1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:17,600 For millennia, people have spotted mysterious objects in the sky. 2 00:00:17,600 --> 00:00:23,400 Most witnesses are ordinary, sensible people startled and amazed at what they see. 3 00:00:23,400 --> 00:00:29,400 Many now report their encounters to government officials who deny any knowledge of UFOs. 4 00:00:29,400 --> 00:00:42,800 Conspiracy, cover-up, or an ominous miscalculation of the power of the unexplained. 5 00:00:42,800 --> 00:00:49,160 1980, 140 miles outside London on the east coast of England, Woodbridge and Brentwater's 6 00:00:49,160 --> 00:00:54,840 naval bases, under the command of the United States Air Force. 7 00:00:54,840 --> 00:00:58,840 Together they form the largest tactical fighter wing in the world. 8 00:00:58,840 --> 00:01:05,240 The two bases are separated by a three-mile stretch of heavy woods known as the Rendlesham Forest, 9 00:01:05,240 --> 00:01:12,040 the backdrop for one of the most investigated UFO sightings in history. 10 00:01:12,040 --> 00:01:15,840 This is what it looked like just after midnight, December 27th. 11 00:01:15,840 --> 00:01:21,040 Woodbridge security supervisor, Sergeant Jim Peniston, rushed to the east gate, 12 00:01:21,040 --> 00:01:24,640 where centuries alerted him to strange lights. 13 00:01:24,640 --> 00:01:31,040 My first thought on it was it was an aircraft downing, a possible aircraft crash. 14 00:01:31,040 --> 00:01:37,040 There was a color scheme of red and yellow and some white light. 15 00:01:37,040 --> 00:01:39,640 That's the reaction to get with chemicals. 16 00:01:39,640 --> 00:01:44,040 Peniston radiated back to the flight supervisor and was given permission to investigate. 17 00:01:44,040 --> 00:01:47,240 He and the centuries advanced into the darkness. 18 00:01:47,240 --> 00:01:51,440 Until they stumbled on a site they could not explain. 19 00:01:51,440 --> 00:01:56,640 The air, for example, had a feeling of electricity in it. 20 00:01:56,640 --> 00:02:01,840 My feelings at the time ran from confusion to disbelief. 21 00:02:01,840 --> 00:02:05,640 I could not understand for the life of me what this could be. 22 00:02:05,640 --> 00:02:10,640 The craft itself measured approximately nine feet by nine feet, triangular in shape. 23 00:02:10,640 --> 00:02:12,240 It had no cockpit. 24 00:02:12,240 --> 00:02:15,040 As far as I could tell, there was no windows. 25 00:02:15,040 --> 00:02:20,040 Just this very highly shiny black glass-like material. 26 00:02:20,040 --> 00:02:23,440 And I think the most fascinating part of it, at least far as I was concerned, 27 00:02:23,440 --> 00:02:32,040 was the fact that this had identifiable inscription, symbols on the side of it. 28 00:02:32,040 --> 00:02:34,440 Peniston says he approached the craft. 29 00:02:34,440 --> 00:02:36,640 It was warm when he touched it. 30 00:02:36,640 --> 00:02:41,240 Suddenly it began to move, lifting up silently right before his eyes, 31 00:02:41,240 --> 00:02:46,440 then disappearing into the night sky. 32 00:02:46,440 --> 00:02:50,840 Peniston claims he drew this sketch of the craft at a debriefing the next morning 33 00:02:50,840 --> 00:02:55,640 with the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt. 34 00:02:55,640 --> 00:03:02,040 The next night, Halt received word that the strange lights had returned. 35 00:03:02,040 --> 00:03:06,040 Well, the base commander and I looked at each other quite in disbelief. 36 00:03:06,040 --> 00:03:09,640 And I said, well, we both agree we needed to put this to bed. 37 00:03:09,640 --> 00:03:15,240 Eager to debunk the entire affair, Halt gathered a Geiger counter, night visioned Starscope, 38 00:03:15,240 --> 00:03:20,040 hand-held tape recorder, then with a few men from the disaster preparedness unit, 39 00:03:20,040 --> 00:03:25,040 he drove to the area where Peniston had seen the UFO. 40 00:03:25,040 --> 00:03:29,040 Portable lights they had brought, mysteriously flickered and died. 41 00:03:29,040 --> 00:03:36,440 Halt, concerned for the safety of his men, ordered several of them back to the East Gate. 42 00:03:36,440 --> 00:03:41,240 With the rest of his unit, he walked into the forest, checking radiation levels. 43 00:03:41,240 --> 00:03:44,840 He says they seemed unusually high. 44 00:03:44,840 --> 00:03:49,040 Suddenly, off in the distance, Halt spotted a glowing object. 45 00:03:49,040 --> 00:03:53,640 This is the actual recording Halt made of his UFO encounter that night. 46 00:03:53,640 --> 00:03:56,840 I'm gonna look at the thing on a plane about 200 to 300 yards away. 47 00:03:56,840 --> 00:03:58,240 It looks like an eye, a wink, an hatch. 48 00:03:58,240 --> 00:04:02,240 It's got a flash of silver into the Starscope that it almost burned dry. 49 00:04:02,240 --> 00:04:04,440 It has never moved down a box. 50 00:04:04,440 --> 00:04:06,240 This is weird. 51 00:04:06,240 --> 00:04:08,840 There's something very, very strange. 52 00:04:08,840 --> 00:04:09,640 And there we stood. 53 00:04:09,640 --> 00:04:11,240 Well, we didn't know quite what to think of that. 54 00:04:11,240 --> 00:04:15,040 But when we looked to the North, suddenly there were objects in the sky. 55 00:04:15,040 --> 00:04:16,840 And we watched this in awe. 56 00:04:16,840 --> 00:04:19,240 Suddenly the object came toward us at high speed. 57 00:04:19,240 --> 00:04:20,640 It moved directly toward us. 58 00:04:20,640 --> 00:04:23,240 I can't estimate the speed, but it moved very rapidly. 59 00:04:23,240 --> 00:04:26,640 Stopped and sent down a pencil-like beam at our feet. 60 00:04:26,640 --> 00:04:30,240 And just as fast as the beam appeared, it just clicked off and disappeared. 61 00:04:30,240 --> 00:04:32,040 I still have questions as to what happened. 62 00:04:32,040 --> 00:04:33,840 I really don't know what it was. 63 00:04:33,840 --> 00:04:38,640 I do know it was something strange, something that was controlled by some type of intelligence. 64 00:04:38,640 --> 00:04:40,640 And that's about all I really know. 65 00:04:41,640 --> 00:04:47,640 Two weeks later, Holt described the incident in a memo sent to the British Ministry of Defense. 66 00:04:47,640 --> 00:04:52,640 The British government never responded to the memo, but word of the encounter spread. 67 00:04:52,640 --> 00:05:00,640 Three years later, UFO researchers pressured the Air Force Commander to release the memo under the Freedom of Information Act. 68 00:05:02,640 --> 00:05:09,640 News of the Rental Shem incident also generated enormous interest from UFO researchers and skeptics. 69 00:05:09,640 --> 00:05:14,640 Here was a case with highly credible witnesses, trained Air Force personnel. 70 00:05:14,640 --> 00:05:24,640 Tucson astronomer and retired U.S. Air Force pilot James McGay-Hay is a UFO skeptic who investigated Holt and Peniston's alleged encounter. 71 00:05:24,640 --> 00:05:31,240 McGay-Hay insists Holt mistook the beams from a lighthouse five miles away for a spacecraft. 72 00:05:31,240 --> 00:05:37,240 That object that was winking at him, which is on the tape, is clearly the lighthouse. 73 00:05:37,240 --> 00:05:41,240 Now he's looking at the lighthouse, I think, with the starlight scope. 74 00:05:41,240 --> 00:05:47,840 Now remember, here comes this beam of light. He's looking at this light with 100,000 times intensity. 75 00:05:47,840 --> 00:05:52,640 What it's going to do is it's going to burn out the image in the center so it's going to become black. 76 00:05:52,640 --> 00:05:56,240 And that's what easily explains the beams and these other things. 77 00:05:56,240 --> 00:06:00,640 When Holt's tape is played against the flashing of the lighthouse, this seems to be the case. 78 00:06:00,640 --> 00:06:06,040 Try not to misposition here, stir the head in between the serrated again. 79 00:06:06,040 --> 00:06:07,640 Watch. 80 00:06:07,640 --> 00:06:11,640 The other end of the flashback. There it is. I actually hit two. 81 00:06:11,640 --> 00:06:15,040 I can't explain that. I really don't know. I never gave it any thought. 82 00:06:15,040 --> 00:06:19,040 I do know that the whole time we were out there, we could see the lighthouse. 83 00:06:19,040 --> 00:06:24,040 And the lighthouse was about 35 or 40 degrees off to our right from where this whole thing took place. 84 00:06:24,040 --> 00:06:28,040 Did area radar operators confirm the UFO sighting? 85 00:06:28,040 --> 00:06:30,040 Holt says maybe. 86 00:06:31,040 --> 00:06:38,040 They really didn't confirm they found anything. Although later I found out that when they reviewed the tapes, they did find some things on the tape. 87 00:06:38,040 --> 00:06:43,040 If he has a radar report, I'd like to see it because I investigated this and I couldn't find one. 88 00:06:43,040 --> 00:06:51,040 Skeptics also suggest the Rendlesham UFO might have been a meteor, bright stars, or a Russian satellite that fell out of the sky that night. 89 00:06:51,040 --> 00:06:58,040 To me, this is just the case. If we're a number of people, saw some lights, got a little excited, 90 00:06:58,440 --> 00:07:02,440 thought about UFOs and all of a sudden everything they see is a UFO. 91 00:07:02,440 --> 00:07:11,440 The first night, it was a combination of a satellite reentry, a meteor fireball, and a police car driving around in the woods. 92 00:07:11,440 --> 00:07:18,440 The second night, it turns out to be a lighthouse, some microwave antennas, and some stars in the sky. 93 00:07:18,440 --> 00:07:27,440 We had a controlled landing. Apparently there was no crater. We also had a craft that was able to take back off with absolutely no sound. 94 00:07:27,840 --> 00:07:38,840 Which tells me high technology. And maneuver back through the tree line, rise over the trees, hover momentarily, and then take off at incredible speed. 95 00:07:38,840 --> 00:07:48,840 It's just totally ridiculous to even consider that it was a Russian satellite or a meteor. Impossible. 96 00:07:49,840 --> 00:07:58,840 In 1991, believing serious questions were still unanswered. The British government finally responded to the Rendlesham incident. 97 00:07:58,840 --> 00:08:02,840 Nick Pope, its top UFO investigator, reopened the case. 98 00:08:02,840 --> 00:08:10,840 I've always felt that Rendlesham Forest is a case which displays a lot of important factors all drawn together. 99 00:08:10,840 --> 00:08:15,840 You have a multiple witness event. Those witnesses are trained military observers. 100 00:08:15,840 --> 00:08:28,840 The Defence Radiological Protection Service had no explanation as to why the radiation readings taken by Colonel Holt's team were so high, undoubtedly something very strange had happened there. 101 00:08:28,840 --> 00:08:40,840 Pope requested further investigation. The British government said no and closed the file. Perhaps in part due to this fact, Sergeant Peniston arrived at the site at approximately 1 a.m. 102 00:08:40,840 --> 00:08:47,840 and reemerged from Rendlesham Forest after dawn, but can only account for less than an hour of his time. 103 00:08:47,840 --> 00:08:56,840 Skeptics question how Peniston could make such an historic discovery and yet not report back to base for several hours. 104 00:08:57,840 --> 00:09:06,840 Well, we had thought it was apparently only maybe hours worth of investigation time turned out to be four hours. 105 00:09:06,840 --> 00:09:14,840 I got a feeling that it might have been the adrenaline that we were pumped up at that point in time. 106 00:09:14,840 --> 00:09:21,840 What is it that Peniston says he saw in touch that night? To this day, he is perplexed by the entire incident. 107 00:09:21,840 --> 00:09:36,840 Something that can sustain a control flight, something that has mass, something that makes no sound, and something that can take off at incredible speeds back up into the atmosphere. 108 00:09:36,840 --> 00:09:39,840 Explain it. I can't. 109 00:09:40,840 --> 00:09:55,840 Unknown forms in the sky surprise and alarm citizens below, sometimes causing governments to do battle with the unexplained. 110 00:09:55,840 --> 00:10:03,840 Belgium, the center of Europe, and the focus of one of the most famous UFO encounters in history. 111 00:10:03,840 --> 00:10:15,840 On the evening of November 15, 1989, police officer Francis Michelsik had completed a few hours of routine patrol in Anne's, a Belgian village near the German border. 112 00:10:15,840 --> 00:10:21,840 When Michelsik says he looked up and became one of the first witnesses of the Belgium Wave. 113 00:10:22,840 --> 00:10:33,840 We saw a large mass in the sky, a triangular mass with three lights oriented downward about 200 meters from our police van. 114 00:10:38,840 --> 00:10:44,840 The object was silent and immobile. This object did not correspond in any way to anything we'd seen before. 115 00:10:44,840 --> 00:10:59,840 Two weeks later, Dieter Plumann, a member of the Jean-Don Marie, the Belgian National Police Force, heard over the police radio fellow officers nearby reporting a strange object in the night sky. 116 00:11:03,840 --> 00:11:09,840 At first, when we heard our colleagues talking to dispatching, we thought they were crazy. 117 00:11:10,840 --> 00:11:17,840 Women's requested permission to investigate, and when he reached the edge of town, he says, witnessed an astounding sight. 118 00:11:25,840 --> 00:11:33,840 We stopped right in front of the nursing home, and there was an immense object over our heads. 119 00:11:33,840 --> 00:11:39,840 The object had three lights at its extremities and a blinking red light in the center. 120 00:11:42,840 --> 00:11:55,840 At a certain point, I saw a small object leave the large thing, an object which was also flashing, which came straight down and turned and flew around the back of the nursing home. 121 00:11:56,840 --> 00:12:05,840 After that, the large object transformed itself into a single light, and we followed it toward Germany. 122 00:12:06,840 --> 00:12:17,840 Belgian radio and TV were soon filled with reports of similar sightings prompting hundreds of calls to the office of the top UFO research group in Belgium, known by its acronym SOBEPS. 123 00:12:18,840 --> 00:12:24,840 Over the next several months, researchers documented more than 800 so-called close encounters. 124 00:12:24,840 --> 00:12:29,840 SOBEPS eventually published two thick volumes on the Belgium Wave. 125 00:12:30,840 --> 00:12:37,840 Specific characteristics of the phenomenon were reported by many, many, many people. 126 00:12:38,840 --> 00:12:43,840 Then on March 30, 1990, the Belgium Wave story took a dramatic twist. 127 00:12:43,840 --> 00:12:50,840 Near midnight, several police officers called the NATO radar installation with reports of a UFO. 128 00:12:50,840 --> 00:12:57,840 Within an hour, that facility and a second radar station were both tracking an unknown flying object. 129 00:13:00,840 --> 00:13:13,840 The chief of operations for the Belgian Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Wilfred de Brouwer, ordered ground command to scramble a pair of F-16 fighter jets armed with missiles. 130 00:13:14,840 --> 00:13:31,840 A supersonic high-tech cat and mouse game ensued. The jets' radar locked on to their targets nine times, but with each lock on, the object drastically changed its position. 131 00:13:31,840 --> 00:13:36,840 After an hour, the F-16s lost contact and returned to base. 132 00:13:37,840 --> 00:13:44,840 For weeks, the encounter was kept under wraps, but Colonel de Brouwer felt compelled to share what he knew. 133 00:13:44,840 --> 00:13:51,840 During an interview with a reporter from one of Europe's most popular magazines, de Brouwer described what happened. 134 00:13:52,840 --> 00:14:00,840 Within days, de Brouwer called a news conference and told reporters from around the world what he knew and what he didn't know. 135 00:14:00,840 --> 00:14:07,840 This is what the pilots saw on their radar. The UFO appears as a diamond in the center of the screen. 136 00:14:08,840 --> 00:14:18,840 What these pilots detected was well outside the normal flying envelope of an airplane. 137 00:14:18,840 --> 00:14:40,840 In other words, sometimes they had what we call lock-ons on a target, which gave a parameter varying from speeds between 150 knots to 990 knots. 138 00:14:40,840 --> 00:14:51,840 This was an acceleration which occurred in a few seconds. These speeds would be impossible to tolerate for a human being. 139 00:14:51,840 --> 00:14:56,840 Colonel de Brouwer never suggested the mysterious flying craft was from outer space. 140 00:14:56,840 --> 00:15:00,840 He only said its speed and rate of acceleration were unexplained. 141 00:15:00,840 --> 00:15:07,840 Over the next few months, the sightings became more sporadic and the Belgian wave came to an end. 142 00:15:10,840 --> 00:15:18,840 Did the skies over Belgium become a way station for alien spacecraft? If not, what did thousands of people witness? 143 00:15:19,840 --> 00:15:23,840 Physical evidence is the key to proving the existence of UFOs. 144 00:15:23,840 --> 00:15:30,840 The Belgium wave, despite hundreds of credible eyewitnesses, has produced only one piece of convincing evidence, 145 00:15:30,840 --> 00:15:35,840 a photo taken by a civilian bystander in the town of Petit-Rachon. 146 00:15:36,840 --> 00:15:42,840 The photo was examined by former NASA scientist Richard Haynes, a specialist in vision, optics and human perception. 147 00:15:43,840 --> 00:15:54,840 My analysis of the Petit-Rachon photograph suggests very strongly to me that the object that was photographed does not obey laws of physics as we know them. 148 00:15:54,840 --> 00:16:03,840 The second point I would make is it's not a forgery. And finally, I think that there may be some clues in this photograph having to do with propulsion and lift. 149 00:16:03,840 --> 00:16:10,840 Belgian scientists and skeptics tried to calm what they considered the UFO hysteria of the Belgian wave. 150 00:16:11,840 --> 00:16:22,840 A professor at the Astrophysics Institute at Belgium's prestigious University of Liage, Pierre Mega, decided to put the Petit-Rachon photo to his test. 151 00:16:23,840 --> 00:16:35,840 We try to reproduce this photograph and we produce this picture, which is very close to the original picture. 152 00:16:35,840 --> 00:16:46,840 So I think the only way to go ahead and to try to understand more is to do as we did, to analyze the witness report together with the photograph 153 00:16:46,840 --> 00:16:55,840 and to see if everything is consistent. And there are so many inconsistencies that it's very hard to believe it's a true picture. 154 00:16:55,840 --> 00:17:01,840 I don't see how someone could recreate this down at the almost the grain level of the film. 155 00:17:02,840 --> 00:17:08,840 The most convincing evidence for the skeptics' position involved the radar lock-ons of the F-16s. 156 00:17:09,840 --> 00:17:19,840 Belgium's electronic war-center analyzed the radar tapes and found that the object descended below ground level at some points, a physical impossibility. 157 00:17:19,840 --> 00:17:29,840 The center concluded that all but one of the radar lock-ons were really caused by electromagnetic interference or unusual atmospheric conditions. 158 00:17:29,840 --> 00:17:36,840 Eventually, even sobeps agreed. But one major question remains unanswered and unexplained. 159 00:17:39,840 --> 00:17:46,840 Experts say that when ground-based and air-based radar track the same object simultaneously, the object is real. 160 00:17:46,840 --> 00:17:56,840 One of the lock-ons, a simultaneous tracking of the UFO by one of the F-16s and the ground radar station, has never been explained. 161 00:17:57,840 --> 00:18:07,840 If I remember, it's lock-on number nine, which has some very weird characteristics. 162 00:18:07,840 --> 00:18:15,840 And this characteristic doesn't fit with atmospheric explanation, not at all. 163 00:18:15,840 --> 00:18:20,840 Thousands of people still wonder if what they saw came from another world. 164 00:18:20,840 --> 00:18:28,840 Others ask if that single perplexing radar report is a clue to civilizations in distant galaxies. 165 00:18:28,840 --> 00:18:35,840 Questions for those who find answers in the unexplained. 166 00:18:36,840 --> 00:18:41,840 For years, the U.S. government seriously investigated sightings of UFOs. 167 00:18:41,840 --> 00:18:46,840 Thousands of cases passed through the hands of military and other government agencies. 168 00:18:46,840 --> 00:18:55,840 Most of these cases had rational explanations. The rest remain classified as unexplained. 169 00:19:01,840 --> 00:19:12,840 Fifty-year-old Polish immigrant and amateur geologist Stephen Mahalek looked forward to his weekend getaways in the Falcon Lake area, 90 miles east of his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. 170 00:19:12,840 --> 00:19:16,840 This was Mahalek's favorite prospecting site. 171 00:19:16,840 --> 00:19:24,840 Around noon on May 20th, 1967, as he examined a quartz formation, Mahalek was distracted by some unruly geese. 172 00:19:24,840 --> 00:19:31,840 He looked up and was transfixed. He says he saw two cigar-shaped objects glowing red in the sky. 173 00:19:31,840 --> 00:19:36,840 The following is a recording Mahalek later made of what he saw next. 174 00:19:37,840 --> 00:19:43,840 The size, you know, was amazing. And here they're coming down. 175 00:19:43,840 --> 00:19:48,840 With speed, I just can't describe. Amazing speed. 176 00:19:48,840 --> 00:19:53,840 Mahalek says one of them stopped, suddenly accelerated, then disappeared. 177 00:19:53,840 --> 00:19:57,840 The other landed about 50 yards away. He watched in awe. 178 00:19:58,840 --> 00:20:09,840 I hear shh. And I hear a high-pitched whistle of running equipment, pumps on high speed. 179 00:20:09,840 --> 00:20:18,840 When the tank landed, it was of gray-pink color. It's stainless steel and it was pink hot. 180 00:20:18,840 --> 00:20:23,840 And I can feel the breeze on my face that that thing is hot outside. 181 00:20:23,840 --> 00:20:28,840 There was my notebook, there was my fancy, so I sketched this thing. 182 00:20:28,840 --> 00:20:32,840 Mahalek claims it was round, about 40 feet long and about 10 feet high. 183 00:20:32,840 --> 00:20:36,840 His curiosity took hold and he approached the craft. 184 00:20:36,840 --> 00:20:42,840 He examined the outside of it, slowly touching the glowing skin with his gloved hand. 185 00:20:42,840 --> 00:20:47,840 It was fiery hot, nearly melting the palm of his rubber glove. 186 00:20:47,840 --> 00:20:52,840 Mahalek says the craft rotated, turning its grid-like exhaust vent toward him. 187 00:20:54,840 --> 00:21:01,840 The blast of hot gas from the vent knocked him to the ground, setting his shirt and undershirt on fire. 188 00:21:01,840 --> 00:21:07,840 Suddenly, the craft lifted off the ground and according to Mahalek, soared straight up. 189 00:21:07,840 --> 00:21:13,840 He threw his burning shirts to the ground, dazed and in severe pain from the burns to his chest and stomach. 190 00:21:13,840 --> 00:21:19,840 Mahalek says he wandered around for what seemed like hours before he managed to gather up his supplies. 191 00:21:20,840 --> 00:21:27,840 He found his way out of the woods, caught a bus and later that night arrived back in Winnipeg. 192 00:21:31,840 --> 00:21:38,840 Still in pain, he rushed from the bus station to nearby Mizorakordia Hospital, where he was treated for first-degree burns. 193 00:21:38,840 --> 00:21:46,840 Mahalek claims the blast from the craft had etched a grid-like pattern into his abdomen that matched the pattern on the exhaust vent. 194 00:21:47,840 --> 00:21:59,840 The next day, Sunday, he was spirited off to the St. Regis Hotel after convincing the managing editor of Winnipeg's highly regarded daily newspaper, the Winnipeg Tribune, that his extraordinary encounter was real. 195 00:22:01,840 --> 00:22:09,840 At that time, I said, OK, as any newsman would have done, draw it. I gave him a piece of paper. 196 00:22:09,840 --> 00:22:19,840 I think that drawing has become the most famous UFO piece of evidence in the world today. 197 00:22:19,840 --> 00:22:35,840 He sat down, he drew it in front of me, I hid it, I talked to him, I called doctors, I called police and I sure as hell didn't want the Winnipeg Free Press getting the story. 198 00:22:35,840 --> 00:22:42,840 Monday's edition of the Tribune led with this headline. Mahalek soon became a sensation worldwide. 199 00:22:42,840 --> 00:22:47,840 What followed was one of the most intensely examined UFO cases on record. 200 00:22:47,840 --> 00:22:53,840 Over the next two years, Mahalek's burns kept recurring and no one could explain why. 201 00:22:53,840 --> 00:23:01,840 He was examined by more than a dozen physicians in Canada and the United States, including doctors at the Mayo Clinic. 202 00:23:02,840 --> 00:23:12,840 An investigation by the Royal Canadian Air Force concluded that the abdominal burns sustained by Mr. Mahalek remain as unexplainable as the source of the burn. 203 00:23:14,840 --> 00:23:23,840 The Mayo Clinic psychological report further concluded that Mahalek was not prone to delusions, hallucinations or any type of emotional disorder. 204 00:23:24,840 --> 00:23:29,840 Perhaps the most influential investigation was conducted under the auspices of the United States government. 205 00:23:29,840 --> 00:23:36,840 The chief investigator, physicist Roy Craig, is now retired and raises llamas on his Colorado ranch. 206 00:23:36,840 --> 00:23:41,840 His job was to investigate UFO reports and find physical evidence. 207 00:23:41,840 --> 00:23:46,840 We responded to the Falcon Lake report as soon as we could. 208 00:23:46,840 --> 00:23:53,840 Now, there's no value in seeing a landing site that somebody's had a chance to go back and prepare for me to look at. 209 00:23:53,840 --> 00:24:03,840 But if we could get back and find a landing site that had not been seen by anyone else, there may be something there that we could use as real evidence that he had a real experience. 210 00:24:03,840 --> 00:24:10,840 Two weeks after the encounter, Craig flew to Winnipeg and joined Mahalek on his first return to the landing site. 211 00:24:11,840 --> 00:24:15,840 He guided us on what he said was a big search for the site. 212 00:24:15,840 --> 00:24:26,840 Actually, we just roamed around in haphazard circles, coming back to about where we started and didn't go very far at all. 213 00:24:26,840 --> 00:24:32,840 He was trying to give us the impression of leading us on a search for a site. 214 00:24:32,840 --> 00:24:35,840 And we all concluded that the site probably did not exist. 215 00:24:35,840 --> 00:24:40,840 With no apparent physical evidence, Craig classified the case as without merit. 216 00:24:40,840 --> 00:24:43,840 The American investigation was over. 217 00:24:45,840 --> 00:24:54,840 University of Manitoba astronomer Chris Rutkowski, believing the government reports left many questions unanswered, launched his own investigation. 218 00:24:54,840 --> 00:25:02,840 In 1994, he published The Falcon Lake Case, too close an encounter, in the respected Journal of UFO Studies. 219 00:25:03,840 --> 00:25:08,840 The terrain around the site is very rugged, very rocky. 220 00:25:08,840 --> 00:25:13,840 The brush is very, very dense. The trees all look alike. The rocks all look alike. 221 00:25:13,840 --> 00:25:22,840 And to a person who's disoriented, not feeling very well, it might be very, very difficult to find the exact site after some period of time has elapsed. 222 00:25:22,840 --> 00:25:28,840 Skeptics disagreeing with Rutkowski also do not believe that Mahalek would make physical contact. 223 00:25:28,840 --> 00:25:35,840 With an extremely hot object, he assumed was a UFO. But this does not surprise his son. 224 00:25:36,840 --> 00:25:47,840 He is the kind of fellow that fear is not in his vocabulary. Not that he's a fearless man, but that when he sees something he doesn't understand, he doesn't fear it. 225 00:25:47,840 --> 00:25:49,840 He just chooses to understand it. 226 00:25:49,840 --> 00:25:52,840 Skeptics wonder why no one else saw the craft. 227 00:25:52,840 --> 00:25:59,840 I talked with the people who were in charge of managing the fire tower. It was man at that time. 228 00:25:59,840 --> 00:26:11,840 And the people were absolutely certain that there was no way that two vehicles, like he described, glowing as they were, could fly into that space and out again. 229 00:26:11,840 --> 00:26:15,840 There was no way that that could happen without their seeing it. 230 00:26:15,840 --> 00:26:24,840 My conclusion on that case is that all the evidence that I found pointed toward hoax rather than a real experience. 231 00:26:24,840 --> 00:26:30,840 And not even a skillful hoax, a very inept hoax. 232 00:26:30,840 --> 00:26:40,840 Mahalek became bedridden and incapacitated in the 1980s. Was this hard-working and devoted family man capable of crafting such a hoax? 233 00:26:41,840 --> 00:26:49,840 For my dad to fabricate something as large as this would require more than I think he had. 234 00:26:49,840 --> 00:26:57,840 More than he has. He's a simple man. He grew up and lived a very straight, hard life. 235 00:26:57,840 --> 00:27:07,840 This was no con man. This was a man who later went down a male. They couldn't figure it out. I couldn't figure it out. The doctor I had there couldn't figure it out. 236 00:27:07,840 --> 00:27:15,840 I am not about to be taken by anybody. This guy didn't take me. This guy was legit. 237 00:27:16,840 --> 00:27:24,840 Stephen Mahalek never wavered from his story. He believed he had encountered a UFO. 238 00:27:24,840 --> 00:27:36,840 Roy Craig and the US governments disagreed, but they never classified the case as solved. The official report lists Mahalek's citing as unexplained. 239 00:27:37,840 --> 00:27:50,840 In the past, the US government routinely took a keen interest in reports of UFOs. Now it denies any investigative role, leaving only questions for witnesses of close encounters with the unexplained. 240 00:27:54,840 --> 00:28:03,840 On the night of March 8th, 1994, something strange was sighted in the skies over Holland, Michigan, on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. 241 00:28:03,840 --> 00:28:07,840 Witnesses were startled and called police. 242 00:28:07,840 --> 00:28:15,840 There were at least four lights and they were all flashing like, okay, there was a sequence. It was kind of like a read. 243 00:28:15,840 --> 00:28:20,840 There were like five, four or five lights and they were all flashing right in the road from the top all the way down to the bottom. 244 00:28:20,840 --> 00:28:30,840 The lights hovered over the outskirts of town near the home of Holly and Daryl Graves. Their 15-year-old son, Joey, was sitting in the living room watching TV. 245 00:28:31,840 --> 00:28:39,840 Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a light and I looked out the window and there was a round circle of lights. 246 00:28:39,840 --> 00:28:50,840 I called my parents and they were sleeping. They didn't know what was going on and my mom, she called 911 to get a cop or someone out here to look at it. 247 00:28:50,840 --> 00:28:52,840 Call 911. 248 00:28:52,840 --> 00:28:59,840 We were just wondering, have you heard anything about these lights that are flickering up here? It's different. I've never seen anything like it. 249 00:28:59,840 --> 00:29:01,840 Okay, why don't we check it out? 250 00:29:01,840 --> 00:29:09,840 It looked like a sphere. The lights were really weird because they changed but they kind of faded into a different color. 251 00:29:09,840 --> 00:29:14,840 So it wasn't like regular lights. So it was kind of weird. 252 00:29:14,840 --> 00:29:24,840 We watched it up to about a half hour. Just slowly moving south. We were just in awe, I think, about the whole thing. 253 00:29:24,840 --> 00:29:33,840 There was no noise. It was very peaceful out. We just stood there and watched this object. 254 00:29:33,840 --> 00:29:37,840 At that moment, Officer Veltos pulled in the driveway. 255 00:29:37,840 --> 00:29:49,840 What I saw were two bright lights. Their movement was something that really caught my attention. Their speed accelerated and then it slowed down again. 256 00:29:49,840 --> 00:29:59,840 I decided to have our 911 dispatcher contact a radar operator in Muskegon, Michigan. 257 00:29:59,840 --> 00:30:15,840 It was a clear night. It was about 10 p.m. I was alone on duty. We had a call from the Central Dispatcher in Ottawa County which is quite common for the police department to call us whenever they have any type of weather questions. 258 00:30:15,840 --> 00:30:23,840 I'm from Muskegon. This is Ottawa County 911 calling. You can get anything weird down in the southern Ottawa County area. 259 00:30:23,840 --> 00:30:29,840 Bouchon checked his radar for any images. What radar operators call returns. 260 00:30:29,840 --> 00:30:37,840 I'm seeing three of those. They're very strong. These are huge returns. I've never seen anything like this. Not even when I'm doing storms. 261 00:30:37,840 --> 00:30:46,840 These are really weird. These are bigger than planes. They're about over the center of Lake Michigan. Three of them in a triangle. 262 00:30:46,840 --> 00:30:53,840 What was extraordinary about the case was that radar apparently detected the object at the same time witnesses saw it. 263 00:30:53,840 --> 00:30:59,840 It's a level of confirmation rarely achieved in reported UFO sightings. 264 00:31:00,840 --> 00:31:13,840 Airplanes look like they're moving. These were just sitting still. And then a few minutes later they would disappear from one spot and show up somewhere else. I really didn't know what it was. 265 00:31:13,840 --> 00:31:20,840 Strange lights in the night sky moving at otherworldly speed. The image confirmed on a radar screen. 266 00:31:20,840 --> 00:31:28,840 This, finally hard evidence of a technology far beyond our own, had an alien spacecraft pay to visit to Holland, Michigan? 267 00:31:31,840 --> 00:31:41,840 There was no explanation for these unusual sightings. A reporter for the Muskegon Chronicle, Michael Walsh, decided to investigate for himself. He too found this story remarkable. 268 00:31:42,840 --> 00:31:57,840 We've had past articles where people have reported some strange phenomena, especially at this time of year. But not once did we ever have any dual confirmations, visual, plus the radar. 269 00:31:58,840 --> 00:32:13,840 Others began looking into the incident. Fascinated by the radar confirmation, a professor of natural sciences and at the same time the editor of the Journal of UFO Studies, UFO researcher Michael Swords, met with radar operator Jack Bouchon. 270 00:32:14,840 --> 00:32:31,840 We went into the radar room. This young fellow really knew how to use the equipment. He would show us the difference between a hard count of something like an airliner and a soft response of something like a storm cloud. 271 00:32:31,840 --> 00:32:36,840 And it was obvious this was an extremely competent operator. 272 00:32:43,840 --> 00:33:03,840 The National Weather Service says that they tracked a number of objects over Lake Michigan. But, of course, not everything that turns up on radar is a solid object. Radar is subjected to mirage conditions of various kinds. 273 00:33:03,840 --> 00:33:15,840 Schaefer believes that the sightings over the lake can be explained by a natural phenomenon which usually happens over Lake Michigan in the spring. Warm air moves over the cold waters of the lake. 274 00:33:15,840 --> 00:33:25,840 The layer of cold air trapped beneath the layer of warm air creates a mirror effect in the sky by bending the light. This effect is called a temperature inversion. 275 00:33:26,840 --> 00:33:39,840 One of the best known investigators of UFO sightings, Philip J. Klass, is a technical journalist for Aviation Week and Space Technology and an expert on radar systems. 276 00:33:39,840 --> 00:33:53,840 Ground radar, especially during temperature inversion conditions, the rays can be, instead of going straight out, they can be bent downwards, so where you get echoes from the ground. 277 00:33:53,840 --> 00:34:02,840 We're trained to know the difference between temperature inversions and, for instance, precipitation because they appear to be the same thing. 278 00:34:02,840 --> 00:34:12,840 Klass says that since Bouchon was using old linear radar, not the newer Doppler radar, the images were probably atmospheric tricks. 279 00:34:12,840 --> 00:34:20,840 It is a weather radar. It is not designed, especially, to detect metal objects or aircraft. 280 00:34:20,840 --> 00:34:36,840 These returns were not only hard returns, but they showed up in this geometric pattern and that when, say, the lead return would move out into Lake Michigan, the other two would stay behind. 281 00:34:36,840 --> 00:34:40,840 Then they would move to reform the triangle. 282 00:34:40,840 --> 00:34:50,840 In fact, according to Muskegon Chronicle reporter Michael Walsh, most of the UFO witnesses did report strikingly similar patterns, shapes and sizes. 283 00:34:50,840 --> 00:34:59,840 I believe that each of them sincerely believed what they saw was something extraordinary. 284 00:34:59,840 --> 00:35:11,840 That's not to say that it's extraterrestrial or paranormal. It may very well be a very physical manifestation of something that we don't yet know about. 285 00:35:11,840 --> 00:35:16,840 There is no consensus on what the UFOs over Holland, Michigan, might have been. 286 00:35:16,840 --> 00:35:23,840 Skeptics point to a temperature inversion and its effect on both the lights in the sky and the radar on the ground. 287 00:35:23,840 --> 00:35:32,840 Witnesses, including a weather service radar operator, say they know they saw something real, but what was it? 288 00:35:32,840 --> 00:35:37,840 Do these eyewitness accounts and the radar confirmation merit further investigation? 289 00:35:37,840 --> 00:35:49,840 The government answered that question long ago. It says no, leaving this encounter one that may forever remain unexplained. 290 00:35:49,840 --> 00:35:56,840 Since the 1940s, believers in the unexplained have charged the U.S. government with conspiracy and cover-up. 291 00:35:56,840 --> 00:36:05,840 In the 1990s, those charges concentrated on a super-secret military base. 292 00:36:05,840 --> 00:36:10,840 In the heart of the desert on the outskirts of Las Vegas, it's Nellis Air Force Base. 293 00:36:10,840 --> 00:36:24,840 85 miles to the northwest is restricted area 4808E, popularly known as Area 51, a jumble of mysterious hangars and runways in one of the most desolate places on Earth. 294 00:36:24,840 --> 00:36:30,840 Officially, it does not exist. 295 00:36:30,840 --> 00:36:40,840 Here is where the U.S. tests its most exotic flying machines. The B-2 stealth bomber, the Blackbird, and the U-2. 296 00:36:40,840 --> 00:36:46,840 The Area 51 control tower identifies itself to area pilots only as dreamland. 297 00:36:46,840 --> 00:36:55,840 There are no tours of Area 51. Instead, soldiers carry loaded machine guns with the authorization to use them. 298 00:36:56,840 --> 00:37:07,840 This base, shrouded in secrecy, has become for many the focus of the world's fascination with UFOs and its hope for contact with extraterrestrial life. 299 00:37:07,840 --> 00:37:18,840 UFO fans from all over the world drive the extraterrestrial highway, a lonely stretch of road that hugs the perimeter of the base, to Mailbox Road. 300 00:37:18,840 --> 00:37:28,840 From this location, hundreds of UFO sightings have been reported. The vast majority have been explained as lights from the latest earthbound military technology. 301 00:37:28,840 --> 00:37:36,840 Some, however, are harder to identify. Author Chuck Clark describes a remarkable craft he says he has seen many times. 302 00:37:36,840 --> 00:37:47,840 It can go from a hover to several thousand miles an hour and back to a hover instantly. It can make very sharp, wide-angle turns and sharper than right-angle turns. 303 00:37:47,840 --> 00:37:56,840 I've seen 120 degree turns at high speed. It appears and disappears in mid-air. Things that normal aircraft don't do. 304 00:37:56,840 --> 00:38:08,840 UFO buffs contend the U.S. is testing an extraterrestrial craft at Area 51, but skeptics and UFO researchers agree that Area 51 is a UFO bust. 305 00:38:08,840 --> 00:38:19,840 Almost all the sightings I hear about happen at night. And at night, you can't judge distance. You can't judge easily, tight in the sky. You can't judge speed. 306 00:38:19,840 --> 00:38:26,840 What I think is that there are no UFOs there. There are no UFOs being developed there. There's no UFO technology there. 307 00:38:26,840 --> 00:38:33,840 Today, the government does not investigate UFO sightings, but for years, they were of vital interest. 308 00:38:33,840 --> 00:38:42,840 Beginning in 1948, the U.S. Air Force began what became known as Project Blue Book, the government's official UFO investigating arm. 309 00:38:42,840 --> 00:38:49,840 But both skeptics and UFO believers say Project Blue Book was half-hearted at best. 310 00:38:49,840 --> 00:38:57,840 As time went on, and especially after the year of 1952, Blue Book's mission was changed. 311 00:38:57,840 --> 00:39:06,840 It was changed from being a somewhat serious look at unidentified flying objects to be basically a public relations office 312 00:39:06,840 --> 00:39:12,840 to try to diffuse emotionalism that was occurring in the American public about this. 313 00:39:12,840 --> 00:39:19,840 So, because this was a rather unsatisfying task to the people at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 314 00:39:19,840 --> 00:39:25,840 they tried rather continuously from the mid-50s onward to get rid of this task. 315 00:39:25,840 --> 00:39:35,840 In 1966, the U.S. Air Force commissioned the University of Colorado to conduct a thorough evaluation of the UFO phenomenon. 316 00:39:35,840 --> 00:39:45,840 The Condon Commission, named after its chairman, Dr. Edward Condon, began an 18-month investigation that ended in controversy. 317 00:39:45,840 --> 00:39:56,840 Condon was an eminent physicist who ridiculed UFOs. He didn't take it seriously. He didn't spend time on the project. 318 00:39:56,840 --> 00:40:06,840 So, the project went wrong because essentially from the top, not the scientific staff, but from the top, it was designed to help the Air Force get rid of the UFO problem. 319 00:40:06,840 --> 00:40:11,840 Well, how could it be designed to do that unless it said UFOs weren't important, weren't serious, and weren't a scientific problem? 320 00:40:11,840 --> 00:40:19,840 Retired physicist and former investigator for the Condon Commission, Roy Craig, strongly supports the commission's work. 321 00:40:19,840 --> 00:40:24,840 We'd have some excellent reports come in with all sorts of proof that there was a strange vehicle there. 322 00:40:24,840 --> 00:40:33,840 And each bit of evidence that we checked out turned out to not be what it really sounded like to start with. 323 00:40:33,840 --> 00:40:38,840 The Condon Commission concluded that the government should stop investigating UFOs. 324 00:40:38,840 --> 00:40:51,840 As a result, in 1969, after 21 years and 15,000 UFO reports, including thousands classified as unexplained, the Air Force closed down Projects Blue Book. 325 00:40:51,840 --> 00:40:57,840 But interest in UFOs remains high, despite the official position taken by the government. 326 00:40:57,840 --> 00:41:02,840 Was the government justified in terminating its UFO investigations? 327 00:41:03,840 --> 00:41:10,840 Most scientists, including astronomer Larry Chupic of Chicago's Adler Planetarium, say yes. 328 00:41:10,840 --> 00:41:19,840 We don't find that the stories of aliens in some government hangar are true. We don't find pieces of spacecraft. 329 00:41:19,840 --> 00:41:29,840 I think when people look at the sky and they don't know what they're seeing, they tend to think of unusual things. 330 00:41:29,840 --> 00:41:35,840 I don't reject the idea that there are flying saucers on Earth from elsewhere. 331 00:41:35,840 --> 00:41:44,840 On the basis that has always been given that our universe is so vast that they couldn't get here, and therefore they aren't here. 332 00:41:44,840 --> 00:41:51,840 We could not, because of our ignorance of our universe, say that other beings could not be here. 333 00:41:51,840 --> 00:41:55,840 I don't believe we've been visited by extraterrestrials. I haven't seen the evidence for it yet. 334 00:41:55,840 --> 00:42:00,840 So we say the question is very much open and should be studied carefully. 335 00:42:00,840 --> 00:42:11,840 For 30 years I've been looking. I have yet to find a single piece of scientifically credible evidence to indicate that we have alien visitors. 336 00:42:11,840 --> 00:42:21,840 Have we been visited by extraterrestrials? Could the elusive evidence be found in a small number of mysterious reports that defy explanation? 337 00:42:21,840 --> 00:42:29,840 Almost all of them turn out to be things we as scientists can identify even though most people couldn't. 338 00:42:29,840 --> 00:42:39,840 Now those last few are always questionable, because neither we nor the observers know what they are. These are the unexplained. 339 00:42:41,840 --> 00:42:45,840 When he rescued us at the forks, I swear the bullets refused to touch him. 340 00:42:45,840 --> 00:42:51,840 We will doomed it, Mondant, till he let us on that charge. That will never change the war.