It’s March 2007. A man named Jim Lacatsky is flying to Utah. He’s not a ghost hunter. He’s not a UFO guy. He’s a ballistic missile physicist, a senior intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Now, in his entire life, he’s never once seen anything he couldn’t explain. That’s all about to change in about 60 minutes because a wealthy businessman named Robert Bigalow owns a ranch out in the desert of northeastern Utah. 500 acres, [snorts] a place with a reputation. And that reputation goes back a long way. For decades, the people tied to this land told the same kind of stories. Lights with no source, sounds with no cause, figures standing out in the dark that had no business standing out there. But unfortunately for some, whatever was out there on that ranch didn’t always stay on that ranch. People would leave, they’d drive home, sometimes hundreds of miles away, and it would show up there in their houses around their families like it could latch onto a person and just ride along. Remember that. And Bigalow’s invited Lacatsky out to see for himself. They pull up to a small house near the front of the property.
Bigalow walks him inside and introduces him to the caretakers, a husband and wife who live and work on the ranch.
Everybody’s standing around the kitchen.
They’re making small talk. totally normal. And then Latsky stops listening because over the shoulders of the people he’s talking to in the next room, there’s something there that was not there a second ago, a device. And it’s hanging in the air a few feet off the floor. It’s not making a sound. It’s semi-transparent, yellowish, a long tubular shape, like a piece of machinery from a factory that doesn’t exist. He
doesn’t say a word. He just stares at it. He looks away. He looks back. It’s still there. Now, for about 30 seconds, a senior physicist at the Defense Intelligence Agency stands in a kitchen and watches an impossible machine hover in midair a few feet from his face. And then it’s gone, vanished on the spot on the drive back to the airport. He’s trying to figure it out because there were four people in that room and he was the only one who saw it. Now, a lot of people file that under trick of the light and they never tell a soul. Latsky wasn’t that kind of person. He worked for the government. And the United States government’s answer to those 30 seconds wasn’t to forget about it. It was to open the checkbook. What one man saw in a kitchen is about to cost the American taxpayer tens of millions of dollars in total secrecy. And whatever was out there followed some of these people home, but we’re going to get to that. I’m John Genoa, and you’re watching America’s Strangest History, coming at you from the great state of Vermont. This is the real story behind Skinwalker Ranch. Stay with me. If you really want to know what Lacatsky walked into in 2007, you got to go back. Way back, long before the government, long before Bigalow, northeastern Utah, the Uenta Basin, a wide, lonely stretch of desert up near the Ute reservation at Fort Duchain. The Uses lived alongside this land for generations. And there’s a story they tell about it. Generations back, they went to war with the Navajo.
And the Navajo, the story goes, sent something back after them. A curse. It’s carried by a kind of witch they call a skinwalker. I’m not telling you it’s true. I’m telling you that the youths believed it enough that to this day, there’s a corner of that basin that they won’t set foot on. They call it the path of the skinwalker. And the ranch, it sits right on it. In 1994, a family bought the ranch. In the famous book, they’re called the Gormans. [music] The real name was the Shermans. Terry and Ellen, their two kids, their cattle people. They paid about $200,000 for $480 acres and a quiet life. They lasted 18 months. The first day they moved in, a man they took for a county worker warned them not to dig in certain spots.
The youths, he said, didn’t go there.
They thought he was being neighborly. It started small. Locks they secured were undone by the morning. Their dog was terrified of the third stall in the barn for some reason. And then early on, something walked out of the treeine. It looked like a wolf, but three times the size of any wolf in Utah. It crossed the pasture calmly and reached through the corral rails. It clamped onto a calf and started dragging it through the bars by the snout. Now, Terry ran at it. He kicked it. He beat it with a piece of lumber. Nothing. No effect. He put a pistol against it and fired point blank.
Then a rifle. These are rounds that should drop a,000 lb steer where it stands. One shot tore a chunk of meat clean off the animal. And this is a detail I can’t shake. The chunk of flesh. It was already rotting. It was decaying like the thing had been dead for a while and somehow walking around anyway. It let go of the calf. It looked at Terry and trotted back towards the trees where its tracks stopped in the wet ground. It stopped midstride like it stepped through a door that wasn’t there. [music] Then the cattle started dying and not torn up the way coyotes do it. One prize calf had 45 lbs of flesh stripped from its carcass. It happened in broad daylight in minutes. A hole was cred out. The edges were corderized. No blood on the ground. No tracks in, no tracks out. Does any of this sound familiar? We did a whole video on cattle mutilations. Check it out if you get a chance. And one night, Terry had four prized bulls, [snorts] £2,000 a piece.
Ellen said it out loud inside the house alone that she was afraid of losing them. Next morning, all four were gone.
They found them stacked inside a single horse trailer at the edge of the property. The doors were latched from the outside. 8,000 lb of terrified animal folded into a space that shouldn’t hold one. Whatever was out there, heard her say it. Then came May 1996, the night that broke them. Terry spots a blue ball of light about the size of a baseball. It’s drifting low across the pasture. He sends his three dogs after it. They chase it into the willows. He hears them yelping. Then he hears a sound he described as bug zapper pops. Then nothing. Now the next morning he walks the field and where the dogs went in, he found three rings of dried dead grass. And in the center of each ring, a single black greasy lump. That’s all that was left of them. Now here’s what I find curious. Over 18 months, cattle slaughtered, bulls stacked, dogs reduced to grease, and not one human being on that ranch was ever physically touched. The Navajo will tell you that a real skin walker is evil to the bone. It wouldn’t hesitate to kill a person. This thing stuffed the bulls and then spared the family. It incinerated the dogs, never touched the kids. Every single time it chose the animal, which means whatever was out there wasn’t a skinwalker in the way the old stories meant it must have been something else.
Something that knew exactly where the line was and chose for now not to cross it. By the summer of 1996, the Shermans were done. Cattle people run out of their own land by something they couldn’t name, they couldn’t shoot, they couldn’t explain. So, they sold it and they left the state. The man who bought it was a billionaire from Las Vegas. You may know his name, Robert Bigalow.
Sometime in the 50s, on a dark highway outside Las Vegas, a couple named Tom and Delta Thibo had a ball of light come straight at their windshield. They swerved. They braced for impact. They watched it make a hard 90° turn and vanish. They told their grandson that grandson was Robert Bigalow. He grew up to build an empire of extended stay apartments out of a single duplex. And once he had the money, he spent it all on this. He’d later say that he spent more of his own fortune chasing the paranormal than any private citizen in America. And get this, in all those years, all those millions, Bigalow never saw a single thing himself. Not once, purportedly. In 1995, he made it official. The National Institute for Discovery Science, NIDS. Not a couple of guys with a camcorder. Real scientists.
A biochemist Colum Kellaher. The physicist Hal Putoff. A retired Army Colonel John Alexander. Even Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. They all sat on the board. In the summer of 1996, Bigalow bought the Sherman’s ranch sight unseen and made them sign a gag order on the way out. Then he did what no rancher would ever do. He turned the place into a machine. Cameras everywhere, observation posts, a command center, scientists living on the property, watching it 24 hours a day, waiting for it to do something on film. But cameras weren’t the only thing Bigalow put on that ranch. He put armed men on it.
Roundclock security. And there’s a story about those men Bigalow’s never fully explained. It came out through a physicist named Jack Sarati who said he heard it from a mysterious French woman with a bodyguard carrying a briefcase that she claimed held a weapon built from alien technology. Got that? Her claim was that Bigalow security got into a gun battle out there, a real one. And not with trespassers, with things that came through a kind of doorway. And that when the shooting stopped, they were dead and wounded on the human side. Now that’s third hand. It’s auditous chain of custody. And it sounds wild. It’s easy to laugh off except in 2010, Robert Bigalow told the New York Times about why he’s so certain it’s real. Quote, “People have been killed. People have been hurt.” He’s never explained it.
Now, to be fair, George Knap, who knows this case better than any reporter alive, and Bigalow’s own consultant, Colonel John Alexander, both deny any alien firefight took place, and they deny the part about the dead men. So, it’s a rumor with a flatout denial that Bigalow’s own words managed to keep alive. Try to wrap your head around that. But here’s what Nid’s actually documented on the record with PhDs holding the clipboards. March 12th, 1997, the dogs go off near the ranch house. Terry Sherman, still on as caretaker, grabs a rifle and drive towards a big cottonwood with two NID scientists right behind him. Now, up in the branches, 20 feet above the ground, they make out a pair of yellow reptilian eyes set about three feet apart with a head three feet wide. Now, at the base of the same tree, a second creature, huge, hairy, massive front legs, a head like a dog. A Sherman fires from 40 yards. They hear a round hit. The thing in the tree just leaves. They find a single clawed track, three-toed pressed into the snow. Nothing besides that.
This becomes the pattern. The phenomenon doesn’t just disappear. It seems to know it’s being watched. The team set up good cameras on a target and the cameras died. Batteries that were full drained to zero. One night, an investigator stood within 30 ft of a running camcorder. He looked away for a second, looked back. He found it switched from record to demonstration mode. This had to be done by hand, but there were no hands there. And when they checked it, the camera snapped a series of photos on its own of objects nobody could identify. So Nids got creative. They left clear boxes around the property that were filled with letters and pictures, hoping that whatever it was would rearrange them to communicate. It never touched them. Colonel Alexander, the Army intelligence man, came away convinced that they were dealing with what he called precognitive sensient intelligence.
something that knew what they were going to do before they did it and stayed one step ahead. One winter morning, they found a perfect circle carved into an ice pond. Nids did what scientists do.
They scraped the shavings into sterile tubes, ran X-ray fluoresence, looking for residue of whatever blade made it.
They mapped the magnetic, electrical, and radiation fields in a hundredy radius. The cut was real. Everything else read normal. They had a flawless circle and not a single clue about who carved it. They even brought in remote viewers, including Joe McMonagle, the Army’s most decorated psychic in the classified Stargate program. We did a video on Project Stargate. Check it out if you get a chance. One remote viewer handed no information at all, sketched the ranch almost exactly, the canal, the ridge, the homesteads, and he flagged one spot on the southwest corner as carrying an energy he called disturbing.
Another asked only to look at the daylight calf mutilation said it was done by a robotic drone of interdimensional origin that had some connection to the military. This went on for years, millions of dollars, and Bigalow admitted at the end that the ranch gave them glimpses, hints of something with its own intelligence, and never once let them pin it down. But by then, Bigalow had already done the one thing that mattered most for this whole story. Back in 1996, he brought a guest to a NIDS meeting, the legendary UFO scientist, Jacques Valet. He laid out the case, and the guest wasn’t a scientist. He was a politician from Nevada. A man who’d become the majority leader of the United States Senate, Harry Reid. Reed walked out a believer.
And for the next decade, the billionaire and the senator stayed close. So, fast forward back to Lacatsky flying home from that kitchen in 2007 with the problem he can’t fly away from. Here’s what people get wrong about this part.
Lacatsky didn’t go to Washington talking about a haunted ranch. That’s not what gets you the money. What got the money was a national security problem nobody wanted to touch. Lacatsky and a DIA colleague named J. Stratton already had a file that scared them. For decades, unknown craft were showing up over most of the sensitive sites in the country.
Take Steven A. Smith. He told investigators he was an Air Force sergeant at Wartsmith Air Force Base in October of 1975, a boom operator on a KC135 when they got vetored to check an unidentified aircraft hovering over a nuclear weapons storage area. Now, that’s not a ghost story. That’s an unknown object parked over American nukes. And it happened over and over across the northern tier for years. Some nights, the missiles reportedly went offline when it was overhead. Now, that’s something you can fund. But who do you take it to? Remember the billionaire who kept a certain senator close for more than a decade? Bigalow connects Latsky straight to Harry Reid.
And Reed’s already a believer. But Reed can’t write the checks alone. So he brings in two more old powerful appropriators. Daniel Inaway from Hawaii and Ted Stevens of Alaska. And get this, Ted Stevens saw one himself as a young pilot in World War II. They all get in a room in the capital and they slip $22 million into a 2008 defense spending bill. No hearings, no headlines, nothing. Now they need a name. And the name is the most important boring thing in this whole story. [music] The money had to land in one specific office, the Defense Warning Office at the DIA. So they built a name engineered to route it there and nowhere else. The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program, OAP. Probably the single most forgettable name you could invent. And it’s done on purpose. Nobody glances twice at advanced aerospace weapons system applications. It’s so buried in that program’s own paperwork, you’ll sometimes see it logged wrong, missing a letter, OSA, and that other name you might know, AIP from the famous newspaper story. That’s not this. But hold that thought. We’re going to circle back to that. Now, they need a company to manage all this. And this is the part that the skeptics circle in red.
Officially, the solicitation went public in the summer of 2008. Open competitive bidding. any aerospace contractor in America could bid. Then the bids came in and exactly one company submitted a proposal. A brand new outfit spun up just for this BAS Bigalow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, a subsidiary of, you guessed it, Robert Bigalow. So the senator’s billionaire’s friends new company was the only name in that hat.
And the man they put in charge as program manager, Jim Latsky, the same guy who started all this on that ranch.
In September 2008, Bass won the contract. About $10 million the first year, renewable. And just like that, with a forgettable name and a single bidder, the largest UFO investigation in the history of the United States government was funded, staffed, and stamped secret. Now, picture a plane office building in Las Vegas, the kind you drive past and never notice. Inside about 50 people are quietly going to work. Excopilitary intelligence officers, PhD scientists.
And the job the United States government is paying them for is to study UFOs, monster sightings, and a haunted ranch in Utah. They came at it from two fronts. Front one was the ranch.
Bigalow’s people watched it. Bass dissected it. They carved the whole property into grid of tenth of a mile squares and measured everything.
radiation, magnetic fields, the chemistry of the soil. They turned 500 acres into one giant instrument. Front two was the data. And this is where it gets crazy. On November 10th, 2008, Bass hired Jock Valet’s company to build them a database, the single largest collection of UFO cases ever assembled.
They poured in old Air Force files, civilian reports, and foreign government archives that nobody ever combined.
nearly a quarter of a million cases going back, and I’m not kidding, to ancient China. This is also the crew that dug into a case you may have heard of, the Nimmits Tic Tac in 2004.
Commander David Fraver off the coast of California chases a 40 foot wide object shaped like a tic tac. No wings, no exhaust. It drops 80,000 ft in seconds and outruns his F-18 like he’s parked.
And here’s what tells you how the government treats this stuff. The official report from that day, the one Fraver’s wingman filed, got read by Brass and then deleted. It was filed in a folder with routine training paperwork and erased because there was no rule requiring anyone to keep it. Bass sent an investigator called Axel Rod to run it down. By June 2009, he’d written three findings that should have sent off every alarm in the Pentagon. that the object was no known artifact of any nation, that it beat US radar across multiple bands, and that it went from a dead hover to speeds no aircraft on Earth can reach with no visible means of propulsion. But the part I still can’t wrap my head around is the paperwork.
OAP commissioned 38 official technical reports, the Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, the DURDS. Listen to some of the titles because this is your tax money. invisibility cloaking, anti-gravity, warp drive, and number 18, transversible wormholes, stargates, and negative energy. The United States government paid a physicist to write a paper on how to build a Stargate. It got diagrams. It walks the actual physics.
It even has a diagram in it labeled, quote, “A Stargate in Time Square, a doorway through time and space in the middle of Manhattan.” Got it? And the math behind it traces back to 1985 when two Caltech physicists worked out the wormhole equations as a favor to Carl Sean for his science fiction novel. Even the one that sounded normal isn’t.
Report 16 studied whether you could use quantum entanglement to talk to something light years away. Instantly, no delay, faster than light itself. For years, regular people online swore the ranch was a portal, a doorway to somewhere else. They got mocked for it.
And all the while, behind all that secrecy, the government’s own physicists were writing papers on exactly that. The Pentagon ended up in the same place.
They even went chasing the oldest ghost story in the business, a rumored secret committee called Majestic 12, MJ12. We did a video on that one. Check it out.
For now, hold that thought. Stargates, warp drives, the world’s biggest UFO file, pilots chasing tic tacs. You’d think that was the wildest thing in the program. It wasn’t because there was one report in that stack of 38 that didn’t belong with the others. It wasn’t about engines or metals or stargates. It was about human bodies and what this stuff does to them. Report number 26. The title alone tells you somebody got scared. Anomalous acute and subaccute field effects on human biological tissues. What happens to a human body when it gets too close to one of these things? It was written by a real doctor, a physician with deep CIA ties named Christopher Kit Green. And green starts somewhere ordinary. Engineers working on big powerful antennas cooked by invisible energy, burns, and radiation sickness. Then [music] he makes the leap. If our machines can do that to a body with energy you can’t see, then whatever these crafts are clearly can do it, too. And the worst part, you can read the wounds to reverse engineer the machine. The injured person becomes the blueprint. So Green builds a catalog. He leans on a list compiled by a UFO researcher. Hundreds of cases of people physically hurt after an encounter.
Burns, radiation sickness, and two words that stand out. Malignant transformation, healthy tissue turning into cancer. There’s stranger stuff in there, including one entry just logged as unaccounted for pregnancy. I wonder what that’s about. About 42 cases solid enough for peer review. About 300 more that never made it to print. And one case he points to is one you might remember from this channel. Cash Landram. Sound familiar? We did a video on that one, too. Then comes the twist that nobody caught. Years later, Green said quietly that maybe these injuries weren’t from aliens at all. Maybe they were from human beings, secret weapons, maybe our own weapons. So, pick your nightmare here. Either something not from here is burning people or we built a machine that does and tested it on people that would get hurt. And it wasn’t just a paper. Bass had its own contact physicians and they followed real people. One man developed 24 separate lumps across his body after an encounter. A bass doctor sat in on the surgery. The pathologist, 22 years on the job, said he’d never seen anything like it. The fear was an aggressive disease that turns into a cancer and kills. But here’s where this starts being about the families. Remember way back at the start when I told you that stuff at the ranch doesn’t always stay on the ranch? This is what I meant. The program kept hitting the same horrible pattern. People who spent time out there went home and something came home with them. They called it the hitchhiker effect. [music] And they didn’t model it like a haunting. They modeled it like a disease, an infection you could catch.
They even compared it to the way gun violence spreads through a city victim to victim and noted that the strange events tended to hit a person months after their exposure, like an incubation period. [music] The worst case was one of their own, the lead investigator, the one the books call Axelrod. He goes to the ranch to do his job. And then 2,000 mi away in a quiet house in suburban Virginia, it starts. Footsteps start moving through the house at night. His kids seeing things in their bedrooms.
And this man whose entire job is finding the rational answer lands on the only conclusion left. Something followed him home. And now it’s in his house with his children. And it wasn’t just him. The History Channel brought in an astrophysicist, Travis Taylor, to debunk the place. a hard skeptic. Taylor got injured by radiation from a source nobody could identify. Now, he’s not a skeptic anymore. He won’t even talk about the hitchhiker much because he’s afraid talking about it might trigger it. He says colleagues put instruments at the ranch and at their homes a thousand miles away and measured the same events happening in both places at the same time. Even Bigalow said it got into his own house. Now, things were happening to him, to his wife. And worst of all, he said, it happened to the government’s people and it affected them in quote very dramatic ways. And the detail that lingers, the program’s own design called for a medical team to scan, test, and biopsy people. And not just witnesses, they’re family members, too. And in the years since, people who worked out there have come forward saying that they got tested as well.
That towards the end, they didn’t feel like employees, they felt like specimens. So, look at where this program ended up. It went from hunting a threat to national security and it found one. It just wasn’t the threat that anybody signed up for. Bass wrote all it down in a final report delivered to the Defense Intelligence Agency in September 2010. The Burns, the hitchhikers, the children, and it stated in plain government language that this phenomenon is a threat to human health and well-being. Then they sent it straight up the command to the Pentagon. So here’s the part that makes no sense. A fedally funded program just told the Pentagon that this thing is real enough to hurt American citizens. No, that should get you a bigger budget, maybe a dedicated building. Instead, it got the program killed. And three things pulled the trigger. Here’s the first. Harry Reid could see the program was fragile, so he tried to bury it deeper. On June 24th, 2009, Reed writes a four-page letter to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, William Lynn III. He’s not asking for money. He’s asking to turn OAP into a restricted special access program with, and this is the actual government language, a bigoted access list. This is the deepest tier of secrecy America has, the kind where admitting the program exists is a crime, unless your name’s on a tiny list. And his reason, he writes that they’ve made progress on quote highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace related findings that’ll soon need extraordinary protection. Then he waits all summer.
Reed’s own staffer, Bob Herbert, works the phones, call after call to a Pentagon official named Marcel Letra just trying to get an answer. The answer comes in November 2009. It’s a no. And the reason, you can’t make this up. The Pentagon wrote that they cannot find adequate justification. Really? Why not?
Well, because everything Bass turned in so far was unclassified. The contractor hadn’t even built a secure facility. The staff were still in the process of getting clearance. So, you want the highest security in America for a program that hasn’t produced one classified page? Denied. And the same memo also noted that the contract had only one bidder, Bigalow’s company, which is really kind of sus. Here’s the second thing, and it’s the strangest reason a government program has ever died. Word was getting around the intelligence world about what OAP was actually studying. Demons, poltergeists, hitchhikers, and certain senior officials didn’t object because they thought it was fake. They objected because they thought it was real. George Knap, the journalist who broke the story, put it plainly. The opposition was quote highlevel people in different intelligence agencies who were fundamentalist Christians who believed anything touching UFOs and the paranormal was satanic. Lewis Alzando, who later ran the follow-up effort, said certain officials found the work dangerous to their philosophical beliefs, which means men with top secret clearances and real power decided that the United States government had no business poking around at the devil.
Again, does any of this sound familiar?
If you saw my Collins Elite video, it’s the same faction, the same belief that the phenomenon isn’t aliens at all. It’s demonic deception and studying it is playing with fire. That belief walked right into the Pentagon and helped switch off the lights. The third thing, Reed wanted a 5-year program with growing budgets, but with no SAP protection and the religious knives out, the money didn’t come back. The program got a 3-month nocost extension. More time, 0. And on December 21st, [music] 2010, it was over. Just over 2 years, the largest, strangest, most secret investigation the United States ever ran into the unknown quietly switched off.
And then the government did the thing it does best. For the next seven years, it would tell the American public that none of it ever happened. December 16th, 2017, the New York Times runs a story that blows 7 years of silence wide open.
A secret Pentagon UFO program front page. But there’s a trick in the story almost nobody caught. And it’s the whole reason people have been confused about this for years. Remember earlier in this video I told you to hold on to that other name, ATIP? The Times called the program ATIP, and ATIP was a small, clean, sanitized version. Military pilots, gun camera footage, the tic-tac videos you’ve all seen. The Times never said the word OAP. So, the whole planet locked onto a tidier version. Fighter jets chasing dots, while the real program, the one about demons and hitchhikers and a haunted ranch and injured families, they stayed buried under a different set of letters. The name confusion wasn’t a reporter’s mistake. It was the perfect cover.
There’s a line that gets passed around the UFO communities that nails it. ATIP was the distraction. OAP was the real program. And prying the real one loose was like trench warfare. Researchers like John Greenwald filed foyer request after request for years. And on March 25th, 2022, the DIA finally cracked and released 37 of 38 reports. 37 of 38.
They held one back. Of course they did.
And remember, this is a government that fought for years against admitting how many nuclear warheads it has, and it’s out there firing the very people who answer foyer requests. Prying the truth out of this machine is a war of attrition. But here’s what they were doing while denying everything. When the DIA killed the program, the people behind it didn’t go home. They walked over to the Department of Homeland Security with a pitch to restart the whole thing under a new code name, Kona Blue. This isn’t me speculating. It’s in the government’s own 2024 report.
interviewees described Kona Blue as a secret DHS compartment to cover up the retrieval of quote nonhuman biologics.
Got that? Non-human biologics. The plan was to restart the paranormal research, the human consciousness work, and to reverse engineer any off-world craft that they can get their hands on.
Senators Lieberman and Reed backed it.
Dangling funding. DHS, well, they ended up turning it down for lack of merit, purportedly. But think about what just got proposed in a federal building.
Senior serious people pitched a secret program to take apart alien spacecraft and store alien bodies. And then there’s what the program’s boss said out loud in 2011 in a meeting in the capital with a US senator and an under secretary. Jim Latsky, the man this whole story started out with. Well, he stated that the United States was in possession of a craft of unknown origin and that [music] we managed to get inside it. He described it streamlined like it was built to fly, but no intakes, no exhaust, no wings, no control services, no engine, no fuel tanks, no fuel. He asked the room a question that nobody could answer. What’s it for? So in 2022, the government built an office to make all this go away. Arrow, the all domain anomaly resolution office. And in 2024, it released its big historical report.
The verdict was exactly what you’d expect. No verifiable evidence anyone ever confirmed a UFO was alien. No empirical evidence anyone’s ever reverse engineered alien technology. The people making the claims, Arrow said, were sincere but confused. Case closed.
Except 7 weeks before one of those denials, Arrow’s own director told the Senate there was quote no credible evidence of off-world technology. And then a decorated intelligence officer named David Grouch sat before Congress under oath and said the opposite. That the United States runs a decadesl long program to recover and reverse engineer craft and that people have been hurt trying to keep it quiet. Now they can’t both be telling the truth. Critics point out the obvious. Arrow was the government investigating the government with no power to force open the very black programs where the secrets would hide. And those anonymous figures in the report, person one, person two, they’re pretty clearly the same small circle of names that you’ve heard throughout this episode. So, here’s where we actually stand. Two official conclusions from the United States government now sit in direct contradiction. One says there’s nothing here. The other from a man who ran the program says we’ve got a craft in a hanger that we can’t explain. Now, both are on the record. And the one program built to settle it, it got switched off 14 years ago, purportedly.
So, let’s go back to where we started.
One man, 30 seconds, a thing that shouldn’t exist, hovering in a kitchen in Utah. That was the door. And the United States government walked right through it with $22 million and the best minds it could hire. And they came back with a conclusion written down, signed, handed to the Pentagon that this thing hurts people and that it doesn’t stay where you put it. It follows them home into their houses around their kids.
They wrote it up like a disease, something that spreads. And think about what they did. They didn’t contain it.
They didn’t cure it. They certainly didn’t warn anybody. They confirmed that it was real, confirmed it was dangerous, watched it crawl into their own people’s homes, and then they shut the program off and walked away. So, whatever got stirred up out there, whatever followed those men home, nobody’s tracking it now. It’s just out there in houses with families doing who knows what. That’s what the government brought home. And the whole way through this, the phenomenon was ahead of them. It knew when the cameras were on. It killed the equipment. It gave them just enough to keep writing checks and never enough to catch it. The hunters became the hunted.
The investigators became the experiment.
So ask yourself, who was really in control out there? The men with the clearances or the thing on the other side of the glass? I don’t think it was the men. And the government’s answer to all this was to rename it, bury it, deny it, and finally build a whole office just to tell you none of it ever happened. All while the man who ran it says that there’s a craft in a hanger.
The scariest part of the story isn’t that the government might be hiding aliens. It’s that they went looking.
They found something. They found out that it could reach into American homes.
And they decided the safest thing to do was stop looking, close the file, and hope you’d never ask. Well, I’m asking.
And now so are you. I’m John Genoa, and this is America’s Strangest History.
Thanks for watching.
