Original subtitles

The world you know is not what it seems.

Buried deep inside one of America's leading universities

lies one of the largest collections

of paranormal research in the world.

This thing is something we communicated--

This is a spirit.

I saw a little object hovering.

From telepathy, possession, the abduction experience...

They said, "We're coming."

Collected over decades,

much of it has never been seen by the public.

This is truly a halfway house

between your world and ours.

I'm scouring the globe

looking for new people with extraordinary stories.

I realized my dream is about to happen.

Their accounts will be preserved

alongside some of the most remarkable cases in history.

She's more than telepathic.

I felt like I was being watched.

I saw really horrific things.

There's no way for me to put into words

what I went through.

For over a decade, our archive has collected

evidence of the paranormal.

Throughout time, people have used religion

to help them understand supernatural beings.

This goes way before the Biblical texts.

These entities have appeared in various forms across time,

from celestial beings, sylphs, angels, demons.

But in today's world, more people than ever

believe in extraterrestrials.

It's led to a debate about whether aliens

could be today's equivalent of demons.

There's even a new term for these beings.

"Nonhuman intelligence" is a very modern expression.

NHI can mean extraterrestrial,

demonic, angelic, extradimensional.

It comes from the UFO world.

We'd like to know, what are people really seeing

when they experience these forms of intelligence?

And why do these encounters take place?

I've asked Diana Pasulka,

a leading researcher in this area,

to come and help me investigate this phenomenon.

The core of my work has been that humanity has always been

in touch with intelligences

that have not originated from Earth.

In the past, people have utilized religion

to understand these experiences that they have.

Today, people are looking at these experiences

through a more technological framework.

For some people, it looks like angel contact,

and for other people, extraterrestrial contact.

So I've invited two people who've had encounters

with different nonhuman intelligences

to share their stories.

Their testimonies will be recorded

and added to the archive for future research.

I'm Nancy Burson, and I'm an artist.

I don't believe in the demonic.

The beings, they survive on violence.

They love it.

So are they aliens?

Yeah, they are.

I moved to New York in 1968.

I lived a life of an artist

that didn't quite know where I was going.

I had seen interactive art, and that was

one of the reasons why I came up with this idea

to create an aging machine.

I spent a couple of years going in and out of MIT,

usually on weekends.

I was counting on software engineers to help me,

because obviously, I was not a programmer.

There was a videotape that was made of three faces aging.

What we're gonna look like when we get old

is a subject that interests all of us.

Conceptual artist Nancy Burson has been

experimenting with a technique

that would project the human face

any number of years into the future.

I really do think that we're hitting within

a 75-80% accuracy range.

The facial mapping technology was eventually bought

by the FBI to find missing kids and adults.

The images of facial morphing I created in the '80s

and in the '90s put me in many of the museums

and eventually came together in a huge retrospective.

At this point in my life,

it was all just science and art,

but it was about to change.

My son was born in '89.

And when my son was 11, we went to the UK on vacation.

It was billed as a Merlin journey.

My son was very into the Merlin books,

and so it was just such a thrill

to take this journey together.

Wiltshire is the home of the crop circles.

I had a natural curiosity to experience them.

So we--we ventured out.

We waited for the sun to go down completely

before we entered the crop circle.

Suddenly, there were these two lights,

these two balls of light,

that were floating in front of us.

They were about 6 to 9 feet away from me,

darting in and out.

It was not like anything I've ever felt before.

I took five consecutive pictures.

After that, they just disappeared,

completely out of sight.

So the crop circles are such a phenomenon, right?

We have records of crop circles

from before the 1800s.

And we know that some of them are hoaxed,

but not all of them.

Even today, some defy conventional explanation,

because we don't have the tools to create what we see.

But they're done within hours, so they're often thought

to have been caused by nonhuman intelligence,

the extraterrestrials.

I didn't really understand,

but I knew it to be very powerful.

The balls of light sent pure love.

It was like my heart had broken open.

I felt like it was the beginning of something.

So Nancy, she has her inaugurating experience

near an epicenter of crop circle activity.

I could totally understand why she was so fascinated by them,

because when you become interested in crop circles,

it opens up a whole belief system

about who could have done this.

I wonder if Nancy's artistic creativity

is part of the reason that these beings

are connecting with her.

Are they seeing a talent in her that they want to harness?

Coming back from England,

I felt like I missed these balls of light.

And so I began to feel like,

OK, well, if I could see them in Wiltshire,

why can't I see them in New York?

I felt that, if I put two maps up of Wiltshire,

that they would perhaps come and visit.

And so I did.

And when I did, it was like, suddenly,

there was balls of light darting everywhere,

and it was scary.

And I remember asking them to slow down,

because they were so fast.

It was overwhelming.

What is this?

I really felt like they answered the call.

I felt like I opened

a vortex to something.

I think the connection to aliens

had already been in my mind

when I really saw those balls of light

and when I first saw the crop circle.

At that point, they seemed to be listening,

and I was speaking to them.

And it wasn't like verbal communication.

It was something else.

So after the balls of light appeared,

my work did really quite well,

and there were international exhibitions,

huge retrospectives.

I was honored, respected,

and that was wonderful.

And I felt like they were here for a purpose.

I was given a gift, and this was my destiny.

So Nancy invited this nonhuman intelligence

into her life and then found

even greater success as an artist.

I wonder if there's a connection here.

These light beings appear to be benevolent,

but it's not clear what their purpose is for Nancy.

When people report these experiences,

they often report that they're wonderful and amazing,

and they want to have it again.

But then it turns dark.

And so it appears almost like a grooming procedure.

Every summer, my son and I would go

back to the crop circles.

I was in a bathtub in Wiltshire,

and all of a sudden in my bath were

all these tiny, little gold pellets.

I had no idea what they were.

Did they actually come out of me,

or were they placed there?

And that was when I actually heard a threat.

What I heard was, "You will be doing,

"from now on, what we specifically ask you,

"for we are your god.

There is no other."

So that revelation sent me emotionally reeling.

I felt completely ruled

by the balls of light.

It was really quite scary.

It seems that the light beings

are turning against Nancy.

Perhaps now that she's had such professional success,

they actually want something back in return.

We returned home to New York,

and I got these gold pellets for three days

in bathtubs and showers.

I knew that these probably did not come out of my body.

They're being delivered because I understood that

these beings can carry tiny, little things

and drop them anywhere.

It was quite bizarre.

And I knew at that point

that they really needed to be analyzed.

Analysis came from different places.

One of them was the University of Atlanta.

And there was cesium in them.

And cesium is radioactive.

And that was a complete surprise to me.

When I heard Nancy talk about the pellets,

I was amazed.

She's reaching out to scientists,

and she's saying, "Analyze this."

She's bringing data.

The fact that Nancy is asking

the scientific community to help her illustrates

that some people are turning to technology,

rather than religion, to explain the impossible.

After the pellets, there were suddenly

crystals coming out of my hands and my feet.

I would wear socks on my hands to collect the crystals.

The medical community did not particularly understand.

Why is this coming out of me?

It's been 18 years.

I keep searching for labs and material scientists

who would help me.

Yale labs noted that there was a great deal of silicon.

There are forms of silicon that do exist within the human body.

But this was not that kind of silicon.

I think it means it's not from here.

So she metabolized something physical,

which in our reality is impossible,

but does happen occasionally.

And she had it corroborated.

I think that kind of materialization is

really powerful, certainly in the history of religions.

I know of Catholic artifacts that are anomalous,

are studied, like the Shroud of Turin.

It's fascinating for Diana and I,

as scholars of religion,

to hear Nancy talk about manifesting these crystals,

because it has an element of the miraculous about it.

But Nancy isn't religious.

Nancy is framing this in terms of extraterrestrial life

and nonhuman intelligences and very contemporary things.

But historically, this-- she would've--

she would have been Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc is considered a saint, because like Nancy,

she had an encounter with light beings

back in the 15th century.

Their divine guidance led her to speak with dead saints

and predict France's war with England.

But here, Nancy's visions come through her art.

Time passed, and one night, everything changed completely.

I suddenly started seeing Greys around my bed.

These were beings in light,

but they were still just slanty-eyed Greys

that people see in solid form.

They would give me anxiety attacks.

I was threatened with jumping out a window.

I didn't want to be suicidal.

These were very scary moments.

And a couple of times, I felt like, am I dead?

So I can see them as balls of light,

but I also see them as Greys.

And they change from solid to light endlessly.

After I began seeing these Grey-like aliens,

I realized all these things are constructs.

They were sent as kind of a test

to see how afraid I could be.

And at that point, our relationship had changed.

I knew that I wasn't gonna get rid of them.

These instances in our lives are destiny.

They are the ones that actually control

the consciousness that we have.

And then at a certain point, I began to create art

with their help.

When I first began to know that artistic expression

is not done alone, it's done in collaboration with them,

it was really easy to make my art.

The balls of light have been with me for 25 years.

My current work is a reflection of what they have given me.

And so the paintings that I've created

are actually what I call photonography

because they're built on a grid system

of two up and two down.

It's their pattern.

It runs through the universe.

What I think is most remarkable about Nancy's story

is the way she responded to the nonhuman intelligences

through art.

Over the years, she's accepted them

as part of her life and work.

But I really do wonder whether she'd ever want

to give up her relationship with these light beings.

If Nancy removes the possessing spirits,

does she not also remove the future art?

And is it worth it?

I don't have an answer to that question,

but it does occur to me that these entities are

somehow related to her creativity.

Perhaps the reason the light beings came to Nancy

was because she has a visionary mind

that is ahead of its time.

I really do think that we're hitting within

a 75%, 80% accuracy range.

The balls of light are not God to me anymore.

They're more what I would call the physics.

That's a very contemporary way

of expressing this, I think.

In other words, she's not going back to a religious framework.

She's going to a scientific framework.

What I'd like to submit to Jeff's collection

is one of the small pellets, as well as some of my crystals.

I think it's free energy.

Nancy's experience gives us a modern

and increasingly common interpretation

that nonhuman intelligence can be extraterrestrial.

Our archive contains rare and unseen footage

of a visionary Catholic priest

who had similarly modern views on aliens

dating back decades.

Corrado Balducci, he was a theologian

of the Catholic Church, an exorcist.

He believed that extraterrestrials were

a separate category, even, from angels and demons,

and a lot of people are upset by that.

There's the idea that,

if we have the smoking gun of alien contact,

that this would decimate religion.

This is the idea of catastrophic disclosure.

And I definitely don't believe that.

Religious people already have

a category for nonhuman intelligence.

God is a nonhuman intelligence.

They're already comfortable with that notion.

Balducci is a figure that I think we can look to.

It's not a catastrophe for him to hold these beliefs

that seem incompatible, but yet are not.

Some religious people view nonhuman intelligence as

being demonic, not extraterrestrial.

With this in mind,

I've invited our second experiencer

to tell her own story about her demonic encounters.

My name is Annie.

I worked for the Los Angeles Police Department

for 18 years.

I am the one you call

if something bad is happening to you.

And yet, I barely, barely survived this.

We cannot stop these creatures from coming into our homes.

I lived in LA for most of my life.

I was brought up by my mother

and the man who adopted me,

who I call my father.

I was baptized as an infant.

I grew up being religious.

But when I was about 13, my grandmother told me that

my mother got pregnant very young.

She also said that the man who I thought was my father

was not my biological father.

He had adopted me when I was a baby.

So there was this question about who my real father was.

To find out the truth, I was devastated.

Time passed, and I was hanging out.

I was wide awake, and suddenly,

a very large, black shadow

appeared in the doorway.

I was absolutely terrified.

And it got on top of me.

I could feel an evil malevolence.

I was brought up religious,

and so I thought these were demons.

And that's why I would pray.

I would pray to God with everything I had.

And it never worked.

People have talked about experiencing demons

as far back as we can see.

The demon was this genius that could be bad or good.

It's not yet clear why Annie is being targeted

by these entities, but already,

she adopts a different perspective from Nancy

by framing the experience through a religious lens.

I continued to have these experiences

throughout my 20s and 30s.

These creatures just pour evil off of them.

I didn't have any idea what this thing was.

There was no internet at that time,

and so this was, in my mind, very supernatural.

When I was in my 20s,

I joined the Los Angeles Police Department.

I loved it.

I was promoted to a detective.

During this time,

Elliott came on loan to our unit.

I joined LAPD in 1993,

which was the year after the Rodney King riots.

So Los Angeles, from a policing point of view,

was a very busy place.

So I went on loan

to the narcotics undercover unit,

and that's where we met.

She was a very good cop--

brave and tough.

But there's a soft side too.

We started dating,

and we ended up getting married.

It was actually a fabulous time in my life.

But I had to explain to Elliot

that I had these things, these shadows,

visiting me in the middle of the night.

I remember Annie telling me about being paralyzed,

but I didn't really fully understand it,

because I never experienced it.

I never thought I was hallucinating

because it was so terrifying.

I had periods of waking up

with unexplained bruises on my body.

I had scratches.

It was absolutely bizarre.

To have a bruise like that on the inside of your thigh,

that big, you would know if you did it.

How is that possibly happening?

Within the history of Catholicism,

the very famous Saint Padre Pio

would keep diaries of his experiences,

and he would say that he had

had physical scuffles with the dark side

and have bruises and scratches.

So you do see this within the Catholic tradition.

I frequently went to church,

and I would pray for help, because I didn't have

a lot of context for it other than,

these are demons that are after me.

How did I become a focus

of nonhuman intelligence?

How did this happen?

When I was in my 30s,

I started looking at adoption forums

to see if I could find my biological father,

and I came across a post from him.

We became in touch, and we decided that

we would meet up for lunch.

It was a very strange meeting.

He was very, very slippery.

He was trying to answer questions that Annie had,

but at the same time, almost as though he was lying.

I gave him a journal,

and this journal asks a lot of leading questions

like, what was your childhood like?

And I thought that this was a really good way

for me to get to know him.

And during that first meeting, it came up that

we worked for the Los Angeles Police Department.

My biological father said, "I'm gonna have to

let you know that I did five years in prison."

Ultimately, I discovered that he was involved

with an international human trafficking ring.

He was running a brothel.

He procured underage girls.

And he was carrying out occult rituals.

Several of the city management of San Francisco

and the police department were customers of his.

What he was saying was so incredibly outrageous.

I had a hard time believing it.

I actually called the newspaper

in San Francisco to verify,

and everything he told me turned out to be true.

I was horrified.

Here I was, on one side of the law,

and after 35 years of not knowing my biological father,

I find out that

he's the absolute worst of the worst.

I had a falling out with my biological father,

and I got the journal back from him,

and I put it away in my storage unit

and didn't have a look at it.

I didn't want any contact with this man ever again.

I continued to have experiences with entities.

Things started to escalate for me,

and one night, I was taking a shower,

and I was praying...

And then a very beautiful woman came down from above,

and she came down into my body.

I felt her looking out of my eyes.

Because I was praying, I assumed

this was going to be a good entity,

but there was something malevolent about her...

And I really felt like

this entity wanted to steal my soul.

NHI being interested in our souls--

so this is a belief that a lot of spiritual people have.

There are researchers who have written books about this too.

One of the most well-known researchers in this field,

Budd Hopkins, began to take on this idea that

maybe these experiences were harmful to people.

That's OK.

Lie down. You're OK, John.

What always happens is the person is paralyzed.

They cannot move.

They can be in bed at night.

What just happened?

- Someone came in the room. - Uh-huh.

Case after case after case replicated the cases before.

And from my own research, what I can say is that

more than 60% of the people that have talked to me

about their own experiences with NHI,

these experiences were scary.

They would prefer not to have had them.

This was something that was very difficult

for me to deal with.

By day, I'm the person you call

if something horrible is happening to you.

By night, I--I became helpless.

I think that people like Annie are

forces of good in the world.

And if we're truly talking about something malevolent,

of course they're gonna want to take down

those forces of good.

So after that incident in the shower,

I reached out to a handful of paranormal researchers.

And I was told that there was an occult connection

to people who experience demons.

One of the very first questions I was asked was,

who in your family is involved in the occult?

And right away, I realized my biological father

had been performing occult rituals.

And I was cleaning out my storage unit,

and I came across that journal

that my biological father had given me.

And when I looked through this journal,

it all just hit me.

He walked out of his Catholic religion

and into Luciferianism...

The belief that Satan is actually the good guy.

"I used to believe in Christ until God showed me different.

"What is the strangest thing you have ever seen?

The devil."

I decided to email my biological father.

In this email exchange, he told me that

he was carrying out occult rituals out in the desert,

and he had come into contact with a female entity

that he describes as The Lady.

There was an email exchange

where he told me he worked for the mob.

He claimed that these entities had saved his life

on multiple occasions and that he was

devoted to these entities.

He was performing sexual abuse and rituals

in order to gain favor from these entities.

A light bulb came on.

The connection that I'm having to these entities

could have originated with my biological father.

My biological father,

he had chosen to worship Satan.

He was in contact with an entity called The Lady.

This sounds like an intentional bargain.

Annie believes her father made a deal with the devil,

which is different than Nancy,

who fell under the spell of the light beings

before they turned on her.

My biological father had never seen me as a baby.

We didn't have any contact whatsoever.

And yet he had experienced the very same entity

that I had experienced.

All of these experiences actually sent me

into a spiritual crisis.

I met a pastor,

and we decided it was a good idea

to go to deliverance, an exorcism.

There was probably about ten of us in the church.

They were aware of my biological father's

involvement with the occult.

They were focused on exorcizing The Lady.

They were telling The Lady that

she had to get out of my body.

But I feel her in there again.

So they aggressively start praying.

It almost seemed as though there was a fight going on.

The gentleman to my left was butting heads with the entity.

My entire body was vibrating.

And eventually, that entity did come out.

And according to the reaction on Annie's face,

something did change.

I always believed in God, but I was just at a distance.

But after Annie's deliverance,

that's when everything clicked for me.

I believe the demonic is 100% real.

It is 100% real.

After the deliverance, I felt a lot better.

My injuries went down.

I stopped seeing the scratches and the bruises.

My faith was restored.

I couldn't have gotten through any of this without Elliot.

I love him very much.

We use this word "genetic" too loosely,

but there's something in the family

that's passed from generation to generation.

It's so interesting that, you know, the idea

of the generational curse, right...

- Yeah. - Is--is here, exemplified.

Annie is convinced that

she is a victim of a generational curse.

It's an ancient idea that we see across traditions,

from the Bible to Greek tragedy.

I had been told by multiple researchers

that these entities owned me before I was even born

because of the contact they had with my biological father.

I would like to submit to Jeff the journal.

Once I found this journal, I did not keep this in my house

because of the idea of entanglement.

I wonder if Annie and Nancy are part of a select group

who are able to see nonhuman intelligences.

Their cases are very different.

Annie's experience is rooted in a religious framework.

She relies on her faith

to free her from demonic encounters.

But Nancy views her 25-year relationship

with extraterrestrials through a scientific lens,

and she's never managed to free herself

from the light beings.

So in a way, science just can't give us

the answers we seek.

Yet religion can, in some way, give us comfort.

I think cases like Annie's and cases like Nancy

are good indications that we can try

to get rid of religion, right?

So we can say, oh, we're secularized,

you know, we're rational, and so forth,

but these kinds of things still happen to people.

I don't see why we would throw religious frameworks away,

because they've helped us deal with NHI

for thousands of years.

We need more data on these entities,

and that is why these stories are so important

for our collection.

If Nancy is controlled by aliens

and Annie is possessed by demons,

are they really describing two different things?

The truth is in the eye of the experiencer.

Within these walls, our archive has evidence

that telepathy is real, dreamers become prophets,

aliens abduct, and the dead can speak.

While tensions continue between science and religion,

we are seeing that these extrasensory abilities

could be connected.

We are awakening to our own superhuman potential.

Maybe it's ourselves that we've been waiting for.

The truth is not just out there.

It's in here.