Everything that we know
and have learned about mankind
and its place
in the universe suggests
that we are a part of the norm.
We are not the exception.
Within the last month,
a planet was identified that has water
a mere 110 light
years away from Earth.
We need to begin to prepare
to accept and understand
that we are not
alone in the universe,
have not been at all
throughout this time.
NARRATOR: The same
year that life-giving water
was discovered
on a distant planet,
the US Navy made a
startling announcement.
[PILOT SPEAKING]
NARRATOR: Images
captured by its pilots
of objects exhibiting a vastly
superior technology were authentic.
MELLON: We can start to finally,
at long last, after all these decades,
begin to answer these questions
about the origin of these vehicles,
where they're from,
how they're made,
how they function and why they're here.
WOMAN: People need to know
there is something else out there.
NARRATOR: To fully understand,
we must examine a body
of evidence long suppressed.
A parallel history to the
one we think we know,
stretching back
at least 70 years.
On a clear, sunny day in 1955,
William Coleman,
a decorated World w*r II pilot,
took off from Miami on a routine
flight to deliver a B-25 b*mber
to an airbase in Mississippi.
My co-pilot said,
"Look at that bright spot up there."
I think it's just a
reflection of the sun,
a craze probably,
in the windshield.
NARRATOR: He and his passengers,
two aviation engineers,
realized it was a strange object
making a rapid descent
right across their flight path.
My God, look at that thing.
And I opened it up to
max continuous power,
we're clipping right along
at over 300 miles an hour,
right on the treetops...
I'm right on the
tail of this thing.
But as we got close, I said,
"It doesn't have a tail.
Doesn't have any wings."
Look at the shadow on the ground.
The shadow was perfectly round.
That's not an airplane.
And I said, "I'm overtaking it."So I said,
"Hang on."
So I make a hard turn.
There it was, a disc going
across the field with two big swirls.
What I didn't see was any exhaust,
propulsion.
No rivet lines, a rounded edge about
that size where it all came together.
A true flying saucer.
NARRATOR: Then
it seemed to vanish,
until they spotted it
thousands of feet above them.
Bright yellow,
sun-ish looking object.
It went like a bat out of hell.
NARRATOR: After they landed, the
stunned witnesses were separately debriefed
by Project Blue Book, the Air Force
investigation of the UFO phenomena.
Ironically,
a little over a decade later,
Col. William T. Coleman became
public spokesman for Project Blue Book.
Probably what we saw may
have been from somewhere else.
Look,
the Air Forces are very deadly,
being when it comes to
intercepting an unknown.
If it proves hostile,
we're gonna sh**t it down.
Other than that, no problem.
NARRATOR: In the late 1940s,
America seemed
impregnable to military threat.
It had just emerged from
World w*r II masters of the air,
the only nuclear-armed
superpower in the world.
But in 1947,
something appeared in the sky,
and everything changed.
MAN: Every newscaster and
every newspaper across the nation
has made headlines out of it.
And this afternoon
we are honored indeed
to have here in our studio
this man Kenneth Arnold,
who we believe may be able
to give us a firsthand account,
and give you the same,
on what happened.
KENNETH: I kept looking for
their tails. They didn't have any tail.
I thought, "Well,
maybe something's wrong in my eyes."
They seemed to flip and flash in the sun,
just like a mirror.
I'd be glad to confirm it with my
hands on a Bible because I did see it,
and whether it has anything to
do with our army or our intelligence,
or whether it has to do with
some foreign country, I don't know.
Arnold had sent this sketch to
the Air Force following his citing.
He was later invited to California's
Hamilton Field Army Air Base,
where he was handed
what he was told
were authentic
photos of a similar craft.
WOMAN: "At the request
of Lt. Col. Donald Springer,
commanding officer of the
Fourth Air Force Intelligence,
I was given the above
prints a4s a courtesy
for the assistance he had
given military intelligence."
NARRATOR: The photo
was taken in Arizona
just two weeks after
his own encounter.
They said that my father,
his sighting of flying saucers,
got more attentionthan
the ending of World w*r II.
He was besieged by newspaper
reporters from all over the world.
Mm-hm.
NARRATOR: Reporters interviewed
United Airlines pilot E.J. Smith
who also flew the
northwest route.
He joked Arnold had likely
been fooled by a c*ck reflection,
until he, too,
became a witness a few weeks later.
He and his stunned
crew had watched
as nine discs maneuvered in
formation for a full 45minutes.
PITTMAN: And from
there it just exploded.
The first few days
in July of 1947
had a very large level
of exciting activity.
NARRATOR: These unknown
objects barnstormed across the country,
sometimes in
fleet-like formations
that looked like a
deliberate show of force.
BOB HOPE: Hundreds of
people told Air Force investigators
they'd seen the saucers
with their own eyes.
Bright, shiny things that whooshed
through the air at incredible speeds.
Even airline pilots, who seldom
indulge in fantasy, reported sighting them.
And Air Force fliers
told of chasing them,
or something, all over the sky.
The Air Force call them
"unidentified flying objects,"
but people went right on calling
them saucers and seeing them.
There was something in the air.
[NEWS BROADCASTER SPEAKING]
NARRATOR: But a then-secret
memorandum by the same general
suggested that the
highest military echelons
thought there was
plenty to worry about.
The memo states,
"The phenomenon reported is something real
and not visionary
or fictitious."
It described metallic discs
circular in shape, with domes on top,
often traveling in formations
of three to nine craft.
It also listed
aerodynamic capabilities
with disturbing implications
for national defense.
Extreme rates of climb,
dazzling maneuverability,
and a superior capacity
for evasive action.
A lot of people expected that
the United States government
was about to confirm,
"Okay, they're ours.
This is an exciting new technological
advance that we were testing,
and now it's time to
tell people about it."
Occasionally,
eyewitness testimony included
compelling
photographic evidence.
Evelyn Trent was feeding
her rabbits when she spotted
a metallic disc-shaped
object floating over their farm.
She alerted her husband,
Paul, to grab his camera,
and he managed to get two shots.
They described the object slowly
hovering before it abruptly sped away.
Life magazine
picked up the story,
and the McMinnville UFO
became a global sensation.
PITTMAN: There's no
chance of this being weather.
There's no chance of this
being a star or an aircraft.
This is either some kind of structured
object that we don't know what it is,
or it's a hoax.
Paul Trent and his wife, they were honest,
simple, hardworking people
who never made a dime off
the photographs that they took.
They never tried to
make a dime off of it.
It just come up like that
and tipped and just...
I mean,
it really went. It went fast.
I've never seen anything go so fast
in my life as that thing went. Yeah.
NARRATOR: In 1951, future astronaut
Gordon Cooper, while training in Germany,
chased a large formation
with his squadron of fighter jets.
[GORDON COOPER SPEAKING]
And they would come over and do
the same maneuvers that we make
except every once in a
while one of them goes, zip!
And you just can't
do that in a fighter.
DELBERT NEWHOUSE: There are two saucers,
one inverted over the other.
They seemed to be made of
some kind of polished metal.
When I first saw the objects,
they were almost overhead.
By the time we had
the camera ready to go,
they had moved to a
considerably greater distance.
NARRATOR: But the unknowns
showed no signs of hostility.
An otherworldly power on
its own mysterious mission.
Commercial pilots William
Nash and William Fortenberry,
former Navy aviators with
thousands of hours of flight experience,
saw eight huge discs
fly in a stack formation
over Chesapeake Bay, Virginia,
just a stone's throw from Washington,
DC.
When they came out over
the blackness of the bay,
they were distinct
six red coins.
When they got closer,
we could see that you're...
It looked like you were looking
down into it, like a hot coal.
NARRATOR: They reported the glowing
red objects had approached them head-on
at a speed they estimated at
6,000 to 12,000 miles per hour.
It came in like this
and went out like this.
There would be no way of making a
complete reversal or a 90-degree turn
12,000 miles an hour or greater
without making the
occupants juice on the wall.
That really shook us up.
Looking at the thing shook us up.
Nothing could have
gotten to that degree
of scientific progress
without some of the intermediate
stuff having become public knowledge.
You just knew that they
were not from this planet.
NARRATOR: The next weekend,
the unthinkable happened.
The nation's capital was
invaded from the skies.
Seven unknown blips suddenly appeared
on radar at Washington National Airport.
Air-traffic controllers at both
Andrews and Bolling Air Force bases
confirmed the objects as they
danced through restricted airspace.
PITTMAN: The Capitol Building.
The White House
where the president lived,
these were some of the most
important places in the country
when it comes to
national defense.
And there were UFOs
violating this airspace,
and there was nothing thatthe
Air Force could do about it.
NARRATOR: F-94
interceptors were scrambled.
Pentagon press liaison Al Chop
was in the radar room that night.
We could see the planes
coming in on this radar scope
and the minute we saw
the beginning of these guys,
the UFOs disappeared.
They just left.
Obviously, whatever these
things were had intelligence,
enough to get out of the area
when we had an intercept going in.
NARRATOR: But the next weekend,
it began again.
Pilot William Patterson pushed
his Starfire jet to maximum speed
to try to intercept one
of the glowing objects.
Flew right into the middle
of three or four of them.
NARRATOR: Al Chop recalls the
pilot's panicky air-to-ground transmission
as he streaked at 600 miles per
hour into a group of unknowns.
He actually said,
"They're closing in on me. What do I do?"
It was frightening.
NARRATOR: The Air Force had just
issued orders to sh**t down the unknowns,
if "they can't talk them down."
I'm not gonna tell an Air Force pilot
to fire at the damn thing or anything.
But I didn't say anything.
Nobody said anything.
And then all of a sudden,
the things began to move away from him
and he said, "They're gone."
I'm convinced
they're solid objects.
I'm convinced that they're
probably from another planet,
or from outer space somewhere.
I've always felt that
way since that night.
NARRATOR: The very next day,
the Air Force's top brass
hastily prepared the largest Pentagon
press conference since World w*r II.
Seen here in a last-minute huddle,
Gen. Roger Ramey,
Air Force director of
operations at the Pentagon.
Capt. Edward Ruppelt
of Project Blue Book,
the Air Force's official
UFO investigations arm,
and director of Air Force intelligence,
Gen. John Samford.
Since 1947, we have received and
analyzed between one and 2,000 reports
that have come to us
from all kinds of sources.
Of this great mass of reports,
we have been able,
adequately,
to explain the great bulk of them.
However, there have been a certain
percentage of this volume of reports
that have been made by credible
observersof relatively incredible things.
We can say that the recent
sightings are in no way connected
with any secret development by
any department of the United States.
NARRATOR: In the Q&A with reporters,
Samford suggested a 50-50 chance
it could have been radar waves
bouncing off temperature inversions.
The point that Samford
put across all too effectively
was that they were not real. They
were just tricks of the atmosphere.
And atmospheric phenomena
can't be a threat to national security.
You don't sh**t at clouds.
NARRATOR: The public
was pondering the implications
of possible
extraterrestrial contact.
MAN: Robert L. Farnsworth, President
of the United States Rocket Society,
told defense officials not to permit
our planes to fire at any flying saucers.
He says this might alienate humankind
from beings of far superior forces.
Farnsworth feels that friendly
contact should be sought
as long as possible.
NARRATOR: Behind the scenes,
the CIA had other concerns.
A secret internal memo
urged immediate attention
to unexplained
objects in the vicinity
of major US
Defense installations.
I would dare say,
if anything happened
we thought was a threat
to our national security,
somebody out there,
one of the services, would respond to it.
Remember,
this is the height of the Cold w*r.
Okay, there are bombers on both
sides loaded with nuclear bombs.
NARRATOR: Dr. Jacque Vallee was the
inspiration for the French UFO researcher
in Steven Spielberg's Close
Encounters of the Third Kind.
[SPEAKS FRENCH]
Have you recently
had a close encounter?
NARRATOR: In real life,
Dr. Vallee conducted
sober scientific research
on the phenomenon.
We know now that
there is no simple answer.
NARRATOR: For decades,
he met with witnesses
and traveled the globe
gathering evidence...
ultimately creating the first
database on the UFO subject.
Mr. Chairman,
all the great nations of the world
are represented on this committee.
Let us keep in mind thatthe
UFO phenomenon may represent
an even greater reality.
NARRATOR: Vallee also consulted with
scientific, military and government officials,
including Project Blue Book's top
science adviser, Dr. J. Allen Hynek.
I began my work as scientific
consultant to the United States Air Force
as an open skeptic.
NARRATOR: Hynek was a university
astronomer with a high-security clearance
when the Air Force recruited
him to investigate UFOs.
And it so happened when the Air
Force got the job of trying to figure out
what some of these strange
flying saucer stories were about,
well, they needed an astronomer
to see how many of the reports
could possibly be explained as
meteors and twinkling stars and planets.
NARRATOR: The two scientists
became close colleagues,
with Hynek entrusting Vallee to
index the reams of Blue Book files
scattered throughout
Hynek's home.
It was there that Vallee made a
chance discovery of a letter so secret,
he had to appeal
to the chief counsel
of the Senate Defense
Appropriations Committee
to get it declassified.
That document changed
my life. It taught me that
the subject had been taken much
more seriously than anybody thought.
NARRATOR: The document
revealed an ultra-secret,
highly funded
scientific investigation
working parallel to Blue Book
unknown to all but a select few.
The letter was
signed by H.C. Cross,
director of exotic metallurgy at
Battelle National Laboratories.
VALLEE: These were the
people who had analyzed the facts
with a large budget, with highly competent
physicistsand computer scientists.
Who are these people? What
information did they have?
Good evening. Tonight,
we go after a fantastic story.
The story that flying saucers from
other worlds are visiting our planet,
just as we are exploring outer
space with our own rocket satellites.
Our guest is former Marine
Air Corps Maj. Donald Keyhoe,
in his campaign to prove
that flying saucers exist.
My name is Mike Wallace.
The cigarette is Parliament.
Why would the United States
government withhold information
from United States
citizens? For what reason?
The Air Force is simply treating
the American people like children.
They don't trust
them with the facts.
NARRATOR: During the '50s and '60s,
it wasn't just the Americans
who were seeing flying saucers.
At the Westall
School in Australia,
several hundred students saw an
object hovering over this power line tower
on their athletic field.
An event they vividly
recall 50 years later.
A student came into the classroom,
you know.
"There's flying saucers in the oval,
there's flying saucers,"
and everybody ran out.
And I remember the fear and
the hysteria of all the students.
I couldn't believe it because
what I was seeing wasn't possible.
It was vertical, horizontal. It'd
move away from us, back towards us.
Appear somewhere else,
somewhere else.
My God,
you know? But it was exciting.
It was like that and then all of a sudden,
it just turned on its side
and I could see that
it was a round disc.
NARRATOR: The children saw the disc
begin to descend into this wooded reserve
at the end of the
school's running path.
I ran towards the corner of the school,
jumped the fence
and ran towards where it looked
as though it went down into the trees,
and then stopped dead because it
was right in front of me on the ground.
Like a disc with a
slight rise in the middle.
I also heard a low,
sort of a humming noise,
and I felt a bit of a heat
coming off it as well.
And it started to take off
pretty well straight away.
It had all bluey-purple
lights around the bottom.
Don't remember
seeing any windows,
and it took off to about probably
four or five meters in the air,
and then turned on its side, and just
went... [VOCALIZES] Straight up so fast,
that there's just nothing,
even nowadays, that could go that fast.
NARRATOR: Shortly
after the object departed,
the authorities
converged on the school.
We had Army, Air Force,
policedown here cordoning off the area
to prevent any of us enteringthe
area or disturbing anything.
We got called to assembly.
The headmaster said,
"You have not seen this.
You do not talk about it.
You'll be in trouble if you do."
NARRATOR: For
the first time ever,
the school science teacher agreed
to describe what he saw that day,
providing we
concealed his identity.
It was not a mirage. There was
something physical in the sky.
It was silver. It could hover.
It could move slowly. It
could move very rapidly.
Eventually it moved away
to the other side of the oval,
and down behind some pine trees.
I was not then,
nor ever have been,
able to use my
knowledge of the world,
nor my scientific training,
to provide a rational explanation.
NARRATOR: What he said next
sheds light on why the school staff
have remained
silent all these years.
There was a knock
on the door one night.
Two older men, one in uniform,
asked for my description
of what I had seen.
I was then told that I
hadn't seen anything,
that I'd made it all up,
possibly because I was drunk
and that they would have to report
that fact to the Education Department
and I would lose my job. After that,
I was told
that I would be prosecuted
underthe Official Secrets Act,
and I was told that there wasn'tanything
there, when I knew there was,
and that I had to
keep quiet about it.
Why did I have to keep quiet?
NARRATOR: The Westall landing
may not have been an isolated incident.
Four days prior,
a then-young engineer in nearby Balwyn
was taking photos in his mother's
garden when something caught his eye.
This tremendous flash of light,
and I looked up, and I saw this object...
I had a Polaroid camera. I pulled
this up and hit myself on the face.
And I took the picture. I've
got the photograph here.
This is the original Polaroid?
That's it.
Looked like it was made
out of some form of metal,
and it was engineered.
And being an engineer,
I was sure it was.
And this is when I
took the photograph,
and it had tipped around
and I could see the bottom,
and it looked like it
was rotating to me.
That was it, and then after that,
it sort of gave a bounce
and it rocketed away to the north,
very high speed.
INTERVIEWER: Can you
describe the acceleration?
It was almost instantaneous. It's
like it had been shot out of a g*n.
Wham, you know?
NARRATOR: Air Force officers
showed up at his doorstep
asking for every
detail of his experience.
And they also had some
photographs of similar things,
and they also had a book which
had pictures of things in which...
They didn't leave it with me,
but I had a look through.
But they said it was an
unidentified flying object.
That was it.
INTERVIEWER: What
was the implication?
ENGINEER: That it didn't
come from anywhere on Earth.
NARRATOR: Project Blue Book, with a skeletal
staff, continued publicly collecting
thousands of cases.
Despite efforts to
explain them away,
hundreds were still
filed as unknown.
MAN: Several reports of a strange
egg-shaped object about 200 feet long
landing on farms and highways
last night in the vicinity of Levelland.
Sheriff Clem says he even
himself got a glimpse of the thing,
which somehow turned off lights
and auto engines when it came near.
Within 24 to 36 hours after
these sightings in Levelland, Texas
at the White Sands Proving Ground,
very close to the Trinity test site
where they first detonated
the first atomic b*mb,
military personnel witnessed
a glowing egg-shaped object
that apparently landed.
This is Bill Haggert,
Public Information Officer of White
Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico.
What they saw looked
like a landing and takeoff
of some controlled
object from outer space.
[MAN SPEAKING]
NARRATOR: They appeared
to be dressed in white coveralls.
And were childlike. That is,
small.
[MAN SPEAKING]
NARRATOR: Zamora added that
one of the two persons turned his head
and looked straight at him.
MAN: When I got out of the car,
about 50 feet from it...
I guess they saw me because they
started their motor or whatever it is.
I could see a big blast of
fire coming from right under it.
So, I was behind some bushes there,
behind my car.
I could see it and I
could feel that heat.
That really got me scared,
you know?
A lot of people say, "Why didn't
you take your g*n out and sh**t at it?"
They weren't
doing nothing to me.
It just took a little
while to get airborne,
came up a little bit, about 20-30 feet,
and it stayed there a while.
And it was just as
quiet as it could be.
And then just flew away,
that's it.
Lonnie was very,
very scared. He was as white as a sheet.
From here, went directly to the
church to talk to the priest, okay?
NARRATOR: Pablo Lopez was among the first
to arrive at the landing and takeoff site.
The ground was still smoldering in
some of the weeds that were around it.
NARRATOR: This rare footage
gives us a glimpse of the scene
shortly after the incident.
Patrolman Zamora stoops to point
out one of the landing gear imprints
where officers had just placed rocks
to protect the fresh ground traces.
And then there was two sets of footprints,
two sets of footprints.
Like so.
That was about the
approximate size of 'em.
In comparison to a quarter,
that's pretty small.
Okay. That's about
the size of 'em.
NARRATOR: Within an hour
and over the next several days,
officials from the FBI, military,
and Project Blue Book
documented the
evidence at the scene.
MAN 1: Were there any prong marks
on the ground or anything like that
- where you could see where it had landed?
- MAN 2: There were four.
MAN 1: Very unusual footprints.
And how many were there?
MAN 2: Two footprints on one side
and two footprints on the other side.
- MAN 1: Of course, the burn area there...
- MAN 2: I was in my car.
I could see it and I
could feel that heat.
They told me that all over
the state they had been seen.
Some of those flying saucers,
whatever you call 'em.
They gave me a book on it,
you know?
They told me to go
ahead and read it.
Well,
it says not to say nothing.
Keep away from it. Don't say too much,
you know.
NARRATOR: It was the middle of the
night by the time Lonnie came home.
MARY ZAMORA: I mean,
he was really pale.
And I thought he was sick. I said,
"Are you sick or something?"
He said,
"No. I was just working." He was like...
Like he was angry.
What I knew about it was when I
started reading the papers, you know.
Started coming out,
and everything. I said, "What's this?"
"I don't know,"
he said. "It's just a headache"
He said "Everybody's after me and
some believe me and some don't."
- MAN 1: Dear Mr. Zamora.
- MAN 2: Dear Mr. Zamora.
- WOMAN 1: Dear Mr. Zamora.
- KID 1: Dear Mr. Zamora.
[KID 2 READING]
WOMAN 2: Sure,
I believe you saw an egg-shaped spacecraft
that had passengers
from off this earth.
[MAN READING]
WOMAN 3: I could go on for a
week telling you what I've seen.
KID 1: A boy in our school
science fair had three pictures
that looked just like the
flying saucer you described.
[MAN READING]
WOMAN: As I have pictures of a
couple of egg-shaped shape ships taken...
- I read about you seeing a flying saucer.
- WOMAN: I'm a retired teacher.
Well,
you have a friend who believes you.
This saucer phenomenon
has changed my life and ideas.
[KID 3 READING]
WOMAN: August 17, 1960,
our Red Bluff officers
and dozens of
people saw a saucer.
KID 4: Can you tell me how long it stayed
on Earth, and other things like that?
MARY: Then people
started making fun of him
that he had seen little
men from outer space
or this and that. A
whole bunch of dirty stuff.
MAN: Lot of people asked me, "Is
that the reason you quit the police force?"
No,
the reason I quit the police force
was because I was going and
doing a lot of publicity and stuff.
I didn't wanna hurt the town.
NARRATOR: The level of inquiry went
all the way to the office of the President.
To this day, the Socorro close
encounter remains unexplained.
VALLEE: Socorro was very similar
to the French cases that I had
brought to Hynek's attention.
Checked by the police,
checked by the French Air Force,
where there were also
occupants who were seen,
short beings,
in connection with the objects.
I think that's what
convinced him
that there were UFO
landings in the United States.
Looked like a toy top
somewhat upside down.
So this is the diagram
which we've come up with.
It's more flat here
other than round.
But it does have
the hump up in here.
It seemed to move off
the groundif it was down.
And then we saw three lights
that went from yellow to red.
When you got right up to it,
it lit up.
I mean, it really did become bright,
and we could see it,
the outline of it, real good.
NARRATOR: Blue Book's
Dr. Allen Hynek investigated
one of the alleged landing sites
with the local sheriff.
At an overflow press
conference later that day,
the world held its breath
for an historic revelation
about the landings in Michigan.
Hynek, by now privately
convinced of the UFO reality,
struggled to follow
the Air Force policy
of tamping down
public excitement.
[MAN SPEAKING]
I'm saying that the two cases that I
investigated most deeply were most likely.
I said in a statement that I
couldn't prove it in a court of law.
[MAN SPEAKING]
No, that's not quite right.
I think that a person can be
pretty sure about something
without being ableto convict
somebody of a m*rder.
- Can you? Please.
- Yes, I do. Honestly, in this case.
[MAN SPEAKING]
NARRATOR: Hynek's
strained explanation,
which he later called
his greatest regret,
ignited a public furor.
MAN: Mr. Ford,
what about flying saucers?
You've had some in
Michigan in the past week.
GERALD: Dave, we've had several
incidents that many felt were sufficient
to justify some action
by our government,
and not the kind of flippant answer
that was given by the Air Force
where they passed
it off as "swamp gas."
It seems to me that
this mystery does require
that the Congress
take a good look at it.
Let them put their
record on the line.
NARRATOR: On April 5th, 1966, congressional
hearings were held with Dr. Hynek
and Secretary of the Air Force
Harold Brown both giving testimony.
MAN 1: Mr. Ford has come out. He has a
pretty good-size stature in the Congress.
And so, Mr. Secretary,
see if you can shed some light
on these highly illuminated objects.
MAN 2: Mr. Secretary,
there have been charges
that the Air Force is hiding
something in the UFO field.
We have not been
hiding anything.
The investigations
have been made public.
The hearing this morningwas
public for just that reason.
There has never
been any evidence
presented to the
United States Air Force,
or discovered by the
United States Air Force,
which would indicate
that the UFO phenomena
represents any interplanetary
space vehicle of any kind.
NARRATOR: Amid growing pressure,
the Air Force commissioned
an outside panel of scientists
to analyze select cases and
settle the matter once and for all.
It was headed by
physicist Edward Condon.
Dr. Condon, do you hope to find
people from outer space here on Earth?
Well, I don't know for sure,
but we'll try to just study the reports
and get as much additional
information as we can to see.
REPORTER: Would you like to have us being
visited by these little or big things?
Well, that'd be fine with
me. I hope they're friendly.
How do you
propose to go about...
NARRATOR: After the project was launched,
Condon remarked to an audience
that he thought the UFO
subject was nonsense.
But "I'm not supposed to reach
that conclusion for another year."
After a two-year investigation,
the panel submitted a
massive 1,400 page report
showing that many cases were
radar and weather anomalies,
but confirming a number
as truly unexplainable.
Among them were the
famous McMinnville photos
taken on the Trent family farm,
as well as film footage of
UFOs in Great Falls, Montana.
NICK: As I looked up,
I saw two silvery objects
moving swiftly out
of the northwest.
No sound, except I thought I heard a
whooshing sound when I first saw them.
The discs appeared
to be spinning like a top,
and were about 50 feet across,
which was much
slower than the jets
which shot by shortly
after I filmed the discs.
I could not see any exhaust,
wings or any kind of fuselage.
They appeared to be of a bright,
shiny metal, like polished silver.
There are cases that are not
explainable in conventional terms.
There is the assumption of
intelligence or intelligent control,
but not necessarily the
assumption of direct communication.
Why are they here?
What are they doing?
What do they want from us?
What are their motivations?
NARRATOR: But it was
Dr. Condon who wrote the final word.
[READING]
I was kind of woolly on that
one. You'd have to conclude
that what we were looking at was
beyond our current state of the knowledge.
But it began to hit me that
Dr. Condon has apparently not read
his own material very carefully.
You do an actual tabulation,
which he doesn't seem to have done,
and you find his percentage
ofunexplained is five to six times
larger than the Air Force.
And yet,
what is his principal recommendation?
The principal recommendation that
Dr. Condon has come through with
is there's nothing of scientific
interest that warrants further attention
on the part of the federal
government here in any major way.
He recommends dropping
the whole problem.
Nobody could get funded. Nobody
would look at the data seriously
because of the
prestige of the academy
saying that the problem
had been solved.
The Air Force closed
their reporting system,
so that if the public
wanted to report something,
they would report
it to the local police.
But it would never
get to the attention
of scientists really
examining the phenomena.
NARRATOR: In 1969, the Air Force
officially ended its public investigations.
Which would suggest what?
That they knew what it was?
Or didn't know what it was.
Also the other way. And
they did know what it was.
NARRATOR: One aspect of the
phenomenon that was swept under the rug
was the pervasive
reporting of UFO intrusions
at the world's most
sensitive military facilities.
Details did not come to
light until decades later
at the National Press Club in Washington,
DC.
Declassified US government
documents and witness testimony
from former or retired
US military personnel
confirmed, beyond any doubt,
the reality of ongoing UFO incursions
at nuclear weapon sites.
What you have heard here today
is evidence of a phenomenon.
It sounds fantastic,
and it is fantastic.
In 1967,
I was a m*ssile launch officer
stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base,
Montana.
NARRATOR: Malmstrom was
America's first line of nuclear defense,
its silos packed with
Minutemen missiles.
Each one nearly 100 times more powerful
than the b*mb that devastated Hiroshima.
Launch officers could,
within minutes of confirmation,
send their birds arcing 6,000
miles to incinerate key Soviet cities,
triggering a w*r that
would end our civilization.
I was the chief of party,
I was the observer.
Basically what I was doing was the
star observation to provide precise
latitude and longitude on
our small three-man team.
Came from the north
and stopped right over us,
and it had a white light from the center,
looking down into this island.
I just said to myself,
"What if this thing beams us up
and takes us off to
some distant place
and never returned
to Earth again?"
I mean, this is going through my
head here while this thing's above me.
And then from this dead stop,
it shoots off to the east.
It's just like now you see it,
now you don't. It just...
MAN: The strike team that went out,
they saw something.
NARRATOR: Lt.
Salas was stationed
in his underground
launch control capsule
when he received a frantic call
from one of his topside guards.
MAN: Screaming into the phone,
saying they're looking
at a red glowing object
hovering just
above our front gate.
Our missiles began going intowhat's
called a no-go condition, or unlaunchable.
Essentially, they were disabled.
NARRATOR: In fact, ten missiles
began going offline in a matter of seconds,
one after the other.
Personally, I'm never aware of two
missiles going down at the same time,
let alone ten.
I was a top-secret
control officer
and I passed down nuclear
launch authenticators.
I can clearly recall a message coming
through my communications center
which basically said that a UFO did,
in fact,
shut down several
m*ssile silos in Montana.
MAN: I was on duty at Echo,
which is our squadron command post.
We had strike teams respond
to alarms from the missiles.
They were three
to five miles away.
And they said, "Sir,
for lack of a better description,
there's a flying saucer
hovering over that m*ssile,
and there's a beam of
reddish light going down to it."
It had to be a data
collection thing.
I'm sure they scanned
the warhead or something.
In 1980, I was reassigned from
the Pentagon to RAF Bentwater
as a deputy base commander.
At that time,
Bentwaters was one of the largest
tactical fighter
ranges in the world.
NARRATOR: It was also the largest
American nuclear b*mb storage depot
in Europe.
In December 1980,
early in the morning,
several of our
security policemen
discovered strange
lights in the forest.
NARRATOR: Expecting
to find a crashed aircraft,
they came upon an unrecognizable
object resting on the forest floor.
They observed it for a period of time,
and it very quickly and silently vanished.
NARRATOR: Two nights later,
Col. Halt received
an urgent visit from the
base security commander.
He was white as a sheet. He said,
"It's back."
I said, "What's back?" He said,
"The UFO."
I took several security
policemen with me.
I also had my small cassette recorder I
carried everywhere when I was on duty.
- MAN: What is it?
- COL. HALT: We don't know, sir.
Yeah, it's a strange,
small red light.
HALT: And all the barnyard
animals have gotten quiet now.
Deathly calm.
This is weird.
One object approached
us at very high speed.
MAN: Here he comes from the
side. He's coming toward us now.
I'm observing what a beam
coming down to the ground.
This is unreal.
We stood there in awe.
Was this a warning?
Was this an attempt
to communicate?
Was this a weapon,
or just a probe?
Just as suddenly as it appeared,
click, disappeared.
We stood there... Oh.
About that time,
we noticed the other object
to the south was
sending down beams.
About a mile,
mile and half awayover at Woodbridge Base,
MAN 1: when we had great
difficulties communicating.
But we were able to discern that
some of those beams were either
falling into or near the
weapons storage area,
and there was a
great deal of concern.
MAN 1: I also found out later that
both the tower operators at Bentwaters
saw an object and picked it up
on their bright radar and watched it.
I was just sitting there
and I happened to see
a dot come on the scope,
and it just went like,
one dot at the beginning,
then another dot,
then another dot, and it was gone.
A nd then it made an immediate right-hand
turn and came right towards the base.
Just absolutely phenomenal.
It's not like any radar
target I've ever seen,
traveling at an extremely
high rate of speed.
It passed over
the control tower,
and then it stopped. It
was an orangish color.
Sort of popped into
my mind at the time
that somebody's flying
a basketball out here.
There were, like,
lights around the center of it.
It was more like portholes.
And then you were seeing
the light from the inside.
But it hovered momentarily,
reversed its course,
and went back out at
a high rate of speed.
NARRATOR: Even more
alarming incidents took place
on both sides of the Cold w*r.
NARRATOR: According to
once secret Soviet documents,
a UFO hovered over a Ukrainian
nuclear base for nearly an hour.
Inexplicably, several missiles
suddenly switched to
full combat readiness
and began a launch sequence
without any authentication codes.
After 15 heart-stopping seconds,
the countdown to a
potential Armageddon
ceased as abruptly
as it had started.
DAVID SCHUUR: As this object
passed over the m*ssile site,
we would start getting erratic
indications on that m*ssile.
The bad thing was we
also had a launch indicator.
MAN: Does that mean that the
launch sequence has been triggered?
SCHURR: That means that the
m*ssile has received a launch signal.
NARRATOR: The countdown
had to be manually aborted.
We had UFOs in the air...
NARRATOR: These witnesses are some
of the most highly-vetted military officers
in charge of the world's
most devastating armaments.
If what they're
reporting is accurate,
then the pattern
is hard to avoid.
UFOs have been making incursions
into top-security nuclear facilities
decade after decade.
To me, it's pretty clear.
"We're shining a light on this,
we're pointing it out.
What are you people doing
with nuclear weapons?"
[PEOPLE SHOUTING]
NARRATOR: As the '90s
dawned and the walls fell down,
it was as if humanity itself
was demanding to be seen
as one people and one world.
The Soviet Union had dissolved
and history's spotlight
began to shine
on long-darkened corners.
Different officials were looking
for ways to open
dialogue with the West,
and embrace all the
changes that were underway
in their country at the time.
This is George Knapp in Moscow,
the city many are...
NARRATOR: Knapp's
team was invited to Moscow,
by government
and military officials
who were willing to share
decades' worth of UFO files.
[SPEAKS RUSSIAN]
MAN: Gen. Igor Maltsev,
for seven years, commander of
the entire Soviet air defense system
recalls a UFO flap
over Moscow in 1990.
Hundreds of visual and radar
observations by military personnel.
Maltsev confirms his standing order was,
"Don't fire on the UFOs".
March 1991,
radar at the Leningrad airport
detects first one, then two,
then three unidentified objects
hovering over a nuclear plant.
From a dead stop, the UFO
zipped away at 2,000 miles per hour.
Jacques Vallee was
one of few Westerners
to personally
investigate the case
by meeting with Russian
sources firsthand.
An object hovered near a
nuclear power plant in Voronezh
and a beam from that object
melted the asphalt there.
The intention was,
maybe we would be
able to find out
from the Russians
more about what the American
government knows about UFOs
than we will ever learn from
the American government itself.
- Governor, you ready to take the oath?
- I am.
NARRATOR: When a young,
open-minded president,
was sworn in,
one of America's most highly
placed civilians saw a chance
for a new government
transparency on the phenomenon.
As a means of access to
people to the wonders of nature...
NARRATOR: Heir to
the power and influence
of one of the world's
wealthiest families,
Laurance Rockefeller,
philanthropist and
conservationist,
also had a passionate
interest in UFOs.
His idea was to
approach the President
with a plea for making
available the data
that the government
had on the subject.
JOHN PODSTA:
The first inclination by,
particularly people
in government
is, "You got to be kidding me".
[LAUGHS] You want
me to risk my career
by getting deeply into
the rabbit hole of
talking about UFOs?"
And so there's a
tremendous resistance.
NARRATOR: Rockefeller met with
President Clinton's science advisor,
Jack Gibbons,
at the White House,.
And persuaded
him to take action.
Rockefeller was then
asked to pick a case
that the White House
should attempt to declassify.
He chose the 1947
Roswell incident,
noting, "Many are convinced
that Roswell marks the beginning
of government
secrecy about UFO's".
Jack had actually
gone to the Air Force,
asked then-Secretary Widnall,
who was the Secretary
of the Air Force,
to take a look, particularly,
at the records around Roswell,
New Mexico.
SHEILA WIDNALL:
"Dear Colonel Cavitt.
The General Accounting Office,
seeks to fully explain the claim
that the US government
recovered an alien spacecraft
near Roswell,
New Mexico, in July 1947,
and since that time
has covered up that fact.
NEWSCASTER: The Army
Air Forces has announced
that a flying disc
has been found
and is now in the
possession of the Army.
[NEWSCASTER SPEAKING]
NARRATOR: Roswell was then home
to the world's only
nuclear air wing,
including the B-29
that had dropped
the first atomic
b*mb on Hiroshima.
The base's chief intelligence officer,
Maj. Jesse Marcel,
was dispatched to the
ranch to investigate.
[JESSE MARCEL SPEAKING]
NARRATOR: Marcel
and another officer
were the first military to
arrive at the crash site.
They came upon an expanse
of unrecognizable debris
strewn across an area
the size of a dozen
football fields.
We found a piece
of metal... Uh...
About a foot and
half to two feet wide.
The thing that got me is that
you couldn't even bend
it. You couldn't dent it.
Even a sledgehammer
would bounce off it.
NARRATOR: Marcel
was ordered to immediately
transport the strange wreckage
to Fort Worth Army Airfield.
There,
Marcel was met by the commanding general,
who told him to keep silent
in the face of what was
becoming a media frenzy.
They had a whole flock
of microphones there.
They wanted some
comments from me,
but I wasn't at
liberty to do that.
NARRATOR: Marcel was
instead ordered to pose
with wood,
foil and rubber debris,
from a conventional
weather balloon.
All I could do is
keep my mouth shut.
And Gen. Ramey is the
one who told the newspapers
what it was and
to forget about it.
It was nothing more than a
weather observation balloon.
Of course,
we both knew differently.
NARRATOR: Col. Thomas DuBose,
who was also
ordered to pose
with the fake debris,
describes how an iron curtain
of secrecy slammed down.
REPORTER: Congressman Schiff,
what got you interested
in this subject per se?
I started receiving letters
a little over two years
ago from constituents,
stating that they believe the
government was covering up
what happened at Roswell.
Many of them clearly believed,
that it was, in fact,
an extraterrestrial crash.
The weather balloon
story never made sense
because it was clearly,
and undisputed in my mind,
extra military
attention to this matter,
from extra security
around the crash scene
to special handling of
whatever the debris was.
That could fit a
classified project.
It doesn't fit a
weather balloon.
NARRATOR: In September 1994,
the Air Force
issued its response.
[READING]
The Air Force claimed it was a
secret project of weather balloons
hung with box kites
and microphones,
to spy on Soviet nuclear tests.
Please roll the video.
MAN: There's a famous box kite
that became the
famous flying disc.
Weather balloons that
were on the balloon train.
NARRATOR: Same rubber balloon,
same foil box kite
as the original cover story,
only many of them
strung together
with microphones
dangling beneath.
MAN: That's the tin foil paper,
rubber and sticks that they recovered
in the desert near
New Mexico in 1947.
NARRATOR: The Air Force,
nearly 50 years later,
was basically
telling the same tale.
That the top security personnel
of the world's only
atomic-bombing wing
really had mistaken this rubber,
wood
and tin foil for a
crashed flying saucer.
Being an intelligence officer,
I was familiar with just
about all the materials used
in aircraft and/or air travel.
This is nothing like that.
It was not anything from this
Earth. That I'm quite sure of.
BILL RICHARDSON:
My suspicion is that
the Roswell incident did happen,
and something maybe
not from our universe,
went down there.
And we should...
allow the American
people to make a judgment
on what that might
have been by disclosing.
I mean, this is probably
the most blatant
case of overreaction
to what is national security.
The public has a right to know.
NARRATOR: Rockefeller put
together a briefing document
intended for world leaders
with a sobering observation.
It is conceivable that
even the President himself
is not fully briefed on matters
classified as
"above top secret."
I did attempt to
find out if there were
any secret government documents
that reveal things,
and if there were,
they were concealed from me,
too.
I wouldn't be
the first president
that underlings have lied to
or the career bureaucrats
have waited out.
But there may be some career
person sitting around somewhere
hiding these dark secrets,
even from elected presidents.
But if so,
they successfully eluded me.
And I'm almost embarrassed totell you,
I did try to find out.
[ALL LAUGHING]
EDGAR MITCHELL: Three
feet for second contact.
That was a beautiful one.
NARRATOR: Apollo
astronaut Edgar Mitchell,
who had grown up around Roswell,
was an aerospace insider with
deep Pentagon connections.
He became convinced
there were UFO secrets
concealed from normal
government channels.
Well,
if the accounts are to be believed...
Yes,
there have been ET visitation.
There have been crashed craft.
There have beenmaterial
and bodies recovered...
and there is some group
of people somewhere
that may or may not be
associated with the
government at this point,
but certainly were at one time,
that have this knowledge.
No one has proven
there's nothing to it.
No one's had the
opportunity to prove
there's something to it,
and that's what I did.
And every passing day...
NARRATOR: In 2007,
the most powerful man in the Senate,
majority leader Harry Reid,
persuaded two colleagues,
Senators Ted Stevens
and Daniel Inouye,
to secretly allocate millions
in Defense Department
funds to investigate UFOs.
The covert program operated from
the tail end of the Bush presidency,
through the Obama
administration,
and into Donald
Trump's first year in office.
In December of 2017,
the lid blew off.
At long last,
the government was admitting
a modern-day program
to investigate UFOs
and released startling
official evidence,
including videotapes from
the c*ck of military aircraft.
One of the key authors
ofThe Times story
was investigative journalist
and best-selling
author Leslie Kean.
She went to Washington
to meet with Luis Elizondo,
who had just resigned
from his position
as head of the secret
Pentagon UFO program.
I was invited to this meeting.
They wanted me to meet Mr. Elizondo,
to see what could happen.
ELIZANDO: Objects
that are moving so fast
and yet we don't see an
ionization trail in the air
and you don't hear a sonic boom.
How is that possible?
Another one is...
NARRATOR: Elizondo's
colleagues took her aside
to reveal some
extraordinary documentation
related to the program.
KEAN: I wasn't allowed
to take anything with me.
I mean, the most importantevidence
that was shared with me
at the meeting regarding
the phenomenon itself,
were the videos.
[MAN 1 SPEAKING]
I knew this was breaking news for
the front page of The New York Times.
[MAN 2 SPEAKING]
[MAN 1 SPEAKING]
[MAN 2 SPEAKING]
KEAN: My co-author,
Ralph Blumenthal,
and I set up a meeting
with Mark Mazzetti
and said,
"We have this expl*sive story."
Sat down with him in the New
York office of The New York Times
and we brought in
all the documents.
"These are the videos.
Here's other documents that
show the existence of the program.
And here's what they've studiedand
here's what they've learned.
And there's a letter from
Harry Reid about the program."
NARRATOR: Elizondo's colleague,
the former deputy
assistant secretary
of defense for intelligence,
Christopher Mellon, managed to
obtain the tapes
from the Pentagon,
and choseThe New York
Times to break the story.
I received the videos,
the now-famous videos,
in the Pentagon parking lot
from a Defense
Department official.
I still have the originals
in the packaging.
This is a case where somebody
bent the rules a little bit,
and they did so
for the larger good.
And we're absolutely
all better off because of it.
In the end, I have to say,
I was still extraordinarily
disappointed with
The New York Times,
because they focused on
this small AATIP program.
And the real story, in my mind at least,
should have been,
"These things are real,
they're here.
This is happening now."
NARRATOR: One
of the Pentagon cases
reported byThe New York Times,
was an encounter
by Naval aircraft,
about 200 miles off the coast of San Diego,
California.
Fifty-five hundred
people that were on
the Nimitzin 2004,
when this happened,
and I guarantee every
single one of them
knows that this event happened.
That's a whole air wing.
That's Mount Fuji. That's Japan.
NARRATOR: Commander David
Fravor was leading a training exercise
from theUSS Nimitz
carrier strike group
when he was abruptly ordered
to investigate an unknown target
that had appeared on one
of the ship's radar scopes.
We're gonna suspend the
training we have real-world tasking.
So we're like, "Okay, cool."
NARRATOR: He and
another F-18 Super Hornet,
each carrying two airmen,
zoomed toward the coordinates.
It was myself and my WSO
and the other pilot and
the WSO in the back seat
of that airplane. So,
there's four of us.
NARRATOR: When they arrived,
they first saw
what appeared
to be a large object
slightly below the
surface of the ocean,
with a strange oval-shaped craft
darting around in
the air just above it.
If you picture a Tic Tac
that's about 40 feet long,
round on both ends, no rivets,
no metal, smooth,
white. It was white.
It was just smooth. No wings,
no propulsion, no windows.
It didn't matter which way it was pointing
because as it was moving over the water,
it never turned. It never
changed its longitudinal axis.
It went fore, aft, left,
right. It was just doing this.
And I said, "Hey,
I'm gonna go check that out."
All of a sudden, you just see
itturn its body and go... [WHOOP]
And start coming
up at you. You go,
"That was rather interesting."
We're just looking at it. We're
doing this. We're looking at it.
We're looking at
it. We go around.
All the way around the outside of a circle,
180 degrees.
Well, I know where he's going,
so I'll just go over there.
This thing goes
"poof" and it's gone.
I mean,
literally that fast. Gone.
You can think about
what we're saying. Like,
"Holy sh*t. What
the... is that?"
And then there's a lot of,
"Dude, what the...
Did you guys see that?
Do you guys see
it?" And they're like,
"It's gone. We don't see sh*t."
Nothing accelerates
that fast. You're talking...
Something that
not only accelerated
beyond anything
that we had seen,
but it just was...
The controller
comes up and says,
"Hey,
you're not gonna believe this,
but that thing is back
at your CAD point."
NARRATOR: Meaning the object
had instantly reappeared at the precise
secret coordinates
of the fleet's
critical aerial defense zone.
FRAVOR: It obviously
had some awareness.
It knew where we were going.
It'll make the hair on the
back of your neck stand up.
I actually told my back seater,
I said,
"I don't know about you.
I'm pretty weirded out."
NARRATOR: More jets equipped
with the Navy's most advanced
radar visual tracking
systems were scrambled.
This time,
capturing the object on video.
FRAVOR: First thing he
gets is a little blip on the radar.
He puts his cursors over it,
and he tries to grab a lock on it.
Basically, when you take a lock,
you tell the radar,
"Look at that location,
and stare at it,
and put all your energy on that point."
Well, as soon as it does it,
the radar gets indications
that it's being jammed by
the object it's trying to lock.
The infrared sees
differing temperatures,
so the Tic Tac is hotter
than the air around it.
It doesn't have to be by much,
but it's gonna appear white.
They're driving straight at it.
It's just kind of
hovering there.
And then it goes "poof" and it takes off,
off the side.
I just don't know.
I doubt that we...
have developed that technology.
I interviewed three
of the four aviators
who were with Dave,
during that encounter,
and it was readily apparent
to everyone involved that
that vehicle had what they call
"dominant battlespace
awareness."
It was in control of that
engagement from the outset.
There was no question
that it completely outmatched
our frontline fighters.
I served on the Special Access
Program Oversight Committee,
so I had access to all of the
black programs in those days.
We know perfectly well
there's nothing like that
behind the scenes or
even on the drawing boards.
NARRATOR: Senator Harry Reid,
who instigated
the secret Pentagon UFO program,
confirmed what
nuclear launch officers
have been reporting for decades.
NARRATOR: UFOs have
interfered with our country's
most powerful weapons.
Did you have anybody
in the Defense Department,
the Pentagon,
pull you aside, bend your ear and say,
"Why are you doing this?"
They did everything they could
to stop the program
from going forward.
They gave the person that
came in initially such a bad time.
He's fortunate to
have hung on to his job
because people
tried to get rid of him,
because they wanted
nothing to do with this.
The Defense Intelligence
Agency was one of the worst.
They drug their feet,
even though there was
one of their senior scientists
thought they
should look at this.
And remember,
all we're saying...
Nobody has to
agree why it's there.
But shouldn't we at least
be spending some money
to study all these phenomenon?
Shouldn't we study this
stuff? The answer is yes.
And that's all this was about,
and why the federal government,
all these years, has covered up,
put brake pads on
everything. Stopped it.
I think it's very,
very bad for our country.
I interviewed Gordon Cooper,
Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper,
back in the '90s.
REPORTER: Cooper said on camera
that there was a
landed UFO circa 1957
at Edwards Air Force Base.
His camera crew captured
the filming of this object,
and he presented
this to the higher-ups
and eventually,
a courier jet came in from Washington.
He handed the footage over,
which was good, he viewed it...
- That's the last he saw of it.
- Exactly.
REPORTER: Did you
know where that footage went
of the flying saucer
that landed on the...
Went to Washington.
That's all that I know.
REPORTER: Did you ever keep in
touch with anybody about it or discuss it?
How would I keep in
touch with anybody about it?
There's no way within the
military or within the government
of keeping track of
something that is classified.
REPORTER: Did you try
to go after stuff like this?
We did. We have. It's there.
Are you saying that there's
some evidence that's...
REPORTER: Still hasn't
seen the light of day?
I'm saying most of it
hasn't seen the light of day.
MELLON: Astronaut
Cooper had spoken
with the President
at a Cabinet meeting.
He raised this with
Secretary Cohen.
And then Cohen's office
called me and asked me
to pursue this
and chase it down.
The Air Force colonel that I
spoke with got very frustrated,
and when I asked him what
happened to all of these records, he said,
"Well, that was all cleaned up
or thrown out to save space,"
something like that.
It sounded ludicrous,
but that's what he told me.
If there is some recovered debris,
say...
It is so deeply buried
and squirreled away
that it's outside of those
normal oversight processes,
and that's where there's
a problem in this area.
NARRATOR: Dr. Jacques
Vallee has collected
purported metal
debris from UFO cases
dating as far back as 1947
that experts are analyzing in
a state-of-the-art laboratory.
The breakthrough has come
with the invention of a machine
that enables usto look
at the atomic structure,
and at that point,
the atomic structure
is impossible to fake.
This device is a
multi-parameterion beam imager.
NARRATOR: Dr. Garry Nolan,
a Stanford microbiologist,
is using a revolutionary
three-dimensional imaging device
to analyze the samples right
down to their individual atoms.
When Dr. Nolan placed
some of the fragments
in the vacuum chamber
of his instrument,
he was astonished to
find their composition
was unlike any known metal.
Just one spot and the isotopic
composition all the way across.
NARRATOR: No
matter where he looked
in the sample's
jumble of elements,
whether magnesium,
iron, nickel or titanium,
the ratio of isotopes
didn't make any sense.
If you're talking about an advanced
material from an advanced civilization,
you're talking about
something that...
I'll just call it an ultra-material,
right?
It's something
which has properties
where somebody
is putting it together,
again, at the atomic scale.
So we're building our
world with 80 elements.
Somebody else is
building the world
with 253 different isotopes.
I intend to use the information
to try to build something.
Try to understand
a physical principle
that we don't know today.
This material was
manufactured. It's not natural.
It's not natural to the materials
that we have around us
in the lab, or on the Earth.
It does not mean
that it was necessarily
made some place in outer space.
It just means that
it was manufactured
specially for a
particular purpose
that we don't understand,
and we want to understand it.
MELLON: There is an immense
array of unanswered questions.
When we observe
some of these craft doing,
think about the possibilities,
what we may discover
technologically,
how we might solve
the energy crisis,
how we might raise
our standards of living.
There is an urgent need,
in my view,
to get to the bottom of it.
We don't know the
origin of these vehicles
nor do we understand the intent
of whoever is controlling them.
NARRATOR: There are cases
that seem to go beyond encounters
with an advanced technology,
to contact with an
engaged intelligence.
Papua New Guinea. June, 1959
An Australian missionary
spots a large disc
hovering just 200
feet off the ground
while standing with
38 other people.
This solid-looking object
and... Can you imagine?
What it's like to
look up in the sky
and see some figures up there?
NARRATOR: All were amazed
to see four small occupants
dressed in what looked
like black diving suits.
Figures walking about on top,
and not the slightest
noise whatsoever.
And so we waved.
Wouldn't it be wonderful
if we could get this object
down onto the playing field?
And as we waved,
wondering whether
we'd get some recognition
and whether, perhaps,
they would understand
what we wanted,
they waved back.
NARRATOR: The
encounter lasted several hours
before the object
abruptly departed.
There was this
amazingly incredible speed
that the hovercraft
disappeared to nothing
across the bay in a
matter of a second or so.
NARRATOR: In 1994,
three days of sightings
across Zimbabwe
culminated in what some believe
is the most significant
close encounter
in modern history.
Hundreds of people
today phoned the ZBC
and BBC correspondent in Harare
saying they sighted an
unidentified flying object last night.
We have some eyewitness reports.
MAN: It almost seemed
to be under the cloud.
As it came past,
I noticed there's no noise,
and that's when I thought, "Well,
there's something very odd here."
It was quite amazing.
It was beautiful.
They are saying that Jesus
is passing through Africa.
That's what they are saying.
TIM LEACH: We
interviewed about 64 children
in front of the camera.
UFO story that happens...
Just say exactly what you want to say,
okay?
Well, I was running and playing,
and then I saw this
maroon colorin the sky.
Why don't we follow it?
We saw this, like,
a silver thing down there.
It was a silver oval thing
that flew past really slowly.
I saw the bigger one and the spaceship,
like, four or five of them.
It was red, green and yellow.
There was this big ship.
It had these lights,
these patterns, and it flew.
I thought, "No, it's not a UFO."
And then I looked
carefully at it,
and I thought, "Maybe."
NARRATOR: Dozens
of children said that
one or more of the
disc-shaped objects
landed just beyond the
far edge of their playground.
The next thing they knew,
something was
standing next to it.
You saw him standing
by the silver thing.
And he had big eyes.
He had a big head
and big black eyes,
and was dressed
in a black bodysuit.
They were wearing pure black.
And I came down and I saw
the funny man with his eyes here,
and I saw a spaceship,
and there were a few
little ones around it.
REPORTER: How far away
were you when you saw him?
Not very far. Not very
far. About a meter away.
- A meter away? That close?
- Yes.
REPORTER: And
how big was the figure?
It was about as
big as a grade six.
Yeah, it's there!
I believe that the children
did see something.
I believe them because
normally children don't lie.
I've always taught my children,
"Seeing is believing."
Unfortunately,
I didn't see. So...
[CHANTING IN LOCAL LANGUAGE]
NARRATOR: This alleged encounter
caught the attention
of Pulitzer Prize-winning
Harvard psychiatrist,
Dr. John Mack.
It seemed that he
was looking at all of us.
What did it feel like when
he was looking at you?
It felt scared.
It felt scary? What
was scary about it?
Well, felt scared
because I've never seen
such a... person like that before.
And I saw this... person.
And it had big eyes.
That's all I saw
about it. Big eyes.
- They had short legs and quite a long top.
- Mmm-hmm.
With a big head
and eyes that are
bigger than ours.
How much bigger than ours?
Four or five times the size.
Four or five times
the size of ours?
And then I was looking at him,
right?
- Yes.
- Then he was looking at me back.
How can I just keep
on looking at him?
So I had to stop and
I looked sideways.
But I was looking
straight into his eyes.
Well, he never said anything.
It's just the face and the eyes.
Maybe they're trying
to communicate with us.
Show us something
which we don't know about.
I think they want... Um...
people to know that
we're actually making
harm on this world,
and we mustn't get
too technological.
We don't look after the planet.
All the trees will
be cut down...
and there will be no air
and people will be dying.
Is this an idea you
have had before?
Or did this idea come to you
when you had this experience?
- When I had this experience.
- Mmm-hmm.
NARRATOR: For the first time in
nearly 20 years, the Ariel schoolchildren
gathered from the
four corners of the world
to talk to each other
about the experience they shared
that September morning.
I remember something there...
One they all still
struggle to understand.
You know that it's moving,
but you...
SALMA SIDDICK: I
stand by what I saw.
There was no
reason for any of us.
To make that up.
EMMA JELIC KRISTIANSEN:
I've not spoken to anybody about it.
Not because I'm not proud of it,
but because I don't
want the... The stigma.
LISIL FIELD: So
it's something that
I've had to deal with
for 19-and-a-half years.
I don't wanna say
I felt like I knew it,
- but I knew that I didn't have to be afraid of it.
- Yeah.
NARRATOR: They took us
back to the moment of contact.
Exactly how I felt. Exactly...
The details still
seared into memory.
I was with one of the
other girls and saying to her,
"This is amazing."
We all were just
stopped in our tracks.
A little man appeared.
On top of the actual craft.
And that moment,
for me, was very distinct,
because I was like,
"That's not human."
Well, I was just completely
engulfed in these eyes.
The eyes, and in that moment,
however long it was,
'cause I have no
idea of the time frame,
it was just mesmerizing.
There was no talking. Um...
It's all just images in the head.
Telepathic communication.
SIDDICK: They were
trying to communicate.
Trying to tell us something,
or something to do
with the environment.
I kept getting these thoughts
and ideas in my
mind of technology.
Technology is not helping,
technology is bad...
And we're going
down a wrong path,
and we have to
start recognizing that
what we're doing is detrimental
and we need to make changes.
And I don't know what to do with that,
or...
They were reaching out to us.
It was as if they wanted
us to go with them.
At that moment, that was kind of
when I snapped
right out of the trance.
As soon as I broke contact,
all of those feelings, technology, the bad,
the horribleness
that was happening
and going around my
body at the time went.
It's making me a bit
anxious being back here.
I can feel it right
now. I was scared.
They came running
up here in such a panic,
screaming,
screaming... Ah! Then we were here.
And a child can't make that up.
SUSAN KRISTIANSEN: So I was
there when they were interviewing them
and saw the way they were.
It was just a huge,
big mess and muddle-up
and just people everywhere.
Just ask them
questions straight off
without explaining
to the children
what they were doing
and why they were doing it.
It was chaos
in terms of the media
frenzy that was going on,
and us being so young,
and not even...
being allowed time to
comprehend what we had seen.
Our teachers certainly
didn't believe us.
So, that was a big deal,
'cause we had to continue
going to school there.
NARRATOR: We went back
one last time to the Ariel School
to meet with Judy Bates,
a teacher at the
time of the incident
and now the headmistress.
Something was weighing on her
that she wanted
to tell the children.
Yeah,
I said I wanted to apologize.
I should have taken more notice.
But I didn't. I was more
concerned about me and not them.
And what was going on in
my own sort of experience.
Well, that's what... Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: And if you could
summarize in just one sentence
what took place September 1994
here at Ariel School,
Ruwa, Zimbabwe,
what would you say?
Aliens visited us. [CHUCKLES]
And that's about it, yeah.
That's why if you believe it,
you believe it.
If you don't, well...
NARRATOR: We find ourselves
confronted with something
that challenges our very
understanding of reality.
We may be sharing this
fragile blue-green oasis
with an unknown other.
One with a mysterious
relationship to humanity,
and its own
interest in our world.
And if you saw him again,
what would you do?
I'll ask him what is
he doing on Earth,
and what does he want with us.
There were
well-observed UFO cases,
just like modern cases,
in the 18th century.
In the 17th century.
There was science.
There were astronomers,
they had telescopes,
and they were
very good observers
because their life depended
on being good observers.
And these observations
come from all over the world.
They just have been forgotten.
I like to think of anomalies,
mysteries, as opportunities,
and we'll go after
those mysteries,
take the torch away
from the campfire,
and out of the cave,
into the darkness
and make some
amazing discoveries.
The UFO phenomenon as studied
by my colleagues and myself,
bespeaks the action of
some form of intelligence.
[SPEAKING IN OTHER LANGUAGE]
These objects
gave the impression
that they wanted to be seen...
with these enormous spotlights.
There was no way that
they were trying to hide.
So why? That is
the main question.
Why do these objects
want to be seen?
Later on, I was so sorry
that why I did not
call on the radio.
Ask them, "Who are you?
"Please,
make communication with us."
I figure if they're smart
enough and capable enough
[CHUCKLES] to
come into our airspace
with the technology
that they have,
if they wanted to do us in,
they could have done us in a long time ago.
So,
I'm not fearful of this at all.
[SPEAKING MANDARIN]
Every once in a while one of them goes,
zip!
It went like a bat out of hell.
Jumped about ten degrees
to the right. Just like this.
I've never seen anything go so
fast in my life as that thing went.
Incredible speed.
Disappeared to nothing.
And just went, zoom,
straight up so fast.
It's like it had been
shot out of a g*n. Wham!
Now you see it,
now you don't. It just...
But it just was, poof!
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Phenomenon, The (2020)
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