FBI agents visited a New Jersey lab where scientists are trying to build a flying saucer – after they received a report of dangerous uranium being used on site.
Mark Sokol, founder of the Falcon Space laboratory in Hawthorne, New Jersey, told DailyMail.com he was shocked when two federal agents showed up at his shop last Friday.
Sokol said the more senior of the two agents told him they had been tasked by Bureau bosses with looking into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the government term for UFOs – making him a kind of real-life Fox Mulder from the classic show The X-Files.
They didn’t find any dangerous uranium, Sokol said, but were intrigued by the experiments going on at Falcon Space.
Sokol, 35, and his colleagues are attempting to use nuclear physics to make objects weightless, the first step towards building a functioning flying saucer.
CCTV shared with DailyMail.com shows two FBI agents grilling scientist Mark Sokol during a surprise visit to his lab in Hawthorne, New Jersey on October 20
Scientists and inventors are trying to build their own gravity-defying flying saucer in the Falcon Space laboratory in New Jersey
Sokol explained he and his colleagues have been working on experiments to make objects weightless – the first step towards building a functioning flying saucer – using this foil-lined Faraday cage that managed to reduce an object’s weight by 17.8%
They are inspired by verified reports of strange unidentified objects flying in extraordinary ways in our skies, seas and space, which are now being openly investigated by the government.
Sokol told DailyMail.com his goal is to figure out the technology behind these objects, which some believe to be extraterrestrial craft.
CCTV shared with DailyMail.com shows the two FBI agents flashing their badges and interviewing the inventor as well as pacing outside with a Geiger counter – a device used to detect radiation – which showed no harmful radiation at the lab, he said.
‘They showed up on Friday right around noon,’ Sokol said. ‘They flashed their badges, said »FBI», and asked if we had any enriched uranium.
‘I laughed and told them no. One said that we’re not in trouble and he wanted to come back at some point and pick my brain about UAPs because he’s been tasked by the FBI, in investigating UAPs or UFOs.’
But if the senior agent is a real-life version of David Duchovny’s Mulder, his partner didn’t quite measure up to Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully.
Sokol said the more junior of the pair was fresh-faced and ‘probably in his early 20s’.
‘They said they got a tipoff that I have enriched uranium. The only uranium we have here is a little piece that I got off Amazon to check our Geiger counter to make sure it’s working.’
A spokeswoman for the FBI field office in Newark, New Jersey, told DailyMail.com: ‘We receive information from the public each day through various reporting mechanisms.
Left to right: Jatin Parmar, Tom Butler, Mark Sokol, Wayne Ojala all working on an experiment at their lab in Hawthorne
Members of the Falcon Space laboratory plot their experiments to replicate UFO technology such as anti-gravity
Falcon Space was founded by Mark Sokol, who turned his battery manufacturing laboratory into a hub for scientists and inventors trying to crack the problem of anti-gravity
‘In general, when we get information about a situation involving illegal and dangerous radiological or hazardous materials, our agents investigate it.’
The spokeswoman did not comment on whether their FBI office had a designated agent for UFO-related cases.
Sokol described his lab as a bootstrapped community of scientists, engineers, and inventors hoping to crack anti-gravity, warp drives, and other futuristic technologies.
They are funded by donations and a few private investors passionate about the topic.
‘We’re researching UFO propulsion, trying to figure out propellant-less propulsion concepts that have been theorized to work throughout the years,’ he said.
‘There’s lots of papers and patents that have been put out. But we’re a lab where we actually put those theories to the test.’
Some of their experiments test the theory that objects’ mass comes from the jumbled directions in which the subatomic particles of their atoms spin.
If you can get those tiny parts to spin in the same direction, it will make them weightless, so the theory goes.
‘We’ve seen up to 17.8% weight loss in one experiment,’ Sokol said.
He believes once they can get above 90%, they’ll be able to make a floating saucer.
Lab cofounder Jeremy Rys runs their YouTube channel Alien Scientist, where they post videos of their experiments and scientific discussions at their regular online ‘Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference’.
Lab cofounder Jeremy Rys said he was skeptical of the FBI visitors, noting that the senior agent had a background in financial crime investigations unrelated to X-Files-type probes
The agents appeared to be real-life versions of FBI special agents Fox Mulder, played by David Duchovny and Dana Scully, played by Gillian Anderson, from the hit sci-fi series The X-Files
Rys was skeptical of the FBI visitors, noting that the senior agent had a background in financial crime investigations unrelated to X-Files-type probes.
‘They said they were interested in UAP and the kind of stuff he was doing at the lab. It could be a shoe in the door,’ he said.
‘Maybe they’re trying to trick Mark into opening up more because they know it’s his passion.
‘If you lie to federal investigators in any way, even just telling them the time on a broken clock, they can later put charges against you.’
Though the government has not officially confirmed it is using FBI agents to conduct UFO-related investigations on the ground X-Files-style, there are several hints that this is the case.
In a presentation by Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in January, the DOJ was listed as one of the agency’s ‘key partners’
A 2021 law which created the latest incarnation of the Pentagon’s UFO investigation office ‘AARO’ also ordered it to ‘rapidly respond to, and conduct field investigations of, incidents involving unidentified aerial phenomena under the direction of the head of the Office’.
At a conference on January 11 this year, AARO director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick presented a slide deck which listed the Department of Justice, ultimately responsible for the FBI, as one of its ‘key partners and stakeholders’.
Kirkpatrick, a decorated physicist and intelligence official, also included one intriguing bullet point on his slides suggesting that AARO aimed to ‘recover’ downed UAP.
The slide said his office is involved in ‘UAP detection, tracking, mitigation, and recovery’.
The US government has itself tried to build craft resembling classic flying saucers, though official records show it achieved little success.
In the 1950s the US Air Force hired a Canadian contractor to help it try to build a supersonic flying saucer.
DailyMail.com obtained a slides from Kirkpatrick’s January 11 presentation which showed the steps AARO was taking to ensure UAP ‘are effectively and efficiently detected, tracked, analyzed, and managed’
Kirkpatrick’s presentation warned of ‘threats to the immediate safety of US citizens and Government facilities’
Documents from the venture, codenamed Project 1794, were declassified in 2012, and include schematics that look like they come right out of a science fiction movie.
According to papers published by the National Archives, the saucer was designed to fly ‘between Mach 3 and Mach 4, a ceiling of over 100,000 ft. and a maximum range with allowances of about 1,000 nautical miles’.
Despite indications of initial success at a relatively low cost, the project fizzled out after engineers apparently failed to get the craft flying higher than a few feet.
From 2015 to 2017 the US Navy filed for a series of patents for futuristic inventions including a triangular-shaped ‘hybrid aerospace underwater craft’ and a ‘craft using an inertial mass reduction device’ – or anti-gravity.
The supposed inventor, Dr. Salvatore Pais, boasted in the patent of possible ‘extreme speeds’ by his vehicle and the potential to ‘engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level’.
But other physicists criticized the filings for their lack of specific technical details and allegedly nonsensical pseudoscience terms – fueling theories that the patents could just be propaganda to confuse America’s adversaries.
The Navy told US engineering news site The Drive that they spent three years and $508,000 on the project, but ended it in September 2019 after failing to prove Dr. Pais’ proposed science.
‘No further research has been conducted, and the project has not transitioned to any other government or civilian organization,’ a spokesperson for the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division told the site in 2021.
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