22x14 - Alien Investigators

[bunniefuu]

A UFO researcher who went from hardened
skeptic to true believer.

An investigative reporter who brought high
strangeness into the mainstream.

And an unassuming hotel manager who discovered
otherworldly clues hidden in the distant past.

When sightings or even crashes of flying
saucers were reported in the 1940s,

the mysterious incidents prompted many to
become what could be considered alien investigators.

The question of, are we alone in the
universe, inspired the scientific

community, the military, and especially ancient astronaut
theorists to dig deeper into the modern phenomenon.

Even private citizens joined together to share research,
collect data, and ultimately create a mutual UFO network.

Denver, Colorado.

July 7th, 2022.

Thousands descend on the Mile High City to
attend the 53rd International Symposium on UFOs.

We had a similar case out of South
Carolina last year.

At this annual conference, researchers
from around the world gather to share and

examine the latest developments in the
study of UFOs.

One resident claimed to have compiled a
list of 110 persons who had witnessed

flying objects out of the small town of
only 2,000.

And it is hosted by an organization with the
most highly trained UFO investigators in the world.

MUFON.

MUFON is the acronym for the Mutual UFO
Network.

It's the largest UFO investigation
organization in the world.

And its mission statement is the scientific
study of UFOs for the benefit of mankind.

MUFON is an all-volunteer organization
that's grown to well over 4,000 members

worldwide of field investigators and people
that want to participate in the quest for the truth.

At the core of MUFON is an investigative
body that exists to go out and investigate

sightings that are worthy of investigation
and compile our database.

MUFON is the coming together of people who are not
just interested in UFOs but want to do something about it.

It's like this huge network of like-minded
people all around the United States and

indeed the world, brought together by their shared
passion for the subject and their shared interest in it.

Having now existed as an organization for
more than five decades, MUFON's mission is

to objectively investigate the hundreds of
eyewitness accounts of UFOs and other

aerial phenomena that are reported every
year across the globe.

MUFON started in the 60s as an association
of private citizens who trained themselves

to ask questions to go to scenes where
people had reported UFOs to question people.

They developed a whole protocol.

They had a very sophisticated methodology that they
used to document these things and they kept records.

Started in Quincy, Illinois, MUFON
originally stood for the Midwest UFO Network.

But by 1973, the organization had so many members across
the country, its name was changed to the Mutual UFO Network.

The group remained relatively obscure,
however, until 1980, when it played a key

role in a sensational UFO case called the
Cash Landrum incident.

Betty Cash and Vicki Landrum are driving
through Texas when they encounter this

giant diamond-shaped object hovering and
spewing out blue flame from the bottom.

They stopped the car to investigate.

The local environment is actually being
heated by this object to the point where

they try to touch their car and it's hot
to the touch.

And then what happens is they notice that
there's an army of helicopters,

Chinook helicopters, seeming to escort
this object.

Now, what makes this unique is that when
they get home, after a couple of days,

they start to show symptoms of being
exposed to ionized radiation.

The women all had their hair fall out, they
developed cancer, and they blamed the U.S.

government for this.

And this then became a very well-known
court case where they were suing the U.S.

government, essentially.

This was reported in major newspapers all
over the United States.

They couldn't ignore this story.

MUFON investigators got the witness
statements, gathered the evidence,

including things like medical records,
which were central to the legal case.

And although the witnesses didn't win their case,
what's important was that that gets it on the record.

Without MUFON, it's unlikely that it would
have gone to court.

It helped MUFON come to the forefront, and
it was a really establishing moment for MUFON.

Mesa, Arizona, November 4, 2022.

You can click on this and you can click on your
state and see if your case is coming up due soon.


community for the annual MUFON Investigator Boot Camp.

This intense, three-day conference offers
hands-on training in techniques used to

investigate cases of reported
extraterrestrial visitations.

Stay with your group.

We have five sites.

You guys are going to go to the site,
and you're going to find stuff,

tag it, bag it, and you're going to submit
it.

MUFON strives to train up their field
investigators to know photo and video analysis.

We're expected to know how to read
astronomical charts.

We're expected to know how to look at
light radar returns.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

One of the strengths of MUFON is that it
brings together people with different skill sets.

So, for example, some of them will be retired
cops, also people who specialize in imagery analysis.

There are other people who know all about
computers.

So, all the different things that an
organization investigating UFOs might

need, someone's going to have that skill
set.

MUFON has many members from the military,
from the police force, lawyers, PhDs, doctors.

Those are highly, highly educated people.

So, it's serious work that these
investigators are doing.

MUFON is not an organization of wide-eyed
believers.

These are not people who think everything
is an alien spaceship.

MUFON gets thousands of cases,
and they investigate, they analyze,

and they conclude.

And MUFON pride themselves on trying to
adhere to the scientific method.

The UFO phenomenon goes back, in my
opinion, thousands of years.

The day when it becomes accepted knowledge globally
that we are not alone and never have been alone on Earth.

I think that MUFON would be part of this
paradigm shift.

When the US military began investigating UFOs in the


Allen Hynek.

And a sequence of bizarre encounters
would turn the skeptical scientist into a believer.



In the aftermath of World w*r II, the United States has
become engaged in a Cold w*r with the Soviet Union.

There has also been an increase in reports
of unidentified flying objects.

And some fear the UFOs could be Soviet
aircraft.

But with extraterrestrials becoming a
popular theme in 1950s science fiction,

many others are genuinely concerned about
an alien invasion.

After the w*r, there were strange
sightings of things in the sky.

And people began to wonder, what's up
there?

People were afraid of aliens in outer
space.

And so, Project Blue Book was created as a
consequence.

Project Blue Book was the Air Force's third and
most significant investigation into the UFO phenomenon.

And once again, they looked to Dr. J.

Allen Hynek to be the scientific face of
the project.

The Air Force said, we keep getting these
reports.

It's still a problem.

In fact, it's a bigger problem than it was
the last time we talked to you.

Would you be willing to come back and help
us with this?

So Hynek agrees.

The military wanted to squash any of this speculation
about aliens from outer space or what have you.

You see, the government wanted to control
the agenda.

And flying saucers did not fit with that
agenda.

We were in a race with Russia.

It was the McCarthy period.

Anyone who deviated from this agenda
would put their scientific reputation on the line.

I think being patriotic is part of why he
worked for the Air Force because that was,

you know, after the w*r and everybody was very
gung-h* and let's help the government and the country.

You see, there's nothing more c*ck than a
relatively young PhD just coming out of a

place like the University of Chicago where
it's strictly science.

You get the feeling that you understand
the universe, you know.

You know all the answers.

But I was at the stage then when I
thought, well, this is obviously nonsense.

We'll solve it all.

But shortly after joining Project Blue Book, Hynek's notion
that UFOs were nonsense would be seriously challenged.

Washington, D.C., July 19th, 1952.

An air traffic controller at Washington
National Airport is alarmed when he picks

up seven strange objects on his radar
screen.

And he quickly determines they are unlike
any man-made aircraft he has ever seen.

These objects that were spherical-shaped were moving
up to 7,000 miles per hour in very unconventional fashion.

We scrambled fighter jets after them,
but as soon as the jets got aloft,

the objects disappeared.

One week later, the strange objects
appeared over the nation's capital again.

There was a press conference at the
Pentagon, which was the biggest single

press conference that had been held since
the end of the Second World w*r.

Hynek got to see the various reports.

The debunking explanation was that these were
mirages sometimes caused by a temperature inversion.

In other words, a layer of particularly
dense air.

While Hynek publicly supported the Air
Force's explanation for the Washington UFO

sightings, privately he was conflicted
about the investigation's findings.

The official conclusion that an optical
illusion was the source of the alarming

events caused Hynek to begin to question
his colleague, Dr. Donald H.

Menzel, director of the Harvard
Observatory.

Dr. Hynek disagreed with Dr. Menzel.

Dr. Menzel had explained when people were seeing those
lights, there was a temperature inversion over Washington.

And that's why the radar was reflected.

I looked at that later, and I met someone
who had been in that radar room.

And he left the room to see if he could see
something in the sky, then he could see the UFOs.

So this was a visual sighting.

It wasn't just radar, which meant that the Menzel
explanation didn't make any sense scientifically.

It was wrong scientifically.

Project Blue Book had just gotten
underway.

But already, Hynek was beginning to think,
UFOs could be something more than just

natural phenomena.

I began to feel guilty.

I thought I was doing a scientific job.

You know, I was debunking it.

I was showing the people how foolish they
were, and so forth.

And then I began to realize that I'm really not being
scientific, because I was disregarding some of the data.

And purposely disregarding that which,
you know, didn't fit.

And you're not supposed to do that in
science.

You're supposed to take all the data.

Over the years, Hynek would become increasingly
conflicted about his role on Project Blue Book.

I remember one time driving up to Canada
in the family car, and I think I was about


hair.

And I said, Dad, what's going on?

He says, well, I'm on the fence.

I mean, he was on the fence.

Having to tow the party line of the Air
Force's, that there's nothing going on

here, that's all explainable, took a toll
on him.

The Air Force continually insisted that every
UFO incident had some natural explanation.

And Hynek knew that that was untrue.

That while many UFO reports could be
explained naturally, there were some that couldn't.

But the Air Force wouldn't allow him to go
that direction.

The more he did his research and the more
people he interviewed, the more he

realized, wait a second, not all of these
eyewitnesses are crazy.

In many cases, these eyewitnesses were not alone when they
experienced their encounters or when they saw something.

He began to realize how long, and these are exact words, how
long am I going to call these people crazy or incompetent?

Some of them were seeing something very, very
unexplainable, and it should be investigated further.

The efforts of Dr. J.

Alan Hynek to scientifically study unidentified aerial
phenomena laid the foundation of traditional UFOlogy.

But there was another alien investigator,
Dr. Hynek's protege, who would bring their

research into the digital age and create
his own secret UFO investigation.

Northwestern University, 1964.

While working towards PhDs in both
industrial engineering and computer

science, Jacques Vallée encourages his
mentor, J.

Alan Hynek, to consider investigating not
only reports of objects in the sky,

but also evidence on the ground.

I kept talking to him about landings,
which he called it close encounters,

and the term stuck, of course.

I just called it landings, where there were traces on
the ground and so on that could be looked at physically.

And then he said, but you go through the Air Force
files and you're going to see very, very few landings.

And I said, well, let me go through the
files and I'll show you some landings.

The reason they didn't show up was that they
were all explained as aberrations or hallucinations.

But you would find very credible witnesses
and you would find traces.

And the thing that clinched it was the
case in Socorro, New Mexico.

In Socorro, not only was there a landing,
they were beings.

Socorro, New Mexico, April 24th,


While chasing a speeding car, police
sergeant Lonnie Zamora hears a thunderous

roar and sees a flame in the sky to the
southwest.

Thinking a local dynamite check might have
exploded.

Zamora leaves the chase to investigate.

I, for a glance out the window,
look to my left.

My throat is white, an egg-shaped looking
object.

Lonnie Zamora sees something.

A landed craft.

Essentially, egg-shaped.

He sees some figures.

And he says afterwards they were either
big children or small adults, which again

raises the question, were these
extraterrestrials, as many believe.

Suddenly, when he got reasonably close,
they got back in and this thing took off.

Zamora examined the area with fellow
police sergeant Sam Chavez.

Both officers documented that the brush
was burning in several places,

and the object had left four perpendicular
impressions on the ground.

Dozens of other investigators arrived on
the scene shortly after the incident,

and in the days that followed.

So, you had actually four levels of
investigation.

You had the Socorro cops.

You had the FBI that happened to be there.

You had the security detail from the
airfield.

You had special investigations with the
Air Force sending Dr. Hynek, and that

became part of Project Blue Book as unidentified
by all the investigators who had been there.

Jacques told me that it was this case that
was more or less the straw that broke the

camel's back that made my father feel
comfortable speaking about beings as

opposed to just crafts in public.

It was a difficult transition for Dr.
Hynek to admit that, yes, not only were

landings important, but they were the greatest source
of actual physical data that you could take to the lab.

For Jacques Vallée, collecting data is the
key to solving the UFO mystery.

As part of his effort to create a global
UFO database, Vallée, with the help from

Dr. Hynek, began building an international
network of scientists investigating the phenomenon.

They called themselves the Invisible College, taking the
name from a group of 18th-century European scholars.

This was similar to what happened in the


And they did a lot of early astronomy,
early physics, chemistry, biology, and so on.

And the only reason they were not hung or k*lled as
witches was because they were protected by the king.

Dr. Hynek thought we were sort of the new
iteration of the Invisible College.

People like Costa de Beauregard in France,
like Professor Chauvin in France,

were internationally known in their
fields, biology, relativity, and so on.

But they were very interested in talking
about UFOs with us.

Of course, this was very secret.

The Invisible College began in Dr. Hynek's
home, where weekly or monthly he would

have scientists from all around the world visit his
house, and there they would discuss the UFO topic.

But they all were sworn to secrecy,
because at the time you couldn't talk

about it in seriousness, especially in the
world of academia.

Although most members of the Invisible College
remained anonymous, Jacques Vallée did not.

And in 1965, he published Anatomy of a
Phenomenon, one of the earliest books

written about the UFO subject by a
scientist.

Anatomy of a Phenomenon was a very, very
strong compilation of these UFO reports at that time.

He was looking at the data, organizing it,
and it really made his name in the UFO field.

In 1980, investigative journalist Linda
Moulton Howe shocked the nation when she

released a documentary about the
disturbing phenomenon of cattle mutilations.

During the course of her reporting,
Linda discovered something that would

change the course of her career when she
became convinced that the perpetrators of

these unnerving acts are not of this
world.

New York City, March 20th, 1983.

Three years after the success of her film,
A Strange Harvest, Linda Moulton Howe

meets with executives at HBO to pitch a
new documentary.

So now, I have a whole new project.

It's completely different.

There's this great story of a UFO landing
at Ellsworth Air Force Base in North Dakota.

And I had written a script as an example
of what I thought we could do.

And I called it UFOs, The E.T.

Factor.

And Jean Abinader was head of documentary.

And she liked the script.

And I signed the contract that afternoon.

And that night, Peter Gersten,
the attorney for Citizens Against UFO

Secrecy, he called me and said, I want to talk about
something to see if you could incorporate it in your script.

Peter Gersten told Linda about an
intelligence officer named Richard Doty.

Doty was a special agent for the Air Force Office of Special
Investigations at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.

And according to Gersten, he had classified information about
a UFO encounter that he was willing to share with Linda.

In 1983, Doty met with Linda over at
Kirtland Air Force Base.

This was an arranged meeting.

This is when Linda's, like, doing her deep, deep dive
into the cover-up and the reality of the UFO phenomenon.

He said, my superiors have asked me to
show this to you.

And he simultaneously opens a drawer,
pulls out a Manila envelope, and he takes

out, I think it was about 12 pages,
typed.

And I still can feel the strangeness as
I'm now looking at all caps, briefing

paper for the President of the United States of
America, on the subject of unidentified aerial craft.

I cannot believe it.

I remember it was just like that.

It was talking about how our government has
been investigating UFOs and ETs for decades.

It's all real.

I was so agitated at, my God, what is
happening here?

Why is he showing me such a document?

According to Linda, Doty also promised her access to
material that could be used in her upcoming documentary.

Doty said, we have film that you would be
able to use.

And gave me names of two people who would
call me about a film from a real UFO,

and that they were going to allow me to
put this in the documentary.

But when Linda met with executives at the
network to update them on the latest

developments, they abruptly canceled her
documentary about UFOs.

Determined to continue with the project, Linda
successfully pitched her special to producers at CNN.

But once again, just as the documentary was set
to proceed, it was dropped due to internal pressure.

So I'm blocked through HBO.

I'm blocked at CNN.

What in the hell is going on here?

Finally, when the UFO footage promised to
her by Richard Doty never materialized,

Linda came to suspect her project had been
shut down by forces within the government.

I've been told this is how the CIA, NSA, DIA have
been working on UFO material since World w*r II.

They did not want anyone showing anything
on television about animal mutilations,

human abductions, extraterrestrials,
none of it.

But it didn't stop me.

It made me more curious.

Is it possible that forces within the government were
responsible for canceling Linda's documentary projects?

According to Linda's daughter,
it was right around this time that both

she and her mother started to suspect that
they were under surveillance.

I feared for my mother.

I remember there were vans sometimes
sitting outside of our house.

And I would say, oh, the UPS truck's
outside the inn.

She's like, that's not a UPS truck.

You know, get away from the window.

And then the Van took off.

But it was kind of scary.

And our phone always seemed to have the
clicking noises on them.

I had a man pull a g*n on me.

And that was in North Carolina.

I'm working.

At this table.

And he pulls the chair out.

And sits down.

And pulls out a g*n.

And it was so surreal.

It was so weird that I don't think I even
felt afraid.

He says, you can't keep doing what you're
doing.

And when he got up, he left me sitting
there thinking, I have every right in the

universe to keep doing the investigations
I'm doing.

When the head of Harvard's Department of
Psychiatry launched a study on 200 men and

women who claimed to have had alien
encounters, he suspected that these

experiences were more rooted in mental
illness than actual extraterrestrial contact.

But what Dr. John Mack's alien investigation led him to
believe is that a compelling phenomenon was occurring.

That was not of this world.

New York City.

January 10th, 1990.

Through a mutual friend, famous alien
abduction researcher Bud Hopkins is

introduced to Harvard professor Dr. John
Mack.

John Mack was professor of psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School.

He was an establishment figure.

Bud Hopkins approached John Mack and said,
look, I'm getting all these cases, what do you think?

John Mack, his initial almost jocular
response was, well, I think they're crazy

and I think you're probably crazy too for
believing them.

But John Mack looked at some of Bud
Hopkins' case files.

Then he started to meet with some of the
abductees.

John Mack wondered if this was some kind
of new mental illness.

What was this public hysteria?

Why were suddenly all of these people coming forward
saying that they had had these experiences with non-humans?

He opened a center at Harvard University.

He conducted a study of 200 individuals.

He did psychological testing.

He did interviews on camera.

By and large, John Mack found exactly what
every other researcher into this found,

which is that most of these people are
very stable.

They've all had these very consistent
types of experiences.

John Mack had to take it seriously because
his patients were truly suffering.

They displayed trauma, telling the story.

They were experiencing very strong PTSD
symptoms.

They were literally reliving these
stories.

As a trained psychiatrist, he could tell
what is truth and what isn't.

Slowly but surely, John Mack became
convinced that this was a real phenomenon.

And so, here you have this intellectual, academic
heavyweight saying alien abductions are real.

What is extraordinary about it is the
consistency of the stories amongst people

who are of sound mind, who come forth very
reluctantly, who doubt their own stories,

who describe what they've gone through
with great emotion.

So, something is occurring that is
entering our world.

In 1994, Dr. Mack published his research
in his best-selling book, Abduction,

Human Encounters with Aliens.

While the book was highly controversial
among his colleagues and drew sharp

criticism from the board at Harvard
University.

It also led to the alien abduction phenomenon
being taken more seriously than ever before.

And as Dr. Mack met with more
and more patients, he found that

one particularly unsettling
experience came up frequently.

It was very clear to Dr. Mack that we were
dealing with non-humans extracting tissue,

blood, sperm from the males and eggs from
the females.

What this taking of eggs, taking of sperm
from the men, what the aliens will tell us

is that it has something to do with evolution,
that we're moving to another level of creation.

Are the incredible revelations that
emerged during Dr. Mack's research

evidence of an alien agenda for humanity?

Perhaps further clues can be found by
examining the account of a man who claims

to have had genetic material extracted
from his body on multiple occasions.

It started with things being disturbed in
my bedroom that I noticed were changed

between when I'd go to bed at night and
then when I wake up in the morning.

I did not know if I was being taken.

I just had an intuition that there were
intruders in my bedroom.

And after two weeks, something happened.

I woke up in my garage and I was suspended off
the floor and I was looking down at a small gray.

After the encounter in his garage,
Eric began to have reoccurring and often

violent experiences with the same gray
beings.

According to his account, they would use some kind of
medical equipment to extract blood and fluids from his body.

Typically, what they would do is they
would collect semen.

But there were times where I suspected
they were taking bone marrow.

I believe they took some from my left arm.

They're determined to take genetic
material from me one way or another.

And I absolutely felt like a lab rat.

While most alien investigators have been
focused on the modern UFO phenomenon,

one brilliant researcher turned his
attention to ancient history.

Eric Von Daniken's groundbreaking work not
only presented evidence of

extraterrestrial contact in the distant past, it
also popularized the ancient astronaut theory.

In 1968, a book appeared on store shelves that
challenged the very foundation of human civilization.

Entitled, Chariots of the Gods,
it pushed the boundaries of our most

established understandings of history,
archaeology, science, and religion.

The title, complete with its enigmatic question
Mark, was as compelling as its inquisitive premise.

Did aliens come to Earth centuries ago?

Did they leave behind evidence in the form
of pyramids, monolithic structures,

strange carvings, and even stranger
markings in the sands?

And if so, could this notion help to
explain everything from mankind's origins

to the unsolved mysteries of the world's
most sacred religions?

Chariots of the Gods reinterpreted ancient
historical texts, religious texts,

as evidence of ancient alien visitation.

It reinterpreted these as being something
that was not necessarily divine,

but rather something that was extraterrestrial,
nuts-and-bolts technology from another star system.

The author of Chariots of the Gods appeared to
be as unthreatening and unlikely as the book's title.

A Swiss hotel manager by the name of Erich
Von Daniken.

When I wrote Chariots of the Gods, I was still the
managing director of a first-class hotel in Switzerland.

I wrote about my ideas.

This was this burning fire in me.

I had to write the book.

And now, all of a sudden, the people look
to this hotel manager completely different.

In the newspaper, for weeks, they saw my
face every day.

Many of the people said, I had similar ideas, but
you are the first one which comes out to public.

Chariots of the Gods led to a fundamental
rethink about our history, our origins,

and indeed our place in the cosmos.

The idea that our ancient gods might not be deities
at all, but extraterrestrial visitors, was a game-changer.

I mean, it absolutely turned the orthodoxy on its head
and opened people up to whole new ways of thinking.

I believe that Chariots of the Gods was
one of the most impactful and most

intriguing publications in the modern
history.

It was full of questions.

And that was the big difference.

The questions made people seek an answer.

But as popular as Chariots of the Gods
proved to be with the book-buying public,

it was also, perhaps not surprisingly, almost entirely
dismissed by members of the academic community.

The early reaction to Chariots of the
Gods, especially from the academics,

was one of disgust.

In the late 60s and early 70s, it was a time
when everyone just listened to the experts.

And Eric was really just torn to bits.

People attacked his character,
they attacked his research and methods.

They just didn't like what was in that
book.

Of course, I was attacked.

After Chariots of the Gods, first I was crushed
down, more or less, by the whole scientific community.

Everyone said, he's crazy.

What is he talking about?

And then some other critics said,
well, he's just a waiter.

Because I came from the hotel business, so
how can he come up with these kind of ideas?

Don't believe him.

He's just a science fiction author.

What was lost on many of the book's
critics was the fact that Von Däniken

never claimed to be an archaeologist or
historian.

Instead, he wrote Chariots of the Gods
from the perspective of a curious citizen.

One who posed compelling questions,
but did not presume to supply the answers.

In the book, I had 238 questions.

Now, I was not absolutely sure that in
every point, in every object, I was correct.

I could have been wrong, and there could be other
possible answers, but I was sure I am on the right track.

The work of Eric Von Däniken and the importance of asking
questions about our past continues to inspire millions.

And it's only by following in the
footsteps of Eric and other alien

investigators from the scientific
methodology of J.

Allen Hynek to the tireless reporting of
Linda Moulton Howe and the citizen

detectives of MUFON that we can form a
better understanding of the events

happening around us and ultimately
discover the truth about humankind's

extraterrestrial origins.