Original subtitles

[narrator] Ever since humankind first looked to the heavens,

we have asked the question, are we alone?

Tales of otherworldly beings,

ancient prophecies and predictions,

and sightings here on Earth,

have heightened our sense of anticipation.

But in recent years,

these claims have become more frequent.

Do you believe our government has made contact with intelligence?

Extraterrestrials?

Something I can't discuss in public setting.

[narrator] More insistent...

Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah.

[narrator] ...and ever more dramatic.

In one of the most remarkable historic incidents,

in July 1952,

the United States Air Force scrambled fighter jets

to intercept UFO's flying over The White House.

...that the recent sightings are in no way connected

with any secret developments.

[narrator] Top secret investigations were long,

explanations given,

but the truth remained elusive.

And whatever it was,

it appears to have returned several times since.

Do you believe you UAPs

pose a potential threat to our national security?

Yes.

-Yes. -Yes.

[narrator] What are we not being told?

Our team of experts reopen the files.

They'll analyze the intelligence,

investigate the science...

and reveal the truth.

July 19, 1952. Washington DC.

A clear, hot and humid evening.

The skies are quiet.

In the control tower at Washington National Airport,

air traffic controller Ed Nugent,

is enjoying an uneventful night.

When suddenly,

seven contacts appear on his radar screen

just 15 miles outside the nation's capital.

It's a problem. No flights were scheduled.

There have been no radar communications.

These contacts shouldn't be there.

[Nick] Well, the Cold War was just getting started.

So, seven uncorrelated targets on the radar

could've caused an absolute panic.

But according to all the reports,

everyone was really calm.

[narrator] In fact, when Nugent calls his boss Harry Barnes over,

his first instinct is to make a joke.

His first comment is, "Here's a fleet of flying saucers for you."

[narrator] Upstairs in the glass lookout section of the tower,

another controller, Joe Zacko,

was experiencing a similar anomaly.

A single unidentified contact

streaking across his radar screen.

When he sought visual confirmation,

he couldn't believe his eyes.

There was a single bright light

just hovering in the sky.

Just sitting there.

He turned to his colleague Howard Cocklin and said,

"If you believe in flying saucers,

that could be one for sure."

[narrator] As they watched,

the light zoomed off at incredible speed.

This was just the start

of what would become an international sensation.

[narrator] With the stakes so high,

air traffic controllers first needed to confirm

their equipment had not malfunctioned.

A radar works in a pretty simple manner.

You have a massive antenna,

and this sends out a beam of radio waves

into the surrounding space.

Now, if these radio waves hit a solid object,

you get a reflection, a return of the radio waves

and they're picked up by the antenna.

So, radio waves travel at the speed of light.

So, if you get a reflection of a solid object,

you get that return very, very quickly.

Now, this return appears as a blip

on the radar screen.

What an experienced radar operator can do

is see that blip

and interpret a lot about the object that reflected it.

Its size, its shape and also its trajectory.

Commercial planes generally maintain

the same speed and trajectory.

So, the blip does the same

and moves smoothly across the screen.

But in Washington in 1952,

these contacts were not doing that.

[narrator] The speeds the objects were traveling at were unprecedented.

Some showing bursts of up to 2200 kilometers per hour.

And one was tracked traveling at close to 11,000 kilometers per hour.

The area around Washington

was home to two of the biggest Air Force bases in the United States.

And with unidentified craft in US airspace,

Harry Barnes followed protocol and contacted them.

[narrator] All the bases in the area,

commercial and military,

were seeing the same contacts on their radar screens.

One controller, William Brady,

also reported a direct line of sight contact.

He said it was an orange ball trailing a fire,

unlike anything he'd seen before.

This wasn't a civilian.

This was someone from the Air Force.

So, if this isn't a UFO,

then the alternative is unthinkable.

At the dawn of the nuclear age,

the possibility that the Russians

had developed an aircraft

that could penetrate our airspace undetected

would've been considered an enormous threat.

[narrator] Unbelievably, despite multiple radar contacts

and two visual confirmations,

fighter planes were not scrambled immediately.

As nights turned to early morning,

finally, there are eyes in the sky.

As capital Air Flight 807

departs Washington National for Detroit,

the control tower asked pilot S.C. Pierman

to report any unusual sightings.

He said, "There's one, and there it goes."

Just like that,

you got visual confirmation from the air

from a pilot with almost two decades of experience.

He saw the same orange ball that Brady saw,

and then it zoomed off.

[narrator] Captain Pierman reported that for the next 14 minutes,

he witnessed the incredible sight of six bright lights,

streaking across the sky at tremendous speed,

describing them as "falling stars without tails."

Barnes has finally had enough.

He's got multiple radar contacts

directly over The White House.

This is now a national security issue.

So, he calls the Air Force as a matter of urgency

and he says, "We have unidentified craft in restricted airspace."

[narrator] At the closest Air Force base, Andrews,

the runways were closed for repairs.

Instead, F-94 interceptor jets are dispatched

from Newcastle Air Force Base in Delaware,

some 160 kilometers from the capital.

Despite combing the skies,

the Air Force pilots see nothing.

And with no more radar contacts,

they're ordered back to base.

But as soon as they're out of the way,

the blips are back on the radar.

[Laurie] Jets are scrambled.

And the UFO's would reappear.

The jets would return to the base,

and the UFO's once again would appear.

They wanted to be seen.

It's as if they were playing some form of game.

[narrator] When daylight once again returns,

they disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived.

The events of the night were a total mystery

witnessed by just a handful of people.

But this small group of witnesses

were all highly-trained, credible professionals.

This was not a random light in the sky.

This was clearly an unidentified flying object.

This object was in government airspace

over The White House viewed by professionals.

This was known as the Washington flap.

Even Truman wanted to know the truth.

[narrator] By Monday, the 21st of July,

reports of the strange sightings

over Washington had hit the press.

And reporters were demanding answers.

But the US Military and government quickly closed ranks,

they had learned from their previous brushes with UFOs.

[Chuck] In 1947,

shortly after the alleged Roswell incident,

US Government commissioned a top secret study

into reported UFO sightings.

The first study Project Sign ran for a year.

Project Grudge followed and ran from 1948 to 1951.

In 1952,

several important things happened

in the intelligence world.

The NSA was founded

and Project Grudge was elevated

to Project Blue Book.

[narrator] Heading up Project Blue Book,

the US Air Force's top secret UFO study

was Captain Edward J. Ruppelt.

Captain Ruppelt enlisted in the US army Air Force in 1942.

He was just 19,

and he became a highly decorated US bomber crewman.

After the war, he went into the reserves

and got a degree in aeronautical engineering.

During the Korean War,

he was recalled to the Air Technical Intelligence service,

which is based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

It was also the home of Project Blue Book.

[Nick] At just 29 years of age,

Ruppelt is responsible

for the UFO phenomenon in its entirety.

And particularly, of course, assessing the defense

and national security implications.

There's a lot riding on this one guy.

[Laurie] Any US citizen that reported something strange,

reported it to Ruppelt, who oversaw Project Blue Book.

So, by the time he took over,

there were 2000 cases already reported

and he had to investigate all of them.

Ruppelt hadn't been in the job for long

when he was warned out of the blue.

"This is going to happen. A big event is coming."

[narrator] In mid-1952,

Ruppelt had met with a scientist

from an unnamed government agency.

This scientist insisted to him,

"Within the next few days,

you're going to have the granddaddy

of all UFO sightings in Washington or New York.

Probably Washington."

Did somebody know that something was in the offing?

Was this planned?

Did someone have fore knowledge

and tip him off?

Or was it just a lucky guess?

We don't know.

But it's a very strange remark.

[narrator] With this prediction fresh in his mind,

how did Ruppelt react to the news

of the UFOs over Washington DC?

Surprisingly, he was never even alerted to it.

Ruppelt learns of the incident only by chance.

A few days after it happened,

he lands at Washington National Airport,

buys a newspaper in the lobby, and sees the headlines.

[Chuck] So, straight away, he's off to the Pentagon,

taking names and asking questions.

Then they start asking him what to do,

because journalists are refusing to let go of the story

and top brass don't know what to say.

[narrator] But Ruppelt is less concerned

with the political implications,

and instead focuses on actual evidence.

He works all night,

laying out the events of the 19th of July,

and plotting the course of his investigation.

He starts with a call to the headquarters of the US Military

seeking assistance

in his bid to visit the air traffic controllers

who had witnessed the UFO phenomenon.

He called the Pentagon

to try to get hold of a staff car,

but he was rebuffed and they said to him,

"No, this is just for full colonels

and generals."

So then, he goes to the finance office

and he tries to rent a car.

And they say, "No, take a bus."

And he's like, "Well, I don't know the transit system.

Can-- Can we not get around this?"

And, and again, they say no.

[Laurie] They told him to take a taxi and to use his per diem.

But his per diem wasn't enough to get him out there again.

[narrator] He asks to speak to the finance officer directly.

But the finance officer had apparently left early to beat the traffic.

Ruppelt knew he was defeated.

"I decided that if flying saucers were buzzing Pennsylvania Avenue,

I couldn't care less," he wrote after the events.

"I caught the next airliner to Dayton."

And he flew home.

But then one week later, something remarkable happened.

They came back.

[narrator] One week after the initial wave

of UFO sightings over Washington DC,

on the night of 26 July, 1952, at 10:00 p.m.,

Air Force intelligence official, Edward Ruppelt

receives a call from a Washington journalist.

The unexplained lights are back.

What does the Air Force plan to do?

[Chuck] And he says, "I have no idea. Probably nothing."

And so he calls the Pentagon

and he finds out he's absolutely right.

They're doing nothing.

He's not gonna let a second chance pass him by.

He sends Fournet and Halcomb to National's control tower.

[narrator] The two US officers arrive at the airport

to an incredible scene.

The air traffic controllers are tracking

a dozen unexplained blips,

almost double the number they had seen the week before.

The objects were flying at low speed in arc formation.

Andrews Air Force Base was seeing the same thing.

Same number of blips, same locations,

something was definitely happening.

Commercial pilots also saw glowing lights in the sky,

and they reported it to national.

The evidence was stacking up.

And he was convinced that what he was seeing on radar

were actual metal objects.

[narrator] Major Fournet radioed a passing Air Force B-25

to request they survey the area

and see if they could get official visual confirmation of these UFOs.

They saw nothing.

Just a tourist boat on the Potomac.

[narrator] The scientific explanation floated at the time

was that these blips could be the result

of a temperature inversion.

If you have, uh, two layers of cold air

with a hot air layer in between,

it creates what we call a refractive zone,

which will bend the radar

so that some things on the ground

can actually appear in the air.

So, at that time, the controllers,

the air traffic in Washington,

would've been familiar with this problem.

[narrator] In fact, there hadn't been a day

without a temperature inversion over Washington for several weeks.

So, radar operators had constantly been distinguishing

between legitimate contacts

and illusions created by temperature inversion.

[narrator] However, Fournet and Halcomb are certain

that these are legitimate airborne targets.

And at 11:00 p.m.,

they scramble two interceptor jets from Newcastle.

[Nick] The exact same thing happens.

The F-94's arrive and the blips disappear.

One of the planes gets its airborne radar

locked on to one of these targets,

but quickly loses it.

The F-94's returned to base, and then the blips reappear.

[narrator] The two officers,

along with the tower controllers at National and at Andrews,

continue to track the objects for another two hours.

At just after 1:00 a.m.,

they make the call to scramble the interceptor jets again.

This time, they saw lights in the sky.

The pilot, William Patterson,

tries to engage one of these objects.

He's gunning it in one of the fastest jet fighters in the world.

This thing is designed to intercept

and chase enemy jets.

And yet, whatever he's chasing is running rings around him.

It's outpacing him.

It's leaving the best technology

that the United States Air Force has just standing.

[Laurie] So, Patterson simply gives up.

He quits the chase.

And whether they're enemies or whether they're aliens,

this is very serious.

[narrator] Eventually, the US Air Force jets returned to Newcastle.

And before dawn,

the lights and the radar contacts

disappear once again.

The Monday morning headlines of the 28th July, 1952

were every bit as sensational as you might expect.

"Saucers swarm over capital."

"Jets chase DC sky ghosts."

But beyond the headlines,

there were very few facts to go on.

And so, we have an unidentified Air Force personnel

telling reporters that these are not UFOs,

but we don't know what they are.

-[speaking German] -[people shouting]

[Christopher] World War II was fresh in our memory.

The Cold War was just starting.

And here is the Air Force admitting they don't know

what is flying over Washington DC.

This is huge news.

[narrator] Enter Major General John Samford.

He's the director of Intelligence for the US Air Force.

Not knowing what or who was in the air

around the nation's capital,

could be a significant embarrassment for him.

He's at the Pentagon,

and he calls what turns out to be

the largest press conference

since the end of the Second World War.

[Chuck] But this is Tuesday afternoon.

Ruppelt's still investigating.

They still know next to nothing.

[narrator] Regardless, Sanford,

who was later to become director of the NSA

had an innate gift for spouting gibberish.

When asked a simple question

about what the pilots saw in the skies

above Washington the previous Saturday,

he gave a typically evasive response.

So, the general gives a master class

in kind of nothing speak.

He's talking and talking,

but not really saying anything.

However, there have been a certain percentage

of this volume of reports

that have been made by credible observers

of relatively incredible things.

Our basic difficulty in dealing with these

is that there is no measurement of them

that makes it possible for us to put them in any pattern

that would be profitable for a deliberate,

uh, custom sort of analysis to take the next step.

[narrator] He talks for an hour and 20 minutes,

saying little of value.

He eventually lands on the temperature inversion theory.

Hot air over Washington.

The press seemed to like it,

and it quickly becomes the official reason for these sightings.

Every publication ran with the same story.

This was merely a trick of the weather and the atmosphere

that had fooled the radar and confused the operators.

The mystery was solved.

Prior to General Samford's press conference,

Ruppelt's team was receiving more than 50 reports a day

during the Washington event.

In the week following the press conference,

that dropped to just 10.

As far as the public was concerned,

the UFO uproar was over.

There were no further radar anomalies.

No more sightings over Washington DC.

The temperature inversion had answered

the American public's questions

and calmed their fears.

But had they been sold an elaborate lie?

[narrator] On consecutive weekends in July 1952,

a swarm of unidentified flying objects

buzzed the White House in Washington DC.

To date, no satisfactory explanation has been given.

In order to understand UFO's properly,

you have to know what was going on

in the culture and society at the time.

[narrator] By this point in postwar history,

UFO sightings were nothing new.

People have always witnessed strange objects in the sky.

But what changes is their interpretation.

In the Bible, they were angelic chariots.

In the 1800s, they were phantom airships.

[narrator] In World War II,

pilots gave these phantom craft a name.

We'd had also during the Second World War,

the so-called Foo Fighters

which were seen actually by both Allied and Axis pilots,

each of whom thought it was a secret weapon of the enemy.

[narrator] And then,

there was the first alleged UFO visitation

of a major US city.

In the early hours of February 25, 1942,

fourteen hundred anti-aircraft ammunitions

filled the skies over Los Angeles.

There was some form of battle happening.

The morning came, the smoke cleared.

The reports said that

they had seen one to five unidentified flying objects,

though previously the night before,

they didn't seem to think that there were any.

Very confusing story.

[narrator] In the immediate aftermath of World War II,

came the story that brought to the world

the whole concept of the flying saucer.

[Christopher] In June of 1947,

Kenneth Arnold was flying over the mountains of Washington state

when he saw nine shiny objects flying near Mount Rainier.

He described them as flying as a saucer would

if you skipped it across water.

This opened up the possibility

that strange objects in the sky

might be extraterrestrial craft.

The Arnold sighting was a catalyst

that changed our interpretation

of strange objects in the sky.

The way they were described,

the speed with which they were flying,

made people start to think strange objects in the sky

might be extraterrestrial craft.

[narrator] Hollywood ran with the idea,

helping to popularize and legitimize

the idea of flying saucers in the public consciousness.

[Christopher] Films such as 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still

featured friendly aliens.

But post 1952,

the aliens took a turn for the worst,

movies such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

and Mars Needs Women

started priming people to think that aliens might be evil.

[narrator] And the relatively new genre of science fiction

was far from the only factor adding to our anxiety.

In 1952,

the United States was coming down

from the victory and elation of World War II.

And facing a new Cold War,

which caused a lot of concern and fear.

To have mysterious objects flying over Washington DC was very troubling.

People were now enjoying post-war prosperity,

but also knew that we now held the power to destroy our own planet.

Maybe by detonating the bomb,

we captured the extraterrestrial's attention.

Perhaps these more advanced ETs were observing us

to protect us from ourselves.

Or maybe they realize we're on the path

to becoming a threat to them,

and we need to be kept in check.

[Nick] This was an era where trust in the government

and the authorities was pretty much absolute.

So, when the government made an explanation

or gave an explanation for something,

people were more likely to believe it.

[narrator] Even the report of a crashed flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico,

can be explained away

with a plausible official statement.

So, people forget, I think, now talking about UFO's

that in relation to the classic Roswell incident

that within 24 hours of saying, "We've recovered a flying disc,"

they said, "No, It was a weather balloon."

And everyone said, "Okay then," and moved on.

It was erased from the public consciousness

because of what the military said

and the way in which that was accepted.

It was only decades later, in the late '70s,

that Roswell was essentially rediscovered.

It wasn't until the publication of The Roswell Incident,

written by Charles Berlitz and William Moore in 1980

that the idea of government cover-ups of UFO incidents

became common knowledge.

People have suggested that the DC incident in 1952

was a government disinformation scheme.

But that wasn't a contemporary opinion.

This is not a popular opinion.

A lot of people disagree with me on this.

But I worked for the ministry of Defense

for 21 years,

and I can say that the view from within government

is you don't tell lies.

It really is only a handful of circumstances,

often to do with intelligence matters where it's allowed.

[narrator] But we do have evidence of cover stories

being used to explain unusual activity.

That's a delicate issue.

I would say a lot of highly classified operations

can have cover stories.

And I wouldn't call those cover stories disinformation.

It's just how we protect classified information.

There's a big difference

between trying to explain something away

and actually doing some form of analysis.

The long arm of the government

did reach Ruppelt in Project Blue Book.

And he did spend all of his time creating explanations,

as opposed to doing an actual investigation.

[narrator] With general agreement

that US intelligence agencies were capable

of constructing cover stories to obscure the truth

behind the July 1952 UFO sightings,

Major General Samford's promotion

of the temperature inversion theory

requires additional scientific investigation.

[Dr. Aderin-Pocock] A temperature inversion occurs

when you get a layer of cold air close to the ground

and a layer of warm air above.

But with layers of different density,

this changes the path of the radio waves

through the atmosphere.

This can give you a misreading of the position

of the object you're looking at.

[narrator] But temperature inversion

is only one potential explanation

for the phenomenon of July 1952.

There are a lot of different ways

you can get strange things on the radar screen

that have nothing to do with what's really there.

For example, just recently,

scientists have discovered microorganisms

that live permanently in the upper atmosphere.

And we know that some bacteria and organisms are bioluminescent.

So, maybe some of the lights we see

moving around in the sky are actually living organisms.

[narrator] Adding further room for doubt

on the official line of temperature inversion,

is the sudden disappearance of the radar blips

when the scramble jets arrived.

[Eric] Well, I can think of one scenario.

Let's suppose those radar glints that we're getting

were actually the result

of what we call Bragg diffraction,

which is radar reflecting off of periodic turbulence in the atmosphere.

When they send the jets up,

they're gonna break up that pattern

and you'd see the radar glints disappear

just by the act of the airplanes flying into the air.

[narrator] If this was the case, why then,

even when these blips disappeared

from air traffic control screens in Washington,

were there identical anomalies still being seen by analysts

at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia?

Next is the visual evidence provided by expert witnesses,

the pilots and the control tower staff.

There's a reason why pilots are considered really good witnesses,

and that's because they are much better

than the average person at estimating height,

speed and distance.

Their lives depend on it.

The way the objects maneuvered

does give us some form of indication

that they're being operated by some form of intelligence.

[narrator] The military's reaction to the phenomenon

also suggests that this was no atmospheric event.

We don't scramble jets for temperature inversion.

This was not the first time any of these professionals

experienced temperature inversion.

It is not cost effective or practical

nor is it following appropriate protocol.

[narrator] Add to that an institutional reluctance among pilots

to not report extraordinary sightings

unless absolutely necessary.

There is a huge culture of underreporting

because of the stigma

and also because of the perceived threat

of a psychological evaluation,

which would lead to a pilot being grounded.

And for a pilot to lose their wings,

well, that's the worst thing in the world.

So, they keep quiet.

[narrator] Despite all attempts to explain away

the UFO sightings of July 1952 scientifically,

there is little doubt that the interceptor pilots

and tower crew believed they were tracking

and had seen physical objects

as opposed to a freak weather system

or trick of the light.

A radar blip can be an anomaly.

A visual sighting can be a mistake.

But combine the two

and you've really got a situation

where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

A radar visual case tells you that there was something there.

But of course, it doesn't tell you what.

If we were allowed weather phenomena,

then we can look at manmade reasons for these sightings.

[narrator] There were rumors at the time

that Boeing was secretly producing

experimental aircraft for the US military.

Could this have been a test flight of a groundbreaking

new military aircraft or weapon?

Well, of course, there were.

There were a lot of companies at the time

like Lockheed and Conveyer and others

who were testing experimental aircraft.

But there was nothing at that time

that comes even close to performing

like the things we're talking about.

Boeing had contracts with the Air Force.

It participated in technology at Area 51.

Boeing built interceptor jets

and spy planes throughout the 1950s,

when the fear of a Russian attack persisted.

The Northrop Grumman craft that's designed

as one long, sleek, wing-looking craft.

The shape of the craft was unusual

and was often misidentified as a UFO.

As many military craft are.

They have to go through numerous tests.

They test them over the public

to see if the public will recognize it.

Then they test the components.

The speed and everything of the craft out in other places.

These are stealth craft.

They're stealth because they're interceptors.

They're made to be not seen.

The X43 is a craft that flies at 7,000 miles per hour.

One can only imagine what other crafts

are currently under development.

Look, in 1952,

there was nothing that could perform like that.

And today there's nothing that can perform like that.

There are some exotic forms of propulsion

that NASA's been evaluating.

For example, magnetic levitation

and various forms of ion drives

that could give you a lot faster performance

than we have today.

But none of those have really been reduced

to an operational setting that would apply here.

[narrator] And what of other rumors

that this was Washington testing its air defense forces

against a new and deadly Cold War threat?

The Soviets had just developed the Tu-95,

which is a long range strategic bomber.

There's no consensus about this,

but at one level, it does make some military sense

because a conventional attack

would take the form of waves of aircraft,

but a single aircraft, you might ignore,

because somebody would be saying,

"Well, maybe it's a temperature inversion,"

"Maybe there's a fault with one of the radar systems,"

but in reality, the strategy would be,

"We'll send one bomber.

It will drop a nuclear bomb

which will decapitate the political

and military leadership of the United States

in a single swoop."

[narrator] To assure that wouldn't happen,

radar operators and military chiefs

would need to be put to the test.

If this was the case,

and they had failed the test,

the one thing that they would not want to do

is let the Soviets

or the public know.

[narrator] And finally then, what of the theory

that the US military had recovered a crashed

alien craft at Roswell in 1947?

Which, by 1952,

it had learned to fly and was putting it through its paces.

[Eric] There is no evidence here to suggest

these were of extraterrestrial origin.

The events do, however, point out

that there's something going on, unexplained,

that says there's a lot we don't understand.

But a scientist or an intelligence analyst

looking at that wouldn't start with aliens.

We'd look at all the other possibilities

and exhaustively rule those out

before we seriously turned our attention to ET's.

[narrator] While alien craft

might be the least likely of all explanations

for the July 1952 sightings,

as conventional answers diminish,

can a case be made for visitors from another planet?

[narrator] Though the official line given

given for the July 1952 sightings

of UFO's over Washington, D.C.,

remains "Temperature inversion,"

it's clear that no single explanation

fits all the facts.

Although it's a big leap

with no satisfactory explanation for the phenomena,

could some form of alien technology

have been responsible?

It's interesting that more than 70 years later,

we still don't have the answers.

We've had more sightings and we have even more questions.

The only thing that's really changed, perhaps,

since the 1950s,

is our willingness to take the government's word at face value.

We've also seen some aspects of science fiction

become science fact,

which might make visits from ET's more plausible.

Well, if you want to make the argument

that this was extraterrestrial,

first of all, I guess you have to show

that alien life exists,

and with the best will in the world,

though there are a lot of people looking,

we haven't yet proven this beyond reasonable doubt.

There are some scientists

who promulgate this idea called panspermia,

in which life arrived at Earth

on an asteroid or comet from somewhere else.

And one notion that supports this

is that mathematicians have looked at modern DNA

and done the math on how many generations

and how many billions of years would have had to bake that DNA,

and found that the DNA that exists today

would have been older than the life of the Earth,

suggesting strongly that life here

came from extraterrestrial origin.

[narrator] Science theory met science fact

as recently as 2023,

when Avi Loeb at Harvard's Galileo Project

recovered tiny, metallic spheroids

remnants of an interstellar meteor

that crashed into our atmosphere in 2014.

For the first time ever, his study uncovered metals

unmatched to any existing alloys

in our solar system.

True intergalactic material

unknown to human science, originating from deep space.

The numbers, distances and time frames

we are dealing with are mind-numbingly vast.

We have calculated that there are approximately

300 billion stars in our galaxy.

And each one of those stars is a sun

like our sun, our local star.

We've also worked out that within the whole of the universe,

there are approximately 200 billion galaxies.

But what we've been doing in the last 30 years,

we've been actually detecting some of the planets

going around these distant stars.

We call them exoplanets.

So far, we've found about 5,000 of them,

but we think that there are many, many, many more out there.

You only need one of those to have developed something

close to light-speed travel

or mastered wormholes,

or to evolve to live tens of thousands of years,

and interstellar travel becomes a possibility.

[narrator] If the craft over Washington were alien,

where might they have come from

and how would they get here?

If they came from our nearest exoplanet,

that's an exoplanet going around the star Proxima Centauri,

that star sits 4.28 light years away from us.

Now 4.28 light years is 40 trillion kilometers.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light-years across.

So even if a beam of light was sent

from the other side of the galaxy,

it would take 100,000 years

to reach us.

[narrator] Our most technologically advanced space probe,

Voyager 1, has traveled only 0.1% of the distance

to Proxima Centauri b In the last 50 years.

[Chuck] With our current technology,

it would take tens of thousands of years

to reach the nearest potentially civilized planet.

To make that leap through time and space,

an alien race would have to have had traveled

through a wormhole to cross the galaxy

in a fraction of what we currently believe is possible.

In short, we have no proven physics

that would underlie any of this.

If faster-than-light travel were in fact a reality,

it would be as much a mystery to us

as would be time travel.

[narrator] But though it might be a mystery to us right now,

it may not be for very much longer,

if the US military industrial complex gets its way.

When Congress found out about the Pentagon's AATIP program,

Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,

they demanded answers,

and the answer came back.

We've done 38 scientific and technical studies,

into things like antigravity, invisibility, wormholes,

warp drive and stargates.

It sounds like science fiction,

but people were working on it,

and they probably still are.

[Eric] We're in new territory here.

There are what I would call the known unknowns

of physics and science.

For example, we don't know what makes up

95% of the stuff of the universe

because we don't know what dark energy and dark matter are.

And so that's stuff that scientists know they don't know.

But there's a whole other realm

which is probably much bigger,

which is stuff we don't know we don't know.

I think the point is we have to be humble

and not dismiss these things out of hand.

[narrator] Through the lens of advanced science and technology,

and thanks to access to recently released

contemporaneous records,

were now able to re-examine the evidence

from the 1952 sightings.

Seventy years later,

we have better access to records,

and we can see that the events were not confined

to Washington, D.C.

While this incident was happening

on the 26th in Washington,

an identical incident was happening

2,500 miles away in California,

where F94 was chasing an orange, glowing light

that was moving at remarkable speeds,

and then also disappearing off the radar screens.

[narrator] And that wasn't the last of it.

On the night of July 29th, 1952,

a UFO traveling at over 600 miles per hour

was caught on radar flying over Lake Huron.

[narrator] More than half a dozen reliable sightings

in three distant locations in a single month.

In all three incidents,

pilots pursued what they were convinced

was a physical craft with extraordinary abilities.

That provides more credibility

that something was happening beyond our understanding.

[narrator] Does this new evidence,

combined with what was known at the time,

help our experts reach any hard and fast conclusions?

Something extraordinary happened that night in Washington, D.C.,

but we don't have a full explanation for it.

And when people lack an explanation,

they seek one out.

We don't like ambiguity. We need answers.

So it's not surprising that people have speculated

about what happened in Washington, D.C. ever since.

So in all fairness, we have to say

that there is a case for conspiracy.

There is a case for non-human craft,

and there is a case for, perhaps, a test plane.

But I do believe that there is intelligent life in the universe.

And I also think that the craft

that were seen during this UFO flap over Washington

did display intelligence.

Maybe its alien craft,

or maybe there's something exotic

going on in our atmosphere we don't understand.

Either way, what a story.

[narrator] The sightings over Washington, D.C. in July 1952

were a watershed moment in UFO history.

For some, they increased Cold War paranoia.

For others, they offered reassurance

that perhaps aliens were watching over us

in this new and terrifying nuclear age.

And still, others were not so convinced of their benevolence.

According to the government at the time,

they were just a trick of light,

an atmospheric temperature inversion.

Today the clamor for answers has grown louder

as science has stretched our understanding

of what's credible.

The idea of UFO's is no longer fringe.

Government and military whistleblowers have come forward,

and even the United States Congress

is holding hearings about what the military

and intelligence establishment knows about UFO's.

The days of half-answers has passed.