Former President Bush Was Briefed on 1964 Alien Contact — And Was Told He “Lacked Clearance”
A new documentary features testimony from a Pentagon scientist who claims George H.W. Bush privately confirmed to him that alien beings made face-to-face contact with military personnel at a New Mexico air base in 1964 — and that even after serving as CIA Director and President, Bush was told he didn’t have clearance to know any more than that.
The Man Who Should Have Known Everything
George Herbert Walker Bush had one of the most remarkable resumes in American political history. He flew torpedo bombers in World War II and got shot down over the Pacific. He ran the Central Intelligence Agency during one of its most turbulent periods. He served eight years as Vice President under Ronald Reagan. And then he spent four years as the most powerful person on the planet — the 41st President of the United States.
If anyone should have had access to America’s deepest secrets, it was George H.W. Bush. The man had seen classified material that would make most intelligence officers’ heads spin. He’d been briefed on covert operations, nuclear protocols, and matters of national security that remain classified to this day.
According to testimony in a documentary that dropped on Amazon Prime last week, when Bush asked for more details about an alleged 1964 encounter between military personnel and a non-human being at a New Mexico air base, somebody told him no. Somebody told a former CIA Director and former President of the United States that he lacked the proper clearance.
That’s either one of the most extraordinary claims ever made about government secrecy, or it’s complete nonsense. The documentary making this claim features enough credentialed officials that it’s worth examining either way.
The Scientist Who Says Bush Told Him
The person making this claim isn’t some anonymous source or UFO enthusiast posting videos from his basement. Dr. Eric Davis holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Arizona. His research areas include breakthrough propulsion physics for interstellar flight, quantum field theory, and space propulsion — the kind of cutting-edge theoretical work that sounds like science fiction but gets published in peer-reviewed journals. He’s a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
More relevant to this story, Davis served as a scientific advisor to something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — AATIP for short — from 2007 to 2012. That was the Pentagon’s quietly funded effort to investigate UFO reports, or UAPs as they’re now called (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, because apparently “UFO” had too much cultural baggage). The program operated under the Defense Intelligence Agency with $22 million in funding, and most people didn’t know it existed until The New York Times broke the story in 2017.
Davis appears in The Age of Disclosure, a documentary directed by Dan Farah that premiered on Amazon Prime on November 21, 2025. In that documentary, Davis describes private conversations he says he had with former President Bush in 2003 — about a decade after Bush left the White House.
According to Davis, Bush described a 1964 incident in which three unidentified spacecraft approached Holloman Air Force Base in Otero County, New Mexico. Holloman sits in the Tularosa Basin, not far from White Sands Missile Range — an area that’s been at the center of American aerospace and weapons testing since the Manhattan Project.
“One of them landed on the tarmac and a non-human entity deboarded the craft that landed and interacted with uniformed Air Force and civilian CIA personnel,” Davis said in the documentary.
That’s a remarkable claim on its own. A former Pentagon scientist saying that an extraterrestrial being stepped off a spacecraft at an American military base and had some kind of interaction with military and intelligence personnel. Davis doesn’t go into detail about what that interaction involved, or what the being looked like, or what it communicated — if anything.
The part that really stands out comes next.
“And when [Bush] asked for more details,” Davis continued, “he was told that he did not have a need-to-know.”
The Credentials That Should Have Mattered
To understand why that claim is so striking, consider just how much George H.W. Bush should have known.
Bush served as Director of Central Intelligence from January 1976 to January 1977. That’s the top job at the CIA — the person who oversees America’s entire civilian intelligence apparatus. He remains the only CIA Director who went on to become President of the United States.
Before that, Bush served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and as the chief U.S. envoy to China. He was a congressman from Texas. And before any of that, he was a decorated Naval aviator who flew combat missions in the Pacific during World War II.
The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is literally named after him. It’s called the George Bush Center for Intelligence.
According to Davis, Bush wasn’t present for the alleged 1964 incident at Holloman. At that time, Bush was in Texas getting his political career started. He ran unsuccessfully for Senate that year. So Bush would have learned about the incident secondhand, presumably through whatever channels former presidents and CIA directors use to learn about such things.
Davis says Bush told him about it in 2003. That was a decade after Bush left office, and nearly 40 years after the alleged incident occurred. Even with all those years of service, all those security clearances, all that access to classified information — when Bush asked for more details, someone apparently drew a line.
Davis didn’t describe what the alien craft looked like. He didn’t describe the beings. He didn’t provide any material evidence. The claim rests entirely on his account of what Bush told him in private conversations more than two decades ago.
Bush died in November 2018 at age 94. He can’t confirm or deny anything.
The Holloman Story Didn’t Start Here
Davis isn’t the first person to claim something strange happened at Holloman Air Force Base in the 1960s. The story has circulated in UFO research circles for more than fifty years.
Back in 1971, a writer named Robert Emenegger was allegedly promised footage of a 1964 landing at Holloman while producing a documentary about UFOs. Emenegger was working with official Department of Defense and NASA source material — this wasn’t some independent production scrounging for whatever footage it could find. According to Emenegger, someone in the military told him actual film existed of a UFO landing at the base.
The resulting 1974 documentary, UFOs: Past, Present, and Future, was narrated by Rod Serling — the creator of “The Twilight Zone” — and it included a dramatized version of what supposedly happened at Holloman. Not the actual footage Emenegger was promised, but a recreation.
In the recreation, three unidentified objects are detected approaching the base. The Air Force sounds a red alert. One of the crafts breaks away and attempts to land. It hovers silently before touching down on extension pads. Air Force officials and scientists wait outside as a panel opens on the craft and beings emerge.
Film historians have noted that this Holloman landing sequence bears striking similarities to the finale of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which came out three years later. Whether Spielberg was influenced by the Emenegger documentary, or whether both were drawing on the same UFO lore, is a question nobody has definitively answered.
Various accounts over the years have described the 1964 incident in more detail. According to some versions, three UFOs flew into Holloman’s airspace, were tracked on radar, and were captured on film. One landed. Three humanoids with blue-gray complexions emerged, wearing tight-fitting flight suits. They were met by the Air Force base commander and other officers.
The details shift depending on who’s telling the story. Sometimes there are three beings. Sometimes the dates don’t quite match up. The promised footage that Emenegger was allegedly told about has never surfaced publicly. What makes the story in The Age of Disclosure different isn’t the Holloman account itself — it’s who’s telling it, and how they claim to have learned about it.
The Documentary and Its 34 Witnesses
The Age of Disclosure premiered at the SXSW film festival on March 9, 2025, before its wider release on November 21. It’s available on Amazon Prime Video, and it also had a limited theatrical run in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. — enough screenings to qualify for Oscar consideration, though whether a UFO documentary has any real shot at Academy recognition is another question.
Director Dan Farah spent three years making the film, working largely in secrecy. His previous credits include producing Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One and the MTV fantasy series “The Shannara Chronicles” — so he comes from mainstream Hollywood, not the UFO documentary subgenre.
“My goal was to only interview people who had direct knowledge of the UAP topic as a result of their work for the U.S. government,” Farah explained, “and who would share what they can legally disclose.”
The result is a film that features 34 U.S. government, military, and intelligence community insiders. And they don’t appear as anonymous silhouettes with voice distortion. They’re people appearing on camera, using their real names, with their titles and credentials displayed on screen.
The roster includes current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Jay Stratton, who ran the government’s UAP Task Force. Whatever anyone thinks about the subject matter, these aren’t fringe figures.
“Every single person I interviewed made it very clear that it was no longer a question of whether this was a real situation,” Farah said. “It’s a very real situation.”
In the documentary, Rubio states: “We’ve had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it’s not ours. And we don’t know whose it is. That alone deserves inquiry, deserves attention, deserves focus.”
That’s a sitting Secretary of State — albeit filmed before he took that position — saying on camera that unidentified objects have repeatedly violated airspace over American nuclear facilities, and that the U.S. government doesn’t know what they are or who controls them.
The Legacy Program
The central claim of The Age of Disclosure goes beyond any single incident at Holloman or anywhere else. The documentary argues that there’s a secret government operation — what it calls the “Legacy Program” — that has been retrieving crashed UAPs and attempting to reverse-engineer their technology for decades.
According to the film, this program is run by a consortium that includes the CIA, the Air Force, the Department of Energy, and private aerospace contractors. The structure is designed to keep the information compartmentalized to such an extreme degree that even the people running the government don’t have access.
The documentary claims that information about UAPs is distributed on a need-to-know basis so restrictive that even the President of the United States and the head of the CIA might know nothing about it.
Rubio addresses this directly in the film. “I think that there’s this assumption that presidents can walk into the Oval Office on day one and say, ‘Alright, take me to Roswell, show me the alien bodies, I want to see the video of the autopsy, I want to see the whole thing — open it up,'” he says. “I think that really is a naive understanding of how our government works.”
That’s a remarkable statement from someone who has served on the Senate Intelligence Committee and now runs the State Department. He’s essentially saying that the compartmentalization of this information — if it exists — is so complete that the normal chains of command don’t apply. The President doesn’t automatically get access. The CIA Director doesn’t automatically get access. Even people who should be at the top of the information pyramid find themselves locked out.
“This is the biggest disinformation campaign in the history of the U.S. government,” Farah stated. “Clearly, the facts around this topic have been covered up for 80 years and kept from the public.”
The Other Scientists
Eric Davis isn’t the only scientist in the documentary making extraordinary claims. The film features several researchers with impressive credentials who’ve apparently concluded that something genuinely unexplained is going on.
Hal Puthoff is a physicist who served as chief scientist for AATIP — the same Pentagon program where Davis worked. Puthoff’s background is unusual even by the standards of UFO research. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and co-founded the CIA’s remote viewing research program at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. That was the government’s attempt to investigate whether psychic phenomena could be used for intelligence gathering — a program that ran for two decades before being shut down.
In the documentary, Puthoff claims that the U.S. government has recovered multiple types of extraterrestrial beings over the years.
“The bodies recovered are not all the same type,” Puthoff says, though he doesn’t go into detail about what those different types look like or where they came from. “Whoever it is — they’re here. And they’ve been operating here for a long time.”
Then there’s Gary Nolan, and his credentials are harder to dismiss. Nolan holds the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor Endowed Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His primary research involves cancer and immunology. He’s published more than 300 research papers, holds 40 U.S. patents, and has founded multiple biotechnology companies. This isn’t someone who built his career on UFO claims — he built it on mainstream medical research and then got pulled into this topic.
According to Nolan, representatives from the CIA and an aerospace company brought military personnel to him for medical evaluation. These were people who had allegedly come into close contact with UAPs and were suffering from health effects.
“You didn’t even have to be an MD to see that there was a problem,” Nolan said. “Some of their brains were horribly, horribly damaged.”
The injuries he describes include severe burns and internal scarring that manifested inside patients’ brains. Nolan says the brain damage resembled the white matter disease or scarring that occurs with multiple sclerosis — except it appeared in people who hadn’t been diagnosed with that condition.
Of approximately 100 patients he examined, Nolan says about a quarter died from their injuries. The majority had symptoms that he describes as “basically identical to what’s now called Havana syndrome” — the mysterious illness that has affected American diplomats and intelligence officers in various countries.
Mike Flaherty, a retired U.S. Navy and Air Force intelligence officer, appears in the documentary claiming he experienced “biological effects” after direct exposure to a craft. He doesn’t go into extensive detail about what those effects involved.
The Soviet Claim
Davis makes another claim in the documentary that extends beyond American territory. According to Davis, in 1989, the Soviet Union recovered four bodies of humanoid aliens from a UAP crash site. The craft was described as large and tic-tac shaped, and Soviet personnel allegedly discovered an advanced directed energy weapon at the site.
This is presented without physical evidence or documentation. It’s Davis’s claim about what he’s been told through whatever channels Pentagon scientists who work on classified programs use to share information. The Soviet Union collapsed two years after this alleged incident, and Russian government archives from that era remain largely inaccessible to Western researchers.
The claim fits into a broader narrative that the documentary presents — that UAP crash retrievals aren’t limited to the United States, and that other major powers have been running their own programs to recover and study this technology. According to the film, since the 1940s, an ongoing race between China, Russia, and the U.S. has been driven by the discovery of crashed UAPs, with each nation wanting to be the first to reverse-engineer the technology.
“The first country that cracks the code on this technology will be the leader for years to come,” says Jay Stratton in the film.
The Man Who Ran the Programs
Jay Stratton is probably the most significant official in the documentary when it comes to direct involvement in government UAP programs. His career represents something close to a continuous thread through every major Pentagon effort to study this phenomenon over the past two decades.
Stratton served as Chief of Air and Space Warfare at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense Warning Office. That’s a position that involves analyzing potential threats to American air and space assets — exactly the kind of job where reports of unidentified objects in controlled airspace would land on your desk.
He’s the only individual to have worked for AAWSAP, AATIP, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Those are the four main government programs that have investigated UAPs since the late 2000s. If someone drew an organizational chart of official Pentagon UFO research, Stratton would appear on every iteration.
Stratton built the UAP Task Force over two years at the request of the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense. When the Secretary of Defense announced the Task Force in 2020, Stratton was named its first director.
His team included David Grusch — the Air Force veteran and intelligence officer who testified to Congress in July 2023 about alleged crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs. Grusch’s testimony generated headlines when he claimed under oath that the U.S. government possesses “vehicles of non-human origin.”
Stratton has made his own direct claims. In trusted circles, he has stated: “I have seen with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings.”
That’s not hedged language. That’s not “I’ve seen reports of” or “credible witnesses have told me about.” That’s a senior intelligence official who spent 32 years in military and federal service claiming direct, personal observation of non-human technology and non-human life.
In May 2025, Stratton posted a public statement affirming that the FBI has taken UAPs seriously for years and was one of his first partners when building the UAP Task Force. According to Stratton, the FBI actively supported classified briefings to Congress and has remained involved in the investigation.
The Programs That Actually Existed
Before evaluating whether any of this is credible, it helps to understand what the government has actually admitted to doing.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program began in 2007 with $22 million in funding. It operated under the Defense Intelligence Agency. The program was initiated by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, at the urging of his friend Robert Bigelow — a billionaire who made his fortune in the hotel industry and had a well-known interest in UFOs and paranormal research. Reid got support from Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii.
The Pentagon says AATIP ended in 2012 after five years. People who worked on the program have claimed it continued in some form under different names and management structures. Davis himself said in earlier interviews that the program never really shut down.
In June 2020, the Pentagon acknowledged the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force. This was the program Stratton built and directed. Its existence was revealed during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing — so Congress knew about it, or at least some members of Congress did.
Today, the government’s official UFO investigation operates through something called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. Senator Gillibrand created AARO in 2022 to focus the Department of Defense on sharing data about UAP sightings and to address related national security concerns.
AARO’s official position is that it “has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.”
That puts the government’s official stance in direct contradiction to what many of the officials in this documentary are claiming. Either AARO is wrong, or AARO is lying, or AARO genuinely doesn’t have access to the information these officials claim exists, or the officials in the documentary are wrong. The possibilities don’t leave a lot of comfortable middle ground.
The Congressional Interest
Whatever anyone thinks about alien contact, the UAP topic has gained a level of official attention that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.
The UAP Disclosure Act, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds, passed the Senate before being blocked by what supporters describe as special interest groups. That legislation would have required disclosure of government information about UAPs and defined “non-human intelligence” in federal law. The term appears two dozen times in the 64-page bill.
“One of two things here are true,” Rubio has said about the whistleblower testimony he’s received. “Either what he is saying is true or partially true, or we have some really smart, educated people with high clearances and very important positions in our government who are crazy and leading us on a goose chase. Either one is a problem.”
Rubio sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He’s now Secretary of State. He’s not treating this as a fringe topic.
Senator Gillibrand has been pushing for transparency on UAPs since she created AARO. In congressional testimony, she stated that UAPs “are frequently observed flying at extremely high or very low speeds and come in various sizes and shapes.”
Gillibrand introduced the amendment that created AARO in the first place, replacing a previous task force with a more robust office that has access to Defense Department and Intelligence Community data. She chairs the subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities under the Senate Armed Services Committee, which means UAP hearings fall under her jurisdiction.
“While we have made progress, there remains a stigma attached to these phenomena,” Gillibrand said during a Senate hearing. “But because of the ‘UFO’ stigma, the response has been irresponsibly anemic and slow.”
The Skeptical Response
The Age of Disclosure hasn’t exactly been a critical darling. On Rotten Tomatoes, only 30% of critics’ reviews are positive. Metacritic gave it a score of 45 out of 100, which the site categorizes as “mixed or average reviews.”
Australian astrophysicist Charley Lineweaver didn’t mince words. The film, he said, is full of “guys who are not scientists, talking about an issue that I think is very scientific, very very interesting, but it’s just baloney.”
Joshua Semeter, a professor of electrical engineering at Boston University, served on the NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team — so he’s someone who’s actually looked at this issue in an official scientific capacity. He was skeptical of the film’s central claims. “I have seen no evidence that the government has been hiding anything,” Semeter said. “Ultimately, testimonies are simply not enough. They need to be backed up with evidence.”
That’s the fundamental problem with the documentary, and it’s one that Farah and his interview subjects don’t really solve. Everyone in the film is talking about classified information they can’t show. They’re describing craft and beings and programs that they insist are real, but they can’t produce photographs, documents, physical samples, or any other evidence that could be independently verified.
Ben Kenigsberg, writing for The New York Times, put it bluntly: “Anyone who sits through its nearly two hours of unprovable claims is a chump.”
The Guardian reviewer Adrian Horton took a more measured view, calling the film “the most serious and sourced documentary on the government’s handling of UAP information to date” — while also noting the lack of evidence provided to support the claims.
That captures the strange position the documentary occupies. On one hand, it features more credentialed officials making more direct statements than any previous UFO documentary. On the other hand, none of them can actually prove what they’re saying. It’s argument from authority without the underlying evidence that would normally accompany such authority.
The Question of Evidence
The documentary raises a question that UFO researchers and skeptics have been arguing about for decades: What would constitute sufficient evidence?
If the U.S. government really has been retrieving crashed alien spacecraft since the 1940s and studying non-human technology in classified programs, then presumably there’s physical evidence somewhere. There are materials. There are documents. There are photographs and videos. There might even be biological samples.
Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, reviewed the documentary and raised this point directly. If these events happened as reported, why weren’t photographs, videos, or security camera footage included in the film? The documentary uses artistic representations of hovering spaceships over military bases — but if actual footage exists, as various officials have implied over the years, none of it appears in the film.
The answer the documentary gives — implicitly rather than explicitly — is that this evidence exists but remains classified. The people speaking on camera can describe what they’ve seen and what they know, but they can’t actually show it because doing so would violate their security clearances and potentially land them in prison.
That’s a frustrating position for anyone trying to evaluate these claims. Either these officials are trustworthy based on their credentials and their willingness to go on record, or they’re not. There’s no way to independently verify what they’re saying.
“When you hear elected leaders who have run for president or have very significant roles in our government say that to your face, it’s pretty eye-opening,” Farah said, “because they’re people who are aware of classified information they could never share. Their conclusion after being aware of the facts is that this is something that keeps them up at night.”
The Enthusiastic Reception
Not everyone shares the critics’ skepticism. The documentary has found an enthusiastic audience among people who’ve been following the UAP disclosure movement.
Podcaster Joe Rogan — whose show reaches millions of listeners — posted on social media calling The Age of Disclosure “one of the best documentaries on the whole UFO phenomenon ever.” He described it as featuring “high ranking government officials revealing the truth about what they know about aliens, crashed craft retrieval programs, and back engineering efforts that have been going on for decades.”
The film has also received praise from other filmmakers. Academy Award-winning documentarian Bryan Fogel called it “an expertly crafted and extraordinary film.” Oliver Stone described it as “monumental — a once-in-a-generation cultural flashpoint.”
The trailer alone racked up more than 20 million views when it was released. That’s not fringe interest. That’s mainstream attention for a topic that, until recently, was largely relegated to late-night cable programming and conspiracy theory websites.
The Bigger Picture
Whatever the truth about Holloman Air Force Base in 1964, or the Legacy Program, or any of the specific claims in this documentary, something has clearly shifted in how the UAP topic is being treated in official Washington.
A decade ago, any member of Congress who talked seriously about UFOs risked being dismissed as a crank. Today, the Senate Majority Leader has sponsored legislation about “non-human intelligence.” The Secretary of State appears in a documentary about alien contact. Multiple congressional hearings have been held, with witnesses testifying under oath about programs they claim the government is hiding.
The Pentagon has officially acknowledged running programs to investigate UAPs. The government has released videos of unidentified objects encountered by military pilots. Former officials with decades of service and high security clearances are going on record with claims that would have ended careers not long ago.
None of this proves that aliens have visited Earth, or that the government has recovered crashed spacecraft, or that George H.W. Bush was really told about a 1964 encounter at Holloman. But it does suggest that something is happening — either a genuine move toward disclosure, or an elaborate deception, or a collective delusion affecting an unusual number of otherwise credible people.
“I think this film puts us in a different place,” Farah told reporters. “It sets the table for a president to step to the microphone and more comfortably tell all of humanity that we’re not alone in the universe.”
Whether that day comes — and whether there’s anything to actually disclose — remains to be seen.
The Age of Disclosure is available on Amazon Prime Video for rental or purchase.
References
– New York Post: President George HW Bush ‘knew’ of 1964 alien contact
– Fox News: ‘Age of Disclosure’ documentary exposes 80-year UAP government cover-up
– Wikipedia: The Age of Disclosure
– Variety: The Age of Disclosure Documentary Release
– Wikipedia: Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
– CIA: George H.W. Bush as Director of Central Intelligence
– Wikipedia: Garry Nolan
– Deadline: HarperCollins Acquires Jay Stratton Memoir
– Wikipedia: UFOs: Past, Present, and Future
– NewsNation: Secretary of State Marco Rubio on UAPs
– Vice: Stanford Professor Garry Nolan Analyzing Materials from UFO Crashes
– The Hill: Senate Armed Services Committee to Hold UFO Hearing
– Skeptic Magazine: A Review of The Age of Disclosure
NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.
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