Original subtitles

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] It's been more than 70 years since the so-called Roswell Incident,

an incident which allegedly involved

the mysterious crashes in the desert of New Mexico

of three-manned extraterrestrial craft,

close to a U.S. nuclear weapons facility.

Initially, the U.S. military

appeared to confirm the reports.

But then, just as rapidly,

denied them.

Later that same year saw the formation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Within it, according to documents that have now come to light,

was a top-secret UFO monitoring group code-named Majestic, or MJ-12.

And one of the main reasons for the creation of the CIA

was, you know, not just to conduct intelligence,

but to do a lot of covert operations.

And the covert operations were necessary

to find out whether there were other Roswell's in other countries.

[narrator] Wind forward 70 years, and, to worldwide astonishment,

a private company, To the Stars... Academy of Arts and Science,

releases footage taken by U.S. pilots,

which appears to show a UFO caught on camera for the very first time.

The Department of Defense

has since authorized the release of these unclassified videos.

[man chattering over radio]

[Knapp] I think what's happening right now is a form of confirmation.

We're getting little bits and pieces of information from different sources,

and they're basically letting us know that something really is going on,

that it is worth investigating,

that it is being pursued behind the scenes by our government,

by our military, and um… and that it's serious.

[narrator] The question is, why has it taken so long for the U.S. government

to acknowledge the existence

of unidentified flying objects?

What other secrets about possible visitations

by extraterrestrial life forms

has the U.S. government, with the help of MJ-12, been keeping from the public?

[theme music playing]

[narrator] According to newly discovered documents,

the U.S. government strategy concerning UFOs

started to take shape in the early post-war years.

Deep in the heart of the newly formed CIA was a special committee,

known as MJ-12,

responsible for monitoring any and all UFO activity.

U.S. nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman

devoted more than a decade to investigating the mysteries

surrounding the existence of MJ-12.

In his book Top Secret: Majic,

he concludes,

"I am convinced that the documents, when carefully and objectively examined,

lead to the conclusion that there indeed was an Operation Majestic-12."

[Dolan] It makes the most perfect sense

that you would need an organization like MJ-12 to manage this.

You would have to.

You can't just leave it in the hands of the United States president.

That would be ridiculous.

That would be dangerous.

[narrator] So who were the members of MJ-12?

Unquestionably, they had to be an elite group of individuals.

The members of MJ-12 were said to be from, you know,

the military and from private industry in the worlds of science and so forth.

Well, MJ-12 was an ongoing project.

It still exists behind the scenes.

There are more than 12 individuals now that it has expanded

to MJ-13, 14, etcetera.

And the minds behind this still exist on high levels.

They're aware of the extraterrestrial specimens

and they are also aware that

there were other needs to update the worldwide community

in terms of the actual factual basis of contact.

[narrator] The Roswell Incident of July 7th, 1947

appeared to have been the catalyst for the formation of MJ-12,

although it was nearly 40 years before any evidence of its existence came to light,

and even then, it was revealed in a particularly strange manner.

[intense music playing]

December 1984. Burbank, Los Angeles.

The house of TV producer Jaime Shandera.

TV producer and UFO researcher Jaime Shandera

discovered a package with no return address in his mailbox.

It contained only an undeveloped black and white 35-millimeter film.

Upon further examination, this appeared to be a microfiche

containing copies of classified government documents

relating to the existence of MJ-12.

At that time, Shandera was collaborating with Stanton Friedman and Bill Moore

on a potential documentary project about the Roswell Incident.

He immediately contacted them to share this remarkable find.

MJ-12 documents were leaked in the 1980s and in fact, in later years,

more documents, which are called the Majestic Documents,

were leaked as well. There's a lot of them. Like this thick.

These documents, I become persuaded that they're talking about something real.

[narrator] Among the documents that made the greatest impression on him

was a memorandum of September 24, 1947

to Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal

confirming the existence of MJ-12,

from none other than the president of the United States, Harry S. Truman.

Yes, the Truman memorandum is very important,

particularly his signature, which was examined by my colleagues.

This is consistent with other government papers,

that show on the highest of levels.

[narrator] Britain's foremost authority on governmental action on UFOs, Nick Pope,

believes that inter-government talks about the existence of UFOs

may have even predated Truman.

My experience is working

for the British government at the Ministry of Defense.

We did have one interesting document that did suggest

that there had been a conversation between Winston Churchill and Eisenhower

during the Second World War to say, apparently, that this was real,

and that we had better not make it public because this would be too much

for people to process in time of war,

and it would fundamentally challenge people's religious beliefs

and perhaps destroy the church.

The document is a testimonial from somebody who was a scientist

whose grandfather was one of Winston Churchill's bodyguards.

Apparently, he was present at that meeting.

[narrator] In 2014,

twenty years after the anonymous package landed in Jamie Shandera's mailbox,

more documents concerning the activities of MJ-12 are once again sent anonymously,

this time to Dr. Steven Greer.

Greer has been a celebrity on the UFO scene since 2001,

when he had held a famous press conference in Washington D.C.,

in which a number of former military and intelligence officers

gave evidence about their experience of UFO phenomena.

He was doing something that was very important and provided a great service

to the UFO community to put all this information, names of all these witnesses,

in the public domain all in the same place.

We are here today to disclose the truth

about a subject that has been ridiculed and questioned,

denied for at least 50 years.

The men and women who are on this stage

and the some 350 additional military intelligence witnesses

to the so-called UFO matter,

and extraterrestrial intelligence,

can prove and will prove

that we are not alone.

[narrator] In 2014, without warning,

Greer, like Jamie Shandera,

received documents from an anonymous source

referring to Project Aquarius,

the U.S. government's top secret UFO monitoring initiative.

Instigated by the Eisenhower administration in 1953,

the objective of Project Aquarius was to glean the maximum scientific

and technological information from any alien spacecraft.

Project Aquarius and MJ-12 are both contentious subjects.

They came about through leaked documents that people have argued about to this day.

So, depending on who you talk to, those are legitimate or not legitimate.

[narrator] While the authenticity of this document was questioned,

it is astounding in the details it revealed about contact

with alien life forms

around the time of the Roswell Incident and afterwards.

In particular, it reported the existence of an extraterrestrial being, or "EBE",

which allegedly survived the Roswell crash

and was taken to a military facility.

1966, New Mexico, USA,

eye-witnessed account reported to Project Aquarius.

[dramatic music playing]

Beings from a civilization-based 38,100 light-years distant from our planet

were observing our nuclear advancement with concern.

Could one of them

survive the mysterious crashes of interstellar craft?

They called him "EBE", Extraterrestrial Biological Entity.

The alien was thoroughly questioned by military intelligence

at a base in New Mexico.

How did they communicate?

Telepathically, and later vocally,

with the language being translated with the aid of pictographs.

It was determined that EBE

came from a planet in the Zeta Reticuli star system.

[mysterious music playing]

EBE survived until June 18, 1952, when he died of an unknown disease.

To this day, the U.S. government has not officially commented on this case.

It has not confirmed whether the U.S. Armed Forces had,

according to previous reports,

shot down a spacecraft in 1947, with an alien being on board.

I think for sure they definitely, the MJ-12 existed.

Um, how powerful they are, I don't know today

if it is the same kind of strength or power.

I think it's, it's kind of transitioned into different types of organizations

and different types of associations.

[narrator] Throughout the history of UFO investigation,

the U.S. government strategy of denial has run into several major obstacles,

two of which are, it cannot control events outside of military bases.

It has also failed to destroy the credibility

of compelling and consistent alien abduction testimony.

One of the most well-known and documented of these

is the case of Travis Walton.

[intense music playing]

November, 1975.

Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, Arizona, USA.

[intense music continues]

The best-known and probably best-documented abduction

in the history of the UFO phenomenon

takes place in November of 1975.

The attention of some forestry workers is drawn to an unidentified craft.

One of these workers, Travis Walton, approaches it.

It has a smooth, shiny surface that reflects the surrounding trees.

Travis hears complex vibrations emerging from it.

His friends call out a warning to him to come back to their vehicle.

Too late.

Travis rises through the air and, with the craft, vanishes.

He is missing for five days.

No one believes his friends' account of the incident

and they are suspected of murdering him.

[mysterious music playing]

When he finally turns up, five days later,

he claims to have been taken on board an alien spacecraft

and placed on a peculiar chair with many signal lights.

When he sits on it,

the walls disappear, and he finds himself in the void of space.

And that's not all.

Blue-suited humanoid creatures with transparent helmets

take him through a giant hangar to another room,

where three more creatures await.

[Walton] I screamed at them and yelled all sorts of things,

but I never got any direct response from them.

Um, I think,

just the entire circumstances of what was done with me and to me,

uh, sort of sends a message about their real intentions

that took me years to realize

that they weren't, um, just collecting humans

in order to dissect them, or some horrible things,

maybe eat them or some crazy thing.

They were, uh,

most likely,

intervening in what happened to me

to correct severe, extreme damage that was caused by a burst of energy

that was probably accidental.

Travis walked up to a vehicle,

um, and got too close to its electromagnetic field,

and it probably stopped his nervous system.

They took him to help him, actually, and resuscitate him,

not to, you know, take any body parts from him or anything like that.

I do not believe the aliens are bad.

I believe that extremely advanced tech-- uh...technologies, civilizations,

evolve out of what we call evil.

[narrator] What would a governmental agency like MJ-12 do

when confronted by such a highly publicized case

as the abduction of Travis Walton?

The strategy was clear: to ignore, intimidate,

and at the same time, gather as much information as possible.

[typewriter clacking]

The FBI or the intelligence agencies

did not want to appear to be…

taking such a thing seriously.

So if they came to me and tried to interview me or interrogate me,

it would make it look to-- if anybody from the outside,

they were totally accepting it.

And back in those days, that is not the case.

They wanted people to stop believing in such things.

The U.S. government denies the existence of UFOs.

So if UFOs don't exist, how are these people being abducted?

They're not admitting anything right now. They know what's going on.

It's best, in my case, for me to just focus

on dealing with the facts of my case,

and attempts to discredit things,

and expose the people who are making such accusations

and show that they're the ones who really need

to improve their thinking ability.

You know, their rationality.

[narrator] Two years after the incident, and even more damning evidence

of the U.S. government's attempts to smear Walton

and discredit those who claim the existence of UFOs,

comes the incredible story of Terry Lovelace,

a lawyer and former assistant attorney.

[intense music playing]

In June 1977, Terry Lovelace,

a medic at Whiteman Air Force Base, who will later become a lawyer,

has a life-changing experience at Devil's Den State Park in Arkansas.

His story begins with a weekend hiking trip with a friend,

a trip that turns into a nightmare about which he keeps silent for decades.

[insects chirping]

During the night,

a giant triangular vessel appears in the sky.

The young men are astonished

at the sight of an object of this size hovering above their heads.

Terry falls into a drowsy stupor.

When he awakes, another shock awaits him.

[ominous music playing]

I got to my knees and I noticed that I was in a lot of pain.

Um, joint pain. Every joint in my body hurt.

And out in this meadow,

this craft that had been 3,000 feet above us the night before

has now descended, and is only about 30 feet above our heads.

And it's enormous.

And had we camped where I wanted to camp,

we'd have been directly underneath this thing.

[eerie music playing]

[Lovelace] There were what I first took to be children.

maybe a dozen, maybe 15,

and they're in pairs, in threes,

and they're walking around this meadow.

And I'm like, "Toby, man,

what the hell are these little kids doing here in the middle of this forest?"

And he said, "Terry, man, those ain't no little kids."

"Don't you remember? They took us, and they hurt us."

[eerie music continues]

And then I had flashes of memory.

And he was right. They did take us, and they did hurt us.

And I'm looking again,

and I could see that these were not human beings.

I don't think they intended to kill us.

I don't think that-- they were not benevolent,

but I don't think they were malevolent either.

I recall I was on their exam table,

and I'm screaming,

and I'm filling my lungs with air, screaming as loud as I can,

but I can't hear anything coming out.

And I heard telepathically in my head, "Why are you screaming?"

"Stop screaming. You know we don't hurt you."

"You know we take you back, stop screaming."

[eerie music continues]

But after years of reflection,

I think that if I could sit down with one of these creatures,

I think that they would tell me, you know, "Hey, no hard feelings."

"We're just doing our job, man." You know?

Uh, I think they are examining us like we examine animals on the Serengeti.

[narrator] During Terry's hospitalization in 1977,

he received some unexpected visitors.

[Lovelace] My night nurse came in.

And two guys in blue business suits.

And they pulled out badges and credentials,

and identified themselves as OSI,

United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

And they shut my door

and the older agent

turned on the overhead lights,

and I felt like somebody punched me in the face.

And I'm like, "Sir, could you please turn those off?"

And he says, "Can't work in the dark, son."

And I asked him, I said, "Sir, am I in trouble?"

And he looked amused.

And he looked over at the captain, and the captain kind of went, "Heh."

And he said to me,

"Would we be here if you weren't in trouble, son?"

[narrator] Over 30 years later,

the story of Terry Lovelace took a further, sinister turn.

In 2012, a routine X-ray of his leg

reveals an embedded piece of metal the size of a fingernail

with tiny wires sticking out of it.

The discovery brings his memories of that night flooding back.

Could it be that he had been under surveillance

by extraterrestrials for all those years?

It is not until 2016 that he speaks openly about it.

You don't need a medical degree to see this.

Above my knee is what looks like a computer chip

with two tiny wires headed up toward my head.

I don't know how far up the wires go.

They took a total of 24 films.

Uh...

I was only able to get my hands on about six.

The rest they claim were destroyed, but I don't believe that.

The doctor also said, "There's something else you should see."

And he popped the-- another film up on the light box,

and this was a view of my leg from the side,

and it showed in my calf muscle,

a collection of objects about the size of Tic Tacs

arranged in a floral pattern.

I asked my doctor, "How can this thing be in my leg without there being a scar?"

And she said, "It has to be by means not known to medical science."

[narrator] But when a UFO encounter

is witnessed not just by one or two civilians,

but by hundreds if not thousands,

the U.S. authorities have their work cut out to keep the incident under wraps.

Phoenix, Arizona. March, 1997.

An electrical storm appears to short circuit the city's electrical grid.

As darkness descends,

unexplained bright lights appear in the night sky.

-[woman 1] Oh, look at that! -[man 1] Calm down!

-[woman 1] Another one. -[girl] Stop screaming.

-[woman 1] We're just excited. -[woman 2] They keep coming.

There's four.

-[woman 1] Whoa, look at them! -[man 2] I got that one on video.

[woman 1] There's a swarm of them! Look, three of them.

-[man 2] I got the third one hopping-- -[man 1] To your left.

-[man 3] Behind the chimney. -[man 1] One flared up.

-[man 2] I got four. -[girl] Another one.

[man 2] Major sighting here.

-[man 3] No, there's five! -[woman 1] Oh!

[man 3] Another one just showed up.

[woman 1] Whoa. I can't see how this works.

-How does this work? -[man 2] Holy...

[narrator] The first report of movement of the giant body in the sky

came at about 6:55 in the evening from Henderson, Nevada.

The dark V-shaped object with five bright lights

moved slowly towards the southeast.

Other reports followed, cumulating at half past ten,

when a series of bright lights

were seen hanging above the western Phoenix skyline,

before gradually submerging behind the Sierra Estrella Mountains.

What they were reporting are these large, black triangles that are able to hover,

and then also travel at very fast speeds, that's something--

That's the sort of technology that we do not have,

or at least if we do, the public is certainly not aware of it.

And for this to be happening in the '90s would be even more extraordinary.

Said that it was time to end months of speculation on the question,

and investigate the matter once and for all to clear it up.

[narrator] Attempting to diffuse public alarm,

Arizona Governor, John Fife Symington, holds a press conference

at which he jokingly presents a member of his staff

dressed in an alien costume.

However, in 2007, after leaving office,

Symington confesses that this was just a way to appease public concern,

and that he remains convinced to this day

that something extraterrestrial visited Arizona that night.

Thank you.

[applause]

[Symington] I think it was a very, um,

you know, I think it was a legitimate occurrence

of an unknown origin craft of some sort, and who knows where it came from.

Inexplicable.

Probably one of the major sightings in, you know, modern history in the country,

'cause a lot of people saw it in Maricopa County, I saw it too, so I--

I used to work, when I was in the Air Force,

I worked at Luke in the SAGE Center there in NORAD.

And so, something like that would go up the chain of command immediately

to NORAD in Colorado and then go to the Pentagon.

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] The turn of the millennium brought new pressure

for the U.S. Government to come clean

about reports of alien visitations and abductions.

With the passage of time, the question repeatedly arises

of whether and when we will see public disclosure

of the secret U.S. Intelligence programs monitoring UFOs

by a president of the United States...

How much, in fact,

do the presidents themselves know about secret programs linked to UFOs?

They probably do tell some presidents more than others,

like Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman,

but other presidents like Clinton, maybe Ford, what did they know, right?

They never disclosed any UFO information.

So it's clear they don't tell the presidents everything.

I can't make any definitive statements on who actually has control of this stuff.

But I can say that I have interviewed and researched extensively,

presidential efforts, government efforts to access some of this material,

some pretty high-level people.

And they were unable to get access to it.

So it leads me to believe that it has gone beyond--

Out of the hands of elected officials and into the private sector.

That, to me, seems to be the most probable, likely scenario.

[narrator] The CIA has long been concerned about the risk of incumbent presidents

disclosing information and jeopardizing the secret programs.

This concern intensified

as U.S. military strengthened its links with private defense contractors

leading to what President Eisenhower termed as

"the military industrial complex,"

whose burgeoning influence he warned about as he departed the White House.

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,

whether sought or unsought,

by the military industrial complex.

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination

endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower wasn't just a president,

he had been a five-star general, for goodness' sake.

He was a military icon.

Eisenhower was only, like, able to leak us a little bit of a warning

about the military industrial complex. So he gave us a warning,

but it, like, helps us to say, "Okay, we need to look into something."

You know, we look at the laws that were put in place by the NSA and the CIA,

it's like, people were murdered for being whistleblowers.

So when Eisenhower warned us in his speech about the military industrial complex,

I think it was about as best as he could do at that time.

[narrator] Is it conceivable that even a U.S. president could be denied access

to the inner sanctum of secret programs?

[tense music playing]

Jimmy Carter, who had personal experience of a UFO sighting,

wanted to be briefed about extraterrestrial and UFO contacts,

but it is alleged that the then Director of the Central Intelligence Agency,

and later himself a U.S. President, George Herbert Walker Bush,

resolved to keep Carter in the dark.

Since then, there have been several presidents

who have alluded to the possibility of alien life.

[President Reagan] This is not enough...

to make us recognize this common bound.

I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish

if we were facing an alien threat

from outside this world.

And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us?

They're a temporary employee.

They're only there for four years, eight max.

As soon as they're done with their term,

they're out and another President comes in.

So why would they tell Donald Trump all of our deepest secrets

when he could be out in months?

There's no way he's going to be read in on all of our nation's deepest secrets.

He is just a temporary employee.

[narrator] As we look back to Roswell,

with the benefit of hindsight and all that's happened since,

what do we make of the rumors and allegations

which swirled around the most famous of all UFO incidents?

[man 1] There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the SA.

[man 2] My gosh!

[man 1] They're going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots west.

[man 2] Look at that thing, dude.

[narrator] In 2017, the world learns that the Pentagon,

despite its previous denials,

has continued to investigate UFOs for decades.

-[man 1] That's not LNS though, is it? -[man 2] It's not. Hold on, I see it.

[man 2] Look at that thing!

[narrator] This disclosure, accompanied by the publication of video footage

shot by the US military,

-confirms what many have believed. -[man on radio] Zero-seven-four-at-twenty.

Maybe, politically, the president can't say,

"My fellow Americans, people of the world, we're not alone."

Because the implication is,

the governments have known about this and lied for it for 70 years.

But maybe there's a way to just slip it out piece by piece.

[intense music playing]

[narrator] Given the facts

revealed by the breakthrough 2017 New York Times article

about the Pentagon top secret UFO program, and three videos showing UFOs,

it can be justifiably assumed

that government agencies not only have their own top-secret programs

associated with this phenomenon,

but are also very sophisticatedly interconnected through a network

of secret agreements with private sector entities.

The question is, who controls who?

Who has the decision-making powers. To put it simply, who's in charge?

It's the defense contractors, they're pulling the strings

because they're the ones that get the money, the contracts.

So the deal is, is that we will pay you to do the research,

and in return you can make it proprietary,

and you can cash in on the technology. That's the agreement that they make.

We're in a world where really, corporations run everything.

They control who gets elected.

They determine how long the person stays in power.

They determine what policies are.

They control the lobbies that pass laws of every country.

We have a world run by corporations, or one run by financial concerns.

That's just how it is.

The government says you can have all the money you want

and you can make it proprietary.

But, you know, we want to get the information,

but you can cash in on it.

So that's how they work this.

[narrator] There have been attempts to overturn the government's embargo

on their records of UFO phenomenon.

The most famous of which occurred in Washington, D.C.

[Robert Wood] The conclusion I have come to, is incredibly wild.

That those in charge have been successful in keeping secret

the greatest story of mankind.

The evidence is overwhelming that Earth is being visited

by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The government has dumped disinformation and misinformation

into the field for decades.

I have lost faith in representative government.

I truly think we're in gridlock.

It doesn't work and so we need to make a change.

You give this committee a lot of reasons for us to say, "Open those files."

[narrator] Today, knowledge and information

have a much higher price than oil.

The fundamental question that has always accompanied the history

of UFO investigation is once again raised.

The million-dollar question is, who has access to all this information?

Who has access to all the photographic evidence

that has been gathered through military channels for decades?

If you are of the camp that believes that a Roswell occurred

as it initially was stated, as it occurred,

they recovered something otherworldly, where did this material go?

And that's the million-dollar question.

Anytime you deal with some of these very significant folks

in industry, in commerce, in military hardware

that have input into these national security agencies,

you're obviously going to have influence, and movement,

in a direction that they want.

That may or may not be in the direction that the public wants.

What people are hoping to learn, what they want disclosed,

is not really located in the government.

It's located in the aerospace industry, it's located in the private sector.

Corporations run the world, not governments.

Money runs the world.

Money has control over this information.

The only person that I know who has come forward

and said that UFOs are real, that we're being visited

by extraterrestrial, uh, visitors from elsewhere, is Robert Bigelow,

who, uh, runs Bigelow Aerospace.

And so I'm not aware of other heads of business who have come forward

and are releasing information to the public.

[narrator] When questioned about his views on extraterrestrials

on the TV show 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow replies

that he is absolutely convinced of their existence.

As for their activities on Earth, he states categorically:

"There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence."

"And I spent millions and millions and millions."

"I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States

has ever spent on this subject."

Longtime UFO hunter, Derrel Sims,

recalls Bigelow visiting one of his UFO Symposiums

and his particular interest in the possibility of alien implantations.

And so I've been doing that for quite a while now,

since the late '80s,

and I did the first public two surgeries in 1995.

And we found evidence that interested Bob Bigelow and his crew

in the aerospace industry and his 18 scientists voted

to study my objects that we'd removed,

and they sent them off to Los Alamos in New Mexico Tech.

Los Alamos determined that the metals were a rare meteorite.

Very rare.

[narrator] Following the disclosure in 2017 of the Pentagon's secret program,

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, known as AATIP,

a new player suddenly appears on the private sector scene

with some fascinating new evidence of Pentagon monitoring of UFO activity.

It comes from an organization known as

To The Stars... Academy of Arts and Science,

founded by rock star Tom DeLonge from the group Blink-182,

and it appears to have some impeccable sources,

at the heart of the U.S. government.

There is a skeptic faction in government,

and there is a believer faction in government.

The To the Stars… Academy is almost like the believer faction.

They worked in government, they had AATIP,

then they decided that they hit some problems,

maybe in getting this information out,

or getting the defense secretary to consider this.

And so they decided to go private.

So I see the To the Stars… Academy, as really a private sector.

Consider it a continuation of some of the work that was done in government.

For example, by AATIP.

You need some, some, something like To the Stars… Academy,

which is in itself a really interesting construct of,

I mean, look at the people who work there.

When I saw the team, I was very impressed. I said, "This has never happened before.

No group like this has ever, uh, come together

in service to our need to know in the public domain,

but with that kind of military intelligence background."

When they made their first public announcement in October 2017,

they made a very powerful statement, which was,

"The U.S. military is continuing to investigate these UFOs."

That was a very significant and new thing to hear at the time.

[narrator] MJ-12 apparently no longer exists

in its original institutional form.

Over the decades, this elite guardian of secrets has not disappeared,

but instead, developed and transformed into a public-private partnership.

The termination of the AATIP program indicates the strong influence

of the private sector in the exploration of UFO phenomenon.

And reports of UFO sightings continue to accumulate.

Both civilian and military pilots are coming forward with graphic details

that may eventually shed more light on this strictly guarded secret.

People are becoming less concerned and more curious.

Is the time approaching for the truth about UFOs?

I feel like what we need to focus on always is the content.

It's the information, that's what matters. Secondarily, where it's coming from.

But most important, you got to pay attention to the information.

And if they're giving information we can use, we should listen.

[narrator] Nevertheless, the government agencies

are still extremely coy about releasing information

on their UFO monitoring programs,

for the fear of revealing state secrets about the extent

of their global surveillance systems, and encouraging conspiracy theorists.

The vast majority of information is still being kept firmly under wraps,

and only occasionally, in a very controlled manner,

being allowed to leak out into the public domain.

As long as that approach continues,

our opportunities are hindered to truly learn

if alien life forms could be out there, waiting to make contact.

Where is it all being held is the real question.

So is there one person or one group that's got it all in MJ-12?

Um, I don't have confirmation that that is the case, but I'm--

I think that's the best assumption we've got right now.

[closing theme music playing]