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This is a journey into a world of mystery and deceit, a fantastical place full of UFOs,

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strange encounters and stories of alien abduction.

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My name is Nick Cook.

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I work for Jane's Information Group, which has reported on defence issues since 1898.

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I investigate secret military programs worth billions of dollars, but hidden from public view.

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I dig out evidence of classified technologies developed by the defence industry and concealed

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behind a network of false trails.

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It's my job to find out what really has been flying through our airspace.

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Also from time to time, I examine sighting evidence of unidentified flying objects.

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Do these sightings offer evidence of top secret military and defence technology, or do they

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hold clues to something more mysterious?

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My plan is to trace the UFO story decade by decade, from early sightings during the Second World War,

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to the mass reports of alien abduction that swept America in the 80s and 90s.

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This world is normally off limits for a journalist, but I wanted to discover for myself what is real and what is not.

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People send me pictures like these every week, and most of them are pretty obvious hoaxes.

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But very occasionally, something genuinely intriguing arrives, like this one for example,

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a picture taken by a Canadian Air Force pilot on a military exercise, and what it shows is indeed quite startling.

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I've seen many pictures like this, all of them taken by aircrew, people who are trained to record data.

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UFOs are a taboo subject in the military, and very much for an aerospace journalist like me.

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Pilots who report them risk being grounded, or perhaps even referred to a psychiatrist for an assessment.

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So these pictures tend to arrive on my desk anonymously and for good reason.

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But these pictures resonate with me because the matter of who you share airspace with when you're travelling at twice the speed of sound really is a matter of life and death.

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I've spent 20 years writing about leading edge aerospace technology.

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I've probably interviewed thousands of pilots in that time.

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A handful of them are reporting UFO incidents that are genuinely mysterious.

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I want to know what it is though, these men are really seeing.

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The history of UFO sightings is not a long one, but it's a bit longer than most people suspect.

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To start to make sense of UFOs you must go back to the 1940s, to the Second World War and these men, and what some of them saw in the night skies over Europe.

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Allied aircrews described being tracked by glowing balls of light which they called Foo Fighters, after an American comic strip.

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This is one of the first recorded reports of a UFO sighting.

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It's taken from the official RAF archives and it is highly unusual.

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It recounts the story of one pilot officer called B.C. Lumsden who saw something extremely unusual during a bombing raid over Germany on the 7th of December 1942.

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The first one is about a man in a red suit.

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It's a light on group 2.

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We were cruising at 7000 feet when we discovered we had company, an orange-colored light off the port wing.

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At first I thought it was tracer flak, but discounted this when I saw how slowly and controlled it was moving.

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It seemed to be playing with red tooth, diving around the fuselage.

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Suddenly it turned starboard and headed straight for us.

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I found it hard to make other members of the squadron believe me, but the following night one of the squadron flight commanders had a similar experience with a green light.

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It's gone, it's gone, it's gone!

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A handful of Foo Fighter sightings could be dismissed as pilot error, but there were hundreds if not thousands of these unexplained phenomena.

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Could they all be the hallucinations of tired or terrified men?

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I've decided to find out more about these strange balls of fire.

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Military historians Dave Clark and Andy Roberts are leading experts on UFO sightings during the Second World War.

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People were seeing tiny balls of light, not much bigger than a beach ball, say, to full-blown flying saucers in the style that we would appreciate today.

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There's a problem of reporting them at debriefing, because if you had bomber crews landing and saying, you know, we saw these peculiar lights chasing us for miles and miles and miles,

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some of the bomber crews I've spoken to were fearful that they'd get grounded for lack of moral fibre, for, you know, for inventing things to get them grounded, some form of psychological problem.

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The first IRF at the Air Ministry were extremely concerned because they thought perhaps it was some form of German secret weapon.

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And it is known that the Nazis did have some quite novel varieties of anti-aircraft, such as scarecrow and things of that nature, which threw huge metal bars around in the sky which people saw.

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And that was designed to unnerve people as much as to damage aeroplanes.

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These designs, taken from secret engineering blueprints seized by the Allies at the end of the war, show just how radical the Nazis' aerospace programmes were.

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And it was plans like these that were unsettling the Allied forces.

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Going through American files of the kind of technological plunder operation that they did on Germany after the war, they do describe technologies that could be pieced together to develop a kind of foo fighter type weapon.

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They were working on all these bizarre little things, but none of these things ever came to fruition.

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If we had the war gone on much longer or had the Germans won, then we may have seen these things developing the same way that we saw the Americans develop at space technology after the war.

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The evidence for foo fighters is intriguing, but I wonder whether there is anything more than the log reports by the pilots who described screaming dogfights with strange balls of light.

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I've come to California to meet physicist and technology historian John Dering. He has first hand information on the development of foo fighters.

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I interviewed a German aircraft engineer who had actually worked on these vehicles in the prototype stage and in the early phases of production.

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These were vehicles that were unmanned. They were what we would probably best describe today as unmanned aerial combat vehicles.

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These were vehicles that were not just set up for surveillance purposes.

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They actually had a purpose of remotely controlled to engage the Allied aircraft, the bombers in particular, by basically trying to apply a mechanism that was not necessarily a catastrophic destructive effect such as blowing the foo fighter up and taking the aircraft down.

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This was intended to be something that could be reused multiple times.

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There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that Allied air crewmen saw these things over Germany, but what about hard evidence on the ground that this technology was actually pursued by the Germans?

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One of the reports that I have seen and looked over was in reference to a project in the Black Forest that involved a small vehicle that was specifically intended to be an interceptor for advanced air defense against Allied bombers.

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Now that document actually came from a US intelligence officer and so I have pretty high certainty that that was real.

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I want to follow up on John Derring's research. His work indicates there was secret technology being developed in Nazi occupied central Europe, which might account for some of the UFO sightings.

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These are the Sudeten Mountains on the Polish-Czech border.

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During World War II this beautiful valley was home to some of the finest scientific mines of the Third Reich.

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It was here that the Nazis built one of their underground research facilities, the Wenceslas Mine.

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I'm meeting Polish military historian Igor Wietkowski, who will guide me round the mine, a vast underground complex hidden away from Allied bombs which Nazi slave labor carved out of the Sudeten Mountains.

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An example of a surface infrastructure being kind of a reflection of the underground facility.

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It was here in the desperate last months of the war that German scientists worked around the clock to produce Kriegensscheiden, the war-winning technology that might produce a stunning knockout blow, even as the Nazis were being pushed back towards Germany.

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As Igor guided me through the flooded tunnels, the air became heavy and difficult to breathe.

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So in effect we've come hundreds of metres through this complex and we're now deep into the mountain.

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Not hundreds of metres, but several kilometres in fact.

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Several kilometres into the mountain and this would have been a highly secure, impenetrable assembly site.

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Exactly and the secret here on this place was very exceptional so that the Allies never found out about it.

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Almost nothing exists of the original mine. As the Nazis retreated in 1945, they sealed most of the tunnels, leaving the advanced technology buried beneath impenetrable walls of rock.

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The Allies did capture one man who knew all about this place and he wasn't a token find.

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His name was SS General Jakob Spornberg and he was in charge of the technical programme at the mine.

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What he revealed astonished his interrogators.

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Indeed I find it surprising 60 years later.

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He spoke of a secret experiment attempting nothing less than to conquer gravity.

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He described a bell shaped device that needed enormous amounts of electrical power.

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It was made of a hard heavy metal and filled with a mercury like substance that was violet in colour and glowed when under test.

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People who worked on the bell suffered from sleep problems and severe vertigo.

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Five of the seven scientists died while working on the project.

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In a memo to Hitler the scientists wrote,

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It is in our opinion that the scientific results ascertained from our experiments with the bell are truly decisive for the war.

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Experiments with the bell happened deep underground in the mine,

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but directly above it on the surface was this strange structure.

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Called the flytrap, it first showed up on an Allied aerial reconnaissance photo in 1944.

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Igor Witkowski believes that the flytrap was a test rig for advanced propulsion technology.

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In other words, flying saucers.

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There is an extremely strong and thick steel reinforcement of the pillars,

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which means that it was to be, to withstand some great forces working on it.

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How did it work? We don't know exactly,

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but we do know from Sporenberg's evidence that the bell was a revolutionary device

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and the flytrap, designed as its test rig, was fed with underground cables running to the heart of the structure.

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So the cabling led down here, right away from the power station over there.

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Yes, up to the flytrap.

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Right.

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It was visually filled with high voltage cables.

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They take us in arms, that thickness.

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I have the photographs of them.

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And that's just another strange fact that points out to such a possibility

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that it would have been used for some experimental purposes.

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I mean, they're actually pretty sizable.

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It's kind of like a metre and a half of a concrete lined ducting gun here.

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Yes, exactly, pretty solid.

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So it all adds up to, I mean, pretty strong evidence that the power station over there

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was just was feeding this tremendous amount of power to the facility, the flytrap over there.

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Just exactly.

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In a way...

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This is interesting.

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I've spent a long time researching the quest to produce anti-gravity technology,

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the holy grail of aerospace design, that would overturn conventional physics

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and allow us to travel in deep space.

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Is it possible that the UFO sightings over Nazi Germany were related to this quest?

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There is a sense here that the Germans were engaged in very highly classified work

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and that possibly they were engaged in anti-gravity type programs.

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What I do know is that many of these bizarre projects like the Bell did not remain in German hands.

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At the end of the war they were plundered secretly by the American High Command

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and taken to the States.

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The speculation about Foo Fighters was about to be overshadowed by one of the most sensational UFO sightings of all,

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the 1947 incident at Roswell in New Mexico.

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That's where I'm heading next.

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The 509th atomic bomb group headquarters at Roswell, New Mexico,

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reports that it has received one of the discs which landed on a ranch outside Roswell.

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Colonel William Blanchard of the Roswell Air Base refuses to give details of what the flying disc looks like.

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In July 1947, a UFO is supposed to have exploded in mid-air over Roswell, New Mexico,

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showering its debris over a remote ranch nearby.

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The actual saucer itself is said to have come down here on the plains of San Agustín.

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UFO proponents doggedly say that this vehicle that allegedly crashed here was extraterrestrial.

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The Roswell crash is the best known case in the annals of ufology.

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Supporters of the extraterrestrial explanation claim that the military recovered crashed debris

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and alien bodies from a site located on the very edge of a top secret military base called White Sands.

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The press had a field day.

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Reports of a crashed disc hit the headlines and Roswell quickly became a part of the military.

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Roswell quickly became a national controversy.

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The military were quick to retract stories of bodies and a disc,

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but their denials just fuelled the belief they were hiding something.

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The Roswell's

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There's something strange about the sky here.

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I'm over 5,000 feet above sea level and the air is crystal clear.

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I've come to meet Mike Smith and Wayne Mattson, two former Air Force officers who have lived in the area for some time.

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Mike explains that the desert climate can throw strange shapes into the air.

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A lot of them are astronomical phenomena and our desert atmosphere here provides practically an infinity of weather conditions,

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which can really play tricks with the eyes.

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And I have seen things that were perfectly explainable that really looked like something totally extraordinary, but they were explainable.

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And as Wayne tells me, even cloud formations can be misleading.

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Lenticular clouds are often mistaken for UFOs.

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Pretty extraordinary, don't they?

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Lenticular clouds can, the wind comes hitting the mountains, swoops up and as it goes over the top, the clouds form.

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I have seen a half a dozen UFOs, lenticular clouds that were one, about a minute later, a second one and so on.

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The cloud story may explain some of the unusual sights witnessed in this area, but it doesn't begin to account for the Roswell incident.

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Debris was recovered from the crash site, so there is physical evidence that something did come down on the plains of San Agustin.

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But the mystery surrounding Roswell comes from the fact that the US Air Force changed their version of events three times.

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One of those stories was linked to a covert military operation flying out of the Roswell area.

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Duke Gildenberg ran a secret program called Skyhook, designed to fly balloons over the Soviet Union, with spy cameras attached.

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The Skyhook balloon wasn't born until 1947, and therefore when it first appeared and for the first five, ten years, it was a new sight in the sky.

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Solomon Air Force Base, then Alamogordo Air Base, was the prime launch site for the United States Air Force, and it happens to be just upwind of Roswell.

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So when the balloons would fly them out, even if they were going to go a thousand miles the other way, the initial climb out would be in the direction of Roswell,

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close enough to the sea, even if they get right overhead.

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Every flight we flew, it generated UFO reports. In fact, for a while we were even using it as a backup tracking system.

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We call up a town and say, anybody see a UFO this afternoon? Yeah, one to the... okay, what direction? To the south? Okay, keep an eye on it.

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We allowed them to remain UFO reports, with the hope being that once they got over the Soviet Union, they'd still be registered as UFO incidents, rather than our reconnaissance balloons.

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Is it your contention that Roswell is explicable as a balloon crash?

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That is correct, and I worked on the Pentagon report for months and months and months.

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Was what crashed at Roswell a spy balloon from a secret program the government was trying to hide? I'm not sure.

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I've seen a memo in the National Archives that suggests there was more to the incident than the Air Force was admitting.

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In September 1947, just a few weeks after the Roswell crash, General Twining, head of the Air Materiel Command,

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issued a classified memo to a small group of his senior officers, outlining his concern about the rash of flying saucer sightings that had been seen across America earlier that summer.

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In the memo, he states that the phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious.

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That there were objects approximating the shape of a disk in the sky.

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He talks of operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb and manoeuvrability.

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One of his conclusions indeed is that these disks might be the product of some high-security project not known to his command.

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The Twining memo shows the Air Force was taking the flying saucer sightings seriously.

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The next stop on my journey is Nevada, where I'm going to meet someone with high-security clearance who might throw light on what really crashed at Roswell.

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I'm here to see Colonel John Alexander, Vietnam vet, ex-special forces and military intelligence.

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He's taken a close interest in the Roswell incident.

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Part of the problem has been the government itself, John Roswell.

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They have been less than forthcoming. They've been caught time after time just overtly lying to the public.

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The government's credibility in this field is pretty damn low.

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They can't go out and say, well, here's the truth today.

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Do you think that these vehicles have crashed to Earth and do you think that the U.S. military has recovered them?

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No.

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Why not?

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Why? I'll tell you why not. This is where I get in trouble with everybody.

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I look. I am kind of the one person who has gone nose to nose with the head of all of the intelligence agencies and whatnot.

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We looked from a historical perspective.

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I can mention now that Edward Teller was one of the folks who was interested in my work in other fields.

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Edward Teller. He was the assistant director at Los Alamos National Laboratory and father of the H-bomb.

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If alien technology had been found by the military, he would surely have known about it.

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I actually had him over for dinner. We had this discussion. He was not opposed to the notion of UFOs.

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We always said if five people knew at that time Teller would have been one of them because understanding energy and he was the one who was working on the most advanced energy source known at the time.

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And you get the absolutely not.

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So Teller told Alexander that whatever crashed at Roswell and something certainly did, it was not extraterrestrial.

199
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Not a balloon, but a different secret program.

200
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Perhaps what really crashed at Roswell is related to the work of the German scientists during World War II.

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I'm going to examine an American operation to capture these scientists and bring their technology to the US at the end of the war.

202
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In 1945 President Truman ordered a secret operation codenamed Project Paperclip.

203
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It instructed the US military in Germany to round up German scientists and persuade them to carry on their work in America.

204
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This is where most of the paperclip scientists ended up. White Sands missile range in New Mexico.

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A top secret base surrounded by a no-go zone the size of a small country.

206
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Probably well over 2,000 scientists were brought to this country.

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I have a listing which I got from the Air Force History Office of all the scientists that were brought to right field.

208
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And nearly 200 top of the line scientists were brought to right field.

209
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The Germans were anywhere from 5 to 15 years ahead in certain areas.

210
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For instance you think of the V2A4 missile, not intercontinental at that time, but a ballistic, first ballistic missile.

211
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There was a huge step at the time.

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I visited this area many times and its power and beauty never diminishes.

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It's a strange mix of primitive landscape and high-tech doomsday hardware tucked into the southwest corner of America.

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And in 1946 it was really isolated, just the place to bring German scientists who would be totally cut off from the outside world.

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The thing that bothered most of them that I knew more than anything was the summertime.

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Because we get temperatures often here of 42 and 43 Celsius in July, June and July.

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And that was absolutely so incredible to them they couldn't believe it.

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It was a vast cry from being in Germany because they're used to mountains and forests.

219
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Okay, we got the mountains, but we don't have the forests down here.

220
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We don't have the water that they have and things are quite a desert.

221
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It was here that the German scientists created the beginnings of the American space program.

222
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And it is also here in this highly secret territory that the number of UFO sightings really started to take off.

223
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I was out stargazing and I looked up and I may have been for at the most five seconds.

224
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There was this large black triangle that just blacked out stars and it was moving across.

225
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Making any noise?

226
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No sound whatsoever, total silence. I never heard any reports about it, nothing.

227
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And you have a massive database.

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These are a few.

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And what are these all these detail sightings of UFOs in the White Sands, Alamogordo, New Mexico region?

230
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I see they kind of range from the jocular to the more serious.

231
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Anything I can get my hands on that I find.

232
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So after all of these years, all of this study, your own sightings, what are you forced to conclude, Wayne?

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I conclude that my government is lying to me.

234
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About what?

235
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About UFOs.

236
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The US government has changed its version of the events at Roswell so many times that my investigative instincts tell me they wanted us to follow a false lead.

237
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Perhaps the work of the German scientists could offer a completely new explanation for the Roswell incident.

238
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What evidence do you have that the Germans were working on flying saucer technology?

239
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There certainly was an interest in that type of a vehicle after the war.

240
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It presented the possibility of some maneuverability that would be greater than what they would have had with the conventional piston or jet engines of that time using a fixed wing.

241
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At the time of Roswell, the US Air Force was experimenting with radical new designs.

242
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Could this bizarre aircraft be based on this one?

243
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A design drawn from secret Nazi blueprints seized by the Americans after the war.

244
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Some of these may indeed have reached the point of being test flown.

245
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However, if they did not have a particularly remarkable advantage over other aircraft that were being pursued at that time, they may not have really gone much further than that.

246
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Perhaps the Roswell crash can be linked to the work of the German aircraft designers courted at White Sands in 1947.

247
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I think it's very possible that what crashed was a secret prototype based on these radical designs.

248
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But I can't prove it.

249
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The truth has been elusive, but what is certain is that UFO sightings in America were about to reach epidemic proportions, not just in New Mexico, but over the skies of the nation's capital, Washington DC.

250
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Sightings made headline news across the country and the government was forced to act.

251
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Within three years of Roswell, public concern caused President Harry Truman to address the country on the subject of UFOs.

252
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Oh yes, we discussed it at every conference that we had with the military.

253
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There's always things like that going on.

254
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They're flying saucers and they've had other things, you know.

255
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If I'm not mistaken.

256
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Flying saucers have invaded our planet.

257
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Washington, London, Paris.

258
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America was about to go.

259
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S saucer crazy.

260
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Best of our knowledge, my wife and I are the only ones left alive.

261
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The 1950s was a time of high tension in the Cold War.

262
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As nuclear annihilation threatened, there was also a huge jump in UFO sightings across America.

263
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My journey to look for the truth behind UFO sightings has led me to Washington DC, where in 1952 a series of strange lights were seen over Capitol Hill.

264
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The first light was a new light.

265
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The light was a new light.

266
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The light was a new light.

267
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The light was a new light.

268
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The light was a new light.

269
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The light was a new light.

270
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The light was a new light.

271
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In 1952 a series of strange lights were seen over Capitol Hill.

272
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In the midst of this big national flap, sightings occurred over Washington DC.

273
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This involved three radar sets in the Washington DC area, which picked up targets that were traveling around in restricted airspace over the Capitol.

274
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This couldn't be ignored.

275
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It had all the makings of a national emergency.

276
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Whether it was alien visitors or, as many in the military suspected, advanced Soviet spy technology, the Air Force had to act fast.

277
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Jets were launched against the UFOs and the military made sure their actions made headline news.

278
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The intention was to reassure the public, and it might have worked, but for the fact that following weekend, the 19th of July, the UFOs were sighted again.

279
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A thousand people reported sightings, including staff from President Truman's office.

280
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The government had to be seen to act.

281
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General John Sanford, head of Air Force Intelligence, was given the job of reassuring the nation and explaining what people had seen.

282
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In pursuit of this obligation since 1947, we have received and analyzed between one and two thousand reports that have come to us from all kinds of sources.

283
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Of this great mass of reports, we have been able adequately to explain the great bulk of them.

284
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So here he was saying specifically they're not a threat to the United States, the implication being the Air Force is doing its job, where there's no threat out there.

285
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In spite of the fact that the Air Force had internal documents that said, you know, it might be Soviet, and used that as a reason to investigate and so on.

286
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The Air Force's commitment to act on the UFO problem would result in one of the biggest military investigations in American history.

287
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The Air Force, which had secretly been investigating UFOs since 1947, were forced to set up an open inquiry.

288
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Called Project Blue Book, it promised to investigate each separate sighting report that was filed by the general public.

289
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In spite of Air Force Intelligence claims there was nothing to worry about, the U.S. Air Force was actually taking UFOs very seriously indeed.

290
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Heading up, Blue Book's investigations was astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek.

291
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With his scientific background, Hynek was hired by the Air Force to interview thousands of witnesses and collate some of the public's most bizarre encounters.

292
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Have you ever seen a meteor with headlights?

293
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No, I've never seen a meteor with headlights.

294
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But one might see a meteor that looks like it had headlights.

295
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Well, I think I do not drink and this had some kind of light on the surface.

296
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Good, fine.

297
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Hynek was a skeptic. During the course of his investigations, he was able to attribute many of the sightings to natural phenomena.

298
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All of them saying that they saw it predominantly in an eastern direction.

299
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Now, if it had been extremely close to any one of them, it could not have been seen to the east by all the people.

300
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But Project Blue Book had severe limitations.

301
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No sightings by military personnel were included in its pages.

302
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Instead, they were immediately classified and buried deep in the files of the Pentagon.

303
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Much to Hynek's frustration, because reports by Air Force pilots of which there were many intrigued him very much.

304
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But now we can tell the story of one such sighting for the very first time.

305
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It involves the early reconnaissance missions by the United States over the Soviet Union.

306
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During the 50s, Major Thomas Hanley was a radar operator and one of the first Cold War spies in the sky.

307
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When you're flying, you are always aware of anything in your airspace.

308
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One particular night, the aircraft commander saw a bright light coming towards us.

309
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And all of a sudden, the light just went immediately to the other side of the aircraft.

310
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So we played cat and mouse with it, whatever it was, for an hour or anything.

311
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The ground was recording it, and they would lose it too on occasion.

312
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There was something out there, something very strange.

313
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It was performing not like a normal aircraft would perform.

314
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It was just too fast and too maneuverable.

315
00:40:00,360 --> 00:40:07,360
Certain something different was out there, but I had no idea what it was.

316
00:40:10,360 --> 00:40:15,360
The problem for the US Air Force was that this man was extremely credible.

317
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He was one of their surveillance specialists, highly qualified and working with what was then state-of-the-art technology.

318
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As far as Tom Hanley is concerned, his questions were never answered.

319
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And I have to admit, I'm at a loss to explain it myself.

320
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But in the meantime, as a recently declassified CIA memo shows,

321
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the agency was becoming very interested in the UFO phenomenon for its own purposes.

322
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The CIA was responsible for surveillance of the Soviet Union,

323
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and it realised that UFOs might offer the perfect cover for its more clandestine activities.

324
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This is a memo written by Walter B. Smith, the head of the CIA at the time.

325
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And it's important because it shows that the CIA were happy to leave the US Air Force

326
00:41:13,360 --> 00:41:17,360
with the problem of analysing each UFO sighting.

327
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I suggest, Smith says, that we discuss at an early board meeting

328
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the possible offensive or defensive utilisation of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes.

329
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This is a pretty stunning document, but when you read something like this,

330
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what you've got to keep in mind first and foremost is its context.

331
00:41:40,360 --> 00:41:46,360
The context, of course, was the Cold War and the struggle between America and the Soviet Union.

332
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But what really set the UFO story running for the CIA was the death in 1953 of Premier Joseph Stalin.

333
00:42:05,360 --> 00:42:10,360
I'm in Washington to meet Melvin Goodman,

334
00:42:10,360 --> 00:42:14,360
former senior analyst at the Soviet desk at the CIA,

335
00:42:14,360 --> 00:42:20,360
who can tell me exactly how the CIA set about manipulating the UFO's story

336
00:42:20,360 --> 00:42:24,360
in order to gain the upper hand in the Cold War.

337
00:42:24,360 --> 00:42:28,360
Melvin, hi. Good to meet you. Good to meet you.

338
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Eisenhower had only been in office for two months, and Stalin died rather suddenly.

339
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And Eisenhower called in some of his major people, not only policy people and political people, but intelligence people.

340
00:42:42,360 --> 00:42:46,360
And so he went around the table in terms of what do we know about the Soviet Union,

341
00:42:46,360 --> 00:42:52,360
what do we know about the contenders for power, what do we know about the direction the Soviet Union might take in its policy.

342
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And he asked people who were also there from the CIA,

343
00:42:58,360 --> 00:43:03,360
and not only was there no speculation on what it would be like in the Soviet Union

344
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and would the Soviet Union be more or less threatening to the United States, there was no intelligence collection.

345
00:43:08,360 --> 00:43:13,360
And I really think it was out of that discussion and that event

346
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that the beginning of the ideas that led to the U-2,

347
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the ability to conduct surveillance of the Soviet Union from the air with a high altitude spy plane,

348
00:43:23,360 --> 00:43:30,360
I think it began with the turning point of Stalin's death and no understanding of what it meant for the United States.

349
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This is the U-2. It's the direct result of American intelligence

350
00:43:37,360 --> 00:43:43,360
coming to terms with how little it really knew about post-Stalin Russia.

351
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We can't make sense of what happened next in ufology

352
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without trying to understand this once highly secret machine.

353
00:43:52,360 --> 00:43:57,360
It triggered a wave of UFO sightings all across America.

354
00:43:59,360 --> 00:44:02,360
What was needed were certain cover stories.

355
00:44:02,360 --> 00:44:07,360
What do you do when people are spotting aircraft and then telling reporters

356
00:44:07,360 --> 00:44:11,360
that they've seen something very unusual flying out of an air base in Nevada?

357
00:44:11,360 --> 00:44:18,360
And frankly, this was the origin of a lot of the sightings that took place in the mid-50s, 1954, 55, 56,

358
00:44:18,360 --> 00:44:23,360
of unidentified flying objects, the UFOs.

359
00:44:23,360 --> 00:44:29,360
So the CIA was involved in encouraging people to believe that yes, they saw UFOs

360
00:44:29,360 --> 00:44:33,360
and the CIA and the military tried to be very helpful to reporters

361
00:44:33,360 --> 00:44:37,360
to get these stories out to divert the attention of the country

362
00:44:37,360 --> 00:44:41,360
and particularly the people in this region about what they had actually seen.

363
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We believe that UFOs are real, that they are from outer space, and that they are intelligently controlled.

364
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And then we went into a small cloud. Again, we started to have it come out of the cloud

365
00:44:57,360 --> 00:45:01,360
and very shortly after that it quickly disappeared.

366
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The CIA's strategy of encouraging public belief in UFOs seemed to be working

367
00:45:11,360 --> 00:45:17,360
and the U2's development and deployment was hidden behind a smoke screen of disinformation.

368
00:45:17,360 --> 00:45:24,360
It was a flying object of some sort that could hover, and such as I've never seen before.

369
00:45:25,360 --> 00:45:33,360
Right here is where this flying saucer, the UFO landed. Right here, about where I'm standing.

370
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And it was a big huge thing and I wondered what the heck it was.

371
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Within two or three seconds it was out of sight.

372
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That was in the Southwest and easy you might think to dismiss out of hand.

373
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But this isn't Life Magazine, a highly respected part of the American scene in the 1950s.

374
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Popular but hard-headed journalism.

375
00:46:01,360 --> 00:46:05,360
A very famous issue of the Life Magazine that has Marilyn Monroe on the front.

376
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And as you can get your eyes off Marilyn Monroe and look in the upper right-hand corner,

377
00:46:09,360 --> 00:46:12,360
you see this, have we visitors from outer space or whatever the title was.

378
00:46:13,360 --> 00:46:19,360
The writers said, well, we have been to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where Project Blue Blue was headed.

379
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We've looked through their sighting files.

380
00:46:21,360 --> 00:46:26,360
We've talked to the people who were on Project Blue Book and some Air Force generals and so on.

381
00:46:26,360 --> 00:46:30,360
And it appears that the Air Force is now treating this subject seriously.

382
00:46:30,360 --> 00:46:35,360
And their conclusion in the article was that, you know, right on the hairy edge of saying,

383
00:46:35,360 --> 00:46:40,360
yeah, there really are interplanetary visitors being involved here.

384
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That's what people are seeing. And the Air Force doesn't seem to be denying that.

385
00:46:44,360 --> 00:46:49,360
But you did have ways of supplying information to people you knew were Soviet assets

386
00:46:49,360 --> 00:46:54,360
or East European assets to send the Soviets looking in another direction.

387
00:47:00,360 --> 00:47:04,360
The real targets of the flying saucer fever were, of course, the Russians.

388
00:47:04,360 --> 00:47:07,360
What did they make of the UFOs, I wonder.

389
00:47:10,360 --> 00:47:22,360
I've come to Moscow to talk to Igor Sinitsin, a former KGB operative,

390
00:47:22,360 --> 00:47:27,360
who was the personal aide to the Bureau's number one, Yuri Andropov.

391
00:47:28,360 --> 00:47:40,360
While in this position, I once had the chance to acquaint myself with a document regarding UFOs,

392
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which had been prepared by one of the military intelligence officers.

393
00:47:45,360 --> 00:47:53,360
So when I read this series of articles on UFOs, I decided to give it to Andropov to read.

394
00:47:58,360 --> 00:48:03,360
Of course, I was somewhat nervous when I went to him with this article,

395
00:48:03,360 --> 00:48:10,360
because I thought that my boss would think that I was out of my mind.

396
00:48:10,360 --> 00:48:17,360
He read through the translation and began to study it very closely.

397
00:48:17,360 --> 00:48:22,360
Then quite unexpectedly, Yuri Andropov opened his desk

398
00:48:22,360 --> 00:48:28,360
and took out a very thin file from the top drawer, gave it to me to read and said,

399
00:48:28,360 --> 00:48:32,360
only read it here and don't take it away.

400
00:48:36,360 --> 00:48:41,360
Much to Sinitsin's surprise, the file contained highly classified UFO sightings

401
00:48:41,360 --> 00:48:44,360
occurring all over the Soviet Union.

402
00:48:44,360 --> 00:48:51,360
What people saw behind the iron curtain was what the CIA wanted them to see,

403
00:48:51,360 --> 00:48:56,360
not classified American technology, but something from outer space.

404
00:48:56,360 --> 00:49:02,360
The CIA cover story worked.

405
00:49:06,360 --> 00:49:11,360
But back in America, the UFO story was about to enter a new phase.

406
00:49:12,360 --> 00:49:18,360
A reliable witness reported a clear sighting of a UFO and its alien occupants.

407
00:49:21,360 --> 00:49:26,360
The first convincing close encounter of the Third Kai.

408
00:49:26,360 --> 00:49:33,360
On the 24th of April 1964, America experienced its first credible close encounter of the Third Kai.

409
00:49:33,360 --> 00:49:39,360
Officer Lonnie Zamora was driving along a quiet stretch of roads,

410
00:49:39,360 --> 00:49:44,360
skirting the edge of the White Sands missile range in New Mexico.

411
00:49:44,360 --> 00:49:47,360
What the hell was going on?

412
00:49:47,360 --> 00:49:52,360
The American police were trying to find out what the UFO was.

413
00:49:52,360 --> 00:49:56,360
He was skirting the edge of the White Sands missile range in New Mexico.

414
00:49:56,360 --> 00:49:58,360
What the hell was that?

415
00:49:58,360 --> 00:50:02,360
Suddenly he caught a glimpse of something strange in the sky.

416
00:50:06,360 --> 00:50:08,360
Whoa!

417
00:50:15,360 --> 00:50:19,360
He left the road and set off for the desert following the craft.

418
00:50:23,360 --> 00:50:29,360
He caught sight of a shiny object, now landed about 200 yards away.

419
00:50:30,360 --> 00:50:34,360
As he looked over, he saw two figures in white coveralls,

420
00:50:34,360 --> 00:50:38,360
close to what looked like a flying saucer.

421
00:50:46,360 --> 00:50:51,360
Suddenly without warning, the craft took off and headed straight for him.

422
00:50:52,360 --> 00:50:56,360
He was in a hurry to get off the car.

423
00:51:12,360 --> 00:51:18,360
And as quickly as it had arrived, it disappeared off into the distance at high speed.

424
00:51:22,360 --> 00:51:27,360
This statement by Lonnie Zamora is one of the most intriguing UFO reports on record.

425
00:51:27,360 --> 00:51:30,360
It made headline news at the time.

426
00:51:30,360 --> 00:51:35,360
Everyone acknowledged that Zamora was a first class witness, a police officer,

427
00:51:35,360 --> 00:51:39,360
a man not prone to exaggeration.

428
00:51:39,360 --> 00:51:46,360
The Zamora case remains one of a handful of unexplained sightings in Project Blue Book.

429
00:51:47,360 --> 00:51:52,360
When investigators arrived at the scene, they found an impression in the soil

430
00:51:52,360 --> 00:51:55,360
surrounded by burnt brushwood.

431
00:51:57,360 --> 00:52:04,360
Zamora was so distraught that he insisted on seeing a priest before handing in his report.

432
00:52:06,360 --> 00:52:11,360
The US Air Force was under pressure to explain what had actually landed.

433
00:52:11,360 --> 00:52:15,360
But there is one man who claims he knows what Lonnie Zamora saw.

434
00:52:16,360 --> 00:52:21,360
Duke Gildenburg ran Cold War spy programs out of White Sands missile range

435
00:52:21,360 --> 00:52:25,360
and had access to top secret flight logs at the time.

436
00:52:25,360 --> 00:52:34,360
That very same day, we had a mission scheduled for the surveyor unmanned spacecraft

437
00:52:34,360 --> 00:52:39,360
that was going to be attached to a small helicopter

438
00:52:39,360 --> 00:52:46,360
and flown all around the range by contractors, sampling lava

439
00:52:46,360 --> 00:52:49,360
and that kind of thing, which they might see on the moon.

440
00:52:51,360 --> 00:52:58,360
On board was the pilot and then there was an engineer and there were both in white coveralls.

441
00:52:58,360 --> 00:53:03,360
So to us that identified it almost perfectly.

442
00:53:03,360 --> 00:53:05,360
There's too much of a coincidence.

443
00:53:05,360 --> 00:53:08,360
Two guys in white coveralls that were doing the mission anyway

444
00:53:08,360 --> 00:53:16,360
and then the sampler which left a print in the dirt that was identical to what later left on the moon.

445
00:53:18,360 --> 00:53:21,360
I'm not at all convinced by Gildenburg's explanation.

446
00:53:22,360 --> 00:53:26,360
Zamora was a trained police officer and I'm sure would have known the difference

447
00:53:26,360 --> 00:53:29,360
between a helicopter and a flying saucer.

448
00:53:30,360 --> 00:53:35,360
To try and make sense of what Zamora saw, we need to go back to the U2 spy plane

449
00:53:35,360 --> 00:53:40,360
and to an event that shook the world on May the 1st 1960.

450
00:53:46,360 --> 00:53:53,360
When U2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, Cold War tensions intensified.

451
00:54:00,360 --> 00:54:05,360
The wreckage of his spy plane was put on public display in Moscow.

452
00:54:08,360 --> 00:54:15,360
This was a huge propaganda coup for Khrushchev and it signalled the end of the U2's covert life.

453
00:54:17,360 --> 00:54:23,360
It was understood very early in the U2 program that it wouldn't be able to fly safely

454
00:54:23,360 --> 00:54:27,360
over the most denied areas of the Soviet Union forever.

455
00:54:28,360 --> 00:54:31,360
Best it was given a few years.

456
00:54:31,360 --> 00:54:37,360
In fact it flew operationally for just about four years which was longer than anybody expected

457
00:54:37,360 --> 00:54:40,360
before one of the aircraft was shot down.

458
00:54:41,360 --> 00:54:49,360
The CIA launched an effort to produce a more workable aircraft with similar or better performance

459
00:54:49,360 --> 00:54:55,360
and one that would be so fast and so high flying that even the best missile technology

460
00:54:55,360 --> 00:55:00,360
that anybody could be looking at in those days would have a very hard time hitting it.

461
00:55:01,360 --> 00:55:08,360
Richard Bissell was head of the CIA's overflight program between 1956 and 1960

462
00:55:08,360 --> 00:55:12,360
set up to monitor the USSR at the height of the Cold War.

463
00:55:14,360 --> 00:55:17,360
He was the man who was given the job of replacing the U2

464
00:55:17,360 --> 00:55:20,360
and he had a radical idea about how to do it.

465
00:55:21,360 --> 00:55:28,360
We see here that he's urging his technical department to design a new aircraft for reconnaissance missions over Russia.

466
00:55:28,360 --> 00:55:33,360
According to Bissell who had a very good grasp of the technological challenges

467
00:55:33,360 --> 00:55:38,360
the optimal shape for that vehicle would be saucer shaped.

468
00:55:42,360 --> 00:55:46,360
The Avrocar which appears for all the world to be a flying disk.

469
00:55:47,360 --> 00:55:51,360
It wasn't just Bissell who had flying saucers on his mind.

470
00:55:51,360 --> 00:55:55,360
Just across the border Avro, a Canadian based company

471
00:55:55,360 --> 00:56:01,360
had recruited talented British aerospace designer John Frost to work on a flying saucer.

472
00:56:03,360 --> 00:56:10,360
Frost was a visionary and under his leadership the company began experimenting with disk shaped craft.

473
00:56:11,360 --> 00:56:17,360
Called the Avrocar it was a handful to fly and could barely get off the ground

474
00:56:17,360 --> 00:56:22,360
but it caught the eye of the United States Air Force.

475
00:56:24,360 --> 00:56:30,360
They bought all rights to the project and then it simply disappeared.

476
00:56:32,360 --> 00:56:37,360
Nothing more was heard or seen of Avro's saucer designs for over 40 years.

477
00:56:38,360 --> 00:56:43,360
But flying disks did not die with the Avrocar.

478
00:56:43,360 --> 00:56:49,360
Buried in the depths of the US Air Force archives I've discovered some blueprints

479
00:56:49,360 --> 00:56:54,360
which reveal something quite fantastic, a supersonic saucer.

480
00:56:54,360 --> 00:56:58,360
Called the Silverbug it was truly revolutionary.

481
00:56:58,360 --> 00:57:05,360
The plans show in detail a multi jet engine craft that boasted amazing maneuverability and speed.

482
00:57:08,360 --> 00:57:14,360
It's an intriguing thought that this concept may tie in with the work of the German scientists

483
00:57:14,360 --> 00:57:19,360
who brought saucer technology to the US at the close of the Second World War.

484
00:57:22,360 --> 00:57:31,360
I believe Silverbug could explain what Lonnie Zamora witnessed in the New Mexico Desert in April 1964.

485
00:57:32,360 --> 00:57:37,360
His description of a silver disk shaped object appears to fit the Silverbug profile.

486
00:57:37,360 --> 00:57:44,360
It's clear that a host of covert technologies were being developed by the Air Force during the 1960s.

487
00:57:44,360 --> 00:57:51,360
Some of the strange UFO sightings might be explained by activities at a secret base here in Nevada.

488
00:57:51,360 --> 00:57:57,360
So secret that according to the Pentagon it still doesn't officially exist.

489
00:57:58,360 --> 00:58:03,360
From a defence journalist's standpoint it doesn't get any stranger than this.

490
00:58:03,360 --> 00:58:06,360
Just behind me there is Nellis Air Force Base.

491
00:58:06,360 --> 00:58:10,360
Nellis is at the southernmost tip of the Nellis Air Force range.

492
00:58:10,360 --> 00:58:15,360
A closed off area totally barred to the public that's about the size of Switzerland.

493
00:58:15,360 --> 00:58:23,360
And messling within the Nellis Air Force range is Area 51, the world's most secret air force base.

494
00:58:24,360 --> 00:58:30,360
When Richard Bissell of the CIA urged his designers to think out of the box,

495
00:58:30,360 --> 00:58:33,360
this is where their imaginations ran wild.

496
00:58:38,360 --> 00:58:43,360
It's the testing ground for the US Air Force's most secret technology.

497
00:58:44,360 --> 00:58:51,360
When the U2's covert life ended, this is what Bissell's designers came up with.

498
00:58:58,360 --> 00:59:02,360
The Blackbird is the apex of aerospace technology.

499
00:59:05,360 --> 00:59:11,360
When the forerunner of this aircraft first flew, the CIA's A-12, in 1962,

500
00:59:12,360 --> 00:59:17,360
from Groom Lake, otherwise known as Area 51 in Nevada.

501
00:59:17,360 --> 00:59:21,360
Its mission and the aircraft itself were super black.

502
00:59:25,360 --> 00:59:29,360
That is to say, it was a super classified aircraft.

503
00:59:29,360 --> 00:59:35,360
It's very easy to imagine how anyone catching a glimpse of this aircraft in 1962

504
00:59:35,360 --> 00:59:37,360
might have mistaken it for a UFO.

505
00:59:37,360 --> 00:59:40,360
Everything about this airplane is strange.

506
00:59:40,360 --> 00:59:47,360
It's black, its shape is extraordinary, and its speed, of course, in excess of Mark III,

507
00:59:47,360 --> 00:59:53,360
that's three times the speed of sound, would have made it one of the most extraordinary sites

508
00:59:53,360 --> 00:59:55,360
that anyone could have seen at that time.

509
01:00:00,360 --> 01:00:04,360
Many Blackbird missions were flown at the height of the Cold War.

510
01:00:08,360 --> 01:00:14,360
The plane flew at over 100,000 feet at the very edge of space.

511
01:00:14,360 --> 01:00:21,360
It was so fast that when it overflew the Soviet Union, it could simply outrun any missile attack.

512
01:00:21,360 --> 01:00:28,360
But it wasn't so much American spy planes that were worrying the Russians.

513
01:00:28,360 --> 01:00:32,360
There was something else in the skies that was causing them alarm.

514
01:00:32,360 --> 01:00:39,360
An incident over the small town of Petrozovodsk would trigger the largest study of UFOs on the face of the Earth.

515
01:00:39,360 --> 01:00:45,360
The Russian military had no idea that this was the only way to get to the Russian side.

516
01:00:45,360 --> 01:00:51,360
This small town of Petrozovodsk would trigger the largest study of UFOs on the face of the Earth.

517
01:00:51,360 --> 01:00:54,360
Russia's ex-viles had begun.

518
01:00:54,360 --> 01:01:19,360
On September 20, 1977, high over the Russian town of Petrozovodsk, a group of soldiers were on routine maneuvers.

519
01:01:19,360 --> 01:01:25,360
Suddenly, a bright star appeared radiating pulsating beams of light.

520
01:01:25,360 --> 01:01:29,360
The object lingered over the town like a huge jellyfish.

521
01:01:29,360 --> 01:01:34,360
After a few minutes, it wrapped into a bright half disk and shot off.

522
01:01:42,360 --> 01:01:45,360
News of the event reached the Kremlin.

523
01:01:46,360 --> 01:01:52,360
And Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, gave an extraordinary order

524
01:01:52,360 --> 01:01:59,360
that the entire Soviet army should watch the skies for unidentified flying objects.

525
01:01:59,360 --> 01:02:03,360
The KGB was sent to the Russian border.

526
01:02:03,360 --> 01:02:07,360
The Russian army was sent to the Russian border.

527
01:02:07,360 --> 01:02:11,360
The Russian army was sent to the Russian border.

528
01:02:11,360 --> 01:02:17,360
I'm in Russia on my way to meet the two men, Colonel Boris Sokolov and Dr. Yuliy Platov,

529
01:02:17,360 --> 01:02:22,360
who were ordered by Andropov to coordinate the whole operation.

530
01:02:29,360 --> 01:02:31,360
Yuri!

531
01:02:44,360 --> 01:02:49,360
At that time, the army had a total of seven and a half million serving personnel

532
01:02:49,360 --> 01:02:55,360
stationed across the whole of the Soviet Union, which comprised the sixth of the world land mass.

533
01:02:55,360 --> 01:02:59,360
The army controlled the monitoring of these abnormal events.

534
01:03:01,360 --> 01:03:04,360
In the beginning, these reports were numerous.

535
01:03:04,360 --> 01:03:11,360
Literally every week there was someone who had seen a dish landing with somebody coming out of it.

536
01:03:11,360 --> 01:03:17,360
Even when a sighting was not considered sensitive, it was still stamped top secret.

537
01:03:17,360 --> 01:03:20,360
I don't know if anyone saw it.

538
01:03:24,360 --> 01:03:28,360
The observations continued every night for 13 years.

539
01:03:28,360 --> 01:03:36,360
No other nation has conducted such a long and thorough research program into unidentified flying objects.

540
01:03:39,360 --> 01:03:44,360
But as Sokolov tells me, the evidence was inconclusive.

541
01:03:47,360 --> 01:03:52,360
I would like to say that it is absolutely certain that in those 13 years

542
01:03:52,360 --> 01:03:56,360
there was not a single report of anybody's contact with aliens.

543
01:04:00,360 --> 01:04:06,360
Most of these sightings, which were taken by observers and thought to be something abnormal,

544
01:04:06,360 --> 01:04:13,360
were in fact, as our research has shown, connected to technical experiments by our own military.

545
01:04:18,360 --> 01:04:26,360
And as Dr. Platov explains, even the Petrozovodsk incident, which led to Andropov's UFO surveillance operation,

546
01:04:26,360 --> 01:04:30,360
was nothing more than a secret missile launch.

547
01:04:32,360 --> 01:04:39,360
That the strange lights and jellyfish shaped object was in reality the burning rocket engine and its exhaust plume.

548
01:04:40,360 --> 01:04:45,360
But not every sighting could be so easily dismissed.

549
01:04:52,360 --> 01:04:57,360
Even though we could explain some of these sightings, there were many unexplained events

550
01:04:57,360 --> 01:05:03,360
which caused scientists to scratch their heads and which still remain unanswered today.

551
01:05:10,360 --> 01:05:16,360
For some, these inexplicable sightings fueled concerns that the United States military

552
01:05:16,360 --> 01:05:20,360
was developing a radical piece of aerospace technology,

553
01:05:20,360 --> 01:05:27,360
something that behaved and looked like a UFO that could fly undetected into Russian airspace.

554
01:05:39,360 --> 01:05:49,360
And the Russian fears were well founded. This is stealth, a quantum leap in aerospace technology.

555
01:05:49,360 --> 01:05:54,360
The Americans had built an invisible plane.

556
01:05:56,360 --> 01:06:00,360
If you took one or two looks at the same time,

557
01:06:00,360 --> 01:06:05,360
and you saw how strange the shape was, it wouldn't take you very long to figure out

558
01:06:05,360 --> 01:06:10,360
that they were aiming at a very, very low level of radar cross-section.

559
01:06:10,360 --> 01:06:19,360
What was done with the first real stealth program was to produce something that had the radar signature over.

560
01:06:19,360 --> 01:06:25,360
And the first real stealth program was to produce something that had the radar signature over.

561
01:06:25,360 --> 01:06:32,360
Small shotgun pellet or perhaps maybe a small bird.

562
01:06:39,360 --> 01:06:47,360
My view is that it was advantageous for the Americans to keep up this kind of hype regarding UFOs.

563
01:06:48,360 --> 01:06:56,360
We guessed it was policy to conduct a campaign of misinformation, as far as the general public was concerned.

564
01:06:59,360 --> 01:07:05,360
Stealth was an enormous breakthrough and nobody out in the wider world really believed it was possible.

565
01:07:05,360 --> 01:07:10,360
Nobody could even imagine that it was possible for them to do it.

566
01:07:18,360 --> 01:07:25,360
The Americans had won the technological race. Stealth was a decisive instrument in the Cold War.

567
01:07:25,360 --> 01:07:32,360
Secrecy was vital and the US were able to hide the existence of stealth from Soviet surveillance

568
01:07:32,360 --> 01:07:37,360
for more than 10 years between 1977 and 1988.

569
01:07:38,360 --> 01:07:53,360
But stealth couldn't begin to explain the series of alleged alien encounters which were about to shock the American Southwest.

570
01:07:53,360 --> 01:07:59,360
The UFO story had come to ground in a very sinister fashion.

571
01:08:00,360 --> 01:08:13,360
This is New Mexico, an area that has witnessed UFO sightings since the 1940s.

572
01:08:13,360 --> 01:08:23,360
But in the early 70s a series of horrific events took these sightings to another level when aliens appeared to be attacking cattle.

573
01:08:24,360 --> 01:08:31,360
Ranchers began to find livestock with terrible injuries lying dead on their grazing plains.

574
01:08:31,360 --> 01:08:36,360
The rectum had been partially removed. The eyes were bulging out.

575
01:08:36,360 --> 01:08:42,360
I was horrified at the thought of what could do this in broad daylight.

576
01:08:44,360 --> 01:08:48,360
I really did believe something strange was going on.

577
01:08:48,360 --> 01:08:56,360
We had one up north where we believed the animal was paralyzed and was alive when it was being mutilated.

578
01:08:56,360 --> 01:09:07,360
I'm on my way to meet Edmund Gomez, a cattle rancher from Dolce, New Mexico, a town close to Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was developed.

579
01:09:08,360 --> 01:09:15,360
We met up and headed out to a desolate corner of his ranch.

580
01:09:25,360 --> 01:09:27,360
Where are we going? Where are you taking me to?

581
01:09:27,360 --> 01:09:30,360
I'm taking you to our animal graveyard.

582
01:09:30,360 --> 01:09:36,360
Normally we would bury carcasses that would die from disease or from natural causes.

583
01:09:36,360 --> 01:09:46,360
But during the cattle mutilations that we had, we never buried any of the animals so in case we ever needed any body parts in the future, especially the bones.

584
01:09:49,360 --> 01:09:52,360
The mutilations themselves took place over quite a time period, didn't they?

585
01:09:52,360 --> 01:09:58,360
Yes, on our wrenches from 1976 through 1982 approximately.

586
01:09:58,360 --> 01:10:03,360
When you found a mutilated cow, typically what kind of wounds would you find on the animal?

587
01:10:03,360 --> 01:10:10,360
The rectum had been cored out. The lower lip had been removed and the reproductive tract had also been removed.

588
01:10:10,360 --> 01:10:16,360
The organs that were removed were removed precisely without spilling of any blood.

589
01:10:16,360 --> 01:10:20,360
And it was very, very neatly done.

590
01:10:20,360 --> 01:10:29,360
Many of the ranchers believed the cattle mutilations were the result of UFOs, that aliens were dissecting the animals for experimentation.

591
01:10:29,360 --> 01:10:36,360
Usually when you find an animal that dies of disease or natural causes, the scavengers will attack the animal and attack the animals.

592
01:10:36,360 --> 01:10:40,360
But for Gomez, there were other clues.

593
01:10:40,360 --> 01:10:44,360
We saw this light kind of flying over our pastures.

594
01:10:44,360 --> 01:10:48,360
And all of a sudden it kind of just came out of the hole.

595
01:10:48,360 --> 01:10:54,360
And we saw that the animals were not just the animals, but the animals were the animals that were killed.

596
01:10:54,360 --> 01:11:00,360
And we saw that the animals were not just the animals that were killed, but the animals that were killed.

597
01:11:00,360 --> 01:11:04,360
We saw this light kind of flying over our pastures.

598
01:11:04,360 --> 01:11:08,360
And all of a sudden it kind of just came to a standstill.

599
01:11:08,360 --> 01:11:18,360
It looked like it was saucer shaped, but had two dicks and had two sets of lights on it flashing one on top and one down towards the bottom.

600
01:11:18,360 --> 01:11:23,360
You know, when you look at them, you think, well, gosh, that looks like the typical flying saucer.

601
01:11:23,360 --> 01:11:29,360
When all of a sudden the lights inside the cockpit of this vehicle went on,

602
01:11:29,360 --> 01:11:34,360
and the lights went on, I could see the props of a chopper.

603
01:11:34,360 --> 01:11:41,360
And as Gomez tells me, he has his own theories about the fate of the targeted animals.

604
01:11:41,360 --> 01:11:49,360
They would put ropes or chains around the legs of the animal and lift them up and haul them off somewhere.

605
01:11:49,360 --> 01:11:56,360
Do their thing, come back, bring them back, and not lay them down, but drop them.

606
01:11:56,360 --> 01:12:02,360
Because we found several animals that had broken legs, broken backs, broken hips, and so forth.

607
01:12:02,360 --> 01:12:07,360
And why dump the cow, you know, leave the carcass here?

608
01:12:07,360 --> 01:12:14,360
We felt that whoever was doing this did it and brought it back and said,

609
01:12:14,360 --> 01:12:17,360
we're doing this and there's nothing you can do about it.

610
01:12:17,360 --> 01:12:22,360
There were a lot of consistencies with the way that they were harvesting these animals.

611
01:12:23,360 --> 01:12:30,360
For Edmund Gomez, there are many unanswered questions.

612
01:12:30,360 --> 01:12:38,360
He wants the cattle mutilations, which put him and his family out of the ranching business, reinvestigated.

613
01:12:38,360 --> 01:12:53,360
What do you think Gomez's hunch was that this was some sort of covert testing activity?

614
01:12:53,360 --> 01:12:55,360
It was bang on the money.

615
01:12:55,360 --> 01:13:01,360
The way the cows were mutilated, the organs that were removed from the cows,

616
01:13:01,360 --> 01:13:10,360
it seems very clear that this was some kind of covert testing, covert monitoring program of some kind of contamination in that region.

617
01:13:10,360 --> 01:13:18,360
It also seems very clear that someone is trying to put in some kind of linkage between this mutilation activity

618
01:13:18,360 --> 01:13:25,360
and UFOs, trying to dress helicopters up, for instance, to make them look like UFOs,

619
01:13:25,360 --> 01:13:34,360
in an area where people are very superstitious, very fearful of things they don't understand.

620
01:13:34,360 --> 01:13:41,360
So it's clear to me that some kind of disinformation campaign is going on,

621
01:13:41,360 --> 01:13:48,360
but the reality is whatever was going on up there has nothing to do with extraterrestrials or UFOs.

622
01:13:56,360 --> 01:14:04,360
In the alien encounters I have examined so far, military and defence technologies seem to be at the heart of what's going on.

623
01:14:09,360 --> 01:14:17,360
But parallel to these stories are other reports, reports of more direct encounters between aliens and humans,

624
01:14:17,360 --> 01:14:20,360
which seem to be of a wholly different order.

625
01:14:21,360 --> 01:14:27,360
These are the chilling first-hand accounts of alien abduction.

626
01:14:38,360 --> 01:14:43,360
The most challenging aspect of the UFO phenomenon is alien abduction.

627
01:14:44,360 --> 01:14:50,360
Throughout the 80s and 90s stories of abduction swept across the US.

628
01:14:53,360 --> 01:14:58,360
Over two million Americans claimed to have been taken by aliens.

629
01:15:01,360 --> 01:15:03,360
These stories followed a pattern.

630
01:15:03,360 --> 01:15:09,360
Typically abductees claimed they had been taken in their sleep to an alien craft,

631
01:15:09,360 --> 01:15:12,360
where they were subjected to invasive surgery.

632
01:15:13,360 --> 01:15:17,360
Samples were taken, probes were implanted.

633
01:15:18,360 --> 01:15:23,360
Some victims reported they had been abducted not just once, but many times.

634
01:15:34,360 --> 01:15:37,360
I've come to meet Travis Walton.

635
01:15:38,360 --> 01:15:44,360
He was the first alien abductee of this epidemic, and his story, which was widely reported,

636
01:15:44,360 --> 01:15:47,360
had a powerful effect on the public imagination.

637
01:15:50,360 --> 01:15:56,360
I caught up with him near the Apache sick-reeves forest in Arizona, where the whole incident unfolded.

638
01:15:59,360 --> 01:16:02,360
Well, there was a group of seven of us men.

639
01:16:03,360 --> 01:16:06,360
We were working up in the mountains in the woods.

640
01:16:07,360 --> 01:16:14,360
We had a tree-cutting contract up there, and we just finished a long, hard-days work, and we were headed home.

641
01:16:16,360 --> 01:16:23,360
We'd worked late that night, so it was starting to get dark, and as we were driving down this rough track there,

642
01:16:23,360 --> 01:16:26,360
we saw light coming through the trees.

643
01:16:27,360 --> 01:16:29,360
What the hell is that?

644
01:16:33,360 --> 01:16:38,360
Travis, man! What the hell are you doing? Come back! Travis!

645
01:16:39,360 --> 01:16:43,360
Back then, you know, I was kind of a wild sort of a guy.

646
01:16:43,360 --> 01:16:47,360
You know, I was showing off, you know? It was stupid.

647
01:16:51,360 --> 01:16:59,360
Closer I got, you know, and it wasn't going anywhere, and I was, you know, thinking about how foolish it was for me to be doing this,

648
01:16:59,360 --> 01:17:06,360
but it was kind of showing off for the crew a little bit, and they were getting pretty excited and yelling at me to get back in the truck.

649
01:17:12,360 --> 01:17:19,360
When I got up to it, and I was standing there looking up at it, the sound suddenly got louder and it started to move,

650
01:17:19,360 --> 01:17:22,360
and it was making this sort of a rocking motion.

651
01:17:25,360 --> 01:17:27,360
Right at that instant, something hit me.

652
01:17:29,360 --> 01:17:45,360
Music

653
01:17:46,360 --> 01:17:51,360
Next thing I knew, I was regaining consciousness, but I was in a lot of pain.

654
01:17:52,360 --> 01:18:02,360
I saw these forms over me, and when I finally got into the focus, I could see this creature looking at me, and I just flipped out.

655
01:18:04,360 --> 01:18:11,360
I looked around, there were three of them. The one that was closest to me, I tried to hit him, I could hardly move,

656
01:18:11,360 --> 01:18:14,360
and my arm felt real heavy and I was weak.

657
01:18:14,360 --> 01:18:17,360
Somehow got the strength to get off the table.

658
01:18:22,360 --> 01:18:28,360
Several nights later, Travis Walton reappeared, dazed and confused.

659
01:18:29,360 --> 01:18:36,360
I didn't know how much time had gone by, and there's something in the conversation that made that apparent to me.

660
01:18:36,360 --> 01:18:43,360
They said, hey, feel your face, and I felt, and I had this week's growth of beard, and I was just totally shocked by that.

661
01:18:43,360 --> 01:18:45,360
I said, you've been gone five days.

662
01:18:47,360 --> 01:18:53,360
I had enough trouble just dealing with the reality of this incredible thing that had happened to me.

663
01:18:53,360 --> 01:18:59,360
It was just so hard to explain what I'd been through, and there was nobody to relate to.

664
01:18:59,360 --> 01:19:05,360
29 years ago, there was nobody to turn to, and I was just on my own.

665
01:19:06,360 --> 01:19:15,360
Travis's story seems incredible, but is only one of many such tales.

666
01:19:15,360 --> 01:19:20,360
Does the weight of evidence add up to a believable pattern of abduction?

667
01:19:20,360 --> 01:19:27,360
Anthropologist Charles Siegler has studied many abductee testimonies.

668
01:19:27,360 --> 01:19:35,360
These people were not mentally impaired. Many of them were, in fact, highly trained.

669
01:19:35,360 --> 01:19:42,360
They believed these things. It gave them the same kind of strength as they were.

670
01:19:42,360 --> 01:19:49,360
The chief skeptic of all, Dr. J. Allen Heineck, who investigated UFOs for the U.S. military,

671
01:19:49,360 --> 01:19:52,360
is now in the United States.

672
01:19:52,360 --> 01:19:59,360
He's been a member of the United States of America since the beginning of the war.

673
01:19:59,360 --> 01:20:07,360
He's been a member of the United States of America since the beginning of the war.

674
01:20:07,360 --> 01:20:14,360
Dr. J. Allen Heineck, who investigated UFOs for the U.S. military, also became a believer.

675
01:20:14,360 --> 01:20:19,360
There were just too many cases that baffled him during his military work.

676
01:20:19,360 --> 01:20:25,360
It was Heineck's interviews and expertise that formed the basis of the 1977 film, Close Encounters,

677
01:20:25,360 --> 01:20:28,360
directed by Steven Spielberg.

678
01:20:28,360 --> 01:20:33,360
I think that we're all interested in having the re-enchantment of the universe.

679
01:20:33,360 --> 01:20:38,360
We want to feel that there are transcendent things out there that we're not aware of

680
01:20:38,360 --> 01:20:42,360
and that bode good for the human race somehow.

681
01:20:42,360 --> 01:20:48,360
I think this is just a natural human feeling.

682
01:20:53,360 --> 01:20:59,360
But what really fascinates me as a defense journalist is that you are as likely to find believers in UFOs

683
01:20:59,360 --> 01:21:04,360
among the higher reaches of the aerospace industry as you are in Hollywood.

684
01:21:08,360 --> 01:21:13,360
This is a report into future technology commissioned in 1968 by McDonnell Douglas,

685
01:21:13,360 --> 01:21:18,360
which I received for a contact with connections to the company.

686
01:21:18,360 --> 01:21:21,360
It takes the existence of UFOs seriously.

687
01:21:21,360 --> 01:21:27,360
It recommends using UFOs and copying their design in order to make the next quantum leap

688
01:21:27,360 --> 01:21:30,360
into aerospace technology.

689
01:21:37,360 --> 01:21:41,360
Some UFOs may be extraterrestrial vehicles.

690
01:21:41,360 --> 01:21:44,360
They certainly have not been proven otherwise.

691
01:21:44,360 --> 01:21:49,360
The existence of extraterrestrial vehicles indicates vehicles can be built,

692
01:21:49,360 --> 01:21:55,360
which would have capabilities quite useful to McDonnell Douglas Corporation.

693
01:21:58,360 --> 01:22:04,360
The report even suggested interviewing contactees to gather data.

694
01:22:04,360 --> 01:22:13,360
And if they were thinking that over 25 years ago, what advances might be on the horizon today?

695
01:22:18,360 --> 01:22:25,360
What I've learnt during this journey is that UFOs have had a powerful impact on our real-world activities

696
01:22:26,360 --> 01:22:29,360
for more than 60 years.

697
01:22:29,360 --> 01:22:33,360
And they continue to inspire us today.

698
01:22:35,360 --> 01:22:40,360
I'm here in Seattle to meet someone who's built a device in the basement of his garage,

699
01:22:40,360 --> 01:22:48,360
indeed is flying it there, that he and others claim is able to do so by defying our current understanding of physics.

700
01:22:49,360 --> 01:22:59,360
As unlikely as it sounds, I'm wondering whether what I'm about to witness may just be our first small step towards the stars.

701
01:23:09,360 --> 01:23:15,360
This strange device is made of balsa wood and glue and covered in a layer of aluminium foil.

702
01:23:19,360 --> 01:23:32,360
It's connected to the mains electricity and is tethered to a device that steps up the power to over 50,000 volts.

703
01:23:35,360 --> 01:23:43,360
As the lifter's inventor Tim Ventura winds up the mains, the airframe buzzes with electrical activity.

704
01:23:49,360 --> 01:23:57,360
So Tim, tell me why is this lifter demonstrating this levitation effect?

705
01:23:57,360 --> 01:24:03,360
Well, there's an interaction that occurs between the coronal wire which runs around the top and the foil underneath.

706
01:24:03,360 --> 01:24:10,360
And there's a 3-4cm air gap in between there and literally a high-voltage electric field occurring.

707
01:24:11,360 --> 01:24:14,360
Now, there's been some controversy. Is this an ion wind effect?

708
01:24:14,360 --> 01:24:21,360
Is it the high-voltage literally taking air molecules with it and creating an upward thrust? Or is it something more?

709
01:24:23,360 --> 01:24:30,360
Nobody knows for sure how the lifter flies, but one popular theory is that high-voltage current flows between the wires,

710
01:24:30,360 --> 01:24:37,360
suspended on the top of the craft, through the air, down to the aluminium foil wrapped around the frame.

711
01:24:37,360 --> 01:24:44,360
The current literally drags air molecules down with it, creating a downforce called an ion wind,

712
01:24:44,360 --> 01:24:49,360
which provides the thrust needed to lift the airframe skywards.

713
01:24:50,360 --> 01:24:58,360
This technology, not just the lifter, but this whole scope of technologies, is almost like looking at the internal combustion engine back in the 1800s.

714
01:24:58,360 --> 01:25:01,360
We're trying to take it and say, look, these are real technologies.

715
01:25:01,360 --> 01:25:08,360
They have the same flaws that any other technology does, but hopefully they can do things that other technologies can't.

716
01:25:08,360 --> 01:25:14,360
So do you think what we're watching here could be the modest beginnings of a whole new industry?

717
01:25:14,360 --> 01:25:22,360
I think the lifter is literally sort of like the tricycle, and it may not end up becoming the technology that builds the starships of tomorrow,

718
01:25:22,360 --> 01:25:28,360
but it at least shows us that given the right circumstances, given the right power, it will work.

719
01:25:31,360 --> 01:25:36,360
I'm nearing the end of my journey, and I feel as if I've come full circle.

720
01:25:37,360 --> 01:25:46,360
Because what Tim Ventura's lifter reminds me of, is the Nazi's secret experiment in anti-gravity propulsion I discovered in the Wenceslas Mine.

721
01:25:52,360 --> 01:25:55,360
So what is the truth about UFOs?

722
01:25:56,360 --> 01:26:03,360
To me, the story of successive attempts to develop radically new forms of flight, conducted under the strictest secrecy,

723
01:26:03,360 --> 01:26:09,360
is inextricably bound up with our relationship with UFOs over the last 60 years.

724
01:26:12,360 --> 01:26:20,360
Whether it was Allied pilots buzzed by strange balls of fire in 1942, or the Roswell incident five years later,

725
01:26:20,360 --> 01:26:28,360
there is a strong case to be made that secret military technology offers a convincing explanation for many UFO stories.

726
01:26:33,360 --> 01:26:42,360
For me, what is so striking about Roswell is that it was the first good example of an officially sanctioned UFO disinformation exercise.

727
01:26:42,360 --> 01:26:49,360
It showed the CIA that UFOs could provide perfect cover for their Cold War activities.

728
01:26:50,360 --> 01:26:58,360
It didn't take much for the CIA to spin the extraterrestrial story into the hearts and minds of the American public.

729
01:26:58,360 --> 01:27:07,360
And once it was there, all manner of experimental technology could, if it was spotted, be put down to the UFO phenomenon.

730
01:27:07,360 --> 01:27:11,360
But there are some cases I just can't explain.

731
01:27:11,360 --> 01:27:31,360
The sightings of UFOs over Capitol Hill in 1952 remain baffling, and navigator Tom Hanley's aerial encounter is testimony to the possibility we are not alone.

732
01:27:31,360 --> 01:27:38,360
What is certain is that real world UFOs, the man-made ones, continue to develop.

733
01:27:42,360 --> 01:27:50,360
In 2003, a series of sonic beams were heard exploding across California and Nevada.

734
01:27:53,360 --> 01:27:58,360
Something was in the sky that could be heard and felt, but not seen.

735
01:27:58,360 --> 01:28:05,360
Some informed observers, and I'm one of them, believe it was an aircraft traveling at several thousand miles per hour.

736
01:28:05,360 --> 01:28:09,360
A secret project known as Aurora.

737
01:28:10,360 --> 01:28:17,360
There is no trace of Aurora's physical existence, no evidence of government spending on its development or deployment.

738
01:28:17,360 --> 01:28:22,360
But there are tantalizing images that point to its existence.

739
01:28:22,360 --> 01:28:25,360
Pictures, for example, like this one.

740
01:28:25,360 --> 01:28:34,360
It shows a donut-shaped exhaust pattern, a sign perhaps that Aurora makes use of something called a pulse detonation wave engine.

741
01:28:34,360 --> 01:28:42,360
And it delivers a hell of a punch, easily enough power to drive an aircraft to six times the speed of sound.

742
01:28:42,360 --> 01:28:46,360
But perhaps the most intriguing are these images.

743
01:28:48,360 --> 01:28:55,360
This is a weather satellite image that shows a very interesting contrail originating out of Area 51 in Nevada,

744
01:28:55,360 --> 01:29:04,360
and moving all the way across the United States, out over the Atlantic, on across Europe, and into Russia and China.

745
01:29:04,360 --> 01:29:09,360
Whatever it is, it's moving in excess of 8,000 miles an hour.

746
01:29:09,360 --> 01:29:19,360
If it is the contrail of a high-altitude hypersonic aircraft, in my book it's the best evidence yet that Aurora is real.

747
01:29:20,360 --> 01:29:30,360
And Aurora's flights will probably give birth to a new wave of UFO sightings.

748
01:29:33,360 --> 01:29:38,360
Because whether aliens exist or not, many of us want to believe in them.

749
01:29:41,360 --> 01:29:48,360
Perhaps the only way we will ever find out for sure is if we make the leap into deep space ourselves.

750
01:29:48,360 --> 01:29:52,360
That day may come sooner than we expect.

751
01:29:52,360 --> 01:29:58,360
Then there was an hour before the light-ejecting tension.

752
01:29:58,360 --> 01:30:05,360
Before the Da Vinci Code there was holy blood, holy grail, and an author who has been investigating

753
01:30:17,560 --> 01:30:23,940
the mysteries of the Templars for 35 years. Bloodlines, knights, and sacred geometry are

754
01:30:23,940 --> 01:30:29,220
all explained by the man behind the Da Vinci Code, part of Da Vinci Decoded Week, tonight

755
01:30:29,220 --> 01:30:30,900
at 8 on the History Channel.