Original subtitles

♪♪

Chris Rutowski: In August of 2004,

several people saw unusual objects in the sky.

TJ Capcon: I got it on tape! I got it!

They formed a shape of a perfect triangle.

TJ [on video]: It almost looks like

it's a triangle of all three of them

really close together.

The video really doesn't define what it is.

Spectator [on video]: What are they?

TJ [on video]: They're U--we don't know,

they're UFOs.

Ashley Kircher: It does just seem to just hover in the sky.

Murray Toews: And it didn't seem to worry too much

about the observers.

Mike Newren: It's kind of scary how quiet it was

and how fast it moved through the sky.

Spectator [on video]: Is it like a jet?

Child [on video]: I'm scared.

Chris: But imagine you're an alien

on a distant planet.

Would you really want anyone to know you are here?

Mike: If something's over Tinley Park, Illinois

and the Air Force, the Army,

the FAA have no clue what it is, that's kind of an issue.

Spectator [on video]: Oh my god.

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: Mass sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena

can be the most disturbing.

How can so many people see the same thing without explanation?

Mike: A lot of people saw it, especially concert goers

at the amphitheatre

and then people doing barbecues and whatnot.

TJ Capcon: People are having fun,

drinking their beers.

Girls are talking,

guys are having their conversations.

And I thought it was a joke at first.

Michael P. Masters: Whenever we have these mass sightings

where hundreds of people see the same object

or group of objects at the same time,

we really have to pay attention to these,

because it's not just one person's word.

They saw something that could be confused for a shooting star

or a drone or a helicopter.

But we have lots of people in the same area,

sometimes spread across multiple states,

observing and reporting the same strange objects in the sky.

And one of the biggest sightings was witnessed by hundreds

of people all at the same time,

including a fellow by the name of Mike Newren.

Mike: It was about nighttime when this all went down,

probably between 7:45 and 8:30.

I was actually laying here with my friends,

standing not too far where you guys are at

and just looking over the houses over here.

And that's when I saw the lights appear over the houses,

and then flying overhead, coming from the west,

heading to the east.

Narrator: Meanwhile, hundreds of other people

witnessed the same lights over Tinley Park.

Chris: 2004, of course, was before everyone had cell phones

with really good cameras.

If you wanted to capture this on video somehow,

you would need a video camera.

And a number of people did.

One fellow named TJ knew this was something remarkable,

so he went and got his own video camera.

TJ: It was probably around 8:00 at night.

And people are having fun, drinking their beers.

Girls are talking,

guys are having their conversations.

And my youngest son, he goes, .Dad, look. UFO. /

I thought it was a joke at first.

I wasn't falling for it.

And Justin goes again, .Dad, UFO! /

And he grabs my chin, and I look up,

and sure enough, there's three lights

that are just slowly moving up out of the horizon,

probably around 30 degrees.

I ran home and got my camcorder.

TJ [on video]: I got it on tape!

I got it!

They formed a shape of a perfect triangle.

It almost looks like it's a triangle of all three

of them really close together.

The video really doesn't define what it is.

Child [on video]: It's a UFO.

Narrator: At the same time, a few blocks away,

Mike Newren witnesses the three lights that appear

in a triangle and tries to tell his friends.

Mike: I just remember seeing it

and trying to get my friends their attention.

It was a guy and a girl, so they were, like,

making out.

They thought I was just trying

to interrupt what they were doing,

but I was literally sincerely trying to tell them,

.There is something up here, guys.

And it's like the most amazing thing ever. /

All these houses that were staring in front of us,

that's where the direction it was coming from,

and then flew over and then came down over

to the east over there, over all those houses.

Child [on video]: It's definitely not a helicopter.

Mike [on video]: On this, all I can see is red.

- TJ [on video]: Right? - Mike [on video]: Yeah.

And the other one, all I can see is a red dot.

Just the same thing as you guys.

It's circular.

It is. It's circular.

TJ, look at this.

Look at this.

- Hurry up, hurry up. - TJ [on video]: I got it.

Mike [on video]: Look through this one.

TJ [on video]: It's like it's circular

and it's, like, moving.

When you play it back, you can see.

It's hard to describe.

It's like a plasma kind of colours you get

in your greens, your reds,

and they're all rotating like a ball

around this one location.

And it's the same thing with the other two lights as well.

TJ [on video]: It's all different.

It's all different colours.

Narrator: Using AI to enhance the image,

the orbs become much clearer with a variably coloured halo.

Could this multicoloured luminance connect the orbs

to each other,

or does it have another function?

Mike: I didn't really hear any sound,

but just seeing these red lights float over,

it's kind of scary how quiet it was

and how fast it moved through the sky,

just how mysterious and ominous it was.

Neil: So in the natural air current that particular day,

from the research that I looked at,

the winds were roughly about 5 to 20 miles an hour,

and it was gusting.

So they would have slowly sort of porpoised their way

through the air,

but they would have been travelling

at whatever the airspeed was.

So if it was actually around 20 miles an hour,

they would have actually been cruising

around 20 miles an hour, maybe slowing down,

maybe speeding up.

But they would have just sort of propelled themselves

through the air.

Murray: Let's just imagine they're smallish,

luminous orbs from somewhere else.

What would it take to resist air currents,

something that size,

and to quietly do so?

Even a drone can't do that

because wind would whip it around.

You would hear a buzzing, you'd hear a motor.

Anything.

But something that just moves very neatly across the sky

is rather remarkable.

Child [on video]: That's going right over us.

We have a very good record of what was seen in the sky.

Not just a few minutes worth, but several minutes, 10, 20,

30 minutes in some cases,

of these objects moving in the sky.

And in all cases,

they were yellow, orange, or red,

depending on perspective,

certainly depending on how far away they were

and how high they were in the sky.

TJ [on video]: You know,

there's a white light in there somewhere.

It's all different colours.

♪♪

Narrator: The witnesses know what they are seeing

defies explanation.

And the fact that the craft, or this last one in Tinley

just hung there for, what, 40 minutes or something,

is amazing.

Child [on video]: Oh, man.

I should call my mom.

I should call my mom and tell her.

TJ [on video]: Look at how slow that thing's moving.

Mike [on video]: I know.

Like I said, there was no sound

or anything to signify that it was, like,

an airplane or a helicopter.

There was no strobes on it flashing like all airplanes

are supposed to have, and helicopters.

So it's quite interesting.

♪♪

This was before drones were very common

for the average person to have.

There were some drones that were available commercially

and certainly from the military,

but not very common enough as they are today.

So probably not drones.

Were these perhaps Chinese lanterns?

[camera shutter clicks]

Neil: It is that sort of a colour.

It is that sort of a shape.

Ashley Kircher: It does just seem to just hover in the sky.

So obviously not anything that would be blown around

by the wind or anything like that.

Not lanterns or balloons or flares even.

Mike: Flares give off a residual.

You'll see it flashing in the sky.

There'll be smoke everywhere.

The lights that I saw didn't have, like,

smoke coming off of it.

It wasn't flashing.

It was a solid red moving through the sky.

It wasn't even lighting up the sky,

what I saw.

And flares would definitely do that.

Murray: They were not satellites, drones.

All kinds of things were ruled out.

This is a case where mysterious lights in the sky

are truly mysterious lights in the sky.

They're not explainable lights in the sky.

Chris: One interesting aspect is that this is another case

of lights.

And lights can be anything.

They can be stars and planets and drones and you name it.

But why would an extraterrestrial craft

need lights?

If you're coming to observe us, you might want to do it in a way

that wouldn't draw attention to yourself.

Maybe we're an anthropology experiment from a distant planet

and you want to just watch us intently.

You wouldn't come out and be seen

and cause the experimental results to be haywire.

You'd want to be very much in the background

and just observe us discreetly.

♪♪

Narrator: What's so interesting

about Tinley Park, Illinois,

a bedroom community of Chicago with a population of 50,000?

That's a bit of a head scratcher.

Tinley Park, it's not where a geologist

would gravitate toward.

At least not a hard rock geologist.

Murray: So we may just be part of the puzzle.

And that's the ship that they witnessed

was just surveying the landscape through,

trying to find pieces of the puzzle,

whatever that puzzle is.

It's an alien puzzle.

Narrator: Let's speculate that the alien puzzle piece

is a far-off Earth-like exoplanet,

like TOI-700 d.

TOI-700 d, it's about 100 light years away.

The system has four exoplanets.

And so TOI-700 d, very, very Earth-like.

And it's around a quiet red dwarf star.

So very long lived, but it doesn't have

all of those issues with the stellar activity, the flare,

so potentially wouldn't erode any of its atmosphere away.

Chris: And what's curious is on Halloween night that same year,

they came back.

TJ [on video]: Okay, UFOs are back.

I'll zoom in a little bit more.

Spectator [on video]: Hey, is that the UFO?

TJ [on video]: They're back again.

♪♪

Chris: The second sighting was literally on Halloween night.

Again, three objects

moving in tandem,

sometimes shifting in their perspective,

but always moving in the sky together.

TJ [on video]: I don't know.

I'm tired.

I'm running out of breath.

I'm zooming a little bit more.

Spectator [on video]: Hey, is that the UFO?

TJ [on video]: They're back again.

Chris: If they were on one large object,

the size of the object would be immense.

Ashley; There was an airplane that came,

and they actually have a video of it.

And it flew sort of in between

the points of light.

It flew right through.

TJ [on video]: There's airplanes.

There's airplanes along with them.

Look at that.

Look at that.

There's airplanes with them.

Spectator [on video]: It went right through it, didn't it?

TJ [on video]: Yeah, they're U--we don't know,

they're UFOs.

They came back on August 21st.

Now there's more.

Spectator [on video]: Yeah, no, I see them right now.

How could the people on the plane not even notice this?

But they actually flew right through the triangle.

TJ: I think you could probably put maybe eight airplanes

on top of this and lay them out in a triangle.

It was huge.

Neil: A 747, I believe, is about 70 metres long.

And I think it's roughly about the same width, as well.

So to actually have something stacked up eight or nine times,

you're talking about a half a kilometre.

That's a big, big, big item.

I don't know how you propel it.

And to lift that much mass and to have that much mass

actually self-supporting,

that would be an engineering feat.

I'm not really sure what you'd build it out of.

I'm not really sure what the design would look like,

but that would be an amazing piece of technology.

Spectator [on video]: That's them, right?

TJ [on video]: Yeah, that's them.

It's the same red cherry lights as we had before.

Spectator [on video]: Look at them turning like that.

TJ [on video]: They're not flares by any means.

They're not like helicopters.

I know for a fact it was not a plane.

I know for a fact it was not stars.

It was not a satellite.

Especially three of them, you know,

that were below the ceiling.

Those are not satellites.

It wasn't a Chinese lantern that would give off, you know,

the residue as it's melting in the ground

and it gives off smoke too.

And it's not a flare, anything like that.

It's just none of the above.

Mike: When I see the footage,

I see how the lights move and whatnot.

And that was very similar to what I was looking at.

And they were just kind of rolling around out there

up in the sky.

Mike [on video]: No, they're going into

a different formation.

It was crazy.

It wasn't moving too fast in the sky.

It moved slowly across the sky

and it was, like, dipping down and flipping around.

And it looked like the orbs were moving in and out.

♪♪

Narrator: Witnesses see a fourth light race across the sky,

seemingly apart from the triangular fixed lights.

TJ [on video]: Here comes another one, same night.

Spectator [on video]: This one's actually lower guys.

- ♪♪ - [chatter on video]

Spectator [on video]: The other ones that came in

were real high.

TJ [on video]: Yeah, they were.

Yeah, they were high.

He saw a red light very quickly come

and he called it a chaser.

TJ [on video]: Oh, whoa, lookit, there's another one.

And he came out single, just by himself.

TJ [on video]: It's going higher in the sky now?

Child [on video]: No, it's going up in the sky,

but it's coming lower.

It's only one light.

It's not three lights like a triangle.

It's only one light,

and it moves faster than what the three lights were doing.

Came out of the same location.

Up and then straight east.

Chris: Perhaps these were, some suggested probes

or some sort of additional remnants

of the original craft that were flying along

in operational support of some sort.

TJ: When I zoomed in on that one,

got the same effects that you did with the three lights.

It was like plasma.

Orange, blue.

Everything was rotating.

Nothing was random.

Everything from the blue comes to the front.

The orange goes to the back, yellow right to the left.

It just--it's amazing how whatever this was,

what it did.

Narrator: Why Tinley Park, Illinois?

Could it be its connection to Chicago,

America's third largest city?

Or perhaps it's the air traffic.

TJ: We see airplanes all the time.

We're very close to Midway Airport.

Mike: There's not, like,

a lot of military action that goes around here either.

I would just say the most action is O'Hare and Midway Airport.

TJ: The flight patterns to land at Midway would come

literally over to our garage,

and on the speaker that we were playing music on,

you would hear the pilot.

You could hear the pilot talking.

And then once the plane got further from us,

then the radio music would come on.

But every time a plane came over,

you could hear that chatter between the tower and the pilot.

But with these three lights, there was nothing that says,

.I'm out here.

You know, pay attention to me. /

Mike: Unless they're, like, into, like, very industrial,

you know, Chicago.

I don't know.

I don't know what brings them here.

Christian Bohm: Is it in an area like Chicago

because some unexplained object or life form

is attracted by the extreme

accumulation of our life forms

and how we interact and use resources

and build a mega city,

including everything that goes with it?

♪♪

I don't know what's so special about us.

Maybe water?

Chris: Mike and some other witnesses describe the object

as going from west to east.

And that would actually take the objects

in sort of the general direction of the lake.

So there is some suggestion that some UFOs,

according to tradition and literature,

have an affinity for waters.

Christian: We have Lake Michigan there,

huge water reservoir.

And so the landscape in that region,

including Tinley Park,

is just marked by glacial features.

Tinley Park itself is situated on a moraine,

a moraine being like a deposit that the glacier creates

by shedding, dumping its material,

its rocks, boulders, gravel, sand,

and anything it picks up anything that gets shed

onto the ice, that's in the ice,

and gets released as the ice melts.

And those type of materials, as unspectacular as they seem,

are actually very important for any type

of infrastructure development.

Narrator: The Tinley Park sightings pushes the boundaries

of what we can see in our skies.

Can we understand what is happening from the point of view

of the UFO?

♪♪

Michael: We need people to get past the stigma that comes with

seeing something strange

that doesn't fit with

our conventionally held notions of physical reality,

in order to learn about these things.

Spectator [on video]: That's them, right?

TJ [on video]: Yeah, that's them.

The same red cherry lights as we had before.

Murray: In this particular case,

it just was seen by a lot of people.

It's well documented.

And it seemed to have purpose and a direction

and didn't seem to worry too much about the observers.

Ashley: Many people in different counties saw these things.

The police actually came and said they had received many,

many calls about the lights.

And also NUFORC,

the National UFO Reporting Center with Peter Davenport

had received, I think they said, 160 calls.

Michael: We rely on other people,

people's encounters and other people's accounts

to learn from these

and to be able to collect data and analyze that data

and pull recurring themes out of these,

to look for patterns among what groups of people

or individuals report.

So when we have these sightings that involve multiple witnesses,

hundreds, sometimes thousands of witnesses,

we can really get a unique opportunity to dive deep

into something that is rare but is also highly informative.

Narrator: With so many sightings,

a community meeting is held led by the Illinois chapter

of MUFON.

TJ: Once we got to talking about it,

.Well, what did you see? /

one of the girls that was at this meeting,

she said if people had Nextel cell phones there at that time,

they died.

They lost their connection.

Once this thing got further east,

then they turned back on.

There was one woman there that said that she heard

jibber-jabber on the baby monitor at that time, too.

She heard some noise going off in there that was not the baby.

Some kind of electronic interference.

Mike: There's this theory that if it's something bigger

than airplanes and it's giving off

a lot of energy,

you would find it in the Doppler.

So if it's on a clear day,

you would see this huge energy system flying overhead.

So that's what they were looking for.

But there's no data that was wiped out.

Narrator: UFO witnesses search for the origins

of their sighting and wonder if it's connected

to the lost weather data.

Mike: When it comes to a UFO sighting,

you want to look at weather data.

And all the weather data for that day

was wiped out of the system.

And then I believe the October

or the Halloween one too as well.

Both those weather datas weren't there.

They couldn't pull the Doppler data.

Narrator: Who interfered with the weather data?

What would anyone gain from that?

Neil: To affect that many different wavelengths

of frequencies--

--so Doppler radar is going to operate

in the microwave band.

The baby monitor might operate in UHF or VHF bandwidths.

That's a pretty big spectrum.

So it would take something like an electromagnetic pulse,

or if you had something transmitting

at all of those bandwidths at the same time

that was overpowering the signals

that they're trying to receive, that could do it.

Another thing that could possibly do it

was maybe a solar storm

if you had a high intensity amount of energy.

But it's very unlikely that you'd have something

that would be causing that much interference

on all of those bands.

Narrator: Could the lights be part

of a secret military exercise

that the US government is trying to keep secret?

Chris: Perhaps these were military craft

or one large military craft.

Indeed, in the Chicago area,

there are some air bases and military operations,

and objects flying over the lake would be relatively common.

So it's very possible that what was seen

was some sort of military craft.

The airport in the area was towards the north,

so it's very possible that the objects were seen

from the south,

heading in the direction of the airport.

Although military aircraft wouldn't be sharing

the same airport,

they might be travelling a long distance,

going somewhat further, perhaps into Ohio,

where Wright Patterson Air Force Base is,

one of the largest Air Force bases in the United States.

And there's a lot of places in between.

TJ: I've seen those types of F35, F15s, F16s,

and they make noise.

If an F16 or F17 flew overhead,

you know that's military for sure.

Neil: I don't really think it was a military aircraft.

The only helicopters that would fly in formation is military.

It's very uncommon to actually have helicopters flying

in formation at night.

Night flying,

you want to make sure you've got a large amount of separation.

So it's very uncommon.

Narrator: If it's not military or human intervention,

what kind of alien craft could this potentially be?

Producers have assigned the exoplanet TOI-700 d

to our experts to theorize what kinds of beings

could operate a vessel

as large as the one seen in Tinley Park in August 2004.

♪♪

Michael: So we're talking about something

that would have a similar gravity.

Because bipedalism is so rare on planet Earth,

even going up to 1.1, 1.15, 10 to 15%

the gravity of Earth,

it might be difficult to find bipedal life in the way

that we've evolved here as upright,

walking bipedal hominins.

But that still is somewhat similar to what we find

with regard to Earth's mass,

Earth's radius, and therefore Earth's gravity.

So we might be looking at something

that is relatively similar.

Narrator: NASA has been searching for places like this

with the Transitional Exoplanet Survey Satellite: TESS.

TESS searches for Earth-like rocky exoplanets

in habitable zones of solar systems.

Nathalie Ouellette: TOI-700 d is another very Earth-like planet,

similar in size to the Earth, a little bit bigger,

so the gravity would be a little bit stronger there.

And it's in the habitable zone.

Michael: It has a high Earth similarity index.

It's about 1.3, 1.5 radius

and mass relatively to the size of the Earth.

So we're talking about something

that would have a similar gravity.

Nathalie: One key thing there

is that it has a very nice quiet star,

so you don't have those issues,

those worries about radiation sort of killing any life

that's there or eroding away an atmosphere

that would be there.

So TOI-700 d is potentially a good candidate

in terms of observing that atmosphere.

Narrator: Once TESS discovers an exoplanet,

NASA scientists can study it

using the James Webb Space Telescope.

Launched in 2021,

it's the largest and most complex telescope humanity

has ever sent into space.

As it orbits the sun,

the telescope helps scientists study the history

of the universe.

It can also look for an atmosphere on an exoplanet

a hundred light years away.

Nathalie: It's sort of at a good distance from us in order

for the James Webb Space Telescope

to do follow-up studies.

The Earth has a very thin atmosphere,

which would be hard to detect with these tools,

so when we're trying to find an Earth-like atmosphere

on these planets, it's quite hard.

Narrator: The TESS mission discovers a handful

of exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star

in the Dorado constellation.

And one, TOI-700 d, is far enough away

that water could exist in liquid form.

It's 100 light years away,

so it's still within the realm of being able to be studied

by the James Webb Space Telescope,

and it's one of the key targets that will be studied with it.

So unlike some more distant planets,

we can actually potentially determine

if it has an atmosphere.

But we don't know yet.

We have studied a lot of rocky exoplanets

with the James Webb Space Telescope,

trying to find an atmosphere.

And we haven't yet been able to detect an atmosphere

around a rocky exoplanet.

Narrator: In our hypothetical scenario,

if the earth-like TOI-700 d is the source

of Earth's visitation,

its inhabitants would not evolve like humans have.

The exoplanet has one major distinction from Earth.

Michael: One of the issues is that it is tidally locked

like a lot of these exoplanets.

So that's going to be a little bit different.

Narrator: Tidal lock means TOI-700 d has terminator zones,

where day and night abruptly meet.

Nathalie: So these exoplanets can be very Earth-like

in terms of their size, their mass, or composition.

But they're going to tend to be very close in,

with very short years, very short orbital periods.

So that ends up being a little bit different

from what we have here on Earth.

They won't have the same day-night cycle

that we have here.

They'll have a day side and a night side.

So we do need to contend with these differences

when we're looking at these exoplanets.

Michael: I think it's important to kind of reflect on

what the environment is like there,

but then also supplant that

and extrapolate to our own planet

where we do know how things

and what it might look like here.

So we could have sort of a spring break side of the Earth,

and then a dark, cold, wintry side of the Earth.

And obviously the environments would be very different.

The way we organize,

the way we interact would be very different.

One thing that is maybe potentially quite beneficial

about Earth is that it's not tidally locked.

We're tidally locked with the Moon,

so it adds a little variation to our oceans,

but nothing like what we would see if we were tidally locked

to the Sun.

Where we had one part of the Earth that was always in the Sun

and one part that was always in the darkness.

And we can think about this in the context of how life

would evolve on another planet.

But maybe we should also consider

what life would look like here if we were tidally locked.

What would we have on this planet?

Would we still have humans dispersed

all throughout the planet,

interacting economically and socially?

Would we be flying around in planes and taking boats

to all of these different places?

In my mind, I see something happening

at that terminator zone.

And then a population, whatever form,

probably not human-like at all, but in whatever form,

just starting to encapsulate that entire planet.

Narrator: Life emerging from the terminator zones,

also known as .twilight zones, /

evolving in unimaginable ways,

perhaps way beyond human evolution.

Also, it's worth remembering

that at 100 light years from Earth,

even travelling at the speed of light,

186,000 miles per second,

it would take any visitor from TOI-700 d 100 years to reach us.

We would probably have life,

given the other characteristics of this planet.

And eventually, if it did over time develop intelligence

and develop technology and social organization,

the ability to work with one another,

to have public works projects like what we see

with the dawn of agriculture áreally,

that was the jumping off point for humanity.

Once we started to become sedentary,

work together, have a surplus

so that we could pay people and offer people food

who weren't involved in the means of production,

who weren't just involved in agriculture,

they went off to do other things.

They started to build monumental public works projects.

We started to have artisans, mathematics, philosophy.

People could just sit around and think,

because they didn't have to toil in the fields.

Narrator: For societies on distant planets,

more time to evolve could mean more advanced tools or weapons

or ways of working and communicating.

When we compare the solar system

to all these exoplanetary systems,

it almost looks like we're the black sheep.

None of these exoplanetary systems look like us,

with four close in terrestrial planets

and these four giants that are farther away.

But that's because it would be really,

really hard to detect a solar system-like system

from where we are now.

If there was alien civilization,

maybe they had better tools to do that.

Narrator: Perhaps the visitors aren't telling us

they have arrived,

but instead they're asking us to pick up the signal.

They're leaving clues,

getting us used to the idea that they are there.

What would happen if we had AI enhance the footage

with all these planetary details of TOI-700 d in mind?

[camera shutter clicks]

Narrator: We can see clear orbs with what looks like

multicoloured plasma fields emanating around it.

But the central portion is obscured.

What is certain is that in 2004,

the people of Tinley Park got used to seeing

this phenomenon fly.

Ashley: People get desensitized after a while.

You see something often enough,

even if you don't believe it at first or don't go along with it,

eventually it kind of becomes like an everyday thing,

like, .Oh yeah, I know all about that.

I've heard about that, I've seen pictures. /

And so I think this might be a way of just getting us used to

the fact that they're here.

Child [on video]: Who saw it first?

TJ [on video]: I did.

Chris: Three objects moving together

and shifting perspective, shifting shape,

shifting formation, and in some cases,

making people feel as if they were being watched

in the same way that they are watching the UFOs.

Spectator [on video]: Hey, is that the UFO?

TJ [on video]: They're back again.

I think this is just them showing themselves more,

and maybe even getting people getting used to the fact

that they're here.

And when disclosure does come,

it's not going to be such a huge shock.

Murray: But it does actually point to a kind of an arrogance

in a way.

Because, you know, if you're an extraterrestrial,

.You're not going to do anything to stop me.

I'm not attacking you.

I'm just silently moving past you.

Believe what you want to see when you see me,

but I am just here to check out your area.

Don't mind me. /

Narrator: From the UFO's point of view,

America's third largest metropolis would offer

endless opportunities,

opportunities to investigate the many patterns that make up

life here on Earth.

Do these patterns speak to them?

And if they do,

is what they say good for humanity?

♪♪

♪♪

Narrator: If in 2004,

the unexplained lights of Tinley Park

were visiting alien craft, what would they have seen?

Murray: Think of it.

You're looking down at a landscape of a city,

of a park,

and there are roadways and patterns,

and that might be just it.

They may be looking at it from a perspective

that's flipped for them,

just like a magic eye would flip for you.

You just see patterns, repetitive patterns.

Once you flip it,

cross your eyes ever so slightly,

the conversion and a new shape emerges from that.

They may be looking for patterns that we can't even see.

Narrator: If alien beings from light years away are drawn

to patterns they discover on Earth,

what is it about Chicago?

Why Tinley Park?

♪♪

Mike: So Tinley Park's more of, like, a blue-collar town.

A lot of blue-collar workers are from Tinley Park.

Tinley Park also has, you know, the amphitheatre,

so it draws in a lot of people for music and whatnot.

A lot of restaurants and dining.

The railroad kind of brought a lot of business here back

in the 1800s, connected Chicago to Joliet, Illinois,

which was the next biggest city.

A lot of people actually came here

because it was close to resources

and this was the granary.

This is where everybody got their grain.

So yeah, Tinley Park's been always

kind of an industrious town.

Definitely an artificial environment

on top of a very natural one.

The natural one being the glacial environment,

and then most extreme artificial environment being like a hub,

like Chicago, O' Hare Airport,

all that comes with it on top.

And then having that large aquifer,

Lake Michigan.

There's major transport corridors both in the air

and on the ground.

There's tunnel systems.

TJ: There's a small park in the centre,

and then a bunch of houses this way with four streets.

And it gets larger and larger and larger.

So that's a very big circle.

And of course you get your street lights also

that are going to be orange

and those shine down on the street at night.

And I think it might be pretty cool

to see something like that at night,

especially if you're high up.

You can see this big circle.

But that's that small little residential area of Tinley Park.

Mike: Once the sighting passed over,

it was heading east.

So I was facing west.

And then I turned my body around and started facing east

where I saw it.

And it was, to me,

it felt like it was following I-80.

It was like following that I-80 corridor.

Narrator: If the craft follows a manmade road,

could it be studying our manmade structures or the movements

of everyday blue-collar humans

just going about their daily activities?

Murray: You're looking for gold or metal items

with a metal detector.

You just casually take your metal detector

and you gently sweep it across the surface.

I entertain the notion that what we're looking at

is a gigantic metal detector, some kind of detection system,

just gently sweeping across just to get a good sense

of what's going on.

It could be visual,

certainly there'd be a lot of electromagnetic going on,

probably lots and lots of pollutants.

They can get great samplings there.

If you were an intelligent race

that was seeking scientific data,

that would be a great place to do it.

You'd see a plethora of different types of activities.

If you're from somewhere else, never been here,

you're a tourist, you're here to view,

and in this particular case maybe even gather data.

Ashley: I can actually see it over an airport,

maybe more than just a regular park.

But they seem to--I mean,

they come to people in all locations

and all situations

and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason.

But if any sort of complex organism started to free itself

from the burdens of subsistence,

like what we see here with human society

about 12,000 years ago with the dawn of agriculture,

then maybe it can start to expand

and it can start to use that technology

and that cohesive social ability

to construct and build

and continue to evolve the ways that we solve problems,

to expand out to the sunnier

and the darker sides of that planet.

Narrator: From their planet light years away to ours,

what do they see?

If it's a craft the size of nine jumbo jets,

it's possible it doesn't see the people at all

and is only focused on the metropolis

and its inherent network of patterns and systems.

It's these patterns and how they interact with our planet

that may speak to them

and inform them of this planet's transition

to our next stage of civilization.

Other kinds of more complex creatures don't really have

a strong sense of their own organizational structure,

only parts of it.

Hard to see the overview of everything,

like what is the overall pattern that emerges from the activity

of things on the ground.

So you have a surveying ship looking at ground patterns

in this way,

there may be patterns and things, like,

that we don't know about ourselves,

that it can learn about us in those convergences.

Narrator: What if the reasons to learn about us

are not altruistic?

What if it's here to take what we have,

to invade, to colonize, to attack?

Can we know the motivation of alien visitors?

Are we simply investing them with our own historic impulses

and flaws?

♪♪

TJ [on video]: I got it on tape!

I got it!

♪♪

Murray: Its motivations for pursuing a landscape

may not be to take it over or to take its resources,

but rather be part of a larger puzzle

that makes sense to that species.

Maybe it could be ritualistic.

It could be part of a much larger puzzle.

Narrator: Whatever the solution to the puzzle,

the sightings leave witnesses in Tinley Park

searching for answers.

Chris: Why Tinley Park?

Well, for one thing, it's Chicago.

Heavily populated area.

A lot of aircraft zipping in and out.

There can be any number of reasons,

but there's never a solid reason why exactly.

Sometimes it's geological.

Sometimes it's about getting soil samples.

Sometimes it's about proximity to something else.

Narrator: Could there be a geological or mineral reason

for coming to Illinois?

Soil in the area is comprised of deposits

left behind by glaciers.

♪♪

Unconsolidated materials like the glacial deposits,

they have a greater pore space.

The space in between the loosely deposited

and relatively uncompacted materials

allow for cavities to move or flow within.

It could be water, it could be gases, air.

You think about the material and its physical properties,

when it has hollow spaces,

it can make for, maybe,

acoustically different properties, in terms of,

like, how it resonates something,

how it carries frequencies or so in the subsurface.

It may absorb signals more, scatter them more.

When it comes to things like electromagnetic energies,

you know, they could be absorbed or moved differently.

We don't know what the size of other life forms are.

So whatever we consider as being an insignificant amount of space

may just be, like, perfect for some other life form

to study or to access.

It may not even be a physical object.

It could just be an energy type of form that wants to infiltrate

or gain energy out of something.

It's a tough one.

Child [on video]: That's going right over us.

Murray: The three lights was quiet, perfectly silent,

and moved and changed ever so slightly,

moving in a constant direction,

almost as if it didn't care

about its surroundings

or whether it would be seen or not.

♪♪

Chris: But imagine you're an alien

on a distant planet.

Would you really want anyone to know you are here?

Some scientists have speculated that you might not want

to announce your presence to the universe

because they might have nefarious reasons

for coming to you.

Spectator [on video]: But if I was a UFO,

would I be going a little faster than that?

Child [on video]: I would.

Maybe they want to conquer you.

Maybe there's an inherent danger.

Maybe there's a reason why alien species in our galaxy

are so widely separated,

to prevent us from actual interaction and visitation.

TJ [on video]: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That's going southwest now.

Or southeast.

It's moving southeast.

Murray: Let's just imagine that this is just part of

an intergalactic puzzle finder.

I have a piece of my puzzle.

I want to know where it fits in the puzzle that I'm creating.

And that's exactly what humanity is doing.

We're finding pieces of puzzles throughout the universe,

and we're trying to make a picture of our universe.

And don't for one second believe

that just because they're riding around in ships that are silent

and move at high speeds of light or whatever,

they have all the answers.

They're probably still looking like we are.

♪♪

Narrator: If the visitors are trying to

understand the unknown, are they afraid of it?

Or is this merely a scanning or a research exercise?

Are these harbingers of a larger visitation to come?

There was no random pattern.

It was just, like, all over the place.

It was really, really interesting.

And I've never seen anything like that before.

Never.

And that's what drew my curiosity.

Was I scared? Absolutely not.

I thought it was just interesting as heck.

I think for a lot of residents that saw that that night,

they can come to the same conclusion

that it was pretty amazing.

TJ [on video]: They're moving closer to us.

Chris: If Tinley Park is proof that aliens are coming to Earth,

well, they are coming.

They're not hiding in the dark forest.

They're announcing their presence to us.

Is that what's going on with Tinley Park?

Is that what's going on with the UFO phenomenon?

We simply don't know.

But it's great to speculate.

These are some of the ways that we try to understand our role

in the universe and the nature of our world.

Mike: If something's over Tinley Park, Illinois,

and the Air Force, the Army, the FAA

have no clue what it is?

That's kind of an issue, you know what I mean?

Chris: Tinley Park remains a very interesting case.

There were so many witnesses.

And combine that with the many videos that are available,

there's evidence,

and it's just a matter of using that evidence

to better understand the point of view.

♪♪

♪♪

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