Original subtitles

- Throughout time, governments and the people

who work for them have done strange and even terrible

things in the name of national interest.

Tonight we look up.

Imagine an intelligence agency stealing a fighter jet

in broad daylight.

- He risks being blown out of the sky at any instant.

[dramatic music]

- And can we ever know with certainty

what happens at Area 51?

- This is actually responsible

for more than half of all reported UFO sightings

in the 1950s.

- This is pure evidence that the government is

hiding something big.

♪ ♪

- It's time to bring these secrets of the skies

back down to Earth.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[tense music]

It's fall 1954.

In Burbank, California, aerospace manufacturer Lockheed

is designing a top secret aircraft

whose very existence will ignite

one of history's greatest conspiracy theories.

♪ ♪

- This plane is cutting-edge technology,

but it's kind of weird.

It uses advanced materials like titanium

that's strong and lightweight,

but it also has these strange features.

Like its gangly, and the landing gear

is lined up like bicycle wheels.

- This is a curious-looking bird.

This plane has 130-foot-long wings

that droop at their length, to the point that

they actually will hit the ground

when the plane is grounded.

- Most unusually, though, for a plane produced by

a fighter jet company, this aircraft isn't

going to carry a single weapon.

- The reason for this plane's extreme design

is its extreme mission.

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

to fly at record-breaking altitudes

on top secret reconnaissance missions

over Soviet territory.

♪ ♪

- In the 1950s, the Americans are worried

about the technology that the Soviets have.

The rumor at the time is that the Soviets

had developed a bomber capable of flying from Moscow

to the United States.

So the CIA comes up with this ingenious plan

to find out if it was true.

- We don't have much of a spy network operating

in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

The Soviets are protected behind an Iron Curtain.

If you can't go through the Iron Curtain

or sneak behind it, you might have to fly over it.

[dramatic music]

- To avoid detection, the CIA decides to build

a state of the art spy plane.

- Any aircraft that are flying over Soviet territory

might be suscepted to air defense,

including sophisticated missiles,

and they might be accused of violating international law.

♪ ♪

The solution is to create an aircraft that flies

twice as high as the Himalayan peaks.

- 70,000 feet and above.

♪ ♪

- No plane has flown so high for so long.

To achieve it means developing brand-new technology.

♪ ♪

- So the government tasked Lockheed

to build this spy plane.

And their solution is essentially

to make a giant glider

and to stick a jet engine on it.

- Flying at the altitude that it is

presents all sorts of new challenges.

For instance, traditional jet fuel just won't work.

- They need to invent an entirely new

type of kerosene fuel

that doesn't boil off at low pressure.

- Lockheed's engineers call its new creation

The Angel, as it flies so close to heaven.

The government designates it Utility Aircraft 2,

or the U-2.

But building this incredible plane

is only half the battle.

♪ ♪

- When the U-2 is complete, the government needs

to figure out how to test it and, most importantly,

where to test it.

- Building a plane in secret, that's doable,

because it's done inside of a hangar.

But testing a plane in secret, that's a lot more difficult.

♪ ♪

- For decades, the location of the U-2's testing site

remains one of the government's

most closely guarded secrets.

But conducting so many flights

of this classified plane

has a strange side effect.

- When they start testing the U-2,

UFO sightings go up tremendously.

The public sees it.

They have no idea what they're looking at.

Air traffic controllers and professional pilots,

they don't know either.

- They see the shimmering in the sky.

They don't know what it is.

It's really high up there.

Therefore, they think it's a UFO.

♪ ♪

- Rather than confess that they're testing a top secret

new plane, which might alert the Soviets to their plan,

the CIA launch a cover-up.

- They claim the sightings are due to natural phenomena.

So understandably,

the conspiracy theories go nuts.

- There are some people who argue that the U-2

in its early stages of development

is actually responsible for more than half of all

reported UFO sightings in the 1950s.

- In 2013, the U.S. admits for the first time

what many have long suspected.

The name of U-2's secret test base is Area 51.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

- One of the reasons that Area 51 is

so important and so secret is that it's near

the Nevada proving grounds.

And no one in their right mind

is going to want to go into an area

where they're testing nuclear bombs.

♪ ♪

- They specifically purchased the land

for testing the U-2.

Were it not for the U-2, there would be no Area 51,

and we would have lost our most iconic UFO conspiracy location.

- While Area 51 becomes the most notorious UFO site

in the world, the U-2 plane becomes one of America's

most vital intelligence tools.

- Between 1956, the first operational flight

July 4 through May 1 of 1960,

the U-2 program dispelled the missile gap

and the bomber gap.

There was none.

We were still ahead of the Soviets,

even though they were saying they were ahead of us.

♪ ♪

- Over the next four years, 30 flights photograph

almost 15% of the USSR.

This provides 90% of the CIA's hard intelligence

on its fiercest rival.

- The CIA thought it had a shelf life

of two to four years.

Well, other than the B-52,

the U-2 spy plane is the longest-flying airplane

in the U.S. Air Force's arsenal,

and it's still flying today.

♪ ♪

- The U-2 isn't the only secret

aviation project to fly into the record books.

A decade later, the world's first supersonic plane

prepares for its maiden flight.

But this isn't the Concorde in London or Paris.

This is in Moscow,

and this aircraft is named Tu-144.

♪ ♪

- The maiden flight of the Tu-144 is a massive

engineering and propaganda win

for the Soviet Union over the West.

Up until that point,

the only planes to fly over the speed of sound

are military jets.

No one has ever built a large-scale plane

like this that can carry passengers,

because the immense technical challenge of it all.

♪ ♪

- The Soviet designers are on cloud nine.

♪ ♪

The creators of the Concorde are in shock.

♪ ♪

- In 1962,

Britain and France entered into an agreement

to share resources to develop and build

a supersonic passenger jet called the Concorde

and get it in the sky before the Soviet Union.

- The fact that the Tu-144 beats Concorde

into the sky is a surprise.

Even more shocking, it has the same design.

- Both planes have got the same sleek nose,

the same delta wing shape, and the same

afterburning turbojet engine.

The Tu-144 is so similar that the Western press,

they called it the Concordeski.

♪ ♪

- The Soviets insist their craft is

100% Russian ingenuity,

but Western engineers point to a series

of suspicious events during Concorde's development.

[tense music]

- Right from the onset, the Soviets showed

an incredible amount of interest

in the Concorde program.

Could there also be a mole within the organization,

someone within the trust of the Concorde program

giving secrets away?

♪ ♪

- Rumors of industrial espionage remain just that.

Then, in 1992, a Russian bureaucrat

walks into the British embassy in Latvia with a bold offer.

♪ ♪

- A disillusioned KGB worker

named Vasili Mitrokhin said

that he had scores of documents

that he would willingly hand over in exchange for asylum.

♪ ♪

When MI6 agents get to Mitrokhin's house in Russia,

they find a treasure trove of material--

more than 25,000 pages.

In total, it's about six trunks' worth of material.

- During his time at KGB, Vasili was actually

hand-copying notes that

he had access to as an archivist.

This discovery would turn out to be the largest single

source of information ever collected during

the entire history of the Cold War.

- Buried in this vast intelligence stash

is evidence of a spy codenamed Ace.

- Agent Ace seems to be a British engineer

who was leaking information to the Soviets.

This is how the Tu-144 got in the sky before the Concorde.

- Agent Ace was the mole that the UK and the Concorde program

suspected from the very beginning.

- For 20 years, the identity of Agent Ace

remains a mystery.

But in 2023, a British professor

pieces together clues from Mitrokhin's archive

to crack the case.

♪ ♪

- Agent Ace's real name

is Ivor Gregory James,

and he is a Hong-Kong-born engineer

who went to work in Britain in the 1970s.

- It was discovered that Agent Ace had actually

supplied the Soviets with more than 90,000 pages

of documentation related to new aircraft designs

over more than a decade.

♪ ♪

And inside that supply of information

were details related to the Concorde program.

♪ ♪

- The theft of the Concorde secrets

is one of the largest industrial espionage operations

of all time.

But for all its initial success,

there's a good reason you probably

never heard of the Tu-144.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

- At this prestigious Paris Air Show,

both the Concorde and the revised Tu-14

are the star attractions.

- The Tu-144 flies at the Paris Air Show.

♪ ♪

And initially, it looks great.

It takes off fine.

It flies for a few minutes.

♪ ♪

But then it stalls and crashes.

♪ ♪

- It all breaks apart in flames.

♪ ♪

- It is a massive embarrassment

for the Soviet Union,

and the plane's reputation never recovers.

- The Tu-144 only ever completes

100 domestic flights.

[solemn music]

The rumors are the sonic jet ends its days

shipping mailbags in Siberia.

♪ ♪

[tense music]

- It's 1967,

and a mysterious light in the sky

over a key American missile base

is about to set off alarms

and ignite a long-running mystery.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

- On March 24, Robert Salas arrives for his shift,

overseeing 10 nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force base.

♪ ♪

As a young missileer,

his job is to serve as the first line of defense

as part of America's nuclear arsenal.

♪ ♪

- In the late 1960s, the Minuteman ICBMs

are really the centerpiece of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

♪ ♪

- Malmstrom is one of multiple sites

that houses 1,000 nuclear missiles.

Each one is in its own silo,

and 150 of them are at Malmstrom.

♪ ♪

Those missiles are kept on alert

and ready to fire on very short notice

in the event of a nuclear exchange.

♪ ♪

- Salas's work is critical to national security,

but it also gets a little repetitive.

- I actually had a chance to serve

at Malmstrom Air Force base as a nuclear missile officer.

And when you're there, you don't feel very important.

You're just one of about 1,000 other people

who are all there taking turns going underground

and monitoring these missiles.

But in reality, you really are carrying

the weight of nuclear deterrence on your shoulders.

- This particular shift at Malmstrom

is anything but routine.

- Salas is in his command headquarters, and suddenly...

[phone rings]

He gets a call from

the gate personnel

at the entrance to Malmstrom.

- And the guard reports that there's

some sort of strange light that's flying,

moving in a strange pattern over the actual base itself.

This is an area that's restricted from aircraft

and restricted from commercial travel.

So what is this light that's flying overhead?

- They don't seem to be engaged in threatening action,

but it is a little disconcerting

to see unexplained lights above the base.

A few minutes later, Salas gets a second call.

- And this time the guard calls Salas in a cold panic.

- There's a glowing orb of red light

that's hovering right above the gate to Malmstrom.

[tense music]

- Needless to say, nobody knew what this was,

and Salas, who's 100 feet underground,

has no idea how to make any sense of this at all.

- Salas orders the gate personnel

to not allow anything to pass the gate.

- And then within just a few seconds,

all 10 missiles under Salas's command go dark.

[dramatic music]

- These Minuteman missiles are

the most sophisticated,

technologically advanced nuclear weapons

in the American arsenal.

♪ ♪

The idea that 10 of them

could suddenly all malfunction at the same time

is unthinkable to Salas.

- 10 missiles actually covers about 15 square miles

of location, all controlled by a single launch

control capsule where Salas was actually sitting.

♪ ♪

- With no explanation,

the red orbiting light disappears.

- The missiles reactivate,

and it's almost as if nothing happened at all.

♪ ♪

- Was this a Soviet spy craft

sent to disrupt America's defenses

or some unidentified aerial phenomenon?

To find out, the Air Force sends a team

from an ongoing secret investigation

known as Project Blue Book.

♪ ♪

- Project Blue Book was a U.S. Air Force program

that started in the early 1950s

and ran for about 15 years

to track and classify all unidentified aerial phenomena

and see if any of them were a threat to national security.

- Investigators from Project Blue Book

look into this incident at Malmstrom,

and they don't think it's an alien spacecraft,

but they also can't find any other logical explanation.

- The official word is that the government doesn't know

why those missiles shut down.

- Malmstrom is instantly classified

like many other Project Blue Book sightings.

- Salas signs a nondisclosure agreement,

and he's sworn to secrecy

about the events that occurred.

He's convinced that if he tells anybody what he saw,

he's going to face prosecution and probably be put in prison.

- The Blue Book investigation ends three years later,

and its findings are made public.

The government concludes that UFOs pose no danger

to America's defenses.

- There is nothing to hide.

- There's nothing to hide at all.

- And no credible evidence exists

for extraterrestrial technology or vehicles.

[tense music]

Problem is, Robert Salas knows what he saw.

♪ ♪

Decades later, in 2010,

he decides to tell his story to the world.

- In 1967, I was a First Lieutenant

stationed at Malmstrom Air Force base, Montana.

- When Robert Salas came out with his story,

UFO theorists and the community really seized on it and said,

"This is pure evidence that the government is hiding

something that happened out there."

♪ ♪

The UFO community starts to believe

that Project Blue Book is designed to just

debunk UFO conspiracies

instead of actually investigating them.

- I think the U.S. government does know more about

some of these UFO sightings than it lets on,

but that doesn't necessarily mean

that they're alien spacecraft.

A mystery is in some ways just as challenging

as an actual secret.

Still, today, the U.S. government is

just as likely to classify its ignorance

as it is it's knowledge.

[dramatic music]

- It's 15 years into the Cold War.

Controlling the skies is vital to defending the land.

One idea of an ambitious U.S. general

involves a fleet of covert nuclear bombers

that circle the enemy nonstop.

But on a winter's night in 1961,

this plan goes up in flames over North Carolina.

[whooshing]

- It's just before midnight on an unusually warm evening

in the small town of Goldsboro.

Some of the residents are still awake

when suddenly their rooms start to glow

with a strange red light.

They see this giant B-52 bomber with just a single wing on fire

passing over their homes.

[dramatic music]

- I can only imagine being one of the residents of Goldsboro.

You hear this loud crash, this boom outside.

It's a B-52 blowing up right over your head, more or less.

It had to be a horrific moment.

♪ ♪

- The plane explodes, scattering debris

across two square miles of cotton farmland,

igniting fields of crops.

♪ ♪

- Military helicopters start to descend upon the scene

quite instantaneously, just about.

- Next thing they know, a voice on a loudspeaker

is yelling at everyone to evacuate.

♪ ♪

- The residents of Goldsboro are told this crashed plane

has scattered deadly cargo.

Two 3.8 megaton thermonuclear bombs,

each 200 times more destructive

than the one that leveled Hiroshima.

What the world doesn't yet know is that

this crashed bomber is part of a classified

national security initiative

named the Airborne Alert Program.

♪ ♪

- The Airborne Alert Program is the brainchild

of General Power, and the idea is that

the U.S. Air Force is going to be ready

to deliver a nuke to the USSR at any time.

♪ ♪

- General Power comes up with this idea

to fly B-52s 24 hours a day,

because we want to make sure that we are able to strike

Russia at any time, should they launch these missiles at us.

- For a brief, shining moment, the Soviet Union

pulled ahead of the United States

in the Cold War nuclear standoff.

They had that first strike advantage.

♪ ♪

- So it seems absolutely batty and insane.

But undoubtedly, many in the 1960s were thinking,

this is exactly how we ensure that

the United States survives should the Cold War

give way to a hot war.

- No one has ever tried to keep a fleet

of nuclear bombers in the air 24/7.

- So General Power and his planners

developed these routes that will go along the Soviet border

and come back out.

- These were grueling missions that are testing

the limits of human endurance.

The reality was that they're circling

in a B-52 over the Arctic Circle,

waiting to start a nuclear war.

♪ ♪

- They have to be refueled while in flight.

And that's very dangerous, because these planes are

carrying a nuclear payload.

- You have an American strategic bomber

thundering through the sky at 40,000 feet

with a bomb bay full of thermonuclear weapons,

trying to receive kerosene from another airplane

while they both bounce around in turbulent air.

What could possibly go wrong?

♪ ♪

- You just wrap your head around it.

Think about that.

There are at least two nukes on every plane.

♪ ♪

- But General Power and our military

think it's worth the risk.

♪ ♪

- After the Airborne Alert Program

has been in secret operation for years,

General Power decides to make it public

on January 18, 1961.

He wants to use its existence as a deterrent to the Soviets.

But exactly one week after his announcement,

one of his bombers springs a fuel leak,

and the residents of Goldsboro end up running for their lives

from two unexploded nuclear bombs.

- Shortly before this mission was undertaken,

Boeing realized that there was a mechanical issue

with the B-52s,

and essentially, they were doing a callback.

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

That's when trouble strikes.

[whooshing, crashing]

- The military evacuate locals, cordons off the area,

and brings in a crack team of bomb disposal experts.

- One of the bombs is very easy to find,

safely hanging from a tree,

ready for the government to take it away.

Now, the second bomb,

that one's a bit harder to get to.

- The second bomb experiences a failure to deploy

of its retarding parachute.

And the result is it slams into the surface of the Earth,

going 700 miles an hour,

and digs itself in to a depth of 180 feet.

- The authorities dig for seven days and nights

under floodlights, in rain and snow,

to try and find the bomb.

- One wrong move, and it could all go boom.

♪ ♪

- So finally, they decide that further digging

represented a greater danger than just isolating the device

and leaving it alone.

♪ ♪

- They realized the better thing to do

is to seal it up and call it a day.

- They leave the bomb in place and they just buy the field

from the farmer for 1,000 bucks.

- The deed to this land forever states

that the owner is not to go more

than five feet into the ground for any purpose.

- 45 years later, the Air Force releases

a never before seen document detailing the crash,

compiled by a senior nuclear weapons safety officer.

It reveals a shocking secret

and the paper thin margin between near-miss

and nuclear apocalypse.

- This document that comes out decades later

reveals that the first bomb,

of its multiple redundant security devices,

all but one are compromised.

- As if by miracle, it stopped at the final stage.

We're one tiny electrical sequence away from

a thermonuclear explosion in North Carolina.

♪ ♪

- As for the second nuke,

the one that is buried deep in the soil of Goldsboro,

it's been half a century.

It hasn't blown up.

So I guess we're doing OK.

And fingers crossed.

[dramatic music]

- In the '60s, the Soviets released

one of the most formidable, most agile,

and most lethal fighter jets ever made.

But this must have weapon to rule the skies

is not for sale to Russia's enemies.

So for the young nation of Israel,

stealing its secrets might tip the balance of a war.

[dramatic music]

- In the 1960s, a Soviet Union created a brand-new,

cutting edge fighter jet

that had the entire Western world on edge.

And it's a game changer.

- It's so fast and agile that it becomes

the biggest selling fighter in history.

It is also designed to be simple to make

and cheap to produce, which means air forces

could have lots of them.

- It's called the MiG 21.

♪ ♪

And for one fledgling nation, Israel,

this nimble new fighter plane spells disaster.

- Israel is surrounded on all sides by hostile neighbors.

[tense music]

- Islamic countries that were buying

MiG 21s from the Soviet Union.

♪ ♪

- What the Israelis want to do is study the MiG 21.

They want to know its potential weaknesses

and ensure their own ability to maintain air superiority.

- Israel's primary concern was this new fighter jet

could tip the scales of power for any future war

that might break out in the region.

- If the Israelis lose air superiority,

they'll lose the war.

If they lose the war, they'll cease to exist.

♪ ♪

The commander of the Israeli Air Force

tells the head of Israeli intelligence agencies,

Meir Amit, "If you can bring me a MiG,

you'll have done me a good day's service."

[dramatic music]

- Meir Amit accepts the challenge

and hatches a covert plan to steal

a MiG 21 from right under the noses

of Israel's neighbors.

The first step?

Finding a pilot.

- The Israelis started to make approaches to pilots

in a lot of different countries.

- The Israelis identify an Iraqi pilot named Munir Redfa,

and they identify this pilot because in an Islamic country,

he himself is Christian.

♪ ♪

- They orchestrate a meeting in a hotel room.

♪ ♪

- It's such an important mission.

The agency's top spy chief even watches the entire meeting

covertly through a peephole.

♪ ♪

- Redfa is a deputy commander of an Iraqi MiG squadron,

and he's not happy, because he's just been

passed over for promotion.

[tense music]

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

which is pretty unusual in Iraq.

He's also very unhappy about being ordered to join

a bombing campaign against Kurdish tribesmen

on the Iraqis' northern border.

♪ ♪

- In all the cases I've ever worked,

in all the spies I've ever recruited,

it was a deep, real relationship

between us and them.

Just because you have differing

political idealizations

doesn't mean that you aren't human beings together.

All you have to do is think in terms of,

what can I do to inspire them to feel safe with me

and solve that action they need solved in their lives?

- It's a very delicate process to create a defector,

to turn a patriot into a traitor.

And every defector comes with their own interests,

their own needs.

Sometimes it's education.

Sometimes it's finances.

But in every case, all a defector is looking for

is to have some sort of control over their future.

♪ ♪

- Redfa is offered $1 million, Israeli citizenship,

and safe passage for his entire family

if he agrees to fly his MiG 21 to Israel.

- Redfa goes for the deal,

but there's one significant setback: fuel.

- As a Christian, Redfa is subject to a lot of scrutiny.

His movements are tightly controlled.

- So he's rarely allowed to fly with a full fuel tank.

This keeps him close to home.

♪ ♪

Even if Redfa has a full tank, a journey to Israel

takes him through hostile Jordanian airspace.

He risks being blown out of the sky at any instant.

- It's two full years before Redfa gets his chance.

[dramatic music]

- Eventually, it happens.

He's told that he'll be part of a formation flight

with a full tank of gas.

♪ ♪

- Mid-flight, he breaks away from his formation

and heads for Israel,

powering over Jordanian airspace.

The Jordanians scramble two jets to give chase,

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

♪ ♪

Redfa hits his afterburners,

sometimes flying as low as 700 feet to avoid missiles

locking onto his plane.

- After a 65-minute flight of sheer terror,

he reaches a base deep in the desert

on his last drop of fuel.

♪ ♪

- 30 years later, details of this daring,

state-sanctioned heist are revealed

to a journalist writing a history of the Mossad.

♪ ♪

And it's now seen as a turning point

in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

- The ending of the story is that the Israelis discovered

the MiG's weaknesses, and in the event

that they have to fight it, they're better prepared.

This operation underscores just how good

Mossad is at understanding their adversaries

and exploiting opportunities.

- An intelligence organization that belonged to

a small country that was less than 20 years old

was now capable of carrying out one of the biggest

heists in history.

- The arms race to control the skies

has had governments everywhere

investing in groundbreaking secret projects.

So maybe it was only a matter of time

before the most enduring design in science fiction

gets a shot: the flying saucer.

Meet 1959's Avrocar.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

- The Avrocar.

It's effectively what you would get

if you mixed a flying saucer

with a hovercraft.

- Project Avrocar is the brainchild

of a British engineer named John Carver Meadows Frost.

- He's a big dreamer, and he's already got a project in mind

to begin to think about the next generation

of aerospace design.

- Frost begins to study this interesting

aerodynamic phenomenon known as the Coanda effect.

- He shows that a jet engine's exhaust can be routed around

to underneath the object,

where it forms an air cloud

that allows it to lift off the ground.

- So basically, he's designed a literal flying saucer.

♪ ♪

- His lab work convinces the Canadian government

that this is actually a possibility,

and they are willing to support his work

for about two years.

♪ ♪

And for Frost, this becomes

his personal passion

to take this flying saucer from a blueprint to reality.

♪ ♪

- But after a year,

the project's astronomical price tag

forces the Canadians to pull the plug.

Frost needs a new backer to realize his dream.

♪ ♪

Luckily for him, a rich neighbor to the south

is in the market for a flying saucer.

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

is looking for planes that can vertically take off and land.

They're known as VTOL planes.

- Governments are beginning to think about

what fighting World War III would actually look like.

So they are focused on developing

planes that can take off vertically

that don't need long runways.

- Also, the military has been rocked by a series

of newspaper articles claiming that the Soviets

are developing similar tech.

Apparently, Nazi engineers had secretly developed

a working flying saucer during the Second World War,

and they were now working for the USSR.

- So if there's even the smallest chance that

the Soviets are developing a game-changing VTOL aircraft,

the U.S. thinks they need one too.

[tense music]

- The story goes that when Frost gets wind of

the U.S.'s interest in saucers,

he spots a visiting delegation

from the Air Force and intercepts them

with his Avrocar prototype.

♪ ♪

- Frost apparently shows them work so secret

even his bosses don't know about it.

And shortly after, the U.S. Air Force

agrees to fund a million-dollar

feasibility study into his flying saucer research.

- For Frost, this is magic.

In an instant, his project has gone from a side hustle

of the Canadian government to accessing

the largest, most powerful military

and budget in the world.

- We'll never know what Frost said to get funding,

but a clue lies in a remarkable document

made public in 2012.

In it, Frost makes some extraordinary claims

about his flying saucer, now code named Project 1794.

- Frost claims that his saucer will far exceed

any jet fighter of the age.

♪ ♪

- It's going to be able to go up to four times

the speed of sound, fly to the edge of space,

travel between continents.

These are bold claims.

- If you are an Air Force general,

this is a machine you definitely want in your hangar.

- Progress is anything but supersonic.

After eight years, in 1959, Frost's team

finally has a prototype ready for its first ever test.

And by this point, the U.S. Army also wants in.

♪ ♪

- The U.S. Army has come out of the Korean War

interested in having basically a flying Jeep.

They see this flying saucer as perhaps

their answer to moving equipment,

moving troops, and even fighting.

- So Frost has both the Army and the Air Force, two bosses,

both pushing him for results.

- Everything hangs on the Avrocar's first test.

The million dollar question is, will this thing fly?

- In the Avrocar's first test flight,

it doesn't go completely as planned.

♪ ♪

Frost's design has some fundamental problems.

It doesn't have the control surfaces

that an airplane has to ensure stability,

and it has no thrust.

Like, the thing can't go fast.

It's riding on a cushion of air, but as it goes up,

the air dissipates, so it loses its lift.

♪ ♪

It's just bad all the way around.

♪ ♪

- After promising supersonic flight at the edge of space,

Frost delivers a wobbly 30 miles an hour,

3 foot from the ground.

Unsurprisingly, the military pulls the plug.

- The project is canceled.

A complete disappointment to everyone,

including, presumably, John Frost.

♪ ♪

- Before it's grounded, the Avrocar racks up

over $100 million in costs in today's money--

a reminder that when it comes to the national interest,

no idea is too crazy to try.

- The prototypes are quickly dumped into storage

as a very obvious embarrassment.

[dramatic music]

- In the 1980s, decades of press censorship

are crumbling in the USSR.

And with this new freedom, Soviet newspapers

focus their attention on a topic that really sells:

UFOs.

[dramatic music]

- During the Cold War, the Soviet government

is very much against any stories that are

at all subversive or unorthodox,

and a UFO sighting is both.

- Discussing UFOs would be viewed as admitting that

there was some sort of power out there stronger

than the Soviet Union itself.

And to do so would be not only risking your career,

but also risking your freedom and ending up in jail.

- The media can't really report on this story at all

until the government kind of lets up on these rules.

- In 1985, things start to change.

- In this era of glasnost and perestroika,

you have the opening up of all of these incredible

hidden stories that had been taking place

inside the Soviet Union.

- It was like the floodgates were opened.

All of a sudden, Russia just kind of went crazy for UFOs.

- Many scientists inside the Soviet Union

questioned the truth of these stories.

- Soviet authorities tried to explain away the sightings,

saying that it's a natural phenomena like ball lightning

that can give the impression of a large glowing orb

that people say they saw.

- Ball lightning presents itself in a circular form,

very similar to what people report as UFOs

where they talk about flying saucers

or balls of light in the sky.

- Others say that this is just mass hysteria,

that people got one story,

and they just fed into each other

and got really excited.

- It's easy to chalk this up as hysteria,

sightings by an uninformed public.

But then in 1991, a whistleblower

from deep within Soviet military circles

steps forward.

A pilot with a résumé so decorated,

her claims demand to be taken seriously.

♪ ♪

- Marina Popovich is one of the USSR's

most decorated and well-respected aviators.

- She's the first Soviet woman to break the sound barrier.

She holds 100 aviation records,

and she's known in the Soviet Union

as Madame MiG.

- The changes gave Marina the opportunity

to talk about her experiences

and what she had seen as a pilot in the USSR

without the worry of repercussions.

- In press conferences and media interviews

and her own writings, she begins to make

some pretty fantastical claims.

- Popovich says she has

multiple experiences with UFOs.

In 1982, she says she was in Siberia

when she saw what looked like a giant glowing orb.

[light music]

- At a press conference in the Russian consulate

in San Francisco, she claims that the Russians

have been able to retrieve five different downed UFOs,

and she also claims that there's evidence

of some sort of hybrid breeding program,

breeding humans with aliens.

- And then in this very dramatic moment,

she produces a photo that she says

is a 15-mile-wide alien spacecraft.

♪ ♪

- She says it is a UFO that has either captured

or destroyed Soviet space probes.

Scientists explain it away as the picture

being very consistent with the launch of a spacecraft.

But because Popovich is so respected,

the UFO community starts to back her,

saying that she's the only one telling the truth

and the government is covering up the real explanation.

- Her claims obviously create

an incredible amount of interest.

I mean, you can imagine the press would go crazy

over stories like this,

especially at that time in history.

[dramatic music]

- Marina Popovich isn't the first

government whistleblower to cry cover-up,

but she's one of the most influential.

- Popovich becomes probably the best example that we have

on the Russian side of a phenomenon

that's actually pretty common,

these so-called UFO whistleblowers.

Government workers, pilots, intelligence officers

who come forward and say that they have privileged knowledge

or have seen hidden evidence.

- The whistleblowers will keep coming forward with stories.

But until someone has really verified evidence

that can be shown publicly, it's just hearsay.

- But still today, we don't know the truth

of what a lot of these mystery sightings end up being.

Our world and our universe is still weirder today

than we can imagine.

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

- For every covert mission we discover

taking place in the skies, many more remain hidden

until someone brings these secrets to light.

I'm David Duchovny.

Thanks for watching "Secrets Declassified."

♪ ♪