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During the Cold War, fighter pilots were scrambled to intercept unknown objects at 30,000 feet.

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This is maximum speed, maximum urgency.

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These objects appear to defy the laws of physics.

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There is absolutely no way to explain these sightings.

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Military documents reveal high speed encounters with the unknown.

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But a lack of evidence makes it hard to verify and easy to speculate.

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You have science, you have speculation, which would you rather do?

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Are they secret aircraft, radar hoaxes, or truly unknown?

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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I don't think we have the extraordinary evidence at this point.

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Chase the answers at Mach 1 and beyond.

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He was thinking, damn, I could be starting World War 3.

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Unidentified flying objects. They've been reported in our skies for decades.

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Thousands of UFO sightings have been documented in official government files.

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Most have logical, scientific explanations.

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Yet some cases remain unexplained, classified, unidentified.

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Can newly released files reveal the truth behind these UFO encounters?

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May 20th, 1957, Kent, England.

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Ground control at Royal Air Force Base, Manstin, picks up an unusual target on radar.

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The blip on radar had unusual flight patterns. It was doing unconventional things.

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Two pilots are scrambled into the night. One of them is Milton Torres, a US Air Force pilot based in the United Kingdom.

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My dad was in his 20s, and these guys were finally tuned machines.

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Milton Torres' son, Jeffrey, recounts his dad's story about that night.

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The ground radar told him, flying to a heading of 32,000 feet over East-Ep Swash.

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He said, do you want me to go full gate? And I said, go full gate.

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Full gate is Air Force Lingo for full power.

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At the time, the F-8060 could reach speeds of 700 miles per hour, just under the speed of sound.

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It's the Cold War, a time of great international tension and paranoia,

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and the radar hit could be a Soviet spy plane or worse, a bomber.

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They had incursions from the Soviet Union to Allied airspace,

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and that was the whole design of the F-86D as an all-weather fighter to prevent these kind of incursions.

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According to Torres, visibility is almost zero. He is using only his instruments to navigate.

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Zulu-1, turn right, heading 010.

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As ground control guides him towards the target, he asks to decrease his speed, but his request is denied.

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Negative, maintain afterburner to intercept.

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So now he realizes, whatever this thing is, they want him to close in on it fast.

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Control, it's impossible to see anything.

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Torres is flying blind, still waiting for the object to appear on his radar when he says ground control gives an order that shocks him.

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Zulu-1, engage target, I repeat.

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They told him to fire all of his rockets. All 24 rockets, they wanted him unloading all of them.

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He was thinking, damn, I could be starting World War 3.

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He thought it was a real event. He told me he was scared.

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Torres can't lock on and fire until his radar finds the object, and when it does, he is astounded.

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And his quote was, it was burning a hole in the radar.

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Torres said his radar showed a target the size of an aircraft carrier.

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He pulls the trigger and waits for the plane's computer to lock onto the target and shoot the rockets.

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But just then, the object disappears off Torres' radar, leaving the rockets unfired and Torres alone in the sky.

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Control, I've lost the target.

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Zulu-1 copy, we've lost target as well. Return to base.

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Upon returning, Torres said he was told the mission was considered classified, so for 30 years, he followed orders and kept his story a secret.

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But it haunted him, and eventually, he went looking for answers.

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He couldn't explain this thing. He didn't know what it was.

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Finally, in his retirement, Milton Torres wrote this affidavit in 1988, but he kept it classified to avoid disclosing a potential military secret.

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It detailed his version of events from that night in 1957.

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Dr. Roger Launius wonders how accurate a story can be after passing through the decades as one man's secret.

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When stories pop up many, many years after the fact, for the first time, then you have to ask the question, why is it coming out now?

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It makes you question whether or not this actually happened.

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But Torres was determined to find any information the military might have on the matter.

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His lawyers sent the secret, sworn testimony, to the UK's Ministry of Defence.

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Nick Pope investigated classified UFO sightings for the British government from 1991 to 1994.

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He said, we have no desire to break the Official Secrets Act, we'd like to know more about this incident if possible.

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In a series of letters in the late 1980s, Torres' lawyer asked the military to declassify the incident, so Torres and others could speak publicly.

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The Ministry of Defence responded by saying that neither they nor the US Air Force had any official record of the incident from 1957.

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What we don't have is any of the original official documents.

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In 2008, the military declassified the incident and released the few documents ahead on the matter, including the affidavit Torres' Sentom in 1988.

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Once the Ministry of Defence itself had released into the public domain Milton Torres' statement, Torres realized that he was free to discuss this.

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Torres could now tell a story 50 years later, but did it happen the way he remembered it? Did it happen at all?

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Now memory obviously morphs with time, I mean anybody can tell you that, who looks into it, and it usually doesn't take very much time.

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I mean even the next day the stories are beginning to diverge.

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Seth Shostak is the lead astronomer for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Our brains are designed not to be like tape recorders where we just record some objective truth, they're interpreters and they refashion the stories to suit whatever our brain finds interesting and important.

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So you really can't rely on it too much.

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There was a second pilot scrambled that night.

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At the request of the military, trying to find answers for Torres, he described his recollections of the night 30 years earlier.

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He wrote that what he remembered varies somewhat from Torres' narrative.

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While he did get radar hits of the unknown objects, he did not recall any shoot down order.

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But what Torres claims next takes the story into the realm of conspiracy.

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He said he was debriefed the next day.

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Have a seat Lieutenant.

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But instead of an Air Force investigator, he met a man in civilian clothing.

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This is highly unusual. His commanding officer isn't anywhere to be seen. He's by himself.

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According to my dad, he was from the NSA.

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The NSA, or National Security Agency, monitors and analyzes intelligence from around the world.

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Did you at any point get a visual of this thing?

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According to my dad, he was extremely intimidating.

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Torres answered his questions about the mission, and the man emphasized it would remain classified,

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saying it would be a national security breach to breathe a word of it to anyone, even his own commander.

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But when people claim secrecy and cover-up, skeptics claim that it's a convenient excuse for having no official records.

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One of the tropes that has emerged from the investigation of UFO incidents is the men in black show up,

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and they interview this person and they tell them to tell nobody, and that's the end of it. There's no records taken.

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Torres never claimed to see any type of ship, only radical radar readings.

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But he thinks they were weird enough to trigger the secrecy.

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Zoo one copy, we've lost target.

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Ground controllers told him the blip had gone off the radar in two sweeps, implying an aircraft going Mach 10, or almost 8,000 miles per hour.

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What was this thing?

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Just asking the question, people just fill it in.

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And so this is the problem with UFO sightings, is what does a blip mean?

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Michael Schermer argues that radar blips do not equal proof.

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We don't know what it is, but the mind just fills it in, and we all do it. It's a big problem with perception.

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Jock Williams was a Canadian fighter pilot and knows the limits of radar, especially at high speed.

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If you banked as an example and pulled too much G, the radar didn't have enough stabilization to stay on the target.

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Radars inherent limitations also made it vulnerable to jamming and spoofing, such as projecting targets onto an enemy's screen where there really were none.

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Nick Poe knows of one such top secret project.

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Project Palladium was a classified CIA scheme to effectively spoof radar systems.

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The goal was to create a ghost return on the radar screen to con the other side into thinking there were aircraft there, when in fact there weren't.

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It's just a kind of electronic hoax.

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Is this what Torres encountered in 1957?

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The problem with the radar spoofing theory is that if you are involved in a classified test of that nature,

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afterwards you are simply told you have been involved in a classified test.

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That's it, end of exercise.

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But Torres claims he wasn't told of any classified test.

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He was simply reporting an encounter with an unidentified flying object.

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He was not the only one.

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The military was in the midst of a UFO wave that it could not explain.

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Everybody was worried about this threat from above.

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This was just the tip of the iceberg and the Air Force scrambled to find out what was invading the skies.

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In 1957 Air Force pilot Milton Torres says he almost fired on a UFO so big that it burned a hole in his radar.

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When he returned he claims he was sworn to keep it quiet.

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Was it a secret Soviet plane, a radar hoax or something truly from another world?

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Torres is not the only one to report a UFO in the mid-20th century.

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Thousands reported strange phenomena from lights and blobs to saucers and disks.

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There's kind of a feedback cycle when it comes to UFO sightings because as soon as you talk about flying disks,

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then suddenly you're getting reports of a lot of flying disks.

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It stoked questions and speculation about what they were or who they were.

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And it all intertwined with pop culture's fascination with outer space.

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Metal casing is definitely extra-dress drill, not found on this earth.

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In 1938 Orson Welles broadcast a radio drama called The War of the Worlds.

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Some thought the dramatized Martian invasion was real.

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In the 1950s science fiction was popular in print, at the movies and on television.

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20th century politics also reached into everyday life with the Cold War.

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In the 50s the United States and Soviet Union were each developing experimental aircraft

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and racing to put the first satellite into space.

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Between geopolitical tension and pop culture imagination,

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people were all too ready to interpret something strange in the skies a threat

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from the Soviets or from space.

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Everybody was worried about this threat from above.

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An internal CIA memo in 1952 illustrates the concern inside the military

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that UFOs pose a serious national security problem.

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Flying saucers exposed the vulnerability of the United States to air attack.

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The Air Force then began the now famous project Blue Book to investigate UFOs.

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They were serious about trying to understand these things, not so much because they necessarily

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believed that they were of extraterrestrial origin, but once again,

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is it a national security threat in some particular way?

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Captain Edward Ruppelt led the UFO project, with the authority to investigate claims

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without going through the usual chain of command.

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The military was eager to find out if UFOs were a national security threat

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and internally there was debate about where the potential threat was coming from.

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In 1952 an internal FBI memo stated,

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air intelligence still feels flying saucers are optical illusions,

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but some military officials are seriously considering the possibility of interplanetary ships.

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Real or not, things no one could explain appear to be violating American airspace with alarming frequency.

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Ruppelt's team crisscrossed the country investigating these claims,

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but there was some reluctance within the military to report them.

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In his 1956 book entitled, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,

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Ruppelt wrote of a flying saucer incident in 1952 that he claimed has never been told.

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It took place at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, September 1952.

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Jan Aldrich is a researcher specializing in Air Force UFO investigations.

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Ruppelt got a call from Lieutenant Parrish, who was the intelligence officer

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of the 34th Air Division at Kirtland Air Force Base.

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According to Ruppelt's account, when they were alone, Parrish pulled an unfiled UFO report from his safe

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and only allowed Ruppelt to read it in his office.

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Ruppelt writes, about 10 o'clock in the morning, a radar near the base had picked up an unidentified target.

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Two jets are immediately scrambled.

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One F-86 went high, one went low.

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The F-86 that went low flattened out his dive, saw what he thought at first was a weather balloon.

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When he got closer, about a thousand feet away from the UFO, it didn't appear to be a weather balloon anymore.

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Ruppelt's story claims the object couldn't be a balloon, as it was staying ahead of the plane.

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In Ruppelt's account, the pilot was intent on getting a visual sighting, flying at 3,000 feet

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and traveling at the speed of sound.

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The pilot was finally closing in and got a good look at the object.

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It appeared to be a saucer-shaped object, round and flat.

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But the pilot realized he could not catch the object and wondered what he should do.

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When he gets within 500 yards, the object starts pulling away from him.

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The pilot tried calling ground control for instructions, but he was out of range.

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The pilot then claims he opened fire.

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Ruppelt writes, a moment later, the object pulled up into a climb and in a few seconds, it was gone.

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Ruppelt says he is astonished by this story.

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Why didn't Parrish send this report immediately to Project Blue Book?

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This is a very serious incident. Probably people did not want this going into the chain of command.

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The belief gap, extraterrestrial or not, often played out within a military base.

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When the pilot reported his encounter, his squadron command accused him of cracking up.

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If you're a pilot, this is the way to discredit yourself.

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If you make a UFO report, even under Ruppelt, they didn't like to report UFOs.

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Ruppelt reports that the commander called the pilot psycho or may have flipped for no good reason.

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But Parrish found the report credible and despite being ordered to destroy it, he secretly kept a single copy in his safe.

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In this case, one can only speculate on what the pilot really saw, something from space or something from Earth.

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They'll fly past it, they'll fly around it and it will actually think that the object is actually trying to have paid them.

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Tim Printy is a retired Navy Submariner and a UFO skeptic.

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What they'll do is they'll go around in circles while the balloon is really not moving that fast, but because of their own motion, it'll appear to be moving very fast.

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In addition to the faults of human perception, UFO reports like this are filtered through the prism of eyewitness storytelling.

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Anybody who has worked in the criminal court system will tell you that eyewitness testimony isn't all that reliable and in fact in science it's about the worst kind of evidence possible.

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To get around the eyewitness problem, the Air Force tried to gather more tangible evidence.

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In December of 52 they specifically mounted gun cameras on fighters at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

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Regular cameras were often installed in fighter planes to capture bird's eye footage, but the Air Force proposed mounting modified cameras that would film the entire spectrum of light to analyze any objects.

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The Air Force was able to see UFO passing by its lens.

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But a fighter plane would have to get close enough to a UFO to film it.

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If the special cameras were ever deployed in an airplane, the film has never surfaced.

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By the late 1960s, the Air Force stopped investigating UFOs.

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What shut down Project Blue Book?

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And after that, how did the military respond to a compelling UFO report?

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It's so fast! It's impossible!

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Coming out of World War II and into the Cold War, UFO sightings exploded around the country.

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There was a concerted effort for, I don't know, more than a dozen years by the Air Force to actually track these things down and try to figure out what they were.

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A special group of Air Force investigators spent years trying to identify the nature and potential threat of reported UFOs.

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Their body of work, Project Blue Book, history's most extensive government investigation into UFOs.

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The value of Project Blue Book is at least the UFologists can't say no one's taken it seriously.

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But after 17 years and thousands of reports, the U.S. Air Force had no proof that any UFOs were extraterrestrials.

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Pressure to find either solid evidence or stop wasting money, the Air Force created an outside panel to study the value of their UFO investigations.

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Physicist Edward Condon led the study.

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After a two-year review, the Condon report concluded that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge.

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The Air Force took the committee's recommendation and shut down Project Blue Book.

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We may not be able to exactly explain what was taking place here, but there's no evidence to indicate that this is a national security threat.

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But after Project Blue Book, a compelling UFO report did get the attention of the military from halfway around the world.

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Tehran, Iran, September 20, 1976.

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At the Imperial Iranian Air Force headquarters, a group of high-ranking officers hold a secret meeting.

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Author and journalist Leslie Kane has written about the Tehran incident.

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As well as all the Iranians that were present, there was also an American colonel there, Colonel Olan Mui.

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In 1976, the United States and Iran are allies.

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Colonel Mui has been sent by the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, which trains any allies using American technology.

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The Iranian Air Force is using American F-4 fighter jets.

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Iran shares a border with both Iraq and the Soviet Union, so the U.S. is helping Iran patrol the borders and perform aerial espionage.

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Lieutenant Colonel Mui has been invited to attend a debriefing about an incident that happened the previous night.

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Colonel Mui took extensive notes and they were written up for the U.S. government.

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Mui's notes have since been declassified. They describe the story he was told in that meeting.

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At Mirabad International Airport, tower operator Hussain Peruzzi begins to receive calls from concerned citizens in a suburb of Tehran.

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The person told him that they saw something up in the sky that worried them.

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It looked like a star, only it was bigger and brighter, and it was just hanging there.

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What did you tell them?

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A minute later, another call came in, and so he stepped outside, took a pair of binoculars, and he could see the thing himself.

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At 12.30 a.m., the command post connects Peruzzi to General Yusefiy.

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The Assistant Deputy Commander of Operations of the Imperial Iranian Air Force.

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General Yusefiy learns nothing is being picked up on radar.

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Looking north towards Tehran, he sees the same bright light as the other.

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Looking north towards Tehran, he sees the same bright unknown object.

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Yusefiy decides to scramble a jet from Shiroki Air Force Base, 200 miles away.

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But as the F-4 gets within 25 nautical miles of the glowing object, it reports all electrical systems are suddenly down.

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Whenever the plane approached within a certain distance of it, all their equipment would go out.

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But when the F-4 turned away from the object, the pilots at the aircraft regained all instrumentation and communications.

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Then, General Yusefiy tells Colonel Moye at 1.40 a.m., he scrambled another F-4.

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It's flown by top Iranian pilot Lieutenant Parviz Jaffari.

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He knows this is not a training exercise. It could be a dangerous incursion demanding a lethal response.

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This is the mission. Recognize, make them to land. If not, shouldn't die.

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Jaffari is directed towards Tehran and given the coordinates of the apparent object.

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I looked to that area while I was climbing and I saw it. I saw the object now.

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As Jaffari closes, his jet is able to achieve radar lock on the bright object at 27 nautical miles.

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The radar signal was as big as the 707 tank.

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The Moye memo states the visual size of the object was difficult to discern because of its intense brilliance.

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It's so brilliant you couldn't see the body of the object.

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But when Jaffari finally gets close, he reports more than just a bright light.

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The object was like a diamond shape and the top was red light, green, orange, blue. So it was illuminating very fast.

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As Jaffari attempts to close in on the object, he says it moves in a manner beyond the ability of any known aircraft.

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All of a sudden, it jumped about 10 degrees to my right. Just like that.

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About 40, 50 miles in less than a second. It's so fast. It's impossible.

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Then, Jaffari claims the incident quickly changed from mystifying to terrifying.

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All of a sudden, something underneath it came out.

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I thought I'm under attack. It is a missile coming toward me.

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Jaffari decides to take aggressive action against the second smaller object.

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I immediately thought that I had to fire a missile, a heat-seeker missile toward it.

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But when Jaffari attempts to fire, he reports all his systems shut down.

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His weapons control panel goes off and he loses all communications.

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Then, Jaffari claims the object appears to circle around his jet.

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Now imagine you're flying close to a speed of sound and something is turning around. Unbelievable.

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Jaffari thinks he's in a dogfight with something he can't explain. Could it be from another country or another planet?

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My weapons, it's coming toward me and I'm going to have impact.

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High above Tehran, Iranian Air Force pilot Parviz Jaffari thinks he's in a dogfight with a UFO.

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Threatened by an unknown object that appears to emerge from a mothership,

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he throws his jet fighter into a steep dive to evade the attack.

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Then, just as quickly as it began, it ends as the object seems to disappear.

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The second object flew away from it and went underneath the main object and disappeared.

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The Iranian pilot said the object returned to the primary object for a perfect rejoin.

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Then, as Jaffari flies away from the main target, his plane regains all weapons systems and communications.

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He is ordered to return to base.

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But Jaffari's experience isn't over yet. As he turns to make the approach into Tehran, he reports seeing something incredible.

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It's a small, wrong object coming out of it, like, right toward the ground.

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I said, oh God, I'm going to see a very big explosion right now.

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Instead of an explosion, Jaffari sees the new object stop dead, a few feet above the ground.

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All over the area was brightened.

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General Yusefhi orders Jaffari to evaluate the object before returning.

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Jaffari approaches the object to try and get a closer look.

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Again, his instruments start to go haywire, things start to malfunction.

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Mouay Memo notes a commercial airliner in the area also has a similar communications failure.

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At that point, General Yusefhi orders him to turn around and come back to base.

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Say a barrel.

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The next day, the pilot recounted his story to superiors and Colonel Mouay.

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His experience was mysterious and potentially dangerous.

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And though it was supposed to remain an internal matter, it soon became national news.

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The young one leaked the UFO story to the press the night it happened.

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Now there was added pressure to investigate and explain it.

288
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But there was little to investigate except the dramatic story of one man

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who interpreted a radical experience as extraterrestrial visitation.

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There's a whole list of things it could be.

291
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So you can't just jump to the conclusion, hey, I don't know what it was,

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but consequently it must be an alien spacecraft.

293
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I mean, that's what's called an argument from ignorance.

294
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I don't know what it is, therefore I'm going to tell you what it is.

295
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The story of the dog fight with the UFO strains all credility that is out there.

296
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An Iranian pilot who is flying an Air Force built fighter gets into a dog fight with the UFO.

297
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That UFO has extraterrestrial technology.

298
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If he had a fight with the UFO and a UFO shot at it, why is he not dead?

299
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Jaffari's experience is dramatic and difficult to fathom,

300
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but there is a rare phenomenon that might explain it,

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something earthbound that can appear otherworldly.

302
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The behavior of this so-called UFO was very much like ball lightning.

303
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Professor of astronomy Michael D. Robertis has studied atmospheric phenomena

304
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in relation to unidentified flying objects.

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We know it performs erratically, it can hover sometimes for minutes in the sky, sometimes low to the ground.

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Scientists consider the rare phenomena of ball lightning to be a small,

307
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but super hot mass of electrically charged gas.

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It can appear high in the atmosphere and close to the ground, similar to what Jaffari witnessed.

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Sometimes ball lightning will fragment and one part will disappear, one part will go to the ground.

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Ball lightning's highly charged state might also explain the electromagnetic failure of radar and weapons systems on the F4.

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In fact, there could be any number of reasons for electrical malfunctions.

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There can be all sorts of causes for electrical failures, it can be generator trips and the backup doesn't come back on, fuse box failures, short circuit, anything.

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Under pressure to fly a malfunctioning supersonic jet, amid a phenomenon he couldn't explain, Jaffari admits he was in a confusing situation.

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Why should I go land? I was confused. What happened at that time to me? I don't know. I don't remember. I don't know what happened. That period of time.

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Jaffari's disorientation could have also affected his attempt to fire. Instead of alien interference, it could have been a simple error.

316
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That is that he made an improper switch selection. If you don't take the armament master switch and flick it up, if you don't select the correct weapon station, any of those mistakes and you push the fire button, nothing happens.

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After the debriefing, Colonel Moy's notes were filed with the US government as an unclassified memorandum of record.

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But the report was soon changed to classified. What happened over the skies of Iran that demanded secrecy?

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Four months later, the Iranian Deputy Commander-in-Chief, General Azar Barzan, revealed the reason.

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In an interview, Azar Barzan stated the US and Iran have this procedure to exchange information on UFOs.

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Then he revealed the information that interested US authorities.

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It is because of what we found out. This jammer could jam different frequencies at the same time. This technology doesn't exist.

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Radar jamming was a known tactic in 1976. An enemy could confuse radar and even create a false target on a pilot's screen, but not disable the entire cockpit.

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Any government in the world would have paid billions of dollars to have the capacity to turn off the guy's instrumentation in any way.

325
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Stop him from being able to effectively make switch selections. Such a thing is unknown even now.

326
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If someone was developing such a disruptive technology, it would be a military game changer. So this report got the attention of the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA.

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The DIA's main mission is to look at adversary capabilities. They're focused on potential enemy technology.

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Six years later, the DIA declassified its report on the Tehran incident.

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All the factors that were most compelling about this UFO sighting are picked out in this DIA analysis. It talks about the credibility and rank of the witnesses.

330
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It talks about a visual sighting corroborated by radar evidence. It talks about possible electromagnetic effects. And it talks about the extraordinary manoeuvrability of this object.

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Through this, nor any report ever surfaced with a clear explanation of what happened over Tehran in 1976.

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The event's declassification seems to indicate that while it might remain a mystery, nothing remains a secret.

333
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Ball lightning remains the best earthly explanation, a rarely seen phenomenon misinterpreted by a confused pilot at a time of great political tension. And that tension was about to snap.

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In 1979, the monarchy of Iran fell to an Islamic Revolution hostile to the United States. Many government records were lost or destroyed.

335
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So in this UFO incident, no evidence exists beyond the notes taken the next day by Colonel Moynihan.

336
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There are no cockpit recordings, no telemetry data, no mechanical records, no radar records.

337
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No supporting testimony exists from anyone else in the military or any citizens on the ground. No photos or video have ever surfaced.

338
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But it is still seared into the memory of the pilot.

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Because the speed of it and the capability of maneuvering, it cannot be a man-made.

340
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So Parvez Jafari is left alone, sincere in his story, but unsupported by evidence.

341
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Another pilot would soon make an extraordinary claim, one that some UFO investigators believe to be historic.

342
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Mosque Santa Maria is probably the only military pilot ever to have opened fire on and hit the UFO.

343
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In 1980, just four years after the Tehran incident, another fighter pilot makes an extraordinary claim.

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This US defense document was filed June 3, 1980. It's a record of a South American UFO incident with hundreds of witnesses.

345
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La Jolla Peru, April 11, 1980. According to the report, 1800 military and civilian personnel are on shift at Mariano-Melgar airbase when a round shaped object is spotted hovering in restricted airspace during the morning hours.

346
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At first, the thinking is that this is a weather balloon, but there was a clear concern here about espionage.

347
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This is a sensitive military establishment. It's restricted airspace, so this is perceived essentially as an incursion.

348
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At the time, Mariano-Melgar was considered Peru's most strategic base, storing weapons and recently purchased Soviet combat aircraft.

349
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Pilot Oscar Santa Maria races to intercept the object.

350
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He is flying a Sukhoi-22, a Soviet-made ground attack fighter equipped with a 30-millimeter cannon.

351
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At the 2013 citizen hearing on UFO disclosure, Santa Maria recounted his story.

352
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He says he rapidly located the target and placed it in his firing site. Acting with a shoot-down order, Santa Maria didn't hesitate to complete his mission.

353
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But according to the DIA report, the pilot claimed to fire upon it without causing any apparent damage.

354
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The rounds just seemed to disappear into the object and have no effect whatsoever.

355
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But Santa Maria was a well-known fighter, and he was a very good fighter.

356
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The pilot said he was going to fire upon it without causing any apparent damage.

357
00:39:09,000 --> 00:39:15,000
Santa Maria was a well-trained pilot. He lined up the target again. This time, the target moved.

358
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The balloon made a sudden rise, leaving me under it without the possibility of firing.

359
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Santa Maria turned on his afterburners and accelerated to one and a half times the speed of sound, but did not appear to gain any ground on the object.

360
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The DIA report states, the pilot tried to make a second pass, but the UFO outran the SU-22.

361
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Santa Maria made several attempts to engage the target, but every time he got within firing range, the object ascended.

362
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It's almost as if it's anticipating his every move.

363
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The pursuit took Santa Maria to 63,000 feet, twice as high as the average commercial airliner.

364
00:40:04,000 --> 00:40:13,000
He pushed his SU-22 beyond its operational ceiling and was now in unknown territory. Then, a warning sounded.

365
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Santa Maria made a desperate final push toward the object before turning back.

366
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When he got closer, the Peruvian pilot claims that what he initially thought was an intruding espionage balloon was actually something else.

367
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According to Santa Maria...

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...he had a circular metal surface with a silver-plated color base.

369
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He did not have any motors, engines, windows, antennas, and all that.

370
00:41:16,000 --> 00:41:20,000
With his fuel running low, Santa Maria was forced to turn back.

371
00:41:21,000 --> 00:41:28,000
It's clear to him at this point that further pursuit of this object is impossible, and now he's out of fuel.

372
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It's the point of no return. He has to go back. Otherwise, he's dead.

373
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As Santa Maria descended, the report states that the object hovered around Mariano Melgar's restricted airspace for another two hours before vanishing.

374
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The DIA report summarizes, apparently some vehicle was spotted, but its origin remains unknown.

375
00:41:53,000 --> 00:42:06,000
For skeptics, it's one thing to report something unexplainable, but it's another to say it played cat and mouse with a fighter jet, even if the story comes from a respected source.

376
00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:17,000
This is why you always hear this case. Well, it was a sheriff, or it was a politician, it was a general, it was an Air Force pilot who saw it as if that makes them better observers.

377
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They're not better observers. We all have the same set of apparatus, eyes and ears and brains that all work the same way, and we're all subject to the same kinds of biases that distort what we think we see.

378
00:42:30,000 --> 00:42:33,000
Some take Santa Maria's story as objective truth.

379
00:42:34,000 --> 00:42:43,000
Oscar Santa Maria is probably the only military pilot ever to have opened fire on and hit a UFO.

380
00:42:44,000 --> 00:42:54,000
But no one can confirm that he hit anything, let alone an extraterrestrial craft. Historical evidence shows that a man-made object is a more likely culprit.

381
00:42:55,000 --> 00:43:02,000
Weather balloons can be a source of UFO reports. They produce very bright objects, they almost look like stars from a distance.

382
00:43:03,000 --> 00:43:08,000
In the case of research balloons and planes, they're over 100,000 feet and many of the aircraft couldn't reach that altitude.

383
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Traveling at high speed with few reference points, a pilot's perception is easily fooled.

384
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Pilots, when they're in the air, once they're looking up into the sky, there's really no point of reference. So even though they think something is close, it may be very far away. So it is an optical illusion in some cases.

385
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Aviation journalist Bill Sweetman also notes a problem with Santa Maria's aircraft, at least within this high-flying scenario.

386
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The Su-22 is a pretty simple rudimentary ground attack aircraft. It's not an interceptor in any way, shape or form.

387
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So it was designed to fly low to the ground and fire heavy bullets a short distance, with great power, but not with great accuracy.

388
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What it means if your guns don't have a very high muzzle velocity, then you have to get closer to the target in order to get an accurate shot.

389
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Because what's going to happen at great range is that the shells will start to drop more because they're not coming out very fast.

390
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Santa Maria's 30mm cannons may have never hit the target, if there was one. Today, only speculation is possible.

391
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For the pilot himself, more than 30 years later, the experience convinces him that we have been visited by other beings.

392
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They were 22 minutes in the manoeuvres, which have been recorded in my memory, and they convinced me that there is technology and extraterrestrial life.

393
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There is absolutely no evidence of any pilot encountering an alien spacecraft. But there is plenty of evidence of them spotting something strange that ends up being explainable, rather than extraterrestrial.

394
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Because there's just weird stuff out there, atmospheric phenomenon of all kinds, sun dogs, northern lights, for example in Alaska.

395
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Pilots see weird stuff all the time. But if you believe in UFOs, then you're going to interpret it that way.

396
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And if a pilot interprets something as extraterrestrial, their actions could become dangerous.

397
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If humans are frightened, if a pilot sees something coming towards them, or they're in a situation where they're doing something unknown, they might take some kind of impulsive action.

398
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A fighter pilot UFO encounter is a rare event with riveting aftershocks. Their stories have yet to confirm alien life, but they do reveal human nature.

399
00:45:28,000 --> 00:45:36,000
In the absence of facts, people are hardwired to supply an explanation for something that they've seen, heard, or experienced.

400
00:45:37,000 --> 00:45:47,000
Our brains just naturally go to the invisible, to the supernatural, to agency, to hidden forces that work. Just simply as a causal explanation for things we can't explain otherwise.

401
00:45:47,000 --> 00:45:58,000
Some pilots remain convinced they chased, or even saw some sort of spacecraft, but they may forever remain unidentified.