(suspenseful music)
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- [Driver] Kevin?
- Yes, hello.
- [Driver] Hi, come on in.
- Alright, here's the package.
- [Driver] So what do you know about the history of this?
- I know that it is supposedly from a crash site
in New Mexico from the St. Augustine Plains.
Happened in 1947 within weeks of the supposed Roswell crash.
If this is just debris from an airplane crash,
then it's not that valuable or not that interesting,
but if it turns out that it's a debris from a crashed UFO
or a crashed alien spacecraft,
or whatever it might be,
then it's invaluable.
So it's priceless.
So we have these weird hand-offs,
these cloak and dagger style hand-offs,
which admittedly are fun
and relatively amusing
and a bit worrisome because you,
I don't know that other people aren't tracking this,
that other people wouldn't like to have it,
that somebody might try to get it from you.
And, you know, we don't know that that's not the case.
I'm a physics professor,
we don't operate this way
and I don't know how, you know,
whether there are other groups or other countries
that would like to get their hands on this that you know,
might go through some, you know,
movie style lengths to do it.
(truck horn blares)
(eerie music)
(upbeat music)
♪ I play music when the day gets dark ♪
♪ Drifting through heaven's gate into outer space ♪
♪ Blistered by the bright blue sunshine ♪
♪ The most beautiful faces we hide inside ♪
- [Narrator] Most science documentaries look at
an encounter with extraterrestrial civilization
from our point of view,
but let's turn it upside down.
What would it be like if you were part
of an advanced civilization meeting
earthlings for the first time?
- Well, place myself in the persona
of an alien being and saying,
here we are, we come in peace.
You know, that's certainly something I would hope.
- If aliens are intelligent, they're also curious,
and that curiosity is going to force them to go out
and examine everything they have access to,
which could include us.
- If I'm a being,
I'm choosing people who can convey my message in a way that
would leave very little doubt.
- Why would they need to have such extensive
direct interactions with us
when everything that they could possibly need from us,
they could take without really having
to expose themselves at all,
we wouldn't really even need
to know about their existence.
The fact that we do would indicate that they are
whatever they are wanting us to think in a particular way,
probably more about ourselves than about them.
(rocket blast)
- My name is Elisa Quintana.
I'm a astrophysicist at NASA Goddard
and I'm the deputy project scientist
for NASA's test mission.
This is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
This is a space mission looking for planets
outside of our solar system,
including those that are small like earth.
Ultimately we're looking for planets
that are in a Goldilock zone,
so they're not too close to their star where it's very hot,
they're also not too far away where it's very cold.
They're in a temperate region
just like earth is around the sun.
They're in a region that would allow the good water
on a planet surface.
Using this transit method we can determine
the size of a planet, it's orbit
and we can ultimately determine which planets
are in the habitable zones of these stars.
So in the early days of searching for other planets,
we were really focusing on sun-like stars.
What we now know is that the most common type of star
that has planets are these M-dwarfs.
So these are stars that are smaller, cooler
and redder than the sun
and they emit different light.
So they emit light in the infrared.
They're very, very different from the sun.
Planets that evolve in the habitable zones of these stars
will have a very different environment.
I often wonder what kind of life
would evolve under infrared light.
What is photosynthesis like?
We have these green plants that evolve under the sun.
Will we have black trees
or will we have some new form of life
that we can't even imagine
that are forming on these stars
that are the most abundant in the sky.
A huge goal of NASA is to find another earth like planet
that could have life,
even intelligent life.
(suspenseful music)
- (foreign language)
- I think it would be fascinating if
we were to find intelligent life
that was very different from ours.
Life where we could learn
and really advance ourselves.
- [Interviewer] So what is the ultimate goal here?
Once the generational program down the road finds
that there not only is life there,
but there's a civilization there,
what happens next?
(laughs)
- That's a really good question.
Everyone is so focused on building the next flagship
that's gonna image the earth, and then what?
Like, I guess-
(laughs)
So if we find life on another planet,
what are the next steps that NASA's gonna do?
What are the next steps that the community is gonna do?
Should we contact and communicate with these other planets?
And that is a whole new discussion area
that people are actually talking about.
And I don't know what the next steps would be.
The SETI Institute does have a procedure
for if they were to find life,
they actually have, you know, a manual.
There's a proper procedure of writing a publication
and what should we do next.
- Because I'm involved in the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence,
people will ask,
do you really think there are aliens out there?
I mean, do you think there's any life out there?
And of course I do.
I mean that's why I took the job really.
And why do I think that?
It's not pretty because we found it,
cuz we haven't,
but what we now know and something that we didn't know
even 25 years ago is that the universe is just shock,
a block with planets.
They're roughly a trillion planets
just in the Milky Way galaxy
and we can see trillions of other galaxies,
so that's a lot of planet pleasure, right?
There are so many worlds out there that to think that,
well no, only earth has produced life or intelligent life,
that sounds like a lot of hubris to me.
Turns out that the techniques used for studying galaxies,
which is what I used to do.
SETI uses many of the same techniques
that I was using to study galaxies.
In other words, you know, big antennas,
call 'em radio telescopes
and just point them in the direction
of some nearby stars
hoping that there's somebody on a planet
around those stars who's broadcasting a signal
that we could pick up and prove
that we have some company there.
So what if we get a signal?
I mean, we might get a signal from deep space tomorrow,
next week, next year,
10 years from now, we don't know,
but what happens?
I can tell you what's really gonna happen
because we've had false alarms,
and in a false alarm,
you see what actually happens.
The media start calling up
because there's no policy of secrecy.
Everybody's sending emails or text messages
or calling their mom or whatever they're doing.
So the news that we picked up a signal gets out
within minutes and the experience
that we've had is when that happens,
even before we've checked out whether it's for real or not,
the local TV stations, the newspapers
and the media start calling.
- Scientists have a mystery on their hands.
Signals from outer space are being detected.
What's most exciting about this signal from outer space
is that it repeats itself every 16 days.
- If the signal's strong enough
some believe to raise the possibility
that it was sent intentionally by aliens.
- One radio versus wavelength light was converted to sound.
- So if I were an alien,
how would I find intelligent life on earth?
Or for that matter,
any life on earth?
Now finding life is kind of a simpler problem
for the aliens than finding intelligent life
because all they have to do is build a big telescope
and analyze the atmosphere of our planet of Earth.
And they would find 20% of that atmosphere is oxygen.
And normally that's not a component
of the gases in the atmosphere of planets,
but it is of ours.
So if the aliens can find oxygen in our atmosphere,
that would be a strong clue that there's
some sort of biology here, at least photosynthesis.
That wouldn't tell 'em that homo sapiens is here of course,
but what would is if they can build big antennas
and pick up our television or our radars or our FM radio
because if there's been enough time
for those signals to get out to them,
they'll pick that up and they say,
well, we don't know what's down there,
but whatever it is it's pretty clever
because they can engineer a transmitter.
- For a long time I banged my head against the wall
looking for a theory of consciousness
in purely physical terms that would work.
I'm David Chalmers,
I'm a professor of philosophy at New York University
where I'm also co-director of
the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness.
I'm a philosopher, so I think about foundational ideas
about the mind, about the world,
about knowledge, about reality.
How is the human mind even possible?
I think about artificial minds.
Could a computer have a mind?
Are there non-human minds in animals or even alien minds?
I think about the nature of reality.
Is the world around us real?
How can we ever have genuine knowledge of reality?
Or is all this somehow an illusion or a simulation?
- The Simulation Hypothesis is simply the hypothesis
that we live in a computer simulation.
To be understood in a literal sense,
not just as a metaphor,
we can think of atoms as bits can.
No, that there is some advanced civilization
that constructed a physical computer
and then run some kind of program on that computer
and we are one of the information patterns within that.
- The venerable philosopher Renee Decartes said,
how do you know that you're not being fooled
by an evil genius who is stimulating your sensory systems
to produce the sense of a world around you
when none of this is real?
Well, the contemporary version of that question is just
how do you know you're not in a computer simulation
right now where all this would seem real, but it isn't.
- Yeah, the Simulation Hypothesis does does not mean
to presuppose that the civilization doing the simulating,
it would necessarily be our descendant.
Like they wouldn't have to be on earth.
You could imagine extraterrestrial civilizations
creating all kinds of simulations
of other extraterrestrial civilizations of their origins
or maybe just fantasy simulations.
- For me, I got into this in part
because 20 odd years ago,
just after The Matrix movie came out,
the Wachowskis, director of The Matrix,
Lorenzo philosophy, and they actually signed up
a bunch of philosophers to write philosophically
about the movie.
So I ended up writing an article
called The Matrix as Metaphysics.
And the central idea was even if we are
living in the matrix, all this is still perfectly real.
- So it would be unlike The Matrix in the sense that
the brain itself would be part of the simulation as well.
That would be the most cost efficient way
of producing human experience.
Not to have these biological,
organic brains floating in nutrient tanks
and then connecting them via some cable
to a virtual reality, but just simulate the whole thing.
You could run many more simulations
for the same amount of dollars as technological maturity
if you did it all in silicon than if you had this
wetware component in there as well.
- The traditional idea has been
that if we're in a simulation,
none of this is real.
I think I have hands,
I think there's a table here,
I think there's a sculpture here.
Many people would say that if this is a simulation,
none of that is genuinely real.
What I wanna say is even if we're in a simulation,
all this is real.
I still have hands, there's still a table here,
there's still a sculpture here.
It's just that all these things are made
at a more fundamental level, out of bits,
out of processes inside a computer,
but digital processes are real processes too.
So I wanna say simulation is reality.
- We don't know that much about the motivations
or the psychology of these possible simulators,
but we can reflect that if there are many
of these civilizations out in the cosmos
with the capability of running simulations,
it would suffice if only a few of them
were still interested in doing this
with even just a small fraction of their resources.
- As soon as you start thinking about the simulation idea,
the question comes up,
who created the simulation?
Is it a god?
I mean this simulator is a created reality.
They're all powerful, all knowing maybe, about this reality
that makes them kind of God-like.
At the same time,
the simulator didn't be much like a God at all.
It might just be a teenage hacker in the next universe up
or 26 dimensional octopus
but from an entirely different reality.
No reason at all to think they're particularly godly.
(sound of ticking)
- I am Dr. Michael Masters.
I'm a professor of biological anthropology.
I should probably list where I do that, huh?
Yeah.
(Michael chuckles)
And author of the book Identified Flying Objects.
Leading up to now,
we've seen a lot of different theories proposed.
It's important to consider all of these
and it's great to see that evolution of this field
where it's not just blind acceptance of one idea,
but we're asking questions
and we're really trying to dig deep
into the subject matter and to figure out the origins
of these individuals and their craft.
Obviously the dominant model for a long time
has been the extraterrestrial hypothesis
that they come from a different planet somewhere else
around a different solar system,
likely within our galaxy.
We would see them coming down from the sky.
Our first gut response would be,
they must come from those stars,
but if we look at all of their characteristics,
the craft themselves appear to have many qualities
that would indicate that they have the capability
of bending back time.
Perhaps it's time to consider other possibilities
and that they are in fact from time rather than space.
- In quantum mechanics and in general relativity,
there were phenomena that we couldn't
fully understand and characterize.
Now we have the math to describe it.
Now we have the physics and it's no longer scary
to conceptualize time dilation
or the double slit experiment.
We have math that can predict essentially
what the distribution of say a particle will be like.
- Many reports of these fast moving objects
is that they sort of almost pulsate
or there's a fluctuation to them as they move,
possibly skipping through parts of time
as they move through space.
And looking at the craft themselves
and especially the inertial forces,
if they're, as we see them,
rapidly shooting across the sky,
any sort of inertial movement like that
is going to splatter any biological creature
against that craft.
- The one hint that I believe helps us
in trying to figure out this mystery
is that I believe at least no biological entity
would be able to cross such vast distances.
They would at the very least require tons of food.
They would require bathrooms.
They would have to require a gravity environment
that's the same as their home world.
There would be so many nuances.
There would be long distance times of hundreds of years,
maybe even thousands or tens of thousands.
- The only possible way they might be able to do this
to survive those forces is by controlling the passage
of time in their relative reference frame inside that craft.
Whereas we see a rapid acceleration,
it may be a very slow acceleration to them.
A great analogy is looking at
how different organisms perceive time.
So when we try to swat a fly,
we see it as this fly swatter coming down
at a very high rate of speed.
Whereas that fly,
because it perceives time
with different frames per unit time,
may see that fly swatter coming down very slowly
and it says, I've gotta get out of the way of this
and it moves out of the way
and we feel like we just missed it
and it felt like it had all day to escape.
So the same thing applies when you talk about
the relativity of time outside of
biological organisms as well.
- It makes me think that the things
that we're looking at aren't biological.
They could be considered life forms
just because they're that advanced
that they can build these things,
but they may be beyond what we describe as traditional life
and how we describe what's living and what's not living.
- There are a number of reports of close encounters
that would seem to corroborate this time travel model.
Amy Rylands, who was taken from her home in Australia
and was found a short period after,
but many hundreds of miles away.
She was taken to the hospital directly after
and the doctors found that the growth of her body hair
was consistent with being gone for multiple days.
And the lack of food in her stomach
was also consistent with that.
This would indicate that the discrepancy
between how long she was actually missing
and how long she reports to have been gone
is best explained in the context of time travel.
- There's also the idea of the direction of time.
They could be coming from the past even.
But what about left in time?
What about right in time or up in time or down?
We can't even conceptualize what that physically looks like.
But what if this is possible
and somebody has mastered that
and they're coming from a time above us
rather than in front of us in our future?
- We cannot judge the intelligence of species
in outer space by our yardstick.
We cannot assume that they're just
a hundred years more advanced than us.
In which case, yeah, they can't reach us.
But if there are thousands of years ahead of us,
new laws of physics begin to open up.
- Before my experience at Rendlestrom,
I did not believe in UFOs,
did not believe in that type of phenomena,
would try to debunk anything I ever heard about that.
I thought anybody that would believe in such stuff
was either whacked out, crazy or delirious.
But all that changed after entering the forest that night.
(background crowd)
It was December, 1980.
It was the height of the Cold War
and I was assigned to the twin bases
that were called RF Bentwaters and RF Woodbridge England.
And in between those two bases was Rendlesham Forest.
- It was almost a perfect storm of
what makes a UFO case compelling.
Multiple witnesses.
Witnesses were military personnel.
The UFO was tracked on radar.
This was a landing,
not lights in the sky.
And all of this is backed up,
not just by the say so of the witnesses,
but by the government file itself.
- The night of the incident
we were working a midnight shift.
Everything started out normally.
Matter of fact,
it was rather mundane.
In the middle of getting my first cup of coffee there,
I get a call from Central Security Control, CSC.
They said, I need to respond to the East gate.
Once at the East gate
I met with Staff Sergeant Steffans.
He was the senior law enforcement patrolman.
And I said, what's going on, Bud?
And he seemed shook and he seemed upset.
He took his finger and he started pointing
over toward Rendlesham Forest
and so I looked over there and I says,
what is that?
You know, I could see some light,
like a bubble light over the canopy of the forest.
In the darker part of the forest toward the ground
you could see multiple color lights going on and off.
While we're in the middle of that conversation,
Sergeant Coffey, the senior controller,
comes back, he says, be advised,
he said, I just checked the lender radar,
eastern radar and Bentwater's radar.
And we lost contact with a bogey,
some type of craft 15 minutes ago.
So we had confirmation of a possible aircraft crash.
Bud says, no, it didn't crash, Jim.
He said, it landed.
As we approached the forest edge
I have airman Kazak behind me about 150 feet.
He stand for patrol point.
I have airman burrows 25 to 30 feet over here to my right.
Normally you would hear wind through the trees.
There was no sound at all.
Actually it was eerily quiet.
So I couldn't hear like, you know, forest animals.
I couldn't even hear my feet on the forest floor,
that which had debris on it.
I started feeling static electricity on my face and my skin.
My movements were labored.
Comparison for that would be like walking through a pool,
water waist high.
I look over my right for about 15 feet around
is like a wall of light.
As we approach the forest edge,
I'm starting to see a formation of a craft,
triangular in shape.
I have the feeling as well,
this cannot be in any Jane's Book of Aircraft.
And it's not an aircraft that was designed
by anything on this planet.
My emotions were all over the place.
They're running from the gamut,
from being scared to in awe.
I got my camera,
I pop it out.
I shot as much film as I could.
(camera clicks)
But I started looking underneath the craft,
I thought I was curious.
I was wondering how is this sitting above the forest floor?
And when I looked underneath
I could see nothing but light under it,
like white light.
There was three indentions in the ground,
triangular.
They were probably an inch, inch and a half deep.
Somehow this light created those indentions.
I thought, well maybe it's still mobile or it could move.
And I thought I could push the craft to see if it, you know,
if you had a car out there for example,
you could push it on the side and you would move,
you know, a half inch or inch.
This was solid.
The skin of the craft,
it was completely smooth.
There was no riveting like black glass that was shiny.
When I was touching it,
it was warm to the touch.
I later find out it had radiation.
I got a glimpse of the side of the craft,
it looked like writing.
I'm thinking, oh great, you know,
it's gonna say NASA or Soviet Union.
As they get closer to it, it's not writing,
but more pictorial glyphs drawn on it.
They measured about three feet wide by five inches high.
And then on top of those pictorial glyphs,
they had a larger glyph that was a triangular one
with a bigger circle around it.
I was just completely baffled.
None of it's making sense.
I can't rationalize it.
It's nothing like I've ever seen before or even today.
(camera clicks)
This craft with radiation
expelled all the film on my camera.
The craft starts generating more white-ish blue light.
And I see the craft start going up
and it goes up to the canopy of the forest
and it's just sort of momentarily hovers there
and then makes a right turn
and in a blink of an eye it's gone.
When it took off,
it didn't have no air displacement,
it had no sound, it had no sonic boom.
None of those, it was void of those two.
One of the thoughts I'd never released in it,
not even in the book,
is I thought that there was a strong possibility
the craft was organic,
the craft skin itself was metal and all that,
but it seems organic.
Even the look of it seems organic
because of the structure of the craft itself.
From their perspective,
it was definitely not hostile.
(camera clicks)
Freely let me walk around, examine it.
Allowed me to take notes,
allows me to touch it.
It allows me to have an exchange with it.
I think its intentions was to communicate,
that's why it was there.
(upbeat music)
- The US Navy has finally acknowledged that video
is appearing to show UFOs flying through the air-
- Are genuine.
They do in fact show aerial phenomenon
the Navy cannot explain.
And that in fact our understanding
of physics cannot explain.
- These are Navy pilots.
This isn't like a farmer who may have no idea
how a plane is constructed.
- [Participant] Right.
- These are experts baffled.
- [Participant] On aviation, you're right.
- This is massive news that could shatter
our entire conception of the universe and our place in it.
The US Navy has confirmed the existence
of Unidentified Flying Objects.
(plane engine whirs)
- My name is Kevin Day,
I'm a former operations specialist senior chief.
My job during the Tic-Tac encounter,
I was a air defense expert
assisting the captain of the ship.
On or about the 10th of November I went up to contact.
I noticed these really bizarre radar contacts
on my radar display.
The reason why I say they were weird is because
they were in a group of between five or six
at that particular day.
They were 28,000 feet going a hundred knots.
Normally something that high going that slow
is gonna fall out of the sky.
So I started coordinating with the bridge team
cuz I wanted them to actually go on the,
what we call the big eye binoculars,
and try to find them in the sky cuz I wanted some
sort of visual information on these things.
- Kevin was very adamant about having me go back and forth
from the bridge wings talking to my lookouts
and scanning the sky for air contacts.
It just wasn't really a job that I needed to be doing.
I needed to be managing the whole bridge that night.
It was really curious to me that Kevin was so concerned
that the chief on the bridge find the air contacts.
I saw a constellation of stars hanging in the sky
that just didn't seem to fit.
They were in a constellation of five to seven stars
hanging approximately 45 degrees in the air
and about 2000 feet up off the port bow of the ship.
And as I lifted the binoculars up to look at them,
all of the stars at once began to move
counterclockwise and in towards the center.
These were definitely not conventional aircraft.
Every single thing that was in
that battle space was managed.
Everything was tracked,
everything had a name, a number,
and had someone watching it on a scope
or making sure that he either got home safe
or got disposed of properly.
It was pretty simple to me that what I was seeing
was unlike anything I'd ever seen before.
I turned to the lookout to my left and I said,
did you see fucking see that?
And he nodded at me with his mouth open
and we just looked at each other for a minute
and looked back up at the sky.
- At one point Sean calls me down to combat.
He says, Hey Kevin, I gotta talk to you man.
I'm getting kind of scared up here
cuz this is like an oh shit moment
cuz no one on the bridge knows what these things are
and why aren't you guys doing anything about this?
(upbeat music)
I went over to the AIC and I said,
Hey, I want you to go ahead and intercept
with one of those contact
that would just happen to be Commander FRAs flight.
- He says, Hey sir, we've seen these objects,
they've been for two weeks they've been coming down
and he's given us the whole story.
He says, we need you to go investigate.
We wanna know what these are.
Water is perfectly calm, no white caps.
I mean it's literally a perfect San Diego, California day.
- It's a pretty boring intercept
cuz we have the coms up in the overhead speaker
until it gets to the merge point
we hear on the radio is a Charlie,
I think we might have a downed aircraft.
I'm seeing a disturbance of the water down here.
I'm gonna check it out.
- It's about the size of a 737.
It actually kind of has a shape of like a cross.
It draws our eyes.
We're like, oh that's kind of odd.
The whizo in the other airplane comes up
and says, Hey skipper, do you?
And that's about what he gets outta his mouth.
And what we see is this white tic-tac looking object
just above the surface of the water.
It's about 40 feet long,
didn't have any markings on it
and it didn't have any wings
and it didn't have any rotors
and it's just radically moving forward, back,
left, right at will.
So I said, I'm gonna go check it out.
So I start driving around and it's still doing
its forward, back, left, right.
We get to about the 12 o'clock position.
I'm just in a nice easy descent.
The tic-tac just kind of rapidly goes boop and turns.
So now it mirrors us.
We're up high, we're coming down,
it starts coming up.
- We hear I'm the overhead speaker.
Oh my god, oh my god, I'm engaged, I'm engaged.
- This is getting interesting.
So we kind of drive all the way around a circle.
I'm descending, it's coming up
and I get over to about the eight o'clock position
of the clock and it's over at about the two o'clock position
and I just kind of drop my nose aggressively
and I cut across the circle
cuz I'm trying to fly to where it's gonna be
cuz I wanna join on it.
I wanna see how close I can get.
And as I'm pulling up,
it's kind of starting to cross my nose.
As I start to pull nose onto it,
it just goes poof and it's gone.
I say, Hey, let's turn around
and let's go back to see what was in the water.
It's gone.
Water's perfectly, there's no white water, nothing,
it's just blue.
- My air intercept controller says,
uh sir, you're not gonna believe this,
but that object is back at your cap station.
- That was our original point where we were gonna
hold 40 miles south of the ship.
This thing just went from wherever we were at
to 60 miles in 30, 40 seconds,
it's already over there.
And it just, and they didn't track it,
it just appeared.
- Whatever it was was not Newtonian physics,
it was not classical physics,
it had to be something else.
Commander Fravor's flight is getting low on fuel,
so he has to return to the carrier.
Next flight was getting ready to launch.
So he goes out on the flight deck and he waves 'em down
and he says, Hey, definitely take a airplane
with an At flayer pod on to record video.
That pilot was name was Chad Underwood.
After flight's launch off the Nimitz
and before I know it I've got all these intercepts going
and these contacts are falling out of the sky.
At one point it seemed to me that it was raining UFOs.
- He goes to lock it up and immediately the radar can tell,
it gets signals back that it's being jammed.
So and technically jamming is an act of war.
Well, he's smart enough to castle to his targeting pod
and he takes a passive track
and that's the video that you see of the tic-tac
where it's just sitting in the middle
of the screen real quiet.
So as you look at it now, in this case,
you would actually start to see stuff going on
and even in TV mode, because you get exhaust,
you know the black exhaust that comes out,
you'll usually be able to see kind of
some of that coming outta the back end.
You don't see anything.
This thing's just sitting there.
It's just kind of sitting and all of a sudden
off it goes to the left.
For something to leave the field of view that fast
with the pod just steering is pretty fast.
I mean, it just, it's like outta here.
The best airplane in the world right now, F22 Raptor,
it can't take off like that,
especially if it's a hover.
I mean you're talking something
that's just sitting in space in the wind
and then it just all of a sudden accelerates,
airplanes don't work that way.
So that's where I say, well it was observing us.
It could have been communicating with whatever was there.
My questions are,
where'd it come from?
That's the biggest one.
Where'd it come from?
What was it doing?
I dunno if it shifted my perspective,
but it was more of a-
It's a validation.
You know, I've always like, yeah, there's a lot of stars.
And then you see something like this
and go, well maybe we're not cuz that pushes you
to the next point to go one lands in my front yard,
then I'll be 100% sure that we are not alone
cuz it's sitting in my front yard.
But I got within a half mile of this thing,
which is people go a half mile is pretty far away.
Again, not when you're flying an airplane,
half mile is like really tight.
- When the tic-tac footage and the gimbal footage
and the go fast footage were all released,
they really changed the game for everybody.
And listening to the narration of the pilots
during the gimbal footage,
it's even more astonishing because you can hear
the sheer incredulity in their voices.
- [Pilot] Look at that thing!
It's rotating.
- [Pilot 2] Oh my gosh, dude, wow.
What is that, man?
Look at it flying!
- Some people have said that
maybe these videotapes are hoaxes, they're doctored.
They're not really real at all.
Well, the military itself has finally owned up
to the fact that no, these videotapes are real.
There is something there
that seems to be pushing the envelope
with regards to the aerodynamics of these objects.
- In my own mind at least,
I'm pretty convinced that we had just intercepted a UFO
and oh, by the way, I was pretty senior,
I was getting ready to retire
and it was my last intercept,
my last real world intercept.
What a hell of a way to end your career, right?
(chuckles)
Interceptive a (beep) UFO.
Who does that?
(laughs)
- The article that I wrote with two colleagues
on the front page of the New York Times
in December of 2017 was a really big deal.
It had a big impact.
And that came about because I was called by some colleagues
to meet with Lou Elizondo,
who was the former head of a secret government program,
a Pentagon program studying UFOs,
which nobody knew about.
And so when I met with him and was given,
shown a lot of information, including some videos,
took those to the New York Times
with my colleague Ralph Blumenthal
and that's how the story started.
Since we exposed the fact that the Department of Defense
had actually had their own program, were looking into this,
and had been studying cases for 10 years,
it makes it a lot harder for government officials
to give really crazy explanations for cases
like they used to do in the day of Project Blue Book.
- Now we have the Navy proactively volunteering
that not only is this video
and these two other videos, are they legitimate?
But by the way, hey, we see hundreds
of these things all the time
and we need help reporting them.
This is a sea change in the UFO phenomenon.
- When I saw these video tapes,
I realized that we were watching
actually something historic.
It used to be that the burden of proof
was on the flying saucer people.
You saw something, prove it.
Now it's shifted.
Now the burden of proof is on the military
to prove that these objects are
not something bizarre and strange
or perhaps from another planet.
- I started my career in Los Angeles
working on a movie called To the Moon and Beyond
for the New York World's Fair,
which opened in 1964 and '65.
And that film was animated and visual effects.
And this film was seen by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clark
who were developing a movie project called
Journey Beyond the Stars,
which later became titled 2001 A Space Odyssey.
And that led to me getting a job
working on some preliminary design for the movie,
and then actually working on the movie with Stanley Kubrick.
Because I worked on 2001 A Space Odyssey,
which was about alien contact
that led later to working with Steven Spielberg
to do the visual effects for
Close Encounters of the third Kind.
And I didn't know when I was working on
Close Encounters that J. Allen Hynek was who he was.
I didn't know that Steven Spielberg
had read a lot of Jacques Vale's books,
which led to his writing the screenplay
for Close Encounters.
And so in retrospect, looking back now with what I do know,
many of the events depicted in Close Encounters
might have actually occurred.
And so I started thinking of Close Encounters
as an expensive documentary film.
When I moved here to the Berkshires
and started rethinking my life,
one of the projects that came to the forefront for me
was really starting out as kind of an amateur astronomer
and talking about would it be possible
to professionally photograph and validate
the existence of flying aerial phenomena.
And I started this little project
to explore that possibility
and I called it UFOTOG,
which meant UFO photography.
- So Doug reviewed the system with me.
It was a Humvee that had a system inside of it
with multiple telescopes, multiple instruments,
that would raise up on a hydraulic lift out of the roof.
Very dramatic.
I looked at it and I said to him
what he was already thinking,
it's a very expensive unit to have,
it can't get every place.
There's inaccessible areas that a large vehicle can't reach.
And I said, why don't we make smaller platters
and just distribute those.
If you're looking up in the sky with these cameras,
your first thought is, okay, was that an insect?
Was that a bird?
One way to narrow it down right away
is to have more than one of these platters
looking up into the sky.
And if you have one of these looking up in the sky
over here, then you have one view.
But if you have another one looking up in the sky
half a mile away-
- Right.
- And it sees the same thing,
it's not a localized event,
it's something farther away
because both see it at the same time.
And then we can triangulate,
we can get the speed, the course, the altitude.
That's something that's very important.
And because each platter will have multiple sensors,
we'll be able to see, for instance,
if it emits some gamma rays,
if the thing shows up only in the infrared
or if it only shows up in the ultraviolet
far off into the blue end of the spectrum
that you can't see with your eyes.
And depending on the method that they use for propulsion,
they're gonna give off different types of radiation.
- And extract an image that tells us
exactly what it's made out of,
what materials it's made out of.
They can see every rivet, they can say,
well, part of it's Teflon, part of it's carbon fiber,
part of it's aluminum, part of it's Mylar.
- Yeah.
- They can actually give you a complete inventory
of what it's made out of.
So I thought well, maybe we're gonna see something
that we've never seen before.
Maybe it's unanalyzable and maybe it's something else.
- That's right.
- That's what we're gonna find out.
- That's right and that's the golden nugget that UFOTOGs
as in the aerial anomaly detection system is all about.
And we're gonna make that data available to everybody.
This is stuff that belongs to humanity.
We've said this over and over again.
This data belongs to humanity
and it goes to humanity.
- What am I as a physicist supposed to do
when someone says they saw something in the night sky?
Maybe they did,
maybe they didn't.
In other words, we need something tangible,
we need a takeaway,
we need something that we can say,
aha, here is the smoking gun.
- To have a real smoking gun where we like
maybe even know what the phenomenon is,
it would have to be something like we've never seen before,
something retrieved by our government
or even is stashed away in a private company
or crash craft or part of a craft
or it could be something the phenomenon does by itself.
And I think either one of those things
would obviously change everything
and would probably allow a determination to be made
as to what they actually are.
(tape rewind)
Part of a craft.
- I know that it is supposedly from a crash site
in New Mexico from the St. Augustine Plains.
It happened in 1947,
within weeks of the supposed Roswell crash.
- My team was lucky.
Over the recent four weeks we were able to
acquire materials that I deem exotic.
(door slams)
So, so yeah, you have three completely different alloys.
At least one of these samples
shows an extremely high probability
of having carbon nano tubes inside of them.
And none of the isotopic ratios
belong to any element on earth.
Based on the first lab that looked at this,
we can say objectively with scientific certainty
that this wasn't created in our solar system.
We are literally villagers right now
trying to pick apart an iPhone in the 16th century.
So we know there's more stuff
going down at the lower levels.
Isotopic ratios, we aren't able to see it yet,
which is what we're hoping to change
with the help of Caltech.
And again, if we prove that the isotopes,
we verify those isotopes,
this will immediately become an international treasure,
a cultural artifact.
(upbeat music)
♪ I play my music when the day gets dark ♪
♪ Drifting thru heaven's gate to outer space ♪
♪ Blistered by the bright blue sunshine ♪
♪ The most beautiful faces we hide inside ♪