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In a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia,

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local residents witnessed lights crashing into the harbor.

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At first, they assume a plane has gone down,

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but government documents reveal a shocking alternative.

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No one reported a UFO.

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One of the unique things of this case,

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it was the authorities that were openly calling it that.

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In Iran, the Air Force scrambles fighters

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to investigate strange lights in the sky,

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leading to an astonishing mid-air encounter.

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These projectiles were heading directly for his aircraft,

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and he didn't know what to do.

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And in New Zealand, several witnesses

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see an object streak across the sky.

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I cannot categorize what it was.

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It was something I have never seen.

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These mysterious sightings spark an investigation

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with some remarkable conclusions.

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It actually climbed, and it increased in speed.

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It was operating in some kind of controlled manner.

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Does anyone know what these phenomena are?

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And do the governments of the world

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know more than they ever revealed to us?

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The answers may lie in the fascinating stories

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of UFO conspiracies.

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October 4, 1967.

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Nova Scotia, Canada.

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In a suburb of Halifax,

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local resident Chris Stiles, then 12 years old,

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is at home.

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At about 10.30 p.m.,

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I was getting ready for bed on a school night.

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I was up late as usual,

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and I happened to look out the back window of my house.

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And when I looked in that direction,

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I saw an orange sphere that was dull,

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quite large, moving along the coastline.

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And I knew right away that I was seeing something very strange,

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and I wanted a better look.

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Chris runs out of the house

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and down to the waterfront as fast as he can.

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I was confronted with a 60-foot orange ore

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that was hovering silently low over the water.

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It was absolutely featureless,

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and the texture of it would remind one of iron

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when it first glowed in a fire.

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I'm looking at this thing, and I'm just overwhelmed with fear.

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Eventually, I seemed to find the courage to run,

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and this unusual object paid no attention to me whatsoever

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and just continued on its way.

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This brief encounter changes Chris' life forever.

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It sets him on a lifelong quest

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to discover what really happened

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off the coast of Canada that night.

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You start to think that everything you've been told is wrong.

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And even as a boy of 12, you knew you were being lied to.

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Answers were few and far between,

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and it was unsettling.

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It was like a bad dream.

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Decades later, Chris' research would lead him to a place

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160 miles to the south, called Shag Harbor.

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There, he would learn that a similar drama unfolded

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at exactly the same time of his own UFO encounter.

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It begins with an 18-year-old fisherman, Lori Wickens,

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who was driving through Shag Harbor after an evening out with friends.

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Lori still lives in Shag Harbor,

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and he's never forgotten the events of that night.

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Ralphie read along here somewhere that we first noticed

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the lights in the sky that night.

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First one would come on, two, three, and four,

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then they would all go out and start over in that same signal.

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It seemed like they were in a line,

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and it didn't seem to be that far away.

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As Lori drives along the Bering Coastal Highway,

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the lights appear to track with him for several miles.

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Couldn't have known engines or no noise from it.

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We got along here somewhere.

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It seemed like it turned down on a 45-degree angle.

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The lights seemed to be coming down towards the water.

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Lori loses sight of the object as it dips below the treeline.

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Then...

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it crashes into the ocean.

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Believing a plane has crashed,

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Lori drives as fast as he can to the nearest phone booth

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to call the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

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They initially dismissed the call as a hoax.

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Fortunately, Lori had a local reputation operating

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and asked him if he had been drinking, and he said,

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No, I am not.

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He said, You guys better get down here.

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There's something out there on the water.

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And they said, OK, they look into it.

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The moment the police hang up on him,

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several other calls come through describing similar events.

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No one reported a UFO.

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Those who called the police said simply

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that they'd seen lights, or perhaps a large aircraft

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would crash into the sound.

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The concern was for survivors.

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This is where we told the RCMP to meet us,

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so we could see the light in the water after I'd been to the phone booth

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and called them, and that's where we first see it in the water.

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Then it was down there, and we watched it drift the whole way down by a harbor here.

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Just one light, like half of a globe upside down,

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sitting on the water.

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It was a yellowish-white light that was on steady.

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The RCMP arrived, and, like Lori and the other witnesses,

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catch sight of the mysterious object floating in the water.

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We just figured it was a plane in the water.

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We was going to look for rackets or people or whatever.

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Then the light vanishes.

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It just went out. Just disappeared.

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It didn't stay on and go into the water. You'd notice it. The light just went out.

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Desperate to find any survivors,

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the police commandeered some local fishing boats,

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while the Coast Guard sent their own rescue vessel to Shag Harbor.

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Lori joins the rescue flotilla.

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We went out looking for the harbor everywhere for debris, and we never found none.

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All that is found is a strange foam on the surface of the water.

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It was yellow. Some of them claimed it was melt-solve.

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First, some said they did not smell anything.

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There was an attempt to collect some of it at the time.

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We used a fine dip net,

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but as you collected the foam, it would simply dissipate, and nothing remained.

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The search resumes at first light,

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but there is no sign of any plane or anything else.

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Canadian Forces headquarters eventually orders an underwater search by maritime command.

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And this went on for several days.

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At last light on Sunday, this search was terminated, reporting new results.

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As far as all the locals are concerned,

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the mysterious object is some sort of aircraft.

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But ironically, the government itself makes an outlandish claim.

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I think it was all about three days after I see an RCMP officer in Barrenton, the Bowling Islands,

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and you know what you see?

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I said, no, he's at the UFO.

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I said, what's that? Then he told me.

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So that's the first we'd ever heard of a UFO.

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This idea from the authorities quickly spreads,

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and the story explodes in the press.

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The Shag Harbor incident was front-page news.

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It quickly went into being a line story that was picked up around the world,

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received national coverage on CBC television.

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A comic book is even made depicting the events of that night.

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But despite the furor, the story is soon all but forgotten.

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The government inquiry is closed, the world moves on,

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and the people of Shag Harbor return to their lives.

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They look at this, they shrugged answers didn't come, said,

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I wonder what that was, went home, made a sandwich, life went on.

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But for Chris Stiles, the events of October 4th, 1967 never went away.

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The mysterious crash in Shag Harbor and his own UFO encounter that night

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continue to haunt him.

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More than 25 years later, he will launch his own investigation,

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which uncovers shocking evidence.

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While these things were occurring in Shag Harbor,

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and while there was a search there,

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there was a second simultaneous search.

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The public never knew about this.

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In Nova Scotia, Chris Stiles is investigating a mysterious incident from the late 1960s.

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The apparent crash of an unidentified craft

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into waters off the fishing village of Shag Harbor.

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He enlists the help of the police,

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he enlists the help of fellow Canadian researcher Don Ledger.

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And he said, you know, I'd like to write a book about that.

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He said, but I'm not very good with the King's English.

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And I said, well, I've done quite a bit of writing.

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So I said, I'll take a stab at it.

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So over the course of a year, I wrote up most of the story.

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Together, Chris and Don begin to search for evidence

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of what the authorities knew that night.

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Their starting point was the fact that the first suggestion that this was a UFO

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came from the government itself.

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No one reported a UFO.

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One of the unique things of this case, it was the authorities that responded

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that even early the next day, we're openly calling it that.

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The Chronicle Herald and here in Halifax, the biggest newspaper this side of Montreal,

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had the banner head lined up, maybe something concrete to UFO crash

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in Shag Harbor in red block letters.

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Armed with this knowledge, they begin a detailed search

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through the archives for the source of the UFO claim.

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What you're looking for in the UFO cases in an investigator is two things.

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You're looking for high strangeness and high credibility.

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And when you get a paper trail like the Shag Harbor incident,

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you've got something in your hands that just won't go away or evaporate.

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One of the first documents they uncover appears to be a smoking gun.

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We look at the tellyx they send back when they order the underwater search.

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And what does it have?

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UFO, three big letters, underlined.

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And I've looked at thousands of these documents, but I've only seen one that was like that.

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This early, intriguing discovery spurs them on, and soon they uncover more.

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There were no aircraft missing anywhere that they could determine,

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up the east coast of Canada or down in the New England area in the United States.

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Each piece of evidence Chris and Don find seems to reinforce their theory.

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The Rescue Coordination Center conducted a preliminary investigation,

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and it's discounted the possibility that this sighting was produced by an aircraft, flare, float, or any other known object.

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The government of the day and the people that were investigating it

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didn't think that there was a conventional explanation possible.

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But the trail of evidence in the paperwork soon goes cold.

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Yet Chris is convinced there is more to the story.

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He started bumping into people who were a military or ex-military that had somehow been involved in this.

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Many of the people Chris meets are former Navy divers.

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These contacts reveal something extraordinary.

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There was a second secret search about 30 miles up the coast from Shag Harbor,

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in another harbor called Shelburne.

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What I was told by divers and support personnel was that several ships held station over two UFOs that were sitting on the bottom.

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Now, Chris had not one UFO to investigate, but two.

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Could it be that they are linked to what was seen hitting the water at Shag Harbor?

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Maybe more than one object went into the harbor that night.

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If that's the case, it raises the question of how they ended up so far along the coast.

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One of Chris's naval sources has a shocking theory based on what he saw on the seabed,

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that the objects were moving under their own power.

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He said, well, you know, we saw things down there.

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It looked like one object was lending assistance to the other object.

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What could these objects be?

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There is no documentary evidence of the Shelburne search available,

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so Chris and Don have never established with certainty what was out there that night.

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One possibility is this incident is connected to the Cold War.

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In 1967, few people are aware that Shelburne is a secret front line in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

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The Shelburne base was Canada's most secret military installation.

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Initially, it was a U.S. base on Canadian soil.

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Its primary mission was to detect the movement of Soviet submarines during the height of the Cold War.

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It's no surprise that a UFO crash in close proximity to a critical naval defense

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would spark a strong response from the military at the height of Cold War tensions,

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especially if whatever went down was a valuable piece of military technology.

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Aviation historian Peter Merlin believes this is a possibility.

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In the late 1960s, the U.S. and Soviets were both developing advanced fighters and bombers.

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They were using high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites.

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If it was, in fact, U.S. technology that fell out of the sky, it's entirely possible

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the government would have wanted to recover it because it was either classified

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and they didn't want people to know, or simply to prevent embarrassment.

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One of the explanations that has come forth is that perhaps what was seen was a super-secret U.S. military device.

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I find this quite odd because if you're trying to test a new aircraft,

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you don't test it near a populated area.

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You certainly don't put flashing lights on it. You don't draw attention to it.

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Too many times these things are supposedly identified or people try to make them

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a military experimental aircraft, yet they're not doing what experimental military aircraft would do.

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If Don and Chris are right, if the objects seen in the sky and water off Nova Scotia

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are not aircraft, then there is a possibility they came from space.

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According to Dr. Alice Gorman, an expert in space debris, that doesn't make it an alien spacecraft,

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but part of a man-made one, a piece of so-called space junk.

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Even by the late 60s, there were at least a thousand objects in Earth orbit.

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We're looking at a lot of stuff that's up there and a lot of stuff with the potential to re-enter.

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What's more, it's not uncommon for pieces of space junk to survive re-entry.

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The most common object to re-enter and survive is actually titanium pressure spheres,

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which are part of the fuel injection system.

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A titanium pressure sphere very closely matches the description of the floating spherical object

246
00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:43,000
seen by Lori Wickens in the harbor that night.

247
00:15:43,000 --> 00:15:47,000
However, those close to the story discount this theory.

248
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That wasn't a meteorite or that wasn't space junk, it had been on fire and it wouldn't have been that color.

249
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It's unlikely to have been space junk, they would have known, they would have told us.

250
00:15:56,000 --> 00:16:00,000
The Canadian government was very forthcoming about such things happening here,

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and a great example occurred in the mid-70s when a Soviet satellite, nuclear-powered Cosmos 954,

252
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entered the atmosphere over the high Canadian Arctic and crashed

253
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and left a large footprint of radioactive debris.

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Everything was released to the public, they were very forthcoming and open about it.

255
00:16:20,000 --> 00:16:24,000
And I just think that if something similar had happened or had been responsible for this,

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that they would have had the same open policy in the 60s as they did a few years later in the 70s.

257
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One final explanation that has been put forward many times,

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suggests that the lights seen in the sky were nothing more sinister than a series of flares.

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The locals of this traditional fishing community scoff at that notion.

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Flare don't go flying through the air, it ain't four lines in a row, it goes up and it comes down,

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and either the bright red or it's white.

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And anybody that thinks that was a flare, I wouldn't want him to come rushing me.

263
00:16:57,000 --> 00:17:04,000
However, there are many different types of flares, and some of them do appear in rows, flying through the air.

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David Higgins, a helicopter pilot who has logged more than 8,000 flying hours, explains more.

265
00:17:11,000 --> 00:17:17,000
On the subject of flares, many military aircraft have the ability to deploy flares.

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And the purpose of these flares are to stave off heat seeking infrared missiles.

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They're mainly magnesium operating at thousands of degrees.

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Now the appearance of these flares are quite dramatic.

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They tend to burst out from the aircraft in an array, so it would give the appearance of being a string of lights.

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These kind of flares are often released as part of military exercises.

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But Don thinks this too is highly unlikely.

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Nobody was doing an exercise down around Shea Harbour, and why would they in the first place?

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That's not their normal exercise area.

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Flare said that's a pretty simple-minded explanation for something that's as complex as Shea Harbour.

275
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Decades later, mystery still surrounds the incident.

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Canada's Department of National Defense has officially stated that this sighting remains unsolved.

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I've already concluded that whatever was responsible for this that night has to be something unconventional.

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I'm not about to tell you that these are little grey guys from Zeta Reticuli or Alpha Centauri. I do not know.

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The lack of further government investigation indicates the events of that night may have been nothing extraordinary.

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Chris, however, will keep searching until he finds a definitive answer.

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I used to be very frustrated. I'm not anymore. I embrace the uncertainty of it now. I love it.

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September 18, 1976. Tehran, Iran.

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00:18:51,000 --> 00:18:57,000
35-year-old Hussein Peruzzi is the night supervisor in the tower at Manorabad International Airport.

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At 10.30pm, he receives an unusual phone call.

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00:19:04,000 --> 00:19:11,000
Peruzzi said that he received initially a call from a woman in the north of Tehran who reported seeing this brilliant object that looked too big to be a star.

286
00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:15,000
And her call was followed by three others from the same area of the city.

287
00:19:15,000 --> 00:19:18,000
When he had four calls, he knew that something was going on.

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The airport's radar system is down for maintenance. All he can try to do is make a visual identification.

289
00:19:25,000 --> 00:19:29,000
To his surprise, he too sees something in the sky.

290
00:19:30,000 --> 00:19:36,000
It was this brilliant flashing different-colored object that was moving, so he was very alarmed by that.

291
00:19:37,000 --> 00:19:44,000
Not knowing the identity of this fast-moving object, Peruzzi contacts the Iranian Air Force. They scramble a plane to investigate.

292
00:19:45,000 --> 00:19:51,000
175 miles away, a state-of-the-art American-made F-4 Phantom takes off.

293
00:19:52,000 --> 00:19:57,000
At the time of this incident, Iran's Islamic Revolution is more than two years away.

294
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Under the old regime of the Shah, Iran is a staunch ally of the United States against the Soviet Union.

295
00:20:05,000 --> 00:20:08,000
Aviation journalist Chris Polcock explains more.

296
00:20:09,000 --> 00:20:16,000
The U.S. and Iran had a close political and by extension military relationship before the fall of the Shah.

297
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And that included the supply by the U.S. of most of the equipment, aircraft, radars, missiles, and training of the Iranian Air Force.

298
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The Iranian F-4 races towards the location of the sightings at supersonic speed.

299
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They were able to get a good look at it as a very brilliant object with pulsing different-colored lights, almost like a strobe light.

300
00:20:42,000 --> 00:20:48,000
These F-4s were able to fly over a thousand miles an hour, and they were not able to catch up with this big UFO.

301
00:20:49,000 --> 00:20:55,000
By this time, the squadron commander, Parviz Jafari, has also taken to the skies in his own F-4.

302
00:20:56,000 --> 00:21:01,000
Now a retired Iranian Air Force general, Jafari still has vivid memories of that night.

303
00:21:02,000 --> 00:21:08,000
I called my first pilot. He said I can catch it with the supersonic speed.

304
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I lost all of my instruments and everything is abnormal.

305
00:21:15,000 --> 00:21:26,000
With the first fighter's electronic instruments disabled, Jafari fears the plane may stray into nearby Soviet airspace and turn a UFO encounter into an international crisis.

306
00:21:27,000 --> 00:21:29,000
He orders it to return to base.

307
00:21:30,000 --> 00:21:35,000
As soon as he returned back, he said I can see it again ahead of me.

308
00:21:36,000 --> 00:21:39,000
I said where is it? Can you give me a position?

309
00:21:40,000 --> 00:21:42,000
I looked there and I saw it.

310
00:21:45,000 --> 00:21:48,000
Jafari's initial sighting appears similar to the other reports.

311
00:21:49,000 --> 00:21:53,000
The shape was like a diamond shape like this.

312
00:21:53,000 --> 00:21:58,000
It was red, green, orange and blue.

313
00:21:59,000 --> 00:22:03,000
It was strobing in different colors and he said it was so bright that you couldn't actually see the body of the object.

314
00:22:04,000 --> 00:22:06,000
You could only see this very, very bright light.

315
00:22:07,000 --> 00:22:11,000
And like the first plane, Jafari has trouble catching up to this object.

316
00:22:12,000 --> 00:22:19,000
All of a sudden, it jumped about 10 degrees to my right, just like this.

317
00:22:19,000 --> 00:22:22,000
It was here, now it was here.

318
00:22:24,000 --> 00:22:29,000
At this point, Jafari's experience begins to radically depart from that of the first crew.

319
00:22:30,000 --> 00:22:32,000
He believes the object starts shooting at it.

320
00:22:33,000 --> 00:22:37,000
He called them projectiles. He said they look kind of like a full moon coming over the horizon.

321
00:22:38,000 --> 00:22:41,000
And these projectiles were heading directly for his aircraft.

322
00:22:42,000 --> 00:22:47,000
I was really scared. I thought they'd launched missiles or something.

323
00:22:50,000 --> 00:22:54,000
Fearing that he's about to be blown out of the sky, Jafari prepares to shoot back.

324
00:22:55,000 --> 00:22:59,000
When he was just about to fire at it, he lost control of his equipment.

325
00:23:00,000 --> 00:23:02,000
Everything went down. He was not able to fire at the missile.

326
00:23:03,000 --> 00:23:06,000
The only controls that remain are the ones keeping his aircraft in flight.

327
00:23:07,000 --> 00:23:12,000
With no weapons, Jafari tries to escape by pulling a radical turn away from the incoming projectile.

328
00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:23,000
He was able to make a turn and avoid it, and the thing then made some jumps and moved back into the main object.

329
00:23:24,000 --> 00:23:29,000
Jafari's commanders order him to break off and land in Tehran.

330
00:23:30,000 --> 00:23:34,000
As he's returning, another of the apparent projectiles appears behind him.

331
00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:39,000
He then sees it heading downwards towards a dry lake bed on the outskirts of the city.

332
00:23:39,000 --> 00:23:49,000
I thought I'm going to see a very big collision with that thing and the ground, but that didn't happen.

333
00:23:50,000 --> 00:23:58,000
It came to the ground and stopped right there. It was so bright that I could see the sands of the girls.

334
00:23:59,000 --> 00:24:07,000
Then the projectile strangely vanishes, and the larger object with flashing lights is also nowhere to be seen.

335
00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:14,000
There was no splash of the sands. There was no burning. Nothing.

336
00:24:21,000 --> 00:24:27,000
Iranian pilot Parviz Jafari is scouring the desert south of Tehran for a possible downed UFO.

337
00:24:29,000 --> 00:24:34,000
Jafari can't see anything, but he does hear something in his radio coming from the crash site.

338
00:24:37,000 --> 00:24:45,000
They call it emergency squawk when there's a box or there's some device when something hits the ground that sends out a signal so that people can locate it.

339
00:24:46,000 --> 00:24:49,000
And for some reason, where this thing went down, there was emergency squawk going out.

340
00:24:50,000 --> 00:24:52,000
Another airplane reported hearing the same sound.

341
00:24:53,000 --> 00:24:59,000
With a clear signal locating the object in the darkness, Jafari is allowed to land at last.

342
00:25:00,000 --> 00:25:05,000
At first blight, he joins the search and rescue teams hunting for the object.

343
00:25:07,000 --> 00:25:14,000
That sound was still beeping, so we went there and we find nothing. Nothing, nothing.

344
00:25:16,000 --> 00:25:19,000
That day, Jafari is debriefed by superior officers.

345
00:25:20,000 --> 00:25:28,000
They called us to the Air Force Headquarter. I had an interview there. I told them the whole story.

346
00:25:28,000 --> 00:25:37,000
And I saw an American colonel was standing at the corner of the room and he was taking notes.

347
00:25:39,000 --> 00:25:47,000
As well as supplying Iran with state-of-the-art U.S. technology, American military advisors are a fixture at many Iranian bases.

348
00:25:48,000 --> 00:25:56,000
During this time of Cold War tension, Jafari's encounter catches the eye of one advisor, Lieutenant Colonel Olan Mui.

349
00:25:56,000 --> 00:26:04,000
After hearing Jafari's debrief, he files a report that is circulated to a wide array of senior policymakers in Washington, D.C.

350
00:26:05,000 --> 00:26:15,000
This particular memo was sent around to many departments within the U.S. government, the White House, the CIA, the State Department, a whole list of very important agencies.

351
00:26:16,000 --> 00:26:22,000
In the document, Lieutenant Colonel Mui gives a thorough description of the incident, but reaches no firm conclusion.

352
00:26:22,000 --> 00:26:32,000
The analysis of the case referred to it as a UFO, so they were never able to explain what it was. It just went on the record as something unidentified.

353
00:26:35,000 --> 00:26:42,000
So there seems to be little doubt that a lot of people saw something and that it was taken seriously in both Iran and in Washington.

354
00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:46,000
But just what could it have been?

355
00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:56,000
One possibility is that the source of the sightings is some kind of aircraft. Could this object be either American or Russian secret technology?

356
00:26:57,000 --> 00:27:00,000
Aviation historian Peter Merlin considers the question.

357
00:27:01,000 --> 00:27:10,000
Considering the state of U.S.-Iranian relations at the time, I hardly think it likely that the U.S. would have been conducting any sort of military operations in Iranian airspace.

358
00:27:11,000 --> 00:27:19,000
More likely, it would be a belligerent neighbor such as Iraq, who would have been supplied by the Soviets, possibly with electronic warfare devices.

359
00:27:20,000 --> 00:27:25,000
An electronic warfare device could explain the equipment malfunctions experienced by the F-4s.

360
00:27:26,000 --> 00:27:33,000
There are all manner of different kinds of avionics that can be used to jam communications, radar tracking.

361
00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:39,000
But Parviz Jafari, an experienced combat aviator, discounts this idea.

362
00:27:40,000 --> 00:27:52,000
The jamming is reflected only on the radar, but you can't jam the missile system or you can't jam the instrument system.

363
00:27:53,000 --> 00:28:02,000
If there was no deliberate attempt to disable the fighter's systems, then perhaps the malfunctions are the result of a more straightforward explanation.

364
00:28:03,000 --> 00:28:07,000
Another experienced pilot, David Higgins, thinks this is a possibility.

365
00:28:08,000 --> 00:28:24,000
Aircraft instruments and radios are electrically powered, and sometimes if you have a failure of a bus bar or a generator, you may lose certain instrumentation and some of the radio navigation equipment.

366
00:28:26,000 --> 00:28:33,000
Electrical failures do happen, and there is a possibility that both planes suffer the same fault.

367
00:28:33,000 --> 00:28:40,000
Yet no aircraft malfunction can explain the most striking thing about the incident.

368
00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:45,000
The bright light seen by Jafari and several other witnesses.

369
00:28:47,000 --> 00:28:51,000
Astronomer Professor Nigel Hembest thinks he knows what the lights could be.

370
00:28:52,000 --> 00:28:55,000
A well-documented piece of space junk.

371
00:28:56,000 --> 00:29:01,000
Among the bigger bits of space junk that can fall down to earth are parts of rockets which are launching satellites into space.

372
00:29:02,000 --> 00:29:08,000
And interestingly enough, on the same night there was a light seen over Morocco where there were UFO reports.

373
00:29:09,000 --> 00:29:13,000
And it turns out that that was actually a rocket engine from a Russian rocket which had launched into orbit.

374
00:29:14,000 --> 00:29:20,000
We don't know of any burning up rocket that happened over Iran on that night, but we can't rule out the possibility.

375
00:29:21,000 --> 00:29:25,000
Often when objects burn up in the atmosphere, they glow in a variety of colors.

376
00:29:26,000 --> 00:29:33,000
As they come down through the earth's atmosphere and burn up, if they've got particular elements, for example copper will make it glow green.

377
00:29:34,000 --> 00:29:37,000
Or if they light up the earth's gases in a particular way.

378
00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:43,000
If there's oxygen, then it will glow green as it goes through the oxygen region, or red as it goes through the nitrogen region.

379
00:29:44,000 --> 00:29:49,000
David Higgins believes there is a reason the aircraft malfunction occurs at the same time the lights appear.

380
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:55,000
It could of course be a coincidence. It could be that there is a fault with the aircraft.

381
00:29:56,000 --> 00:30:02,000
And that's why he's seen these faults at the same time as seeing this object and he has linked the two together.

382
00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:08,000
But it still leaves one more unexplained element to the story.

383
00:30:09,000 --> 00:30:14,000
The strange radio signal. The squawk heard by Jaffari and the search and rescue team.

384
00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:24,000
There are reports in this case that a transponder was found on the ground and reports that it had been dislodged from the aircraft or came away in turbulence.

385
00:30:25,000 --> 00:30:32,000
If you did find a transponder on the ground, you would expect to see that as part of wreckage of an aircraft.

386
00:30:33,000 --> 00:30:35,000
You would not find a transponder by itself.

387
00:30:36,000 --> 00:30:41,000
There is no one single explanation for what happened in the skies over Iran that night.

388
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:45,000
It's quite possibly just a bizarre coincidence.

389
00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:50,000
But the mystery continues to captivate believers and skeptics alike.

390
00:30:51,000 --> 00:30:54,000
It's so well documented. There were so many witnesses.

391
00:30:55,000 --> 00:31:01,000
So because it's so well documented and so fascinating, it's really one of the most interesting cases that we have on record as far as I'm concerned.

392
00:31:01,000 --> 00:31:11,000
March 9th, 1995. Taronga, New Zealand.

393
00:31:12,000 --> 00:31:20,000
Local port employee Bill McKinnon is out for an afternoon's pleasure fishing on New Zealand's tranquil Bay of Plenty.

394
00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:27,000
It was bright sunlight like it is today. A very clear day.

395
00:31:28,000 --> 00:31:35,000
The day passes without incident until about 1.15pm when Bill sees something out of the corner of his eye.

396
00:31:36,000 --> 00:31:43,000
I turned around and noticed there was a strange object in the sky coming across from northeast to southwest.

397
00:31:44,000 --> 00:31:50,000
It looked like a sphere, a very shiny sphere, white and silver.

398
00:31:50,000 --> 00:31:53,000
But it had a shimmer in front of it.

399
00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:58,000
And it's like the pushing of a ship's bow in the water.

400
00:31:59,000 --> 00:32:04,000
And it was rippling like this in front, very, very noticeably.

401
00:32:05,000 --> 00:32:09,000
The object appears to be moving at incredible speed and has a ghostly white tail.

402
00:32:10,000 --> 00:32:12,000
And yet there is no noise.

403
00:32:13,000 --> 00:32:17,000
I know how fast an airplane goes and it was a lot quicker than an airplane.

404
00:32:21,000 --> 00:32:24,000
I can't clarify what I saw that day.

405
00:32:25,000 --> 00:32:30,000
But it definitely was an unidentified flying object of a fairly large proportion.

406
00:32:34,000 --> 00:32:38,000
It's possible that this is a simple case of mistaken identity.

407
00:32:39,000 --> 00:32:43,000
The object Bill saw was a plane or perhaps some natural phenomenon.

408
00:32:45,000 --> 00:32:48,000
Except Bill is an experienced observer of the skies.

409
00:32:49,000 --> 00:32:54,000
One of his jobs at the port is to feed data to the Meteorological Service of New Zealand,

410
00:32:55,000 --> 00:32:58,000
a role that requires a detailed knowledge of the atmospheric phenomena.

411
00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:06,000
To do this we were educated as to how to divide the sky, whether it be cloudy or partly cloudy.

412
00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:13,000
There was quite a lot in giving a description and I learnt how to observe.

413
00:33:14,000 --> 00:33:20,000
Perplexed by a sighting, Bill gets in touch with a local UFO investigation group run by Suzanne Hansen.

414
00:33:21,000 --> 00:33:25,000
Suzanne is a believer in the existence of extraterrestrials on Earth

415
00:33:26,000 --> 00:33:30,000
and her group specialises in sightings by pilots and other aviation experts.

416
00:33:31,000 --> 00:33:34,000
Well New Zealand has quite a rich history of aviation sightings.

417
00:33:35,000 --> 00:33:40,000
There have been some fairly phenomenal, world-renowned sightings concerning pilots and air traffic controllers.

418
00:33:40,000 --> 00:33:47,000
And I decided that that was an area that needed to be focused on because it carries a great deal of credibility in the public eye.

419
00:33:48,000 --> 00:33:52,000
She gives Bill a shocking revelation. He is not alone.

420
00:33:53,000 --> 00:34:00,000
60 miles inland, in the town of Hamilton, another highly reliable eyewitness has seen something that day.

421
00:34:01,000 --> 00:34:03,000
Air Traffic Controller Graham Opie.

422
00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:09,000
In 1995 I was the control tower manager at Hamilton Airport.

423
00:34:10,000 --> 00:34:13,000
I was responsible for the daily operation of the control tower.

424
00:34:14,000 --> 00:34:18,000
I was a practicing air traffic controller and also a commercial pilot at that time.

425
00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:25,000
On March 9th 1995, Graham was on duty in the tower, supervising a team of air traffic controllers.

426
00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:33,000
I happened to be looking south of the control tower and I observed a brilliant flash of light shining at me.

427
00:34:34,000 --> 00:34:39,000
It was exactly like somebody was reflecting the sun off a mirror at you. It was extremely bright.

428
00:34:40,000 --> 00:34:44,000
It had a tiny tail to it. Orange and red in colour and it was extremely fast.

429
00:34:45,000 --> 00:34:48,000
Graham immediately turns to his colleagues in the tower.

430
00:34:49,000 --> 00:34:53,000
The first thing I said when I saw the object flash across the sky was, hey did you guys see that?

431
00:34:54,000 --> 00:34:59,000
And both of them said no, unfortunately. So I had no back-up witnesses but I knew what I'd seen.

432
00:35:00,000 --> 00:35:06,000
Graham's fellow controllers may not have seen the bright streak with their eyes, but maybe it's been spotted on radar.

433
00:35:07,000 --> 00:35:11,000
We have a direct line to the air traffic control centre in Auckland where they've got radar up there.

434
00:35:12,000 --> 00:35:15,000
The radar controller in Auckland said they had no targets to the south of Hamilton.

435
00:35:16,000 --> 00:35:19,000
No eye witnesses and no radar contact.

436
00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:24,000
At this stage, Graham thinks he's the only one to have seen the strange object.

437
00:35:29,000 --> 00:35:32,000
Then he gets a phone call from Suzanne Hansen.

438
00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:38,000
She explains his signing is not a one-off, but part of a whole series of similar events.

439
00:35:39,000 --> 00:35:45,000
We know that it was reported in the newspaper and it was probably seen by hundreds if not thousands of people.

440
00:35:46,000 --> 00:35:51,000
They didn't know what it was. Some people thought it was a jet plane. People thought it was anything from a meteor to a comet.

441
00:35:52,000 --> 00:35:56,000
It was completely silent and would have covered quite a distance over the central North Island.

442
00:35:57,000 --> 00:36:04,000
Once Suzanne had contacted me and we had that other information available, she requested that I do a proper investigation of the sighting.

443
00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:08,000
Over the coming weeks, he would uncover remarkable evidence.

444
00:36:09,000 --> 00:36:12,000
I was positive that it wasn't of an earthly origin.

445
00:36:18,000 --> 00:36:24,000
Graham Obey begins a detailed investigation into a suspected UFO he's seen on New Zealand's North Island.

446
00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:29,000
He begins with the most obvious possibilities.

447
00:36:30,000 --> 00:36:37,000
My initial reaction when I saw the object was it was some kind of jet fighter because of the speed it was travelling at.

448
00:36:38,000 --> 00:36:46,000
That theory would also explain one of Bill McKinnon's observations, that he witnessed a rippling effect like a bow wave around the front of the UFO.

449
00:36:48,000 --> 00:36:54,000
When aircraft approach supersonic speeds, they can create what's known as a sonic boom cloud.

450
00:36:55,000 --> 00:37:00,000
It's caused by water vapor condensing around the craft between waves of high pressure air.

451
00:37:02,000 --> 00:37:08,000
But if what he saw was a jet, that raises the question, why didn't it register on ground radar?

452
00:37:09,000 --> 00:37:18,000
The fact that it didn't meant that it was either cloaking itself or it was travelling so fast that the radar dish just didn't have time to register the object.

453
00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:26,000
But the fact that it didn't appear on radar meant that it wasn't anything of our air force, it was just a UFO.

454
00:37:27,000 --> 00:37:33,000
A UFO doesn't mean to say that it's got little green mean flying around it or anything, but whether it was extra terrestrial or not, I had no idea at that stage.

455
00:37:34,000 --> 00:37:40,000
As part of his investigation, OP interviews Bill McKinnon and a crucial piece of evidence emerges.

456
00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:47,000
The sightings of the two men were just three minutes apart, but separated by a distance of more than 60 miles.

457
00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:51,000
And that's not the most surprising thing.

458
00:37:52,000 --> 00:38:02,000
From the sighting in Terraria to the sighting in Hamilton, it actually climbed and it increased in speed, which showed that it was operating in some kind of controlled manner.

459
00:38:03,000 --> 00:38:15,000
The results of Graham's investigation led him, Suzanne and Bill to the same conclusion. The object was possibly of extra terrestrial origin.

460
00:38:16,000 --> 00:38:30,000
I was positive that it wasn't a man-made aircraft. It was travelling too fast. The speed of the object was the deciding factor to say to me that it wasn't of an earthly origin.

461
00:38:31,000 --> 00:38:44,000
I really have to have an open mind about it and I'm willing to believe that it was a spaceship of some sort, extra terrestrial. I don't believe it's from this country or from the will.

462
00:38:46,000 --> 00:38:59,000
Seasoned observers of the sky, like astronomers Nigel Hanbest and Carolyn Crawford, agree with Bill. The object is almost certainly not from New Zealand and maybe not even from this world.

463
00:39:00,000 --> 00:39:04,000
The accounts that I've seen match very closely to a fireball crossing the sky.

464
00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:19,000
A fireball is a meteor that is intensely bright, so you've got something more massive burning up in our atmosphere. And you get light not just from the meteor itself heating up, but also from the way it energises the air as it travels through.

465
00:39:20,000 --> 00:39:25,000
So there's a lot of light generated. It can be as bright as the sun, even in extreme cases.

466
00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:31,000
Fireballs are rare occurrences, but several had been documented on camera in recent years.

467
00:39:32,000 --> 00:39:39,000
One of the most famous cases is a fireball that passed over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013.

468
00:39:40,000 --> 00:39:52,000
And you can see from the videos that were taken at the time from car dashboards, you can see the thing crossing the sky, the blue daytime sky. And that was so brilliant. It was easy to see, in fact, it cast shadows even in daytime.

469
00:39:55,000 --> 00:39:58,000
Those close to the case discount this theory.

470
00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:11,000
We consulted the late Dr Frank Bateson, who's New Zealand's most renowned astronomer, who was quite sure given the full description that he looked at, it couldn't possibly have been a meteor.

471
00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:19,000
It gained in height, it moved on a curved path and it seemed to have a very bright reflective object at the front of it.

472
00:40:20,000 --> 00:40:23,000
And there's one other major flaw in the fireball argument.

473
00:40:24,000 --> 00:40:29,000
It was completely silent. There was no sonic boom and no sound attached to the sighting.

474
00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:36,000
The Chelyabinsk fireball creates a sonic boom so powerful, it shatters thousands of windows across the city.

475
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:42,000
However, some fireballs are in fact completely silent.

476
00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:51,000
When I read this report of it going across the sky in this way and was visible for quite a long period of time, but wasn't seen to come down to the ground.

477
00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:58,000
It reminds me of a case in 1972 called the Great Daylight Fireball, which was seen from North America.

478
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:04,000
This was actually a space rock which skimmed the Earth's atmosphere. It came in the top of the atmosphere.

479
00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:09,000
It came across, skimmed like a stone, skipping across water and went back out into space again.

480
00:41:13,000 --> 00:41:18,000
This could explain the eyewitness accounts of seeing an object moving horizontally rather than falling.

481
00:41:19,000 --> 00:41:27,000
And the altitude of the object, high in the upper atmosphere, would allow it to be seen almost simultaneously from both Hamilton and Tauranga.

482
00:41:28,000 --> 00:41:31,000
It would also explain why the object made no sound.

483
00:41:32,000 --> 00:41:35,000
The ones that burn up at the top of the atmosphere, we generally don't hear a sonic boom.

484
00:41:37,000 --> 00:41:47,000
But how could both Graham Opie, a veteran air traffic controller, and Bill McKinnon, a seasoned meteorologist, be so mistaken about the object's speed and altitude?

485
00:41:49,000 --> 00:41:52,000
These men spend their professional lives watching the sky.

486
00:41:54,000 --> 00:41:58,000
But as human perception expert Bo Lotto explains, it's not that simple.

487
00:42:00,000 --> 00:42:07,000
Because of their history of experience, especially if they're an air traffic controller, and let's imagine that it's an airplane that they're looking at, not surprisingly,

488
00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:12,000
they have a very good sense of how far it will be because of their history of experience.

489
00:42:12,000 --> 00:42:24,000
If, however, they're looking at something that's unfamiliar, there's no basis then to judge its distance because this thing could be a huge object very far away or a small object up close.

490
00:42:25,000 --> 00:42:28,000
And you have no way of knowing unless, to a certain extent, you know what that object is.

491
00:42:30,000 --> 00:42:32,000
Nobody can be entirely sure of what was seen that day.

492
00:42:33,000 --> 00:42:37,000
As with so many UFO sightings, there are many theories, but few hard facts.

493
00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:42,000
We may never know the true cause of the case, so the mystery remains.

494
00:42:43,000 --> 00:42:49,000
If we look at what the object could have been, we can go through a logical process of elimination.

495
00:42:50,000 --> 00:42:56,000
If it wasn't a meteor or a natural object, and it certainly wasn't an aircraft, then it has to be something else.

496
00:42:57,000 --> 00:42:59,000
And that something else could well be something from beyond our planet.