1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:07,000 For decades, governments around the world have investigated UFO sightings. 2 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:11,000 But just how are these top secret studies conducted? 3 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:14,000 Who is called upon to analyze the evidence? 4 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:19,000 And why do many of these governments deny that they study UFOs? 5 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:25,000 If a senior officer says, don't talk about UFOs, that's an order. 6 00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:32,000 And all sorts of adverse consequences will befall anyone who disobeys that. 7 00:00:32,000 --> 00:00:39,000 Join us as we reveal how governments officially investigate unidentified flying objects 8 00:00:39,000 --> 00:00:43,000 and uncover why they keep it a secret. 9 00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:50,000 A global effort has begun. 10 00:00:50,000 --> 00:00:54,000 Secret files hidden from the public for decades. 11 00:00:54,000 --> 00:00:58,000 Detailing every UFO account are now available to the public. 12 00:00:58,000 --> 00:01:03,000 We are about to uncover the truth behind these classified documents. 13 00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:07,000 Find out what the government doesn't want you to know. 14 00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:08,000 Unsealed. 15 00:01:08,000 --> 00:01:10,000 Alien files. 16 00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:14,000 Exposing the biggest secret on planet Earth. 17 00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:20,000 Despite constant denials, governments around the world do study UFOs. 18 00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:28,000 I joined the British government's Ministry of Defence in 1985 and I left in 2006. 19 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:32,000 My job was to research and investigate UFOs. 20 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:36,000 I had mixed feelings when I joined the UFO project. 21 00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:40,000 On the one hand, I was fairly skeptical about this. 22 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:44,000 When I looked at some of the extraordinary radar visual cases, 23 00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:50,000 I soon began to realize that my initial skepticism had been misplaced. 24 00:01:50,000 --> 00:01:58,000 The United States government, among others, has formed many UFO investigative units dating back to the 1940s. 25 00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:05,000 After an unprecedented wave of UFO sightings in 1947, which includes the infamous Roswell incident, 26 00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:11,000 the U.S. created investigative bodies, project sign, project grudge, 27 00:02:11,000 --> 00:02:16,000 and ran project Blue Book until it was canceled in 1969. 28 00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:21,000 In July of 1947, headlines were printed that showed that a flying saucer, 29 00:02:21,000 --> 00:02:26,000 alien in nature, complete with bodies and all, crashed on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. 30 00:02:26,000 --> 00:02:34,000 The United States Air Force became convinced the nation was being invaded by an unknown advanced technology. 31 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:42,000 And in the fall of 1948, one of the military's own had an encounter that was too convincing to ignore. 32 00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:53,000 Unsealed case file, the Gorman dog fight, Fargo, North Dakota, October 1st, 1948. 33 00:02:53,000 --> 00:03:03,000 Veteran World War II pilot, Lieutenant George Gorman, is flying his Air National Guard P-51 Mustang over Fargo on a clear night. 34 00:03:03,000 --> 00:03:08,000 He encounters an object. It's six to eight inches and Diamond describes it. 35 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:13,000 It's well lit. It's a lit ball of light. And it's flying around the town just like he is. 36 00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:21,000 Several other personnel at the base also witnessed the ball of light and describe it as bright with tight edges. 37 00:03:21,000 --> 00:03:25,000 Gorman obtains permission to investigate the unidentified object. 38 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:28,000 He decides to engage him and it starts playing with him. 39 00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:36,000 He has a few head-on passes with it. He tries to chase it around. It does things that he can't keep up with. 40 00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:39,000 And then eventually just takes off and he is gone. 41 00:03:39,000 --> 00:03:45,000 He estimated that this object was flying at least 500 miles per hour, which was incredibly fast for the time. 42 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:52,000 They were doing what they could describe as dog fight type maneuvers in the sky, chasing each other. 43 00:03:52,000 --> 00:04:01,000 Within hours of the incident, officers arrive from Project Sine, the U.S. government's official UFO investigative body at the time. 44 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:10,000 During his interview, Gorman describes the ball of light as bright with clear edges, not completely round but slightly flat. 45 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:19,000 Then he stuns investigators by stating that the unidentified object's movements were so specific and responsive that there was, quote, 46 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:22,000 thought behind the UFO's maneuvers. 47 00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:30,000 His report was considered very highly credible, his incredible officer. So what was his thing? Nobody really knew. 48 00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:36,000 What he knew was he couldn't keep up with it and it did things that he had never encountered before. 49 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:45,000 After a full investigation and national media coverage, Project Sine concludes that Gorman chased a weather balloon. 50 00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:53,000 The incident with Gorman was not a lone case. There are quite a few examples in our UFO history that show that pilots do have encounters with UFO's. 51 00:04:53,000 --> 00:05:02,000 After investigation, most cases did turn out to have conventional explanations and I was able to explain them in terms of people 52 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:12,000 misidentifying aircraft lights, weather balloons, satellites, meteors, airships, all manner of objects and phenomena. 53 00:05:12,000 --> 00:05:20,000 Perhaps in as many as 80% of cases, I was able to find a clear explanation. 54 00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:26,000 The question is, what exactly did Gorman encounter in the skies above North Dakota? 55 00:05:26,000 --> 00:05:36,000 Despite Project Sine's official 1948 findings, experts in the UFO community considered the Gorman dogfight to be unresolved. 56 00:05:36,000 --> 00:05:43,000 Many experts now look at the documents and say, well, they really weren't doing their job as true investigators. 57 00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:48,000 They were collecting these reports, analyzing them and pretty much dismissing them one at a time. 58 00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:57,000 There were no weather balloons here, swamp gas there, the planet Venus over here, and they were just completely dismissing anything that came in. 59 00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:36,000 In 5% of cases, or thereabouts, they were categorized as genuine unknowns. 60 00:06:36,000 --> 00:06:49,000 Now, of course, unknown does not necessarily mean as the pop culture understanding is, extraterrestrials, but neither could we or did we rule out that possibility. 61 00:06:49,000 --> 00:06:53,000 Unknown means unknown, nothing more, nothing less. 62 00:07:06,000 --> 00:07:10,000 There were black triangular UFOs over Belgium, people were seeing them everywhere. 63 00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:19,000 Many of them describe the black triangle craft that are reported today, where you have a black triangle craft, multiple lights on the bottom. 64 00:07:20,000 --> 00:07:30,000 30 different sets of witnesses and three separate groups of police officers allegedly see black triangular UFOs in the skies above Belgium. 65 00:07:30,000 --> 00:07:36,000 Officials question the witnesses for any information that would lead to a rational explanation. 66 00:07:36,000 --> 00:07:48,000 But over the next few months, the initial sighting becomes a wave, with over 1,000 sightings reported from November of 1989 through the spring of 1990. 67 00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:54,000 The Belgium Air Force response to that was to actually scramble jets and chase these things. 68 00:07:54,000 --> 00:08:07,000 We always had specialists who could look at things in detail for us, whether it was looking at photos or videos, and of course the other big part of UFO investigations is radar. 69 00:08:07,000 --> 00:08:15,000 They had F-16s, high technology jet, they chased these things, they gave chase, they had visual contact, they had radar contact confirmation. 70 00:08:16,000 --> 00:08:18,000 And this went on for some time. 71 00:08:18,000 --> 00:08:27,000 The evidence is overwhelming, something is appearing in the skies. The Belgian government is forced to investigate. But how? 72 00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:40,000 I would always make sure that in our investigations we included the experts, be they civilians or military, who could tell us, firstly, was anything tracked on radar? 73 00:08:40,000 --> 00:08:44,000 And secondly, if something was, what can you tell us about it? 74 00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:57,000 What I would then try to do is correlate that with something that I knew about or could find out about in terms of aerial activity, astronomical phenomena, etc. 75 00:08:57,000 --> 00:09:04,000 So for example, I would look at flight paths, I would look at military exercises. 76 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:15,000 On March 30th, 1990, more than four months after the initial sightings, a NATO base near Glon, southeast of Brussels, registers an unknown object on radar. 77 00:09:15,000 --> 00:09:28,000 Two F-16s are scrambled to intercept and identify an aerial unknown. One of the jets is able to achieve a radar lock for a few seconds and reports that the object is diamond shaped. 78 00:09:28,000 --> 00:09:47,000 Radar is not an exact science. Some returns are better than others. So again, that would be a big part, an important part of all government UFO investigations, not just in the British government's UFO project, but in project blue book all around the world. 79 00:09:48,000 --> 00:10:07,000 Many skeptics ask if the Belgium triangles were so widespread, where is the photographic proof? Many eyewitnesses took photographs, but images are blurred and obscured, prompting one expert to consider the triangles were employing a sophisticated form of infrared jamming. 80 00:10:07,000 --> 00:10:19,000 But perhaps this single image of a black triangle captured from video footage taken during the Belgium wave was enough to justify the government's unprecedented investigation. 81 00:10:19,000 --> 00:10:30,000 The Belgian government was actually very responsible. They treated these things as if they were real. They asked the public and ufologists to help them in investigation of what these things were. 82 00:10:30,000 --> 00:10:43,000 The Belgium UFO wave is an important and rare example of civilians, scientific experts, government officials and independent UFO investigators collaborating and analyzing evidence. 83 00:10:43,000 --> 00:10:53,000 But also, I guess showed a little bit of faith that they knew what they were doing, that they were going to bring the truth to the forefront and try and unravel this UFO mystery. 84 00:10:53,000 --> 00:11:03,000 Despite thousands of sightings, radar records, video and photographic evidence, nearly 30 years later, the mystery is still unexplained. 85 00:11:03,000 --> 00:11:10,000 When you see black triangles or you hear about a wave, you can't help but think, is this potentially a testing ground? 86 00:11:10,000 --> 00:11:19,000 Were they US? Were they foreign technology that could represent a national threat to them? Or were they something from elsewhere? 87 00:11:20,000 --> 00:11:32,000 In the past seven decades, governments around the world have investigated thousands of UFO sightings and encounters, often times under an umbrella of secrecy. 88 00:11:32,000 --> 00:11:40,000 But despite officially denying the existence of UFOs, to this day, many in the public are not convinced. 89 00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:52,000 Each year, when I was working on the UFO project, I probably received two or three hundred sighting reports and each of these had to be properly investigated. 90 00:11:52,000 --> 00:12:05,000 Unsealed case file, the O'Hare Airport flying disk, Chicago, Illinois, November 7th, 2006. Something unusual appears over one of the nation's busiest airports. 91 00:12:05,000 --> 00:12:10,000 November 2006, 4.15 in the afternoon, an object appears over O'Hare Airport. 92 00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:20,000 Aircraft operations are shut down for a while for this object. This thing is sitting over the airport. People are seeing it, people are videoing it, and this thing just sits there. 93 00:12:20,000 --> 00:12:28,000 But what is it? Many eyewitnesses that day describe the object as a rotating gray disk shaped like a frisbee. 94 00:12:28,000 --> 00:12:44,000 It's a round for one of the better term flying saucer type spacecraft or craft, and people are looking at it, and then all of a sudden the thing just goes up vertically and punches a hole through the clouds. 95 00:12:44,000 --> 00:12:50,000 The incident is witnessed by ground crew, pilots, passengers, and airline personnel. 96 00:12:50,000 --> 00:13:00,000 It did shut down air operations for a while, but other than that, we didn't have time to scramble jets on it. We didn't really react to it well. We were in shock. 97 00:13:00,000 --> 00:13:04,000 But many are reluctant to go on record and report what they saw. 98 00:13:05,000 --> 00:13:22,000 You have to almost befriend them, or certainly empathize with them. Be receptive. Put them at ease if they're concerned that we wouldn't take them seriously, concerned that we might think they were wasting their time. 99 00:13:22,000 --> 00:13:25,000 You're full. That's what I think it was. 100 00:13:25,000 --> 00:13:37,000 I mean, this happened. It's undeniable, and the Chicago Tribune, to their credit, I believe, put this on the front page. So the mainstream media knew that there was a story here. 101 00:13:37,000 --> 00:13:50,000 The O'Hare UFO receives wide U.S. network media coverage, but the Federal Aviation Administration, the government agency that oversees national safety in our skies, refuses to investigate. 102 00:13:50,000 --> 00:14:06,000 I think because of the ridicule factor, both the airline and indeed the Federal Aviation Administration kind of locked down this whole thing and said, oh, it didn't happen. 103 00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:12,000 Dozens of people saw it. You know, you can't say that this thing didn't happen. It happened. 104 00:14:12,000 --> 00:14:20,000 Authorities conclude that due to the low cloud ceiling that day, conditions were perfect for an atmospheric anomaly. 105 00:14:20,000 --> 00:14:26,000 A skeptical explanation about weather phenomenon was put forward. 106 00:14:26,000 --> 00:14:32,000 Whatever was witnessed hovering above O'Hare is still, to this day, unexplained. 107 00:14:32,000 --> 00:14:42,000 If you've got something flying in such a controlled airspace, well, that's something that should be taken seriously, whether you're a believer or a skeptic. 108 00:14:42,000 --> 00:14:51,000 From studying UFOs for years in the UK, Nick Pope knows that investigations are often abandoned due to lack of data. 109 00:14:51,000 --> 00:15:02,000 In maybe 15% of cases, there was insufficient information, too little data to really come to a definitive conclusion. 110 00:15:02,000 --> 00:15:08,000 Is this the reason the FAA will not investigate UFO sightings? 111 00:15:08,000 --> 00:15:14,000 Why wouldn't they care if a UFO is there? It doesn't mean that it's alien, but it means that it's a threat. 112 00:15:14,000 --> 00:15:19,000 So it really kind of begs the question, are they covering up their interest? 113 00:15:21,000 --> 00:15:28,000 Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many governments claim that they do not investigate UFOs. 114 00:15:28,000 --> 00:15:36,000 But those who have witnessed unexplained phenomena in the sky and many in the media choose to believe otherwise. 115 00:15:36,000 --> 00:15:45,000 In 2011, the Huffington Post asked the Pentagon about a specific passage in the United States Air Force personnel manual. 116 00:15:45,000 --> 00:15:55,000 Air Force Manual 10-206 included a section on how United States Air Force pilots were to report UFO sightings. 117 00:15:55,000 --> 00:16:04,000 All United States Air Force pilots were instructed and ordered to report any UFO, any unidentified flying object that they saw. 118 00:16:04,000 --> 00:16:08,000 This was spelled out in black and white for years. 119 00:16:08,000 --> 00:16:13,000 Just a few days after the inquiry, the passage was deleted. 120 00:16:13,000 --> 00:16:28,000 Within 24 hours of this major media outlet inquiring to the Pentagon about this manual, it was completely rewritten, it was changed, and the entire chapter on UFOs was completely gone. 121 00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:33,000 There are a couple of reasons why the military are very tight-lipped about UFOs. 122 00:16:33,000 --> 00:16:39,000 Firstly, the military are inherently a secretive organization. 123 00:16:39,000 --> 00:16:45,000 The default position is always say nothing unless you absolutely have to. 124 00:16:45,000 --> 00:16:56,000 They were going to put the spotlight and show beyond a reasonable doubt unidentified flying objects was still on the books to be reported as Air Force pilots see them. 125 00:16:56,000 --> 00:17:05,000 The second point is that as a hierarchical organization, it's actually very easy to clamp down on this. 126 00:17:05,000 --> 00:17:12,000 Because if a senior officer says, don't talk about UFOs, that's an order. 127 00:17:12,000 --> 00:17:19,000 And all sorts of adverse consequences will befall anyone who disobeys that. 128 00:17:19,000 --> 00:17:27,000 That's why over the years, the military has been very able to keep a lot of this secret. 129 00:17:27,000 --> 00:17:33,000 Pentagon officials claim it was a coincidence that the passage was deleted at the time of the inquiry. 130 00:17:33,000 --> 00:17:38,000 Why is there this big charade that they're not interested in anything related to UFOs? 131 00:17:38,000 --> 00:17:44,000 And in black and white, under the Freedom of Information Act, you can completely prove the opposite. 132 00:17:45,000 --> 00:17:51,000 We may never know exactly what kinds of UFO phenomena governments around the globe have investigated. 133 00:17:51,000 --> 00:18:00,000 This is not an area I can discuss in any great detail, of course, because I'm still bound by the British Government's Official Secrets Act. 134 00:18:00,000 --> 00:18:09,000 What I can say is that through intelligence means those of us in government have a pretty good idea of the sorts of things that are out there. 135 00:18:09,000 --> 00:18:14,000 The question is, what exactly is out there?