Original subtitles

Everything that we know and have learned about mankind

and its place in the universe suggests

that we are a part of the norm. We are not the exception.

Within the last month, a planet was identified that has water

a mere 110 light years away from Earth.

We need to begin to prepare to accept and understand

that we are not alone in the universe,

have not been at all throughout this time.

NARRATOR: The same year that life-giving water

was discovered on a distant planet,

the US Navy made a startling announcement.

[PILOT SPEAKING]

NARRATOR: Images captured by its pilots

of objects exhibiting a vastly superior technology were authentic.

MELLON: We can start to finally, at long last, after all these decades,

begin to answer these questions

about the origin of these vehicles, where they're from,

how they're made, how they function and why they're here.

WOMAN: People need to know there is something else out there.

NARRATOR: To fully understand,

we must examine a body of evidence long suppressed.

A parallel history to the one we think we know,

stretching back at least 70 years.

On a clear, sunny day in 1955,

William Coleman, a decorated World War II pilot,

took off from Miami on a routine flight to deliver a B-25 bomber

to an airbase in Mississippi.

My co-pilot said, "Look at that bright spot up there."

I think it's just a reflection of the sun,

a craze probably, in the windshield.

NARRATOR: He and his passengers, two aviation engineers,

realized it was a strange object

making a rapid descent right across their flight path.

My God, look at that thing.

And I opened it up to max continuous power,

we're clipping right along at over 300 miles an hour,

right on the treetops...

I'm right on the tail of this thing.

But as we got close,I said, "It doesn't have a tail.

Doesn't have any wings."

Look at the shadow on the ground. The shadow was perfectly round.

That's not an airplane.

And I said, "I'm overtaking it."So I said, "Hang on."

So I make a hard turn.

There it was, a disc going across the field with two big swirls.

What I didn't see was any exhaust, propulsion.

No rivet lines, a rounded edge about that size where it all came together.

A true flying saucer.

NARRATOR: Then it seemed to vanish,

until they spotted it thousands of feet above them.

Bright yellow, sun-ish looking object.

It went like a bat out of hell.

NARRATOR: After they landed, the stunned witnesses were separately debriefed

by Project Blue Book, the Air Force investigation of the UFO phenomena.

Ironically, a little over a decade later,

Col. William T. Coleman became public spokesman for Project Blue Book.

Probably what we saw may have been from somewhere else.

Look, the Air Forces are very deadly,

being when it comes to intercepting an unknown.

If it proves hostile,

we're gonna shoot it down.

Other than that, no problem.

NARRATOR: In the late 1940s,

America seemed impregnable to military threat.

It had just emerged from World War II masters of the air,

the only nuclear-armed superpower in the world.

But in 1947, something appeared in the sky,

and everything changed.

MAN: Every newscaster and every newspaper across the nation

has made headlines out of it.

And this afternoon we are honored indeed

to have here in our studio this man Kenneth Arnold,

who we believe may be able to give us a firsthand account,

and give you the same, on what happened.

KENNETH: I kept looking for their tails. They didn't have any tail.

I thought, "Well, maybe something's wrong in my eyes."

They seemed to flip and flash in the sun, just like a mirror.

I'd be glad to confirm it with my hands on a Bible because I did see it,

and whether it has anything to do with our army or our intelligence,

or whether it has to do with some foreign country, I don't know.

Arnold had sent this sketch to the Air Force following his citing.

He was later invited to California's Hamilton Field Army Air Base,

where he was handed what he was told

were authentic photos of a similar craft.

WOMAN: "At the request of Lt. Col. Donald Springer,

commanding officer of the Fourth Air Force Intelligence,

I was given the above prints a4s a courtesy

for the assistance he had given military intelligence."

NARRATOR: The photo was taken in Arizona

just two weeks after his own encounter.

They said that my father, his sighting of flying saucers,

got more attentionthan the ending of World War II.

He was besieged by newspaper reporters from all over the world.

Mm-hm.

NARRATOR: Reporters interviewed United Airlines pilot E.J. Smith

who also flew the northwest route.

He joked Arnold had likely been fooled by a cockpit reflection,

until he, too, became a witness a few weeks later.

He and his stunned crew had watched

as nine discs maneuvered in formation for a full 45minutes.

PITTMAN: And from there it just exploded.

The first few days in July of 1947

had a very large level of exciting activity.

NARRATOR: These unknown objects barnstormed across the country,

sometimes in fleet-like formations

that looked like a deliberate show of force.

BOB HOPE: Hundreds of people told Air Force investigators

they'd seen the saucers with their own eyes.

Bright, shiny things that whooshed through the air at incredible speeds.

Even airline pilots, who seldom indulge in fantasy, reported sighting them.

And Air Force fliers told of chasing them,

or something, all over the sky.

The Air Force call them "unidentified flying objects,"

but people went right on calling them saucers and seeing them.

There was something in the air.

[NEWS BROADCASTER SPEAKING]

NARRATOR: But a then-secret memorandum by the same general

suggested that the highest military echelons

thought there was plenty to worry about.

The memo states, "The phenomenon reported is something real

and not visionary or fictitious."

It described metallic discs circular in shape, with domes on top,

often traveling in formations of three to nine craft.

It also listed aerodynamic capabilities

with disturbing implications for national defense.

Extreme rates of climb, dazzling maneuverability,

and a superior capacity for evasive action.

A lot of people expected that the United States government

was about to confirm, "Okay, they're ours.

This is an exciting new technological advance that we were testing,

and now it's time to tell people about it."

Occasionally, eyewitness testimony included

compelling photographic evidence.

Evelyn Trent was feeding her rabbits when she spotted

a metallic disc-shaped object floating over their farm.

She alerted her husband, Paul, to grab his camera,

and he managed to get two shots.

They described the object slowly hovering before it abruptly sped away.

Life magazine picked up the story,

and the McMinnville UFO became a global sensation.

PITTMAN: There's no chance of this being weather.

There's no chance of this being a star or an aircraft.

This is either some kind of structured object that we don't know what it is,

or it's a hoax.

Paul Trent and his wife, they were honest, simple, hardworking people

who never made a dime off the photographs that they took.

They never tried to make a dime off of it.

It just come up like that and tipped and just...

I mean, it really went. It went fast.

I've never seen anything go so fast in my life as that thing went. Yeah.

NARRATOR: In 1951, future astronaut Gordon Cooper, while training in Germany,

chased a large formation with his squadron of fighter jets.

[GORDON COOPER SPEAKING]

And they would come over and do the same maneuvers that we make

except every once in a while one of them goes, zip!

And you just can't do that in a fighter.

DELBERT NEWHOUSE: There are two saucers, one inverted over the other.

They seemed to be made of some kind of polished metal.

When I first saw the objects, they were almost overhead.

By the time we had the camera ready to go,

they had moved to a considerably greater distance.

NARRATOR: But the unknowns showed no signs of hostility.

An otherworldly power on its own mysterious mission.

Commercial pilots William Nash and William Fortenberry,

former Navy aviators with thousands of hours of flight experience,

saw eight huge discs fly in a stack formation

over Chesapeake Bay, Virginia,

just a stone's throw from Washington, DC.

When they came out over the blackness of the bay,

they were distinct six red coins.

When they got closer, we could see that you're...

It looked like you were looking down into it, like a hot coal.

NARRATOR: They reported the glowing red objects had approached them head-on

at a speed they estimated at 6,000 to 12,000 miles per hour.

It came in like this and went out like this.

There would be no way of making a complete reversal or a 90-degree turn

12,000 miles an hour or greater

without making the occupants juice on the wall.

That really shook us up. Looking at the thing shook us up.

Nothing could have gotten to that degree

of scientific progress

without some of the intermediate stuff having become public knowledge.

You just knew that they were not from this planet.

NARRATOR: The next weekend, the unthinkable happened.

The nation's capital was invaded from the skies.

Seven unknown blips suddenly appeared on radar at Washington National Airport.

Air-traffic controllers at both Andrews and Bolling Air Force bases

confirmed the objects as they danced through restricted airspace.

PITTMAN: The Capitol Building.

The White House where the president lived,

these were some of the most important places in the country

when it comes to national defense.

And there were UFOs violating this airspace,

and there was nothing thatthe Air Force could do about it.

NARRATOR: F-94 interceptors were scrambled.

Pentagon press liaison Al Chop was in the radar room that night.

We could see the planes coming in on this radar scope

and the minute we saw the beginning of these guys,

the UFOs disappeared. They just left.

Obviously, whatever these things were had intelligence,

enough to get out of the area when we had an intercept going in.

NARRATOR: But the next weekend, it began again.

Pilot William Patterson pushed his Starfire jet to maximum speed

to try to intercept one of the glowing objects.

Flew right into the middle of three or four of them.

NARRATOR: Al Chop recalls the pilot's panicky air-to-ground transmission

as he streaked at 600 miles per hour into a group of unknowns.

He actually said, "They're closing in on me. What do I do?"

It was frightening.

NARRATOR: The Air Force had just issued orders to shoot down the unknowns,

if "they can't talk them down."

I'm not gonna tell an Air Force pilot to fire at the damn thing or anything.

But I didn't say anything. Nobody said anything.

And then all of a sudden, the things began to move away from him

and he said, "They're gone."

I'm convinced they're solid objects.

I'm convinced that they're probably from another planet,

or from outer space somewhere.

I've always felt that way since that night.

NARRATOR: The very next day, the Air Force's top brass

hastily prepared the largest Pentagon press conference since World War II.

Seen here in a last-minute huddle, Gen. Roger Ramey,

Air Force director of operations at the Pentagon.

Capt. Edward Ruppelt of Project Blue Book,

the Air Force's official UFO investigations arm,

and director of Air Force intelligence, Gen. John Samford.

Since 1947, we have received and analyzed between one and 2,000 reports

that have come to us from all kinds of sources.

Of this great mass of reports, we have been able,

adequately, to explain the great bulk of them.

However, there have been a certain percentage of this volume of reports

that have been made by credible observersof relatively incredible things.

We can say that the recent sightings are in no way connected

with any secret development by any department of the United States.

NARRATOR: In the Q&A with reporters, Samford suggested a 50-50 chance

it could have been radar waves bouncing off temperature inversions.

The point that Samford put across all too effectively

was that they were not real. They were just tricks of the atmosphere.

And atmospheric phenomena can't be a threat to national security.

You don't shoot at clouds.

NARRATOR: The public was pondering the implications

of possible extraterrestrial contact.

MAN: Robert L. Farnsworth, President of the United States Rocket Society,

told defense officials not to permit our planes to fire at any flying saucers.

He says this might alienate humankind from beings of far superior forces.

Farnsworth feels that friendly contact should be sought

as long as possible.

NARRATOR: Behind the scenes, the CIA had other concerns.

A secret internal memo urged immediate attention

to unexplained objects in the vicinity

of major US Defense installations.

I would dare say, if anything happened

we thought was a threat to our national security,

somebody out there, one of the services, would respond to it.

Remember, this is the height of the Cold War.

Okay, there are bombers on both sides loaded with nuclear bombs.

NARRATOR: Dr. Jacque Vallee was the inspiration for the French UFO researcher

in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

[SPEAKS FRENCH]

Have you recently had a close encounter?

NARRATOR: In real life, Dr. Vallee conducted

sober scientific research on the phenomenon.

We know now that there is no simple answer.

NARRATOR: For decades, he met with witnesses

and traveled the globe gathering evidence...

ultimately creating the first database on the UFO subject.

Mr. Chairman,

all the great nations of the world are represented on this committee.

Let us keep in mind thatthe UFO phenomenon may represent

an even greater reality.

NARRATOR: Vallee also consulted with scientific, military and government officials,

including Project Blue Book's top science adviser, Dr. J. Allen Hynek.

I began my work as scientific consultant to the United States Air Force

as an open skeptic.

NARRATOR: Hynek was a university astronomer with a high-security clearance

when the Air Force recruited him to investigate UFOs.

And it so happened when the Air Force got the job of trying to figure out

what some of these strange flying saucer stories were about,

well, they needed an astronomer to see how many of the reports

could possibly be explained as meteors and twinkling stars and planets.

NARRATOR: The two scientists became close colleagues,

with Hynek entrusting Vallee to index the reams of Blue Book files

scattered throughout Hynek's home.

It was there that Vallee made a chance discovery of a letter so secret,

he had to appeal to the chief counsel

of the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee

to get it declassified.

That document changed my life. It taught me that

the subject had been taken much more seriously than anybody thought.

NARRATOR: The document revealed an ultra-secret,

highly funded scientific investigation

working parallel to Blue Book

unknown to all but a select few.

The letter was signed by H.C. Cross,

director of exotic metallurgy at Battelle National Laboratories.

VALLEE: These were the people who had analyzed the facts

with a large budget,with highly competent physicistsand computer scientists.

Who are these people? What information did they have?

Good evening. Tonight, we go after a fantastic story.

The story that flying saucers from other worlds are visiting our planet,

just as we are exploring outer space with our own rocket satellites.

Our guest is former Marine Air Corps Maj. Donald Keyhoe,

in his campaign to prove that flying saucers exist.

My name is Mike Wallace. The cigarette is Parliament.

Why would the United States government withhold information

from United States citizens? For what reason?

The Air Force is simply treating the American people like children.

They don't trust them with the facts.

NARRATOR: During the '50s and '60s, it wasn't just the Americans

who were seeing flying saucers.

At the Westall School in Australia,

several hundred students saw an object hovering over this power line tower

on their athletic field.

An event they vividly recall 50 years later.

A student came into the classroom, you know.

"There's flying saucers in the oval, there's flying saucers,"

and everybody ran out.

And I remember the fear and the hysteria of all the students.

I couldn't believe it because what I was seeing wasn't possible.

It was vertical, horizontal. It'd move away from us, back towards us.

Appear somewhere else, somewhere else.

My God, you know? But it was exciting.

It was like that and then all of a sudden, it just turned on its side

and I could see that it was a round disc.

NARRATOR: The children saw the disc begin to descend into this wooded reserve

at the end of the school's running path.

I ran towards the corner of the school, jumped the fence

and ran towards where it looked as though it went down into the trees,

and then stopped dead because it was right in front of me on the ground.

Like a disc with a slight rise in the middle.

I also heard a low, sort of a humming noise,

and I felt a bit of a heat coming off it as well.

And it started to take off pretty well straight away.

It had all bluey-purple lights around the bottom.

Don't remember seeing any windows,

and it took off to about probably four or five meters in the air,

and then turned on its side, and just went... [VOCALIZES] Straight up so fast,

that there's just nothing, even nowadays, that could go that fast.

NARRATOR: Shortly after the object departed,

the authorities converged on the school.

We had Army, Air Force, policedown here cordoning off the area

to prevent any of us enteringthe area or disturbing anything.

We got called to assembly. The headmaster said,

"You have not seen this. You do not talk about it.

You'll be in trouble if you do."

NARRATOR: For the first time ever,

the school science teacher agreed to describe what he saw that day,

providing we concealed his identity.

It was not a mirage. There was something physical in the sky.

It was silver. It could hover.

It could move slowly. It could move very rapidly.

Eventually it moved away to the other side of the oval,

and down behind some pine trees.

I was not then, nor ever have been,

able to use my knowledge of the world,

nor my scientific training, to provide a rational explanation.

NARRATOR: What he said next sheds light on why the school staff

have remained silent all these years.

There was a knock on the door one night.

Two older men, one in uniform,

asked for my description of what I had seen.

I was then told that I hadn't seen anything,

that I'd made it all up, possibly because I was drunk

and that they would have to report that fact to the Education Department

and I would lose my job. After that, I was told

that I would be prosecuted underthe Official Secrets Act,

and I was told that there wasn'tanything there, when I knew there was,

and that I had to keep quiet about it.

Why did I have to keep quiet?

NARRATOR: The Westall landing may not have been an isolated incident.

Four days prior, a then-young engineer in nearby Balwyn

was taking photos in his mother's garden when something caught his eye.

This tremendous flash of light, and I looked up, and I saw this object...

I had a Polaroid camera. I pulled this up and hit myself on the face.

And I took the picture. I've got the photograph here.

This is the original Polaroid?

That's it.

Looked like it was made out of some form of metal,

and it was engineered.

And being an engineer, I was sure it was.

And this is when I took the photograph,

and it had tipped around and I could see the bottom,

and it looked like it was rotating to me.

That was it, and then after that, it sort of gave a bounce

and it rocketed away to the north, very high speed.

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe the acceleration?

It was almost instantaneous. It's like it had been shot out of a gun.

Wham, you know?

NARRATOR: Air Force officers showed up at his doorstep

asking for every detail of his experience.

And they also had some photographs of similar things,

and they also had a book which had pictures of things in which...

They didn't leave it with me, but I had a look through.

But they said it was an unidentified flying object.

That was it.

INTERVIEWER: What was the implication?

ENGINEER: That it didn't come from anywhere on Earth.

NARRATOR: Project Blue Book, with a skeletal staff, continued publicly collecting

thousands of cases.

Despite efforts to explain them away,

hundreds were still filed as unknown.

MAN: Several reports of a strange egg-shaped object about 200 feet long

landing on farms and highways last night in the vicinity of Levelland.

Sheriff Clem says he even himself got a glimpse of the thing,

which somehow turned off lights and auto engines when it came near.

Within 24 to 36 hours after these sightings in Levelland, Texas

at the White Sands Proving Ground, very close to the Trinity test site

where they first detonated the first atomic bomb,

military personnel witnessed a glowing egg-shaped object

that apparently landed.

This is Bill Haggert,

Public Information Officer of White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico.

What they saw looked like a landing and takeoff

of some controlled object from outer space.

[MAN SPEAKING]

NARRATOR: They appeared to be dressed in white coveralls.

And were childlike. That is, small.

[MAN SPEAKING]

NARRATOR: Zamora added that one of the two persons turned his head

and looked straight at him.

MAN: When I got out of the car, about 50 feet from it...

I guess they saw me because they started their motor or whatever it is.

I could see a big blast of fire coming from right under it.

So, I was behind some bushes there, behind my car.

I could see it and I could feel that heat.

That really got me scared, you know?

A lot of people say, "Why didn't you take your gun out and shoot at it?"

They weren't doing nothing to me.

It just took a little while to get airborne,

came up a little bit, about 20-30 feet, and it stayed there a while.

And it was just as quiet as it could be.

And then just flew away, that's it.

Lonnie was very, very scared. He was as white as a sheet.

From here, went directly to the church to talk to the priest, okay?

NARRATOR: Pablo Lopez was among the first to arrive at the landing and takeoff site.

The ground was still smoldering in some of the weeds that were around it.

NARRATOR: This rare footage gives us a glimpse of the scene

shortly after the incident.

Patrolman Zamora stoops to point out one of the landing gear imprints

where officers had just placed rocks to protect the fresh ground traces.

And then there was two sets of footprints, two sets of footprints.

Like so.

That was about the approximate size of 'em.

In comparison to a quarter, that's pretty small.

Okay. That's about the size of 'em.

NARRATOR: Within an hour and over the next several days,

officials from the FBI, military, and Project Blue Book

documented the evidence at the scene.

MAN 1: Were there any prong marks on the ground or anything like that

-where you could see where it had landed? -MAN 2: There were four.

MAN 1: Very unusual footprints. And how many were there?

MAN 2: Two footprints on one side and two footprints on the other side.

-MAN 1: Of course, the burn area there... -MAN 2: I was in my car.

I could see it and I could feel that heat.

They told me that all over the state they had been seen.

Some of those flying saucers, whatever you call 'em.

They gave me a book on it, you know?

They told me to go ahead and read it.

Well, it says not to say nothing.

Keep away from it. Don't say too much, you know.

NARRATOR: It was the middle of the night by the time Lonnie came home.

MARY ZAMORA: I mean, he was really pale.

And I thought he was sick. I said, "Are you sick or something?"

He said, "No. I was just working." He was like...

Like he was angry.

What I knew about it was when I started reading the papers, you know.

Started coming out, and everything. I said, "What's this?"

"I don't know," he said. "It's just a headache "

He said "Everybody's after me and some believe me and some don't."

-MAN 1: Dear Mr. Zamora. -MAN 2: Dear Mr. Zamora.

-WOMAN 1: Dear Mr. Zamora. -KID 1: Dear Mr. Zamora.

[KID 2 READING]

WOMAN 2: Sure, I believe you saw an egg-shaped spacecraft

that had passengers from off this earth.

[MAN READING]

WOMAN 3: I could go on for a week telling you what I've seen.

KID 1: A boy in our school science fair had three pictures

that looked just like the flying saucer you described.

[MAN READING]

WOMAN: As I have pictures of a couple of egg-shaped shape ships taken...

-I read about you seeing a flying saucer. -WOMAN: I'm a retired teacher.

Well, you have a friend who believes you.

This saucer phenomenon has changed my life and ideas.

[KID 3 READING]

WOMAN: August 17, 1960, our Red Bluff officers

and dozens of people saw a saucer.

KID 4: Can you tell me how long it stayed on Earth, and other things like that?

MARY: Then people started making fun of him

that he had seen little men from outer space

or this and that. A whole bunch of dirty stuff.

MAN: Lot of people asked me, "Is that the reason you quit the police force?"

No, the reason I quit the police force

was because I was going and doing a lot of publicity and stuff.

I didn't wanna hurt the town.

NARRATOR: The level of inquiry went all the way to the office of the President.

To this day, the Socorro close encounter remains unexplained.

VALLEE: Socorro was very similar

to the French cases that I had brought to Hynek's attention.

Checked by the police,checked by the French Air Force,

where there were also occupants who were seen,

short beings, in connection with the objects.

I think that's what convinced him

that there were UFO landings in the United States.

Looked like a toy top somewhat upside down.

So this is the diagram which we've come up with.

It's more flat here other than round.

But it does have the hump up in here.

It seemed to move off the groundif it was down.

And then we saw three lights that went from yellow to red.

When you got right up to it, it lit up.

I mean, it really did become bright, and we could see it,

the outline of it, real good.

NARRATOR: Blue Book's Dr. Allen Hynek investigated

one of the alleged landing sites

with the local sheriff.

At an overflow press conference later that day,

the world held its breath for an historic revelation

about the landings in Michigan.

Hynek, by now privately convinced of the UFO reality,

struggled to follow the Air Force policy

of tamping down public excitement.

[MAN SPEAKING]

I'm saying that the two cases that I investigated most deeply were most likely.

I said in a statement that I couldn't prove it in a court of law.

[MAN SPEAKING]

No, that's not quite right.

I think that a person can be pretty sure about something

without being ableto convict somebody of a murder.

-Can you? Please. -Yes, I do. Honestly, in this case.

[MAN SPEAKING]

NARRATOR: Hynek's strained explanation,

which he later called his greatest regret,

ignited a public furor.

MAN: Mr. Ford, what about flying saucers?

You've had some in Michigan in the past week.

GERALD: Dave, we've had several incidents that many felt were sufficient

to justify some action by our government,

and not the kind of flippant answer that was given by the Air Force

where they passed it off as "swamp gas."

It seems to me that this mystery does require

that the Congress take a good look at it.

Let them put their record on the line.

NARRATOR: On April 5th, 1966, congressional hearings were held with Dr. Hynek

and Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown both giving testimony.

MAN 1: Mr. Ford has come out. He has a pretty good-size stature in the Congress.

And so, Mr. Secretary,

see if you can shed some light on these highly illuminated objects.

MAN 2: Mr. Secretary, there have been charges

that the Air Force is hiding something in the UFO field.

We have not been hiding anything.

The investigations have been made public.

The hearing this morningwas public for just that reason.

There has never been any evidence

presented to the United States Air Force,

or discovered by the United States Air Force,

which would indicate that the UFO phenomena

represents any interplanetary space vehicle of any kind.

NARRATOR: Amid growing pressure, the Air Force commissioned

an outside panel of scientists

to analyze select cases and settle the matter once and for all.

It was headed by physicist Edward Condon.

Dr. Condon, do you hope to find people from outer space here on Earth?

Well, I don't know for sure, but we'll try to just study the reports

and get as much additional information as we can to see.

REPORTER: Would you like to have us being visited by these little or big things?

Well, that'd be fine with me. I hope they're friendly.

How do you propose to go about...

NARRATOR: After the project was launched, Condon remarked to an audience

that he thought the UFO subject was nonsense.

But "I'm not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year."

After a two-year investigation,

the panel submitted a massive 1,400 page report

showing that many cases were radar and weather anomalies,

but confirming a number as truly unexplainable.

Among them were the famous McMinnville photos

taken on the Trent family farm,

as well as film footage of UFOs in Great Falls, Montana.

NICK: As I looked up, I saw two silvery objects

moving swiftly out of the northwest.

No sound, except I thought I heard a whooshing sound when I first saw them.

The discs appeared to be spinning like a top,

and were about 50 feet across,

which was much slower than the jets

which shot by shortly after I filmed the discs.

I could not see any exhaust, wings or any kind of fuselage.

They appeared to be of a bright, shiny metal, like polished silver.

There are cases that are not explainable in conventional terms.

There is the assumption of intelligence or intelligent control,

but not necessarily the assumption of direct communication.

Why are they here? What are they doing?

What do they want from us? What are their motivations?

NARRATOR: But it was Dr. Condon who wrote the final word.

[READING]

I was kind of woolly on that one. You'd have to conclude

that what we were looking at was beyond our current state of the knowledge.

But it began to hit me that Dr. Condon has apparently not read

his own material very carefully.

You do an actual tabulation, which he doesn't seem to have done,

and you find his percentage ofunexplained is five to six times

larger than the Air Force.

And yet, what is his principal recommendation?

The principal recommendation that Dr. Condon has come through with

is there's nothing of scientific interest that warrants further attention

on the part of the federal government here in any major way.

He recommends dropping the whole problem.

Nobody could get funded. Nobody would look at the data seriously

because of the prestige of the academy

saying that the problem had been solved.

The Air Force closed their reporting system,

so that if the public wanted to report something,

they would report it to the local police.

But it would never get to the attention

of scientists really examining the phenomena.

NARRATOR: In 1969, the Air Force officially ended its public investigations.

Which would suggest what?

That they knew what it was?

Or didn't know what it was.

Also the other way. And they did know what it was.

NARRATOR: One aspect of the phenomenon that was swept under the rug

was the pervasive reporting of UFO intrusions

at the world's most sensitive military facilities.

Details did not come to light until decades later

at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

Declassified US government documents and witness testimony

from former or retired US military personnel

confirmed, beyond any doubt, the reality of ongoing UFO incursions

at nuclear weapon sites.

What you have heard here today is evidence of a phenomenon.

It sounds fantastic, and it is fantastic.

In 1967, I was a missile launch officer

stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana.

NARRATOR: Malmstrom was America's first line of nuclear defense,

its silos packed with Minutemen missiles.

Each one nearly 100 times more powerful than the bomb that devastated Hiroshima.

Launch officers could, within minutes of confirmation,

send their birds arcing 6,000 miles to incinerate key Soviet cities,

triggering a war that would end our civilization.

I was the chief of party, I was the observer.

Basically what I was doing was the star observation to provide precise

latitude and longitude on our small three-man team.

Came from the north and stopped right over us,

and it had a white light from the center, looking down into this island.

I just said to myself, "What if this thing beams us up

and takes us off to some distant place

and never returned to Earth again?"

I mean, this is going through my head here while this thing's above me.

And then from this dead stop, it shoots off to the east.

It's just like now you see it, now you don't. It just...

MAN: The strike team that went out, they saw something.

NARRATOR: Lt. Salas was stationed

in his underground launch control capsule

when he received a frantic call from one of his topside guards.

MAN: Screaming into the phone,

saying they're looking at a red glowing object

hovering just above our front gate.

Our missiles began going intowhat's called a no-go condition,or unlaunchable.

Essentially, they were disabled.

NARRATOR: In fact, ten missiles began going offline in a matter of seconds,

one after the other.

Personally, I'm never aware of two missiles going down at the same time,

let alone ten.

I was a top-secret control officer

and I passed down nuclear launch authenticators.

I can clearly recall a message coming through my communications center

which basically said that a UFO did, in fact,

shut down several missile silos in Montana.

MAN: I was on duty at Echo, which is our squadron command post.

We had strike teams respond to alarms from the missiles.

They were three to five miles away.

And they said, "Sir, for lack of a better description,

there's a flying saucer hovering over that missile,

and there's a beam of reddish light going down to it."

It had to be a data collection thing.

I'm sure they scanned the warhead or something.

In 1980, I was reassigned from the Pentagon to RAF Bentwater

as a deputy base commander.

At that time, Bentwaters was one of the largest

tactical fighter ranges in the world.

NARRATOR: It was also the largest American nuclear bomb storage depot

in Europe.

In December 1980, early in the morning,

several of our security policemen

discovered strange lights in the forest.

NARRATOR: Expecting to find a crashed aircraft,

they came upon an unrecognizable object resting on the forest floor.

They observed it for a period of time, and it very quickly and silently vanished.

NARRATOR: Two nights later, Col. Halt received

an urgent visit from the base security commander.

He was white as a sheet. He said, "It's back."

I said, "What's back?" He said, "The UFO."

I took several security policemen with me.

I also had my small cassette recorder I carried everywhere when I was on duty.

-MAN: What is it? -COL. HALT: We don't know, sir.

Yeah, it's a strange, small red light.

HALT: And all the barnyard animals have gotten quiet now.

Deathly calm.

This is weird.

One object approached us at very high speed.

MAN: Here he comes from the side. He's coming toward us now.

I'm observing what a beam coming down to the ground.

This is unreal.

We stood there in awe.

Was this a warning?

Was this an attempt to communicate?

Was this a weapon, or just a probe?

Just as suddenly as it appeared,click, disappeared.

We stood there... Oh.

About that time, we noticed the other object

to the south was sending down beams.

About a mile, mile and half awayover at Woodbridge Base,

MAN 1: when we had great difficulties communicating.

But we were able to discern that some of those beams were either

falling into or near the weapons storage area,

and there was a great deal of concern.

MAN 1: I also found out later that both the tower operators at Bentwaters

saw an object and picked it up on their bright radar and watched it.

I was just sitting there and I happened to see

a dot come on the scope,

and it just went like, one dot at the beginning,

then another dot, then another dot, and it was gone.

A nd then it made an immediate right-hand turn and came right towards the base.

Just absolutely phenomenal.

It's not like any radar target I've ever seen,

traveling at an extremely high rate of speed.

It passed over the control tower,

and then it stopped. It was an orangish color.

Sort of popped into my mind at the time

that somebody's flying a basketball out here.

There were, like, lights around the center of it.

It was more like portholes.

And then you were seeing the light from the inside.

But it hovered momentarily, reversed its course,

and went back out at a high rate of speed.

NARRATOR: Even more alarming incidents took place

on both sides of the Cold War.

NARRATOR: According to once secret Soviet documents,

a UFO hovered over a Ukrainian nuclear base for nearly an hour.

Inexplicably, several missiles

suddenly switched to full combat readiness

and began a launch sequence without any authentication codes.

After 15 heart-stopping seconds,

the countdown to a potential Armageddon

ceased as abruptly as it had started.

DAVID SCHUUR: As this object passed over the missile site,

we would start getting erratic indications on that missile.

The bad thing was we also had a launch indicator.

MAN: Does that mean that the launch sequence has been triggered?

SCHURR: That means that the missile has received a launch signal.

NARRATOR: The countdown had to be manually aborted.

We had UFOs in the air...

NARRATOR: These witnesses are some of the most highly-vetted military officers

in charge of the world's most devastating armaments.

If what they're reporting is accurate,

then the pattern is hard to avoid.

UFOs have been making incursions into top-security nuclear facilities

decade after decade.

To me, it's pretty clear.

"We're shining a light on this, we're pointing it out.

What are you people doing with nuclear weapons?"

[PEOPLE SHOUTING]

NARRATOR: As the '90s dawned and the walls fell down,

it was as if humanity itself was demanding to be seen

as one people and one world.

The Soviet Union had dissolved

and history's spotlight began to shine

on long-darkened corners.

Different officials were looking

for ways to open dialogue with the West,

and embrace all the changes that were underway

in their country at the time.

This is George Knapp in Moscow,the city many are...

NARRATOR: Knapp's team was invited to Moscow,

by government and military officials

who were willing to share decades' worth of UFO files.

[SPEAKS RUSSIAN]

MAN: Gen. Igor Maltsev,

for seven years, commander of the entire Soviet air defense system

recalls a UFO flap over Moscow in 1990.

Hundreds of visual and radar observations by military personnel.

Maltsev confirms his standing order was, "Don't fire on the UFOs".

March 1991, radar at the Leningrad airport

detects first one, then two, then three unidentified objects

hovering over a nuclear plant.

From a dead stop, the UFO zipped away at 2,000 miles per hour.

Jacques Vallee was one of few Westerners

to personally investigate the case

by meeting with Russian sources firsthand.

An object hovered near a nuclear power plant in Voronezh

and a beam from that object melted the asphalt there.

The intention was, maybe we would be

able to find out from the Russians

more about what the American government knows about UFOs

than we will ever learn from the American government itself.

-Governor, you ready to take the oath? -I am.

NARRATOR: When a young, open-minded president,

was sworn in,

one of America's most highly placed civilians saw a chance

for a new government transparency on the phenomenon.

As a means of access to people to the wonders of nature...

NARRATOR: Heir to the power and influence

of one of the world's wealthiest families,

Laurance Rockefeller,

philanthropist and conservationist,

also had a passionate interest in UFOs.

His idea was to approach the President

with a plea for making available the data

that the government had on the subject.

JOHN PODSTA: The first inclination by,

particularly people in government

is, "You got to be kidding me".

[LAUGHS] You want me to risk my career

by getting deeply into

the rabbit hole of talking about UFOs?"

And so there's a tremendous resistance.

NARRATOR: Rockefeller met with President Clinton's science advisor,

Jack Gibbons, at the White House,.

and persuaded him to take action.

Rockefeller was then asked to pick a case

that the White House should attempt to declassify.

He chose the 1947 Roswell incident,

noting, "Many are convinced that Roswell marks the beginning

of government secrecy about UFO's".

Jack had actually gone to the Air Force,

asked then-Secretary Widnall,

who was the Secretary of the Air Force,

to take a look, particularly,

at the records around Roswell, New Mexico.

SHEILA WIDNALL: "Dear Colonel Cavitt.

The General Accounting Office, seeks to fully explain the claim

that the US government recovered an alien spacecraft

near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947,

and since that time has covered up that fact.

NEWSCASTER: The Army Air Forces has announced

that a flying disc has been found

and is now in the possession of the Army.

[NEWSCASTER SPEAKING]

NARRATOR: Roswell was then home

to the world's only nuclear air wing,

including the B-29 that had dropped

the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The base's chief intelligence officer, Maj. Jesse Marcel,

was dispatched to the ranch to investigate.

[JESSE MARCEL SPEAKING]

NARRATOR: Marcel and another officer

were the first military to arrive at the crash site.

They came upon an expanse of unrecognizable debris

strewn across an area

the size of a dozen football fields.

We found a piece of metal... Uh...

About a foot and half to two feet wide.

The thing that got me is that

you couldn't even bend it. You couldn't dent it.

Even a sledgehammer would bounce off it.

NARRATOR: Marcel was ordered to immediately

transport the strange wreckage

to Fort Worth Army Airfield.

There, Marcel was met by the commanding general,

who told him to keep silent

in the face of what was becoming a media frenzy.

They had a whole flock of microphones there.

They wanted some comments from me,

but I wasn't at liberty to do that.

NARRATOR: Marcel was instead ordered to pose

with wood, foil and rubber debris,

from a conventional weather balloon.

All I could do is keep my mouth shut.

And Gen. Ramey is the one who told the newspapers

what it was and to forget about it.

It was nothing more than a weather observation balloon.

Of course, we both knew differently.

NARRATOR: Col. Thomas DuBose, who was also

ordered to pose with the fake debris,

describes how an iron curtain of secrecy slammed down.

REPORTER: Congressman Schiff, what got you interested

in this subject per se?

I started receiving letters

a little over two years ago from constituents,

stating that they believe the government was covering up

what happened at Roswell.

Many of them clearly believed,

that it was, in fact, an extraterrestrial crash.

The weather balloon story never made sense

because it was clearly, and undisputed in my mind,

extra military attention to this matter,

from extra security around the crash scene

to special handling of whatever the debris was.

That could fit a classified project.

It doesn't fit a weather balloon.

NARRATOR: In September 1994,

the Air Force issued its response.

[READING]

The Air Force claimed it was a secret project of weather balloons

hung with box kites and microphones,

to spy on Soviet nuclear tests.

Please roll the video.

MAN: There's a famous box kite

that became the famous flying disc.

Weather balloons that were on the balloon train.

NARRATOR: Same rubber balloon, same foil box kite

as the original cover story,

only many of them strung together

with microphones dangling beneath.

MAN: That's the tin foil paper, rubber and sticks that they recovered

in the desert near New Mexico in 1947.

NARRATOR: The Air Force, nearly 50 years later,

was basically telling the same tale.

That the top security personnel

of the world's only atomic-bombing wing

really had mistaken this rubber, wood

and tin foil for a crashed flying saucer.

Being an intelligence officer,

I was familiar with just about all the materials used

in aircraft and/or air travel.

This is nothing like that.

It was not anything from this Earth. That I'm quite sure of.

BILL RICHARDSON: My suspicion is that

the Roswell incident did happen,

and something maybe not from our universe,

went down there.

And we should...

allow the American people to make a judgment

on what that might have been by disclosing.

I mean, this is probably

the most blatant case of overreaction

to what is national security.

The public has a right to know.

NARRATOR: Rockefeller put together a briefing document

intended for world leaders

with a sobering observation.

It is conceivable that even the President himself

is not fully briefed on matters

classified as "above top secret."

I did attempt to find out if there were

any secret government documents

that reveal things, and if there were,

they were concealed from me, too.

I wouldn't be the first president

that underlings have lied to

or the career bureaucrats have waited out.

But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere

hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents.

But if so, they successfully eluded me.

And I'm almost embarrassed totell you, I did try to find out.

[ALL LAUGHING]

EDGAR MITCHELL: Three feet for second contact.

That was a beautiful one.

NARRATOR: Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell,

who had grown up around Roswell,

was an aerospace insider with deep Pentagon connections.

He became convinced there were UFO secrets

concealed from normal government channels.

Well, if the accounts are to be believed...

Yes, there have been ET visitation.

There have been crashed craft.

There have beenmaterial and bodies recovered...

and there is some group of people somewhere

that may or may not be

associated with the government at this point,

but certainly were at one time,

that have this knowledge.

No one has proven there's nothing to it.

No one's had the opportunity to prove

there's something to it, and that's what I did.

And every passing day...

NARRATOR: In 2007, the most powerful man in the Senate,

majority leader Harry Reid,

persuaded two colleagues,

Senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye,

to secretly allocate millions

in Defense Department funds to investigate UFOs.

The covert program operated from the tail end of the Bush presidency,

through the Obama administration,

and into Donald Trump's first year in office.

In December of 2017, the lid blew off.

At long last, the government was admitting

a modern-day program to investigate UFOs

and released startling official evidence,

including videotapes from the cockpits of military aircraft.

One of the key authors ofThe Times story

was investigative journalist

and best-selling author Leslie Kean.

She went to Washington to meet with Luis Elizondo,

who had just resigned from his position

as head of the secret Pentagon UFO program.

I was invited to this meeting.

They wanted me to meet Mr. Elizondo, to see what could happen.

ELIZANDO: Objects that are moving so fast

and yet we don't see an ionization trail in the air

and you don't hear a sonic boom.

How is that possible? Another one is...

NARRATOR: Elizondo's colleagues took her aside

to reveal some extraordinary documentation

related to the program.

KEAN: I wasn't allowed to take anything with me.

I mean, the most importantevidence that was shared with me

at the meeting regarding

the phenomenon itself, were the videos.

[MAN 1 SPEAKING]

I knew this was breaking news for the front page of The New York Times.

[MAN 2 SPEAKING]

[MAN 1 SPEAKING]

[MAN 2 SPEAKING]

KEAN: My co-author, Ralph Blumenthal,

and I set up a meeting with Mark Mazzetti

and said, "We have this explosive story."

Sat down with him in the New York office of The New York Times

and we brought in all the documents.

"These are the videos.

Here's other documents that show the existence of the program.

And here's what they've studiedand here's what they've learned.

And there's a letter from Harry Reid about the program."

NARRATOR: Elizondo's colleague,

the former deputy assistant secretary

of defense for intelligence,

Christopher Mellon, managed to

obtain the tapes from the Pentagon,

and choseThe New York Times to break the story.

I received the videos,

the now-famous videos, in the Pentagon parking lot

from a Defense Department official.

I still have the originals in the packaging.

This is a case where somebody bent the rules a little bit,

and they did so for the larger good.

And we're absolutely all better off because of it.

In the end, I have to say,

I was still extraordinarily

disappointed with The New York Times,

because they focused on this small AATIP program.

And the real story, in my mind at least, should have been,

"These things are real, they're here.

This is happening now. "

NARRATOR: One of the Pentagon cases

reported byThe New York Times,

was an encounter by Naval aircraft,

about 200 miles off the coast of San Diego, California.

Fifty-five hundred people that were on

the Nimitzin 2004, when this happened,

and I guarantee every single one of them

knows that this event happened.

That's a whole air wing.That's Mount Fuji. That's Japan.

NARRATOR: Commander David Fravor was leading a training exercise

from theUSS Nimitz carrier strike group

when he was abruptly ordered to investigate an unknown target

that had appeared on one of the ship's radar scopes.

We're gonna suspend the training we have real-world tasking.

So we're like, "Okay, cool. "

NARRATOR: He and another F-18 Super Hornet,

each carrying two airmen, zoomed toward the coordinates.

It was myself and my WSO

and the other pilot and the WSO in the back seat

of that airplane. So, there's four of us.

NARRATOR: When they arrived, they first saw

what appeared to be a large object

slightly below the surface of the ocean,

with a strange oval-shaped craft

darting around in the air just above it.

If you picture a Tic Tac that's about 40 feet long,

round on both ends, no rivets,

no metal, smooth, white. It was white.

It was just smooth. No wings, no propulsion, no windows.

It didn't matter which way it was pointing because as it was moving over the water,

it never turned. It never changed its longitudinal axis.

It went fore, aft, left, right. It was just doing this.

And I said, "Hey, I'm gonna go check that out."

All of a sudden, you just see itturn its body and go... [WHOOP]

And start coming up at you. You go,

"That was rather interesting."

We're just looking at it. We're doing this. We're looking at it.

We're looking at it. We go around.

All the way around the outside of a circle, 180 degrees.

Well, I know where he's going, so I'll just go over there.

This thing goes "poof" and it's gone.

I mean, literally that fast. Gone.

You can think about what we're saying. Like,

"Holy shit. What the...is that?"

And then there's a lot of, "Dude, what the...

Did you guys see that?

Do you guys see it?" And they're like,

"It's gone. We don't see shit."

Nothing accelerates that fast. You're talking...

Something that not only accelerated

beyond anything that we had seen,

but it just was...

The controller comes up and says,

"Hey, you're not gonna believe this,

but that thing is back at your CAD point."

NARRATOR: Meaning the object had instantly reappeared at the precise

secret coordinates of the fleet's

critical aerial defense zone.

FRAVOR: It obviously had some awareness.

It knew where we were going.

It'll make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

I actually told my back seater, I said,

"I don't know about you. I'm pretty weirded out."

NARRATOR: More jets equipped with the Navy's most advanced

radar visual tracking systems were scrambled.

This time, capturing the object on video.

FRAVOR: First thing he gets is a little blip on the radar.

He puts his cursors over it, and he tries to grab a lock on it.

Basically, when you take a lock,

you tell the radar, "Look at that location,

and stare at it, and put all your energy on that point."

Well, as soon as it does it, the radar gets indications

that it's being jammed by the object it's trying to lock.

The infrared sees differing temperatures,

so the Tic Tac is hotter than the air around it.

It doesn't have to be by much, but it's gonna appear white.

They're driving straight at it.

It's just kind of hovering there.

And then it goes "poof" and it takes off, off the side.

I just don't know. I doubt that we...

have developed that technology.

I interviewed three of the four aviators

who were with Dave, during that encounter,

and it was readily apparent to everyone involved that

that vehicle had what they call

"dominant battlespace awareness."

It was in control of that engagement from the outset.

There was no question that it completely outmatched

our frontline fighters.

I served on the Special Access Program Oversight Committee,

so I had access to all of the black programs in those days.

We know perfectly well there's nothing like that

behind the scenes or even on the drawing boards.

NARRATOR: Senator Harry Reid, who instigated

the secret Pentagon UFO program,

confirmed what nuclear launch officers

have been reporting for decades.

NARRATOR: UFOs have interfered with our country's

most powerful weapons.

Did you have anybody

in the Defense Department, the Pentagon,

pull you aside, bend your ear and say, "Why are you doing this?"

They did everything they could

to stop the program from going forward.

They gave the person that came in initially such a bad time.

He's fortunate to have hung on to his job

because people tried to get rid of him,

because they wanted nothing to do with this.

The Defense Intelligence Agency was one of the worst.

They drug their feet,

even though there was one of their senior scientists

thought they should look at this.

And remember, all we're saying...

Nobody has to agree why it's there.

But shouldn't we at least be spending some money

to study all these phenomenon?

Shouldn't we study this stuff? The answer is yes.

And that's all this was about,

and why the federal government,all these years, has covered up,

put brake pads on everything. Stopped it.

I think it's very, very bad for our country.

I interviewed Gordon Cooper,

Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper,back in the '90s.

REPORTER: Cooper said on camera

that there was a landed UFO circa 1957

at Edwards Air Force Base. His camera crew captured

the filming of this object,

and he presented this to the higher-ups

and eventually, a courier jet came in from Washington.

He handed the footage over, which was good, he viewed it--

-That's the last he saw of it. -Exactly.

REPORTER: Did you know where that footage went

of the flying saucer that landed on the...

Went to Washington. That's all that I know.

REPORTER: Did you ever keep in touch with anybody about it or discuss it?

How would I keep in touch with anybody about it?

There's no way within the military or within the government

of keeping track of something that is classified.

REPORTER: Did you try to go after stuff like this?

We did. We have. It's there.

Are you saying that there's some evidence that's...

REPORTER: Still hasn't seen the light of day?

I'm saying most of it hasn't seen the light of day.

MELLON: Astronaut Cooper had spoken

with the President at a Cabinet meeting.

He raised this with Secretary Cohen.

And then Cohen's office called me and asked me

to pursue this and chase it down.

The Air Force colonel that I spoke with got very frustrated,

and when I asked him what happened to all of these records, he said,

"Well, that was all cleaned up or thrown out to save space,"

something like that.

It sounded ludicrous, but that's what he told me.

If there is some recovered debris, say...

It is so deeply buried and squirreled away

that it's outside of those normal oversight processes,

and that's where there's a problem in this area.

NARRATOR: Dr. Jacques Vallee has collected

purported metal debris from UFO cases

dating as far back as 1947

that experts are analyzing in a state-of-the-art laboratory.

The breakthrough has come with the invention of a machine

that enables usto look at the atomic structure,

and at that point,

the atomic structure is impossible to fake.

This device is a multi-parameterion beam imager.

NARRATOR: Dr. Garry Nolan, a Stanford microbiologist,

is using a revolutionary three-dimensional imaging device

to analyze the samples right down to their individual atoms.

When Dr. Nolan placed some of the fragments

in the vacuum chamber of his instrument,

he was astonished to find their composition

was unlike any known metal.

Just one spot and the isotopic composition all the way across.

NARRATOR: No matter where he looked

in the sample's jumble of elements,

whether magnesium, iron, nickel or titanium,

the ratio of isotopes didn't make any sense.

If you're talking about an advanced material from an advanced civilization,

you're talking about something that...

I'll just call it an ultra-material, right?

It's something which has properties

where somebody is putting it together,

again, at the atomic scale.

So we're building our world with 80 elements.

Somebody else is building the world

with 253 different isotopes.

I intend to use the information to try to build something.

Try to understand a physical principle

that we don't know today.

This material was manufactured. It's not natural.

It's not natural to the materials that we have around us

in the lab, or on the Earth.

It does not mean that it was necessarily

made some place in outer space.

It just means that it was manufactured

specially for a particular purpose

that we don't understand, and we want to understand it.

MELLON: There is an immense array of unanswered questions.

When we observe some of these craft doing,

think about the possibilities,

what we may discover technologically,

how we might solve the energy crisis,

how we might raise our standards of living.

There is an urgent need, in my view,

to get to the bottom of it.

We don't know the origin of these vehicles

nor do we understand the intent

of whoever is controlling them.

NARRATOR: There are cases that seem to go beyond encounters

with an advanced technology,

to contact with an engaged intelligence.

Papua New Guinea. June, 1959

An Australian missionary spots a large disc

hovering just 200 feet off the ground

while standing with 38 other people.

This solid-looking object and... Can you imagine?

What it's like to look up in the sky

and see some figures up there?

NARRATOR: All were amazed to see four small occupants

dressed in what looked like black diving suits.

Figures walking about on top,

and not the slightest noise whatsoever.

And so we waved.

Wouldn't it be wonderful

if we could get this object down onto the playing field?

And as we waved,

wondering whether we'd get some recognition

and whether, perhaps,

they would understand what we wanted,

they waved back.

NARRATOR: The encounter lasted several hours

before the object abruptly departed.

There was this amazingly incredible speed

that the hovercraft disappeared to nothing

across the bay in a matter of a second or so.

NARRATOR: In 1994,

three days of sightings across Zimbabwe

culminated in what some believe

is the most significant close encounter

in modern history.

Hundreds of people today phoned the ZBC

and BBC correspondent in Harare

saying they sighted an unidentified flying object last night.

We have some eyewitness reports.

MAN: It almost seemed to be under the cloud.

As it came past, I noticed there's no noise,

and that's when I thought, "Well, there's something very odd here."

It was quite amazing. It was beautiful.

They are saying that Jesus is passing through Africa.

That's what they are saying.

TIM LEACH: We interviewed about 64 children

in front of the camera.

UFO story that happens...

Just say exactly what you want to say, okay?

Well, I was running and playing,

and then I saw this maroon colorin the sky.

Why don't we follow it?

We saw this, like, a silver thing down there.

It was a silver oval thing

that flew past really slowly.

I saw the bigger one and the spaceship, like, four or five of them.

It was red, green and yellow.

There was this big ship.

It had these lights, these patterns, and it flew.

I thought, "No, it's not a UFO."

And then I looked carefully at it,

and I thought, "Maybe."

NARRATOR: Dozens of children said that

one or more of the disc-shaped objects

landed just beyond the far edge of their playground.

The next thing they knew,

something was standing next to it.

You saw him standing by the silver thing.

And he had big eyes.

He had a big head and big black eyes,

and was dressed in a black bodysuit.

They were wearing pure black.

And I came down and I saw the funny man with his eyes here,

and I saw a spaceship,

and there were a few little ones around it.

REPORTER: How far away were you when you saw him?

Not very far. Not very far. About a meter away.

-A meter away? That close? -Yes.

REPORTER: And how big was the figure?

It was about as big as a grade six.

Yeah, it's there!

I believe that the children did see something.

I believe them because normally children don't lie.

I've always taught my children, "Seeing is believing."

Unfortunately, I didn't see. So...

[CHANTING IN LOCAL LANGUAGE]

NARRATOR: This alleged encounter

caught the attention of Pulitzer Prize-winning

Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John Mack.

It seemed that he was looking at all of us.

What did it feel like when he was looking at you?

It felt scared.

It felt scary? What was scary about it?

Well, felt scared

because I've never seen such a... person like that before.

And I saw this... person.

And it had big eyes.

That's all I saw about it. Big eyes.

-They had short legs and quite a long top. -Mmm-hmm.

With a big head

and eyes that are bigger than ours.

How much bigger than ours?

Four or five times the size.

Four or five times the size of ours?

And then I was looking at him, right?

-Yes. -Then he was looking at me back.

How can I just keep on looking at him?

So I had to stop and I looked sideways.

But I was looking straight into his eyes.

Well, he never said anything.

It's just the face and the eyes.

Maybe they're trying to communicate with us.

Show us something which we don't know about.

I think they want... Um...

people to know that

we're actually making harm on this world,

and we mustn't get too technological.

We don't look after the planet.

All the trees will be cut down...

and there will be no air and people will be dying.

Is this an idea you have had before?

Or did this idea come to you when you had this experience?

-When I had this experience. -Mmm-hmm.

NARRATOR: For the first time in nearly 20 years, the Ariel schoolchildren

gathered from the four corners of the world

to talk to each other

about the experience they shared

that September morning.

I remember something there...

One they all still struggle to understand.

You know that it's moving, but you...

SALMA SIDDICK: I stand by what I saw.

There was no reason for any of us.

to make that up.

EMMA JELIC KRISTIANSEN: I've not spoken to anybody about it.

Not because I'm not proud of it,

but because I don't want the... The stigma.

LISIL FIELD: So it's something that

I've had to deal with for 19-and-a-half years.

I don't wanna say I felt like I knew it,

-but I knew that I didn't have to be afraid of it. -Yeah.

NARRATOR: They took us back to the moment of contact.

Exactly how I felt. Exactly...

The details still seared into memory.

I was with one of the other girls and saying to her,

"This is amazing."

We all were just stopped in our tracks.

A little man appeared.

On top of the actual craft.

And that moment, for me, was very distinct,

because I was like, "That's not human."

Well, I was just completely engulfed in these eyes.

The eyes, and in that moment, however long it was,

'cause I have no idea of the time frame,

it was just mesmerizing.

There was no talking. Um... It's all just images in the head.

Telepathic communication.

SIDDICK: They were trying to communicate.

Trying to tell us something,

or something to do with the environment.

I kept getting these thoughts

and ideas in my mind of technology.

Technology is not helping, technology is bad...

And we're going down a wrong path,

and we have to start recognizing that

what we're doing is detrimental and we need to make changes.

And I don't know what to do with that, or...

They were reaching out to us.

It was as if they wanted us to go with them.

At that moment, that was kind of

when I snapped right out of the trance.

As soon as I broke contact, all of those feelings, technology, the bad,

the horribleness that was happening

and going around my body at the time went.

It's making me a bit anxious being back here.

I can feel it right now. I was scared.

They came running up here in such a panic,

screaming, screaming... Ah! Then we were here.

And a child can't make that up.

SUSAN KRISTIANSEN: So I was there when they were interviewing them

and saw the way they were.

It was just a huge, big mess and muddle-up

and just people everywhere.

Just ask them questions straight off

without explaining to the children

what they were doing and why they were doing it.

It was chaos

in terms of the media frenzy that was going on,

and us being so young, and not even...

being allowed time to comprehend what we had seen.

Our teachers certainly didn't believe us.

So, that was a big deal,

'cause we had to continue going to school there.

NARRATOR: We went back one last time to the Ariel School

to meet with Judy Bates,

a teacher at the time of the incident

and now the headmistress.

Something was weighing on her

that she wanted to tell the children.

Yeah, I said I wanted to apologize.

I should have taken more notice.

But I didn't. I was more concerned about me and not them.

And what was going on in my own sort of experience.

Well, that's what... Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: And if you could summarize in just one sentence

what took place September 1994

here at Ariel School, Ruwa, Zimbabwe,

what would you say?

Aliens visited us. [CHUCKLES]

And that's about it, yeah.

That's why if you believe it, you believe it.

If you don't, well...

NARRATOR:We find ourselves confronted with something

that challenges our very understanding of reality.

We may be sharing this fragile blue-green oasis

with an unknown other.

One with a mysterious relationship to humanity,

and its own interest in our world.

And if you saw him again, what would you do?

I'll ask him what is he doing on Earth,

and what does he want with us.

There were well-observed UFO cases,

just like modern cases, in the 18th century.

In the 17th century.

There was science.

There were astronomers, they had telescopes,

and they were very good observers

because their life depended on being good observers.

And these observations come from all over the world.

They just have been forgotten.

I like to think of anomalies, mysteries, as opportunities,

and we'll go after those mysteries,

take the torch away from the campfire,

and out of the cave, into the darkness

and make some amazing discoveries.

The UFO phenomenon as studied by my colleagues and myself,

bespeaks the action of some form of intelligence.

[SPEAKING IN OTHER LANGUAGE]

These objects gave the impression

that they wanted to be seen...

with these enormous spotlights.

There was no way that they were trying to hide.

So why? That is the main question.

Why do these objects want to be seen?

Later on, I was so sorry

that why I did not call on the radio.

Ask them, "Who are you?

"Please, make communication with us."

I figure if they're smart enough and capable enough

[CHUCKLES] to come into our airspace

with the technology that they have,

if they wanted to do us in, they could have done us in a long time ago.

So, I'm not fearful of this at all.

[SPEAKING MANDARIN]

Every once in a while one of them goes, zip!

It went like a bat out of hell.

Jumped about ten degrees to the right. Just like this.

I've never seen anything go so fast in my life as that thing went.

Incredible speed. Disappeared to nothing.

And just went, zoom, straight up so fast.

It's like it had been shot out of a gun. Wham!

Now you see it, now you don't. It just...

But it just was, poof!