Jesse Michels

So he's kind of, he's like this total insider in the Manhattan Project who is arguably responsible for creating modern day UFO secrecy in some ways.

You get that time and time again where a lot of these debunkers who end up stigmatizing the topic for a very long time to come were actually tied in with the early kind of atomic programs in the U.S.

So he's a good example of that.

And from then on, you get this like crazy kind of stigma attached to the UFO topic.

You have a couple, you have a 1974 documentary called UFOs Past, Present, and Future, where the Air Force starts to change its tune and starts to become more open about the topic.

And J. Allen Hynek kind of admits that, you know, maybe there is something real here.

And Jacques Vallée, who I, you know, mentioned earlier, this kind of French godfather of ufology, is actually J. Allen Hynek's assistant.

And he takes part in that documentary, which is really interesting.

And then in the 80s, you have the advent of stealth craft.

So like aircrafts that, you know, they have their radar cross sections reduced and, you know, they can evade ground systems, you know, for the Soviets or the Chinese.

And so you have the F-117, the B-2 stealth bomber.

And I think a lot of games get played around calling those UFOs kind of, you know, the U-2 spy plane, the SR-71.

Before that, I think we're mistaken for UFOs.

So there's this constant sort of cross, you know, wiring of like what's ours, what's theirs sort of thing.

And it's important to stay kind of hardheaded about that.

But you also have some stories that come out in the 80s around like this guy, Bob Lazar, who claims that he's at S4 Area 51 and he's working directly on UFOs, on reverse engineering UFOs.

And he gets the job through Edward Teller, who's father of the hydrogen bomb.

And it's this crazy story that's like really hard to debunk.

Like the best debunkers probably have trouble, you know, denying that he worked at Area 51.

And a lot of the core details seem to check and actually get corroborated over time.