01x01 - Secrets of the Skies

[bunniefuu]

Throughout time,

governments and the people

who work for them have

done strange and even terrible

things in the name of national interest.

Tonight we look up.

Imagine an intelligence

agency stealing a fighter jet

in broad daylight.

He risks being blown out

of the sky at any instant.

And can we ever know with certainty

what happens at area 51?

This is actually responsible

for more than half of

all reported ufo sightings

in the 1950s.

This is pure evidence

that the government is

hiding something big.

It's time to bring these

secrets of the skies

back down to earth.

Advertise your product or brand here

It's fall 1954.

In Burbank, California,

aerospace manufacturer lockheed

is designing a top secret aircraft

whose very existence will ignite

one of history's greatest

conspiracy theories.

This plane is cutting-edge technology,

but it's kind of weird.

It uses advanced materials like titanium

that's strong and lightweight,

but it also has these strange features.

Like its gangly, and the landing gear

is lined up like bicycle wheels.

This is a curious-looking bird.

This plane has 130-foot-long wings

that droop at their

length, to the point that

they actually will hit the ground

when the plane is grounded.

Most unusually, though,

for a plane produced by

a fighter jet company, this aircraft isn't

going to carry a single weapon.

The reason for this

plane's extreme design

is its extreme mission.

It's being made for the U.S. government

to fly at record-breaking altitudes

on top secret reconnaissance missions

over Soviet territory.

In the 1950s, the Americans are worried

about the technology

that the Soviets have.

The rumor at the time is that the Soviets

had developed a b*mber

capable of flying from Moscow

to the United States.

So the CIA comes up

with this ingenious plan

to find out if it was true.

We don't have much of

a spy network operating

in the Soviet union in the 1950s.

The Soviets are protected

behind an iron curtain.

If you can't go through the iron curtain

or sneak behind it, you

might have to fly over it.

To avoid detection,

the CIA decides to build

a state of the art spy plane.

Any aircraft that are

flying over Soviet territory

might be suscepted to air defense,

including sophisticated missiles,

and they might be accused

of violating international law.

The solution is to

create an aircraft that flies

twice as high as the him a lay an peaks.

70,000 feet and above.

No plane has flown so high for so long.

To achieve it means

developing brand-new technology.

So the government tasked lockheed

to build this spy plane.

And their solution is essentially

to make a giant glider

and to stick a jet engine on it.

Flying at the altitude that it is

presents all sorts of new challenges.

For instance, traditional

jet fuel just won't work.

They need to invent an entirely new

type of kerosene fuel

that doesn't boil off at low pressure.

Lockheed's engineers

call its new creation

the angel, as it flies so close to heaven.

The government

designates it utility aircraft 2,

or the u-2.

But building this incredible plane

is only half the battle.

When the u-2 is complete,

the government needs

to figure out how to test

it and, most importantly,

where to test it.

Building a plane in secret, that's doable,

because it's done inside of a hangar.

But testing a plane in secret,

that's a lot more difficult.

For decades, the location

of the u-2's testing site

remains one of the government's

most closely guarded secrets.

But conducting so many

flights of this classified plane

has a strange side effect.

When they start testing the u-2,

ufo sightings go up tremendously.

The public sees it.

They have no idea

what they're looking at.

Air traffic controllers

and professional pilots,

they don't know either.

They see the shimmering in the sky.

They don't know what it is.

It's really high up there.

Therefore, they think it's a ufo.

Rather than confess that

they're testing a top secret

new plane, which might

alert the Soviets to their plan,

the CIA launch a cover-up.

They claim the sightings

are due to natural phenomena.

So understandably, the

conspiracy theories go nuts.

There are some people

who argue that the u-2

in its early stages of development

is actually responsible

for more than half of all

reported ufo sightings in the 1950s.

- In 2013, the U.S.

- admits for the first time

what many have long suspected.

The name of u-2's

secret test base is area 51.

One of the reasons that area 51 is

so important and so

secret is that it's near

the Nevada proving grounds.

And no one in their right mind

is going to want to go into an area

where they're testing nuclear bombs.

They specifically purchased the land

for testing the u-2.

Were it not for the u-2,

there would be no area 51,

and we would have lost our

most iconic ufo conspiracy location.

While area 51 becomes

the most notorious ufo site

in the world, the u-2 plane

becomes one of america's

most vital intelligence tools.

Between 1956, the first operational flight

July 4 through may 1 of 1960,

the u-2 program dispelled the m*ssile gap

and the b*mber gap.

There was none.

We were still ahead of the Soviets,

even though they were

saying they were ahead of us.

Over the next four years,

30 flights photograph

almost 15% of the ussr.

This provides 90% of

the CIA's hard intelligence

on its fiercest rival.

The CIA thought it had a shelf life

of two to four years.

Well, other than the b-52,

the u-2 spy plane is the

longest-flying airplane

in the U.S. air force's arsenal,

and it's still flying today.

The u-2 isn't the only secret

aviation project to fly

into the record books.

A decade later, the world's

first supersonic plane

prepares for its maiden flight.

But this isn't the concorde

in London or Paris.

This is in Moscow, and

this aircraft is named tu-144.

The maiden flight of

the tu-144 is a massive

engineering and propaganda win

for the Soviet union over the west.

Up until that point,

the only planes to fly

over the speed of sound

are military jets.

No one has ever built a large-scale plane

like this that can carry passengers,

because the immense

technical challenge of it all.

The Soviet designers are on cloud nine.

The creators of the

concorde are in shock.

In 1962,

britain and France

entered into an agreement

to share resources to develop and build

a supersonic passenger

jet called the concorde

and get it in the sky

before the Soviet union.

The fact that the tu-144 beats concorde

into the sky is a surprise.

Even more shocking,

it has the same design.

Both planes have got

the same sleek nose,

the same delta wing

shape, and the same

after burning turbojet engine.

The tu-144 is so similar

that the western press,

they called it the concordeski.

The Soviets insist their craft is

100% Russian ingenuity,

but western engineers point to a series

of suspicious events during

concorde's development.

Right from the onset,

the Soviets showed

an incredible amount of interest

in the concorde program.

Could there also be a

mole within the organization,

someone within the trust

of the concorde program

giving secrets away?

Rumors of industrial

espionage remain just that.

Then, in 1992, a Russian bureaucrat

walks into the British embassy

in Latvia with a bold offer.

A disillusioned kgb worker

named vasili mitrokhin said

that he had scores of documents

that he would willingly hand

over in exchange for asylum.

When MI6 agents get to

mitrokhin's house in Russia,

they find a treasure trove of material

more than 25,000 pages.

In total, it's about six

trunks' worth of material.

During his time at kgb, vasili was actually

hand-copying notes that

he had access to as an archivist.

This discovery would turn

out to be the largest single

source of information

ever collected during

the entire history of the cold w*r.

Buried in this vast intelligence stash

is evidence of a spy codenamed ace.

Agent ace seems to be a British engineer

who was leaking

information to the Soviets.

This is how the tu-144 got in

the sky before the concorde.

Agent ace was the mole that

the UK and the concorde program

suspected from the very beginning.

For 20 years, the identity of agent ace

remains a mystery.

But in 2023, a British professor

pieces together clues

from mitrokhin's archive

to crack the case.

Agent ace's real name

is ivor Gregory James,

and he is a Hong-Kong-born engineer

who went to work in britain in the 1970s.

It was discovered that

agent ace had actually

supplied the Soviets with

more than 90,000 pages

of documentation related

to new aircraft designs

over more than a decade.

And inside that supply of information

were details related to

the concorde program.

The theft of the concorde secrets

is one of the largest

industrial espionage operations

of all time.

But for all its initial success,

there's a good reason you probably

never heard of the tu-144.

At this prestigious Paris air show,

both the concorde and the revised tu-14

are the star attractions.

The tu-144 flies at the Paris air show.

And initially, it looks great.

It takes off fine.

It flies for a few minutes.

But then it stalls and crashes.

It all breaks apart in flames.

It is a massive embarrassment

for the Soviet union,

and the plane's

reputation never recovers.

The tu-144 only ever

completes 100 domestic flights.

The rumors are the

Sonic jet ends its days

shipping mailbags in Siberia.

It's 1967, and a

mysterious light in the sky

over a key American m*ssile base

is about to set off alarms

and ignite a long-running mystery.

On march 24, Robert

salas arrives for his shift,

overseeing 10 nuclear missiles

at malmstrom air force base.

As a young missileer,

his job is to serve as

the first line of defense

as part of america's nuclear arsenal.

In the late 1960s, the minuteman icbms

are really the centerpiece

of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Malmstrom is one of multiple sites

that houses 1,000 nuclear missiles.

Each one is in its own silo,

and 150 of them are at malmstrom.

Those missiles are kept on alert

and ready to fire on very short notice

in the event of a nuclear exchange.

Salas's work is critical

to national security,

but it also gets a little repetitive.

I actually had a chance to serve

at malmstrom air force base

as a nuclear m*ssile officer.

And when you're there,

you don't feel very important.

You're just one of

about 1,000 other people

who are all there taking

turns going underground

and monitoring these missiles.

But in reality, you really are carrying

the weight of nuclear

deterrence on your shoulders.

This particular shift at malmstrom

is anything but routine.

Salas is in his command

headquarters, and suddenly

He gets a call from the gate personnel

at the entrance to malmstrom.

And the guard reports that there's

some sort of strange light that's flying,

moving in a strange pattern

over the actual base itself.

This is an area that's

restricted from aircraft

and restricted from commercial travel.

So what is this light

that's flying overhead?

They don't seem to be

engaged in threatening action,

but it is a little disconcerting

to see unexplained lights above the base.

A few minutes later,

salas gets a second call.

And this time the guard

calls salas in a cold panic.

There's a glowing orb of red light

that's hovering right above

the gate to malmstrom.

Needless to say, nobody

knew what this was,

and salas, who's 100 feet underground,

has no idea how to make

any sense of this at all.

Salas orders the gate personnel

to not allow anything to pass the gate.

And then within just a few seconds,

all 10 missiles under

salas's command go dark.

These minuteman missiles

are the most sophisticated,

technologically advanced

nuclear weapons

in the American arsenal.

The idea that 10 of them

could suddenly all

malfunction at the same time

is unthinkable to salas.

10 missiles actually covers

about 15 square miles

of location, all controlled

by a single launch

control capsule where

salas was actually sitting.

With no explanation,

the red orbiting light disappears.

The missiles reactivate,

and it's almost as if

nothing happened at all.

Was this a Soviet spy craft

sent to disrupt america's defenses

or some unidentified

aerial phenomenon?

To find out, the air force sends a team

from an ongoing secret investigation

known as project blue book.

Project blue book was

a U.S. air force program

that started in the early 1950s

and ran for about 15 years

to track and classify all

unidentified aerial phenomena

and see if any of them were

a threat to national security.

Investigators from project blue book

look into this incident at malmstrom,

and they don't think

it's an alien spacecraft,

but they also can't find any

other logical explanation.

The official word is that

the government doesn't know

why those missiles shut down.

Malmstrom is instantly classified

like many other project

blue book sightings.

Salas signs a nondisclosure agreement,

and he's sworn to secrecy

about the events that occurred.

He's convinced that if he

tells anybody what he saw,

he's going to face prosecution

and probably be put in prison.

The blue book investigation

ends three years later,

and its findings are made public.

The government concludes

that ufos pose no danger

to america's defenses.

There is nothing to hide.

There's nothing to hide at all.

And no credible evidence exists

for extraterrestrial

technology or vehicles.

Problem is, Robert

salas knows what he saw.

Decades later, in 2010,

he decides to tell his story to the world.

In 1967, I was a first lieutenant

stationed at malmstrom

air force base, Montana.

When Robert salas

came out with his story,

ufo theorists and the community

really seized on it and said,

"this is pure evidence that

the government is hiding

something that happened out there."

The ufo community starts to believe

that project blue book is designed to just

debunk ufo conspiracies

instead of actually investigating them.

I think the U.S. government

does know more about

some of these ufo

sightings than it lets on,

but that doesn't necessarily mean

that they're alien spacecraft.

A mystery is in some

ways just as challenging

as an actual secret.

Still, today, the U.S. government is

just as likely to classify its ignorance

as it is it's knowledge.

It's 15 years into the cold w*r.

Controlling the skies is

vital to defending the land.

One idea of an ambitious U.S. general

involves a fleet of

covert nuclear bombers

that circle the enemy nonstop.

But on a winter's night in 1961,

this plan goes up in

flames over north Carolina.

It's just before midnight on

an unusually warm evening

in the small town of goldsboro.

Some of the residents are still awake

when suddenly their rooms start to glow

with a strange red light.

They see this giant b-52 b*mber

with just a single wing on fire

passing over their homes.

I can only imagine being one

of the residents of goldsboro.

You hear this loud

crash, this boom outside.

It's a b-52 blowing up right

over your head, more or less.

It had to be a horrific moment.

The plane explodes, scattering debris

across two square

miles of cotton farmland,

igniting fields of crops.

Military helicopters start

to descend upon the scene

quite instantaneously, just about.

Next thing they know, a

voice on a loudspeaker

is yelling at everyone to evacuate.

The residents of goldsboro

are told this crashed plane

has scattered deadly cargo.

Two 3.8 megaton thermonuclear bombs,

each 200 times more destructive

than the one that leveled Hiroshima.

What the world doesn't yet know is that

this crashed b*mber

is part of a classified

national security initiative

named the airborne alert program.

The airborne alert

program is the brainchild

of general power, and the idea is that

the U.S. air force is going to be ready

to deliver a nuke to the ussr at any time.

General power comes up with this idea

to fly b-52s 24 hours a day,

because we want to make

sure that we are able to strike

Russia at any time, should

they launch these missiles at us.

For a brief, shining

moment, the Soviet union

pulled ahead of the United States

in the cold w*r nuclear standoff.

They had that first strike advantage.

So it seems absolutely batty and insane.

But undoubtedly, many

in the 1960s were thinking,

this is exactly how we ensure that

the United States

survives should the cold w*r

give way to a hot w*r.

No one has ever tried to keep a fleet

of nuclear bombers in the air 24/7.

So general power and his planners

developed these routes that

will go along the Soviet border

and come back out.

These were grueling

missions that are testing

the limits of human endurance.

The reality was that they're circling

in a b-52 over the arctic circle,

waiting to start a nuclear w*r.

They have to be refueled while in flight.

And that's very dangerous,

because these planes are

carrying a nuclear payload.

You have an American strategic b*mber

thundering through

the sky at 40,000 feet

with a b*mb bay full of

thermonuclear weapons,

trying to receive kerosene

from another airplane

while they both bounce

around in turbulent air.

What could possibly go wrong?

You just wrap your head around it.

Think about that.

There are at least two

nukes on every plane.

But general power and our military

think it's worth the risk.

After the airborne alert program

has been in secret operation for years,

general power decides to make it public

on January 18, 1961.

He wants to use its existence

as a deterrent to the Soviets.

But exactly one week

after his announcement,

one of his bombers Springs a fuel leak,

and the residents of goldsboro

end up running for their lives

from two unexploded nuclear bombs.

Shortly before this

mission was undertaken,

boeing realized that there

was a mechanical issue

with the b-52s,

and essentially, they

were doing a callback.

But this b-52 had yet to make the list.

That's when trouble strikes.

The military evacuate

locals, cordons off the area,

and brings in a crack team

of b*mb disposal experts.

One of the bombs is very easy to find,

safely hanging from a tree,

ready for the government to take it away.

Now, the second b*mb,

that one's a bit harder to get to.

The second b*mb

experiences a failure to deploy

of its retarding parachute.

And the result is it slams

into the surface of the earth,

going 700 miles an hour,

and digs itself in to a depth of 180 feet.

The authorities dig for

seven days and nights

under floodlights, in rain and snow,

to try and find the b*mb.

One wrong move, and

it could all go boom.

So finally, they decide

that further digging

represented a greater danger

than just isolating the device

and leaving it alone.

They realized the better thing to do

is to seal it up and call it a day.

They leave the b*mb in

place and they just buy the field

from the farmer for 1,000 bucks.

The deed to this land forever states

that the owner is not to go more

than five feet into the

ground for any purpose.

45 years later, the air force releases

a never before seen

document detailing the crash,

compiled by a senior

nuclear weapons safety officer.

It reveals a shocking secret

and the paper thin

margin between near-miss

and nuclear apocalypse.

This document that

comes out decades later

reveals that the first b*mb,

of its multiple redundant

security devices,

all but one are compromised.

As if by miracle, it

stopped at the final stage.

We're one tiny electrical

sequence away from

a thermonuclear

expl*si*n in north Carolina.

As for the second nuke,

the one that is buried

deep in the soil of goldsboro,

it's been half a century.

It hasn't blown up.

So I guess we're doing ok.

And fingers crossed.

In the '60s, the Soviets released

one of the most formidable, most agile,

and most lethal fighter jets ever made.

But this must have

weapon to rule the skies

is not for sale to Russia's enemies.

So for the young nation of Israel,

stealing its secrets might

tip the balance of a w*r.

In the 1960s, a Soviet

union created a brand-new,

cutting edge fighter jet

that had the entire

western world on edge.

And it's a game changer.

It's so fast and agile that it becomes

the biggest selling fighter in history.

It is also designed to be simple to make

and cheap to produce,

which means air forces

could have lots of them.

It's called the mig 21.

And for one fledgling nation, Israel,

this nimble new fighter

plane spells disaster.

Israel is surrounded on all

sides by hostile neighbors.

Islamic countries that were buying

mig 21s from the Soviet union.

What the Israelis want

to do is study the mig 21.

They want to know its

potential weaknesses

and ensure their own ability

to maintain air superiority.

Israel's primary concern

was this new fighter jet

could tip the scales of

power for any future w*r

that might break out in the region.

If the Israelis lose air superiority,

they'll lose the w*r.

If they lose the w*r,

they'll cease to exist.

The commander of the Israeli air force

tells the head of Israeli

intelligence agencies,

meir amit, "if you can bring me a mig,

you'll have done me

a good day's service."

Meir amit accepts the challenge

and hatches a covert plan to steal

a mig 21 from right under the noses

of Israel's neighbors.

The first step?

Finding a pilot.

The Israelis started to

make approaches to pilots

in a lot of different countries.

The Israelis identify an

Iraqi pilot named munir redfa,

and they identify this pilot

because in an islamic country,

he himself is Christian.

They orchestrate a

meeting in a hotel room.

It's such an important mission.

The agency's top spy chief

even watches the entire meeting

covertly through a peephole.

Redfa is a deputy commander

of an Iraqi mig squadron,

and he's not happy,

because he's just been

passed over for promotion.

He believes it's because he's a catholic,

which is pretty unusual in Iraq.

He's also very unhappy

about being ordered to join

a bombing campaign

against kurdish tribesmen

on the Iraqis' northern border.

In all the cases I've ever worked,

in all the spies I've ever recruited,

it was a deep, real relationship

between us and them.

Just because you have

differing political idealizations

doesn't mean that you

aren't human beings together.

All you have to do is think in terms of,

what can I do to inspire

them to feel safe with me

and solve that action they

need solved in their lives?

It's a very delicate

process to create a defector,

to turn a patriot into a traitor.

And every defector comes

with their own interests,

their own needs.

Sometimes it's education.

Sometimes it's finances.

But in every case, all

a defector is looking for

is to have some sort of

control over their future.

Redfa is offered $1

million, Israeli citizenship,

and safe passage for his entire family

if he agrees to fly his mig 21 to Israel.

Redfa goes for the deal,

but there's one significant setback: Fuel.

As a Christian, redfa is

subject to a lot of scrutiny.

His movements are tightly controlled.

So he's rarely allowed

to fly with a full fuel tank.

This keeps him close to home.

Even if redfa has a full

tank, a journey to Israel

takes him through

hostile Jordanian airspace.

He risks being blown out

of the sky at any instant.

It's two full years before

redfa gets his chance.

Eventually, it happens.

He's told that he'll be

part of a formation flight

with a full tank of gas.

Mid-flight, he breaks

away from his formation

and heads for Israel,

powering over Jordanian airspace.

The Jordanians scramble

two jets to give chase,

but they can't match the mig 21's speed.

Redfa hits his afterburners,

sometimes flying as low

as 700 feet to avoid missiles

locking onto his plane.

After a 65-minute flight of sheer terror,

he reaches a base deep in the desert

on his last drop of fuel.

30 years later, details of this daring,

state-sanctioned heist are revealed

to a journalist writing

a history of the Mossad.

And it's now seen as a turning point

in the arab-Israeli conflict.

The ending of the story is

that the Israelis discovered

the mig's weaknesses, and in the event

that they have to fight

it, they're better prepared.

This operation

underscores just how good

Mossad is at understanding

their adversaries

and exploiting opportunities.

An intelligence

organization that belonged to

a small country that was

less than 20 years old

was now capable of

carrying out one of the biggest

heists in history.

The arms race to control the skies

has had governments everywhere

investing in groundbreaking

secret projects.

So maybe it was only a matter of time

before the most enduring

design in science fiction

the flying saucer.

Meet 1959's avrocar.

The avrocar.

It's effectively what you would get

if you mixed a flying

saucer with a hovercraft.

Project avrocar is the brainchild

of a British engineer named

John carver meadows frost.

He's a big dreamer, and he's

already got a project in mind

to begin to think about

the next generation

of aerospace design.

Frost begins to study this interesting

aerodynamic phenomenon

known as the coanda effect.

He shows that a jet engine's

exhaust can be routed around

to underneath the object,

where it forms an air cloud

that allows it to lift off the ground.

So basically, he's designed

a literal flying saucer.

His lab work convinces

the Canadian government

that this is actually a possibility,

and they are willing to support his work

for about two years.

And for frost, this becomes

his personal passion

to take this flying saucer

from a blueprint to reality.

But after a year,

the project's astronomical price tag

forces the Canadians to pull the plug.

Frost needs a new

backer to realize his dream.

Luckily for him, a rich

neighbor to the south

is in the market for a flying saucer.

In the early 1950s, the U.S. military

is looking for planes that

can vertically take off and land.

They're known as vtol planes.

Governments are

beginning to think about

what fighting world w*r

III would actually look like.

So they are focused on developing

planes that can take off vertically

that don't need long runways.

Also, the military has

been rocked by a series

of newspaper articles

claiming that the Soviets

are developing similar tech.

Apparently, n*zi engineers

had secretly developed

a working flying saucer

during the second world w*r,

and they were now working for the ussr.

So if there's even the

smallest chance that

the Soviets are developing

a game-changing vtol aircraft,

the U.S. thinks they need one too.

The story goes that

when frost gets wind of

the U.S.'s interest in saucers,

he spots a visiting delegation

from the air force and intercepts them

with his avrocar prototype.

Frost apparently shows

them work so secret

even his bosses don't know about it.

And shortly after, the U.S. air force

agrees to fund a million-dollar

feasibility study into his

flying saucer research.

For frost, this is magic.

In an instant, his project

has gone from a side hustle

of the Canadian

government to accessing

the largest, most powerful military

and budget in the world.

We'll never know what

frost said to get funding,

but a clue lies in a remarkable document

made public in 2012.

In it, frost makes some

extraordinary claims

about his flying saucer, now

code named project 1794.

Frost claims that his

saucer will far exceed

any jet fighter of the age.

It's going to be able

to go up to four times

the speed of sound,

fly to the edge of space,

travel between continents.

These are bold claims.

If you are an air force general,

this is a machine you

definitely want in your hangar.

Progress is anything but supersonic.

After eight years, in 1959, frost's team

finally has a prototype

ready for its first ever test.

And by this point, the

U.S. army also wants in.

The U.S. army has come

out of the Korean w*r

interested in having

basically a flying Jeep.

They see this flying saucer as perhaps

their answer to moving equipment,

moving troops, and even fighting.

So frost has both the army

and the air force, two bosses,

both pushing him for results.

Everything hangs on

the avrocar's first test.

The million dollar question

is, will this thing fly?

In the avrocar's first test flight,

it doesn't go completely as planned.

Frost's design has some

fundamental problems.

It doesn't have the control surfaces

that an airplane has to ensure stability,

and it has no thrust.

Like, the thing can't go fast.

It's riding on a cushion

of air, but as it goes up,

the air dissipates, so it loses its lift.

It's just bad all the way around.

After promising supersonic

flight at the edge of space,

frost delivers a wobbly 30 miles an hour,

3 foot from the ground.

Unsurprisingly, the

military pulls the plug.

The project is canceled.

A complete disappointment to everyone,

including, presumably, John frost.

Before it's grounded,

the avrocar racks up

over $100 million in

costs in today's money

a reminder that when it

comes to the national interest,

no idea is too crazy to try.

The prototypes are

quickly dumped into storage

as a very obvious embarrassment.

In the 1980s, decades

of press censorship

are crumbling in the ussr.

And with this new

freedom, Soviet newspapers

focus their attention on

a topic that really sells:

Ufos.

During the cold w*r,

the Soviet government

is very much against any stories that are

at all subversive or unorthodox,

and a ufo sighting is both.

Discussing ufos would

be viewed as admitting that

there was some sort of

power out there stronger

than the Soviet union itself.

And to do so would be

not only risking your career,

but also risking your

freedom and ending up in jail.

The media can't really

report on this story at all

until the government kind

of lets up on these rules.

In 1985, things start to change.

In this era of glasnost and perestroika,

you have the opening

up of all of these incredible

hidden stories that had been taking place

inside the Soviet union.

It was like the floodgates were opened.

All of a sudden, Russia just

kind of went crazy for ufos.

Many scientists inside the Soviet union

questioned the truth of these stories.

Soviet authorities tried to

explain away the sightings,

saying that it's a natural

phenomena like ball lightning

that can give the impression

of a large glowing orb

that people say they saw.

Ball lightning presents

itself in a circular form,

very similar to what people report as ufos

where they talk about flying saucers

or ba*ls of light in the sky.

Others say that this

is just mass hysteria,

that people got one story,

and they just fed into each other

and got really excited.

It's easy to chalk this up as hysteria,

sightings by an uninformed public.

But then in 1991, a whistleblower

from deep within Soviet military circles

steps forward.

A pilot with a résumé so decorated,

her claims demand to be taken seriously.

Marina Popovich is one of the ussr's

most decorated and

well-respected aviators.

She's the first Soviet woman

to break the sound barrier.

She holds 100 aviation records,

and she's known in the

Soviet union as madame mig.

The changes gave

Marina the opportunity

to talk about her experiences

and what she had seen

as a pilot in the ussr

without the worry of repercussions.

In press conferences

and media interviews

and her own writings,

she begins to make

some pretty fantastical claims.

Popovich says she has

multiple experiences with ufos.

In 1982, she says she was in Siberia

when she saw what looked

like a giant glowing orb.

At a press conference

in the Russian consulate

in San Francisco, she

claims that the Russians

have been able to retrieve

five different downed ufos,

and she also claims that there's evidence

of some sort of hybrid breeding program,

breeding humans with aliens.

And then in this very dramatic moment,

she produces a photo that she says

is a 15-mile-wide alien spacecraft.

She says it is a ufo

that has either captured

or destroyed Soviet space probes.

Scientists explain it away as the picture

being very consistent with

the launch of a spacecraft.

But because Popovich is so respected,

the ufo community starts to back her,

saying that she's the

only one telling the truth

and the government is

covering up the real explanation.

Her claims obviously create

an incredible amount of interest.

I mean, you can imagine

the press would go crazy

over stories like this,

especially at that time in history.

Marina Popovich isn't the first

government whistleblower

to cry cover-up,

but she's one of the most influential.

Popovich becomes probably

the best example that we have

on the Russian side of a phenomenon

that's actually pretty common,

these so-called ufo whistleblowers.

Government workers,

pilots, intelligence officers

who come forward and say that

they have privileged knowledge

or have seen hidden evidence.

The whistleblowers will keep

coming forward with stories.

But until someone has

really verified evidence

that can be shown

publicly, it's just hearsay.

But still today, we don't know the truth

of what a lot of these

mystery sightings end up being.

Our world and our

universe is still weirder today

than we can imagine.

For every covert mission we discover

taking place in the skies,

many more remain hidden

until someone brings

these secrets to light.