Original subtitles

(Eerie resonating)

(Rapid beeping)

- Funny thing about ufos, they're always changing

while perpetually remaining the same.

The earliest documented reports of strange

objects in the sky essentially defined them similarly

to early descriptions of flying saucers.

In the 1600s, reports of strange lights

off the coast of the Americas

defined some of the earliest known types of ufo sightings,

while in the 1700s settlers in the new england areas

recalled descriptions of hovering orbs in the skies

above the waterways around Boston.

Today, it's not just flying saucers or lights in the sky

that experiencers encounter.

Cigar shaped craft, tic tacs from space,

and yes, the black triangles.

Triangular shaped craft began gaining notoriety

during the 1980s when a wave of sightings

swept across the Hudson valley.

But it wasn't until 1997 that the national media

began focusing on them.

- My name is lynne d. Kitei, md.

I am a medical doctor.

Had no interest or knowledge in this topic at all

till what would become the most historic,

most documented, and most important mass anomalous

aerial sighting in modern history if not all history

called the Phoenix lights.

My husband and I are physicians and healthy skeptics.

One must be when you're a physician.

We had a very close sighting to our home.

We live mountainside in paradise valley

pretty high on the mountain.

Have a panoramic view of the city skyline

so we know what planes look like, and helicopters,

and street lights and so forth.

These phenomena are very different than anything

we'd ever seen before.

In fact, my husband called me to one wall of our bedroom

is a window so we see whatever pops up out there.

He noticed that there were three Amber orbs

a little below over very treacherous desert landscape.

We live in a gated community nestled in the mountains

so there is no way that it could have been military.

Here these three orbs in a period formation,

one on top and two underneath, were just hovering there.

Most people that have these anomalous experiences

don't move, they're in awe.

I wanted to take everything in mentally.

The size, the shape, the color.

These orbs were about three to six feet each,

depending on how close they were.

They were actually oval shaped, like an egg on its side

or like what Navy pilots are now describing

as tic tac shape.

It was a uniform Amber color throughout

and they didn't glare at all.

Every other light out there glared.

My husband calls me back, he says, "get over here quick,

"one of them is disappearing."

And as we both watched in awe

the top orb, without budging from the other two underneath,

started to implode, shrink, almost like a dimmer switch.

Getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller.

- Dr. Kitei's sighting would be the first of three

that culminated with the mass sighting on march 13th

of what would become widely known

as the Phoenix lights incident.

Between 1995 and 1997 lynne would begin studying

the ufo subject and paid closer attention

to the sky above her desert home.

Lynne's next sighting would occur in January 1997,

two months prior to the Phoenix anomaly.

But what she witnessed that night bears close similarity

to the craft that would make its way overhead

in march later that same year.

- I was lying in bed and I happened to notice

three huge Amber orbs, but at a distance far away.

I thought, "wait a minute, they're Amber,

"they're in a line formation equidistant from each other,

"they're hovering for moments, minutes."

Which is ironic, because two months later

thousands of people who saw the Phoenix lights phenomena

on march 13th, 1997 would describe them as five lights

in a v formation with two trailing.

But this was two months before.

I watched as each one imploded.

They seemed to shrink, from right to left,

and they were gone.

(Bugs chirping) (Owl hooting)

(Static crackling) (Unsettling music)

(Fast paced unsettling music)

(Static crackling)

- Now, triangles and tic tacs are weird enough,

but the history of unidentified objects in the us

goes back further than most people realize.

In researching the ufo subject

I found a string of reports of unidentified craft

which hovered over major cities and small towns alike,

seemingly wanting to be seen.

Sound familiar?

No, this wasn't the Phoenix lights

or any number of other modern day mass sighting events,

it was the great airship waves,

and they occurred well over a century ago.

To start to understand the full scope

of what is being seen overhead today

it's almost a necessity to take a look back

at what people were seeing in the past.

To look back through American history

there's probably no better place to start than new england,

and there's fewer schooled in the history of strange objects

in the sky than Linda Zimmerman.

Linda is a researcher and author located in upstate New York

who has written a number of books on ufos,

particularly of sighting and encounters

in the Hudson valley area.

Linda's knowledge of the ufo subject

comes from a lifelong interest in the phenomena

and a decade's worth of experience interviewing witnesses.

- The oldest sight tests I'm aware of are probably

in the 1700s colonial accounts

of strange objects in the sky.

Certainly by the 1800s there were a lot.

The biggest, earliest wave that I've been able to find

was 1908-1909, the mysterious airships as they called them.

They weren't called ufos yet.

But these were enormous craft that could hover,

they could fly at extremely high rate of speed,

and carried one to three extremely bright spotlights.

There simply were no craft that we mere mortals had

at that point that had those flight characteristics.

Didn't exist.

- These cases are just incredible.

I remember reading about them years ago.

They dubbed them airships,

so and the 1890s there was this whole outbreak

of sighting and encounters that people were having

with airships, they didn't know what else to call them.

They actually looked like, for me it evokes

sort of a steampunk version of a zeppelin or something

because you read these cases and these people

are talking about these massive shifts.

Sometimes with different kinds of gears and fins

and things like that on them.

They see these crafts, sometimes they land,

sometimes they encounter the occupants.

- A lot of them were described as balloons

or zephyrs, or that sort of thing.

Although, (mumbles) Of this type were not very popular,

especially not here in the United States.

There was a little bit of research into that,

but most of that was going on in Europe.

- In the area where I live in southern Hudson valley

there were sightings many, many nights.

Farmers would be out commenting on these enormous

bright lights like as if they were searching for something.

Worcester, Massachusetts in Christmas of 1909

tens of thousands of people were just

spilling out of their homes and businesses

to see the mysterious airships that sometimes

would circle overhead for hours and hours.

- You get these farmers and people living in rural areas

who really just don't know what to think.

All of a sudden there's this flying craft.

You can imagine what that was like in the late 1800s,

well before airplanes and so forth.

Suddenly there are these huge ships

that are coming down from somewhere.

- One night there was a sighting,

it went as far from New York City to Boston

in a single night, witnesses all along the way.

These were just long sustained flights.

- These are some of the earliest cases that we get,

this whole rash of airship sightings and encounter

are sort of a subset of the identifications of ufos.

- When you see these stunning reports basically from here

to Canada and out to the midwest over a two year period,

how else do you explain that?

- When were seeing that sort of thing

here in the United States,

I think that really was a genuine mystery.

- When we get into later periods of course descriptions get

somewhat more consistent, but only to a degree.

(Rapid beeping) (Eerie music)

- Dean merchant is something of a ufological historian.

He's based in New Hampshire, not far from the site

of one of the more famous encounter stories near exeter.

It's apparent that his love of the subject

has placed him in a unique position as a gatekeeper

for information that others might otherwise

let slip through the cracks.

- Kenneth adleman was a really cool part of the ufo history.

He was a pilot himself.

He saw (mumbles) Craft in the (mumbles).

He saw the craft and he chased after it.

He got a very good look at it

and he knew this was something

that was not basically of this world.

Came back and reported them and he talked about them.

Tried to describe how they acted and he said,

"if you could picture a saucer skipping on the water."

And that kind of was coined.

But actually, a lot of them seen are in disc shapes.

Even more of the wing, like the b-2 stealth bomber

which interests me.

They had that kind of flying wing shape that he saw.

At that time this became of great interest to the press.

The movie genre was going to be starting soon.

All of this stuff is milling around.

Post world war ii, about to hit the early '50s,

so there's a lot of interest with the media.

(Rapid beeping)

- Stan Gordon has been taking reports of ufos

in the state of Pennsylvania since the 1960s.

In that time, he's become known as the got to source

of information relating to anomalous phenomena

on the western edge of the state,

and he's authored multiple books

on a number of strange subjects.

He's also spent decades researching a purported crash

of one of america's many supposed crashed unknown objects

near the village of kecksburg,

which makes him a very valuable resource

when it comes to identifying trends,

if they exist, in craft descriptions.

- Well, of course, going back many, many years

and you still get some of these reports.

You had your typical big disc,

and I can tell you during the 1960s

there were many, many incidents here in Pennsylvania

of very large structured metallic objects.

Big discs, many with portholes in it,

very low to the ground.

There's a common accepted idea of the flying saucer

that literally looks like maybe a pair of plates

or a saucer if you turned it upside down that's flying.

A lot of people were reporting those types of crafts.

And there were landing reports, in fact,

there was one happened only miles from where we're sitting

years ago, probably one of my favorite stories.

Unfortunately, both witnesses are now deceased.

They were two brothers.

It was February in 1968.

The older brother gets married in February of '68

and he and his new wife, they ran a small farmhouse

not far from here.

One afternoon, look out the window,

about 50 feet off the ground

there's this huge metallic dome shaped object

with portholes and like a catwalk hovering right there.

He can't believe what he's seeing.

He steps outside, he calls his wife,

and as they're looking at this thing

these small little humanoid creatures

come out on the catwalk, communicating with each other,

and they look directly at them.

It's starting to snow.

He goes back in the house,

he calls his brother in greensburg who believed in this.

He and his wife come out.

When they get there it's still there,

but it's about 100 feet off the ground.

Starting to snow pretty good.

As they watch this thing suddenly it shoots off

across the sky into the heavens.

Looks like a red star crossing the sky and disappears.

They called the local airport and they said,

"you're one of many people calling in

"to report the same thing."

- There would be variations on them.

Sometimes they would have windows along the sides.

Sometimes a window on the top or a dome.

- 1930s we started getting circular craft,

your classic flying saucers.

Certainly that was the model of choice in the '40s

and '50s and early '60s.

- But then we have all these other

variations of these ships.

The cigar shape is another one that was really reported

quite often initially,

and that was this idea that it was a larger craft,

going back to that balloon type of shape

or zeppelin type of shape, but it's more of a

metallic looking cigar shape.

- We have many reports for years and years

of the big metallic cigar shaped object,

including as we're filming in the last week

some very detailed sightings up in Cambria county

where something like this was being seen

by independent observes 100 feet, 200 feet off the ground.

Very close range reports coming in.

- Do you notice, and I don't know if this is just me,

do you notice a weird correlation between

ufo descriptions

and the era in which they're taking place technologically?

- So there are phases that go on.

The typical flying saucer, the round disc shaped object

that we saw so much in the '50s seemed to be

more something that was happening during that era

and we haven't seen so much since then.

So there are trends that seem to happen here and there.

- Gee whiz.

(Explosion booming)

- In the midst of that we also had craft that

resembled a little bit closer to the bomber,

the stealth bomber.

- Then the triangles.

The triangles, vs, and boomerangs of the 1980s.

The signature events of the waves of the 1980s

were triangular shaped craft

that almost always were described

as the size of a football field

would descend down to treetop level.

I had people tell me they could have hit it

with a baseball, a rock, a tennis ball,

that's how close these were.

- Larger craft that were reported, for instance,

in the Phoenix lights, these massive,

hesitate to use the word almost, but motherships

as some people dubbed them.

- Absolutely silent.

Most people said eerily quiet, dead silent.

One witness said it was like a city of lights.

Hundreds and hundreds of multicolor lights.

- Triangles were something new.

That wasn't something as abundant

as it has been more recently,

although these triangle sightings have been going on

for quite some time,

but it just seems like more.

(Whooshing)

- Again, the ability to hover in place

for extremely long periods of time

and then shoot off in the blink of an eye.

There was one man that impressed me in particular,

Mike hartnit.

He actually became one of the highest ranking members

of the New York City fire department.

This was not a skittish man at all

and he had one of these massive triangles

move very, very slowly over his house.

Being one of New York's bravest,

he got a very bright like million candle power light

and he flashed it at this object

and in response all of its lights dimmed

and then came back on in direct response to him.

(Rapid beeping)

- Shawn Kevin Jason witnessed a black triangle for himself

on a desert road somewhere between

Las Vegas and Rachel, Nevada.

Shawn has spent the time following his sighting

further exploring the subject

and fully admits he hopes to have another encounter.

What Shawn witnessed though is distinctly different

from the Phoenix lights phenomena

or the typical triangular shaped ufo craft descriptions,

and his theories as to what was piloting the craft

make his sighting stand out.

- It was a slow night.

Business was slow.

Jumped on the highway heading out of town

until I hit the apex exit.

Got off at apex where you head on 93,

highway 93 heading towards area 51.

Right when I'm getting to the end of that turn

off in the distance I see these lights.

By this time it was right around 10 o'clock.

I see lights off ahead and I think,

"okay, there's another car heading my way."

Didn't think anything of it at first and continued driving.

I was a little concerned because this was a time

before cellphones, that sort of thing,

so if someone's in trouble am I gonna stop to help them?

So I'm driving a little ways thinking about this

when it dawned on me that the lights were not on the road,

they were hovering over the road,

because I can see the lights over the road

and then I can see the illuminated road

underneath these lights.

So I had a pair of binoculars with me

and I decided to try to get a view of the craft

through my binoculars as I'm driving.

I'm trying to drive while i'm using them at the same time.

I can definitely see the lights better with the binoculars

and tell something for sure is over the road.

I had tossed the binoculars in my backseat

and decided to just floor it.

Push the car as fast as I could to get there

before this craft leaves.

It didn't take long at all before I found myself

pulling up underneath the craft and parking my car.

There's lights in a delta formation like this

and it's juts a pitch black craft.

Perfect equilateral black triangle.

It was hovering rightly around 20 feet over the road.

Completely silent, making no noise at all.

The craft was actually darker than the sky behind it.

I'm sitting there and just dumbfounded, in awe.

At one point I decided to pinch my arm

just as am I really awake?

Is this really happening?

And I had done so so hard

that I wanted to draw blood from my arm.

I'm thinking if I can grab my binoculars

I might be able to make out any logo or identification.

I had thrown them in the back seat,

so I turn around, see them right away,

they were lying on the floor behind the passenger seat,

grabbed them, turned back around and the craft is gone.

I'm thinking at this point it's totally gone,

I'm not gonna see it again.

So I start scanning the horizon,

I catch it again to my seven o'clock position.

It actually got a good ways down the valley from me

in just that short period time.

Like I said, it was flying to the seven o'clock position

and then it made a right heading basically north

towards the mountains.

It was just a bizarre thing to see

as this thing slowly crept up the side in the mountain

and you see it hit the top

and then it just drops down the other side of it.

(Electronic music)

- So today we know that a number of early sightings

of triangular shapes craft might be written off

as stealth bombers undergoing testing,

particularly in the western part of the country.

It doesn't account, however,

for the large number of sightings in recent years

and certainly can't account for the sightings of craft

that seem to be city sized.

Still, more recently the face of the phenomena

continues to change.

This is evidenced in the abbreviation used by many

within the research community,

changing from ufo for unidentified flying object

to uap for unidentified aerial phenomena.

Tic tacs and craft referred to as gimbles

are being seen in the skies, and further along we come

the more obvious it is that we're leaving behind

the days of only reports of the classic flying saucers.

But, like the old adage goes,

the more things change the more they stay the same.

- So you've got all these different reports

from so many different people.

Just like the sighting last week up in Cambria county,

I got the first report that evening from a witness

who saw this thing very low, very foggy area,

big solid cigar shaped object.

But he said the entire object was glowing and luminous.

Not separate windows, it was completely luminous.

He said it would suddenly fade out and disappear,

reappear again, fade out, and then disappear and it's gone.

This guy very familiar with aircraft.

- When I was talking about these military encounters

typically what they're encountering is an orb of light,

some kind of bright round or elliptical shapes object.

That's been going on for years.

- The most typical craft that have been reported

to me personally have been mostly triangular

or mostly lights, just lights in the sky,

whether it's orbs or just unnatural formations of lights.

That seems to be where we are right now

in terms of the amount of reports coming in.

A lot of people think that ufo reports

have dwindled a lot in the past decade or so.

I don't know what that is, what that represents,

but there seems to be a decrease

in the amount of ufos being reported.

The ones being reported are mostly lights in the sky

I would say.

- In the 1800s it was balloons and wooden ships

and that sort of thing.

In the '40s and '50s, especially once we started building

our jets, they were typically shiny silver craft

when the f-117 came around and the b-2 stealth bomber

now we're getting into black triangular designs.

But as curious that the dimensions, the shape, the color

of these craft often mirror

where our aviation is at the time.

- What's become more apparent in recent years

is the bleeding together of various

"craft shapes and sizes."

Small craft are seen gaining mass

while large craft dwindle to small lights

that flitter away in the night sky

like ashes from a dying fire.

All of this points to just one reason

why many consider the Phoenix lights event of 1997

one of the most fascinating cases in recent memory.

On march 13, 1997 between the hours of 7:30 and 10:30 pm

thousands of people across the city of Phoenix

and the surrounding area witnessed a series of lights

in a v formation floating across the night sky.

The event encompassed a number of descriptives

regarding uaps that helps illustrate just how varied

these strange things people are seeing can be.

- In 1997 there was an incident

called the Phoenix lights incident.

It's become probably one of the most famous cases

in recent ufo history.

It involved a large number of people

obviously in the Phoenix area who reported seeing

a massive craft moving through the sky completely silent.

- Many people called.

Most people called between 8:00 and 10:00 that night

because most people were outside looking up

at the hale-bopp comet at that time.

But the mass sighting of anomalous aerial phenomena

were not only appearing in Arizona,

but starting at 3:00 pm in the afternoon

daylight sighting in Arizona.

Five o'clock hour they were seen

by native Americans in new Mexico.

Seven o'clock hour in California.

11 o'clock hour they were actually reported

by two separate airline commercial pilots

who reported one of these massive

over mile wide craft covering Las Vegas.

- In his time working with aerojet,

Ron regier was tasked with multiple classified projects,

chief of which was the defense support program,

a satellite used to keep a close watch on the airspace

above the United States as well as the rest of the world.

In his time involved in the program

he witnessed a number of unusual phenomena

detected on the infrared system,

including the Phoenix lights.

- The Phoenix lights, which everybody's heard of,

we tracked those from just south of area 51

down to tuscan.

- When you say tracked them,

can you elaborate on that a little bit?

- Yeah, our satellite is in the

geosynchronous earth orbit, so it's always looking,

and we put three of them around the earth.

That gives us full binary vision coverage

of the entire earth surface 24/7.

Phoenix lights, we first picked those up

just south of area 51, which is northeast of Las Vegas.

Don't know where it originated from

or if that's just when it became within our spectrum.

It came all the way down past Phoenix

and then went down and went out of sight

just north of tuscan.

- Do you know how big that was

or how big it might have been?

- Well, it could be eight separate objects

or it could have been one big object,

I don't know.

- Air traffic controllers

at sky harbor international airport

saw the same exact thing.

Took their high power binoculars to look

and what they described was six equidistant points of light

that seemed to be attached to something over a mile wide,

but they couldn't quite see

what these lights were attached to.

You would hear that again by thousands of people

and they were alarmed, because there is a 30 mile radius

around the center of the airport

called class b restricted airspace.

Anyone that comes into that airspace,

especially 1,000 feet altitudes that these were,

must call into the tower but no one did.

- Often these sightings the craft or whatever it is

seems to be wanting to see it.

It's not like people see triangle craft often,

but when they do seem them they're often

extraordinary circumstances.

For instance, you've got the Phoenix lights

that happened in '97 and that was a big deal.

Governor fife symington says he saw those lights.

What he says is taken seriously.

He goes as far as to say he believes

that they are from something else.

That what he saw was a craft

from out of this world essentially.

- The last report I received, credible report personally,

was from a boeing crewman who was coming in to work

with his crew at 5:30 am the next morning

at sky harbor international airport

and saw one of these mile wide craft

hovering over their tarmac.

It was for many, many hours, over a dozen hours,

and there were many activities happening

in many areas at the same time during the mass sighting.

- A lot of people don't realize actually

that the Phoenix lights were also seen in Nevada

in the Vegas area and other regions.

This was a very concentrated wave of sightings

that a large number of witnesses saw.

The fascinating thing about that is, again,

we still have no answers.

- Now we have really evolved since the '90s

to actually looking at the data

now that more and more credible people are coming forward,

including our own former Arizona governor

who admits that he saw one of these mile wide crafts

and that it was otherworldly.

Now that Navy pilots are coming forward

and sharing that what they're seeing,

the technology is so far passes any technology

that we have here on earth that we know about.

The whole thing is really evolving to a good place,

a much better place of people being ready.

Being ready to learn about the topic

and being ready to accept that this is real.

- At the turn of the 20th century it was airships,

which became flying saucers,

which became cigar shaped objects,

and then triangles, and on, and on.

This is where it was first seen, or they were first seen,

the Phoenix lights.

The phenomena first appeared in the sky

above the Prescott valley,

then moved over the town of Dewey,

before finally making its way over the city

in the direction of sky harbor airport.

It's a sobering thing to come to a place like this

and look up into the same sky

where something so important happened over 20 years ago.

For a lot of witnesses the event passes

and is then forgotten.

A string of lights passing in the night

no doubt was easily forgotten

for most people when they're completely unaware

that what they're seeing is something extraordinary.

But for others like lynne, it was the beginning.

A door opened, she stepped through,

and now there won't be any going back.

It makes you feel very small to stare up into the sky

and wonder if they're still here,

and if they are and you're one of those who catch a glimpse,

just what it is you'll see.

(Somber piano music)

Coming up on the next episode of on the trail of ufos.

- Over the last several weeks people in this area

are reporting high altitude objects in the sky

they're not familiar with.

- You'll find that there are areas,

particularly in the united states and around the world,

that seem to have a high concentration of sightings.

Places like point pleasant, West Virginia

or Chestnut Ridge, sedona.

- The Hudson valley ufo wave started with the police

and it kind of ended with the police.

They actually invested all these cases.

(Camera shutter clicking)

(Unsettling electronic music)