A global scramble is underway to identify and perhaps replicate unidentified mystery materials that have been collected at multiple sites around the world.

A few of the samples have defied analysis by leading scientists, who say they don’t know how the material was engineered, or why, or by whom?

Some of the metamaterial was allegedly collected in connection with UFO incidents, which gives the whole endeavor an otherworldly glow.

For years, the Pentagon secretly studied the seemingly impossible abilities of unknown craft captured in military videos.

Scientists now want to know if the materials used in these mystery aircraft allow them to do what they do. For years, one of the secret studies was carried out by BAASS (Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies), a Las Vegas operation hidden within Bigelow Aerospace.

Documents first reported by the I-Team show that BAASS landed a contract with the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and one of the objectives was to study so called metamaterials, as well as futuristic technologies.

“It was a multilayered bismuth and magnesium sample. Bismuth layers less than a human hair. Magnesium samples about 10 times the size of a human hair, supposedly picked up in the crash retrieval of an advanced aerospace vehicle. It looks like it’s been in a crash,” said Dr. Hal Puthoff, with the Institute for Advanced Studies during a presentation in Las Vegas.

In June, physicist Hal Puthoff came pretty close to saying that the weird wedge of metamaterial came from a crashed saucer, but he can’t know for sure. Puthoff and his colleague Dr. Eric Davis are on the cutting edge of attempts to identify an assortment of bits and pieces that are seemingly beyond anything we can create.

This one sample is engineered in layers thinner than microns, through a process unknown on earth, and for a purpose we can only guess.

“Nowhere could we find any evidence that anybody ever made one of these when we talked to people in the materials field who should know, they said we don’t know why anybody would want to make anything like this,” Dr. Puthoff said.

Astrophysicist Dr. Jacques Vallee has been analyzing mystery materials since the 80s, often using the technical expertise of Stanford University and Silicon Valley to unravel unknown samples acquired from all over the world. Vallee pointedly steers clear of any military funding and he’s shared his findings at public conferences.

“We have multiple samples from multiple sources, a wide range of variety and integrity,” said Lue Elizondo, To The Stars Academy.

These days, former intelligence officer Lue Elizondo helps to collect and protect unknown chunks for To The Stars Academy. Before that, he ran AATIP (Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program), the Pentagon’s secret UFO study. The same one which released the now famous videos of encounters between Navy pilots and the mystery machines dubbed the Tic Tac and Gimbal UFOs.

This summer, To The Stars launched ADAM, its own effort to find and study pieces of material that may have been stashed for decades after being retrieved from the sites of close encounters. Elizondo says there are legitimate reasons why the military, and now private groups, are now in a race to figure out these materials.

“What our international efforts are to potentially — and I say potentially, I’m not saying we’re doing this, maybe to replicate that technology or to reverse engineer that technology. Now you’re getting into sensitivities you don’t necessarily want everyone to be privy to,” Elizondo said in a June 2018 interview with the I-Team.

When the New York Times broke its story last year about the Pentagon’s UFO story, it reported that a sample of mystery material was secretly stored at Bigelow aerospace. Managers of that program told the I-Team that while they are familiar with some of the metamaterial samples, none were ever stashed in Las Vegas.