Original subtitles

HOST (over TV): One of these three men is an expert on

unidentified flying objects.

What is your name please?

CONTESTANT 1 (over TV): My name is J. Allen Hynek.

CONTESTANT 2 (over TV): My name is J. Allen Hynek.

CONTESTANT 3 (over TV): My name is J. Allen Hynek.

RODEGHIER: J Allen Hynek came into the UFO field with the

typical scientific attitude,

which is, they shouldn't be studied,

there's nothing to them.

O'CONNELL: Ultimately that changed, and

that's sort of the core of the J Allen Hynek story.

HOST (over TV): I, J. Allen Hynek,

am a consultant to the United States Air Force

on unidentified flying objects.

KEAN: Like so many other key figures of that era,

Hynek had to push against the government that he once

worked for and stand up for the truth.

HOST (over TV): I am also a professor of astronomy and

director of a large university observatory.

KEAN: Hynek believed that science was the tool.

Science could get us to an understanding of what UFOs are.

And that's what he advocated for.

O'CONNELL: There are a lot of people who don't always

understand his rationale for the things he did or the

things he said, but Hynek's impact today, I think,

is immeasurable.

MAN (over TV): Only one of these men is the real

J. Allen Hynek.

The other two are imposters and will try to fool this panel

On To Tell The Truth!

HYNEK: We get reports every night.

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

MAN 2: A rotating light around it...

MAN 3: I'd like to report a UFO.

(theme music plays)

RODEGHIER: The US government closed its formal study of UFOs,

Project Blue Book, in late 1969.

And the government as a whole, says we're not interested in

UFO reports.

POWELL: The Air Force made the decision: let's get out of

this business of investigating UFOs.

Our business is national security, we see no threat.

Let's stop Project Blue Book.

KEAN: J. Allen Hynek who was the scientist who worked for

Project Blue Book for almost 20 years,

actually came through that with the opposite perspective,

which was that UFOs were something serious and

they should be investigated.

HYNEK: In my association with Project Blue Book, I know and

I know very well that it was not a scientific project.

I also know that they never, never would notify the media

when an interesting case came up.

They did everything they could to keep it down,

so they definitely withheld information.

RODEGHIER: Dr. Hynek realized that this was a serious problem,

UFO reports could not all be explained, and that

the military should be taking this more seriously.

KEAN: We now know that there were UFO cases during this

time that did seem to have national security implications.

ELIZONDO: I think the public would be shocked to realize

that there were incidents going back even into the '60s,

where our nuclear missile silos were being interfered with.

MELLON: Production facilities, weapons facilities.

We've had incidents over numerous ICBM bases.

KEAN: During the Cold War,

intercontinental ballistic missiles, called ICBMs,

were strategically located

throughout northern parts of the United States,

where they were within striking distance of the Soviet Union.

There were almost identical UFO events at two of the

Minuteman ICBM locations:

at Minot Air Force base in North Dakota in 1966,

and at Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana in 1967.

SALAS: My name is Robert Salas.

In 1967, I was a lieutenant in the Air Force,

stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana.

SCHINDELE: My name is David Schindele.

I'm a retired Air Force captain

at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.

In 1966, my responsibility was to launch our ten

nuclear tipped missiles upon appropriate and verified order.

JAMISON: My name is Robert Jamison.

I was a first lieutenant in the United States Air Force,

Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.

One of my jobs was to, if a missile goes off alert

for any reason, is to go out and restart it.

MAN (over film): The Air Force includes missile men.

Here at Malmstrom Air Force Base a strategic missile wing

controls the most modern Minuteman in its

underground silo.

The Air Force specialists on this job, by continuous

readiness to launch their bird, help prevent rather

than start a nuclear war.

SALAS: We had Minuteman 1 missiles and that's an

800-kiloton weapon.

And just for reference the weapons that were dropped on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 20 kilotons.

MELLON: That capability is helping to keep the peace.

We have a policy of mutually assured destruction.

It would be suicide for us or our potential adversaries to

launch a nuclear attack.

Unless they could disable that capability in that system.

Then they could conceivably decapitate the United States,

destroy the Capital without fear of a retaliatory response

and change the global balance of power.

SALAS: Our location was 60 feet underground.

SCHINDELE: We were very well protected.

SALAS: It was a concrete steel-reinforced capsule.

SCHINDELE: And this capsule was sitting below what we call

the launch controls facility.

SALAS: We had six security guards topside.

They had the responsibility for making sure

there was nobody trying to break in.

(laughs)

SCHINDELE: I traveled to base to attend a pre-departure crew briefing.

After the briefing, several missile crews came up to me

and said, "Did you hear what happened overnight?"

SALAS: Sometime in the evening hours, I get up a call from

the main guard upstairs.

He tells me that there are strange lights flying over the facility.

They're looking at reddish-orange, glowing,

pulsating light.

It's hovering just above the front gate.

SCHINDELE: And he pointed with his arms, and he says it's

right out there hovering, motionless and without sound.

SALAS: He did think that there was a solid object within the

light, sort of oval-shaped.

I kind of dismissed it.

I even said, "You mean like UFOs?"

and, uh, kind of laughed at him.

And he said, "Well, they're not airplanes, sir."

About five minutes later, he calls back and he is

screaming into the phone now.

He's very frightened.

He's babbling.

He said, he's got all the guards out there with their

weapons drawn.

They wanted orders on what to do.

I told him, "Make sure nothing enters the fenced area."

When I hung up the phone, I thought we were under attack.

By who or what, I had no idea.

And then we get bells and whistles going off

at our control panel.

And, we could see the lights going from green to red,

all across the board.

Meaning the missiles were inoperable now.

MELLON: If the president had given the order to launch the

missiles, we could not have launched them.

♪ ♪

SALAS: Losing 10 missiles was a shock.

Except for that instance, I never lost more than

one missile at a time.

MELLON: Somehow, some way, vehicles were able to maneuver

right over those ICBMs and turn them off.

JAMISON: We don't know why they went down,

and still don't know.

There's no other reason I can think of that would cause the

ten to go off alert within seconds.

SCHINDELE: We knew it wasn't an ordinary man-made machine

because we had nothing like that.

SALAS: After the incident, I was required not to speak to

anybody about it.

SCHINDELE: I attempted to question the security guard,

and he said, "sorry, sir, I've been told to keep quiet.

And he was told that as far as you're concerned,

it never happened.

JAMISON: I had to go through a special briefing.

This is where they told me, "You're not supposed to say

ever again that something happened,

because nothing happened."

Of course, the first thing I did when I got home was,

"hey honey, guess what happened."

There was a man from Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

All he wanted me to do was to sign this document stating

I would never speak about this again.

Once we signed that document, we were released,

told to leave, and that was that.

I never spoke about any of this until 1994,

so that was about 27 years later.

KEAN: Three years after the Malmstrom incident in which

ten missiles were shut down, the Air Force released a

"Fact Sheet" to the public, announcing the close of

Project Blue Book.

And it stated that no UFO reported, investigated or

evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of a threat

to our national security.

Meaning not even one has represented any kind of

national security threat.

SALAS: That was certainly um...

a lie.

Let's, let's use the right word.

The Air Force knew full well these were UFO-related

incidents and that UFOs were responsible for the

shutdown of these missiles.

KEAN: We found out later, in 1979, that in fact a secret

memo had circulated called the Bolender Memo which stated

that any national security cases could continue to be

reported through channels already in place.

And so it was a complete black and white contradiction

between what was being said to the public and what was being

said behind the scenes.

JAMISON: There's something that's in our atmosphere that

we just don't know what it is.

These things seem to be interested in our nuclear capabilities.

And that's something we should be concerned about.

SCHINDELE: I kept the secret for 40 years.

It was a long time to have this burden on the back of my shoulders.

I'm normally a quiet personality, and I just

don't want to be in the limelight.

But the public needs to know this.

KEAN: Robert Salas did not speak out about what happened

for many, many years.

And it shows how intimidated these people are to come forward.

Decades will go by and they won't even talk about it.

SCHINDELE: Good morning.

My name is David Schindele.

In 2001 I found an article describing Robert Salas'

incident, and when I saw it I said, oh my God.

The incident that he had was almost identical

to the one I had.

And I experienced a, just a joyful freedom, and

I finally was able to tell my wife my secret.

And so thanks, Robert, for helping me out.

SALAS: After the incident, the guards had called me and

literally begged me to come out and see them because this

was a very traumatic experience for the guards.

But I had just signed a nondisclosure statement,

so I had to tell them on the phone that I could not see them.

So when I talk about this, I do it partly for those airmen

that begged me to come see 'em and I just couldn't do it.

HYNEK: There's a shyness and a reluctance on the part of many

witnesses, and understandably so, against reporting, because

too many have been ridiculed and life has been made

somewhat miserable for them.

MELLON: Dr. Hynek grew increasingly disillusioned by

the Air Force's dismissive approach to these sightings

and dismissive approach to the evidence.

RODEGHIER: Hynek gradually realized that this was a

subject that demanded serious study.

O'CONNELL: Back when Hynek was in Project Blue Book, there

was a case that involved a father and his two sons in Idaho.

One day they saw this object just zoom down this gully,

down the river bed and disappear.

They, all three, saw it.

Hynek found it fairly convincing.

He ended up writing it off as something with a natural cause.

That was Hynek's official report to Project Blue Book,

Why this is significant is years later when Hynek started

to change his mind, he had regrets about that specific case.

He said, "With that case, I should have said,

'You know what? It doesn't add up completely.

I think there's more going on here.

I'm not gonna dismiss it.

I'm gonna try to find out more.'"

So, that was kind of the first chink

in Hynek's façade as a debunker.

HYNEK: I began to get certain doubts because it was the

people themselves.

I said to myself, well now, come on, how much longer am

I going to call these people crazy.

And when I changed my glasses you might say, a little bit,

and took a view that maybe these people aren't crazy,

and began to realize what sort of people they were:

good, solid people.

I said to myself, well, the time has come to maybe

change my attitude."

♪ ♪

POWELL: With the United States Air Force leaving the role

behind of taking in UFO investigations, this left a

large vacuum that civilian organizations began to fill.

KEAN: In 1974, J. Allen Hynek founded

The Center for UFO Studies, abbreviated "CUFOS".

This was a civilian group composed of very qualified

people that runs the gamut of the average person with

enthusiasm, to a very highly trained scientist or academic.

And the records that they provided are absolutely crucial.

RODEGHIER: I'm Mark Rodeghier, the scientific director of the

Center for UFO Studies in Chicago.

Dr. Hynek mentored me and designated me as his successor.

Dr. Hynek was the classic professor.

He loved teaching.

He also really enjoyed jokes, you know, and a good time.

He wasn't stuffy.

He had a little twinkle in his eye.

People really warmed up to him.

Allen was very open minded, and that is really the

background to him being interested in UFOs.

UFO groups, you know, they're not massive organizations.

In fact, we're now sitting in the basement in my

UFO office here in my house.

The Center is really like a scientific think tank.

Dr. Hynek realized that there was a need for a focused,

professional group to study UFOs.

That involves mainly three things.

Being a place for people to report sightings.

Number two is to be a place for reliable information.

We publish a journal, a periodical, with monographs.

And finally, of course, a place to do research.

We've stayed pretty close to that mission all through the years.

O'CONNELL: One of the first things that CUFOS did was

establish a national hotline for UFO reporting.

They distributed this hotline to law enforcement agencies

around the country and said,

"Put this on your bulletin board.

If you ever get a call from someone who has seen a UFO

call us on this hotline, and we will do the investigation."

WITNESS (over phone): But it didn't look like anything I know of...

POWELL: But there was a big difference between civilian

and military investigations of UFOs.

The military has access to other information civilians don't.

KEAN: In the 70s and 80s in general, government officials

were not talking about UFOs.

But some presidents were also interested in getting

information about UFOs.

When Jimmy Carter was the governor of Georgia in 1969,

he had a sighting with a group of other witnesses.

CARTER: All of us saw a very bright light in the western sky.

And it got closer and closer and then it seemed to stop in

its proximity to us.

And then the color of it changed from white to blue to red.

KEAN: Jimmy Carter was very impressed by that.

It really impacted him.

Then in 1973, he filed a written report on this with a

number of civilian UFO groups.

So it's on the record.

So when he did become President, he approached NASA

to see if they would open up a new investigation that could

continue what the Air Force had been doing prior to

closing down Project Blue Book.

The Air Force would not have wanted this to happen

seven years after closing Project Blue Book.

So the Air Force jumped in on the process and said to NASA,

"we don't want you to do this."

After a series of exchanges,

NASA did decline the president's request.

PLANTE: Under pressure to answer by the end of the year,

NASA concluded that it would be pointless to mount a new

research effort because of the lack of physical evidence.

KEAN: It was kind of stunning that a request from the

president would have been denied.

♪ ♪

SHALIT: If there is no concrete evidence of people

from outer space, how do you write a whole book about UFO's?

HYNEK: That's exactly why I called it The UFO Experience

instead of something that would've sold more,

like Sex and the UFO.

I call it "The UFO Experience" because that's what I was

talking about: the experience that people had.

And you can't convince a person who's had a real

UFO experience that he hasn't had it.

KEAN: In the early '70s, J. Allen Hynek came out with

his monumental book, called The UFO Experience.

It wasn't just about research.

He was somebody that would listen and took people

seriously who had had sightings, and had experiences.

He would go on lots of TV shows and radio interviews and

he was a public figure advocating for official

recognition and study of UFOs.

MELLON: With the space program taking off, there was a

groundswell of interest in outer space.

ARMSTRONG (over TV): It's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

MELLON: It was a national movement.

And so, people's imaginations, of course, run wild.

Hollywood was able to capture that and feed people's thirst

and imagination.

And it led to a longstanding, powerful genre.

MAN (over TV): May the force be with you.

KEAN: So UFOs became a cultural, creative,

imaginative area.

And Hynek's book was a big hit...

SHALIT: Dr. J. Allen Hynek...

O'CONNELL: Steven Spielberg bought the rights to Hynek's

book and hired Dr. Hynek as a technical consultant.

KEAN: And so Spielberg worked with Hynek in helping to get

the facts accurate for his movie Close Encounters.

SPIELBERG: Yeah, I was very influenced by J. Allen Hynek

because he was not looking at UFOs as science fiction,

but he was looking at them as science speculation.

So I met with him and I used him and I picked his brain

and, and he consulted with me.

RODEGHIER: Dr. Hynek was the fellow that coined the term

"Close Encounters".

HYNEK: Close encounters of the first kind is when it's close

and nothing really happens.

O'CONNELL: A close encounter of the second kind

includes physical damage to the environment.

That could be landing pad imprints in the grass where a

UFO was said to have landed.

HYNEK: And the close encounters of the third kind

are the most interesting of all.

SPIELBERG: Close encounter of the third kind...

is really when you meet 'em.

KEAN: It was clear that Spielberg wanted real science,

real data, accurate information about UFOs

and that's why he called on J. Allen Hynek.

ELIZONDO: They were drawing from real

U.S. government information, on how these things

operated and maneuvered.

Hypersonic velocities, or fast speeds, instantaneous

acceleration, even biological effects,

where Richard Dreyfuss, half his face has this sunburn.

Those were all observables that we were seeing in the

US government.

Real observables that made their way onto the Hollywood screen.

And that's because Steven Spielberg was provided

information from people from Project Blue Book.

KEAN: Along with Hynek, Spielberg also talked to

Jacques Vallée, a French scientist who was well known

in the UFO field and had written numerous books on the topic.

VALLÉE: I had the privilege of working with Dr. Hynek for

five years and we built the first computer based data

catalog of UFO sightings, starting with the Air Force

files, which covered about 20,000 cases.

(speaking in French).

BALABAN: These people have come from all over their country.

VALLÉE: The French scientist in the movie, the character of

Lacombe, was based loosely on, on me.

France has an official scientific committee for UFOs

that includes physicists, the military, including

sociologists and psychologists.

SPIELBERG: By letting the project team leader be a

Frenchman it immediately gave more of a depth to the

understanding of UFOs.

VALLÉE: In the whole history of American movies,

It's always, they come from somewhere, they kill somebody,

so we bring the tanks and they destroy all the tanks...

that's a very American way of looking at an alien life form.

SCIENTIST: If everything's ready here on the dark side of

the moon, play the pipe tones.

VALLÉE: The movie was the first movie in which we were

greeting these aliens and they were coming to us as equal,

and we were going to have an intelligent discussion with

them, or, intelligent exchange.

(chimes playing)

(loud horn)

KEAN: Close Encounters just captured the spirit of the

mystery of the phenomenon, the scariness of the phenomenon

and kind of the impact that it has on people.

ANCHOR: Whatever the government may think about them,

unidentified flying objects seem to be

popular with the people.

Columbia Pictures reports that its film,

Close Encounters of the Third Kind,

has grossed $39 million in 3 weeks.

SPIELBERG: I owe a lot to J. Allen Hynek;

his instilling in me a professional's point of view

on this kind of field reporting.

And he helped me make the movie more credible than it

would have been without his, his existence.

O'CONNELL: Steven Spielberg actually brought him on set

for when they filmed the movie's huge climax at the

secret UFO base in Wyoming.

MAN (over film): Captain, United States Navy, 0-4-3-4-3-1

O'CONNELL: And of course Close Encounters,

it became a household term

because of Steven Spielberg's movie and

really catapulted Hynek to a degree of celebrity.

HOST (over TV): Therefore, will the real Dr. J. Allen Hynek

please stand up?

(audience gasps and applause).

KEAN: Even though Hynek worked for our government for almost

two decades.

What he was doing in the 70s and 80s seemed to have

no impact at all on the government.

And sightings continued.

HYNEK: There's the fantastic sightings last year and this

year in the Westchester and Putnam County areas.

Those are literally out of this world.

I can find no logical explanation for them.

WITNESS: I don't know what the hell it is!

♪ ♪

WORTHINGTON: We were coming home from grad school.

And we were just yakking like we are now.

And all of a sudden, Doris says, what are those lights up there?

SORAVILLA: I was driving north on 118, and I was

approaching the light here.

I looked into the northern skies, saw what appeared to be

a large aircraft with landing lights flying very low,

about 500 feet.

And it stopped and rotated 180 degrees

and started to head west.

SANT: I looked up at Interstate 84 and it was

a parking lot.

People were out of their cars, blinking lights,

pointing up at the sky.

And there was that city of lights hovering over in my backyard.

ACOSTA: And it went from like night to broad daylight.

SANT: And all of a sudden, it was, "It's gonna land!

It's gonna land!"

ACOSTA: You could hear a pin drop.

SANT: And I said, "Oh, what do with my family?

How am I gonna handle all this?"

SORAVILLA: What I saw was unbelievable.

Mind boggling.

The whole town saw this.

KEAN: Beginning in around 1983, There was an incredibly

dramatic series of sightings that took place in the

Hudson Valley area of New York state and in Connecticut,

which was actually a wave

because it took place over years.

People would report these UFOs to the police or maybe

to local UFO groups.

And a lot of people were kind of awed and frightened.

BROOKS: It was a little spooky.

REPORTER: How come?

BROOKS: Because it was unexplainable.

REPORTER: What Jim Brooks saw...

MELLON: There was a lot of local reporting,

some local civilian investigation.

SCARBOROUGH: Now, researchers have set up a special UFO

hotline in Westchester...

MELLON: But it was something that involved hundreds,

at least, witnesses, if not more.

KEAN: There was nothing coming from our government,

even though these gigantic craft were cruising around over

a part of the United States.

REPORTER: The Federal Aviation Administration has joined the

Air Force and many astronomers in attributing most UFO

sightings to man-made objects and natural phenomenon.

SCIENTIST: Believe it or not, the planet Venus is a fairly

common UFO sighting.

WITNESS 1: It moved very slowly.

WALSH: We looked up in the sky and we saw six lights

in a V-shape.

KEAN: Even after all these witnesses had seen these

objects and had reported them to their local police,

it still became a kind of a joke.

CARBONE: The head of my school, he said, you know,

some people might think you're crazy.

SANT: I was the commissioner of motor vehicles and I was

involved in a political race at that time.

The last thing I wanted to be known for was little

green people or UFOs.

ACOSTA: My husband also thought I was nuts, and so

I didn't talk about it too much.

HYNEK: What is interesting, tragic, and amusing all at the

one and the same time is that lots of people are afraid to

talk about it.

Their friends will laugh at them and so forth.

And we need to let these people

feel safe and talk about it.

KEAN: On August 25th of 1984, Hynek came to the Hudson Valley

and he gave a talk at the middle school there.

This was the last case that he was involved with before he

died and it made a huge impression on him.

HYNEK: Here's the sketch of the thing going on in

Westchester County now.

There's this large boomerang-shaped object

that moves slowly, far below the stall speed of aircraft;

moves silently.

I've been told by highly responsible witnesses that

it is as large as the football field.

ZIMMERMAN: It speaks to the importance of the

Hudson Valley wave that J. Allen Hynek came here.

He thought it was important enough, to speak to the

witnesses, to go to the sites.

SANT: I spent a weekend with Dr. Hynek.

Dr. Hynek could ask you a question and he'd sit back and

he would listen and if one of my kids jumped into the

conversation, he would just kindly just put up his hand

and go, "I'll get right back to you," with a little wink.

And you were the most important person for that

moment he was talking to you.

That's the way he made me feel.

KEAN: It was very important for these witnesses who were

not getting any official recognition that somebody like

J. Allen Hynek,

an astronomer who had worked for the government,

that he came there, and spoke with them,

and took them seriously.

SANT: And we walked through the whole sighting,

he wanted to go every place.

And every time we made a stop he said,

"What were you feeling?

Did you feel anything in your gut?

Did you feel connected to this object?"

KEAN: It made a huge difference to have him

on site during the wave.

HYNEK: In the Westchester case in New York for instance we

had witnesses geographically independent of each other,

didn't know each other, and yet reported identically the

same things now you cannot call that mass hallucination.

KEAN: Lack of scientific involvement or government

acknowledgement of UFOs encourages people's

imaginations to go wild with, "What are they hiding?

WORTHINGTON: We called the police when we got home and

they didn't tell us that night but a couple of days later we

were reading they thought they were ultralights.

The planes?

HYNEK: The chief meteorologist at the Westchester County Airport

with some 25 years experience told me that

when he saw it overhead, it moved very slowly like a

ship docking at a berth.

Now that cannot possibly be ultralights flying in formation.

That's just out of the question.

ROSE: The plane flying in formation is one of the

reasons cited including an article in Discover Magazine.

KEAN: This article that was in Discover Magazine talks about

the pilots who were going up and hoaxing UFOs and it

implies that's probably what all the sightings were.

WITNESS: Hear the engines?

SANT: Planes fly all the time.

Do you hear 7,000 people coming out and saying,

"Ah, I saw planes over my head."

No.

They saw something different.

WORTHINGTON: Ultralights make noise!

CARBONE: They do make noise!

WORTHINGTON: So we've never had a good explanation.

KEAN: So these pilots did a huge disservice by creating

this hoax situation to confuse everything, and to bring a

lack of credibility and to give the government something

to hang their hat on when they were asked what people were

actually seeing.

ZIMMERMAN: People began doubting themselves.

It kept the entire wave suppressed.

KEAN: Hynek was just stunned by the fact that this was

not getting attention.

HYNEK: The subject came up in the United Nations recently.

We have reports from 133 different countries.

And the same pattern exists around the world.

It's not just localized in one particular country, you see.

KEAN: So while our government was telling the public that

there was nothing to UFOs, that the investigations had

all been shut down...

documents reveal that officials were, in fact,

monitoring cases in other countries.

POWELL: What they were seeing was very similar to what was

seen in the Hudson Valley.

(beep).

HYNEK: This map was prepared by Dr. Jacques Vallée.

UFO reports are truly global, and that they seem to occur in

waves or "flaps" as they are often called.

Notice how the flaps have been distributed throughout the

years and over the world.

MELLON: This is truly an international phenomenon.

There's no question about it.

There's a very similar pattern, very similar reports.

Foreign militaries are also having encounters.

The Belgian Air Force had some extraordinary encounters.

KEAN: A few years after the Hudson Valley wave,

a very similar wave occurred in Belgium.

ZIMMERMAN: These large black triangles.

Again, all the characteristics, silent, low,

beams of light, hovering.

KEAN: Belgian authorities would scramble jets in order

to try to get a better look at the objects.

They wanted to identify what it was that was invading

protected airspace over their country.

They felt that this was their responsibility.

POWELL: The F-16s that the Belgian military had

tracked these objects on radar.

So they actually have radar imagery of the unknown,

moving through Belgian airspace.

KEAN: And the contrast from how the Belgium government

handled it there versus how our government didn't handle

the events in Hudson Valley are really striking.

The Belgian Air Force became actively involved with a group

of scientists to collect reports from witnesses.

They assigned a colonel to head up in an investigation.

KEAN: And they held a press conference packed with media,

in which they disclosed everything they knew and

how they were approaching this.

KEAN: And the public were encouraged to file reports.

ZIMMERMAN: Air Force officers were coming forward, and

speaking about it.

They gave it a legitimacy that we have yet to see here in

this country.

ANCHOR: You said the government stopped

investigating back in 1969.

Do these UFO watchers have any reason to expect the

government to get re-involved in investigating these claims?

REPORTER: Right now they're a bit disappointed the

government has not gotten more involved than it has in the

last ten years.

But we do know that the CIA and the Defense Department

have been doing some research into other sightings in other

nations, like the Soviet Union and Iran,

but in the United States, they seem very skeptical.

KEAN: The Belgian case was documented by

U.S. government officials.

Colonel de Brouwer had approached American officials

to inquire whether this was ours.

And we had told them no.

And we had said also, "We'd like to know whose it was."

So there was a document filed about the Belgian wave,

but no document filed about a wave in our own country.

At least that we are aware of.

HYNEK: To me, the greatest evidence for the existence of

something strange going on is the caliber of

many of the witnesses.

For instance, in Westchester, we had meteorologists,

Navy test pilot, IBM executives, priests, CPAs...

ROSE: Are they all saying the same thing?

That it is not explainable to them

by any conventional explanation?

HYNEK: You just said it, Charlie!

That's exactly what they're saying.

They're seeing the same things.

WORTHINGTON: You know, there were so many people that saw it.

It wasn't, you know, if I saw it alone, I probably

wouldn't have told anybody.

If the three of us saw it, I might have told my family.

CARBONE: Yeah.

WORTHINGTON: But there were so many people that had saw it,

that I was fine with, you know.

CARBONE: Yeah.

WORTHINGTON: Spreading the word.

CARBONE: Me too.

WORTHINGTON: And everybody that I told said, they were

sorry they didn't see it.

O'CONNELL: A lot of people took solace in the fact that

Hynek was a guy who was on their side.

If you witnessed a UFO, Hynek was one person who would take

you seriously, wouldn't make fun of you, and really try to

get a full picture of your experience and that, that's so

huge just to someone who has seen something weird in the

sky and doesn't know how to tell anyone about it.

SANT: I felt validated.

That's the way Dr. Hynek made me feel.

So I could say, "There's nothing wrong with me and

nothing wrong with my eyes

and nothing wrong with my intuition.

They're all intact."

VALLÉE: Dr. Hynek was someone who was very alive, very open.

He told me once that the reason he became interested in

UFOs was about the challenges, about, you know:

what is this world?

If this is real, what does that mean for human existence?

KEAN: The last thing Hynek did before leaving this earth,

was try to understand the nature of the denial and

the disconnect among human beings when something

this dramatic happens.

Hynek wrote an essay that was a rough draft that was left on

his computer when he died.

He said, "How is it possible that in the United States

where even trivial events are often flashed across the

world, only one national TV and radio network carried an

account of these utterly astounding sightings?

Was no one minding the store?

Was everyone asleep at the switch?"

Hynek was a different person than he was previously when

he worked at Project Blue Book.

Here he was saying: UFOs, they're of scientific interest,

the witnesses should be taken seriously.

It was just the most profoundly important moment

in setting a course of events that continued through the

'70s, '80s and '90s.

HYNEK: Starting as a complete skeptic,

I underwent a transformation.

And now, I guess the best way of saying it is that it's an

itch that I just have to scratch.

I feel that we have a phenomenon that, could be,

of tremendous potential importance to the human race,

I feel that strongly about it.

♪ ♪

MAN: It's a definite UFO or something like that.

It just flew right over me.

HILKEVITCH: This is highly restricted airspace.

You don't want something up there that doesn't belong there.

KEAN: The culture as a whole didn't really

take UFOs seriously.

FOX: I stuck with it despite the level of ridicule for decades.

CALLAHAN: He described it as a huge ball of light turning

around and he says it was about four times bigger than a 747.

KEAN: My immediate response was, "I wanna break this story!"

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.