Why Alien Sightings Double In Nuclear Zones | UFO Documentary | Alien Disclosure Files | S1E01

(keyboard types) - [Narrator] Are we alone? For millennia as we gazed at the stars, this question has kept humanity awake at night. Stories of unexplained phenomenon and strange visitors have persisted throughout history. With the advent of modern technology, these stories have not only multiplied, but have become harder to dismiss. Recently, the US government revealed that they had been collecting information on unidentified aerial phenomena for decades, and trained pilots have been going publi

c with photographic and video evidence of their encounters. But what is behind these interstellar visits? What do they want? A new energy source? Our bountiful supplies of natural resources? Or could they be after something far more sinister? These are "The Alien Disclosure Files." - [Orson Welles] We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man. - [Narrator] The 1938 broadcast of "War of the Worlds" incited panic am

ong many listeners, who believed planet Earth was under attack from Martian invaders. By then, Hollywood was already well into the Martian business. The alien craze had begun, and the American public couldn't get enough. Television blasted information out into space with every broadcast, their signals reaching across the solar system at the speed of light. Did humans inadvertently leave a trail of radio wave breadcrumbs for other civilizations to find, leading directly back to our planet? - It's

conceivable that the aliens are trying to figure out the jokes on "I Love Lucy." It's possible. - [Narrator] Or were aliens interested in a different human invention? UFO sightings increased rapidly after we dropped the first nuclear bomb, and UFOs were twice as likely to appear in or around cities with nuclear power plants. - The fact that our nuclear fleet was based at the Roswell Army Airfield at the time, and that we had this activity around that facility, kind of points to an interest in o

ur nuclear arsenal. - [Narrator] The government couldn't remain silent any longer. - I'm here to discuss the so-called flying saucers. The 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. - [Narrator] First, it was the short-lived Project Sign, which quickly became Project Grudge. - Project Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book were e

fforts by the government, usually the Air Force, to try and determine what all these sightings that were being reported might be. Are they aircraft? Are they something they have to worry about? They wanted to know what's in our airspace. - [Narrator] Project Blue Book was born in 1952, the same year as a massive public sighting over the nation's capital. - So one of the most famous UFO incidents was in 1952 when UFOs flew over the Capitol. It's never been explained, it's just something that's go

ne down in history. - [Narrator] Project Blue Book faded away into history. Despite this, UFO sightings increased, especially among the military. In 1973, two men fishing in Pascagoula, Mississippi reported being abducted by three aliens with crab like pincers. In 1982, in the wealthy area of Hudson Valley, New York, there were reports of a set of lights flying almost silently in a V formation. - [Pilot] Thank God. I don't know. - [Narrator] Hundreds reported similar sightings in the area over t

he next few years. - A lot of people report having some kind of encounter with non-human intelligence, and they're not just in the United States or in Europe. These things happen all over the globe. - [Narrator] Then on November 14th, 2004, a UFO was spotted with the sophisticated tracking sensors on board a military fighter plane in San Diego. - [Pilot] There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the ASA. My gosh. - [Narrator] It was undeniable, seen by the most trusted eyes in the sky, US Navy figh

ter pilots. Footage showed the fighter jet followed a Tic-Tac like aircraft for five minutes. (pilot speaks indistinctly) - [Pilot] It's rotated. - [Narrator] Commander Dave Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich watched the object drop from 80,000 feet to 20,000 in a couple of seconds. It lowered itself to the ocean below and hovered. The water appeared to boil underneath it, and in the blink of an eye, it sped off. - We noticed something in the water that seemed to be disturbing the wat

er or making it churn. We were able to then visually pick up what we described as a Tic-Tac, 'cause that's what it looked like, this white oblong shaped object that was moving very fast. - Pilots are trained to identify objects near them. Some of them did step forward, and then you know, they're very respected individuals. - [Narrator] Adding further legitimacy to the sighting is the fact that Lieutenant Commander Dietrich is a skeptic. - I don't identify as a UFO person. I hope I'm not the the

UFO Tic-Tac person for the rest of my life. This is not what I envisioned for myself. - [Narrator] There was nothing that identified it as technology that humans are capable of. - And it appeared to respond in a way that we didn't recognize. And it surprised us, because it didn't appear to have any visible flight control surfaces or means of propulsion. - Even the people that have encountered these will say, "Well, these are not doing anything "that we have been able to accomplish in our flight

physics. "Therefore, we don't have the technology." Nobody has the technology. - [Narrator] This event changed the way that governments approached UAPs, finally forcing the government to reveal some unbelievable secrets to the public for the first time. (mysterious music) - [Pilot] They're all going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots to the west. - [Narrator] As a result of the encounter by US Navy pilots in 2004, a secret unpublicized program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identificat

ion Program, or AAITP, was created. - AAITP is the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It came out of Bigelow Aerospace, and was eventually brought into the Department of Defense and run by a man named Lue Elizondo, who is the person who went public in 2017 - AAITP, this is an effort by the government to, at least some parts of the government, to try and figure out are there interesting phenomena in our skies that we're missing? - The amount of information that these guys have and

the stuff that the public has never seen is enough to convince Lue Elizondo to take a whole lot of risk and go public with his story. But he's kind of in an interesting position. He knows a lot of things, but he also is completely forbidden from talking about 'em. - [Narrator] Over the course of five years, millions of dollars of taxpayer money went into the AAITP until it was stopped in 2012 abruptly. In 2014 and 2015, more UAP incidents were recorded on both military instruments and sensors. T

he sightings by Fravor, Dietrich, and Graves were a game changer for the rest of the US Navy pilots, as well. - In the Navy, there is now a formal procedure for filing reports that didn't exist years ago. So I think in the future, we're likely to hear about many more reports, and the removal of the stigma from any such discussion was extremely important, because again, if you ridicule any such report, you will not get any report. - [Narrator] In the half century since the US Congress had address

ed the public about UFOs, the term UFO got a makeover. They are now referred to as UAPs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. On May 17th, 2022, the chances of finding other life in our universe took a giant leap forward, thanks to the US House Select Committee. - More than 50 years ago, the US government ended Project Blue Book, an effort to catalog and understand sightings of objects in the air that could not otherwise be explained. - UAP reports have been around for decades, and yet we haven't h

ad an orderly way for them to be reported. It's the job of those we entrust with our national security to investigate and to report back. - [Narrator] Followers of UFO culture were vindicated by the acknowledgement of the existence of other life in the universe by a government, and then another bombshell. - In 2017, we learned for the first time that the Department of Defense had quietly restarted a similar organization tracking what we now call Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. Last year,

Congress rewrote the charter for that organization, now called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG. AOIMSG is not starting from scratch. This is the third version of this task force in DoD and civil society groups like Mutual UFO Network. Mr. Corbell and others have been collecting data on this issue for years. - I'm Ron James. I'm the media relations director for MUFON. MUFON stands for the Mutual UFO Network. It's the largest and oldest organizat

ion of its kind for the betterment of humanity. - [Narrator] MUFON was instrumental in the US Select Committee hearing. They compiled compelling evidence from their database of cell phone photos from their 6,000 members and physical materials from UFO encounters reported by civilians. - One of the things that we were instrumental in was working with Mike Gallagher and Congressman Andre Carson to help get these hearings that recently happened about the UAP topic to happen in front of the public.

We were behind the scenes on that, and we got Andre Carson to actually go ahead and convene these hearings. It was something that hadn't happened in over 50 years, and it was a milestone, and MUFON was partially responsible for getting that done. - Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way. For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. - [Narrator] The hearings had it all, bipa

rtisan agreement, a promise of more revelations to come, and an indication that the US government had multiple agencies tracking UAP activity. But the most important point made at the historic meeting was they are real. (mysterious music) - [Pilot] We just had something go right over the top of us that, I hate to say this, looked like a long cylindrical object. - The pilots on Flight 2292 on route to Phoenix, Arizona from Cincinnati, Ohio report an unidentified fast object flying over them while

they were over New Mexico. - [Pilot] It almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing moving really fast. Have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us. (dramatic music) - [Responder] That is some weird (bleep). - [Narrator] Pilots with thousands of hours of flight experience are now repeatedly reporting UAP events across our planet. Even with the US government's recent efforts to address UAPs, some military pilots often wait until retirement to go public with

what they saw in the skies. And if it's hard for military pilots, who have an outlet to report their encounters, what about commercial and cargo pilots? - I'm Christiaan. I'm a Dutch airline pilot with nine and a half thousand hours of flight time. Currently captain on the Boeing 747 flying worldwide. In the last 20 years, I happened to document or capture with my camera one or two events that I haven't been able to explain. It was only after I saw the interviews of Commander David Fravor, Lieut

enant Ryan Graves, and later on the interviews with Mr. Lue Elizondo that I started to realize that the stuff that I had seen and even once documented was really something extraordinary and couldn't be explained just even by naval pilots. - [Narrator] Christiaan Van Heijst captured several UAPs from his 747 cockpit. - We were flying Boeing 737 from the southern part of Greece back to Amsterdam. It was a beautiful clear day, and all of a sudden I see from my perspective on the left hand side a re

ally bright lights falling vertically, actually moving vertically, from really high up in the atmosphere, quickly disappearing into the sea. - [Narrator] It wasn't the first time he saw this same unidentified aerial phenomenon. - We were flying with this F-50 between two layers of clouds at night, roughly at 20,000 feet, and all of a sudden we saw a really bright object or bright lights moving through the upper cloud layer, down towards the ground, and it basically disappeared into the lower clo

ud layer, which it was illuminated quickly as the light fell through, and it disappeared from sight. - [Narrator] On January 23rd, 2010, Christiaan was flying from Amsterdam to Malaga, Spain when he watched a UAP ahead of his plane for an hour. These photos are of what Christian described as "a massive unidentified aircraft." - So this was about one hour flights, and the object was a complete solid. It was a massive object, it was really far ahead of us. - [Narrator] The rapid movement of the ob

ject Christiaan describes is nearly identical to the one Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich and Commander David Fravor saw in 2004. The other similarity was the way the object seemed to interact with the ocean. - So a lot of these are submersible unidentified objects. We've seen evidence that these things can traverse the ocean, they can go into the air, and they can go into space, all with one craft. So when we talk about the oceans, it provides a couple of different things. One is it's a compl

etely protected environment. We've only explored a small percentage of our oceans. We don't know what's down there. It's away from sensors, and could be hidden from us for all of our recorded history. - [Narrator] During the Earth's formation, there was no water. Water is believed to be an alien element with origins from other worlds. Could aliens be visiting Earth for the energy properties of its vast oceans? - One of the better theories for where Earth got its water was that, you know, it wasn

't water that was endemic to the Earth. It wasn't, the Earth didn't start out with a lot of water, but the water was brought by comets that crashed into the Earth, you know, a long time ago, 4 billion years ago, and they brought the ocean. So when you have a a glass of water, you're drinking comet juice. - If there is a device that needs fuel, then going into the ocean makes sense, because in the air doesn't offer, you know, much fuel, but if you can take advantage of the oceans, and obviously y

ou don't want to collide with the ground, because you will crash. So in the oceans you can, in principle, scoop fuel or nutrients, use whatever you find there. Yeah, so I would say it does make sense, but you need to have technologies that allow that, and you know, we just don't know. And so again, we should be guided by evidence. If we see objects getting into the ocean, coming out again, you know, we have to figure out what they're doing there. (mysterious music) - [Narrator] Energy, manmade e

nergy. Starting in the atomic era of the late 1940s, there have been thousands of reported sightings of UAPs over American nuclear test facilities. An FBI documented case from the '50s now declassified mentions a flying saucer more than 50 feet in diameter over Los Alamos Nuclear Lab. - The age of the modern UAP phenomenon, some say, started back when we made nuclear breakthroughs. - [Narrator] In the '60s, UAPs were spotted over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, a known storage facility for

nuclear missiles. At the same time as the sighting, the base suddenly lost their ability to launch missiles. - Colonel Bob Salas went public a few years back with a story about UFOs or UAPs that actually were able to disable nuclear weapons right here in the United States. These lights appeared over the base, and completely shut down the entire system. - [Narrator] Reports became so frequent, personnel were assigned to actively watch for them. - Congress has said something about the fact that, y

ou know, these programs to monitor what are now called UAPs used to be called UFOs, but Unidentified Aerial Phenomena now. If you're in the military, you need to know what's up there in the skies, right? I mean, just strictly from a defense point of view. And it could be aliens, but it could also be Chinese drones or who knows what. So you need to know that sort of thing, and so, you know, programs that do investigate these things are obviously worthwhile. But could they also uncover, you know,

alien craft? - [Narrator] In 2023, the United States Air Force shot down four spy balloons near Montana, believed to be from China, but they referred to them as UAPs. - [Observer] Ha ha! - We heard about these balloons that were shot down, okay? I think that is a dramatic development in the sense that now the government has attention, you know, publicly acknowledged that it pays enhanced attention to objects in the sky. Okay, that's extremely important, because in the past there were, there was

a stigma on the subject. (thunder rumbles) - [Narrator] Energy and water. These are where the two most common UFO occurrences take place. The 2004 event and others involving fighter pilots occur mostly over the ocean. - There's 95% of the oceans that are unexplored, and we don't know what's down there, but we are beginning to get evidence that there is some kind of technological activity that we can't identify happening in and around the oceans. - [Narrator] Whether it's for the untapped energy

stored in our oceans, our nuclear proliferation, or something else entirely, it stands to reason that we might be attracting extraterrestrial attention. After all, the universe is big, and there's no reason to believe we're the only ones in it. - You know, surveys have shown that, you know, half the American population believes that the aliens are not only out there, but a fair fraction of them believe that they're here. People will say, "Well, do you think there really is some life out there, "

alien life?" And the answer is, yeah, I think there is. - [Narrator] But if humanity mostly agrees on the existence of aliens, opinions of what to do when we make contact with them is divided. Some believe our options may be limited. - Think about the Native Americans living in the Caribbean in 1492, right? They didn't have a plan for what they were gonna do when these three Spanish ships came across the horizon. I'm not sure that a plan actually helps much, because whatever you plan for, it won

't be like that. You won't have a common language. If they're hostile, well, the fact that they've come here means whatever they wanna do, they can do when it comes to military stuff. - [Narrator] As terrifying as this prospect sounds, others hold a more optimistic view of our interstellar guests. - For all those people that are worried about threat from another civilization, I would say don't worry about it. I don't think there is any risk, existential risk, for us. On the other hand, there is

a great opportunity for us to learn from them. (mysterious music) (light music) (typewriter clicks)