[low whirring]
[whirring accelerates]
[static]
[beep]
♪ pulsing, dramatic music ♪
[man] What the hell is that thing?
[woman] I saw this huge saucer-shaped vehicle.
[woman 2] I've never seen anything like that before.
[man 2] It wasn't blinking or nothing.
Was just like a ball of light.
[man 3] Whoa.
It's got three triangular lights.
-[pilot] Well, if there's a-- -[pilot 2] Look at that thing!
[pilot] It's rotating.
[man 3] It's extremely quiet.
It's definitely not an airplane or a helicopter.
I don't know what that was.
♪♪♪♪♪
[Leslie Kean] For decades,
UFO witnesses were laughed at.
They're just told that they can't talk about it.
"We don't want to hear about it.
Maybe you're a little crazy, if you even saw it."
[man 4] No, whatever that is, that's huge.
[Kean] But we're at a place right now
where we are beginning to realize
how strange it is and how little we really understand.
♪♪♪♪♪
Imagine if it was acknowledged,
officially, that UFOs exist.
That would be a big paradigm shift.
♪♪♪♪♪
[birds chirping]
[newswoman] Intelligence agencies have six months
to release all the information they have on UFOs.
It's part of a $2.3 trillion-dollar bill
signed back in December. The report needs
to contain analysis of any UFO data
as well as name any possible security threats that they pose.
♪ slow, pulsing music ♪
Thousands of newly declassified documents on UFOs
from the CIA
now accessible on the Internet,
and you can thank a UFO enthusiast
for that massive dump of docs now known as Black Vault.
[John Greenewald Jr.] With the passing of this bill,
a lot of people think this is it.
This is when the government and the military is gonna come out
and reveal the truth behind what these UFOs or UAP are.
[Aucoin] Seemed like they were aware of our presence,
'cause they would actively move around us.
[Greenewald] We know that there was the UFO research program.
We know they enlisted scientists,
people that could look at this information,
whether it be witness testimony,
photographs or film reels.
♪ hypnotic, pulsing music ♪
There is so much to dig into.
[man] What we've been doing is simply looking
for flying objects that are where
they're not supposed to be.
But on the one in a million chance that it really is E.T.,
we kind of want to know that, too.
[Greenewald] I think the media's attention
to the UFO topic absolutely fueled then
the public's response for demanding answers,
for demanding action
and to encourage senators
like Marco Rubio to say, "Hey,
this phenomena is real.
You should investigate it."
Tell them it's a threat, tell them
that it's encroaching on military installations,
all of a sudden, you got that Senate Committee on Intelligence
pretty darn interested on what intelligence can be gathered,
and they're 100% on board trying to get to it.
♪♪♪♪♪
December of 2017,
The New York Times really put the reality
of what they called a-a UFO research program
out there into the cosmos,
and people ate this up.
♪♪♪♪♪
That was one of the biggest stories,
if not the biggest story,
that the New York Times digital edition ever had.
♪♪♪♪♪
[keys clacking]
[Kean] I've been writing for many years
about unconventional phenomena,
large mysteries that really intrigued me
but are not usually covered by... journalists.
It's not easy to get The New York Times
to cover a subject that's
not fully documented.
Particularly if it's an issue like this,
where politicians,
although they may be interested,
they're afraid to deal with it.
[newsman] Recent report by The New York Times
unveiled the existence of a real-life X-Files department.
It's a five-year secret government program
to investigate mysterious flying objects.
[newsman 2] The Pentagon now confirms the existence
of a secretive UFO program
tasked with investigating reports
of unidentified flying objects.
[Brian Todd] Tens of millions of dollars
for the project were pushed through
by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The New York Times says Reid acknowledged to them
that he and two other senators
did not want public debate
on the Senate floor over this program.
♪ gentle, pulsing music ♪
"Real UFOs? Pentagon Unit Tried to Know."
♪♪♪♪♪
Pretty amazing.
♪ hypnotic, pulsing music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
The Department of Defense had a program
called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,
and we all call it AATIP, which is the acronym.
They had had this program since 2007,
whose purpose was to study UFOs.
♪♪♪♪♪
The funding was not made public,
so nobody knew about it.
This is the first time it was on the record.
♪♪♪♪♪
What instigated the whole thing was the fact
the director of the program resigned
in October, two months before the story came out.
I was fortunate enough to have a meeting with him
literally the day he resigned or the day after.
And he wrote a powerful letter to the Secretary of Defense,
James Mattis, at the time,
explaining why he was leaving,
which had to do with the fact
that there were not enough resources provided
for what he considered to be a national security issue.
[newswoman] Do you believe
that-that life from somewhere else,
while you ran this program,
came here, visited, observed?
There is very compelling evidence that we, uh...
we m-may not be alone,
whatever that means.
[Kean] After our story came out,
there started to be briefings
for various committees in Washington.
♪♪♪♪♪
The New York Times has a huge impact.
It opens the door
for things to happen.
[reporter] I wondered if the president will show his...
degree of transparency on, uh, this issue.
Uh, I'm not aware of any plans the president has to, uh...
uh, make public any information about this.
I would be interested in knowing
if there's some other people here.
[newsman] I don't believe it. Dan?
-I believe it. -[Dan] Listen...
UFOs? Any UFOs?
Did you ask about that?
I've certainly asked about it.
And?
Can't tell you.
-Sorry. -Okay.
All right, I'll take that as a yes.
-[chuckling] Why not? -'Cause if there were none,
you'd say there was none, right?
Feel-feel free to think that.
I do.
-[horns honking in distance] -[jackhammering]
[Diana Walsh Pasulka] I remember when I woke up
the day it came out.
It was a bombshell, right? That's what it was.
♪ pulsing, tense music ♪
I'm a research professor.
And I research the connections
between technology and religious belief,
among other things.
♪♪♪♪♪
That article just electrified
the whole environment of the study.
♪♪♪♪♪
I got phone calls from Harvard.
I got phone calls from Princeton,
from academics everywhere.
[man] What is that?
[Pasulka] These are things that academics don't want to touch.
[pilot] My gosh.
They're all going against the wind.
[Pasulka] We have scientists
who studied the phenomena anonymously
to keep their careers intact, frankly.
♪♪♪♪♪
[Avi Loeb] Scientists have a problem
discussing the possibility
of extraterrestrial intelligence.
They-- It's out of the mainstream,
and it should not be.
[Pasulka] It's almost like the Invisible College.
Back in the 1500s, the Invisible College
was a word for the scientists,
like Francis Bacon,
who were kind of making headway,
but the church would kill them
if they knew what they were doing, right?
[man] There it is.
[Pasulka] People who study the phenomena
won't talk to each other about it.
They just won't. And so I thought, "What is that?"
And I thought, "You know, it's really like Fight Club,
that movie from the 1990s
with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton."
You've got this guy who starts this cult movement.
Right?
And they don't talk about it.
First rule of Fight Club:
don't talk about Fight Club.
And with UFO events,
I found it again and again
and again and again.
And it was pervasive.
♪♪♪♪♪
So there's no longer an Invisible College.
It's a Fight Club.
♪♪♪♪♪
[Kean] I think it's important for people to understand
that most sightings of what people call UFOs
can be explained.
I mean, if you have people out at night
and they see something weird in the sky
and they might report it,
well, the authorities can find out.
Was there a weather balloon in the sky that day
at that location?
Only a small percentage of sightings can't be explained.
We need to do proper investigations.
I think
it's irresponsible, it's dangerous
to just ignore it.
It's really disrespectful to the witnesses.
The best example of this is
the Phoenix Lights case.
♪ soft, haunting music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
[newsman] It is very rare for thousands of people to call
and report seeing the same lights in the same spot
at the same time.
[Kean] Unlike a lot of the cases that we take very seriously,
this one was about people,
massive numbers of people.
And a lot of people were calling
the National UFO Reporting Center.
♪♪♪♪♪
[newswoman] UFO watchers are calling it a dramatic event.
-[woman] Another one, too! -[woman 2] Where? Whoa!
-Look at that. Wait. -[man] I got that one on video.
-Can't see how this works. -[man] Whoa.
-[man 2] Shit. -[man 3] Aliens,
first thing that I thought.
It scared the heck out of me.
[man 4] It was a UFO.
[woman 3] We saw five lights in a row.
[man 5] It looked like some kind of, uh,
geometric drawing.
[child] It was big as a football field,
-at least. -As I was coming up the hill,
I didn't know what it was.
You heard nothing.
[newsman] What do you think it is?
[woman 4] I think it was a spaceship
of some sort.
[Greenewald] There's a lot of mystery behind us
and a lot of unanswered questions
that no one wants to talk about.
-[woman 5] What? -What is it? Can you see it?
[Pasulka] We're still talking about it because
of the aftereffects that the people who experienced it
are still having.
♪ loud, ominous music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
Interview, Fife Symington. Camera A, B, C, D. Mark.
♪♪♪♪♪
[Symington] I remember I'd been listening to the news,
and people were reporting lights over Phoenix.
And turned to my wife and said, "You know,
I'm gonna go take my car and I'm gonna go drive to Squaw Peak
to see if I can see what all the hullabaloo is about."
♪ gentle, haunting music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
There were a whole bunch of people in the park,
and everybody's looking for the lights.
Then somebody said, "Holy cow. Look at that."
And so I turned around, and this great big
delta-shaped thing came out of the northwest
and headed down into the Southeast Valley.
[man] They're lined up in-in a pattern, man.
-There's geometry behind this. -[man 2] Yeah.
[Symington] It was really eerie. It had embedded lights.
I always refer to it as otherworldly.
♪♪♪♪♪
I've never seen anything like it.
♪♪♪♪♪
-There's one behind a chimney. -[man] Major sighting here.
[Kevin Watson] Couldn't hear it. Not being able to hear it...
[woman] Yeah, it was eerie.
-...was-was eerie to me. -Mm-hmm.
That-- Something in the air
-moving at that size... -Yeah.
...completely still, freaked me out.
[man] And then did it just disappear, like it was gone?
-[Watson] Lights flicker and-- -And people saw it in Tucson
-minutes later. -Yeah.
-So that's how fast it was. -Minutes later.
-[woman] Yeah. -[newsman] Some believe
the lights were flares.
Some believe they were
a secret military aircraft.
And others believe they were spaceships.
[newswoman] City Councilwoman Francis Emma Barwood
is the only city official to look for answers.
[Barwood] I had assumed that this event
was already being investigated,
and I was told that nobody would touch it.
Come on.
Good, good, good.
I have a hard time letting things drop
that aren't finished.
I always want answers.
♪ slow, gentle music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
I was going to a city council meeting
May 6th of 1997.
I was stopped by a reporter,
and she asked me if I knew about this object
that flew over Phoenix on March 13th.
And she said, "Could you ask at the council meeting?"
When it came my turn for a council request,
I told them about the reporter and...
could we find out whatever this object was.
Kind of curious. Especially since people are starting
to ask more questions.
Everybody turned around, looked at me.
And it was like,
"Did I say something wrong?"
[chuckles]
-[woman] Thank you. -Thanks.
Councilman Siebert.
[Barwood] How can this be swept under the rug?
What are they all afraid of?
♪ soft, pulsing music ♪
[Symington] It was a fairly
tumultuous time for me politically,
and I certainly didn't want
to pour any kerosene on the fire.
♪♪♪♪♪
So, the next day,
I'd kept my mouth shut.
[chuckles]
I just decided to lock it away and not-not talk about it.
It just seemed to be the prudent thing to do.
I didn't, I didn't need to stand up and say,
"Hey, I-I've seen it."
Uh, you have thousands of other people who stood up
and said they've seen it.
The story was out there.
[Tom Brokaw] Are we alone?
No, I don't mean just you and me.
I mean this Earth.
Have we had some visitors recently?
The buzz is very big in the desert southwest,
where it's really never gone away after some...
weird happenings in the skies
over Phoenix recently.
[newsman] Phoenix Councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood
says she now gets stacks of mail
from across the country detailing similar sightings.
There's no doubt in my mind
that they saw something really phenomenal.
Why isn't anybody else curious?
I mean, why am I the only elected official that...
wanted to find out about it?
[newswoman] Strange dots of light that were the talk
-of the town. -[newsman] A mass,
statewide UFO sighting.
[Kean] As a result of the kind
of uproar that occurred,
it was sort of like all the citizens suddenly woke up.
And so there was all this pressure
on Governor Fife Symington to do something.
[newsman] Today, in a very surprising move,
Governor Symington said he was going to do something
to find out what was going on.
[Symington] You're governor--
your highest duty is to the citizens
who elected you to office
and to protect them if there's some danger
and demand answers.
Many of our citizens have been
very disturbed by this.
In response, I suggested that it was time
to end months of speculation on the question
and investigate the matter once and for all to clear it up.
[man] If the authorities don't know what it is,
they should say. And if they do know, they are accountable
to the public and they'd better cough up an answer.
♪ pulsing, tense music ♪
[Symington] We made serious inquiries,
asking the Air Force, "Well, what did you find?"
And we never got a satisfactory explanation.
The most interesting one was
the Warthogs, the A-10s,
that they said had dropped flares.
[newswoman] The National Guard says it was
conducting flare exercises outside Phoenix that night.
[man] Our A-10 Thunderbolts that are right behind me
were on a night illumination exercise.
[Symington] I mean, I'm a pilot.
I knew they weren't flares.
Flares don't do what those lights were doing.
Plus, the problem with that was the timing.
The Air Force said that the A-10s
were out there at about ten o'clock,
but the lights were at around 8:30 or something.
[newswoman] What took place here was far different than what
the Air National Guard says took place.
This happened over a period of hours
all over the state.
So, the official response
was completely bogus.
But a governor has no power
over the Air Force or Luke Air Force Base
to do anything more than ask a lot of questions.
That's all you...
all you could do, you know?
Sometimes very difficult dealing with the federal government.
[Kean] Senator John McCain was asked about this.
People would write him letters and call his office.
[man] Why don't they come clean and say,
"We don't know" or "We do know"?
That's all we want to know.
[Kean] John McCain asked the Air Force
if they would conduct an investigation
and was told that they don't investigate UFOs,
which was about as far as he could go
as a public official.
[Symington] Yes. McCain
was very open to it being a... an unidentified flying object.
So, I asked the Air Force, "Well, what did you find?"
And they said they didn't find anything, so...
There have been reports that several aircraft
took off from Luke Air Force base
in hot pursuit with afterburner
and tried to intercept whatever the lights were.
[man] Almost blew over me.
And as soon as the jets got
to the object, this thing, like, shot straight up
and vanished right in front of my eyes.
And that's... that was really
what put me over the edge there
when I... when I saw that.
[thunder rumbling]
♪ slow, dramatic music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
[Siavelis] It's hard to believe that something
can be in our airspace that the government
is not aware of.
No matter what level it is in the Air Force.
The government is supposed to be in charge.
[host] Let me, uh, start the tape, and I'll start a timer.
For the record, it's Friday, the 14th of March, '97.
I'm talking with a gentleman which is calling from Phoenix.
Okay, sir, go ahead.
[Siavelis] The jets that were taking off
from Luke Air Force Base...
You don't scramble jets just from somebody calling in
to the police station.
And they weren't flares.
Those two pilots get out of their aircraft,
and they're shaken,
because their gun-ready camera
was filming
something they've never saw before.
[Greenewald] With UFOs, nothing is ever black-and-white.
There's always mud in the water
of trying to figure out some of these stories.
There's half a century of secrecy relating to this,
and so I started
researching the United States government connection
to what UFOs were.
♪ pulsing, dramatic music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
[man] On flying saucers,
do you yourself believe that they exist?
Well, I'm positive they exist.
The weight of the evidence makes it impossible
to arrive at any other conclusion.
[Greenewald] It started way back in 1947.
There were UFO fleets that were
being seen above the skies of Washington.
People were scared.
[Mike Wallace] Tonight, we go after a fantastic story.
The story that flying saucers
from other worlds are visiting our planet.
[Kean] There were so many sightings,
and the Air Force just didn't know what to do about it.
[John Samford] Air Force interest in this problem
has been due to our feeling of an obligation
to identify and analyze
to the best of our ability,
anything in the air
that may have the possibility of threat
or menace to the United States.
[Greenewald] There was this aim
to truly investigate UFOs.
[Samford] There have been reports
that have been made
by credible observers
of relatively incredible things.
[Greenewald] The Air Force Office of Special Investigations
created a Project Grudge,
Project Sign,
and then later Project Blue Book in 1952
to investigate
and ultimately explain them.
[Kean] Project Blue Book was set up
with a public office
where citizens could contribute reports of sightings.
So, you had all these witnesses.
[Thomas Hanchett] I looked up,
and to my right, I saw a large ball of fire.
The object, uh, very rapidly disappeared...
♪ pulsing, intense music ♪
[Pasulka] You have
people experiencing something
that they don't quite understand.
These experiences impact these people.
Impacts the way that they
live their lives.
[John Foster] Two small lights appeared to me
at the outer edges of the object
glowing in a bluish green light and...
[Pasulka] Lots and lots and lots of people,
lot of very, you know, intelligent
and successful people
believe and see UFOs.
Researchers in contact
with some of the people still today decide to look
at the effects.
What if thousands of people saw it?
You know, what kind of effects would they have?
What would that do to our culture?
UFO, for want of a better word,
this phenomenon becomes, somehow, a new form
of religiosity.
It created true believers.
[newswoman] It was 1:40 a.m.
Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson was on patrol
in rural Marshall County when, suddenly,
he saw a bright light
a few feet above ground level two miles down the road.
I traveled about a mile,
and the light seemed to, uh, intercept me,
so to speak, and, uh, came right up on me.
It was painful. The light was extremely brilliant and painful.
I closed my eyes, and I heard the sound of breaking glass,
and that's the last I remember.
[newswoman] Johnson was unconscious for 40 minutes
before he radioed for help and was taken to the hospital.
A doctor and later an eye specialist
confirmed that Johnson had suffered mild welder
or flash burns to his eyes.
Even stranger, both Johnson's wristwatch
and the electric clock in his patrol car
had mysteriously stopped for 14 minutes.
It's truly unexplainable to me or, uh, un-unknown to me.
[Greenewald] UFO sightings
blew up in a way that no one truly expected.
Going back to the Space Race of the '60s,
the astronauts that were going up for the first time,
they were seeing stuff that they just couldn't explain.
[Greenewald] It didn't stop in the 1960s either.
Today there are many NASA videos
that have these mysterious and unknown objects.
There are a growing number of cases
that don't have a logical explanation.
And from the beginning, the government
had to squash it.
♪ tense, dramatic music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
In the early 1950s, the CIA was starting to see
that there was a much bigger national security implication
behind what UFOs were.
Whether or not they were alien
at this point really was irrelevant.
They knew that the excitement
that the general public had,
that in itself could create a risk.
A group of scientists put together by the CIA
analyzed all of the UFO data
that the United States Air Force collected, and they said,
"Are we looking at a phenomena that's real?
Is this something that we should worry about,
and what should we do about it?"
The committee concluded that in the 19 years
since the first UFO was sighted, there has been no evidence
that unidentified flying objects
are a threat to our national security.
[Greenewald] Project Blue Book,
which lasted all the way through 1969,
was not to investigate anything.
It was rather to explain it.
To say, "Look, you guys think you don't understand this,
but we do. We're the all-powerful government.
We're the all-powerful CIA. We can explain this."
[Kean] Some of the explanations they gave were so ludicrous
that it was essentially like ridicule.
I cannot prove in a court of law
that marsh gas is the full explanation
of these sightings,
but it does appear, to me, extremely likely.
[newsman] Are you saying, Doctor, that Michigan
is now producing nonexistent saucers?
[chuckles] Well, it's one way of putting it, I suppose.
[Kean] It just became part of the cultural way
of dealing with this, unfortunately.
[newswoman] The National Guard says it was conducting
flare exercises outside Phoenix that night.
[Kean] You were considered to be crazy
just for reporting something that was actually happening.
It was completely irrational.
[Harris] Tales of aliens
have been our first conspiracy tales.
They were our first way of questioning
whether the government
was, in fact, lying to us on a mass scale.
Not just the Roswell story,
which is obviously the most famous one,
but you have a number of other incidents like that
in the 1950s.
Just as the Cold War is starting,
we start to see more an increasing prevalence
not just of UFO narratives
but of spy narratives, of the sense
that the government is acting with duplicity.
This is absolutely untrue.
We are not hiding anything.
We have nothing to hide.
♪ intense, dramatic music ♪
[Harris] The rise
of lack of faith in the government to tell us
the truth coincides with the expansion of mass media
in a way where we're suddenly receiving
our information about the world
through the television, through the radio.
[man] One thing is clear.
You could not keep a spaceship a secret.
Too many journalists could not be restrained
from trumpeting one of the greatest news stories
of all time.
[Harris] And, so, whatever authority
the mainstream that has long denied the existence
of these beings had
slowly began
to slip away.
Eventually, that authority
breaks down completely with the Internet.
-[man] I got it. -[woman] Oh, my gosh.
-[man] Whoa. -[woman] What the hell?
[Harris] I think that we are,
as a people, willing to believe
almost anything.
Conspiracy theories or myth can take hold
using the possibility of UFOs existing
as a way of doubting
almost everything in our culture.
The fact that our government
is now slowly doling out information
concerning potential evidence of alien existence,
I think, only feeds into those narratives.
[newsman] United Airlines employees who swear
it was something otherworldly in the skies
above Chicago's O'Hare Airport on November 7th,
but neither the FAA nor indeed their own employer
appear to be taking them seriously.
[indistinct chatter]
[Kean] The O'Hare incident
is a really important case.
[Olbermann] Our number one story in the countdown,
unidentified flying objects
from outer space.
[Kean] The story broke
in the Chicago Tribune in January,
so it was about two months later.
[Olbermann] Chicago Tribune, interviewing
several people anonymously, including maintenance workers,
baggage handlers and pilots
who each and all describe a dark gray saucer-like object
that hovered low over Concourse
before shooting off into the sky.
[Kean] Most UFO sightings
are fairly quick. Something flies by, right?
This was at least five minutes
in the middle of the afternoon rush hour in the daylight.
Pilots on the ground in their planes
who were just taxiing in or out
were looking, leaning out and looking at it.
There was a lot of radio chatter about it.
One of the managers from United Airlines
called the tower and said,
"Do you see that there's this disc-shaped object up there?"
And it's a very interesting conversation.
At one point, he says,
"No, I don't see it, and if I did,
I wouldn't report it anyway."
The woman who called up called a second time,
and she had to explain, "I'm not high.
I haven't been drinking.
There's this disc-shaped object. It's actually there."
But that conversation is very interesting
because it shows the attitude of this.
I mean, this was a safety hazard.
The explanation that was provided by the FAA...
First, they said it was a-a weather phenomenon.
By "a weather phenomenon," they were probably referring
to what's called a hole punch cloud.
And this is a picture of a hole punch cloud.
Ice crystals that fall from one cloud
to a cloud below, like a cloud bank below.
And then they melt a hole in the ice.
I mean, it's an absurd notion to think
that these aviation people
would look up at something like that and think that was
a metallic disc hovering
over the airport, you know?
The pilots from United Airlines,
the employees, they were...
clear that they were not supposed to talk about this.
Literally not one witness
to this event would put their name on the record.
Not one.
[newsman] The FAA is still
pinning this to some kind of weather phenomenon,
that some lights from the airport in the overcast sky
somehow got together and created this image,
but, uh, weather experts,
uh, astronomy experts, others that I've talked to
said that that's, uh, that's bunk.
[Kean] Somebody has an obligation
within the government. If it's not the FAA,
it's got to be someone else to deal with that,
to protect the-the aircraft that are around it,
to find out what it is.
[Olbermann] It seems to me that the likeliest conclusion
here is that
the aliens have landed many years ago in this cou...
in this country, in this world with one goal in mind--
to create conspiracy theories
and then just sit back and enjoy them.
♪ whimsical music ♪
[Kean] The acronym "UFO"
has come to be a real loaded term.
Unidentified flying object.
That's all it means.
The question "Do you believe in UFOs?"
really doesn't make any sense.
There's no issue of belief there.
The question is maybe, "What do you believe they are?"
But whether they exist
is not even a matter of belief. It's a fact.
[newsman] On the record,
the Arizona National Guard, who would know
about military exercises and stuff,
says it has no explanation at all for those lights.
Doesn't look like anything that I've seen.
Yeah. I haven't seen anything either.
-Strange. -Not picking anything up
-in the weather center either. -Yeah.
They say the craft was moving
very slowly and without any sound at all.
The people that saw that believe
what they saw was an alien spacecraft.
Now Governor Symington himself has launched
an official investigation.
The video that I saw a quick glimpse of was intriguing.
Um, so I'm going to order a, uh, full,
you know, investigation of this through DPS.
We're going to make all the necessary inquiries,
and we're going to get to the bottom of it.
We're going to find out if was a UFO.
Uh, you can sit down. Gonna put a little bit of the deshine
-on you if that's okay. -Okey doke.
[James Heiler] You know, one of the things
that you notice about media is they have some favorite foods.
One of those is sex scandal, and another one is UFOs.
We had phone calls
coming in from all over the world.
[man] It was huge across,
and there were bright lights.
[man 2] It was just so bright.
I, uh, saw five bright luminous objects,
a straight line heading south.
[Heiler] We realized we weren't really gonna be able
to satisfy people's longings for answers.
We didn't really hold adequate means of investigating it
as a state government apparat.
[Barwood] Yeah. We had so many people
that we sat with and talked to, and they all described
exactly the same thing.
That I talked to? And, well...
I talked... It was around 700, you know, total.
She had interviewed 700 people?
That, that sounds like an overwhelming task.
Did you remember her investigating it?
No, I'm not sure how she would have the wherewithal...
How would she have the wherewithal?
...to interview 700 people, or
what, if any, real value you would...
you would glean from that.
That's probably what he would have to say.
What else is he going to say?
Is he going to say, "Oh, yeah, I should have looked into it"?
-When he didn't. -He really couldn't step up.
Probably, he feels bad that she did and was taking the grief.
[newsman] The ridicule started almost immediately.
This cartoon was published by The Arizona Republic.
[Barwood] They saw how much
ridicule I got.
[laughing] Maybe that's why they didn't want to do that.
[Siavelis] And so, therefore,
the best thing to do is to put it to bed.
[horns honking]
And how do you put things to bed?
You ridicule anybody that's involved
so you try to kill the story.
That's what happened to so-called "Phoenix Lights."
[newsman] That's right.
Now the governor is holding a press conference
at this very moment.
In fact, at the state capitol.
Reportedly, he says that the DPS has already
turned up startling new information about this case.
[Barwood] The governor had called
an emergency news conference.
The only time you do an emergency news conference is
when it's a threat to life, health and all that stuff.
Yes, definitely. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, you'd have to remind me. I'm...
It's been so long ago.
You have the advantage of having
the record in front of you. I don't...
I just remember kind of the highlights
and the impetus for the, um...
the what I call "the alien caper," and, uh--
Sure.
I issued a call for an investigation
by the Arizona Department of Public Safety,
and I'm happy to report we already are getting results.
Let me just say that I believe it's a serious offense
for anyone-- human, space alien, or otherwise--
to engage in mysterious activity in our nighttime skies.
[Barwood] I thought,
"Oh, good, he's going to investigate."
We may all look upon the guilty party.
[laughter]
Hey, don't get him too close to me, please. It's...
-[laughter] -You know. [clears throat]
[laughter]
This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious.
[laughter]
[applause]
[laughter]
-[applause] -Thank you. Thank you.
[Barwood] Everybody was so angry.
And-and I said, "I don't know what to tell you.
You know, it's...
it's over."
-Mocked everybody. -Mocked us, yeah.
You got to understand... you got to understand that
when it's your own state's governor
that's coming out and with a fake alien on the podium.
-Yeah. -That totally discredits any...
See, even he didn't want to admit it right away.
That totally discredits anything
-that anybody saw. -Yeah.
We weren't trying to ridicule people's concerns,
but there was that element of building hysteria,
which really needed to be dealt with.
I was 12, so imagine that age, too, is, "You...
-Mm-hmm. -I saw... I saw a UFO, guys."
I mean, that's a different conversation
when you're that age.
All right, our own governor,
who many people supported at the time...
-Mm-hmm. -...is going out
and mocking what I saw.
I kept to myself. I-I didn't... [stammers]
Absolutely a stigma and I don't know why.
I don't know why it's there.
But we're gonna not talk about this right now,
because clearly it's just a joke to everybody.
I'm sorry if it offended some people,
but it was a lot of fun.
There you go. This is your trophy,
-and you give it to Joe, okay? -Okay.
I'll see you all later. Thank you very much.
[laughter]
[Kean] When you're in a position of authority,
and you can't explain something
to your constituents, it could panic people,
it could frighten people.
So one of the tools in the toolbox, when
they're forced to talk about it, is to ridicule it.
It's a way of minimizing its significance, you know?
"These are little green men. Ha, ha, ha."
That's the problem with the term "UFO."
It's sort of
been contaminated.
[newsman] If the Air Force
had nothing to hide,
Frank Mannor, the Michigan farmer,
who had brought in the first report,
was caught in the middle.
He was mad.
Are you sorry now that you did tell people what you saw?
Yes, I am. I am... I'm sorry because it...
Not that it's not the truth, but it's just the idea,
the-the reaction of the people.
They think you're a... a nut.
Tell you the truth. That's just what they figure you are.
[Kean] Once Project Blue Book
shut down in 1970, the whole thing kind of went quiet.
[military official] The conclusions
of Project Blue Book were: no UFO reported
has ever given any indication
of threat to our national security.
There is no evidence submitted
that sightings represent technological developments
beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge, and
there is no evidence indicating
that these unidentified objects are extraterrestrial.
[Greenewald] That report that they produced was known
infamously as the Condon Report.
Now why is this important?
Because they literally shot down the topic of UFOs,
said it was a waste of time and money,
and said, "Shut the investigations down.
It's useless."
[Kean] Think about the opportunities that were lost
for taking it seriously and for investigating it.
[newswoman] The Air Force says
it doesn't investigate unknown objects anymore.
NORAD told UPN News 13 that it only tracks objects
that originate in our atmosphere.
The CIA, some other intelligence agency,
well, if they're investigating,
we don't know about it, and chances are, we never will.
[Greenewald] The U.S. government always maintained to me
that they had no interest in UFOs.
But back in 2008,
I had discovered a United States Air Force manual.
And there was a whole section
about unidentified flying objects.
On not only how to report 'em, but where to report 'em to,
and the two places that are not subject
to the Freedom of Information Act--
one being the White House,
the second being the NORAD installation--
is on the receiving end of whatever these UFO reports are.
And I tried to access the documents,
but of course they said, "Nope, sorry.
We're not subject to the Freedom of Information Act."
How convenient that they send the UFO records
to that one place.
[newsman] Believers have always maintained
the government knows more than it claims about UFOs
and doesn't always tell the truth.
The latest government admissions concede both points
and do little, if anything, to settle the UFO debate.
[Barwood] About the Phoenix Lights,
I'm extremely disappointed that nobody's taken this on.
I think that the governor was interested in all of it.
When you look at the press conference that he did,
you can see he was truly uncomfortable, and
I think it was because he was not comfortable with that.
I think he really did want to look into it.
There is no way
that he orchestrated that.
And I said, "There's something else going on here."
My speculation is, a deal had to be made.
♪ dramatic music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
[newsman] We are now less than 12 hours away
from Governor Symington's criminal trial.
The governor is on trial for 22 fraud counts.
20 of those counts involve falsifying financial statements
to federally insured banks.
[Heiler] The trial was the culmination
of seven and a half years of investigation
of Fife Symington's private life before becoming governor.
Then it morphed into a criminal investigation.
[Barwood] He had been in court.
People that were in court, watching this whole thing, said,
he was called out to go into a private meeting.
And then, the next thing is
this emergency press conference.
So somebody else said,
in my opinion, okay,
not-not fact but my opinion,
"If you make this a joke, we'll dismiss the charges."
Yeah, I don't... I wonder where that came from.
Well, if I understand your question correctly,
you're, you're suggesting some people believe
that we somehow did this
in league with government authorities...
-Oh. -to mock the idea
of those lights being extraterrestrial.
No, there was no conspiracy behind it at all. No.
We-we weren't trying to cover up anything.
We were... we were just trying to make light of it.
♪ ominous music ♪
[Barwood] He was serious
that he was going to do an investigation,
and then it turned into a joke.
Somebody somewhere has got to be afraid of the truth coming out.
That's it.
And why?
[Heiler] Neither then or now do I have any
plausible explanation more than
anyone might speculate about as to what those lights were.
I felt then as I do now that what
really caused a lot of the "hullabaloo,"
to use the governor's word, and the speculation is that
the only information provided
by the authorities was implausible
to anybody who saw the-the lights.
So I think government makes things worse
when it operates that way.
And why they do that, I don't know.
I don't know if it's just bureaucratic obtuseness
or if it's some part of a-a larger attempt
to deflect attention from things that are meant to remain secret.
My best guess at it was it was some sort
of high-altitude stealth technology
that we didn't want known.
♪♪♪♪♪
You and I will always disagree on this,
but there's no way that that was a B-2...
a B-2 bomber or a stealth bomber.
This object was big and close.
And you think it was a single object for sure?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
[Watson] There's no way
that something like that's man-made that we know of.
[woman] Right. That's right.
Now I don't know if it could have been
extraterrestrial, whatever.
Regardless, it is what it is.
We saw what we saw. It was giant, quiet.
Moved extremely fast, and was amazing.
♪ dramatic music ♪
♪♪♪♪♪
[Pasulka] There's a creation of discourse
around these events.
Pop culture today is gonna represent
these "UFO events," for want of a better word,
as something quite different
than how the people experience them.
[man] Wow. Look at this here. These three things.
-[man 2] Really? -[woman] What is it?
[Pasulka] Remember, I'm a historian of Catholicism.
So, in the 1980s,
Pope John Paul II wrote a very interesting teaching
on the angels
to his bishops. It's called
"The Catechesis on the Angels."
And he basically says, these were invisible beings,
and people don't believe in them anymore,
and they even denied them during Jesus's time, Jesus's era.
He said, "But they exist." And he said,
"And they intervene in human history."
He was kind of reinscribing this idea
that what we see today is not what we think we're seeing.
♪♪♪♪♪
Our perceptions see objects, but what are really there?
♪♪♪♪♪
We're coming upon a new way
of understanding the transcendent,
and it's no longer an angel.
♪♪♪♪♪
[Harris] What would it mean for our humanity
for us to discover that, in fact,
there are other sentient beings
that are capable of traveling here?
♪♪♪♪♪
The things that we think are important
in the midst of the ongoing pandemic
or the uprising for racial justice...
-[explosive pops] -[crowd yelling]
[Harris] In the specter of being visited
by those from another planet, our own divisions would
suddenly feel so much smaller.
Would feel less insurmountable, one would hope.
I don't know what that would look like,
but I do know that it would
be the biggest change that we ever witnessed, any of us,
in the way that human beings saw themselves
and saw each other.
[Kevin Day] I was a top ten graduate,
a senior air controller,
had 18 years sea time.
We were gonna do a big, huge air defense exercise.
A mock air battle for-for training purposes.
This encounter profoundly affected me.
[Day] Oh, yeah. The entire crew
was talking about it. You bet.
-[man] Oh, my gosh, dude. -[man 2] Wow.
[Day] They certainly didn't behave
like anything from this Earth.
I'm pretty convinced they had to be quantum-based.
If that's true, then what are the possibilities?
It's a pretty short list, isn't it?
Uh, aliens.
♪ dramatic music ♪