NARRATOR: After Luis Elizondo resigns from his position with AATIP and leaves the Pentagon, he shares three declassified videos recorded by Navy pilots with his new colleagues at To The Stars Academy. The first object, known as Tic Tac, was caught on radar in 2004 off the USS Nimitz at an altitude of 80,000 feet. As Navy F-18s approached the object, it descended to within one foot of the water in seconds.

We don't have this capability of dropping 80,000 feet within a matter of seconds, hitting a velocity of Mach 20. So, we now know that there's some kind of propulsion system that exceeds the capability of our own rockets.

NARRATOR: Naval aviator Lieutenant Chad Underwood was ordered to pursue the object in an F-18 equipped with a sophisticated FLIR video system.

UNDERWOOD: The object looked featureless, and that's why I called it the Tic Tac. It looked like a Tic Tac. It had no wings, no method of propulsion and on your forward-looking infrared pod, all it is is tracking heat. So you would typically see engine exhaust coming out of one of the ends of the aircraft. Not seeing any of it. The object was changing altitude, air speed, things that my FLIR and my radar were having difficulty tracking. And then at the end of the encounter is when you see it dart off to my left on the FLIR pod, and that's when I was like, "Whoa. What just happened?"

NARRATOR: The other two videos Elizondo brought to his colleagues at To the Stars Academy were equally groundbreaking. Known as "Gimbal" and "GoFast," both videos were taken by Navy jets from the USS Theodore Roosevelt near the Florida coast in 2015. All three videos show objects moving in ways that defy the known laws of physics.

KAKU: These objects can zigzag effortlessly, defying the known laws of aerodynamics. These objects can effortlessly accelerate up to 20 times the speed of sound. They have no visible means of propulsion. So what could it be? Well, the short answer is, we don't know.

PODESTA: The phenomena had unusual flight characteristics, unusual vectors, speed, being able to hover and move.

PODESTA: The fact that the Chinese or the Russians or anyone else would have that kind of capability and we wouldn't know about it is pretty slim.

NARRATOR: As head of AATIP, Elizondo was able to have the videos declassified, but they had never been made public. His involvement in To the Stars Academy offered a new opportunity to share the remarkable information collected at the Pentagon. To The Stars-- their goal was that they were gonna crack it all open, and they were going to open up the truth that the government knows about these unidentified aerial phenomena that have a technology that does not exist in terms of human production.

WILLIAM HENRY: To The Stars Academy, to their credit, brought Lou Elizondo together with Chris Mellon, Department of Defense official, Senate Intelligence insider. And then they go to The New York Times with this blockbuster story about the U.S. government's interest in investigating UFOs.

NARRATOR: Chris Mellon arranged a meeting with Leslie Kean, a best-selling author who had spent years trying to draw mainstream media attention to UFOs. Mellon and Elizondo revealed to Kean the existence of the secret AATIP program and promised her access to the videos if she could place the story with The New York Times. Leslie Kean is very well-connected, politically. Her uncle Thomas Kean was the former governor of New Jersey and headed up the 9/11 Commission. This gives you an idea of, uh, just how plugged in to the political network Leslie is. So when Leslie was contacted by Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon, she then teamed up with Ralph Blumenthal, veteran New York Times reporter, and Helene Cooper, again from the Times.

NARRATOR: Ralph Blumenthal came to know Leslie Kean while working on his book The Believer, a biography about alien abductions researcher Dr. John Mack. When he heard about the government's AATIP program, he was eager to help break the story.

Well, it was clearly a great story for The New York Times. A-A secret Pentagon unit investigating UFOs after, uh, the government was supposed to be out of the UFO business, but of course, never really was.

NARRATOR: Blumenthal pitched the story directly to the New York Times managing editor Dean Baquet. And on December 16th, 2017, Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper's groundbreaking report about the Pentagon's mysterious UFO program made the front page of The New York Times online edition.

BLUMENTHAL: We had it nailed down chapter and verse, the people involved it in on the... everything on the record, the documents, so this hit all the benchmarks. We had the Navy videos, which we were able to put on the Times website and they garnered more views than almost anything in Times history.

DAVID CHILDRESS: This was a real turning point in the United States, because The New York Times has always said that they are the guardians of the truth. Suddenly, The New York Times is actually reporting on UFOs. This really shows that UFOs and the study of UFOs and the investigation has entered the mainstream.

[narrator] Las Vegas, Nevada, May 15, 1989. Who among us has not heard about an alleged UFO coverup?

[narrator] On local TV station KLAS, investigative reporter George Knapp interviews a man going by the name Dennis and shot in silhouette to hide his identity. The man claims to work at the secret military installation that the U.S. government still maintains does not exist. And according to him, the base does, in fact, hold extraterrestrial spacecraft.

[dramatic music playing]

[Knapp] Exactly what's going on up there?

["Dennis"] Well, there's several, actually nine, uh, flying saucers, flying discs, uh, that are out there, of extraterrestrial origin.

[dramatic music playing]

Here was someone who claimed to have worked at Area 51 back-engineering alien technology, UFOs that had crashed, possibly at Roswell, and trying to figure out how they worked. And then, maybe building one ourselves.

[tense, dramatic music playing]

[narrator] Frightened that the government might try to harm him if he remains anonymous, the whistleblower and reporter George Knapp wrestle with the idea of revealing his name.

The day that we unveiled his identity to the world... he's in the station and he grabs the tape. He said, "I've changed my mind. Not gonna do it." Right up to the end, he was fighting it and arguing with himself about whether it's a good idea, even though his life had been threatened, his life had been turned upside-down.

[narrator] In the end, the whistleblower decided to come out of the shadows and reveal his name: Bob Lazar.

The one good thing Bob Lazar did was came forward with George Knapp in 1989 on May 15. And by doing that, he protected himself. He was scared for his life, and he protected himself by telling you what happened to him in one shot, straight up.

[dramatic musical sting]

[narrator] From that day onward, Bob Lazar has remained the most controversial UFO whistleblower in history. And going public came at a heavy price. A price, many believe, was exacted by a government determined to hide the truth about Area 51.

Not only was Bob's house broken into and they moved stuff around, they'd write things on the wall, he's got an Uzi peeking out the window. The fear was real. The threats that were made against him were real. The surveillance was real.

[narrator] Faced with such harassment, Lazar retreated from public view for decades.

I don't like being in the public eye. I don't have money for doing this. And quite frankly, I could make up a better lie. But I have no motivation to lie.

[narrator] But if Bob Lazar's claims are true, just how much could he expose about what's really going on at Area 51? On December 4, 2018, Lazar finally decided to end years of silence and tell his full story to filmmaker Jeremy Corbell in an explosive documentary entitled, Bob Lazar: Area 51, and Flying Saucers.

[Lazar] In the late 1980s, the U.S. government had recovered alien spacecraft, several of them, and the technology in the Nevada desert that they were keeping quiet and analyzing. That's a fact. That's all my story was. Was that I was just one of the people working on these craft.

There probably wouldn't be this awareness of Area 51 without Bob Lazar. And now we have the film, and suddenly, he's back in the media and the public eye.

[narrator] The most extraordinary technology that Lazar claims to have encountered at Area 51 was an alien reactor, one that he believes has the potential to change the world.

[Lazar] The first time they showed me the reactor in operation, just seeing something like that, it immediately starts that whole chain reaction in your mind going, wow, wait. If you can do this, we don't need jet and rocket engines anymore. That means there's-- wait-- there's no use for cars. I mean, boom. The whole thing changes. The entire world, the economy, everything would go end on end just if we had an answer to how that machine worked.

NARRATOR: The Pentagon's U.A.P. Task Force, along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, submits to Congress its long-awaited report. Entitled "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," the simple nine-page report represents the most direct and substantive U.S. government account of U.A.P.s ever made public. The headline is that out of 144 reported encounters, only one UAP was identified as a large, deflating balloon. The other UAPs remain unexplained.

I thought that report was tremendous. A tremendously important step forward. 'Cause to me, it says two things: UFOs are real, and two, they're not ours. I thought it was an astonishing report. And it spoke volumes. We got 144 cases, we can't figure out 143 of them. It's monumental. I mean, it is a watershed moment. We're giving cover and relief for folks who are in the intelligence community now and work for our government and folks who have served and pilots who can now talk about this thing. It's only a preliminary assessment. Some people in the UFO community were a bit disappointed because it wasn't disclosure. But what it did say was, I think, very encouraging and important. It essentially said that whatever UFOs are, some of these sightings demonstrate advanced technology, and this, in one sense, is a form of disclosure. It's certainly taking this further than it's ever been taken before within government. It's quite an admission.

NARRATOR: Of the 144 reports that the U.A.P. Task Force reviewed, the bulk of the sightings had occurred between 2019 and 2021, after the Navy reporting protocol was put into effect. But perhaps what is most compelling is the revelation that out of the 144 reported UAP sightings, only one sighting has been explained. Only one out of them has been shown to be spurious. That indicates to me that we're sitting on a gold mine, a gold mine of incidences that cannot be explained using the normal metrics.

KAKU: We're talking about incidences that are beyond the stretch of our imagination, that indicate new laws of physics opening up. And we physicists are just dying to get access to it.

NARRATOR: The report established five potential explanatory categories-- airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. government or American industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a category for U.A.P. reports that require additional analysis, simply called "Other." "Other" simply means beyond the known technologies of today, which could be extraterrestrial, or who knows? But I think the military is now admitting "other" could mean extraterrestrial.

NARRATOR: Although the word "extraterrestrial" never appears in the report, many observers believe it contains one very profound statement. There's a bombshell quote in the report that a lot of people have missed, and it says, essentially, that we may have to fundamentally change our understanding of the laws of physics to figure out what's going on here. "We may require additional scientific knowledge "to successfully collect on, analyze "and characterize some of them. "Pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them." This is not a sci-fi novel, this is a government report. That was the thing that most stuck out to me as jaw-dropping. "Our current science, our current tech can't understand some of these." The government said that. Wow. Additional scientific knowledge could mean knowledge beyond the known laws of physics. In other words, a technology thousands of years more advanced than ours.

NARRATOR: The U.A.P. Report received mixed reactions from the public. Some were stunned by the government's admission that it couldn't explain so many of the unidentified objects seen in the sky, while others felt it contained nothing of substance. But for UFO investigators, the report represented validation that was long overdue.

TSOUKALOS: The U.A.P. report that came out in June 2021 was revolutionary for the world of UFOs, because for the first time in the history of the United States, the government of the United States has released a statement in which the whole UFO question is addressed. And the bottom line is that the U.S. government knows what our adversaries are capable of. And in this report it says it's not them.

HOWE: I have more hope. It doesn't change the dangerous relationship that I have with several whistleblowers who have, I am telling you, substantial information. Not about just one type of nonhuman. There are a lot. That's the part that keeps astonishing me.

NARRATOR: New Delhi, India. January 2010. The India space program announces plans for their first manned trip to the Moon. China, Russia and the United States all have similar plans in the works. There are also numerous planned missions to Mars currently in development by both private and public organizations. In the midst of this new fervor for space exploration, on April 7, 2015, NASA chief scientist, Ellen Stofan, makes a bold statement concerning the discovery of extraterrestrial life.

I think we're gonna have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade. And I think we're gonna have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.

When we look at that statement, and we compare it with the new lunar and Martian missions that are coming up... ...we have reason to believe that we may be getting prepared, drip by drip, for an open public acknowledgement of the reality of a secret space program that has been in existence throughout much of the 20th century, and only now is going to be revealed to us.

WOOD: I don't think MJ-12 is the only thing that's been kept secret. And I think the disclosure process needs to go way beyond MJ-12, because it's just a tiny portion of the secrets that this country lives in and with. And my goal is to find the truth. I don't care what the truth is, I want to find the truth. Once this knowledge is revealed to us, it will fundamentally propel us into a Star Trek age. Almost overnight, we will have the ability to travel throughout our solar system, perhaps travel outside our solar system. We will learn that we are not alone in the universe. I can understand that many will have a problem believing me, and all I can say is that I've had these experiences, I know them to be true, and one of these days, this information will be revealed, and you will know it to be true.

NARRATOR: Could there really be a government agency known as the Majestic-12? And if so, is it helping the United States, in league with other nations, to pave the way for future communications between mankind and its extraterrestrial counterparts? According to numerous top secret documents, the answer is a profound "yes." And the ultimate proof may very well be waiting for us when we venture back to the stars and begin the next phase in human evolution-- the colonization of other planets.

NARRATOR: While the United States officially denied investigating UAPs until 2017, some nations had always been ahead in their approach to the subject. Leading the world in UAP research is the South American country of Chile. In 1997, the Chilean government officially instructed air traffic control and military personnel to create the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena. The committee studies all reports of UAP activity by commercial, military and civilian pilots. One of the most well-publicized was a shocking incident that occurred in 2014 when Chilean naval officers flying along the coast of Santiago captured video of a UAP.

ALEJANDRO ROJAS: There was an incident in 2014 where a military helicopter got video of a strange object. It kind of looked like a rocket with some sort of plume behind it. And they said they were at about 4,500 feet.

RICHARD DOLAN: They have nine minutes of fairly clear video that exists on this. The Chilean military studied it for two years, and they were not able to identify this at all.

HESELTINE: Chile, like many other South American countries, seem to be far more open to the idea that there are objects coming into our airspace.

GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: I think one of the reasons why South American countries are more open-minded about the UFO and the extraterrestrial question is because it is part of their cultural heritage. In fact, Peru and Bolivia, they're treasure troves for the ancient astronaut theory. The whole pre-Inca culture and even the Inca culture spoke of these beings of light that descended from the sky. And so, these countries essentially grew up with this intrinsic knowledge of someone up in the sky. Brazil has had a history of really dramatic UFO encounters. Chile, I think Uruguay, maybe, as well. But the whole world didn't pay much attention to it.

NARRATOR: In addition to South America, now other parts of the world are also starting to disclose information about UFOs. Governments are openly investigating encounters reported by both civilians and military personnel. But many researchers believe the most noteworthy country to join this international effort is also one of the most skeptical: Japan. For the longest time in Japan, those in charge, those at the top of the defense departments have denied UFOs, showed a disinterest in UFOs, basically a complete dismissal of the UFO topic completely.

GREG SULLIVAN: The Japanese government made a sudden press release that was said they would not recognize any UFO encounters or extraterrestrial presence on Earth or in the airspace of Japan. I thought this was very strange, as we had already interviewed two pilots, uh, who had several i-incidents and, uh, testimonies that they gave us regarding various pilots' encounters in the air and from the ground over the years when they were active in the military.

NARRATOR: Mamoru Sato, a former wing commander in the Japanese Self-Defense Force, said that he regularly heard stories from other pilots as well as civilians about UAP sightings.

(speaking Japanese)

TRANSLATOR: Some people said, "There's something strange up there." There were a lot of opportunities to see inexplicable things, such as UFOs that were monitoring the sky and training in the sky. And it was my subjective view that we should make a report and organize these things as correct data. But even when this happened, it was only shared among colleagues and not reported publicly.

(speaking Japanese)

NARRATOR: According to Sato, numerous pilots have reported highly unusual encounters with what they described as cigar-shaped objects. During one such incident, a student in his fighter pilot course even lost control of his craft.

(speaking Japanese)

SATO (translated): He said, "The aircraft started going crazy." The alarm rang to indicate that something was wrong with the machine. I saw a cigar-shaped object flying about 1,500 meters high from east to west. The anomaly continued until it disappeared.

NARRATOR: For years, pilots in the Japanese military were instructed to remain silent about such incidents. But in September 2020, Japan's decades-long policy of secrecy and denial came to an end when Defense Minister Taro Kono tasked the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to make a visual recording of any encounter with an unexplained craft. Many believe this very public shift in policy was prompted by a meeting held one month earlier between Minister Kono and his U.S. counterpart Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

The Japanese, after this meeting, uh, gave a press conference. And they said one of the topics that came up was unidentified aerial phenomena. And we talked about the need to cooperate on this. That's a major development, I think, when you have close allies like the U.S. and Japan openly speaking about the UFO issue and agreeing to cooperate. We've come so far in such a short amount of time.

RYAN SPRAGUE: The fact that Japan denied that there was UFO activity happening in their country, and now they're establishing the Japanese Space Operations Squadron says to me that there clearly is something going on over the skies of Japan.

NARRATOR: Ancient astronaut theorists suggest governments throughout the world are finally beginning to acknowledge that there may be objects in our skies that are not of this Earth.

NARRATOR: Japan Airlines Flight 1628 is carrying cargo from Paris, France to Narita International Airport near Tokyo. The three-person crew is led by Captain Kenju Terauchi, an ex-fighter pilot with over 10,000 hours of flight time. As the 747 approaches Anchorage, Captain Terauchi notices two strange lights out of his cockpit window. It's dark. It's, uh, very early morning. Before sunrise. These lights are clearly maneuvering. They are, in relationship to each other, one is on top of the other, and they move directly in front of his aircraft. Now, he's flying at about 500 miles per hour. These things are pacing him.

NARRATOR: Captain Terauchi realizes the lights are strange oval-shaped flying objects, and they are getting dangerously close to his aircraft. As bright lights fill the cockpit, Captain Terauchi radios the Anchorage Air Traffic Control Center and asks if they can identify the objects near his plane.

NARRATOR: As Terauchi attempts a series of evasive maneuvers to avoid a potential collision, the two UFOs suddenly disappear. In their place is another object. One so large, it dwarfs the 747.

RICHARD DOLAN: His words for describing it were, "gigantic spaceship the size of maybe two aircraft carriers." Just immense. Tarauchi sees this massive thing in the sky, and he's scared.

NARRATOR: Concerned by Captain Terauchi's report, the air traffic controller calls NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, based at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Communication specialists at the airbase confirm that there is a very large unidentified object on their radar screens. Traffic control told them that they could actually take whatever evasive actions they needed to, to avoid collision, and they even dropped down to 4,000 feet above sea level, and the thing continued to follow them.

RYAN SPRAGUE: Air traffic control diverted another commercial flight to come look at this UFO. And by the time they got there, the UFO was completely gone.

TSOUKALOS: One of the reasons why the J.A.L. report is such a big deal is because the corroborating evidence is overwhelming. Not only were there eyewitness reports, but there's the records of the communication systems that Terauchi was in touch with, actual dialogue that happened. "Hey, we are up here. We see this. Are you guys seeing this on your radar?" All this stuff is recorded.

NARRATOR: Once safely grounded, Captain Terauchi, his copilot and flight engineer were immediately interviewed by Alaska Federal Aviation Administration officials and other special agents.

NICK POPE: There's an FAA investigation into this. There's lots of documentation. There's no real, hard and fast conclusion about this. And so, the pilot, perhaps out of frustration, talks to the media.

NARRATOR: In December 1986, one month after the encounter, Captain Terauchi contacted Kyodo News and said he believed the mysterious crafts were of extraterrestrial origin. The unauthorized statements prompted Japan Airlines officials to remove Captain Terauchi from pilot duty, and assign him to a desk job. Around the same time, John Callahan, the FAA's division chief of the Accidents and Investigations branch. learned of the incident and deemed it worthy of investigation.

DOLAN: John Callahan went to D.C. about this, and there was a meeting that was chaired by one of the top people of the FAA. This meeting was also attended by representatives of the FBI, representatives of the CIA and representatives of President Reagan's White House. They had audiotapes that were played, between the pilot and air traffic control, describing everything that was happening, and written reports. And at the end of the meeting, one of the CIA, uh, agents stood up and said, "This meeting never happened, "and we're confiscating all of the data that has been, uh, shared here." Now, Callahan, he was a little sly, but he was within his rights. "They never asked me," he said, "if I had a copy of any of this myself," he said. "Which I did." He had a copy of the audio recordings, if nothing else. And a little over a decade later, shared that with the public.

MICAH HANKS: John Callahan came away with the feeling that there was essentially a kind of coverup. The FAA didn't want the fact that this incident had occurred to get out.

POPE: I've spoken to pilots who have seen amazing things out there, but never report it because of the fear of being disbelieved, being ridiculed, and perhaps, being grounded. You won't be flying anymore. So, what do they say? Most times, nothing.

TSOUKALOS: You have countless commercial and private airline pilots who spend an exorbitant amount of time up in the sky. And, in my opinion, I think they're the best people to discern what is natural and what is not.

NARRATOR: As far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned, UFO encounters reported by civilian pilots provide some of the most compelling evidence that there is an extraterrestrial presence in the skies above Earth. And, according to some pilots, what they've witnessed presents a serious danger.

CHILDRESS: Historically, there have been a lot of UFO sightings around the Aleutian Islands. And there are 57 volcanoes throughout the Aleutian Islands. And it seems that some of these volcanoes have some very peculiar activity around them.

NARRATOR: But east of the Aleutian Islands is a large area that has become even more notorious for strange phenomena. It is called the Alaska Triangle. The Alaska Triangle is an area roughly between Anchorage, Juneau, and Barrow, Alaska, more or less running along the border of the Canadian territories and the State of Alaska.

TSOUKALOS: The Alaska Triangle can be likened to the Bermuda Triangle, where really strange things happen, seemingly without explanation.

NARRATOR: Within this region of anomalous activity stands Mount Hayes, one of Alaska's tallest peaks and a place where UFO sightings are reported with great frequency. Many people have seen, uh, UFOs, flying saucers, strange lights, flying in and around Mount Hayes. Now, there's no road that can go up there. The only way to get to Mount Hayes is to actually fly there, which most people don't do. So, what are these craft that are flying around Mount Hayes?

NARRATOR: For decades, eyewitness testimony was the only evidence to support the notion that Mount Hayes was a UFO hot spot. But in 1995, declassified documents revealed that Mount Hayes featured prominently in a top secret government project called "Stargate."

NEWMAN: Researchers were looking through CIA documents, and they found evidence of a project underneath Mount Hayes. And they say they saw written in these records that it was actually an alien underground base in this area.

NARRATOR: Researchers were astounded to find a reference to an extraterrestrial base in official CIA documents. And just as intriguing is how this information was obtained. According to the declassified documents, the existence of an alien base beneath Mount Hayes was gleaned from a top secret experimental investigation technique used by Project Stargate, a technique called "remote viewing."

NEWMAN: Remote viewing was used by the CIA all during the Cold War. And this is really a psychic projection technique, where, from one location, the remote viewer can look into a different place on the Earth's surface, and he's able to project his vision there and able to see what is going on. Project Stargate had a specific purpose of using remote viewers, um, quite literally psychic spies, to find information on what the Soviets were up to.

NARRATOR: The most famous remote viewer to come out of the Stargate project was a man named Pat Price. Price was the first to report what he believed to be an alien base under Mount Hayes. He would sit down and draw what he sees, and he was deadly accurate on his predictions. One time, Pat Price, uh, remote viewed Mount Hayes and saw that there was, uh, structures that were under the mountain-- tubes, tunnels-- and he was intrigued by that, so he went deeper.

RICKSECKER: Pat Price saw within Mount Hayes what he described as geographical instrumentation. He saw computers. He also described these strange humanoid creatures that were within the mountain, and they were working alongside human personnel, which he believed were military personnel.

NARRATOR: Price began to fear that he had seen something he wasn't supposed to see and told friends that his remote viewing of the secret base under Mount Hayes had put him in grave danger.

COLLINS: In Las Vegas, just as he checked in to the Stardust, somebody deliberately bumped into him, and he felt a sharp pain in his leg. And that evening, he started to feel unwell. And the following morning, he had convulsions and died. What's really strange about Pat Price's death is that the hospital didn't even notify the wife, and they had him cremated.

BRUCE PEARSON: I think it is fair and reasonable to ask the question if Pat Price's mysterious death does not enter into a long lineage of similar tragic deaths of people that are whistleblowers or are stepping out of line and saying things they shouldn't say about things they have witnessed or know about.

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What Governments Know About Aliens | Ancient Aliens

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