New Realities, October 17, 2026

New Realities with Alan Steinfeld UFO Intentions, Atomic Site Patterns, and Seventy Years of Institutional Denial with Larry Hancock Host Alan Steinfeld talks with researcher Larry Hancock about UFO Intentions, the book he co-wrote using strategic-intelligence methods to trace seventy years of sighting patterns around atomic weapons sites, military bases, and government disclosure efforts. A 1964 Sighting Sparks a Lifetime of Research Alan Steinfeld opens the show by introducing Larry Hancock, who has studied UFOs since 1964 and recently co-authored UFO Intentions. Hancock traces his interest to that summer in Oklahoma, when local radio stations carried live reports of police watching a formation of lights in the sky. Stepping outside, he saw a bright oval object overhead that he later learned was a military jet on afterburner, even though the Air Force denied sending any aircraft and claimed the sightings were really the constellation Orion, a claim Hancock, already an amateur astronomer, knew was impossible. He explains that his team spent seven years applying strategic-intelligence practices, the methods analysts use to study an adversary who never behaves predictably, to UFO sighting data. His earlier book, Unidentified, tested the theory that the objects were Soviet or captured German technology and found that scenario did not hold up, which pushed him toward the broader study published in UFO Intentions. Patterns Around Atomic Weapons Sites Hancock describes the clearest finding from his research team's pattern analysis: UFO sightings in the late 1940s cluster first around sites where radioactive materials were refined and produced, then shift to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were assembled and stockpiled, and later move again as warheads are deployed to bases across the country and eventually to missile sites in the 1960s. Each shift follows the weapons rather than repeating at earlier locations, a trend Hancock says shows clear intention rather than coincidence. He contrasts that solid data, drawn from Air Force studies that ran through 1970, with a troubling gap afterward, when the Air Force stopped investigating reports and no comparable records resumed until renewed congressional interest around 2020. Hancock points to a seven-hour 2024 incident at White Sands Missile Range, where helicopters and radar tracked unidentified orbs that lined up and flashed their lights in sequence, a display he reads as deliberate signaling that the United States has never answered. Behavioral Studies, the Ariel School, and Institutional Denial Hancock explains that beginning in the mid-1960s the pattern shifts from dramatic daytime formation flights to quieter nighttime encounters at low altitude involving individuals, often with reports of lost time that resemble hypnosis more than ordinary trauma. He cites the Ariel School incident in Africa, where children reported an empathetic, telepathic message from beings at their schoolhouse, as an example of this different kind of contact attempt. Steinfeld argues that even without government acknowledgment, individual witnesses are deeply transformed, and he suggests the phenomenon is pushing humans to develop consciousness as a tool for meeting it on equal footing. Hancock agrees the effort looks developmental rather than hostile, but notes that some of the scarier stories, like underground alien bases harvesting people, trace back to disinformation planted by American agencies in the 1970s and 1980s to cover unrelated national-security programs, not to anything the visitors themselves have done. Both men call the government's refusal to even say the word intelligence an unresolved institutional denial. Trickster Myths, Hidden Mentors, and Fifty Years of Warnings The conversation turns to Hancock's background in anthropology, where he sees a broader taxonomy of contact that includes historical traditions, not just physical craft. He recalls indigenous stories across many cultures of advanced, usually benevolent mentors, alongside a separate trickster figure who causes trouble only to teach a lesson, distinct from purely malicious tricksters like Coyote. Hancock argues that the recurring message passed down to contactees has never been an offer of technology, but a warning about how humans are already using their own: atomic energy, chemicals, and environmental damage. He points out that the current wave of sightings began in the 1940s, in the middle of a war, and suggests observers may have been alarmed to watch humanity build forty thousand atomic weapons within a decade. Steinfeld brings up John Mack, who was rejected by both academic and UFO communities for taking the spiritual and transformative side of these experiences seriously, and argues Mack's instinct that the phenomenon targets what he called the consciously impaired was essentially correct. The Elephant in the Room and the 1952 Robertson Panel Hancock calls the government's basic unwillingness to say the obvious, that an intelligence is behind these objects, the elephant in the room. He traces today's silence to 1952, when the CIA-organized Robertson Panel, alarmed by sightings around atomic sites in the southwest, chose to treat the subject as a psychological-warfare problem rather than a physical one, worried both that the Soviets could exploit the confusion and that public morale would collapse if people believed the country's airspace was not secure. The panel's recommendations, Hancock says, led directly to policies that minimized reports by labeling them insufficient data and made the subject look ridiculous through planted stories and even Walt Disney films mocking the idea of life on Mars. He adds a more concrete example of apparent two-way contact: during the 1950s, several unidentified objects responded correctly when interrogated by military Identification Friend or Foe radar codes, including one object over Arizona that stopped abruptly after approaching at eight thousand miles an hour and signaled that it was friendly before departing. Whistleblowers, Disclosure Theater, and the Road Ahead Steinfeld and Hancock turn to recent figures like David Grusch and Elizondo, with Hancock warning that newer, more sensational claims, such as reptilians killing a recovery team, echo the same disinformation pattern he traced in earlier decades, even when the people repeating them are sincere. He also flags older contactees, including Daniel Fry's story of boarding a landed craft at White Sands, as examples that mix real and manufactured accounts together in ways that discredit everyone. Both agree that legislation protecting whistleblowers fails because it does not protect their sources, leaving witnesses unable to name names. Hancock argues real disclosure already happened years ago in substance, and that the practical path forward is new, internationally vetted research channels, free of nondisclosure agreements, rather than waiting on any single government. He closes by holding up UFO Intentions, crediting co-authors Ian Porritt, Joshua Pierson and Sean Grovenser, naming publisher Skyhorse, and previewing a more speculative follow-up book, UFO Origins, due in February, before Steinfeld thanks him for grounding the conversation in evidence.