The Phenomenon

Everything that we know and have learned about mankind

and its place in the universe suggests

that we are a part of the norm. We are not the exception.

Within the last month, a planet was identified that has water

a mere 110 light years away from Earth.

We need to begin to prepare to accept and understand

that we are not alone in the universe,

have not been at all throughout this time.

The same year that life-giving water

was discovered on a distant planet,

the US Navy made a startling announcement.

Images captured by its pilots

of objects exhibiting a vastly superior technology were authentic.

We can start to finally, at long last, after all these decades,

begin to answer these questions

about the origin of these vehicles, where they're from,

how they're made, how they function and why they're here.

People need to know there is something else out there.

To fully understand,

we must examine a body of evidence long suppressed.

A parallel history to the one we think we know,

stretching back at least 70 years.

On a clear, sunny day in 1955,

William Coleman, a decorated World War II pilot,

took off from Miami on a routine flight to deliver a B-25 bomber

to an airbase in Mississippi.

My co-pilot said, "Look at that bright spot up there."

I think it's just a reflection of the sun,

a craze probably, in the windshield.

He and his passengers, two aviation engineers,

realized it was a strange object

making a rapid descent right across their flight path.

My God, look at that thing.

And I opened it up to max continuous power,

we're clipping right along at over 300 miles an hour,

right on the treetops...

I'm right on the tail of this thing.

But as we got close,I said, "It doesn't have a tail.

Doesn't have any wings."

Look at the shadow on the ground. The shadow was perfectly round.

That's not an airplane.

And I said, "I'm overtaking it."So I said, "Hang on."

So I make a hard turn.

There it was, a disc going across the field with two big swirls.

What I didn't see was any exhaust, propulsion.

No rivet lines, a rounded edge about that size where it all came together.

A true flying saucer.

Then it seemed to vanish,

until they spotted it thousands of feet above them.

Bright yellow, sun-ish looking object.

It went like a bat out of hell.

After they landed, the stunned witnesses were separately debriefed

by Project Blue Book, the Air Force investigation of the UFO phenomena.

Ironically, a little over a decade later,

Col. William T. Coleman became public spokesman for Project Blue Book.

Probably what we saw may have been from somewhere else.

Look, the Air Forces are very deadly,

being when it comes to intercepting an unknown.

If it proves hostile,

we're gonna shoot it down.

Other than that, no problem.

In the late 1940s,

America seemed impregnable to military threat.

It had just emerged from World War II masters of the air,

the only nuclear-armed superpower in the world.

But in 1947, something appeared in the sky,

and everything changed.

Every newscaster and every newspaper across the nation

has made headlines out of it.

And this afternoon we are honored indeed

to have here in our studio this man Kenneth Arnold,

who we believe may be able to give us a firsthand account,

and give you the same, on what happened.

I kept looking for their tails. They didn't have any tail.

I thought, "Well, maybe something's wrong in my eyes."

They seemed to flip and flash in the sun, just like a mirror.

I'd be glad to confirm it with my hands on a Bible because I did see it,

and whether it has anything to do with our army or our intelligence,

or whether it has to do with some foreign country, I don't know.

Arnold had sent this sketch to the Air Force following his citing.

He was later invited to California's Hamilton Field Army Air Base,

where he was handed what he was told

were authentic photos of a similar craft.

"At the request of Lt. Col. Donald Springer,

commanding officer of the Fourth Air Force Intelligence,

I was given the above prints a4s a courtesy

for the assistance he had given military intelligence."

The photo was taken in Arizona

just two weeks after his own encounter.

They said that my father, his sighting of flying saucers,

got more attentionthan the ending of World War II.

He was besieged by newspaper reporters from all over the world.

Mm-hm.

Reporters interviewed United Airlines pilot E.J. Smith

who also flew the northwest route.

He joked Arnold had likely been fooled by a cockpit reflection,

until he, too, became a witness a few weeks later.

He and his stunned crew had watched

as nine discs maneuvered in formation for a full 45minutes.

And from there it just exploded.

The first few days in July of 1947

had a very large level of exciting activity.

These unknown objects barnstormed across the country,

sometimes in fleet-like formations

that looked like a deliberate show of force.

Hundreds of people told Air Force investigators

they'd seen the saucers with their own eyes.

Bright, shiny things that whooshed through the air at incredible speeds.

Even airline pilots, who seldom indulge in fantasy, reported sighting them.

And Air Force fliers told of chasing them,

or something, all over the sky.

The Air Force call them "unidentified flying objects,"

but people went right on calling them saucers and seeing them.

There was something in the air.

But a then-secret memorandum by the same general

suggested that the highest military echelons

thought there was plenty to worry about.

The memo states, "The phenomenon reported is something real

and not visionary or fictitious."

It described metallic discs circular in shape, with domes on top,

often traveling in formations of three to nine craft.

It also listed aerodynamic capabilities

with disturbing implications for national defense.

Extreme rates of climb, dazzling maneuverability,

and a superior capacity for evasive action.

A lot of people expected that the United States government

was about to confirm, "Okay, they're ours.

This is an exciting new technological advance that we were testing,

and now it's time to tell people about it."

Occasionally, eyewitness testimony included

compelling photographic evidence.

Evelyn Trent was feeding her rabbits when she spotted

a metallic disc-shaped object floating over their farm.

She alerted her husband, Paul, to grab his camera,

and he managed to get two shots.

They described the object slowly hovering before it abruptly sped away.

Life magazine picked up the story,

and the McMinnville UFO became a global sensation.

There's no chance of this being weather.

There's no chance of this being a star or an aircraft.

This is either some kind of structured object that we don't know what it is,

or it's a hoax.

Paul Trent and his wife, they were honest, simple, hardworking people

who never made a dime off the photographs that they took.

They never tried to make a dime off of it.

It just come up like that and tipped and just...

I mean, it really went. It went fast.

I've never seen anything go so fast in my life as that thing went. Yeah.

In 1951, future astronaut Gordon Cooper, while training in Germany,

chased a large formation with his squadron of fighter jets.

And they would come over and do the same maneuvers that we make

except every once in a while one of them goes, zip!

And you just can't do that in a fighter.

There are two saucers, one inverted over the other.

They seemed to be made of some kind of polished metal.

When I first saw the objects, they were almost overhead.

By the time we had the camera ready to go,

they had moved to a considerably greater distance.

But the unknowns showed no signs of hostility.

An otherworldly power on its own mysterious mission.

Commercial pilots William Nash and William Fortenberry,

former Navy aviators with thousands of hours of flight experience,

saw eight huge discs fly in a stack formation

over Chesapeake Bay, Virginia,

just a stone's throw from Washington, DC.

When they came out over the blackness of the bay,

they were distinct six red coins.

When they got closer, we could see that you're...

It looked like you were looking down into it, like a hot coal.

They reported the glowing red objects had approached them head-on

at a speed they estimated at 6,000 to 12,000 miles per hour.

It came in like this and went out like this.

There would be no way of making a complete reversal or a 90-degree turn

12,000 miles an hour or greater

without making the occupants juice on the wall.

That really shook us up. Looking at the thing shook us up.

Nothing could have gotten to that degree

of scientific progress

without some of the intermediate stuff having become public knowledge.

You just knew that they were not from this planet.

The next weekend, the unthinkable happened.

The nation's capital was invaded from the skies.

Seven unknown blips suddenly appeared on radar at Washington National Airport.

Air-traffic controllers at both Andrews and Bolling Air Force bases

confirmed the objects as they danced through restricted airspace.

The Capitol Building.

The White House where the president lived,

these were some of the most important places in the country

when it comes to national defense.

And there were UFOs violating this airspace,

and there was nothing thatthe Air Force could do about it.

F-94 interceptors were scrambled.

Pentagon press liaison Al Chop was in the radar room that night.

We could see the planes coming in on this radar scope

and the minute we saw the beginning of these guys,

the UFOs disappeared. They just left.

Obviously, whatever these things were had intelligence,

enough to get out of the area when we had an intercept going in.

But the next weekend, it began again.

Pilot William Patterson pushed his Starfire jet to maximum speed