Original subtitles

Taking a flying disc off by C-17.

Among the quiet towns and bustling epicenters around the world,

reports pour in of unusual aerial phenomena.

It shoots high into the air.

It's moving in an erratic way.

This is not a terrestrial craft.

Flying discs, hovering orbs,

strange biological substances falling from the sky.

To determine what it might have been,

you'd have to eliminate all the other possibilities.

The sensational becomes credible once it's crowdsourced.

Thousands of people claim to see these orbs.

UFO hotspots light up on the map.

What's made these places the target of otherworldly attention?

This might be the location of the vortex.

As vessels reappear in the same locations,

can we use the earthly to guess at otherworldly motives?

Are these mysterious visitors friends or foe?

And should we fear their return?

All over the world, repeat sightings of UFOs baffle researchers.

UAP are in our airspace, but they are grossly underreported.

The pattern begins to emerge.

These sightings are not rare or isolated.

They are routine.

What is the meaning behind these hotspots?

I can't go beyond what I've already stated publicly.

The government is not prepared.

Are we being mapped?

June 2nd, 2009.

12.40 AM.

Two brothers step out their front door and take a few cautious steps towards a dark field across the street.

They watch as a fleet of bright floating orbs drift across the patchy grassland.

Suddenly, a car rounds the corner at the top of the road, flooding the street with light.

The orbs instantly vanish.

The brothers watch the car pass, stepping closer to the field as the glowing objects return.

The lights move in sweeping, hypnotic circles, never dipping lower than a few feet above the ground.

Then, one light in the center of the field turns a bright green.

It begins to spin, faster and faster.

Just when it seems the object couldn't rotate any quicker, it shoots up towards the sky.

The rest of the mysterious lights follow, vanishing rapidly among the stars.

Plunged into sudden darkness, the youngest boy begins to shake.

His brother comforts him, reassuring him the lights are nothing to be scared of.

This isn't the first time UFOs have been spotted moving across his family's land.

On this night, the strange sightings over Dulce prove harmless.

But could they be linked to a rise in shocking reports that came just several decades earlier?

June 16th, 1976.

Police officer Gabe Valdez arrives at a ranch on the outskirts of town.

The ranch owner, Manuel Gomez, has called to report a strange death.

Not a human's, but a cow's.

Officer Valdez carefully approaches the body.

The cow has been torn open.

But these aren't the hungry marks left by a normal predator.

These are precise, almost surgical wounds.

Some of the cow's organs appear to have been removed, and the wounds cauterized, as if by a laser.

A few feet from the cow's body, Officer Valdez notices strange scorch marks on the grass.

Almost as if a three-legged object had stood there, burning the ground beneath it.

Valdez is baffled.

Neither he nor Manuel Gomez have ever seen anything like this.

But this grisly scene on the Gomez ranch will be the first of many.

Over the next few months, Officer Valdez will personally investigate more than 30 cattle mutilations in this small corner of New Mexico.

And each scene will be stranger than the last.

What Officer Valdez describes is an absolutely bizarre scene.

So we have the dead cattle, but around them are all sorts of detritus, like gas masks, glow sticks, and other bits and pieces that are largely inexplicable.

One of the things that Valdez found right within one of the mutilated cattle was a fetus, unidentified.

He would assume that it would be a cow fetus, but he said it actually had a mix of features that he identified with a monkey, even, or frog-like, reptilian-like.

Something clearly that he'd never seen before, that we don't know to exist.

And then, of course, the strangest thing of all was that it seemed to have no bones left.

There was no skeletal structure left in it.

It was actually just filled with liquid.

The story defies credulity.

I mean, you can't even picture the scene.

It's just so grim to imagine what or who could have done this.

Unexplained livestock mutilations have plagued farmers around the world for centuries.

In 1606, hundreds of sheep were found dead in the area surrounding London, England.

Each of the animals was left with their wool intact and only their internal organs missing.

These mutilations continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries across Europe and North America,

leaving experts and farmers struggling to find an explanation.

These unexplained animal deaths remain a relatively small story, largely ignored until the 1970s,

when a wave of bizarre cattle mutilations gripped the United States.

The cattle mutilation is a very disturbing phenomenon.

This involves cattle or horses being surgically operated on amputations,

removal of blood, things like that.

All of these activities would normally leave a trail of evidence.

But apparently, these particular mutilations, there was no such trail of evidence.

So it seems as if someone with a very malicious purpose and very advanced technology

was manipulating these creatures and killing them.

Accounts of these mysterious mutilations spread over Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico.

One of the figures given at the time was of 10,000 cattle being mutilated and killed.

Now, it has to be said, that figure is pretty unreliable.

It's hard to find a verifiable source for it.

But nevertheless, it whipped up a national frenzy.

Cattle ranchers as well, they often reported unidentified helicopters or planes

that were hanging around their ranches, and in some cases, even as extreme as chasing them

and even firing at them.

As outrage in the area grew, residents were left with two crucial questions.

Why were these bizarre animal mutilations happening?

And who could be behind them?

This was a time of economic chaos in the 1970s, when inflation was roaring upwards,

when beef prices were being capped.

Smaller ranchers, in particular, were basically facing going bankrupt.

And in this atmosphere of panic and gloom,

people almost convinced themselves that their cattle had been mutilated.

One of the things that happens is insomnia,

is the inability to sleep well across nights.

And we know that when you're having disrupted sleep over a long period of time,

it does cause changes in the brain.

Without enough REM sleep, you can think you're sleeping every night,

but if those disruptions keep you from getting through REM states

through the three to five cycles a night that you actually get through the full set of REM sleep,

it can lead to hallucinations.

After months of investigations,

the apparent epidemic of cattle mutilations was simply attributed to natural predators.

But ranchers in New Mexico refused to accept it.

You have, on the one hand, local ranchers who know their animals well,

who have been in the area for generations,

and generally have a very good knowledge of the kinds of activities that take place on their property,

and they're saying that this is not matching what they've seen in the past.

This is inexplicable to them.

And then on the other hand, you have experts who are often not in the rural areas,

who are usually in urban centers, scientists, government officials,

who say quite a different narrative that actually this is really natural,

there's nothing weird going on here.

It's a combination of bacteria causing natural death,

scavengers doing the things the scavengers do,

going for a soft tissue first,

and then maybe the environment causing effects to the corpses

that you maybe wouldn't see in other places.

And all this together creates quite a natural phenomenon that's easily explainable.

If we think about how bacteria behave in the whole process of decomposition,

the way that bacteria goes for softer tissue,

and in a sense, if you want, hollows out a dead cow going for the organs first,

this might explain why some people on coming across these dead cows

came to believe that they'd somehow been ritually disemboweled and mutilated.

In April, 1979, New Mexico Senator Harrison Schmidt

announces a public hearing to discuss the ongoing spate of cattle mutilations in the state.

One of the 80 attendees at this gathering is local Dulce resident Paul Benowitz.

Though he didn't know it at the time,

Benowitz would soon find himself at the center of a truly terrifying conspiracy.

Benowitz was a World War II veteran,

and he became an engineer, a radio and electronics engineer,

which is also oddly common for those interested in UFOs.

They're very interested in the nuts and bolts of how UFOs work.

Using his own camera and radio equipment,

Paul Benowitz embarked on a mission to track down any suspicious UFO activity in the Dulce area.

And it didn't take long for him to find it.

He took out radio and electronics equipment to try to gather signals of various kinds.

And he was assuming, I think, that he was going to find this information coming from the skies,

given what they knew about UFOs at the time.

But to his surprise, it all seemed to be coming from underground.

The interesting thing about radio waves is objects tend to be less opaque to radio waves.

So where light won't go through a wall, to a certain extent, radio waves will go through the wall.

Having said that, radio waves are still attenuated or decreased in intensity

when they do go through solid objects.

So radio waves don't travel through rock and concrete and glass and water particularly well.

So when somebody thinks they found a radio signal coming from underground,

it would be considered very strange.

In October 1980, Benowitz reports his findings to officials at Kirtland Air Force Base,

200 kilometers south of Dulce, on the outskirts of Albuquerque.

Following his report, the United States Office of Special Investigations

sends Special Agent Richard Doty to meet with Benowitz.

Doty starts giving Benowitz information that confirms a lot of what Benowitz is starting to conclude,

that based on his work, there's some kind of top-secret underground base

connected to UFOs, possibly connected to catamulations in some way.

What Doty tells Benowitz convinces him not only that there is an underground alien base

at Dulce, New Mexico, but that it's part of a network of alien bases all around the world.

In 1988, Benowitz publishes his findings in a paper called Project Beta.

In it, he lays out the approximate size and location of the supposed Dulce UFO base,

as well as any blind spots that could make the installation susceptible to an attack.

But following publication of the report, Benowitz's life begins to unravel.

The information that Doty is giving to Benowitz really convinces him, along with his own continuing investigations,

that this phenomenon is totally real, that there is something top-secret and quite nefarious going on,

and it really starts to affect his life.

He believes that his wife has an alien implant of some description.

He barricades himself in his own room and eventually, exasperated,

his family has him committed to a mental institution for a while.

Benowitz never really fully recovers from this experience,

and a few years later, he dies, and it's possible that the cause of death was suicide.

Even to keen UFO watchers,

Paul Benowitz's claims of an underground alien base seemed far-fetched.

That is, until 2013,

when Richard Doty comes forward with a startling revelation

that helps to explain why Benowitz was so convinced of alien involvement in the region.

If Benowitz detected some nefarious activity in catamulations in his thoughts about top-secret bases,

in a sense, he was absolutely correct.

Because it comes out later that the intelligence official that he meets,

that he's interacting with, Richard Doty,

allegedly was assigned to misdirect Benowitz directly,

that this was his mission,

was to feed Benowitz and the larger UFO community by extension

misinformation or disinformation,

very specifically targeted to put people off the track.

But if Doty was deployed to misdirect Benowitz

and steer him away from the real reasons

for the strange apparitions and cattle mutilations in the area,

the question is, why?

What is it the United States authorities were trying to hide?

If I was going to shoot a movie on another planet,

I would probably go shoot it in New Mexico

because it has what looks like a pretty alien landscape.

The vegetation, the mountain ranges,

the colors that you see there,

the rock formations,

these are pretty unique.

You don't see these elsewhere.

New Mexico's striking landscape

is due in large part to the process of erosion.

Over millions of years,

exposure to wind and rain

have gradually carved through the rocks and desert sands,

molding the land into spectacular natural formations.

It's like airborne sandpaper running across the geography

and it wears away the rocks,

the softer rocks,

until you're just left with a core of harder rock

that looks like a pillar,

and they're called buttes.

One of the most striking collections of buttes

appears around 150 kilometers from Dulce

in the Bistie Denizen Badlands.

They don't look like natural formations to most people.

They look possibly intentionally done.

And so New Mexico is a great place

for UFO stories, frankly.

The Bistie Denizen Wilderness,

like much of northwestern New Mexico,

lies on the very edge of the Colorado Plateau.

It's the largest plateau in the United States.

The Colorado Plateau is an area of land,

240,000 square miles,

and it is simply an area of land

that's higher than the land around it.

But towards the edges of the plateau,

the rocks begin to slant downwards.

And one of these depressions is the San Juan Basin,

home to some of New Mexico's

most fascinating archaeological sites.

Millions of years ago,

this basin was covered by an inland sea

which divided the North American continent.

As the sea gradually receded,

the area was transformed into wetlands.

During this period,

ancient species like dinosaurs and reptiles

thrived here.

Here, encased in layers of rock,

are some of the world's richest fossil beds,

sites that could hold the key

to Earth's ancient past.

The most dramatic fossil recorded

in this region to date

has been affectionately called

the Bistie Beast,

a 75-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex

discovered in the late 1990s.

The preservation of ancient animals

is extraordinarily rare.

Even though we think of fossils

as something that we find everywhere,

there are probably millions of species

that we will never know anything about

because those bodies didn't preserve very well

or the exact geological situation

wasn't perfect to preserve those bodies.

and the snapshots that we do have,

we are so lucky to have,

to understand the changes

that life on Earth

and our Earth itself has gone through.

A few miles west of the Bistie Badlands

lies another crucial archaeological site.

Goat Hill is the imposing rock formation

overlooking the small city of Raton.

And it was here

that American scientists

Lewis and Walter Alvarez

discovered a thin layer

of iridium-rich rock

that would spark a revolutionary idea.

And knowing that iridium is found

in things like meteorites

that fall to Earth,

they were able to connect

these ideas together

and develop a theory

that potentially was a giant impact

that deposited this layer of iridium

that also may have caused

the destruction of the dinosaurs.

Because iridium is found

not as abundantly on Earth

as it is in, say,

bodies like meteors or asteroids,

we can extrapolate

that that was most likely

an impact from a very large celestial body.

The remarkable discoveries

made in these New Mexican deserts

have made the region

a hotbed of scientific exploration.

To this day,

researchers continue to map

the Earth's history

through the layers

of ancient exposed rock

in the San Juan Basin.

The question is,

are we the only ones

doing the mapping?

June 1st, 1997, 11 p.m.

A man raises his binoculars

for some routine stargazing

a few miles south of Raton.

He spots what he believes

to be a satellite,

tracking its movements

through the night sky.

But he realizes

the object is far too fast

to be a satellite.

He watches as two other

strange crafts join the first,

accelerating into a triangle formation

before vanishing over the horizon.

September 21st, 2007,

10.35 a.m.

A family traveling north

through the Bistie Badlands

notices a strange white cigar-shaped craft

hovering only 100 meters from the road.

As they watch,

the object suddenly rockets upwards,

disappearing into the sky without a trace.

Whether it's human beings

or an advanced civilization

who wants to understand the Earth's past,

who wants to understand the Earth's story

and possibly its future,

need to do research

in places like the Badlands.

Residents in the small town of Dulce

wonder whether the answers

to these mysterious phenomena

could lie in a far more modern structure

buried deep in the ancient desert rock.

So, during the Cold War,

especially post-Hiroshima,

we changed our perspective

on what a military base needs to be.

We realized that in a nuclear war,

essentially, life at ground level

would cease to exist

if it was a significant war.

So, nations around the world

built underground military bases

and bunkers.

They wouldn't be directly affected

by a nuclear blast

if you tried to bomb them

directly, they're deep enough

that they're not going to be

significantly affected

and that you would have enough

food and water

to sustain the people there,

at least through the initial portion

of the nuclear winter.

If you want to hide military secrets

or other things,

you would build an underground base

so that people can't spy on you,

they can't see what you're doing,

satellites can't really see

what's going on.

In July 1979,

explosives engineer Phil Schneider

arrives at a top-secret military installation

in the New Mexico desert.

He's been brought here

to help build a new military facility,

an enormous seven-story complex

housed entirely underground.

As soon as he arrives,

Schneider is struck

by the unusually large number

of U.S. special forces

guarding the camp.

He guides his team

to begin drilling holes

deep into the sandy earth.

But what emerges

isn't the typical rock dust

Schneider and his team

are expecting.

Instead,

he claims he came face-to-face

with visitors from outer space.

When Schneider goes underground

to investigate,

he comes across

a group of aliens,

which he said

were something like

seven foot tall,

gray-skinned,

and the thing that really struck him

was the pungent odor

that they were admitting.

It's a bit unclear why,

but he felt the need

to immediately pull out his gun

and start blasting away.

And so he says

that he potentially shot

and killed a couple of them

before one of them

made almost like

a dismissive flick

of their hand

and sent some kind of

shockwave energy

towards Schneider.

And this resulted in him

losing several fingers

off of his hand

and presumably meant

his almost certain death,

except that luckily for him,

one of the green berets

that he said

was stationed around

came to his rescue

and heroically sacrificed himself,

pushing Schneider

into an elevator

that sent him back

to the surface.

For a decade after

his alleged encounter

with the mysterious

gray aliens,

Schneider claimed

that the Dulce base

remained a hotbed

of UFO activity,

a holding center

for extraterrestrial visitors

and their highly advanced technology.

And according to Schneider,

this was only the tip

of the iceberg.

It launches a career

of sorts for Schneider.

He very quickly becomes

a coveted speaker

on the UFO circuit,

giving accounts

of this encounter

and has also happened

with previous UFO stories.

It starts to add more details,

maybe embellishes it

a little bit,

depending who you ask.

And so no longer

is it just this one battle.

He starts to tell tales

that the U.S. government

is doing some

quite nefarious stuff

to do with

alien-human hybrids,

that they are actively,

presumably capturing

people, citizens,

and taking them underground

and subjecting them

to experiments

and hybridization,

and that the U.S. government

is actively covering

all this up.

He goes on to assert

that there are

hundreds of these bases

across the United States

funded by the American government.

He estimates

that each of these bases

cost about $17 billion

funded out of the U.S. government's

black budget,

as he calls it.

Schneider's claims

send shockwaves

through the UFO

investigative community.

Even for committed

UFOlogists,

the story,

much like Paul Benowitz's claims,

is hard to believe.

Conspiracy theorists

like to think

there's something

nefarious going on

and that it needs

to be hidden

from the public eye.

The best way

to hide things

from the public eye

is to make them invisible.

And really,

the only reasonable way

to do that on Earth

is to put them underground.

For months,

Schneider had allegedly

warned his family

that his story

may endanger his life.

Then,

in 1996,

Schneider is found dead

in his home.

The cause of death,

as with Paul Benowitz,

is likely suicide.

The interesting thing

is that before his death,

Schneider said to his wife

that if I end up dead

and it appears

to be a suicide,

it's not.

It's not as it seems.

And so,

that will immediately fuel

all kinds of speculation.

If you belong

to the community

which thinks

that there is indeed

some kind of

human-alien-type base

in Dulce, New Mexico,

then you're going to think

that now measures

are being taken

to eradicate

everyone

who knows about this.

In the decades

since the deaths

of Paul Benowitz

and Phil Schneider,

theories about a possible

underground military base

containing UFO technology

have continued

to circulate.

December 13, 2004.

A local hiker

clicks through the photographs

of her trip

to the Archuleta Mesa.

Squinting at her

small digital camera,

she can see

a strange object

clearly outlined

against the blue sky.

For years,

the hiker has heard

rumors of the UFOs

over Dulce.

Now,

she believes

she has photographic evidence.

November 21, 2018.

A local woman

spots a strangely bright star

in the night sky.

As she watches,

the star seems to grow,

swelling and changing colors

as it begins to move,

surveilling the area

in giant loops

before finally

disappearing from view.

To this day,

local residents

are left wondering

whether there could be

any truth

to the rumors

of a secret

Dulce subterranean base.

In terms of

underground government activity,

actually,

during the

President Eisenhower years

at the height

of the Cold War,

the government

had what was called

a continuity

of government program

where bunkers

and tunnels

were created

so that senior

government officials,

civil servants,

and so on,

will be able to

basically,

literally,

go underground

and continue

the business of government

as a nuclear war

raged overhead.

And so when you take

that into account

that these bunkers

do exist,

they are underground

and some of them

quite extensive,

it lends credence

to the idea that,

well, maybe there are

other bunkers out there

as well

that we simply

don't know about.

It is now public knowledge

that in 1950,

work began

on a deep underground facility

at Raven Rock Mountain

in Pennsylvania.

In just 10 months,

almost 400,000 cubic meters

of granite

are secretly blasted

out of the mountain

to make room

for a new structure

dubbed

the Underground Pentagon.

This network

of three underground buildings

would be able

to house

3,000 people,

forming the core

of the U.S. government's

continuity plan

in the event

of a national emergency.

In the late 50s

and early 60s,

two more underground

complexes

are built under

Bear Mountain

in Massachusetts

and Cheyenne Mountain

in Colorado.

Hardened to withstand

a nuclear blast,

these command centers

would be linked

to form the North American

Aerospace Defense Command

or NORAD.

A fourth underground base

is constructed

in 1959

in Blue Ridge, Virginia,

acting as the control center

for the Federal Emergency

Management Agency.

From here,

the United States president

would be able

to access

the nation's

emergency alert system

in the event

of a nuclear attack.

To this day,

the Mountain Weather

Emergency Operations Center

is still a prominent

relocation site

for high-level civilian

and military officials

in the event

of active conflicts

and national emergencies.

I mean,

the very nature

of military work

means that some

of that work

will be secretive.

And to facilitate secrecy,

there are all kinds

of military facilities

built,

and some of them

are underground.

So this leads people

to think that,

well, there may be more

to this story.

If they're not telling us

anything about it,

if they're being

so secretive about it,

there must be something

nefarious going on

over here.

Along with these

elaborate underground

operation centers,

the United States military

also oversees

several subterranean

storage facilities,

each one charged

with housing

some of America's

deadliest weapons.

One of the largest

of these bunkers

is the underground

munitions maintenance

and storage complex

at Kirtland Air Force

Base, New Mexico.

Could this be the source

of the strange phenomena

which have been

so frequently seen

in the area?

I think it can't

be underestimated

how alluring

it might be

for a UFO enthusiast

to pay attention

to the underground

nuclear storage facility

at the Kirtland

Air Force Base.

It alone is

over 50 acres large.

To see a space

like that

and to not really

see anything

given that it's underground

is eerie.

It's unsettling

to know that

that's all under there.

Since the end

of World War II,

UFO researchers

have become

increasingly interested

in an apparent link

between UFO sightings

and nuclear activity.

Something that makes

the link between

nuclear power,

nuclear facilities

in America

and UFOs

potentially a little clearer

is one incident

from 1967

in Montana

when a missile operator

at an Air Force base

that was equipped

with nuclear missiles

started receiving messages

from colleagues

saying that there was

a UFO sighted

above,

around the base itself,

which is cause

for concern,

certainly if you're

in that kind of position.

But then the particularly

strange part

is that very shortly

after possibly seemingly

caused by the UFO,

all of the nuclear missiles

go completely offline.

They deactivate entirely

and nobody at the base

has done this

and there's no explanation

really forthcoming

about how this occurred.

In 1986,

during the Chernobyl

nuclear reactor meltdown,

when there was

some people reported

seeing a UFO

hovering over the facility,

shining a light down on it.

And what's remarkable

about this

is that

there were reports

of a reduction

in ionizing radiation

after the UFO

had appeared.

To this day,

unidentified flying objects

are regularly reported

in the vicinity

of U.S. Army

and Air Force bases.

The very earliest

of these dates back decades

when a group

of highly trained

military officers

witnessed a remarkable sight.

March 22nd, 1950.

Eleven members

of the 4,925th Test Group

gather outside

Kirtland Air Force base,

New Mexico.

They're looking intently

up at the clear morning sky,

tracking a strange object

flying nearly 8,000 meters

above them.

It isn't like

any conventional aircraft.

The men can make out

a disc

or a flying wing

with the tan color

fading out

to a darker brown

along its edges.

The officers watch

as the aircraft

travels steadily northwest

before altering its course

to due north

and accelerating away

with a sudden

burst of energy.

In the days that follow,

all 11 crew members

are interviewed extensively

by military personnel.

Their stories never waver,

leaving their commanders

with a string

of troubling questions.

What was the unidentified craft?

And what was it doing

so close to the Kirtland Air Base?

And Kirtland Air Force base

has a pretty story history

to begin with.

It was one of the main hubs

connecting the nation

with the Manhattan Project,

which was America's crash program

to build the atomic bomb,

one of the most well-known uses

for atomic energy, of course,

and nuclear capability.

And so if UFOs

are interested in this,

the interest may go back

quite a ways,

given that there were

integral components

of both atomic bombs

that were eventually dropped

on Japan

that moved through this space.

In 1954,

nine years after dropping

the first atomic bomb,

the United States

carried out

the most powerful

nuclear detonation

in the nation's history

over the Marshall Islands.

The resulting blast

was more than

a thousand times

more powerful

than the bombs dropped

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Within moments,

nuclear fallout began

to rain down

on the surrounding area,

exposing hundreds

of civilians

to one of the most

dangerous forms

of energy on Earth,

ionizing radiation.

When we get

to ionizing radiation,

that radiation

is intense enough

that it causes

chemical changes

within the organic compounds

in our body.

So ionizing radiation

can be x-rays,

gamma rays,

and potentially

nuclear events

that produce neutrons

or other fast-moving particles.

These things

have the potential

to penetrate our body,

do damage,

and potentially

cause cancer.

after the Second World War,

people were

really paranoid

about the fact

that there was going

to be another

major confrontation,

this time

between the United States

and the Soviet Union,

and these powerful weapons,

nuclear weapons,

hydrogen bombs,

this was the weaponry

which these two giants

would use against each other

in the event

of a Third World War.

On the night

of July 8, 1962,

across Hawaii,

groups gathered

to drink,

share food,

and monitor

the night sky.

These happy gatherings

planned for days

are referred to as

Watch the Bomb Parties.

They were there

to witness

the Starfish Prime

High Altitude Experiment,

the largest nuclear test

ever carried out

in outer space.

The Starfish Prime

High Altitude Experiment

involved the detonation

of a 1.4 megaton bomb

about 250 miles

above the Earth's surface.

So in this case,

what we saw

was a very vivid

light display

in the sky.

It was very brilliant,

and then it dissipated.

And this is different

from what we see

in terms of nuclear

detonations on Earth

because on Earth,

there's material

to be kicked up.

And so on Earth,

we see something

that's more like

the typical mushroom cloud

that we've seen

in videos from the past.

In 1962 alone,

the United States

and the Soviet Union

would detonate

a further six

high-altitude nuclear explosions,

releasing massive amounts

of nuclear radiation

into outer space.

Only 30 years later

would the seismic effect

of these detonations

become clear.

In 1993,

United Nations scientists

made the rather depressing

announcement

that as a result

of nuclear atmospheric testing,

the world's population

had been exposed

to 50 times more radiation

than resulted

from the Chernobyl disaster.

This era

of fierce

and highly destructive

competition

has led some

to wonder

whether the potential

for a global catastrophe

may have alerted

another

as yet unknown

civilization.

If human beings

start playing around

with nuclear weapons,

it's not unlikely

that an advanced

extraterrestrial species

begins to pay attention

to what's going on

on planet Earth.

After more than a decade

of nuclear detonations

and growing concern

over their long-term effects,

the United States

and the Soviet Union

grudgingly agree

to end their testing programs.

In 1992,

work starts

on the 56-acre

underground munitions complex

at the Kirtland Air Force Base.

This warehouse

holds the majority

of the U.S.'s nuclear stockpile.

But despite

the mothballing

of deadly weaponry,

reports of UFO sightings

keep coming.

June 20, 2006,

12 p.m.

A cluster of people

on the outskirts

of Albuquerque

gaze up at a huge disk

floating impossibly

above the Kirtland Air Base.

As they watch,

it slowly disappears

from view.

September 13, 2007,

7.30 p.m.

Another small crowd

of people

gathers on the street

of Farmington,

less than 16 kilometers

from Kirtland.

They watch in awe

as a large red aircraft

floats through the sky,

orbited by four smaller,

equally mysterious objects.

November 28, 2014,

could it be

that decades

of nuclear development

have acted as a beacon

to extraterrestrials

in the universe?

One of the explanations

that some UFO enthusiasts

have proposed

to explain their presence

is that maybe

they detected

this amount of radiation,

a very unusual,

unnatural amount

of radiation

coming off the Earth.

Ever since the 1970s,

rumors surrounding UFOs

in northwestern New Mexico

have centered around

fear, secrecy,

and in the cases

of Paul Benowitz

and Phil Schneider,

feverish paranoia

and outlandish theories.

If you think about it,

Schneider draws first,

as they say

in the Wild West.

He doesn't wait

to see what the alien

is going to do.

He assumes

the alien is going

to attack him

and maybe that's really

a sad comment

on us as a species,

that we meet

another species,

we meet aliens

and we automatically

assume they're going

to kill us.

So one of the concerns

is that any advanced

civilization visiting us

might have the motive

of exploiting the resources

of Earth.

I suspect this is unlikely

and the reason for this

being that there's

a limited number

of important resources

like rare earth metals

on Earth

and even as a species

long term,

there's not enough

on Earth

to supply demand.

There's also a degree

of arrogance

on the part

of humanity

where we assume

that an alien

is going to be

a kind of variation

on us.

In fact,

an alien may be

something

unrecognizably different.

As UFO sightings

above the Kirtland

Air Force Base

continue to be reported,

as well as at other

military facilities

around the world,

the thought

that these crafts

may be appearing

to help

rather than hinder

or to protect

rather than harm

is for many

a much more logical

and reasonable explanation.

The only reason

that I think

that aliens would come

to check out Earth

is because it has life.

And that is,

I think,

what makes

our planet so special.

is for the

the planet so special.

It's got six

hundred

and I think

it's a very important

point in theнутry

of the Kirtland

in the world.

I think

it's a very important

point in the world

to go

and hopefully

it's a very important

element

in the world.

It's a good point

and it's a very important

point.

It's a very important

point in the world

that we have

to prime

and we have

to create

a new idea

of the Kirtland

in the world.

It's a very important

in the world

who can come

to the world

and the kind