EXCLUSIVE: Retired US Army Colonel says secret UFO projects should be made public by October 2030 - to beat America's rivals and get ahead of a 'catastrophic' leak

Nearly two decades ago, a think-tank in Washington D.C. invited past and present government officials from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon and elsewhere to debate the risks of revealing the truth about UFOs. The 2004 event -- according to a former CIA scientist who went public with the shocking story Friday -- broke into working groups to weigh the positive and negative ramifications of declassifying America's top secret UFO programs. Every working group according to that scientist, Dr. Hal Puthoff, came back with the same conclusion: the societal risks of UFO'disclosure' were just too great. But now, a host of Washington insiders are calling for a strategic'campaign' to drag these alleged UFO reverse-engineering programs out into public view. The Sol Foundation, a new nonprofit dedicated to exploring the broad implications of what are now called'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena' or UAP, convened its first ever symposium Friday, sponsored by Stanford University's School of Medicine Sol's lofty goal, as described by its chief operating officer - the now famous UFO whistleblower and US Air Force and intel veteran David Grusch - is to'open ourselves to a future where truth, unity, technological advancements and a deeper understanding of our existence converge' The pivot emerged this weekend at an invite-only conference of former government officials, tenured physicists and other academic researchers, activists and reporters, held at Stanford University and attended by DailyMail.com. The most explosive moments from the UFO event -- the first ever symposium of the new nonprofit Sol Foundation, which is dedicated to exploring the broad implications of what are now called'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena' or UAP -- came from recently retired US Army Colonel Karl E. Nell.