In the first half, Luis Elizondo, former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the secretive Pentagon unit that studied UFOs, joined George Knapp for an update about recent UFO & UAP news. They spoke about an unclassified image that's reportedly circulated among US intelligence agencies. The photo, depicting UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) has been called just a balloon by some. However, Elizondo pointed out that it was taken from inside the cockpit of an F-18 fighter jet, and seems to be part of an encouraging trend for greater openness. There is now a UAP Task Force run by the Pentagon, he continued, and classified briefings are provided to congressional staff.
The former director of the CIA, John Brennan, recently acknowledged that some of the unexplained aerial phenomena captured in military videos are genuinely puzzling and could represent a different form of life, Elizondo reported. Regarding the so-called "metamaterials" (anomalous manufactured materials allegedly found at UFO crash sites), Elizondo noted that researcher Jacques Vallee recently confirmed in The Phenomenon documentary that such materials are being analyzed and have a very unusual isotopic structure.
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In the latter half, international paranormal and UFO researcher Paul Stonehill discussed his quest to locate a mystical land known as the Russian 'Shambala' (related video), as well as incidents of high strangeness in Russia and the former Soviet Union. There have been a number of names and locations over the centuries for Shambala's utopian city, including spots in Siberia, Slavic lands, and the Altai Mountains where Russia, China, and Mongolia converge. In the Gobi Desert, he added, there are purportedly underground cities. In an inexplicable case from 1977 (in the Ural Mountains in a region near the Dyatlov Pass incident), over one-hundred people suddenly disappeared from a village, he recalled.
Putin and other Russian presidents have mostly been silent about the UFO subject, though a covert academy continues to study the subject, Stonehill revealed. Many of the seasoned independent Russian UFO investigators have passed away over the years. He talked about strange activity around the Baltic Sea, including a burning object that crashed into the water and remained on fire for some time. In the Arctic territories in 1979, there was a wave of UFO and USOs, along with a huge unexplained craft that circled Soviet submarines, he detailed. In the Black Sea, a gigantic underwater object was observed changing shape before vanishing. Stonehill also delved into the mysterious 1968 death of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin-- his fatal plane crash may have been due to an impact with a UFO.