(signal buzzing) (dramatic music) - There actually have been and may now be present in the Earth's atmosphere strange aerial objects. Some are of a geometric order. Others can only be described as brilliant light sources. Their form cannot be determined.
So far, science has not been able to explain them satisfactorily as natural phenomena. Thus far, they can only be regarded as artificial devices created and operated by a high intelligence and no power plant has been made or known on this Earth that could account for the performance of these devices. - [Man] As it grows darker, conditions are improving.
If during the next half-hour there are any reports on these mysterious blips, we're going to head straight for them. - Man has the flexibility or the option of either walking this planet or some other planet, be it the moon or Mars or I don't know where. - There's a lot more of space to explore and a lot more to learn when we do. (suspenseful music) - Tonight, we have left the political arena for the arena where men's minds and imagination take over from established facts and provable theories. We're going to examine that unfathomable area of outer space.
- [Man] 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Fire. (engine roaring) (suspenseful music) - [Man] Are you looking for little green men or what? - No.
No, not little green men or women. - [Man] I have seen UFOs and so I don't need persuading. I've seen these objects in the sky. - [Man] Here you've got dead aliens down there and you're shocked. Everybody probably was.
- [Man] He went along with the Air Force explanation. You know, he knew full well that was not true. - And we didn't lie. So, I'm insistent that, yes, I saw it.
Yes, I held it. - I'm positive that there's information being withheld from the public domain concerning the Roswell event. - I'm hoping that they will someday release the information. - Tell us what actually happened.
(electric buzzing) - [Narrator] Come with us as we recount the eyewitness accounts and the alleged subsequent cover up attempts by the United States Military in an attempt to, once and for all, understand what fell from the skies that evening in the barren desert near Roswell. Descriptions of UFOs have remained fairly consistent throughout the ages defined as bright lights, in formation, traveling at impossible speeds, saucer-shaped objects hurtling through the sky then disappearing from view. - [Man] Look at this thing! - [Man] Huh! [Narrator] All descriptions synonymous with our outer space visitors. It's easy to dismiss modern-day sightings as weather balloons or top secret military technology but depictions of unidentified flying objects go back long before the Wright brothers took flight.
Or da Vinci putting pen to paper to sketch his flying machines. - [Man] Oh! (film whirring) - [Narrator] The Tulli Papyrus, hieroglyphs found on an ancient Egyptian papyrus dating back to the reign of Thutmose III over 3,000 years ago, depict a sighting of fiery discs becoming more numerous and ascending in the sky. With knowledge that the Egyptians were astronomical geniuses, it's hard to believe that they mistook this for an astral event. It will always remain in speculation until the original papyrus is found.
One thing remains certain, it isn't the only ancient artifact depicting unidentified flying objects. Fast-forwarding 750 years to the Roman civilization in the year 218 B.C., a celebrated historian and academic by the name of Titus Livius Patavinus chronicled his strange observation.
He states that he gazed and spotted phantom ships gleaming in the sky. (dramatic music) In recent history, the most pivotal and well known UFO sighting happened in Roswell, New Mexico, United States of America, a hotbed of extraterrestrial activity. July 1947, Roswell a small tranquil town in New Mexico, is hit by controversy. An unidentified flying object hurdles through the atmosphere and crashes into an unsuspecting farmer's ranch. (beeping) - [Announcer] Headline Edition, July 8th 1947.
The Army Air Force has announced that a flying disc has been found and is now in the possession of the Army. Army officers say the missile, found sometime last week, has been inspected at Roswell, New Mexico, and sent to Right Field, Ohio, for further inspection. (beeping) - [Narrator] This begins the conspiracy of Roswell, a conspiracy marred by mystery. After one stormy evening, rancher Mac Brazel and his son return home on horseback from checking on their flock. On returning, they stumble upon some unexplainable debris which will later inspire investigations all around the world.
Very few people refute that something did, indeed, crash but what it was remains unexplained. (explosion booming) - [Narrator] All the developments and method, equipment and destructive power that we were studying seemed minor innovations compared to the revolutionary impact of the atom bomb. - [Narrator] Roswell Army Airfield, a place shrouded in secrecy was the home of the elite 509th Bomb Wing during World War II, an airstrip where from the little boy atomic bomb took off to obliterate Hiroshima, a fitting place for an impact of its own. - There are claims that Roswell was a significant place for an alien spacecraft to be in action on this planet because it was the home, at that point, of the 509th which was the only squadron, airborne squadron, trained to drop nuclear weapons on the face of the Earth. So, consequently, the two of them seemed to be a little bit coincidental, to say the least. I'm a little bit skeptical about that, but I think there are good reasons why this particular crash would happen there.
In the New Mexico area, you've got miles and miles of empty desert. It's a very good place to locate anything that you don't want to be overseen by the general public. - [Narrator] Being the public relations officer for the 509th Bomb Group, Walter Haut was tasked with releasing their newly-discovered information to the local news corporations revealing they had, indeed, discovered the remains of a crashed flying saucer.
- I was called to headquarters. Was given copies of a press release which stated, in essence, that we had in our possession a flying disc. I was told to hand deliver to the foreign news media we had in town at that time, two radio stations and two newspapers. - [News Reader] News outlets swiftly began distributing the story. Front page headline on the Roswell Daily Record, RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on ranch in Roswell Region. - We have to consider the timing on the press release.
So, a few weeks before the Roswell case, I mean literally late June 1947, there had been a huge story when a guy called Kenneth Arnold had seen what were reported as flying saucers. It was the first flying saucer story and it was actually the first use of the word flying saucer which wasn't down to Kenneth Arnold. He said he'd seen objects that were moving like saucers skipped over water. It was actually a journalist who coined the phrase. So, it was current at the time and a reasonable guess would be the following, that what the Army Air Force thought they were doing and what Walter Haut, who released the press release, thought he was doing was sticking out a story that would be spectacular and distracting for a short amount of time, at which point, they could say, oh sorry, we made a mistake. It was just a weather balloon.
- [Narrator] Not even four hours had gone by and the reports were redacted. General Roger Ramey had taken charge and released a new altered account of the events. It wasn't anything harmful or a groundbreaking discovery. Ramey implied it was just the wreckage of an experimental Army weather balloon.
Was this the truth or a cover up? - I think that at the heart of this, the flying saucer press release, i.e., the press release put out by Walter Haut, that said that they'd captured a flying saucer was probably a pretty bad error of judgment in the heat of the moment because they realized that they've got some of their own technology and they didn't want people to know that there are experiments going on locally and they completely over egged the press release which meant that they had to retract it very, very quickly. But that's the only major mistake I think they made. - Everybody believed it was a weather balloon.
The way it was handled, it was a real slick way. Say, yes, we've got a flying saucer and have a general, who is much more knowledgeable, naturally, say, no, it was a new type of weather balloon. - Project Mogul lasted for two years, from 1947 to 1949. The intention of it was to use balloons like weather balloons, but huge, great trains of them to lift listening devices into the high atmosphere and the point of doing that was that they could hear in the high atmosphere, they could hear sounds from Russian atomic tests. So, they were actually spying on the Russians.
It was discontinued for two reasons. First of all because it was only limited in its effectiveness and, secondly, because the Americans managed to find better ways of spying on the Russians. I'm totally on the side of the fact that the Roswell crash is explicable by a weather balloon and they're particularly for two reasons.
First of all because there's a consistent story that's been investigated and reinvestigated a number of times and it's turned up quite compelling evidence to suggest that that's the true explanation and, secondly, because the competing explanations which are to do with recovering of alien craft and alien bodies have contradicted themselves and there are a number of major problems with the evidence on that side. - [Narrator] Locals of Roswell weren't having any of it. They believed it was something out of this world.
- My father was on the intelligence team at the Roswell Army Airfield and it was his job to look at what they thought was a crashed aircraft or a crashed something out there out of Roswell. When he came in, he was very excited. He woke my brother and myself up, it must have been one or two o'clock in the morning and he wanted us to see what he was bringing in from the field.
He said this is parts of a flying saucer. The material that I saw almost resembled something that could have blown out through the side of the craft, like there's an inflight explosion, just spreading debris, blowing debris out of the side of the craft. - Well, there are claims that things were salvaged.
So, with all the claims about salvage, i.e. we got something back and we thought we'd use it to do with captured alien hardware. The arguments about the Project Mogul balloon that was retrieved doesn't claim that anything was salvaged. They just picked up a load of rubbish and got rid of it because it was embarrassing in terms of blowing the lid on their experiment, but there are claims that what was salvaged, with regard to the technology, the alien technology, has gone on to inspire everything from laser beams to Velcro. - [Narrator] Accounts from Roswell spoke of bodies recovered at the wreckage.
- Daddy came in so excited and he said what they saw was not from this world. There were two bodies that were laying on the ground outside of this craft and that there was one, what he called a little person, and he said, there's one little person that was walking around and he said they were still alive. And he said that the other two were dead and that this one that was alive was very sad. My dad would not have gotten excited over a weather balloon.
He was not easily excitable and this is the most thrilled I'd ever seen him in my life. He thought that was the most fantastic thing in the world. He kept saying there's no need for us to be afraid.
They're not here to hurt us and he said that he really felt badly that we couldn't help them. He felt very sorry for whoever that was. If it was from some other world, planet, their family will never know what happened to them.
They'll never go back home. - [Narrator] Are there extraterrestrial bodies lying in a secret military vault somewhere? - I sincerely believe we had a crash of something from outer space because we still don't have materials that compare with the descriptions I've gotten of the material that was picked up out on the ranch and brought (mumbles) (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Interplanetary visitors or not, the army fueled speculation of alien contact with their secrecy and manipulation of their purported account of the event. - There are a number of cases where the military has used UFO stories to cover up their own goings on and those are probably better documented than anything where subsequently they've covered up a genuine UFO story.
So, for example in 1976, radar in California picked up a UFO which disappeared in one sweep of the radar and declassification of documents later on has revealed that was a test for the Stealth Bomber. I mean an early version of that. So, clearly if it was invisible to radar and produced a UFO report, it was doing its job properly, wasn't it? One of the best known cases in terms of a documentary trial is that in 1956, American servicemen were told that they were guarding the wings and engine of a flying saucer which was crated up and it was shipped all the way from Budapest to Fort Knox in Texas which is typical of the kind of crash retrieval stories. You get it, you contain it, you put it somewhere safe. Although Fort Knox is not an obvious place to store a UFO. But, again, documents would be classified post Glasnost and what they were guarding, despite the fact that they've been told this was the wings and engine of a flying saucer, they were guarding the Hungarian crown jewels because the Hungarians were well aware that the Russians were coming and they didn't want these national treasures to be taken up to Moscow.
So, there's a number of cases like that where we have a documentary case and you can see that the use of a UFO cover story would take people's attention in a completely different direction. - [Narrator] Or were they worried about the nation's security and reaction of the country if they revealed we had truly been visited by extraterrestrial beings? - [Phillips] There's a jet of flame springing from the mirror and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they're turning into flame! (man yelling) - [Narrator] Previously, the country had been in mass hysteria surrounding the visitation of aliens. Nine years prior to Roswell on October 30th 1938, a radio broadcast directed by Orson Welles caused the United States to burst into a frenzied panic. An adaptation of H.G. Wells' drama, The War Of The Worlds,
played out across the airwaves. Reports of explosions on Mars and unusual objects falling from the skies were made culminating in what was described as a destructive and devastating alien invasion. - [Man] Coming this way now, about 20 yards to my right.
- [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grovers Mill. - [Narrator] Not knowing that the broadcast was a drama, some listeners were so distraught that they committed suicide. - So, The War of the Worlds incident is often overlooked in ufology because everybody knows it was a radio drama. Keeping it really simple, on the 30th of October 1938, there was a broadcast, a radio drama broadcast, Orson Welles' Theater on the Air, and what they did was to do a kind of reality, almost like a mockumentary. It was like a live news report but they claimed that aliens were landing in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. And there is clear evidence that a handful of people panicked and it so worried the United States that the first bit of serious media research was done on that particular case study and there was a peer-reviewed university paper published about it and they found a number of things out.
First of all, that it was almost accidental that some people panicked. One of the biggest causes of the panic was that they'd introduced this drama as a drama. A lot of people had missed the start of it because they were flitting between radio stations. Because the competition wasn't that great, he got a bigger audience than he expected and the handful of people that panicked, panicked because they heard the opening few minutes, but not the very start and that was quite convincing, yeah. Another major reason that some people panicked was that, actually, people who had a very strong religious view panicked because they genuinely believed, a few of them, genuinely believed this was the end of the world. And also another reason a lot of people panicked was because they were amusing those around them.
So, actually, the BBC once did a documentary on this and they found a guy that could barely contain himself 40 years later laughing at it because he was remembering how him and his siblings had just watched their dad panic and they knew full well it was a drama and they just let him go, yeah. So, a number of the people panicking actually were panicking unnecessarily and were put right within a matter of minutes and the actual number of panicking people believing the martians were coming were significantly less than, you know, the general story would have you believe now. I think one thing about The War of the Worlds that we can't prove but may well be relevant is that because there was a belief in 1938 that aliens were landing, the American government, with that knowledge and with the research that came out three years later when it was investigated by the Office of Radio Research at the University of Princeton, they knew that people could be persuaded that these kind of things were going on and so, subsequently, there's no written evidence trail of this, but you can just imagine using a bit of common sense. If you tried to come up with some press release that will so amaze people or engage their imagination that you will get them to do what you want, then you might make those suggestions and you would know from The War Of The Worlds that'd be going on and you wouldn't ever write this down. You'd just sit around and have a talk in an office about it.
And there has been some reporting on the fact that in the 1950s, there was a kind of, watch this guy's panic in America and the authorities, in inverted commas, were definitely behind it. And there's a very pragmatic reason why they wanted that. They were bothered by the fact that their radar wasn't covering the entire coast. So, if they could make the population believe that there were UFO's flying around, a lot more people would be outdoors looking up and looking out to sea and they'd report anything they saw and it was a very good way of the Americans trying to keep tabs on whether there were incoming aircraft in the places where the Russians could fly that close and whether there was anything else going on that they need to be worried about.
- [Narrator] Were they worried history could repeat itself? - The reason that the incident was quieted down, basically, the main reason was panic. They were, all of a sudden, were confronted with something from another place or another time or another dimension or we had no idea what we're dealing with and, relating that all way back to 1938 with H.G. Wells and the invasion of the Martians and all people committing suicide, doing crazy things, they're afraid that this will bring total chaos.
Also, they had to take into consideration what we're dealing with here, a new technology or what. - And I think that's why these people were, in fact, involved right at ground level. To be sure, they were the ones that dictated policy at that time which would, ultimately, lead to where we are today as far as the official ridicule and the still classified aspects of our knowledge of what we really know about UFOs. - The best evidence we have from a number of eyewitness sources is that the craft and the bodies were brought to Hangar 84 of the Roswell Army Airfield and stored overnight before transport. What we understand from the eyewitness testimony is the bodies were sealed in a large wooden crate kept at the center of the hangar. It's absolutely brilliant what they did.
They announced they have a flying saucer, but they've already captured it. They've already got it. There's nothing to see so nobody goes out looking for the thing then they shift everything to Fort Worth, the higher headquarters says, no, no, those guys made a mistake. It was just a weather balloon.
The press can't find Jesse Marcel because he's in Fort Worth and he's been silenced. There's corroborative testimony that suggests somebody was putting pressure on people to silence them and they used what means were necessary to keep those people silent. With the military people, it was merely the threat of imprisonment and going to jail because they understood that. - A number of people have claimed that they're being silenced with regard to things that they know about UFOs. You can't give a simple answer to this.
I think it totally plausible that some people are silenced and are lent on to be silent about UFO-related events, okay, but I think much more likely is that what's going on, sometimes, is that secret hardware is being tested and the people being lent on to be quiet are in the military and they might be seeing things going on that they've got no need to know about, but they accidentally encounter. And, in a case like that, you could quite easily silence somebody. You could simply point out you didn't see it, you know why you didn't see it and your career might be better if you never talk about it again. And there's a number of cases where that's happened. - With some of the civilians, they were told that if you ever talk about it, you will be killed. - I said, yes, I did handle it and he started emphasizing, no, you didn't.
Well, my mother was pretty strict and we didn't lie. So, I'm insistent that yes I saw it. Yes, I held it and he got mad and he got louder and he had one of those, looks like a small baseball bat that hooks on the side of your belt and he took that out, he's holding it, and he starts beating his hand. Every time he said something he would hit that on his hand and he would say, I want you to understand you were never there. You did not see anything. You did not hear a conversation.
And he said if you can't understand this, there are things that we can do. He said we can take you out here in the middle of this desert. He said this is a big desert here. He said no-one will ever find your bodies, ever. No-one will ever know what happened to you. He said the only way I'm going to let you stay around or live is if you promise you'll never talk about this the rest of your life.
So, I told them I wouldn't. - You know, when he came back from Carswell, after flying the debris, he did tell me not to talk about this to my mother, not you talk about this, this is not an event. Play like it never happened. Don't even talk about this with your friends, which I didn't and, years later, he confided that he was actually part of the cover up 'cause he went along with the Air Force explanation. You know, he knew full well that that was not true. - [Man] Oh, we're sitting at a bar and this guy I knew a little bit, not real well, and I'm not going to say what county it was in, we got to talking and he said, well, I was at Roswell where they say the aliens crashed.
And, boom, that was it. He didn't say no more. You know, like he woke up and like, oh, oh, I'm shooting my mouth off. And, bear in mind, there is a lot more excitement on something like that probably than preparing for the bomb. Here you got dead aliens down there and you're shocked. Everybody probably was.
If he shot his mouth out, those people, the government's knowing about it now, they've got to know about it. And maybe he's been warned already? Maybe you won't see him again? (dramatic music) - I think at last count I had spoken to around four dozen people who handled various aspects of the debris. The most dramatic is the foil-like material that you can wad up into a ball and let it go and it would unfold itself. - They tried to burn it and they couldn't burn it. It wouldn't catch on fire and they took out their pocket knives and they tried to cut it and they couldn't cut it. I guess they all had their chance to play with it for a while and it's laying on the table so I reached over and picked it up.
And I played for probably five minutes. When you would wad it up in your hand you couldn't feel it in your hand. You couldn't feel you had anything there. And it would go to a size that was so small that you'd have to look to see if it was still in your hand and then when you drop it, it spread out all over the table.
- You couldn't burn it. You couldn't tear it. Take the aluminum foil, ah, the material it looked like aluminum foil, wad it up in your hands, then it would come out without a crease on it. - One of the things that I had a lot of fun with is this story about the metal that they wadded up and they crunch up in their hand and it comes back. - You could crush it in your hand and it would, the wrinkles would all come out. It would just straighten back out.
- One of the people that interviewed me once before says, well, we don't have anything like that today. So, I kind of chuckled and I waited until we got off the air and I said, you remember what you said about the technology, we don't have anything like that today? I said but it's right before your eyes. He says, what do you mean? I says, well, for instance, like this. I said I got these about three years ago.
They're really interesting, you know. We don't have anything like that today, do we? This is called memory metal. It goes back to traditional shape. I got it because, I got these frames because I was always sitting on my glasses and ended up having to buy new frames.
Well, I've had these now for three years and, obviously, they're in good shape. - [Narrator] Archive footage allegedly shows some debris from the crash of the unidentified flying object. (suspenseful music) Roswell debris handler, Major Jesse Marcel's son, Jesse Marcel Junior, reports that he was shown pieces of the UFO by his father. "There were these eye beams about 12 to 18 inches long "and the most unusual part of that was the symbols "or writing on the inner surface.
"I thought at first, it was like Egyptian hieroglyphics, "but when I looked closer, it seemed to be more "like geometric symbols of some kind. "It was very strange." - And we just looked at it.
You know, I picked up this particular eye beam and held it up to my upper left to look at it with the kitchen light reflecting on the inner surface and that's when I saw the writing or the symbols of some sort. (suspenseful music) The debris in the film was somewhat different than the debris that I saw on the kitchen floor. Certainly, the symbols on the so-called eye beam were much larger.
The size of the beams are certainly different. The one I saw was probably, greatest three-eights of an inch in cross-sectional diameter, 12 to 18 inches long. The beam in the film were much larger that this, several inches across in cross-sectional diameter.
If this is an authentic film then it could have come from a different portion of the craft. (suspenseful music) - What the debris looked like was stainless steel that had become in contact with very extensive heat. It would be like very bright and then it would be a pink and then to a dark brown and almost to black. - The symbols on the object that I saw on film do not resemble any language that I studied myself.
I mean they vaguely resemble maybe capital Greek letters, but, then again, capital Greek letters are different. They're not Egyptians and they're neither old Egyptian, middle Egyptian, late Egyptian, Demotic, Coptic. They're not Arabic, they're not Persian. They're not Latin, obviously, they're not Greek.
The perfect workmanship of the signs themselves, the perfectly round circles, the perfectly straight lines, they don't waver and they don't vary in width and in depth as far as I can tell on the tape. I would assume that the society who produced that piece is either comparable to our own society in its technological achievement or possibly more. (gentle music) - The more that we learned about the technology and the advances that we made, it made it a greater case for keeping it secret. - [Narrator] Something happened there that night in 1947, a cover up or not, what information is being withheld from us? With nuclear arsenals expanding at the time, were they curious about our newly discovered technology? - There is no question that film exists of the autopsy. When you have an event like this, you're going to film every aspect of it. We've been told by people who participated in the cleanup on both the debris field and the impact site that photographs were taken.
Film was taken. All of this exists somewhere. - We looked at their files, interviewed now about four or 500 witnesses, been added a couple of years and I am one scientist who has been forced farther and farther to the position that the extra terrestrial hypothesis, but I underscore that word hypothesis, is the most probable hypothesis. I'm ready to throw it over when I see something that categorically rules it out, but this is my position. - [Narrator] The suspected crash in Roswell happened over 70 years ago. Why do we still know very little from that event? Ex-Congressman, Steven Schiff, took up the fight for answers.
- When I sent the first request to the Secretary of Defense for response about the Roswell incident in view of the fact that there were these accusations, essentially, of a government cover up, the response I got was a very terse letter that said, in about a sentence or two, from the Air Force, we referred your letter to the National Archives. That's all it said. The National Archives then said, we don't have any information about the Roswell incident, which I was convinced the Defense Department had to know before they were sending me there.
So, in other words, I thought I was getting the run around. - [Narrator] In an attempt to provoke the military, Schiff looked to the GAO. Towards the end of 1993, the General Accounting Office agreed to undertake an investigation into Roswell.
Hoping to trigger a response from the Air Force, in late 1994, a new explanation of the 1947 wreckage in Roswell was given. In 1995, the GAO looked to government defense bodies, the CIA, FBI, Department of Energy and the Department of Defense for any documentation classified or not. All the agencies declared they had no such information on Roswell. - They have this about the weather balloon story, but they say that it was then a different kind of balloon, a special balloon to go to very high altitude for the purpose of detecting whether the Soviets were exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.
I don't know the Air Force has ever explained what took them so long to say this is the explanation, if this is the explanation. They believe that the records, in fact, were destroyed more than four decades ago. So, there's not an individual on the job now, we can just call up and say, what happened to these records? And so, the GAO has simply no further recommendations or ideas on how to go farther. - [Narrator] Further requests were made for outward telephone conversations from the Roswell Air Field at the time. What they found won't shock you. All tapes had been destroyed.
- The only records we're talking about being destroyed are communications from Roswell Army Airfield, 509th, the only atomic bombing group in the world out moving messages about the analysis of the materials, about the autopsy reports, about the eyewitness testimony from those who stood guard, those who carried it, those who tested it in various government labs. There ought to be a ton of other paper. - We're still talking about Roswell after 71 years for a number of very understandable reasons. First of all because it's a great story. So, whether I'm skeptical or not, I would thoroughly recommend anybody that's interested in Roswell to read the book, The Day after Roswell. I don't believe many words in that at all.
I believe it fit the authors who he claims to be, but it's a thumping good read and there's some serious intent to me saying that. The stories like Roswell give us things that we really need in an age when we don't trust authorities the way we used to do and where we don't trust other establishments like say the established church. The thing about something like Roswell is you're apparently one or two steps away from something that's bordering on miraculous. It explains your existence and it explains your place in the universe in a way that you can begin to understand.
So, it's a very powerful story. Whether or not it's true, it's a very powerful story. So, we're talking about it for that reason.
We're talking about it because there's still a lot of market value in it. So, if people keep coming forward and claiming things and finding new things out or rediscovering things that alone will keep the story going forward in the same way that a lot of mysteries and myths keep going forward, right. And we're still talking about it because, if any of the things that I'm skeptical about are true, then it is one of the most significant events in the history of mankind. (gentle music) - One time there was a requirement for our OIC to go to Fort Belvoir, Virginia. So, I went ahead and I was selected as the driver to take him to Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
After we arrived there, he went to where the officers were meeting for a briefing. The drivers went to another location. There was myself and an airman first class and we went inside to the balcony area which had a plexiglass cover over where we could look down to where the officers were. When we looked down there, we found that they were watching films. We were watching and thinking, well, it has to be some type of science fiction movies that they're watching where they're splicing together like trailers and the end of a movie.
We couldn't figure out what type of movies they were. So, while we were talking amongst ourselves, we looked around and we had two gentlemen come in and told us that we were to follow them. The airman and myself thought we were in trouble because we'd seen all these officers being brought together with taxpayers' money, watching what we perceived to be little clips from science fiction movies because I honestly didn't think that we would ever be in a position where I could be so easily exposed to something like that.
However, after four days and five nights of that, I went ahead and finally convinced them that I wouldn't be discussing this situation. What happened to me is what they call intensified debriefing and, I can tell you this much, intensified debriefing, you'll go ahead and you'll take sleep over food. You'll get water because, see, it's important you have water or you'll die.
They'll provide you with food. But you slept in spurts. You'd go and lay your head down on the pillow. You'd go into what they call a deep sleep, that's about three to five minutes and you'd be woken up and you'd be taken back, put under the lamps again, for more intensified debriefing.
And what they'd do, they knew that you were wondering what was going to happen to you. So, it had an effect on you. And that's about the gist of it.
Forgive me. - With regard to some of the civilian witnesses at Roswell and with regard to some of the people who claim to be military when maybe they weren't, I think there's a huge great irony about the silencing because the people who are claiming to be silenced are the ones who are selling the most books. In other words, their very material disproves the existence of it. I'm interested in ufology for quite complicated reasons, but, at heart, because it's one of the greatest mysteries that we've got and we cannot ever know enough about it. So, first of all, it engages your imagination.
You hear amazing things all the time. It challenges anything that you might think to be true. So, whilst I'm quite skeptical, I've met loads of people who've claimed abductions and I would never call them liars.
I've definitely met people who've had experiences as traumatic as a car accident and the mere fact that that's going on keeps me interested because, that alone, it's mysterious and it's a place where you can actually begin to figure things out. I'm also interested because if one story, one of these amazing stories that people claim is true, then it makes a hell of a difference to what we know about ourselves, where the planet fits within the cosmos, and all of those kind of things and I'm interested in it because it's just an area that keeps on giving. We keep finding more things out and the things we find out are genuinely amazing.
(gentle music) - [Man] Been an airline pilot for three years and I've been flying for about 20 years. I looked over in the field one night and I saw some red lights rise out of that field. I estimated maybe about a quarter mile away. It rose to maybe a 150 feet in the air and then it kinda lowered back down towards the field. And then they rose back up and they were moving constantly.
And then the lights disappeared. I mean, I had seen meteors and stars shoot across the sky and, occasionally, I could see the light of the space shuttle going by or something like that. It's nothing I can explain.
I cannot explain that. - [Man] What's that? (suspenseful music) - Hello. This hood supposed to be on here? Now, ridicule has been a very unfortunate factor in this thing.
I know, but what it boils down to is that anybody reports one now, they'll say you're crazy. Look what the Connor Report said. Now, if we let the Connor Report go unchallenged, we would be guilty of letting these people be victimized and there are many people who have been badly hurt by official ridicule after sightings.
The airline pilots today, most of them will not report a sighting publicly. Many pilots have told me, he said, I wouldn't report one to the Air Force if the thing flew right into the cockpit. He said that because they, and they cite the case of Captain Killian who was very badly ridiculed and finally silenced by his airline.
According to his wife, said he was pressured, they were pressured into it by the Air Force. Now, that's hearsay, but the fact is, the man since that time has never answered any questions. He will not go on TV, radio, and talk to reporters at all.
(electric buzzing) - Well, some people are ridiculed for their beliefs regardless of what they are and that includes people who are into UFOs, but it also includes people who are into thrash metal, right. It includes people who are extreme religious zealots and often they're ridiculed because they're very uncompromising and the ridicule starts because they bring these beliefs up in situations where nobody's really asking for them or welcoming when it happens, at which point, they perceive themselves as being persecuted, but I've spent most of my working life, at least part of the week, working with young people quite impressionable people. And if anything, my interest and knowledge in UFOs has been a very positive thing. It makes you more interesting to people and, if you're willing to engage in discussions, and a lot of people who've got knowledge about this, in just the same way that a lot of people who know things about other, in inverted commas, cool subjects, yeah, you know, if you're old enough to have seen The Smiths, somebody will say to you, really? Yeah, all right.
And ufology has that aspect so I've not felt ridiculed over the years. On balance, it's been a very positive part of my life. - They get treated badly for seeing a UFO so they wish not to even speak about it anymore. So, I'm sure it's much easier on them if they just keep it to their own self. They were not allowed to speak about it and others would just walk away. He said it was a hushed deal on the UFO.
You were not allowed, he just told me to my face, that you were not even allowed to speak about the UFO. Yeah, speak about something else. - Well, I identified myself as the director of the National Investigations Committee on aerial phenomenon which for 12 years has been carrying on a private research into UFOs with the intention of trying to get the facts and present them to Congress, the press and the public. - I feel that over a period of time, a couple of years now, that I have been in a position to look at some of the evidence and, certainly, I have not seen all of the evidence that might be pertinent, I too have been driven in the direction of recognizing that there are cases that are not explainable in conventional terms.
This, at least, leaves us with the existence of a real UFO. Beyond that, there is the question of whether some of these real UFOs may be under intelligent control. Again, at the present time, I would say that I have seen evidence that is readily interpretable in search terms, but which may also be susceptible of other interpretation. (dramatic music) - If the National Academy of Sciences had put one tenth as much time into investigating these things and collecting reports from competent people, I mean daylight sightings of machines, not merely lights seen at night in the sky, formation, changing formation, radar scope showing the formations and showing objects switch from one to the other, all of which were neatly classified by Air Force regulation. If they spent any time looking into it, they wouldn't have made that statement. Now, I was a skeptic too.
It took me almost a year before I stopped laughing about it. - And I happened to have spent some time in the past year making a study of the nature, of the kinds of points of view that one can have toward this problem. My conclusion in that area is that there are, in fact, five different points of view that one can have towards this problem. One of these I would label as prejudiced. A second one I would label as being party line. A third one I would label as being skeptical and, by that, I mean open-minded.
A fourth one would be that point of view of the believer and a fifth one is the point of view of the contactee. - Contactee? - Contactee, the individual who operates on the assumption that it is possible to communicate with the occupants of flying saucers or UFOs or whatever you choose to call them. Now, within this framework, we can recognize two points of view which are generally opposed to the reality of the UFO phenomenon and two points of view which start from the assumption that the phenomenon is real. And one point of view which I listed in the middle, which starts from the assumption that reports are real and may contain information that is of some potential value.
I've been asked to identify myself and, by now, it should be obvious that I would prefer to be regarded in that middle point of view. - A non-believer would be someone who did not believe at all in anything connected with UFOs, same way I used to be. I thought it was nonsense, complete nonsense. It took reading hundreds of reports and talking with hundreds of witnesses, many (mumbles) before I was convinced. - [Reporter] In your mind does it boil down then to a case of believers and non-believers? - No, it doesn't.
What it should boil down to is this, an open investigation independent of any government agency. Maybe the government would have to provide some, but there should be some way of making it open so there would be no chance or charges of being biased to find out what is back of this. Now, let's say that all right, you don't have to prove the extraterrestrial answer, but here are reports that prove there have been devices under intelligent control seen tracked by radar, sometime simultaneously tracked by two radar stations that get a fix on it. Now, one is often enough, but when you get two that confirm identically what is seen visually, that's a pretty tight case. (dramatic music) (electric buzzing) - I think the only honest answer to the question about whether we've been visited by aliens is to say that you don't know. There is no irrefutable proof that we have, okay.
There are a lot of mysterious things that have gone on which are not easily explainable by any means whatsoever. Therefore, you've got to leave in any paranormal means, okay. I'm very skeptical about whether nuts and bolts UFOs have been observed, photographed or seen up close in the last few years which is what a lot of people do claim. I think it much more likely, if we've been visited by aliens, number one we might have been visited in ways that we wouldn't even begin to understand. So, it would be akin to if, there's a safari park near here where they save, you know, they work on endangered species including lions. Now, those lions don't possibly know that we're trying to preserve them because their brothers in Africa are under threat, yeah, and, if we've been visited by aliens, it might be the same as that, that we might only see a little part of it and that strikes me as much more plausible than whether or not we've been visited by a craft that came to abduct somebody.
So, as the cameras have got better, as the recording devices have got better, we have got better evidence. It's just we've got nothing that proves that there's an alien spacecraft out there. - [Narrator] Will we ever get definitive answers regarding the unidentified flying object that crashed into the New Mexico desert? Still there are many unanswered questions.
Our history is riddled with new discoveries that were first ridiculed and rejected by the wider community. The concept of black holes, destruction of our ozone layer, the Wright brothers and their belief in air travel, Darwin's evolutionary theory. What about first contact with an alien species? We'll leave that down to you to decide.
- [Interviewer] Well now, doctor, could they be hallucinations or some other misrepresented objects? - They could, but I am firmly convinced that such an explanation is not valid for all of them. It might be in few cases. But there's still remaining a solid block of very reliable, good observations, which cannot be explained by such means. - You still hold to the fact that they are visitors from another planet, aye? - Yes, I do, definitely. - Well now, doctor, if that is true, if these things are visitors from another planet and we have a great deal of knowledge on this Earth, do we not? - Yes. - Why haven't we been able
to go to other planets ? - The difference might be that we hadn't time enough to do so. - [Interviewer] You think we could, you mean we could do it? - With our knowledge of today, we could well do so, but we have to put up some 10 to 15 years of intensive work and to spend amounts of the order of the Manhattan Project to do so. - Well, if these things that have been seen, doctor, are visitors from another planet, why haven't they landed? - Oh, I have an explanation for that too.
They might regularly land outside on oceans or in uninhabited parts of countries, but they might also not be ready to tell us. - Well, there you are. Is that convincing that we have interplanetary visitors in our midst? (dramatic music) (electric buzzing) (dramatic music)
2023-05-22