To briefly recap
last week's episode: In Chapter 1, we met the young paranormalist Hal Puthoff in 1978 while he was working at the Stargate Project, testing psychic performers like Uri Geller for the CIA, under the watchful eye of a fascinated government staffer named Chris Mellon. In Chapter 2, Puthoff was funded by the hotel billionaire and reincarnation aficionado Robert Bigelow at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah beginning in 1995, where they called themselves the National Institute for Discovery Science. They tantalized Bigelow's friend, senator Harry Reid, that poltergeists and flying saucers were the same manifestation of inter-dimensional beings, and talked him into coughing up $22 million in taxpayer money to fund such an exploration, which he began disbursing to Bigelow in 2008. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 covered the transfer of this $22 million to at least three different entities over at least five years, all controlled by Bigelow. The last of these various incarnations of the inter-dimensional poltergeist hunt was called AATIP, the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program, and was funded by Bigelow himself with exactly one employee, former military man Luis Elizondo. It was the unveiling of AATIP that first exploded onto the world news scene in 2017, accompanied by Navy UFO videos. In today's episode, we're going to discover just how this group of fringe paranormalists, armed only with Bigelow's very deep pockets and his passion to discover the secret of life after death, managed to capture the world's attention, their appetite for the paranormal now somehow reframed for public consumption as a hunt to learn the truth about UFOs that could threaten the military.