Original subtitles

(keyboard types)

- [Narrator] Are we alone?

For millennia as we gazed at the stars,

this question has kept humanity awake at night.

Stories of unexplained phenomenon

and strange visitors have persisted throughout history.

With the advent of modern technology,

these stories have not only multiplied,

but have become harder to dismiss.

Recently, the US government revealed

that they had been collecting information

on unidentified aerial phenomena for decades,

and trained pilots have been going public

with photographic and video evidence of their encounters.

But what is behind these interstellar visits?

What do they want?

A new energy source?

Our bountiful supplies of natural resources?

Or could they be after something far more sinister?

These are "The Alien Disclosure Files."

- [Orson Welles] We know now that in the early years

of the 20th century,

this world was being watched closely

by intelligences greater than man.

- [Narrator] The 1938 broadcast of "War of the Worlds"

incited panic among many listeners,

who believed planet Earth was under attack

from Martian invaders.

By then, Hollywood was already

well into the Martian business.

The alien craze had begun,

and the American public couldn't get enough.

Television blasted information out into space

with every broadcast,

their signals reaching across the solar system

at the speed of light.

Did humans inadvertently leave a trail of radio wave

breadcrumbs for other civilizations to find,

leading directly back to our planet?

- It's conceivable that the aliens are

trying to figure out the jokes on "I Love Lucy."

It's possible.

- [Narrator] Or were aliens interested

in a different human invention?

UFO sightings increased rapidly

after we dropped the first nuclear bomb,

and UFOs were twice as likely to appear in or around cities

with nuclear power plants.

- The fact that our nuclear fleet was based

at the Roswell Army Airfield at the time,

and that we had this activity around that facility,

kind of points to an interest in our nuclear arsenal.

- [Narrator] The government couldn't remain

silent any longer.

- I'm here to discuss the so-called flying saucers.

The Air Force interest in this problem

has been due to our feeling of an obligation

to identify and analyze to the best of our ability

anything in the air that may have the possibility

of threat or menace to the United States.

- [Narrator] First, it was the short-lived Project Sign,

which quickly became Project Grudge.

- Project Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book

were efforts by the government, usually the Air Force,

to try and determine what all these sightings

that were being reported might be.

Are they aircraft?

Are they something they have to worry about?

They wanted to know what's in our airspace.

- [Narrator] Project Blue Book was born in 1952,

the same year as a massive public sighting

over the nation's capital.

- So one of the most famous UFO incidents was in 1952

when UFOs flew over the Capitol.

It's never been explained,

it's just something that's gone down in history.

- [Narrator] Project Blue Book faded away into history.

Despite this, UFO sightings increased,

especially among the military.

In 1973, two men fishing in Pascagoula, Mississippi

reported being abducted by three aliens

with crab like pincers.

In 1982, in the wealthy area of Hudson Valley, New York,

there were reports of a set of lights

flying almost silently in a V formation.

- [Pilot] Thank God.

I don't know.

- [Narrator] Hundreds reported similar sightings

in the area over the next few years.

- A lot of people report having some kind of encounter

with non-human intelligence,

and they're not just in the United States or in Europe.

These things happen all over the globe.

- [Narrator] Then on November 14th, 2004,

a UFO was spotted with the sophisticated tracking sensors

on board a military fighter plane in San Diego.

- [Pilot] There's a whole fleet of them.

Look on the ASA.

My gosh.

- [Narrator] It was undeniable,

seen by the most trusted eyes in the sky,

US Navy fighter pilots.

Footage showed the fighter jet followed

a Tic-Tac like aircraft for five minutes.

(pilot speaks indistinctly)

- [Pilot] It's rotated.

- [Narrator] Commander Dave Fravor

and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich

watched the object drop from 80,000 feet to 20,000

in a couple of seconds.

It lowered itself to the ocean below and hovered.

The water appeared to boil underneath it,

and in the blink of an eye, it sped off.

- We noticed something in the water

that seemed to be disturbing the water or making it churn.

We were able to then visually pick up what we described

as a Tic-Tac, 'cause that's what it looked like,

this white oblong shaped object that was moving very fast.

- Pilots are trained to identify objects near them.

Some of them did step forward,

and then you know, they're very respected individuals.

- [Narrator] Adding further legitimacy

to the sighting is the fact that

Lieutenant Commander Dietrich is a skeptic.

- I don't identify as a UFO person.

I hope I'm not the the UFO Tic-Tac person

for the rest of my life.

This is not what I envisioned for myself.

- [Narrator] There was nothing that identified it

as technology that humans are capable of.

- And it appeared to respond

in a way that we didn't recognize.

And it surprised us,

because it didn't appear to have any visible

flight control surfaces or means of propulsion.

- Even the people that have encountered these will say,

"Well, these are not doing anything

"that we have been able to accomplish in our flight physics.

"Therefore, we don't have the technology."

Nobody has the technology.

- [Narrator] This event changed the way that governments

approached UAPs,

finally forcing the government to reveal

some unbelievable secrets to the public for the first time.

(mysterious music)

- [Pilot] They're all going against the wind.

The wind's 120 knots to the west.

- [Narrator] As a result of the encounter

by US Navy pilots in 2004,

a secret unpublicized program called

the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,

or AAITP, was created.

- AAITP is the Advanced Aerospace

Threat Identification Program.

It came out of Bigelow Aerospace,

and was eventually brought into

the Department of Defense and run by a man

named Lue Elizondo,

who is the person who went public in 2017

- AAITP, this is an effort by the government to,

at least some parts of the government,

to try and figure out are there interesting phenomena

in our skies that we're missing?

- The amount of information that these guys have

and the stuff that the public has never seen

is enough to convince Lue Elizondo to take

a whole lot of risk and go public with his story.

But he's kind of in an interesting position.

He knows a lot of things,

but he also is completely forbidden from talking about 'em.

- [Narrator] Over the course of five years,

millions of dollars of taxpayer money went into the AAITP

until it was stopped in 2012 abruptly.

In 2014 and 2015, more UAP incidents were recorded

on both military instruments and sensors.

The sightings by Fravor, Dietrich, and Graves

were a game changer

for the rest of the US Navy pilots, as well.

- In the Navy, there is now a formal procedure

for filing reports that didn't exist years ago.

So I think in the future,

we're likely to hear about many more reports,

and the removal of the stigma from any such discussion

was extremely important,

because again, if you ridicule any such report,

you will not get any report.

- [Narrator] In the half century since the US Congress

had addressed the public about UFOs,

the term UFO got a makeover.

They are now referred to as UAPs,

or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

On May 17th, 2022, the chances of finding other life

in our universe took a giant leap forward,

thanks to the US House Select Committee.

- More than 50 years ago,

the US government ended Project Blue Book,

an effort to catalog and understand

sightings of objects in the air

that could not otherwise be explained.

- UAP reports have been around for decades,

and yet we haven't had an orderly way

for them to be reported.

It's the job of those we entrust with our national security

to investigate and to report back.

- [Narrator] Followers of UFO culture were vindicated

by the acknowledgement of the existence

of other life in the universe by a government,

and then another bombshell.

- In 2017, we learned for the first time

that the Department of Defense

had quietly restarted a similar organization

tracking what we now call

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs.

Last year, Congress rewrote the charter

for that organization,

now called the Airborne Object Identification

and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG.

AOIMSG is not starting from scratch.

This is the third version of this task force in DoD

and civil society groups like Mutual UFO Network.

Mr. Corbell and others have been collecting data

on this issue for years.

- I'm Ron James.

I'm the media relations director for MUFON.

MUFON stands for the Mutual UFO Network.

It's the largest and oldest organization of its kind

for the betterment of humanity.

- [Narrator] MUFON was instrumental

in the US Select Committee hearing.

They compiled compelling evidence from their database

of cell phone photos from their 6,000 members

and physical materials from UFO encounters

reported by civilians.

- One of the things that we were instrumental in

was working with Mike Gallagher

and Congressman Andre Carson to help get these hearings

that recently happened about the UAP topic

to happen in front of the public.

We were behind the scenes on that,

and we got Andre Carson to actually go ahead

and convene these hearings.

It was something that hadn't happened in over 50 years,

and it was a milestone,

and MUFON was partially responsible for getting that done.

- Unidentified aerial phenomena

are a potential national security threat,

and they need to be treated that way.

For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs

has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis.

- [Narrator] The hearings had it all,

bipartisan agreement,

a promise of more revelations to come,

and an indication that the US government

had multiple agencies tracking UAP activity.

But the most important point made at the historic meeting

was they are real.

(mysterious music)

- [Pilot] We just had something go right over the top of us

that, I hate to say this,

looked like a long cylindrical object.

- The pilots on Flight 2292

on route to Phoenix, Arizona from Cincinnati, Ohio

report an unidentified fast object flying over them

while they were over New Mexico.

- [Pilot] It almost looked like a cruise missile

type of thing moving really fast.

Have any targets up here?

We just had something go right over the top of us.

(dramatic music)

- [Responder] That is some weird (bleep).

- [Narrator] Pilots with thousands of hours

of flight experience are now repeatedly reporting UAP events

across our planet.

Even with the US government's recent efforts

to address UAPs,

some military pilots often wait until retirement

to go public with what they saw in the skies.

And if it's hard for military pilots,

who have an outlet to report their encounters,

what about commercial and cargo pilots?

- I'm Christiaan.

I'm a Dutch airline pilot

with nine and a half thousand hours of flight time.

Currently captain on the Boeing 747 flying worldwide.

In the last 20 years,

I happened to document or capture with my camera

one or two events that I haven't been able to explain.

It was only after I saw the interviews

of Commander David Fravor, Lieutenant Ryan Graves,

and later on the interviews with Mr. Lue Elizondo

that I started to realize that the stuff that I had seen

and even once documented was really something extraordinary

and couldn't be explained just even by naval pilots.

- [Narrator] Christiaan Van Heijst captured several UAPs

from his 747 cockpit.

- We were flying Boeing 737 from the southern part of Greece

back to Amsterdam.

It was a beautiful clear day,

and all of a sudden I see from my perspective

on the left hand side

a really bright lights falling vertically,

actually moving vertically,

from really high up in the atmosphere,

quickly disappearing into the sea.

- [Narrator] It wasn't the first time

he saw this same unidentified aerial phenomenon.

- We were flying with this F-50

between two layers of clouds at night,

roughly at 20,000 feet,

and all of a sudden we saw a really bright object

or bright lights moving through the upper cloud layer,

down towards the ground,

and it basically disappeared into the lower cloud layer,

which it was illuminated quickly as the light fell through,

and it disappeared from sight.

- [Narrator] On January 23rd, 2010,

Christiaan was flying from Amsterdam to Malaga, Spain

when he watched a UAP ahead of his plane for an hour.

These photos are of what Christian described as

"a massive unidentified aircraft."

- So this was about one hour flights,

and the object was a complete solid.

It was a massive object, it was really far ahead of us.

- [Narrator] The rapid movement of the object

Christiaan describes is nearly identical

to the one Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich

and Commander David Fravor saw in 2004.

The other similarity was the way the object

seemed to interact with the ocean.

- So a lot of these are submersible unidentified objects.

We've seen evidence that these things

can traverse the ocean,

they can go into the air,

and they can go into space, all with one craft.

So when we talk about the oceans,

it provides a couple of different things.

One is it's a completely protected environment.

We've only explored a small percentage of our oceans.

We don't know what's down there.

It's away from sensors,

and could be hidden from us for all of our recorded history.

- [Narrator] During the Earth's formation,

there was no water.

Water is believed to be an alien element

with origins from other worlds.

Could aliens be visiting Earth

for the energy properties of its vast oceans?

- One of the better theories for where

Earth got its water was that, you know,

it wasn't water that was endemic to the Earth.

It wasn't, the Earth didn't start out with a lot of water,

but the water was brought by comets

that crashed into the Earth, you know, a long time ago,

4 billion years ago, and they brought the ocean.

So when you have a a glass of water,

you're drinking comet juice.

- If there is a device that needs fuel,

then going into the ocean makes sense,

because in the air doesn't offer, you know,

much fuel, but if you can take advantage of the oceans,

and obviously you don't want to collide with the ground,

because you will crash.

So in the oceans you can, in principle,

scoop fuel or nutrients, use whatever you find there.

Yeah, so I would say it does make sense,

but you need to have technologies that allow that,

and you know, we just don't know.

And so again, we should be guided by evidence.

If we see objects getting into the ocean, coming out again,

you know, we have to figure out what they're doing there.

(mysterious music)

- [Narrator] Energy, manmade energy.

Starting in the atomic era of the late 1940s,

there have been thousands of reported sightings of UAPs

over American nuclear test facilities.

An FBI documented case from the '50s now declassified

mentions a flying saucer more than 50 feet in diameter

over Los Alamos Nuclear Lab.

- The age of the modern UAP phenomenon,

some say, started back when we made nuclear breakthroughs.

- [Narrator] In the '60s,

UAPs were spotted over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana,

a known storage facility for nuclear missiles.

At the same time as the sighting,

the base suddenly lost their ability to launch missiles.

- Colonel Bob Salas went public a few years back

with a story about UFOs or UAPs

that actually were able to disable nuclear weapons

right here in the United States.

These lights appeared over the base,

and completely shut down the entire system.

- [Narrator] Reports became so frequent,

personnel were assigned to actively watch for them.

- Congress has said something about the fact that,

you know, these programs to monitor what are now called UAPs

used to be called UFOs,

but Unidentified Aerial Phenomena now.

If you're in the military,

you need to know what's up there in the skies, right?

I mean, just strictly from a defense point of view.

And it could be aliens,

but it could also be Chinese drones or who knows what.

So you need to know that sort of thing,

and so, you know, programs that do investigate these things

are obviously worthwhile.

But could they also uncover, you know, alien craft?

- [Narrator] In 2023, the United States Air Force shot down

four spy balloons near Montana,

believed to be from China,

but they referred to them as UAPs.

- [Observer] Ha ha!

- We heard about these balloons that were shot down, okay?

I think that is a dramatic development in the sense that

now the government has attention, you know,

publicly acknowledged that it pays enhanced attention

to objects in the sky.

Okay, that's extremely important,

because in the past there were,

there was a stigma on the subject.

(thunder rumbles)

- [Narrator] Energy and water.

These are where the two most common

UFO occurrences take place.

The 2004 event and others involving fighter pilots

occur mostly over the ocean.

- There's 95% of the oceans that are unexplored,

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

but we are beginning to get evidence

that there is some kind of technological activity

that we can't identify happening in and around the oceans.

- [Narrator] Whether it's for the untapped energy

stored in our oceans,

our nuclear proliferation, or something else entirely,

it stands to reason

that we might be attracting extraterrestrial attention.

After all, the universe is big,

and there's no reason to believe we're the only ones in it.

- You know, surveys have shown that, you know,

half the American population believes

that the aliens are not only out there,

but a fair fraction of them believe that they're here.

People will say,

"Well, do you think there really is some life out there,

"alien life?"

And the answer is, yeah, I think there is.

- [Narrator] But if humanity mostly agrees

on the existence of aliens,

opinions of what to do

when we make contact with them is divided.

Some believe our options may be limited.

- Think about the Native Americans living

in the Caribbean in 1492, right?

They didn't have a plan for what they were gonna do

when these three Spanish ships came across the horizon.

I'm not sure that a plan actually helps much,

because whatever you plan for,

it won't be like that.

You won't have a common language.

If they're hostile,

well, the fact that they've come here

means whatever they wanna do, they can do

when it comes to military stuff.

- [Narrator] As terrifying as this prospect sounds,

others hold a more optimistic view

of our interstellar guests.

- For all those people that are worried about

threat from another civilization,

I would say don't worry about it.

I don't think there is any risk, existential risk, for us.

On the other hand,

there is a great opportunity for us to learn from them.

(mysterious music)

(light music)

(typewriter clicks)