Original subtitles

[dramatic intro music]

[static over comms]

[siren wails]

[narrator] In April 2020, the United States' Department of Defense

took the unprecedented decision

to declassify and release to the world's media

three previously classified recordings

made by US Navy pilots,

showing what the DoD described simply as

"unexplained aerial phenomena".

The recordings, made between 2004 and 2015,

appear to show a kind of circular flying object,

which might at one time have been labelled a flying saucer.

Upon its release, the footage went viral on social media

and, unusually, was accompanied by no explanation from the authorities

as to what the flying discs might be.

The accompanying press release simply stated:

A marked change in approach from the Cold War era,

which, as we shall see, was a time of denial, lies and admitted cover-ups

by some of the United States' most powerful institutions.

[dramatic music]

The state of New Mexico on the southern border of the United States,

where in July 1947, the town of Roswell

became the sight of one of the most notorious cover-ups in American history,

although the repercussions wouldn't be felt until several decades into the future.

A rancher named William Mack Brazel

was out riding when he stumbled upon a large amount of mysterious-looking wreckage.

[flames crackling]

Brazel informed the local sheriff,

who, in turn, reported the wreckage to the Army Air Force Base at Roswell,

believing it to be the result of some kind of military air exercise.

Air Force intelligence officer Jesse Marcel

drove out to the ranch and collected some of the wreckage,

and is said to have been so excited by the strange other-worldly material

that he rushed home in the early hours to show pieces of it to his family.

At the time, recent press reports of lights in the sky and flying saucers

in other parts of the country had already piqued the public interest.

So when local Air Force press officer Walter Haut

issued a press release, claiming that the Air Force

was in possession of a flying disc, the story became

an international sensation overnight.

The matter was referred to General Roger M Ramey

of the Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas,

and it was here that the story was to be quashed

almost as quickly as it had been born.

[camera shutter clicks]

General Ramey ordered a press conference,

at which he showed off some sections of what was purported to be the famous wreckage.

The news reports issued the following day

were anticlimactic, to say the least.

Indeed, the fragments on display at the press conference -

small pieces of wood, rubber and tinfoil -

were less than impressive,

and with that, public interest in the story waned.

Locally, however, many insisted that the material displayed by General Ramey

did not come from the Roswell wreckage.

And stories of Air Force personnel threatening witnesses

and rumours of a second, more extensive crash site,

which was hidden from the public, ensured that the story would never quite die.

Gary Heseltine is the founder and editor of

"UFO Truth Magazine".

I, personally, have met many of the top searchers involved in the Roswell story.

But I think there is something like 800 witnesses loosely

based throughout the decades that have been traced

and, without a shadow of a doubt, it's a cover-up by the US Air Force,

the US Government and was one of the pinnacle things

that set us on a path of ufology, the modern era.

It was decades later, under intense pressure from UFO researchers,

that the US Air Force was finally forced to admit

the water balloon story was a lie.

We were in a cold war and there was a real fear

of Soviet expansion and there'd be a Third World War,

which would, of course, have been a nuclear atomic war,

which would have probably decimated the entire Earth.

And I think that was a genuine reason why

they didn't want people to think, well, actually there might be aliens as well,

and that's another treat - we could have an alien invasion.

Personally, I don't think it stacks up longer term.

As we shall see, there had been a cover-up at Roswell.

But a cover-up of what?

[dramatic music]

In 1948, the US Air Force began to take an official interest

in the UFO phenomenon.

The US Air Force decided to create a project called Project Sign.

And I think in the early days, this was a serious attempt

to study what was genuinely baffling sightings,

often by military personnel, commercial pilots.

People were genuinely interested in the subject

and they set up this Project Sign

with the intention of trying to get to the truth.

Project Sign was headed up by General Nathan Twining

and was established in response both to the incident at Roswell

and another major sighting that also took place in 1947.

Mount Rainier, Washington State.

On June 24th, 1947,

a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold

was flying his light aircraft

in search of a downed Marine Corps' transport plane,

for which the Air Force was offering a reward.

Instead of the transport plane, Arnold encountered a series of strange lights,

which as he approached them appeared to be saucer-shaped craft

flying in formation at incredible speed.

Arnold knew the layout of the mountains,

and he knew the distances between two peaks,

which proved advantageous because he saw them

pass the beginning of one peak and he knew the distance between the other peak.

So he was able to calculate the speed from the first one to reaching the second one.

And he concluded that it was about 1,200 miles an hour.

Arnold provided a report of the incident to the Air Force,

who, he said, took it seriously.

He also spoke to reporters and the subsequent news stories

are thought to represent the first-ever published use of the term "flying saucer",

based on Arnold's descriptions.

However, the subsequent Air Force report into the incident was dismissive.

Public awareness of the flying saucer issue

increased further in 1948,

thanks to a highly publicised incident over Kentucky.

January 7th, 1948,

the Godman Army Airfield in Kentucky

receives multiple reports of some kind of unidentified airborne object.

The object remained in view for over an hour

and was witnessed by numerous senior officers,

none of whom were able to identify it.

Flight Commander Captain Thomas Mantell

was conducting a routine training flight nearby

and was ordered by the control tower to investigate the strange object.

Mantell, who was flying without an oxygen mask,

climbed to 15,000 feet

and radioed the tower that he had the object in sight

and was giving chase.

That was the last report he made.

The wreckage of his plane was later found

90 miles south of Godman Airfield.

The story of an heroic Air Force pilot losing his life

in pursuit of a flying saucer caught the public imagination

and was widely reported by the press.

But again, the Air Force report attempted to explain away the entire incident

with an astonishingly unlikely conclusion.

By the end of 1948,

they looked over about 1,000 reports

during that 12-month period.

And they came up with a report called "The Estimate of the Situation".

"The Estimate of the Situation" concluded that,

almost certainly, some of the sightings involved

interplanetary craft,

which was a term of the day in 1948.

And that was sent to a General,

who was supposed to send it on to the President.

The General said, "No, we're not having that as a conclusion."

And basically, ordered that all copies be burned.

With the vast majority of the incidents recorded in Project Sign

being dismissed as mistaken sightings of everyday phenomena,

the project was closed down by Air Force Chief of Staff

General Hoyt Vandenberg,

on the basis that it was a waste of time and resources.

They were genuinely good guys trying to get to the truth on Project Sign.

They were replaced by a whole new team of investigators,

but with a clearly different remit.

And that remit was, from '48 onwards,

with Project Grudge, which is to debunk everything.

According to a 1999 report by Gerald Haines of the National Reconnaissance Office,

the intention of the debunking remit

was to alleviate public anxiety over UFOs.

But a less charitable conclusion would be that sightings were explained away

in order to discourage public curiosity about such events.

In any case, in the only official report

ever produced by Project Grudge,

hundreds of incidents and sightings

recorded throughout the 1940s

were dismissed in a variety of creative ways.

And the report's final conclusion was that:

By the end of the decade,

Project Grudge was quietly being wrapped up.

[dramatic music]

In the early 1950s,

two incidents, in particular, reawakened

the Air Force's interest in UFOs.

The first of these took place in Lubbock, Texas,

in August 1951,

when a group of professors from the Texas Technical College

witnessed a number of mysterious lights

moving in a U- or V-shaped formation.

Several days later, the same group of men

witnessed the lights again and, separately,

a student at the college claimed to have photographed the lights.

The photographs, though never confirmed to be genuine,

were widely publicised,

necessitating an official Air Force response,

which was to declare the mystery lights were most likely birds

reflecting the glow from recently installed street lamps.

The second incident, however, was not so easy to dismiss.

One of the biggest events that took place

in UFO history was actually in 1952,

when over two successive weekends

multiple UFOs were seen visually and on radar

over the capital, Washington DC.

It began on the 19th July, 1952,

when a Washington DC aircraft controller

spotted numerous objects on his radar

that did not match any scheduled aircraft or flight plans.

The readings were confirmed by other operators,

while witnesses saw bright lights moving at incredible speeds

over the White House.

Two jet fighters were scrambled to intercept the mystery aircraft.

But before the planes could reach Washington,

all of the objects had vanished from the radar.

As soon as they were seen on radar,

they despatched the pilots to go up, vectored to the area,

and then, mysteriously, they would disappear.

When the jets subsequently left the area to refuel,

the UFOs reappeared, suggesting a controlled, intelligent behaviour

that could not be dismissed as birds or errant weather balloons.

Over two successive weekends, there were multiple incursions over Washington DC

and despite planes being sent up,

they could never find them.

And yet, the top radar guy said,

you know, we had nine hours on one particular weekend

where these objects were buzzing around.

And he said, these were real aircraft.

These were machines. These were not temperature inversions.

These were not swamp gas. These were not Venus.

And he was convinced that there was real objects being seen.

Mysterious aircraft in the vicinity of the White House

was a potential threat to national security

and the subsequent investigation went all the way to the top.

Whilst public statements announced that the radar blips

had been caused by "temperature inversions",

behind the scenes, plans were being formulated

for a new Air Force project to investigate UFOs,

named Project Blue Book.

And this time, the CIA was to become actively involved.

The CIA were tasked at one point

to investigate UFOs, but it was all done in secret.

But their role was not to investigate the validity or truthfulness

of UFO cases, it was really, "How do we manage public perception?"

And what they did, they commissioned the Robertson Panel,

the scientists, which in 1953, that created, in a sense,

the theme of the debunking programme,

which has been followed ever since.

In the 1999 Gerald Haines' report,

he admits that the CIA had been monitoring the Air Force's investigations

into UFOs since 1947.

But a decision had been made to keep the intelligence agencies' interest in such matters

a closely guarded secret.

A classified CIA memo from the time stated:

The Central Intelligence Agency was established in 1947

as a response to the growing threat from the Soviet Union.

But it could be argued that it quickly developed

a tendency towards spying on and controlling

the American public.

This is evidenced by the agency's attitude

towards the supposed threat represented by UFOs.

Rather than assist in the Air Force investigations,

the CIA suggested a media campaign of public debunking

to "educate" the population

and discourage them from reporting UFO incidents.

According to the Haines report, this was to include:

Most people aren't aware that the CIA commissioned

a panel of top scientists of the day.

And they said, "How do we strip the aura that the public have,

the fascination the public generally have for this mystery?"

And they concluded, after two days of talking about this,

that the best way to strip the aura of flying saucers,

which was the term of the day in the '50s,

was to debunk it in all forms of media,

ie, film, TV, radio, newspaper.

And so, if you think about it, that's what's happened.

And America control the subject of UFOs worldwide, historically.

And so, literally, anybody born after 1953,

has lived in a genuine world of a debunking programme.

[dramatic music]

When the CIA did undertake investigations,

secrecy and outright deception were standard operating procedure.

Once such incident outlined in the Gerald Haines report

took place in 1955.

Two elderly sisters contacted the Journal of Space Flight

to say that they had intercepted a strange alien code on their radio

and had made a recording of the broadcast.

[beeping and static]

For some reason, this caught the attention of the CIA-backed

Office of Scientific Intelligence,

and a field officer named Dewelt Walker

Was despatched to interview the sisters and to make a copy of the recording.

Rather than admit to the CIA's involvement in such an investigation,

Walker told the sisters that he worked for the Air Force.

The recording, when analysed,

turned out to be nothing more than some accidentally intercepted Morse code

and the incident was forgotten, until two years later,

when an independent UFO researcher

decided to follow up on the case

and wrote to the Air Force asking for clarification around who had taken the recording

and what had been done with it.

The result was a lengthy correspondence

in which the Air Force and the CIA

attempted to shift the responsibility to another

unnamed government agency,

before finally stating that the recording had been destroyed to save file space.

This was not an isolated incident

and it may even be the case that the celebrated urban legend

of the mysterious "Men In Black",

unnamed agents who are said to appear out of nowhere

in response to reports of UFO sightings,

might actually be down to CIA agents acting suspiciously

and refusing to identify themselves.

Over the next decade, Project Blue Book

increasingly became a bureaucratic exercise

in box ticking and debunking

with the barest minimum of investigative work undertaken.

Any report of a balloon-like object

was recorded as a balloon.

Any mysterious light in the sky was simply a star,

the planet Venus or the Moon.

Project Blue Book is littered with cases.

You could have four aviation pilots all looking at

a triangular object in front of them,

from four different aircraft perspectives,

and they'd say it was Venus or temperature inversions.

Reports and press releases from the project

began attracting criticism

from UFO researchers and reputable witnesses,

who felt that their testimony and professionalism was being undermined.

One such example came in the summer of 1955.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol reported that an Air Force base near Oklahoma City

had tracked up to four UFOs simultaneously

and that several of them had descended very rapidly,

from about 22,000 feet to about 4,000 feet in just a few seconds,

which was well beyond the capabilities of any conventional aircraft.

At the same time, eyewitnesses saw multi-coloured lights

and mysterious diamond-shaped aerial objects.

Project Blue Book concluded that witnesses had simply mistaken

the planet Jupiter and bright stars, such as Rigel and Betelgeuse,

for something more sinister.

However, this report was ridiculed when independent experts pointed out

that these stars and planets are not visible from Oklahoma in the summer.

You would literally have to be on the other side of the planet to have seen them.

Not to mention the fact that the UFOs were tracked on radar,

which is unlikely to have picked up a planet located 365 million miles from Earth.

Similarly, in 1966, two police officers

spotted a disc-shaped, silvery object with a bright light

emanating from its underside in the sky above Ravenna, Ohio.

The police officers gave chase,

following the object at high speed for over half an hour,

with officers from several other jurisdictions joining in the pursuit.

The event made national news

and a report was duly submitted to Project Blue Book,

where the official response was that the officers must have been, at various points,

chasing a satellite, a star and even the Moon.

The officers, one of whom was a former Air Force pilot himself,

angrily rejected this finding

and even Ohio Congressman J William Stanton

commented on the incident.

Prophetic words for Project Blue Book.

The three US Air Force projects,

Sign, Grudge and Blue Book,

basically, ran for 22 years but by '69, it closed.

Why did it close? Well, that's quite simple.

They found a mechanism and a way to close it.

And the mechanism was to ask a university

and it went to a guy called Edward Condon

and it became known as the Condon Committee.

And basically, they had a two-year contract

to look at all of the best evidence, in theory,

and make conclusions to the US Air Force.

Well, literally, on day one,

Condon, who was a very well-regarded physicist,

he privately said, this is just a paper exercise.

We already know it's a load of rubbish.

As with Project Sign and Project Grudge,

the Condon Committee delivered a final report,

which was long on pages but short on revelations.

A panel chaired by Yale astronomer Gerald M Clemence

studied the report for six weeks and concluded that:

What you had, literally, from the late '40s onwards,

until it finished for 20 years, was a debunking programme

and we kind of know and always suspected as UFO researchers

that many of the best cases never found their way

into what should have been this definitive project, Project Blue Book.

And we know that because General Bolender

actually admitted in the late '60s and early '70s

that there was a secret programme

and the best cases didn't go into Project Blue Book.

So I think the general conclusion is as we look back

on the history of ufology is that for many, many years

the... Project Blue Book and certainly Project Grudge

were nothing but public relations exercises for the public.

[dramatic music]

[Houston] OK, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now.

[Neil Armstrong] It's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

[narrator] In 1969, the very same year that Project Blue Book was disbanded,

NASA achieved what many had thought impossible,

and some still think impossible,

sending Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Moon

and bringing them back alive.

It was inevitable that the validity of such an extraordinary achievement

would be called into question and thousands of conspiracy theorists around the world

soon began pointing out what appear to be strange anomalies

in the images and footage presented to the public.

Mismatched shadows and evidence of tampering in photographs,

together with questionable physics and the lack of stars

in the footage from the Moon's surface.

More intriguing still is the staggering admission from NASA in more recent years

that much of the original footage and telemetry data from the Apollo Moon flights

has apparently been "lost".

Critics immediately jumped on this admission as further evidence

that NASA had something to hide.

If you think about it, if we had the technology

to get to the Moon in 1969,

don't you find it a bit bizarre, even for the most ardent sceptic,

to think, well, if we could do it in '69, why haven't we been back since '72?

Which was the last mission. It really doesn't make sense.

And actually, you find, in the world of conspiracy,

that some people will say, "Actually, the Moon missions didn't actually happen."

I think they did. I personally think that the footage

of Neil Armstrong touching the ground.

I don't think we had the means to do that live.

And I think that was recreated in a studio, but I personally think we did go to the Moon.

But undoubtedly, there's a lot of cover-ups.

[man] Oh, it's beautiful, Mike, it really is.

[narrator] So, were the Moon landings really faked,

or was NASA hiding something even more extraordinary?

There's a huge amount of data that would say that, um,

things were seen en route to the Moon,

that things were seen possibly on the Moon, the far side of the Moon.

I mean, there's bits of footage where, absolutely unambiguous footage,

where you see a lovely colour shot of the Lander

coming back towards the main craft and a UFO,

a white sphere, passes underneath.

UFO researchers have scoured the photographs and footage from NASA missions

looking for unusual or unexplained objects,

and even NASA personnel have spoken out on the issue.

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

stated that he believed 90% of reported UFO sightings

were the result of alien activity.

And that he personally was aware of several UFO visits during his career,

and that each one had been covered up.

In interviews, he spoke of a secret cabal in the government

that was studying alien bodies recovered at Roswell.

NASA issued a terse statement in response:

Mitchell later retracted the claims,

stating they were just speculation.

Similarly, celebrated Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin

once claimed to have seen strange lights

flying alongside the astronauts en route to the Moon.

But later stated that his words had been taken out of context and misunderstood.

The idea of secret UFO bases on the Moon

stemmed from claims that private ham radio operators

had managed to record secret off-air transmissions

between the Apollo 11 crew and Houston from the surface of the Moon.

Allegedly, on Apollo 11,

Neil Armstrong went over the air to say that UFOs

are parked up, as it were, on a crater rim looking down at them.

[astronaut] These craters are huge, enormous!

-[static] -Oh, my God!

You wouldn't believe it!

I'm telling you, there are other spacecraft out there,

lined up on the far side of the crater edge.

They're on the Moon watching us.

[static over comms]

[narrator] The actual recordings have never emerged,

but the idea of aliens on the Moon took hold,

with hundreds of researchers scouring images

of the Moon's surface for signs of hidden bases,

with some claiming that the clearest images were deleted by NASA.

NASA denies this.

Do I think that there's a potential cover-up?

Yeah, I think there's evidence to say that there's a secret space programme,

but it's to what extent.

I certainly don't think it's fleets and fleets

of huge battlecruisers in space, like a "Star Trek" scenario.

But I do think we probably have done a lot of other stuff in space,

missions that nobody's aware of.

And if you think that some kind of contact has been made - ET on the Moon -

I think that's entirely conceivable,

because I really don't understand why we've not been back.

[dramatic music]

The Rendlesham Forest incident is considered by UFO researchers

to be second only to Roswell in terms of its significance.

Britain's most famous case is what's called the Rendlesham Forest incident.

And it's regarded now in UFO historical terms

as being up there with Roswell, that's how good the case is.

And some people would say that in many ways it's a better case than Roswell

because it contains more evidence.

It began on December 26th, 1980,

at RAF Woodbridge, a military base in southern England,

which was, at the time, being used by the American Air Force.

A security patrol near the east gate of the base

saw strange lights in the sky,

which appeared to be descending into nearby Rendlesham Forest.

The next day, servicemen searching the forest

found three small impressions on the ground in a triangular pattern,

as well as burn marks and broken branches on nearby trees.

All indications that some kind of triangular craft

had made a landing in the forest.

Even more dramatically, the following night,

a small team led by the deputy base commander,

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt,

went out to the site with a Geiger counter

to check for radioactivity.

Halt was recording the event using a small Dictaphone

when something incredible happened.

[tape playing, hissing]

[Halt] 3:05. We see strange strobe-like flashes

to the... rather sporadic,

but there's definitely something, some kind of phenomenon.

3:05. At about ten degrees, horizon, directly north,

we've got two strange objects,

er, half-moon shape, dancing about with coloured lights on 'em.

At, er, guess to be about five to ten miles out, maybe less.

This was an audio tape that he did into a little Dictaphone

and he made a series of audio commentaries,

little updates on it over four or five hours.

So he'll give a regular update. He'll say, "We're now crossing the creek.

"We can see an object," blah, blah, blah.

But one of the exciting things that happened

is that at one point they see an object

move towards them, stop above their heads at 1,000 feet

and then shine a light akin to a laser beam down at their feet.

[soldier] Watch. straight ahead, off my flashlight there, sir. There it is.

[Halt] I see it, too. What is it?

-We don't know, sir. -Can I get some of those?

[Halt] It's a strange, small red light.

Looks to be maybe a quarter to a half mile, maybe further out.

There is no doubt about it, there's some type of strange flashing red light ahead.

-[soldier] Sir, it's yellow. -[Halt] I saw a yellow tinge in it, too. Weird!

-Pieces of it are shooting off! -At eleven o'clock.

There is no doubt about it. This is weird!

[narrator] Two weeks after the incident,

Lieutenant Halt submitted a memorandum

recording what he had witnessed, which was released in 1983,

under the Freedom of Information Act.

But at the time, there didn't seem to be any will

to investigate the incident further.

He put in a one-page memo of three paragraphs that he sent to the MOD

and, supposedly, the MOD said, "Ah, there's nowt to this."

Even though it mentioned in the first paragraph

that there was a landed triangular craft of unknown origin.

But interest in the case was reignited

when the story made its way into the press in 1983.

The News of the World did a big full-page "UFOs land in Suffolk, it's official".

The result was a media debunking that rivalled

those seen in Project Blue Book years earlier.

The moving light was identified as being the beam from a nearby lighthouse.

And the three star-like objects were just that - stars.

Some of the explanations given by the sceptics are...

For example... I mean, this is UFOs seen over multiple nights.

This isn't just one UFO, it's multiple and 14 or 15 separate incidents

over several consecutive nights.

And yet they would say they were all done by a lighthouse!

To counter the growing scepticism about the event,

in 2010, the now retired Colonel Halt

signed a notarised affidavit clarifying what he saw.

Most importantly, this new affidavit destroys the lighthouse theory.

Whilst critics have pointed out that Halt's description of the lights in the affidavit

does not match the one he gave in his original memo,

his dramatic cassette recording,

the authenticity of which is not in dispute,

remains as persuasive evidence

that something extraordinary happened in Rendlesham Forest that night.

[Halt] Here he comes from the south. He's coming toward us now.

Now we're observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground.

This is unreal. [laughs]

It's a very complicated case but, suffice to say,

that what you have is US Air Force police officers

guarding nuclear weapons,

and, basically, over several nights,

they have various encounters with various shaped UFOs.

And I'm involved and I've been for the last two and a half years

in researching the case from the ground up,

by going through everything back to day one.

And we've uncovered a lot of new evidence.

Of all the cases reported worldwide,

95% have a mundane explanation,

which is atmospherics, pure misidentification, etc.

Just plain mistakes, but then we're always left

with a residue of 5% of cases and that gets the UFO researchers interested.

And then they delve down into those cases.

And then you lose another 2%

because they're identified after investigation.

But you will always have this residue of, say, about 2% to 3%.

Those cases are the ones that you should look at.

[dramatic music]

In spite of the best efforts of the CIA and other authorities,

by the 1990s, public interest in UFOs was at an all-time high

and the formally debunked Roswell incident

once again came to the attention of UFO researchers.

They interviewed hundreds of people who claimed

to have had a connection with the events of 1947.

Their conclusions were that at least one alien spacecraft

crashed near Roswell.

Alien bodies had been recovered

and a government cover-up of the incident had taken place.

Such was the popularity of the story

and the allegations that something had been covered up,

the Air Force issued a 1994 report,

along with this publicity film,

which aimed to put the controversy to rest.

The report revealed for the first time,

that the wreckage found on the Brazel Ranch was not from a weather balloon,

but was, in fact, from an experimental high-altitude listening device

that was being flown by the Air Force as part of a programme named Project Mogul

and was designed to detect far-off nuclear detonations,

part of the Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union.

The report went on to suggest that people who claim

to have seen alien bodies

had most likely been witness to nothing more than mannequins

or crash-test dummies, which were frequently employed by the Air Force

when testing experimental aircraft.

But for many UFO researchers, the Project Mogul explanation

is barely any more credible than General Ramey's weather balloon story.

It was a big mistake and made it worse for the Air Force,

because they found out that Project Mogul didn't operate until the mid-'50s,

when this occurred in 1947,

and it used human six-foot sized plastic objects that were dropped from planes.

Well, when we talk about the bodies that were reported and recovered,

the aliens, allegedly, recovered, they were three feet in height.

Three or four feet high, so looked nothing like six-foot, plastic dummies.

So, again, that made their stance on an explanation as untenable really.

Researchers also point to the immediate reaction of the men at Roswell Airbase,

particularly Major Jesse Marcel.

Marcel was not only an Air Force intelligence officer,

he was part of the elite 509th Bomb Group,

which was responsible for the deployment of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

The idea that Marcel couldn't recognise and identify

the wreckage of an Air Force high-altitude balloon,

even an experimental Project Mogul balloon,

and the breadth and scope of the subsequent cover-up,

suggests that whatever was being hidden,

it wasn't a simple balloon- mounted listening device.

It's created an ongoing debate for many, many years.

And I have no doubt that a UFO crashed.

And I have no doubt that certain pieces of material were recovered.

As we would do. If a UFO crashed outside my window now,

the police would get called, it would get cordoned off,

the military would turn up, it would be carted off and you'd never see it again.

Marcel himself maintained for the rest of his life

that what he saw at the Brazel Ranch

was something not of this Earth.

The general rule is, if anybody knows anything about aviation,

is that even stealth aircraft,

for example the F-117, a little back-wing plane...

Well, that was first flown in about '75

and yet it didn't become public until 1991 with the first Gulf War.

So for 16 years that was in stealth, in secret mode,

while it was being developed and it's roughly 15 to 20 years

before it makes mainstream confirmation.

Well, you've got a conundrum there because if these objects

are flying around since the 1940s,

well, OK, then it's a super secret, man-made object.

The general rule is 20 years.

The fact that it hasn't come out in 70 years says it's not ours.

The 1990s were also an interesting time for NASA,

with frequent Space Shuttle missions

providing researchers with new footage to analyse.

There is one particular sequence that I'm very impressed with

as a researcher, which is called the tether sequence.

[astronaut] Again, we're just moving into sunrise.

81 nautical miles now from Columbia.

[narrator] On February 25th, 1996,

the Space Shuttle Columbia was attempting to deploy a tethered satellite system,

designed to investigate new sources of spacecraft power

and ways to study Earth's upper atmosphere.

But five hours into the experiment,

the tether broke and the satellite floated away.

And a video recording of the event appeared to show something extraordinary.

Dozens of unidentified objects floating in space around the tether.

[Control] Franklin, we see a long line,

a couple of star-like things and a lot of things swimming in the foreground.

Can you describe what you're seeing?

These things are flashing,

they seem to self-illuminated, they pass underneath it.

There's literally hundreds of these things all swarming around it.

The astronauts commenting on what they were recording,

made no particular mention of the strange phenomena,

which were later dismissed as space debris and ice particles.

And they're trying to say, "Oh, this is ice particles."

But a lot of research has been done into that footage

and you can actually track each of the objects.

And so objects will suddenly appear.

They'll go around it and then come back on themselves.

They'll stop and then they'll go left or stop and go right.

So they, you know, they seem to under intelligent control.

[astronaut] There's a long line. It's, er, it's the tether.

And there's a little bit of debris that... that kinda flies with us.

Now, with the International Space Station cameras operating 24/7,

providing rolling coverage of outer space,

researchers are also working 24/7

to examine the footage for anomalies,

in the belief that it can only be a matter of time

before something is captured that cannot be debunked.

NASA itself comes under suspicion as being possibly

a front, a public relations exercise.

And there are some, you know, really kinda geeky people

who spend their lifetime going through archives

of thousands of Apollo photographs

to find a couple of anomaly photographs

which can't be explained and we owe them a debt of gratitude,

because most people wouldn't do that.

But they do find some very good stuff that can't be explained.

And similarly, there are people who study the space footage

and there are anomalies, but a lot of people suspect

that the best evidence of things in space has been hidden away.

[dramatic music]

There is no two ways about it, if you study the subject,

if you were to intelligently look at the very, very best cases,

you would thing these would be front-page news.

And the fact that they're not means that there has to be

a reason why they're not on the front page.

Now, I think, in a strange way, President Trump

has kind of legitimised the term "fake news".

And that wasn't really recognised in the mainstream.

But now we have fake news and "disinformation"

is now a real watch word in modern society.

Well, it wasn't for many decades, but now it's an accepted thing

and, believe me, there is so much disinformation

on the UFO subject. And I always say this,

that if the public really were to be presented with the best evidence,

that 3% of best cases, there would be no doubt

the ET phenomenon was real.

Despite the earlier claim that there had been no serious government interest

in the UFO phenomenon since the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969,

in December 2017, there was a surprise admission from the Pentagon.

In fact, a secret study into UFOs entitled

"The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Programme"

had been operating for the last five years

with a total budget of over $20 million.

I think the Pentagon admissions in 2017

really did open the Pandora's box,

because it can only lead one way.

You can't actually put that information back now.

The programme was initiated in 2007,

by then Senate majority leader Harry Reid,

who in 2009, wrote a letter to the Deputy Secretary of Defense,

which contained some intriguing sentences.

The announcement coincided with the release by the New York Times

of leaked UFO footage, recorded by US Naval pilots,

which was later released officially by the Pentagon in 2020.

[pilot] There's a whole fleet of them. Look on my SA.

My gosh!

They're all going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots to the west.

Look at that thing, dude!

There's been so much frustration and lies told.

However, in 16th December, 2017,

the Pentagon admitted that these things were real

and they didn't know what they were flying around the airspace.

And so that changed the goalposts.

And so now, we're actually I think definitely on a path

to, um... to...

Within the next three to five years I think significant events

will push the door open.

Together with the release of the footage,

came admissions from the Office of Naval Intelligence

that they were still holding highly classified documents

pertaining to UFOs.

An official statement from the Navy read:

But with modern image-sharing technology

and instant access to data of all kinds,

it's seems the time of governments being able to

restrict access to information is coming to an end,

despite the best efforts of the mainstream media

and the California tech giants.

UFO researchers yearn for what's called "Disclosure" with a big D.

When it's on every TV channel that there's this open admission that there's contact.

That ET is real and it's been visiting us.

That's what we're all kind of working towards

and we've been working towards that for the last 70 years

in this, what was classed as, a modern era.

I think we are moving in the right direction

and I think with technology and the world that we live in now,

of mass media, and the way we can instantly get stuff around the world,

I think it's all looking good for a major announcement in the next few years.

One thing that comes from Disclosure with a big D

is that the world will need to finally be truthful.

So if that happens,

then the world will be in a very different place

and, in terms of history, the history of the 20th century

and the first part of the 21st century

will have to be rewritten.

[outro music]