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

intelligent extraterrestrials?

Something I can't discuss in a public setting.

[narrator] More insistent.

Biologics came with some of these recoveries. Yeah.

[narrator] And ever more dramatic.

Charles James Hall, a U.S. Airman stationed

on a highly protected military base,

claimed that not only were extraterrestrials real,

but that for two years, he lived among them.

Top secret investigations were launched.

Explanations proposed.

Denials issued.

But the truth remained elusive.

And new revelations from military whistleblowers

have only added to the mystery.

Do you believe UAPs

pose a potential threat to our national security?

Yes.

-Yes. -Yes.

[narrator] What are we not being told?

Our team of experts reopened the files.

They'll analyze the intelligence.

Investigate the science.

And reveal the truth.

In 1964, Charles James Hall

enlisted in the United States Air Force.

After basic training in San Antonio, Texas,

Hall trained as a weather observer at Chanute, Illinois.

In the spring of 1965,

he was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base,

just outside Las Vegas, Nevada.

It was a deployment

that would change his life forever.

Nellis was a tactical fighter center,

and Hall's mathematical ability

made him a good fit

for the base's vital weather stations.

It wasn't a glamorous assignment,

but with the U.S. at war in Vietnam,

it was a safe, domestic posting.

Or so it appeared.

Hall's harrowing experience at Nellis

began shortly after his arrival at the base

when he was taken to his observation post.

The weather observer that I was supposed to replace,

he didn't seem to know where anything was.

He was shaken with fear.

[narrator] As they pull up to the weather shack on Range 4,

Hall's escort refuses to leave the truck.

Instead, he delivers a stark warning.

He said, "If you see anything,

I'll go get help. We won't abandon you.

Just know that if you can't find me,

we're coming back for you."

Perplexed by the warning,

Hall continued to his post.

He had no idea what his predecessor could be talking about.

On entering the weather shack,

it became obvious

that nobody had been inside for months.

Hall's guide would leave the base soon after,

claiming that he couldn't spend another night there.

His fear was clearly real.

For Hall, however, this was just the beginning.

One night,

he's going to the latrine,

and out of the corner of his eye,

he sees this almost glowing white figure,

a woman,

clutching some kind of weapon.

In the 1960s, there were

no enlisted female personnel on the Air Force base.

[narrator] He put it down to an overactive imagination

and went back to bed.

Since his arrival at Nellis,

Hall had been warned by other airmen

about a glowing white phantom

that roamed the ranges,

nicknamed Range 4 Harry.

He had written it off as standard Air Force hazing,

but his early time on the base

was marked by strange experiences.

At Range 3,

he could see lights floating up in the valley.

He said he would hear rustling sounds in the sagebrush,

but could never see anything...

until one day...

[Laurie] So Charles Hall, he's doing his usual patrols.

It's 100 degrees, and he notices,

somehow, a little girl,

about 100 yards into

a very thick brush, as he described.

A brush so thick that he needed

some form of

a hatchet to cut his way through.

I looked at her, and I saw

that she was a little girl,

but she wasn't a human little girl, okay?

And the shock I felt

can hardly be described.

I was coming down

the last big wide trail,

and I stopped and turned around slowly,

and running straight towards me,

50 feet, maybe less,

was a tall white man.

[narrator] This was the phantom figure

the other airmen on the base warned him about.

It was Range 4 Harry.

A few nights after his strange encounter,

Hall was awakened by a group

entering his bunkhouse.

[Hall] One of them sounded like the Air Force General.

He specifically said, "I have a man down here.

He's bunking down here at the end.

Harry, go down and get him like you always do and march him out front."

I can't explain the feeling of terror

that I felt.

And he pointed the squarish instrument

at my temple,

and it half hypnotized me.

[narrator] They took him outside,

but the colonel was concerned he wasn't fully under.

So they moved him to a storage shed.

Despite everything he had seen,

Hall wasn't sure he could believe his own eyes.

He thought he must be dreaming.

I went back and I covered up myself

and went to the fetal position

and said my prayers and went to sleep.

[narrator] Hall had other

infrequent brushes with these Tall Whites

and began to believe he must have imagined them all.

Until one day, he was checking equipment at Range 3.

I'd taken the reading and as I was turning to the left,

this tall white lady in a suit

leaned over my shoulder.

Because she was floating,

I thought it was me.

I thought my brain was malfunctioning or something, you know?

And so to control my fears, I just smiled.

[narrator] He was convinced she was real.

He called her "The Teacher,"

and her visit would mark a turning point for Hall,

giving him an entirely new understanding of the universe.

[narrator] After Charles Hall's first encounter

with a Tall White alien he came to know as The Teacher

in the spring of 1965,

the Tall Whites began to communicate with him more frequently.

Hall began to learn about their lives,

their technology and their culture.

The Teacher was equivalent in age

to a human lady,

21, 22 years old.

[narrator] Through his encounters with The Teacher,

Hall learned that the Tall Whites

could live for up to 800 years.

They stood about two meters tall,

and their eyes changed from blue to pink

as they aged.

Hall claimed the Tall Whites

were physically fragile,

and their language was

a high-pitched flute sound similar to the meadowlark.

[high-pitched whistles]

[narrator] Hall said they were nervous around humans.

[Hall] Talking to the aliens,

they're always well-armed.

Even if they're your friends,

you never, never, never once wanted to

surprise them or scare them.

[narrator] Charles learned

that each carried a single personal weapon.

Shaped like a pencil,

it focused frequencies to create microwaves

that interacted with the body's ions.

The device could hypnotize,

stun, or even kill humans.

Torn between feeling that the Tall Whites

were absolutely real

and the possibility that he was losing his mind,

Hall told nobody of these apparitions.

He continued doing his job as a weather observer,

visiting the ranges and taking wind measurements.

And over a period of more than two years,

he learned answers to the questions

we all have about alien beings visiting Earth.

Where have they come from? How did they get here?

And why are they here?

[Hall] When the Tall White deep spacecraft come in,

you say that spacecraft could have

covered 100 light-years.

A hundred light-years is actually

nearly one quadrillion kilometers.

That's 1,000 trillion kilometers.

Now, even traveling as fast as we can

with current technology,

that journey would take

nearly four million years.

So we have to ask ourselves,

without a huge technological leap,

is such a journey even possible?

[Hall] Their craft travel faster than the speed of light,

and they reduce the forces of inertia,

which makes space travel possible.

[Hall] Charles Hall claims the aliens' technology

defied physics as we know it, making their

faster-than-light journey possible in just a few months.

[Maggie] The speed of light

is 300,000 kilometers per second.

Now, Einstein's theory of special relativity

says nothing can travel at the speed of light

apart from photons.

Because to accelerate things up to the speed of light,

you would need an infinite amount of energy.

[narrator] As an object approaches light speed,

its mass increases exponentially,

which means the force of gravity

would also increase.

To date,

there is no theory that suggests

faster-than-light travel is possible.

Hall, however, was adamant

that it was possible for the Tall Whites.

He even believes he calculated where they came from,

though the Tall Whites refused to tell him.

[Hall] Their home planet is much further away.

My best guess,

coming from a star

something around 105 light-years away,

and something above

the 21st line of southern latitude.

It's a southern hemisphere star.

[narrator] And he claims to have learned how they managed

a precarious Earth landing

after such an incredible journey.

[Hall] The Tall White craft come in

on the night of the full moon.

The Moon, the Earth, and the Sun are lined up.

You have a region in space where the gravity field

is smooth with no bumps.

And so when you're coming in,

you can sync up with the movement

of the Sun and the Earth

and let the Earth's gravity pull you in.

When the Moon is leading the Earth in its orbit,

no spacecraft pilot

ever wants to get caught in between

the Earth and the Moon

when the Moon is leading the Earth in its orbit.

[narrator] According to Hall,

the Tall Whites utilize our planet's gravity

like a slingshot.

A gravitational slingshot is a technique

used in space flight to change

the trajectory or the velocity of an object.

And it's done by using the gravitational force

of a celestial body,

like a moon or a planet.

[narrator] And he claims they had to use this technique because

the fiber-optic-powered propulsion systems

on their ships tended to overheat

through faster-than-light speed travel.

And needed repairs.

The Tall Whites claim they've been visiting Earth

for thousands of years.

And this group said they had been hit

by a meteor shower.

[Hall] It was obvious that one of the things they were gonna need

was high-grade titanium

to do repairs on the interior of the ship.

All of them need

to have a hangar.

[narrator] According to Hall,

in exchange for accommodations at Indian Springs

and access to repair materials,

the Tall Whites would share technological knowledge.

But they weren't willing to share everything.

[Hall] For example, the Tall Whites,

there were parts of their technology

that they did not wish to share with us,

such as their engine technology.

[narrator] They apparently refused

to provide information about anti-gravity drive technology,

light-speed travel,

or advanced weaponry.

But whether or not

the Tall Whites would eventually share

their technology, Hall would never know.

On the base just over two years,

in 1967,

he was sent to fight in Vietnam.

He never saw the Tall Whites again.

Years after these meetings,

Hall confessed to his wife

that he had never come to terms with the fear he felt.

He had been secretly keeping notes about his experiences

for over 20 years.

And his wife insisted that they publish

fictionalized accounts of what he claims happened to him.

Hall now travels the world,

giving paid talks to UFO enthusiasts

about his experiences.

Many people have written off Charles Hall's stories

as unbelievable tales.

[narrator] However, two years prior to his encounters

with the Tall Whites at Nellis,

an unexplained event

may provide some corroborating evidence.

[narrator] On the evening

of 18th April, 1962,

residents of Oneida, New York,

saw a flaming object speed westward across the night sky.

It was at high altitude

and emitted no noise.

[Chuck] It was picked up by radar.

Operators watched as the object

streaked from county to county,

state to state,

crossing the Midwest in minutes.

[narrator] As it approached Utah, there were reports

that the Strategic Air Command had launched

F-94 interceptor jets from Luke Air Force Base, Arizona.

This thing was flying over cities in Utah

and it was bright enough to turn night into day.

[narrator] Then, as it passed over Eureka,

it came down. Whatever it was,

it disrupted the electricity for the whole area.

But just a few minutes later, it flew off again

and headed towards Reno, Nevada,

where it made a sweeping turn south

and disappeared from radar view.

Calls from terrified residents

inundated the sheriff's office in Clark County,

all reporting the same thing.

A flaming ball

flying almost horizontally overhead

before coming down

in a huge explosion near Mesquite,

just 75 miles from Nellis Air Force Base.

This was seen by thousands of people, civilian and professional,

drivers on the freeway,

people in their yards, pilots in flight.

[narrator] One pilot reported seeing the ball light up an area

of roughly 20 square miles.

As if it were day.

This was not an illusion or a weather event.

Something physical had streaked across the sky

in multiple states, recorded by multiple people.

The only question was what.

[Chuck] Initial responses assumed

a plane crash,

so the sheriff's office immediately organized

a ground-based search and rescue party.

But they found nothing.

No debris, no indications of a physical crash.

[narrator] In the morning,

they continued to survey by plane.

But still, they found no evidence.

[Chuck] No planes had been reported missing.

There were no military exercises in the area.

It was a real mystery.

[narrator] The search was called off.

But the investigation had only just begun.

One of the first interviewed was the Air Force pilot

who had reported seeing the ground

lit up like daylight.

[Chuck] This pilot, Captain Herman Shields,

was flying at about 8,500 feet

in a C-119A military transport plane.

Not only did he see the ground lit up,

he saw something flying.

[narrator] Shields recalled a slender,

rounded object whose shape he couldn't describe.

It looked like nothing he had seen before.

Shields says there was no exhaust,

no trail following after it.

[narrator] His description was confirmed by a witness

on the ground in Silver City, New Mexico,

who also claimed to have seen the object come down.

He said it slowed down, that he could hear a gasping sound,

like it was stalling,

and then it surged ahead.

He said it did this a few times before arching over,

starting to fishtail, and then descending.

[narrator] The investigating officer, Douglas Crouch,

from Hill Air Force Base,

interviewed all those who'd witnessed the strange phenomenon.

[Chuck] He said that everyone he interviewed seemed logical, and mature,

and that what they had seen

was not a balloon or a conventional aircraft.

[narrator] He continued to write off other potential explanations,

including missile test,

unusual weather,

or astronomical conditions,

and even cast doubt

on the most obvious explanation,

a large meteor.

[Chuck] Shields had his doubts.

Several witnesses spoke about a flat trajectory

and noises coming from the object.

Neither of those are common with meteors.

[narrator] But despite Shields

and the others' compelling testimony,

investigators found no physical evidence.

After a day of quizzing witnesses in central Utah,

they concluded that they had seen

a very rare meteoric event known as a bolide.

[Maggie] A bolide is essentially a big meteor

that doesn't burn up in the Earth's atmosphere

or hit the Earth.

Instead, it explodes in the upper atmosphere.

It can be 100 times brighter

than the full moon.

[narrator] That became the official explanation

of the U.S. Air Force,

at least until people started asking questions.

[Laurie] What they witnessed

was major deviation

from a trajectory, changing directions, landing,

and then taking off again.

Uh, because it was witnessed,

I believe, through eight or nine states in two countries,

uh, it could have been

an extraterrestrial craft.

Certainly could have been.

And it could have also been

a test pilot

flying one of our own

secret planes.

[narrator] Meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere

at about 100,000 miles per hour,

or 40 miles per second.

But rarely do they change directions

as dramatically as this object.

[Chuck] The UAP was tracked by Air Force radar over Montana,

Idaho, Wyoming, Utah,

New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

Not only is it incredibly rare

for a meteor to be tracked by radar at all,

but a meteor would make that journey in about a minute.

Then you have the height.

Other than exceptionally rare circumstances,

bolides usually explode in the upper atmosphere.

[narrator] Both Captain Shields

and a commercial airline pilot

flying out of Las Vegas

at around 11,000 feet

reported seeing the object flying beneath them.

[Chuck] There was a Utah Highway Patrol sergeant

who reported he was seeing something

from a missile range explode right over him,

creating a shower of white sparks.

And controllers in the towers at Reno,

Elko, and Las Vegas airports all said they saw a flash.

[narrator] The eyewitness accounts and radar readings

cast significant doubt

over the bolide explanation.

But internal papers suggest

the military had an explanation for that.

[Chuck] The Utah incident with the fireball

and the explosion could be explained by the bolide.

While the radar tracking from New York

across the Midwest and into Nevada

follows a flight path of a high-altitude weather balloon

or a U-2 spy plane,

two wildly different propositions

that exhibit entirely different behaviors.

[narrator] All flights above 14,000 feet were tracked.

If there had been a U-2 flight

or a high-altitude balloon in that area,

the Air Force would have known about it.

And if they had known about it,

they wouldn't have scrambled jets

from two separate air bases.

Project Blue Book initially labeled it

as unidentified, before later

changing it to insufficient data

for scientific analysis.

[narrator] What is certain

is that this incident happened near Nellis Air Force Base

just two years before Charles Hall

claims to have encountered the Tall White aliens

who were living there and repairing their damaged ship.

Could these incidents be connected?

Could Charles Hall's fantastical stories be true?

[narrator] In the mid-1960s,

U.S. Airman Charles James Hall claims

that he lived with a group of aliens

on Nellis Air Force Base

have prompted curiosity and mockery in equal measure.

Now let's see if they stand up to our experts' scrutiny,

or whether there may be another explanation

for these strange apparitions.

According to Hall's account,

the Tall Whites traveled here from a planet

some 105 light-years away.

Well, that translates to

700 trillion miles.

So even if you were traveling at light speed,

that would take you well over a century.

And that raises some questions.

[narrator] Hall claimed that the aliens could

live up to 800 years.

And more importantly,

they found a way to cancel the force of inertia,

allowing them to fly at these incredible speeds.

[Eric] Well, first of all,

if you start increasing toward the speed of light,

your equivalent mass increases, which means

you need infinite energy to move you that fast.

And with infinite energy,

you have infinite mass and inertia.

So to cancel that,

there's no known way to do it.

To cancel that is the equivalent

of eliminating your mass,

which means you wouldn't be there.

It contradicts every known law of physics.

The bottom line here is

he doesn't talk like a real physicist.

[narrator] But Hall is adamant

that the Tall Whites traveled here

faster than light speed,

and that it's possible because Einstein was wrong in his belief that

nothing in the universe can travel faster

than the speed of light.

The claim that Einstein was wrong might be true,

but it requires an extraordinary amount of proof.

Where's the proof?

To date, we have found nothing

to dismiss Einstein's ideas.

These theories have been extensively tested

and have provided accurate predictions.

They have been confirmed again and again.

While Einstein's theory

still remained the foundation of modern physics,

there are some phenomenon

within the quantum realm or dark energy and dark matter

which it still can't fully explain.

[narrator] So even if our current understanding

of physics falls short,

Einstein left us some wiggle room

for traversing the galaxy.

One of the theories is that a warp drive could be possible

to create the effect of faster-than-light travel

without real faster-than-light travel.

The idea is that

space and time are one thing.

It's called space-time.

And they are shaped by objects and energy.

So if you have intense mass or intense energy,

you're gonna warp space-time.

And so space-time itself would

carry you and your vehicle

along with it. And that, in theory, could happen.

You would not be violating the relativity.

You would still be traveling below the speed of light.

In theory,

a wormhole could allow

very fast travel across vast distances.

And they actually grow out

of Einstein's theories of relativity.

But there's no evidence

that wormholes actually do exist.

Or if they did exist, you could travel through them

without being

squished to death by the intense gravity at their core.

[narrator] Although many obstacles stand between

our current scientific knowledge

and the possibility of interstellar travel,

Eric refuses to rule it out entirely.

[Eric] I think we have to be humble.

Just because we don't know

of any theoretical way this could happen

doesn't mean it didn't happen.

[narrator] In theory,

how could an interstellar engine operate?

Almost certainly not as Hall described it.

And if it did malfunction,

could it really be repaired here on Earth,

as Hall claimed?

So Hall said that the ET's

space drive was broken

and they had to use our fiber optics to repair it.

But it takes infinite energy

to move at the speed of light.

So it's completely ludicrous to believe

that they would use our low-tech fiber optics

to repair their

unimaginably high-tech space drive.

[narrator] In fact, NASA scientists

have calculated that to power the theoretical warp drive

would require energy equivalent

to 1.5 million Hiroshima bombs.

Another element that undermines Hall's light speed claims

is the aliens' reliance on gravitational slingshots.

Hall claims that they can go faster than the speed of light.

And Hall also claims that they had to use

gravitational slingshots to achieve

great accelerations.

Well, those two things don't go together

because going faster than the speed of light

gives you many millions of times greater velocity

than any gravitational slingshot.

Therefore, the whole arguments

are inconsistent and contradictory.

[narrator] Looking at Hall's other claims,

he said that the alien pilots had to avoid getting caught

between the Earth and the Moon

for fear of being blown off course.

He seemed to be saying that the phase of the Moon,

which is to say where it was in its orbit around the Earth,

made a difference.

It could make a slight difference

if you were gonna approach the Earth

on the side that the Moon was or on the opposite side.

But those tidal forces are so negligible

that I can't imagine they would affect

the trajectory of a spacecraft made by aliens

capable of faster-than-light travel.

[narrator] And could the Tall Whites' home planet

really orbit a twin star?

[Maggie] There are many binary systems out there,

and we've found exoplanets orbiting them.

The first of these

was Kepler-16b.

It's a gas giant the size of Saturn,

experiencing double sunrises

and double sunsets.

This shows

that exoplanets can exist in very complex systems,

different to those we find in our own solar system.

[narrator] And what of his claims

that their planet remains fixed in its orbit

and is half covered in ice?

[Maggie] Unlike the other planets in the solar system,

Uranus actually spins on its side.

This means that as it orbits the Sun,

the pole away from the Sun

experiences a long, dark winter.

This shows us that there can be planets out there

that can be very different from our Earth.

[narrator] Hall claims to have pinpointed

the location of the alien's home planet

on the 21st line of latitude in the southern sky.

[Eric] Hall doesn't use terms that astronomers would use,

and it really calls into question his credibility.

For example, he talks about lines of latitude

for positioning celestial objects,

but those aren't the terms that astronomers use.

When they talk about coordinates,

they talk about declination and right ascension

to describe where something is in the celestial sky.

[narrator] Wherever they may have come from,

the Tall Whites' technology wasn't limited to their ships.

Charles Hall described their universal translators

and their multi-purpose microwave weapon.

Eric Haseltine has spent several years

researching the effects of microwave radiation

on the brain.

[Eric] The first problem with his story

about the microwave weapon

is that it's roughly the size of a pencil.

And microwaves are, you know, roughly that long.

And when you have energy that long

coming out of something thin like that,

it's gonna spread out uniformly.

It's what we call diffraction.

So if someone were holding a device like that,

it would radiate them as much as anybody else.

So that just

does not seem like a credible microwave weapon.

-[audience applauding] -[Hall] Oh, thank you.

[narrator] The serious doubt

cast over many of Hall's claims

suggests his memories were colored less by science

than by science fiction.

[Christopher] Charles Hall's experiences allegedly happened

in the 1960s,

but he didn't write about them until the 2000s.

So he had a lot of culture to draw upon

when he was developing his story.

[narrator] Even Hall's description of the Tall Whites

seems adapted from other people's alien imaginings

rather than from his own experience.

Hall's description of the aliens he encountered

combine characteristics of the Nordics and the Greys,

two alien races that were

featured in UFO stories around the time

he was developing his tale.

[narrator] Aside from contemporary accounts and science fiction,

Hall's vision of the Tall Whites

may have been influenced by a text

thousands of years old, the Old Testament.

[Laurie] There are many stories of legend

and lore and myth of

tall beings, some giant-like.

Now, the Nephilim

were the offspring

of most likely the Anunnaki,

the sons of the gods.

So the Nephilim

also interbred with the humans,

creating, again,

tall white beings.

[Christopher] By the time Hall's story appeared,

people were ready for stories

about military encounters with aliens.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Area 51,

the Roswell tales, The X-Files,

all of these things were available in the culture

at the time, and this story

is an amalgamation of all of them.

Simply put,

Hall told his story at the right time.

[narrator] Aliens or not, perhaps something inexplicable

did happen to Charles Hall at Nellis,

and over time, his mind stitched the rest together.

And maybe that triggering event

was even more insidious than an alien conspiracy.

The United States government,

and other world governments as well,

uh, and particularly Russia, Germany, and China, have

often experimented with mind control.

I feel that Charles Hall's particular

psychological profile

lends him

into the category of high probability

of him being manipulated

and tested on

to see if he could be controlled.

[narrator] As far-fetched as it may seem,

the U.S. military and intelligence agencies

have admitted to having

a psychotronic research program

throughout the 1970s and 80s,

named the Stargate project.

Which leads us to the big question.

Is Charles James Hall a reliable witness?

[Laurie] I believe that he thinks his story is true.

I think that Charles Hall has some body language

that indicates he believes he's telling the truth.

But that doesn't mean it is the truth.

On several occasions, Charles was unsure.

And he did question himself

so many times,

and would, you know,

in his own words,

curl up into a fetal position and go back to sleep.

Or question himself,

"Might I be dreaming?"

[narrator] Though much of Hall's account is unverifiable,

many of the details that can be easily fact-checked

have turned out to be false,

putting his whole story in question.

He talks about hacking through the bushes

in order to get to the alien actor.

And I actually grew up in the Mojave Desert

not far from there.

And I never had to hack through bushes

to get anywhere. It's an arid desert

where the vegetation is very sparse.

[narrator] One has to wonder,

did Hall even serve at Nellis Air Force Base?

[Eric] He talked about a one-star colonel.

Well, there is no such thing as a one-star colonel.

There are full-bird colonels,

and there are one-star generals.

Nobody who ever served in the armed forces

would ever make a mistake like that.

[narrator] Charles Hall tells an alien account

rife with unproven details,

but one which stems

from a verifiable, inexplicable event.

The much-disputed bolide crash of 1962.

[Eric] Well,

it might have been a bolide that broke up.

And when it broke up,

some of the fragments still glowing

and giving off life changed directions.

Or it might have been a rocket that,

uh, was sent into space and then

came back in reentry and burned up on reentry.

Or it could be some

orbital craft that crashed

through the atmosphere and broke up into a lot of pieces.

Bolides and other meteorites

have a very distinct trajectory,

falling towards the Earth at very great speeds.

Although it may be possible

for bits to fly off in different directions,

I cannot see any mechanism

where a bolide could land,

relaunch itself,

and then continue flying around.

[narrator] Eyewitnesses

reported the object changing direction.

Even in less extreme circumstances,

eyewitness accounts aren't always trustworthy.

[Maggie] I don't know if you've ever seen the Moon low on the horizon.

It looks big and bright.

But then when you look at it later on,

it looks much smaller in the night sky.

This is because when it's low on the horizon,

you have other things relative to it,

so the Moon looks bigger.

But when it's up there in the night sky,

it looks much smaller because there's no reference.

This is an example of the Ponzo effect,

which says that our perception of things

are disrupted by what surrounds it.

[narrator] If it was a meteor,

why would the military scramble jets?

[Eric] If they thought it was a meteor,

they would not send jets.

But there can be ambiguity

about whether it's a meteor or not

because a big enough meteor will show up on radar,

and it might move in a way

like it was an intercontinental missile.

So they may well have sent jets out to investigate

if they thought there were even a possibility

that it was a serious threat.

[narrator] It's the military's job to be vigilant and discreet.

[Eric] You know, the military's first instinct when

encountering the unknown

is to keep it under wraps,

to keep it secret for lots of reasons.

But there were a lot of classified things

that happened during the Cold War.

For example, ferret operations.

NATO forces would sometimes probe

with aircraft, Soviet defenses,

to just see how they reacted.

And the Soviets did the same thing to us.

And sometimes we shot them down,

and sometimes some of their pilots were killed.

And it was never talked about by mutual agreement,

because during the Cold War, that's just the way it was.

[narrator] So is it possible that a Soviet airborne incursion

was targeting Nellis

or some of the many bases in the area?

Well, Nellis is an important Air Force base.

A lot of exercises happen there,

such as Red Flag,

but also there is

a simulated adversary threat environment there

so that our pilots can train,

uh, against simulated threats.

And there are various ranges there where

a snoop could see what our advanced weapons and systems are doing.

So there are very good reasons to keep people away

from Nellis that have nothing to do with aliens.

[narrator] In an area with top-secret air bases,

it's possible that the lights in the sky

could have been a mission or tests that went wrong.

The official explanation of bolide

doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

[Maggie] Typically, a bolide will fall towards the Earth

with a steep descent angle.

Factors such as the size, the mass

and velocity of the bolide

also has an influence,

as does the atmosphere that it's passing through.

But with all these different factors,

I can't see a bolide

traveling horizontally

for any significant amount of time.

Therefore, my conclusion is

this is not a bolide.

When we see something unexplainable,

our first instinct

should not be something exotic like aliens.

We should come up with a list of all the possibilities

that fall in the realm of known physics and science.

And only when we've completely exhausted that

do we start looking at

extremely improbable exotic solutions.

[narrator] As ever,

science demands irrefutable evidence

for fantastical claims.

But relying on the testimony of individuals

will always be problematic.

They can be mistaken or compromised.

In this case,

irrefutable evidence of Charles Hall's claims

of the Tall Whites at Nellis

can only come from the United States military.

But the U.S. government,

military and intelligence agencies

are only now beginning to open their files to scrutiny.

And as they do so,

new evidence for the existence of UAPs

has recently come to light.

In 2017,

the U.S. Navy confirmed

the authenticity of two films shot by their pilots

that appear to show UAPs

sharing many qualities with the one Herman Shields

claims to have seen over Las Vegas

before it crash-landed near Nellis.

Perhaps we do have evidence of alien vehicles after all.

With all the evidence assessed and analyzed,

what do our experts make of

Charles Hall's extraordinary claims

of what happened to him in the mid-1960s

at Nellis Air Force Base?

[Laurie] I believe that maybe at one point

he saw something that might have been anomalous.

There is the possibility

that he witnessed a test craft flying,

saw one of our own pilots

coming out in some new form of test suit.

He may have thought he saw something and let it

fire itself

into the story that we know today.

[narrator] As ever, with alien files,

the boundary between truth and fiction

is constantly shifting.

[Laurie] Well, um,

I actually think that, um,

his body language

in certain areas of his story

indicate that he does believe himself.

But at one point he became compliant

and put out a second book and then a third book.

So he obviously at that point knew what he was doing.

[narrator] It's a reoccurring theme in our alien files.

An encounter with the unknown and a need to be believed

undermined by an absence of convincing evidence

and actors with dubious motives.

[Eric] The fascinating thing to me about Hall's story

is what it tells us about human nature.

When we're faced with something we can't explain,

it really makes us uncomfortable,

because we can't predict it and we can't control it.

So we have to come up with

some explanation that at least makes sense of it.

So we come up with ET and aliens.

And it really says a lot more about our anxieties

and insecurities

than it says about the reality of ETs.

[narrator] Truth or lies,

fact or fiction,

Charles Hall seemed convinced of what he saw,

but he has no proof.

Like many of the claims of interactions with ET,

they're based on little evidence.

Is it possible?

Yes, anything's possible.

But there has to be more

to substantiate that such encounters actually took place.

I also think

that a civilization that has the ability to travel here

would have contingencies without requiring human help.

On the other hand,

I personally do think

some sightings of UAPs

are very real and worthy of investigation.

[narrator] Only now are we getting

the official documentation and detail we require

to examine claims like Hall's

with the rigor and depth they deserve.

It may be that the Tall Whites

were a figment of an overactive

or manipulated imagination.

But even if they were, the weight of evidence

for the existence of UAPs and UFOs

is mounting by the day.

Elected officials are beginning to ask questions.

Government secrecy is being called into question.

Whistleblowers are breaking cover.

Classified documents are leaking out.

The truth is out there.

But are we ready for it?