Investigation Alien (2024) s01e04 Episode Script

1
[unsettling music playing]
[birds singing]
[Knapp] I started this investigation
with one key question.
What are the intentions of these craft
that people have been seeing
in the skies for more than 70 years?
But following the evidence
has caused me to rethink
exactly where we should be looking
for these answers.
From Brazil
[Tecchetti] You can see hundreds of UFOs
in different shapes.
[Knapp]to Tampico
[in Spanish] There are a lot of fishermen
that have seen things
and won't talk about it
because people don't believe them.
[Knapp in English]and considering
the missing piece of the jellyfish video
[source] It just stops,
dead in its tracks,
and drops into the lake.
[Knapp]it seems there's
a recurring connection to water
that needs to be explored.
- Have a seat.
- Thank you.
[Knapp] Now Rory's back
from his underwater investigation
of the Channel Islands,
I'm hoping his data can tell us
what nonhuman visitors
might be doing in the water
and how long they've been down there.
[Kremer] We've got some stuff
on the side-scan sonar here that
It's out in the middle
of what should be a sandy plain.
Very little, if anything,
should be popping up.
And if something pops up,
it's something that has been put there,
artificially, by somebody.
Take a look at this right here.
What does that look like to you?
- [Knapp] Like a big plane.
- [Kremer] Like a plane.
A ship of some sort.
A plane, a flying saucer, something.
It's huge.
It's over 100 feet long
and probably 30, 40 feet wide.
- [Knapp] Could this be a crashed airplane?
- I don't know. That is a big feature.
And it's not a natural feature.
This square item
Look how large that is.
That's square.
What can you think of
in nature that is square?
Yeah, you don't see
a lot of 90-degree angles.
Exactly. It looks like
somebody has placed a building there.
Okay, so we'd been working all day long
and finally get the ROV in the water
over at this location.
And as soon as we've dropped
the ROV in the water
Wait till you see this video.
[tense music playing]
[Kremer] Look at how fast that's going.
Boom.
[Kremer] Light's just totally changed.
[Knapp] Holy shit.
It went from, like, 200 yards from us
to five miles away in less than a second.
Damn. Like it wanted to see
what you're doing,
but from a safe distance.
[Kremer] And then we had cameras set up
at night on the boat.
And we've got this other one too
that is just cool.
Now, this is with everybody sleeping,
with the exception of our night watch guy.
Don't tell me it's gonna go in the water.
[Kremer] Now it's in the water.
I'll be damned.
So this is what it does
when it thinks nobody's watching.
Have you ever seen anything like this?
A Willie Peter flare
is the only thing that I know
that will hang like that in the air,
but that's not a flare
because there's no smoke coming off of it.
Look at that.
It's under the water.
I don't know. I've got no answers. Do you?
[Knapp] You think it's got a base
down there like we saw in Tampico?
[Kremer] It could be. It could be.
People have been seeing things
flying in the skies
and things that pop
in and out of the water out in that area
for a long time.
How long has it been there?
Archaeology is your thing,
so what do you think?
Oral history
from a lot of the native tribes here
will talk about, um, things flying,
and they
they usually attributed it to gods.
Uh, the Chumash and the Salinans
all have oral histories of lights
that they can't explain.
Way back.
Way back. And you go
around the world, basically,
and look at the archaeological records.
Tribes have a lot of, um,
oral histories and written histories
they've recorded of sightings,
and they don't know.
So it has gone on a long time.
I think we scratched the surface here,
and I think that there could very well be
something underwater.
The fact that Rory is able to capture
images like that, it's a huge deal.
I've heard that the US government
has video like that.
A UFO that goes into the water
and becomes a USO.
Unidentified Submerged Objects.
I'm gonna share this
with some insiders I know,
which will hopefully lead
to getting more videos like this
released to the public
to get to the bottom of
what nonhuman intelligence
might be doing in our oceans.
This is not us. It's from somewhere else.
[sounds distort]
[Knapp] I sent a copy of Rory's video
to Vee to get her opinion,
since this falls into
her field of expertise.
- Hey, Vee, did you see that video I sent?
- [Armour] I did, yeah. I saw it.
What do you make of that
as a pilot, as a flyer?
What could it be,
and what are we ruling out?
I'm going to look for sound.
I'm going to look
for traditional movements of aircraft.
Combustion that comes
out of an engine, right?
Fire, some kind of fuel.
And this had none of that.
You do have to consider drone.
I've seen drones crash and burn.
Drones are crazy sensitive.
When you hit water,
it can be as hard as the ground.
So if this thing went in the water,
'cause you can see the refraction,
I mean, I just don't know
what kind of drone
with its propellers
would be able to do that.
Either it's flying in the air
or it's a submergible.
There's no drone that I know of
that can do both.
[Knapp] There's a pattern to this.
I mean, it appeared
in front of a bunch of people,
and then it went away,
and then later, it comes back
when everybody went to bed.
What do you make of that?
If I look at this
from a military perspective,
it looks like it could be doing
a reconnaissance operation
with the return trips back and forth.
But it's interesting
that you bring up the patterns.
There are some pilots
I've been discussing this idea with.
They've regularly been seeing lights
over the Pacific Ocean.
I got a couple of them
to agree to meet with me,
and they're bringing some video.
- I'll let you know what I find out.
- All right, bye.
[tense music playing]
[Armour] Starting this project
with George,
I've been rattling the cages a bit
with my pilots' network,
trying to figure out who's had experiences
and if they might have any insight
on why they're here.
So, two commercial pilots,
Chris and Trent, really stood out
because they actually have video.
And we're talking about decades
of aviation experience here.
And for so long, it was taboo for pilots
to talk about this kind of stuff.
So the fact that they still want to share
this footage with me
leads me to feel
that it's pretty significant.
It's a little hard to see on the screen,
but I'll spin that around to you.
If you look kind of here in the center,
and then there's gonna be
a couple of lights here,
coming in from the left-hand side.
[suspenseful music playing]
We were coming back over the Pacific,
uh, heading westbound,
and we looked to the north,
and we started to see some funny lights.
They would grow in intensity.
Then they would dim down.
It was one object that split off into two.
With the naked eye, you could see things
being jettisoned off
from the bigger, brighter lights.
These were shooting off
in all different directions,
almost like probes of some type.
[Trent] This was
outside of the atmosphere,
and we started to see some movement
that was just unexplainable.
And when you speed it up at 2 or 3 times,
you start to see a little bit more
of the irregularities in the flight path.
There was chatter going on.
Other pilots were seeing this.
[pilot 1] Do you see something out there?
[pilot 2] We saw two, maybe three lights.
They appear to be orbiting in a circle.
[pilot 1] You said it was moving fast?
[pilot 2] Yeah.
I don't know how far away it is,
but it's too fast
for what I'm familiar with.
[pilot 1] I worked this shift last night,
and we had, uh, similar reports.
And what about air traffic control?
So, unfortunately,
when we're over the ocean,
there's nobody to talk to.
Are you serious?
There's no one to talk to?
No, it's all Satlink where we do
position reports via text message.
And of course, that's when they chose
to show themselves.
What I'm learning is there's
an intelligent calculation
to this phenomenon.
Like Rory's anomaly.
These craft are choosing
to reveal themselves
in situations we can't control
and where it's difficult
to get clean data about their patterns.
It's almost like they want us to know
who's in control.
How many experiences
would you you say you've had?
Maybe one out of three times,
I see something unexplainable.
That's a lot.
And always in an area with no comms.
Oh yeah, 100%.
It really needs to come out
that not all of this is explainable.
And the thing is, now that is happening.
It's not just something
that's seen in the United States.
This is happening worldwide.
[intense, rhythmic music playing]
The Pentagon has just released
a 60-page comprehensive report on UAPs.
And in it, the Department of Defense says
there is no evidence
of any alien visits to our planet.
Ridiculous.
Last year, the Pentagon debuted AARO,
this new office
to investigate all forms of UAPs,
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
The job of AARO was supposed
to put together a historical record
of all the other US government programs
that have looked into UFOs
for the past 75 years.
[reporter] The official word
from the Pentagon, no dead alien bodies,
no crashed alien craft,
and no government cover-up.
And most importantly,
they found no evidence to suggest
that the United States government
or industry possesses
any alien technology.
They spent, what, 18 months
reviewing gigantic
storehouses of information
gathered by other government programs,
and they come to a definitive conclusion,
"Move along, folks. Nothing to see here."
It's ridiculous.
AARO has found no evidence
that any US government investigation
has confirmed
that any sighting of a UAP
represented extraterrestrial technology.
[Knapp] You know,
I have read the government files.
I have copies of all that material.
And I can tell you for a fact
that this AARO report
is a complete whitewash.
But if anyone would know for sure,
it's an insider like Chris Mellon.
I wanted to talk about this AARO report
because at the beginning,
we were all really hopeful
that the attention from media,
from Congress, would lead us
to try to have an understanding of this,
finally, at last.
I didn't think it would be this bad.
It's so riddled with absurd mistakes
and references and claims.
You know, they fundamentally changed
the standard
for how we function and operate
in the intelligence community,
and what is considered evidence.
We're not gonna call it
unidentified or unexplained.
We're just gonna say "insufficient data."
Do you believe
UAPs pose a potential threat
to our national security?
Yes. The technology that we faced was
far superior than anything that we had.
You're talking something
that can go into space,
drop down in a matter of seconds,
do whatever it wants, and leave.
And there's nothing
we can do about it. Nothing.
And unfortunately, these conclusions
were just sort of glibly absorbed
and reported by the media
without consulting,
as they normally would,
anybody who's an expert in the subject.
[Knapp] It seemed that was the plan,
is to get that headline out, to make sure
members of Congress read that headline.
And hopefully,
they'll move on to something else.
[Mellon] Obviously, it's half-baked.
We have to continue
to study this phenomenon
and try to get to the bottom of it
and try to find answers.
And if this sloppy report
damages the efforts to to do that,
that is gonna damage national security,
as well as science,
rather than enhance it.
[Knapp] What worries me
about the AARO report is
that it will discourage Congress
from asking questions.
Discourage mainstream media
from pursuing the story.
Discourage academics from pursuing
their own investigations and research,
which is essential to try to answer
these important questions,
just as we seem to be getting somewhere
with the water.
But there is a lesson
we can learn from it.
We can never count on our Pentagon
to come clean on the UFO issue
and tell what it really knows.
If they would go to such lengths
to discredit this topic,
it tells us
we're gonna have to do it ourselves.
I'm gonna write my own report
to counter the AARO whitewash,
and we'll be submitting that to Congress.
[energetic music playing]
First thing I wanna do in putting together
our counter report to AARO
is to find witnesses
who testified to AARO,
who gave them information.
And then try to verify, find out
what stories they shared with them,
and make sure that they get the hearing
that they deserve.
These witnesses told them
everything they knew,
believing in good faith
that AARO would treat the information
with respect,
would actually investigate it,
which they did not.
This one guy I've talked to several times,
his name is Michael Herrera.
[Herrera] I could take you
to one of these locations
that could prove that this stuff exists.
Michael Herrera not only testified
to AARO,
but he claims he's in touch with people
who can prove beyond any doubt
that reverse-engineering programs
of UFOs really do exist.
I've been trying to set up a meeting
with him for several weeks,
but he's been a little reluctant.
I can tell you for a fact that elements
of the US government, the US military,
have forcibly intimidated
potential witnesses.
I had that happen to me back in 1989.
When I was first investigating
these wild stories we heard about Area 51,
I put out a request for information.
I said on the air, "Hey, look, I know
there are people in this viewing area
who know more about this program,
this secret out there in the desert,
than they've ever told before."
"Get in touch with me."
And a lot of 'em did.
And then six of 'em,
one right after another,
who I spoke to on my phone in KLAS-TV,
were visited by government agents
who told them to shut up.
And a couple of those people
were threatened.
[gentle music playing]
[Knapp] Michael Herrera also says
he's been threatened,
but decided his story is too important
to let it get swept aside.
It's an ambitious story,
and I hope I'm able to verify
the allegations that he's made
about this amazing technology.
If it turns out to be true and verifiable,
this could go a long way
toward exposing the AARO report
for the smokescreen that it is.
- How's it going?
- Good. How are you?
So, this is it.
- Great to meet you in person.
- [Herrera] You too.
You gave a statement to AARO.
- Yes, I did.
- They didn't take it seriously.
We know that now 'cause of the report.
You and everybody else.
Yes, they did.
They put misinformation out.
You go into the jungle
in Indonesia, right?
- Correct.
- What do you see?
Something that's unforgettable.
So, we were originally tasked
with a humanitarian mission in 2009,
and this was the result of an earthquake
that hit on the western part of Sumatra.
We were actually positioned
on top of this hill.
Well, we turned away from the south
and looked at the north,
and we saw something sitting there, which
There's vegetation
that was on top of the hill
that was obscuring it,
so you could see only part of it.
- [Knapp] Are you talking about a UFO?
- Correct.
And we can see something rotating,
and we can see colors changing.
Light matte gray to a dark matte black,
and there's just in between.
- How big was it?
- I would estimate 300 feet.
- Three hundred feet?
- Correct.
And that looked like it had a pyramid
on the top.
So when we decided to go down this slope,
we could go into a clearing
that actually opened up pretty well,
and this is when we can see it
in its entirety.
And one of the eerie things about this
was how it was sitting there, hovering,
rotating in a clockwise position.
It was just like it was set in stone,
just rotating and moving.
And it didn't make a sound
except for, um, you know, a high
Not really a high pitch,
but like a pitch of, like, a transformer.
- Or like a guitar amp.
- Like a hum?
Yes.
And it wasn't something
that gradually changed.
It was just a constant noise.
But it looked like it was manufactured.
It had rivets. It had seams.
I've heard some speculation from people
who've seen real ET craft,
and they say it's completely seamless.
It has no designations of it
actually being pieced together.
- So this was ours?
- Correct.
Based on design
maybe we got from somewhere else?
Correct. It was
reverse-engineered technology.
I had video and pictures of this thing.
That night, my camera was on my rack,
and I had the memory card out of it
and the battery that was out of it too.
- Somebody got in there and took it out.
- Mm-hmm.
- So that's gone?
- That's gone.
- Where do you think that went?
- I have no idea.
It could be in somebody's vault.
It could be in a file. I have no clue.
We didn't talk about this at all
to anybody because of the situation.
It just sounds very unbelievable.
I mean,
this is a hell of a story you tell.
It's pretty fantastic.
Did you say you testified to the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence?
- Or met with them?
- Yes. They believe me.
They think I'm credible, which is
I've been able to provide
some other people, at least, to them
who know what I've dealt with.
And as well as gave
the names of the guys that were with me.
- Can you give me some of those names?
- No.
- Okay. So far, we've got your word for it.
- Correct.
But you and I talked before, and you said
there's gonna be something coming forward
that will confirm a lot of this.
Show us the goods, you know.
Where's the proof? When are we gonna know?
Um, give me a time frame.
I understand where everybody's sitting at
with wanting everything to be revealed.
I'm also impatient with that.
But me being on this side of disclosure,
I understand why it's taking time.
But I will tell you this.
There will be, hopefully soon,
some information that's gonna be put out
with factual evidence
that will support this.
How long? Any idea?
I would say
within probably the next few months.
- Within months?
- Correct. And that's all I can say.
- That will verify what you're saying?
- Correct.
I wish I could go into more detail
on how this will be.
But, uh, I will say
that it's gonna be something that
it will shock the world.
[intriguing music playing]
[Knapp] I came here to meet
with Michael Herrera
to get specific information.
Names, locations, hard information
that we could corroborate
that would prove his story.
He says that's probably months away.
And that worries me
because the window's closing.
We may not have that kind of time.
The pushback is real.
It's getting harder and harder for us
to get witnesses to come forward.
We need solid evidence
to counter the AARO report.
And we need it now.
[somber music playing]
[Knapp] I've been thinking
about my next steps
and decided that the best way
to counter a report
that denies all nonhuman intelligence
is to bring forward tangible,
physical proof of nonhuman contact
that cannot be easily dismissed.
At this point,
a lot of folks are kind of jaded.
They're at the point where,
"Show me. Show me the flying saucer."
"Show me the dead alien bodies."
"Until I see that,
I'm not believing any of it."
They're never gonna kick open
the hangar doors.
"There's the flying saucers, everybody.
Take a look." That's never gonna happen.
The only way
we're gonna get this information
is to dig for it ourselves.
[intense music playing]
[Knapp] UFO investigators would say
crash retrievals
and crash retrieval material
is sort of the Holy Grail.
We're talking about unknown craft,
possibly nonhuman craft,
that crash and leave debris
or other materials at the crash site.
There is a great deal of evidence
that crash retrievals are real.
There was a program called Blue Fly,
another one called Moon Dust.
It was the job of these military units.
Something falls from the sky, go get it.
Might be satellites, Russian or otherwise.
But some of it was pretty exotic.
Far more exotic
than a human-made satellite.
If the government has it,
if the defense contractors have it,
they're not coughing it up.
But luckily, there are some scientists
who have had the guts to gather samples
from alleged crash sites
and to go ahead and analyze them.
And we're going today
to go see two of the best.
Jacques Vallée,
he is a giant in the field.
He's written 12 or so
monumentally important books
that have changed the face
of how UFOs are investigated.
Dr. Garry Nolan, he's a medical doctor
and has patented a number
of really truly advanced medical devices.
Some of those devices
that have been used to analyze humans
and diseases in humans
are also really good
at analyzing materials.
Let's start this way.
Crash retrievals, debris
Give me the big picture.
What have we learned?
There is a long history
within the community of people
doing research on this,
uh, gathering samples,
analyzing them, and so on.
Much of what we know
about crash retrievals
is from people who, uh,
on the inside have come forward and said
that there are these objects that
have been retrieved by the US government.
And actually, other governments as well.
[Knapp] The story started with Roswell.
1947, the US Army Air Force said
that they'd recovered
a flying saucer, a flying disc.
The story didn't come from UFO people.
It came from the US Air Force.
They issued the release that said,
"We found one. A crashed saucer."
And that headline went all over the world.
Within 24 hours, they changed their mind,
changed that tune,
and said, "No, it's not a crashed saucer.
It's just a weather balloon."
Roswell was the first,
but there have been dozens of others
reported by reliable witnesses.
Kingman, Arizona, 1953.
There were multiple UFOs seen sort of
in a dogfight formation over Kingman.
A couple of these things
fall out of the sky.
There was a military team
that came in there, scooped 'em up,
took 'em back toward Nevada.
There's a case in Del Rio, Texas.
There's a case
in Cape Girardeau, Missouri,
with dozens of witnesses
who say it was real.
There's the Kecksburg case.
We still don't know what that object was,
but the public didn't get to see it
after it crashed and was hauled away.
So is there somewhere
we might get new samples
from a possible UFO crash
that you guys could test?
One, of course,
is the Council Bluffs material.
An object was seen
in Council Bluffs in the mid-1970s.
People are going through the park
in the evening,
and then they see something in the sky.
This mass of material
in a molten state falls.
What attracted me to the case
was the, uh, level of rigor
that had been applied.
Somebody checked, well,
were there any foundries nearby
that could produce this level of material
and drop it off in the middle of a field?
Was it a meteor?
It just wouldn't leave
a molten blob on the ground.
It would make an impact crater.
So something was there.
The witnesses saw it.
And then we have the material
that was apparently dropped
or left behind.
[Knapp] Since the government did not come
to Council Bluffs to confiscate evidence,
Doctors Nolan and Vallée believe
it may be possible to get more samples.
So what can we learn
from testing this kind of material?
Might the construction
or the way it's made
give us hints about how it flies,
how it operates,
how it does the miraculous things
that some UFOs do?
If something is determined
to have been made
in a zero-gravity environment,
we can say for sure it wasn't us.
We don't have
manufacturing capabilities in space.
That would be a real breakthrough.
[mysterious music playing]
[Knapp] If we're gonna put this forward
as proof of extraterrestrial activity,
it has to be rock solid.
I've heard there are witnesses to be found
who could possibly speak publicly now
for the first time in more than 40 years.
But thanks to the AARO report,
they could easily decide to clam up again.
But another thing that came up
as I was doing more research
is that at least one person claims
it wasn't a UFO encounter at all
but some sort of a hoax.
Wherever you have a story of a UFO crash
or a UFO crash retrieval operation,
people come out of the woodwork
with stories that debunk it.
- What's up, George?
- How you doing?
So I'm calling in Doug to help me explore
all angles of the story.
[car door closes]
[Knapp] My point of entry
into this whole UFO thing
started in the '80s
when I heard these rumors
about what goes on
here in the Nevada desert.
That there are crashed flying saucers,
UFOs, and that the US government
and defense contractors
had been trying to take 'em apart
and figure out how they work.
The question is, have they stashed 'em
with some private company,
some defense contractor,
trying to figure out
how that technology works?
I think the answer is yes,
but the AARO report says otherwise.
If there were
some sort of alien technology
that landed on Earth
and the United States government
collected it,
absolutely, without question,
I can assure you and guarantee you,
very few people would get to see that.
Right now in DC,
there's this huge pushback.
The defense industry has immense power
on Capitol Hill.
You know. That's your town.
- Beltway Bandits.
- Yeah. And they're pushin' back hard.
I don't know if we're ever going to
get them to cough that stuff up.
If they could figure out how it works,
it'd be worth trillions of dollars.
It'd change the world economy.
So I'm not sure they'll give it up,
but I just met with Garry Nolan
and Jacques Vallée at Stanford.
Okay.
They told me we might get our hands on
what could be extraterrestrial material.
So Council Bluffs, Iowa, huh?
- Right. That's where it happened.
- Uh-huh.
So the plan for us is to go ahead
and get more samples if we can.
As far as I know,
Jacques Vallée and Garry Nolan
never talked to the witnesses.
So I hope you can get to them
before they change their mind.
- I can keep this?
- Yeah.
Okay.
Fantastic.
[Laux] So we're just getting
into Council Bluffs, Iowa.
This is where the event occurred
in December of 1977.
First stop, I'm going to meet
with a guy named Jason Offutt.
I found a piece of his that he had online
where he did some pretty extensive
research on the event.
So ideally, he's gonna be able
to hook me up
with, uh, some contact information
of one of the eyewitnesses
who was actually on the scene at the time.
Hi there.
I asked Jason to meet me at the library.
That library also still retains
microfiche from the '70s,
so they have some stuff
I haven't been able to procure online.
So I've pulled up an article here.
Let me just scan to it.
You can see here
That is from the day after the incident.
- "The mystery metal falls from the sky."
- [Offutt] From the sky.
How is this not on the front page?
Like, this is buried
almost in the obituaries.
[Offutt] Ten B.
All right, the first person mentioned,
Assistant Fire Chief Jack Moore.
I spoke with his son Mike about this.
He was a direct witness.
Mike and his wife at the time were driving
through the park at about 7:45 p.m.,
and they saw a bright red light
hovering in the sky.
At first, he thought it was from
Eppley Airfield, which is fairly close.
- Right.
- [Offutt] But it wasn't moving.
And then all of a sudden,
another red ball, a smaller one,
fell from beneath it.
So, Jack Moore. His son is Mike Moore.
- He's local.
- Right. He's still local.
So then you can probably guess
my next question. [laughs]
[Offutt] Yes, I can.
Jason at the library said
he'd put me in touch with Mike.
Mike's been really reluctant
to talk about this in the past,
but it seems like he's ready
to get things off his chest now.
You know, Mike initially was like,
"You want to do something tomorrow, or"
No. How about today?
- He was there.
- Mike.
[Laux] Saw it with his own eyes.
I want him to tell me the story
as he saw it.
Then I can make an assessment.
I can tell you what I've seen,
take you where I've seen it.
I'd love that.
[Laux] Were you by yourself?
I had my ex-wife with me.
[Laux] So you're driving in the car.
You're with your ex-wife.
Walk me through what that was like.
Well, I'm driving along here,
and it'd be over here that I would look up
and I could see it coming out of the sky.
First, I thought it was a plane coming in,
but then I realized
it's coming straight down.
And there's no lights that would have been
on a wingtip or anything like that.
And the fact it was coming straight down
instead of going on a final approach.
Then she said she'd kind of looked up
and saw something hovering.
In this same direction?
- Yeah.
- Where?
Where we're going.
Like, going this way. It was up above us.
[Laux] I'm trying to get a read on Mike
to get a sense if he's telling the truth.
If I had seen what he had seen,
I would have been pounding
on the dashboard, blown away.
But that's me. Other people are different
how they perceive things
and how they receive
something as surreal as that.
[energetic music playing]
This is where it actually hit.
It was right here on this bank.
- [Laux] Here?
- I think about right in here.
Yeah, this area right in here
is where it fell.
And basically,
the fire department was called
because it set this whole bank on fire.
- How big of a berth was on fire?
- About four by six feet.
- And the metal's right here.
- Laying right here.
And it's leaking.
- Yeah. It's running down here.
- But hardening.
Yeah. In fact, uh, this is
what I came back and picked up.
- Oh shit. Can I touch it?
- Yeah, go ahead.
What the
I can see how you say it was bubbled.
Oh shoot. That's heavy.
[Moore] When I got home, I hit 'em
with an eight-pound sledgehammer.
I couldn't bend it.
I can't cut it with a torch.
I can't grind it. I can't even bend it.
When I got here,
there were pieces of blue in the metal.
They reminded me of,
like, a 1950s, '60s flashbulb.
- The blue ones?
- Yeah, like in a camera or something.
They were sitting there,
and they weren't melting.
They were like chunks.
Kind of looks like a rock,
a little bit, but it's really heavy.
And I don't know
what this silver shiny stuff is
that I can see, like, on the end.
Like, especially there
where my first finger's at.
When I saw it,
I'm like, "That looks like a rock."
But then when I picked it up,
I realized the density.
And I was like, "Oh man, this is"
Look, what I thought was about two pounds
is about 10 to 15 pounds.
All I remember my dad telling me one time
was he didn't know what was all in it.
Well, I'd love to get this tested
to find out, for sure.
I can give you a piece to take with you,
and you can give her testing.
- You got my word. I'll get it back.
- I'd just like to know what it is.
[energetic music playing]
[Knapp] While Doug
is gathering physical evidence
of a possible UFO crash in Iowa,
I'm moving on to tackling
the fundamental premise
of the AARO report head-on,
that everything people report as UFOs
can somehow be explained away
as either natural phenomena
or human technology.
We've come up here
to California's wine country
to meet a Swedish astronomer,
Dr. Beatriz Villarroel.
She's a highly decorated
scientist and professor
and has just published
an explosive new paper
about light anomalies
that may look like satellite
but were captured
before humans had that technology.
The suggestion is
that an advanced civilization
somewhere out there may have dispatched
maybe millions of probes across the galaxy
to look for other civilizations,
other intelligences.
They've been operating
in our skies near our planet.
I'm really looking forward to find out
what kind of evidence they've accumulated.
[tense music playing]
[Knapp] Tell me, how did you go about
looking for these possible alien probes?
Palomar Sky Survey has digitized
a collection of plates.
The digitized plates,
everyone can access these plates online.
What we've been doing
is to download these images
and comparing them
to images of the sky as it looks today.
And look for differences.
Is there something in the 1950s
that you cannot find today?
Look here, and you can see here
nine stars, and they all look like stars.
And then you look at it 30 years later.
You never see those stars again.
They're simply not there.
- They were there, and they're gone.
- Exactly.
This is five years before Sputnik.
- It's not us up there?
- No.
We have nothing that I know of,
especially not at those altitudes
we are thinking of.
Assuming that these images
are real astronomical observations.
And you've checked.
You've looked at different
Well, we have not been able
to find any problem.
We can never exclude that.
There's always going to be
some haunting possibility of
that we've missed
an instrumental explanation.
But there's certainly
no astrophysical explanation to this.
And there's no obvious
instrumental explanation either.
Can you give me another example?
Yeah. I have two here.
You can see here five transients.
July 1952, and they are vanished later.
[Knapp chuckles]
July 1952 sort of stands out.
That date rings a bell with me.
That's the That's the dates
of the Washington, DC, overflights.
July 1952, UFOs appeared
over the US capital two weekends in a row.
They were detected on radar.
They were seen by pilots in the air.
Jets were scrambled to go after them.
And as soon as they got close,
these things would take off.
And then there's the last example
that has been, uh, found
by my colleague in Madrid, Enrique Solano.
- Look at these beautiful three stars.
- And when is this?
Uh, this is from 19th of July 1952.
They're there, three objects,
and they are not there.
So the tantalizing possibility is
it's some sort of alien.
That's one possibility.
And maybe there's some new astrophysics
that is behind that that we can't imagine.
A craft much closer to Earth
than stars are.
I have to be open for all possibilities.
That's an amazing coincidence.
In a sense, it makes sense.
If you think about some
extraterrestrial civilization out there,
that they would send probes,
because we've sent probes out.
- We've sent them.
- Exactly.
We have Voyager 1, and we have Pioneer.
So if we can do that,
why wouldn't they send something to us?
They might have produced
maybe thousands or millions of probes
and sent them everywhere.
[energetic music playing]
[Knapp] We've seen time and again
that these aliens' interest in us
has a scientific or research angle.
So these possible alien probes are
yet another data point
as to why they might be here.
One thing's for sure.
AARO can't write this evidence off
as satellites, Starlink, or drones.
If anything, it might be
an advanced species' version
of this technology.
But what are they planning to do with it?
That's what I'm still hoping to find out.
[music fades]
[unsettling music playing]
[Laux] George told me
going into this investigation
that somebody claimed
that this case was actually a hoax.
I'm going to meet a gentleman
named Darrell Livengood.
He claims that in 1977,
he fabricated the entire story.
I hate going
into any interview really suspect
and not believing from the get-go.
So I'm gonna keep an open mind,
but I might have
to grill him a little bit.
Hit me with everything, and I'm all ears.
In December, it'll be 46 years.
- Yup.
- I had come back from college.
It was the middle of wintertime,
and I met up with three buddies of mine.
Two of the fellas had worked
for the Union Pacific.
- Oh.
- Well, they gave me two of these devices.
Uh, they called 'em charges,
but basically what they were
is a thermal welding device.
- Okay.
- And it was full of phosphorus and powder.
Right.
And what you would do is
you'd ignite the fuse.
And it was similar to a fountain
like you would have at Fourth of July.
One of those little cone things
that spray for a couple minutes.
- Yeah.
- But this thing went for about 15 minutes.
- Okay.
- It shot sparks about 30 feet in the air.
That plume of smoke that went up
clearly must have dissipated
to the point where it looked like a UFO.
Really?
Probably caught the tail end of the burn,
so it looked like
the spaceship was shooting flame down
instead of really it was shooting it up.
Shooting flame up? Okay.
When he broke it down for me,
that he had friends
working for the railroad,
and he's describing to me the device
that the railroads use,
and that it's the most common thing
used to weld two tracks together.
So maybe he did ignite that.
You know, we were a bunch of kids out
just having a good time.
Yeah.
And the fire marshal's son
[Laux] Mike Moore.
put the stamp of legitimacy on this.
- Okay.
- You know, who would doubt his word?
And we kept it quiet
until I couldn't keep it quiet anymore,
you know.
[Laux] His story was pretty credible,
but he doesn't have anything tangible.
Guess what? Mike does.
And now it really comes down
to taking what Mike gave me
and comparing that to what's inside
that thermal welder device
and seeing if they marry up one-to-one.
I need to get back with George
and tell him where my head's at
after talking with Darrell.
And I'm not sure
how he's going to take it.
[suspenseful music playing]
[music swells, ends]