Original subtitles

- [Narrator] Everything we know about UFOs is changing,

thanks to a team led

by former Pentagon UFO Investigator Lue Elizondo.

- That is real, whatever that is.

- [Narrator] And former

Top Intelligence Official Chris Mellon.

- This is occurring, a continuing phenomenon.

It's happening, it continues to happen.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] They discovered five unique characteristics

that UFOs have in common they call the five observables,

and release ground-breaking videos.

- [Narrator] That forced the Navy to admit its pilots

were coming face-to-face with unidentified objects.

- [Reporter] The US Navy made a shocking admission today.

- [Journalist] Strange flying objects caught on tape

by their own fighter pilots are, in fact, UFOs.

- Something needs to be done.

- [Narrator] Now a new wave of military witnesses

is coming out of the shadows.

- [Justin] I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scared ----less.

- [Man] I've never talked to anybody publicly

about this story.

- Certainly never on TV, that's for sure.

- When you're told as a soldier not to talk about it,

you don't talk about it.

- I've never seen anything move like that.

Shape, size, speed is clearly unidentifiable.

- [Narrator] The team is united on a new mission:

connect the dots to reveal the truth about UFOs.

- [Man] This thing had no capability

like anything on Earth.

- [Narrator] And warn the world

about the dangers they might represent.

- [Chris] Carl Sagan once famously said,

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

He was absolutely right, but now we have the proof.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] In 2004, Navy pilots on a training exercise

for the USS Nimitz reported coming face-to-face

with a bizarre, unidentified object.

Each pilot reported the same thing:

the UFO had a smooth, oblong shape resembling a Tic-Tac,

and maneuvered in ways impossible to known aircraft.

Video of the Nimitz incident shocked the world

when it was released,

but Lue Elizondo and his team believed

that sighting is not unprecedented.

New testimonies suggest UFOs with similar characteristics

to Tic-Tacs have been seen in nearly every American war zone

in the last 50 years.

- We have American troops coming forward

and recording these things in combat theaters.

The question is, why?

Is there an active interest in us conducting the warfare,

or is there an interest in the tools we use

to make war?

Conventional tools, nuclear tools.

What is the connection?

- [Narrator] To investigate how widespread

the sightings are, and what threat they might represent,

Elizondo is meeting with US combat veterans,

starting with one who served

on the front lines in Afghanistan.

- [Lue] Tell me a little bit about the situation,

what province were you in, and what was it like?

- Well, we were in Helmand province,

so we were in the hottest part of the country.

The Taliban were getting really thick in that area.

Suicide bombers were always trying

to attack the main entry point,

whether they could drive up a fuel tanker on the south side,

wherever they could try to get in,

they were trying to get in.

- [Lue] So it was a tense time.

- Very tense, yeah.

- [Narrator] In March 2009, President Obama had ordered

a massive increase in American troops to fight the Taliban.

- 18, four up.

(gunshots firing)

- Got about six of them moving back there.

- The troop surge was just starting up.

We were that line of defense between the Taliban

and the rest of our forces.

(bomb explodes)

- [Narrator] On September 4, 2009,

Justin Doerfler was assigned tower duty.

- You are the first, last, only defense

for everybody in that forward operating base.

You're the eyes, you're the ears, and you're the weapon.

- [Narrator] What he sees that night changes his life.

- We had done our periodic scans.

All was quiet,

(aircraft whooshing)

and we hear what sounded like an aircraft.

It was a clear night, the stars were just out everywhere,

but we could not find this aircraft.

We could hear it.

It sounded like it was flying pretty high,

so I pull out the night vision,

and it records both night vision and infrared.

- [Narrator] Infrared cameras identify objects

using temperature differences rather than ambient light,

allowing objects to be seen in complete darkness.

- I look back up, I see this jet,

and it was very high up there,

but I could definitely see the heat.

It was probably around 500-600 miles an hour, maybe,

but the weirdest thing,

I thought at first it was a shooting star.

This shooting star that cleared almost the entire sky came

to a dead stop, right at this jet.

Went above it, to this side, below it, out front,

and it just sat there, and the jet continued past it,

and this happened a couple of times,

and so at that point, I'm trying to wrap my head around,

how is this possible?

- [Lue] Okay, so let's say here's the aircraft.

- Yep, so there's the aircraft.

Let's say it's coming by, and out of nowhere,

this other thing just literally cleared the entire sky

right up to it, went above, to the other side,

down below, and then out front.

Now it sat there as like you're doing, flew right by.

It goes right again, right up to it.

- Do you even think that the pilot was aware of it?

Did you see the pilot take any type of evasive maneuvers?

- The pilot stayed on a steady track.

This happened for just a little bit longer,

and then it just (imitates pop) up.

First thought in my head is:

How can someone pilot something like that

without killing yourself?

- At the end of the day,

aircraft maneuver in a predictable way,

because they are subject to the same laws

of physics that everything else is, and yet,

when you come across an object that's moving in a way

that it shouldn't be, an arrow being shot out

of a bow is gonna go straight.

You don't expect it to do right angle turns,

and yet that's exactly what these things are doing.

- [Narrator] The object Doerfler is describing matches two

of Elizondo's five observables: instantaneous acceleration,

where the ability to go from a complete stop

to an incredibly high rate of speed,

and hypersonic velocity, speeds over 3700 miles per hour,

capabilities Elizondo says he's cataloged

in numerous sightings, including the 2004 Nimitz incident.

- I'm kind of pulling nose to where he's gonna be,

and he's coming up.

He just rapidly accelerates beyond anything

that I've ever seen.

Crosses my nose, and it's gone,

and I'm like, whoa.

- It was so unnerving, because it was so unpredictable.

High-G, rapid velocity, rapid acceleration,

so you were wondering:

How can I possibly fight this?

- Instant acceleration, very, very fast velocities,

looks an awful lot like a flying white Tic-Tac.

Are we talking about the same thing here?

Sounds pretty similar to me.

(jets whooshing)

- [Narrator] While the Nimitz Tic-Tac encounter happened

during a training exercise, Doerfler's sighting occurred

in an active war zone.

To Elizondo's team member Chris Mellon,

that raises troubling questions.

- The issue of the source, the origin,

the intent of these vehicles, or these craft,

is extremely pressing because we don't think they're ours,

and therefore, that raises a host

of rather alarming, concerning questions.

Have we been technologically leapfrogged?

Could it be the Russians, or Chinese,

or someone else?

- [Narrator] Whatever he saw,

Doerfler chose not to file an official report.

- I'm like, how do you write this?

What do you say?

Are you gonna get locked up?

Are you gonna be made fun of by your peers

for the duration of deployment?

- [Narrator] But for Chris Mellon,

the sighting represents a clear threat.

- [Chris] These aircraft, these vehicles

are demonstrating capabilities we do not possess.

It's difficult to imagine a more urgent requirement

than to find out who is operating these vehicles,

why they're here, what their intentions are.

- [Narrator] Coming up on Unidentified:

- This is the actual journal that I had in Afghanistan.

I would do my daily entries and logs in this.

- [Narrator] Army Specialist Justin Doerfler has agreed

to divulge his account of a Tic-Tac-like UFO he says

he witnessed while serving in Afghanistan.

- The moment of log entry was 11:56 in the morning.

I'd started it off with, "Last night was fun.

"Something weird that will confuse me for life."

- [Narrator] It's the first time he's publicly shared

this diary entry.

- Friday, September 4, 2009.

"On my thermal scan, I could see the heat

"from a plane flying overhead in blackout mode.

"If it wasn't for the thermal imaging,

"no one would see it, not even night vision."

Ugh, this is gonna be weird.

"Okay, I don't believe in UFOs or anything,

"but something flew off the plane faster than a missile,

"then stopped, looped over it so fast,

"then stopped, went around it, then took off so fast.

"It had mach speeds and a zig-zag pattern,

"then up and down and stopped again."

- Doerfler was so moved by what he saw.

He actually wrote in his diary about the event,

and then had the Judge Advocate General notarize his diary,

so nobody could accuse him of forging these notes

after the fact.

- At the end of that whole sentence,

I ended up putting, "I'll forever wonder,"

and I tried to, I basically suppressed that didn't happen.

It just can't happen.

That's not possible.

When you see something that defies science,

and I am a person of faith,

but I would be lying if I said that wasn't a faith shaker

at the time.

- [Narrator] Some believe Tic-Tac-like objects

are extraterrestrial, but could there be

an earthly explanation?

Former Air Force test craft engineer

and Aviation Week editor Bill Scott suggests the objects

could be secret US technology.

- We learned clear back in Kosovo days

that you couldn't rely on just stealth alone,

but what if it also had some kind

of a protection mechanism?

So we had decoys.

By the time the air campaign started in Afghanistan,

there was a lot of new stuff that was being tried

just to see how they work.

- [Narrator] Scott is describing small jet-powered decoys

launched to fly alongside a plane,

their heat signature used to confuse enemy missiles.

- They started calling them Angels.

They could fly around these vehicles

in highly maneuverable ways.

That could give you some strange visual effects

from guys on the ground,

because a lot of maneuvers can trick you.

- [Narrator] While a missile decoy might explain

what Justin Doerfler witnessed in 2009,

can it account for a similar object

seen nearly 30 years earlier?

To investigate, Elizondo is meeting with a veteran

who claims to have seen a UFO

with Tic-Tac-like characteristics

during the Vietnam War.

- [Lue] Mr. Boshears.

- [James] Hey.

- [Lue] How are you, sir?

Thank you very much for your time and being here.

- My name is James Ray Boshears.

I was in the US Air Force from 1968 to 1973.

I've never shared this story with anyone except my wife

and close friends that we've made.

- This is an Air Force guy who decides

to fly the biggest aircraft that we have,

which is the B-52 Stratofortress bomber.

(plane whistling)

- [Narrator] The B-52 Stratofortress

is a long-range heavy bomber that was the backbone

of the US Aerial Campaign in Vietnam.

- I flew missions in South Vietnam, Laos,

Cambodia, and North Vietnam.

I flew hundreds of missions.

Southeast Asia, I know exactly it was 101 missions,

because you have to do 100 to get that patch.

Missions were going off around the clock.

The enemy was trying to take over areas,

and the B-52 turned out to be one

of the most advantageous bombers.

- Their job is to fly a really long distance,

drop bombs, and come back.

It was 12 hours of complete boredom

with about 30 minutes of sheer terror.

(bombs exploding)

- [Narrator] June 1970.

James Boshears and his crew are on their way back to Guam

after a bombing run,

when they notice an unidentified object heading their way.

- I was in command of the aircraft.

I was the co-pilot at that time,

and the navigator came on the intercom to me

and said, "Co-pilot, do you see a bogey

"at about 12 o'clock and high above us?"

And I looked out the window,

and I couldn't see anything right off the bat,

and then he said,

"Well, it's about 20 miles or so from us,

"and it's coming towards us."

All of a sudden, I saw a white light, and it was up high,

and it just kept getting bigger as it was getting closer

to us, but it never fluctuated.

It didn't flash.

I said, "Wake up the radar."

He came on the intercom and said,

"Yeah, I've got a bogey for you at 12 o'clock,

"and it's really high."

None of us had ever heard of one of our aircraft being able

to go up higher than 70,000 feet.

This was already above 60,000 feet.

- [Narrator] Thousands of feet up in his B-52,

James Boshears realizes the rest of his crew

is also in awe of the object.

- And then the radar navigator comes back and says,

"Holy smoke!

"This bogey just made a sharp left turn."

I mean, at 5000-plus knots,

it made almost a 90-degree turn instantly.

And we're going, "Nobody can do that,"

and he said, "It's coming straight for us."

- [Narrator] The bright light he says he witnessed

is similar to the nighttime reports

of glowing white Tic-Tac-like objects

during the 2004 USS Nimitz event, and like those UFOs,

it displayed two of Elizondo's five observables:

Instantaneous acceleration and hypersonic velocity.

- A radar navigator comes back and says,

"Pilot, he's exceeded 6000 knots,

"and now he's made another sharp turn to the north

"at 6000 knots," so the radar navigator said,

"I'm turning on the camera."

He had a camera that could snap pictures

of the radar screen,

so we had proof that this thing was flying

at the speed that it was flying.

And he finally said, "It's increasing altitude

"and it's over 6000 knots, climbing."

No transponder signals, no squawking, no radio,

and then the light just disappeared.

He said he lost him on radar

when the object reached about 100,000 feet.

The command pilot told the crew, he says,

"Hey, guys, well now you've seen a UFO."

- [Narrator] Boshears reported the incident

to Air Force Intelligence Officers.

What happens next would only deepen the mystery.

Coming up on Unidentified:

- So the radar navigator said, "I'm turning on the camera."

He had a camera that could snap pictures

of the radar screen.

- [Narrator] B-52 pilot James Boshears spotted

a Tic-Tac-like UFO after a bombing run

during the height of the Vietnam War.

He says his navigator was able to capture photographs

of its flight path on his radar screen,

but in their routine briefing

with Air Force Intelligence Officers the next day,

something strange happened.

- We told them all about it,

and we wanted to know if we could get some copies

of the pictures, and they said,

"Yeah, it shouldn't be a problem.

"There's nothing out there."

The next morning, our radar went back to get the pictures,

and when he got there, they said,

"Oh, you can't have any pictures.

"They've reclassified them as top secret."

- So I'm in the process of gathering some information

in order that I can initiate

a Freedom of Information Act request to the US government.

- [Narrator] Believing these photos

could provide important evidence,

Elizondo and his team filed

a Freedom of Information Act request,

but there's been no response so far.

- Most of the time,

things remain classified for up to 25 years.

I can't imagine why a photograph

of a radar scope taken back in the 1960s would still,

after 50 years, remain classified.

- [Narrator] Will the missing photos reveal

the earliest known Tic-Tac?

Some theorize these advanced craft

are merely secret technology deployed

by the US or an adversary,

but could that explain the incredible speed

and maneuverability Boshears says his crew witnessed?

- When they encountered this object somewhere

over the Pacific Ocean in 1970,

there was really only two man-made objects

that could even fly at hypersonic velocities,

and those were the man-made rockets

that were putting people in orbit,

and that was the X-15 experimental aircraft

rocket plane,

keeping in mind, a rocket goes up into space.

It doesn't follow you if you're in a B-52,

and the X-15 was a very specific purpose-built vehicle

that was never flying over the Pacific Ocean.

- [Narrator] Chris Mellon believes the objects

could be spying on US military technology.

- Bear in mind that those B-52s

that we employed during the Vietnam War

to deliver conventional ordnance,

their primary function was this part

of the Strategic Air Command's nuclear deterrent.

The potential adversary would be very interested

in their capabilities,

not surprising that the Russians or Chinese

would be interested in collecting on them,

but it's hard to relate that particular set

of observations with any known capability

that either we or they possess.

- [Narrator] On the trail of Tic-Tacs,

Elizondo is meeting with another Vietnam veteran.

His testimony may provide more insight

into UFOs reported during that war.

- We're heading down to see

Lieutenant Commander Brian Westin,

and meet with him in his home.

When one of these individuals are sharing

with you an experience they had in Vietnam,

that carries a lot of weight.

I think we need to listen to what they have to say.

Hello, good sir!

- Hey, hey, how you doing?

Take some oranges

if you want 'em. - I was just gonna say

I may take an orange or two.

- [Brian] There you go, no problem.

- [Lue] First of all, I want to thank you for your service.

- [Narrator] Lieutenant Commander Brian Westin

is a highly decorated Navy pilot

who flew dangerous, low-altitude bombing runs

over North Vietnam.

(jet whooshes)

Westin's A-6 Intruder was one of the most advanced aircraft

of its time, able to rain down 18,000 pounds

of munitions onto the enemy under any weather condition.

(bombs exploding)

The unusual high-performance aircraft

could have caught the attention of foreign powers,

Russian, Chinese, or something else.

- You were awarded one of the highest honors

that the Navy has.

- [Narrator] In the spring of 1966,

the pilot of Westin's plane was wounded

by North Vietnamese ground fire,

and their aircraft crashed into the Gulf of Tonkin.

For rescuing the wounded pilot from shark-infested waters,

Westin was awarded the prestigious Navy Cross Medal,

but while the harrowing experience

nearly cost him his life,

it's an incident that took place three weeks earlier

that has haunted him for decades.

- Can you describe the events leading up to,

with your pilot/co-pilot, what you saw that day?

- That day was a mini-strike,

which was kind of in between alpha strikes,

where you're really intense and losing people.

We were going with two A-4 Charlies,

and they're very slow,

and so we're just trucking over to go to Ho Chi Minh Trail.

- [Narrator] April 6, 1966.

Westin's A-6 intruder is accompanying

the slower A-4 Skyhawks on a quick hit-and-run bombing raid,

when suddenly, he notices something strange

off his right wing.

- This thing just wafted over the wing or right next to it.

I mean, it was within inches.

It was that close, and I was gonna say, "Did you see that?"

I didn't even get the duh out.

What the F was that?

- [Lue] Right.

- And he banks the airplane to the right,

and we look for the damn thing.

Nothing.

I mean, couldn't see the object,

couldn't see a contrail, couldn't see a puff of smoke,

couldn't see nothing.

- So what I'm gonna ask you to do if it's okay,

can you draw for me, 'cause--

- [Brian] I'm not a very good drawer.

- That's okay.

Oh, you got it.

- Yeah. - Okay, great.

- Kind of a ratio of about like that,

just the size of a water heater.

Just as if you took a humongous blob of mercury

and puffed it up into that perfect shape,

shimmering, perfect chromium, polysilver.

No windows, no wings, no protuberances, no nothing.

- If somebody said,

"Well, it could be a Tic-Tac,"

I suppose it could have been

on the edge of a Tic-Tac type thing.

- [Narrator] The UFO Westin says he saw demonstrated another

of Elizondo's five observables: anti-gravity.

That's the ability to move without any obvious signs

of propulsion, and it's a trait recorded

in multiple sightings of Tic-Tacs.

- I mean, it's not flying, that we know flying.

To me, it had to be, if it is there, sitting there,

it doesn't just sit there.

There has to be some way of controlling,

like magnetically or something.

- Yeah, some sort of

advanced physics. - Some physics.

- [Narrator] Did Westin witness a UFO similar

to what later pilots compared to a Tic-Tac,

or can the strange metallic object be explained

by military technology of the time?

- I'd like to know what the heck it was.

- [Lue] Yeah.

- And if it wasn't ours,

and it wasn't the Russians or Chinese or North Koreans,

I'm convinced that there's stuff out there

that people don't want to come to grips with.

- You could throw out some possibilities.

Very unlikely that it could be a gravity-dropped bomb,

because they tend to go down very quickly.

Pretty unlikely that it would be a surface-to-air missile,

because pilots describe those as flying telephone poles.

Fuel tanks would tend to drop away very quickly,

and that pretty much leaves it in the category

of we don't know.

- If this is indeed one of our terrestrial adversaries,

there's great cause for concern

that we may have been technologically leapfrogged.

They're also demonstrating an interest

in our technology.

They seem to be very uncannily interested

in our military capabilities,

so we have every reason to be concerned about that.

- [Narrator] Coming up on Unidentified.

- [Lue] We're putting together the mosaic

with disparate pieces of data.

It's a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

At first, you have all these little pieces on the table,

but little by little, the more pieces you have,

the more the picture becomes in focus.

- [Narrator] Lue Elizondo has just interviewed

a second Vietnam veteran about a strange object

he saw in an active war zone,

but he needs to gather more data.

- If we can establish the things that they were seeing

back then in the past from the Vietnam war

are indeed the same types of vehicles being observed

and perhaps the same type of technology

that we're seeing today.

Then maybe it'll help us figure out what the things are

and where they're from.

- [Narrator] Today, he's sitting down with a veteran

who witnessed a similar object

during the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999.

- Mr. Tarr, I presume. - Yes, Sir

- Hey how are you, sir?

- How are you?

- Thank you very much for coming here and speaking with me.

I really appreciate it.

- My name is Derek Tarr.

I was a senior Airman during the late 90s,

serving in the United States Air Force.

This isn't the first time I've ever told this story.

- [Narrator] Derek Tarr was a boom operator

on an Air Force, KC-10.

Responsible for the mid-air refueling

of NATO jets between bombing runs.

- You got a lot of pilots out there,

but you have very few boom operators.

These individuals are trained experts on all sorts

of allied NATO aircraft.

They know the difference between an F/A-18 Hornet

between an F-117 night fighter and F-16.

They know all these aircraft

because they see them day in and day out.

- [Narrator] 0n March 24th, 1999,

Tarr is on a refueling mission over the Adriatic sea.

When suddenly he sees a strange light.

- I was sitting in the boom pod in the back of the KC-10,

just waiting for the next set of receivers to arrive.

I had noticed a bright light that was behind us,

slightly below our altitude.

Just kind of hung back,

didn't seem to make any more forward progress

towards our aircraft.

That's when I kind of started to wonder

what was going on.

I called up to my pilot on the interphone to ask him

if we had more receivers coming and said that

we did not have anyone scheduled.

- [Narrator] Tarr say the control center monitoring

the airspace, reported all known aircraft

were accounted for.

- We started into a turn and as I looked back,

I was just at a bright white orb.

It was very bouncy almost like a super ball,

very short, very succinct, very sharp movements,

but extremely rapid.

The jostling or oscillations that it was doing,

was certainly not minute adjustments,

probably several hundred feet up, down side to side.

Once I got to about our eight o'clock position

that did a rapid climb and just in the blink of an eye,

went straight up and it just shot right up in the sky.

The fastest thing I've ever seen.

- [Narrator] The UFO Tarr claims the saw was spherical

instead of the oblong shape of tic-tacs,

but it featured some of the same five observables.

- [Tarr] We have hypersonic velocities,

instantaneous acceleration,

and of course positive lift,

or in the vernacular anti-gravity.

- [Narrator] Four new sightings spending decades in Kosovo,

Afghanistan, and Vietnam.

U.S miliTarry eyewitnesses reported single objects

in close proximity to American planes.

And in the 2004 Nimitz encounter

where an entire carrier strike group was present.

Radar operators reported a fleet of objects.

- What Tarr saw, and what the Nimitz folks had reported

back in 2004,

there were some commonalities

in the performance of these things.

- [Narrator] The team needs to gather more data

to address the biggest question,

are these the same objects?

And if so, what are they?

In the case of Derrick Tarr sighting,

could the conflict itself offer for a clue?

- Clearly when we engage Kosovo, we're operating in fairly

close proximity to Russia and it's opportunity for them

to collect intelligence on these cutting edge aircraft

in the U S inventory, including the stealth bomber.

- [Narrator] The B-2 stealth bomber was first used

in combat in the Kosovo war.

At the time, it was America's most advanced aircraft.

- So all of those kinds of technologies

are very pertinent to the Russian military

who are constantly preparing for the eventuality

in which they may have to engage the United States.

- [Tarr] The thought did cross my mind that this certainly

could be a hostile.

- Where they really an adversarial technology

that has managed to hoodwink us and leapfrog ahead

of the United States going back decades?

If that's the case then I think we have a much,

much bigger problem on our hands

because that means there is something inherently broken

with our national security apparatus.

- I think, it very well could be

a significant national security issue,

if we just kind of bury our head in the sand

or look away, we're screwed.

- [Narrator] Coming up on unidentified.

- [Narrator] Lue Elizondo has returned from meeting

four American veterans who claimed to have seen UFOs

similar to the tic-tac witnessed by pilots

from the USS Nimitz in 2004.

Sightings in war zones, dating back 50 years.

- The testimony that we are seeing now

from these courageous individuals,

I think it's beginning to open the aperture

and what we're now realizing, it wasn't just the USS Nimitz

and flying tic-tacs.

It goes all the way back to Vietnam.

- [Narrator] For Elizondo and his team,

serious questions remain about the origin of these objects

and the threat they represent?

- The stunning and concerning thing about

these unidentified aerial phenomenon,

is they demonstrate performance characteristics

that are far superior to anything in the U.S inventory

at either a classified or unclassified level.

- If it's not us and it's not them,

then that means somebody else.

- [Narrator] Now he's meeting

with his team members, Steve Justice.

One of the most respected aviation experts

in the United States.

Justice was a director at Lockheed Martin skunk works,

where he helped develop some of America's

most advanced top secret aircraft.

- I kind of want to run by you some of these scenarios,

these experiences, if you're okay with that.

- Yeah, yeah sure.

- [Narrator] Elizondo wants Justice to explore

whether war time sightings of tic-tac like objects

can be explained by conventional technology.

- [Tarr] Once it got to our eight o'clock position,

it did a rapid climb and just in the blink of an eye,

went straight up and it just shot right up in the sky,

- 1999, where were we with our technology then

as far as objects that could operate from 30,000 feet

and all of the sudden pop up to 80,000 feet and disappear?

- We don't have that today, so I don't know

why we would have it,

you know, and in the 1990s

- In 1999, which we did have lasers

- Oh, absolutely.

- Was it possible that someone could have been shooting

a laser from the ground

- [Narrator] in the late 1990s, the U.S had begun testing

a ground-based chemical laser capable

of hitting objects in space.

- If there were a nighttime and it were visible laser,

then you would see the beam.

- So what technologies can you talk about

that the enemy might've had in the late 90s?

- The only things I know of

were all very conventional things.

I don't know of anything that was exotic.

- [Narrator] Elizondo also wants to know what Justice

thinks about a nighttime sighting

10 years later by Justin Doerfler in Afghanistan.

- This thing from a dead stop going straight, straight,

it only moved at straight lines.

- [Narrator] aviation expert, Bill Scott.

Theorize the objects could be anti-missile decoys,

but Afghanistan also saw a new generation

of unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs,

could it have been one of them?

- This was kind of the place where UAVs

really got their traction, but I don't know

of any UAVs that do that.

Maneuver like that?

Yes, but not at those speeds.

- [Narrator] Elizondo has one more sighting

he wants Steve Justice to look at.

One that's also confounded the experts,

the bizarre metallic object that appeared

to be hovering in the sky.

As Brian Westerns, A-6 intruder flew by

more than five decades earlier over North Vietnam.

- Probably about three feet in diameter

and maybe five or eight feet long.

This thing just wafted over the wing or right next to it.

I mean, it was within inches.

- [Narrator] Could it have in artillery shell

visible from Western's low flying A-6?

- [Lue] think of a tic-tac with a flat end on the back.

- Artillery shells that are fired off of battleships

are relatively blunt.

- I've seen one fired five shell from Paladins.

- If you know what you're looking for, you can see him.

You know I'll admit, I can't explain low altitude.

Typically shells are arcing through the air.

He said it was just sitting there,

so I can't explain that.

- Color, let's go into color.

- Sil- the silver chrome?

- Like mercury?

- Yeah, I can't really explain that.

- And what about if it's not going up

an object coming down like some sort

of reconnaissance balloon.

- The closest thing to the shape that you've described

is a napalm canister, to be perfectly honest with you.

But napalm was also dropped from relatively low altitudes

who were drawn from tree top levels.

- What other considerations then,

should we be looking at here?

- This falls into that un identified category.

You know, there's just some of these things

that can't be explained.

- [Narrator] David Clarke is an investigative journalist,

who combed through the British national archives,

studying military UFO sightings.

- Pilots, however highly trained they are,

are human beings.

- [Narrator] He believes that many of these sightings

can be attributed to the fog of war.

- Particularly in wartime, where you're on edge.

Every time you go out, you don't know whether

you're gonna return, you're going without sleep.

Some of the pilots actually admitted this,

that maybe they saw quite ordinary things

and thought there was something extraordinary.

- [Narrator] Others disagree and say, the heat of battle

can make service members better observers.

- I think you have to look at these reports

on a case by case basis, and the data that's available.

I don't think you can paint with a broad brush and say,

oh, that's just the fog of war.

- If anything, your senses are raised during that

because of the heightened sense of awareness,

they saw something they might not have normally seen.

I think that's a benefit to us, not a liability

- [Narrator] For the veterans who remembered these events

as if they were yesterday, there's no question

- For something to be in your airspace

without any form that you can recognize.

No wings, no engine, no exhaust

and it's like, well it shouldn't have been there

but what do you do when it is there?

And somebody said, well really wasn't there.

Well, all I can say is it was there.

I saw it clearly, Bill saw it clearly.

It was startling

- [Narrator] Coming up on unidentified,

- [Narrator] Lue Elizondo has been investigating

a pattern of sightings of tic-tac like UFOs

in America's war zones.

Could they be a threat to national security?

Today he's briefing the team,

Tom DeLonge, Chris Mellon and Steve Justice

on what he's found.

- When I was in ATIP,

we really focused primarily looking

at the USS Nimitz incident and forward.

I was shocked to learn that some of the same observables

that we noticed were precisely the same observables

that were being reported even back in the 1960s,

- [Narrator] Elizondo details, Derek Tarrr's UFO sighting

during the Kosovo conflict in 1999,

which displayed some of those observables.

- It starts to maneuver in a very peculiar manner.

Something that we now know from the Nimitz event,

the tic-tac event,

basically this weird type of 90 degree, right turns.

- [Steve] The ricochet kind of thing.

- [Lue] Like a ping pong, right like a ricochet.

- [Narrator] The team finds clear similarities

between the UFO seen during recent conflicts

and the object observed by us Navy pilots in 2004.

- I think this fits the same category as the reports

on these coasts and the tic-tacs.

- [Narrator] In each case, they believe the tic-tacs

were displaying capabilities, not consistent

with known technology of U.S or otherwise,

but there's one last piece of the puzzle to consider.

- Gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you

to a friend of mine.

- Oh, hey.

- [Lue] This is Lieutenant commander, Brian Western retired

- [Narrator] Elizondo has invited

retired Lieutenant commander, Brian Weston

to meet the team and discuss the UFO

he saw over North Vietnam in 1966.

- This individual happens to not only be a Patriot,

but frankly in my opinion,

a war hero during the early days of Vietnam,

he encountered a pretty remarkable event.

- What I saw didn't make any sense

in the context of the time.

- Here, we have something that is not unlike the description

of the tick-tack and other things that we reported on.

And you have this instantaneous acceleration

and even low observability.

And this is going back to 1966.

- Was it flying the opposite direction or something,

or you pass it potentially?

- Did not see it coming.

All I saw was right there, which is just wafted by

- Wow.

- This thing wasn't there, it got there somehow.

If it wasn't propulsing, like I'm used to, or a jet

or a rocket or something, no wings.

I mean, there's about only one thing left

as far as I can see as anti-gravity.

And if we had that and people knew about it,

how they could sit on it would be absolutely beyond me.

- When we develop a game changing technology,

it's not uncommon that we feel that during times

of conflict, right?

I can't imagine given our conflict in Afghanistan

and Iraq, and Kosovo, and Vietnam,

that we have managed to sit on a game changing technology,

putting pilot's lives in danger this entire time.

For more than a damn near 60 years.

We just sit on technology that long,

even with nuclear technology we use it,

we implement it.

- [Steve] We don't necessarily use it.

- Okay, so let's elaborate.

- It would be a strict case where we would use that.

- But they're not a secret.

- We use them every day for deterrence.

- So I'm going to take the other side

of the devil's advocate thing.

So unlike nuclear weapons,

which do represent a big deterrent,

if you were to talk about this, would it be a deterrent?

No, if anything it would just draw curiosity.

So if it represented a game changing capability,

would you not tend to sit on it, and hold it down tight?

- Yes, but I wouldn't be then flying it.

- I get that.

- If you keep it locked in a warehouse and nobody sees it.

You do not fly that thing within inches

of a fully combat capable,

A-6 over North Vietnam.

- If your talking about whether this thing was some secret

U.S. weapons program, heck no.

- [Narrator] For now the team can't definitively conclude

that the UFOs reported during the Vietnam war match

those seen in more recent conflicts,

but one thing is certain.

- Would you live through what you survived?

What you did is amazing.

- [Tom] With a lot of sacrifice too.

- Incredible.

- I mean, is's burned into my memory.

- [Narrator] So to is their ongoing mission.

The need to keep investigating the strange objects

in the sky and determine what they might be.

- Took me a decade.

I stayed in the shadows.

I now know I wasn't alone.

And I'm telling you guys, you're not alone either.

The conversation's open and it's not going away.

- I don't think that calculus has changed since Vietnam

or frankly from world war II, or frankly from the 1900s

or frankly from the civil war,

or frankly from 2000 years ago in Rome.

And I think the time has come that we opened our eyes

when we finally addressed what the hell is going on.

- [Narrator] This season on unidentified.

The team scours, the globe uncovering UFO hotspots.

- Are they seeing the same thing

in the sky is that we are?

Oscar Santamario was given the order.

If it isn't ours, shoot it down.

- [Narrator] And hunts for answers

to the biggest UFO mysteries.

- It was a perfect black equal lateral triangle.

- [Pilot] Chase back at you, ha!

- [Narrator] Revealing never before seeing videos.

- [Narrator] Never before heard stories,

- They were there scoping out our capabilities.

- It's as if it's never left, that changed everything.

- [Narrator] And stunning revelations about

the most famous UFO encounters.

- And out of nowhere, this object drops out from the sky

at an incredible speed.

- Un halo brillante.

What? That for me was a drop the mic moment.

- [Narrator] What is flying in our skies.

- They definitely weren't planes,

they had different lights and just no rhyme

or reason to where they were flying.

- Something was coming up underneath me,

unverifiable, unidentifiable but undeniable.

- If one of these did hit one of our airplanes,

most likely would kill everybody on board.

(intense music)