1413 THE UFO MISSION: They Studied Our Nukes—Then They Started Studying Us

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight.

Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm reexamining this case.

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I really didn't believe any of it was real, and I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job.

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Richard Syrett (0:32)

Every now and then, someone would die.

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He comes up behind me and whispers hard in the ear, nobody knows where you are, and nobody can hear you scream.

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Some of these stories will make you laugh till you're crying. And then I realize, I'm unconscious.

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They catch my mom poisoning my sister. My brother, he died at the hands of my mother.

Larry Hancock (1:01)

I said, Mike, don't make me shoot you, please.

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But he did.

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Larry Hancock (1:32)

National Security still is public to some extent. We have a task list of what subjects are assigned to the national security structure, and UFOs never show up on there. So there is never any tasking, which means there's never any budgeting. So if anybody was looking at it, it's more like within some command somewhere, some senior officer allowed three or four people to go do a private investigation and report back to them. And actually, interestingly enough, John Alexander, who was deeply inside the security infrastructure, went looking for that. He and a group of people went looking just for that in the 80s, because it's like, surely that's happening. Surely, some agency, some command at least did a minimal look at it. And he went to all the agencies, whether it's NORAD or NASA or the militaries, and no sign of that at all.

SPEAKER_7 (2:30)

Richard Syrett's Strange Planet, following the truth wherever it leads, exposing evil and corruption and the secret machinations of powerful elites, revealing the highest strangeness beneath the surface of our supposed reality. Coming to you from the Great White North and his studio beneath the stairs.

Here's Richard.

Richard Syrett (2:59)

There's something about the UFO story that tends to get lost in all the noise. We spend so much time arguing about what these things are, secret aircraft, misidentifications, visitors from somewhere else, that we rarely stop and look at what they've actually been doing. And that's where tonight's story gets interesting, because when you line up the better documented cases over the last 80 years, they don't appear to be scattered randomly across the map. They show up around Hanford, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, the places at the heart of America's early atomic program. Then, as America's nuclear arsenal expands, the UFO activity seems to move with it. Weapons, assembly sites, storage facilities, strategic air command bases, missile fields. Military pilots see them, radar operators track them, personnel at sensitive installations report them. And then, something changes.

The big conspicuous daylight encounters become less common. More of the activity moves into the night. The encounters become closer, stranger, more controlled, and increasingly involve ordinary people.

So, maybe there is another way to approach this mystery. Forget for a moment about trying to identify the hardware. Look at the behavior.

Is there a pattern? Is there evidence of reconnaissance, surveillance, signaling? Were our nuclear weapons the original focus? And if so, why? And could the mission have eventually shifted from studying our technology to studying us?

That's the argument Larry Hancock and his colleagues have spent years investigating. Larry is an author and national security researcher specializing in Cold War history and intelligence operations. He holds degrees in history and anthropology, served in the United States Air Force and as electronics communication specialist, and spent more than 30 years in the computer and communications industry. He's written more than a dozen books, including Unidentified, The National Security Problem of UFOs. He also serves on the board of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, and leads its Intentions Studies team. His latest book, co-authored with Ian Porritt, Sean Grosvenor, Dr. Joshua Pierson, is UFO Intentions, Decoding the Patterns. And tonight, we're going to do something refreshingly simple. We're going to stop chasing individual UFOs around the sky. Instead, we're going to stand back, look at 80 years of activity as a whole, and ask whether there's a pattern hiding in plain sight. And if there is, what does it tell us about whoever or whatever is behind it?