The Micah Hanks Program

For centuries, stories have persisted about lost civilizations, mysterious islands, and ancient peoples whose innovations have been forgotten by time. Arguably, the most famous example involves the fabled Atlantis, which has remained a curious footnote in history since the philosopher Plato first discussed it in a pair of incomplete manuscripts,  Timaeus  and  Critias.  While these legends persist...

It is a question that has long haunted humankind:  are we alone in the universe?  Since early times, humans have wondered about "others," and mythology from around the world has passed down tales of strange, alien visitors and their wonderful - and at times frightening - technologies, which are often seen as being more akin to magic. Today, scientists continue the search that ancient cave artists...

2020 was a significant year, and in more ways than one. As the world fought the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, there were nonetheless many advances in science, as well as notable historical events that included the Pentagon's authorized release of Navy videos purporting to show unidentified aerial phenomena or UFOs.  As we look back on the last twelve months in this final 2020 edition of the...

By January 1953, dramatic events had brought the CIA and UFOs - a topic the agency had little desire to commit to having involvement with - to a gridlock. Following widespread sightings around the country, and even over Washington, D.C., the intelligence community was beginning to look seriously at what UFOs might represent and whether they might present a threat, directly or indirectly. What foll...

On the morning of July 16, 1945, the world changed forever. On a remote test site in the New Mexico desert, a group of scientists gathered and watched the first atomic explosion, and humankind's entry into the Atomic Age.  It has long been argued that the beginning of the UFO phenomenon coincides with the arrival of nuclear weapons at the end of the Second World War. But despite the fact that many...

In 1948, a TOP SECRET document was produced by the U.S. Air Force which made surprising conclusions about the possible origins of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. Because of this, all copies were ordered to be declassified and destroyed, leaving none in existence today. It is but one among many long-sought documents produced by the United States government which chronicle the history of its i...

Many futurists believe that we will go on to create technologies far more the likes of science fiction than what we recognize today as science fact... perhaps even resembling what we call UAP or UFOs. Within the next century, possible innovations in artificial intelligence may reshape the world as we know it, and eventually, humans could even develop spacecraft that can carry us to the stars. But...

For centuries, humans have wondered whether alien life exists on other worlds. Today, astronomers agree that in the coming decades--perhaps within some of our lifetimes--we will discover alien life in some form. But if it ends up being intelligent, will humankind be capable of communicating with them? To know the answer to this begs further questions about the origins of language, and how that rel...

During the Cold War, U.S. Intelligence agencies learned that the Soviet Union was funneling large amounts of funding toward unlocking mysteries of the human mind. This prompted similar efforts on part of the United States, eventually culminating in the CIA's Star Gate remote viewing program.  Could psychic phenomena really be used to gain intelligence about the enemy, and if so, what else could be...

It was the most high-profile case involving a hacker in the history of Britain, and at the time the story broke, one of the biggest stories in the UK, if not the world. Gary McKinnon, a Glasgow-born computer programmer, was arrested at his apartment flat in Wood Green, north London. The charge: hacking United States military computer systems within just weeks of the September 2001 terror attacks....

Some of the most famous minds of the 19th century became swept up in the allure of Spiritualism and mediumship. No less among these had been Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who became one of the staunchest defenders of Spiritualism, even authoring a two-volume history of the religion. However, his friend Harry Houdini, while initially open to the possibility of mediumship as an avenue toward making contac...

It was an Autumn afternoon like any other. The date was October 24, 1961, and Joan Carolyn Risch had just returned with her daughter from shopping after a dentist's appointment earlier that day. Her husband Martin had traveled to New York on business, leaving at home Joan alone while her infant son slept upstairs, and her daughter Lillian played across the street at the home of their neighbors, th...

The Second World War had barely ended by the time reports of "flying saucers" began to make headlines in 1947. What were these mysterious objects, and were they friends, or foes? Soon, speculation about what world superpower might possess such technology shifted to a novel proposition: what if they could be evidence of extraterrestrial visitation to Earth? Although the flying saucers were a new de...

At the height of the Cold War, the entire world was on edge. Desperate times often lead to desperate measures, and during this tense period, the Central Intelligence Agency began a program aimed at testing to see if the human mind could be controlled. They aspired to become "mind hackers," and the program that resulted was Project MK Ultra, one of the most notorious endeavors ever undertaken by an...

Some have called it the "ultimate" Cold War-era urban legend. It is a story of two space programs: but rather than those of Soviet Russia and the United States, this tale involves the theory that apart from Russia's "public" program, there was much that it also kept hidden away in the world of black projects. During the early years of the Space Race, a pair of Italian brothers began to intercept s...

Last week, the search for extraterrestrial life got quite a boost after a team of researchers announced that they may have discovered signs of life on one of Earth's nearest and least hospitable neighboring planets, Venus.  It would be ironic if we were to discover the likely presence of life on such an otherwise inhospitable world, especially since this had been the planet which figured heavily i...

On Monday, Oct 22, 1973, the Ohio Lancaster Eagle-Gazette carried a most unusual headline. "Helicopter Nearly Tangles With UFO" the story read, which recounted a harrowing tale of an Army Captain, Lawrence Coyne, and three other servicemen who had the fright of their lives a few days earlier, while flying back to Cleveland after a routine medical examination. 1973 was one of the most significant y...

In 1958, a series of large, human-like footprints were discovered by employees at a California logging site. A casting of one of the prints was made by the man who discovered them, Jerry Crew, who took his unusual find to a local newspaper... and an American legend was born.  However, decades later it was revealed that one of the men overseeing the logging operation, Ray Wallace, had been involved...

In 1970, zoologist and popular author Ivan T. Sanderson wrote, "it may come as somewhat of a shock... to learn that, by actual count, over 50 percent of all so-called 'sightings' of UFOs have occurred over, coming from, going away over, or plunging into or coming out of water. That this fact is known to officialdom is manifest from their official publications, but they seem to have left this aquat...

In November 2006, something odd appeared in the late afternoon skies above one of the world's busiest airports. More than a decade later, no simple explanation exists for what had been observed by a crew staff at O'Hare International Airport, which was described by those who saw it as a circular or disc-shaped object hovering over Gate C17. The story has become one of the most widely-discussed and...

This week on  The Micah Hanks Program,  after news and a segment that takes a deep look at what is currently known about the DoD's recent announcement about its UAP Task Force, we turn our attention to the efforts of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, an organization comprised of scientists, former military, and others from various disciplines who are working to advance efforts toward the a...

It was the summer of 1967, and Jacques Vallee was feeling troubled. A young French computer scientist living in America, Vallee had been tasked with one of the most unusual jobs anyone could imagine: assisting astronomer J. Allen Hynek with the review of reports collected by the United States Air Force about unidentified flying objects. It was also the summer of 1967 that Vallee first uncovered a...

During the 1960s, American author and UFO researcher John Keel had a problem: it involved reports of Men in Black, the mysterious strangers in dark suits said to appear after UFO sightings and intimidate witnesses. So who were these ominous observers of the UFO phenomenon? Could some of them have been government agents—possibly investigators with the U.S. Air Force during the years of Project Blue...

"For more than a decade," reads the latest in a series of New York Times articles on UFOs that have appeared since late 2017, a shadowy Pentagon UFO program "has been conducting classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials," according to officials and documents associated with the program.  That isn't all the recent New York Times p...