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November 2004 off the coast of Southern California, the radar operators on the US's Princeton begin to see objects coming essentially from space.

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And as I come up I can see them as these crossing in front of me, it starts to accelerate, gets right on my nose and disappears.

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This particular object was not following any of our rules.

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Like what the f*** is that?

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Like we're seeing something for the first time.

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We don't know if it's a threat, we don't even know what it is.

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We don't know what we don't know.

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Look at that thing!

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These unidentified flying phenomenon or objects, you know, I don't know what they are.

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But we've established one thing, they exist.

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Our pilots have been seeing these things for decades.

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Their sightings go all the way back to the 40s and 50s and 60s.

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We have a report of an unidentified aircraft south of the field.

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There have been hundreds of sightings of Westchester, Duchess, and Putnam counties.

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Anything that enters an airspace that's not supposed to be there is a threat.

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There's a lot of people who are very passionate about this issue and they just want people to take it seriously as they should.

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The military and the government basically decided on a policy of shaming.

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The witnesses were very afraid of being ridiculed.

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They think you're a nut.

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Tell you the truth, that's just what they figure you are.

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We needed to remove the stigma.

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Republicans are just as curious as Democrats when it comes to these matters.

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It used to be that the burden of proof was on the true believer.

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They saw something prove it.

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Now the burden of proof has shifted to the government.

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Now they have to prove that they don't come from perhaps another universe beyond ours.

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We get reports every night.

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I don't know what's happening. It looks like they're not standing right around it.

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Yes, it came from outer space to fill the world with terror to bring you unforgettable suspects.

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When you hear the term UFO, I think a lot of people think of little green men and Elvis on the mothership and tinfoil hats.

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Where did it come from?

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When in reality what we're talking about are real objects that are being encountered over controlled US airspace.

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In some cases very sensitive locations.

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Performing in ways that frankly we can't understand.

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Honestly, we have video footage of UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.

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My gosh!

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They're going against the wind. The wind's 100.5 knots west.

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Oh, all things dude.

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More and more things that we can't identify.

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So we need to know what it is. That is necessary for national security.

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There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the ASA.

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Might this be from the Russians, the Chinese government, or another hostile nation, a non-state actor?

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Or are these aircraft otherworldly?

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Are these beings from another galaxy or universe?

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These are questions that have to be answered.

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I think the best way to characterize it is we're vulnerable.

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It's a vulnerability and that vulnerability could be exploited, could be massively exploited.

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So that has to be a national security concern.

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We've been looking at this topic for the last 70 years as a country.

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We have substantiated reports of UAP activity from at least World War II.

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We have received and analyzed between 1 and 2,000 reports that have come to us from all kinds of sources.

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You're not taught this in history class, but we had a phenomenal series of UFO sightings directly over the nation's capital in July 1952 on two successive weekends.

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The Air Force's interest in this problem has been due to our feeling of an obligation to identify anything in the air that may have the possibility of threat or menace to the United States.

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The American people wanted answers, and unfortunately the Air Force chose to obfuscate.

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Our critics continually charge that the United States Air Force is withholding information from the general public.

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This is absolutely untrue. We are not hiding anything. We have nothing to hide.

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So in the early 1970s, the government concluded its investigation into UFOs.

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As a result of that, there was this quiet period. This point where the U.S. government had washed its hands of the topic, and that occurred for several decades.

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Or at least that's what we were led to believe.

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In fact, in 2008, I was approached by a couple representatives from a little small obscure office somewhere in the Pentagon.

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That office was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, ATIP.

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The individuals asked me if I would be part of an effort, which quite literally looked at UFOs.

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ATIP was the deliberate and purposeful study of unidentified aerial vehicles that were being encountered in controlled U.S. airspace.

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People asked me, well, why you, Lou? And as it was explained to me, it was because of my background.

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I'm a career counterintelligence special agent. Many of my assignments were overseas, initially in the Latin American hemisphere.

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And then later on, after September 11th, over in Afghanistan in the Middle East.

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I took an oath many, many years ago to defend this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

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And that's why I accepted the offer to join ATIP.

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I approached this job the same way I did every other job I ever had in intelligence.

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The exact same methodologies that we used to hunt terrorists, we were using to hunt UFOs.

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The sources of information that was collected was primarily through Department of Defense and military assets.

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Think of fighter aircraft and military eyewitnesses. We did not engage the public.

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These pilots are not only trained observers, but they are some of the best aircraft pilots on the planet, operating some of the most sophisticated weapons systems on the planet.

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When they're telling you that they are encountering something that they cannot describe, that impacts our national security and our ability to respond to a perceived threat.

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And so when they are encountering these objects, we have to take their testimony seriously.

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Imagine something that had the ability to fly in space, underwater and in our atmosphere at 13,000 miles an hour and change directions instantly.

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We fly the SR-71 at 3,200 miles an hour.

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If you wanted to take a right-hand turn, it would take you roughly half the state of Ohio to do it.

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And yet what we are seeing are objects that can do 90-degree turns instantly.

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And when I'm talking about speeds of 3,200 miles an hour, they've been clocked at over 13,000.

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The question arises, how is that possible?

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On the Armed Services Committee, the one thing I did become aware of that I was very concerned about is that members of our Armed Forces have come forward over many years.

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With reports of unidentified aerial phenomenon that they actually captured.

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And instead of that information being well received, it's often been denigrated.

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By and large, most of the data was not even filed or saved or reported.

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The information that was stored did not go to a central authority.

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That's not acceptable.

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And if we don't know what it is, it's not an appropriate response to say, well then let's not look at it.

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Or let's not admit it's there.

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And so I wanted to look into this further.

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So is that like an adrenaline junkie? Is that what you call yourself?

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I don't say I'm an adrenaline junkie, but I like fast cars and flying jets are pretty cool.

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I mean, I think it's the greatest job on the planet.

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My name is David Fraver. I'm a retired Navy commander, super hornet pilot.

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I flew for 18 years for the United States Navy.

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July 1969, I was with my mom watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

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And I was fascinated with space and my mom said they were all former military pilots and about from that point on,

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I had this goal that I was going to fly tactical aircraft somewhere in the United States military.

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I got some pilots that I worry about.

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The first thing you don't want to lose anybody in number two, the airplanes are pretty expensive and it's tax dollars.

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In November of 2004, we were going to work with the USS Princeton and we were flying.

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We're training our aircrew.

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Stand by for work and commanding officer.

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As Alex was flying the other plane, the Princeton came up and said,

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Hey sir, we're going to hold on training today.

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So he said, hey, we have a real world vector and they turned us off to the west.

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It goes to, oh, real world. Maybe we're going to intercept some drug runners.

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We were flying in a tactical combat spread formation to aircraft.

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Each aircraft had two aircrew.

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As the radar hits on the USS Princeton scope, start to march towards each other.

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They get so close that they can't differentiate them and that's called a merge plot.

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And a merge plot is when you would expect to merge with this other aircraft.

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And if you're in a combat situation, that's obviously a very tense moment.

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So when you do that, you start looking outside.

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So we're kind of doing this, looking around to see where it's at because it's somewhere around you and you don't know.

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And I looked down and I go, what is that?

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Close your eyes and imagine a long cylindrical white object with rounded ends.

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Roughly 40 feet long that looked like a giant tic-tac.

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It was white, pure white.

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It had no windows, no wings, no visual signs of propulsion.

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And this thing was going like this.

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And I describe it as like if you put a ping pong ball and it was bouncing off a wall.

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This particular object was not following any of our rules.

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It didn't have a turn radius that we would expect.

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It didn't have a period to accelerate and decelerate.

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It just seemed to zip so quickly that it was again really disorienting, really confusing for us.

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David said it was the WTF moment.

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Yeah, yeah.

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We're definitely some WTFs on the radio.

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Not in a scared way, but like what the f*** is that?

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Like we're seeing something for the first time.

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You know, some people go, what is that? And they run.

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And then some people see it. What is that? And they're curious.

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They want to get closer and closer.

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I wanted to get closer, see what it was.

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My lead, Commander David Fraver, he says I'm in, which means that he's engaging with this thing.

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We're going around. We get to about the 12 o'clock position.

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And this thing's still pointing north-south.

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The tic-tac goes and turns and starts coming up.

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So now it's mirroring me.

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Whatever it was was aware that we were there.

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And as I come up, I can see him as he's crossing in front of me.

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It starts to accelerate, gets right on my nose and disappears.

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For something to come off the surface of the ocean like it was moving around,

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to be able to just accelerate, to match my speed,

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and then to rapidly go away, we do not possess that technology.

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Dave Fraver was my commanding officer.

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Dave had his encounter.

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He comes back and lands on the carrier and goes, I'm a little weirded out.

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We were out there and we saw this object.

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I need you to go out to this sector of airspace and try to find it.

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He's been flying his entire career over 20 years.

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When he says something like that, I take it seriously.

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Chad decided if there's any way possible, if I can get this thing on video,

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I'm going to do it.

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I think it's a testament to Chad Underwood and his pilot,

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their experience, their expertise, their technical acumen

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that they were able to launch and find it and bring back FLIR footage.

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You can see we just jumped to infrared.

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Target is now white against a black background.

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It's the same picture.

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It's just a different kind of polarity.

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I told my pilot, I'm like, hey, I'm going to go into every single field of view, zoom,

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TV and just try to bring back as much footage.

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So we pop the tapes in and take a look and every single eyeball in the room

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was just like wide open, like whoa.

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How do I describe this to someone who's going to be, you know, skeptical

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and there was kind of that stigma of like, all right, you saw an alien.

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I'm like, I didn't say I saw an alien.

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All I can tell you is I couldn't describe it.

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There's a lot more videos there.

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What we're seeing on gun camera footage is being validated and verified by eye witness testimony,

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which is also being further substantiated by radar data.

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My intent was to have this information presented to the Secretary of Defense

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so he could make an informed decision.

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There are aspects of this phenomenon that definitely belong within the national security arena.

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Especially if these objects were over controlled U.S. airspace, that's inherent government business.

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The boss needed to see the data.

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And unfortunately, that information was not permitted to get to him.

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On a regular routine basis, I was brought up to the Secretary's suite

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and I was briefing his direct reports.

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But they wouldn't bring it to his attention.

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And I suspect they were trying to save him from embarrassment

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because if someone in the media said, were you ever briefed on UFOs, he'd have to say yes.

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And so after several failed attempts to brief the Secretary of Defense, I chose to resign.

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Sometimes if you want to help the system, you have to leave the very system to do it.

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And that's what I chose to do.

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My resignation wasn't easy. It was probably most difficult on my family.

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I had given up a successful career.

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But it's kind of a code of ethic with us in government that if you can't fix a problem internally, then you leave.

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Which is ultimately what I had to do.

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Leslie, interview, take one, Mark.

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My name is Leslie Kane and I'm an investigative journalist and I've been reporting on UFOs for about 21 years.

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In the fall of 2017, I got a call from a source of mine, Chris Mellon, a former Undersecretary of Defense,

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who was very interested in UFOs.

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And he invited me to the secret meeting in Washington, D.C.

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And I eventually learned that the purpose was for me to meet the former head of an official program within the Department of Defense,

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which was studying UFOs and had been doing so for 10 years.

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I met Lou Elizondo the day after he resigned from the secret program.

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So this was unbelievable to me. There was a program and I was actually about to meet the person who headed up that program.

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It was a big deal. It was the biggest moment of my career as a journalist.

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These are original copies from the original negative of the probably the most...

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When I first started reporting on UFOs in 2000, I was working at a public radio station in Berkeley, California.

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And suddenly this colleague from France sent me a report in the mail.

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The report was called the Cameto Report and I had the only exclusive English translation.

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What it was was a 90-page study of official UFO cases put together by French military officials.

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Generals and admiral, the chief of police.

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What really stunned me when I read it was their conclusion.

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What they said was that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the most valid, rational and logical explanation for the UFO cases that they studied.

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So I thought this was a huge story and I thought to myself, what if the equivalent level of officials in America said something like that?

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Wouldn't that be front-page news? Wouldn't that go all over the world?

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And then I pitched a story to the Boston Globe and in May of 2000, that story came out.

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The response was huge within the UFO world.

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But what I was surprised about was that there wasn't more response outside of the people who already cared about this topic.

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And so my goal in writing about UFOs has been mainly to bring information forward to the public.

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But beyond that, it's to motivate our government to pay attention.

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I commend the media for tackling this because they're putting a lot at risk as well, reporting on this topic.

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Pilots are in a position to provide very useful information to scientists.

219
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That's how we have a comprehensive conversation with the American people.

220
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I did not walk away from that meeting with Lou Elizondo carrying anything with me.

221
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I was shown three videos of UFOs and these were official Department of Defense videos that were, without question, unexplained objects.

222
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She ran through the videos and she asked me, are these authentic?

223
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And I said, I can tell you that the videos are authentic.

224
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And the only reason why I'm telling you this is because they're unclassified.

225
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I facilitated the review process for them through the Department of Defense.

226
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Two of them had audio tapes of the pilots exclaiming about what they were seeing and they're shocked and they're awe and everything else.

227
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This was just absolutely stunning to me because there had been no official videos of UFOs released.

228
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I don't think ever, but certainly not since way back in the 50s or 60s.

229
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And they were official. That's the thing. They were just somebody out with a cell phone taking a video.

230
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When you hear the pilots reaction to these encounters, it's very compelling.

231
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My God!

232
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They're obviously startled. They're obviously encountering something that they can't explain, that we need to figure out what we collectively are going to do about it.

233
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And that's why I resigned from the Department of Defense.

234
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Luis Elizondo's letter of resignation that he wrote for the Secretary of Defense, I think that might have just knocked me out of him more than anything else.

235
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He explained why he was resigning this job and it had to do with his understanding that UFOs were a national security concern.

236
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To see that written down and the courage that it took for him to do that was just incredible.

237
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In order to understand why I resigned, I think you have to go back to where I came from.

238
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I come from on my father's side, Cuban immigrants.

239
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That's meaningful for me because this country offered my family opportunities that nobody else would.

240
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And so from a very young age, I've always wanted to serve the country that gave my family so much.

241
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You know, ironically, I left the Department of Defense out of loyalty, not disloyalty.

242
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I left the Department of Defense to finish the very mission they gave me in the first place.

243
00:22:00,000 --> 00:22:10,000
After reporting all these years on UFOs, there was nothing that came close to the power of that particular meeting.

244
00:22:12,000 --> 00:22:22,000
Once I realized this was a big story, I teamed up with my colleague Ralph Blumenthal, who was a freelance reporter for the New York Times, and he pitched it to the head editor.

245
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I had never reported for the New York Times before, so I didn't know what would happen.

246
00:22:29,000 --> 00:22:31,000
But that's where I felt the story should go.

247
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The public has a right to know about what we are learning about this extraordinary phenomenon.

248
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I think it was sometime in the fall of 2017.

249
00:22:47,000 --> 00:22:53,000
My boss, the Washington Bureau Chief, walked up to my desk and said, do you want to write about UFOs?

250
00:22:54,000 --> 00:23:01,000
And we both sort of laughed, and she said, Leslie Kane had information about a secret Pentagon program.

251
00:23:02,000 --> 00:23:07,000
And that was easily to me fascinating. There's no way I don't want to write about it.

252
00:23:09,000 --> 00:23:13,000
I'm Helene Cooper. I'm the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times.

253
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I've been with the paper since 2004.

254
00:23:18,000 --> 00:23:22,000
You can always tell Pentagon reporter because we like to say that's the best beat in Washington.

255
00:23:23,000 --> 00:23:28,000
You're on aircraft carriers, you're on fighter jets, I've been on bombers, I've been on the B-1 and the B-2.

256
00:23:29,000 --> 00:23:33,000
You're on naval destroyers in the South China Sea. You're never bored.

257
00:23:33,000 --> 00:23:34,000
You're never bored.

258
00:23:38,000 --> 00:23:45,000
Once Helene Cooper was on board, we set up a meeting with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon program.

259
00:23:47,000 --> 00:23:51,000
We met up at a hotel somewhere near Capitol Hill.

260
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It started in the afternoon, it ended up in the evening.

261
00:23:56,000 --> 00:23:59,000
She made it very clear that she was writing this story.

262
00:24:00,000 --> 00:24:04,000
I owes a little bit to be completely forthcoming, a little intimidated.

263
00:24:05,000 --> 00:24:09,000
When the New York Times comes knocking, that'll get your attention pretty quickly.

264
00:24:10,000 --> 00:24:14,000
It's stacks of papers and information.

265
00:24:15,000 --> 00:24:19,000
I think they were trying to get me to confirm who was the sponsor of the program.

266
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He told us that Senator Harry Reid had put money in the Pentagon budget to fund this program.

267
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Leslie, Ralph and I all thought that Harry Reid would deny that he had put the money in there.

268
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This was black money, it was kind of off the books.

269
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And so all I wanted was to nail the fact that the Pentagon had a UFO, secret UFO program.

270
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That's all I needed to do.

271
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I'm not trying to prove that they're UFOs, I'm not trying to prove that anybody's visited.

272
00:24:52,000 --> 00:24:59,000
I just wanted to interview the people who were involved in this program and put them on the record.

273
00:25:01,000 --> 00:25:05,000
Going to interview Senator Reid was a big deal.

274
00:25:06,000 --> 00:25:09,000
We needed him to acknowledge that he put the money into the program.

275
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If we didn't have Harry Reid, we might not have a story. He was that important.

276
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We didn't know whether he would be willing to go on the record because this was a very sketchy field to begin with.

277
00:25:23,000 --> 00:25:40,000
You know, most people thought if you're a senior person in the government, it's kind of a career ender to say that the government should actually take seriously the prospect that unidentified aerial phenomena might be, in fact, UFOs.

278
00:25:41,000 --> 00:25:47,000
And so I flew to Las Vegas to meet with Senator Reid.

279
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He like has this huge suite of offices at the Bellagio.

280
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This is going to be it. This is my one shot.

281
00:25:56,000 --> 00:26:00,000
And I walked in to talk to him and he was completely open.

282
00:26:01,000 --> 00:26:06,000
These unidentified flying phenomena or objects, you know, I don't know what they are.

283
00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:10,000
But we've established one thing. They exist.

284
00:26:11,000 --> 00:26:18,000
In that moment, you're sitting there as a reporter and your blood is sort of pounding because you're getting the goods.

285
00:26:19,000 --> 00:26:23,000
I was so excited. It's like I'm writing it down and I can't believe he's telling me this stuff.

286
00:26:26,000 --> 00:26:32,000
My name is Harry Reid. I served in the United States Congress from 1982 to 2017.

287
00:26:33,000 --> 00:26:42,000
I was born and raised in Searchlight, Nevada, which is about 55 miles here from Las Vegas.

288
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During the time that I grew up there, it was, uh, the mines were gone and then the brown business was prostitution.

289
00:26:49,000 --> 00:26:52,000
So that's the atmosphere I was raised in.

290
00:26:53,000 --> 00:26:58,000
I can still remember looking up at the sky, just wondering what it was all about.

291
00:26:58,000 --> 00:27:01,000
And I always, always have remembered that.

292
00:27:03,000 --> 00:27:10,000
Harry Reid really stood out because he was one of the few members of Congress who were willing to talk about this issue.

293
00:27:11,000 --> 00:27:16,000
And he had also gotten secret funds to start this program.

294
00:27:17,000 --> 00:27:21,000
It was a modest amount, $22 million, which is a drop in the bucket of the Pentagon budget,

295
00:27:22,000 --> 00:27:26,000
but it was the first significant amount of money to be dedicated to this issue of UFOs.

296
00:27:26,000 --> 00:27:31,000
Well, it's interesting. You know, my staff, they said in so many words,

297
00:27:32,000 --> 00:27:37,000
Senator, don't get involved in this. This is too weird. It's not going to help your career.

298
00:27:38,000 --> 00:27:40,000
Dude, that is so strange.

299
00:27:41,000 --> 00:27:52,000
Didn't tend to be a topic that members of the House or members of the Senate or people in senior positions in the executive branch wanted to embrace.

300
00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:57,000
But I was determined to learn more about this.

301
00:27:58,000 --> 00:28:03,000
And so in spite of the admonitions for me to stay the hell away from it, I went ahead and did it.

302
00:28:04,000 --> 00:28:10,000
Well, God bless Senator Reid. He was certainly someone I looked up to and admired.

303
00:28:11,000 --> 00:28:14,000
People want their leaders and representatives to be bold.

304
00:28:15,000 --> 00:28:18,000
And if you're unwilling to be bold, then why are you in office?

305
00:28:22,000 --> 00:28:27,000
And as I look back over my involvement in this, I think, what if we hadn't done this?

306
00:28:28,000 --> 00:28:32,000
Where would we be without the work that we did? We would be nowhere.

307
00:28:34,000 --> 00:28:39,000
From a scientific standpoint, technological standpoint, security of this nation,

308
00:28:40,000 --> 00:28:42,000
these are the reasons we have to continue looking into this.

309
00:28:52,000 --> 00:29:01,000
At the end of the interview with Senator Reid, I walked out of the Bellagio and there's a bridge from the Bellagio over the strip to whatever is on the other side.

310
00:29:02,000 --> 00:29:06,000
And it's a pedestrian bridge. And I called Leslie and Ralph and they were on the phone with Lou.

311
00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:10,000
So we're in this four-way phone call and I was like, he confirmed everything.

312
00:29:11,000 --> 00:29:14,000
Harry Reid had never spoken out before about this program.

313
00:29:15,000 --> 00:29:19,000
So this was like the first moment in which he came out on the topic. And that was a big deal.

314
00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:26,000
We were ecstatic because that moment we knew we had it. It's like, no matter what happens next, we have the story.

315
00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:36,000
The lead up to the actual publication of the story on December 17th was torturous.

316
00:29:37,000 --> 00:29:43,000
Our editors were constantly saying, make sure we put skeptics in there. We put people challenging this notion.

317
00:29:44,000 --> 00:29:51,000
This caution by our editors was starting to naturally get on our nerves. It's like, run the story already.

318
00:29:52,000 --> 00:29:55,000
We've like dotted every possible I. We can dot.

319
00:29:56,000 --> 00:30:01,000
And we knew at this time that Politico was chasing the story as well.

320
00:30:03,000 --> 00:30:07,000
It's Saturday morning. It's 11 posts at the story. I think it's 11 or 12.

321
00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:12,000
And we're hearing from Lou and from other people that Politico is about to post.

322
00:30:13,000 --> 00:30:18,000
And I'm on the phone with the guy who's the Saturday editor going, publish, just publish already.

323
00:30:19,000 --> 00:30:22,000
And he's tinkering around with what kind of headline do we want.

324
00:30:23,000 --> 00:30:26,000
I was just like, publish, publish. And he finally posted the story.

325
00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:33,000
The story is up and I'm like, thank God it's up. I put my phone in my pocketbook.

326
00:30:33,000 --> 00:30:38,000
I go into Costco and I'm buying, I don't know, what tenderloin for Christmas.

327
00:30:39,000 --> 00:30:44,000
And I'm in there for about an hour and I come back out and my phone is like, has blown up.

328
00:30:45,000 --> 00:30:49,000
And a striking expose published over the weekend, The New York Times revealed the existence.

329
00:30:50,000 --> 00:30:53,000
Amazon has confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

330
00:30:54,000 --> 00:30:59,000
People were calling me and they were like a tax and it was just like, the response was huge.

331
00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:04,000
It was a firestorm. Tens of millions of dollars for the project were pushed through.

332
00:31:05,000 --> 00:31:09,000
It was all over the place. Unveiled the existence of a real life X-Files department.

333
00:31:10,000 --> 00:31:11,000
It was all over the world.

334
00:31:13,000 --> 00:31:18,000
But according to Louis Célezondo, who directed the financial program, it just went like wildfire.

335
00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:22,000
It was a huge deal.

336
00:31:24,000 --> 00:31:26,000
Why do you think it attracted so much attention?

337
00:31:26,000 --> 00:31:31,000
I think one of the main reasons it attracted so much attention was because of those two videos that we included.

338
00:31:37,000 --> 00:31:41,000
I mean, there is nothing like watching a video of a UFO for people.

339
00:31:42,000 --> 00:31:48,000
Those videos garnered tremendous views among the most watched videos of times it ever put up.

340
00:31:49,000 --> 00:32:00,000
So the response was huge, but that was when I started to realize just how intense the people who care about this are.

341
00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:04,000
And just also how equally intense the skeptics are.

342
00:32:06,000 --> 00:32:10,000
I'm content to say that's mysterious. I don't know, maybe it's a glitch in the hardware.

343
00:32:11,000 --> 00:32:14,000
And if you're going to say, no, it's not a glitch in the hardware, are you really sure?

344
00:32:19,000 --> 00:32:28,000
For the Navy videos, there are in fact explanations that involve nothing more complex than commercial aircraft or balloons or things like that.

345
00:32:29,000 --> 00:32:32,000
It doesn't mean they're necessarily alien craft.

346
00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:40,000
I think that the assumption that we're being visited fails on the evidence of it, but it's not that it's impossible.

347
00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:45,000
It's just, from my point of view, so difficult to go from one star system to another.

348
00:32:45,000 --> 00:32:50,000
I think that it's unlikely these are alien craft.

349
00:32:51,000 --> 00:32:58,000
The universe brims with mysteries, and we so want many of those mysteries to be a light in the sky you don't understand.

350
00:32:59,000 --> 00:33:02,000
Gee, I want that to be aliens visiting us.

351
00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:07,000
But for a skeptical scientist, that would probably be the last explanation.

352
00:33:09,000 --> 00:33:13,000
The skeptics had two major points of focus after our story came out.

353
00:33:13,000 --> 00:33:21,000
One of them was on the videos, because they didn't necessarily believe that those videos showed some kind of anomalous object.

354
00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:23,000
They thought they could be explained.

355
00:33:24,000 --> 00:33:32,000
The second point is the skepticism about these being extraterrestrial craft, which personally, to me, is sort of a disconnect,

356
00:33:33,000 --> 00:33:37,000
because we're not saying that they're extraterrestrial, we're just saying we can't explain them.

357
00:33:38,000 --> 00:33:44,000
Now, I don't mind someone being skeptical. I think healthy skepticism is important.

358
00:33:45,000 --> 00:33:50,000
In the same weird sort of way, skeptics are really no different than believers.

359
00:33:51,000 --> 00:33:53,000
They're just on the opposite end of the argument.

360
00:33:54,000 --> 00:33:59,000
At the end of the day, data is what is going to determine the validity of something.

361
00:33:59,000 --> 00:34:06,000
Well, if humanity wants to understand what is causing this phenomenon, then we need to do real scientific study.

362
00:34:07,000 --> 00:34:17,000
And that means we need to collect data, we need to analyze that data, and understand how it might be possible for that phenomenon to fit within the laws of physics.

363
00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:20,000
Now, watch the way this thing starts to turn.

364
00:34:21,000 --> 00:34:24,000
But we can't speculate about what it is. We can't just imagine what it is.

365
00:34:24,000 --> 00:34:32,000
You're looking between 20 and 25,000 feet in altitude, and this thing, when it turns sideways, does go down.

366
00:34:33,000 --> 00:34:41,000
We need real hard data. This 99.9 and range 99. Those are indications that my radar is receiving jamming cues.

367
00:34:42,000 --> 00:34:47,000
It's possible that these objects represent a threat to the United States.

368
00:34:48,000 --> 00:34:51,000
It's behaving in strange ways. It has an aura around it.

369
00:34:51,000 --> 00:34:56,000
Then we need to know exactly what they are so that we can respond accordingly.

370
00:34:57,000 --> 00:35:03,000
And so I think it's extremely important for us to understand an unidentified area of the phenomenon.

371
00:35:07,000 --> 00:35:15,000
After the New York Times story was blasted out on the Internet on a Saturday, the story ended up on the front page of the Sunday New York Times.

372
00:35:16,000 --> 00:35:21,000
And then it was a whole inside page when you opened it up. So it was a long piece.

373
00:35:23,000 --> 00:35:31,000
During all the years I covered UFOs, and I had access to some newspapers, but they weren't at the caliber of the New York Times.

374
00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:38,000
And so to see a story on the front page of that newspaper just meant everything to me.

375
00:35:39,000 --> 00:35:40,000
Did you know it was going to be on the front page?

376
00:35:41,000 --> 00:35:44,000
No. No, I did not know. It was going to be on the front page.

377
00:35:45,000 --> 00:35:56,000
It was, wow, looking back, I haven't thought about that in a long time. It was profound.

378
00:35:57,000 --> 00:36:04,000
Not only have the New York Times rarely covered UFOs at all, and when they had, they were usually kind of ridiculing it.

379
00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:11,000
It's really the fodder more for late night talk shows than it is for front page reporting.

380
00:36:12,000 --> 00:36:18,000
Did you go through the secret files, the UFO documents?

381
00:36:19,000 --> 00:36:20,000
I'm not telling you nothing.

382
00:36:22,000 --> 00:36:26,000
When it comes to aliens, there's some things I just can't tell you on air.

383
00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:28,000
But you don't tell us off that.

384
00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:30,000
Great.

385
00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:37,000
But the New York Times piece, it kind of opened up that you could treat this seriously.

386
00:36:37,000 --> 00:36:46,000
What it did is it removed a lot of the stigma that was attached to the UFO world.

387
00:36:47,000 --> 00:36:54,000
Now, instead of looking at it as a joke, we can start looking at these objects from a scientific standpoint.

388
00:36:55,000 --> 00:37:02,000
We can gather the information, we can gather the data, and then have experts who are qualified analyze it in a systematic way.

389
00:37:02,000 --> 00:37:07,000
And so that's why I think it's important to destigmatize the issue.

390
00:37:08,000 --> 00:37:17,000
One reason that article was so compelling and so good is that it was just very factual based on scientific evidence.

391
00:37:18,000 --> 00:37:27,000
And I think that was the beginning of having the American people and probably the world take a look at these areas of unidentified flying objects more intensely than they had before.

392
00:37:27,000 --> 00:37:32,000
So the New York Times article generated a lot of questions among people.

393
00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:37,000
Whoa, you know, they're studying these objects and we don't know what they are.

394
00:37:38,000 --> 00:37:41,000
Where's all the intelligence data? How come we didn't know anything?

395
00:37:42,000 --> 00:37:47,000
And they demonstrate technology that we don't seem to have and we didn't even know about this.

396
00:37:49,000 --> 00:37:56,000
There's no doubt that there are objects that are seen that behave in ways that are not natural for this planet or for the future.

397
00:37:57,000 --> 00:38:02,000
And before this environment, this is a phenomenon we do not yet understand.

398
00:38:05,000 --> 00:38:07,000
There's nothing wrong with us not understanding it.

399
00:38:08,000 --> 00:38:15,000
There are many things in the universe that we do not understand, but it asks us to investigate to learn more.

400
00:38:16,000 --> 00:38:26,000
Just as we'd want to learn more about any of the stars or galaxies we see in the universe, any of the new creatures we find at the bottom of our oceans here on this planet,

401
00:38:27,000 --> 00:38:29,000
we don't want to learn more about this too.

402
00:38:31,000 --> 00:38:41,000
My hope is that we will use the U.S. intelligence community to solve this mystery once and for all, to find out where are they coming from?

403
00:38:42,000 --> 00:38:45,000
Who's behind them? What is the agenda?

404
00:38:46,000 --> 00:38:52,000
We have the means and the capability to do that if we set our minds to it as a nation.

405
00:38:52,000 --> 00:39:00,000
Unfortunately, the government has been pretty secretive about providing hard data to better understand what this phenomenon might be.

406
00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:11,000
So right now, what we still have is a lot of speculation, a lot of what-ifs, and no hard information.

407
00:39:12,000 --> 00:39:20,000
The biggest question that remains for me is what else do they have inside the government? What do they actually know about UFOs?

408
00:39:21,000 --> 00:39:24,000
And why can't more be released to the public?

409
00:39:26,000 --> 00:39:36,000
And this is a big question because we spent so long obfuscating the truth about this topic that we've somewhat backed ourselves into a corner, a corner for over 70 years.

410
00:39:37,000 --> 00:39:45,000
Mr. Secretary, there have been charges that the Air Force, for reasons best known to the Air Force, is hiding something in the UFO field. What is that, if anything?

411
00:39:46,000 --> 00:39:53,000
And I do not think this is a conversation like fine wine, where the longer we keep a cork on it, the better it gets.

412
00:39:54,000 --> 00:40:00,000
I think this is a conversation more like rotten vegetables in a refrigerator, and the longer we don't address it, the more it's going to start to smell.

413
00:40:01,000 --> 00:40:09,000
There is nothing in Air Force files that come to a conclusion that spaceships have visited the Earth.

414
00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:15,000
I assume that the secrecy is just because that is what they do in the government.

415
00:40:16,000 --> 00:40:26,000
There's so many programs going on in that building that they don't talk about. You know, they classify everything. They just add to the mysteriousness of it.

416
00:40:27,000 --> 00:40:32,000
We should never be afraid of what we don't know. That is an absurd reaction.

417
00:40:33,000 --> 00:40:37,000
The target is three degrees to the left of my nose, and it's five degrees below my nose.

418
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:45,000
Not knowing is where you start your inquiry. So we were operating in and around these waters off the coast.

419
00:40:46,000 --> 00:40:53,000
It doesn't mean it's where you end your inquiry, and that's where I think the US military, if they haven't been doing the work, is mistaken.

420
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:01,000
Oh my God.

421
00:41:01,000 --> 00:41:06,000
They don't look like no plane. They don't look like no helicopters. What the f*** is this?

422
00:41:07,000 --> 00:41:10,000
UFO sightings burst into the news in 1947.

423
00:41:11,000 --> 00:41:13,000
These sightings have continued ever since.

424
00:41:14,000 --> 00:41:18,000
The Air Force made an effort to clear the air about the phenomenon.

425
00:41:19,000 --> 00:41:20,000
There's nothing to hide at all.

426
00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:26,000
I was stunned that we didn't have the integrity to pursue this.

427
00:41:27,000 --> 00:41:30,000
The US government closed its 30 UFOs.

428
00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:34,000
The work fell into the hands of civilian groups.

429
00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:36,000
The UFO reports not only exist, but persist.

430
00:41:37,000 --> 00:41:38,000
I mean, it's a definite UFO.

431
00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:44,000
The government owes it to this country to investigate sightings of extraordinary objects.

432
00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:46,000
They cover the whole entire sky.

433
00:41:47,000 --> 00:41:49,000
People want to know, is this otherworldly?

434
00:41:50,000 --> 00:41:55,000
This could be one of the biggest events in all of human history.