Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified (2021) s01e01 Episode Script

[aircraft sounds]
[narrator] It's been over 75 years
since a United States
Night Fighter Squadron
observed the so-called
Foo Fighters high over
the Franco-German border
during World War II.
But the fact is that it was just a prelude
to the UFO phenomenon,
the start of which coincided with
the most deadly perio d in human history.
The Second World War in Europe
ended in May 1945,
but it was to be several months later
before the most horrific conflict
in human history
reached a conclusion.
In August,
the US military dropped nuclear bombs
on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
[explosion]
The Soviets tested their first atomic bomb
on the steppes in what is now Kazakhstan
on August 29th, 1949,
triggering the onset of the tense
40-year nuclear standoff
between Russia and the United States
The Cold War.
[ominous music playing]
At some point, perhaps when this problem
with the Soviet Union was resolved
and we got on the same page
and was like, oh, okay, great,
you know, you're communists,
we're capitalists, but that's fine. You
You helped win the war.
Let's work together. That didn't happen.
What happened was trillions
and trillions of modern dollars
were spent on building
70,000 nuclear warheads.
Then nuclear submarines,
putting them on tracks,
putting them on launchpads,
putting them underwater,
so that they could you could be dead
12 seconds after the war began.
[narrator] Could we be on the verge
of another deadly conflict?
These series of nuclear tests were
preceded by astonishing events.
Events that raised
a completely different kind of concern
and helped precipitate the creation
of many top secret projects.
Projects which have remained
top secret until now.
[eerie music playing]
[narrator] June, 1947.
In the skies above Washington State,
close to Mount Rainier,
private pilot Kenneth Arnold
reported sighting a formation
of unidentified flying crafts.
Arnold's account led to the press
quickly coining the terms
"flying saucer" and "flying disc"
as popular descriptions
for Unidentified Flying Objects.
One month later,
the most notorious
UFO sighting in history occurred.
July, 1947.
Roswell, New Mexico.
Major Jesse A. Marcel,
Air Force Intelligence Officer,
arrived home to his house in Roswell.
He walked into his ten-year-old son's
bedroom and woke him up,
saying that he would probably never again
see what he was about to show him,
items recovered from inside a UFO.
[Marcel]
There was a lot of rather thick foil-like
material, kind of a
not a shiny aluminum,
but burnished or a slate grey type
of aluminum metal.
Uh, there was a black plastic-type debris
like bait light which was shattered.
It was very brittle.
Perhaps at its core,
why it has really
resonated throughout the years
is that it was the first time
and perhaps only time
where the United States Air Force,
and maybe it was still called
Army Air Force at the time,
authorized a newspaper article that said,
"We have captured a flying saucer."
[narrator] In Washington,
that newspaper report created turmoil.
And say that you're the President
of the United States.
You're Harry Truman.
What do you do with that information?
If you tell the world that it's real,
first of all, you don't know,
are they hostile or friendly.
Basically it's informally
the moment that Truman sent
the authorization to Roger Ramey
down at Dallas Fort Worth,
that press release out of Roswell
Air Force Ba, army air force base,
that has got to be reversed, immediately,
because if the press get to Roswell
in time to start interviewing
people all over town,
this is out, this is done.
[narrator] The White House
ordered a complete lockdown
of all information and personnel
connected with the Roswell Incident.
Major Jesse Marcel was ordered
to return to base immediately.
The information about the crash
of an extraterrestrial vessel
that had been prematurely
released to the public
had to be played down.
The UFO genie had to be put back
in the bottle, at all costs.
The very same day they hold
a late press conference,
later in the day,
they get Jesse Marcel senior back there.
They get him in a room
to hold up some Reynolds Wrap
that might've been wrapping
Roger Ramey's fish in the freezer and say,
"Weather balloon.
It was just a weather balloon."
And, the press goes,
"Oh, okay, right, no problem"
[man] They debunked
the whole thing and said,
"Oops, it was a mistake.
We just saw a balloon"
and it was completely forgotten.
I think initially they might have thought
it was even a Russian weapon or something
to cover that was for the referral
cover up for the [coughing]
various stories. But later,
it was determined it was not a Russian
That left one other possibility,
that it was something
from out of our atmosphere.
If the UFO, the flying saucer at the time,
phenomena gets out of the bag
and people across the country are afraid,
like, of a War of the Worlds scenario,
that we're going to have laser ships
destroying society.
That means the Air Force has failed
in creating this sense of safety
amongst the populace.
[narrator]
Given the circumstances of the time,
it's not surprising that an initiative
emerged within the Pentagon
to establish a program to investigate
the UFO phenomenon.
The foundations were laid
for the creation of the longest
and most wide-spanning
government UFO monitoring program:
Project Blue Book.
Project Blue book was run
by the United States Air Force
and it was the best known of
the three UFO research and investigation
programs that the US government
had had in the early days.
Starting in 1947
with Project Sign
and then evolving into Project Grudge.
Project Blue book was,
I think a genuine attempt
to investigate UFO sightings
and come to some sort
of assessment of the phenomenon.
[Salla] They really needed to get
as much information as they could
from private citizens who saw the craft,
who could report if the craft had landed,
who was inside of the craft,
with people who were being taken
inside of the craft
and being shown things.
So all of this information they needed
and the best way for them to get it was
to have this Project Blue Book set up
so that it could act as a kind of veneer
for people to report UFO sightings.
Project Sign was sort of like
this high watermark of
"Hey, there's something going on."
"No, there's not."
"We got a grudge against this,
there's nothing going on."
And then that was disbanded and led
to the creation of Project Blue Book.
[narrator] The newly formed team
is about to face a truly
spectacular warmup round
with an incident directly above
the nation's capital
observed by countless numbers of people.
I do believe probably the most
significant case in Blue Book was 1952.
Because we have a case here,
a lot of people say,
"I'm not going to believe in UFOs unless
they land on the lawn in Washington, D.C."
Well, they practically did.
They buzzed, they flew over.
[intense music playing]
[narrator] July, 1952.
Washington, D.C.
We bring you the dramatic story
of what happened over our nation's capital
just one week ago tonight.
[narrator] Air traffic controller
Edward Nugent
noticed seven unidentified
flying objects on his radar screen
outside of authorized airspace.
He reported them to his superior.
It was also confirmed
by two other controllers.
At nearby Andrews Air Force Base,
Airman William Brady
also reported sightings of objects
resembling fireballs,
whose speed and maneuverability
were unlike anything he'd ever seen.
We asked him to describe it,
he said he couldn't describe it.
It was just a small white light.
[narrator] So did S.C. Pierman,
a pilot waiting for takeoff clearance
at Washington National.
Inexplicably,
Project Blue Book
commander Edward J. Ruppelt
was only made aware
of this incident much later.
The unknown object passed over
the White House and the Capitol Building.
F94 Starfire jet fighters
were scrambled from Andrews,
but the objects vanish.
[tense music playing]
[aircraft engine whirring]
A week later, the incident occurred again,
with the same unidentified craft
appearing in the skies above the Capitol.
Project Blue Book spokesman
Albert M. Chop
denied reporters' requests
to photograph the radar screens.
During this second incident,
Lieutenant William Patterson
locked onto one of the objects,
attempting to pursue it.
His efforts were futile.
It was far too fast.
The unknown objects tracked on the radar
were moving at unbelievable speeds,
ranging from 1,150
to over 7,000 miles per hour.
[Rojas]
Project Blue Book investigators were ready
and when they started happening again,
they went to the National airport,
they took over the control panel,
they took over the control tower
and they witnessed
this UFO encounter themselves.
They saw the jets being scrambled,
they saw the radars,
they were right there at the time
and they weren't able to determine
what it was.
It's an amazing episode of history
that a president who is very calm
and controlled like Truman,
who is not prone to flights of fancy,
or, you know, panicking,
got angry enough about the situation
he called the director
of Project Blue Book
and he said, "What the hell is going on?"
And he scrambled fighter jets
to shoot these things down.
[Rojas] Was these jet fighters
were chasing,
and that were outrunning them.
A very similar incident to what we see
at the in the Nimitz,
that's making the news
right now or the Roosevelt,
which was also making news.
So it's a repeat of what keeps happening
where these things show up.
We chase them,
they outmaneuver our best technology
and we have no idea
what the heck they are.
[narrator]
The country was in the midst of a Cold War
and people feared global conflict.
When unknown craft flew in formation
over the nation's capital,
something had to be done.
On July 29th, 1952,
an extraordinary press conference
was held at the Pentagon.
The largest press conference since
World War II was held at the Pentagon
and Major General John Alexander Samford
spoke to the public,
along with other military officers
about the sightings.
We can say that the recent sightings
are in no way connected
with any secret development
by any agency of the United States.
General Samford stated that these things
have been seen in the sky
dating back to biblical times,
that there are credible people
who are seeing incredible things,
that you can't explain
any of this except for phenomena.
However, there have been
a certain percentage
of this volume of reports
that have been made by credible observers
of relatively incredible things.
It is this group of observations
that we now are attempting to resolve.
[narrator] This was perhaps
the one and only time in history
when the military command
of a global superpower
issued a public response
to documented UFO sightings
and admitted that it was
at a loss to explain them.
It was the first official admission
that extraterrestrial craft
of superior speed and maneuverability
had been observed
in the Earth's atmosphere.
And that shook them up.
Because they can't stop it.
They try to come up with a cover story.
Nobody believed it.
[narrator] The flights over Washington
seem to announce to the world:
"We are here.
You can count on our involvement."
"Nuclear weapons can endanger
not only you, but the entire planet
and as yet undiscovered worlds beyond it."
To this day, UFOs are sighted
near bases with nuclear arsenals,
and in at least two documented cases,
the coded activation system
was inexplicably tampered with.
In 2010,
UFO expert Robert Hastings states:
"Declassified US government documents
and witness testimony from former
or retired US military personnel
confirm beyond any doubt,
ongoing UFO incursions
close to nuclear weapons facilities."
But information about this
is kept under wraps and denied.
And so, how do you keep that under wraps?
Well, you use all of the spy craft tools
and disinformation tools
and stuff that we had developed
during the war.
You formalize the CIA or the OSS,
you create the NSA.
And you use your technology,
you get in touch with publishers
and key papers.
You talk to the three networks
and you say, "Look, you gotta work,
play ball with us." And they did.
[man]
Is there anything in the files,
either classified or unclassified
that would indicate that there may be
extraterrestrial visitors over here?
[Quintanilla] First of all,
the project is completely unclassified
and there is nothing in the record
that would indicate
that we have been visited
by any advanced civilization.
[man] place where man can explore
[narrator] Despite authorities' efforts,
these sightings would keep on coming,
confounding attempts to play down
the whole notion of UFO phenomena.
[man speaking indistinctly]
One of the cases that really
impressed me in Project Blue Book
was that in 1952,
there was this sighting of a flying saucer
in the vicinity of Desert Springs.
And this was the place
where George Adamski says
that he actually had his first encounter
with a extraterrestrial from Venus.
And Adamski had six people that
witnessed him having this encounter.
[intense music playing]
[narrator] November, 1952.
Desert Center, California.
[mysterious music playing]
George Adamski returns home
from stargazing with friends.
He was about to experience an encounter
that would change his life.
First, he recalls a cigar-shaped object
appearing in the sky.
Others in the group were shocked,
but George Adamski
was not so easily fazed.
He left the group and walked towards
where the craft had apparently landed.
Adamski disappeared over the horizon
just as the vessel appeared to land,
but from a distance,
it is too hard to tell.
Adamski returned just moments later
with an alarming message.
He said that he was warned
by a being from Venus called Orthon
about the threat of imminent nuclear war.
He tells them the Venutian
communicated with him non-verbally.
[mysterious music continues]
I have, more or less,
gestures of mental telepathy,
as it is known, talk transfer.
[man] He does not speak?
He didn't at the time
but I have met him since
and he does speak very well English
as well as any other language.
[Salla] They saw the UFO,
they actually even saw
a cigar-shaped craft in the vicinity.
So these witnesses,
uh, they gave their testimony
to a local newspaper,
they took some soil samples
to support what Adamski said,
that he had a real life meeting,
and in the Project Blue Book files
there was another person,
independent of Adamski
and his six witnesses
who said that they,
they reported a UFO sighting
in the precise area
where Adamski had his encounter.
[narrator]
On December 13th, 1952,
George Adamski claims
to have photographed a UFO.
The image was debunked
and compared to a surgical lamp.
Which of George Adamski's
claims were true?
Project Blue Book commander,
Edward J. Ruppelt,
and his scientific advisor,
Joseph Allen Hynek,
took an interest in Adamski.
In his 1956 memoirs, Ruppelt writes:
"To look at the man
and to listen to his story,
you immediately felt
an urge to believe him."
Decades later it is clear,
not only from Ruppelt's memoirs,
but also from the testimony of other
direct participants in Project Blue Book
that the project manipulated facts,
especially in its later phase.
Some cases were filed
with a blatant effort
to avoid any unexplainable
or unidentified phenomena.
There was a policy instituted
at that time, in 1953
and in 1954,
there were two new Air Force regulations
put into effect that, essentially,
any information that was not
explained by the Air Force
was to go through a different process,
a different system,
and that only the information
that could be identified
as conventional craft
could be told to the public
and to the media.
The whole idea was to say,
"We're taking it seriously,"
when they weren't taking it seriously,
they just wanted information,
but they would interpret it
one way for the public,
they'd interpret it another way
for themselves
because they knew this was real.
You're a publisher and they come and say,
"This is national security."
"We cannot have
significant investigations of this."
"You can write some articles but
do not challenge our position on this."
"It's for the benefit of the nation."
And what is the publisher going to do?
"Ah, screw you."
[narrator] Project Blue Book's
most famous commander
was Captain Edward J. Ruppelt,
a decorated World War II pilot,
who, incidentally, coined the term
Unidentified Flying Object.
After resigning from his post,
Ruppelt wrote the book
The Report on Unidentified
Flying Objects,
which to this day provides readers
with a very solid picture
of what happened behind the scenes
of military investigations
into the phenomenon
between 1947 and 1955.
[Dolan]
Ruppelt and his people
were very strongly looking
at the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
But in later years,
Blue Book was explicitly given orders
by the Air Force, by the military
to explain all of these
unexplained cases and just
to give them explanations:
weather balloon, a hoax
or media or whatever.
Uh, and they got their percentage
of unknowns down very, very low.
But that doesn't mean that
these were legitimate investigations.
[narrator]
The most significant civilian figure
associated with Project Blue Book
was Joseph Allen Hynek,
a scientist hired by the Pentagon
to advise on three consecutive
UFO studies:
Project Sign, Project Grudge
and Project Blue Book.
Hynek's observations became a case study
of how empirical findings
on the UFO question
brought about
radical change of opinion.
So if you put it in the where I use
the word possibility and not probability
then I would have to say I think
as any scientist would have to say
it is certainly possible, yes.
So
my father got involved with
Project Blue Book and the predecessors.
Um, there are two theories.
One is that because of
his classified work with the Air Force
or the army during World War II
and the proximity fuse,
he had a security clearance.
And there are people
and you can see websites,
where they say it was a CIA plan
to get Hynek involved again.
Um
The alternative view is that
they just needed a respectable
astronomer to come in and say,
"Don't worry folks,
there's nothing going on."
Among the tremendous noise or static
or crud or whatever you wanna call it,
a tremendous number of unreliable reports
that are easily explained,
there is this residue
of most interesting cases
that intrigue me in the same way
that a good mystery story intrigues me
and I'd like to get the solution.
Now, we knew Jay Allen Hynek quite well.
We were with him both privately
and at public conferences
in the '70s and '80s
and he was a man who was paid,
literally by the Project Blue Book,
to cover up the extraterrestrials.
But he was a man who
had an inquisitive mind.
[narrator]
He starts looking behind the scenes
and spitting out,
"There's something real going on here."
"What it is we don't know,
but it's worthy of study."
[Hernandez] Big, big cases, which
they never gave to Hynek. So Hy
That's when Hynek discovered
that they were using him.
Project Blue Book was basically
an attempt to put under the table
this phenomenon to discredit it.
We have not been hiding anything.
The investigations have been made public,
the explanations of those,
where there is a clear explanation
have been made public,
the hearing this morning was public
for just that reason.
Then later on in his life,
he totally switched.
Uh, he understood that the phenomenon
was both physical and psychic.
So it was both physical and paranormal.
I think what was
initially surprising for my father
was the sort of cavalier attitude
that the Air Force had
to not really learn the truth.
Whether or not they need
to learn the truth for a different,
you know, military point of view
than my father's scientific inquiry,
but they just
weren't interested in the truth.
[narrator]
But what the US Military couldn't control
were reports of sightings of UFOs,
coming from outside the United States.
June, 1959.
Boianai, Papua New Guinea.
The peace and quiet
of the Boianai Anglican Mission
was unexpectedly disrupted.
Reverend William Booth Gill
was the first to observe intense light
around unoccupied Mount Pudi.
He and his assistant thought
it was an atmospheric phenomenon,
hardly realizing that they would soon
witness something much more extraordinary.
On June 26th,
Father Gill along with
38 other eyewitnesses
saw a large disk in the sky
emitting blue light.
He later went public
with what he had seen.
[Father Gill]
What it's like to look up in the sky
and see a totally foreign looking object,
that stays there just hovering,
uh, not very far high up, maybe two,
three hundred feet up in the air.
[narrator] Observers saw what appeared
to be beings inside the craft.
They looked like people,
but something told Father Gill
he was witnessing an encounter
of an entirely different kind.
The visitation was repeated again
the following night
and was observed by yet
another 25 witnesses.
Figures walking about on top
and not the slightest noise whatsoever.
And so, we waved.
They waved back.
[narrator] Was it possible?
Did these beings come from another world
or from a parallel universe?
Rarely has such an event
been witnessed by so many.
The question is no longer whether
there is intelligent life in the universe,
but how many different forms
might it take?
[Gill] And then suddenly it did go.
And there was this amazingly,
incredible speed,
that the whole craft disappeared
uh, to nothing.
Listen, I met Father Gill, he came
to our house for dinner one night
for an ecumenical religious conference.
And this was not a guy
who went on the UFO lecture circuit.
He did not write a book.
He was a man in his seventies who was very
comfortable in his own skin, as we say,
and I saw him with my own eyes
and I'm looking at him thinking,
"I don't think this guy is lying."
"I don't think this guy is crazy."
So he didn't really understand
why they didn't want to just
thoroughly investigate,
even though they will do something
different than he would.
So I think that was surprising to him.
[narrator] In the 1950s,
at the behest of the CIA,
The Robertson Panel was established.
A scientific committee that precisely
shaped strategies and tactics
of dealing with the media.
Even if UFOs did not pose
a direct threat to the United States,
a threat could arise
from the mismanagement
of classified information
and public interest.
Therefore,
a massive disinformation plan
was created and put into action,
gradually integrating their talking points
into public life.
[Dolan] The Air Force always wanted
to get rid of Project Blue book but,
they weren't really able to
without a proper pretext,
a proper explanation reason.
That's where the so-called
Condon Committee investigation came in.
In the late 1960s,
the University of Colorado
was contracted by the Air Force
to do a supposedly
scientific study of UFOs. Well
that was a whole rigged game as well.
Dr. Edward Condon made statements
such as, "We do not expect
extraterrestrial life
from outside our solar system
to reach our planet
in the next 10,000 years."
If you actually look
at the Condon Project reports,
the scientific study,
you'll find that much of that information
indicates that UFOs are real
and that there was
a serious interest in this.
Sort of signal low points
would be 1953 and 1969.
Uh, 1953 was the Robertson Panel,
which is the first of sort of
two scientist-led symposiums
to discuss UFOs and write a report
and come up with a conclusion.
Basically they had a report
whose conclusion said,
"There's nothing to the UFO phenomena."
"Let's close the doors and go home."
[narrator]
The fact that the contents of the program
remained classified until 1975,
five years after Project Blue Book
was terminated,
demonstrates without a doubt,
that the Robertson Panel Report
wasn't just a temporary program.
It was a sustained, long-term effort
to mak e the subject of UFOs
scientifically unrespectable.
Hynek saw this
essentially as a smokescreen
to keep critical information about UFOs
out of the public domain.
Project Blue Book
was officially shut down in 1969
with the archive made available
to the public in 2015.
As it turns out,
the archive
is far from complete.
Following a discovery
by UFO investigator Rob Mercer,
who lived close to the Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base in Ohio,
many previously undisclosed cases
recorded by the US military
and collated by Project Blue Book
came to light.
Thanks to a classified advertisement
offering official military files
related to UFOs,
Mercer took possession
of a cache of boxes.
These boxes were filled with
documents stored in a garage
by a former military base officer.
Thanks in large part to Mercer,
a much clearer picture
of the history of the project
and the sheer volume of information
in its possession, came to light.
April, 1964.
Socorro, New Mexico.
[police siren]
It was hot at the end of April that year,
especially for patrolman, Lonnie Zamora,
at around 5:45 in the afternoon
while in pursuit of a speeding driver.
[tense music playing]
He witnesses a flash of fire
on the horizon,
about a half a mile away.
Suspecting that a dynamite store
in the area exploded,
he decided to drop the pursuit
in order to check out the scene.
[Lonnie on the tape]
I went up that little road,
for about half a mile, I guess.
Uh, came up to this
little parking deal there
on the side of the road,
and I thought
I'd glance out of the window.
Looked to my left to see
a white object on the ground.
Thought that it might be a car
that had turned over.
Crossed the river [indistinct]
going out there to investigate,
thought maybe somebody would be hurt.
[narrator] Astonished,
the object spotted by Zamora
slowly began to rise into the air.
There was no smoke,
just a blue and orange flame
beneath the object.
Frightened, the policeman fled.
Stumbling, losing his glasses
as he fell on the dusty ground,
he tries to take cover in anticipation
of an explosion above him.
Suddenly, everything went quiet.
He looked up to see
the object slowly departing,
but not through rocket propulsion,
simply floating silently away.
Jay Hynek met with Lonnie Zamora
to discuss what he had seen
and evaluate his credibility.
He was favorably impressed.
My father thought he was
a very credible witness,
um, who exhibited signs of trauma
immediately after the event
and was very consistent
in his recounting of the event after that.
And this is sort of
part of a flurry or a flap
of cases in New Mexico, um,
in the 40s, 50s and 60s.
So that was a very convincing case.
That was one of the cases
that led my father
to finally jump in with both feet
to the deep end of the UFO Pool.
[narrator]
Testimonies gathered over the years
refute perhaps the most important
official conclusion of Project Blue Book,
which states:
"There has been no evidence submitted
or discovered by the Air Force
that sightings categorized
as 'unidentified'
represent technological developments
or principles beyond the range
of present day scientific knowledge."
"There has been no evidence
indicating the sightings
categorized a s 'unidentified'
are extraterrestrial vehicles."
You know, when you investigate cases
and they're obviously extraterrestrial,
at some point you just have to say,
"This is not able to be
covered up any longer."
[JJ] This is why Project Blue Book
was diminished,
because it did not have answers
that were sufficient, really,
to other areas of science.
The largest study ever done
by the US Air Force,
uh, was done in 1954, 1955,
at the prestigious
Battelle Memorial Institute.
3,201 cases were categorized
by the scientists who did this study.
In the end, 21.5%
were labeled as true unknowns.
They could not identify them
as anything conventional on this planet.
However, the secretary of the Air Force
made a statement that it was only 3%.
When you say that it's only 3%,
it can be easily dismissed.
21.5% deserves
further scientific investigation.
[narrator] By the time Project Blue Book
was terminated in 1969,
it had accumulated a total
of 12,618 UFO sightings,
categorizing the majority of the cases
as natural phenomena,
anomalies or conventional aircraft.
Roughly 6% of the cases, 701 to be exact,
are labeled as "Unexplainable."
One of the most intriguing of these
was reported just three years
before Blue Book was shut down.
March, 1966.
Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas.
[car approaching]
Shortly before sunrise,
fifty-six-year-old
electrician Eddie Laxson
was driving over the state line
between Texas and Oklahoma,
little suspecting
what he was about to encounter.
The beams of a car's headlights
on this dark road?
There wasn't a living soul in sight.
And yet, a moment later,
Eddie sharply had to stomp on his brakes.
Dumbfounded, he stared ahead
while the car radio suddenly died.
As did the vehicle's engine.
He got out of his car and stood transfixed
at a 75 foot long, 8 foot high
and 12 foot wide craft.
It was unlike anything he had ever seen.
[Schratt] Here is its dimensions.
It's 75 feet in length.
It has a three foot diameter
porthole here.
It has a bubble canopy here.
There's four landing gear legs,
and then there's a door right here.
[narrator] There were figures
standing alongside the vessel,
dressed in uniforms
bearing unfamiliar emblems.
The ship, as he recalled,
was marked with the numbers TL 4768.
The vessel had no wings,
as you might see on a conventional
man-made aircraft of that period.
[Schratt] There was a man shining
a flashlight on the bottom of this craft
with a porthole here.
And when he saw that
he was being viewed by the eyewitness,
he went up the ladder, he closed the door.
[narrator] Shortly after,
it rose noiselessly
and vanishes at a speed
of perhaps 700 miles per hour,
faster than the speed of sound,
but without a sonic boom.
Eddie was at a complete loss
to explain what he had just seen.
Were these humanoid extraterrestrials?
Time travelers?
Even with today's technologies,
human science is incapable
of building such a vessel.
And as this thing was departing,
truckers who are going down the same road,
they saw it too.
So we've got multiple
independent confirmation
of this craft actually being seen.
Sheppard Air Force Base back in 1966.
[narrator]
And yet, despite the weight of evidence,
Project Blue Book filed away
this compelling eyewitness testimony,
continuing its policy of suppressing
any accounts of UFO sightings
or information which might contradict
the official government line
on the existence of UFOs.
To explain the way of UFO sightings
as quickly as possible
when they become public
and deny that UFOs really exist.
This theory that Project Blue Book
was just a public relations exercise
has been given some new credibility
because, of course, we now know
that the Pentagon had at least, um,
from 2007 to 2012,
but maybe still existing,
a program called ATIP,
Advanced Aerospace
Threat Identification Program.
So the idea of having a public program
like Blue Book, but having
as well a secret program,
that the people, the media
and the public don't know about,
does now have more, more credibility.
[Masters] The stigma was manufactured.
We as scientists were used
in this divide and conquer tactic
that we were meant to come out and
get people not to be talking about this
or dismiss any sort of encounter
that somebody had.
[man]
What are you doing there, Moe?
[Moe] Just flying saucers.
[Masters] What we see today,
the stigma that still exists
in the separation
between the UFO community
and the scientific community
is a hangover of this period.
It's a legacy of this
divide and conquer strategy
that was used by military and government
in the 1940s, 50s and throughout.
And that's not conspiracy theory.
[Dolan] When you keep
encountering these objects
that are over sensitive airspace
that are not supposed to be there,
you have to do something about it.
And the thing is they tried to do it
as quietly as they can,
but this has never stopped being a problem
for the United States military.
[narrator] Although the results
of many years of observation
have been downplayed and censored
with UFOs having been successfully
relegated to the sphere of pop culture,
this doesn't mean that the US military
has lost interest in the phenomenon
or has stopped being active
in monitoring any activity
which could be associated with UFOs.
[Pope] It put the United States government
in a very difficult position
because for years,
they had said in response
to any questions about this,
"We don't investigate UFOs anymore."
"We haven't done this
since Project Blue Book."
So, of course, this story
proved that they had.
So it was embarrassing.
[Hynek] The philosophical drive
of Project Blue Book
was that UFOs did not exist.
So they're always looking for explanations
like a weather balloon, the planet Saturn,
or a hoax to explain them away.
I don't think it is space people,
although I would be delighted
if it turned out that way,
because as an astronomer,
I think it would make astronomy
even more interesting than it is.
And as far as the Air Force is concerned,
I can't speak for them of course,
but I should imagine
that if the existence of spacecraft
were really established,
it would really increase
the appropriations of the Air Force.
Project Blue Book was sort of
the front man out there saying,
"Hey, don't worry. Nothing going on here.
Don't look behind the curtain."
[Bassett] So they've been researching
whatever they can research
about the extraterrestrial presence,
particularly the technology, 24/7,
uh, month after month, year after year,
all the way back into the 50s.
And so this idea that, "Oh, they just did
Blue Book and they didn't do anything."
And then they came up
with the ATIP program.
Believe me,
they've been studying it all this time.
The idea that we have to classify
and keep things secret and safe,
and, you know,
we don't have the same level
of existential threat we used to have.
We just don't.
It's time to move on and say, "Look,
I'd rather have some
of these secrets get out
and have a more open world
and a lot stronger understanding
than what we currently have."
[closing theme music playing]