In this episode of "Reality Check," Ross Coulthart sits down with Dr. Phil McGraw, the psychologist and television host the White House invited to review the latest tranche of UFO files before it reached the public. Dr. Phil explains why an administration weighing disclosure went looking for a trusted voice rather than an astrophysicist, and what changed his mind once he started reading the government's own words: from Lt. General Nathan Twining's 1947 assessment that the phenomenon was something real and not visionary, to the 1949 classified conference at Los Alamos convened over sightings above America's nuclear weapons sites, to the CIA's Robertson Panel strategy of publicizing cases already debunked and saying nothing about the ones that weren't, to the JANAP directives that put military and commercial pilots under threat of prison, heavy fines and the Espionage Act for describing what they saw.
He tells Coulthart the imagery released so far is intentionally grainy, that far bette...
Suggested Credits
Tags, Events, and Projects