mack was interested in this idea

that you wanted to focus on the experience.

gentle, intriguing music

When they talk about him going native,

it does seem to me what any good

treatment professional, any therapist would do.

You try to put yourself in the position

in a sympathetic way,

even maybe empathetic way

of looking at problems and issues

through the experiences and lives

of the people you're treating.

[inhales deeply]

[grunts]

[speaks indistinctly]

-They're horrible. -[Hopkins] Who's horrible?

-They are. -[Hopkins] Who's "they"?

I don't want to talk about it.

Right.

He had won a Pulitzer Prize,

the biography of Lawrence of Arabia.

John Mack did identify with Lawrence.

The person who had a conflict between his inner life...

very, uh, intellectual... and his outer life,

obviously mobilizing Arab tribesmen

against the Ottoman Empire.

A very action-filled life.

[shouting]

No prisoners! No prisoners!

Hyah!

Charge!

[Blumenthal] He said many times, John Mack,

that he identified with his struggles.

And he tried to emulate Lawrence's methods

because Lawrence was a master statesman, too.

Very politically savvy.

John Mack was in similar circumstances.

You know, pillar of the Harvard establishment,

interested in, you know, aliens and UFOs.

intriguing, dramatic music

[Mack] Either we try to shrink the phenomenon

into something where it...

as far as I can tell, it won't fit,

or we're gonna have to stretch our notions of the possible.

John really had a lot at stake given his position at Harvard

and his credentials and, you know, all of that.

[Blumenthal] First of all,

Harvard was really no stranger to anomalous research.

I mean, William James, the father of psychology,

was attending séances

and writing about paranormal events

a hundred years ago.

But something

about John Mack's manner had put them off.

He was a little too popular.

Academia will never forgive... [laughs]

...professors who spend their lives writing,

you know, obscure papers that never get any attention.

Then this guy comes along, and he writes a best seller

after trying to get peer-reviewed, you know,

-and being rejected. -[Eghigian] Harvard ends up

doing an investigation

into his research practices.

In the end, he is

allowed to continue his career.

This is also part of that history

of the flying saucer UFO phenomenon,

that whenever an institution

that is recognized as respected,

whenever they grant this stuff

some sort of legitimacy as a topic

that is worthy of conversation, worthy of investigation...

...it is credibility.

[Knapp] During that same period of time, Bob Bigelow

is starting to put the pieces together

for the National Institute for Discovery Science, NIDS.

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[Lara Logan] Do you imagine

that in our space travels,

we will encounter other forms of intelligent life?

You don't have to go anywhere.

-You can find it here? -Yeah.

-[laughs] -[Knapp] He and I would meet,

and during those years, he would share with me

things that he was financing,

the kind of research that he had funded.

He was, at that time, providing financial support

to a number of really distinguished academics

and researchers.

People like Budd Hopkins.

And eventually

Dr. John Mack from Harvard.

[Greenewald] When you look at those connections, right,

and everybody seemingly is more and more connected,

uh, into this story,

you see them all essentially gel for decades together,

and they just keep popping up

in the same programs or the same stories

or the same objectives.

Why is that?

Is it that they're just all buddies and friends

and they have this budding interest

in the same things?

Or maybe there's something else being played out

at this point that keeps them all together?

- -[dialogue inaudible]

[Dorsch] I want to be generous, but

if there's anything we've learned,

there is money and a certain kind of prestige

in being at the forefront of this.

Thank you.

[Eghigian] From the very beginning,

there are drivers of this.

There are people who take up a role

kind of self-appointedly.

[chuckles] They take up this role that,

"I am going to be

a campaigner."

-[applause] -For a time,

they are the bright,

shining stars in all this,

but they ultimately fall away,

and new people take their place.

[applause]

There's never been

some central institution,

a central agency or a group of people

who concertedly try to keep this thing alive.

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But there's always been this kind of interest

at an individual level.

I think you can go so far as to say some people

really understand themselves as crusaders for truth.

[Richard Doty] In 1947, two craft crashed in New Mexico.

They collided,

and one crashed near Corona, New Mexico,

which is public record.

The second craft crashed way out west

of Magdalena, New Mexico,

and that wasn't found until two years later.

But the one that crashed in Corona,

they also found a live alien.

That live alien was named Eba,

and he was transported to...

It was a ma... a male.

He was transported to Los Alamos, where he...

he lived out his life.

He died in 1952,

but during that time period that he was with us,

he told us a plethora of information

about what they have learned about the universe

and what their technology is.

Their technology is probably, uh, estimated

to be about 50,000 years ahead of us.

They did have some tools and some material in the craft

that the Air Force was able to

and U.S. intelligence community was able

to retrieve and reverse engineer.

[sighs] I don't know that I necessarily have much

to say about that except, like, at risk of...

I don't want to impugn anyone's character,

but in the sort of post-Brexit, post-Trump era

of social media and fake news,

there is something dangerous

about allowing uncritical narratives

that undermine public trust

in really fundamental institutions

like the United States military

and our intelligence communities.

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[Kean] We have to move in a way that's very credible,

that can penetrate the status quo

and can get through to senators and congressmen and scientists.

I've always advocated.

I started working on this in the year 2000,

and one of my initial points to advocate for was that we need

a government agency in order to do proper investigations.

Somebody who's interested in UFOs

writes a story about UFOs.

Well, there's a plot for you.

There's a dastardly plot.

Of course she's interested in UFOs,

and of course she helped, uh, get that story on-on the paper.

Is she supposed to cover stories she's not interested in?

[Kean] It was Puthoff, Mellon and Jim Semivan,

who was in the CIA for many, many years.

And I had known Puthoff for a very long time,

and I had known Chris Mellon also.

They knew that I was a journalist

who took this seriously,

so they were interested in just bringing me down

and telling me about the program.

A secret UFO program has just been revealed.

The military spent millions of dollars

to look into UFO sightings,

and those videos are now being made public.

[newsman] Christopher Mellon served

as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence

for Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.

In 2017, as a private citizen, he surreptitiously acquired

the three Navy videos Elizondo had declassified

and leaked them to The New York Times.

It's bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself

has to do something like that

to get a national security issue like this on the agenda.

[Knapp] Chris Mellon is one of the wealthiest

people in America.

He devoted himself to a life of public service,

working for Senate intelligence committees

and then at the Pentagon. He doesn't need the money.

He's not out to besmirch his family's reputation,

his own reputation

by engaging in some kind of disinformation plot,

fooling the American public.

He's there 'cause he wants to know.

[Eghigian] To the Stars... Academy

and the people involved in that

have definitely assumed the driving role.

They are, in many ways,

the kind of now center of gravity

for this stuff.

I really don't know the inside story.

I mean, I just know that they have moved on.

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And I think people like Chris Mellon, Lue Elizondo

are working to try to get as much as they can...

You know, to have the influence to try to get

as much as can be released released.

Having members of Congress briefed,

speaking to all kinds of people to keep the ball rolling.

I don't know.

It's just a slow process, unfortunately.

But it's unpredictable.

[Eghigian] The thing that defines

the UFO is this elusiveness, right?

There's a French sociologist who makes a really good point

about UFOs.

The thing that makes UFOs so interesting

isn't that they appear; it's that they disappear.

The thing that's frustrating for so many

is the very key to why it's so mesmerizing.

It's the disappearance.

[man] There goes one. Now they're back to two lights.

Oh, there it goes.

Boom. All three.

[woman] What is that?

[newswoman] I want to take you straight to NASA headquarters.

Let's just listen and see what might be happening.

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And a picture there that you can see

the first powered controlled flight

on another planet,

so cause for celebration.

We've been flying on Earth for just over 100 years,

and now we're-we're gonna go to another planet and fly.

It's crazy.

[Blumenthal] You don't need science fiction anymore.

[laughs] Reality is really exciting enough.

I mean, it sounds quaint today to pick up books

about voyages to Mars.

We've vastly outpaced the science fiction of the '50s.

[Kean] It's just a different world now,

and there's a level of openness

and now an acceptance of the reality.

We've had some big events in the past

where, you know, there were hundreds of witnesses

where the government would still just not comment

or ignore it or say it was planes flying in formation.

Today, that could not happen.

The next big line

to be crossed is when there is an acknowledgement that

it definitely is not from any country on Earth.

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[man] My gosh.

[Barack Obama] There's footage and records

of objects in the skies

that we don't know exactly what they are.

We can't explain how they moved,

their trajectory.

They did not have an easily explainable pattern.

[Kean] If Russia, China and America

all got together and said, "We're gonna acknowledge this,

that this doesn't come from any of our countries."

I don't know if that's ever gonna happen,

but I think that's the direction we're moving in.

[Eghigian] The thing about the UFO phenomenon is

it's just not a phenomenon.

It has always been

shrouded in mystery.

There are people who view this stuff

as a puzzle that can be solved.

We just need to put the pieces together.

And then there are people who see these as mysteries,

and mysteries are never solved.

I think that's what John Mack felt.

It was a mystery that was just going to constantly be there

because what we do as human beings is work through them.

[Blumenthal] There's two huge mysteries,

I think, uh, out there. One is:

Are we alone in the universe?

The second mystery is: What happens after we die?

And maybe they're related.

Those are the two big mysteries.

[man] Have you seen this image captured

by the Hubble Telescope

of the farthest ever view of the universe?

Every dot is a galaxy.

[Eghigian] It's fantastic.

But, on one hand, it makes you feel small,

makes us feel really tiny.

But you're also sort of caught up with this sense

that there's something bigger out there.

Carl Sagan used to say we are all made of star stuff, right?

We are all made of this cosmos, and so there's a sense

of being connected to something that is bigger than us.

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