When I got the opportunity to be in a conference call about Syfy's program Inside Secret Government Warehouses: Shocking Revelations, I jumped at it. My late father had a very long-term interest in the stories of UFOs, the writings of people like Erich Von Daniken and related subjects, so the chance to speak to the producer of this show before it aired was of great interest to me.

In my report of the conference call that took place last Thursday, I told of what the speakers, Peacock Productions producer Gretchen Eisele and Syfy executive vice president for programming Tom Vitale shared about the special. In the call, they mentioned possible smoking guns that the program would present on television for the first time. However, they were not willing to say much beyond what was in a press release that was sent out before the call.

The show did not only look at so-called secret warehouses, but at some well-known and not so well-known conspiracy subjects, such as Project Montauk. It also discussed some known projects that were once secret, such as MKULTRA -- which involved the testing of drugs on Americans without their knowledge of what they were being subjected to.

One place of interest that cooperated with the program -- allowing the host, NBC News journalist Lester Holt access -- was the Vatican. They opened up their secret archives for filming, giving them access very rarely given. One item of note was as Holt entered the head archivist's office was a large display of a document of historical note, specifically the letter of a number of English lords in the 1500s asking the Pope to allow the nullification of the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. You can see a picture of Holt standing in front of the document by clicking this link.

Beyond that, the show did not get inside any government facility that was speculated to be secret. In the case of the Vatican, one of the archivists clearly states that it is called "secret" as it is private, not concealed. In the case of the two most famous alleged secret warehouses, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and the infamous Area 51 in Nevada, all you get to see are external shots of one, and the usual shots of desert for the other.

There were only three things in the show that resembled smoking guns that saved this show from becoming, sadly, the latest version of Al Capone's Vault of television infamy. The first was the results of ground penetrating radar at Camp Hero in New York, the site of the alleged Project Montauk showed a flat surface under the ground that could be the roof of the rumored underground facility.

The second item consisted of a piece of video, supposedly of the interview of an alien, shot through a glass partition. This item was examined by a visual effects specialist who is very skeptical of it as the movements were more similar to the movements of a puppet than a living being.

The final item was a plaster mold of a mandible that was said to be of a creature not of this Earth. However, Shara Bailey, dental anthropologist at New York University, noted that the cast had been altered after it was created, and raised more questions about the validity of the cast.

Frankly, the special was a great two hours for conspiracy buffs, but very short on evidence, genuine smoking guns, or anything of earth shaking magnitude, which explains, in this writer's opinion, why this program was consigned to Syfy instead of the main NBC network, despite it being produced by NBC News.