.
The 20th century.
Mankind leaves his home planet for the first time.
.
In the middle of the 19th century,
the French author Jules Verne
had described a fictional journey to the moon.
Amazingly, he had calculated the velocity necessary
to overcome the gravitational field of the Earth.
.
Many of his contemporaries,
world-famous astronomers like the Frenchman Flammarion,
believe that there could be life on the moon.
.
Once in a while, black clouds could be seen on its surface.
Were they dark swans of moon insects,
or was it the smoke from the chimneys of lunar factories?
.
Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin
from the Intercontinental Radio News.
Toronto, Canada.
Professor Morse of Macmillan University
reports observing a total of three explosions
on the planet Mars between the hours of...
By observing the surface of Mars,
darker and lighter zones were noted
where these oceans and continents.
.
Now, nearer home,
comes a special bulletin from Trenton, New Jersey.
It is reported that at 8.50 p.m.
a huge flaming object,
believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm.
On Govanciaparelli's Maps of Mars,
long canals divided the planet.
The astronomer, Percival Lowell,
called them purpose-built irrigation systems.
We have dispatched a special mobile unit to the scene,
and we'll have our commentator, Carl Phillips,
give you a word picture of the scene
as soon as he can reach there from Princeton.
In the meantime, we take you to the...
Where are these canals constructed
by a superior civilization?
..
These sorts of fantastic imaginings
suddenly become a nightmare
for American radio audiences.
On Halloween in New York,
the awesome Wales adaptation of the play
The War of the Worlds is broadcast.
The night's events were subsequently
reconstructed in the movie
The Night That Panicked America.
..
Invincible beings from Mars
have landed in Grover's Mill, New Jersey,
and moved to conquer New York.
Hundreds of thousands of radio listeners
believe that the play is a true report
of a real invasion.
They flee in wild panic
out of the cities to hide in nearby hills.
Do you understand?
We're helpless against them. Listen.
Of this night, the 31st of October,
New York tumbled into fear and panic.
..
This is the end of the world.
..
Was this only a fantastic invention?
Or was it the foreshadowing
of the fast-approaching Second World War?
..
Was it the early anticipation
of the space travel that was to become
commonplace in a few decades?
..
Of nuclear weapons?
..
Of a century within which the impossible
has become the mundane?
But all too soon, the Second World War
becomes an ugly reality,
and public attention is distracted
from continuing mysterious events.
On the night of the 25th of February, 1942,
strange red lights appear in the sky
over Los Angeles.
The military believe them to be a Japanese attack.
On the morning of February 16 and 414,
these unidentified flying objects
are attacked by the United States Army Air Force.
No bombs are dropped, but three civilians
are killed by U.S. Air Force fire,
and some houses are seriously damaged.
Three people die of heart attacks.
According to thousands of witnesses,
one of the flying objects remained completely
stationary throughout the shooting.
It was inconceivable that it could have survived
the many direct hits it must have received.
The attack hit flew slowly away and disappeared.
Publicly, the military authorities
dismissed the entire incident as a false alarm
brought on by the heightened anxiety
of America's new war status.
However, the following day,
the responsible commander,
General George C. Marshall,
sent a secret memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
in which he declared his suspicions
that the night's events had been hostile activity
on the part of enemy agents.
Autumn, 1944.
The war rages on all fronts.
Rookie U.S. pilots returning from missions over Germany
report remarkable incidents.
They tell of mysterious fireballs
appearing from nowhere
and closely following their airplanes.
They are unable to shake off their pursuers
in spite of some breakneck maneuvering.
These fireballs came to be known as Foo Fighters,
or, because of the German's famous love of sauerkraut,
Krautballs.
Were these Hitler's new secret weapons?
German pilots reported similar things,
but they ascribed the strange weapons to their allies.
There is no known case in which the Foo Fighters
presented any danger,
and as a result, they were officially considered
to be weapons of psychological warfare.
But this phenomenon was not confined to Europe.
Flight staff reported similar incidents
in the Pacific theater during World War II,
and sightings were also made during later conflicts
in Korea and Vietnam.
1945.
The Second World War comes to an end,
and at the scenes of conflict,
the rubble is cleared aside.
In Sweden, a country that had remained untouched by the war,
the first reports of unidentified flying objects
appear in 1946.
They were called ghost rockets.
Sometimes they silently raced through the sky.
Sometimes they moved quite slowly.
The American ambassador, shocked,
reported to Washington.
Recently, the number of reports about such objects
has increased hugely.
A member of the embassy staff saw one on Tuesday afternoon.
The Swedes maintained that they have no knowledge
about the origin of these flying objects.
Actually, the Swedes assumed that the objects
were German V-2 rockets that had been captured by Stalin.
They demanded urgent help from the USA and Great Britain.
Already, more than 2,000 sightings had been reported
from Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
More were coming in from Portugal, Morocco, Italy,
Greece, and India.
These territories encompassed an area
that far exceeded the maximum range
of the Russian rockets of that time,
and as a result, the riddle the sightings posed
remained unsolved.
Mount Rainier is to be found 12,000 feet
above sea level in Washington,
the most northwesterly state in the Union.
It is the 24th of July, 1947,
a glorious day with excellent visibility.
For many journalists and researchers,
this is the dawn of a new era in the study of UFOs.
Kenneth Arnold is a businessman and an experienced pilot
who has clocked up more than 4,000 hours flying time.
As a volunteer pilot in the Idaho Search and Rescue Service,
he is on a mission in his own private plane.
He approaches the mountain and searches the glacier
for a lost airplane.
A horribly bright light flashed.
It lit up the cockpit and the entire sky.
It was like an explosion,
and this was on a bright afternoon,
and then it flashed a second time,
and I looked to my left, and there was a row
of very strange flying objects.
They flew in chaotic patterns,
and at more than 1,200 miles an hour,
twice as fast as any airplane.
Arnold assumed that Russian secret weapons
had entered American airspace.
He reported his observations to the flight control in Yakima,
where he stopped to refuel.
His news spread quickly, and at his next landing,
a bunch of excited news reporters were waiting for him.
Arnold described the strange flight movements of the object
as like a saucer skimming over water.
The phrase was coined, flying saucers.
Kenneth Arnold's observation was by no means unique.
According to a study by Ted Blucher,
853 UFOs were sighted by more than 3,200 witnesses
in June and July 1947,
and that was over the USA alone.
The military was concerned.
Were Russian secret weapons really menacing America?
Arminously, statements from Canadian witnesses
seemed to confirm a flight path over the North Pole.
The then commander of the Air Materiel Command
of the US Army Air Force, General Nathan F. Twining,
drew on the 23rd of September
the following initial conclusions.
That the reported phenomena were real,
that the flying saucers were the product
of a highly developed technology,
and that they should be investigated secretly
and with high priority.
The FBI was supposed to cooperate in the investigations,
but refused to do so because it was not willing,
according to official sources,
to investigate flying toilet lids, hubcaps and old hats.
Practical jokers had repeatedly used these kind of objects
to create hoax photos of UFOs,
and these had been greedily snapped up by the gullible media.
Despite all of this, on the 22nd of January 1948,
Project Sign started its work.
The phenomena presented themselves to the Air Force investigators
in a confusing variety of forms.
Disks, cylinders, sickles and fiery balls
all carried out unbelievable flight maneuvers.
Some flew on their own, others in formation.
Mostly they moved in complete silence,
but sometimes they vanished in a cracking explosion.
Were the Soviets the origin of this technology?
This suspicion soon became less credible
when the CIA reported from Moscow
that Russia too had started secret investigations into UFOs.
As a result, the US Air Force took on an astronomer
as a scientific advisor under contract.
Amongst those in the know, two groups formed.
Both schools of thought acknowledged
that the phenomena were real.
One group advanced no explanation.
The other reported to Washington
that flying saucers could be of interplanetary origin
and that it would be advisable to put the military on alert.
This report ended up on the desk of General Hoyt Vandenberg,
the chief of staff of the Air Force.
Without final and conclusive evidence,
Vandenberg was not willing to act for fear of a general panic.
In the meantime, new reports arrived.
The DC-3 pilots of Eastern Airlines,
Clarence S. Charles and John B. Whitted,
saw in the summer of 1948 this object.
A similar flying object was observed during a clear night
by the world-famous astronomer Clyde Tombaugh,
who was the discoverer of Pluto.
Tombaugh described the object glowing in a bluish light
with a bright light shining out of six geometrically arranged windows.
Tombaugh was absolutely astonished.
This was an entirely new phenomenon to him.
That was clearly not a mirage, nor an aeroplane,
nor meeches, nor northern lights.
Witnesses who were trained to observe,
like pilots or astronomers,
made extremely credible witnesses.
They had nothing to gain by reporting extraordinary sightings.
Indeed, they put their reputations at risk.
Other unimpeachable witnesses included the scientists
who were working on the continuing development of atom bombs.
They were amazed by green fireballs that appeared at the end of 1948
over their extremely secret research base in New Mexico.
The astronomer, Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the University of New Mexico,
was consulted in order to clarify
whether these could be a rare kind of meecher.
On the 12th of December, 1948,
La Paz observed a similar object with his own eyes.
He was convinced and concluded that these are no meeches.
He took the view that they were rockets that emitted a white-green light
and subsequently destroyed themselves.
A scientist from the secret Los Alamos base
declared that they looked like Hitler's B-2 rockets.
Where did these flying objects come from?
Were they spaceships of extraterrestrial civilisations?
Memories of Orson Well's radio play were fresh in the mud
of journalists and scientists when they discussed two pressing questions.
First, were the atom bomb explosions that had occurred on Earth
visible from Mars?
And secondly, had those explosions alarmed beings on Mars?
Other scientists thought that visitors from space were extremely unlikely
because of the seemingly insoluble problems of interplanetary,
let alone interstellar, space travel.
The members of SINE demanded financial help for their research,
but the military had developed a new agenda.
The authorities changed Project SINE into Project GRUDGE.
Researchers were told to find natural explanations
for as many sightings as possible.
Officially, UFOs could not exist.
The scientific adviser to the US Army Air Force was an astronomer
at the Ohio State University, J. Alan Hynek.
He described the situation like this.
They were told not to excite the public.
Don't rock the boat.
They were told not to excite the public.
Don't rock the boat.
And I saw it in my own eyes,
that whenever a case happened that they could explain,
which was quite a few, they made point of that
and let that out to the media.
Things that, the cases that were very difficult to explain,
they would jump the handsprings to keep the media away from them.
For there, they had a job to do,
to, whether rightfully or wrongly,
to keep the public from getting excited.
Mockery now entered the reports about UFO sightings,
even though Air Force explanations often sounded highly questionable.
August 1950, Great Falls, Montana,
at the feet of the Rocky Mountains.
Club manager Nick Mariana and his secretary
inspect the sports ground for a forthcoming home game.
Suddenly, he sees two strange flying objects passing by
and he grabs his 16mm camera.
He shows the film to a few groups of interested civilians
and eventually someone proposes that the film should be investigated by the Air Force.
The official report, released to the media,
said that the objects were fighters glittering in the sunlight.
According to statements made by Mariana after the investigation,
the first 35 frames of the film,
on which the mysterious objects could be seen most clearly, were missing.
This film was investigated repeatedly in the following years,
including at the University of Colorado,
which, between 1966 and 1968, did in-depth UFO investigations.
With the help of a powerful computer,
the university concluded that the film showed
two disc-shaped objects with highly reflecting metallic surface
circa two miles in distance from the camera.
The officer on deck of the US Marine, Delbert C. Newhouse,
recorded this film on the 2nd of July, 1952.
After examination by the Air Force, again a telling sequence was missing.
The official explanation? Possibly a flock of birds.
The US Marine Corps' own photo-development laboratory contradicted this.
Birds or airplanes would be recognisable as such in the analysis.
The objects on the film are self-illuminated
and are obviously under intelligent control, origin unknown.
Confronted with this, the Air Force stressed again in a later investigation
that the images were probably a flock of flying ducks.
In the meantime, the Air Force had founded in March 1952
a new UFO investigation programme.
Project Blue Book was supposed to continue to portray all UFO sightings as false.
Sometimes this task was nearly impossible.
Saturday, 19th July, 1952.
The summer heat lies heavy over the nation's capital, Washington DC.
Late in the evening, at around 2340 hours,
air traffic control at Washington National Airport
reports that seven unidentified flying objects
have entered into the restricted airspace
that made up the security zone between the capital and the White House.
Numerous motorists report them as strange lights that move up and down
and sometimes accelerate to fantastic velocities.
Fighter aircraft are requested, but hours pass
and it is not until around 3am that the expected fighter planes arrive.
In the same moment, the mysterious flying objects vanish from the sky.
When the jets have to return to base for refuelling,
the scare starts again.
Only when morning breaks does tranquillity return.
The event makes headlines from coast to coast,
but Washington has little time to calm the nation down.
On the following Saturday, the same strange performance is repeated.
This time, the unknown flying objects appear at around 2100 hours
and soon after, a fighter squadron is over the capital.
One of the pilots, William Patterson, encounters the strange objects.
When he begins to approach the intruders,
the terrifying blue-white lights start to form a ring around him.
Helpless and frightened, the intruders try to escape
Helpless and frightened, he asks ground control what he should do,
but the radar observer, as powerless as the pilot himself, remains silent.
Lieutenant Patterson experiences some horrible minutes
until finally the UFOs leave him in peace.
The drama over Washington lasts until dawn, when again the sky is clear.
Under intense media pressure, the boss of the Air Force Secret Service,
General Samford, declares on the following Tuesday...
We can say that the recent sightings are in no way connected
with any secret development by any agency of the United States.
A little later, the Air Force declares the whole incident was only a mirage.
Here, in sunny California, at the end of the 40s,
the novel is created with the title Pioneer of Space.
It is the report of a fantastic journey to the Moon, Venus and Mars,
a science fiction story, but the author, George Adamski,
cannot find a publisher.
So he continues to earn his living in a restaurant on the southern slopes
of Palomar, on which the famous observatory is situated.
Adamski is often called by his friends, professori.
He prefers to describe himself as a philosopher, student,
teacher and source of researcher, though without academic rank.
1953, the breakthrough comes.
Together with the British author, Desmond Leslie,
he publishes the book Flying Saucers Are Landing.
Adamski describes in his book his first encounter
with an extraterrestrial being.
He says,
I am a human being.
In the book, his first encounter with an extraterrestrial being
in the Californian desert on the 20th of November, 1953.
Orthon, Adamski's name for his new friend,
tells him that all the planets in our solar system are inhabited.
The book becomes a bestseller, and George Adamski becomes
Professor Adamski of Mount Palomar, an era that he gracefully accepts.
In his second book, Inside of the Spaceship, two years later,
he describes his journeys with his planetarian friend
to the moon and to Venus, his fame was sealed.
As an ambassador of his brothers from space, he tells mankind,
yes, the moon is inhabited, as I have seen myself.
Around its equator is a beautiful area where plants, trees,
and animals flourish and humans live comfortably.
About Venus, he reported,
I saw magnificent mountains.
Some mountain tips were covered in snow, others were bare and rocky,
not very different from on Earth.
Others were covered by thick forests, and I saw waters
streaming down the mountain walls in streams and waterfalls.
In the country, I saw horses and cows, both of them a little smaller
than the ones on Earth, but very similar.
I was shown several towns on Venus, large and small ones.
All the time, I had the feeling that I'd been carried off
into a wonderful fairy tale country.
But Adamski maintained that the main reason for the visit to Earth
of extraterrestrials was the danger that mankind had created for itself
through its abuse of atomic forces.
Our brothers from space have come to rescue us from ourselves.
If necessary, all people who want to be rescued will be invited
to board the spaceships which will be provided.
Adamski's credibility grows with ever more photos of flying saucers.
His faithful group of supporters soon reach into the top echelons of society.
An invitation from the Dutch Queen Juliana follows a private audience
with Pope John XXIII.
In 1965, shortly before his death, Adamski produces the crowning climax
of his UFO picture documentation.
In front of the house of Madeline Rodifers in Silver Spring, Maryland,
this film of a Venusian scout ship was shot.
His planetarian friends had told him in advance that he should prepare
a loaded film camera for the 26th of February
and that he could film a spaceship from close up.
George Adamski is considered by his supporters as the pioneer
of a new form of cosmic thinking, the space brother philosophy.
I think it did me great justice.
For Orfeo Angelucci, a worker at the Lockheed Aircraft Factory
in Burbank, California, this philosophy is central.
On the 23rd of May, 1952, he observes close to him
two spherical objects of about one meter diameter
and a voice speaks to him.
Don't be afraid, Orfeo, we are your friends.
What starts for Orfeo Angelucci as a mystical experience
of almost biblical proportions becomes an illumination
of his spirit in the flying saucer.
During a space flight, he receives from Neptune,
his new space friend, warnings for the population of Earth.
If the humans don't change, they will get problems in 1986.
In his vision, Angelucci encounters Jesus Christ,
who informs him that we are surrounded on Earth
by extraterrestrials who live unrecognisably amongst us.
They are here to bring us into a new era.
The messengers of this philosophy are called contactors.
Wide, groups of these are formed.
For them, it is the true religion.
UFOs are steered by superior beings who are here to help humans.
Uriel will preside over a new age of cosmic wisdom and harmony,
a far cry from the 1950s,
a shadow of nuclear destruction hovered over the land.
Now, through prayer, it is time to charge the spiritual battery.
Blessed are they who work for peace.
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
Are these new philosophies an expression of the fear of an atomic future?
Does the denial of UFO phenomena by the authorities
lead to even greater speculation and fantasy?
In any case, it was standard policy for the military and governments
of all countries to gloss over sightings.
From this point on, all important reports of UFOs were officially discredited
and blamed on crackpot spiritualism or plain insanity.
Thus, the Soviet newspaper Pravda declared on the 9th of January, 1961,
civilians of the Soviet Union who claim they have observed
the so-called flying saucers are either mentally ill or lying.
In Michigan, USA, on the 21st of March, 1966,
the town of Hillsdale experiences the climax of a three-week-long UFO sensation.
Six police cars hunt unidentified flying objects.
Amongst the numerous people who observe the spectacle from close quarters
is the leader of the local civilian defense who is also dean of Hillsdale College.
Finally, the Air Force investigator, J. Allen Hynek,
arrives at the scene of the event, but by then the show is over.
Nevertheless, under media pressure, Hynek gives a press conference
during which he declares that the mysterious lights were probably marsh gas.
Civilians and press alike feel cheated by this explanation,
and America jokes about the marsh gas state of Michigan.
Allen Hynek's explanation had consequences.
In the U.S. Congress, the leader of the opposition and later president,
Gerald Ford, demanded an official hearing into the subject of UFOs.
Ford said, I do not agree at all that these reports should be so easily explained away.
The citizens of America have a right to a more complete explanation
than is currently given by the Air Force.
The Air Force, under pressure, commissioned the University of Colorado
to investigate UFO phenomena.
There, professor of physics, Edward Condon, led the project.
When he started his work in October 1966, he explained to the New York Times
that it was the aim of his study to show that UFOs were hallucinations.
Out of more than 10,000 reports of sightings,
Condon's staff investigated only a few.
For around a third of these, they could not find a satisfactory explanation.
Despite this, Condon recommended at the beginning of 1969
not to proceed with further investigations
on the grounds that they were scientifically worthless.
In spite of all the contradictions in the Condon report,
the military used it as an excuse to end Project Blue Book in December 1969.
But many private UFO researchers adapted Condon's opinion.
One such is the electrical engineer and scientific journalist Philip Klass.
Well, fortunately, about 98% of all UFO reports are legitimate.
These come from intelligent, sensible people who've seen something,
usually in the night sky, that they can't identify.
They don't know how to go about investigating it,
just as if I feel a pain in my stomach, I don't know how to diagnose it.
And some legitimate cases take many days or weeks of effort
before you come up with a prosaic explanation.
About 2% are either intentional hoaxes or self-delusion.
And fortunately, most of the hoaxers in the UFO field
are not as clever or as ingenious.
They don't work at it. It's sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing.
UFO photos are very easy to hoax, particularly still photos.
And I think we may see some of these.
We have some photographs here.
I mean, it's just like a trash can lid and they throw it through space
and they take a shot at it.
Now, what is this we're looking at?
Now, here's one that occurred in the early 1950s.
McMinnville, Oregon, one of two photos taken by farmer Paul Trent and his wife.
They claimed it was a giant spacecraft that they photographed in the evening.
It turns out that from the shadows on the wall, you can tell it was morning, not evening.
It's a hoax.
The Condon Commission of the University of Colorado investigated both photos
and came to completely different conclusions.
It is an extraordinary flying object.
At a distance from the camera of about 1.3 kilometers,
it is silver and metallic, disc-shaped, and the diameter is more than 30 meters.
Newer computer picture analyses have shown that the shadow on the wall
cannot come from the morning sun, as Philip Klass said,
but rather from a shining cloud that is illuminated by the evening sun.
The astronomer, J. Allen Hynek, was for more than 20 years
the scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force.
In numerous cases, he had given natural explanations for UFO sightings,
including the Marsh Gas Affair, which he later described
as the lowest point of his UFO research.
Now that the Air Force had declared its UFO investigations ended,
he turned against the methods of his former employers.
In 1973, he founds the Center for UFO Studies,
an organization where scientists and academics from different disciplines
try to understand UFO phenomena.
At the Center for UFO Studies, we have a computerized data bank
that now has more than 75,000 UFO reports on it,
and what is even more interesting, they come from, by latest count,
from 133 countries.
When you start reading off the countries,
it sounds like a roll call at the United Nations.
And even more interesting, and they just number themselves,
don't mean so much.
But the thing that finally convinced me that we were not dealing with nonsense
is basically the caliber of the witnesses.
Many of the reports are made by highly responsible people,
impeccable integrity, people in technical training,
air traffic controllers and military and commercial pilots.
Finally got to the point, it took me quite some time,
I finally got to the point, however, where I simply said,
I can't continue to call these people deluded or nuts,
they are seeing something, something is real.
Heineck's experience over many years spent studying UFOs
was used by Steven Spielberg in his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
According to Heineck, the preeminent researcher,
sightings of UFOs from long distances were of little meaning.
From these reports, hardly any worthwhile knowledge of strange flying objects
or their pilots could be gained.
Very important, however, were the close encounters
between the UFOs and their pilots.
Very important, however, were the close encounters of the first to the fourth kinds.
A close encounter of the first kind is an observation from no more than 150 meters.
During dusk on the 11th of November 1987,
the head of a construction firm, one Ed Walters,
photographed this series of five pictures of an unidentified flying object,
diameter about 4.2 meters, distance to the camera about 40 meters.
This was a close encounter of the first kind.
This was the first of a wave of new sightings
that excited the 60,000 inhabitants of Gulf Breeze on the coast of Florida.
That wave started in November 1987
and ended in the early summer of the following year.
After some articles appeared in the local press,
the first UFO researchers arrived.
Suspicious, they undertook tests on Ed Walters and his pictures.
Was Walters a gifted faker of photos?
Never had so many details been seen on so many UFO pictures.
This was suspicious, but on the other hand,
there were now two more pictures from different witnesses.
A flap is what UFO researchers call a wave of sightings.
In the course of this one, more than 100 people from Gulf Breeze and its environs
claim to have seen unidentified flying objects.
One of them is the local deputy sheriff, Mike DeLay,
who together with a coast guard observed a UFO.
Initially when I arrived here, I had a Florida Marine Patrol officer with me
and we were dispatched to an unidentified flying object,
so we were in the area looking.
Ed Walters took one photo after another.
At the end of the UFO wave, there were about 40 pictures.
Amongst these were many that could not possibly have been manipulated
or set up with models.
Amongst the journalists on the local paper,
the credibility of Ed Walters was beyond doubt.
However, the skeptical UFO researchers wanted harder evidence.
They provided him with a specially sealed camera
with security devices designed to exclude fraud.
Ed Walters took with this camera a photograph of this flying object.
It was less than 20 metres away from the camera and only one metre long.
UFO researchers called these objects scouts.
Ed Walters explains his unusual ability to secure UFO photographs
as a physical condition.
Usually he feels a buzzing in his head just before a UFO appears.
This way he managed to take many pictures,
some with a specially built stereo camera system
that better determines the distance and size of the UFO.
Since 1972, Dr Bruce McAbee has worked in the optical research department
of the US government.
He was involved in the STI or strategic defence initiative programme.
For over a year he investigated Ed Walters' photographs
with all the resources of modern science.
A long-term sceptic, he was forced to the conclusion
that there were no signs of faking or manipulation
and that the photographs are real.
He has to set up each one and stage it...
A spherical spot of burnt grass, 3.6 metres in diameter.
That's nearly as big as the UFO that Ed Walters photographed
from a short distance.
The location of the soil at the University of Florida
could not reveal any natural causes.
Are these the landing places of mysterious visitors?
Again and again these strange soil phenomena appear around UFO sightings.
Most of the time these are like engulfed breeze,
circular areas of burnt soil or squashed vegetation.
Frequently the earth has become sterile and water resistant.
In 83 you can see around a roughly 8 foot spot.
You can see a spot that goes off on an angle
which is 12 to 18 inches wide, straight down through the yard
all depressed and where it stops it's perfectly cut off.
This spot was created overnight according to Harry Tomey
who shows his photographs.
Definitely it had some type of radioactivity to it
because it ruined my Geiger counter.
The fact that I could never zero it at this property.
So there was some type of activity that we couldn't identify
that had taken place here.
For an entire winter no snow would settle on this area.
Sometimes pressure marks can be found that look like the tracks
that would have been left by the landing legs of flying objects
that are extremely heavy.
For UFO researchers these are the signs of a close encounter of the second kind.
These occur when a UFO sighting is accompanied by some measurable physical phenomenon
that can be objectively observed such as interference in TV reception,
electricity blackouts, interrupted electrical systems or immobilized vehicles.
In 1982, Steven Spielberg made his blockbuster ET the extraterrestrial.
It was the story of a close encounter of the third kind
which is defined as an observation during which the crew within a UFO
or in its close surroundings can be seen.
After the terror of the first encounter ET becomes a child's playmate.
ET?
ET.
Ed Walters and his wife Frances reported from Gulf Breeze
of a close encounter of the third kind.
On the night of December the 2nd, 1987, Ed Walters takes a picture of this UFO.
About an hour later, the Walters are already in bed.
Their dog begins barking.
To look for the cause, Ed opens the shutters and is terrified.
Large black slanted eyes stare at him.
Frances also sees the alien which she had thought at first
was Ed's reflection in the window.
Before the Walters recover from their shock,
the alien turns around and vanishes into the night.
From many different countries, similar reports of close encounters
of the third kind are received.
In the south of France, farmer Maurice Massé discovered on the morning
of the 1st of July, 1965, an oval object in his lavender field.
Next to the object, two human-like creatures as tall as 8-year-old children
investigated his plants.
When he came closer, Massé was paralysed with a pencil-shaped stick.
After this, both of the aliens re-entered their machine and flew noiselessly away.
On the landing place, no plant grew until the soil was ploughed.
Unbelievable as these reports may sound, very often such an encounter
of the third kind seems to precede a close encounter of the fourth kind.
It was thus for Ed Walters in Gulf Breeze.
On May 1st, 1988, he took here at the shore with his stereo camera
a picture of this UFO.
Suddenly, the flying object appears above him.
About an hour later, Ed awakes some meters from his camera.
He has no memory of the time that has elapsed.
The first known case of this kind happened on the evening of September 19th, 1961.
A couple, Betty and Barney Hill, are on a journey back from a short holiday in Canada.
On Route 3 towards Boston, they observe a strongly luminous object
of an uncommon shape.
Later, the Hills cannot account for two hours of their journey.
A year later, panic attacks and nightmares drive Barney Hill to a psychiatrist.
The therapist tries to revive the Hills lost memory.
Under hypnosis, Barney Hill relives his kidnapping in a UFO.
In its drama, The Intruders, the television company CBS
has included a scene with a close encounter of the fourth kind.
What seems at first glance to be a science fiction drama
is in reality a description of the bizarre experiences of people kidnapped by aliens.
From most cases, a pattern emerges.
Usually, victims are first abducted while they are still children.
Very often, several members of one family are concerned.
Descriptions are mainly of medical examinations
and surgical procedures that leave visible scars.
From men, sperm samples are taken, from women, egg cells.
Stimulated by his own UFO sighting,
Bud Hopkins, the renowned New York painter and sculptor,
has investigated many such kidnappings since 1974.
His book, Intruders, provided the material for the 1992 film of the same name.
In fact, Hopkins has investigated over 500 cases so far
and he has published data on many of them.
Owing to his participation in the research,
psychologists and psychiatrists have become aware of the phenomenon.
Has frightening reality overtaken the imagination of the science fiction filmmakers?
More recently, eminent scientists have begun working seriously on these kidnappings.
For example, the professor of psychiatry at Harvard is Dr. John Mack.
Initially, people just dismissed it out of hand.
They said, this is nonsense.
You know, somebody's fooling you or it's got to be something else.
People come up with what they already know.
It's probably some form of sexual abuse or childhood trauma
that's been relived in this other form.
And, you know, I listened seriously to this
and then I looked at the cases carefully and it wasn't like that.
Some people may have childhood traumas and sexual abuse,
but it doesn't account for that.
It is an alien phenomenon, meaning outside our knowledge.
It is foreign to us.
And, therefore, the only way to respond to this is with some degree of nervousness
and with the sense that this is tentatively now, at least, unknowable, really.
In the meantime, the UFO phenomenon seems to sweep worldwide even faster.
Latest events, like the one on the German East Coast over Griefswald
on the 24th of August, 1990, don't leave any doubts as to the reality of these mysterious appearances.
But the scientific investigations are only the beginning.
One thing seems to be clear.
The results will change our perceptions of the world.
There is only one more story to tell
that makes the link from the beginning of the new age of UFO observations in 1947 up until today.
We begin with Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States.
In 1976, during his election campaign, he declared to the press,
I don't laugh anymore about people who claim to have seen UFOs because I have seen one myself.
In his statement, President Carter described a luminous object
that came closer until it became as big as the full moon.
Carter is a nuclear physicist, and there are no doubts about his observation.
In the light of this experience, he promised voters that he would ensure that,
during his presidency, all UFO files would be released to the public.
Indeed, under his government in 1979, the Freedom of Information Act was passed.
Documents from the U.S. government secret archives have to be given to citizens,
providing the information released does not endanger national security.
Up until today, more than 1,400 secret documents have come into the public domain.
Blackened passages, which have been censored from these for security reasons,
show that the material available to the public even now is only the tip of the iceberg.
One document, of July 10, 1947, is related to the refusal of the FBI to take part in Project Sign
because it would not investigate flying toilet lids and old hats, as it described UFO sightings.
In a handwritten note, FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover added onto the internal memorandum
that he would be in favor of taking part in some investigations
in the hope that the FBI would receive access to recovered disks.
He wrote, for example, in the above case, the Army had made it their own,
and they didn't even allow us a short investigation.
Shortly after, on the 4th of September, 1947,
the FBI stated that a lieutenant could not attend a routine intelligence meeting
because two of his men had died suddenly after the investigation of a flying disk.
Did the FBI in the meantime receive access to a recovered UFO?
According to this report,
a story as incredible as any science fiction drama has been proved real.
New Mexico, July 2, 1947.
A week after Kenneth Arnold's famous UFO sighting,
in a remote area 75 miles northwest of Roswell,
a strange object crashes.
The farmer, one William Brazel, discovers the wreck the next morning.
Brazel is undecided about what to do.
He doesn't own a telephone,
and it is several days before news of his find spreads to the Army Air Force base in Roswell.
At this time, the only functioning nuclear squadron in the world is based in Roswell.
Major Jesse Marcell, a physicist,
and the first military investigator at the scene of the crash, remembers.
I said, uh, it looks like balsa wood.
It would seem lighter than balsa wood.
So I got my cigarette lighter, and I said, I want to see if this stuff would burn.
It didn't.
The base commander says that there's a lot of smoke.
It didn't.
After the recovery, Colonel William Blanchard, the commander of the air base,
called his press officer, Walter Hort.
Hort recalled.
I got a telephone call from then Colonel Blanchard,
the base commander, telling me that they had in their possession
what he believed was a flying disc, flying saucer.
At the same time, Major Marcell was flying the wreckage
to the 8th Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth
and the attention of the 8th Air Force commander, General Roger Ramey.
That, say some investigators, is where the cover-up began.
Less than 24 hours after the flying saucer press release, it was retracted,
the Air Force saying it was only a weather balloon,
General Ramey and a colonel showing reporters a crashed weather balloon to prove it.
But Jess Marcell went to his grave disputing the weather balloon story.
At the same time, Ramey passed the mysterious material
to the Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio,
the most secret research and development center in the USA.
The Roswell incident was investigated several times
and its details confirmed by more than 100 witnesses.
Despite this, it would have remained gossip if FBI Director Hoover
had not insistently demanded a few days later to have access to the recovered disc.
Up until today, the alleged recovery of four corpses,
the pilots of the UFO, remains unconfirmed.
The secret documents released up to this date yield no clear, plain evidence.
The latex dolls of a Canadian producer are in any case
not the pilots of the mysterious crash object.
The circle closes itself with a man named Robert Lazar.
On November the 6th, 1989, he declares on a TV show in Las Vegas
that he worked as a physicist in the highly secret test and development center in Nevada,
officially called Area 51, unofficially known as Dreamland.
He describes the mysterious research projects like this.
They are actively and have in their possession alien spacecraft and they are actively undergoing analysis and flying them.
They set up and produce their own gravitational field.
Just as the Earth holds all matter down, they produce that same field but out of phase and it repels itself.
The effects that can cause the way in which everything operates is by all intents and purposes magic.
I mean it is so far beyond our level of technology.
Why did Lazar go public with this revelation?
According to his statement, the qualification to work in Area 51 is first of all top secret clearance,
especially for those involved in these pioneering projects, the best brains in the scientific world are needed.
The producer of the world famous Learjet, John Lear, secretly received test flight dates from Bob Lazar,
who wanted to draw attention to events in Area 51.
Lear makes arrangements to film a flight.
But Lazar is discovered, scared by the FBI and receiving death threats, he decides to go public with his knowledge.
Bob Lazar's story has made many distinguished scientists pause for thought,
for their advanced theoretical concepts for futuristic flight engines are in perfect agreement
with Lazar's description of the propulsion systems that already exist in the UFOs of Area 51.
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