Original subtitles

(suspenseful music)

(static sizzles)

- [Driver] Kevin?

- Yes, hello.

- [Driver] Hi, come on in.

- Alright, here's the package.

- [Driver] So what do you know about the history of this?

- I know that it is supposedly from a crash site

in New Mexico from the St. Augustine Plains.

Happened in 1947 within weeks of the supposed Roswell crash.

If this is just debris from an airplane crash,

then it's not that valuable or not that interesting,

but if it turns out that it's a debris from a crashed UFO

or a crashed alien spacecraft,

or whatever it might be,

then it's invaluable.

So it's priceless.

So we have these weird hand-offs,

these cloak and dagger style hand-offs,

which admittedly are fun

and relatively amusing

and a bit worrisome because you,

I don't know that other people aren't tracking this,

that other people wouldn't like to have it,

that somebody might try to get it from you.

And, you know, we don't know that that's not the case.

I'm a physics professor,

we don't operate this way

and I don't know how, you know,

whether there are other groups or other countries

that would like to get their hands on this that you know,

might go through some, you know,

movie style lengths to do it.

(truck horn blares)

(eerie music)

(upbeat music)

♪ I play music when the day gets dark ♪

♪ Drifting through heaven's gate into outer space ♪

♪ Blistered by the bright blue sunshine ♪

♪ The most beautiful faces we hide inside ♪

- [Narrator] Most science documentaries look at

an encounter with extraterrestrial civilization

from our point of view,

but let's turn it upside down.

What would it be like if you were part

of an advanced civilization meeting

earthlings for the first time?

- Well, place myself in the persona

of an alien being and saying,

here we are, we come in peace.

You know, that's certainly something I would hope.

- If aliens are intelligent, they're also curious,

and that curiosity is going to force them to go out

and examine everything they have access to,

which could include us.

- If I'm a being,

I'm choosing people who can convey my message in a way that

would leave very little doubt.

- Why would they need to have such extensive

direct interactions with us

when everything that they could possibly need from us,

they could take without really having

to expose themselves at all,

we wouldn't really even need

to know about their existence.

The fact that we do would indicate that they are

whatever they are wanting us to think in a particular way,

probably more about ourselves than about them.

(rocket blast)

- My name is Elisa Quintana.

I'm a astrophysicist at NASA Goddard

and I'm the deputy project scientist

for NASA's test mission.

This is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

This is a space mission looking for planets

outside of our solar system,

including those that are small like earth.

Ultimately we're looking for planets

that are in a Goldilock zone,

so they're not too close to their star where it's very hot,

they're also not too far away where it's very cold.

They're in a temperate region

just like earth is around the sun.

They're in a region that would allow the good water

on a planet surface.

Using this transit method we can determine

the size of a planet, it's orbit

and we can ultimately determine which planets

are in the habitable zones of these stars.

So in the early days of searching for other planets,

we were really focusing on sun-like stars.

What we now know is that the most common type of star

that has planets are these M-dwarfs.

So these are stars that are smaller, cooler

and redder than the sun

and they emit different light.

So they emit light in the infrared.

They're very, very different from the sun.

Planets that evolve in the habitable zones of these stars

will have a very different environment.

I often wonder what kind of life

would evolve under infrared light.

What is photosynthesis like?

We have these green plants that evolve under the sun.

Will we have black trees

or will we have some new form of life

that we can't even imagine

that are forming on these stars

that are the most abundant in the sky.

A huge goal of NASA is to find another earth like planet

that could have life,

even intelligent life.

(suspenseful music)

- (foreign language)

- I think it would be fascinating if

we were to find intelligent life

that was very different from ours.

Life where we could learn

and really advance ourselves.

- [Interviewer] So what is the ultimate goal here?

Once the generational program down the road finds

that there not only is life there,

but there's a civilization there,

what happens next?

(laughs)

- That's a really good question.

Everyone is so focused on building the next flagship

that's gonna image the earth, and then what?

Like, I guess-

(laughs)

So if we find life on another planet,

what are the next steps that NASA's gonna do?

What are the next steps that the community is gonna do?

Should we contact and communicate with these other planets?

And that is a whole new discussion area

that people are actually talking about.

And I don't know what the next steps would be.

The SETI Institute does have a procedure

for if they were to find life,

they actually have, you know, a manual.

There's a proper procedure of writing a publication

and what should we do next.

- Because I'm involved in the search

for extraterrestrial intelligence,

people will ask,

do you really think there are aliens out there?

I mean, do you think there's any life out there?

And of course I do.

I mean that's why I took the job really.

And why do I think that?

It's not pretty because we found it,

cuz we haven't,

but what we now know and something that we didn't know

even 25 years ago is that the universe is just shock,

a block with planets.

They're roughly a trillion planets

just in the Milky Way galaxy

and we can see trillions of other galaxies,

so that's a lot of planet pleasure, right?

There are so many worlds out there that to think that,

well no, only earth has produced life or intelligent life,

that sounds like a lot of hubris to me.

Turns out that the techniques used for studying galaxies,

which is what I used to do.

SETI uses many of the same techniques

that I was using to study galaxies.

In other words, you know, big antennas,

call 'em radio telescopes

and just point them in the direction

of some nearby stars

hoping that there's somebody on a planet

around those stars who's broadcasting a signal

that we could pick up and prove

that we have some company there.

So what if we get a signal?

I mean, we might get a signal from deep space tomorrow,

next week, next year,

10 years from now, we don't know,

but what happens?

I can tell you what's really gonna happen

because we've had false alarms,

and in a false alarm,

you see what actually happens.

The media start calling up

because there's no policy of secrecy.

Everybody's sending emails or text messages

or calling their mom or whatever they're doing.

So the news that we picked up a signal gets out

within minutes and the experience

that we've had is when that happens,

even before we've checked out whether it's for real or not,

the local TV stations, the newspapers

and the media start calling.

- Scientists have a mystery on their hands.

Signals from outer space are being detected.

What's most exciting about this signal from outer space

is that it repeats itself every 16 days.

- If the signal's strong enough

some believe to raise the possibility

that it was sent intentionally by aliens.

- One radio versus wavelength light was converted to sound.

- So if I were an alien,

how would I find intelligent life on earth?

Or for that matter,

any life on earth?

Now finding life is kind of a simpler problem

for the aliens than finding intelligent life

because all they have to do is build a big telescope

and analyze the atmosphere of our planet of Earth.

And they would find 20% of that atmosphere is oxygen.

And normally that's not a component

of the gases in the atmosphere of planets,

but it is of ours.

So if the aliens can find oxygen in our atmosphere,

that would be a strong clue that there's

some sort of biology here, at least photosynthesis.

That wouldn't tell 'em that homo sapiens is here of course,

but what would is if they can build big antennas

and pick up our television or our radars or our FM radio

because if there's been enough time

for those signals to get out to them,

they'll pick that up and they say,

well, we don't know what's down there,

but whatever it is it's pretty clever

because they can engineer a transmitter.

- For a long time I banged my head against the wall

looking for a theory of consciousness

in purely physical terms that would work.

I'm David Chalmers,

I'm a professor of philosophy at New York University

where I'm also co-director of

the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness.

I'm a philosopher, so I think about foundational ideas

about the mind, about the world,

about knowledge, about reality.

How is the human mind even possible?

I think about artificial minds.

Could a computer have a mind?

Are there non-human minds in animals or even alien minds?

I think about the nature of reality.

Is the world around us real?

How can we ever have genuine knowledge of reality?

Or is all this somehow an illusion or a simulation?

- The Simulation Hypothesis is simply the hypothesis

that we live in a computer simulation.

To be understood in a literal sense,

not just as a metaphor,

we can think of atoms as bits can.

No, that there is some advanced civilization

that constructed a physical computer

and then run some kind of program on that computer

and we are one of the information patterns within that.

- The venerable philosopher Renee Decartes said,

how do you know that you're not being fooled

by an evil genius who is stimulating your sensory systems

to produce the sense of a world around you

when none of this is real?

Well, the contemporary version of that question is just

how do you know you're not in a computer simulation

right now where all this would seem real, but it isn't.

- Yeah, the Simulation Hypothesis does does not mean

to presuppose that the civilization doing the simulating,

it would necessarily be our descendant.

Like they wouldn't have to be on earth.

You could imagine extraterrestrial civilizations

creating all kinds of simulations

of other extraterrestrial civilizations of their origins

or maybe just fantasy simulations.

- For me, I got into this in part

because 20 odd years ago,

just after The Matrix movie came out,

the Wachowskis, director of The Matrix,

Lorenzo philosophy, and they actually signed up

a bunch of philosophers to write philosophically

about the movie.

So I ended up writing an article

called The Matrix as Metaphysics.

And the central idea was even if we are

living in the matrix, all this is still perfectly real.

- So it would be unlike The Matrix in the sense that

the brain itself would be part of the simulation as well.

That would be the most cost efficient way

of producing human experience.

Not to have these biological,

organic brains floating in nutrient tanks

and then connecting them via some cable

to a virtual reality, but just simulate the whole thing.

You could run many more simulations

for the same amount of dollars as technological maturity

if you did it all in silicon than if you had this

wetware component in there as well.

- The traditional idea has been

that if we're in a simulation,

none of this is real.

I think I have hands,

I think there's a table here,

I think there's a sculpture here.

Many people would say that if this is a simulation,

none of that is genuinely real.

What I wanna say is even if we're in a simulation,

all this is real.

I still have hands, there's still a table here,

there's still a sculpture here.

It's just that all these things are made

at a more fundamental level, out of bits,

out of processes inside a computer,

but digital processes are real processes too.

So I wanna say simulation is reality.

- We don't know that much about the motivations

or the psychology of these possible simulators,

but we can reflect that if there are many

of these civilizations out in the cosmos

with the capability of running simulations,

it would suffice if only a few of them

were still interested in doing this

with even just a small fraction of their resources.

- As soon as you start thinking about the simulation idea,

the question comes up,

who created the simulation?

Is it a god?

I mean this simulator is a created reality.

They're all powerful, all knowing maybe, about this reality

that makes them kind of God-like.

At the same time,

the simulator didn't be much like a God at all.

It might just be a teenage hacker in the next universe up

or 26 dimensional octopus

but from an entirely different reality.

No reason at all to think they're particularly godly.

(sound of ticking)

- I am Dr. Michael Masters.

I'm a professor of biological anthropology.

I should probably list where I do that, huh?

Yeah.

(Michael chuckles)

And author of the book Identified Flying Objects.

Leading up to now,

we've seen a lot of different theories proposed.

It's important to consider all of these

and it's great to see that evolution of this field

where it's not just blind acceptance of one idea,

but we're asking questions

and we're really trying to dig deep

into the subject matter and to figure out the origins

of these individuals and their craft.

Obviously the dominant model for a long time

has been the extraterrestrial hypothesis

that they come from a different planet somewhere else

around a different solar system,

likely within our galaxy.

We would see them coming down from the sky.

Our first gut response would be,

they must come from those stars,

but if we look at all of their characteristics,

the craft themselves appear to have many qualities

that would indicate that they have the capability

of bending back time.

Perhaps it's time to consider other possibilities

and that they are in fact from time rather than space.

- In quantum mechanics and in general relativity,

there were phenomena that we couldn't

fully understand and characterize.

Now we have the math to describe it.

Now we have the physics and it's no longer scary

to conceptualize time dilation

or the double slit experiment.

We have math that can predict essentially

what the distribution of say a particle will be like.

- Many reports of these fast moving objects

is that they sort of almost pulsate

or there's a fluctuation to them as they move,

possibly skipping through parts of time

as they move through space.

And looking at the craft themselves

and especially the inertial forces,

if they're, as we see them,

rapidly shooting across the sky,

any sort of inertial movement like that

is going to splatter any biological creature

against that craft.

- The one hint that I believe helps us

in trying to figure out this mystery

is that I believe at least no biological entity

would be able to cross such vast distances.

They would at the very least require tons of food.

They would require bathrooms.

They would have to require a gravity environment

that's the same as their home world.

There would be so many nuances.

There would be long distance times of hundreds of years,

maybe even thousands or tens of thousands.

- The only possible way they might be able to do this

to survive those forces is by controlling the passage

of time in their relative reference frame inside that craft.

Whereas we see a rapid acceleration,

it may be a very slow acceleration to them.

A great analogy is looking at

how different organisms perceive time.

So when we try to swat a fly,

we see it as this fly swatter coming down

at a very high rate of speed.

Whereas that fly,

because it perceives time

with different frames per unit time,

may see that fly swatter coming down very slowly

and it says, I've gotta get out of the way of this

and it moves out of the way

and we feel like we just missed it

and it felt like it had all day to escape.

So the same thing applies when you talk about

the relativity of time outside of

biological organisms as well.

- It makes me think that the things

that we're looking at aren't biological.

They could be considered life forms

just because they're that advanced

that they can build these things,

but they may be beyond what we describe as traditional life

and how we describe what's living and what's not living.

- There are a number of reports of close encounters

that would seem to corroborate this time travel model.

Amy Rylands, who was taken from her home in Australia

and was found a short period after,

but many hundreds of miles away.

She was taken to the hospital directly after

and the doctors found that the growth of her body hair

was consistent with being gone for multiple days.

And the lack of food in her stomach

was also consistent with that.

This would indicate that the discrepancy

between how long she was actually missing

and how long she reports to have been gone

is best explained in the context of time travel.

- There's also the idea of the direction of time.

They could be coming from the past even.

But what about left in time?

What about right in time or up in time or down?

We can't even conceptualize what that physically looks like.

But what if this is possible

and somebody has mastered that

and they're coming from a time above us

rather than in front of us in our future?

- We cannot judge the intelligence of species

in outer space by our yardstick.

We cannot assume that they're just

a hundred years more advanced than us.

In which case, yeah, they can't reach us.

But if there are thousands of years ahead of us,

new laws of physics begin to open up.

- Before my experience at Rendlestrom,

I did not believe in UFOs,

did not believe in that type of phenomena,

would try to debunk anything I ever heard about that.

I thought anybody that would believe in such stuff

was either whacked out, crazy or delirious.

But all that changed after entering the forest that night.

(background crowd)

It was December, 1980.

It was the height of the Cold War

and I was assigned to the twin bases

that were called RF Bentwaters and RF Woodbridge England.

And in between those two bases was Rendlesham Forest.

- It was almost a perfect storm of

what makes a UFO case compelling.

Multiple witnesses.

Witnesses were military personnel.

The UFO was tracked on radar.

This was a landing,

not lights in the sky.

And all of this is backed up,

not just by the say so of the witnesses,

but by the government file itself.

- The night of the incident

we were working a midnight shift.

Everything started out normally.

Matter of fact,

it was rather mundane.

In the middle of getting my first cup of coffee there,

I get a call from Central Security Control, CSC.

They said, I need to respond to the East gate.

Once at the East gate

I met with Staff Sergeant Steffans.

He was the senior law enforcement patrolman.

And I said, what's going on, Bud?

And he seemed shook and he seemed upset.

He took his finger and he started pointing

over toward Rendlesham Forest

and so I looked over there and I says,

what is that?

You know, I could see some light,

like a bubble light over the canopy of the forest.

In the darker part of the forest toward the ground

you could see multiple color lights going on and off.

While we're in the middle of that conversation,

Sergeant Coffey, the senior controller,

comes back, he says, be advised,

he said, I just checked the lender radar,

eastern radar and Bentwater's radar.

And we lost contact with a bogey,

some type of craft 15 minutes ago.

So we had confirmation of a possible aircraft crash.

Bud says, no, it didn't crash, Jim.

He said, it landed.

As we approached the forest edge

I have airman Kazak behind me about 150 feet.

He stand for patrol point.

I have airman burrows 25 to 30 feet over here to my right.

Normally you would hear wind through the trees.

There was no sound at all.

Actually it was eerily quiet.

So I couldn't hear like, you know, forest animals.

I couldn't even hear my feet on the forest floor,

that which had debris on it.

I started feeling static electricity on my face and my skin.

My movements were labored.

Comparison for that would be like walking through a pool,

water waist high.

I look over my right for about 15 feet around

is like a wall of light.

As we approach the forest edge,

I'm starting to see a formation of a craft,

triangular in shape.

I have the feeling as well,

this cannot be in any Jane's Book of Aircraft.

And it's not an aircraft that was designed

by anything on this planet.

My emotions were all over the place.

They're running from the gamut,

from being scared to in awe.

I got my camera,

I pop it out.

I shot as much film as I could.

(camera clicks)

But I started looking underneath the craft,

I thought I was curious.

I was wondering how is this sitting above the forest floor?

And when I looked underneath

I could see nothing but light under it,

like white light.

There was three indentions in the ground,

triangular.

They were probably an inch, inch and a half deep.

Somehow this light created those indentions.

I thought, well maybe it's still mobile or it could move.

And I thought I could push the craft to see if it, you know,

if you had a car out there for example,

you could push it on the side and you would move,

you know, a half inch or inch.

This was solid.

The skin of the craft,

it was completely smooth.

There was no riveting like black glass that was shiny.

When I was touching it,

it was warm to the touch.

I later find out it had radiation.

I got a glimpse of the side of the craft,

it looked like writing.

I'm thinking, oh great, you know,

it's gonna say NASA or Soviet Union.

As they get closer to it, it's not writing,

but more pictorial glyphs drawn on it.

They measured about three feet wide by five inches high.

And then on top of those pictorial glyphs,

they had a larger glyph that was a triangular one

with a bigger circle around it.

I was just completely baffled.

None of it's making sense.

I can't rationalize it.

It's nothing like I've ever seen before or even today.

(camera clicks)

This craft with radiation

expelled all the film on my camera.

The craft starts generating more white-ish blue light.

And I see the craft start going up

and it goes up to the canopy of the forest

and it's just sort of momentarily hovers there

and then makes a right turn

and in a blink of an eye it's gone.

When it took off,

it didn't have no air displacement,

it had no sound, it had no sonic boom.

None of those, it was void of those two.

One of the thoughts I'd never released in it,

not even in the book,

is I thought that there was a strong possibility

the craft was organic,

the craft skin itself was metal and all that,

but it seems organic.

Even the look of it seems organic

because of the structure of the craft itself.

From their perspective,

it was definitely not hostile.

(camera clicks)

Freely let me walk around, examine it.

Allowed me to take notes,

allows me to touch it.

It allows me to have an exchange with it.

I think its intentions was to communicate,

that's why it was there.

(upbeat music)

- The US Navy has finally acknowledged that video

is appearing to show UFOs flying through the air-

- Are genuine.

They do in fact show aerial phenomenon

the Navy cannot explain.

And that in fact our understanding

of physics cannot explain.

- These are Navy pilots.

This isn't like a farmer who may have no idea

how a plane is constructed.

- [Participant] Right.

- These are experts baffled.

- [Participant] On aviation, you're right.

- This is massive news that could shatter

our entire conception of the universe and our place in it.

The US Navy has confirmed the existence

of Unidentified Flying Objects.

(plane engine whirs)

- My name is Kevin Day,

I'm a former operations specialist senior chief.

My job during the Tic-Tac encounter,

I was a air defense expert

assisting the captain of the ship.

On or about the 10th of November I went up to contact.

I noticed these really bizarre radar contacts

on my radar display.

The reason why I say they were weird is because

they were in a group of between five or six

at that particular day.

They were 28,000 feet going a hundred knots.

Normally something that high going that slow

is gonna fall out of the sky.

So I started coordinating with the bridge team

cuz I wanted them to actually go on the,

what we call the big eye binoculars,

and try to find them in the sky cuz I wanted some

sort of visual information on these things.

- Kevin was very adamant about having me go back and forth

from the bridge wings talking to my lookouts

and scanning the sky for air contacts.

It just wasn't really a job that I needed to be doing.

I needed to be managing the whole bridge that night.

It was really curious to me that Kevin was so concerned

that the chief on the bridge find the air contacts.

I saw a constellation of stars hanging in the sky

that just didn't seem to fit.

They were in a constellation of five to seven stars

hanging approximately 45 degrees in the air

and about 2000 feet up off the port bow of the ship.

And as I lifted the binoculars up to look at them,

all of the stars at once began to move

counterclockwise and in towards the center.

These were definitely not conventional aircraft.

Every single thing that was in

that battle space was managed.

Everything was tracked,

everything had a name, a number,

and had someone watching it on a scope

or making sure that he either got home safe

or got disposed of properly.

It was pretty simple to me that what I was seeing

was unlike anything I'd ever seen before.

I turned to the lookout to my left and I said,

did you see fucking see that?

And he nodded at me with his mouth open

and we just looked at each other for a minute

and looked back up at the sky.

- At one point Sean calls me down to combat.

He says, Hey Kevin, I gotta talk to you man.

I'm getting kind of scared up here

cuz this is like an oh shit moment

cuz no one on the bridge knows what these things are

and why aren't you guys doing anything about this?

(upbeat music)

I went over to the AIC and I said,

Hey, I want you to go ahead and intercept

with one of those contact

that would just happen to be Commander FRAs flight.

- He says, Hey sir, we've seen these objects,

they've been for two weeks they've been coming down

and he's given us the whole story.

He says, we need you to go investigate.

We wanna know what these are.

Water is perfectly calm, no white caps.

I mean it's literally a perfect San Diego, California day.

- It's a pretty boring intercept

cuz we have the coms up in the overhead speaker

until it gets to the merge point

we hear on the radio is a Charlie,

I think we might have a downed aircraft.

I'm seeing a disturbance of the water down here.

I'm gonna check it out.

- It's about the size of a 737.

It actually kind of has a shape of like a cross.

It draws our eyes.

We're like, oh that's kind of odd.

The whizo in the other airplane comes up

and says, Hey skipper, do you?

And that's about what he gets outta his mouth.

And what we see is this white tic-tac looking object

just above the surface of the water.

It's about 40 feet long,

didn't have any markings on it

and it didn't have any wings

and it didn't have any rotors

and it's just radically moving forward, back,

left, right at will.

So I said, I'm gonna go check it out.

So I start driving around and it's still doing

its forward, back, left, right.

We get to about the 12 o'clock position.

I'm just in a nice easy descent.

The tic-tac just kind of rapidly goes boop and turns.

So now it mirrors us.

We're up high, we're coming down,

it starts coming up.

- We hear I'm the overhead speaker.

Oh my god, oh my god, I'm engaged, I'm engaged.

- This is getting interesting.

So we kind of drive all the way around a circle.

I'm descending, it's coming up

and I get over to about the eight o'clock position

of the clock and it's over at about the two o'clock position

and I just kind of drop my nose aggressively

and I cut across the circle

cuz I'm trying to fly to where it's gonna be

cuz I wanna join on it.

I wanna see how close I can get.

And as I'm pulling up,

it's kind of starting to cross my nose.

As I start to pull nose onto it,

it just goes poof and it's gone.

I say, Hey, let's turn around

and let's go back to see what was in the water.

It's gone.

Water's perfectly, there's no white water, nothing,

it's just blue.

- My air intercept controller says,

uh sir, you're not gonna believe this,

but that object is back at your cap station.

- That was our original point where we were gonna

hold 40 miles south of the ship.

This thing just went from wherever we were at

to 60 miles in 30, 40 seconds,

it's already over there.

And it just, and they didn't track it,

it just appeared.

- Whatever it was was not Newtonian physics,

it was not classical physics,

it had to be something else.

Commander Fravor's flight is getting low on fuel,

so he has to return to the carrier.

Next flight was getting ready to launch.

So he goes out on the flight deck and he waves 'em down

and he says, Hey, definitely take a airplane

with an At flayer pod on to record video.

That pilot was name was Chad Underwood.

After flight's launch off the Nimitz

and before I know it I've got all these intercepts going

and these contacts are falling out of the sky.

At one point it seemed to me that it was raining UFOs.

- He goes to lock it up and immediately the radar can tell,

it gets signals back that it's being jammed.

So and technically jamming is an act of war.

Well, he's smart enough to castle to his targeting pod

and he takes a passive track

and that's the video that you see of the tic-tac

where it's just sitting in the middle

of the screen real quiet.

So as you look at it now, in this case,

you would actually start to see stuff going on

and even in TV mode, because you get exhaust,

you know the black exhaust that comes out,

you'll usually be able to see kind of

some of that coming outta the back end.

You don't see anything.

This thing's just sitting there.

It's just kind of sitting and all of a sudden

off it goes to the left.

For something to leave the field of view that fast

with the pod just steering is pretty fast.

I mean, it just, it's like outta here.

The best airplane in the world right now, F22 Raptor,

it can't take off like that,

especially if it's a hover.

I mean you're talking something

that's just sitting in space in the wind

and then it just all of a sudden accelerates,

airplanes don't work that way.

So that's where I say, well it was observing us.

It could have been communicating with whatever was there.

My questions are,

where'd it come from?

That's the biggest one.

Where'd it come from?

What was it doing?

I dunno if it shifted my perspective,

but it was more of a-

It's a validation.

You know, I've always like, yeah, there's a lot of stars.

And then you see something like this

and go, well maybe we're not cuz that pushes you

to the next point to go one lands in my front yard,

then I'll be 100% sure that we are not alone

cuz it's sitting in my front yard.

But I got within a half mile of this thing,

which is people go a half mile is pretty far away.

Again, not when you're flying an airplane,

half mile is like really tight.

- When the tic-tac footage and the gimbal footage

and the go fast footage were all released,

they really changed the game for everybody.

And listening to the narration of the pilots

during the gimbal footage,

it's even more astonishing because you can hear

the sheer incredulity in their voices.

- [Pilot] Look at that thing!

It's rotating.

- [Pilot 2] Oh my gosh, dude, wow.

What is that, man?

Look at it flying!

- Some people have said that

maybe these videotapes are hoaxes, they're doctored.

They're not really real at all.

Well, the military itself has finally owned up

to the fact that no, these videotapes are real.

There is something there

that seems to be pushing the envelope

with regards to the aerodynamics of these objects.

- In my own mind at least,

I'm pretty convinced that we had just intercepted a UFO

and oh, by the way, I was pretty senior,

I was getting ready to retire

and it was my last intercept,

my last real world intercept.

What a hell of a way to end your career, right?

(chuckles)

Interceptive a (beep) UFO.

Who does that?

(laughs)

- The article that I wrote with two colleagues

on the front page of the New York Times

in December of 2017 was a really big deal.

It had a big impact.

And that came about because I was called by some colleagues

to meet with Lou Elizondo,

who was the former head of a secret government program,

a Pentagon program studying UFOs,

which nobody knew about.

And so when I met with him and was given,

shown a lot of information, including some videos,

took those to the New York Times

with my colleague Ralph Blumenthal

and that's how the story started.

Since we exposed the fact that the Department of Defense

had actually had their own program, were looking into this,

and had been studying cases for 10 years,

it makes it a lot harder for government officials

to give really crazy explanations for cases

like they used to do in the day of Project Blue Book.

- Now we have the Navy proactively volunteering

that not only is this video

and these two other videos, are they legitimate?

But by the way, hey, we see hundreds

of these things all the time

and we need help reporting them.

This is a sea change in the UFO phenomenon.

- When I saw these video tapes,

I realized that we were watching

actually something historic.

It used to be that the burden of proof

was on the flying saucer people.

You saw something, prove it.

Now it's shifted.

Now the burden of proof is on the military

to prove that these objects are

not something bizarre and strange

or perhaps from another planet.

- I started my career in Los Angeles

working on a movie called To the Moon and Beyond

for the New York World's Fair,

which opened in 1964 and '65.

And that film was animated and visual effects.

And this film was seen by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clark

who were developing a movie project called

Journey Beyond the Stars,

which later became titled 2001 A Space Odyssey.

And that led to me getting a job

working on some preliminary design for the movie,

and then actually working on the movie with Stanley Kubrick.

Because I worked on 2001 A Space Odyssey,

which was about alien contact

that led later to working with Steven Spielberg

to do the visual effects for

Close Encounters of the third Kind.

And I didn't know when I was working on

Close Encounters that J. Allen Hynek was who he was.

I didn't know that Steven Spielberg

had read a lot of Jacques Vale's books,

which led to his writing the screenplay

for Close Encounters.

And so in retrospect, looking back now with what I do know,

many of the events depicted in Close Encounters

might have actually occurred.

And so I started thinking of Close Encounters

as an expensive documentary film.

When I moved here to the Berkshires

and started rethinking my life,

one of the projects that came to the forefront for me

was really starting out as kind of an amateur astronomer

and talking about would it be possible

to professionally photograph and validate

the existence of flying aerial phenomena.

And I started this little project

to explore that possibility

and I called it UFOTOG,

which meant UFO photography.

- So Doug reviewed the system with me.

It was a Humvee that had a system inside of it

with multiple telescopes, multiple instruments,

that would raise up on a hydraulic lift out of the roof.

Very dramatic.

I looked at it and I said to him

what he was already thinking,

it's a very expensive unit to have,

it can't get every place.

There's inaccessible areas that a large vehicle can't reach.

And I said, why don't we make smaller platters

and just distribute those.

If you're looking up in the sky with these cameras,

your first thought is, okay, was that an insect?

Was that a bird?

One way to narrow it down right away

is to have more than one of these platters

looking up into the sky.

And if you have one of these looking up in the sky

over here, then you have one view.

But if you have another one looking up in the sky

half a mile away-

- Right.

- And it sees the same thing,

it's not a localized event,

it's something farther away

because both see it at the same time.

And then we can triangulate,

we can get the speed, the course, the altitude.

That's something that's very important.

And because each platter will have multiple sensors,

we'll be able to see, for instance,

if it emits some gamma rays,

if the thing shows up only in the infrared

or if it only shows up in the ultraviolet

far off into the blue end of the spectrum

that you can't see with your eyes.

And depending on the method that they use for propulsion,

they're gonna give off different types of radiation.

- And extract an image that tells us

exactly what it's made out of,

what materials it's made out of.

They can see every rivet, they can say,

well, part of it's Teflon, part of it's carbon fiber,

part of it's aluminum, part of it's Mylar.

- Yeah.

- They can actually give you a complete inventory

of what it's made out of.

So I thought well, maybe we're gonna see something

that we've never seen before.

Maybe it's unanalyzable and maybe it's something else.

- That's right.

- That's what we're gonna find out.

- That's right and that's the golden nugget that UFOTOGs

as in the aerial anomaly detection system is all about.

And we're gonna make that data available to everybody.

This is stuff that belongs to humanity.

We've said this over and over again.

This data belongs to humanity

and it goes to humanity.

- What am I as a physicist supposed to do

when someone says they saw something in the night sky?

Maybe they did,

maybe they didn't.

In other words, we need something tangible,

we need a takeaway,

we need something that we can say,

aha, here is the smoking gun.

- To have a real smoking gun where we like

maybe even know what the phenomenon is,

it would have to be something like we've never seen before,

something retrieved by our government

or even is stashed away in a private company

or crash craft or part of a craft

or it could be something the phenomenon does by itself.

And I think either one of those things

would obviously change everything

and would probably allow a determination to be made

as to what they actually are.

(tape rewind)

Part of a craft.

- I know that it is supposedly from a crash site

in New Mexico from the St. Augustine Plains.

It happened in 1947,

within weeks of the supposed Roswell crash.

- My team was lucky.

Over the recent four weeks we were able to

acquire materials that I deem exotic.

(door slams)

So, so yeah, you have three completely different alloys.

At least one of these samples

shows an extremely high probability

of having carbon nano tubes inside of them.

And none of the isotopic ratios

belong to any element on earth.

Based on the first lab that looked at this,

we can say objectively with scientific certainty

that this wasn't created in our solar system.

We are literally villagers right now

trying to pick apart an iPhone in the 16th century.

So we know there's more stuff

going down at the lower levels.

Isotopic ratios, we aren't able to see it yet,

which is what we're hoping to change

with the help of Caltech.

And again, if we prove that the isotopes,

we verify those isotopes,

this will immediately become an international treasure,

a cultural artifact.

(upbeat music)

♪ I play my music when the day gets dark ♪

♪ Drifting thru heaven's gate to outer space ♪

♪ Blistered by the bright blue sunshine ♪

♪ The most beautiful faces we hide inside ♪