Was It Scrap Metal or an Alien Spacecraft? The Army Asked an Elite Defense Lab to Investigate

The comment was made half jokingly, but for one company, Lockheed Martin, the answer was…complicated. 

Lockheed’s Skunk Works lab—a legendary facility known for its work on some of the country’s most secret projects—had, in fact, just tested, and attempted to replicate, a piece of metal that was said to have been gathered from a crashed UFO outside Roswell, N.M. The U.S. Army wanted to know whether it could use the material to build vehicles that bend the conventional rules of gravity.

Spoiler alert: The idea didn’t fly. But the untold story behind the ersatz space metal turned out to be almost as strange as UFO fiction. The metal went on a three-decade journey from a fringe legend fed by a late-night radio personality to the hands of a 1990s-era rock star to the elite testing lab of a top defense contractor. 

It was just one of a series of episodes Kirkpatrick’s team dug into as it investigated claims that Washington was hiding what it knew about a secret program to reverse-engineer fallen extraterrestrial spacecraft. 

Along the way, Kirkpatrick’s investigation brought him into contact with a growing collection of UFO true believers from the Pentagon. They included men whose careers had taken them to unconventional places in the outer reaches of the American intelligence community, where they explored the potential uses of psychic powers and teleportation in warfare—not to mention werewolves. Alleged evidence to support the whistleblowers’ theories appeared to vanish just as Kirkpatrick got close to it.

By the time Kirkpatrick’s inquiry wrapped up—culminating in a report last year by the Defense Department that found allegations of a government coverup to be baseless—his witnesses saw him, too, as part of the vast UFO coverup.

In a statement, Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough, said the investigation “has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently” and “determined that claims involving specific people, known locations, technological tests, and documents” that say otherwise “are inaccurate.”  

This account is based on interviews with two dozen current and former U.S. officials, scientists, and military contractors involved in the inquiry as well as thousands of pages of documents, emails, text messages and recordings.

In 1996, Art Bell, a late-night radio host whose program on the paranormal was one of the most popular in the country, received a mystery package in the mail. It contained metal fragments from an anonymous listener who wrote that their grandfather had collected them as part of a military crash-retrieval team at Roswell.

Roswell had long been a touchstone of UFO culture. In 1947, the Army announced it had recovered the remnants of a flying disc near a base there. Although the government eventually revealed it was really a U.S. spy balloon, there was no convincing many UFO buffs that the military wasn’t harboring alien technology.  

“They are metal, they are charred, very charred, on the outside, either a result of re-entry or entry into the atmosphere, and the resulting heat, or a crash. I would have no way of knowing,” Bell said on the show, before moving on to discuss sightings of a mythical creature known as the chupacabra, which is said to suck the blood of goats.

More than a decade later, two scientists who had worked with the Pentagon helped run a research program examining the possibilities of alien technology and explored “metamaterials,” a type of synthetic substance. The program published research speculating that metamaterials could bestow aircraft with exotic powers such as invisibility.

Could the Bell sample be proof of the concept? 

A group founded by Tom DeLonge, a frontman for the pop-punk band Blink-182, thought so. The group, called To The Stars, bought the pieces of metal from a UFO researcher in 2019 for $35,000 to test that possibility.

By then, To The Stars had assembled a collection of heavyweights including the two scientists and a former Pentagon official. The former official, Luis Elizondo, joined after quitting the Defense Department and going public with the claim that he had helped run a government UFO program. 

One of the scientists, Hal Puthoff, became vice president for the group. The other, Eric Davis, who also became an adviser to the group, told the New York Times in 2020 that testing of the sample had revealed it was not of this Earth. “We couldn’t make it ourselves,” he told the Times. 

To The Stars made the case to the Army that replicating this material could unlock futuristic weapons systems. The Army soon signed an agreement to test the metal for potential antigravity and cloaking properties.

It turned out Davis, an astrophysicist, was a source of many of Kirkpatrick’s witness accounts. Davis was a storied character in UFO lore and had spent more than 20 years investigating ideas for the military most would consider unfathomable, including teleportation, antigravity devices and the possibility of interstellar space travel using wormholes.  

For years, Davis, now 64, was part of a small group of defense experts who had claimed to know about a top-secret program at Lockheed’s Skunk Works to hoard extraterrestrial technology that might one day be converted into fearsome weapons. Their claims gained credence in part because of the siloed nature of the U.S. national security establishment, which can make it almost impossible even for insiders to determine the truth of some of the country’s most secret programs. 

When Davis went to talk to Kirkpatrick, he said he knew both about a U.S. alien program and a similar one by Moscow. Central Intelligence Agency officials in the late 2000s had asked him to look into a crashed UFO decades earlier in Russia, he told Kirkpatrick’s team. In Davis’s telling, Moscow was said to be reverse-engineering a laser system harvested from the vessel, one that could threaten U.S. space assets. 

The CIA told Kirkpatrick’s team that it had no record of Davis being tasked with any such assignment. But investigators came across another startling tidbit: The information Davis had was of a real, covert Russian laser program. Kirkpatrick’s team determined the UFO part of the story was likely Russian misinformation designed to throw America off the trail—not unlike the Air Force’s own myths about Area 51.

Puthoff, who also had a long history with exotic U.S. programs—creating one for the CIA in the 1970s to deploy psychic spies against the Soviet Union—told Kirkpatrick’s team of another mysterious incident that had fueled UFO belief. 

He said he had been invited to a 2004 panel in Arlington, Va., the type the government often quietly funds through think tanks to field new ideas. This one, Puthoff said he was told, was sponsored by the White House and given a very specific prompt: Help the president decide whether or not he should finally disclose the existence of a crash-retrieval program, and assess the possible upheaval the revelation would ignite. What would be the effect on the stock market? On religion? Would aerospace companies sue the government into bankruptcy when they learned their rivals had decades ago been given access to alien technology? 

“We added up all the numbers and we said, ‘no way,’ we can’t handle disclosure,” Puthoff said in an interview. Kirkpatrick’s team investigated whether the White House really sponsored such an event. The chief executive of the think tank that hosted the discussion, John Petersen, told Kirkpatrick a former senior Pentagon space official had notified him that President George W. Bush was preparing to make public all the secrets held by the government about aliens.

“I was told that it was real, that it was happening,” Petersen said in an interview. But months later, when Petersen asked the former official about the monumental truth about to be revealed, the reply was, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” 

Bush’s chief of staff from that time told Kirkpatrick he didn’t know about the panel or any such plan to disclose alien secrets. Both Kirkpatrick and Petersen ended up with the only explanation they could think of: Arlington Institute and the panelists had been tricked. For what reason remains a mystery.