The Secret Space Program is a family of claims that hidden military, intelligence or corporate groups operate spacecraft, off-world bases and crews outside public knowledge. Its best-known version, promoted by Corey Goode, holds that recruits serve 20-year tours on other worlds and are then age-regressed and returned to the moment they left, a scheme he calls "20 and Back." No government has acknowledged any such program.

According to the Washington Spectator, the story grew out of Alternative 3, a mock documentary broadcast by Britain's Anglia Television in June 1977 that described a secret superpower plan to colonize the Moon and Mars. Gary McKinnon, the Scottish systems administrator charged in the United States over intrusions into military and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002, told the BBC in 2006 that he had glimpsed a NASA image of a cigar-shaped object above Earth that "definitely wasn't man-made"; he has also described finding a list of "non-terrestrial officers." NASA told the BBC it had no direct evidence of extraterrestrial life. From 2015 the exopolitics writer Michael Salla published a run of books on alleged Navy, Air Force and Army space programs, while Goode co-hosted the Gaia series Cosmic Disclosure with David Wilcock. MUFON made "The Case for a Secret Space Program" the theme of its 2017 symposium, a choice some ufologists criticized.

No record supports the claims, and they have drawn direct rebuttals. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office said in its March 2024 historical report that alleged hidden programs either did not exist or were misidentified authentic programs, according to the Washington Spectator, which also reported that in a 2022 deposition Goode said, "I've never lived on another planet," and called his stories his intellectual property. Goode also sought trademarks on "Secret Space Program" and "20 and Back," The Daily Beast reported. McKinnon's computer intrusions are documented, but he never preserved the image he describes.

Scrutiny intensified in 2026. On NewsNation's Reality Check in September, filmmaker Darcy Weir, whose Dark Alliance films trace the claimants promoted on Gaia, discussed that deposition, and he and Ross Coulthart contrasted the "20 and Back" and med bed stories with documented covert space activity such as the Manned Orbiting Laboratory and the X-37B spaceplane. Weir has also called McKinnon's account different from the rest. The Secret Space Program remains one of the most commercially successful strands of modern UFO belief, sustained by books, streaming series and conferences, while no record has surfaced of the off-world fleets or age-regressed veterans at its center.