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Sightings, a crash, panic, bodies, conspiracy.

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It happened in Aurora, Texas in 1897 and it's still happening today.

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Hello, I'm Tim White. On this sighting special report, we'll explore 100 years of UFO cover-up and ask this question,

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will we ever know the truth?

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On this special edition of Sightings, 100 years of UFOs. 100 years of conspiracy.

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Maybe they ought to exhume the grave and that would determine what's the truth and what's not.

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100 years of UFO eye witnesses.

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There's some type of big ship with lights all over it.

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Have we been visited by extraterrestrials?

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I am firmly and absolutely convinced that we indeed have been visited by alien beings.

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Are the real facts being hidden?

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I can't comment on UFO investigations done at RAF Red Lowe Manor.

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That's a no, then I take it.

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It's an in-depth investigation that separates truth from myth.

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I have not yet seen anything that I would consider even barely credible evidence that we've been visited.

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Fact from fiction.

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Why is the government working so hard to convince the UFO community there's nothing to it?

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Project Blue Book, Roswell, Hanger 18, Men in Black, witnesses around the world.

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On one occasion, Belgian Air Force fighters intercepted these triangular UFOs.

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And the latest footage that may be the best evidence to date that UFOs are real.

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It's a sightings in-depth and beyond special.

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UFOs, the 100 year cover-up.

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A little more than 100 years ago, the seeds of a worldwide UFO cover-up were planted in the tiny town of Aurora, Texas.

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Since then, there's a seemingly impenetrable wall that's been building up between what the government's willing to tell

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and what the public believes the government really knows.

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But now, there are cracks in that wall.

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And a recent article published in the CIA journal Studies and Intelligence

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may soon bring the whole thing tumbling down.

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And with it, 100 years of UFO cover-up.

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UFOs, unidentified flying objects.

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They've been sighted all over the world by tens of thousands of people

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caught on film and tape from Mexico City to Phoenix, Arizona.

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There are credible eyewitnesses, military officers, police officers, all echoing the same refrain.

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Something is out there and we want to know what it is.

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But despite high-tech analysis and sightings going back to the dawn of recorded history,

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there is no answer to the UFO mystery.

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Or is there?

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What does the government know that they're not telling us?

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A little discussed article sightings found in the CIA's in-house journal

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has opened a window on a previously covert world.

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The CIA's 1997 winter edition of Studies in Intelligence

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details long-denied U.S. protocols concerning UFOs,

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including revelations about systematic cover-up, disinformation, intimidation,

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and deceit by both the Air Force and the CIA.

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Jerome Clark is the author of the UFO Encyclopedia.

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I'm always amused when the CIA is accusing other government agencies of covering things up.

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I think that's inherently funny.

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I also think it's interesting that the CIA has essentially validated and claimed

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that UFO researchers have been making for a long time that the Air Force was covering stuff up about UFOs.

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That seems to be pretty obvious.

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I think the question beyond that is, what were they covering up?

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Were they covering up actual knowledge of extraterrestrial presence in the Earth's atmosphere?

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Or were they just covering up their own confusion and incompetence?

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Many researchers herald the report as an historic first step in an official admission that UFOs exist,

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but others warn, judging by past actions, this may be just another calculated attempt

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to divert attention from what the government really knows and when they knew it.

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So, ufologists agree, the days of waiting for the powers that be to reveal the truth are over.

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It's time to put the study of the UFOs on the scientific fast track,

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and it's time to expose the cover-up.

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Kevin Randall has studied UFOs for more than 25 years.

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For too long, the investigation of the UFO phenomena has been left in the hands of people who are interested in it,

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not left in the hands of people who are trained in science, people who are trained in investigative techniques.

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So, the evidence that has been gathered has not been of sufficient quality

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to convince the scientific community that there's something valid to the UFO phenomenon.

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I think if we apply strict scientific standards to the UFO phenomenon, we can find out exactly what's going on.

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Aurora, Texas, 1897, an insignificant town, an insignificant date,

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until you realize its role in the history of UFO cover-up.

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100 years ago, thousands of people all over the United States were seen airships sail across the skies,

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and when one crashed in Aurora, the modern age of ufology was born.

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Jim Mars writes about this historic crash in his recent book, Alien Agenda.

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On the morning of April the 17th, 1897, a large, silvery, cigar-shaped object floated in,

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very slowly over the town, heading in a northeasterly direction,

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slowly settling towards the earth and exploded, apparently.

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At the crash site, Jim Mars introduced me to Wally Sheraton,

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a Texas native who grew up hearing the old folks talk about the alien-looking spacecraft

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and has spent years studying the legend of the Aurora crash.

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The central question, Wally, is whether or not something 100 years ago crashed here.

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Do you think anything did?

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Well, I try to keep an open mind.

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I'm skeptical, but I think I believe something happened.

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Now, whether it was a crash or not...

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This is the area. There was maybe an explosion, maybe there wasn't.

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It fell to the ground, the pilot was rescued from the wreckage and died shortly thereafter.

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But despite shocking accounts from those at the crash site,

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the story was buried in the back of the newspaper.

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Descriptions of a being not of this earth are barely worthy of mention,

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but this sentence, reporting the Christian burial of what in modern terms would be called an extraterrestrial being,

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links the past to the present.

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Somewhere in this cemetery lies the body, not of this earth.

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What was on the headstone?

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Well, I will sketch it out for you.

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It was an inverted V with a little circle and then a space and then two more little circles like portholes.

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The diagram on the headstone was not a typical grave marker.

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It was really intriguing because I have been around these little rural cemeteries up here in North Texas for years

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and I'm very familiar with the Confederate graves and some of the old headstones

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and this was not like anything I'd ever seen.

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Did anybody ever bother to dig?

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As far as I know, Bill Case and I went back and both wrote stories for our respective papers

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and just simply raised the question about maybe they ought to exhume the grave

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and that would, you know, maybe determine what's the truth and what's not.

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Well, immediately the people up here just got in an uproar

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and in fact they put a police guard on this cemetery for about two weeks or so

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until everything kind of died down and then just a night or two after they pulled the police guard away

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the tombstone was taken by somebody and has never been seen since.

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Some say that the disappearance of the headstone smacks of a cover-up

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preventing further exploration of the site to determine if an alien body is buried here.

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The crash at Aurora stands out because it is the first in a 100-year history

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of UFO encounters and reports of alien bodies buried by time and official cover-up.

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Aurora was the first but it would certainly not be the last.

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By the spring of 1897, Suddings had spread all across the United States.

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The objects were called airships and most people thought of these things

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as somebody's secret aviation breakthrough.

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They thought that these were advanced aircraft that some American inventor had test flown.

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And was soon going to announce his invention to the world.

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But the first piloted flight of anything at all was still more than a decade away.

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There was also an undercurrent of speculation about extraterrestrial visitation.

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There was some talk that maybe these things were actually Martian aircraft.

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Time is the enemy in the Aurora case and Mars has little to go on to prove the extraterrestrial theory.

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This is a classic example of mine said depends on who you talk to.

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Some of the people who talk to the old folks who say, yeah, I was here to happen.

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Then obviously they believe that it really all happened.

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Those who talk to others and they say, no, I was just hoax and that's what they believe.

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And until some hard evidence surfaces which I'm not holding my breath for,

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I'm not sure there's anybody can say anything for certain.

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Inevitably the 100-year history of UFO conspiracy is also the 100-year history of UFO hoaxes

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and the lengths to which some of the hoaxers will go to get their kicks is truly amazing.

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Ufologists are constantly at odds with these masters of trickery,

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but in at least one instance it is a hoax that actually provides us with a template

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for how the government creates and maintains a cover store.

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I suspect that UFOs may actually fall into two different categories.

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One is that her hoax is done by humans and one is that her hoax is done by aliens.

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In California's Mojave Desert, Keith Henson recreates one of his most historic UFO hoaxes.

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I suppose one might say that UFO faking was my 1960s equivalent of graffiti.

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So we wrote graffiti across the sky and people attributed it to aliens.

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As a college student, Henson released scores of flying lanterns over the skies of Tucson and Prescott, Arizona.

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Several were cited and reported as UFOs.

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There's an awful lot of people like me around to do this kind of thing.

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The two guys in England who were faking the crop circles, who were going out and making the crop circles,

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are examples of the UFO people, the guys that do it.

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And there's been a number of others, most of whom I haven't gotten caught.

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I don't quite understand why more of them don't get reported.

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In 1962, one of Henson's balloons was not only cited by the public,

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but also received an official explanation from the Air Force.

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The military insisted that the sighting was neon reflecting off low-lying clouds.

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It's a clear indication that the government feels compelled to invent an explanation and then pantilate as the truth.

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Here we go.

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And there it goes.

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Henson's low-tech approach was effective in the 1960s,

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but in the new age of ufology, hoaxes are more easily exposed

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and inevitably the number of truly inexplicable sightings has been greatly reduced.

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Jim Wilson is science and technology editor for Popular Mechanics Magazine.

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I have not yet seen anything that I would consider even barely credible evidence that we've been visited at any time in the past,

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and I tend to dismiss all of the claims of current sightings.

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Carl Flock, a former employee of both the Pentagon and the CIA, disagrees.

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He finds ample evidence that UFOs are real.

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What we've got is a very substantial body of evidence that clearly demonstrates UFOs are real,

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and there are a large proportion of those I suspect we will discover are unusual natural phenomena.

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But when you get rid of those, what you've got is some kind of unusual craft that came here from elsewhere.

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But when the craft is not coming from elsewhere, when the explanation is clear and simple,

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why have the official reports been less than honest?

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Psychotherapist Howard Schachter has studied the psychology of hoaxes

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and how government officials might play on their weaknesses.

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UFO experts end up arguing at conferences in journals or magazines more about the veracity,

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the truth of the particular events, than actually going out and doing the work that they need to do to investigate other cases.

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Confusion has its costs.

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For ufology, confusion creates chaos, and perhaps chaos is part of the grand design of the UFO cover-up.

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One wonders how many UFO reports there will be tonight.

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Coming up on sightings, the saucers arrive and the military is caught off guard.

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I spied something out there, it was kind of bright.

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Didn't know if it was an air craft or what it was.

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Later, compelling new information surfaces and the strangest UFO case in history is closer to being solved.

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That is the first time that I and I think anyone else working on this case have ever heard that there was a long-term effect that had never previously been reported.

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And men in black wage war on UFO eyewitnesses.

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Between 1897 and 1940, public ignorance was the government's best friend.

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Undocumented UFO sightings could easily be dismissed as anecdotal accounts by people who just didn't know the difference between a biplane and a whooping crane.

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But with the outbreak of World War II came the invention of inexpensive portable cameras, the widespread use of radar,

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and most important of all, a vigilant public trained to watch the skies know the difference between friend and foe.

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Suddenly, just calling into question the credibility of the eyewitnesses wasn't going to be enough.

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In the 1940s, World War II was this planet's first major air war, and aircraft came of age quickly, fueled by the Allied and the Axis war machines.

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Almost daily, new secret weapons arrived.

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Radar, sonar, buzz bombs, atomic bombs, changed the face of warfare and keeping secrets became a growth industry.

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But there was one type of flying machine that slipped in among the ranks and remains a mystery to this day.

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They were small, glowing craft that defied known aerodynamic principles. They were dubbed the Foo Fighters.

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Foo Fighters were the modern UFO phenomenon by another name. They were given that name during World War II, and these were several varieties of phenomena.

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Some of them looked like amorphous lights, some of them looked like structured objects.

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They were seen by bombing crews in the European theater, also the Asian theater.

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They were seen by pilots and combatants on both the Allied and Axis side.

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What it most likely was was a poxia, which is a condition when you don't get enough oxygen.

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This is probably what was happening to these pilots. They were beginning to nod off a little bit.

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But for those who saw the Foo Fighters for themselves, a poxia is a ludicrous explanation.

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Robert May was a tail gunner in New Zealand during World War II. He is still baffled by his sighting more than 50 years later.

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I spied something out there. It was kind of bright. I didn't know if it was an aircraft or what it was.

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I'd say it was probably traveling at a fairly decent speed, maybe 200 miles an hour, 300 miles an hour.

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And it was coming toward it, but it was coming in a bright light.

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That's what made it so odd that we could not identify it. We all knew exactly whatever, whatever enemy aircraft it was.

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We knew who it was. We thought it was very easy because that's one of the things we learned real quick.

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The Foo Fighters sound very much like what people report as UFOs to dance.

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Also extremely unlikely that they were hallucinations caused by oxygen deprivation because there were multiple witnesses to these things.

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It wasn't just a single pilot going off the beam, but you'd have whole crews and sometimes crews of more than one aircraft reporting the same appearance of these objects.

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The military did its best to explain away the Foo Fighters, but there were several stubborn sightings that defined classification.

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Each side assumed that they were some secret weapon that was developed by the other.

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It was only after World War II when we knew what was going on that both sides figured out that neither side had these things and there was no explanation for them.

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The military kept countless reports on pilot sightings of Foo Fighters, but kept them secret until just recently.

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But one major wartime sighting was too massive to hide.

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In February of 1942, there were all these sightings of strange flashing maneuvering lights in the sky over Los Angeles.

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There was a mass panic in which it was believed that the city was under air attack and I think what the thought was is that the Japanese fleet had put carriers off the coast and they were attacking.

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Anti-aircraft batteries opened up on them and just fired and fired and fired for about two hours straight without hitting anything, without bringing anything down.

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And there's no question that there were things in the sky, you know, thousands of people saw them.

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The Japanese had not attacked.

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Official explanations at the time ranged from false alarm to unidentified airplanes and to this day there has never been a satisfactory answer made public.

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The detonation of the atomic bombs polarized the world and the secrecy of the atomic program infected every branch of the US government.

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Through World War II, government and science came much closer together.

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They had won this great war and beaten these enormously nasty and powerful foes.

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And so they come out of the war, you know, with great confidence and confidence is fine but the dark twin brother of confidence is arrogance.

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After World War II, the seeds of arrogance were sown and grew into a new kind of government program.

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Black projects, military tests, so top secret most of the Congress didn't know what was going on.

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It was at this point that UFO sightings increased dramatically and were sucked into the burgeoning vortex of silence.

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But the hands-off approach to UFO sightings that had worked so well for the government in the past stopped working in the summer of 1947 when Americans began to demand answers.

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1947 was the year that captured everybody's imagination and it was the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24th, 1947 that was the thing, the real catalyst that excited this.

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This is the voice of Kenneth Arnold describing what he had witnessed near Mount Rainier.

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They looked something like a pipe plate that was cut in half with sort of a convex triangle in the rear.

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I kept looking for their tails. They didn't have any tails. They seemed to flip and flash in the sun just like a mirror.

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They didn't fly in a conventional formation that's taught in our army. They seemed to kind of weave in and out right above the mountaintops.

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He saw nine disshaped objects flying at a speed that he first estimated at about 1700 miles per hour.

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Other sightings began to occur very quickly in the Northwest particularly. The objects were frequently described as disshaped and so the term flying saucers took hold.

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It's important about 1947. This is the first time that the flying saucer phenomenon was widely reported throughout the country.

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It was the first time that the extraterrestrial phenomenon was suggested as a possible explanation.

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It was the first time that we really discussed in serious veins the idea of alien visitation to the United States, to the world if you will.

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The granddaddy of the UFO reports, the UFO crash at Roswell took place in early July 1947, just two weeks after Arnold made his report.

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That sighting, the Roswell case tended to set the tone for the UFO investigation by the government from that point.

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The Roswell incident was first reported in a press release issued by the Army on July the 8th, claiming that the military had recovered a crashed disk.

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However, by the next morning the story had changed and the crashed disk was now just a weather balloon.

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But it was that original report that most ufologists told to be the only true account of the Roswell crash.

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Up until the Roswell incident took place, there was a lot of discussion about what flying saucers were, were they extraterrestrial, were they interplanetary, were they secret experiments, were they rockets.

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But suddenly, government doesn't want us to discuss it anymore. The tone of secrecy is set by the 1947 wave because of the events that took place in 1947.

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The tone of secrecy established by the government in 1947 worked for quite a while.

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Roswell would remain a secret for nearly 30 years before a few of the old timers finally started to talk.

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And once they did, the government couldn't do anything about it except coin a new phrase.

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We can neither confirm nor deny.

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Coming up next on Sightings, more than a half century after the legendary crash in the desert, the Roswell mystery lingers on.

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Will we ever know the truth?

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Later, a Boy Scout troop has a close encounter in the Florida wilderness.

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Everybody wanted to be in the front. They were afraid that something was going to get them if they were the last guy, so they wanted to be in the front.

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And secrets can be kept in this country and around the world.

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Royal Air Force Rudd-Lomanna was indeed the coordination point for official UFO investigations.

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The United States of America

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1947 is considered by many ufologists to be the single most important year of the 100-year history of UFO cover-up.

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It was the 50th anniversary of the UFO crash in Aurora, Texas.

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It was the year we first heard the phrase, flying saucer.

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And it was the year the world first heard of a small desert town in southeastern New Mexico.

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A name that would become synonymous with cover-up.

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I have examined all eyewitness reports from all over the country.

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And after numerous calculations, my figures are conclusive.

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Of all the items in our stock catalog, there is only one which would have the high velocity and low wind resistance of flying saucers.

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The cover of a GI trash can.

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Your tax dollars at work, circa 1962.

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It was standard operating procedure for all branches of the military to turn the UFO threat into a joke.

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And that's still the way the military treats the phenomenon, publicly at least.

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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

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I'm sure I'd like to show you this book, tell you it's $18 and the head's for the door,

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but there are two armed guards right there and they're not going to let me out of that easily.

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But the report Colonel John Haynes is referring to is no joke.

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It is the government's last word on the Roswell incident.

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At this historic press conference in 1997, Colonel Haynes attempted humor,

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and his thinly veiled contempt for those genuinely interested in the Roswell crash,

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make him the perfect military spokesperson.

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We're confident once the report is out and digested by the public

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that this will be the final word on the Roswell incident.

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The conclusion of the first report left no doubt that what was recovered near Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947

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was debris from a formerly top secret Army Air Force's research project, code name Mogul.

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Mogul was an attempt to acoustically detect Soviet nuclear blast and ballistic missile launches.

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Colonel Haynes is quoting directly from Case Closed, written by retired military Captain Jim McAndrew.

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A lot of people have come out recently with various theories about what really happened at Roswell.

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But I did the research over a three-year period and published two books.

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What we found out is that there were actually a series of actual occurrences in the Roswell area.

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However, they were not of extraterrestrial origin.

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They were Air Force scientific research projects conducted from Alamogordo, New Mexico, at Holloman Air Force Base.

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They were balloon-borne projects, and the balloons would typically float over and land in the vicinity of Roswell.

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What was reported accurately in 1947 were a collection of tinfoil paper, rubber, and sticks that were found in a field north of Roswell.

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Over the years, Roswell has grown just like a fish story.

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It's gone from tinfoil paper, rubber, and sticks from one site to two, three, four sites, and now two up anywhere up to eight alien bodies over a period of 40 years.

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The press ate it up, but hardcore ufologists were unimpressed.

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The Air Force has been using the project Mogul explanation for over two years,

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and it is only the latest in a series of different explanations that the Air Force has given since 1947,

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each time claiming that that explanation was the final word on Roswell.

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When you hear the word Roswell, that sums up everything about government cover-up, crash-flying saucers, daily alien beings, and all of that.

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The Air Force, in dealing with Roswell, has given us a kind of textbook example of how bureaucracy deals with things it doesn't want to deal with.

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In the initial instance, we had a recovery of this strange material.

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We had a zealous officer in the midst of all this excitement about flying discs at the time,

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and pushing the envelope and making an announcement that he shouldn't have made that they'd recovered one of those flying saucers,

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the Air Force then had to scramble to protect a secret project. Everything was quiet after that.

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Subsequently, the Air Force had a standard line.

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When anyone inquired about flying saucers, they said, we don't do that anymore, don't bother us.

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And, in fact, maybe the military was onto something when they decided to address all UFO stories with the same carefully worded stock phrases.

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Because, during the most recent press conference on Roswell, it seemed like the more Colonel Haynes talked, the more incredible the Air Force story became.

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The Air Force regret not be classifying some of this information sooner rather than just the last few years.

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Right question. Nothing in here was ever classified. In the first report, everything was classified in the 70s.

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To ufologists, Haynes' contradictory statement is just more classic bureaucratic back peddling.

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But what came next, they say, is just downright absurd. It was the Air Force explanation for this.

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Charges that there were alien bodies recovered at the Roswell crash site.

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Their theory? Claims of alien bodies at Roswell are really misidentifications of dead and injured pilots and crash dummies seen around the country in the 1950s and 60s.

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It was actually a combination of anthropomorphic test dummies and aircraft accident victims, which really, unfortunately, someone has brought into the Roswell myth because the descriptions of these so-called bodies are very clearly aircraft accident victims.

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The problem is, these tests did not begin until 1953 and the Roswell event was 1947.

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But that minor detail is no problem for Air Force logic.

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And I think it's logical to assume that the people there saw Air Force ambulances come out. They saw gurneys come out. They saw body bags come out because the dummies were put into body bags to protect them.

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They saw people in pith helmets. They saw people in shorts out there brushing the bushes looking for the remnants of the balloons.

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And when you put all that stuff together and spin it, you find that it fits perfectly with many of the occurrences in Roswell during that era.

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People are not talking about balloons or earthly aircraft, even unusual earthly aircraft, and they're not talking about crash test dummies or the bodies of human pilots.

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They're not talking about some very strange residue in metal and some very strange looking bodies. You can discard all that testimony if you want.

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But if you're trying to make a case and using the eyewitness testimony selectively, I think that you're probably not constructing an honest case.

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Support for Clark's claim that the flying disc recovered near Roswell was anything but a top secret balloon comes from an unlikely source.

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One is an editor for Popular Mechanics and the author of this in-depth report on the crash at Roswell.

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At the time we wrote our article, we suggested that there was one of two possible explanations for the Roswell episode.

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One was that it was a crashed version of an early UFO that was on the going tests.

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A number of people came forward to us with what they claimed was evidence of UFO sightings.

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The other was that it was a craft of Japanese design.

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Since then I think the evidence has been pointing more toward the Japanese craft.

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The most compelling piece of evidence we found had to do with a fragment of material that was found at the second Roswell crash site, what's referred to as the Hubcorn crash site.

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This piece of metal was debunked as being of extraterrestrial origin, but it was identified as having been made using a metallurgical technique that was developed a very long time ago by Japanese jewelry makers.

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And this tended to push us in the direction of believing that the vehicle that crashed in Roswell was perhaps of a Japanese design and may have indeed carried a Japanese pilot.

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There's absolutely no evidence that the bodies recovered at Roswell were Japanese, not to mention the fact that the people who were on the scene, the eyewitnesses would have recognized the bodies of Japanese because those are human and they did not do so.

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But whether the craft and bodies recovered by the military in 1947 were earthly or alien, Randall, Wilson and many other Roswell investigators do share common ground in their belief that the Air Force is not yet telling the whole story.

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Are you confident that you're not part of any cover-up, willingly or unwittingly?

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I'm totally confident, but I think Colonel Weaver, you might have seen him on TV earlier, said at Vest, we can't even keep single secrets. How could we have a conspiracy or a cover-up?

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One thing we're learning about is all the really disturbing things that government did to us in the 40s and 50s during that period of great arrogance and confidence where the ends were seen as justifying means.

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Radiation experiments conducted on, you know, innocent citizens without warning them, CIA officers being given LSD without being told what was happening to them and being the subject of essentially human experimentation.

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All these things have come out and we certainly hope that they aren't continuing, but there is no question that they did happen.

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And that, in fact, contrary to a cliche that we all hear, the government is perfectly capable of keeping secrets.

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Roswell may get the press, but it was by no means the only suspicious UFO-related crash of the era.

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And it certainly was not the only case during that time that would pit the military against the public in a game of hide the truth.

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Coming up next on CITINGS, was it all a hoax or did this man really see alien bodies inside Hanger 18?

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There was a silvery gleaming disc shaped spacecraft standing on a tripod landing gear. Apparently it made an automatic landing after its occupants had died.

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And later, the best evidence, UFOs caught on tape.

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I have no idea what this thing is.

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Everyone has an explanation, but there's holes to basically everything we found.

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The suspicious crash and subsequent government response in Roswell, New Mexico, marked the beginning of a critical era in the 100-year history of UFO cover-up.

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The public was demanding more and more information about an alarming increase in the number of UFO sightings.

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And the government was starting to give fewer and fewer details about what they knew.

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The UFO Cold War had begun.

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One thing we're learning about is all the really disturbing things that government did to us in the 40s and 50s.

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And we know that there are things even from the early history of the Cold War that are just now emerging.

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And some of these things could conceivably involve government UFO investigations, government knowledge of UFO evidence.

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One thing we have to take a look at is that the government is very good at keeping secrets regardless of what people say.

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They kept the atomic secrets. They were very careful to make sure nobody spilled that secret before the end of the Second World War.

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Suddenly they've got a much bigger secret that we're not alone in the universe.

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From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, government programs were devised to study and, in the eyes of most UFO researchers, discredit the UFO phenomenon.

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There was Project Sine, Project Grunge, and then the most unsecret secret project of all.

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Project Blue Book has been much maligned, I think, rightly so after a certain point.

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The investigations were not being conducted as objectively or as effectively as they should have been or could have been.

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Nonetheless, there was a lot of material gathered and there's a tremendous body of data there that is very useful to us and that needs to be mined and thoroughly studied.

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Project Blue Book may have been nothing more than a thinly veiled public relations unit, but, say some of you ufologists,

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the real work of UFO cover-up was going on only a few hundred yards away from Blue Book headquarters in a top secret building at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, known as Hangar 18.

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Rumors of alien bodies and crashed flying saucers circulated among a handful of UFO researchers.

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Then, in the early 1970s, ufologist Robert Carr made this extraordinary claim at a national UFO conference.

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It is known throughout the academic world, the medical world, it is known throughout the Air Force, and above all, it is known throughout the CIA that the air intelligence at Wright Patterson Field has, in its possession,

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a spacecraft, a silvery gleaming disc-shaped spacecraft standing on a tripod landing gear.

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Apparently, it made an automatic landing after its occupants had died.

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Robert Carr was the government's best friend.

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He was a showman, a man who called himself a professor and a doctor, yet he had no advanced degree.

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It was Child's play to discredit him and his claims of saucers and bodies at Wright Pat.

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Even Carr's own son, in this recent article for the Skeptical Inquirer, debunks his father's story as an outright fabrication.

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But Carr's credibility notwithstanding, could there be a germ of truth in Carr's original statement?

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Based on the evidence that we have accumulated, based on the eyewitness testimony, the remains of the saucer picked up at Roswell were taken to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in July of 1947.

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Officially, Wright Patterson was the home office for the Air Force's Project Blue Book.

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Unofficially, it is also believed to have been the home of recovered flying saucers and alien bodies, and not just because of the questionable claims made by the late Robert Carr.

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Men working in the secret catacombs underneath this military installation also had stories to tell.

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Among them was Air Force Officer Jack Donahue, who told family members that he had witnessed the autopsies of extraterrestrial creatures.

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My uncle Jack had a top-secret security clearance when he worked at Wright Patterson the complete time.

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The strangest story that he ever accounted to me was the day that he asked me if I had heard of a UFO crash out in Phoenix, Arizona.

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He said, we have the bodies from the crash. He said, we went down to the cold storage area.

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There was a stainless steel table in this room that was arranged a little bit like a laboratory.

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The man said, look at this. Jack looked at the body. Jack told me that at the time they were doing full autopsies on the bodies.

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The head was shaped basically like a human head, only was small.

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He said, we better not spend very much time here, and they left the room.

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I tried to bring it up at a later date. He said, forget him. Just forget about the whole incident.

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And I said, what do you mean forget it? He said, just forget it. It never happened.

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We've talked to people who were on the aircraft flights. We've talked to people who knew the destination.

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We've talked to people who were at Wright-Patterson at the time and said the material got there.

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We know that it was held there for a period of time. What we don't know is if it's still there.

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Wright-Patt would be the logical next stop for a recovered saucer, because the base was home to the military's foreign technology division where German and Japanese weapons were being reverse engineered.

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Back engineering or reverse engineering is a process of taking an unknown product and dismantling it or otherwise probing it and trying to work out backwards as it were what makes it tick.

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And in fact, after 1947, there was a significant number of saucer shaped aircraft designs coming out of Wright-Patterson.

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The level of the U.S. involvement in saucer shaped craft has always been downplayed.

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And it wasn't until the release as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request that we really had a very good idea of just how actively the United States was pursuing saucer shaped craft technology in the 1950s.

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Two top secret projects only recently declassified offer corroborating evidence that reverse engineering was an important and significant part of post-war engineering advances.

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First, there was Operation Paperclip.

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Operation Paperclip was put into use at the end of World War II when the Americans, as well as the Allies and of course the Russians wanted to acquire as many of the Nazi scientists as they could, those who had been dealing with particularly missile technology, nuclear technology and so forth.

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And we now know that the secrets learned through Operation Paperclip propel the U.S. in a new direction into outer space.

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Bless is known, however, about another top secret project.

393
00:42:02,000 --> 00:42:11,000
Silverbug was a report prepared for the intelligence community on the type of work that was being done within the United States to develop a circular type of aircraft.

394
00:42:11,000 --> 00:42:20,000
One of the things we show in our magazine article is patent drawings of parts of these different aircraft that actually came out of Germany.

395
00:42:20,000 --> 00:42:25,000
We know for a fact that several saucer type airframes were built.

396
00:42:25,000 --> 00:42:35,000
I would not be surprised if some of the craft that people reported having seen in very secret hangars were not in fact these airframes.

397
00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:38,000
But Wilson's contention is not universal.

398
00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:45,000
The only saucer shaped craft that were ever developed by the United States government proved to be basic failures.

399
00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:51,000
There was the Avro cars that was called, it was developed jointly with the Canadians in the 50s that didn't work.

400
00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:56,000
There was the flying flapjack, the Navy craft, they built one prototype and that was that.

401
00:42:56,000 --> 00:43:03,000
So essentially with the Earthly saucers there really has never been anything particularly successful.

402
00:43:03,000 --> 00:43:09,000
In recent years the government has had success in developing small unmanned flying saucers.

403
00:43:09,000 --> 00:43:18,000
These remotely piloted vehicles called RPVs are airborne drones designed to fly into enemy territory where human pilots would be at risk.

404
00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:29,000
Today there are things flying which could readily be thought of as flying saucers but don't come from anywhere other than places like General Dynamics or Lockheed or elsewhere.

405
00:43:29,000 --> 00:43:35,000
But the archetypal flying saucer profile is not the only shape of unearthly things to come.

406
00:43:35,000 --> 00:43:46,000
As military technology changes so do UFO sightings reports convincing Jim Wilson that UFOs are nothing more than misidentifications of experimental but very earthly aircraft.

407
00:43:46,000 --> 00:43:56,000
If you go back and you look at the classical UFO description of a craft coming out of the sky very suddenly appearing to briefly hover and then shoot off as it changes colors.

408
00:43:56,000 --> 00:44:03,000
What you're describing is a SR-71 during one of its maneuvers to begin an operation.

409
00:44:03,000 --> 00:44:16,000
In order to conserve energy and fuel this aircraft and many other types of aircraft that traveled faster than the speed of sound would perform a maneuver that the SR-71 pilots would call a Dipsy Doodle.

410
00:44:16,000 --> 00:44:30,000
It would climb to an altitude of perhaps say 33,000 feet and then it would begin a descent past beyond the sound barrier, come upward and shoot off to high altitude.

411
00:44:31,000 --> 00:44:39,000
The early training flights of the SR-71 do explain quite a few of the sightings which occurred along the experimental craft's flight path.

412
00:44:39,000 --> 00:44:46,000
But not every sighting falls in line with Jim Wilson's description of the SR-71's aerodynamic capabilities.

413
00:44:46,000 --> 00:44:50,000
And not every sighting was made by untrained eyes.

414
00:44:50,000 --> 00:44:57,000
A startling number of sightings in the 1950s were made by military personnel who are only now coming forward.

415
00:44:58,000 --> 00:45:05,000
Coming up, he was a respected member of the community, a scoutmaster, and then he saw a UFO.

416
00:45:05,000 --> 00:45:15,000
He was fired, he was discharged as a scout leader, he was labeled a liar and a cheater.

417
00:45:15,000 --> 00:45:19,000
But the government did believe his story and their documents prove it.

418
00:45:19,000 --> 00:45:24,000
It's the most puzzling UFO incident of the last four decades, next on Sightings.

419
00:45:27,000 --> 00:45:51,000
In 1952, five years after the crash at Roswell, New Mexico, something the government said couldn't possibly be happening was happening all over the United States.

420
00:45:51,000 --> 00:46:01,000
And when a phalanx of UFOs invaded the sacred triangle of airspace between the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon, the military had to respond.

421
00:46:10,000 --> 00:46:18,000
In the summer of 1952, one of the most enormous waves in the history of the UFO phenomenon erupts all over the United States.

422
00:46:18,000 --> 00:46:26,000
And it is climaxed by a really startling series of incidents which happened in Washington, D.C. in July.

423
00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:34,000
When all kinds of objects are seen over the nation's capitals, tracked on radars by three airports in the Washington, D.C. area.

424
00:46:34,000 --> 00:46:37,000
Newspaper reporter Stephen Johnson.

425
00:46:37,000 --> 00:46:47,000
The U.S. Air Force was concerned enough about it that they scrambled quite a few flights of aircraft over a several-week period to pursue these radar sightings.

426
00:46:47,000 --> 00:46:53,000
Some of the pilots, when they got airborne, were able to get radar fixes on these objects and pursue them.

427
00:46:53,000 --> 00:47:07,000
There's so much alarm that the intelligence channels are clogged up that if the Soviet Union or some other enemy had chosen that moment to invade the United States, there's no way the messages would have gotten through.

428
00:47:07,000 --> 00:47:16,000
The Washington, D.C. sightings made international headlines. The security breach was of grave concern to our strongest ally, Great Britain.

429
00:47:16,000 --> 00:47:20,000
Prime Minister Winston Churchill reportedly resented being kept in the dark.

430
00:47:20,000 --> 00:47:25,000
Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill demanded to know from his air staff what was going on.

431
00:47:25,000 --> 00:47:28,000
And several weeks went by and the answer came back from the air staff.

432
00:47:28,000 --> 00:47:31,000
Prime Minister, there's nothing to worry about. It's all nonsense.

433
00:47:31,000 --> 00:47:38,000
Even the radar sightings can be explained in terms of pigeons with metal rings around their legs. There's nothing to it at all.

434
00:47:38,000 --> 00:47:39,000
Wrong.

435
00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:50,000
The Prime Minister was misinformed by his obviously ignorant air staff because at that very time the authorities in the States were desperately concerned about the UFO phenomenon.

436
00:47:50,000 --> 00:47:58,000
They even acknowledged that 20% of official reports from pilots and so forth could not be explained at that time.

437
00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:05,000
And the American public was seeing more and more saucers every day. And then along came Delbert Newhouse.

438
00:48:05,000 --> 00:48:13,000
Delbert Newhouse was a Navy photographer. And he and his family were traveling near Trementon, Utah in July 1952.

439
00:48:13,000 --> 00:48:22,000
When he and his wife looked out the window of their car and saw these silvery, disc-shaped objects maneuvering and banking in the sky.

440
00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:28,000
And Newhouse grabbed his movie camera, ran outside and took film of these.

441
00:48:28,000 --> 00:48:36,000
This is among the first UFO films ever shot. And after more than 45 years these objects remain unexplained.

442
00:48:36,000 --> 00:48:41,000
And the fact that they were captured by a Navy photographer makes this sighting unimpeachable.

443
00:48:41,000 --> 00:48:54,000
Mr. Newhouse spent his career in the U.S. Navy aviation and he was unable to even place these objects as being something close to an experimental vehicle.

444
00:48:54,000 --> 00:49:02,000
The Newhouse film provides an extremely rare opportunity to see what tens of thousands of Americans were seen in 1952.

445
00:49:02,000 --> 00:49:08,000
Never before or since have so many UFOs been reported by credible eyewitnesses.

446
00:49:08,000 --> 00:49:13,000
And the blue book sightings for 1952 are ten times larger than for any other year.

447
00:49:13,000 --> 00:49:22,000
One sighting during the Great American Flap of 1952 stands out as a landmark case in the 100-year history of UFO cover-up.

448
00:49:22,000 --> 00:49:34,000
On August 19, 1952, in West Palm Beach, Florida, scout master Sonny Disvergers was driving home with some of his scouts when he claimed to have been burned by a flying saucer attack.

449
00:49:34,000 --> 00:49:38,000
Does this look like it is the place, Chuck, or can you tell for sure?

450
00:49:38,000 --> 00:49:40,000
It just looks somewhat like it, yeah.

451
00:49:40,000 --> 00:49:41,000
I mean, I just pull off into here.

452
00:49:41,000 --> 00:49:50,000
Carl Flock has located one of the eyewitnesses to the historic UFO encounter. Chuck Stevens was a 12-year-old boy scout in 1952.

453
00:49:50,000 --> 00:49:52,000
Okay, now let's see.

454
00:49:54,000 --> 00:49:57,000
Now you guys, you stayed with the car back on the road, is that right?

455
00:49:57,000 --> 00:49:58,000
Yes, we did.

456
00:49:58,000 --> 00:50:03,000
Okay, and then he, let's see, he came in straight off the road and straight back into here?

457
00:50:03,000 --> 00:50:05,000
Went straight back into the woods, yes.

458
00:50:06,000 --> 00:50:15,000
Carl hoped to jog Chuck's memory of the event by walking him back to the area where the scouts had had their terrifying UFO encounter.

459
00:50:15,000 --> 00:50:25,000
Well, I believe initially when we were heading south on the military trail, we saw one white light where light shouldn't be.

460
00:50:27,000 --> 00:50:35,000
Chuck recalled the night clearly. The weekly scout meeting had just ended and scout master Disvergers was taking Chuck and two of his friends home.

461
00:50:36,000 --> 00:50:44,000
Suddenly, lights appeared in the sky over a stretch of deserted farmland and Disvergers first thought that a plane may have crashed.

462
00:50:46,000 --> 00:50:51,000
The scout master stopped the car and Chuck recalls watching the lights hover overhead for several minutes.

463
00:50:51,000 --> 00:50:57,000
When the lights didn't move on, sunny Disvergers got out of the car and told the boys to wait there.

464
00:50:58,000 --> 00:51:07,000
If he wasn't back in 15 minutes, he told the boys they were to run to a nearby farmhouse and call the sheriff.

465
00:51:09,000 --> 00:51:15,000
Chuck Stevens remembers watching the scout master descend into the woods toward the UFO.

466
00:51:15,000 --> 00:51:22,000
The boys waited, unaware that sunny Disvergers would eventually re-emerge with a fantastic story to tell.

467
00:51:28,000 --> 00:51:36,000
We were running down the middle of the road. Everybody wanted to be in the front.

468
00:51:36,000 --> 00:51:42,000
They were afraid that something was going to get them if they were the last guy, so they wanted to be in the front.

469
00:51:42,000 --> 00:51:46,000
When you were running, could you still see the lights up in the trees?

470
00:51:46,000 --> 00:51:50,000
Oh, no. The lights were behind us and hopefully real far behind us.

471
00:51:50,000 --> 00:51:53,000
I see. Okay. So you were trying to put those behind you for sure, right?

472
00:51:53,000 --> 00:52:01,000
Yes, definitely. When we got to the farmhouse, we called the deputy, the sheriff, and he came out and picked us up and took us back.

473
00:52:01,000 --> 00:52:10,000
And when we got back to the sunny's car, about that time sunny was coming out of the woods.

474
00:52:10,000 --> 00:52:15,000
In the official report, the deputy noted that sunny's uniform was charred.

475
00:52:15,000 --> 00:52:19,000
He had burns on his face and arms, but the UFO was nowhere to be seen.

476
00:52:19,000 --> 00:52:29,000
And the deputy had only sunny Disvergers word for what had really happened. Chuck Stevens does recall, however, evidence of the UFO encounter blanketed the site.

477
00:52:29,000 --> 00:52:41,000
On the pine trees, where a limb had broken off, like an example, this spot right here, it had popped out and the sap was running down the tree.

478
00:52:41,000 --> 00:52:48,000
I see. And was there any other evidence of the incident? Anything that was dropped on him?

479
00:52:48,000 --> 00:52:55,000
The vegetation around there was wilted, looked like what I took from intense heat.

480
00:52:55,000 --> 00:53:10,000
And we had reportings later that their findings was that the soil in the area that sunny had indicated was singed or heated immensely, 16 to 18 inches below the ground surface.

481
00:53:10,000 --> 00:53:21,000
Now, declassified blue book files back up the remembrances of a 12 year old boy and the once secret report reveals that it isn't just ufologists who've been interested in this case.

482
00:53:21,000 --> 00:53:29,000
Page after page of data, photo after photo of the site, physical evidence taken by Air Force personnel just hours after the incident.

483
00:53:29,000 --> 00:53:33,000
It's all still part of the government file on the Scoutmaster incident.

484
00:53:33,000 --> 00:53:49,000
The one feature of this case that is extremely puzzling because otherwise it could easily be written off and would have been a long time ago as a hoax, is the physical evidence embodied in the vegetation that was collected by the Air Force.

485
00:53:49,000 --> 00:53:55,000
Although there are some possible ways to explain it, nobody has satisfactorily done so today, as far as I know.

486
00:53:55,000 --> 00:54:06,000
So why isn't this story as big as Roswell? How did the Air Force keep the lid on a UFO encounter where they had collected real physical evidence? It was simple.

487
00:54:06,000 --> 00:54:17,000
The government knew that the best way to silence the story was to let sunny disvergers keep talking. He was a braggart embellishing the story with each retelling. He was branded a liar.

488
00:54:17,000 --> 00:54:21,000
Lifelong resident Vicki Oaks remembers what happened next.

489
00:54:21,000 --> 00:54:24,000
Well, how was he treated? What was it that caused you to be...

490
00:54:24,000 --> 00:54:38,000
He was fired. He was discharged as a scout leader. And he was labeled a liar and a cheat. And I just thought that was horrible.

491
00:54:38,000 --> 00:54:45,000
Sunny dropped out of town, dropped out of sight, and has never been heard from since. All attempts to find him have failed.

492
00:54:45,000 --> 00:54:58,000
I was rather disgusted with the way the man was treated. And I thought people should have come and seen that there was something, and they should have left him alone.

493
00:54:58,000 --> 00:55:03,000
Vicki Oaks also revealed that she saw evidence of Sunny's encounter more than a year later.

494
00:55:03,000 --> 00:55:08,000
We were quite surprised to find that there wasn't any growth in that big circle.

495
00:55:08,000 --> 00:55:11,000
So it was an area, a circular area?

496
00:55:11,000 --> 00:55:25,000
It was a circular area, and it had been burned, singed or something anyway. It was there still as it had been when they left it.

497
00:55:25,000 --> 00:55:36,000
And I thought, well now, why couldn't somebody have come out and found out that his saw evidence and not treated that poor man so badly?

498
00:55:36,000 --> 00:55:46,000
That is the first time that I and I think anyone else working on this case have ever heard that. That there was a long term effect that had never previously been reported.

499
00:55:46,000 --> 00:55:56,000
Further evidence that the government was trying to keep the public away from knowing the truth comes from Lyman Bradford, who saw the 1952 UFO with his own eyes.

500
00:55:56,000 --> 00:56:02,000
And I was looking out this way, which is east, and I noticed some type of big ship with lights all over it.

501
00:56:03,000 --> 00:56:15,000
It was light enough that I got a good visual view of it, and it was descending, I would guess 60 to 70 feet above the ground level at that time.

502
00:56:15,000 --> 00:56:26,000
Lyman did what any 7-year-old would do. He ran and got his father, and his father, a machinist at the local Air Force Base, did what any of us would do. He took pictures.

503
00:56:27,000 --> 00:56:33,000
The Air Force people who came out here, they took soil samples and they took the camera.

504
00:56:33,000 --> 00:56:35,000
But the camera never came back.

505
00:56:35,000 --> 00:56:37,000
Yeah, we had the camera back.

506
00:56:37,000 --> 00:56:38,000
But the film did not come back.

507
00:56:38,000 --> 00:56:39,000
We didn't get the film.

508
00:56:39,000 --> 00:56:42,000
Do you recall if your dad tried to get the film back?

509
00:56:42,000 --> 00:56:49,000
Yes, he inquired about it two or three times, and he was told, you have to remember now that his paycheck came from there.

510
00:56:49,000 --> 00:56:52,000
And I imagine if they told him, just forget it, he probably forgot it.

511
00:56:52,000 --> 00:56:56,000
Do you recall if there was anything seen on the ground?

512
00:56:56,000 --> 00:57:05,000
Well, from what I get, yes. They came out and they took the samples, and they had a truck back in here somewhere, and they took samples.

513
00:57:05,000 --> 00:57:10,000
And there was a round circle that was, all the grass was like dead.

514
00:57:10,000 --> 00:57:12,000
It was just round circles.

515
00:57:12,000 --> 00:57:13,000
This was the following day?

516
00:57:13,000 --> 00:57:17,000
That's the following day it was all brown, yes, from heat or gas or something.

517
00:57:17,000 --> 00:57:24,000
I don't think there's any question that Lyman's story is significant because it's the first new information in the way of a possible

518
00:57:24,000 --> 00:57:33,000
sighting that might confirm what was claimed by the scoutmaster about his sighting in approximately the same time.

519
00:57:33,000 --> 00:57:40,000
And while the Air Force insists that these old Blue Book files are all they've ever had from the scoutmaster incident,

520
00:57:40,000 --> 00:57:42,000
where is Lyman Bradford's missing film?

521
00:57:42,000 --> 00:57:44,000
Where is the physical evidence being kept?

522
00:57:44,000 --> 00:57:46,000
And where is Sonny Disvergers?

523
00:57:46,000 --> 00:57:49,000
And the secrets he may have taken with him to the grave.

524
00:57:50,000 --> 00:57:58,000
Coming up next, two Texas cops are tracked by a UFO and then find themselves harassed by men and black.

525
00:57:58,000 --> 00:58:00,000
Two guys showed up at the courthouse.

526
00:58:00,000 --> 00:58:04,000
They were wearing dark suits and derby hats.

527
00:58:04,000 --> 00:58:10,000
Later on sightings, a British soldier has a terrifying encounter while protecting England's Area 51.

528
00:58:10,000 --> 00:58:16,000
It felt like a sheep didn't bend in. It was like a cone of light around us.

529
00:58:29,000 --> 00:58:38,000
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. government was extremely effective in silencing members of the military and law enforcement establishment,

530
00:58:38,000 --> 00:58:41,000
who were claiming that they had had encounters with UFOs.

531
00:58:41,000 --> 00:58:48,000
We know this now only because those same people, now in their 70s and 80s, are finally coming forward,

532
00:58:48,000 --> 00:58:51,000
because they no longer feel they have anything to lose.

533
00:58:56,000 --> 00:59:03,000
In 1951, Cold War jitters turned into full-scale panic when U.S. military personnel stationed in Iceland

534
00:59:03,000 --> 00:59:10,000
spotted several enormous UFOs. Navy Commander Graham Bethune and experts from the Pentagon and Lockheed

535
00:59:10,000 --> 00:59:12,000
were brought to Iceland to study the situation.

536
00:59:12,000 --> 00:59:15,000
Naturally, their first thought was that the craft was Soviet,

537
00:59:15,000 --> 00:59:21,000
but when Bethune and 31 other highly-trained aviation experts saw the UFO for themselves,

538
00:59:21,000 --> 00:59:24,000
they knew that this was not a Soviet threat.

539
00:59:24,000 --> 00:59:29,000
We're flying at 10,000 feet. It was a dark night, and I saw something between us and the horizon,

540
00:59:29,000 --> 00:59:34,000
about 40 miles away, on the water. It appeared as though it was a small city we were approaching.

541
00:59:34,000 --> 00:59:45,000
But as we got closer, there was a defined image of these lights, and they were in a circle, bright lights, on the water.

542
00:59:45,000 --> 00:59:47,000
And all of a sudden, the lights went out.

543
00:59:47,000 --> 00:59:52,000
The next thing was a small yellow halo on the water, I mean, really small.

544
00:59:52,000 --> 00:59:57,000
And that was about 20 or 25 miles away, and it was so big that I thought it was going to go right through us,

545
00:59:57,000 --> 01:00:04,000
so I disengaged the autopilot, pushed the nose over, and the next thing you know, I was looking at it right straight on,

546
01:00:04,000 --> 01:00:14,000
but it stopped about 200 feet below us, and maybe 1,500 feet at least that close, and it stayed there a few seconds.

547
01:00:14,000 --> 01:00:18,000
We didn't know at the time that they had tracked it, but we did find out later that they had tracked it.

548
01:00:18,000 --> 01:00:26,000
The VIP transport escaped, but just two years later, another military aircraft flying over Lake Superior would not be so lucky.

549
01:00:26,000 --> 01:00:35,000
The Kinross incident occurred on November 23, 1953, when a target was tracked at Kinross Air Force Base.

550
01:00:35,000 --> 01:00:42,000
An F-89 was sent to pursue this fast-moving, unidentified object that was being tracked on radar.

551
01:00:42,000 --> 01:00:50,000
What was observed on radar was the merging of the blip of the F-89 with the blip of the UFO, until only the UFO was left.

552
01:00:50,000 --> 01:00:57,000
It appeared to the control tower as if the F-89 and its pilot had simply been swallowed up into oblivion.

553
01:00:57,000 --> 01:01:04,000
I talked to a pilot who was in or on that base in 1953, and he told me there were two schools of thought.

554
01:01:04,000 --> 01:01:12,000
One was that the aircraft went intact into the lake, and because it went intact, it sank with no wreckage being seen on the surface.

555
01:01:12,000 --> 01:01:16,000
The other school of thought, the much larger school of thought, was that the flying saucer took it.

556
01:01:16,000 --> 01:01:20,000
That case is not in the Project Blue Book files. You would expect it to be there.

557
01:01:20,000 --> 01:01:28,000
The only reference in the Project Blue Book files is a note that this was not a UFO sighting, but it is in fact an aircraft accident debunking the entire UFO phenomenon.

558
01:01:28,000 --> 01:01:33,000
Why is the government working so hard to convince the UFO community there's nothing to it?

559
01:01:33,000 --> 01:01:36,000
Why do they care what we think?

560
01:01:36,000 --> 01:01:44,000
The only answer I can come up with is there's something to it, and they're attempting to keep that buried by taking us in the wrong direction.

561
01:01:44,000 --> 01:01:53,000
There were a few rare voices during the UFO Cold War that did speak out, and one of the most famous was a police officer named Lonnie Zamora.

562
01:01:53,000 --> 01:02:01,000
His encounter with an egg-shaped craft outside Socorro, New Mexico would change the face of ufology forever.

563
01:02:04,000 --> 01:02:12,000
Socorro is a quiet little town now, but three decades ago the place was swarming with reporters who all wanted to talk to this man.

564
01:02:12,000 --> 01:02:22,000
Lonnie Zamora remains at the center of an historic and controversial UFO event, and on this day took sightings back to the site of his 1965 close encounter.

565
01:02:22,000 --> 01:02:36,000
I could see a white object sitting between those two bushes over there, and I had to come real slow because this was a messed up road, had big rocks on it and everything.

566
01:02:36,000 --> 01:02:45,000
I got out the car and glanced down to the royal there, and I saw this white looking object.

567
01:02:45,000 --> 01:02:53,000
It was sort of a big egg shape, bigger in a car. Those were the exact bushes that were there, and the craft was sitting right in between them too.

568
01:02:53,000 --> 01:03:02,000
So I started down to see what it was, and then I heard this big boom in the bottom, and the fire came out of the bottom.

569
01:03:02,000 --> 01:03:15,000
So I started running behind my police car to take cover. I could feel the heat off of it because of the wind now, and then it gradually pulled up, up about 20, 30 feet and stayed there for a while, and then it just took off.

570
01:03:16,000 --> 01:03:22,000
Zamora called for backup, and when two state troopers arrived, they too saw the evidence.

571
01:03:22,000 --> 01:03:37,000
We came down here, and we saw this big rock right down here, and it was still on fire. And then we saw the imprints of the legs, of the craft, and it was four of them, and then we saw these footprints around here.

572
01:03:37,000 --> 01:03:45,000
It is one of the only cases in the Project Blue Book files labeled as unidentified where the witness claimed to have seen the creatures from inside the craft.

573
01:03:45,000 --> 01:04:05,000
Hector Quintanillo, who headed Project Blue Book in an utter skeptic, admitted in writing in an article that he did in the then classified CIA journal called Studies and Intelligence that this was a case they couldn't explain, and more than that, he firmly believed that Zamora really did see something, a solid flying machine of some kind that the Air Force has never been able to explain.

574
01:04:06,000 --> 01:04:14,000
This is one of the most intriguing and, to me, indicative of alien visitation cases that we've got on the books.

575
01:04:15,000 --> 01:04:27,000
The official explanation was that Lonnie Zamora had seen the test flight of a lunar lander and did not seem troubled by the fact that what Zamora described was egg-shaped and smooth, not trapezoidal and textured.

576
01:04:27,000 --> 01:04:36,000
Then, later that same year, another UFO was cited by two police officers, and this time the government couldn't come up with an explanation at all.

577
01:04:36,000 --> 01:04:46,000
At the Houston Chronicle, staff reporter Stephen Johnson has investigated what is known as the McCoy Goods Sighting. His research is now on the Chronicles website.

578
01:04:46,000 --> 01:04:58,000
And this was a 1965 siding, and these were two Brazoria County deputy sheriffs, very upright, stalwart law enforcement officers, and their siding was investigated by the Air Force.

579
01:04:58,000 --> 01:05:10,000
It was reviewed by many private UFO researchers, and their reputation was such that nobody ever really questioned their testimony about what they saw, and what they saw was very amazing.

580
01:05:11,000 --> 01:05:20,000
Using the information on the website, sightings traveled to the sleepy Texas town of Columbia. It was here that we met up with eyewitness Billy McCoy.

581
01:05:26,000 --> 01:05:39,000
McCoy has long since retired from the sheriff's department, but there are still vivid memories of a terrifying night shift he worked with partner Bob Good. It was a night that began with an alligator bite.

582
01:05:40,000 --> 01:05:51,000
Bob is the next game warden, and he had a little small two or three foot alligator in one pond. He said he was moving that alligator from that pond to another one, and it bit him on the finger.

583
01:05:51,000 --> 01:06:05,000
And he unwrapped his finger and showed his all red swollen down the back and red inflamed, kind of seeping, bloody looking water out of it. It looked pretty bad.

584
01:06:09,000 --> 01:06:23,000
At about 11 o'clock or shortly after 11, we had come back on to Highway 36, and I noticed this brilliant light back over towards the San Bernard River area.

585
01:06:23,000 --> 01:06:29,000
A smaller blue light seemed to appear right out of it and go a short ways from it and stopped.

586
01:06:30,000 --> 01:06:39,000
I called Bob's attention to it, so we pulled over to the side of the road, and that thing was right on top of us. We heard no sound.

587
01:06:39,000 --> 01:06:54,000
The purple light was pulsating. It completely inundated us in the patrol car, but I yelled, he yelled, it shot directly back, made an abrupt 90 degree turn, and it went straight up and disappeared.

588
01:06:55,000 --> 01:06:59,000
And this is where that alligator bite becomes significant to the story.

589
01:06:59,000 --> 01:07:10,000
Mr. Good had the wounded hand out the car window during the time of the sighting when this very warm, oddly colored light shone on them from the object above.

590
01:07:10,000 --> 01:07:16,000
Mr. Good's claim is that later in the evening, his finger seemed to be healed.

591
01:07:17,000 --> 01:07:24,000
And I made the statement, Bob, the good thing that happened about all this is it made you forget about your finger hurting.

592
01:07:24,000 --> 01:07:39,000
And he said, you know, that thing's not even sore. And he unwrapped his finger. The swelling was gone. He threw the bandages away, and the next day it was just almost like nothing had happened to his finger.

593
01:07:39,000 --> 01:07:46,000
Another fascinating component of this close encounter came two days later when Deputy Good was approached by two mysterious men.

594
01:07:46,000 --> 01:07:51,000
This was one of the first documented cases of what we now refer to as the men in black.

595
01:07:51,000 --> 01:07:58,000
Two guys showed up at the courthouse and asked to speak with the devotees who had had this sighting.

596
01:07:58,000 --> 01:08:02,000
They were wearing dark suits and derby hats.

597
01:08:02,000 --> 01:08:08,000
Bob says almost immediately these guys started telling him what had happened to us.

598
01:08:08,000 --> 01:08:15,000
They told him that if we had stopped and had not run from that craft, it would have landed.

599
01:08:15,000 --> 01:08:19,000
We would have been greeted by people much like we are.

600
01:08:19,000 --> 01:08:25,000
We would have been invited aboard and taken for a ride and brought back unharmed.

601
01:08:25,000 --> 01:08:27,000
We got to wondering about these guys.

602
01:08:27,000 --> 01:08:31,000
Nobody had sent anyone down that we could find to interview us about it.

603
01:08:31,000 --> 01:08:39,000
The men in black seemed to show up and visit people who had actually seen a UFO.

604
01:08:39,000 --> 01:08:47,000
And the government admits this has happened, so I'm just assuming that what happened to us is what happened to other people.

605
01:08:47,000 --> 01:08:51,000
Air Force personnel from Project Bluebook investigated the sighting.

606
01:08:51,000 --> 01:08:57,000
The Air Force determined there was no ground fog. The moon was almost full.

607
01:08:57,000 --> 01:09:02,000
They could find nothing to cause our story not to be true.

608
01:09:02,000 --> 01:09:08,000
Billy McCoy remembers that he took a lot of heat from the other deputies for not confronting the UFO.

609
01:09:10,000 --> 01:09:15,000
Well, you know, we had guns in the car.

610
01:09:15,000 --> 01:09:20,000
We had guns on our side. A lot of people have said, gosh, why didn't you shoot at that?

611
01:09:20,000 --> 01:09:23,000
Well, you're trying not to shoot at something you don't know what it is.

612
01:09:23,000 --> 01:09:25,000
If you don't know what it is.

613
01:09:25,000 --> 01:09:32,000
After observing the UFO at close range for more than 15 minutes, Billy McCoy and Bob Good could draw only one conclusion.

614
01:09:32,000 --> 01:09:43,000
I have not seen anything that would lead me to believe that we were not being viewed by some craft from another world.

615
01:09:43,000 --> 01:09:49,000
And I believe the investigating officer himself concluded that these gentlemen were eminently believable

616
01:09:49,000 --> 01:09:55,000
and that despite the strangeness of it, these individuals were telling the truth.

617
01:09:55,000 --> 01:10:03,000
In the 1960s, credible witnesses like McCoy and Zamora were effectively silenced by the threats of mysterious strangers.

618
01:10:03,000 --> 01:10:10,000
But now that all of the Blue Book files from their sightings have been declassified and serious researchers are examining the cases,

619
01:10:10,000 --> 01:10:17,000
the major players in the great close encounters of the past are coming forward to once again say, watch the skies.

620
01:10:17,000 --> 01:10:22,000
The Sikoro event had one more extraordinary impact on the world of ufology.

621
01:10:22,000 --> 01:10:27,000
Until Sikoro, Dr. J. Allen Heineck, the man who had coined the term close encounters,

622
01:10:27,000 --> 01:10:32,000
had worked on UFO investigations for the government as part of the prestigious Robertson panel.

623
01:10:32,000 --> 01:10:38,000
But Sikoro convinced Dr. Heineck that the truth about UFOs was being manipulated by the Air Force.

624
01:10:38,000 --> 01:10:42,000
And after Sikoro, Heineck left his post.

625
01:10:42,000 --> 01:10:48,000
The government lost one of its most prestigious spokesmen and gained one of its most ardent critics.

626
01:10:48,000 --> 01:10:54,000
Coming up next, a terrifying UFO encounter outside England's Area 51.

627
01:10:54,000 --> 01:11:03,000
As the soldiers sort of woke up from this nightmare experience, they found themselves 600 meters off course over in this direction.

628
01:11:03,000 --> 01:11:10,000
And later, the evidence is mounting. The latest images caught on tape at UFO hotspots around the world.

629
01:11:23,000 --> 01:11:28,000
It's only been in the last 40 years that ufologists have begun to organize and mobilize.

630
01:11:28,000 --> 01:11:33,000
The strides that have been made are impressive and with organization comes respect.

631
01:11:33,000 --> 01:11:42,000
Now that ufology is seen as less of a fringe science, it's attracting more and more defectors from the stranglehold of government secrecy.

632
01:11:48,000 --> 01:11:53,000
What's still top secret in America isn't anymore in Spain and Belgium.

633
01:11:54,000 --> 01:11:59,000
Those countries have broken rank to open up secret UFO reports for public inspection.

634
01:11:59,000 --> 01:12:02,000
But not all of Europe is so forthcoming.

635
01:12:02,000 --> 01:12:11,000
This is what happened to British ufologist Matt Williams when he tried to get a few questions answered at one particular military base in Great Britain.

636
01:12:11,000 --> 01:12:17,000
So you don't want to comment about stories that RAF Redlow Manor investigated UFOs?

637
01:12:18,000 --> 01:12:23,000
That's a no then I take it.

638
01:12:28,000 --> 01:12:34,000
When I've been to Redlow Manor, we've been stopped sometimes. The M.O.D. police are not happy about people being there.

639
01:12:34,000 --> 01:12:41,000
They have a policy of playing down the fact that the base is A, operational and B has an underground facility.

640
01:12:41,000 --> 01:12:48,000
From the outside, Redlow Manor is an innocent looking collection of buildings in the middle of the quiet English countryside.

641
01:12:48,000 --> 01:13:01,000
It's an underground facility for the most part and it's involved with signals, communications, investigations and RAF police who have in the past investigated the subject of UFOs.

642
01:13:01,000 --> 01:13:03,000
It's very secret.

643
01:13:03,000 --> 01:13:22,000
Royal Air Force Redlow Manor was indeed the coordination point for official UFO investigations from 1977 until 1992 and this was confirmed to me by no less than the officer commanding Royal Air Force Redlow Manor despite denials for decades.

644
01:13:22,000 --> 01:13:28,000
But why all the mystery? What secrets could be hidden underground at this military base?

645
01:13:28,000 --> 01:13:36,000
There have been UFO sightings and nearby RAF bases have actually diverted and scrambled aircraft to intercept UFOs.

646
01:13:36,000 --> 01:13:45,000
We don't know what these objects were because the files didn't tell us but certainly that Redlow Manor being in the centre of this area has had its own UFO activity.

647
01:13:45,000 --> 01:13:53,000
Is it merely a coincidence that one of Great Britain's most secure bases is located in the heart of so much UFO activity?

648
01:13:53,000 --> 01:13:57,000
Uphontologists and paranormal investigators say no.

649
01:13:57,000 --> 01:14:07,000
The area where Redlow Manor is based is actually on a lay line and there are some unusual things connected with the area where Redlow Manor is.

650
01:14:07,000 --> 01:14:17,000
It's got a tunnel which goes to Boscombe down apparently which is an 80 mile tunnel across country and that tunnel comes out near Stonehenge.

651
01:14:17,000 --> 01:14:28,000
And researchers suggest perhaps the same force that caused ancient people to erect strange monuments here is the same force that is now drawing extraterrestrial visitors.

652
01:14:28,000 --> 01:14:32,000
I do believe that there is an extraterrestrial presence.

653
01:14:32,000 --> 01:14:43,000
Nick Pope didn't believe in UFOs when he first joined the Ministry of Defence in 1985 but by the time he was transferred to another position within the government he was no longer a skeptic.

654
01:14:43,000 --> 01:14:58,000
Three years of official research and investigations at the Ministry of Defence gave me access to a huge database of case files from the past and also of course to the sightings that came in during my tour of duty.

655
01:14:58,000 --> 01:15:09,000
These are not lights in the sky, these are solid craft getting through our radar systems sometimes operating very low over military bases.

656
01:15:10,000 --> 01:15:15,000
John King is the editor of the British publication UFO Reality.

657
01:15:15,000 --> 01:15:30,000
For someone who is completely convinced by the military explanation that all UFO reports can be either put down to fantasy, natural phenomena or a sighting of some or other military experimental aircraft.

658
01:15:30,000 --> 01:15:45,000
I would just remind them of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of reports over recent years of a massive black triangular aircraft that is reportedly the size of a football pitch.

659
01:15:45,000 --> 01:15:56,000
On one occasion Belgian Air Force fighters intercepted these triangular UFOs and one of them jumped I think the space of 2000 meters in less than a second.

660
01:15:56,000 --> 01:16:05,000
So quite clearly we were dealing with a very advanced technology here. In Belgium there were about 2000 reports between 1989 and 1990.

661
01:16:05,000 --> 01:16:11,000
Increasingly here in England we've been getting reports of the so-called flying triangles.

662
01:16:11,000 --> 01:16:31,000
According to researchers many of these sightings have been made in a 300 square mile area called the Salisbury Plain and Salisbury Plain is also where you will find RAF Rudlow Manor and some of the world's most famous sacred sites like Stonehenge and the unexplained mounds and stone circles of Avery.

663
01:16:31,000 --> 01:16:44,000
Behind me now is a good portion of Salisbury Plain which is pretty much the home of the British Army's training land. There have been a number of sightings across Salisbury Plain, yeah, a number of sightings, a number of reports.

664
01:16:45,000 --> 01:17:03,000
In 1994 British UFO researcher Reg Presley spotted a mysterious ball of light hovering over Salisbury Plain. He shot several minutes of remarkable videotape before an unmarked helicopter buzzed his location and then hung ominously nearby.

665
01:17:03,000 --> 01:17:09,000
It was clearly an attempt at intimidation and in most cases it works.

666
01:17:09,000 --> 01:17:25,000
I received a letter from Mark who's an ex-British soldier. One night during the winter of 1989-1990 he'd been out on night manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain.

667
01:17:25,000 --> 01:17:31,000
So basically all it was was about three and a half, four K, March.

668
01:17:31,000 --> 01:17:43,000
Mark, a former British soldier who was stationed near the Salisbury Plain, has asked that his identity be hidden and his voice disguised. He still fears reprisals from the British Defence Ministry.

669
01:17:43,000 --> 01:17:53,000
So Mark would have been hiking across this open piece of land and as he approached this copse here, this wooded area here.

670
01:17:53,000 --> 01:17:58,000
We looked in there at the place where we were going to get picked up and it's just off to our left.

671
01:17:58,000 --> 01:18:04,000
And then suddenly this massive craft appearing as if out of nowhere.

672
01:18:04,000 --> 01:18:13,000
And it was vast, great big, like triangle craft and a very strong strobe like being down as if it's looking around for something.

673
01:18:13,000 --> 01:18:30,000
And the next thing Mark can remember is a guy dressed all in black, black flying suits coming out of the copse, approaching the six soldiers including Mark, holding this rod or prodding thing.

674
01:18:30,000 --> 01:18:40,000
It felt like a sheep getting penned in with this like cone of light around us. Almost a buzzing feel about it to your body.

675
01:18:40,000 --> 01:18:50,000
As he called it, bluish cone of light that eventually engulfed all six soldiers and kind of took over their minds.

676
01:18:50,000 --> 01:18:58,000
Refrain and experience. It's like you've got no control over it. Something's controlling you. No control over it at all.

677
01:18:58,000 --> 01:19:11,000
As the soldiers sort of woke up from this nightmare experience, they found themselves 600 meters off course over in this direction, wondering where they were and how on earth they got there.

678
01:19:11,000 --> 01:19:22,000
I was still at this missing time, you know, which was making me pretty agitated. The feelings that I could go from my head was a guinea pig. I'm really angry about it.

679
01:19:22,000 --> 01:19:29,000
As more and more witnesses step forward, the hope is that more and more countries will come clean about what they know.

680
01:19:29,000 --> 01:19:37,000
Because, insider Nick Pope says, UFOs are still of grave concern to the governments of the world.

681
01:19:37,000 --> 01:19:46,000
I know for a fact, of course, that the British government is actively investigating UFOs because that was my job for them for three years.

682
01:19:46,000 --> 01:19:57,000
The attitude of governments worldwide does indeed vary widely. In my opinion, that is because the majority of governments worldwide don't have access to the full facts.

683
01:19:57,000 --> 01:20:07,000
I'm convinced that the United States government knows more about this subject than any other and therefore they have more reason for covering up information.

684
01:20:08,000 --> 01:20:23,000
As more and more documents become declassified, as more and more people arm themselves with information and video cameras, officials can no longer blame every major UFO sighting on comets or clouds or crash test dummies.

685
01:20:23,000 --> 01:20:30,000
Does this mean that the government will finally begin telling us everything it knows about UFOs?

686
01:20:31,000 --> 01:20:33,000
Coming up, the evidence is mounting.

687
01:20:33,000 --> 01:20:42,000
Phoenix, Oklahoma and extraordinary new images from the longest ongoing UFO flap of this decade. Are we getting closer to an answer?

688
01:20:42,000 --> 01:20:49,000
The UFO question is not going to be solved until science takes it up and treats it as a science question.

689
01:21:01,000 --> 01:21:09,000
A hundred years after Aurora, 50 years since Roswell, it's getting harder and harder for the government to cover up what it knows.

690
01:21:09,000 --> 01:21:17,000
Just as technological advances during World War II propelled ufology into a new era, so it is as we enter the next millennium.

691
01:21:17,000 --> 01:21:21,000
And now, our toys are so much more sophisticated.

692
01:21:22,000 --> 01:21:39,000
Land Lamphere and Jared Bostic are professional storm chasers. They have recorded just about every atmospheric phenomenon known to man, but their training could not prepare them for what happened during one storm in Oklahoma.

693
01:21:39,000 --> 01:21:47,000
On May 25, 1997, Jared Bostic and myself were chasing a storm that had just ripped through a Duncan, Oklahoma.

694
01:21:47,000 --> 01:21:56,000
I have a small digital camera that I set up and was filming this thing. So we're filming a wall cloud and a forming tornado to the right in front of the wall cloud.

695
01:21:56,000 --> 01:22:01,000
When they played back the videotape, they realized that they'd captured the image of a UFO.

696
01:22:01,000 --> 01:22:07,000
What we saw in the video was basically an object come by moving really, really fast.

697
01:22:07,000 --> 01:22:19,000
We've had people give estimates anywhere from Mach 10 to 20,000 miles an hour based on certain assumptions about the film and the angle of the lens and all kinds of weird, extraneous things.

698
01:22:19,000 --> 01:22:24,000
I've been told by another professor that the object may have been self-illuminous.

699
01:22:25,000 --> 01:22:32,000
The Lamphere Bostic sighting illustrates just how far analysis has come since the airship sightings of 100 years ago.

700
01:22:32,000 --> 01:22:45,000
I went over to the National Severe Storms Labs based here in Norman, Oklahoma and had the director, the sub directors for both the SPC and NSSL along with a group of scientists look at this tape all at the same time.

701
01:22:45,000 --> 01:22:49,000
They had no idea what it was. They did definitely say it was not a storm-related event.

702
01:22:49,000 --> 01:22:53,000
The videotape has been analyzed by NASA researcher Otha Vaughn.

703
01:22:53,000 --> 01:23:00,000
If you look at the Lamphere tape, what you see is an object which is moving across the field pretty fast.

704
01:23:00,000 --> 01:23:05,000
The question is, what is the object? How big it is? How fast is traveling?

705
01:23:05,000 --> 01:23:10,000
Vaughn routinely analyzes videotaped images sent back from the space shuttle.

706
01:23:10,000 --> 01:23:16,000
Most recently, he has been studying two atmospheric anomalies known as sprites and jets.

707
01:23:16,000 --> 01:23:22,000
Amazing videotape may be all in today's work for Vaughn, but the Lamphere Bostic video has him stymied.

708
01:23:22,000 --> 01:23:30,000
You can see right in front of my finger here where it's going along. This is a slow motion video of the movement of the object.

709
01:23:30,000 --> 01:23:37,000
It's moved from the lower upper right. It'll move across the cloud here and go out of sight over here toward the edge here.

710
01:23:37,000 --> 01:23:45,000
I don't believe this is a ball of lightning because one thing I see no lightning affects in the cloud whatsoever on this time frame of the storm.

711
01:23:45,000 --> 01:23:49,000
And from the standpoint of the tape, I do not know what the object is.

712
01:23:49,000 --> 01:24:01,000
It could have possibly been a meteorite, but after running an airplane as well as a helicopter and overflying the supposed impact area, there's nothing.

713
01:24:01,000 --> 01:24:10,000
There's absolutely nothing there. The object is not ball lightning. It's not a flying cow. We researched it. It's not a flying cow.

714
01:24:11,000 --> 01:24:18,000
It's not debris in front of the lens. It's not debris associated with the storm. It's not a baseball being thrown three miles.

715
01:24:18,000 --> 01:24:28,000
I have no idea what this thing is. I've never seen anything like this before in my life, period, of it not just as a storm chaser, but I've never seen anything like it before ever.

716
01:24:28,000 --> 01:24:38,000
Further analysis of the Lamphere Bostic UFO is ongoing and may be observed on Land Lamphere's website at www.windchaser.com.

717
01:24:39,000 --> 01:24:45,000
But ironically, ruling out the possibilities of what the object isn't only increases the mystery about what it is.

718
01:24:45,000 --> 01:24:53,000
And nowhere is this more true than in Mexico City, where thousands of people have been citing the unexplainable for years.

719
01:24:53,000 --> 01:25:00,000
Investigative reporter Jaime Musson has been investigating the Mexico City sightings since they began in 1991.

720
01:25:00,000 --> 01:25:10,000
It may sound difficult to believe that in a city of 20 million people, that practically every afternoon you can see a UFO.

721
01:25:10,000 --> 01:25:17,000
During the last few years, hundreds of thousands of people have witnessed the appearance of unidentified flying objects.

722
01:25:17,000 --> 01:25:27,000
With already so many sightings and so many videos, we are now trying to pursue more physical evidence, but the going is slow.

723
01:25:28,000 --> 01:25:35,000
The most dramatic new UFO images to have emerged from Mexico City were shot on tape in August of 1997.

724
01:25:35,000 --> 01:25:42,000
These startling images are currently the focus of heated debate on serious UFO websites across the Internet.

725
01:25:43,000 --> 01:25:48,000
Unfortunately, the Mexican UFO research program is only just beginning.

726
01:25:48,000 --> 01:25:57,000
And so, despite multiple videotapes of the UFOs and a thorough examination of those tapes by experts, the Mexico City sightings remain a mystery.

727
01:25:57,000 --> 01:26:01,000
In this country, UFO groups are at a distinct advantage.

728
01:26:01,000 --> 01:26:06,000
The latest UFO event in Phoenix, Arizona illustrates just how far we've come.

729
01:26:07,000 --> 01:26:13,000
On the night of March 13, 1997, strange lights appeared over Phoenix, Arizona.

730
01:26:13,000 --> 01:26:23,000
Immediately, the phones at the National UFO Reporting Center were jammed with sightings reports, and everyone with a video camera, it seems, was out there taping.

731
01:26:23,000 --> 01:26:26,000
This was one UFO that would not get away.

732
01:26:26,000 --> 01:26:33,000
I got done watching TV and I noticed a light over on the mountains, further to the east than I've ever seen it before.

733
01:26:33,000 --> 01:26:37,000
I had my camera on a table. I was doing some work on it.

734
01:26:37,000 --> 01:26:42,000
I decided to take a...go out there and try to photograph it to see what it would look like on tape.

735
01:26:42,000 --> 01:26:49,000
While I was photographing the light, all of a sudden to the right, an entire display of lights came on in a sequence.

736
01:26:49,000 --> 01:26:55,000
I filmed the pattern for approximately about three and a half minutes until all the lights had gone out.

737
01:26:55,000 --> 01:27:02,000
There were thousands of eyewitness reports coming in, including a huge contingent far north of Phoenix in Prescott, Arizona.

738
01:27:02,000 --> 01:27:07,000
Ufologist Mike Tanner drove to Prescott to attend a meeting of eyewitnesses.

739
01:27:10,000 --> 01:27:14,000
Meet your fellow witnesses. This is Roger, Steve, Liz.

740
01:27:14,000 --> 01:27:15,000
Please meet here.

741
01:27:15,000 --> 01:27:16,000
And you know.

742
01:27:16,000 --> 01:27:17,000
And Gary.

743
01:27:17,000 --> 01:27:27,000
We were on our way home and the kids saw a formation of lights down below the hill there.

744
01:27:27,000 --> 01:27:37,000
What we saw was on the other side of Glassford Hill and it was coming from the Paulden and the Prescott Airport area and heading directly towards our house.

745
01:27:37,000 --> 01:27:40,000
And that's just the relative size to the full moon.

746
01:27:40,000 --> 01:27:41,000
And...

747
01:27:41,000 --> 01:27:51,000
Mike Tanner brought the materials gathered from his field investigation back to the Phoenix office where he investigated sightings with partners Jim D'Alitosa and Bill Hamilton.

748
01:27:51,000 --> 01:27:52,000
How's that going?

749
01:27:52,000 --> 01:27:53,000
Good.

750
01:27:54,000 --> 01:27:59,000
I'm Craig Johnson's sighting. We've just been discussing here. Now we've transferred that over here.

751
01:27:59,000 --> 01:28:00,000
Okay.

752
01:28:00,000 --> 01:28:03,000
It's labeled as Event 7.

753
01:28:03,000 --> 01:28:13,000
The location of every witness who contributed videotape has been charted to determine the size, speed and direction of travel of the UFO formation.

754
01:28:13,000 --> 01:28:32,000
Fortunately, since we have video in these multiple locations looking at the 10 o'clock event, the triangulation in the 3D database can let us see exactly what the pathway was and know absolutely whether it was in front of or behind the Astrea Mountains.

755
01:28:32,000 --> 01:28:36,000
Jim D'Alitosa is a world-renowned video analyst.

756
01:28:36,000 --> 01:28:48,000
We've done some simulation and some conjecture about its shape, its flight path, its position and created a 3D model as viewed from a satellite above.

757
01:28:48,000 --> 01:28:58,000
Looking at the entire state over a period of 90 minutes, we find continuity in what all the witnesses said.

758
01:28:58,000 --> 01:29:02,000
In the meantime, the government has released its official explanation.

759
01:29:02,000 --> 01:29:09,000
The Air Force press release states that the Phoenix UFOs were nothing more than military flares dropped from National Guard aircraft.

760
01:29:09,000 --> 01:29:20,000
Why should anyone believe the flare story? It's someone's duty. It's someone's responsibility to say that it was flares and it was hot air balloons and it was a mistake.

761
01:29:20,000 --> 01:29:23,000
It was a hoax. It was an accident. It was nothing.

762
01:29:23,000 --> 01:29:29,000
In the past, this type of government statement would be the last word on the UFO sightings.

763
01:29:29,000 --> 01:29:40,000
But not today, because Jim has made a comparative study of the images of the UFOs shot by home video cameras and videotapes of military aerial flares.

764
01:29:40,000 --> 01:29:43,000
The results are not exactly what the government wants to hear.

765
01:29:43,000 --> 01:30:01,000
In analyzing the Phoenix lights, we have a long history of looking at flares, airplane lights, a number of things prior to this that are in the database where we know their digital characteristics and can compare the Phoenix lights to that database.

766
01:30:01,000 --> 01:30:15,000
So what we have is no match. And the taxonomy that we have left that describes it all is the same taxonomy as unknown lights in other places around the world.

767
01:30:15,000 --> 01:30:28,000
Whatever created the lights, certainly required a high degree of technology. And it's unlikely that somebody with a hoax could be able to afford to do something to this magnitude.

768
01:30:28,000 --> 01:30:50,000
The Phoenix lights has created an entirely new Confederacy, let's call it, amongst UFO investigators worldwide that see that now there's something tremendous that's happened without a logical explanation.

769
01:30:50,000 --> 01:30:59,000
For UFOlogists, the Phoenix event is particularly important because it falls in line with sightings of very similar craft in Great Britain, North Africa and Japan.

770
01:30:59,000 --> 01:31:06,000
Is this the shape of extraterrestrial craft to come? The saucer is dead. Long live the triangle.

771
01:31:06,000 --> 01:31:10,000
And UFOlogists aren't waiting around for the government to feed them information.

772
01:31:10,000 --> 01:31:18,000
They're stockpiling sophisticated computers, software, cameras, mobilizing more and more scientists and average citizens.

773
01:31:18,000 --> 01:31:30,000
The new millennium of ufology is born. And once we know as much about the present UFO situation as the government seems to, the hope is that the government will finally tell us the truth about the past.

774
01:31:30,000 --> 01:31:42,000
Eventually the government is going to announce that what happened at Roswell was a crash of an alien spacecraft or one's going to land outside the United Nations or going to land at the river entrance to the Pentagon with a press in attendance and there's going to be no way to hide it.

775
01:31:43,000 --> 01:31:50,000
My critical mind tells me that we don't have the proof yet, but my gut if you will and in my heart.

776
01:31:50,000 --> 01:31:58,000
There I am firmly and absolutely convinced that we indeed have been visited by alien beings from another world.

777
01:31:58,000 --> 01:32:02,000
Now we need to bury down and let's see what we can do about getting the proof.

778
01:32:02,000 --> 01:32:09,000
The UFO question is not going to be solved until science takes it up and treats it as a science question.

779
01:32:10,000 --> 01:32:13,000
This thing doesn't have to be a mystery forever.

780
01:32:14,000 --> 01:32:20,000
It would be naive to deny that the 100 year history of UFO cover-up is written with a tainted pen.

781
01:32:20,000 --> 01:32:27,000
There have been hoaxes, misidentified experimental aircraft and weird atmospheric anomalies.

782
01:32:28,000 --> 01:32:39,000
But there have been enough cases shrouded by the mystery of an official pattern of denial that we have to admit at least the possibility that someone or something out there is trying to make contact.

783
01:32:40,000 --> 01:32:44,000
And if we stop looking, contact will never be made.

784
01:32:45,000 --> 01:32:47,000
For Sightings, I'm Tim White.

785
01:32:57,000 --> 01:33:04,000
Sightings is a series of historical overviews and extensive databases are all part of the most comprehensive exploration of UFOs ever assembled.

786
01:33:04,000 --> 01:33:08,000
The Sightings UFOpedia CD-ROM, available in February.

787
01:33:12,000 --> 01:33:19,000
It's Brain vs. Braun at 300 fathoms when a mind-melting supervillain takes command of the Sequest ESV.

788
01:33:19,000 --> 01:33:22,000
Roy Scheider stars tonight at 11 p.m. Eastern.

789
01:33:22,000 --> 01:33:27,000
But right now, mobsters are making a play for nuclear weapons on TechWar the series.

790
01:33:27,000 --> 01:33:29,000
Sci-Fi Channel next.

791
01:33:52,000 --> 01:34:02,000
Sightings is a series of historical overviews and extensive databases are all part of the most comprehensive exploration of UFOs ever assembled.