KLAS

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Tales of crashed saucers stashed away in secret hangars have been a staple in Nevada for more than three decades. Now, Congress is hot on the trail.

In the early morning hours of May 14, 2008, an oblong object glowing turquoise blazed across the southwest sky. An ex-cop in Bullhead City was among the witnesses. Seconds later, a fisherman in a houseboat saw it too when it landed with a thump on the sandy riverbank of Near Needles.

“It didn’t look like a meteor. I’ve seen meteors before it looked like a plane crashing,” the fisherman who uses the nickname Bob told 8 News Now.

Within minutes, a group of four military helicopters descended on the site and spotlighted his boat. Soon after, a huge military sky crane appeared, grabbed the unknown object, and carried it away toward the Air Force ranges of Nevada, Bob said.

In the days that followed, someone used heavy equipment to clean up the crash site. Ex-cop Frank Costigan said cleanup crews were seen by locals.

“There was a cleanup crew dining at the Topock marina on occasion after that thing had been removed and we were hunting for the spot,” Costigan said.

In the most literal sense, the oblong craft was a UFO. In the aftermath, the most likely explanation was that it had been some sort of advanced drone or spy platform that somehow got off the reservation, which could explain why the military arrived so quickly.

Are there secret recovery teams created to do this type of work? Without question.

Pentagon documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show the recovery programs trace their roots back to 1947, the same year as the crash of an unknown object outside Roswell.

Rapid response programs dubbed Blue Fly and Moon Dust were eventually created so that any unknown object that fell from the sky, whether Russian or other, could be quickly obtained and analyzed.

In the summer of 2023, the online defense publication, The War Zone, reported that an effort now called “Foreign Material Exploitations” is still very real and very active.

Historically, the military’s foreign technology division has been headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, home to the rumored Hanger 18, where the Roswell wreckage was supposedly transported.

Does the military have bits of technology from unidentified objects or entire craft?

One source who blew the whistle is late intelligence Colonel Phillip Corso, who was at the top of the U.S. Army’s foreign technology program at the Pentagon and who said he participated in a reverse engineering effort that tried to exploit the advanced tech obtained from the Roswell crash and perhaps other incidents.

Bob Lazar, the former government scientist who came forward to 8 News Now in 1989 and said there were alien craft stashed in a secret facility in the Nevada desert, remains controversial, but even critics who do not find him to be credible agree that what he alleged was essentially true.

Physicist, Dr. Eric Davis has worked on classified projects for the military and recently gave formal, closed-door testimony to Congress. What he told congressional staff has not been formally released, but Davis made public comments about crash retrievals.

“We have crash retrievals and they have been analyzed and unfortunately our laboratory diagnostic technologies and our material sciences and the understanding of physics that we had were not advanced enough to be able to make heads or tails of what it is, of what they had their hands on,” Davis said in the book In Plain Sight by Ross Coulthart.

Davis previously worked for Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow investigating unusual phenomena. He was directly involved with AAWSAP, the largest acknowledged government investigation of UFOs, which was based in Nevada.

The AAWSAP contract made provisions for Bigelow’s company to receive unspecified exotic materials. The man who designed the program, Defense Intelligence Agency scientist Dr. James Lacatski acknowledged in 2023 that the U.S. does possess at least one craft of unknown origin.

An interest in UFO crashes is one of the primary reasons Nevada Senator Harry Reid began his long-secret involvement in the subject in the late 1980’s. Reid said multiple times that he was made aware that the Russians and Chinese were both pursuing their own UFO reverse engineering efforts in a race for the ultimate military technology.

Reid was not the first Nevada senator to chase the same mystery one of his predecessors, four-term Senator Howard Cannon, a decorated pilot who was known as “Mr. Aviation” in Congress told 8 News Now in the 1990s that he and his close friend, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, tried to get into Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson to see the presumed UFO wreckage, but they were denied. 

Senator Goldwater made multiple public statements acknowledging that he had been turned away, even though he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time.

The search for physical proof of UFOs has reached the point where it is a front-burner issue for some members of Congress. Intelligence Officer David Grusch’s startling public statements about crashed saucers and reverse engineering programs hidden inside defense contractors and special access programs have been deemed credible and urgent. 

Grusch learned about the programs because he was assigned to do exactly that.

Can Congress ever pierce the veil of secrecy? Maybe not.

There is a race for the technology, and from most sources we have developed, very little progress has been made in the 35 years since Lazar’s allegations were leveled. There are legitimate national security issues involved because whoever masters the secrets of these craft, wins.