- 3 days ago
"Secret Access: UFOs on the Record" (2011) is a two hour History Channel Special that follows investigative journalist Leslie Kean as she takes a dynamic look into the history of the UFO phenomenon. High-level sources including an Air Force Major, a retired Air Force Colonel, a top executive with FAA and former Arizona governor Fife Symington III share their personal testimonies about UFO sightings and investigations. Each compelling story is illustrated through photographs and animation, which create a real life picture of the unique UFO encounters.
Category
š„
Short filmTranscript
00:00:00Lens flare, weather balloons, optical illusions, swamp gas, 95% of all UFO sightings can be
00:00:12explained and quickly discredited. But 5% have enough eyewitnesses and factual evidence that
00:00:19they demand to be taken seriously. Journalist Leslie Kane has been researching these cases for
00:00:25over 10 years, focusing on the most credible evidence and witnesses. I've worked with high
00:00:30level officials, pilots, generals, and a former U.S. governor to show that there is a physical
00:00:36phenomenon that exists. A huge triangular object. Dark gray oval. Like a frisbee, like a UFO check thing.
00:00:46Now, new evidence, audio recordings, radar data, and never before heard witness testimony.
00:00:52make these sightings part of the select 5% that is impossible to ignore.
00:00:56Time to correct the record once and for all.
00:01:10The large majority of UFO reports are made by civilians in isolated cases with one or two
00:01:16corroborating witnesses and can be easily dismissed.
00:01:20Here he comes from the side. He's coming toward us now.
00:01:23But when a sighting occurs over a nuclear-armed American military base, at the height of the
00:01:29Cold War, and is seen by 60 Air Force personnel for 45 minutes, it demands closer scrutiny.
00:01:36Here we have a senior officer making a report of a UFO directly over the most important base in
00:01:45the whole NATO network, and there's no response to him. I found that absolutely astounding.
00:01:52Now, 30 years later, key witnesses have come forward to tell their remarkable story.
00:01:59The team and witnesses were told to treat the investigation as top secret, and no further discussion
00:02:05would be allowed.
00:02:06This is the extraordinary incident at Rendlesham Forest.
00:02:27My name is Colonel Charles Halt. In 1980, I was a deputy base commander at RAF Bentwaters-Woodbridge,
00:02:33England. At that time, Bentwaters was the largest tactical fighter wing in the free world,
00:02:38and our mission as a key NATO installation was to be prepared should anything happen.
00:02:46Early in the morning of the 26th of December, I went in to collect the police blotters.
00:02:50That's the chronological list of what happened the previous 24 hours.
00:02:54And as I walked into the office, the on-duty desk sergeant started to laugh.
00:02:58He said, Colonel, you're not going to believe this.
00:03:01Last night, three of our policemen were out in the forest chasing UFOs.
00:03:06They called in and thought they saw a donned aircraft.
00:03:09They went out and investigated, and they had some type of an experience.
00:03:12They said, we'll put something into the blotter to the effect that they saw some lights,
00:03:16and we'll leave it at that for now.
00:03:18Halt plans for the UFO story to go away,
00:03:21despite growing rumors around the base about a strange craft seen in the woods on Christmas night.
00:03:26But within days, he is forced to act.
00:03:30Two nights later, we were having the Christmas party,
00:03:33and we were just finishing the main course and getting ready for dessert,
00:03:36when the on-duty flight lieutenant cornered the base commander and I and said,
00:03:40we have to talk. The UFO is back.
00:03:42I was sure I could put this thing to rest.
00:03:45So I took my little pocket recorder, which I carried everywhere,
00:03:49an APN-27, which is a Geiger counter, and we went out into the forest.
00:03:56Late in the evening on December 27, 1980, Colonel Halt takes a team of four officers,
00:04:02including a flight commander and a disaster preparedness expert,
00:04:05out to the site where the alleged craft had landed two nights earlier.
00:04:09And lo and behold, I find half our security force out there.
00:04:13Five, six, seven vehicles, Jeeps, six passenger pickup trucks,
00:04:17and they're trying to light up the forest.
00:04:19Here I'm thinking, this is a public relations disaster just waiting to happen.
00:04:23So I tell them to knock it off, get as many people and things back to the base as they can.
00:04:28And with a little tape recorder, I took a small team into the forest to the alleged landing site.
00:04:34Halt and his team locate three indentations in the shape of a triangle at the alleged landing site.
00:04:53The radiation readings are ten times the normal or background level,
00:05:07signaling that there is definitely more to the sighting than Halt had first allowed.
00:05:14We find rub marks on the trees facing the site and quite a few broken branches on the ground.
00:05:19And when we looked up, we noticed a break in a tree canopy above us.
00:05:23It was obvious something had come up through or down through the trees.
00:05:28As we're investigating, we also hear the barnyard animals, the cows and the chickens,
00:05:32sort of went into a frenzy for a short period of time and then got very silent.
00:05:40And then somebody suddenly notices a glowing red object on the far side of the forest.
00:05:44And I immediately turned my tape recorder back on.
00:05:47Do you saw a light over there?
00:05:51Where?
00:05:52Right in this position here.
00:05:54Straight ahead in between the street.
00:05:56There it is again.
00:05:58Watch.
00:05:59Straight ahead off my flesh right there.
00:06:01There it is.
00:06:02Hey, I see it too.
00:06:03What is it?
00:06:04We don't know, sir.
00:06:05Yeah, it's a strange, small red light.
00:06:07Maybe a quarter to half.
00:06:08Maybe further out.
00:06:09Let's hold on to the edge of the carrying so we can get a good look at it.
00:06:14As Holt and his team race to get closer, the details of the object come into focus.
00:06:23It was oval.
00:06:24This was all reddish orange.
00:06:26And there were like pieces of molten metal dripping off it.
00:06:30And they were falling to the ground.
00:06:32It had a black like center.
00:06:35This was solid black.
00:06:36And this would actually like blink.
00:06:38Almost like an eye.
00:06:39It moved horizontally through the trees.
00:06:42About four to six feet off the ground.
00:06:44Zig-zagging, bobbing up and down a little bit.
00:06:46But as though they were searching for something.
00:06:48And it definitely was under some type of intelligent control.
00:06:51Holt's description matches many other sightings of UFOs.
00:06:56Witnesses often report red orbs that dart.
00:07:00And searches of under intelligent control.
00:07:03But for Holt and the other officers, their experience is about to become anything but typical.
00:07:09We watched it for probably two or three minutes.
00:07:24And suddenly, it silently exploded into five white objects.
00:07:29And everything disappeared.
00:07:33Well, this really puts us all but in shock.
00:07:35I'm thinking, I'm never going to be able to explain this.
00:07:38People will never believe this.
00:07:40This is just too bizarre.
00:07:42Well, somebody in the party looks to the north and said,
00:07:44Look, what's that?
00:07:51And we see four or five objects that are elliptical with multi-color lights.
00:07:56Probably three or four thousand feet in elevation.
00:07:59And they're moving at high speed with sharp angular movements.
00:08:05We hear a lot of chatter on the radios.
00:08:07And we were having difficulties the whole time, too.
00:08:09There was a lot of interference.
00:08:11Some say that sending down a beam into the weapons storage area.
00:08:14And we were all extremely nervous about what was happening.
00:08:17It's moving out fast.
00:08:18This one on the right, checking the way too.
00:08:20Can I move to the north?
00:08:21Here he comes from the south.
00:08:22He's coming toward us now.
00:08:23Suddenly, one comes overhead and stops.
00:08:24It sends down a beam at our feet.
00:08:25When the beam came down, we stood perfectly still.
00:08:26I don't think anybody moved.
00:08:27Everybody just stood there in shock.
00:08:28It's going through my mind.
00:08:29There has to be some type of a reason for this.
00:08:30Is this a communication?
00:08:31Is this a weapon?
00:08:32Is this a warning?
00:08:33What do we do now?
00:08:34Halt and his men are transfixed by the craft looming overhead.
00:08:35The sight is something unfamiliar to these trained military professionals.
00:08:39Never seen anything like it.
00:08:40And while we're standing there, just as suddenly as it appeared, click.
00:08:44It's gone through my mind.
00:08:45There has to be some type of a reason for this.
00:08:46Is this a communication?
00:08:47Is this a weapon?
00:08:48Is this a warning?
00:08:49What do we do now?
00:08:52Halt and his men are transfixed by the craft looming overhead.
00:08:57The sight is something unfamiliar to these trained military professionals.
00:09:02Never seen anything like it.
00:09:04And while we're standing there, just as suddenly as it appeared, click.
00:09:08It's gone.
00:09:11I'm thinking, there is no real explanation for all of this.
00:09:15Why did I get involved?
00:09:17This is not exactly career enhancing.
00:09:21Over 60 Air Force personnel are reported to have seen a UFO during the two nights that
00:09:26comprise the Rendlesham incident.
00:09:28According to witnesses, this really shook up the base.
00:09:31This was during the Cold War.
00:09:33This was a nuclear-armed outpost.
00:09:36And it was an incursion, a national security concern,
00:09:39about the British and the Americans.
00:09:41As the commanding officer on duty, Halt is required to report the events to his superiors.
00:09:47So he files a brief memo, hoping to put the matter to rest.
00:09:51Due to the base's location within England, the memo is forwarded to the British Ministry of Defence,
00:09:58which quickly concludes that the event is of no defence significance and closes the case.
00:10:04And it would remain that way for over a decade.
00:10:14My name's Nick Pope.
00:10:15I worked for the Ministry of Defence for 21 years.
00:10:18And for much of the early 90s, I ran their UFO project.
00:10:23My job was to investigate sightings and determine whether there was evidence of any potential threat to the United Kingdom.
00:10:33In 1994, Nick Pope instigates a cold case review of the Rendlesham Forest incident.
00:10:39One of the things that prompted me was the apparent lack of any formal response to Colonel Halt's report.
00:10:46Here was one of the most senior officers ever to go on the record,
00:10:51making a report of a UFO landing in close proximity to two of the most important bases in the whole NATO network.
00:11:00And there's no response to him.
00:11:03I found that absolutely astounding.
00:11:07Pope begins an exhausted three-year study, uncovering several key errors in the investigation,
00:11:14including a confusion over jurisdiction.
00:11:19The Rendlesham Forest incident involved the twin bases, Bentwaters and Woodbridge.
00:11:25Now, of course, these were United States Air Force bases, but on British soil.
00:11:30So there was total confusion about who was in charge.
00:11:35Another problem was that the landing site had not immediately been cordoned off.
00:11:42People were coming and going, contaminating the site.
00:11:46It should have been searched thoroughly with a metal detector.
00:11:50Soil samples should have been taken.
00:11:52This didn't happen.
00:11:54Years into his review, Pope uncovers one of the most critical failures of the original investigation.
00:12:01I was looking at the question of whether or not the UFO was tracked on radar.
00:12:05One of the witnesses said that, for an instant, there was an uncorrelated target
00:12:11that was hanging over the bases for about two or three sweeps of the radar, and then it disappeared.
00:12:17But when the Americans made the report to the UK, the date was wrong.
00:12:26So, of course, the Ministry of Defence were looking at the wrong night.
00:12:29And by the time we realized the error, the radar tape had been destroyed.
00:12:39The original investigation had been fatally flawed.
00:12:43But Pope would go further than simply detailing the failures of the original investigation.
00:12:50Soon he would encounter an eyewitness who came close enough to touch one of these remarkable craft,
00:12:56and produce striking images of a landed UFO unlike any he had seen before.
00:13:00It was very clear to me that we did have solid evidence that an unidentified object or objects was operating over the UK.
00:13:08Just after Christmas in 1980, over 60 Air Force personnel witness what they describe as multiple unknown craft
00:13:23over the twin NATO bases, Bentwaters and Woodbridge, England.
00:13:27The experience rattles the soldiers, including Deputy Base Commander Colonel Charles Holt.
00:13:34I'm thinking, I'm never going to be able to explain this.
00:13:37People will never believe this. This is just too bizarre.
00:13:41The sighting is never officially explained, leaving the witnesses to question what they believed they saw.
00:13:47Until a decade later, when Nick Pope, a British Ministry of Defence official in charge of UFO investigations,
00:13:54instigates a cold case review of the now infamous sightings.
00:13:59It was soon clear to me that the original investigation had been fatally flawed.
00:14:09Troubled by these failures, Pope takes his investigation deeper.
00:14:13In 1994, he interviews a man who would become a key witness in the case,
00:14:18Sergeant James Penniston, a senior American airman in charge of security.
00:14:21Two days before Colonel Holt's sighting, Sergeant Penniston had also seen the UFO.
00:14:29And he and two other airmen had actually approached this object,
00:14:34and he got close enough to produce some spectacular drawings.
00:14:37Penniston clearly got very close.
00:14:52See the essentially triangular shape here.
00:14:56And it's interesting to note that indentations were found at the landing site in the shape of a triangle.
00:15:03And peak radiation readings were recorded in those three indentations.
00:15:06As the three of us got closer to the craft, we started experiencing radio difficulties.
00:15:20The air around us was electrically charged and we could feel it on our clothes, our skin and our hair.
00:15:28Nothing in my training prepared me for what I was witnessing.
00:15:37Sergeant Penniston observed the craft for nearly 45 minutes.
00:15:41One of the most intriguing pieces of information were strange symbols that he saw on the side,
00:15:48which he said reminded him a bit of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
00:15:52And he sketched this in his police notebook.
00:16:00Many years after the incident, Sergeant Penniston decides to step out of the shadows,
00:16:05and speak publicly about his sighting.
00:16:09Over 80 Air Force personnel, all trained observers, witnessed the takeoff.
00:16:15The team and witnesses were told to treat the investigation as top secret.
00:16:20And no further discussion would be allowed.
00:16:23I think in looking back at the Rendlesham Forest incident, it was very clear to me that we did have solid evidence of a compelling UFO case.
00:16:37That an unidentified object or objects was operating over the UK.
00:16:42The Rendlesham Forest incident is now considered one of the most conclusive UFO sightings in history,
00:16:51and includes several archetypal characteristics seen in the most credible UFO cases.
00:16:57Triangular and disc-shaped craft that move silently and accelerate instantly to unknown speeds.
00:17:06It stands as a benchmark against which all other UFO cases can be measured.
00:17:10And when you add in all the cases that involve high-level military people,
00:17:15government officials, pilots, cases that have been officially investigated,
00:17:19you have a body of evidence that simply can't be ignored.
00:17:23You're someone very, very strange.
00:17:27But what happens when an entire city witnesses a UFO reported to be as large as two or three football fields?
00:17:34It was the shape of a boomerang.
00:17:37A large black object coming right towards us.
00:17:40I was going to pass out.
00:17:41I was so enthralled in looking at this thing.
00:17:43And I said, that's something.
00:17:45It's a mile long.
00:17:47In 1997, thousands in Phoenix, Arizona witnessed an enormous craft.
00:17:52Do these lights belong to visitors from outer space?
00:17:56It was being blasted all over the television, so people were going outside of their houses and looking up in the sky.
00:18:00Now, new evidence is introduced in one of the most enduring UFO cases in history.
00:18:06All hell broke loose, basically, and we had a complete lockdown.
00:18:10Official explanations are dissected.
00:18:12The Air Force stated that flares were dropped around 10 p.m., but witness reports came in over an hour before the flares were dropped.
00:18:20So, using that excuse makes a mockery out of what thousands of people said they saw.
00:18:24And a former governor reveals his startling admission.
00:18:28I knew more about the lights over Phoenix than I let on.
00:18:32This is the Phoenix Lights.
00:18:34I'm Fyfe Sammington, the former governor of Arizona.
00:18:48And in the spring of 1997, there was a very unusual event that occurred while I was the governor.
00:18:56I guess some people refer to it as the lights over Phoenix.
00:18:59It was Thursday night, March 13, 1997, 8.30 p.m.
00:19:07My daughter Monica came running in to say there was something coming over the end of Camelback Mountain.
00:19:13And so, four of the kids got up, ran out, and I ran out with them.
00:19:17And I looked to the north.
00:19:20My wife and I saw three bright white lights in triangle formation coming right towards us.
00:19:26It had five big lights in front, and it was the shape of a boomerang.
00:19:32It was a solid craft, silent, very low to the ground.
00:19:36And the thing that took me was the size.
00:19:39Profoundly enormous, profoundly massive.
00:19:43I mean, we don't even have shopping centers this big.
00:19:46We stood and watched it come, and it floated directly over our house.
00:19:49And it was probably five to six minutes that we had full view of this.
00:19:56My wife and I, we just stared at each other.
00:19:59And I looked her right in the eye, and I said, we just saw our first UFO.
00:20:03Do these lights belong to visitors from outer space?
00:20:07Hundreds of people across the valley think it's a distinct possibility.
00:20:11What is described as a giant, brightly lit boomerang soars through the air.
00:20:15No official explanation of those strange, bright lights.
00:20:19That night, it was being blasted all over the radio, all over the television.
00:20:22So people were going outside of their houses and looking up in the sky.
00:20:25And it was being viewed by thousands of people across the valley.
00:20:31There were barrages of phone calls coming into the governor's office and to the Department of Public Safety.
00:20:37People wanted answers.
00:20:39So, of course, I was making my inquiries immediately to the head of the National Guard.
00:20:43And I had members of my staff calling Luke Air Force Base to find out if they were flying some exotic aircraft over the valley and not really getting any answers.
00:20:53I mean, everybody was just sort of, oh my gosh, well, we don't know what it is.
00:20:57Something strange happened in the skies over Arizona that still hasn't been fully explained.
00:21:04It's something UFO enthusiasts are calling a major sighting.
00:21:08Pilots report seeing it in the air.
00:21:10Yet military radar screens pick up nothing.
00:21:13Whatever it was, it has more than a few Phoenicians watching the skies tonight.
00:21:16Well, in the weeks following the incident, over 700 witnesses called and reports to local officials and to the National UFO Reporting Center, a private organization in Seattle, Washington.
00:21:26And these witnesses included pilots, police officers and military professionals.
00:21:34Although descriptions of the craft differ, several overriding characteristics prevail.
00:21:39It is a massive solid object, not merely lights, in the shape of a delta or triangle.
00:21:48And it makes no noise as it moves over the valley.
00:21:52Most importantly, it is viewed from multiple vantage points by witnesses across the county for a total of 106 minutes.
00:22:01We literally were laying down on the grass looking up at it.
00:22:06It was a solid, solid, solid object.
00:22:08Something that I'll never explain.
00:22:10Real deal.
00:22:12It was a major UFO event, seen by thousands of people across the state of Arizona.
00:22:16And they were expecting a serious response from the government.
00:22:19Well, you can imagine the building hysteria that was going on in our community about what really happened and what we were going to do about it.
00:22:33I'm going to order a full, you know, investigation of this through DPS.
00:22:37We're going to make all the necessary inquiries and we're going to get to the bottom of it.
00:22:40I was probing, trying to get answers, but everybody was sort of denying that they saw it in official channels, which really had me perplexed.
00:22:47And Councilwoman Barwood really took the lead.
00:22:52She called Senator John McCain and the Senator was the first person to get something out of the Air Force.
00:23:01The Air Force tells Senator McCain that the lights are high-intensity flares, dropped by the National Guard between 9.30 and 10 p.m.
00:23:08But since the sightings began at 8.15 p.m., over an hour before the flares were dropped and in a different part of the city than the UFO was seen, this fails to explain what many witnesses saw.
00:23:22They were all shot right around 10 o'clock at night. They were all southwest of Phoenix. They weren't even over the city or even in the county. What my wife and I saw happened at 8.30.
00:23:34Seems to me this big object came over at 8.30. The authorities decided they'd better do something to cover it up, so they had a flare show at 10.
00:23:43Well, it was an intentional diversion, yes.
00:23:45What's really confusing is that the lights that were shown on TV that night were actually the flares.
00:23:50Do these lights...
00:23:52Because the news footage was taken at 10 p.m. when the flares were dropped.
00:23:55Strange dots of light that were the top of the...
00:23:58But that doesn't explain what all the witnesses saw.
00:24:01The flares were dropped over two hours after the sightings began.
00:24:05These were two separate events.
00:24:07Casting further doubt on the Air Force's explanation is this never-before-heard recording of a call made by an airman at Luke Air Force Base to the National UFO Reporting Center early in the morning on March 14th.
00:24:25Apparently, we got a call from Prescott Valley Airport, a small airport north of us, reporting an object that had a near-miss with a small Cessna.
00:24:37The call came up approximately 8.32.
00:24:40They encountered something over Phoenix, Arizona, over the area of 7th Avenue and Indian School Road.
00:24:46They don't know what it was.
00:24:47According to the airman, Luke Air Force Base launched two F-15s to investigate the incident shortly after 8.30 p.m.
00:24:58He spoke with one of the F-15 pilots after their return, describing him as visibly shaken.
00:25:04The command pilot of this particular flight, I've never seen this man scared.
00:25:09And he was scared to death. He's not sure what it was.
00:25:11His statement was that they followed this aircraft, it went on a straight-line course heading towards Sky Harbor Airport, which is one of our main airports here, at approximately 18,000 feet, descending to 10,500.
00:25:25He saw five distinct lights in a triangular pattern.
00:25:30The first three lights were in a tight triangular formation, and then the other light was at about 400 yards, also on the east side of the triangle.
00:25:39It scared the hell out of them, and after they landed the bases, we had a complete lockdown.
00:25:49All hell broke loose, basically, and the facility was closed.
00:25:55Despite the shocking testimony, the Air Force categorically denies the encounter.
00:26:00But like the Rendlesham case before it, official attempts to dismiss the sightings are unsuccessful.
00:26:06It was the story that wouldn't go away, and the governor knew he would have to address it.
00:26:12Governor Fyfe Symington is determined to find out what those lights are all about.
00:26:17Soon the Phoenix lights would reach national prominence, as Governor Symington reveals his astonishing news.
00:26:22I knew more about the lights over Phoenix than I let on.
00:26:25To escort the accused into the room, so that we may all look upon the guilty party.
00:26:30It's time to correct the record once and for all.
00:26:32When you serve in public office, you have to be very careful dealing with sensitive, incendiary subjects like UFO sightings.
00:26:48The fact of the matter is, if you're a public official, and you start talking about UFOs, you really get attacked.
00:26:54It's unbelievable.
00:26:55We start tonight with those strange dots of light.
00:26:59In 1997, thousands witnessed a UFO over Phoenix.
00:27:04Reports described a delta-shaped craft, several football fields in length.
00:27:09Like the craft at Rendlesham, it was viewed from multiple vantage points by witnesses across the county for a total of 106 minutes.
00:27:16Thousands of people saw it, and it was quite a build-up of public interest almost close to hysteria.
00:27:24UFO enthusiasts all over the country.
00:27:27Three months after the sighting, USA Today features the Phoenix lights on its front page, forcing Governor Symington into the spotlight.
00:27:34In early June, there was some major publicity, and all of a sudden we found ourselves sort of besieged.
00:27:42So I organized this press conference to try to get people to kind of climb off the emotional mountain a bit.
00:27:49On June 19th, Symington holds a news conference to announce the mystery has been solved.
00:27:56And now I'll ask Officer Stein and his colleagues to escort the accused into the room so that we may all look upon the guilty party.
00:28:03Don't get him too close to me, please.
00:28:06This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious.
00:28:09It really was a very funny spoof, but unfortunately it was taken the wrong way.
00:28:21It was an insult, and I'm greatly offended, as are many, many witnesses, because a lot of people could have came forward.
00:28:29But instead, they became reclusive.
00:28:32They refused to talk about it because of this, because of the ridicule.
00:28:35I was angry over it because I know what I saw, and I did not like that kind of attitude.
00:28:44When this thing was over my house for five minutes, someone should care.
00:28:48Someone should care.
00:28:49That press conference, it really did upset a lot of people, and I regret that.
00:28:56But what really bothered me was that I knew more about the lights over Phoenix than I let on.
00:29:03And I should have talked more openly about my own experience sooner.
00:29:09On March 13th, I was having dinner with my family.
00:29:17We had the TV on, and I was well aware of the news about the UFO.
00:29:22So I said, I'm going to jump in my car, and I'm going to go down Lincoln Drive, Pasquale Peak, and see if I can see what's going on.
00:29:32When I got here, there were people milling around, just enjoying the park.
00:29:39And I was here for probably five or ten minutes, and somebody said, look at that, look at that.
00:29:44And out to the northwest, this great big massive craft, probably around three or four thousand feet, took out a whole chunk of the sky.
00:29:52And you could see other aircraft in the distance, but airplanes look like little toothpicks compared to the size of this craft.
00:30:02And it came right at us, made not a sound, and just moved almost sort of gently and smoothly, not that fast.
00:30:10It just glided over Squaw Peak.
00:30:14And we had a magnificent view of it, silhouetted.
00:30:17Governor Symington observes the object for nearly a minute before it speeds away across the valley.
00:30:25It just all of a sudden disappeared.
00:30:27You know, I served in the U.S. Air Force, and I've been flying all my adult life, and I've never seen anything like that before.
00:30:35It obviously had unbelievable aeronautical capabilities, something way beyond anything we have in our inventory, that's for sure.
00:30:43But I thought I'd best be quiet about it, because I'm the governor, and if I go start talking about it, it's going to create more hysteria, and one should not lose sight of the fact that I had a state to run.
00:30:55Symington maintained his silence throughout his second term.
00:30:59But now, nearly 15 years later, the former governor draws lessons for all public officials.
00:31:05I think, as far as government is concerned, we're sort of driven to always have an explanation for everything.
00:31:11And it's hard for government entities to say, you know, I don't know.
00:31:16You know, we can't explain it and admit to complete vulnerability.
00:31:21But I learned a hard lesson about this subject based on personal experience.
00:31:28Public officials need to be more open and more courageous in dealing with issues like this.
00:31:34We need to deal with it legitimately and objectively.
00:31:37And if we don't know what it was, then we should say, we don't know what it was.
00:31:41It's time to square up and do the right thing.
00:31:44The particulars of what was seen that March 1997 night are still avidly debated.
00:31:53And the Phoenix Lice case remains unsolved.
00:31:59But what is not in question is the case revealed an urgent need in UFO study.
00:32:04An official government process for receiving and investigating reports.
00:32:09As it stands now, for people in the United States, there is no official body for them to go to if some kind of event takes place, which they feel needs to be reported.
00:32:19And what's interesting is that in terms of the aviation community, the FAA has actually told its employees in its manual that if they see a UFO, they are not to tell the FAA about it.
00:32:31So they're actually saying right in their manual that we, the U.S. government, do not want to hear anything about UFO sightings.
00:32:39Pilots and people in the aviation community in particular make excellent witnesses.
00:32:45But very often when they see UFOs, they don't go on the record because they fear that their careers will suffer.
00:32:52And it's a real problem because it makes the case harder to report and it really limits the available data on the phenomenon.
00:33:00Without an official agency collecting sightings, coupled with the ridicule surrounding reports, it is impossible to accurately record the frequency and magnitude of UFO activity.
00:33:11But particularly in the aviation community, this risks a grave safety hazard.
00:33:17These unidentified flying objects are real. Mid-air collisions with our aircraft could be catastrophic.
00:33:23Less than a decade after the Phoenix lights, these issues are brought to light with the alleged incursion of a UFO into one of America's busiest airports.
00:33:41Several pilots and United Airlines workers swear they saw a UFO.
00:33:48Definitely it was not an airplane as we know it.
00:33:50UFO reports have exploded across the internet, making it more difficult than ever to weed out the credible from the questionable.
00:34:00In response, a handful of experts are applying rigorous investigative and scientific standards to evaluate evidence of this phenomena.
00:34:12One of these is veteran journalist Leslie Kane.
00:34:15I've been looking into the UFO subject for about ten years.
00:34:19Always focused on the hardcore factual information.
00:34:23Radar evidence, the photographic evidence, the physical evidence that had been studied in laboratories.
00:34:29And not on more conspiracy-oriented material that's floating out in the culture and all over the internet.
00:34:38In January of 2007, I was struck by an amazing story that was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.
00:34:45A number of employees of United Airlines witnessed a disc-shaped object.
00:34:50It looked like a metallic disc hovering over the United Airlines terminal, specifically over gate C-17.
00:34:57And this was at rush hour, a busy afternoon around 4, 4.30.
00:35:01It was seen by a lot of people on the ground.
00:35:04It was seen by pilots, by crew members, by managers, by people that were moving planes around.
00:35:10It was estimated to be about 22 to 88 feet.
00:35:13And they said that it was hovering over gate C-17 for at least five minutes.
00:35:18And then the thing suddenly just shot up, directly up through the cloud bank above it,
00:35:23and cut a crisp hole through it, very clean like a cookie cutter.
00:35:28The witnesses, trained aviation professionals, were confounded by what they had seen.
00:35:34I've been at O'Hare for quite some time.
00:35:37And I'll tell you definitely it was not an airplane as we know it.
00:35:42The O'Hare case adds to the growing mountain of UFO data, echoing the common characteristics of earlier UFO sightings.
00:35:51It was a disc-shaped object that hovers silently and accelerates instantly to unknown speeds.
00:36:00But the most critical piece of evidence is yet to be revealed.
00:36:12Several months after the incident, Kane obtains a copy of the control tower tapes,
00:36:17which includes a never before heard recording of a United Airlines supervisor calling in to report the sighting.
00:36:24Okay, I'm sorry, what can I do for you?
00:36:27Oh yeah, all right.
00:36:28There was, I told Dave there was a disc flying outside above Charlie 17,
00:36:32and he thought I was pretty much high.
00:36:34But, um, I'm not high and I'm not drinking.
00:36:37Yeah.
00:36:38Someone actually has a picture of it, so if you guys see it out there.
00:36:40A disc?
00:36:41Like a Frisbee?
00:36:42Like a UFO type thing.
00:36:47Yeah, okay.
00:36:48I'm okay.
00:36:49This is, you know, very, very important evidence.
00:36:56It shows that there was something there, it was reported to the tower,
00:36:59but it was still treated like some kind of a joke.
00:37:02And I believe that that's at least partly due to the FAA policy of discouraging UFO reports.
00:37:09Even though this was in restricted airspace, a busy airport in the middle of rush hour,
00:37:13and nobody knew what this thing was going to do.
00:37:16I mean, this was a serious hazard.
00:37:18So the FAA initially didn't say anything.
00:37:22But once these tapes were released, they had to say something.
00:37:25Under public pressure, the FAA releases a cursory explanation two months after the sighting.
00:37:32Well, the first thing that the FAA told people was that this was some kind of light reflection off the bottom of the cloud bank.
00:37:38They said it was the airport lights can do funny things on the clouds.
00:37:42But the problem is the airport lights had not even been turned on yet.
00:37:46The second explanation that the FAA gave was that it was a weather phenomenon, most likely what is called a hole punch cloud.
00:37:55A hole punch cloud is a natural phenomenon that is caused by ice crystals falling from above a cloud down to a cloud bank below and melting a hole in the cloud.
00:38:06The problem is you have to have freezing temperatures for this to occur.
00:38:11Well, we know for a fact that it was too warm at O'Hare that day.
00:38:15The temperatures were not below freezing at the level of the cloud bank.
00:38:18So it is an absolute physical impossibility for that event to have been caused by a hole punch cloud.
00:38:27Ultimately, the O'Hare case and the FAA response to it are typical of how the US government handles UFO sightings.
00:38:38First, they avoid having to talk about it at all, but if that becomes impossible, the authorities will just throw out whatever explanation they think might fit whether it's plausible or not.
00:38:48And it's a real problem. This has happened countless times for decades. It's a standard operating procedure for cases like this.
00:39:00Despite the current situation, there was a period in US history where open scientific study was encouraged. Sightings were actually welcomed by the government.
00:39:09For the past three years, a large number of perfectly sane and reliable people have been involved in this flying saucer business.
00:39:18We read about them, talk about them, wonder about these reports of strange phenomena in the skies.
00:39:24I am inclined to believe that it's of an extraterrestrial origin.
00:39:32Back in the 50s and 60s, there were a lot of sightings that were being reported.
00:39:36There was a lot of coverage in the media and officials could not figure out what was going on.
00:39:41And it was during the Cold War.
00:39:43So there was heightened concern in the general public about unexplained things in the sky.
00:39:48So the US government set up an agency within the Air Force called Project Blue Book.
00:39:53And its purpose was to take reports from the public and to investigate cases.
00:39:57Project Blue Book officially launches in 1952, with its five-person staff receiving over 1,500 reports in the first year alone.
00:40:10I was driving north on 101 highway at about three o'clock in the afternoon.
00:40:15I noticed a terrific blue flag had those in my airplane.
00:40:19I looked to my right, and there in the sky were three tubes of fluorescent light.
00:40:26And it went over me, practically right over my head.
00:40:30The object traveled in a straight line.
00:40:32I counted eight of them, proceeding directly out to sea.
00:40:35And I began to hear a hissing, whistling sort of a sound.
00:40:38A beautiful, silvery, pink-tinged moonlight.
00:40:43Between 1952 and 1969, Blue Book receives over 12,000 UFO reports, nearly 800 of which are unresolved.
00:40:55It is soon clear that the scope of the UFO phenomenon is far greater than the small Air Force office can handle.
00:41:02Blue Book was plagued from the start.
00:41:05It was understaffed, incompetent in certain ways, and eventually it just became like a public relations exercise for the Air Force.
00:41:12So in 1966, it was decided that its future would hinge on a government-funded study commissioned at the University of Colorado.
00:41:21The university study is headed by Dr. Edward Condon, physicist and former head of the National Bureau of Standards.
00:41:30Condon was biased against UFOs from the beginning.
00:41:34In fact, in a 1967 article, he was quoted as saying,
00:41:37My attitude is there's nothing to it.
00:41:40But I'm not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year.
00:41:44The Condon report is completed in 1968 and includes some valuable analysis of unresolved UFO cases in its nearly 1,500 pages.
00:41:55But that goes largely ignored in favor of the two-page summary written by Condon himself,
00:42:00which declares that further scientific study of UFOs is unwarranted.
00:42:06In 1969, the Air Force announces the termination of Project Blue Book, effective the following month.
00:42:13Since then, the report has been cited countless times by officials and scientists to justify dismissal of UFO study.
00:42:20It's really a tragedy. I mean, this was the only official investigation by our government.
00:42:27When it closed, the golden age of UFO study in America was over.
00:42:32Since 1970, many cases have challenged the assertions behind the close of Blue Book.
00:42:44But a 1986 sighting near Anchorage, Alaska would produce standout evidence that demands to be taken seriously.
00:42:51In this case, a captain with 30 years of flight experience puts his reputation on the line
00:43:06by reporting an enormous craft that follows him for nearly an hour.
00:43:10An encounter that would yield the longest recorded data of a UFO to date.
00:43:14Hard evidence that would be brought all the way to the White House.
00:43:18They were all excited about it.
00:43:20So I said, what do you think it is?
00:43:22He says, well, it's a UFO.
00:43:25My name is Richard Haynes, and I have been a research scientist for NASA since 1967.
00:43:37My interest in unidentified aerial phenomena goes back 30 years at least.
00:43:43When I was a skeptic, I was just quite convinced that I could explain the phenomenon.
00:43:49But I had an opportunity to talk with commercial pilots who would come in to fly our simulators.
00:43:56And once in a while, a pilot would tell me this remarkable story that had happened to him.
00:44:02And over the years, I began to realize that I was wrong, that I could not explain the phenomenon.
00:44:09So in the 1970s, I began collecting face-to-face pilot interviews, sometimes in the cockpit of the airplane.
00:44:17Sometimes we would re-fly an actual encounter.
00:44:20And so far, I have collected over 3,000 sightings from virtually every country of the world.
00:44:27And quite a number of them were very serious.
00:44:30These would qualify as near-miss by FAA standards.
00:44:34And so, looking at air safety is our concern.
00:44:37We formed NARCAP, the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena.
00:44:49NARCAP is a reporting center for pilots and air traffic controllers
00:44:55who would like to make a report of their sightings in a completely confidential manner.
00:45:00This is very important because a lot of pilots are afraid for their careers.
00:45:05They believe that they will be ridiculed.
00:45:08And the implication is that if you see something in flight,
00:45:11you're not competent to fly the airplane, which is absurd.
00:45:15We've got to turn that situation around.
00:45:19Yeah, that's 1-2 again. Some other equipment over here.
00:45:21We have confirmed there is a flight size of 2 around here, 1-5-5-0, squawk.
00:45:25Where is he home? It looks like he is, yes.
00:45:28In 1986, NARCAP learns of a sighting near Anchorage, Alaska,
00:45:33that would become one of the best-known pilot cases on record.
00:45:37A key investigator on this case is former FAA Division Chief John Callahan.
00:45:43I was the division manager for the Accidents, Investigations and Evaluation Division, FAA Headquarters.
00:45:52The rule was if anything came up that was newsworthy or was an accident,
00:45:55we had to know before the smoke cleared.
00:45:58Sometime in January of 87, I received a call from the Alaskan region.
00:46:04Apparently a UFO had chased this Japanese 747 across the skies for like 31 minutes.
00:46:11Somehow the media found out about it and now they want more information.
00:46:14They didn't know what to tell them.
00:46:16I said, tell them it's under investigation.
00:46:21I told them to package up all the data, the voice tapes, the computer tapes, the military tapes,
00:46:25and send them overnight delivery on the Red Eye flight to the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City.
00:46:31Callahan assembles a team of FAA analysts who synchronize the radar with the pilot's radio transmissions.
00:46:38The result is recorded on this video by Chief Callahan
00:46:42and becomes an essential clue in unraveling the case.
00:46:46Captain Kenju Teruchi, a senior captain for Japan Airlines flying a 747 cargo flight from Paris to Tokyo.
00:47:15I saw a military test of some advanced nature.
00:47:20When he looked at his airborne radar, he saw a large target, 7, 8, 9, 10 miles in front of him.
00:47:27And the first thing he did is he called the FAA and wanted to know if they had any traffic up there for him.
00:47:33Japan Air 1628 Air, sir, if you're able to identify the type of aircraft,
00:47:38if you can tell whether it's military or civilian.
00:47:41Japan Air 1628 Air, sir, if you're able to identify the type of aircraft,
00:47:50but we can see navigation right and navigation right.
00:47:58Viewing this one-of-a-kind radar evidence,
00:48:00Callahan's team is able to confirm the unidentified target near Teruchi's plane.
00:48:05But it is this never-before-heard interview conducted by Dr. Haynes with the Japanese pilot
00:48:11that illustrates the extraordinary details of the craft.
00:48:14What he told me was remarkable.
00:48:17It was a huge object, something far bigger than his own airplane.
00:48:22Big walnut shaped as large as three or four aircraft carriers.
00:48:27Had lights coming from it.
00:48:29And small craft coming and going from the bigger craft.
00:48:33How long did it take to move from the 12 o'clock position?
00:48:44Captain Teruchi made no excuse for being afraid.
00:48:48He said he was fearful.
00:48:50The captain and his first officer were expecting a collision and were bracing themselves.
00:48:57That's how serious this was.
00:49:00The Anchorage controller clearly takes the sighting seriously
00:49:03because his next step is to confirm the unidentified target
00:49:06with nearby Elmendorf Air Force Base.
00:49:10It looks like I am getting some search for my return.
00:49:13I don't know if it's erroneous or whatever.
00:49:16It's not erroneous.
00:49:17I want you to keep a good track of the aircraft.
00:49:19You can pick up a code.
00:49:21You do not have any aircraft operating in that area.
00:49:24That is firm.
00:49:25We do not have anybody up there right now.
00:49:28The military guy sees those targets.
00:49:31The controller working the radar sees these targets.
00:49:34According to the pilot, there's a great big ship out here,
00:49:37and that stays with them for a while.
00:49:43Jupiter 16, 28 heavy.
00:49:45Sir, I'm going to request you to make a right 360 degree turn.
00:49:48And advise me what your traffic does then.
00:49:50Flight turn, please, please.
00:49:54As Captain Torucci was approaching Fairbanks,
00:49:57he received permission to carry out a 360 degree turn.
00:50:01He wanted to try to get away from that object
00:50:04that was on his left-hand side.
00:50:06His supposition was that the object would continue in a straight flight,
00:50:10and he would bank to the right and leave it behind.
00:50:13Oh yeah, it was just a good-finding person.
00:50:14That's the exact one.
00:50:15No.
00:50:24Yup.
00:50:25And, basically it was the key to the right and wait.
00:50:28The sight behindę°£ļæ½ I had shot,
00:50:29so I'll stop hearing.
00:50:31Oh yeah.
00:50:32Yes, I had no idea how to move.
00:50:34That huge space I that quadruple is just walking with.
00:50:36That's fine.
00:50:37Yeah, there's 1-2 again.
00:50:41Some other equipment over here.
00:50:42We have confirmed there's a flight size of 2 around 1550, Squawk.
00:50:45Where is he?
00:50:46It looks like he is, yes.
00:50:50As Terrucci continued the 360-degree turn,
00:50:54the object traveled around the circle with him,
00:50:56which is very interesting because it has to be going faster than that airplane to keep up.
00:51:03So the phenomenon had to be under good control,
00:51:06perhaps intelligent control,
00:51:09to maintain precise station with that airplane.
00:51:12The pilot sees it, his co-pilot sees it.
00:51:15The military base and the Anchorage controller track it on radar.
00:51:20And a United Airlines passenger jet flying nearby also reports unknown traffic in the area.
00:51:26In all, the Alaska sighting shares many characteristics with the most credible UFO cases,
00:51:32including Rendlesham, Phoenix, and Chicago.
00:51:34It is a massive disc-shaped object that moves as if under intelligent control
00:51:41and is capable of accelerating instantly to unknown speeds.
00:51:45And most remarkably, the encounter lasts nearly 55 minutes over a span of 350 miles,
00:51:55providing the FAA with significant amounts of data.
00:51:58I had the analysts put together a chart that would explain every hit around the 747.
00:52:09And even a blind man could see there was a target there.
00:52:12But I'm thinking it's the stealth bomber, figuring who believes in UFOs.
00:52:17When Callahan returns to Washington,
00:52:20a meeting is arranged with the White House scientific team to review the materials.
00:52:24There was three scientists from Reagan's staff.
00:52:27There was three guys that said they were with the CIA.
00:52:30And I played the tape three times for them.
00:52:33Ram 4-3, your best radar is dead.
00:52:35Serves are worth 7,000.
00:52:36When the video got done, they were all excited about it.
00:52:39They're drooling.
00:52:40They can't wait to get their hands on all this data.
00:52:42This is the first time they ever had more than a few minutes of radar data to go through.
00:52:49And then the CIA guy, he steps forward and he says,
00:52:53this event, pointing to the TV monitor, never happened.
00:52:58We were never here.
00:53:01We're confiscating all this data, and you're all sworn to secrecy.
00:53:06So I said, what do you think it is?
00:53:09I'm still thinking it's the stealth bomber.
00:53:11He says, well, it's a UFO.
00:53:14Two months after Callahan's meeting,
00:53:16the FAA releases an official explanation for the sighting,
00:53:19which, like the Phoenix and Chicago cases,
00:53:21seeks to explain away the phenomenon.
00:53:24They said it was a split beacon.
00:53:25It was a ghost target.
00:53:27It was ring-around.
00:53:28It never happened.
00:53:30But the Japanese pilots do not see ghost targets.
00:53:33They don't see ring-around.
00:53:34They don't see split beacons.
00:53:36We only see a dot or a slash on radar.
00:53:39You have to rely on the pilot telling you what's there.
00:53:48Captain Turucci decides to go public with his encounter,
00:53:52at great personal risk to his reputation.
00:53:54Because of his willingness to fill out the forms and be interviewed in great depth,
00:54:01Japan Airlines decided that he should no longer fly.
00:54:05And so Captain Turucci was asked to fly a desk, as they say.
00:54:09This case illustrates what's at stake.
00:54:11Until the U.S. government changes its policy on UFO sightings,
00:54:16witnesses are always going to be afraid to come forward with critical and important evidence.
00:54:21This is how science progresses,
00:54:24is to allow people to openly and honestly describe what they're seeing.
00:54:30We're never going to get to the bottom of this phenomenon until we have an open disclosure.
00:54:35These days, if you go on to sites like YouTube,
00:54:44you'll see all sorts of videos of UFOs.
00:54:47And there's a huge amount of fake videos,
00:54:51photos which have been mocked up with various computer programs.
00:54:54I mean, it's almost impossible these days to pick out the signal from amidst the noise.
00:55:01And the only pictures that are really important
00:55:04are the ones that have been so thoroughly analyzed and vetted
00:55:07that we know that they are a genuine, unidentified flying object.
00:55:15One of the most viewed UFO videos on the web,
00:55:18with over 17 million YouTube hits, is this clip,
00:55:21claimed to have been shot in 2007 in Haiti.
00:55:27Along with other recent images submitted online,
00:55:29it has UFO watchers buzzing.
00:55:35But with advances in special effects software,
00:55:38it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between real and faked images,
00:55:42making experts in the visual effects community a valuable voice on the subject.
00:55:49I'm Doug Trumbull.
00:55:50I make movies that have to do with science fiction, special effects.
00:55:54I worked on 2001 A Space Odyssey,
00:55:56Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
00:55:58Blade Runner,
00:55:59Star Trek The Motion Picture.
00:56:01And so I do motherships and spaceships and UFOs for a living.
00:56:07We have a situation right now
00:56:09where everybody who has a laptop can make a fake UFO.
00:56:13I can make a fake UFO on my cell phone.
00:56:16I mean, it's just all over the place.
00:56:18My personal belief is that I'm convinced that there is something very real.
00:56:24But I've never seen a photograph that I couldn't duplicate or fake digitally or optically or photographically
00:56:30and make it look just like that.
00:56:33And so I'm my own worst enemy in that respect because I know what's possible.
00:56:37On break from his latest project,
00:56:40Trumbull shares his opinion on the authenticity of the 2007 Haiti video.
00:56:45I think it's really good.
00:56:47I don't buy it as a real UFO or UFOs.
00:56:50But I think it's a pretty well done special effect
00:56:52because they're doing very dynamic camera moves.
00:56:55They're matching the irregular movement of the camera to the movement of the object.
00:56:59They seem to have kind of aircraft-like ballistic trajectories
00:57:03that all kind of make sense, like they're flying in formation.
00:57:05But there are a number of things happening here that kind of give away the illusion to a certain extent.
00:57:12Let me just freeze on this.
00:57:14You know, look at these two palm trees.
00:57:16They're identical.
00:57:18That front, this front, that front, that front.
00:57:21These are actually a photocomposite of one palm tree put in two places.
00:57:25So it's really the same palm tree twice.
00:57:29That doesn't happen in nature.
00:57:30It's absolutely impossible.
00:57:32There's other things that happen, like when this thing goes through the trees,
00:57:35even though this seems to be an extremely bright light,
00:57:38it's not affecting these fronds at all.
00:57:41There should be more light happening up in the fronds of the tree
00:57:44so you get a little twinkly light and some interaction, but there isn't any.
00:57:48Because that's a much harder thing to do.
00:57:51So good job, but I don't buy it.
00:57:55While vacationers with video cameras may stumble upon irrefutable proof of UFOs in the future,
00:58:06there are already images of the phenomenon that have been scientifically tested and widely accepted.
00:58:19The Belgian sightings of the late 1980s and early 90s are some of the most widespread in history.
00:58:25With over 2,000 well-documented and researched reports by pilots, police, and military professionals.
00:58:32I thought this is an intrusion over airspace.
00:58:36We have to find out because it's an air defense issue.
00:58:40The 18-month epidemic of UFO sightings rattles the Belgian government
00:58:45and brings the scientific community its most conclusive piece of UFO evidence to date.
00:58:50I look at it and said, oh my God, that's too much.
00:58:55My feeling at the time, I must admit, it was a fake.
00:58:59This is the Belgian wave.
00:59:03My name is Patrick Ferrin, and I was one of the two co-founders of SOBEPS,
00:59:26which is a non-profit association devoted to the study of aerial space phenomenon.
00:59:34In 1989, the situation was very quiet here in Belgium concerning UFOs.
00:59:41So quiet that we decided to close the association because there was no sighting anymore.
00:59:48And all of a sudden, strange things started to happen in the area of Eupen.
00:59:57And this was, historically speaking, the beginning of the Belgian UFO wave.
01:00:03I was the dispatcher at the Eupen police station.
01:00:33At around 5.30 p.m., a team of police officers informed Kreutz of an object flying over a nearby field
01:00:42and purportedly lighting it up like a soccer stadium.
01:00:51I joked with them, since it was the end of November, that it was St. Nicholas coming down.
01:00:57Then they screamed, look out your top floor window and you'll see it.
01:01:03I go to the window, and I see the object about 200 or 300 meters in front of me,
01:01:16like a boat floating in the sky.
01:01:20It was magnificent to see.
01:01:28And it made me think that we are not alone on this Earth, in the universe.
01:01:33I found it beautiful.
01:01:43Immediately, the dispatcher is flooded with calls from concerned citizens.
01:01:47So he orders local officers stationed nearby to follow the object.
01:01:56One of these is Dieter Plumens, chief inspector of the Kalmas police force.
01:02:01Plumens is on duty with his partner, catching drug dealers near the Netherlands border when the call comes in.
01:02:07When we heard the call on the radio, we were driving in this direction.
01:02:16We saw a light or some type of object resting over the town of Henri Chapelle.
01:02:23And we asked ourselves, what is that?
01:02:26I told them to pursue the object and observe it.
01:02:35So they followed it to Henri Chapelle, where the object hovered motionless over the Beloye retirement home.
01:02:41I think this is pretty much the exact spot where we stopped at the time.
01:02:53We saw a huge object above us with round lights on three corners.
01:03:03And at some point, a much smaller object flew out from behind.
01:03:06And it had a reddish blinking light that blinked in rhythm with the larger light.
01:03:14Plumens and his partner observed the objects for several minutes.
01:03:18And then suddenly, the red orb is reeled back into the larger craft.
01:03:24The object then rose up and flew away.
01:03:26Kreutz and Plumens' accounts are among the many that began to flood in that night.
01:03:38In all, a total of 13 police officers called in reports of an unidentified triangular craft
01:03:44spotted in eight different locations around UPIN.
01:03:48Over 60 additional civilian reports are made that evening,
01:03:52producing a concentrated mass of sightings
01:03:54that would soon bring international media attention
01:03:57and compel the Belgian government to respond.
01:04:00It was really an historic night
01:04:01because the sighting reports were also similar.
01:04:05But the big surprise was that this was only the beginning.
01:04:08The day after November 29, it was a huge covering in the media.
01:04:32It was on TV. It was in the newspaper, everywhere.
01:04:38And immediately, we took our car and we went to UPIN to interview the people who saw it.
01:04:45We collected one hundred and fifty different sightings from the same area.
01:04:50We collected one hundred and fifty different sightings from the same area.
01:04:55describing almost the same thing.
01:05:02So what's in the same thing?
01:05:03So what's in the form of a triangle?
01:05:05A triangle?
01:05:06A triangle?
01:05:07A triangle?
01:05:08A triangle?
01:05:09Yes.
01:05:10A triangle?
01:05:11Dark object.
01:05:12different sightings from the same area, describing almost the same thing.
01:05:25A huge, triangular, dark object.
01:05:42What is very interesting is that triangular object wasn't reported at the time, in 1989.
01:05:52At the time, in ufology, people were speaking about flying saucers, discs, something like that,
01:06:01but not a triangular, dark-shaped object. This was new.
01:06:06The Belgian sightings of November 29th garner international attention,
01:06:15prompting an immediate response from the government.
01:06:18A point man is assigned to head up the government inquiry.
01:06:22Major General Wilfrid de Brouwer, head of operations for the Belgian air staff.
01:06:27In 1989, I was in charge of protection of the airspace of the country,
01:06:32when a total of 143 sightings were reported in the area of Ćpen.
01:06:40When receiving such report at military level, a lot of officers were rejected,
01:06:46because it's not in their terms of reference. It's frustrating.
01:06:50It's frustrating having to declare that you don't know what is going on.
01:06:55So, when it came to my office, I wanted to react the same way,
01:07:00but I thought, this is an intrusion over airspace.
01:07:04We are the country hosting NATO.
01:07:07We have to find out, because it's an air defense issue.
01:07:12De Brouwer's first action is to contact the U.S. Embassy to find out if any stealth flights
01:07:18had taken place in the area without warning them.
01:07:21Now, they came back very quickly and confirmed formally that no such flights had taken place over Belgium.
01:07:30So that wiped out that theory.
01:07:34But the sightings continue, including many cases where several people were involved in a single sighting.
01:07:41Police officers, military and government personnel, and an Air Force weather forecaster.
01:07:46Highly credible witnesses, all of them convinced that they saw something exceptional.
01:07:53One of the cases that most intrigues De Brouwer occurs just two weeks after the initial sightings,
01:08:00when several witnesses report a triangular-shaped craft near the rural town of Ernauge.
01:08:06De Brouwer is particularly struck by the account of Colonel AndrƩ Amand,
01:08:10a civil engineer who is also director of infrastructure for the Belgian army.
01:08:15I was driving from my house, my wife by my side, to go pick up my son at the Jean Bleu train station.
01:08:21I noticed three yellow panels moving parallel with me beside the road.
01:08:28Under them was a pulsating red light.
01:08:30I did not understand what it was.
01:08:35My wife said it's probably just a plane.
01:08:39But I wanted to see it, so I slowed down.
01:08:43And the object stayed with my car.
01:08:48So I accelerated and slowed down two or three more times.
01:08:52And every time the UFO would catch up with me.
01:08:56Then the UFO traveled behind the Saranej woods.
01:09:00So I turned left and stopped on a small hill in front of a farm.
01:09:09The UFO came out from behind the woods, over there.
01:09:14I saw a huge, bright white beacon come over until it was about a hundred meters in front of us.
01:09:19You could hear traffic on the highway and a train going by about one kilometer away.
01:09:27But at no point could you hear any noise coming from this object only one hundred meters in front of us.
01:09:35We observed it for six to eight minutes.
01:09:39And then my wife says, AndrƩ, come on, get in the car. I don't like this.
01:09:44And at that point, the great white beacon retreats and it darts away to the southwest.
01:09:50And about the time it takes to let out a breath.
01:09:56In my experience, that kind of acceleration requires a very large amount of energy.
01:10:01That wouldn't be possible without materials that could super conduct at a low temperature.
01:10:08And today, 20 years later, I know one thing.
01:10:10There is no man-made object able to do what I saw that object do that day.
01:10:16Not then and still not now.
01:10:19It's impossible.
01:10:22Colonel Oman sends a report to the Ministry of Defense.
01:10:26And as one of the many military professionals who convinces the Belgian government, action was necessary.
01:10:32We decided to set up a procedure to launch in the future aircraft to try to identify these sightings, but on conditions.
01:10:46First of all, witnesses would report to the police.
01:10:49They would confirm the sighting, and then they would call a radar station which had the authority to scramble F-16s.
01:10:58I am Eve Milbergs.
01:11:05In 1990, I flew F-16s in the 350th squadron in Belgium.
01:11:12We had heard about the wave of UFOs, particularly in the regions of LiĆØge and Yupin.
01:11:24On the evening of March 30th, 1990, Milberg's unit is informed of a string of UFO sightings around the town of Louvain.
01:11:38We immediately took off in formation, two F-16s flying east of Brussels.
01:11:51Our goal was to intercept or come as close as possible to the objects and try to identify it as best we could.
01:11:58The speed at which the object was moving, the large variations in altitude and course were particularly unique.
01:12:19In air combat, we're used to seeing objects move very quickly.
01:12:25But in this case, the object's variations were unforeseen,
01:12:29which proved that we were dealing with an object very different from an aircraft.
01:12:34Don't do contact.
01:12:35The speed at which the object's
01:12:45Right.
01:12:46This time we saw the object's vector, 300 degrees,
01:12:48and 999 degrees.
01:12:54The velocity of a normal aircraft at this altitude is the range of 350-400 degrees.
01:13:00Under pressure from a hungry press in public, de Brouwer holds a press conference to discuss Milberg's flight.
01:13:13The F-16 has registered objects that were flying at a normal speed,
01:13:19but suddenly turning and accelerating to speeds which were much higher than the speed of sound.
01:13:25Now, this cannot be done by any conventional aircraft.
01:13:38Fortunately, only one of the F-16 radar tapes provided sufficient information to analyze,
01:13:44which meant that we couldn't compare the tapes to exclude electromagnetic interference,
01:13:50which is a reflection of an object, sometimes on the ground,
01:13:55that can go through the atmosphere and bounce back to the F-16 radar.
01:14:00Due to the failure of the secondary radar recording, government officials cannot verify the pilot's account.
01:14:12But Milberg's remains convinced.
01:14:15Personally, I believe there was an object at that location that day.
01:14:20We had ground witnesses, radar stations, and airplanes.
01:14:25Three different sources watching the same object at the same time in the same place.
01:14:32There was something in the air that night.
01:14:35The individual sightings of the Belgian wave are remarkable,
01:14:42and impressed de Brouwer and other investigators with their legitimacy.
01:14:46But what they didn't have was something irrefutable,
01:14:48a piece of evidence that would bring this fully into the realm of science.
01:14:52On a spring evening in a village not far from where it all began,
01:14:56this evidence would finally arrive, and the results would be more than they had imagined.
01:15:01My feeling at the time, I must admit, it was a fake.
01:15:10More than a year after the Belgian wave began,
01:15:12UFO reports continue to flood the office of Sobapp's co-founder, Patrick Ferrand.
01:15:18For almost 18 months, we collected massive observations,
01:15:23and we met several hundred people.
01:15:26We collected something like 60 photographs of unidentified flying things,
01:15:35and almost the same amount of video films.
01:15:39But unfortunately, they're all very bad.
01:15:43All you can see is small dots of lights on a dark background.
01:15:49But we were lucky to find one good picture.
01:15:58And this picture was taken in the small village of Petit-Rochin,
01:16:03which is not that far from Yupen.
01:16:08The fall of April 1990, at 10 o'clock in the evening,
01:16:12the girl was walking her dog in the garden, and she saw a very strange object.
01:16:22She came back in and told her boyfriend,
01:16:24we have something strange here, can you come and have a look?
01:16:27And he went out, and he took his camera.
01:16:32He only had two pictures left, so he leaned against the wall,
01:16:36it didn't move at all, and set an exposure time of about one to two seconds.
01:16:41He took two pictures, and when he got his film developed,
01:16:46he saw that one of the two pictures was blank,
01:16:49there was nothing on it, so he threw it away.
01:16:52But the second one was interesting.
01:16:54He saw three lights, and something reddish right in the middle.
01:16:59But that was all.
01:17:01I received the original at the time.
01:17:08I looked at it and said, oh my God, that's too much.
01:17:14My feeling at the time, I must admit, it was a fake.
01:17:19So, I built a small model,
01:17:22and I tried to reproduce what was on the slide.
01:17:26And I immediately understood that it was not a model.
01:17:35So, we decided to see someone who was an expert in digital analysis.
01:17:41Someone who had the right tools to detect and to prove it was a fake or not.
01:17:48The slide is put under an intensive year-long study by Professor Mark Ashawa,
01:17:55a nuclear physicist at the Royal Military Academy in Brussels.
01:18:00Professor Ashawa's analysis of the blue component of the slide
01:18:05showed that one side of the triangular object is perfectly in focus,
01:18:11but two other sides are blurred.
01:18:14This proves that there is an independent movement of the object.
01:18:20It was not a fake.
01:18:23The slide is further analyzed by scientists around the world,
01:18:27including Professor AndrƩ Marion,
01:18:29a nuclear physicist at the University of Paris-Sud.
01:18:32Professor Marion discovered that there was a magnetic field around that object
01:18:38because he observed a pattern like iron filings behave in a magnetic field.
01:18:47Professor Marion's findings trigger speculation that the craft may have moved
01:18:51using a magnetoplasma dynamic propulsion system,
01:18:54an electrically powered engine that uses a magnetic field to generate thrust.
01:18:59Such a system could also account for the lack of wind and noise reported by witnesses.
01:19:05In the history of UFO study,
01:19:08the Petit Rechin photograph stands out
01:19:10as one of the most convincing pieces of evidence of a sighting to date.
01:19:14Not only does it reinforce thousands of reports from across Belgium,
01:19:18but it reveals many shared attributes of the most credible UFO cases.
01:19:22It is a triangular craft that moves silently
01:19:27and accelerates instantly to unknown speeds.
01:19:30And what's interesting about the Belgian sightings is that we in the UK had a very similar wave of sightings three years afterwards.
01:19:43Many of the witnesses talk about a large triangular shaped UFO with three lights on the underside of the craft,
01:19:51and a larger, slightly dimmer light in the center.
01:19:56So it's clear that in both cases, governments are looking at this
01:20:00and are coming to the conclusion that we are dealing with a real phenomenon.
01:20:08The Belgian wave is remarkable not just for the sheer number of sightings, over 2,000,
01:20:13but for how well they were reported and officially investigated.
01:20:18It lasted for almost 18 months, and all of a sudden, everything stopped.
01:20:27Of the 2,000 reported cases, 650 were investigated,
01:20:32and out of the 650, 500, 500 remain unexplained.
01:20:41The question remains open, what is it?
01:20:43And I don't know the answer, that's for sure.
01:20:46I can only say what it was not.
01:20:49It was no aircraft, no helicopter, no blim, no zeppelin, no ULM, no RPV, you just name it.
01:20:58The Belgian wave remains a mystery.
01:21:01And even now, 20 years later, witnesses are left with more questions than answers.
01:21:08I'm frustrated, because after 20 years, no one has a valid explanation.
01:21:15Indeed, there were two objects in the sky.
01:21:20We have no other explanation.
01:21:23I had never seen such a flying object before that day or since then.
01:21:28And to this day, I still don't know what it was.
01:21:32Is it something extraterrestrial? Could be.
01:21:36I can only say what I saw.
01:21:37For the thousands of witnesses in the Belgian wave, and many others who have documented their encounters at military bases, major airports, or in the skies above our cities, there is but one conclusion.
01:21:59There is something out there, and we need to take it seriously.
01:22:08The difficulty, of course, of studying UFOs, if in fact they are manifestations of some advanced civilization, is that we are more or less in the same position of, let's say, laboratory mice attempting to understand the civilization of biology technicians in the laboratory.
01:22:23It is just beyond our imagination.
01:22:27And Arthur C. Clarke said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
01:22:35History is filled with accounts of new phenomena, poorly understood phenomena, that have been ridiculed, made fun of.
01:22:47Why? Because science hasn't had a chance to look into it, or won't look into it for various reasons.
01:22:54We've got to turn that situation around.
01:22:57We have this propensity in our culture to ridicule UFO sightings.
01:23:03It's a problem, and we need to be more mature about it in this country.
01:23:07You know, it's not all aircraft lights and weather balloons and hoaxes. There is a genuine phenomenon here.
01:23:16Something that the scientific community should want to look at.
01:23:21It should want to engage on this. I mean, potentially, it has incredible things to teach us.
01:23:28We have to keep in mind that our civilization is only about 40,000 years old, which is a blink in the lifetime of our galaxy.
01:23:42So we are babes in the woods.
01:23:45And with 200 billion stars, that adds up to an enormous number of planets, including, we now know, Earth-sized planets.
01:23:53So the potentiality for life out there does seem to be very great indeed.
01:24:02We have very, very sophisticated analytical techniques that are being used all over the universe now to look at planets, stars, nebulosities.
01:24:10But I started asking them, I said, well, has anybody done a really sophisticated, technologically astute approach to photographing UFOs?
01:24:21So that you could really get, you know, what I sometimes call the Zapruder film of UFO sightings?
01:24:26And the answer was no.
01:24:28So in that vacuum, I decided to undertake what has become kind of a hobby project for me.
01:24:32I've started applying very sophisticated digital motion controls and tracking technology that we use in special effects, some of which we developed during the making of Close Encounters, to try to photograph a UFO.
01:24:45Trumbull's project known as UFOtog, or UFO photography, uses precisely calibrated cameras and radio antennas to record images and data in the night sky.
01:24:57By simultaneously observing the same area from multiple vantage points, Trumbull's equipment can pinpoint the speed, trajectory and altitude of any recorded object,
01:25:08and more accurately, determine if it is a conventional aircraft.
01:25:11My plan is to make imagery that would be scientifically valid and that could be scrutinized, just like the Zapruder film, to where really good scientific photo-optical analysts could look at them and say, well, this is exactly what happened.
01:25:28Taking a two-second dark exposure.
01:25:30And I think over the next few years, it's unlikely that we won't encounter some evidence of intelligent life in the universe.
01:25:36I just think it's going to happen and it's probably going to happen fairly soon.
01:25:41And I'd like to be part of that.
01:25:47It's really an exciting time to be involved with UFO research.
01:25:51And there seems to be greater chances that we're going to capture even more solid data.
01:25:56But we also have to be extremely careful to hold it to the absolute highest standards.
01:26:02We do not have anybody up there right now.
01:26:03I was driving north on 101.
01:26:04In these, the most credible UFO cases of our generation, we have heard first-hand accounts that defy dismissal.
01:26:16A NATO-based commander, an FAA division chief, decorated pilots, police officers, a former governor, all have put their reputations on the line to deliver testimony that they, at first, were unwilling to accept.
01:26:30Together with the evidence collected, from radar data to photographs to never-before-heard audio recordings, these sightings present a case that cannot be ignored.
01:26:51It's the accumulation of overwhelming evidence from pilots, generals, government officials, that prove, in my opinion, that we have an actual physical phenomenon that has not been explained.
01:27:08It's time to embrace this information and the new reports much more openly.
01:27:13The command pilot of this particular flight, he was scared to death, he's not sure what it was.
01:27:18It was the shape of a boomerang.
01:27:20Huge, triangular object.
01:27:22As large as three or four aircraft carriers.
01:27:25And it came right at us.
01:27:27Made not a sin.
01:27:28Definitely was under some type of intelligent control.
01:27:31It's coming its way.
01:27:32It is definitely coming its way.
01:27:34Green tubes are fluorescent light.
01:27:37Dark gray oval.
01:27:38Like a UFO track thing.
01:27:39It looked like someone had poked a hole in the clouds.
01:27:42It just all of a sudden disappeared.
01:27:44There is no doubt about it.
01:27:45This is weird.
Be the first to comment