Original subtitles

[unsettling music playing]

[birds singing]

[Knapp] I started this investigation with one key question.

What are the intentions of these craft

that people have been seeing in the skies for more than 70 years?

But following the evidence has caused me to rethink

exactly where we should be looking for these answers.

From Brazil...

[Tecchetti] You can see hundreds of UFOs in different shapes.

[Knapp] ...to Tampico...

[in Spanish] There are a lot of fishermen that have seen things

and won't talk about it because people don't believe them.

[Knapp in English] ...and considering the missing piece of the jellyfish video...

[source] It just stops, dead in its tracks,

and drops into the lake.

[Knapp] ...it seems there's a recurring connection to water

that needs to be explored.

- Have a seat. - Thank you.

[Knapp] Now Rory's back from his underwater investigation

of the Channel Islands, I'm hoping his data can tell us

what nonhuman visitors might be doing in the water

and how long they've been down there.

[Kremer] We've got some stuff on the side-scan sonar here that...

It's out in the middle of what should be a sandy plain.

Very little, if anything, should be popping up.

And if something pops up, it's something that has been put there,

artificially, by somebody.

Take a look at this right here. What does that look like to you?

- [Knapp] Like a big plane. - [Kremer] Like a plane.

A ship of some sort. A plane, a flying saucer, something.

It's huge.

It's over 100 feet long and probably 30, 40 feet wide.

- [Knapp] Could this be a crashed airplane? - I don't know. That is a big feature.

And it's not a natural feature.

This square item...

Look how large that is.

That's square.

What can you think of in nature that is square?

Yeah, you don't see a lot of 90-degree angles.

Exactly. It looks like somebody has placed a building there.

Okay, so we'd been working all day long

and finally get the ROV in the water over at this location.

And as soon as we've dropped the ROV in the water...

Wait till you see this video.

[tense music playing]

[Kremer] Look at how fast that's going.

Boom.

[Kremer] Light's just totally changed.

[Knapp] Holy shit.

It went from, like, 200 yards from us to five miles away in less than a second.

Damn. Like it wanted to see what you're doing,

but from a safe distance.

[Kremer] And then we had cameras set up at night on the boat.

And we've got this other one too that is just cool.

Now, this is with everybody sleeping, with the exception of our night watch guy.

Don't tell me it's gonna go in the water.

[Kremer] Now it's in the water.

I'll be damned.

So this is what it does when it thinks nobody's watching.

Have you ever seen anything like this?

A Willie Peter flare is the only thing that I know

that will hang like that in the air,

but that's not a flare because there's no smoke coming off of it.

Look at that.

It's under the water.

I don't know. I've got no answers. Do you?

[Knapp] You think it's got a base down there like we saw in Tampico?

[Kremer] It could be. It could be.

People have been seeing things flying in the skies

and things that pop in and out of the water out in that area

for a long time.

How long has it been there?

Archaeology is your thing, so what do you think?

Oral history from a lot of the native tribes here

will talk about, um, things flying,

and they... they usually attributed it to gods.

Uh, the Chumash and the Salinans all have oral histories of lights

that they can't explain.

Way back. And you go around the world, basically,

and look at the archaeological records.

Tribes have a lot of, um, oral histories and written histories

they've recorded of sightings, and they don't know.

So it has gone on a long time.

I think we scratched the surface here,

and I think that there could very well be something underwater.

The fact that Rory is able to capture images like that, it's a huge deal.

I've heard that the US government has video like that.

A UFO that goes into the water and becomes a USO.

Unidentified Submerged Objects.

I'm gonna share this with some insiders I know,

which will hopefully lead to getting more videos like this

released to the public

to get to the bottom of what nonhuman intelligence

might be doing in our oceans.

This is not us. It's from somewhere else.

[sounds distort]

[Knapp] I sent a copy of Rory's video to Vee to get her opinion,

since this falls into her field of expertise.

- Hey, Vee, did you see that video I sent? - [Armour] I did, yeah. I saw it.

What do you make of that as a pilot, as a flyer?

What could it be, and what are we ruling out?

I'm going to look for sound.

I'm going to look for traditional movements of aircraft.

Combustion that comes out of an engine, right?

Fire, some kind of fuel.

And this had none of that.

You do have to consider drone.

I've seen drones crash and burn. Drones are crazy sensitive.

When you hit water, it can be as hard as the ground.

So if this thing went in the water, 'cause you can see the refraction,

I mean, I just don't know what kind of drone

with its propellers would be able to do that.

Either it's flying in the air or it's a submergible.

There's no drone that I know of that can do both.

[Knapp] There's a pattern to this.

I mean, it appeared in front of a bunch of people,

and then it went away,

and then later, it comes back when everybody went to bed.

What do you make of that?

If I look at this from a military perspective,

it looks like it could be doing a reconnaissance operation

with the return trips back and forth.

But it's interesting that you bring up the patterns.

There are some pilots I've been discussing this idea with.

They've regularly been seeing lights over the Pacific Ocean.

I got a couple of them to agree to meet with me,

and they're bringing some video.

- I'll let you know what I find out. - All right, bye.

[tense music playing]

[Armour] Starting this project with George,

I've been rattling the cages a bit with my pilots' network,

trying to figure out who's had experiences

and if they might have any insight on why they're here.

So, two commercial pilots, Chris and Trent, really stood out

because they actually have video.

And we're talking about decades of aviation experience here.

And for so long, it was taboo for pilots to talk about this kind of stuff.

So the fact that they still want to share this footage with me

leads me to feel that it's pretty significant.

It's a little hard to see on the screen, but I'll spin that around to you.

If you look kind of here in the center,

and then there's gonna be a couple of lights here,

coming in from the left-hand side.

[suspenseful music playing]

We were coming back over the Pacific, uh, heading westbound,

and we looked to the north, and we started to see some funny lights.

They would grow in intensity. Then they would dim down.

It was one object that split off into two.

With the naked eye, you could see things

being jettisoned off from the bigger, brighter lights.

These were shooting off in all different directions,

almost like probes of some type.

[Trent] This was outside of the atmosphere,

and we started to see some movement that was just unexplainable.

And when you speed it up at 2 or 3 times,

you start to see a little bit more of the irregularities in the flight path.

There was chatter going on. Other pilots were seeing this.

[pilot 1] Do you see something out there?

[pilot 2] We saw two, maybe three lights.

They appear to be orbiting in a circle.

[pilot 1] You said it was moving fast?

[pilot 2] Yeah. I don't know how far away it is,

but it's too fast for what I'm familiar with.

[pilot 1] I worked this shift last night, and we had, uh, similar reports.

And what about air traffic control?

So, unfortunately, when we're over the ocean,

there's nobody to talk to.

Are you serious? There's no one to talk to?

No, it's all Satlink where we do position reports via text message.

And of course, that's when they chose to show themselves.

What I'm learning is there's

an intelligent calculation to this phenomenon.

Like Rory's anomaly.

These craft are choosing to reveal themselves

in situations we can't control

and where it's difficult to get clean data about their patterns.

It's almost like they want us to know who's in control.

How many experiences would you... you say you've had?

Maybe one out of three times, I see something unexplainable.

That's a lot. And always in an area with no comms.

Oh yeah, 100%.

It really needs to come out that not all of this is explainable.

And the thing is, now that is happening.

It's not just something that's seen in the United States.

This is happening worldwide.

[intense, rhythmic music playing]

The Pentagon has just released a 60-page comprehensive report on UAPs.

And in it, the Department of Defense says

there is no evidence of any alien visits to our planet.

Ridiculous.

Last year, the Pentagon debuted AARO, this new office

to investigate all forms of UAPs, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

The job of AARO was supposed to put together a historical record

of all the other US government programs

that have looked into UFOs for the past 75 years.

[reporter] The official word from the Pentagon, no dead alien bodies,

no crashed alien craft, and no government cover-up.

And most importantly, they found no evidence to suggest

that the United States government

or industry possesses any alien technology.

They spent, what, 18 months

reviewing gigantic storehouses of information

gathered by other government programs,

and they come to a definitive conclusion, "Move along, folks. Nothing to see here."

It's ridiculous.

AARO has found no evidence

that any US government investigation has confirmed

that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.

[Knapp] You know, I have read the government files.

I have copies of all that material.

And I can tell you for a fact

that this AARO report is a complete whitewash.

But if anyone would know for sure, it's an insider like Chris Mellon.

I wanted to talk about this AARO report

because at the beginning, we were all really hopeful

that the attention from media, from Congress, would lead us

to try to have an understanding of this, finally, at last.

I didn't think it would be this bad.

It's so riddled with absurd mistakes and references and claims.

You know, they fundamentally changed the standard

for how we function and operate

in the intelligence community, and what is considered evidence.

We're not gonna call it unidentified or unexplained.

We're just gonna say "insufficient data."

Do you believe UAPs pose a potential threat

to our national security?

Yes. The technology that we faced was far superior than anything that we had.

You're talking something that can go into space,

drop down in a matter of seconds, do whatever it wants, and leave.

And there's nothing we can do about it. Nothing.

And unfortunately, these conclusions were just sort of glibly absorbed

and reported by the media

without consulting, as they normally would,

anybody who's an expert in the subject.

[Knapp] It seemed that was the plan,

is to get that headline out, to make sure members of Congress read that headline.

And hopefully, they'll move on to something else.

[Mellon] Obviously, it's half-baked.

We have to continue to study this phenomenon

and try to get to the bottom of it and try to find answers.

And if this sloppy report

damages the efforts to... to do that,

that is gonna damage national security,

as well as science, rather than enhance it.

[Knapp] What worries me about the AARO report is

that it will discourage Congress from asking questions.

Discourage mainstream media from pursuing the story.

Discourage academics from pursuing their own investigations and research,

which is essential to try to answer these important questions,

just as we seem to be getting somewhere with the water.

But there is a lesson we can learn from it.

We can never count on our Pentagon to come clean on the UFO issue

and tell what it really knows.

If they would go to such lengths to discredit this topic,

it tells us we're gonna have to do it ourselves.

I'm gonna write my own report to counter the AARO whitewash,

and we'll be submitting that to Congress.

[energetic music playing]

First thing I wanna do in putting together our counter report to AARO

is to find witnesses who testified to AARO,

who gave them information.

And then try to verify, find out what stories they shared with them,

and make sure that they get the hearing that they deserve.

These witnesses told them everything they knew,

believing in good faith

that AARO would treat the information with respect,

would actually investigate it, which they did not.

This one guy I've talked to several times, his name is Michael Herrera.

[Herrera] I could take you to one of these locations

that could prove that this stuff exists.

Michael Herrera not only testified to AARO,

but he claims he's in touch with people who can prove beyond any doubt

that reverse-engineering programs of UFOs really do exist.

I've been trying to set up a meeting with him for several weeks,

but he's been a little reluctant.

I can tell you for a fact that elements of the US government, the US military,

have forcibly intimidated potential witnesses.

I had that happen to me back in 1989.

When I was first investigating these wild stories we heard about Area 51,

I put out a request for information.

I said on the air, "Hey, look, I know there are people in this viewing area

who know more about this program,

this secret out there in the desert, than they've ever told before."

"Get in touch with me."

And a lot of 'em did.

And then six of 'em, one right after another,

who I spoke to on my phone in KLAS-TV,

were visited by government agents who told them to shut up.

And a couple of those people were threatened.

[gentle music playing]

[Knapp] Michael Herrera also says he's been threatened,

but decided his story is too important to let it get swept aside.

It's an ambitious story,

and I hope I'm able to verify the allegations that he's made

about this amazing technology.

If it turns out to be true and verifiable,

this could go a long way toward exposing the AARO report

for the smokescreen that it is.

- How's it going? - Good. How are you?

So, this is it.

- Great to meet you in person. - [Herrera] You too.

You gave a statement to AARO.

- Yes, I did. - They didn't take it seriously.

We know that now 'cause of the report. You and everybody else.

Yes, they did. They put misinformation out.

You go into the jungle in Indonesia, right?

- Correct. - What do you see?

Something that's unforgettable.

So, we were originally tasked with a humanitarian mission in 2009,

and this was the result of an earthquake that hit on the western part of Sumatra.

We were actually positioned on top of this hill.

Well, we turned away from the south and looked at the north,

and we saw something sitting there, which...

There's vegetation that was on top of the hill

that was obscuring it, so you could see only part of it.

- [Knapp] Are you talking about a UFO? - Correct.

And we can see something rotating, and we can see colors changing.

Light matte gray to a dark matte black, and there's just in between.

- How big was it? - I would estimate 300 feet.

- Three hundred feet? - Correct.

And that looked like it had a pyramid on the top.

So when we decided to go down this slope,

we could go into a clearing that actually opened up pretty well,

and this is when we can see it in its entirety.

And one of the eerie things about this was how it was sitting there, hovering,

rotating in a clockwise position.

It was just like it was set in stone, just rotating and moving.

And it didn't make a sound except for, um, you know, a high...

Not really a high pitch, but like a pitch of, like, a transformer.

- Or like a guitar amp. - Like a hum?

Yes.

And it wasn't something that gradually changed.

It was just a constant noise.

But it looked like it was manufactured.

It had rivets. It had seams.

I've heard some speculation from people who've seen real ET craft,

and they say it's completely seamless.

It has no designations of it actually being pieced together.

- So this was ours? - Correct.

Based on design maybe we got from somewhere else?

Correct. It was reverse-engineered technology.

I had video and pictures of this thing.

That night, my camera was on my rack, and I had the memory card out of it

and the battery that was out of it too.

- Somebody got in there and took it out. - Mm-hmm.

- So that's gone? - That's gone.

- Where do you think that went? - I have no idea.

It could be in somebody's vault. It could be in a file. I have no clue.

We didn't talk about this at all to anybody because of the situation.

It just sounds very unbelievable.

I mean, this is a hell of a story you tell.

It's pretty fantastic.

Did you say you testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence?

- Or met with them? - Yes. They believe me.

They think I'm credible, which is...

I've been able to provide some other people, at least, to them

who know what I've dealt with.

And as well as gave the names of the guys that were with me.

- Can you give me some of those names? - No.

- Okay. So far, we've got your word for it. - Correct.

But you and I talked before, and you said

there's gonna be something coming forward that will confirm a lot of this.

Show us the goods, you know.

Where's the proof? When are we gonna know?

Um, give me a time frame.

I understand where everybody's sitting at with wanting everything to be revealed.

I'm also impatient with that.

But me being on this side of disclosure, I understand why it's taking time.

But I will tell you this.

There will be, hopefully soon, some information that's gonna be put out

with factual evidence that will support this.

How long? Any idea?

I would say within probably the next few months.

- Within months? - Correct. And that's all I can say.

- That will verify what you're saying? - Correct.

I wish I could go into more detail on how this will be.

But, uh, I will say that it's gonna be something that...

it will shock the world.

[intriguing music playing]

[Knapp] I came here to meet with Michael Herrera

to get specific information.

Names, locations, hard information

that we could corroborate that would prove his story.

He says that's probably months away.

And that worries me because the window's closing.

We may not have that kind of time. The pushback is real.

It's getting harder and harder for us to get witnesses to come forward.

We need solid evidence to counter the AARO report.

And we need it now.

[somber music playing]

[Knapp] I've been thinking about my next steps

and decided that the best way

to counter a report that denies all nonhuman intelligence

is to bring forward tangible, physical proof of nonhuman contact

that cannot be easily dismissed.

At this point, a lot of folks are kind of jaded.

They're at the point where, "Show me. Show me the flying saucer."

"Show me the dead alien bodies."

"Until I see that, I'm not believing any of it."

They're never gonna kick open the hangar doors.

"There's the flying saucers, everybody. Take a look." That's never gonna happen.

The only way we're gonna get this information

is to dig for it ourselves.

[intense music playing]

[Knapp] UFO investigators would say

crash retrievals and crash retrieval material

is sort of the Holy Grail.

We're talking about unknown craft, possibly nonhuman craft,

that crash and leave debris or other materials at the crash site.

There is a great deal of evidence that crash retrievals are real.

There was a program called Blue Fly, another one called Moon Dust.

It was the job of these military units. Something falls from the sky, go get it.

Might be satellites, Russian or otherwise. But some of it was pretty exotic.

Far more exotic than a human-made satellite.

If the government has it, if the defense contractors have it,

they're not coughing it up.

But luckily, there are some scientists

who have had the guts to gather samples

from alleged crash sites and to go ahead and analyze them.

And we're going today to go see two of the best.

Jacques Vallée, he is a giant in the field.

He's written 12 or so monumentally important books

that have changed the face of how UFOs are investigated.

Dr. Garry Nolan, he's a medical doctor

and has patented a number of really truly advanced medical devices.

Some of those devices that have been used to analyze humans

and diseases in humans

are also really good at analyzing materials.

Let's start this way. Crash retrievals, debris...

Give me the big picture. What have we learned?

There is a long history

within the community of people doing research on this,

uh, gathering samples, analyzing them, and so on.

Much of what we know about crash retrievals

is from people who, uh, on the inside have come forward and said

that there are these objects that have been retrieved by the US government.

And actually, other governments as well.

[Knapp] The story started with Roswell.

1947, the US Army Air Force said

that they'd recovered a flying saucer, a flying disc.

The story didn't come from UFO people. It came from the US Air Force.

They issued the release that said, "We found one. A crashed saucer."

And that headline went all over the world.

Within 24 hours, they changed their mind, changed that tune,

and said, "No, it's not a crashed saucer. It's just a weather balloon."

Roswell was the first, but there have been dozens of others

reported by reliable witnesses.

Kingman, Arizona, 1953.

There were multiple UFOs seen sort of in a dogfight formation over Kingman.

A couple of these things fall out of the sky.

There was a military team that came in there, scooped 'em up,

took 'em back toward Nevada.

There's a case in Del Rio, Texas.

There's a case in Cape Girardeau, Missouri,

with dozens of witnesses who say it was real.

There's the Kecksburg case.

We still don't know what that object was, but the public didn't get to see it

after it crashed and was hauled away.

So is there somewhere we might get new samples

from a possible UFO crash that you guys could test?

One, of course, is the Council Bluffs material.

An object was seen in Council Bluffs in the mid-1970s.

People are going through the park in the evening,

and then they see something in the sky.

This mass of material in a molten state falls.

What attracted me to the case was the, uh, level of rigor

that had been applied.

Somebody checked, well, were there any foundries nearby

that could produce this level of material and drop it off in the middle of a field?

Was it a meteor?

It just wouldn't leave a molten blob on the ground.

It would make an impact crater.

So something was there. The witnesses saw it.

And then we have the material

that was apparently dropped or left behind.

[Knapp] Since the government did not come to Council Bluffs to confiscate evidence,

Doctors Nolan and Vallée believe it may be possible to get more samples.

So what can we learn from testing this kind of material?

Might the construction or the way it's made

give us hints about how it flies, how it operates,

how it does the miraculous things that some UFOs do?

If something is determined to have been made

in a zero-gravity environment, we can say for sure it wasn't us.

We don't have manufacturing capabilities in space.

That would be a real breakthrough.

[mysterious music playing]

[Knapp] If we're gonna put this forward as proof of extraterrestrial activity,

it has to be rock solid.

I've heard there are witnesses to be found who could possibly speak publicly now

for the first time in more than 40 years.

But thanks to the AARO report, they could easily decide to clam up again.

But another thing that came up as I was doing more research

is that at least one person claims it wasn't a UFO encounter at all

but some sort of a hoax.

Wherever you have a story of a UFO crash or a UFO crash retrieval operation,

people come out of the woodwork with stories that debunk it.

- What's up, George? - How you doing?

So I'm calling in Doug to help me explore all angles of the story.

[car door closes]

[Knapp] My point of entry into this whole UFO thing

started in the '80s when I heard these rumors

about what goes on here in the Nevada desert.

That there are crashed flying saucers,

UFOs, and that the US government and defense contractors

had been trying to take 'em apart and figure out how they work.

The question is, have they stashed 'em with some private company,

some defense contractor,

trying to figure out how that technology works?

I think the answer is yes, but the AARO report says otherwise.

If there were some sort of alien technology

that landed on Earth

and the United States government collected it,

absolutely, without question, I can assure you and guarantee you,

very few people would get to see that.

Right now in DC, there's this huge pushback.

The defense industry has immense power on Capitol Hill.

You know. That's your town.

- Beltway Bandits. - Yeah. And they're pushin' back hard.

I don't know if we're ever going to get them to cough that stuff up.

If they could figure out how it works, it'd be worth trillions of dollars.

It'd change the world economy. So I'm not sure they'll give it up,

but I just met with Garry Nolan and Jacques Vallée at Stanford.

Okay.

They told me we might get our hands on what could be extraterrestrial material.

So Council Bluffs, Iowa, huh?

- Right. That's where it happened. - Uh-huh.

So the plan for us is to go ahead and get more samples if we can.

As far as I know, Jacques Vallée and Garry Nolan

never talked to the witnesses.

So I hope you can get to them before they change their mind.

- I can keep this? - Yeah.

Okay.

Fantastic.

[Laux] So we're just getting into Council Bluffs, Iowa.

This is where the event occurred in December of 1977.

First stop, I'm going to meet with a guy named Jason Offutt.

I found a piece of his that he had online

where he did some pretty extensive research on the event.

So ideally, he's gonna be able to hook me up

with, uh, some contact information of one of the eyewitnesses

who was actually on the scene at the time.

Hi there.

I asked Jason to meet me at the library.

That library also still retains microfiche from the '70s,

so they have some stuff I haven't been able to procure online.

So I've pulled up an article here. Let me just scan to it.

You can see here... That is from the day after the incident.

-"The mystery metal falls from the sky." - [Offutt] From the sky.

How is this not on the front page?

Like, this is buried almost in the obituaries.

[Offutt] Ten B.

All right, the first person mentioned, Assistant Fire Chief Jack Moore.

I spoke with his son Mike about this. He was a direct witness.

Mike and his wife at the time were driving through the park at about 7:45 p.m.,

and they saw a bright red light hovering in the sky.

At first, he thought it was from Eppley Airfield, which is fairly close.

- Right. - [Offutt] But it wasn't moving.

And then all of a sudden,

another red ball, a smaller one, fell from beneath it.

So, Jack Moore. His son is Mike Moore.

- He's local. - Right. He's still local.

So then you can probably guess my next question. [laughs]

[Offutt] Yes, I can.

Jason at the library said he'd put me in touch with Mike.

Mike's been really reluctant to talk about this in the past,

but it seems like he's ready to get things off his chest now.

You know, Mike initially was like, "You want to do something tomorrow, or..."

No. How about today?

- He was there. - Mike.

[Laux] Saw it with his own eyes.

I want him to tell me the story as he saw it.

Then I can make an assessment.

I can tell you what I've seen, take you where I've seen it.

I'd love that.

[Laux] Were you by yourself?

I had my ex-wife with me.

[Laux] So you're driving in the car. You're with your ex-wife.

Walk me through what that was like.

Well, I'm driving along here,

and it'd be over here that I would look up and I could see it coming out of the sky.

First, I thought it was a plane coming in,

but then I realized it's coming straight down.

And there's no lights that would have been on a wingtip or anything like that.

And the fact it was coming straight down instead of going on a final approach.

Then she said she'd kind of looked up and saw something hovering.

In this same direction?

- Yeah. - Where?

Where we're going. Like, going this way. It was up above us.

[Laux] I'm trying to get a read on Mike to get a sense if he's telling the truth.

If I had seen what he had seen,

I would have been pounding on the dashboard, blown away.

But that's me. Other people are different how they perceive things

and how they receive something as surreal as that.

[energetic music playing]

This is where it actually hit. It was right here on this bank.

- [Laux] Here? - I think about right in here.

Yeah, this area right in here is where it fell.

And basically, the fire department was called

because it set this whole bank on fire.

- How big of a berth was on fire? - About four by six feet.

- And the metal's right here. - Laying right here.

And it's leaking.

- Yeah. It's running down here. - But hardening.

Yeah. In fact, uh, this is what I came back and picked up.

- Oh shit. Can I touch it? - Yeah, go ahead.

What the...

I can see how you say it was bubbled. Oh shoot. That's heavy.

[Moore] When I got home, I hit 'em with an eight-pound sledgehammer.

I couldn't bend it. I can't cut it with a torch.

I can't grind it. I can't even bend it.

When I got here, there were pieces of blue in the metal.

They reminded me of, like, a 1950s, '60s flashbulb.

- The blue ones? - Yeah, like in a camera or something.

They were sitting there, and they weren't melting.

They were like chunks.

Kind of looks like a rock, a little bit, but it's really heavy.

And I don't know what this silver shiny stuff is

that I can see, like, on the end.

Like, especially there where my first finger's at.

When I saw it, I'm like, "That looks like a rock."

But then when I picked it up, I realized the density.

And I was like, "Oh man, this is..."

Look, what I thought was about two pounds is about 10 to 15 pounds.

All I remember my dad telling me one time was he didn't know what was all in it.

Well, I'd love to get this tested to find out, for sure.

I can give you a piece to take with you, and you can give her testing.

- You got my word. I'll get it back. - I'd just like to know what it is.

[energetic music playing]

[Knapp] While Doug is gathering physical evidence

of a possible UFO crash in Iowa,

I'm moving on to tackling

the fundamental premise of the AARO report head-on,

that everything people report as UFOs can somehow be explained away

as either natural phenomena or human technology.

We've come up here to California's wine country

to meet a Swedish astronomer, Dr. Beatriz Villarroel.

She's a highly decorated scientist and professor

and has just published an explosive new paper

about light anomalies that may look like satellite

but were captured before humans had that technology.

The suggestion is that an advanced civilization

somewhere out there may have dispatched

maybe millions of probes across the galaxy to look for other civilizations,

other intelligences.

They've been operating in our skies near our planet.

I'm really looking forward to find out what kind of evidence they've accumulated.

[tense music playing]

[Knapp] Tell me, how did you go about looking for these possible alien probes?

Palomar Sky Survey has digitized a collection of plates.

The digitized plates, everyone can access these plates online.

What we've been doing is to download these images

and comparing them to images of the sky as it looks today.

And look for differences.

Is there something in the 1950s that you cannot find today?

Look here, and you can see here nine stars, and they all look like stars.

And then you look at it 30 years later. You never see those stars again.

They're simply not there.

- They were there, and they're gone. - Exactly.

This is five years before Sputnik.

- It's not us up there? - No.

We have nothing that I know of,

especially not at those altitudes we are thinking of.

Assuming that these images are real astronomical observations.

And you've checked. You've looked at different...

Well, we have not been able to find any problem.

We can never exclude that.

There's always going to be some haunting possibility of

that we've missed an instrumental explanation.

But there's certainly no astrophysical explanation to this.

And there's no obvious instrumental explanation either.

Can you give me another example?

Yeah. I have two here.

You can see here five transients. July 1952, and they are vanished later.

[Knapp chuckles]

July 1952 sort of stands out. That date rings a bell with me.

That's the... That's the dates of the Washington, DC, overflights.

July 1952, UFOs appeared over the US capital two weekends in a row.

They were detected on radar.

They were seen by pilots in the air. Jets were scrambled to go after them.

And as soon as they got close, these things would take off.

And then there's the last example that has been, uh, found

by my colleague in Madrid, Enrique Solano.

- Look at these beautiful three stars. - And when is this?

Uh, this is from 19th of July 1952.

They're there, three objects, and they are not there.

So the tantalizing possibility is it's some sort of alien.

That's one possibility. And maybe there's some new astrophysics

that is behind that that we can't imagine.

A craft much closer to Earth than stars are.

I have to be open for all possibilities.

That's an amazing coincidence. In a sense, it makes sense.

If you think about some extraterrestrial civilization out there,

that they would send probes, because we've sent probes out.

- We've sent them. - Exactly.

We have Voyager 1, and we have Pioneer.

So if we can do that, why wouldn't they send something to us?

They might have produced maybe thousands or millions of probes

and sent them everywhere.

[energetic music playing]

[Knapp] We've seen time and again that these aliens' interest in us

has a scientific or research angle.

So these possible alien probes are yet another data point

as to why they might be here.

One thing's for sure.

AARO can't write this evidence off as satellites, Starlink, or drones.

If anything, it might be an advanced species' version

of this technology.

But what are they planning to do with it? That's what I'm still hoping to find out.

[music fades]

[unsettling music playing]

[Laux] George told me going into this investigation

that somebody claimed that this case was actually a hoax.

I'm going to meet a gentleman named Darrell Livengood.

He claims that in 1977, he fabricated the entire story.

I hate going into any interview really suspect

and not believing from the get-go.

So I'm gonna keep an open mind,

but I might have to grill him a little bit.

Hit me with everything, and I'm all ears.

In December, it'll be 46 years.

- Yup. - I had come back from college.

It was the middle of wintertime, and I met up with three buddies of mine.

Two of the fellas had worked for the Union Pacific.

- Oh. - Well, they gave me two of these devices.

Uh, they called 'em charges, but basically what they were

is a thermal welding device.

- Okay. - And it was full of phosphorus and powder.

Right.

And what you would do is you'd ignite the fuse.

And it was similar to a fountain like you would have at Fourth of July.

One of those little cone things that spray for a couple minutes.

- Yeah. - But this thing went for about 15 minutes.

- Okay. - It shot sparks about 30 feet in the air.

That plume of smoke that went up clearly must have dissipated

to the point where it looked like a UFO.

Really?

Probably caught the tail end of the burn, so it looked like...

the spaceship was shooting flame down instead of really it was shooting it up.

Shooting flame up? Okay.

When he broke it down for me,

that he had friends working for the railroad,

and he's describing to me the device that the railroads use,

and that it's the most common thing used to weld two tracks together.

So maybe he did ignite that.

You know, we were a bunch of kids out just having a good time.

Yeah.

And the fire marshal's son...

[Laux] Mike Moore.

...put the stamp of legitimacy on this.

- Okay. - You know, who would doubt his word?

And we kept it quiet

until I couldn't keep it quiet anymore, you know.

[Laux] His story was pretty credible, but he doesn't have anything tangible.

Guess what? Mike does.

And now it really comes down to taking what Mike gave me

and comparing that to what's inside that thermal welder device

and seeing if they marry up one-to-one.

I need to get back with George

and tell him where my head's at after talking with Darrell.

And I'm not sure how he's going to take it.

[suspenseful music playing]

[music swells, ends]