Original subtitles

-Well, the flying saucer myths,

there’s not a single verified

or checked-out report which is at all connectable

with the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

It’s all very pseudo-scientific.

-Ufology is a mythology that’s based on superstition wrapped

inside a fairy tale telling a story that’s simply not true.

-There of course has been a stigma towards the scientific

study of UAP/UFOs.

This is something that has been, essentially,

taboo for many, many decades.

To talk about this as a scientist may have been

considered professional suicide.

-Maybe you can just set up, you know,

the term 'abduction'.

-I don’t wanna talk about abductions.

-If you could give an overview of the major high

watermarks of gathering anecdotal [evidence].

-Yeah, that’s what I don’t wanna talk about.

-Okay. -Can we skip these questions?

-Sure, sure. Sure. -Oh, god.

Do I really want to say anything?

-Oh, I’ll tell you something off-camera.

-Okay. -Okay.

-Since 2017, and the articles that were published

in the New York Times,

it was an occasion when more scientists became

aware that Unidentified Aerial Phenomena could

justify a scientific investigation.

-We are now no longer talking about whether

there are UFOS/UAP.

The question now is, what are these things,

and where are they coming from?

-We don’t know what these things are.

I mean who couldn’t be interested in this?

-We are trying to bring this subject to the

mainstream of science.

Look forward to identifying the unidentified.

-One of my colleagues asked me,

“Why are you studying these things?

Why would you do this to yourself?”

And I said,

“This really could be the biggest discovery

in human history.

And as a scientist, I can’t walk away from that.”

[♪ theme music playing]

-We get reports every night.

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

-It's rotating right around it.

[♪ theme music playing]

-Anomalies are observations or phenomena

that resist explanation in terms of prevailing beliefs.

Anomalies are often not immediately taken

seriously by scientists.

A really good example of this is meteorites.

For centuries, it was denied that rocks fall

from the sky.

This was a phenomenon that was presumed to be magical

in some way.

It was widely ridiculed.

And then in the last few decades of the 1700s,

there were mass sightings and there was material recovered

and a physicist by the name of Ernst Chladni looked

at almost 20 cases and he concluded from this

that this phenomenon is actually real.

He suggested that these rocks are actually coming

from outer space.

And so that discovery overturned a widely held idea

that interplanetary space is completely empty.

And so part of the challenge of scientists is to push aside

all of the popular explanations in order to

acknowledge the phenomenon itself is real.

So in the case of UAP,

these phenomena really seem to fall outside of

what we expect.

And so myself and other scientists have advocated,

simply for the study of the phenomena.

Let's try to detect it and let's try to characterize it.

-2017 really started it all.

There was a lot going on.

You have the New York Times article where we learned that

the Pentagon had been studying UFOs for years and

later there was the release of the three Navy videos,

which were interesting and exciting.

You really had this realization that you know,

oh my God, some aspect of this is real.

For me, as a scientist,

what’s interesting is that the more you get into this,

the more unbelievable it gets,

which makes you wonder what’s really going on.

My name is Kevin Knuth.

I'm a professor of physics at the University at Albany.

I mainly focus on studying exoplanets,

planets orbiting other stars.

But I also do some work related to the physics of UAPs.

These are clearly anomalous things that we

don't know what they are.

And that's, that's exciting.

But I had never seen a UAP and I didn't have equipment

to go look for them.

So I just started reading up on them and learning about

what has been observed.

So, I learned about the AATIP Program and that our

government had been studying UFOs.

They defined five "observables," they called them.

Five characteristics that were unique to UAPs.

One of these was transmedium travel,

the ability to travel from one medium to another,

air to water typically.

Another one is instantaneous acceleration.

So these things go from zero velocity to an extremely

high velocity in a very short period of time.

Another is a hypersonic speeds.

That's the ability to fly through the air without a

sonic boom or a fireball.

Another is low visibility or cloaking.

These objects can kind of fade away or disappear

and reappear again.

And finally, no apparent propulsion.

So objects that are able to fly and we don't know how.

Those are very strange behaviors that we

really don't understand.

And so I thought maybe I can apply what I've done most of my

life to cases to try to learn something about UAPs.

I focused on the Nimitz 2004 incident because of all of the

data that was collected.

-In November of 2004,

I was a Navy Commander Super Hornet Pilot.

We were flying, we were training our aircrew.

The USS Princeton is using their radars to direct us.

The ship came up and said, "Hey sir,

we're going to hold on training today."

They said, "Hey, we got real-world investigation.

We got an object."

They said, "We've been seeing these things on radar.

We have no idea what they are."

To investigate they turned us off to the west and they asked

what kind of weapons we have on board.

So we're kinda doing this, looking around to see where

it's at because it's somewhere around you and you don't know.

And I looked out, I go, "What is that?"

And I saw a long cylindrical white object:

no windows, no wings,

no visual signs of propulsion roughly 40 feet long,

that looked like a giant Tic-Tac.

And this thing was going like this and I describe it

as like if you put a ping-pong ball and it was bouncing

off a wall.

And as I come up I can see him as he's crossing

in front of me,

it starts to accelerate, gets right on my nose,

and disappears.

[Kevin Knuth] The Nimitz case was quite interesting because

I could somewhat reliably estimate

accelerations and speeds.

The radar operator had been noticing that there were

objects that would appear on his radar and these objects

would periodically drop from 28,000 feet to sea level

in .78 seconds.

I mean, you're looking at dropping five and a half miles

in less than a second.

And if you work through this,

you find out that the accelerations are

on the order of 5,000 times the acceleration of gravity,

which is extremely high,

that’s extremely high acceleration.

So, I mean, the F-35 fighter,

the wings will rip off at only 13 and a half Gs.

And we're looking at something like over 5,000 Gs.

The altitude and the time that it took for this maneuver were

all estimated from the radar data and we learned about that

through speaking with the radar operator.

Every time the pilots were being directed to one of these

objects, they actually encountered an object.

And of course, there was the video that we all saw.

So that is evidence that the radar wasn't malfunctioning.

So these are real objects doing real things.

If the data we have already is accurate,

they're clearly going faster than most of

our spaceships travel.

Could they be interstellar spacecraft being able to

get up to that speed?

Yes, they could be interstellar spacecraft.

It's really quite shocking.

I was always interested in UFOs as I was in space.

I was 12 years old when Star Wars came out,

so that had quite an impression on me.

And around that time we had a TV show In Search Of

with Leonard Nimoy.

And there were often stories about UFOs in that,

which were intriguing and interesting.

[Leonard Nimoy] They’ve been seen but fleetingly.

And their extraordinary presence creates

a frightening mystery.

[Kevin Knuth] Of course I was skeptical and

I'm still skeptical,

but you can't be skeptical to the point of

shutting down conversation and shutting down

exploration and study.

That's potentially dangerous.

You know, especially when you hear from the Navy.

When the Navy's concerned, it's a different issue.

-So I think when the Navy comes out and says it's anomalous,

I'm going to take them at face value,

it means it's unexplained.

But the possibility that one of our adversaries has

next-generation technology also has to be explored.

[Kevin Knuth] While it's possible that they could be the

craft from a foreign adversary or experimental craft,

it's hard to believe that if that were the case,

that they wouldn't be used.

They would be incredibly useful for the military.

Performing these calculations from the Nimitz case was far

more anomalous than what I expected the results to be.

The speeds and accelerations were just unreasonable.

Not only could these be interstellar craft,

but they could be excellent ones.

These are huge discoveries that could have a huge

impact on humanity.

These are something that we really should understand

what they are.

Of course, you get much less data than you would hope for,

which makes it much harder to study.

[Adam Frank] So when it comes to doing scientific studies of

UFOs and UAPs, I have no problem with that.

We just need better data.

Understanding why UFOs have been sort of outside

of science for so long really comes down to a single term,

"standards of evidence," which I consider to be the

most important and most boring topic in the universe.

Science only works because we have very,

very rigorous standards for what we consider to be evidence

that supports a claim.

The Navy pilot videos are only gonna take you so far.

The problem with them,

is those cameras are not scientific instruments.

That's not what they were designed for.

We don't know whether,

was this instrument just refurbished,

what kind of software does it have?

And you know that's not the way you take data.

You could do the same thing about radar and how often there

can be problems.

You know, the whole point of science is you have to be able

to control your instruments.

What needs to happen for true scientific investigation

of UAP phenomena is you build your own instruments.

You start from scratch, and you design a research program,

and let's see where it leads.

[Alex Delacroix] Hi, Avi.

-Hi, Alex. So, you are there already?

-Yes I’m on site. -Okay we are driving now.

My name is Avi Loeb and currently,

I am leading the Galileo Project that was

established at Harvard University for

the scientific research of

unidentified anomalous phenomena.

I'm a theoretical astrophysicist,

I started my career studying the first stars and galaxies.

Now, I'm also interested in the question of whether

UAPs are real.

We’re heading to Pigeon Run,

which is the code name for the Galileo Project observatory,

which is the site where we get data.

If there are any UAPs out there we’ll see them.

The Galileo Project was funded by generous donations at

a few million dollars.

What we needed is an observatory that monitors the

entire sky all the time with fully controlled

scientific instruments.

This is the scientific approach.

At the same time,

there is pushback from the scientific community

to such studies because it goes against the status quo

of saying we are alone, we haven’t seen anything.

There are billions of other stars in the

Milky Way galaxy alone.

By now we know that a substantial fraction

of all stars,

maybe a quarter of them,

have planets like the Earth where liquid water

may exist on the surface and the chemistry of life

as we know it may blossom.

And so the interesting question is are we alone?

[reporter] The ultimate question, yet unanswered...

...are we alone in the universe?

A Harvard astronomer theorizes it’s possible we are not.

[Avi Loeb] On October 19th, 2017,

the PANSTARRS telescope in Hawaii discovered an object

that moves very fast.

And it was given the name 'Oumuamua.

-‘Oumuamua was a very exciting event for astronomers.

It was the first time we’d ever seen a object coming from

outside the solar system that was just passing through.

And so what we expected was that it was going to be

a comet or an asteroid.

But then Avi Loeb said, you know this could be an

interstellar artifact, an artifact of technology.

[reporter] When Harvard professor Dr. Avi Loeb

suggested the new discovery could be a sign of

extraterrestrial life,

it created a rift in the academic research community.

[Avi Loeb] 'Oumuamua was discovered by the

PANSTARRS Telescope in Hawaii.

They found it was the size of a football field.

And what was peculiar about it is that it was most

likely flat in its shape based on the

reflection of sunlight.

And moreover, it was pushed away from the sun by some

mysterious force without showing any cometary evaporation.

So the question is what was pushing it away from the sun?

My explanation to the unusual propulsion of ‘Oumuamua

was that it was pushed by reflecting sunlight.

For that to be the case,

the object had to be very thin like a membrane and

nature doesn't make such objects.

-Avi Loeb came out questioning whether it

might be some kind of an alien artifact and

not a natural object.

There was an outcry among the scientific community

because for them this was an outrageous claim.

There was a lot of pushback on Avi Loeb for daring

to draw that kind of conclusion.

[Adam Frank] People who were, you know, experts in comets

were able to postulate that it was perhaps a comet

made out of frozen nitrogen,

which, if it was outgassing,

making jets would be very difficult to detect.

[Avi Loeb] One suggestion was put forward that it may

be a nitrogen iceberg chipped off the surface of a

planet like Pluto that has solid nitrogen on its surface.

But we've never seen nitrogen icebergs

in the solar system.

[Leslie Kean] Avi Loeb said that basically,

they were just taking one anomalous possible explanation

and replacing it with another anomalous possible explanation,

and he didn't believe that that was the right one.

For Avi Loeb the question of what ‘Oumuamua actually was

was never definitively determined.

[Adam Frank] One problem with ‘Oumuamua is it

came through and it left.

So we only had a little while to collect data.

And if your claim is,

“We're being visited by aliens from another planet,”

you're going to need data to be able to even get,

you know, a fraction of the way to

supporting that claim.

[Avi Loeb] To me, that was a very fair question to

put out in the scientific literature.

I thought it will inspire us to collect more evidence and

encourage future data collection on

objects like ‘Oumuamua.

The only way for us to arrive at the truth is

by collecting evidence,

and that’s why I established the Galileo Project.

-Hello Alex, how are things? -Oh pretty good.

-PTZ’s working? Connected? Or-

-Yes, yes it’s working.

I’m going to fine-tune it and do some tests.

-Okay, excellent.

-My name is Alex Delacroix.

My background was mechanical engineer

at Cal Tech in astrophysics

designing astrophysics instruments.

So I design most of the instruments that are here

and I’m assembling them, maintaining them.

This is a direct view from the visible camera.

You can really increase the size of the image and

see exactly what it is.

This was a satellite tumbling as an example.

So it’s a pretty powerful instrument.

[Avi Loeb] It took two years to assemble all the instruments,

which include the radio sensors and an acoustic sensor

that detects sound from the skies.

-We hope to find the unknown.

To be able to characterize and

give a definition of the object that people

have seen for years.

It's extremely exciting.

It’s difficult to stop working!

[Alex Delacroix] So the data we’re collecting here

transferred to Harvard for analysis with

our AI system that Richard is developing with the team.

-We're using artificial intelligence to sort through

the data because it just wouldn't be feasible to have

people sitting there watching the cameras entirely for 24/7.

Humans are error-prone.

So by having artificial intelligence look at our data,

rather than humans, it's quicker and also

it's more reliable.

At the moment the models are very good at

just picking out objects in the sky and tracking them.

And we are in the process of developing our models to

actually differentiate known objects from unknown objects.

And allow for things like, is it a bird?

Is it an airplane? Is it a balloon?

And from that we'll be able to properly analyze whether

it's something that's behaving in a way that is not

typical of known objects.

[Avi Loeb] We're training the system to report back whether

there is anything anomalous, anything that looks unfamiliar.

So far we haven't seen any,

but we are just at the beginning.

The goal is to build telescope systems and distribute them in

many geographical locations.

We are currently assembling a second one in Colorado.

And my hope is that within the coming years,

the observatories of the Galileo Project will be able to

tell if there is anything out there that appears anomalous.

A number of reporters recently gave me the title of

the “Alien Hunter.”

I don't care how you call me.

If a question has huge significance for

the future of humanity, you cannot ignore it.

-Avi Loeb is far from the first scientist to have been

ridiculed for studying UAP.

I'm Jacob Haqq Misra. I'm an astrobiologist.

And as a scientist,

I sometimes do get a little perplexed why there's not more

excitement about this UAP topic because there's

something we don't know.

It deserves study until we figure out what it is.

What got me interested in taking this seriously was when

I learned about James McDonald.

-In my opinion, the UFO problem is the

greatest scientific problem of our times.

[Wesley Watters] James McDonald was an

eminent atmospheric physicist.

And as an atmospheric scientist,

he was especially well-equipped to interpret and

understand UFO reports.

Especially anything related to atmospheric optical phenomena

like sun dogs.

He was very familiar with weather balloons and thought

very deeply about how mirages, for example,

how high they could be above the horizon.

-McDonald was meticulous and he actually took the time

to look into the cases from Project Blue Book,

the official longest-term Air Force analysis of UFOs.

[James McDonald] My study of the problem leads me

to take the position that

there has not been application of the best

scientific facilities available,

adding up to inadequate UFO investigations.

I take, as an example, the Lakenheath case on the

east coast of England.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] Lakenheath is one of the most

bizarre UFO cases in history.

In August of 1956, two separate radar stations

tracked multiple UFOs.

Objects moving at 12,000 miles per hour

conducting very, very strange maneuvers.

Formations of objects bunching up into one object and

then moving off at rapid speeds.

That happened on three separate occasions.

[James McDonald] There was a C-47 pilot at 4,000 feet

over the field

who, concurrent with the radar,

saw a bright object move below his aircraft from

west to east.

From that time on, both radar and visual

observers were available.

-So this case was particularly noteworthy to

McDonald because it contained all the elements that

we hoped for, for a good UFO case.

There were numerous pilots that saw these.

There was both ground-based and airborne radar

that captured these,

so multiple modes of collecting data.

If, according to McDonald, Project Blue Book had been

adequately staffed with scientists who were approaching

this with the kind of rigor that he was doing,

maybe he would've learned something more,

instead of just dismissing this as a case

that could be explained.

So to McDonald, this is one of the truly puzzling cases,

that should have received much more attention than it did.

[James McDonald] To regard this as anything but a problem

of considerable scientific importance,

I think will be to miss something that we've already

missed far too long.

-Many people say that, okay,

there is no evidence for UFOs, why are you wasting your time?

But it's a catch-22.

If nobody ever puts in one hour into this research,

we will never get the evidence.

It's time to think of alternative ways of searching

for UFOs around the earth.

[Beatriz Villarroel] So the Galileo project,

they're looking for everything that passes on the sky.

They are looking also inside our atmosphere.

My project is very different.

I'm looking very deep into the solar system by using

these old photographic plates.

My name is Beatriz Villarroel.

I'm an astronomer.

I work at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics

in Stockholm.

I lead the project where we are looking for identifiable

signatures of alien spaceships.

[Jacob Misra] There are a lot of efforts in the search

for life elsewhere that are based on

new technologies and collecting new data.

But there is also a lot that could potentially be learned

from archival sources of data.

Perhaps the discovery of extraterrestrial life is

already on some photographic plate and

we just haven't looked at it right.

[Beatriz Villarroel] The first thing I used was images

from the Palomar Observatory in the early 1950s.

In the past, when one was taking images of the sky,

one had these big glass plates and one put it in

the telescope and let it expose an image for

maybe 50 minutes.

Like films.

So we started studying these plates.

I was sitting with 24,000 images and

I looked them through, one by one, myself.

Then I found that we had one image where nine objects

seemed to appear and vanish within one hour,

which was completely crazy.

Because a star is not going to appear and vanish

within one hour.

That’s completely unthinkable.

When I first found the nine transients,

I thought that something must be wrong.

A transient is a short-lived astrophysical phenomenon that

you see is something that changes.

Like a supernova is a transient.

A comet is a transient.

[Jacob Misra] One of the values in the approach

Beatriz is taking, using historical plates,

is these are astronomical observations of the sky before

the satellite era.

This is before Sputnik launched,

before we had anything else artificial orbiting the planet.

So if you find evidence of some sort of transient object

in the sky during the early 1950s,

it can't be a human satellite,

so what is it?

[Beatriz Villarroel] So we started studying this case and

we started doing all kind of tests to see what could be

wrong with the image.

We were worried that this could be some kind

of plate defects.

Let's say some kind of scratch on the plate.

The thing with these plate defects is that they usually

have random shapes,

there is no reason why they would get a perfect

starlike shape.

It can happen maybe once.

But our issue was that we had nine of them.

It seems pretty unlikely.

And we have kept finding examples of these interesting

images of transients and vanishing objects.

So here we see three stars,

looking just like any other of the bright stars

in the same field.

They're there, and you can’t see them if you compare to the

other image that is taken later.

More excitingly and more recently we found our

absolutely best candidate for Alien Probes around the earth.

So what you see here are five flashes of light.

And if you look there, they're not seen later.

But they are also lying along a narrow stripe.

The probability to find five random objects lying along this

stripe is one in 10,000.

If it's along one line,

it could in principle be one object.

Something that is moving.

So it's a quite interesting image.

It's a very unlikely alignment.

We have to rule out every astronomical phenomenon we

could think of like comets, asteroids, supernova.

[Jacob Misra] The biggest criticism of Beatriz’s work is

that it’s very, very difficult to explain what it

is you’ve found.

So if you’re left with something that

you can’t understand,

and you perhaps have extraordinary hypotheses,

like maybe these are extraterrestrials,

maybe they are.

But how do you know?

How do you follow up on an observation that was

taken over 50 years ago?

[Beatriz Villarroel] Photographic plates capture

one single image.

And we want to have multiple images of the same phenomenon

before we can claim a real E.T. probe.

But there’s two fun coincidences when it comes to

the dates of these transients.

So the triple transient happens on the 19th of July, 1952,

and a second from the 27th of July, 1952.

They coincide with one of the most famous UFO flyovers called

the Washington DC flyover.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] In the summer of 1952,

over two consecutive weekends,

was perhaps the most significant wave of UFO

sightings in U.S. history.

[Beatriz Villarroel] Air traffic controllers could see

multiple mysterious objects moving on their radars.

And also, there were many witnesses,

like pilots and stewards, that saw mysterious objects.

The US Air Force held a press conference to discuss

the “flying saucer” invasion.

During this press conference,

they said that everything were misidentifications.

And this was based on the interpretation of an astronomer

called Donald Menzel.

[Donald Menzel] A layer of warm dry air

will bend the radar beam back to Earth.

This was what happened in Washington

in 1952.

[Jacob Misra] Donald Menzel was a scientist who worked with

Project Blue Book,

and he took it to be one of his personal tasks in

his career to challenge and debunk many of these UFO cases.

Menzel and McDonald definitely went head-to-head many times.

[James McDonald] Dr. Menzel, I cannot agree with the

optical, physical, astronomical principles.

I do not believe they represent scientifically sound analyses.

[Donald Menzel] It’s time that we put an end

to chasing ghosts, hobgoblins,

visions and hallucinations.

And as for the true believers,

bless their little hearts,

let them go on believing in UFOs,

fairies, or Santa Claus, if they want to.

[host] Mr. McDonald, you have been highly critical

of your own government's attitude towards UFOs.

-Indeed, indeed I have, yes.

I've taken a very good look at the American official

investigation program, Project Blue Book,

run by the Air Force, and I have quite unequivocally

described it to scientific colleagues back in the States

as "superficial and incompetent."

[Jacob Misra] As McDonald became more interested and

especially vocal in his advocacy for studying UFOs,

it definitely led him to a professional isolation.

He received not just pushback, but ridicule and harassment.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] In 1971 he testified in front

of Congress, not about UFOs, but about dangers

to the Ozone Layer.

[Wes Watters] McDonald was one of the very first

atmospheric scientists worried about the Ozone Layer.

[Marik Von Rennenkampff] One of the members of

Congress asked, basically,

“If you believe in little green men and flying saucers,

how can I take your testimony on the depletion of

the ozone layer seriously?”

-This completely discredited his testimony.

And in science your reputation is everything.

Ultimately, his funding sources were attacked and taken away.

[Jacob Misra] It did not take a good toll on his

mental health, arguably.

And unfortunately, he died at the age of 51.

He was found in the desert with a gun and what appeared to

be a suicide note.

We can only speculate as to what was really going

on in his head.

I think there were some things going on in his

personal life that may have been a factor.

But of course,

when you face significant pushback from your

colleagues for doing what you believe is acting

in integrity as a scientist,

one can only imagine that that might have been

at least a factor in what led him to such a terrible end.

For scientists who believe that there is

something to be studied,

McDonald, he created the template for how to do this.

And he inspired scientists to talk about things,

even if there might be backlash,

there might be stigmatization.

[Garry Nolan] This is a turning point.

And there’s a whole expanding field of scientists who agree

that the data is interesting and worth following up.

[♪ whimsical music playing]

-The objective here is to bring people like this together

to legitimize and professionalize your ideas.

[Leslie Kean] The SOL Foundation is a research think tank

set up by Professor Garry Nolan and his colleague

Peter Skafish,

to pull together some of the best thinkers and scientists

who are looking into the UAP issue.

[Garry Nolan] I think the SOL Foundation is meant to be

an agent of change.

Here you now have everybody realizing that it’s possible to

talk about this and that they’re not going to be booed

out of the room.

My name is Garry Nolan.

I'm a professor in the Department of Pathology at the

Stanford University of Medicine.

I’m a laboratory scientist.

I’m a practicing scientist.

My laboratory focuses largely on biology in cancer and

autoimmune diseases.

[Leslie Kean] Some scientists have been looking out

into the universe, or even in our own atmosphere,

to try to study UFOs.

Others are focused on collecting materials from sites

where UFOs have supposedly either crashed or landed to

just try and understand the nature of the material that is

associated with the craft.

-How do you get involved in UFOs?

-So it was actually rather unexpected.

Around 2012, I got a knock on my door in my office at

Stanford and there were these two gentlemen

standing there outside from the CIA and

a aeronautics corporation.

They started talking about UFOs and they wanted my help.

To be honest, at the time I thought it was a joke.

I actually thought it was a Candid Camera moment

of some sort.

I kept looking around to see if there was a camera

somewhere else pointed at me.

But they were serious, and uh, deadly serious.

I couldn't get them to laugh about anything.

They had heard that my lab had made one of the deepest immune

profiling devices in the world, the mass spectrometer.

[Jacob Misra] With mass spectrometry,

you essentially can analyze samples and figure out what

atoms and what molecules are in that sample.

Is this something we know or is this something unusual?

-What the CIA wanted from me was help in understanding

the blood of people who had claimed that they

had seen UFOs to help them understand what

had happened to these people.

But as I got deeper and deeper into it,

it became pretty clear that several of these patients,

these events had happened to them up to a decade before.

And so there wasn't gonna be anything I would be

able to find in the blood.

But as I developed a relationship with these

individuals from the CIA,

they started saying, “Okay, well, we also have

these materials that supposedly some of these

craft had left behind.

What would you do with them?”

[Leslie Kean] Garry Nolan's mass spectrometer can analyze

the composition of blood samples,

and it can do the same thing for non-biological

physical materials.

After Garry got involved with doing some of these studies

with the physical material,

he met Jacques Vallée because Jacques Vallée had

been interested in the very same thing for decades.

-Welcome back to On the Record.

Dr. Jacques Vallée is an astrophysicist who provided the

inspiration for the character of the French scientist

in the film,

Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

[speaking in French].

[translator] This is a small group of people...

[speaking in French].

[translator] Who have shared a vision in common.

-Look...

[Garry Nolan] Jacques Vallée is probably one of the best-known

thinkers in the area of anomalous phenomena.

[host] You are something of an anomaly,

I mean a real scientist who's studying...

-Well, there are a few of us, there are a few of us.

Most of them stay underground because they don’t want

to put their jobs in jeopardy.

-Tell me how long you have been looking at UFOs, UAP?

-I’ve um lost um lost count of that.

My background has been mostly in computer science.

I've built about 15 different databases on UFOs.

And I've investigated cases all over the world.

And I started gathering materials or metals that were

deposited around encounters with UFOs and UFO observations.

[Garry Nolan] That mass spectrometer and the ability to

measure metals was I think what triggered Jacques’

interest because he had these metals and

it was like, "Well, okay, can you help us analyze

these materials?"

So Jacques, start with the new cases.

-There was an observation of a large,

bright object close to a road.

Now we, we have the actual material.

[Garry Nolan] He came with some simple materials at the

beginning and as the results started

getting more interesting,

he brought some more interesting materials to study.

Like the Council Bluffs story, as an example.

In 1977, Council Bluffs, Iowa,

at least three groups of people saw a object

or at least lights that were in the sky,

and something appeared to drop from the object.

[Jacques Vallée] There were 11 witnesses in

three different locations.

All their views converged over that particular spot.

And then the people who were in the park itself found

that there was a mass of metal.

It was melting. It was red.

[Garry Nolan] Somebody along the way called the police.

And the police arrived very quickly thereafter.

Jacques did get a piece of the material from one

of the witnesses.

And he got the original photographs, the Polaroids,

from the police.

So, you know, I mean, that's about as good as it gets.

[Jacques Vallée] So how do you get a half a ton of molten

steel falling from the sky?

That's what we have to explain.

[Jacques Vallée] The case of Council Bluffs,

it's certainly an interesting whodunnit.

Now at the time people thought it could be

a satellite reentry.

So this escalated to NASA and to the Air Force.

Everybody was on the same team,

which is very rare.

All the hypotheses were looked at in detail

by professional investigators.

So the first thing they thought it might be

was a Russian satellite,

but satellite debris is not molten when it gets to ground.

-It was clear it wasn't a meteor because a

meteor doesn't leave pools of molten metal on the ground.

A meteor leaves a hole.

-So all that was eliminated one by one and

then NASA and the Air Force gave up their investigation.

So this was perfect for Dr. Nolan to start looking

because we knew this was a real case.

-And so we start analyzing what it's made of.

-In 2021, Garry Nolan and Jacques Vallée published the

results of their study.

And they were able to present some unusual properties

of this material.

[Garry Nolan] In the Council Bluffs event,

the material on the ground was incompletely mixed

which is strange because for instance if

you’re making cement you add all the constituents and

then you mix them thoroughly because if they’re not

thoroughly mixed you’re gonna get cracks.

That’s a flaw in the structure and then

the thing will break.

-You don't find partially mixed compounds being

used for industrial purposes and especially not out in the

middle of nowhere dropping off of some kind of object

in the sky in a molten state.

The fact that it's incompletely mixed just makes

it even stranger.

[Garry Nolan] The objects are not just natural.

The objects are manufactured in some manner.

Part of some industrial process that had engineered them.

Now there've been all kinds of attempts to disapprove it,

even recently, somebody claiming it was just a hoax.

Well, could somebody have carried this much metal here?

What's the closest foundry where such metal

might be produced?

There was none anywhere nearby.

There were no railway cars that had gone nearby.

There were no tire tracks anywhere nearby that would show

that it had been dumped.

I'm not saying that it proves that it's a UAP.

These are just all intriguing data points.

And so I want to study as many materials as possible.

We’re actually setting up standardized testing,

basically creating a federation of other scientists

who can analyze the data freely available.

I can’t look at everything and know the answers but I

want to get the data out there so everybody can.

[Jacques Vallée] I think there is a lesson there that you don't

want to be alone raising the issue.

You have to build a coalition first,

and I think that's what we're seeing now.

We can have a coalition of scientists,

but one man is not going to get anywhere.

Dr. McDonald was a single scientist and he was

essentially dismissed, didn't really get a real study going.

[Kevin Knuth] But the impact that James McDonald had is

important because he advocated for a

scientific approach to UFOs.

They should be studied in detail,

with multiple types of instruments,

which is what we're trying to do today.

There should be multiple disciplines involved such as

physics, chemistry, biology.

[Garry Nolan] With the UAP phenomena,

the alternative explanations are narrowing,

are being reduced.

And that to me is exciting because if the answer is that

these things are not from here,

that's an even bigger turning point for humanity.

-I saw this bright white light.

I suddenly felt weird.

And I felt like my skin was on fire.

I remember thinking, "Oh my God, I'm dead."

-If you talk to experiencers,

their story’s going to get really weird really fast.

-I can remember being levitated out of the car.

-When you’re sitting with an experiencer,

it feels like there has been something traumatic

that has happened.

[Leslie Kean] When you have a mystery that big,

it’s valuable to study it.

There’s a lot that can be learned from experiencers.

-I looked up, and all of a sudden I’m like,

I’m on a UFO.

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.