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00:00Have you heard anything about these lights that are flipping up here?
00:04They're missing a flight. It's got by C-17.
00:07Among the quiet towns and bustling epicenters around the world,
00:11reports pour in of unusual aerial phenomena.
00:14It shoots high into the air. It's moving in an erratic way.
00:19This is not a terrestrial craft.
00:22Flying disks, hovering orbs, strange biological substances falling from the sky.
00:27To determine what it might have been, you'd have to eliminate all the other possibilities.
00:34The sensational becomes credible once it's crowdsourced.
00:37Thousands of people claim to see these orbs.
00:41UFO hotspots light up on the map.
00:43What's made these places the target of otherworldly attention?
00:47This might be the location of the vortex.
00:50As vessels reappear in the same locations,
00:53can we use the earthly to guess at otherworldly motives?
00:56Are these mysterious visitors friends or foe?
01:00And should we fear their return?
01:02All over the world, repeat sightings of UFOs baffle researchers.
01:07UAP are in our airspace, but they are grossly underreported.
01:10A pattern begins to emerge.
01:12These sightings are not rare or isolated. They are routine.
01:15What is the meaning behind these hotspots?
01:17I can't go beyond what I've already stated publicly.
01:20The government is not prepared.
01:22Are we being mapped?
01:23June 2nd, 2009.
01:3312.40 AM.
01:36Two brothers step out their front door
01:39and take a few cautious steps towards a dark field across the street.
01:43They watch as a fleet of bright floating orbs drift across the patchy grassland.
01:52Suddenly, a car rounds the corner at the top of the road, flooding the street with light.
01:57The orbs instantly vanish.
02:01The brothers watch the car pass, stepping closer to the field as the glowing objects return.
02:09The lights move in sweeping hypnotic circles, never dipping lower than a few feet above the ground.
02:15Then, one light in the center of the field turns a bright green.
02:21It begins to spin, faster and faster.
02:25Just when it seems the object couldn't rotate any quicker, it shoots up towards the sky.
02:31The rest of the mysterious lights follow, vanishing rapidly among the stars.
02:39Plunged into sudden darkness, the youngest boy begins to shake.
02:44His brother comforts him, reassuring him the lights are nothing to be scared of.
02:49This isn't the first time UFOs have been spotted moving across his family's land.
03:00On this night, the strange sightings over Dulce prove harmless.
03:04But could they be linked to a rise in shocking reports that came just several decades earlier?
03:13June 16th, 1976.
03:16Police officer Gabe Valdez arrives at a ranch on the outskirts of town.
03:23The ranch owner, Manuel Gomez, has called to report a strange death.
03:29Not a human's, but a cow's.
03:33Officer Valdez carefully approaches the body.
03:38The cow has been torn open.
03:40But these aren't the hungry marks left by a normal predator.
03:43These are precise, almost surgical wounds.
03:49Some of the cow's organs appear to have been removed, and the wounds cauterized, as if by a laser.
03:56A few feet from the cow's body, Officer Valdez notices strange scorch marks on the grass.
04:04Almost as if a three-legged object had stood there, burning the ground beneath it.
04:09Valdez is baffled.
04:12Neither he nor Manuel Gomez have ever seen anything like this.
04:17But this grisly scene on the Gomez ranch will be the first of many.
04:22Over the next few months, Officer Valdez will personally investigate more than 30 cattle mutilations in this small corner of New Mexico.
04:31And each scene will be stranger than the last.
04:35What Officer Valdez describes is an absolutely bizarre scene.
04:42So we have the dead cattle, but around them are all sorts of detritus, like gas masks, glow sticks, and other bits and pieces that are largely inexplicable.
04:55So one of the things that Valdez found right within one of the mutilated cattle was a fetus, unidentified.
05:03He would assume that it would be a cow fetus, but he said it actually had a mix of features that he identified with a monkey, even, or frog-like, reptilian-like.
05:14Something clearly that he'd never seen before, that we don't know to exist.
05:20And then, of course, the strangest thing of all was that it seemed to have no bones left.
05:24There was no skeletal structure left in it. It was actually just filled with liquid.
05:30The story defies credulity. I mean, you can't even picture the scene.
05:35It's just so grim to imagine what or who could have done this.
05:40Unexplained livestock mutilations have plagued farmers around the world for centuries.
05:49In 1606, hundreds of sheep were found dead in the area surrounding London, England.
05:56Each of the animals was left with their wool intact and only their internal organs missing.
06:02These mutilations continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries across Europe and North America,
06:08leaving experts and farmers struggling to find an explanation.
06:14These unexplained animal deaths remain a relatively small story, largely ignored until the 1970s,
06:21when a wave of bizarre cattle mutilations gripped the United States.
06:27The cattle mutilation is a very disturbing phenomenon.
06:32You know, this involves cattle or horses being surgically operated on amputations, removal of blood, things like that.
06:43All of these activities would normally leave a trail of evidence.
06:47But apparently, these particular mutilations, there was no such trail of evidence.
06:53So it seems as if someone with a very malicious purpose and very advanced technology
07:01was manipulating these creatures and killing them.
07:06Accounts of these mysterious mutilations spread over Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico.
07:16One of the figures given at the time was of 10,000 cattle being mutilated and killed.
07:25Now, it has to be said, that figure is pretty unreliable.
07:30It's hard to find a verifiable source for it.
07:33But nevertheless, whipped up a national frenzy.
07:37Cattle ranchers as well, they often reported unidentified helicopters or planes that were hanging around their ranches
07:47and in some cases, even as extreme as chasing them and even firing at them.
07:59As outrage in the area grew, residents were left with two crucial questions.
08:04This was a time of economic chaos in the 1970s when inflation was roaring upwards,
08:22when beef prices were being capped.
08:24Smaller ranchers, in particular, were basically facing going bankrupt.
08:29And in this atmosphere of panic and gloom, people almost convinced themselves that their cattle had been mutilated.
08:40One of the things that happens is insomnia, is the inability to sleep well across nights.
08:46And we know that when you're having disrupted sleep over a long period of time,
08:52it does cause changes in the brain.
08:53Without enough REM sleep, you can think you're sleeping every night.
08:57But if those disruptions keep you from getting through REM states through the three to five cycles a night
09:03that you actually get through the full set of REM sleep, it can lead to hallucinations.
09:11After months of investigations,
09:13the apparent epidemic of cattle mutilations was simply attributed to natural predators.
09:18But ranchers in New Mexico refused to accept it.
09:25You have, on the one hand, local ranchers who know their animals well,
09:29who have been in the area for generations,
09:32and generally have a very good knowledge of the kinds of activities that take place on their property.
09:37And they're saying that this is not matching what they've seen in the past.
09:40This is inexplicable to them.
09:42And then on the other hand, you have experts who are often not in the rural areas,
09:49who are usually in urban centers, scientists, government officials,
09:53who say quite a different narrative that actually this is really natural,
09:57there's nothing weird going on here.
10:00It's a combination of bacteria causing natural death,
10:04scavengers doing the things that scavengers do,
10:07going for a soft tissue first,
10:09and then maybe the environment causing effects to the corpses
10:13that you maybe wouldn't see in other places.
10:15And all this together creates quite a natural phenomenon that's easily explainable.
10:20If we think about how bacteria behave in the whole process of decomposition,
10:26the way that bacteria goes for softer tissue,
10:30and in a sense, if you want, hollows out a dead cow going for the organs first,
10:36this might explain why some people on coming across these dead cows
10:42came to believe that they'd somehow been ritually disemboweled and mutilated.
10:47In April, 1979, New Mexico Senator Harrison Schmidt
11:02announces a public hearing to discuss the ongoing spate of cattle mutilations in the state.
11:09One of the 80 attendees at this gathering is local Dulce resident Paul Benowitz.
11:14Though he didn't know it at the time,
11:18Benowitz would soon find himself at the center of a truly terrifying conspiracy.
11:24Benowitz was a World War II veteran,
11:27and he became an engineer, a radio and electronics engineer,
11:31which is also oddly common for those interested in UFOs.
11:35They're very interested in the nuts and bolts of how UFOs work.
11:38Using his own camera and radio equipment,
11:42Paul Benowitz embarked on a mission to track down any suspicious UFO activity in the Dulce area.
11:51And it didn't take long for him to find it.
11:53He took out radio and electronics equipment to try to gather signals of various kinds.
12:02And he was assuming, I think, that he was going to find this information coming from the skies,
12:07given what they knew about UFOs at the time.
12:11But to his surprise, it all seemed to be coming from underground.
12:14The interesting thing about radio waves is objects tend to be less opaque to radio waves.
12:24So where light won't go through a wall, to a certain extent, radio waves will go through the wall.
12:31Having said that, radio waves are still attenuated or decreased in intensity
12:37when they do go through solid objects.
12:40So radio waves don't travel through rock and concrete and glass and water particularly well.
12:47So when somebody thinks they found a radio signal coming from underground,
12:52it would be considered very strange.
12:55In October 1980, Benowitz reports his findings to officials at Kirtland Air Force Base,
13:03200 kilometers south of Dulce, on the outskirts of Albuquerque.
13:07Following his report, the United States Office of Special Investigations
13:14sends Special Agent Richard Doty to meet with Benowitz.
13:18Doty starts giving Benowitz information that confirms a lot of what Benowitz is starting to conclude,
13:27that based on his work, there's some kind of top-secret underground base
13:31connected to UFOs, possibly connected to cattle mutilations in some way.
13:35What Doty tells Benowitz convinces him not only that there is an underground alien base
13:44at Dulce, New Mexico, but that it's part of a network of alien bases all around the world.
13:53In 1988, Benowitz publishes his findings in a paper called Project Beta.
13:59In it, he lays out the approximate size and location of the supposed Dulce UFO base,
14:07as well as any blind spots that could make the installation susceptible to an attack.
14:13But following publication of the report, Benowitz's life begins to unravel.
14:18The information that Doty is giving to Benowitz really convinces him, along with his own continuing
14:26investigations, that this phenomenon is totally real, that there is something top-secret and quite
14:32nefarious going on, and it really starts to affect his life.
14:36He believes that his wife has an alien implant of some description.
14:41He barricades himself in his own room, and eventually, exasperated, his family has him committed
14:49to a mental institution for a while.
14:53Benowitz never really fully recovers from this experience, and a few years later,
14:57he dies, and it's possible that the cause of death was suicide.
15:04Even to keen UFO watchers, Paul Benowitz's claims of an underground alien base seemed far-fetched.
15:13That is, until 2013, when Richard Doty comes forward with a startling revelation that helps
15:20to explain why Benowitz was so convinced of alien involvement in the region.
15:24If Benowitz detected some nefarious activity in catamulations in his thoughts about top-secret
15:32bases, in a sense, he was absolutely correct, because it comes out later that the intelligence
15:41official that he meets that he's interacting with, Richard Doty, allegedly was assigned to
15:46misdirect Benowitz directly, that this was his mission, was to feed Benowitz and the larger
15:52UFO community, by extension, misinformation or disinformation, very specifically targeted
15:59to put people off the track.
16:03But if Doty was deployed to misdirect Benowitz and steer him away from the real reasons for
16:08the strange apparitions and cattle mutilations in the area, the question is, why?
16:14If I was going to shoot a movie on another planet, I would probably go shoot it in New Mexico because
16:40it has what looks like a pretty alien landscape.
16:44The vegetation, the mountain ranges, the colors that you see there, the rock formations, these
16:50are pretty unique.
16:51You don't see these elsewhere.
16:54New Mexico's striking landscape is due in large part to the process of erosion.
17:01Over millions of years, exposure to wind and rain have gradually carved through the rocks and desert
17:07sands, molding the land into spectacular natural formations.
17:13It's like airborne sandpaper running across the geography and it wears away the rocks, the softer rocks,
17:23until you're just left with a core of harder rock that looks like a pillar, and they're called buttes.
17:33One of the most striking collections of buttes appears around 150 kilometers from Dulce, in the Bisti Denizen Badlands.
17:42They don't look like natural formations to most people, they look possibly intentionally done.
17:48And so New Mexico is a great place for UFO stories, frankly.
17:53The Bisti Denizen Wilderness, like much of northwestern New Mexico, lies on the very edge of the Colorado Plateau.
18:02It's the largest plateau in the United States.
18:07The Colorado Plateau is an area of land 240,000 square miles, and it is simply an area of land that's higher than the land around it.
18:22But towards the edges of the plateau, the rocks begin to slant downwards.
18:28And one of these depressions is the San Juan Basin, home to some of New Mexico's most fascinating archaeological sites.
18:39Millions of years ago, this basin was covered by an inland sea which divided the North American continent.
18:46As the sea gradually receded, the area was transformed into wetlands.
18:52During this period, ancient species like dinosaurs and reptiles thrived here.
19:01Here, encased in layers of rock, are some of the world's richest fossil beds.
19:07Sites that could hold the key to Earth's ancient past.
19:13The most dramatic fossil recorded in this region to date has been affectionately called the Bisti Beast.
19:20A 75 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex discovered in the late 1990s.
19:27The preservation of ancient animals is extraordinarily rare.
19:34Even though we think of fossils as something that we find everywhere,
19:38there are probably millions of species that we will never know anything about
19:44because those bodies didn't preserve very well,
19:47or the exact geological situation wasn't perfect to preserve those bodies.
19:53And the snapshots that we do have, we are so lucky to have,
20:00to understand the changes that life on Earth and our Earth itself has gone through.
20:06A few miles west of the Bisti Badlands lies another crucial archaeological site.
20:13Goat Hill is the imposing rock formation overlooking the small city of Raton.
20:19And it was here that American scientists Lewis and Walter Alvarez
20:24discovered a thin layer of iridium-rich rock that would spark a revolutionary idea.
20:30And knowing that iridium is found in things like meteorites that fall to Earth,
20:35they were able to connect these ideas together and develop a theory that potentially was a giant impact
20:41that deposited this layer of iridium that also may have caused the destruction of the dinosaurs.
20:46Because iridium is found not as abundantly on Earth as it is in, say, bodies like meteors or asteroids,
20:56we can extrapolate that that was most likely an impact from a very large celestial body.
21:05The remarkable discoveries made in these New Mexican deserts have made the region a hotbed of scientific exploration.
21:13To this day, researchers continue to map the Earth's history through the layers of ancient exposed rock in the San Juan Basin.
21:21The question is, are we the only ones doing the mapping?
21:28June 1st, 1997, 11pm.
21:32A man raises his binoculars for some routine stargazing a few miles south of Raton.
21:38He spots what he believes to be a satellite, tracking its movements through the night sky.
21:43But he realizes the object is far too fast to be a satellite.
21:48He watches as two other strange crafts join the first, accelerating into a triangle formation before vanishing over the horizon.
21:59September 21st, 2007, 10.35am.
22:04A family traveling north through the Bisti Badlands notices a strange white cigar-shaped craft hovering only 100 meters from the road.
22:14As they watch, the object suddenly rockets upwards, disappearing into the sky without a trace.
22:21Whether it's human beings or an advanced civilization who wants to understand the Earth's past,
22:27who wants to understand the Earth's story and possibly its future, need to do research in places like the Badlands.
22:34Residents in the small town of Dulce wonder whether the answers to these mysterious phenomena could lie in a far more modern structure buried deep in the ancient desert rock.
22:47So during the Cold War, especially post Hiroshima, we changed our perspective on what a military base needs to be.
22:58We realized that in a nuclear war, essentially life at ground level would cease to exist if it was a significant war.
23:06So nations around the world built underground military bases in bunkers.
23:12They wouldn't be directly affected by a nuclear blast.
23:15If you tried to bomb them directly, they're deep enough that they're not going to be significantly affected.
23:21And that you would have enough food and water to sustain the people there, at least through the initial portion of the nuclear winter.
23:30If you want to hide military secrets or other things, you would build an underground base so that people can't spy on you.
23:38They can't see what you're doing. Satellites can't really see what's going on.
23:41In July 1979, explosives engineer Phil Schneider arrives at a top secret military installation in the New Mexico desert.
24:00He's been brought here to help build a new military facility, an enormous seven story complex housed entirely underground.
24:10As soon as he arrives, Schneider is struck by the unusually large number of US special forces guarding the camp.
24:20He guides his team to begin drilling holes deep into the sandy earth.
24:25But what emerges isn't the typical rock dust Schneider and his team are expecting.
24:31Instead, he claims he came face to face with visitors from outer space.
24:38When Schneider goes underground to investigate, he comes across a group of aliens which he said were something like seven foot tall, gray skinned.
24:53And the thing that really struck him was the pungent odor that they were admitting.
24:59It's a bit unclear why, but he felt the need to immediately pull out his gun and start blasting away.
25:04And so he says that he potentially shot and killed a couple of them before one of them made almost like a dismissive flick of their hand and sent some kind of shockwave energy towards Schneider.
25:18And this resulted in him losing several fingers off of his hand and presumably meant his almost certain death, except that luckily for him, one of the green berets that he said was stationed around came to his rescue and heroically sacrificed himself, pushing Schneider into an elevator that sent him back to the surface.
25:41For a decade after his alleged encounter with the mysterious gray aliens, Schneider claimed that the Dulce base remained a hotbed of UFO activity, a holding center for extraterrestrial visitors and their highly advanced technology.
26:00And according to Schneider, this was only the tip of the iceberg.
26:07It launches a career of sorts for Schneider.
26:09He very quickly becomes a coveted speaker on the UFO circuit, giving accounts of this encounter and has also happened with previous UFO stories, starts to add more details, maybe embellishes it a little bit, depending who you ask.
26:25And so no longer is it just this one battle.
26:29He starts to tell tales that the US government is doing some quite nefarious stuff to do with alien human hybrids, that they are actively presumably capturing people, citizens and taking them underground and subjecting them to experiments and hybridization.
26:47And that the US government is actively covering all this up.
26:51He goes on to assert that there are hundreds of these bases across the United States funded by the American government.
27:02He estimates that each of these bases cost about $17 billion, funded out of the US government's black budget, as he calls it.
27:13Schneider's claims send shockwaves through the UFO investigative community.
27:22Even for committed UFOologists, the story, much like Paul Benowitz's claims, is hard to believe.
27:29Conspiracy theorists like to think there's something nefarious going on, and that it needs to be hidden from the public eye.
27:38The best way to hide things from the public eye is to make them invisible.
27:43And really, the only reasonable way to do that on Earth is to put them underground.
27:48For months, Schneider had allegedly warned his family that his story may endanger his life.
27:57Then, in 1996, Schneider is found dead in his home.
28:02The cause of death, as with Paul Benowitz, is likely suicide.
28:07The interesting thing is that before his death, Schneider said to his wife that,
28:13if I end up dead and it appears to be a suicide, it's not. It's not as it seems.
28:19And so that will immediately fuel all kinds of speculation.
28:23If you belong to the community which thinks that there is indeed some kind of human-alien-type base in Dulce, New Mexico,
28:34then you're going to think that now measures are being taken to eradicate everyone who knows about this.
28:43In the decades since the deaths of Paul Benowitz and Phil Schneider,
28:47theories about a possible underground military base containing UFO technology have continued to circulate.
28:57December 13, 2004.
29:00A local hiker clicks through the photographs of her trip to the Archuleta Mesa.
29:07Squinting at her small digital camera, she can see a strange object clearly outlined against the blue sky.
29:15For years, the hiker has heard rumors of the UFOs over Dulce.
29:20Now, she believes she has photographic evidence.
29:23November 21, 2018.
29:30A local woman spots a strangely bright star in the night sky.
29:34As she watches, the star seems to grow, swelling and changing colors as it begins to move,
29:42surveilling the area in giant loops before finally disappearing from view.
29:47To this day, local residents are left wondering whether there could be any truth to the rumors of a secret Dulce subterranean base.
29:59In terms of underground government activity, actually during the President Eisenhower years,
30:06at the height of the Cold War, the government had what was called a continuity of government program,
30:13where bunkers and tunnels were created so that senior government officials, civil servants and so on,
30:20would be able to basically, literally, go underground and continue the business of government as a nuclear war raged overhead.
30:30And so when you take that into account that these bunkers do exist, they are underground and some of them quite extensive,
30:37it lends credence to the idea that, well, maybe there are other bunkers out there as well that we simply don't know about.
30:43It is now public knowledge that in 1950, work began on a deep underground facility at Raven Rock Mountain in Pennsylvania.
30:52In just 10 months, almost 400,000 cubic meters of granite are secretly blasted out of the mountain to make room for a new structure dubbed the Underground Pentagon.
31:05This network of three underground buildings would be able to house 3,000 people,
31:10forming the core of the U.S. government's Continuity Plan in the event of a national emergency.
31:17In the late 50s and early 60s, two more underground complexes are built under Bear Mountain in Massachusetts and Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.
31:27Hardened to withstand a nuclear blast, these command centers would be linked to form the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.
31:37A fourth underground base is constructed in 1959 in Blue Ridge, Virginia, acting as the control center for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
31:46From here, the United States President would be able to access the nation's emergency alert system in the event of a nuclear attack.
31:55To this day, the Mountain Weather Emergency Operations Center is still a prominent relocation site for high-level civilian and military officials in the event of active conflicts and national emergencies.
32:09I mean, the very nature of military work means that some of that work will be secretive.
32:14And to facilitate secrecy, there are all kinds of military facilities built, and some of them are underground.
32:21So, this leads people to think that, well, there may be more to this story.
32:26If they're not telling us anything about it, if they're being so secretive about it, there must be something nefarious going on over here.
32:32Along with these elaborate underground operations centers, the United States military also oversees several subterranean storage facilities, each one charged with housing some of America's deadliest weapons.
32:49One of the largest of these bunkers is the underground munitions maintenance and storage complex at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico.
32:58Could this be the source of the strange phenomena which have been so frequently seen in the area?
33:04I think it can't be underestimated how alluring it might be for a UFO enthusiast to pay attention to the underground nuclear storage facility at the Kirtland Air Force Base.
33:16It alone is over 50 acres large.
33:19To see a space like that and to not really see anything given that it's underground is eerie.
33:24It's unsettling to know that that's all under there.
33:27Since the end of World War II, UFO researchers have become increasingly interested in an apparent link between UFO sightings and nuclear activity.
33:44Something that makes the link between nuclear power and nuclear facilities in America and UFOs potentially a little clearer is one incident from 1967 in Montana.
33:55When a missile operator at an Air Force Base that was equipped with nuclear missiles started receiving messages from colleagues saying that there was a UFO sighted above around the base itself.
34:09Which is cause for concern, certainly if you're in that kind of position.
34:12But then the particularly strange part is that very shortly after, possibly seemingly caused by the UFO, all of the nuclear missiles go completely offline.
34:23They deactivate entirely and nobody at the base has done this and there's no explanation really forthcoming about how this occurred.
34:30In 1986 during the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown when there was some people reported seeing a UFO hovering over the facility shining a light down on it.
34:48And what's remarkable about this is that there were reports of a reduction in ionizing radiation after the UFO had appeared.
35:01To this day, unidentified flying objects are regularly reported in the vicinity of US Army and Air Force bases.
35:18The very earliest of these dates back decades, when a group of highly trained military officers witness a remarkable sight.
35:31March 22nd, 1950.
35:34Eleven members of the 4925th Test Group gather outside Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico.
35:42They're looking intently up at the clear morning sky, tracking a strange object flying nearly 8,000 meters above them.
35:50It isn't like any conventional aircraft.
35:53The men can make out a disc or a flying wing, with the tan color fading out to a darker brown along its edges.
36:02The officers watch as the aircraft travels steadily northwest before altering its course to due north and accelerating away with a sudden burst of energy.
36:14In the days that follow, all 11 crew members are interviewed extensively by military personnel.
36:31Their stories never waver, leaving their commanders with a string of troubling questions.
36:39What was the unidentified craft?
36:42And what was it doing so close to the Kirtland Air Base?
36:48And Kirtland Air Force Base has a pretty story history to begin with.
36:54It was one of the main hubs connecting the nation with the Manhattan Project, which was America's crash program to build the atomic bomb.
37:02One of the most well-known uses for atomic energy, of course, and nuclear capability.
37:08And so if UFOs are interested in this, the interest may go back quite a ways, given that there were integral components of both atomic bombs that were eventually dropped on Japan that moved through this space.
37:23In 1954, nine years after dropping the first atomic bomb, the United States carried out the most powerful nuclear detonation in the nation's history over the Marshall Islands.
37:36The resulting blast was more than a thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
37:46Within moments, nuclear fallout began to rain down on the surrounding area, exposing hundreds of civilians to one of the most dangerous forms of energy on Earth, ionizing radiation.
37:59When we get to ionizing radiation, that radiation is intense enough that it causes chemical changes within the organic compounds in our body.
38:10So ionizing radiation can be X-rays, gamma rays, and potentially nuclear events that produce neutrons or other fast-moving particles.
38:20These things have the potential to penetrate our body, do damage, and potentially cause cancer.
38:27After the Second World War, people were really paranoid about the fact that there was going to be another major confrontation, this time between the United States and the Soviet Union.
38:42And these powerful weapons, nuclear weapons, hydrogen bombs, this was the weaponry which these two giants would use against each other in the event of a Third World War.
38:54On the night of July 8th, 1962, across Hawaii, groups gathered to drink, share food, and monitor the night sky.
39:06These happy gatherings, planned for days, are referred to as, watch the bomb parties.
39:13They were there to witness the Starfish Prime High Altitude Experiment, the largest nuclear test ever carried out in outer space.
39:22The Starfish Prime High Altitude Experiment involved the detonation of a 1.4 megaton bomb about 250 miles above the Earth's surface.
39:33So in this case, what we saw was a very vivid light display in the sky. It was very brilliant, and then it dissipated.
39:41And this is different from what we see in terms of nuclear detonations on Earth, because on Earth, there's material to be kicked up.
39:48And so on Earth, we see something that's more like the typical mushroom cloud that we've seen in videos from the past.
39:54In 1962 alone, the United States and the Soviet Union would detonate a further six high-altitude nuclear explosions, releasing massive amounts of nuclear radiation into outer space.
40:11Only 30 years later, would the seismic effect of these detonations become clear.
40:18In 1993, United Nations scientists made the rather depressing announcement that as a result of nuclear atmospheric testing,
40:31the world's population had been exposed to 50 times more radiation than resulted from the Chernobyl disaster.
40:40This era of fierce and highly destructive competition has led some to wonder whether the potential for a global catastrophe may have alerted another as yet unknown civilization.
40:56If human beings start playing around with nuclear weapons, it's not unlikely that an advanced extraterrestrial species begins to pay attention to what's going on on planet Earth.
41:09After more than a decade of nuclear detonations and growing concern over their long-term effects, the United States and the Soviet Union grudgingly agree to end their testing programs.
41:22In 1992, work starts on the 56-acre underground munitions complex at the Kirtland Air Force Base.
41:31This warehouse holds the majority of the US's nuclear stockpile.
41:37But despite the mothballing of deadly weaponry, reports of UFO sightings keep coming.
41:44June 20th, 2006, 12pm.
41:48A cluster of people on the outskirts of Albuquerque gaze up at a huge disk floating impossibly above the Kirtland Air Base.
41:56As they watch, it slowly disappears from view.
42:01September 13th, 2007, 7.30pm.
42:05Another small crowd of people gathers on the street of Farmington, less than 16km from Kirtland.
42:11They watch in awe as a large red aircraft floats through the sky, orbited by four smaller, equally mysterious objects.
42:20November 28th, 2014.
42:23Could it be that decades of nuclear development have acted as a beacon to extraterrestrials in the universe?
42:30One of the explanations that some UFO enthusiasts have proposed to explain their presence is that maybe they detected this amount of radiation,
42:39a very unusual, unnatural amount of radiation coming off the Earth.
42:44Ever since the 1970s, rumors surrounding UFOs in northwestern New Mexico have centered around fear, secrecy,
42:53and in the cases of Paul Benowitz and Phil Schneider, feverish paranoia and outlandish theories.
42:59If you think about it, Schneider draws first, as they say in the Wild West.
43:04He doesn't wait to see what the alien's going to do.
43:07He assumes the alien is going to attack him, and maybe that's really a sad comment on us as a species,
43:16that we meet another species, we meet aliens, and we automatically assume they're going to kill us.
43:24So one of the concerns is that any advanced civilization visiting us might have the motive of exploiting the resources of Earth.
43:34I suspect this is unlikely, and the reason for this being that there's a limited number of important resources like rare earth metals on Earth,
43:44and even as a species, long term, there's not enough on Earth to supply demand.
43:55There's also a degree of arrogance on the part of humanity where we assume that an alien is going to be a kind of variation on us.
44:04In fact, an alien may be something unrecognisably different.
44:09As UFO sightings above the Kirtland Air Force Base continue to be reported,
44:14as well as at other military facilities around the world,
44:18the thought that these crafts may be appearing to help rather than hinder,
44:23or to protect rather than harm, is for many a much more logical and reasonable explanation.
44:30The only reason that I think that aliens would come to check out Earth is because it has life.
44:37And that is, I think, what makes our planet so special.
44:41What makes our planet so special?
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