Robert Emenegger, an American writer, composer and producer, wrote the 1974 book UFOs: Past, Present and Future and co-wrote and scored the documentary of the same name. Through that project and his later interviews he became the original source of one of the most persistent stories in UFO history: that the U.S. Air Force once offered him film of a craft landing at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, the alleged Holloman UFO landing.

Emenegger's career was mainly in music and television. He was the composer for Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, the live-action series with chimpanzee actors that ran on ABC's Saturday-morning schedule in 1970 and 1971, and he scored other film work in the 1970s and early 1980s. His UFO project was a collaboration with producer Allan Sandler, whose company, Sandler Institutional Films, produced the documentary. Ray Rivas directed it from a script by Emenegger and Carol Johnsen, and Ballantine Books published Emenegger's companion book in 1974.

UFOs: Past, Present and Future was released in July 1974 with narration by Rod Serling, Burgess Meredith and José Ferrer, and it was nominated for Best Documentary at the 33rd Golden Globe Awards. Accounts of its origin differ: sources variously say the 1971 request to make a UFO film using only official Defense Department and NASA material came from the Republican Party, from officials at Norton Air Force Base in California, or from the Defense Department. Its interviewees included Colonel William Coleman, a former spokesman for Project Blue Book, and Colonel George Weinbrenner, a former head of foreign technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The film was reissued in 1976 and 1979 as UFOs: It Has Begun, the later version with added commentary by Jacques Vallée.

According to Emenegger and Sandler, Air Force officials told them they could use footage of a landing at Holloman, then withdrew the offer before the film was finished. The documentary instead included a dramatized Holloman sequence narrated by Serling. A few seconds of it were long rumored to come from real footage, but analysis showed the shot was part of the re-enactment, and no film or official record of such a landing has been made public.

Emenegger's account returned to wide circulation in 2026. A "UAP Timeline" attached to Michael Shellenberger's written testimony for a November 2024 House Oversight hearing lists, as an alleged event, a May 1973 meeting at which Coleman and Weinbrenner encouraged the filmmakers and promised them classified footage of a 1971 Holloman landing; an August 2026 post drew new attention to that entry. In July, physicist Eric Davis cited a taxonomy of craft and beings from an Emenegger book on a podcast, and in October excerpts posted online showed Jay Stratton writing in his memoir Out of the Shadows that multiple senior sources had told him of a 1964 landing at Holloman. Half a century after his documentary, the landing story Emenegger first told remains the reference point for those claims.