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00:00I'm seeing a flying disc out by C-17.
00:02Among the quiet towns and bustling epicenters around the world,
00:06reports pour in of unusual aerial phenomena.
00:09It shoots high into the air.
00:11It's moving in an erratic way.
00:14This is not a terrestrial craft.
00:17Flying discs, hovering orbs,
00:19strange biological substances falling from the sky.
00:23To determine what it might have been,
00:25you'd have to eliminate all the other possibilities.
00:28The sensational becomes credible once it's crowdsourced.
00:32Thousands of people claim to see these orbs.
00:36UFO hotspots light up on the map.
00:38What's made these places the target of otherworldly attention?
00:42This might be the location of the vortex.
00:45As vessels reappear in the same locations,
00:48can we use the earthly to guess at otherworldly motives?
00:52Are these mysterious visitors friends or foe?
00:55And should we fear their return?
00:57All over the world, repeat sightings of UFOs baffle researchers.
01:02UAV are in our airspace, but they are grossly underreported.
01:05The pattern begins to emerge.
01:07These sightings are not rare or isolated.
01:09They are routine.
01:10What is the meaning behind these hotspots?
01:12I can't go beyond what I've already stated publicly.
01:14The government is not prepared.
01:17Are we being mapped?
01:25June 2nd, 2009.
01:2812.40 AM.
01:30Two brothers step out their front door and take a few cautious steps towards a dark field across the street.
01:38They watch as a fleet of bright floating orbs drift across the patchy grassland.
01:47Suddenly, a car rounds the corner at the top of the road, flooding the street with light.
01:52The orbs instantly vanish.
01:56The brothers watch the car pass, stepping closer to the field as the glowing objects return.
02:04The lights move in sweeping hypnotic circles, never dipping lower than a few feet above the ground.
02:10Then, one light in the center of the field turns a bright green.
02:16It begins to spin, faster and faster.
02:20Just when it seems the object couldn't rotate any quicker, it shoots up towards the sky.
02:27The rest of the mysterious lights follow, vanishing rapidly among the stars.
02:34Plunged into sudden darkness, the youngest boy begins to shake.
02:38His brother comforts him, reassuring him the lights are nothing to be scared of.
02:46This isn't the first time UFOs have been spotted moving across his family's land.
02:55On this night, the strange sightings over Dulce prove harmless.
02:59But could they be linked to a rise in shocking reports that came just several decades earlier?
03:08June 16th, 1976.
03:12Police officer Gabe Valdez arrives at a ranch on the outskirts of town.
03:18The ranch owner, Manuel Gomez, has called to report a strange death.
03:24Not a human's, but a cow's.
03:27Officer Valdez carefully approaches the body.
03:33The cow has been torn open, but these aren't the hungry marks left by a normal predator.
03:39These are precise, almost surgical wounds.
03:44Some of the cow's organs appear to have been removed, and the wounds cauterized, as if by a laser.
03:50A few feet from the cow's body, Officer Valdez notices strange scorch marks on the grass.
03:59Almost as if a three-legged object had stood there, burning the ground beneath it.
04:05Valdez is baffled.
04:07Neither he nor Manuel Gomez have ever seen anything like this.
04:11But this grisly scene on the Gomez ranch will be the first of many.
04:17Over the next few months, Officer Valdez will personally investigate more than 30 cattle mutilations in this small corner of New Mexico.
04:26And each scene will be stranger than the last.
04:29What Officer Valdez describes is an absolutely bizarre scene.
04:37So 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.
04:51One of the things that Valdez found right within one of the mutilated cattle was a fetus.
04:57It was unidentified.
04:58He 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.
05:09Something clearly that he'd never seen before that we don't know to exist.
05:15And then, of course, the strangest thing of all was that it seemed to have no bones left.
05:19There was no skeletal structure left in it.
05:21It was actually just filled with liquid.
05:23The story defies credulity.
05:28I mean, you can't even picture the scene.
05:30It's just so grim to imagine what or who could have done this.
05:38Unexplained livestock mutilations have plagued farmers around the world for centuries.
05:43In 1606, hundreds of sheep were found dead in the area surrounding London, England.
05:51Each of the animals was left with their wool intact and only their internal organs missing.
05:56These mutilations continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries across Europe and North America, leaving experts and farmers struggling to find an explanation.
06:08These unexplained animal deaths remain a relatively small story, largely ignored until the 1970s, when a wave of bizarre cattle mutilations gripped the United States.
06:20The cattle mutilation is a very disturbing phenomenon.
06:27This involves cattle or horses being surgically operated on amputations, removal of blood, things like that.
06:38All of these activities would normally leave a trail of evidence.
06:42But apparently, these particular mutilations, there was no such trail of evidence.
06:49So it seems as if someone with a very malicious purpose and very advanced technology was manipulating these creatures and killing them.
07:01Accounts of these mysterious mutilations spread over Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico.
07:12One of the figures given at the time was of 10,000 cattle being mutilated and killed.
07:20Now, it has to be said, that figure is pretty unreliable.
07:25It's hard to find a verifiable source for it.
07:28But nevertheless, whipped up a national frenzy.
07:32Cattle ranchers as well, they often reported unidentified helicopters or planes that were hanging around their ranches and in some cases even as extreme as chasing them and even firing at them.
07:46As outrage in the area grew, residents were left with two crucial questions.
08:00Why were these bizarre animal mutilations happening?
08:05And who could be behind them?
08:07This was a time of economic chaos in the 1970s when inflation was roaring upwards, when beef prices were being capped.
08:19Smaller ranchers in particular were basically facing going bankrupt.
08:24And in this atmosphere of panic and gloom, people almost convinced themselves that their cattle had been mutilated.
08:35One of the things that happens is insomnia, is the inability to sleep well across nights.
08:41And we know that when you're having disrupted sleep over a long period of time, it does cause changes in the brain.
08:49Without enough REM sleep, you can think you're sleeping every night.
08:52But if those disruptions keep you from getting through REM states through the three to five cycles a night that you actually get through the full set of REM sleep, it can lead to hallucinations.
09:04After months of investigations, the apparent epidemic of cattle mutilations was simply attributed to natural predators.
09:15But ranchers in New Mexico refused to accept it.
09:20You have on the one hand local ranchers who know their animals well, who have been in the area for generations,
09:27and generally have a very good knowledge of the kinds of activities that take place on their property.
09:32And they're saying that this is not matching what they've seen in the past.
09:35This is inexplicable to them.
09:39And then on the other hand, you have experts who are often not in the rural areas,
09:44who are usually in urban centers, scientists, government officials,
09:48who say quite a different narrative that actually this is really natural.
09:53There's nothing weird going on here.
09:55It's a combination of bacteria causing natural death, scavengers,
10:00doing the things the scavengers do, going for a soft tissue first,
10:04and then maybe the environment causing effects to the corpses that you maybe wouldn't see in other places.
10:10And all this together creates quite a natural phenomenon that's easily explainable.
10:15If we think about how bacteria behave in the whole process of decomposition,
10:22the way that bacteria goes for softer tissue,
10:25and in a sense, if you want, hollows out a dead cow going for the organs first,
10:31this might explain why some people on coming across these dead cows
10:37came to believe that they'd somehow been ritually disemboweled and mutilated.
10:42In April 1979, New Mexico Senator Harrison Schmidt
10:57announces a public hearing to discuss the ongoing spate of cattle mutilations in the state.
11:04One of the 80 attendees at this gathering is local Dulce resident Paul Benowitz.
11:09Though he didn't know it at the time,
11:13Benowitz would soon find himself at the center of a truly terrifying conspiracy.
11:19Benowitz was a World War II veteran,
11:22and he became an engineer, a radio and electronics engineer,
11:26which is also oddly common for those interested in UFOs.
11:30They're very interested in the nuts and bolts of how UFOs work.
11:33Using his own camera and radio equipment,
11:37Paul Benowitz embarked on a mission to track down any suspicious UFO activity in the Dulce area.
11:46And it didn't take long for him to find it.
11:48He took out radio and electronics equipment to try to gather signals of various kinds.
11:57And he was assuming, I think, that he was going to find this information coming from the skies,
12:02given what they knew about UFOs at the time.
12:06But to his surprise, it all seemed to be coming from underground.
12:09The interesting thing about radio waves is objects tend to be less opaque to radio waves.
12:19So where light won't go through a wall, to a certain extent, radio waves will go through the wall.
12:26Having said that, radio waves are still attenuated or decreased in intensity
12:32when they do go through solid objects.
12:35So radio waves don't travel through rock and concrete and glass and water particularly well.
12:42So when somebody thinks they found a radio signal coming from underground,
12:47it would be considered very strange.
12:50In October 1980, Benowitz reports his findings to officials at Kirtland Air Force Base,
12:58200 kilometers south of Dulce, on the outskirts of Albuquerque.
13:02Following his report, the United States Office of Special Investigations
13:09sends Special Agent Richard Doty to meet with Benowitz.
13:13Doty starts giving Benowitz information that confirms a lot of what Benowitz is starting to conclude,
13:22that based on his work, there's some kind of top-secret underground base
13:26connected to UFOs, possibly connected to catamutulations in some way.
13:30What Doty tells Benowitz convinces him not only that there is an underground alien base
13:39at Dulce, New Mexico, but that it's part of a network of alien bases all around the world.
13:48In 1988, Benowitz publishes his findings in a paper called Project Beta.
13:54In it, he lays out the approximate size and location of the supposed Dulce UFO base,
14:02as well as any blind spots that could make the installation susceptible to an attack.
14:08But following publication of the report, Benowitz's life begins to unravel.
14:14The information that Doty is giving to Benowitz really convinces him, along with his own continuing
14:21investigations, that this phenomenon is totally real, that there is something top-secret and
14:27quite nefarious going on, and it really starts to affect his life.
14:31He believes that his wife has an alien implant of some description.
14:36He barricades himself in his own room, and eventually, exasperated, his family has him committed
14:44to a mental institution for a while.
14:48Benowitz never really fully recovers from this experience, and a few years later,
14:52he dies, and it's possible that the cause of death was suicide.
14:59Even to keen UFO watchers, Paul Benowitz's claims of an underground alien base seemed far-fetched.
15:08That is, until 2013, when Richard Doty comes forward with a startling revelation that helps
15:15to explain why Benowitz was so convinced of alien involvement in the region.
15:19If Benowitz detected some nefarious activity in catamulations in his thoughts about top-secret
15:27bases, in a sense, he was absolutely correct, because it comes out later that the intelligence
15:36official that he meets that he's interacting with, Richard Doty, allegedly was assigned to
15:41misdirect Benowitz directly, that this was his mission, was to feed Benowitz and the larger
15:47UFO community by extension misinformation or disinformation, very specifically targeted
15:54to put people off the track.
15:58But if Doty was deployed to misdirect Benowitz and steer him away from the real reasons for
16:03the strange apparitions and cattle mutilations in the area, the question is, why?
16:09What is it the United States authorities were trying to hide?
16:17If I was going to shoot a movie on another planet, I would probably go shoot it in New Mexico,
16:34because it has what looks like a pretty alien landscape.
16:38The vegetation, the mountain ranges, the colors that you see there, the rock formations, these
16:45are pretty unique.
16:46You don't see these elsewhere.
16:48New Mexico's striking landscape is due in large part to the process of erosion.
16:56Over millions of years, exposure to wind and rain have gradually carved through the rocks
17:01and desert sands, molding the land into spectacular natural formations.
17:08It's like airborne sandpaper running across the geography and it wears away the rocks, the softer
17:17rocks until you're just left with a core of harder rock that looks like a pillar and they're
17:25called buttes.
17:28One of the most striking collections of buttes appears around 150 kilometers from Dulce in
17:35the Bisti Denizen Badlands.
17:37They don't look like natural formations to most people.
17:40They look possibly intentionally done.
17:43And so New Mexico is a great place for UFO stories, frankly.
17:49The Bisti Denizen Wilderness, like much of northwestern New Mexico, lies on the very edge of the Colorado
17:55Plateau.
17:57It's the largest plateau in the United States.
18:02The Colorado Plateau is an area of land 240,000 square miles.
18:11And it is simply an area of land that's higher than the land around it.
18:18But towards the edges of the plateau, the rocks begin to slant downwards.
18:24And one of these depressions is the San Juan Basin, home to some of New Mexico's most fascinating
18:30archaeological sites.
18:35Millions of years ago, this basin was covered by an inland sea which divided the North American
18:41continent.
18:42As the sea gradually receded, the area was transformed into wetlands.
18:47During this period, ancient species like dinosaurs and reptiles thrived here.
18:54Here, encased in layers of rock, are some of the world's richest fossil beds.
19:02Sites that could hold the key to Earth's ancient past.
19:07The most dramatic fossil recorded in this region to date has been affectionately called the Bisti Beast, a 75-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex discovered in the late 1990s.
19:21The preservation of ancient animals is extraordinarily rare.
19:29Even though we think of fossils as something that we find everywhere, there are probably millions
19:35of species that we will never know anything about because those bodies didn't preserve very well
19:42or the exact geological situation wasn't perfect to preserve those bodies.
19:48And the snapshots that we do have, we are so lucky to have to understand the changes that life on Earth and our Earth itself has gone through.
20:03A few miles west of the Bisti Badlands lies another crucial archaeological site.
20:09Goat Hill is the imposing rock formation overlooking the small city of Raton.
20:14And it was here that American scientists Lewis and Walter Alvarez discovered a thin layer of iridium-rich rock that would spark a revolutionary idea.
20:25And knowing that iridium is found in things like meteorites that fall to Earth, they were able to connect these ideas together
20:32and develop a theory that potentially it was a giant impact that deposited this layer of iridium that also may have caused the destruction of the dinosaurs.
20:41Because iridium is found not as abundantly on Earth as it is in, say, bodies like meteors or asteroids, we can extrapolate that that was most likely an impact from a very large celestial body.
20:58The remarkable discoveries made in these New Mexican deserts have made the region a hotbed of scientific exploration.
21:07To this day, researchers continue to map the Earth's history through the layers of ancient exposed rock in the San Juan Basin.
21:15The question is, are we the only ones doing the mapping?
21:22June 1st, 1997, 11pm.
21:26A man raises his binoculars for some routine stargazing a few miles south of Raton.
21:32He spots what he believes to be a satellite, tracking its movements through the night sky.
21:38But he realizes the object is far too fast to be a satellite.
21:42He watches as two other strange crafts join the first, accelerating into a triangle formation before vanishing over the horizon.
21:51September 21st, 2007, 10.35am.
21:58A family traveling north through the Bisti Badlands notices a strange white cigar-shaped craft hovering only 100 meters from the road.
22:08As they watch, the object suddenly rockets upwards, disappearing into the sky without a trace.
22:15Whether it's human beings or an advanced civilization who wants to understand the Earth's past,
22:21who wants to understand the Earth's story and possibly its future, need to do research in places like the Badlands.
22:30Residents in the small town of Dulce wonder whether the answers to these mysterious phenomena
22:36could lie in a far more modern structure buried deep in the ancient desert rock.
22:42So, during the Cold War, especially post-Hiroshima, we changed our perspective on what a military base needs to be.
22:53We realized that in a nuclear war, essentially, life at ground level would cease to exist if it was a significant war.
23:01So, nations around the world build underground military bases in bunkers.
23:07They wouldn't be directly affected by a nuclear blast.
23:10If you tried to bomb them directly, they're deep enough that they're not going to be significantly affected,
23:16and that you would have enough food and water to sustain the people there,
23:21at least through the initial portion of the nuclear winter.
23:24If you want to hide military secrets or other things, you would build an underground base,
23:30so that people can't spy on you, they can't see what you're doing, satellites can't really see what's going on.
23:36In July 1979, explosives engineer Phil Schneider arrives at a top-secret military installation in the New Mexico desert.
23:55He's been brought here to help build a new military facility, an enormous seven-story complex hosed entirely underground.
24:08As soon as he arrives, Schneider is struck by the unusually large number of US Special Forces guarding the camp.
24:15He guides his team to begin drilling holes deep into the sandy earth.
24:20But what emerges isn't the typical rock dust Schneider and his team are expecting.
24:26Instead, he claims he came face-to-face with visitors from outer space.
24:33When Schneider goes underground to investigate, he comes across a group of aliens,
24:44which he said were something like seven-foot-tall, gray-skinned.
24:48And the thing that really struck him was the pungent odor that they were admitting.
24:54It's a bit unclear why, but he felt the need to immediately pull out his gun and start blasting away.
24:59And 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
25:09and sent some kind of shockwave energy towards Schneider.
25:13And this resulted in him losing several fingers off of his hand and presumably meant his almost certain death,
25:22except that, luckily for him, one of the green berets that he said was stationed around came to his rescue
25:29and heroically sacrificed himself, pushing Schneider into an elevator that sent him back to the surface.
25:38For a decade after his alleged encounter with the mysterious gray aliens, Schneider claimed that the Dulce base remained a hotbed of UFO activity,
25:48a holding center for extraterrestrial visitors and their highly advanced technology.
25:54And according to Schneider, this was only the tip of the iceberg.
26:01It launches a career of sorts for Schneider.
26:04He very quickly becomes a coveted speaker on the UFO circuit, giving accounts of this encounter
26:11and has also happened with previous UFO stories, starts to add more details, maybe embellishes it a little bit, depending who you ask.
26:20And so no longer is it just this one battle.
26:24He starts to tell tales that the US government is doing some quite nefarious stuff to do with alien-human hybrids,
26:31that they are actively presumably capturing people, citizens, and taking them underground
26:37and subjecting them to experiments and hybridization,
26:42and that the US government is actively covering all this up.
26:45He goes on to assert that there are hundreds of these bases across the United States funded by the American government.
26:56He estimates that each of these bases cost about $17 billion,
27:03funded out of the US government's black budget, as he calls it.
27:08Schneider's claims send shockwaves through the UFO investigative community.
27:16Even for committed UFOologists, the story, much like Paul Benowitz's claims, is hard to believe.
27:23Conspiracy theorists like to think there's something nefarious going on,
27:29and that it needs to be hidden from the public eye.
27:33The best way to hide things from the public eye is to make them invisible.
27:38And really, the only reasonable way to do that on Earth is to put them underground.
27:44For months, Schneider had allegedly warned his family that his story may endanger his life.
27:52Then, in 1996, Schneider is found dead in his home.
27:57The cause of death, as with Paul Benowitz, is likely suicide.
28:03The interesting thing is that before his death, Schneider said to his wife that,
28:08if I end up dead and it appears to be a suicide, it's not. It's not as it seems.
28:14And so that will immediately fuel all kinds of speculation.
28:18If you belong to the community which thinks that there is indeed some kind of human-alien-type base in Dulce, New Mexico,
28:29then you're going to think that now measures are being taken to eradicate everyone who knows about this.
28:37In the decades since the deaths of Paul Benowitz and Phil Schneider,
28:42theories about a possible underground military base containing UFO technology have continued to circulate.
28:52December 13th, 2004.
28:55A local hiker clicks through the photographs of her trip to the Archuleta Mesa.
29:00Squinting at her small digital camera, she can see a strange object clearly outlined against the blue sky.
29:10For years, the hiker has heard rumors of the UFOs over Dulce.
29:15Now, she believes she has photographic evidence.
29:21November 21st, 2018.
29:25A local woman spots a strangely bright star in the night sky.
29:29As she watches, the star seems to grow, swelling and changing colors as it begins to move,
29:37surveilling the area in giant loops before finally disappearing from view.
29:45To this day, local residents are left wondering whether there could be any truth
29:50to the rumors of a secret Dulce subterranean base.
29:54In terms of underground government activity,
29:57actually, during the President Eisenhower years, at the height of the Cold War,
30:02the government had what was called a continuity of government program,
30:07where bunkers and tunnels were created so that senior government officials,
30:13civil servants and so on, would be able to basically, literally, go underground
30:19and continue the business of government as a nuclear war raged overhead.
30:25And so when you take that into account that these bunkers do exist,
30:28they are underground and some of them quite extensive,
30:31it lends credence to the idea that, well, maybe there are other bunkers out there as well
30:35that we simply don't know about.
30:37It is now public knowledge that in 1950, work began on a deep underground facility at Raven Rock Mountain in Pennsylvania.
30:47In just 10 months, almost 400,000 cubic meters of granite are secretly blasted out of the mountain
30:54to make room for a new structure dubbed the underground Pentagon.
30:59This network of three underground buildings would be able to house 3,000 people,
31:05forming the core of the U.S. government's continuity plan in the event of a national emergency.
31:11In the late 50s and early 60s, two more underground complexes are built under Bear Mountain in Massachusetts
31:20and Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.
31:22Hardened to withstand a nuclear blast, these command centers would be linked to form
31:27the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.
31:32A fourth underground base is constructed in 1959 in Blue Ridge, Virginia,
31:37acting as the control center for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
31:41From here, the United States President would be able to access the nation's emergency alert system
31:47in the event of a nuclear attack.
31:50To this day, the Mountain Weather Emergency Operations Center is still a prominent relocation site
31:56for high-level civilian and military officials in the event of active conflicts and national emergencies.
32:03I mean, the very nature of military work means that some of that work will be secretive.
32:09And to facilitate secrecy, there are all kinds of military facilities built,
32:14and some of them are underground.
32:16So, this leads people to think that, well, there may be more to this story.
32:20If they're not telling us anything about it, if they're being so secretive about it,
32:24there must be something nefarious going on over here.
32:28Along with these elaborate underground operation centers,
32:32the United States military also oversees several subterranean storage facilities,
32:38each one charged with housing some of America's deadliest weapons.
32:43One of the largest of these bunkers is the underground munitions maintenance and storage complex
32:50at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico.
32:53Could this be the source of the strange phenomena which have been so frequently seen in the area?
33:00I think it can't be underestimated how alluring it might be for a UFO enthusiast
33:05to pay attention to the underground nuclear storage facility at the Kirtland Air Force Base.
33:11It alone is over 50 acres large.
33:14To see a space like that and to not really see anything given that it's underground is eerie.
33:19It's unsettling to know that that's all under there.
33:29Since the end of World War II, UFO researchers have become increasingly interested
33:34in an apparent link between UFO sightings and nuclear activity.
33:38Something that makes the link between nuclear power and nuclear facilities in America and UFOs
33:45potentially a little clearer is one incident from 1967 in Montana
33:50when a missile operator at an Air Force Base that was equipped with nuclear missiles
33:55started receiving messages from colleagues saying that there was a UFO sighted above around the base itself,
34:03which is cause for concern, certainly if you're in that kind of position.
34:07But then the particularly strange part is that very shortly after,
34:12possibly seemingly caused by the UFO,
34:15all of the nuclear missiles go completely offline.
34:18They deactivate entirely and nobody at the base has done this
34:21and there's no explanation really forthcoming about how this occurred.
34:25In 1986, during the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown,
34:34when there was some people reported seeing a UFO hovering over the facility,
34:41shining a light down on it.
34:43And what's remarkable about this is that there were reports of a reduction in ionizing radiation
34:53after the UFO had appeared.
35:04To this day, unidentified flying objects are regularly reported in the vicinity of US Army and Air Force bases.
35:12The very earliest of these dates back decades,
35:17when a group of highly trained military officers witness a remarkable sight.
35:23March 22nd, 1950.
35:28Eleven members of the 4925th Test Group gather outside Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico.
35:37They're looking intently up at the clear morning sky,
35:40tracking a strange object flying nearly 8,000 meters above them.
35:45It isn't like any conventional aircraft.
35:48The men can make out a disc or a flying wing,
35:53with the tan color fading out to a darker brown along its edges.
35:58The officers watch as the aircraft travels steadily northwest before altering its course to due north
36:05and accelerating away with a sudden burst of energy.
36:09In the days that follow, all 11 crew members are interviewed extensively by military personnel.
36:21Their stories never waver, leaving their commanders with a string of troubling questions.
36:30What was the unidentified craft?
36:35And what was it doing so close to the Kirtland Air Base?
36:40And Kirtland Air Force Base has a pretty story history to begin with.
36:49It was one of the main hubs connecting the nation with the Manhattan Project,
36:53which was America's crash program to build the atomic bomb,
36:57one of the most well-known uses for atomic energy, of course, and nuclear capability.
37:02And so if UFOs are interested in this, the interest may go back quite a ways,
37:08given that there were integral components of both atomic bombs
37:12that were eventually dropped on Japan that moved through this space.
37:18In 1954, nine years after dropping the first atomic bomb,
37:23the United States carried out the most powerful nuclear detonation
37:27in the nation's history over the Marshall Islands.
37:31The resulting blast was more than a thousand times more powerful
37:35than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
37:40Within moments, nuclear fallout began to rain down on the surrounding area,
37:46exposing hundreds of civilians to one of the most dangerous forms of energy on Earth,
37:52ionizing radiation.
37:54When we get to ionizing radiation, that radiation is intense enough
37:59that it causes chemical changes within the organic compounds in our body.
38:05So ionizing radiation can be X-rays, gamma rays, and potentially nuclear events
38:12that produce neutrons or other fast-moving particles.
38:15These things have the potential to penetrate our body, do damage, and potentially cause cancer.
38:24After the Second World War, people were really paranoid about the fact
38:29that there was going to be another major confrontation, this time between the United States
38:35and the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union.
38:38And these powerful weapons, nuclear weapons, hydrogen bombs,
38:42this was the weaponry which these two giants would use against each other
38:47in the event of a Third World War.
38:50On the night of July 8th, 1962, across Hawaii, groups gathered to drink, share food,
38:58and monitor the night sky.
39:01These happy gatherings, planned for days, are referred to as Watch the Bomb Parties.
39:08They were there to witness the Starfish Prime High Altitude Experiment,
39:13the largest nuclear test ever carried out in outer space.
39:18The Starfish Prime High Altitude Experiment involved the detonation of a 1.4 megaton bomb
39:25about 250 miles above the Earth's surface.
39:29So in this case, what we saw was a very vivid light display in the sky.
39:33It was very brilliant, and then it dissipated.
39:36And this is different from what we see in terms of nuclear detonations on Earth,
39:40because on Earth, there's material to be kicked up.
39:43And so on Earth, we see something that's more like the typical mushroom cloud
39:47that we've seen in videos from the past.
39:52In 1962 alone, the United States and the Soviet Union would detonate a further six
39:59high-altitude nuclear explosions, releasing massive amounts of nuclear radiation into outer space.
40:06only 30 years later would the seismic effect of these detonations become clear.
40:13In 1993, United Nations scientists made the rather depressing announcement
40:21that as a result of nuclear atmospheric testing,
40:26the world's population had been exposed to 50 times more radiation
40:32than resulted from the Chernobyl disaster.
40:35This era of fierce and highly destructive competition has led some to wonder
40:43whether the potential for a global catastrophe
40:46may have alerted another as yet unknown civilization.
40:51If human beings start playing around with nuclear weapons,
40:55it's not unlikely that an advanced extraterrestrial species
40:59begins to pay attention to what's going on on planet Earth.
41:04After more than a decade of nuclear detonations
41:08and growing concern over their long-term effects,
41:11the United States and the Soviet Union
41:14grudgingly agree to end their testing programs.
41:17In 1992, work starts on the 56-acre underground munitions complex
41:23at the Kirtland Air Force Base.
41:26This warehouse holds the majority of the US's nuclear stockpile.
41:33But despite the mothballing of deadly weaponry,
41:36reports of UFO sightings keep coming.
41:40June 20th, 2006, 12 p.m.
41:44A cluster of people on the outskirts of Albuquerque gaze up at a huge disk
41:49floating impossibly above the Kirtland Air Base.
41:52As they watch, it slowly disappears from view.
41:56September 13th, 2007, 7.30 p.m.
42:00Another small crowd of people gathers on the street of Farmington,
42:04less than 16 kilometers from Kirtland.
42:07They watch in awe as a large red aircraft floats through the sky,
42:11orbited by four smaller, equally mysterious objects.
42:15November 28th, 2014.
42:18Could it be that decades of nuclear development
42:21have acted as a beacon to extraterrestrials in the universe?
42:25One of the explanations that some UFO enthusiasts have proposed
42:29to explain their presence is that maybe they detected this amount of radiation,
42:34a very unusual, unnatural amount of radiation coming off the Earth.
42:38Ever since the 1970s, rumours surrounding UFOs in northwestern New Mexico
42:44have centred around fear, secrecy,
42:47and in the cases of Paul Bennewitz and Phil Schneider,
42:50feverish paranoia and outlandish theories.
42:53If you think about it, Schneider draws first, as they say in the Wild West.
42:58He doesn't wait to see what the alien's going to do.
43:02He assumes the alien is going to attack him,
43:05and maybe that's really a sad comment on us as a species,
43:10that we meet another species, we meet aliens,
43:14and we automatically assume they're going to kill us.
43:18So one of the concerns is that any advanced civilization visiting us
43:24might have the motive of exploiting the resources of Earth.
43:28I suspect this is unlikely, and the reason for this being that
43:32there's a limited number of important resources like rare earth metals on Earth,
43:38and even as a species long-term, there's not enough on Earth to supply demand.
43:50There's also a degree of arrogance on the part of humanity
43:53where we assume that an alien is going to be a kind of variation on us.
43:59In fact, an alien may be something unrecognisably different.
44:04As UFO sightings above the Kirtland Air Force Base continue to be reported,
44:09as well as at other military facilities around the world,
44:13the thought that these crafts may be appearing to help rather than hinder,
44:18or to protect rather than harm,
44:20is for many a much more logical and reasonable explanation.
44:25The only reason that I think that aliens would come to check out Earth is because it has life.
44:32And that is, I think, what makes our planet so special.
44:36Earth is a very special.
44:39Earth is a very special.
44:41In this case, if you will do so much more,
44:44it varies by chance to set up Earth to be обратно by God.
44:46P鉛i said to Russia
44:49Everything from Earth is a very special.
44:52Tenemos a wonderful fear of becoming through.
44:54And clues and Zustand L fills a little one.
44:56But imagine that that.
44:58We're going to be one of the most protective Ä‘ passed,
44:59and we're willing to accept it.
45:00We're going to be one of the most vulnerable beams.
45:02We're going to hospitalizi Grand Air Force Base.
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