Ralph Blumenthal

If, if I was thrown into this without a knowledge of UFOs and was beginning to search and I had access to all this classified information, uh, I think it would, it would transpire differently.

But when we, when we look at the, um, uh, all the stuff that's come on since 2017 when Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal wrote their initial article and it looked like disclosure was moving forward rapidly.

And here we are, nearly 10 years later, and we haven't got any closer.

Yeah.

Everything's changing.

These people have come forward and they say, "Look, I actually worked on the program that studied UFOs," or, um, you know, "We have bait programs for UFOs to capture and then afterwards study and try and reverse engineer these UFOs and, you know, find out who the occupants are and catalog that." Um, and you know, of course, I'm talking about the sort of bombshell stuff that came out through Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal in The New York Times with the help of Lue Elizondo, Christopher Mellon.

Um, and it, it's so interesting though, you know, just to look at the community of ufology.

This rift started right then and there because you had people like Greer go on this kind of, like, defamation campaign the moment that Elizondo, Jeremy Corbell, Christopher Mellon, um, you know, lesser now Tom DeLonge, but more prevalently then in 2017, coming forward and saying, "We're not alone.

rectors that move on

have watching the changes in the ufo field and 2017 of course the new york times upset article from ralph blumenthal and leslie kane and helene cooper about the pentagon's investigation of ufos did you read those articles at the time

Oh, at the time I did.

Yeah, that's when the entire field changed because when Lou Elizondo and them, they leaked out the 2004 Nimitz Tic Tac incident video, an entirely new cast of characters emerged from the UFO field.

So we brought in Matthew Modine to do the narration.

We had people like Michio Kaku and Ralph Blumenthal, um, actually appearing in the movie.

And, um, that's when I decided to call it accidental truth.

And Chris helped me with the rough cutting of that movie.

She's got some wonderful books turned into documentaries on UFOs, life after death.

Um, she was the co-author of the 2017 New York Times article with Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal.

She speaks about how this is probably the best evidence available publicly for UFOs, and I agree with that.

In terms of the, its provenance, its chain of custody, its definition and how clear it is, bear in mind we're going back to 1971 when this is taken.

It had been funded with twenty-two million dollars in classified appropriations tucked into the vast labyrinth of the Pentagon's black budget, and its existence had never been publicly acknowledged by the United States government until that morning.

The story was written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean.

It was not an opinion piece.

It was not speculative journalism.

Um, so, uh, even in starting this, like, the, the topic has gained momentum, and more people have been brought into the fold, and more people are paying attention now.

Um, and Leslie Kean, who we were fortunate enough to, to interview, um, she wrote this amazing article with Helen Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal in 2017 for The New York Times, and that was a very kind of pivotal moment in UFO research because it showed that the US government does in fact fund research into the topic.

Um, and that kind of gave birth to, you know, Lue Elizondo and David Grusch and some of these other whistleblowers that, you know, really put, put their reputations and lives on the line by coming forward and talking about it.

You know, we're, we're artists from Detroit, so, you know, like-

You can't just...

A lot of academics now, um, you know, after American Cosmic came out, after the 2017 New York Times article with, you know, Ralph Blumenthal, Leslie Kean, and Helene Cooper, um, so many academics all of a sudden wanted to study this.

Whereas like five years before I was, I was like, people were thinking I was crazy for studying it.

Now, now they all wanna study it, okay? All right.