Original subtitles

[♪ suspenseful music playing]

-Do you have any traffic...

Can’t really say how far, but at my 12:00.

-When I looked at it through my binoculars,

you could see a perfectly clear defined,

so-called cigar-type shape.

-No idea what it was.

Stay away from 17,000 (feet.)

-These were official Department of Defense

unexplained objects.

-What we were seeing out there were essentially

radar contacts that we didn’t think belonged there.

[pilot] Look at that thing!

-Commercial pilots, military pilots,

have been sharing a lot of their experiences and

what they’re seeing on a regular basis.

-Pilots are scared that if they come forward individually,

they’re out the door.

But if we all go together,

the door’s not big enough to get us all through

it at the same time.

-People would say,

"Yeah, you should be wearing a tinfoil hat."

I would say 50% of the pilots that were working for

the same airline that I did have seen something.

-Their sightings go all the way back to the 40s and

50s and 60s.

-If you said something about UFOs to me,

I would’ve laughed at you.

-Picture the brightest, shiniest,

silver that you’ve ever seen.

-As I first saw it, it came into view,

glinting off of the horizon.

-I want to make it clear that these pilots, I think,

are being entirely honest.

But one thing people have to realize now is the sky

is full of stuff.

-And up to this point,

it’s been difficult for airline pilots,

or military pilots, to say anything.

-Some airlines do not wanna be known as the airline

you fly in order to see UFO.

-We get reports every night.

-I don't know what the hell it is.

-Rotating right around it.

[♪ theme music playing].

-The US Navy, documented several hundred observations

of phenomena that are unexplainable in

restricted military airspace.

These are very credible witnesses who have seen these

objects on a range of government platforms.

My name is Tim Gallaudet.

I’m a retired rear admiral in the US Navy.

In 2015, I was in charge of all the meteorologists in the

Navy and oceanographers providing weather forecasts

for safety of flight.

I was a one-star admiral working for the United States

Fleet Forces Command.

I had a top-secret clearance,

and I'd been read into special access programs.

For example, if there was a very special weather sensor

that we own that we didn't want our adversaries to have,

that's something I would have a need to know as the

head meteorologist of the Navy.

There were pilots flying off the USS Theodore Roosevelt

that were having experiences witnessing UAP and

I received a email on the

Navy's Secret Network from the operations officer,

and the subject of it was,

"Urgent Safety of Flight Issue."

And he had attached a video.

-Object on the... whoa, got em!

Woo-hoo!

[Tim Gallaudet] The video shows an object moving rapidly.

It seemed to be just basically a white sphere.

It really didn't have any means propulsion,

there was no exhaust.

The text of the email was short,

and it just said,

"If any of you know what this is, tell me ASAP."

And it was addressed to me and the 20 or so other

subordinate commanders under US Lead Forces Command.

So these are one and two-star admirals.

Some of 'em are in charge of carrier strike groups.

The disconcerting thing is the next day,

that email was wiped from my computer.

And no one talked about that incident.

It was never discussed.

We were forced to do nothing about a serious risk.

-I was aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2015.

I used to fly the F18 Super Hornets in the Navy

for about 11 years and it was very uncertain what

we were dealing with here.

The pilots that saw the object described as a dark gray

or a black cube inside of a clear sphere about

four to six feet in diameter.

And I assumed that with enough chatter the video we saw that

it would go up the proper channels and there would be

some type of response but it didn't.

And this wasn't the first time that we had

seen these things.

A few years earlier one of these actually almost

hit one of our aircraft.

Two aircraft about 150 feet apart.

One of these objects went right between the two aircraft.

That was what we would consider "a near midair."

I saw the pilots when they came back from the flight,

they were in the ready room with all their gear on.

And the pilot looked at me, he said,

“I almost hit one of those damn things.”

He just had a look of shock on his face,

his mouth was open.

We all knew what he was referring to when

you said “those things.”

We didn't really have a name for them,

but we all understood that there were these unknown

objects in our airspace.

-There was a spike and a surge around 2015 of encounters

involving US Navy ships.

We were having sightings of UFOs,

on a regular basis.

We're getting hundreds of reports per year now.

Clearly that’s not something that just changed overnight.

-These are pilots of some of the most advanced fighter

planes in the world saying,

“I experienced an encounter with something that

I can't explain.”

One of the challenges with almost any sighting

is that there are a lot of possible mundane

answers as well.

These could be craft from China or Russia or Iran.

Or it could even be US technology that the pilots

encountering it don't understand is our own.

-One thing people have to realize now is the sky

is full of stuff.

Everything from kids' balloons,

you know, that rise up high enough to

be moving at high speeds,

to all kinds of drone technologies and such.

So, you know, there's a whole list of things.

And so, you know, for any individual case,

you have to actually look at the data,

you know, examine it, unpack it, unpack the time of day,

unpack the weather that was happening.

And you typically find that the vast majority of

them are explainable.

[Tim Gallaudet] My job was safety of flight.

I knew these objects are not of our own origin because we,

the US government, doesn't conduct experiments

in training ranges.

And I had a top-secret clearance.

I knew all the threat capabilities,

what China and Russia owned and I knew they didn't

have any technology like that.

-At the very beginning of this,

we actually assumed it was a radar error,

but once we started correlating these

sightings with our missile systems,

with our camera systems,

and eventually with our eyeballs,

we absolutely had to assume that these were

physical objects that could hurt our aircraft.

-Did you box the moving target?

-No. It’s in auto track.

[pilot] Oh okay.

[Tim Gallaudet] When I saw that email,

and then it was removed from my computer,

I didn't speak out because I wanted to keep serving.

And I realized okay, this is classified.

I'm not supposed to have seen it.

I'll just salute smartly and move on because if I

tried to speak out,

I would've been forced to leave the military.

But I had to change my thinking a bit once I got

out of the government.

because I knew these were causing risk to the

safety of flight.

We needed to address that.

That's why I've decided to speak up.

[Ryan Graves] I will say that when I made the decision

to talk about UAP and pilot reports,

I also knew I was essentially slitting my

own throat in some ways.

[host] Does it sound possible to you that that kind of secrecy

is still happening?

-Well, that just seems to be the case.

-Ryan Graves kinda jolted the world,

certainly in Washington.

[Ryan Graves] I’ve been reporting on unidentified

objects since 2014 and 2015 off the coast of Virginia Beach.

-How common was this, and what were they saying?

-They upgraded our radar systems and when we flew

with the new radars,

we started seeing objects on our radars.

-I don't think I would've made those statements if I

thought I was going to be in the Navy for the

rest of my career at that point.

The stigma and the fear of repercussions would've

been much too strong, frankly.

But in the same token,

that's a massive problem because this was

a recognized safety issue.

[Christopher Mellon] Unfortunately, the stigma

around the UAP issue was so great that nobody

would touch it.

You couldn't discuss this topic at all in the military.

And we're now learning that it's a relatively frequent

occurrence for commercial airline pilots as well.

These pilots have greatly feared the damage to their

reputations and careers from discussing UFOs.

-Some airlines do not wanna be known as the airline you

fly in order to see a UAP off, off the wing.

My name is Richard Haines,

and I established NARCAP,

the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena.

I was a senior research scientist at NASA

for about 21 years.

I was involved in the Gemini program,

which is a two-man capsule in the Earth orbit.

That went on to the Apollo program and then eventually

to Space Station.

I was initially quite skeptical of the subject of UAP.

It didn't fit my paradigm or my colleagues.

Didn't fit traditional science.

But I eventually met pilots,

commercial pilots that came to NASA Ames in California

to carry out research in our flight simulators there.

And I would just,

once in a while ask ‘em a question, um,

“Have you ever seen anything you couldn't identify

in your flying career?”

Once in a while they would look at me

with a strange expression and say,

“Well, if you promise not to tell anybody,

I'll tell you my story.”

That's what got me hooked.

I can tell you one story that a pilot told me.

He was flying left seat, that's senior captain with a

younger man in the right seat.

And the captain got to talking about strange,

anomalous phenomena.

After they landed, he got a call,

“We're gonna schedule you to see the psychiatrist

for our office.”

I came to understand that pilots have a wide range of

motives for not telling a story.

And one of the reasons not to tell a story is it collides

with our belief system.

And so that's hard to admit.

But another reason and I think one of the most

prominent reasons is they didn't wanna lose their job.

-My name is Brent Sipley.

I'm a commercial airline pilot.

I've been flying for about 36 years now.

My sighting occurred in 2019.

We were operating from Dallas to Louisville.

It was about 10:00 in the morning.

When we first picked up the object,

we thought it was another aircraft.

But as we got closer to the object,

we could see that it had no air surfaces,

no engines, no anything.

It was just a sphere.

And it was extremely reflective,

very bright, brighter than any lights I've ever seen

on an aircraft.

And then it started to turn green,

almost like it was so reflective that I was picking

up the ground.

My first officer Jake grabbed his phone and

got the video of the UAP,

and he got a good beat on it.

Right here you can see the sphere as we're

going under it,

it's very, very bright and it's going

right over top of the aircraft right now.

And I contacted Indy Center and I was like,

"We've got high altitude traffic, 12:00."

And he goes, “I don't have anything here,

let me switch over to primary.”

The primary is just a raw sweep of the radar.

And then you hear him just go, “Huh.”

And there was a really long pause and

just dumped us.

Basically Air Traffic Control at that point was telling us,

“We don't want to hear about whatever you're

seeing right now.”

I'm not going to say I've seen everything,

but in 36 years of flying,

I've seen a lot of things from Venus and Jupiter rising.

I’ve seen weather balloons.

They looked nothing like this that I saw that day.

I didn't really want to come forward with any of this

because it could be something that could

potentially end a career.

The stigma associated with it is,

it's much more than just people whistling The X-Files

when you walk by.

Pilots have to go through medicals every six months.

We have to do training every six months.

There's lots of ways that people can get you

out of your flying seat,

and why give them ammunition?

[Garrett Graff] I'm dubious that all of the characteristics

of some of these craft are being captured

accurately by the witnesses.

Or that aliens are visiting Earth.

But, you know,

it’s clear that some of these encounters

are still unsolved.

The government has said UFOs are not aliens,

but it has never answered what UFOs are and

it has never seemed particularly interested in

figuring out what they are if they’re not aliens.

[Christopher Melon] When we look back at US government

investigations of UAP,

Project Blue Book went on until 1970.

But it was not really a scientific investigation.

It was really more of a propaganda

public relations effort.

[Leslie Kean] People lost faith in Project Blue Book

over the years.

So the Air Force commissioned this study,

basically saying that there was nothing to it and

it wasn't worthy of investigation and

Blue Book was shut down as a result of that study,

which was of course fine with the Air Force.

[Richard Haines] After Blue Book was basically put

to bed in 1969,

pilots had almost nowhere to go to report their

sightings until the formation of a number of private

organizations because when an airplane and a UFO

or a UAP come in close proximity,

there is always a safety issue.

Why?

Because the pilot never knows what that object

or phenomenon's gonna do.

[Leslie Kean] I think that Project Blue Book

didn't treat witnesses very well.

There was an effort to ridicule witnesses,

to explain cases away when they really didn't

have adequate explanations.

And there was a sense in the general public that there

was a cover-up going on,

that they were not telling us the truth.

-Professional pilots, both commercial and military,

do see UFOs,

but the culture of silence within their ranks means

the public almost never hears about it.

[Leslie Kean] After the government shut down its work

on UFOs and declared that there was nothing to it,

the work fell into the hands of civilian groups.

[Richard Haines] Well, there've been quite a number of them

over the ages,

the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization.

Then MUFON, Mutual UFO Network came on the scene.

And then there is NARCAP, N-A-R-C-A-P,

which I helped to establish,

the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena.

A colleague and I, his name is Ted Roe,

got together one day in 1999.

And we talked about what can we do to make a reporting center

for professional pilots,

a safe place to report their sightings.

We pulled together a board of directors.

We had air traffic controller,

meteorologist, pilots, physicists, chemists,

because that's how science operates.

-NARCAP was probably the best group there was at the time.

It was the closest thing we had to a government agency

because of the caliber of people involved.

-Our objective in NARCAP was to collect

a body of evidence that would be sufficient to take

to the International Civil Aviation Organization

to work out safety procedures.

And so I started collecting cases and I ended up with

thousands of pilot sightings that would demonstrate

a relationship between UAP and flight safety.

[pilot] If you said something about UFOs to me,

I would've laughed at you.

[Richard Haines] Has it changed your outlook?

[pilot] Yeah.

Because I've been out there and saw them

flying all over town.

[Leslie Kean] Back in those days NARCAP had a website and

they actually had a phone number there.

And Richard Haines was very responsive to these calls

and he would talk to these pilots year after year and

record the conversations.

[Richard Haines] In other words, you couldn't see it

through your front window,

but only... the door window?

[Captain Price] Right, it depends on how I move.

It was just moving in and out the whole time.

It made an abrupt change in attitude.

And then it zipped across the sky

and then when it climbed it made another abrupt change.

[Leslie Kean] Dr. Haines has many, many tapes,

audio tapes of conversations he had with pilots.

And they're just, just amazing to listen to.

[Captain Haney] It came through a path just north of Seoul

and I turned around

to make our approach into the airport,

and we saw this steel hovering right in front of us.

and then it just took off.

So the pilot just had to keep quiet about it, because...

career.

[Captain Shultz] Picture the brightest,

shiniest silver that you’ve ever seen

and multiply that 100 times

and try to get how shiny this object is.

[Leslie Kean] And from the audio tapes

of those conversations,

Richard Haines wrote this report and that was

about 100 pages.

And in that report,

he documented all kinds of incidences between

pilots and UFOs.

All of them affecting aviation safety,

but in a lot of different ways.

[Richard Haines] And I had sent those copies out to,

I'd say at least a dozen recipients:

the American government, and all the major airlines,

and I waited.

I hoped that it would elicit some kind of response.

But I didn’t get one response.

-There were a lot of cases way before

the ones that we're seeing now that also should

have been paid attention to.

But in those days, it was so deeply ignored.

It was totally taboo in the United States,

as opposed to other countries where it

was completely different.

France sees it as a scientific problem.

It had an official agency that went back to the 1970s.

The Chilean government set up an official agency

under the purview of the Air Force in Chile

and it was known to the world at large,

especially to all the pilots that there was a

place they could go to report UFO sightings.

-“People are becoming more aware that

this is a certain phenomenon

that needs to be analyzed from a multidisciplinary

point of view.”

[Leslie Kean] Without an entity,

an agency or an organization for the pilots

to go to to report UFO sightings or UFO events,

we're losing lots of valuable data.

We shouldn't be making it hard for pilots to report.

The UK actually requires its pilots to

fill out reports of any sightings.

[Ray Bowyer] My name is Captain Ray Bowyer.

I started, uh, flying training in 1984 and, uh,

finished flying in about 2015.

About 31 years.

[controller] ...544 zone, pass message.

[Ray Bowyer] Do you have any traffic, er,

- can't really say how far, about my 12 o'clock level?

-It was 2007 in the springtime.

We were flying a scheduled airline service

from Southampton in England on the south coast

into Alderney, Channel Islands.

I think there were about nine or ten people on board.

And just as we got into the cruise sector of the flight,

I noticed something ahead,

a very bright yellow dot in front of us.

Brilliant, brilliant yellow with this band of, uh,

interfacing light between going up and down

this dark band and the yellow interface,

the dark band.

And there was these lights going up and

down at different speeds.

Uh, quite impressive to see.

[Ray Bowyer] Very flat platform,

looking at it through binoculars as we speak.

I was about 60 miles north of Alderney when

I first saw the aircraft.

And the second object appeared about 20 miles away from

a landing point.

And getting closer to them

they started getting larger and larger.

[Ray Bowyer] It was a shape about 20 to 1 aspect ratio.

And it came to the point where I didn't need binoculars

to see it anymore, and we're still 30 miles away.

The air traffic controller asked if there were any other

aircraft that could witness this.

And there was another aircraft.

That was quite a relief simply because it's been backed

up by somebody else.

I was quite relieved that the objects were picked up on radar.

And this was what we found to have appeared.

This is my aircraft coming in from the Northeast into land.

This is the other aircraft from Blue Islands coming in

from the Isle of Man.

This shows the tracks and the times of the

object traveling from North to South.

And this is the object traveling from South to North.

The other pilot was going southeast and

over his left shoulder, looking in his 7:00,

he could see the nearest object.

But his company wouldn't allow him to come forward.

[Leslie Kean] When Ray Bowyer landed,

he filled out a report and made a drawing right in that

report of what he saw.

He also did some interviews on BBC within a few days later,

his airline did not force him to stay quiet.

-I actually had no intention of explain it to anybody,

to be fair.

I just thought it was just gonna go away.

And then everyone, everyone,

and their dog wanted to know what it was.

-So, tell me some of the things that people have said

to sort of excuse what your sighting was.

-They normally say,

"How many beers have you had before you went flying?"

-I would never tell anybody they didn't see what they saw.

You know, as every cop and prosecutor will tell you,

eyewitness testimony is the worst kinds of testimony.

Memory is not a record.

-I’ve seen a lot of strange things in the air, you know,

all sorts of different atmospheric anomalies.

It looked nothing like that.

[Garrett Graff] There's a lot of stuff out there that

appears as UFOs

but that also are very easily identifiable as ordinary

technology or ordinary astronomical, meteorological,

or atmospheric technologies.

-I think most people find it a credible sighting simply

because another aircraft in a different place saw it.

It's on radar.

And of course, there was a 150-page report.

It was very in-depth.

It was very, uh, scientifically done.

But, um, yeah, they couldn't find an explanation for it.

-Over the years,

the US government has had a tendency to try

to explain away these events with information

that doesn't really fit the facts.

But other governments, even right over our border,

say in Canada,

are much more willing to just acknowledge when

they investigate a case that they don't have an

explanation for it.

-Look at the contrail. -Yeah.

-Guy’s up at 38,000 feet.

Beginning in 1947,

the FAA issued a reporting form and it would be mailed

to you and you would fill it out.

-They said, “If you see something,

you should report it.”

But you saw something and reported it,

you invariably ended up having to answer a bunch of

mental stability questions that maybe you shouldn't

have had to answer.

-My name's Ralph Loewinger and I am a former

Air Force tanker pilot.

And after I separated from service,

I went to work for Pan-American World Airways.

-I'm Michael Littlepage.

I went through a civilian air training program before

joining Pan-American and

I have a total of approximately 39,000 hours

of flight time.

-On the night of October 4th, 1967,

we were flying a Boeing 707 cargo airplane

from New York to London.

We took off from Kennedy at about midnight,

and an hour and a half later that would have put us up

approaching the south coast of Nova Scotia near Yarmouth

which would've put Shag Harbor to our right

and not very far away.

[Michael Littlepage] Ralph was busy flying the airplane

and Captain Kurt Olson was talking on the radio to

air traffic control.

[pilot] Flight to Sierra, Atlanta bridge control,

radar contact.

-It was a beautiful, clear night.

I was the first one to see this light formation,

five or six lights at our 11:00 position.

And I said, “Ooh, watch this guy,”

because it looked like another airplane

banking towards us.

[Michael Littlepage] It was moving at the same airspeed.

It was at the same altitude and it very slowly

drifted towards our left wing tip to the point

where we felt that we were in danger of having

a midair collision.

-Maintain 8,000. Kilo...

-I asked Boston Center, I said,

“Do you still have us in radar?”

And he said, “Roger, we still have radar contact.”

I said, “Well, who's this guy out here on our left side?”

He paused a minute and he said,

“I don't have any traffic out there.”

-It was the biggest thing that I have ever seen in the sky.

We quickly realized that this was not an airplane

with its landing lights on,

but we were looking into a lighted space object.

The light was diffused,

it was slightly orange in color,

and I couldn't see anything on the inside.

And the five of us sitting there mesmerized,

I was actually terrified.

If it had come a little bit closer and impacted our

airplane, that would've been the end of us.

[Ralph Loewinger] This light formation just sped up

and hurdled towards the eastern horizon,

approaching the southern coast of Nova Scotia,

getting smaller and smaller, and then it disappeared.

It was later that same evening,

there were sightings all over Nova Scotia and

we weren't aware of that until some years later.

-We didn't know anything about Shag Harbor at the time.

-On the night of October the fourth, 1967,

which is the night known as the night of the UFOs,

there were numerous sightings from the center of Nova Scotia,

In Metro Halifax, Dartmouth,

to the southern southwestern tip of the province.

And if you were outside that night and looked up,

you would've seen something unusual in the sky.

Laurie Wickens was a local fisherman in Shag Harbor.

And he was the very first individual to contact the RCMP,

the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

-Me and a friend of mine,

we were coming from Barrington when we got

on top of the hill there and that is where we

happened to see the lights.

We just thought it was a plane and it was going along

no faster than we was and it had four lights on it.

One would come on, two,

then the third one, the fourth one.

They’d all be on for a second or so.

And then they all went out and started over again.

We lost sight of it for about two seconds.

Made it top of the hill.

We could see the,

see a light in the water up here,

about 200 yards from here and about

300 yards from shore.

We figured it was a plane that crashed.

So we went to the phone booth,

called the RCMP.

First thing he said, “What you've been drinking?”

I said, “Nothing.”

[Chris Styles] The RCMP, of course had received

several other calls.

Most of the eyewitnesses that contacted the nearby

RCMP reported simply that they thought an

aircraft had crashed.

Nobody was reporting a UFO.

The concern was for the possibility of survivors that

they may have indeed seen the crash of a commercial aircraft.

-I think one of the more interesting reports is this

Shag Harbor Nova Scotia sighting.

That's, that's fairly well documented because all these

civilians who reported these objects,

they just thought a plane had crashed.

So they, they weren't even trying to go after any

kind of UAP story.

They were being honest,

good citizens trying to help public safety officials

respond to what might've been a mishap.

[Chris Styles] Once the RCMP arrived on the scene,

they tried to approach the strange light that had remained

in the water, but before they reached it,

it either submerged or disappeared.

The search effort went on for several days.

The RCMP said,

“We don't really know what we're looking for.

We know it wasn't a conventional aircraft.

In fact, we don't know what it was.”

There was just nothing that would account for it.

And eventually, the search was terminated,

claiming nil results.

It was the authorities that would first refer to it as an

unidentified flying object.

What I have here in my hand is a bunch of telexes.

Telex, back in the day,

was the primary form of communication.

But the great thing about these telexes is often what the

staffers wrote in the margins.

And when you look at this one,

some staffers started to write,

“Could this be a meteorite?”

And then it's all crossed out.

“This could not possibly be an aircraft.”

And it's all crossed out.

So again, very telling.

Here we have a few days later into the search.

And it says, “What is the situation?”

They write, “Unidentified Flying Object,”

and they circle it.

And the case remains to this day in the present,

open and unsolved.

-There's no doubt that what we saw was the same type

of light formations that were reported in Shag Harbor.

-I had never been a believer or denier of UFOs.

I know what I saw,

and I can remember the apprehension,

the helplessness, and abject terror really.

That was, that was a real emotion that I felt that night.

[Garrett Graff] You would think that organizations like the FAA

would be more interested in cataloging things that exist

in our national airspace that we can't identify.

And it's really remarkable to me how unseriously the

government has dealt with this subject,

up until the present day.

-Since the congressional hearing with the Navy pilots,

the Navy has placed guidelines in effect now asking their

pilots to report these things.

The commercial pilots, nothing's really changed.

We contacted the FAA to ask them about their

reporting procedures for commercial pilots,

and they didn't have any.

Since there's no reporting mechanism in

place for commercial pilots,

they don't even really feel comfortable talking about

these cases because there's nothing they can do.

But these events can be safety problems and we’re not

gathering the data we need in order to address that issue.

[Ryan Graves] Should a pilot want to report an issue,

they can report it to a number of civilian UFO groups

but there is no way for that information to then therefore

be processed or further looked at.

So what I've been doing at the organization,

Americans for Safe Aerospace

is provide a reporting mechanism so that

that information can get to the proper channels

for further investigation.

It was never intended to be a UFO or

UAP organization at all.

Our primary mission is to identify what's in the sky.

And just ensuring that pilots have the proper tools

to be able to do their job and be safe in the air.

After the hearing on Capitol Hill,

commercial pilots and others have reached out

to our organization to say,

“Hey, one, we support you.

Thank you for doing this.

And two, let me tell you what I'm seeing.”

-The light appeared, disappeared.

Four, four times.

Just a small distance apart.

-I don't know what it was. I'd love to be able to tell you.

I'd love to have an explanation on what it was.

But, like I said it would turn into a debrief item and

I never really even thought about it until after my,

after my encounter.

[Chris Van Voorhis] We have a lot of pilots that

have come forward to me and say,

"Hey, you know, I've seen stuff out there

that I can't explain..."

-Wow. -“But I don't have an avenue

really to express what I've seen without repercussions

from the airline.”

-My name is Chris Van Voorhis and basically I started flying

when I was 14 years old and worked my way up the

chain of command all the way up to 747 Captain.

My initial sighting back in 2005.

We were flying back from Fukuoka, Japan around

39,000 feet and about 4:30 in the morning

just past Midway Island,

when we saw three actual discs come

into the atmosphere.

They sat there for a little while and took off.

It's not like they even accelerated.

They were just at speed and gone over the horizon.

This was something that really kind of

rocked my world and I've seen a lot of the pilots now that,

kind of, feel the same way.

They're like, "Hey it opened my eyes that we're not

maybe alone out there."

Back then, though, we couldn't tell anybody.

The UAP world,

it’s something that I think you almost have to

have a personal experience with it in

order to understand it.

-Navigate, navigate, communicate.

Pilots are trained to do those three things.

They've gotta fly their airplane.

They have to communicate with the ground.

They have to follow all the rules and laws of aviation.

And all of a sudden,

they have to integrate this incursion by

a new phenomenon.

And this is a challenge.

-Pilots are affected differently by their encounters.

I mean, it depends on the nature of the encounter,

whether it was dangerous or not, how dramatic it was.

-Does it affect their cognitive processing?

Does it something that keeps them awake at night?

Is it interfering with their well-being every day?

Can they talk about this?

My name is Dr. Iya Whiteley.

I'm a space psychologist with expertise in

clinical psychology and aviation human factors.

I'm looking at this phenomena more from the point,

not what they're seeing,

but I'm interested what is happening in their mind.

Initially, my work was not related to UAP.

I came across this quite recently and I felt that if it

has an effect on their performance,

if it's in any way affecting their decision-making,

then we need to see how we can assist.

-Hello -Hi! Hi, Chris.

-How are you doing again? -Yeah, good to see you.

I am at my very early investigation regarding what

pilots are seeing.

As a psychologist in me,

I feel there is something that they’re holding back

because they’re not comfortable talking about this.

So what do we need to support the pilots

post this encounter, post the observation?

-Proper reporting channels and proper interaction between

the company and the pilots and the unions.

Knowing that they won't be subject to any repercussions

from the company if they do report it.

-We want to collect enough variety of stories that then

becomes a database.

But we only can have that through pilots having no

repercussions for talking about what they’re seeing.

-It was a very interesting type of experience.

I was not a skeptic,

but I had never seen anything that I could not

explain prior to that.

And this was something that I couldn't explain.

It’s kind of one of those moments you never

forget in your life.

It makes a huge impact.

-What I found interesting with Chris,

that when he observed the objects in 2005,

it’s almost like marked his life.

That there was a life before observing something and

then there was a life after.

There are experiments in psychology that demonstrate

that if you don’t want to see something,

you will not see it.

So if there are pilots who don’t want to see a

UAP because of the stigma,

what else are they not going to notice?

It’s safety critical.

[Chris Van Voorhis] What we’re seeing is things that are

undescribable in the way of conventional types of

propulsion or flight.

And airline pilots train, you know, for weather anomalies.

They train for emergency anomalies that we may have.

But no one ever trains you on what you’re going

to see out there.

[Iya Whiteley] If there are many of us speaking up from

various perspectives,

why not put all of that effort together and then,

you know, we have much better way of investigating.

-We have ignition.

All engines are running.

-Lift off from a tropical rainforest to the

edge of time itself.

[Richard Haines] I think it's fair to say that

science and technology progresses on the shoulders

of those who have gone before.

What Ryan Graves has done really,

he took the ball and ran with it to form an

organization that would carry on NARCAP’s work.

I think that with the government sponsorship that

he is developing, we're gonna see some breakthroughs.

-The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act

had a historic amount of legislation and language

regarding the UAP conversation.

But this is something that these people really struggle to

integrate into their worldview.

So, how do we move this conversation forward?

How do we gain the trust of the American people

to show that, hey,

we are actually resolving this potential

national security issue?

I advised a number of representatives on the ways

I thought legislation could be introduced.

One of those included Congressman Garcia.

Ultimately, his office ran with those suggestions and

has resulted in him introducing the

Safe Aerospace for Americans Act.

-Commercial pilots may encounter a UAP and they have

no real way to report to the government.

They can report that to their airline.

But the pilots that I've talked to feel that

if they reported a UAP,

that maybe they would get fired from the airline or that

they would somehow be tagged with a medical condition

or some kind of issue.

So there needs to be a way to report any type of

UAP encounter or any type of UAP experience in a way

that's safe to the pilot.

Our new proposal, our Safe Aerospace Act,

is currently in the Congress.

It has both Republican and Democratic support.

And it provides a transparent process for pilots to report

any UAP encounter.

Those are collected and then they are forwarded on to our

department within the US government that actually

currently is looking at UAPs.

-If nothing else, this will provide additional

data points for the commercial airliners to better understand

the safety risks that their aircrew are exposed to.

[Chris Van Voorhis] Can you imagine the amount of data

that's been lost because pilots are afraid to say something?

Over the years there's been thousands and thousands of

hours flown with people seeing things that they didn't

feel good about reporting because they were

worried about repercussions.

-As we look at this data,

it helps us better understand the total scope

of the problem.

It's going to inform our ability to better detect UAP

in the future.

-One of the things I've come to believe is that there

are fascinating frontiers of meteorology,

atmospheric science, astronomy,

you know, mind-bending physics,

that to us would be just as interesting as the

answer being aliens.

-We have now available to us lots of relatively

inexpensive sensors that can monitor the sky and

the environment 24-7.

And um, in addition to that, the advances in machine learning

and artificial intelligence allow us to process

large amounts of data in a short time.

-There was a lot going on in 2017 that made a

big difference in public opinion.

[anchor] Earlier this month, it was revealed that the

Department of Defense ran a $22 million effort to

document and research UFOs.

-As a scientist,

that mattered and it mattered to my colleagues, you know.

My colleagues realized, wow,

there's apparently something interesting here.

Yeah, it warrants scientific investigation.

[Iya Whiteley] Curiosity drives science.

So why aren't we not curious about something that

many professionals are reporting?

-There's no doubt that there's a stigma attached

to this subject in the science community still today.

But, if we're gonna be scientists,

we need to lay it all out and let people come to

their own conclusions.