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Unidentified flying objects, UFOs. They appear as sleek metallic disks in daylight skies,

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or mysterious shapes that illuminate the night. Where do UFOs come from? What do they want?

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Are they merely inventions of the modern age? If so, why do they appear in early paintings?

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If UFOs are kites or planes or weather balloons, why do they move like nothing else from Earth?

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The extraordinary answers to these age-old questions. Next.

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UFOs are now hauntingly familiar. They have shared our skies for an uneasy 50 years.

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Eyewitness accounts testify to their breathtaking speed, unparalleled maneuverability, and uncanny silence.

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They are different than any aircraft made here on Earth.

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These stealthy visitors are called UFOs, unidentified flying objects.

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They have shown up unexpectedly in photographs taken all across the globe.

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Yet if we turn back the pages of history, there are intriguing hints that UFOs have been with us all along.

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Perhaps even as far back as 12,000 years ago, when our ancestors found shelter in the darkness of caves.

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The walls of these primitive dwellings were often painted with figures of hunters and the animals they hoped to snare.

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Recently, other images have come to light.

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These tracings were made from caves in France and Spain, and they show pictures not ordinarily associated with hunting.

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Their shapes are very peculiar because they do oftentimes look like UFOs and saucers.

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I'm not saying that they are UFOs, that they do represent craft of any type,

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only that they have a similarity to what we now perceive as maybe craft from another planet as UFOs.

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One wonders where the cave people were getting the impetus for putting these on their walls.

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Obviously, putting paintings on cave walls was a laborious process,

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and you would only put down the most important things of your daily life.

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And here these objects appear not once, not twice, but fairly numerous times on the cave walls.

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The advance of civilization brought us out of caves and into cities.

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Some 4,000 years ago, scribes recorded what sounds like the sighting of UFOs during the reign of a pharaoh named Tothmosis III.

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In the year 22 of the third month of the winter, a circle of fire appeared in the sky.

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After some days, it became more numerous and shown with the brightness of the sun extending to the very limits of the heavens.

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Royal records of Tothmosis III, 1480 BC.

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A millennium later, young Alexander the Great conquered his way across the known world.

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In 332 BC, he laid siege to the Phoenician city of Tyre,

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and accounts from both sides report that shield-shaped silver objects appeared in the sky.

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One supposedly sent down a beam of light that destroyed the city walls.

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Even the Bible itself contains passages that some say refer to alien spacecraft.

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I looked and behold, a stormy wind came from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing through it, and a radiance round about it,

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while out of the midst of it gleamed something with a luster like that of shining metal.

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Ezekiel 1

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There are a number of reports from the past, and I believe that some of them are quite legitimate.

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But one of the things is you can't interview witnesses, of course.

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You can't get independent witnesses, you can't ask, well, what angle was it above the horizon?

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The problem we have with them is we have to take them totally at face value.

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It's always important in looking at these to remember that there are a lot of strange astronomical phenomena

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that only occur once in a while, like a star going supernova and suddenly appearing in the sky,

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or a comet which appeared unexpectedly.

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And so you always have to look at these from the point of view of astronomy.

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There could be some atmospheric phenomenon or an astronomical phenomenon that they were depicting as something supernatural.

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As the scientific awareness of the population grew, superstition was replaced by knowledge of what was actually going on in the heavens.

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However, when an object would fly across the sky and stop, or hover, or seemingly descend to the ground,

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or maybe exhibit many different color changes or change shape or what have you,

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then even those people knew that they were looking at something out of the ordinary.

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The residents of Nuremberg, Germany had just such an experience on April 4th, 1561.

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On that day, the skies above the city filled with a chaotic array of tube-shaped objects and balls of light.

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Eyewitnesses called it a frightful spectacle.

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Chronicles of the time also report extraordinary displays over Basel, Switzerland during the summer of 1566.

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These events were depicted in primitive woodcuts made by eyewitnesses.

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However, it was the talented master artists that have left us the most fascinating images.

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In 1998, an Italian writer named Daniella Giordano earned an award for her landmark study of the enigmatic flying objects depicted by Renaissance artists.

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She discovered that not only did the artist have these objects in the picture, but he also had people looking at these objects

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and shielding their eyes as all the people were actually noting with amazement that something unusual was in the sky.

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I don't know on why the objects there, but it does appear and it looks like a UFO.

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This apparently traditional religious work is known as the Madonna and St Giovanni.

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Here too, a witness to the flying object is placed unobtrusively, yet unmistakably, in the background.

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It's very obvious that this person's attention is directed to the flying object.

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And the artist obviously wanted viewers of the painting to see that not only is there the Madonna in the painting,

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but that there's also an object in the background.

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Curious airborne craft show up in other media as well.

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These tapestries from the 1500s depict the life of the Virgin Mary.

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Looking in the background is the familiar shape of a 1950s style UFO.

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This fresco from a 14th century monastery in Kosovo prominently features what appears to be a flying vehicle.

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On this French coin minted in 1680, a ray of light beams down from a colossal wheel-shaped object.

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Sporadic sightings continue to be recorded for the next 250 years.

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In the 1940s, World War II pilots joined the long list of UFO eyewitnesses.

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Some of these pilots would later come forward to tell their stories, as interest in UFOs increased after the war.

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Pilots on all sides of the conflict, the Axis and the Allied pilots reported strange objects,

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sometimes flying off the wingtips of their airplanes, and seemingly exhibit intelligent maneuvering.

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If you tried to fly the airplane toward it, the object would fly along with you and just keeping off the wing

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or dive down or fly above, you couldn't catch up with it.

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I talked to a pilot of a B-24 bomber during World War II, and he said one circled around their airplane.

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Round, smooth, sleek, they all expected to die instantly, because this must be a new German secret weapon.

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I was going to shoot him down, and we sure don't have anything that looks like that and flies like that.

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I have one account where they actually fired on, they seemingly went through it, they didn't damage the object at all.

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Allied pilots thought they were secret weapons of the Germans,

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Germans thought they were secret weapons of the Allies, England and America, and they were even seen in the Pacific Theater.

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However, after the war, it became clear that neither the Allies nor the Axis had produced these super aircraft, someone else had.

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And they did exhibit maneuvering that, again, was much like the types of objects that were seen immediately after the war ended and called flying saucers at that time.

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Many believe that in July of 1947, near the top secret air base at Roswell, New Mexico, the United States military finally got a close-up look at these mysterious spacecraft.

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The Army Air Force has announced that a flying disc has been found and is now in the possession of the Army.

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In the fall of 1945, American boys came home to a hard-earned welcome. They had faced unspeakable horrors.

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Now they would head for suburbia and get started on the baby boom.

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At the same time, another new era was dawning, the age of flying saucers.

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The enigmatic spacecraft that had appeared from time to time through the centuries would now take center stage.

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The age of innocence was over.

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The wave of modern UFO sightings began simply with no photos, no radar returns and no physical evidence.

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Just a story told by one man at the right time in history.

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Kenneth Arnold was a 32-year-old successful businessman on the summer day that his sighting took place.

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He sold firefighting equipment and flew his own light plane.

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On Tuesday, June 24, 1947, Arnold was flying toward Mount Rainier above the Cascade Mountains of Washington State.

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The air was smooth and clear as he reached 9,200 feet and noticed a bright flash.

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To the left and north of Mount Rainier, Arnold saw what he described as nine unusual aircraft flying at over 1,200 miles per hour.

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As they passed the mountain, the objects were outlined against the snow.

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They traveled in a v-formation and skittered across the sky in such a way that Arnold said they resembled a saucer skipping across water.

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Arnold first told his story upon landing at the Yakima, Washington airport.

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He sketched a series of diagrams to illustrate what he had seen.

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What he drew was shaped like a crescent, 50 feet long and only 3 feet thick.

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It had a rounded point in the rear.

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When seen edge on, he reported, it looked like a black line.

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It wasn't long before the story of Arnold's sighting startled the world.

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The newspapers quickly coined a name for Arnold's skipping discs.

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The name was Flying Saucers.

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Kenneth Arnold was soon to enjoy a celebrity status.

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The author of a book and the subject of magazine cover stories, he was looked upon as a combination of space age visionary and screwball eccentric.

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The press would anoint him, the man who started it all.

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In the days and weeks after Arnold's landmark flight, Flying Saucers became big news.

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Sightings were reported across the country.

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Indeed, at that time, more people knew about Flying Saucers than about the Marshall Plan for the post-war reconstruction of Europe.

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But one incident above all established Flying Saucers in the public mind.

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Roswell, New Mexico lies deep in the empty expanse of the American Southwest.

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Today, its very name conjures up memories of a supposed UFO crash and government cover-up.

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It is remembered as the Roswell incident.

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In the summer of 1947, the Army airfield in Roswell was home to the elite 509th bomb group.

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During World War II, the B-29s that carried atom bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki had originated here.

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And so would an event that gave substance to the belief in Flying Saucers.

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Walter Hott was public information officer of the 509th bomb group.

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He was the official instructed to dispatch press releases to the radio station and newspapers in Roswell.

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The story fed the imagination of the country, but has been the source of controversy ever since.

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A press release that I received stated that the bomb was a bomb.

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A press release that I received stated that we had in our possession parts of a crashed flying disc.

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The material was found on a ranch north of Roswell.

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Then the story abruptly changed.

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General Roger Ramey took command of the Roswell situation and issued a new statement.

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It wasn't a flying disc after all.

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To me, I think it was one of the slickest cover-ups by admitting that we had the material and then a higher authority says,

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No, you don't.

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Flying saucer or weather balloon.

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Both Air Force stories couldn't be true.

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One fact was undisputed.

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Something had crashed at Roswell.

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A rancher named Mac Brazel discovered the metallic debris in this isolated rangeland outside of town.

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The wreckage was strewn over more than half a mile and Brazel alerted the base, assuming a military plane had crashed.

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Jesse Marcell Jr. recalls that his father, the intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Airfield,

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had been dispatched to the debris site to determine what had crashed there.

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The night that my dad came home, he was very excited.

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He woke my mother, myself up and said he wanted to show us something very strange.

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As I recall, he said this was part of a flying saucer.

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I was 11, almost 12 at the time, and I had seen pieces of an airplane and weather balloons and things like that,

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but this was not like anything that I'd ever seen before.

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The most intriguing portion of the debris that I recall seeing was what appeared to be eye beams.

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When I looked at this with the light reflecting on it, I noticed what appeared to be some symbols

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were writing along the inner surface of this eye beam, and the implication was this was something that came from some other planetary system.

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Author Kevin Randall researched the Roswell incident and learned more about the debris Major Marcell had collected.

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You have something called metal foil. It's been described by various people as tinfoil or lead foil.

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You water it up into a ball, you drop it on the table, it unfolds itself and there's no sign of a crease.

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Randall interviewed some people who say they actually handled the mysterious wreckage back in 1947.

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It was all watered up when he dropped it and when he dropped it on the table and it hit the table, it spread out just like it was water.

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And so they all started holding it and playing with it. They were trying to cut it with their knives and they tried to burn it with their lighters,

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and they couldn't do any damage to it at all.

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There were also rumors of a second crash site with even more stunning discoveries.

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Frankie Rosefather said that the fire department was called to the scene. There he had observed nothing less than actual extraterrestrial beings.

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They got in a car on what they thought was a plane crash about 30 miles north of Roswell.

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And when they got out there, it was not an airplane. He said it was a flying saucer that had crashed.

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And there were little, what he called little people, and he said one of them was still alive.

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There were two that were covered up laying on the ground and he called, he said they had been covered up, it looked like with body bags.

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And the one that was walking around there didn't appear to be hurt.

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Through his research, Kevin Randall has established what he believes happened next.

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According to a number of Liai witnesses, the craft and the bodies were taken to Hangar 84 at the Roswell Army Airfield where they were held for a period of time before the various flights were initiated and sent out of Roswell.

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Randall believes that crates containing the alien bodies and flying saucer wreckage were shipped out of the heavily guarded Hangar 84, never to be seen again.

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When the Air Force produced one meagre weather balloon at the Roswell crash debris, many concluded it was part of a cover-up.

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In the 50s, there was the belief that the U.S. Air Force had proof of some sort that these were alien spaceships and was covering it up to prevent panic.

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There obviously was a cover-up of this action because years later my dad said he was actually part of the cover-up because he went along with the weather balloon story.

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Indeed, according to Marcel, his father revealed that he had been ordered to pose with wreckage from a weather balloon.

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My dad explained to my mother that this was a non-event, don't even discuss it with your friends, don't talk about it.

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It was a true Air Force brat, believed in following the orders, you know, he didn't want me to talk about it, so we did not talk about it.

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These people were visited by military authorities, they were told to keep quiet.

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Frankie Rowe recalls such a visit from a man in a uniform.

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He started getting louder and he kept saying, don't you understand, you did not see anything.

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And he had a night stick type of thing with him that was kind of hanging on his belt.

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And he took that out and he got very loud and he started talking and every time he would make a point, he would hit his hand with the night stick.

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So he would say, you didn't see anything, you were not there.

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And he said, if you ever say one word about this, the rest of your life, we will spread up this family.

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If that's not enough, he said, you know, this is a big desert out here.

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We can take you out in the desert.

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And he said, no one will ever find your bodies.

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If this disturbing account is true, it can only be described as a death threat, a warning to remain silent about the Roswell incident.

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What was so vital to protect? In January of 1948, the Air Force would launch an investigation into the escalating flood of UFO reports.

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Something crashed at Roswell, New Mexico.

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But whether the object that fell from the sky in July of 1947 originated here on Earth or somewhere in outer space has been hotly debated for more than a half century.

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Perhaps it truly was a weather balloon, as the Air Force insists.

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If so, that would deflate one of the seminal events in the history of UFOs.

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However, if the object was in fact extraterrestrial, the issue then becomes, what business did it have at Roswell?

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At the time of the Roswell crash, New Mexico was host to the most advanced military and scientific experiments on the face of the planet.

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In fact, the Roswell area was the only place in the world where testing of cutting-edge radar, rockets and nuclear weapons could all be found.

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Perhaps these lurking UFOs had become a threat to national security.

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The Air Force quietly began investigating the rash of post-war sightings in January of 1948.

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This inquiry was codenamed Project Sine, and by October it would reach a truly stunning conclusion.

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Project Sine wrote a final report called The Estimid of the Situation, which concluded that UFOs were interplanetary vehicles.

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You can imagine that this didn't go over well to Pentagon.

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The government could not have the idea of UFOs as an interplanetary spacecraft coming out when they'd been trying to cover up the Roswell crash.

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It went all the way to the chief of staff of the Air Force who said, I don't find this document particularly persuasive.

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He batted it back down and fired practically everybody in Project Sine.

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The people who were left at Project Sine could read the handwriting on the wall.

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If you said they were extraterrestrial, you lost your job. Your career is over.

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After the purge, the inquiry was revamped as Project Grudge, a name that may have suggested a certain skepticism.

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An Air Force insider actually characterized Project Grudge as the dark ages of UFO investigation.

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In August of 1951, this v-shaped pattern of objects appeared over Texas and became known as the Lubbock Lights.

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Grudge said it was a flock of birds reflecting the glow of the city.

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This film was submitted from Great Falls, Montana in 1950.

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It depicts bright white dots moving behind the smokestacks of a green mill.

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The photographer described the objects as shiny, bright and metallic, like polished silver.

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Project Grudge concluded that they were F-94 Air Force interceptors landing nearby.

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After three years of debunking UFO reports, Grudge was reorganized into the supposedly more objective Project Blue Book.

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Blue Book became the focus for public attention and press attention.

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But it was never scientific. It was never comprehensive. They didn't have radar. They didn't have computers.

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They didn't have people ready to go up, you know, in aircraft with instruments to monitor UFO science.

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Typically an officer, a sergeant, several secretaries, their job was primarily to try to tell us that there was nothing to flying saucers.

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Major Hector Quintanilla Jr. became Blue Book director in 1963.

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The objectives of the program are twofold. They're the same as they have been since 1953 when the regulation was written.

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First of all, to try to determine if the UFO phenomena presents a threat to the security of the United States.

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And second to determine if the UFO phenomena exhibits any technological advances which could be channeled to research and development.

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Many of the UFO reports were easily explainable as atmospheric anomalies, like this saucer-shaped lenticular cloud formation.

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The man who shot this film, a Navy officer and aerial photographer, claimed he saw these objects up close before getting out his camera.

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He said they were disjaped and gunmetal colored. Blue Book determined they were high-flying birds.

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Astronomer J. Allen Hineck, a Blue Book consultant for its entire 16-year run, had this assessment of the project.

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Quote, when Major Quintanilla came in, the flag of the Uttern Nonsense School was flying at its highest.

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Blue Book's most notorious nonsense came in March of 1966 when it dismissed a wave of credible sightings, including many by policemen, as swamp gas.

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In December of 1969, the Air Force closed down Project Blue Book and washed its hands of UFOs.

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Few scientists were willing to approach the subject. However, there were some who embraced UFOs without reservation.

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During the 1950s, the Air Force stood by its finding in the Roswell case. The crash was nothing more than a weather balloon.

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But newsreels show a public that continued to watch the skies, hoping to glimpse a spacecraft.

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Suddenly, people from coast to coast began seeing UFOs.

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What followed was a popular movement that embraced flying saucers and the spacemen who flew them.

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Ready or not, the flying saucers were coming.

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Within a matter of several days, I will, myself, make what might be called a flying saucer.

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Although I don't choose to call it that, because it may not respond to our controls.

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To the vast majority of the people in the late 40s and 1950s, flying saucers were a terrific novelty.

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And there was a great deal of popular fascination. There were cheesy science fiction films based on the idea that margeons were invading the Earth and flying saucers.

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Popular magazines printed on pulp paper would hit the newsstands in time to cash in on the trend and expand it to legendary proportions.

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The man behind those flying saucer legends was publisher Raymond Palmer.

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Palmer was a man who, in his youth, had been severely injured, and so he was crippled up, and he was what you would call a hunchback, I guess.

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He had the instincts of a carnival barker. He liked to put something over on you.

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And the thing about Palmer was that his fans liked having Palmer put something over on them.

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It was Palmer's Fate magazine, later called Flying Saucers Magazine, which helped spread the idea of UFOs in the 1950s.

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Spacecraft from around the universe played across these colorful pages.

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It was here that the UFO was finally identified. Now everyone knew they were spaceships from other worlds.

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What followed was a craze in the 1950s known as the Contactee Movement.

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Contactees were people who said that they had made contact with space people.

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I was aboard a flying saucer in the Nevada desert on 11 different occasions.

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I was taken into this monstrous saucer by one of the men and confronted with a lady captain.

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Beautiful complexion, beautiful appearing woman, and the peaceful people.

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They mean no harm to us. They come down here to investigate what's going on on Earth,

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and they certainly convince me that they're peaceful and they come from another planet they call Clarion.

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They told me there was life on Mars and that there were life on other planets as well,

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and all planets except Earth had interplanetary means of travel.

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The man credited with starting the Contactee Movement was a Polish immigrant and self-styled philosopher named George Adamski.

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In his book Flying Saucers Have Landed, Adamski claimed that in 1952 he had been aboard an alien spacecraft.

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We were picked up on a desert in California desert and I was taken to the mother ship and they were flowing around,

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not too close to the moon but with instruments.

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Similarly, you might say they accepted it wasn't the camera, it was a wriggly sort of a telescopic instrument

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that we were able to see what was on the moon on the other side of it. See?

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Adamski's book detailed his meeting with a man from Venus called Orthon.

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There were also photographs of the spaceship he supposedly flew in.

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Adamski's books also reflected the political climate of the 1950s,

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like growing concerns about the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

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When Orthon departed, he would leave behind these enigmatic footprints.

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Adamski said they contained a message urging an end to nuclear testing on Earth.

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In a similar vein, other Contactees spoke of aliens from utopian planets who wanted to prevent all-out nuclear war.

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Best of all, these aliens looked just like us.

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I have a picture here of the gentleman who escorted me through the craft and I would like to share with and describe it.

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This gentleman, he appeared almost as I am, except that he was about 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing about 150 to 155 pounds.

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And they all appeared about that same size, including the lady.

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George Adamski would publish two more volumes on his contacts with beautiful space people from Saturn and Mars.

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He even had opportunity to take home movies of the scout ships that transported him, guided by robot pilots from Venus.

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The impact of Adamski's tales led to an explosion of flying saucer clubs and conventions.

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As the flying saucer phenomena continued into the 50s, civilians began to become very interested, of course.

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People did and clubs formed up with a classic meaning of the term club, hobbyist as it were, that were just interested in the wilder esoteric aspects of the phenomena, particularly the stories of people who said they were in contact with aliens.

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Many of the Contactees would gather at the largest flying saucer festival of all time.

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It took place in California at a place called Giant Rock in March of 1954. It attracted over 5,000 outer space enthusiasts.

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With many space people from many areas of space, both inside and outside of the solar system.

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Lectures were given from the Giant Rock and stalls were set up to sell books, photos and space-age souvenirs.

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Most importantly, conventions like this gave the Contactees a place to exchange ideas, rumors and reports.

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But I do believe what I see and I am one of those who was inside of flying saucer.

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I seem to become one with the entire universe. Everything in the universe seems to be contracted down to one small stop.

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What's what that goes like? The woman had a radiant red box pleated skirt and a black velvet appearing blouse and a black and red stem or beret and the men had clothes very similar to our Greyhound bus driver.

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Contactees also described the alien spacecraft they had seen in astonishing detail.

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On July the 12th, I took a trip in a flying saucer which I am pointing right here.

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The saucer was well equipped with rooms, bedrooms, bathroom, toilets and this saucer.

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I went up in two Mars over the moon, Venus, Florian and Orion.

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When I say Orion, I do not mean Orion. It is a planet outside of our galaxy.

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Also popular among Contactees was a belief that startling evidence was about to be revealed.

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We are going to see more and more of these visitors from space and that before too long the evidence will be in controversial that you will have on your TV screens and on your movie screen concrete evidence that the ships are here and that they are real and they are not fantastic things which have been cooked up to make a movie.

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The Contactee wave of the 1950s was a light hearted sideshow to the UFO phenomenon.

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However during the same period photographs began to surface that suggested UFOs were no joke and had to be taken seriously.

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The

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They are round, they are cigar shaped and they are cylindrical. Some appear to be sleek and smooth as if made of stainless steel.

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While others appear bolted together from some alien cast iron. At night they are described as having flashing lights.

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They appear without warning, streak across the sky and disappear.

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Many UFO films and photographs have been identified as natural phenomenon or hoaxes.

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But some UFOs appear in photos when we least expect them and defy explanation.

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UFO photo cases are tantalizing because there is some type of what you might think of as objective proof.

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The UFO phenomenon is ephemeral and normally all we have are reports of witnesses on a piece of paper and a tape recorder.

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But with photos you think you have something physical.

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Indeed photos offer some of the most convincing evidence that extraterrestrial aircraft may be real.

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This series of photos remains among the most compelling examples of what ufologists call a daylight disc.

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The photographs were taken on July 29, 1952 by George Stock outside of his lawnmower shop in Pasek, New Jersey.

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Stock reported that as he was working outside at 4.30pm he looked up to see something unusual flying overhead.

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Using an inexpensive box reflex camera he snapped pictures of what he described as a disc shaped object with a metallic bottom.

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It hovered momentarily and accelerated and flew away.

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All that remains of this astonishing daytime visitation are a few pictures.

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But are photos reliable evidence for UFOs?

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Dr. Bruce McAbee is an optical physicist employed by the United States Navy.

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His official research involves high energy space lasers but his interest also lies in the detailed analysis of UFO photographs.

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Of particular interest to Dr. McAbee are photos which show no evidence of a hoax or misidentification and cannot be otherwise explained.

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One such case began at a farm in rural Oregon in 1950.

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These are two photos taken by a farmer and his wife in 1950 in Macmillan, Oregon.

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Here's the first photo and here's the second and we'll get a little bit of a blow up on these.

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Using image enhancement equipment, McAbee brings into focus the startling photographs that were taken in the early evening with a simple camera.

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You can see that it's an oval object with a little thing on the top, like a little protrusion at the top of it.

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This is obviously a hoax or the real thing, there's no halfway point.

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You can see the image clearly enough to see that it's not a bird or plane or Superman.

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So the next question is what could it be?

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And if we go back over here we can see that there are electrical wires right up above the object.

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Looking again at the blow up.

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And now the question is is there any evidence of a suspension underneath the wires?

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A contrast enhanced version of the Oregon photo reveals minute scratches that McAbee must distinguish from a string or line that might have been attached to the object to suspend it for a hoax.

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No one has found any evidence of a line going up above the object.

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There is a possibility that this thing might have been thrown in photograph except that the image is not blurred by motion.

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Agents of the Air Force and FBI questioned the couple who took this picture and authorities later confiscated a copy held by the local newspaper.

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No one has yet explained why.

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This photograph is another of the more credible UFO pictures ever taken.

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It was snapped in Brazil by a government survey team in 1958.

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A Brazilian naval photographer on a ship was there with the rest of the men when they saw an object shaped like Saturn.

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In other words an object with a ring around it flying toward an island that they were near, Trinidad Island, flying around the island and then taking off in the distance.

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And he snapped four or five or so or more photos of the object with literally dozens and dozens of witnesses.

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The sighting lasted nearly two minutes.

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First the object was reported to have approached the island then it disappeared behind a mountain.

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It then reappeared before moving off at high speed toward the sea.

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This is clearly a structure that somebody builds that doesn't look like anything that we have on Earth.

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There were all these witnesses who saw the picture being taken.

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For these reasons the photographs are unusually evidential and have to figure in any kind of case for the reality of UFOs is somebody's technology.

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Because this is a multiple witness case done by scientists and a professional photographer and has many photographs it probably has to be taken seriously as the number one photographic case in UFO history.

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Soon after the photos were taken Brazil's president, Juselino Kubocek ordered them released to the press.

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His action stands in stark contrast to the apparent secrecy of official UFO inquiries in the United States beginning with the Roswell incident in 1947.

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Even today requests for government records are routinely refused.

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Documents that are released are often censored to the point of uselessness.

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Perhaps it is no surprise that many suspect a government cover-up and conclude that unidentified flying objects may indeed originate somewhere other than Earth.

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For the young, Brazil's self-reliance and eruption are mega disasters. Tuesday night at 9 on the History Channel.