Hangar 1: The UFO Files (2014) s01e04 Episode Script
Crashes and Cover-Ups
December 12, 2009.
Residents of Barstow, California, report the sudden appearance of a UFO skimming over their rooftops in the predawn sky.
Witnesses claim that this UFO streaked across the neighborhood, and then it touched down in a desert across the highway.
So what they decided to do was walk over and see what was going on.
But the residents quickly find that the strange craft is not the only unusual arrival that day.
The citizens are making their way towards the lights.
They're coming out of their house in the early morning, and then all of a sudden, a fleet of SUVs barrel right past them towards the scene.
Those SUVs were heading towards the UFO.
Nobody ever got out and said that, you know, "we're from an official agency.
We're government.
" They didn't acknowledge them.
Witnesses claim the vehicles encircled the grounded UFO, shining their high beams outward and blinding the onlookers.
Any details of the downed craft are lost behind a glare of headlights.
Before anybody can get a good look at what's going on, a flatbed truck rolls in, and about 10 minutes later, all the cars pull out.
And what was on this flatbed truck is about the size of a vw bug, but of course, it was covered in the tarp.
The convoy disappears as quickly as it arrived, leaving the residents of Barstow with far more questions than answers.
And that's it.
The witnesses contact the police and the military, and they hit dead end after dead end.
No explanation is given.
Could this be another UFO incident locked away in a classified file? The U.
S.
government has a longstanding history of covering up UFO incidents.
So we have to ask the question, "why?" What do they have to gain from concealing this fact from their own citizens? Throughout history, numerous UFO crashes have been reported, and to date, none have been officially acknowledged.
What exactly is the government concealing, and why? MUFON opens its files to reveal more of these incredible stories and investigate the extreme methods that go into covering them up.
The mutual UFO network, known as MUFON, is an independent organization not bound to any government.
They investigate reports of UFO sightings from around the world.
Over the past five decades, they have collected more than 70,000 files stored at a secure location known as Hangar 1.
Now, for the first time, MUFON is granting access to their vast archive.
These are the files of Hangar 1.
Inside Hangar 1, MUFON investigators review thousands of UFO sightings each year.
The Barstow incident is just one case.
That downed UFO is cordoned off and removed by the military without explanation.
Very few of these stories ever reach the public.
But this was not always the case.
MUFON files contain a long history of reported UFO crashes and cover-ups, including one of the first recorded incidents in the United States: Back in 1897, when a UFO crash was simply reported as everyday news and a lone gravestone marked the event.
April 17, 1897.
A day like any other in the small farm town of Aurora, Texas Until eyewitnesses report a flying airship trailing fire across the morning sky.
It comes flying down into this rural town, it hits a windmill, and it crash-lands on a farmer's property.
Judge J.
S.
Proctor's windmill is destroyed by the unusual craft.
Allegedly, this UFO crash was witnessed by the entire town, but it happened in 1897.
How do you verify something like that? Well, MUFON launched an investigation.
In 1973, MUFON conducted a search for surviving Aurora witnesses.
The 1973 investigation turns up several living witnesses eager to share their stories.
One 83-year-old man, Charlie Stevens, remembers witnessing the crash as a child.
There were witnesses to this.
The 10-year-old boy actually saw the crash occur working on his father's farm.
Our investigators tracked down a 91-year-old woman.
She was 15 at the time, and she saw it.
Mary Evans tells MUFON that the 1897 incident was the talk of the town, and that talk wasn't just about the UFO, but what townspeople found inside the craft.
Multiple townspeople are actually on record as having seen an alien body, and these witness reports are corroborated by local newspaper accounts uncovered by MUFON.
The Aurora newspaper runs a vivid account of the UFO crash from local reporter S.
E.
Haydon.
This is oddly matter-of-fact coverage for such an unusual event, but the article gets even stranger when we come to the aftermath.
The newspaper account states that the pilot is "badly disfigured" and "not an inhabitant of this world.
" "Not an inhabitant of this world.
" This article casually mentions that aliens crashed.
It's just in the newspaper in black and white.
In 1897, not only was the public trusted with this information, the public was also invited to the alien's funeral.
For nearly 80 years, a simple tombstone stands as a reminder of the Aurora crash.
It bears no name and is only marked with a small carving depicting a flying saucer.
You have to remember that, at the time of the Aurora crash, our own planet still held a lot of mystery.
It wasn't scary to them back then to have mysteries.
It's us today that can't accept the unknown and the unexplained.
We're frightened by that.
But in Aurora, in 1897, this was not a scary event.
During MUFON's 1973 investigation in Aurora, they attempt to recover evidence and exhume the remains of the alien.
It would seem like a surefire way to debunk or confirm the story would go dig up the evidence, literally.
So we went to the small Aurora cemetery to do just that: Dig it up.
Investigators arrive at the Aurora cemetery with metal detectors.
As they went from grave to grave, only one grave site registered anomalous readings: The grave of the alien pilot.
MUFON submits an official request to exhume the grave.
It is denied.
We're denied access to the grave because it's on church property.
The following day, we come back for one last look before going home.
The grave was exhumed the night before.
There's your proof.
There's your smoking gun.
So whatever was buried there is now lost, and the headstone is missing as well.
In less than 80 years, it appears the official attitude on UFOs shifts from openness to secrecy.
This is just another example of the kind of cover-up that we find in this sort of investigation.
Over the course of 100 years, UFO reports have evolved from openness and transparency to secrecy and denial.
That's an example of how much things have changed.
But why have things changed so drastically? Could there be dangers that we are unaware of? Hangar 1 contains thousands of files, each one a record of UFO activity from around the world.
One file tells the story of an 1897 UFO crash in Aurora, Texas, where residents held a public funeral for a dead alien.
But 80 years later, a MUFON investigation into that crash hits a dead end.
Is it possible that UFO incidents are still routinely covered up? Another file documents a UFO crash in Mexico that some believe to be the subject of an international cover-up.
Texas, 1974.
United States air defense radar detects an unidentified flying object over the Gulf of Mexico rapidly approaching U.
S.
airspace.
Across the border, Mexican authorities are alerted.
Right from the start, we have independent confirmation in this incident.
the same object is being tracked by both the United States and Mexico.
The object shifts course away from the U.
S.
and rockets back toward Mexican airspace.
Radar operators on both sides of the border are stunned.
When you're looking at this kind of movement, it would have to be under some kind of intelligent control.
Reportedly, the U.
S.
military traces the UFO's path to Coyame, a sparsely populated Mexican border town, where it suddenly vanishes from radar.
At the same moment, Mexican authorities receive a distress call.
They receive a radio broadcast that a civilian airplane has crashed in the vicinity, possibly due to a midair collision.
In the same location where this UFO went off radar, a civilian aircraft collided with something in flight.
Well, what did it collide with? Mexican authorities arrive at the crash site and discover the remains of a small civilian plane.
But there also appears to be wreckage from a second craft at the scene.
There was another report of a second crash, and this is interesting.
They said it was damaged, but it was perfectly intact.
It was described as saucer, metallic shape with no markings.
The Mexican military does not know what to make of the unusual craft.
They call in a report and then go radio silent.
But word of the crash has already reached U.
S.
authorities.
The Mexican broadcast was intercepted by the CIA, and they wanted to bring their own crash retrieval special team down to Mexico, but the Mexican authorities flat-out denied that a crash even occurred.
Within hours, CIA reconnaissance captures images of the Mexican convoy departing the Coyame crash site.
At this point, the CIA know about the convoy, and they definitely know that there's a salvaged crashed UFO on the back of that truck.
In the file are claims that the CIA dispatches a small, covert team to intercept the Mexican convoy and get a closer look at the UFO.
The U.
S.
team arrives, and surprisingly, they're met with zero resistance from the Mexican army.
The Mexicans suddenly want nothing to do with this UFO anymore, and that's because the whole situation has taken a dark turn.
The Americans encounter a grim scene.
When the CIA finally arrive, they come up on the convoy and they see four soldiers laying down in the dirt.
It's clear that the Mexican soldiers are dead.
What's not clear is how they died.
All of the dead soldiers had made contact with the UFO while trying to remove it from the crash site.
Is it radiation? Extraterrestrial bacteria? We don't know.
The Mexicans realize how dangerous this craft was, and the CIA managed to convince them that they had more experience containing this sort of threat.
It is believed the American team takes possession of the UFO and transports it back to Missouri's Whiteman air force base.
The incident is kept secret until it is unearthed by a MUFON investigation.
The Coyame incident occurred in 1974, but it didn't really come to our attention until 1992 through an anonymous report that went to Ruben Uriarte, one of our field investigators.
It detailed this crashed saucer and the subsequent cover-up.
Ruben Uriarte's informant provides a full report, detailing the Coyame crash and its subsequent cover-up by authorities.
The report provided a good place to start an investigation.
It was a credible account, and it drove us to seek further evidence.
Ruben Uriarte was able to get flight logs, communication logs, and radar logs that synch up perfectly with this sighting report.
The biggest find was that Uriarte was actually able to confirm the names of the dead Mexican soldiers.
This is huge.
I mean, he now had proof that these four soldiers died at the exact same time, during an incident that officially never occurred.
But even with this evidence in hand, the investigation is stonewalled.
So Ruben was able to track down the names of the dead soldiers, but the government denied that they'd ever existed.
So again, we have a classic example of cover-up.
We have evidence.
We have witnesses.
Yet with every piece of evidence we've got, there's continuing pushback and denials.
Is the cover-up of the Coyame crash linked to the unknown dangers encountered when recovering the UFO? Perhaps, because the files reveal that a more recent crash in Brazil led to similar casualties.
We have verified sightings of UFOs in Varginha.
We have E.
T.
s walking around in the town.
And we have a dead body.
The evidence is piling up.
Another swift and forceful cover-up leads to the question, how many UFO crashes will it take before the truth is finally revealed? Inside Hangar 1, MUFON has opened its 70,000 files, which reveal stories from around the globe of UFO crashes And authorities determined to conceal all evidence.
A deadly UFO crash in Coyame, Mexico, may have been covered up by both U.
S.
and Mexican officials, and this pattern continues throughout the world.
From Brazil comes the story of another extraterrestrial encounter that is derailed by cover-ups and suppression.
There's a tendency to believe that the U.
S.
government is behind every UFO cover-up, but this is just not the case, as we see from a number of cases in our files.
January 20, 1996.
Local police respond to reports of a wild animal running loose in the town of Varginha, Brazil.
Earlier that morning, a group of three girls were startled by this strange creature that was located behind an auto body shop.
And what they described it as, it was a small creature with a large, disproportionate head, lidless eyes, and it was snarling and growling at them.
And officer Marco Cherese decided to investigate.
By evening, the town is consumed with stories that a devil creature is on the loose.
But what officer Cherese eventually encounters is all too real.
Officer Cherese tracks down this creature, and when he comes towards it, he could tell that it almost seems like it's half dead, almost dying.
So he decides to pick it up, and the thing pushes him.
And in doing so, it made contact with his ungloved hand, which he didn't think very much about during the time.
Officer Cherese and his partner take the creature and transport it to a local hospital.
By the time the officer arrives at the hospital, it's already swarming with military personnel.
And what he didn't know was that a radio call went out of another entity, a second entity that was tracked and captured by the military.
They bagged it and tagged it and threw it in the back of the truck.
That second creature was examined in the same hospital.
Officer Cherese had to be wondering, "what's going on here?" The army wouldn't be involved if it was just a wounded animal.
So what's even more interesting on January 13th, the whole week before this incident, NORAD gave the Brazilian government a head up that a UFO was tracked coming down over the hills of Varginha.
Was this a crash? Were these alien pilots? When officer Cherese tries to investigate these creatures even further, he is told to back off, forget about it, and pretend like it didn't even happen.
And that would've been okay.
He probably would've, but then something else happened.
Two weeks after his encounter, officer Cherese's doctor finds something unusual on his arm in the exact same spot where the creature touched him.
Officer Cherese starts feeling really ill and sick.
He starts complaining of back pains, high fever, respiratory failure, and he's hospitalized.
Reportedly, one week later, the 23-year-old police officer is dead.
The autopsy revealed that his body was riddled with infections, and it's odd that a young man would contract so many infections all at the same time.
Even the doctor confirms that this is a strange death without rational explanation.
We have verified sightings of UFOs in Varginha.
We have E.
T.
s walking around in the town.
And we have a dead body.
The evidence is piling up, right? Wrong.
Just days after these events, mysterious strangers arrive in the town.
All the witnesses to this event the three girls, even their parents and the police captain were visited by four men who strongly intimidated them and encouraged them, "do not discuss this in public.
" We don't know who these men were or who they represent.
It wouldn't make sense for them to be military because they also confronted military personnel.
With some witnesses, they threatened.
Others, they offered bribes.
According to the file, Brazilian authorities explained the Varginha incident with a controversial report.
The official story about the bodies recovered from Varginha were that they were dwarves.
Dwarves! That was the best they could come up with when half the town had seen these creatures.
And since when does the military round up dwarves? No mention of a UFO.
It's paper thin, absolutely ridiculous, but that's their story.
And once again, we may never know what really happened because the witnesses have been silenced.
Could this be another incident in a pattern of UFO crashes and cover-ups? And is it possible to silence every witness, even when that witness is a high-profile political figure? If someone of this stature and integrity were to go public, it would have an incalculable effect on the media and the public regarding the truth with UFOs.
MUFON investigates this story, and its surprising twist, when we return.
Hangar 1's files contain hundreds of stories of UFO witnesses who claim to be intimidated by authorities.
Their agenda: To cover up all evidence of extraterrestrial encounters, a pattern seen in case files from Barstow, California; Coyame, Mexico; and Varginha, Brazil.
But sometimes, witnesses may even feel pressure to censor themselves, such as one case involving a UFO abduction allegedly observed by one of the most prominent men in the world.
Manhattan, New York.
Linda cortile awakens at 3:00 A.
M.
and is astonished to find herself hovering 12 stories above the street, outside her apartment.
The witness, Linda, thinks she's dreaming, but this is no dream.
Here she is, floating over the New York skyline.
Linda claims that she has been pulled toward the giant UFO.
She described it as a sort of tractor beam pulling her through the night sky.
As Linda is pulled into the UFO, the surrounding neighborhood experiences a major power outage.
And not just in the buildings, but on the street also.
Cars were dying right in the middle of the street.
Once on board, Linda falls into a dreamlike trance and then, many hours later, finds herself back in her apartment.
In the days to come, Linda is traumatized by her experience and seeks help.
She eventually meets with famed abduction investigator Budd Hopkins.
Budd Hopkins worked for years in the UFO field with abductees, taking their stories, publishing the results of his investigations, and basically really being a pioneer in the whole field of abduction research.
Budd found Linda's case extremely interesting, particularly after doctors found a small metal object in her skull shortly after her abduction.
This is an intriguing story, but there's not much to base our investigation on other than Linda's memory of the event, and there are no witnesses to corroborate it.
But this story cannot be easily dismissed, because the files report that one year after the incident, two surprise witnesses come forward.
Budd Hopkins receives a letter from two individuals, Richard and Dan.
They claim to have witnessed the abduction of Linda.
Richard and Dan identify themselves as New York city police officers who were providing private security for a vip client at the time of Linda's abduction.
The men describe the exact same story that Linda experienced.
They saw a woman floating in the sky above them, slow drifting towards a massive, oval-shaped craft.
But the case takes a bizarre turn when the men reportedly reveal the identity of their vip client.
These men reveal that there was a third witness, the vip client they were providing security for, and he happened to be Perez de Cuellar.
At the time, Javier Perez de Cuellar is the secretary general of the united nations.
The other two witnesses had already told Budd Hopkins that the third man was traumatized by what he had seen that night.
Maybe because of his high-level position, he didn't know where to turn.
According to reports, Budd Hopkins reaches out to Javier Perez de Cuellar.
Budd is overwhelmed with this revelation.
If someone of this stature and integrity were to go public, it would have an incalculable effect on the media and the public regarding the truth with UFOs.
And it is true that Budd Hopkins did communicate at least one time with Javier Perez de Cuellar on this, and de Cuellar absolutely did not want to get involved publicly on this matter whatsoever.
Secretary general Javier Perez de Cuellar has never acknowledged this story, and we may never know the truth.
Clearly, Javier Perez de Cuellar, one of the most public, prominent men in the world at that time, knew full well there was no way he was going to come out and publicly say, "yes, I too was involved in that utterly fantastic abduction experience.
" In the de Cuellar case, we see an example of self-censorship.
It's not always the media or the government.
Sometimes it's us.
If you fly in the face of public opinion, you run the risk of losing jobs, losing friends, losing credibility.
Hangar 1 files reveal a possible pattern of UFO cover-ups, from government denials and secrecy to the self-censorship of witnesses afraid to speak out.
A UFO crash in 1965 is believed by some to be one of the first cases of a UFO investigator who searches for the truth and pays the ultimate price.
December 5, 1965.
Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.
Dozens of eyewitnesses report a UFO streaking across the sky over Canada, Michigan, and Ohio.
The F.
A.
A.
logs sightings from 23 pilots along the UFO's flight path.
Finally, the residents of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, observe a fiery object plummeting from the sky and into the woods.
People in town describe seeing this fireball-shaped object, and it suddenly changes course and crashes in the wood line.
So the Kecksburg case is extremely interesting because you have an entire town that sees an object coming out of the sky and crashing into the woods.
So they all come out to take a closer look.
A lot of people went out to the woods to investigate, and they got there first before anybody else did.
A couple of the guys described it as a acorn shape that was embedded into the dirt, and there was a outside circumference, what they described resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics.
In the middle of the scene, a local reporter, John Murphy, is capturing the events with his camera.
John Murphy was a reporter and news director for whjb, a radio station in nearby greensburg, Pennsylvania.
So while this is going on, he's snapping pictures of everything.
It is not long before the authorities show up.
John Murphy was just snapping away, taking pictures of the object.
The military shows up and tells him, "this is now a restricted area.
You guys are ordered out of here.
" They confiscated his camera, and they told everybody to get the hell off the property.
They were all pushed back, and all the military trucks pulled in.
This is a small town a few miles from where I live.
There were dozens of witnesses on the street.
The army brought in a flatbed and did a crash and retrieval, and then they left.
The official government report on this incident states that only three members of the military were sent to investigate the scene.
the Kecksburg crash of 1965, that's a perfect example of this disparate nature between what officially happened and then what really happened.
A team of three individuals go investigate it, and that's all she wrote.
What everyone in the town of Kecksburg knows is that an enormous number of people Military, different types of branches of the military Probably over 100 outside people came in, combed the woods, sealed off the woods from the public.
And yet what's interesting is that there's no official acknowledgment by the military services that they did this type of thing.
Think about it.
You see something happen with your own eyes.
You know hundreds of military personnel swarmed a small town.
Yet this is outright denied by the government.
When you get that kind of firsthand look at how these cover-ups work, you're going to be hungry for the truth.
So now the town was just sitting around with all these rumors of what the heck is going on.
Kecksburg buzzes with stories about the mysterious object in the woods, and John Murphy, the reporter at the scene, decides to investigate.
Some people heard that it was a misfired army missile.
Others thought it was a satellite that came crashing down.
And because this was at the height of the cold war, some even thought that it could be a Soviet spy plane that was shot down.
But the official story ends here, with authorities denying that any UFO was involved.
The fallen object is reported to the press as a meteorite, but no meteorites or fragments were recovered from the scene.
The Kecksburg case is important, I think, because it involved the landing or crashing of a physical object.
So it means that there is a physical object.
It was taken away by the military and put somewhere, and there aren't that many UFO cases that involve something physical like that.
Leaving John Murphy and other witnesses to wonder, "what became of the evidence?" So the fact that all these people witnessed a physical object come down some saw it in the woods on the ground, others saw it on the flatbed truck being taken away means that there is a huge evidential thing that the U.
S.
government has somewhere.
So you have this very black and white contradiction between what the official line was and what actually happened.
However, the journalist at the scene, John Murphy, is determined to uncover the truth.
But is it possible that John Murphy's search for answers regarding the Kecksburg UFO could ultimately lead to his untimely death? Inside Hangar 1, MUFON files reveal the story of a UFO crash in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, in 1965.
The file describes a UFO seized by the military and the subsequent suppression of all evidence, until a local reporter threatens the cover-up.
John Murphy begins gathering evidence on the Kecksburg crash.
John Murphy decided to do a radio documentary, and what he needed to do was go around and talk to all the witnesses to get all the pieces of the story together.
The reporter believes that the government's account is very different from actual eyewitness reports.
Right away, Murphy notices there are many witnesses, yet their descriptions of the UFO are consistently similar.
And this wasn't a typical flying saucer.
This was a very specific kind of craft with unusual details.
John Murphy actually feels like he's on the verge of something here, and he's pouring all his energy and effort into this radio broadcast, and he's telling all his friends that he's uncovered something huge.
He conducts this thorough investigation, and is about to reveal his findings to the world, and this is when things take a dark turn.
The file reports that on the evening before the radio documentary is to air, John Murphy receives some unannounced visitors.
So two men show up at the radio station.
They don't identify themselves as military or police or any type of investigator.
John Murphy never disclosed what the men actually told him, but they clearly convinced him that it was in his best interest to keep quiet about the whole thing.
Then they confiscated his recordings and other evidence he'd obtained.
Murphy was forced to re-cut his documentary at the 11th hour, and the version that aired was a chilling testament to how badly these visitors had intimidated him.
The documentary that airs is simply an account of a possible meteor strike.
It contains no new evidence, makes no reference to the military, and does not mention a UFO.
This guy is absolutely devastated.
After pouring his heart and soul into a potentially world-changing investigation, it gets snatched away at the last minute.
He loses his job and spends the next three years completely beaten down and dejected, until he decides to do something about it.
In 1967, Murphy reportedly confides to a friend that he wants to reopen his original investigation.
John Murphy eventually convinced himself that this story had to be told, and apparently, he no longer believed he was in any danger.
But he was wrong.
Two days after reportedly reopening his investigation into the Kecksburg crash, John Murphy crosses the street and is killed by a hit-and-run driver.
The driver is never found.
It's impossible to categorically state that he was killed because of what he knew about Kecksburg and to prevent him from disclosing his information, but it's certainly cause for alarm.
John Murphy is far from being the only UFO whistleblower to die under mysterious circumstances.
Some wonder if there is a pattern of UFO investigators who have seemingly met untimely deaths.
There's been a long list of UFO investigators that have died under mysterious circumstances fast-acting cancers, car accidents, suicides all way before their normal lifespan should've ended.
James E.
McDonald.
He testified before congress twice.
He ends up dying of a suicide.
John Mack, he gets hit by a car.
John Murphy of the Kecksburg case, he gets hit by a car.
It goes on and on, UFO investigators all meeting an early death.
Between the desire to keep a lid on UFO sighting reports and the treatment of the witnesses and the data they share, there's a strong program in place to suppress credible UFO information.
How far this desire to suppress goes is impossible to know.
MUFON files chronicle a long history of UFO crashes and cover-ups, but it seems the public still knows very little about many of these events, as witnesses continue to be silenced and evidence is locked away.
But somewhere within the files of Hangar 1 is the truth.
Residents of Barstow, California, report the sudden appearance of a UFO skimming over their rooftops in the predawn sky.
Witnesses claim that this UFO streaked across the neighborhood, and then it touched down in a desert across the highway.
So what they decided to do was walk over and see what was going on.
But the residents quickly find that the strange craft is not the only unusual arrival that day.
The citizens are making their way towards the lights.
They're coming out of their house in the early morning, and then all of a sudden, a fleet of SUVs barrel right past them towards the scene.
Those SUVs were heading towards the UFO.
Nobody ever got out and said that, you know, "we're from an official agency.
We're government.
" They didn't acknowledge them.
Witnesses claim the vehicles encircled the grounded UFO, shining their high beams outward and blinding the onlookers.
Any details of the downed craft are lost behind a glare of headlights.
Before anybody can get a good look at what's going on, a flatbed truck rolls in, and about 10 minutes later, all the cars pull out.
And what was on this flatbed truck is about the size of a vw bug, but of course, it was covered in the tarp.
The convoy disappears as quickly as it arrived, leaving the residents of Barstow with far more questions than answers.
And that's it.
The witnesses contact the police and the military, and they hit dead end after dead end.
No explanation is given.
Could this be another UFO incident locked away in a classified file? The U.
S.
government has a longstanding history of covering up UFO incidents.
So we have to ask the question, "why?" What do they have to gain from concealing this fact from their own citizens? Throughout history, numerous UFO crashes have been reported, and to date, none have been officially acknowledged.
What exactly is the government concealing, and why? MUFON opens its files to reveal more of these incredible stories and investigate the extreme methods that go into covering them up.
The mutual UFO network, known as MUFON, is an independent organization not bound to any government.
They investigate reports of UFO sightings from around the world.
Over the past five decades, they have collected more than 70,000 files stored at a secure location known as Hangar 1.
Now, for the first time, MUFON is granting access to their vast archive.
These are the files of Hangar 1.
Inside Hangar 1, MUFON investigators review thousands of UFO sightings each year.
The Barstow incident is just one case.
That downed UFO is cordoned off and removed by the military without explanation.
Very few of these stories ever reach the public.
But this was not always the case.
MUFON files contain a long history of reported UFO crashes and cover-ups, including one of the first recorded incidents in the United States: Back in 1897, when a UFO crash was simply reported as everyday news and a lone gravestone marked the event.
April 17, 1897.
A day like any other in the small farm town of Aurora, Texas Until eyewitnesses report a flying airship trailing fire across the morning sky.
It comes flying down into this rural town, it hits a windmill, and it crash-lands on a farmer's property.
Judge J.
S.
Proctor's windmill is destroyed by the unusual craft.
Allegedly, this UFO crash was witnessed by the entire town, but it happened in 1897.
How do you verify something like that? Well, MUFON launched an investigation.
In 1973, MUFON conducted a search for surviving Aurora witnesses.
The 1973 investigation turns up several living witnesses eager to share their stories.
One 83-year-old man, Charlie Stevens, remembers witnessing the crash as a child.
There were witnesses to this.
The 10-year-old boy actually saw the crash occur working on his father's farm.
Our investigators tracked down a 91-year-old woman.
She was 15 at the time, and she saw it.
Mary Evans tells MUFON that the 1897 incident was the talk of the town, and that talk wasn't just about the UFO, but what townspeople found inside the craft.
Multiple townspeople are actually on record as having seen an alien body, and these witness reports are corroborated by local newspaper accounts uncovered by MUFON.
The Aurora newspaper runs a vivid account of the UFO crash from local reporter S.
E.
Haydon.
This is oddly matter-of-fact coverage for such an unusual event, but the article gets even stranger when we come to the aftermath.
The newspaper account states that the pilot is "badly disfigured" and "not an inhabitant of this world.
" "Not an inhabitant of this world.
" This article casually mentions that aliens crashed.
It's just in the newspaper in black and white.
In 1897, not only was the public trusted with this information, the public was also invited to the alien's funeral.
For nearly 80 years, a simple tombstone stands as a reminder of the Aurora crash.
It bears no name and is only marked with a small carving depicting a flying saucer.
You have to remember that, at the time of the Aurora crash, our own planet still held a lot of mystery.
It wasn't scary to them back then to have mysteries.
It's us today that can't accept the unknown and the unexplained.
We're frightened by that.
But in Aurora, in 1897, this was not a scary event.
During MUFON's 1973 investigation in Aurora, they attempt to recover evidence and exhume the remains of the alien.
It would seem like a surefire way to debunk or confirm the story would go dig up the evidence, literally.
So we went to the small Aurora cemetery to do just that: Dig it up.
Investigators arrive at the Aurora cemetery with metal detectors.
As they went from grave to grave, only one grave site registered anomalous readings: The grave of the alien pilot.
MUFON submits an official request to exhume the grave.
It is denied.
We're denied access to the grave because it's on church property.
The following day, we come back for one last look before going home.
The grave was exhumed the night before.
There's your proof.
There's your smoking gun.
So whatever was buried there is now lost, and the headstone is missing as well.
In less than 80 years, it appears the official attitude on UFOs shifts from openness to secrecy.
This is just another example of the kind of cover-up that we find in this sort of investigation.
Over the course of 100 years, UFO reports have evolved from openness and transparency to secrecy and denial.
That's an example of how much things have changed.
But why have things changed so drastically? Could there be dangers that we are unaware of? Hangar 1 contains thousands of files, each one a record of UFO activity from around the world.
One file tells the story of an 1897 UFO crash in Aurora, Texas, where residents held a public funeral for a dead alien.
But 80 years later, a MUFON investigation into that crash hits a dead end.
Is it possible that UFO incidents are still routinely covered up? Another file documents a UFO crash in Mexico that some believe to be the subject of an international cover-up.
Texas, 1974.
United States air defense radar detects an unidentified flying object over the Gulf of Mexico rapidly approaching U.
S.
airspace.
Across the border, Mexican authorities are alerted.
Right from the start, we have independent confirmation in this incident.
the same object is being tracked by both the United States and Mexico.
The object shifts course away from the U.
S.
and rockets back toward Mexican airspace.
Radar operators on both sides of the border are stunned.
When you're looking at this kind of movement, it would have to be under some kind of intelligent control.
Reportedly, the U.
S.
military traces the UFO's path to Coyame, a sparsely populated Mexican border town, where it suddenly vanishes from radar.
At the same moment, Mexican authorities receive a distress call.
They receive a radio broadcast that a civilian airplane has crashed in the vicinity, possibly due to a midair collision.
In the same location where this UFO went off radar, a civilian aircraft collided with something in flight.
Well, what did it collide with? Mexican authorities arrive at the crash site and discover the remains of a small civilian plane.
But there also appears to be wreckage from a second craft at the scene.
There was another report of a second crash, and this is interesting.
They said it was damaged, but it was perfectly intact.
It was described as saucer, metallic shape with no markings.
The Mexican military does not know what to make of the unusual craft.
They call in a report and then go radio silent.
But word of the crash has already reached U.
S.
authorities.
The Mexican broadcast was intercepted by the CIA, and they wanted to bring their own crash retrieval special team down to Mexico, but the Mexican authorities flat-out denied that a crash even occurred.
Within hours, CIA reconnaissance captures images of the Mexican convoy departing the Coyame crash site.
At this point, the CIA know about the convoy, and they definitely know that there's a salvaged crashed UFO on the back of that truck.
In the file are claims that the CIA dispatches a small, covert team to intercept the Mexican convoy and get a closer look at the UFO.
The U.
S.
team arrives, and surprisingly, they're met with zero resistance from the Mexican army.
The Mexicans suddenly want nothing to do with this UFO anymore, and that's because the whole situation has taken a dark turn.
The Americans encounter a grim scene.
When the CIA finally arrive, they come up on the convoy and they see four soldiers laying down in the dirt.
It's clear that the Mexican soldiers are dead.
What's not clear is how they died.
All of the dead soldiers had made contact with the UFO while trying to remove it from the crash site.
Is it radiation? Extraterrestrial bacteria? We don't know.
The Mexicans realize how dangerous this craft was, and the CIA managed to convince them that they had more experience containing this sort of threat.
It is believed the American team takes possession of the UFO and transports it back to Missouri's Whiteman air force base.
The incident is kept secret until it is unearthed by a MUFON investigation.
The Coyame incident occurred in 1974, but it didn't really come to our attention until 1992 through an anonymous report that went to Ruben Uriarte, one of our field investigators.
It detailed this crashed saucer and the subsequent cover-up.
Ruben Uriarte's informant provides a full report, detailing the Coyame crash and its subsequent cover-up by authorities.
The report provided a good place to start an investigation.
It was a credible account, and it drove us to seek further evidence.
Ruben Uriarte was able to get flight logs, communication logs, and radar logs that synch up perfectly with this sighting report.
The biggest find was that Uriarte was actually able to confirm the names of the dead Mexican soldiers.
This is huge.
I mean, he now had proof that these four soldiers died at the exact same time, during an incident that officially never occurred.
But even with this evidence in hand, the investigation is stonewalled.
So Ruben was able to track down the names of the dead soldiers, but the government denied that they'd ever existed.
So again, we have a classic example of cover-up.
We have evidence.
We have witnesses.
Yet with every piece of evidence we've got, there's continuing pushback and denials.
Is the cover-up of the Coyame crash linked to the unknown dangers encountered when recovering the UFO? Perhaps, because the files reveal that a more recent crash in Brazil led to similar casualties.
We have verified sightings of UFOs in Varginha.
We have E.
T.
s walking around in the town.
And we have a dead body.
The evidence is piling up.
Another swift and forceful cover-up leads to the question, how many UFO crashes will it take before the truth is finally revealed? Inside Hangar 1, MUFON has opened its 70,000 files, which reveal stories from around the globe of UFO crashes And authorities determined to conceal all evidence.
A deadly UFO crash in Coyame, Mexico, may have been covered up by both U.
S.
and Mexican officials, and this pattern continues throughout the world.
From Brazil comes the story of another extraterrestrial encounter that is derailed by cover-ups and suppression.
There's a tendency to believe that the U.
S.
government is behind every UFO cover-up, but this is just not the case, as we see from a number of cases in our files.
January 20, 1996.
Local police respond to reports of a wild animal running loose in the town of Varginha, Brazil.
Earlier that morning, a group of three girls were startled by this strange creature that was located behind an auto body shop.
And what they described it as, it was a small creature with a large, disproportionate head, lidless eyes, and it was snarling and growling at them.
And officer Marco Cherese decided to investigate.
By evening, the town is consumed with stories that a devil creature is on the loose.
But what officer Cherese eventually encounters is all too real.
Officer Cherese tracks down this creature, and when he comes towards it, he could tell that it almost seems like it's half dead, almost dying.
So he decides to pick it up, and the thing pushes him.
And in doing so, it made contact with his ungloved hand, which he didn't think very much about during the time.
Officer Cherese and his partner take the creature and transport it to a local hospital.
By the time the officer arrives at the hospital, it's already swarming with military personnel.
And what he didn't know was that a radio call went out of another entity, a second entity that was tracked and captured by the military.
They bagged it and tagged it and threw it in the back of the truck.
That second creature was examined in the same hospital.
Officer Cherese had to be wondering, "what's going on here?" The army wouldn't be involved if it was just a wounded animal.
So what's even more interesting on January 13th, the whole week before this incident, NORAD gave the Brazilian government a head up that a UFO was tracked coming down over the hills of Varginha.
Was this a crash? Were these alien pilots? When officer Cherese tries to investigate these creatures even further, he is told to back off, forget about it, and pretend like it didn't even happen.
And that would've been okay.
He probably would've, but then something else happened.
Two weeks after his encounter, officer Cherese's doctor finds something unusual on his arm in the exact same spot where the creature touched him.
Officer Cherese starts feeling really ill and sick.
He starts complaining of back pains, high fever, respiratory failure, and he's hospitalized.
Reportedly, one week later, the 23-year-old police officer is dead.
The autopsy revealed that his body was riddled with infections, and it's odd that a young man would contract so many infections all at the same time.
Even the doctor confirms that this is a strange death without rational explanation.
We have verified sightings of UFOs in Varginha.
We have E.
T.
s walking around in the town.
And we have a dead body.
The evidence is piling up, right? Wrong.
Just days after these events, mysterious strangers arrive in the town.
All the witnesses to this event the three girls, even their parents and the police captain were visited by four men who strongly intimidated them and encouraged them, "do not discuss this in public.
" We don't know who these men were or who they represent.
It wouldn't make sense for them to be military because they also confronted military personnel.
With some witnesses, they threatened.
Others, they offered bribes.
According to the file, Brazilian authorities explained the Varginha incident with a controversial report.
The official story about the bodies recovered from Varginha were that they were dwarves.
Dwarves! That was the best they could come up with when half the town had seen these creatures.
And since when does the military round up dwarves? No mention of a UFO.
It's paper thin, absolutely ridiculous, but that's their story.
And once again, we may never know what really happened because the witnesses have been silenced.
Could this be another incident in a pattern of UFO crashes and cover-ups? And is it possible to silence every witness, even when that witness is a high-profile political figure? If someone of this stature and integrity were to go public, it would have an incalculable effect on the media and the public regarding the truth with UFOs.
MUFON investigates this story, and its surprising twist, when we return.
Hangar 1's files contain hundreds of stories of UFO witnesses who claim to be intimidated by authorities.
Their agenda: To cover up all evidence of extraterrestrial encounters, a pattern seen in case files from Barstow, California; Coyame, Mexico; and Varginha, Brazil.
But sometimes, witnesses may even feel pressure to censor themselves, such as one case involving a UFO abduction allegedly observed by one of the most prominent men in the world.
Manhattan, New York.
Linda cortile awakens at 3:00 A.
M.
and is astonished to find herself hovering 12 stories above the street, outside her apartment.
The witness, Linda, thinks she's dreaming, but this is no dream.
Here she is, floating over the New York skyline.
Linda claims that she has been pulled toward the giant UFO.
She described it as a sort of tractor beam pulling her through the night sky.
As Linda is pulled into the UFO, the surrounding neighborhood experiences a major power outage.
And not just in the buildings, but on the street also.
Cars were dying right in the middle of the street.
Once on board, Linda falls into a dreamlike trance and then, many hours later, finds herself back in her apartment.
In the days to come, Linda is traumatized by her experience and seeks help.
She eventually meets with famed abduction investigator Budd Hopkins.
Budd Hopkins worked for years in the UFO field with abductees, taking their stories, publishing the results of his investigations, and basically really being a pioneer in the whole field of abduction research.
Budd found Linda's case extremely interesting, particularly after doctors found a small metal object in her skull shortly after her abduction.
This is an intriguing story, but there's not much to base our investigation on other than Linda's memory of the event, and there are no witnesses to corroborate it.
But this story cannot be easily dismissed, because the files report that one year after the incident, two surprise witnesses come forward.
Budd Hopkins receives a letter from two individuals, Richard and Dan.
They claim to have witnessed the abduction of Linda.
Richard and Dan identify themselves as New York city police officers who were providing private security for a vip client at the time of Linda's abduction.
The men describe the exact same story that Linda experienced.
They saw a woman floating in the sky above them, slow drifting towards a massive, oval-shaped craft.
But the case takes a bizarre turn when the men reportedly reveal the identity of their vip client.
These men reveal that there was a third witness, the vip client they were providing security for, and he happened to be Perez de Cuellar.
At the time, Javier Perez de Cuellar is the secretary general of the united nations.
The other two witnesses had already told Budd Hopkins that the third man was traumatized by what he had seen that night.
Maybe because of his high-level position, he didn't know where to turn.
According to reports, Budd Hopkins reaches out to Javier Perez de Cuellar.
Budd is overwhelmed with this revelation.
If someone of this stature and integrity were to go public, it would have an incalculable effect on the media and the public regarding the truth with UFOs.
And it is true that Budd Hopkins did communicate at least one time with Javier Perez de Cuellar on this, and de Cuellar absolutely did not want to get involved publicly on this matter whatsoever.
Secretary general Javier Perez de Cuellar has never acknowledged this story, and we may never know the truth.
Clearly, Javier Perez de Cuellar, one of the most public, prominent men in the world at that time, knew full well there was no way he was going to come out and publicly say, "yes, I too was involved in that utterly fantastic abduction experience.
" In the de Cuellar case, we see an example of self-censorship.
It's not always the media or the government.
Sometimes it's us.
If you fly in the face of public opinion, you run the risk of losing jobs, losing friends, losing credibility.
Hangar 1 files reveal a possible pattern of UFO cover-ups, from government denials and secrecy to the self-censorship of witnesses afraid to speak out.
A UFO crash in 1965 is believed by some to be one of the first cases of a UFO investigator who searches for the truth and pays the ultimate price.
December 5, 1965.
Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.
Dozens of eyewitnesses report a UFO streaking across the sky over Canada, Michigan, and Ohio.
The F.
A.
A.
logs sightings from 23 pilots along the UFO's flight path.
Finally, the residents of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, observe a fiery object plummeting from the sky and into the woods.
People in town describe seeing this fireball-shaped object, and it suddenly changes course and crashes in the wood line.
So the Kecksburg case is extremely interesting because you have an entire town that sees an object coming out of the sky and crashing into the woods.
So they all come out to take a closer look.
A lot of people went out to the woods to investigate, and they got there first before anybody else did.
A couple of the guys described it as a acorn shape that was embedded into the dirt, and there was a outside circumference, what they described resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics.
In the middle of the scene, a local reporter, John Murphy, is capturing the events with his camera.
John Murphy was a reporter and news director for whjb, a radio station in nearby greensburg, Pennsylvania.
So while this is going on, he's snapping pictures of everything.
It is not long before the authorities show up.
John Murphy was just snapping away, taking pictures of the object.
The military shows up and tells him, "this is now a restricted area.
You guys are ordered out of here.
" They confiscated his camera, and they told everybody to get the hell off the property.
They were all pushed back, and all the military trucks pulled in.
This is a small town a few miles from where I live.
There were dozens of witnesses on the street.
The army brought in a flatbed and did a crash and retrieval, and then they left.
The official government report on this incident states that only three members of the military were sent to investigate the scene.
the Kecksburg crash of 1965, that's a perfect example of this disparate nature between what officially happened and then what really happened.
A team of three individuals go investigate it, and that's all she wrote.
What everyone in the town of Kecksburg knows is that an enormous number of people Military, different types of branches of the military Probably over 100 outside people came in, combed the woods, sealed off the woods from the public.
And yet what's interesting is that there's no official acknowledgment by the military services that they did this type of thing.
Think about it.
You see something happen with your own eyes.
You know hundreds of military personnel swarmed a small town.
Yet this is outright denied by the government.
When you get that kind of firsthand look at how these cover-ups work, you're going to be hungry for the truth.
So now the town was just sitting around with all these rumors of what the heck is going on.
Kecksburg buzzes with stories about the mysterious object in the woods, and John Murphy, the reporter at the scene, decides to investigate.
Some people heard that it was a misfired army missile.
Others thought it was a satellite that came crashing down.
And because this was at the height of the cold war, some even thought that it could be a Soviet spy plane that was shot down.
But the official story ends here, with authorities denying that any UFO was involved.
The fallen object is reported to the press as a meteorite, but no meteorites or fragments were recovered from the scene.
The Kecksburg case is important, I think, because it involved the landing or crashing of a physical object.
So it means that there is a physical object.
It was taken away by the military and put somewhere, and there aren't that many UFO cases that involve something physical like that.
Leaving John Murphy and other witnesses to wonder, "what became of the evidence?" So the fact that all these people witnessed a physical object come down some saw it in the woods on the ground, others saw it on the flatbed truck being taken away means that there is a huge evidential thing that the U.
S.
government has somewhere.
So you have this very black and white contradiction between what the official line was and what actually happened.
However, the journalist at the scene, John Murphy, is determined to uncover the truth.
But is it possible that John Murphy's search for answers regarding the Kecksburg UFO could ultimately lead to his untimely death? Inside Hangar 1, MUFON files reveal the story of a UFO crash in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, in 1965.
The file describes a UFO seized by the military and the subsequent suppression of all evidence, until a local reporter threatens the cover-up.
John Murphy begins gathering evidence on the Kecksburg crash.
John Murphy decided to do a radio documentary, and what he needed to do was go around and talk to all the witnesses to get all the pieces of the story together.
The reporter believes that the government's account is very different from actual eyewitness reports.
Right away, Murphy notices there are many witnesses, yet their descriptions of the UFO are consistently similar.
And this wasn't a typical flying saucer.
This was a very specific kind of craft with unusual details.
John Murphy actually feels like he's on the verge of something here, and he's pouring all his energy and effort into this radio broadcast, and he's telling all his friends that he's uncovered something huge.
He conducts this thorough investigation, and is about to reveal his findings to the world, and this is when things take a dark turn.
The file reports that on the evening before the radio documentary is to air, John Murphy receives some unannounced visitors.
So two men show up at the radio station.
They don't identify themselves as military or police or any type of investigator.
John Murphy never disclosed what the men actually told him, but they clearly convinced him that it was in his best interest to keep quiet about the whole thing.
Then they confiscated his recordings and other evidence he'd obtained.
Murphy was forced to re-cut his documentary at the 11th hour, and the version that aired was a chilling testament to how badly these visitors had intimidated him.
The documentary that airs is simply an account of a possible meteor strike.
It contains no new evidence, makes no reference to the military, and does not mention a UFO.
This guy is absolutely devastated.
After pouring his heart and soul into a potentially world-changing investigation, it gets snatched away at the last minute.
He loses his job and spends the next three years completely beaten down and dejected, until he decides to do something about it.
In 1967, Murphy reportedly confides to a friend that he wants to reopen his original investigation.
John Murphy eventually convinced himself that this story had to be told, and apparently, he no longer believed he was in any danger.
But he was wrong.
Two days after reportedly reopening his investigation into the Kecksburg crash, John Murphy crosses the street and is killed by a hit-and-run driver.
The driver is never found.
It's impossible to categorically state that he was killed because of what he knew about Kecksburg and to prevent him from disclosing his information, but it's certainly cause for alarm.
John Murphy is far from being the only UFO whistleblower to die under mysterious circumstances.
Some wonder if there is a pattern of UFO investigators who have seemingly met untimely deaths.
There's been a long list of UFO investigators that have died under mysterious circumstances fast-acting cancers, car accidents, suicides all way before their normal lifespan should've ended.
James E.
McDonald.
He testified before congress twice.
He ends up dying of a suicide.
John Mack, he gets hit by a car.
John Murphy of the Kecksburg case, he gets hit by a car.
It goes on and on, UFO investigators all meeting an early death.
Between the desire to keep a lid on UFO sighting reports and the treatment of the witnesses and the data they share, there's a strong program in place to suppress credible UFO information.
How far this desire to suppress goes is impossible to know.
MUFON files chronicle a long history of UFO crashes and cover-ups, but it seems the public still knows very little about many of these events, as witnesses continue to be silenced and evidence is locked away.
But somewhere within the files of Hangar 1 is the truth.