- This isn't small.
This isn't like, "Hey, I saw something in the sky."
It's so much bigger than that.
- UFOs are real. - Congress is holding its first
hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years.
- And the government's finally taking them seriously.
- This is a national-security issue.
Putting your head in the sand and saying it doesn't exist
is not an appropriate solution or approach.
- If there's something that's up there or out there
and we don't know what it is, it could harm us.
So, figure out what it is.
- So, wait, are we talking spaceships
with little green men who are weirdly obsessed with cows?
- The fact that we don't know what it is doesn't mean
that we then know what it is.
That's what the "U" stands for,
in unidentified aerial phenomenon.
If it's unidentified, you don't know what it is.
- How can anyone possibly know that information?
It's ridiculous.
- In 2021, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand led efforts,
alongside Senator Marco Rubio
and Representative Ruben Gallego,
to include an amendment in the latest defense bill
that required the DOD to set up a permanent office
meant to investigate what they're calling UAPs.
- Under all circumstances, you need to know what it is
because if it is an adversary --
let's say it's Russia or China --
you better know what technology they have.
And if it's other, then you also need to know that.
Like, you really have to know the answer and use
as much scientific capability
as we have to make those determinations,
and if we don't have enough scientific capability,
then increase the scientific capability.
- So far, the DOD has collected about 400 credible reports.
They haven't provided any answers,
other than a list of possible explanations,
like airborne clutter, natural atmospheric stuff,
classified US tech,
classified foreign tech, or alien, I mean, other.
We've been seeing UFOs for a long time,
and it's not the government's first time looking into it.
- In the '50s, particularly,
early '50s, there was kind of a UFO craze,
and you had these sort of mass sightings of UFOs,
of flying saucers.
It was all over the media.
A lot of that turned out to be, you know,
either pranksters or things that were easily explained,
but there was enough sort of noise
there that the Pentagon decided to begin to collect data.
- The program was called Project Blue Book,
and it called on the Air Force
to investigate UFOs from 1947 to 1969.
By the end of the program,
the Air Force had looked into over 12,000 sightings,
of which over 700 still remain unidentified.
It was enough to keep people interested over the years.
- And I think that's the threat that was picked up in the 2000s,
when Senator Harry Reid, from Nevada, decided that,
"Look, we need to spend some official time and money
and really do this right."
That's how AATIP came to be.
- AATIP, or the Advanced Aerospace
Threat Identification Program,
was an unclassified, but unpublicized program.
In fact, the public didn't even know it existed until 2017,
five years after the program had officially ended.
Lue Elizondo was in charge of AATIP,
and the more he investigated UAPs,
the more he was convinced they might not be of this world.
- And when he would try to present facts
to people within the Pentagon,
his higher-ups, there was a lot of skepticism,
and so he was pushed off, he felt, and so, eventually,
he decided to bring this program to public light.
- We're learning this morning, about a Pentagon program
that spent millions of dollars to look into UFO sightings.
- Fuzzy videos captured
by military pilots caused a media splash.
- There is very compelling evidence
that we may not be alone.
- Elizondo resigned and joined forces with Tom DeLonge,
who you may know as this guy.
♪ All the ♪
♪ Small things ♪
-Yeah, the guy from blink-182.
- The entry point for like UFOs for people
is because they saw something in the sky, you know?
Then the second thing is, "Oh, my gosh,
you know, aliens, you know.
They're coming from other planets!"
And then people kind of like stop there.
The evidence of these things is really pointing
that these things aren't coming from planets.
The past, present, and future exist at one moment.
So, that means you can laterally step back and forth,
depending on frequency.
We can't do this, but something else can.
- Doc, I'm from the future. - In 2015, DeLonge left the band
and started a company called To the Stars.
- The mission of To the Stars is to study, analyze,
and explain all these different facets of this phenomenon.
- One of their biggest projects
was a documentary series called "Unidentified."
In it, they released the first three UFO videos
taken by Navy pilots.
- Hey! Got it!
- Three years later,
the Pentagon confirmed these videos were real.
- The progress that's been made might not have been made
if those videos had not leaked and captured so much attention
and sparked so many questions.
And I think, if the public could see more
of what some of the pilots are seeing and radar operators
are seeing and other military personnel are seeing,
their level of interest would be much higher,
their demands would be greater, and the system responds to that.
- There's some next-level [bleep] going on around here,
and I'm with that.
- It may be a while before the Pentagon
declassifies more information, but scientists everywhere
have been trying to collect their own data, too.
For example, SETI, which stands for Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,
has been around for over 60 years.
It even influenced the movie "Contact."
- "Contact" was exceptional
in that the science in it was accurate,
I mean, until the alien showed up, right?
- Uh, right. - We have a listening station
about 300 miles north of San Francisco,
in the Cascade Mountains here in California.
We point them in the direction of nearby stars.
Okay, maybe they have a planet like ours,
and maybe there's somebody there who is broadcasting radio waves.
Why?
Well, we don't know why, but, in a sense, we don't care why.
- Phone. - Rocket ship.
- If we discover intelligent life in the universe,
that would be extraordinary,
one of the most extraordinary discoveries ever.
It's hard to assess what the likelihood of success would be,
in that, but we all think it's pretty low.
- They might be right about that,
but on the other hand, you can always say,
"Look, if we don't look, do you expect us to find anything?"
Right? Of course not.
- It's like a fishing expedition.
If you don't cast a fishing net, you will never find anything.
- Avi Loeb is not a fisherman, but a professor at Harvard
who was inspired to look for ETs after an interstellar object
visited our solar system in 2017.
- It was given the name Oumuamua, and, at first,
astronomers thought it must be a comet.
- But there was something weird going on.
It didn't look or act like a comet,
and scientists were confused.
- This anomaly was very intriguing
because it looks like an artificial object.
The scientific community was very reluctant
to even discuss this possibility.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Well, guess what?
Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding.
- $2 million later, Loeb started the Galileo Project,
which has two big things in the works.
One is to build a special telescope
that can better identify UAPs,
and another is to send a rocket with a camera
up to the next interstellar object and take a picture of it.
- You guys discovered a comet? That's so dope.
- There was once a time when we thought the Earth was flat.
Eventually, we figured it out.
Most of us, at least.
There are still many things we don't understand
about how the universe works.
So, what's true?
Are aliens real, and are they here?
- Well, personally, I'm not convinced
that the aliens are really here.
- The search for intelligence, by the way,
has certain assumptions -- that we even know
what intelligence is or that we, in fact, are intelligent.
- We should be guided by evidence
and not by our emotions or prejudice.
- Overwhelmingly, they're going to be either drones
or have some other conventional explanation,
but the question there is,
are any of them manifestations of alien intelligence?
And if even one or two are, that is, arguably,
the greatest discovery in the history of science and mankind.
- Until then, maybe the answer remains unidentified.