Original subtitles

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♪ ♪

STEVE ALLEN: January the 8th, 2008,

it was approximately 6:00 PM in the afternoon,

and the sun was just going down,

and my buddy Mike Odam called me and says,

"You want to come over and enjoy the afternoon?

We'll build a campfire up on the hill

and just hang out and shoot the breeze."

And I said, "Sure can."

Second I got out of my pickup,

I noticed some lights coming at us

at a very high rate of speed.

I asked Mike and Lance if they was seeing what I was seeing,

they replied back, "Yes, we're seeing it."

We saw a craft coming from the east going west.

Had extremely large lights,

like a magnesium flare,

almost burnt your eyes to look at it.

And it was moving extremely fast,

faster than any normal aircraft that we have around here.

And as we watched it, we saw that it had two F-16 jets

in hot pursuit after it, chasing it.

I know what a F-16 is.

I go to air shows and pretty familiar with aircraft.

It was unbelievable.

It left us all in shock,

you know, it was, uh, out of this world.

♪ ♪

LARRY KING: Last week, several people in Stephenville, Texas,

witnessed what many are calling a UFO.

STANTON FRIEDMAN: The Air Force has lied about UFOs

for 60 years, actually.

And this would be in keeping with that.

LESLIE KEAN: In the late '40s and early '50s,

there was so many sightings across the United States.

It was in the middle of the Cold War,

so government officials were trying to figure out

what these objects were.

CHRIS MELLON: The government examined

over 12,000 UFO sightings.

Many of those bore a striking resemblance

to what we're seeing today.

JOHN A. SAMFORD: There have been a certain percentage of reports

by credible observers of relatively incredible things.

MARK O'CONNELL: The Air Force, I think, for a time

may have been making an honest effort

to clear the air about the phenomenon.

Unfortunately, it didn't last too long.

J. ALLEN HYNEK: To this time, there is no valid

scientific proof that we have been visited by spaceships.

KEAN: They were inundated by these reports

and just wanted to be done with the whole thing.

LAWRENCE J. TACKER: We are not hiding anything;

we have nothing to hide.

KEAN: This became the launch of taboo on a more official level.

Ridicule became sanctioned.

ALLEN: I would like to have answers,

but I'm not sure if we'll ever get any.

HYNEK: We get reports every night.

MAN: I don't know what the hell it is.

MAN: Looks like a rotating right around it.

MAN: I'd like to report a UFO.

KEAN: In 2017, two colleagues and I published a story

in The New York Times

about a secret Pentagon program studying UFOs.

The story was on the front page of The New York Times,

and it was huge,

it was covered everywhere all over the world.

It was like such a sea change for me as a journalist

and also for the issue of UFOs in general.

For most people, this was the first time they heard anything

about any official relationship between the government and UFOs.

But actually in the late 1940s,

the government was really starting to wake up

to what this issue was really all about.

MARK RODEGHIER: It's extremely important to understand

that the Cold War affected both the perception of UFOs

and how it was handled by the military.

MELLON: It's hard for us today to remember

what the mindset was, but it was dire.

It was life and death between the United States

and Soviet Union.

There was people out with binoculars all over the country,

constantly searching the skies for a Russian strike.

O'CONNELL: It was only natural that during the Cold War,

UFOs sort of got folded into this overriding fear

of what might attack us at any given time.

(phone rings)

OPERATOR: Air Defense, go ahead.

WOMAN: Bravo, hotel, three five, black, west.

OPERATOR: Check. Thank you.

KEAN: And then, in 1947, just when these Cold War fears

were starting to take hold,

there was a very famous sighting by a pilot named Kenneth Arnold.

That was the sighting that marked the beginning

of the modern era of UFOs.

ED MORROW: It all began with an incident

which occurred in 1947.

On the afternoon of June 24th of that year,

Kenneth Arnold made the first report on flying saucers.

O'CONNELL: Kenneth Arnold was a private pilot

searching for a military plane

that had crashed sometime earlier,

and he sees, off in the distance,

a chain of nine silvery objects.

He said they look sort of like silver pie plates

with a crescent cut out of them.

And he times them at going over 1,000 miles an hour.

RODEGHIER: Nothing in 1947 was capable of traveling

1,200 miles an hour.

Nor did we have any aircraft

that looked like this.

KENNETH ARNOLD: They seemed to flip and flash in the sun,

just like a mirror.

Kind of weaving and going at a terrific speed.

O'CONNELL: He landed at his next stop at the next airport

and told the flight crew what he had encountered,

and people pretty much just laughed him off.

But when got to his next stop,

there were reporters waiting for him.

He described their movement as

"a saucer skipping across the water."

And that reporter thought, "Ah, flying saucers.

That's what we'll call 'em."

And that's what we've been using ever since.

In the aftermath of Kenneth Arnold's report,

there were hundreds and hundreds of reports

pouring into the Air Force every day,

and the Air Force couldn't just ignore that.

KEAN: It was in the middle of the Cold War,

and so government officials were trying to figure out

what these objects were.

O'CONNELL: General Twining saw this phenomenon

as a possible threat to our country.

So, he issued a very famous memo in which he said,

"The phenomenon reported is something real...

not visionary or fictitious."

Those were pretty big words coming from a general

in the Air Force in the summer of 1947.

KEAN: The Twining memo marked the beginning of an era

in which the Air Force would become deeply involved

with the question of UFOs.

The government was put in a position where it had to decide

was it going to engage with this phenomenon,

and if so, how much of it was it going to make public?

That continued on in the decades that followed,

and it impacted all the cases that came decades later.

MELLON: The Stephenville, Texas, UFO case

is very intriguing to me.

In 2008, a large, unidentified flying object was observed

by a large number of people from the ground.

ALLEN: When we first saw it,

it had seven lights across the back of it,

all blinking in no particular order.

As it approached Stephenville,

these seven lights became

an arch shape of seven lights,

and then a brief moment later

they burst into a flame,

and it looked to me like the flame was contained

in a rectangle box.

Somebody had made the comment,

"Well, is it half the size of a Walmart?"

I said, "It's much bigger than a normal Walmart."

ROBERT POWELL: What made the Stephenville case so interesting

was that in a four-hour period of time,

you had dozens of reports of an object.

And they all described seeing the same thing.

ALLEN: It happened about 12 and a half, 13 years ago.

I still think about it quite often.

We're still trying to find out

and discover what the cause of it was.

It just had two large, bright, intense red lights

with a white light in the center of it,

and it had two military jets behind it,

which everybody saw in town the jets.

They was running full throttle,

but they wasn't able to catch it.

CLAUDETTE ODAM: There were fighter jets

chasing those lights.

And the jets couldn't keep up with them.

And then it just left, it was gone. That fast.

PRODUCER: What do you think it was?

ODAM: I don't know what it was,

but I know it wasn't an airplane.

♪ ♪

ALLEN: After that, I spoke to probably 200 or 300 people

that witnessed it.

Business owners, city councilmen, policemen.

But no one could say what we saw that night.

So I called the Stephenville Empire-Tribune

to see if anybody may have got a visual on it.

The editor directed me to a newspaper reporter

named Angelia Joiner.

She interviewed me over the phone,

and she started digging deep

to help find out what we was seeing.

She was hell-bent to find out the truth.

♪ ♪

SARA VANDEN BERGE: My name is Sara Vanden Berge,

and I was the managing editor of the Stephenville Empire-Tribune

for 14 years.

In 2008, Steve Allen and a couple of his friends

saw some suspicious lights, and they called into the newsroom

and talked to Angelia Joiner.

Angelia Joiner was one of my reporters at the Empire-Tribune.

Sadly, Angelia passed away of COVID last year.

Angelia was a super fun person, but she took her job seriously.

Good writer, she was thorough,

she was, she was a good reporter.

ANGELIA JOINER: Steve Allen called me and said,

"Hey, I got a story for ya."

And I could tell by talking to him,

you know, the way his voice changed

and his inflections changed, and, and he was just so sincere

when he was describing it to me,

I knew this guy saw something.

He really saw something big.

VANDEN BERGE: After Steve Allen called,

she pitched the story to me and said,

"Here's what's happened, what do you think?"

PRODUCER: Did you have any concern at that point

about reporting on this?

VANDEN BERGE: Yeah, it just seems like, you know,

it's the thought of the little green men

coming out of the spaceship.

It was sort of tabloid-ish to me.

That was my concern as a journalist

who wanted to be taken seriously.

I was afraid that, you know,

this would somehow taint my reputation.

So, I said put something together and pitch it to me

tomorrow evening when I get back to the office,

and then we'll talk about it.

JOINER: This sighting was like right here

in our core readership area, and I thought, you know,

the readers are gonna like this,

they're gonna really like this.

So, and the people, they, they know the people in the story,

that's another thing.

So that was another reason I went ahead and did it.

PRODUCER: Do you, uh...

JOINER: And the editor left early.

(laughs) You have to cut that part!

But she did!

(laughs)

VANDEN BERGE: Next morning, at the end of my driveway

was the paper.

I picked it up, and across the top had

"UFO Sightings in Erath County" in like 72-point font.

It was just huge.

After I had left for the day, the publisher and Angelia

redid the front page and went to press, and I had no idea.

I almost had a nervous breakdown right then.

I could not believe that, um,

that that had happened overnight.

Two hours into my day, I got a call from the publisher.

She said, "Things are blowing up.

We've sold out of all the papers we've had."

That was my first indication

like, wow, people are really interested in this.

KIDS: You need to get a helmet, ma'am!

You need to get a helmet.

VANDEN BERGE: It generated a lot of excitement here.

A lot of businesses had T-shirts made and sold those,

and the high school kids had fun with it.

MAN: Stephenville may be typical,

but what's happening in the skies above it

is a whole 'nother story.

JOINER: It kind of is the talk of the town right now.

MAN: Angelia Joiner is a reporter

with the town's newspaper.

She's now on the strangest

and possibly the biggest story of her life.

VANDEN BERGE: It went from this little story

to this huge, out of control, worldwide frenzy.

ALLEN: I started getting phone calls from all over the world:

Brazil, Japan, England.

And the next thing you know,

CNN, and quite a few other TV things showed up

and wanted our story.

KEAN: What's notable about the Stephenville case,

and other cases that are similar to that,

is that despite the numbers of witnesses

seeing these gigantic craft,

nobody in positions of authority came to investigate.

That's in contrast to what was going on in the '40s and '50s

where there was an Air Force program

and they would investigate cases.

NEWSCASTER: Here is a picture that was released just today.

It shows four luminous objects in formation

in the sky over Salem, Massachusetts.

Now here on this map are pinpointed locations

where some 30 saucers have been sighted

and are still unexplained.

O'CONNELL: In 1949, the military started looking into

all these stacks of UFO reports

that the Air Force was receiving.

MAN: Headquarters United States Air Force has issued

a directive for a detailed study of flying disc reports.

KEAN: The program was initially called Project Sign,

then became Project Grudge,

and then it was named Project Blue Book.

O'CONNELL: Project Blue Book was operated

out of the dingiest office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

They had a malfunctioning coffee pot, they had a couple desks,

they had a big map up on the wall, and that was it.

But they just had a system down.

MELLON: Project Blue Book started as a good faith effort

by the government to collect reports and investigate UFOs.

When there were big cases, they would sometimes dispatch someone

to interview the witnesses.

O'CONNELL: The Air Force was pretty open

about Project Blue Book.

O'CONNELL: Alongside the military employees,

the Air Force felt that they needed

a credible scientific opinion to support their research.

INTERVIEWER: Is it in the realm of possibility

that there are spaceships someplace in this universe?

HYNEK: Well, if you put it in the word,

use the word "possibility" and not "probability,"

then I would have to say,

I think as any scientist would have to say,

it is certainly possible, yes.

O'CONNELL: J. Allen Hynek was a mild-mannered college professor

from Ohio State University.

His job was to go through all these stacks of UFO reports

that the Air Force was receiving

and try to find out what's going on.

MELLON: Project Blue Book examined

over 12,000 UFO sightings,

many of them bore a striking resemblance

to what we're seeing today.

Crafts with a similar shape, sometimes the same color,

hovering, then shooting off instantaneously

at hypersonic speeds.

Multiple, multiple cases like that.

O'CONNELL: While working for Project Blue Book,

Hynek noticed that he was able to explain 80% of cases.

But he also noticed that there was about a 20% residue of cases

that he hadn't been able to explain away.

RODEGHIER: Allen Hynek came into the UFO project

with the attitude which is, there's nothing to UFOs,

but he was a good enough scientist to say,

"Wait a minute,

I'm seeing reports here that are not easily explainable."

O'CONNELL: The Air Force and their UFO study project

may have been making an honest effort

to clear the air about the phenomenon.

Unfortunately, it didn't last too long,

simply because they were just overwhelmed with reports.

MAN: This is the Kremlin.

Russia today is regarded as a grave threat to our nation,

to our freedom, to the peace of the world.

♪ ♪

KEAN: In the '40s and '50s,

tensions with Russia were building.

MELLON: The Cold War was so intense at that point,

so there was a genuine concern

that the UFO phenomenon could be exploited.

RODEGHIER: The US government felt adversaries

could hoax UFO sightings

and then clog up our reporting channels

and then have a surprise attack.

So the idea was that the UFO problem

was not a security problem as such,

meaning aliens aren't going to land and, and attack us.

What the UFO problem was, it was a sociological problem,

and it was one that demanded a different approach.

NARRATOR: The CIA entered the picture

by convening a panel of top scientists

to examine UFO phenomenon.

The thinking was that the enemy could exploit UFOs as a decoy

in the preparation for an attack on the United States.

Five outstanding scientists

and various Air Force and CIA representatives were to meet.

Among the panel members was J. Allen Hynek.

MELLON: In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency

formed a scientific panel led by a highly regarded scientist

named Robertson to examine this phenomenon and its implications.

KEAN: The Robertson Panel was a group of hand-picked scientists

who came together to try to determine a way

to damp down public interest in UFOs.

O'CONNELL: Dr. Hynek was actually brought in

to be a consulting witness to the Robertson Panel.

HYNEK: The panel members were seated around this table.

It was a rather somber and impressive occasion, actually.

O'CONNELL: The mission given by the Robertson Panel

was essentially to make people stop filing UFO reports.

KEAN: They proposed two methods to damp down public enthusiasm.

One was through debunking.

The second one was through education,

teaching people to explain UFOs

in other ways than something extraordinary.

It was an extremely important moment in the evolution

of how government was going to engage with this topic.

This became the launch of taboo on a more official level,

where it was becoming policy in a way.

Ridicule became sanctioned.

The Robertson Panel conclusion seemed to have a big impact

on Project Blue Book.

The project began to dismiss as many cases as possible

and provide sometimes ridiculous explanations for them

just to have an answer and make them go away.

O'CONNELL: Hynek's job became going through

all these UFO reports

and explain them away as natural occurrences.

Comet, meteor, shooting star, sun dog, eclipse.

HYNEK: I would say the great majority are balloons, meteors,

satellites, aircraft seen with the sun glinting off of them.

Generally, quite usual things seen under unusual circumstances

or surprising circumstances.

RODEGHIER: Dr. Hynek did his job very thoroughly.

Allen was a fellow trying to please the Air Force

and what they wanted.

O'CONNELL: Hynek would have a bunch of reports

dropped on his desk,

and he would explain them all away.

If a report said "probable airliner,"

they would cross out "probable" and just say "airliner,"

and that's what the witness saw.

It was kind of an insult to the, to the, to the intelligence

of the American people.

Hynek had taken the job for the extra money.

Struggling young professional with a growing family,

of course he's not gonna turn down work.

RODEGHIER: But behind the scenes,

Hynek gradually realized that this was a scientific problem.

But he wouldn't go out and state it publicly.

He didn't want to do that, because it would have been

what the Air Force didn't want him to do.

KEAN: Even though it took place in 1953,

the Robertson Panel was so potent

in terms of its desire to clamp down, to ridicule,

to debunk, and to, quote,

"educate people to interpret UFOs in other ways,"

its legacy carried on through the decades,

and it impacted cases like Stephenville

and other cases of the time.

WOMAN: Alright, stand by!

KING: Last week, several people in Stephenville, Texas,

a small, rural town of about 15,000,

witnessed what many are calling a UFO.

In Selden, Texas, is Steve Allen.

Also there is Angelia Joiner,

staff writer for the Empire-Tribune,

the local newspaper in Stephenville.

Angelia, what are some witnesses telling you?

JOINER: The thing that I hear over and over and over

is how bright the lights were,

so I think there's been a lot of consistency in the spottings.

ALLEN: It was Angelia that started digging deep.

She was hell-bent on trying to find out what we saw

and what happened.

And it almost consumed her.

MELLON: The incredible thing about the Stephenville sightings

was that witnesses reported seeing F-16 fighters

pursuing this object.

ODAM: I heard this really, really loud noise.

And I ran out the front door,

and there were fighter jets chasing those lights.

ALLEN: Angelia wanted to know what the Air Force knew

about the two F-16s and what we saw.

She got in touch with the naval air station in Fort Worth

and talked to a Major Karl Lewis.

And Major Karl Lewis said we didn't have any aircraft

in your area at that time.

I feel like we wasn't given the truth,

and the military didn't seem like they was interested

in any questions.

Then on about the tenth day,

the military issued a press release.

WADE GOODWYN: Now in a plot line that's out of The X-Files,

Air Force officials are saying they concede they had F-16s

over Stephenville, Texas, on the evening of January 8th.

Major Karl Lewis says there was

an internal communications mistake.

ALLEN: The plot thickened, but the Air Force wouldn't say

why they did in fact have F-16s in the area.

GOODWYN: Angelia Joiner says that the Air Force's admission

that it did indeed have fighter jets,

as reported by the witnesses, bolsters their story all around.

JOINER: Military coming out with this at this point

just is going to fuel the fire for,

okay, there is something going on, now what is it?

ALLEN: We thought their attempt to try to explain it away

was terribly strange.

We had more questions than answers.

WALTER CRONKITE: UFO reports, hoax or serious sightings,

wind up here at Wright-Patterson air field in Dayton, Ohio.

The Air Force investigative unit is known as Project Blue Book.

MELLON: In the wake of the Robertson Panel,

Project Blue Book was investigating

these civilian reports

as a way to tamp down public concern.

For example, in Michigan, there were at one point

a large number of sightings by people in a community there.

And Walter Cronkite, the arbiter of truth for many Americans,

covered the story.

CRONKITE: The great flying saucer mystery of 1966

began here, near Dexter, Michigan, late in March.

FRANK MANNOR: As I turned around to come back on the porch,

I looked to the north of me, and looked like a falling star,

meteor, it was red and kind of coming down.

CRONKITE: Frank Mannor's UFO remained over his swamp

more than four hours.

40 miles away, another swampland and another UFO sighting.

WOMAN: I believe I saw it, but I can't fathom it,

because it seems so unreal.

O'CONNELL: This was a huge national story.

Everyone was demanding that Blue Book solve the case.

And so they called in Hynek.

His Air Force Project Blue Book boss said,

"Get out there and put a lid on this."

CRONKITE: The Air Force sent its chief scientific consultant

on UFOs, Professor J. Allen Hynek,

to check the Michigan sightings.

HYNEK: The illusion of motion frequently is given by the fact

that a little bit of swamp light appears here, it goes out,

another one appears over here, that goes out,

and but the illusion as viewed from a distance

is that the object has moved back and forth.

And sometimes this gas will gather into a ball

and actually float away.

♪ ♪

RODEGHIER: Allen made an ill-fated remark about,

"Well, some of these sightings could be caused by swamp gas,"

and the witnesses were, um, upset to say the least.

The people of Michigan thought that Hynek

was making fun of them,

that he thought they were all loonies and kooks.

And the whole thing blew up in Hynek's face.

MANNOR: They think you're a nut, tell you the truth,

that's just what they figure you are,

and I'm not gonna take it no more,

I don't want nobody down in here.

I just...leave me alone.

KEAN: When Hynek came up with the swamp gas explanation,

we don't really know whether he believed that or not.

But we do know that he was working for the Air Force,

and they were committed at that point

to discrediting sightings like this one.

It was a real turning point for the beginning

of people really just having had enough

of these kinds of bogus explanations for these events.

Following the swamp gas incident,

the public was outraged,

and even members of Congress became involved.

GERALD FORD: We've had several incidents in Michigan

that many reliable citizens felt were sufficient to justify

some action by our government,

and not the kind flippant answer that was given by the Air Force

where they passed it off as swamp gas.

RODEGHIER: Gerald Ford, who was a congressman at the time

in Michigan, decided that his constituents

were not being taken seriously.

KEAN: Gerald Ford listened to his constituents

and decided that he should call for congressional hearings.

FORD: I think the American people would be more assured

that there were or were not if such a public hearing was held.

KEAN: On April 5, 1966,

Harold Brown, the Secretary of the Air Force,

and J. Allen Hynek walked into the Capitol Building

to answer questions about

Blue Book's investigation into UFOs.

HAROLD BROWN: We have not been hiding anything.

The investigations have been made public,

the explanations of those, where there is a clear explanation,

have been made public.

O'CONNELL: They brought in the secretary of the Air Force,

and he just stonewalled.

And then it came to be Hynek's turn to talk.

He made his own statement that he hadn't shared with anyone,

and he said, "Look, we need to sponsor a scientific study

and tell us whether this is something

we need to keep studying."

REPORTER: How many really mysterious incidents are there

that you'd like to go back and look at again?

HYNEK: Well, as I mentioned in the hearings this morning,

I have picked some 20 cases,

I think those, I would recommend

that they be looked at quite closely.

A scientists has to keep open-minded on an investigation,

a scientific one, without fanfare,

a quiet look at the data, I think, is in order.

KEAN: Hynek was initially a skeptic,

but as he went through the years,

he gradually learned that there really is something to this.

Hynek started to believe that we could learn a lot more

about the phenomenon through better scientific study.

And in fact that's what happened in Stephenville, Texas.

STEVE HUDGENS: Good evening, everyone!

My name is Steve Hudgens.

I'm senior field investigator for MUFON.

We're down here to investigate this extraordinary event.

We have our section director from Waco, Dave Fields,

and Director of Research Robert Powell.

POWELL: My name is Robert Powell.

My educational background is in chemistry,

and I work in the semiconductor industry

as an engineering manager.

Early January of 2008, I'm the director of research at MUFON.

The term MUFON stands for Mutual UFO Network.

I went up to Stephenville with multiple investigators,

and we began to interview the witnesses.

JOINER: Hey! MAN: How are you?

JOINER: I'm good, how are you?

POWELL: I met several key people such as Angelia Joiner,

Steve Allen, and Lee Roy Gaitan.

And Lee Roy just gave me the best description

of what happened that day to him.

LEE ROY GAITAN: As I walk out to my car,

I saw 10 to 12 bright, fluorescent orbs.

They're moving really quickly and then they stop.

And then all of a sudden, they shoot off.

But what was surprising, as I'm still looking,

probably 20, 30 seconds, I hear two jets.

POWELL: After interviewing Lee Roy, the first thing

I decided that I could do was get radar data.

Freedom of Information request to the FAA,

and I got that data back after about six to eight weeks.

And it was incredible.

POWELL: Good morning. My name's Robert Powell.

I'm the director of research

with the MUFON organization.

We obtained radar data from the Federal Aviation Administration

in the Stephenville area.

I talk about this a little bit on the screen here.

One of the first things I do when I get the radar data,

is I find the F-16s and I match that, yes,

that matches the time they went by Lee Roy's home.

Then I look on the radar data for unknowns,

and I find two miles south of his home, just like he told me,

objects on radar that are basically stationary,

just like he said.

And then, the really interesting part

was, on radar, these objects that were over his home,

the next radar blip, the object is to the northeast,

towards Stephenville, and it had traveled at a minimum speed

of 1,900 miles per hour.

And that is from stationary.

There's no way for me to know what it was.

The only thing I can say is what it was not.

It was not any type of aircraft, because no aircraft can hover

and then move to a speed of over 1,900 miles an hour

at low altitude and then stop and hover again.

It's just not something we have the ability to do.

♪ ♪

KEAN: There are so many UFO sightings,

and the vast majority of them can be explained.

But then there are those that involve mass sightings

of something really unusual, and in those cases,

people deserve an investigation by the officials.

O'CONNELL: In the aftermath of the swamp gas case,

the government decided to fund a college research program

of the UFO phenomenon.

MELLON: At the time, the Air Force was trying to find

a way to get out from under the burden

of having to investigate UFOs and comment on this.

And so a scientific panel was established

to investigate and assess the issue.

It was led by a Dr. Robert Condon.

INTERVIEWER: The Air Force has turned to

the University of Colorado

to investigate unidentified flying objects.

And they've asked Dr. Edward U. Condon

to head the project.

How do you propose to go about studying

this particular phenomenon?

EDWARD CONDON: We'll pick certain selected cases

that seem specially interesting and, and go out and try to learn

more about them and those few in greater depth.

RODEGHIER: The guy who was leading it,

Professor Edward Condon,

had no interest in the subject and had to be talked into it.

So, you have a professor who was not looking to do a project,

that was given the project, and things didn't go well.

KEAN: They reviewed 59 cases and wrote them up in a study

that was close to 1,000 pages.

One of the events they covered was the McMinnville incident

in 1950, where the farmer and his wife

took a photograph of a disk-shaped object

that came over their farm.

MELLON: The McMinnville photograph

taken by a poor rural couple in a remote area

who didn't seek any press,

and it showed a UFO very clearly in black and white,

maybe 200, 300 yards away.

KEAN: Here's what the Condon Report said

about the McMinnville sighting:

"This is one of the few UFO reports

in which all factors investigated,

geometric, psychological and physical,

appear to be consistent with the assertion

that an extraordinary flying object

flew within sight of two witnesses."

And there were other cases they described in similar ways.

O'CONNELL: When the final report came out,

the main body of the report was open to the possibility

that UFOs might be real,

but the final summary of the report

was written by Dr. Condon himself.

Dr. Condon said, "It's time for the government

to just wash its hands of this whole thing."

That's about the only thing most people read.

MELLON: The Condon Report concluded in 1969,

this was not a threat to national security.

There was no indication of extraterrestrial connection,

and there was likely no benefit scientifically

from continuing to study this phenomenon.

Dr. Robert Condon was somebody that was strenuously opposed

to the idea that UFOs could be alien craft of any kind,

so from the outset he had his mind made up.

Word is that Dr. Condon himself didn't even bother to read

the report or review the data, he just wrote his conclusion,

because that's what the Air Force wanted to hear.

KEAN: Condon was definitely the nail in the coffin

for Project Blue Book.

The Air Force had been involved with looking into UFOs

for more than 15 years.

They were inundated by these reports, frustrated,

and just wanted to be done with the whole thing.

MELLON: The result was the Air Force said,

"Well, we don't need to follow this anymore."

So they used that as a rationale to close down Project Blue Book.

Shortly thereafter, Dr. Allen Hynek

renounced the whole process

and, and the way the Air Force handled it.

KRESKIN: Some of us who followed this whole phenomena

became interested in the Condon Report.

What's your feeling about that?

HYNEK: Well, my feeling is that the Condon Report

was a travesty on science.

KRESKIN: You don't feel it presented a fair picture?

HYNEK: Condon committee was unable to explain one quarter

of the cases that were submitted that they studied.

ANNOUNCER: Our guest tonight is one of the world's foremost

authorities on unidentified flying objects.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek!

(applause)

O'CONNELL: When Project Blue Book is shut down in 1970,

it freed Hynek to say and do whatever he wanted

where UFOs were concerned.

Dr. Hynek worked nearly two decades on Project Blue Book,

and during that time,

in the data that Project Blue Book had collected,

the cases were still breaking down

in that very same 80/20 ratio.

He was able to explain 80% of them away.

He was not able to explain 20% of them.

And now he started to worry about that.

He was a scientist, and he saw a trend,

and he thought that might mean something.

HYNEK: If these things didn't fit patterns,

then there's no way of studying it.

But when you get reports from Australia, Japan, France,

then you have to say, well, either there's a virus

going around that's causing everybody to become crazy

at the same time, or there's something to it.

O'CONNELL: Hynek was finally free to start investigating

what UFOs are in any way he wanted.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

KEAN: I'm so glad you're doing what you're doing.

'Cause there aren't that many reporters

that take this seriously.

JOINER: Yeah! KEAN: I'm glad you're doing it.

JOINER: I've gotten tons of people,

you know, they walk up to me

and say, "Thank you for reporting it as straight news."

And then I think they just, it was their news judgment,

the publisher and the editor,

that, okay, we don't want any more of this,

let's get back to normal.

KEAN: Some people said you were fired.

Some people said, well, you kind of wanted to leave anyway.

So, what was the actual story?

JOINER: I had given my notice.

They--I was asked not to cover anything else on UFOs.

I came in, my computer was gone, my Rolodex was gone,

and, uh, called to the publisher's office,

and it wasn't a pleasant scene,

and they asked me to pack and go, so I did.

KEAN: Thanks for talking with me.

VANDEN BERGE: Sadly when Angelia left, we never spoke again.

I hate that that story really divided us, but it did.

She just could not get back to doing her regular reporting.

It took over her life.

JOINER: I thought, you know,

the readers are gonna like this,

they're gonna really like this.

So that was another reason I went ahead and did it.

And the editor left early.

(laughs) You have to cut that part.

But she did!

VANDEN BERGE: I have never seen this, that's hilarious.

You know, it's funny to see that, um...

Sorry, I just, I haven't seen Angelia in a long time.

And she loved that story,

and you know, I look back on that time

and I think I was so wrong,

and I thought I was so smart, and I was so wrong,

because they had the foresight

to see something that I couldn't.

And people did love that story, it was fun for them.

♪ ♪

I've never spoken about this,

but about a year after the story died down,

I was driving my daughter to gymnastics one evening.

It was dusk, and I saw (chuckles) the exact same thing

that everyone else had been talking about the year prior.

A big thing, with the lights, the clear lights

that kind of were all over the place,

they went straight line, and it took off.

♪ ♪

And I get goose bumps now, even just remembering it.

Oh, my god, that's what we've been writing about for a year,

and I was the biggest skeptic of all, and here I am.

It was a strange moment, for sure.

The next day I got to the office,

never planned to say a word to anybody,

and we had about a dozen calls that day from others who said,

"Oh, my gosh, I think I saw that again."

That's when I sort of went,

okay, there, there really was something to this,

but it took me that long.

The government should be looking at this, of course.

I have to believe that what happened in Stephenville,

in Erath County, was big enough

that it got the attention of the government.

I, I just believe that.

And I believe that they know a heck of a lot more

than, than we do.

TOM SNYDER: Please welcome from the Center of UFO Studies

in Evanston, Illinois, Dr. J. Allen Hynek.

Dr. Hynek!

(applause)

KEAN: In the years that followed,

J. Allen Hynek became a hero

advocating for the study of UFOs.

RODEGHIER: Dr. Hynek realized

that this was a serious problem.

MAN: These things were coming over our bases,

over our nuclear facilities.

MAN: I thought we were under attack.

By who or what, I had no idea.

Captioned by Side Door Media Services