Latest / Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries / Roswell & Area 51: The Full History of America’s Biggest UFO Mystery | History for Sleep with Rain Sounds

Transcript

Roswell & Area 51: The Full History of America’s Biggest UFO Mystery | History for Sleep with Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Sleepless History!
• 0:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to the desert.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to the high dry country of Southeastern New Mexico in the summer of 1947.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: When a rancher found a field of strange debris and an army airfield briefly told the world it had recovered a flying
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: to a dry lakebed ringed by mountains, where the United States government built a base, it would not admit existed for more than half a century.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: These two places, Roswell and Area 51, have become fused together in the popular imagination.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: People speak of them almost as one story, one secret.
• 0:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: but they are really two different stories separated by distance and by time and the most interesting thing about them may be how they came to be woven together.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is a story about a wreck in the desert and a press release that was walked back within a day.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other is a story about real secrets, real aircraft and real deception, hidden in plain sight beneath an empty sky.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will move slowly tonight.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will begin with the summer of 1947 when Americans first began looking up and seeing sources.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will go to the ranch and the press release and the retraction.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will follow the long quiet that came after, and the remarkable revival that began in the late 1970s.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will go to groom Lake and meet the airplanes that flew there.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we will end with the whistleblowers, the lawsuits, the declassified files, and the congressional hearings of recent years, and ask where the whole question stands now.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we start, if you enjoy these long journeys through history,
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Please consider subscribing and leaving a comment to let me know where you are listening from and what topics you would like to hear next.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It genuinely helps this small independent show find new listeners.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, before we begin tonight's story, I wanted to say that sleepless history is independent with no network behind it, just careful research and quiet evenings.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine,
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can support the show on Patreon, linked in the show notes, early access, add free listening and your favourite episodes with different or no background audio on waiting for you.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: We still have a few spaces open for our founding members and I'd love to see you there.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: If that's not for you right now, that's okay, simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1, Summer of 1947 and the Source Away.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the afternoon of Tuesday, June 24, 1947, a businessman named Kenneth Arnold was flying his small private airplane over the cascade mountains of Washington State.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Arnold was 32 years old.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: He sold an installed fire control equipment, the kind of systems that suppress fires in buildings, and he flew himself from one sales call to the next across the vast distances of the American Northwest.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was an experienced mountain pilot, comfortable in rough air, and familiar with the high peaks.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: That day he had taken a small detour.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Marine Corps transport plane had gone missing in the mountain in some months earlier, and a reward of $5,000 had been offered to anyone who found the wreckage.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Arnold, with a little time on his hands, decided to look around the slopes of Mount Rainier on his way to Yakama.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a clear day, smooth and bright.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: At around 3 in the afternoon,
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Arnold saw a flash of light like sunlight reflecting off a mirror.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then he saw another.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Looking
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: toward Mount Rainyman, he saw a line of objects moving rapidly across the sky.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He counted nine of them.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were flying in a loose diagonal chain, he said later.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost like the tail of a kite and they seemed to dip and flip as they flew, catching the sun on their surfaces and flashing brightly before going dark again.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: What struck Arnold most was their speed.
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: he timed them.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He watched as they passed between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, two landmarks who separation he knew roughly, and he used the clock on his instrument panel to estimate how long they took to cross.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: When he did the arithmetic afterward, the result astonished him.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: By his reckoning, the objects had been travelling at well over a thousand miles per hour.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1947, no human aircraft had yet broken the sound barrier in level fluid.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: That milestone would not come until October of that year, when Chuck Yeager flew the rocket powered bell zone over the Mahave Desert, Arnold landed at Yakima and told people what he had seen.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then he flew on to Pendleton, Oregon, where word of his story had already travelled ahead
• 5:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: A reporter for the local newspaper, the East Oregonian, came out to talk to him.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Arnold described the objects carefully.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were flat, he said, and thin, and they moved in an odd, erratic way.
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: In one of the most consequential descriptions in the history of popular culture, he said that they flew away a saucer might move if you skipped it across the water.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He meant the motion.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was describing the way they bounced and fluttered through the air.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In his own sketches, the objects he drew were not round at all, but shaped something like crescents or boomerangs, flat at the front, and curving to a point at the back.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the phrase that went out over the news wires was something else.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within a day or two, headline writers across the country had condensed his account into two words that would never leave the language, flying sources.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing to think about what America was like in that summer.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Second World War had ended less than two years earlier.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The country had emerged from it as the most powerful nation on Earth, but also as a nation that had seen what new technology could do.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Radar had won battles, rockets had fallen on London, and in August of 1945, two atomic bombs had destroyed two Japanese cities, each in a single flash.
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: People understood, in a way they had not performed, that the sky could hold sudden and
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, a new rivalry was taking shape.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union and broken down almost as soon as the guns fell silent.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: In March of 1947,
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Harry Truman had announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine, committing the United States to resisting communist expansion.
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word called war was just entering common use.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Americans knew that the Soviets had captured German rocket science.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: and German rocket designs.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just as the Americans have, nobody knew exactly what the other side might be building, and they had already been strange stories.
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the war, Allied Air crews flying over Germany in the Pacific had reported mysterious balls of light and seen to pace their planes at night.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: They called them Vufaites, borrowing a nonsense
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1946, people across Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia had reported hundreds of fast moving objects in a scum, some trailing fire, which the press called Ghost Rockers.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Swedish military investigators concluded that most of them were meteors or misidentified ordinary things.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: but a small number remained unexplained, and many suspected Soviet tests of capture-driven missiles.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when Kenneth Arnold's story went out across the wires in late June of 1947, it fell onto very dry ground, and like a spark in dry grass, it spread.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within days, people all across the United States were reporting sources.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: They saw them over farms and over cities at dawn and at dusk.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They saw single objects and formations, silver discs and glowing lights.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: At first, the reports came mostly from the Pacific Northwest near where Arne had his sighted.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then they began coming in from Idaho, from Utah, from Colorado, from the Midwest, from the east coast.
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the first week of July reports were arriving from nearly every state to the youth, and from Canada as well, on the evening of July 4th, the crew of the United Airlines.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: leaving Boise Eider, reported seeing a group of disc-shaped objects silhouetted against the sunset, flying alongside them for several minutes before disappearing.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the witnesses were professional airline pilots, the report carried particular waves.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The captain, a man named Emil Smith, had been openly skeptical of the source of stories before that evening.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: After what he was not, that 4th of July weekend marked the peak of the way.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a holiday, and people were outdoors, picnic, and watching fireworks, and looking up at the sky.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: source of stories were in every newspaper.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: On some days, dozens of separate sightings were reported in a single state.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: A researcher named Ted Blotcher, who decades later went back through newspapers from that summer and catalogued every report he could find, counted more than
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The great majority clustered in those few weeks around the beginning of July, it is hard to overstate how quickly the idea took hold.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: In August of that year, the Gallup polling organisation asked Americans whether they had heard of flying sources.
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roughly nine out of ten said they had.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was a level of awareness that many serious political issues of the day could not manage.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within about six weeks, two words coined by a headline writer in rural Oregon had become one of the most widely known phrases in the country.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they also have fun.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers ran cartoons of housewives throwing crockery.
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Radio comedians made sorts of joars.
• 11:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some businesses and newspapers announced catch rewards for anyone who could produce an actual flying disk.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: One off a promised $1,000, another promised more.
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: These rewards were partly publicity stunts, but they were real.
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they meant that anyone who found something strange lying on the ground had a reason to come forward and say so.
• 12:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Keep that in mind, because it will matter very soon.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were also hoaxes and some of them were elaborate.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: In late June, two men in Tacoma, Washington named Harold Darwin and Fred Chrisman
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that one of them had showered their boat with a slag-like debris that killed a dog and injured a boy.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story drew the attention of Kenneth Arnold himself, who was asked by a magazine editor to investigate.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It also drew two army air forces intelligence officers, Lieutenant Frank Brown and Captain William Dates, who flew up from California to interview them there.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: On their way back, on August 1st, their bomber caught fire and crashed, and both officers were killed on them.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Investigators later concluded
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that the slag was ordinary industrial debris, but the deaths gave the whole episode a dark and lasting aura, and it became one of the first great legends of the sorcerage.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the military was paying attention, though at first with some uncertainty about what exactly to pay attention to.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Army Air Forces, which, in September of that year, would become the independent United States Air Force, began quietly collecting reports.
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Officers at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: were asked to look into the phenomenon.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1947, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, who led that command, wrote a memo, concluding that the reports describe something real and not imaginary, and recommending a formal study.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: That memo would lead at the end of the year.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: to the creation of the Air Force's first official investigation of unidentified flying objects called Project Sign.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: What did the military actually think the sources were?
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The honest answer is that opinions varied.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some officers suspect in secret American projects that they themselves had not been told about.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some feared Soviet aircraft or missiles based on captured German designs.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: A few, even then, wondered about something more exotic, and many, perhaps most, assumed that the reports were a mixture of misidentified ordinary objects, imagination, and the contagious excitement of a summer when everyone was looking up.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That last explanation is not as dismissive as it might sound.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: When people look at the sky expecting to see something, they see a great deal.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The summer sky is full of things that are easy to misread.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bright planets near the horizon.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Aircraft catching the sun at certain angles.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: birds lit from below at dusk, weather balloons, which by 1947 were being released by the hundreds every day from stations across the country to measure temperature and wind at altitude.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the military itself was flying new and unusual things from jet aircraft to research rockets, often without much public announcement.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now let us turn our attention
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: where many of those new and unusual things were concentrated.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Southeastern New Mexico in 1947 was a land of wide plains, cattle and sheep branches, oil wells and enormous sky.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The town of Roswell, sitting in the Pecos River Valley, had a population of somewhere around 25,000 people.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a quiet place, known for its ranching
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and for the New Mexico Military Institute, a military school that had been there since the 1890s.
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Roswell had also become almost by accident, one of the most important places in the world for the strange new technologies of the 20th century.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1930s, the rocket pioneer Robert Goddard had chosen Roswell as his base, because of its clear skies, its open country, and its mild climate.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: For about a decade, Goddard launched his liquid fuel rockets from a ranch outside town, quietly laying the foundations for the space of each other.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: To the west, across the mountains, lay the white sands proving rhythm.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where by 1946, the army was launching captured German V2 rockets high into the upper atmosphere.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: With German scientists, including Verne Hervon Braun, helping to run the program, further north-west was the Trinity site, where the world's first atomic bomb had been detonated in July of 1945.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and further north still in the mountains was Los Alamos, where that bomb had been designed and where atomic weapons work continued.
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And just south of Roswell itself lay Roswell Army Airfield.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1947, this was the home of the 509th bomb group.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: That unit carried enormous significance.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the group that had flown the missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in 1947, it was the only military unit anywhere in the world, trained and equipped to deliver atomic weapons.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its bombers were the most important aircraft in the American arsenal.
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its security was tight.
• 18:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: its officers were among the most trusted in the service.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The base commander was Colonel William Blanchard, a capable and ambitious officer, who would later rise to the rank of four star general.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, picture the scene as it stood in the first days of July 1947.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Across the country, the source of wave was cresting.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers were full of sightings.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rewords had been offered for a captured disc.
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Military intelligence officers had been told to take report seriously.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the dry ranch country, north-west of Roswell, home to the world's only atomic bomber unit, and surrounded by rocket ranges and weapons laboratories.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: A rancher was about to drive into town with something in the back of his trunk.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter two, the ranch, the press release, and the retraction.
• 19:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: William Wear Brazel
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: was known to almost everyone as Mac.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the summer of 1947, he was in his late 40s, a weathered and quiet man who worked as the former of a large sheep ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: about 75 miles north-west of Roswell, as the crow flies.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ranch was owned by a family named Foster, and it lay in remote country southeast of the little town of Corona.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brasal lived out there with his family for much of the year, tending sheep across thousands of acres of rolling grassland and scrub.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Ranch House had no telephone.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no electricity to speak of.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: News from the outside world arrived slowly when anyone happened to drive into town.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to the account Brasal gave to reporters a few weeks later, some time around the middle of June, he was outrighting the range with his young son when he came across a large area scattered with debris.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was strewn over a patch of ground.
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: perhaps 200 yards across.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a great deal of it.
• 20:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He described bright, foil-like material, a kind of tough paper, strips of rubber and small sticks or beams of a light wood.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of the pieces were held together with tape, and some of that tape, he said, had flowers printed on it.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were also a few small eyelids, as though something had once been tied together.
• 20:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brazel did not think much of it at first.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was busy and the debris was a nuisance more than anything else scattered across a pasture where his sheep needed to graze.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He later said that he gathered some of it up and set it aside.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not thinking about flying sources because at that point out on the remote range he likely had not heard of.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kenneth
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: had not even had his sighting end when Brazzle first came across the wreckage, or if he had, the story had not reached the foster ranch.
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That changed on the weekend of July 4th.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brazzle drove into Corona, and there, by most accounts, he heard people talking about the flying discs that everyone across the country received.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He may have heard about the
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the junk on his ranch might be one of those sources.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea seems to have lodged in his mind.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: On Sunday, July, sick, Brazel made the long drive to Roswell, bringing some of the debris with him.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: You went to see the Chab's County Sheriff, a man named George Wilcox.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brasal told Wilcox what he had found, and Wilcox sensibly enough, decided that this might be a matter for the military.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roswell Army Airfield was right there, just south of town.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wilcox picked up the telephone and called the base.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The call was rooted to the base intelligence office,
• 22:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: was major Jesse Marcel.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marcel was 40 years old, a native of Louisiana and the intelligence officer for the 509th bomb group.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before the war he had worked as a cartographer and during the war he had served as an intelligence officer with bombing units in the Pacific.
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1946
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had been part of the team at the atomic tests at Bikini Aital in the Pacific Ocean.
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, by all accounts, competent and well-regarded.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marcel went to the sheriff's office, met Brasel, and looked at what the rancher had brought in.
• 23:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then he reported to Colonel Blanchard.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Blanchard told him to go out to the ranch and see for himself.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marcel took a longer counterintelligence officer, named Captain Sheridan County, and later on that Sunday afternoon, the two men followed Brazel back out of the foster ranch.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a long drive over rough roads, and by the time they arrived, it was easy.
• 23:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They stayed the night, and the next morning, Monday and July 7th, braze all took them out of the debris field.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: What did they find?
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here we come to the heart of the matter and to the problem that will run through the rest of our storm.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost everything we know about what Marcel and Kavit saw on that Monday comes from two kinds of sources.
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first kind are the accounts written down in the newspapers within a few days in July of 1947.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second kind are the accounts given by Marcel and others more than 30 years later starting in the late 1970s.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: These two kinds of sources do not always agree and the gap between them is when most of the Roswell legend lives.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the short term, what we know is this.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marcel and Kavit gathered up a quantity of food to breathe.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: They loaded what they could into their vehicles.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marcel later said there was so much of it that they could not take it all.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: They drove back toward Roswell and in the small hours of Tuesday morning July 8, Marcel stopped at his own house in town.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He woke his wife and his 11-year-old son, Jesse Jr.
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he brought some of the debris into the kitchen to show them.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The boy would remember that night for the rest of his life.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then Marcel went on to the base.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of Tuesday, July 8th, something happened that has never been entirely explained.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The base public information officer, a young, first-left tenant named Walter Hout, was told to prepare a press release.
• 25:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hout was 25.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: a former bomber deer who had flown missions in the Pacific.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to his long-standing account, he wrote the release on the instructions of Colonel Blanchard and around noon he personally delivered copies to Roswell's two radio stations and its two newspapers.
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The release said, in essence, that the rumours about flying disks had become a reality.
• 26:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: had come into possession of a flying disk with the help of a local rancher and the county sharing.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It said that the disk had been recovered on a ranch near Roswell, that it had been stored at the ranch's home until he could contact the sharing, and that major Marcel had picked it up, and that it had been flown on to higher head quarters.
• 26:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was all.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not describe the object.
• 26:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not mention alien beings or anything of that coming.
• 26:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it used the phrase, flying disk, and it came from an official United States military installation, and not just any installation, but the home of the atomic bombs.
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within an hour or so, the story had gone out over the associated crest wide, and it was being read in newsrooms across the country and around the world.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reaction was immediate.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Telephones at the Roswell Base and at the Sheriff's Office began ringing and did not stop.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reporters called from New York, from Chicago, from London, from Rome.
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The afternoon edition of the Roswell Daily Record carried the story under a banner headline, announcing that the airfield had captured a flying saucer on a ranch in the Roswell region.
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: For a few hours, it seemed that the mystery that had gripped the nation for two weeks had been solved.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: the sources were real, and the army had one, but the story was already changing.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: While the press release was spreading, the debris itself was being flown out of Roswell.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It went first to Fort Worth Army Airfield in Texas, the headquarters of the 8th Air Force, which had command over the Roswell bombers, Marcel flew along with it.
• 27:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The commander of the 8th Air Force was Brigadier General Roger Ramey, and when the material arrived at his office in Fort Worth that afternoon, he and his chief of staff, Colonel Thomas Dubos, took charge of the situation.
• 28:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ramey had the material laid out on the floor of his office.
• 28:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reporters were invited in.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: A photographer for the Fort Worth Star Telegram, James Bond Johnson
• 28:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In them, you can see a scattering of crumpled foil, pieces of thin stick, and what looks like torn paper or rubberized fabric spread across a carpet.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: In some photographs, Rami kneels beside the debris.
• 28:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In one, Jesse Marcel crouches beside it, holding up a piece of the foil covered material.
• 28:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In another, Rami holds a folded piece of paper in his hand.
• 28:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in recent decades, people have spent many hours trying to read the words printed on it, in enlarged scans of the photograph, without reaching any agreement.
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then a weather officer was called in.
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: His name was warrant officer Irving Newton, and he worked at the base weather station.
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newton looked at the debris and identified it right away, he later said, as the remains of a weather balloon and a radar target.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In those days, weather stations sometimes attach to kind of a kind like reflected to their balloons.
• 29:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: made of bolster sticks and foil-covered paper, so that radar operators on the ground could track the balloon as it rose and measure the winds at altitude.
• 29:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But these reflectors were called rowing targets, short for radar wind.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: To Newton, the material on Rame's floor looked exactly like one of them along with the shredded rubber of a balloon.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: That evening, General Rame announced that the object found near Roswell.
• 29:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: was nothing more than a weather balloon and its radar reflector.
• 30:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He went on the radio in Fort Worth to say so.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The news went out over the same wires that had carried the flying disk story a few hours before.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and just like that, the story reversed itself.
• 30:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next morning, Wednesday, July 9th, newspapers across the country carried the correction.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Roswell Daily Record ran a story about Mac Brasal himself.
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brasal had been brought into town the evening before, and he had given an interview at the newspaper office, apparently accompanied by military personnel.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The headline described him as a harassed rancher who was sorry he had ever said anything.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: In that interview, Brasal described the debris in the plain terms I mentioned earlier.
• 30:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rubber strips, tinfoam, tough paper, sticks, tape with flowers on it.
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He estimated that the whole collection might have weighed about £5.
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said he had seen no words on it, though there were some letters on some of the pieces.
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said there were no metal parts that he could see, nothing like an engine or a propeller.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then he added something that later researchers would seize upon.
• 31:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said that he had found whether balloons on the ranch twice before, and that what he found this time did not resemble either of those.
• 31:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brasal also said, according to the article, that if he ever found anything else, short of a bomb, he would not say a word about it.
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the story was over.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within about 48 hours of the original press release,
• 31:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Roswell flying disc had been explained, corrected, and largely forgotten, newspapers moved on.
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The source of wave itself began to subside through the rest of July.
• 31:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some editorialists made fun of the army for having mistaken a weather balloon for a spaceship.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Roswell, Colonel Blanchard went on leave, a fact that later writers found suspicious
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Walter Hout went back to his ordinary duties, Mac Brazel went back to his chic, and for the next 30 years almost nobody talked about him.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, before we follow the long silence, I want to spend some time on what the debris actually was.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the answer that most historians accept today is not quite the answer that General Ramey gave in 1947.
• 32:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is something stranger and it was secret.
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the summer of 1947, a team of scientists from New York University was working in New Mexico on a classified project.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were launching enormous balloon trains, from the area around Alamagorder near White Sands, about a hundred miles south-west of the foster room.
• 33:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were not ordinary weather balloons.
• 33:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: A single launch might involve dozens of balloons strung together in a long chain, sometimes stretching 600 feet or more from top to bottom, hanging from the chain were instruments, ballast, and crucially several radar reflectors of exactly the kind Irving Newton recognized so that the balloon train could be tracked
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The project's purpose was to see whether sensitive microphones carried high into the atmosphere could detect the sound waves produced by distant explosions.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea had come from a geophysicist named Maurice Ewing, who had discovered during the war that sound could travel enormous distances through a particular layer of the ocean.
• 34:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wondered whether a similar layer existed high in the atmosphere.
• 34:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: then microphones floating at altitude might be able to hear an atomic bomb test on the other side of the world.
• 34:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1947 the United States badly wanted to know when the Soviet Union would test its first atomic bomb.
• 34:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: This balloon project was one of the ways they hoped to find out.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The project's codename was mogul.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The engineers who launched the balloons in New Mexico among them a young man named Charles Moore did not necessarily know that name or the full purpose of their work.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: They knew they were launching balloon trains for the air forces and they knew not to talk about it.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The radar reflectors they used were made in part by a company in New York that also produced toys and novelty items.
• 34:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reflectors were built of balsa wood sticks and foil covered paper, and to reinforce the joints, the company had used whatever tape it had on hand.
• 35:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of that tape
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: was decorated with small patterns, which more and others later described as flowers or hearts and pink and purple.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the balloon trains came down in the desert, as they eventually all did, they left behind long trails of torn near-prem balloon, shredded foil and paper, bolster sticks, string and tape.
• 35:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The records of the New York University team show a flight that was launched on June 4, 1947.
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that was tracked heading northeast before contact was lost.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was never recovered.
• 35:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1990s, Charles Moore, by then a retired professor of atmospheric physics, went back over the wind data from that period and concluded that this flight known as flight number four could very well have come down in the area of the foster ranch.
• 36:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: If it did,
• 36:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would have been lying out on the range when Mac Brasal wrote past it in mid-June, and it would have looked to Brasal like nothing had seen before, not because it came from another world.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: but because it was a far larger and stranger assemblage than an ordinary weather balloon.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1994, the United States Air Force published a report that was prompted by a congressional inquiry we will hear about later.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It concluded that the material brazil found was very likely from a project mogul balloon train.
• 36:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: the report pointed out that the officers at Roswell, including Marcel, and even General Rainy, would not have known about local, which was highly compartmentalised.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: To them, the debris would have looked like an unusual weather balloon, and that is what they said it was.
• 37:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The secret was not a spacecraft.
• 37:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a classified program to spy on Soviet atomic tests.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: not everyone accepts this explanation.
• 37:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Critics point out that the flight records are incomplete, and that flight number four may have been cancelled or may have come down elsewhere.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: They point to myself later descriptions of materials with strange properties that do not sound like falling in those.
• 37:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They ask why a base full of experienced offices would have issued that first press release at all.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: If what they had was a pile of balloon wreckage, these are fair questions and we will come back to them.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it is worth noticing one thing.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every account written down in July of 1947, including the description given by Mac Brasal himself, describes something light, flimsy, and made of ordinary materials.
• 38:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rubber, foil, paper, sticks, tape, about five pounds of it.
• 38:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Roswell of the later legend, with its bodies and its spacecraft, and its debris that could not be cut or burned, did not exist yet.
• 38:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would take 30 years from that Roswell to be born.
• 38:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: As for the press release, its origins remain a genuine puzzle.
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why did Colonel Blanchard, if it was Blanchard, authorize a statement saying the base had captured a flying disk?
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some historians suggest it was simply a mistake made in the excitement of the moment.
• 38:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a summer when the term flying disk was being used loosely for almost any unidentified object.
• 38:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when an airfield commander might have been eager to show that his people were on top of things.
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others suspect that some officers genuinely did not know what they had and that the phrase reflected honest confusion and believers have long argued the opposite, that the press release was the true account and the weather balloon story was the cover-up.
• 39:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is certain is that within a single day, Roswell had gone from the most famous town in the world to a punch.
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then, for a generation, the town and the world for God.
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3, the 30-year silence and the revival.
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is one of the strange effects about the Roswell story that for roughly three decades after 1947, it was barely a story at all.
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today Roswell is the most famous name in the history of unidentified flying objects.
• 39:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: But through the 1950s and the 1960s, when interest in flying sources was at times intense,
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: When books about them sold in the hundreds of thousands of government agencies were investigating them in earnest, Roswell was almost never mentioned.
• 40:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The flying saucer enthusiasts of that era either had not heard of it, or if they had, they accepted that it had been a weather balloon.
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rest of the subject, however, did not stand still.
• 40:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let us follow it briefly through those years, because what happened during the silence shaped what came after.
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: After Project Sign was established at the end of 1947, the Air Force's investigations went through several phases.
• 40:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some within Project Sign seemed to have believed, at least for a while, that the sources might be interplanetary,
• 40:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They drafted an estimate of the situation, arguing that very point.
• 40:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it was rejected by the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg, and the project took a more skeptical term.
• 41:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1949, it was renamed Project Grudge, and under that name, it largely treated the subject as a matter of public relations, something to be explained away.
• 41:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, in 1952, it was reorganized again under the name Project Blue Book.
• 41:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Led at first by a thoughtful officer named Captain Edward Rupelt, who coined the term unidentified flying object.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's abbreviation UFO.
• 41:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Partly because he felt the phrase flying saucer was misleading.
• 41:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: That same summer in July of 1952 came one of the most dramatic episodes of the era.
• 41:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: radar operators at Washington National Airport and at nearby Andrew's Air Force Base picked up unexplained targets moving over the nation's capital on two weekends in a row.
• 42:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fighter jets were scrambled to intercept them.
• 42:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story made front pages across the country, and the air force held its largest press conference since the end of the war, to explain that the radar returns were most likely caused by a weather phenomenon called a temperature inversion, which can bend radar beams and create false echoes.
• 42:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The central intelligence agency was concerned, though not quite in the way enthusiasts might imagine.
• 42:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The agency's wiring was that a flood of source reports could clog military communication channels during the crisis, or that the Soviet Union could exploit public excitement to cause panic.
• 42:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1953, the agency convened a panel of scientists under the physicist Howard Robertson.
• 43:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Robertson panel concluded that there was no evidence the reports represented a threat or anything beyond known phenomena and it recommended a public education campaign to reduce interest in the subject.
• 43:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later writers would point to this panel as the beginning of a deliberate policy of debunking.
• 43:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Through the 1950s, the whole culture grew up around flying sources.
• 43:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were contactees, people like Georgia Damsky, who claimed to have met handsome, peaceful visitors from Venus, who warned humanity about atomic weapons.
• 43:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were saucer gloves and conventions.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: magazines and newsletters.
• 43:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hollywood produced films such as the Day the Earth stood still in 1951 and Earth versus the Flying Sources in 1956.
• 43:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1961 a new Hampshire couple named Betty and Barney Hill reported being taken aboard a crumb and account that became the template for the
• 44:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: and there was one important crash to source a story in this period, though it was not about Roswell.
• 44:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1950, a writer for the entertainment magazine Variety named Frank Scully, published a book called Behind the Flying Sources.
• 44:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: In it, he claimed that several flying sources had crashed in the American Southwest, including one near the town of Aztec, New Mexico.
• 44:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that the government had recovered them along with the small bodies of their occupants.
• 44:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The book was a best-selling, but within two years, a journalist named J.P. Khan, writing in true magazine, revealed that Scully's main sources were two confidence men, Silas Newton and Leo Gabbauer, who had been using the source of story to promote a fraudulent oil detecting device.
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were later convicted of fraud in a separate case.
• 45:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Aztec story collapsed and for a long time afterward, the very idea of crashed sources and recovered bodies was treated as a hallmark of hoaxes, something serious research has avoided.
• 45:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is one reason Roswell's state quiet.
• 45:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another is simply that the original story had been so thoroughly and quickly closed, where the balloon, case solved.
• 45:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not a mystery that anyone thought needed solving.
• 45:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the late 1960s, the Air Force decided it wanted out of the business of investigating flying sources all together.
• 45:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It funded a study at the University of Colorado, led by the
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Condon Committee examined dozens of cases and its final report published in 1969 concluded that nothing of scientific value had come from the study of UFOs over the previous two decades.
• 46:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that further study was unlikely to be productive.
• 46:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Critics, including some members of Condon's own staff, argued that the conclusions were decided in advance and did not match the cases inside the report, a significant number of which remained unexplained.
• 46:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Air Force had the cover it needed.
• 46:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: In December of 1969, Project Blue Book was closed.
• 46:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over its lifetime, the Air Force's projects had collected more than 12,000 reports.
• 46:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The great majority were explained as stars, planets, aircraft, balloons, and the luck.
• 46:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Several hundred were listed as unidentified.
• 46:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, by the early 1970s, the official government position was that UFOs were not a matter of national security or scientific interest, and yet what the decade that followed was full of distrust.
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was the Vietnam War with its credibility gap between official statements and reality on the ground.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was the Watergate Scan, which ended with a President's resignation.
• 47:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were the Church Committee hearings in the United States Senate in 1975, which revealed that the CIA and the FBI had conducted secret programs of surveillance, assassination plots, and mind control experiments, while denying them to the public, Americans learned
• 47:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a series of shocking revelations that their government had indeed lied to them about important things for years as a matter of policy.
• 47:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was into this atmosphere that Roswell returned.
• 47:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In early 1978, a man named Stanton Friedman was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for a television appearance.
• 48:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Friedman was a trained nuclear physicist who had worked for years in the aerospace industry on nuclear propulsion projects and who had become by the 1970s, the full-time lecturer on flying sources.
• 48:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to the story Friedman often told, a station manager mentioned to him between interviews that he had a friend, a ham radio operator in the town of Homer, who had once handled pieces of a flying saucer while in the military.
• 48:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: That friend was Jesse Marcel.
• 48:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Friedman called Marcel and Marcel told him a story.
• 48:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this telling, the debris he had collected on the foster ranch
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: was not balloon wreckage at all.
• 49:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a large field of material, unlike anything he had ever seen.
• 49:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were thin metallic pieces, lighter than paper, that could not be dented with a sledgehammer.
• 49:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was foil that, when crumpled, smoothed itself out again.
• 49:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were small beams, like bolsa, but not bolsa, that would not burn when held to a flame.
• 49:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: and some of them were marked with strange symbols that look like hieroglyphics or a kind of writing.
• 49:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marcel said that what had been shown to the pressing thought worth was not the real material but a substitute.
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: A weather balloon swapped in to make the story go away.
• 49:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marcel's son, Jesse Jr., by then a doctor, had his own memory to add.
• 49:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He recalled being woken in the night as a boy
• 49:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he described a small beam, purple violet symbols on it, embossed or printed along its length.
• 50:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a powerful test.
• 50:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here was the very intelligent officer who had collected the material, and I witnessed with no apparent motive to invent it, saying on the record that the official story was false.
• 50:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Friedman, along with a colleague named William Mord, began seeking out other witnesses from Roswell in 1947.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: In February of 1980, the tabloid newspaper, the National Inquiring, published an interview with Marcel.
• 50:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The same year, more and the best-selling author Charles Belitz, already famous for his book about the new detrying.
• 50:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Published
• 50:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The book gathered Marcel's account, along with others, and it woven a separate story that had come to freedom and more than second hand.
• 50:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to this story, a civil engineer named Barney Barnett had once told friends that he had come upon a crashed disk and small dead bodies on the plains of San Augusta, a vast flat basin in Western New Mexico.
• 51:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: well over a hundred miles from the Foster Ranch.
• 51:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Barnett had died in 1969, so he could not be questioned.
• 51:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The book suggested that a craft had broken up over the Foster Ranch, scattering debris, and then crashed further west with its crew.
• 51:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Roswell incident sold well, though not spectacularly in first, but it planted the seeds of everything that followed over the
• 51:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it grew in a characteristic way, more witnesses came forward or were found.
• 51:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their accounts added new details.
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And each new book incorporated the new details into an ever larger and more elaborate structure.
• 51:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1984, a television producer named Jaime Shandara, who was working with William, said he had received in the mail, an envelope,
• 52:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: When developed, it showed images of what appear to be a top secret briefing paper dated 1952 and prepared for president-elect Dwight Eisenhower.
• 52:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The document described a secret group of 12 senior officials and scientists, codenamed Majestic 12.
• 52:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Set up by President Truman to manage the recovery of a crashed alien craft near Roswell and the study of four alien bodies.
• 52:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The so-called MJ-12 documents caused a sensation when they became public in 1987.
• 52:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The FBI investigated and concluded they were bogus.
• 52:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Researchers, including some sympathetic to the Roswell story, pointed out problems with the signatures, the formatting and the dating.
• 53:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today, most researchers on all sides regard them as fabrications, though who made them and why it has never been said.
• 53:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1989,
• 53:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The popular television program Unsolved Mysteries aired a segment on Roswell with dramatic re-enactments of the crash and the recovery.
• 53:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It reached tens of millions of views and it brought forward still more people with stories to tell.
• 53:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them was a man named Glenn Dennis.
• 53:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1947, Dennis had been a young mortician brought up a funeral home in Roswell, which also held a contract to provide ambulance service to the air base.
• 53:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dennis said that in July of that year, he received an odd call from the base mortuary officer, asking about small, hermetically sealed cascades.
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and how to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements.
• 54:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later, he said, he drove an injured animal to the base hospital and saw strange wreckage in the back of an ambulance.
• 54:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was ordered out of the building by a redhead officer who threatened him.
• 54:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a nurse he knew, he said, told him the next day that she had seen small bodies with large heads and drew him sketches.
• 54:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Shortly afterward, according to Dennis, she was transferred overseas and later died in a plane crew.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a vivid, moving story, but researchers who went looking for the nurse could find no record of her.
• 54:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The name Dennis Gave did not match any nurse at the base.
• 54:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later, he said he had given a false name to protect her, her transfer and death could not be documented.
• 54:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the years, even some researchers who believed in the Roswell crash came to doubt Dennis has account.
• 55:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1991, two researchers named Kevin Randall and Donald Schmidt
• 55:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: at Roswell, they argued against the planes of San Augustin theory and placed the main crash site much closer to Roswell, north of town.
• 55:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: They introduced new witnesses, including a man named Frank Kaufman, who claimed to have been part of a secret team that found the craft and its occupants.
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a later book in 1994, they presented a revised timeline
• 55:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: based largely on Kaufman's account.
• 55:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here the story became tangled in ways that reveal how difficult it is to recover truth from memories decades old.
• 55:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Different researchers champion different crash sites and different witnesses and they sometimes disagreed sharply with one another.
• 56:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gerald Anderson, a witness who claimed to have seen the crash on the planes of Santa Guston as a child, was found to
• 56:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: after Frank Kaufmann died in 2001.
• 56:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Documents he had used to support his story were examined and found have been altered or fabricated.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Donald Schmidt himself was found to have exaggerated his own professional background and critics pointed out that Jesse Marcel's own later statements about his military career such as claims about his education and combat record did not always match
• 56:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of this proves that nothing happened at Roswell, but it does illustrate a pattern that historians of memory know well.
• 56:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: When people are asked to recall events from 30 or 40 years before, especially events that have since become famous.
• 57:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: their memories are not fixed recordings.
• 57:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are reconstructions, shaped by everything they have heard and read in between, a man who handled foil and bolsa in 1947 and who spent decades wondering about it.
• 57:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Might remember it differently after reading saucer books, hearing other people's stories, and being treated as a key witness in the greatest mystery of the age.
• 57:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: the town of Roswell was discovering that the legend could be good for business.
• 57:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1991, three men who had been part of the original story, the former press officer Walter Holt, the Mortician Glenn Dennis, and a local businessman named Max Littell, founded the International UFO Museum and Research Centre.
• 57:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: it opened in downtown Roswell and became a magnet for tourists.
• 58:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soon there were alien themed shops, alien shaped streetlights, and an annual festival held around the anniversary in early July.
• 58:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The surge of public interest also drew attention in Washington.
• 58:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1993, congressman Stephen Schiff of New Mexico asked the Department of Defense about Roswell and by his
• 58:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: received an unsatisfying run around.
• 58:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: He then asked the general accounting office, the investigative arm of Congress, to search for any government records related to the event.
• 58:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The resulting report released in July of 1995 found something tantalizing.
• 58:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Administrative records from Roswell
• 58:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: including outgoing messages that had been destroyed and the office could not determine when or by who's authority.
• 59:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: to believers, this looked like proof of a cover-up.
• 59:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: To skeptics, it looked like the ordinary disposal of routine paperwork decades earlier.
• 59:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Shifts inquiry also prompted the Air Force to conduct its own review, which produced the 1994 report I mentioned in our last chapter.
• 59:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: identifying project mogul as the most likely source of the debris.
• 59:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three years later, in June of 1997, the Air Force released a second report.
• 59:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: This one with the blunt title, the Roswell report, Case Closed.
• 59:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: This one addressed the stories of alien bodies.
• 59:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's suggested that witnesses may have been remembering and merging together several real events from the 1950s.
• 59:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: In that decade, the Air Force had dropped human-shaped crash test dummies from high-altitude balloons over New Mexico, as part of research.
• 1:00:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: into how pilots might survive ejecting at extreme altitudes.
• 1:00:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Recovery crews dressed in their workloads would drive out into the desert to retrieve these dumps.
• 1:00:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes found lying in the scrub without their heads or hands.
• 1:00:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The report also mentioned a 1956 crash of an Air Force
• 1:00:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a 1959 Balloon accident in which an officer's head was injured and swollen.
• 1:00:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The air force argued that witnesses had compressed these different memories from different years into a single event in 1947.
• 1:00:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: many people found this explanation strained.
• 1:00:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The dummies after all were not dropped until years after the crash was supposed to have happened.
• 1:01:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The phrase time compression became for a while, a kind of joke, and the air force did not help its case with the timing of the release, timed just before the 50th anniversary.
• 1:01:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: By then, Roswell had reached the height of its
• 1:01:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 1990s were the golden age of UFO culture in America.
• 1:01:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The X-Files premiered on television in 1993.
• 1:01:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: with its paranoid stories of government conspiracies and alien cover-ups.
• 1:01:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it became one of the most popular shows of the decade.
• 1:01:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1995, a British entrepreneur named Ray Santilly released Granny Black and White footage that purported to show the autopsy of an alien body recovered at Roswell.
• 1:01:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The so-called alien autopsy film was broadcast on television around the world.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than a decade later, Santillion met it that the footage was a recreation, which he said was made to restore real film he had seen, but which had degraded, a claim that has never been substantiated.
• 1:02:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1996, the blockbuster film, Independence Day, included a secret alien spacecraft, hidden at Area 51.
• 1:02:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: recovered from the crash at Roswell.
• 1:02:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in early July of 1997, for the 50th anniversary, tens of thousands of visitors poured into Roswell from around the world.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were parades, lectures, costume contexts, and crowds of journalists.
• 1:02:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The same year, a retired army officer named Philip and Corsa published a book called The Day After Roswell, claiming that he had personally helped to seed alien technology, recovered from the crash into American industry, giving rise to inventions such as fibre optics and the integrated circuit.
• 1:02:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Historians of technology rejected these claims, but the book was a better.
• 1:03:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two years later, a television series called Roswell began about teenage aliens hiding in the town.
• 1:03:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: There would be one more chapter in Walter Hout's story.
• 1:03:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2002, Hout then in his 80s signed a sworn affidavit to be sealed until after his death.
• 1:03:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: When he died in 2005,
• 1:03:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was opened and it was published two years later.
• 1:03:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In it, how stated that he had attended a meeting with senior officers on July 8, 1947, that he had been shown a craft and small bodies in a hanger at the base, and that the weather balloon story had been deliberately concocted.
• 1:03:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was dramatic, because for decades, Houghton said in interviews that he had seen nothing himself and had only written the press release.
• 1:04:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The affidavit was prepared with the help of researchers when Hought was elderly and skeptics questioned how much of its content reflected his own memory.
• 1:04:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Believers regarded it as a deathbed confession, and so by the turn of the century, the Roswell story had become two stories that barely touched.
• 1:04:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: One was the documented story from July of 1947 of a rancher, a pile of flimsy debris, a press release, and a correction.
• 1:04:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other was the remembered story assembled from the late 1970s onward of a crashed drive, bodies, threads and a cover-up.
• 1:04:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The two have never been fully reconciled and perhaps they never can be.
• 1:04:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But along the way, the legend of Roswell had acquired a second world.
• 1:04:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The aliens and their ship, the story went, had not stayed in New Mexico.
• 1:05:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had been taken somewhere secret.
• 1:05:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere in the desert of Nevada, behind mountains and guarded fences, at a base that the government would not even admit existed.
• 1:05:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: That base was very real.
• 1:05:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the true story of what was hidden there may be stranger and more fascinate than any legend.
• 1:05:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4.
• 1:05:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Group Lake.
• 1:05:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Real Secret.
• 1:05:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand Area 51, we have to go back to the early 1950s and to a problem that kept American leaders
• 1:05:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It covered a sick of the land surface of the Earth and almost all of it was hidden from Western eyes.
• 1:05:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: In August of 1949, the Soviets had tested their first atomic bomb years earlier than many American experts had predicted.
• 1:06:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1953, they tested a hydrogen weapon.
• 1:06:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were building
• 1:06:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the United States had very little idea of how many were all where or how fast.
• 1:06:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spies on the ground were few and frequent.
• 1:06:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ordinary reconnaissance flights along the Soviet border could only see a little way in.
• 1:06:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And those that strayed over the frontier were sometimes shone down.
• 1:06:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Water-American needed was a way to look straight down into the Soviet Union from directly overhead.
• 1:06:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: from an altitude so high that no fighter plane could reach it and no missile could hit it.
• 1:06:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1950s, that meant an airplane.
• 1:06:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Satellites were still years away.
• 1:06:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The solution came from a remarkable aircraft designer named Clarence Johnson, known to almost everyone as Kelly.
• 1:07:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Johnson led a small, secretive engineering division
• 1:07:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: which had become famous for building advanced aircraft quickly and quietly.
• 1:07:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its nickname was the Skunkworks borrowed from a comic strip of the day.
• 1:07:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Johnson proposed what was essentially a jet-powered glider.
• 1:07:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: an aircraft with extremely long slender wings, a single engine, and a frame stripped of every unnecessary ounce, able to climb to altitude above 70,000 feet and cruise with thousands of miles.
• 1:07:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: In November of 1954, President Eisenhower approved the project, unusually
• 1:07:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was placed under the control of the Central Intelligence Agency, rather than the Air Force, or the two worked closely together.
• 1:08:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The man in charge of the Agency was Richard Bissel, a brilliant and energetic former economic professor.
• 1:08:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The aircraft would become known as the U2, and it would need somewhere to be tested.
• 1:08:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: somewhere remote where no one would see it, somewhere with a long flat surface where it could take off and land and where the weather was clear nearly every day of the year.
• 1:08:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1955, Lockheed's Chief Test pilot, Tony Levere, and a colleague named Dorsey Camera, set out in a small private airplane to search the deserts of the American West for such a place.
• 1:08:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They flew over dry lake beds across California, Nevada, and Arizona, looking at each one from the air.
• 1:08:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: After weeks of searching, they found what they were looking for in southern Nevada, about 90 miles north of Las Vegas.
• 1:08:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a dry lake bed, flat and hard, about three miles across, sitting in a broad valley surrounded on all sides by mountains.
• 1:09:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its name was Groon Lake.
• 1:09:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was an additional advantage.
• 1:09:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Groon Lake sat right next to the Nevada proving grounds.
• 1:09:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later called the Nevada Test Site, where the atomic energy commission had been detonating nuclear weapons in the open air since 1951.
• 1:09:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was already about as restricted a piece of land as could be found in the United States.
• 1:09:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: and their Air Force partner Colonel Osmond Ritland flew out to see it.
• 1:09:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: They agreed it was ideal.
• 1:09:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And their request, the Atomic Energy Commission, added the area around Grume Lake to its restricted territory.
• 1:09:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the Commission's maps, the land in that part of Nevada was divided into numbered sections, and the parcel containing the lake
• 1:10:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and its surroundings was labelled Area 51.
• 1:10:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Construction began almost immediately.
• 1:10:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a matter of months, a small base rose on the edge of the lake bed.
• 1:10:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a paved runway, a few hangers, a controlled tower, some trailers and simple buildings for housing, a mess hall and water wells.
• 1:10:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kelly Johnson
• 1:10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: who knew how hard it would be to persuade engineers to leave their families and move to an empty patch of desert, jokingly gave the place a cheerful name.
• 1:10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He called it Paradise Ranch.
• 1:10:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The work has shortened it to the ranch, and that name stuck for years.
• 1:10:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others called it Watertown, or simply the area.
• 1:10:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The name Area 51 was used in official documents, but it did not become famous until much later.
• 1:10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: In late July of 1955, the first U2 arrived at the ranch, disassembled and flown in aboard a cargo plane.
• 1:11:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: On August 1st, during a high-speed taxi test on the lake vent, Tony Lavir found to his surprise that the airplane lifted itself into the air.
• 1:11:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So efficient were its long wings.
• 1:11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He brought it back down safely.
• 1:11:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A few days later, on August 4th, he took it up for its official first flight.
• 1:11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within a year, YouTube's were flying over the Soviet Union.
• 1:11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: photographing airfields, missile sites, and factories in astonishing detail.
• 1:11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: In those years, the photographs they returned changed the American understanding of Soviet strength.
• 1:11:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They showed, among other things, that the feared bomber gap and later the missile gap did not exist.
• 1:11:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviets were weaker than many in Washington had feared,
• 1:12:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: one that connects directly to the story we have been following tonight.
• 1:12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the mid-1950s, commercial airlines typically flew at altitudes of between about 10,000 and 20,000 feet.
• 1:12:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Military aircraft flew higher, but rarely above 40,000 feet.
• 1:12:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was widely believed that no manned aircraft could fly out to choose much above that.
• 1:12:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet here was the U2, cruising quietly at 60,000 feet or more.
• 1:12:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Far above where anyone imagined an airplane could be.
• 1:12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was something else.
• 1:12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: At those altitudes, the sun sets much later than it does on the ground.
• 1:12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the early evening when the land below was already in twilight, and the sky above was turning dark, a U2 high overhead would still be bathed in bright sunlight.
• 1:13:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It silver wings would catch the light and flash brilliantly, to an airline pilot flying west at dusk or to someone standing on the ground, it looked like a bright fiery object hanging
• 1:13:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: People reported these sightings and they reported a lot of them.
• 1:13:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1997, the CIA published an internal history written by the agency historian Gerald Haynes about its role in the study of UFOs from 1947 to 1990.
• 1:13:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In it, Haynes described what happened.
• 1:13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to his account, the U2 and the high altitude aircraft that came after it led to a large increase in reports of unidentified flying objects, starting in the mid-1950s, airline pilots, air traffic controls, and ordinary citizens, wrote to the Air Force about strange lines high in the sky.
• 1:14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Haines wrote that this comparison explained a substantial share of the reports from the late 1950s and into the 1960s, according to some accounts more than half of them.
• 1:14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the investigators could not say so, the YouTube was a secret.
• 1:14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So according to Haines,
• 1:14:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Air Force offered the public other explanations, such as ice crystals or temperature inversions, while knowing the real cause.
• 1:14:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, the UFO sightings were, in a very real sense, the secret program working as designed.
• 1:14:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: A program built to fly, where no one could see it was being seen, and the cost of keeping it hidden was that the sightings had to remain unexplained, or be explained falsely.
• 1:15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The government was not covering up flying sources, it was covering up its own airplanes, and in doing so, it fed the very mystery it was publicly trying to dismiss.
• 1:15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The U2 era at Grume Lake did not last forever.
• 1:15:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: On May 1st, 1960,
• 1:15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A YouTube flown by France's Gary Powers was shocked down by a Soviet missile, deep inside the Soviet Union.
• 1:15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Powers survived, was captured, and was put on trial in Moscow.
• 1:15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The incident was a major embarrassment for President Eisenhower, who had first allowed the public story that the plane was a lost weather research aircraft.
• 1:15:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: only to have the Soviets reveal that they had the pilot and the wreckage.
• 1:15:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over flights of the Soviet Union by manned aircraft came to an end.
• 1:16:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: But by then,
• 1:16:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next airplane was already on the drawing board, and it would be even more extraordinary.
• 1:16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The CIA knew that the U2 would not stay safe from Soviet missiles for long, so even before powers were shot down, the agency commissioned a successor.
• 1:16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had to fly higher still, and much, much faster.
• 1:16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: that would cruise at more than three times the speed of sound, at altitudes around 90,000 feet.
• 1:16:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: At those speeds, friction with the air would heat the airplane's skin to hundreds of degrees, hot enough that ordinary aluminum would weaken.
• 1:16:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the aircraft would be built almost entirely of titanium, a metal that at the time was difficult to work with and had to be obtained in large quantities.
• 1:16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: in some case, through intermediaries, from the Soviet Union itself.
• 1:17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The project was called Ox-Count, and the aircraft was designated the A12.
• 1:17:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was long and black and sinister looking, with a sharp shine running along its sides that gave it a faintly co-bra-like profile.
• 1:17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grume Lake was chosen as its test base, and the base grew to accommodate it.
• 1:17:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: A new, much longer runway was built.
• 1:17:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fuel storage was expanded for the special fuel the aircraft needed.
• 1:17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Housing was built for hundreds of workers.
• 1:17:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The A12 made its first flight from Grume Lake in late April of 1962.
• 1:17:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The A12 and its descendants.
• 1:17:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: including the Air Force's two-seat SR-71 Blackbird, were among the most remarkable aircraft ever built.
• 1:17:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: They could fly from coast to coast across the United States in a little over an hour.
• 1:18:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And once again, they produced sightings.
• 1:18:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: At Mac 3, at 90,000 feet, the aircraft could appear as a fast-moving light.
• 1:18:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: or as a dark shape flashing across the sky, airline crews over the southwest reported strange objects moving its speeds that seemed impossible.
• 1:18:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And once again, Project Blue Book could not explain publicly.
• 1:18:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rumling also became a place for studying the aircraft of America's adversaries.
• 1:18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1966,
• 1:18:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: an Iraqi Air Force pilot defected to Israel in a Soviet built in May 21, then the most advanced fighter in the Soviet arms.
• 1:18:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Israel led the aircraft to the United States, and in 1968 it was flown a groom lake under a program called Have Donut.
• 1:19:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: American pilots took it up and flew mock combat against American fighters, learning its strengths and its weaknesses.
• 1:19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other Soviet aircraft followed acquired by various means.
• 1:19:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lessons learned in no secret dogfighters over in Nevada desert were passed on to American pilots heading to Vietnam.
• 1:19:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: and later contributed to the creation of the famous Navy Fighter School, known as Tom Gunn.
• 1:19:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1970s, groom Lake became the cradle of something entirely new.
• 1:19:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Engineers at Lockheed Skunkworks, drawing on mathematical work by a Soviet physicist named Piotr Ufimtse, which had been published in the Open Literature.
• 1:19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: and largely ignored in his own country had worked out how to shape an aircraft so that it reflected almost no radar energy back to all its source.
• 1:19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The result was an airplane made of flat angled panels, like a cut diamond.
• 1:20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It looked as though it should not be able to fly at all.
• 1:20:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its engineers nicknamed it the hopeless diamond.
• 1:20:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under a program called Have Blue, two small demonstrator aircraft were built.
• 1:20:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first flew from groom Lake in December of 1977.
• 1:20:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: To radar, it appeared about as large as a small bird.
• 1:20:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both demonstrators eventually crashed during testing, but they proved the concept.
• 1:20:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Air Force ordered a full-sized operational version.
• 1:20:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: the F-117 Nighthawk.
• 1:20:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: First flew from Green Lake in June of 1981.
• 1:20:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Nighthawk was flat black, angular, and utterly strange in appearance.
• 1:20:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was designed to fly at night, and its operational squadron was based at another secret site, the Tonepart Test Range Air
• 1:21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: further north in Nevada, where its pilots flew only in darkness and lived under a cover story.
• 1:21:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The very existence of the aircraft was not publicly acknowledged until November of 1988 and the public did not see one in person until 1990.
• 1:21:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its first combat came during the American invasion of Panama in 1989 and it became famous during the Gulf War in 1991.
• 1:21:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: As these aircraft flew at night across the Nevada sky, people saw things, dark shapes, odd lights, triangles.
• 1:21:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other aircraft flew at Grume Lake too.
• 1:21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a curved whale-like stealth test aircraft called Tasset Blue, which tested ideas for low observable surveillance in the early 1980s, and which the Air Force did not reveal.
• 1:21:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: until 1996.
• 1:22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a small Boeing aircraft called Bird of Prey, flown in the late 1990s and revealed only in 2002.
• 1:22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were drones, prototypes, and projects whose names we still do not know.
• 1:22:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each one
• 1:22:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Flying in the empty skies over the Nevada Desert was capable of producing sightings that could not be explained by anyone who did not have a security clearance.
• 1:22:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: All the while, the base was growing.
• 1:22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: What had started as a handful of trailers became a substantial installation with multiple runways, large hangers, dormitories, a fire station, and a work force
• 1:22:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of them did not live there.
• 1:22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They commuted daily on unmarked white passenger jets that took off from a private terminal at the Las Vegas airport and flew north into restricted airspace.
• 1:23:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pilots and air traffic controllers referred to these flights by the cool sign Janet and the Janet flights became part of the law of Las Vegas, visible to anyone who knew where to look and yet officially the base did not exist.
• 1:23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: For decades, government spokespeople would neither confirm nor deny that there was any facility at Grume Lake.
• 1:23:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maps omitted it.
• 1:23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Government publications did not mention it.
• 1:23:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Workers signed agreements never to speak of it.
• 1:23:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The airspace above it was among the most restricted in the country, closed to all civil and military aircraft, except those cleared to enter.
• 1:23:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Military pilots called that block of airspace the box, and a stray into it was to invite serious consequences.
• 1:23:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The place acquired a nickname among pilots, dreamland.
• 1:23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the ground, the perimeter was marked by orange-topped posts and warning signs.
• 1:24:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The sign said that photography was prohibited and that the use of deadly force was authorised.
• 1:24:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond the signs were motion senses.
• 1:24:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and on the hills nearby, security personnel in white pickup trucks watched the roads through binoculars.
• 1:24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: tourists who came to look called them the camo dudes for their desert camouflage uniforms.
• 1:24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: for years it was possible for curious visitors.
• 1:24:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: to drive to certain hilltops on public land, such as freedom-rich and white-sides-mounted and look down at the base from a distance of a dozen miles or so.
• 1:24:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The government responded by quietly taking control of more land.
• 1:24:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1984, the Air Force took over the groomed mountain range overlooking the base.
• 1:25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1995, it withdrew the last public vantage points, freedom ridge and white signs.
• 1:25:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: After that, there was no legal place left from which a member of the public could see the base.
• 1:25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The closest town is a small place called Rachel Nevada, a cluster of mobile homes and a few small businesses on the lonely highway that runs through the valley.
• 1:25:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rachel became a kind of pilgrimage site.
• 1:25:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the 1990s.
• 1:25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's small bar and motel renamed the Little Alay, served burgers to tourists hoping to see something in the night sky.
• 1:25:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: A mailbox belonging to a local rancher.
• 1:25:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Standing alone on the side of the road became famous as a gathering spot for watches who called it the black male boss.
• 1:25:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1996, the state of Nevada officially gave the road through Rachel, State Route 375.
• 1:26:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The name, the extraterrestrial highway, complete with signs and a dedication ceremony attended by the cast and crew of the film Independence Day.
• 1:26:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: What should we make of all this?
• 1:26:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The truth about Area 51 is that it was and is exactly what its critics feared and its legend claimed.
• 1:26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: A secret base where the government developed and tested technology that it hid from the public and about which it lied and the strange flying objects that people reported seeing in the skies over the west were in many cases very real and very strange.
• 1:26:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were real aircraft, flying faster, higher and more quietly than the public believed possible.
• 1:26:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The government was so committed to protecting those secrets that it allowed and sometimes encouraged the public to believe it was seeing something else.
• 1:26:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, the myth of Area 51 grew in the shadow and cast by the reality of Area 51.
• 1:27:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The secrecy that protected the U-2 and the A-12 and the Nighthawk was the very same secrecy that let people imagine flying sources in its hangars.
• 1:27:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: When a government refuses to say what is behind a fence, people will fill the space with whatever they fear or hope, and for a public raised on Roswell on the ex-files, on decades of source of stories, the most natural thing to imagine behind that fence was a spacecraft.
• 1:27:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is one more piece to this.
• 1:27:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal in 2025.
• 1:27:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Investigators at the Pentagon's own UFO office had found evidence that at least on some occasions, the deception went further than simple assignments.
• 1:27:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reporting described instances in which officials appeared to have deliberately encouraged alien stories, including according to the report.
• 1:28:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: an Air Force officer who in the late 1960s gave doctored photographs of flying sources to the owner of a barn near the base, apparently to muddy the waters around real secret programs.
• 1:28:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It also described a strange practice in which some new personnel were reportedly told as a kind of hazing or loyalty test.
• 1:28:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: that they were being briefed on a program involving alien technology.
• 1:28:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The full details of these stories remain murky, but if they are accurate, they suggest that some within the government found the U.F.O.
• 1:28:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Legend useful and did not mind feeding, which brings us to the man who, more than anyone else, made Area 51 faint.
• 1:28:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter 5, Lazzam, the law suit, the declassifications and where the question stands.
• 1:29:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: In May of 1989, a man appeared on the evening use of a Las Vegas television station, his face hidden in shadow, his voice disguised.
• 1:29:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He called himself Dennis.
• 1:29:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was being interviewed by an
• 1:29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he told a story that would echo around the world.
• 1:29:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some months later, in November of that year, the man came forward under his real name.
• 1:29:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was Robert Lazzard known as Bob.
• 1:29:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A 30-year-old who said he was a physicist, Lazar claimed that in late 1988 and early 1989, he had been hired to work at a secret facility he called S4, located at Papus Lake, a dry lake bed about 10 miles south of Green Lake, within the same restricted area.
• 1:30:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: There, he said, built into the side of a mountain.
• 1:30:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wuhan is containing nine flying sources of extraterrestrial origin.
• 1:30:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: His job he said had been to help reverse engineer their propulsion systems.
• 1:30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lazar's account was detailed and technical.
• 1:30:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He described a craft he called the sport.
• 1:30:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: A disk about 40 feet across made of a material that looked like metal
• 1:30:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said the craft were powered by a reactor that used a super heavy element, element number 115, which he said did not occur naturally on Earth.
• 1:30:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to Lazarus,
• 1:30:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: This element produced a gravitational field that the craft could use to bend space and travel enormous distances.
• 1:30:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said he had read briefing documents describing the aliens who built the craft, who came from a planet orbiting a star in the constellation reticular.
• 1:31:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He also told a story that made his account more concrete for many people.
• 1:31:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said that on several Wednesday evenings he had taken friends out to a spot along the highway near the restricted area.
• 1:31:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that they had watched the sources of being test flown as glowing lights that moved in impossible ways.
• 1:31:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: On one of these trips he said, they were stopped by security and soon afterwards his clearance was revoked and he was let go.
• 1:31:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lazar's story was electric.
• 1:31:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It combined the thing everyone had suspected about Area 51 with an insider's voice and a scientist's vocabulary.
• 1:31:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Naps reports were picked up and I replayed around the world.
• 1:31:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: tourists began flocking to the highway outside Rachel, hoping to see the Wednesday nine test flights.
• 1:32:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lazar became a fixture in UFO culture.
• 1:32:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Decades later, in 2018, he was the subject of the documentary film.
• 1:32:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and in 2019, he appeared on one of the most popular podcasts in the world, introducing his story to a whole new generation, but serious questions surrounded Lazar from the start.
• 1:32:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said he held master's degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology.
• 1:32:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Neither institution had any record.
• 1:32:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only verifiable record of his higher education was at a community college in Los Angeles, Pierce College, Lazar and his defenders said that the government had erased his records to discredit him.
• 1:32:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Skeptics noted that erasing someone's records from two universities and from all the classmates and professors who would have known him would be an extraordinary undertaking.
• 1:33:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lazard did have some verifiable connection to the scientific world.
• 1:33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1980s, he had worked as a technician at the Los Alamos Messing Physics Facility, a part of Los Alamos National Laboratory through a contract.
• 1:33:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A local newspaper article from that time about a jet-powered car he had built, described him as a physicist there.
• 1:33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and his name appeared in a laboratory phone directory, so he was not an outsideer with no ties to government science.
• 1:33:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that worked did not establish the advance training he described, and nothing documented his employment at S4, as for element 115.
• 1:33:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was eventually created by a team of Russian and American scientists working in the Russian city of Dubner in 2003.
• 1:34:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was officially named Moscow Vium in 2016.
• 1:34:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lazar's supporters pointed to its creation as a vindication.
• 1:34:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1989, when he spoke of it, the element had not yet been made.
• 1:34:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Moscow VM that scientists created is wildly unstable.
• 1:34:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's atoms decay in a fraction of a second, which is the opposite of the stable element, Lazar described.
• 1:34:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: his defenders reply that a stable form could exist but is not yet been found.
• 1:34:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Physicists generally regard that as highly unlikely.
• 1:34:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1990, Lazar was arrested in connection with a brothel in Las Vegas and he pleaded guilty to a felony charge related to pandering.
• 1:34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was sentenced to probation, his supporters saw it as a smear.
• 1:34:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: his critics saw it as one more reason to question his credibility.
• 1:35:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: To this day, Bob Lazar remains one of the most debated figures in the whole history of the subject.
• 1:35:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are people who knew him who are convinced he was telling the truth.
• 1:35:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are researchers who have spent years trying to verify his story and come away unable to do so.
• 1:35:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: What can be said with confidence?
• 1:35:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: is that his account was never corroborated by documents or by other witnesses who worked as form.
• 1:35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what can also be said is that his story arrived at the perfect moment.
• 1:35:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the very real stealth aircraft flying out of groom Lake were still secret, as the government still refused to acknowledge that the base existed, and as public fascination
• 1:35:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He gave the empty space behind the fence, the name and a shape.
• 1:35:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: After 1989, Area 51 meant aliens.
• 1:36:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a light-hearted post-script to Lazarus influence.
• 1:36:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: In June of 2019, shortly after his podcast appearance, a young man in California created a joke event on social media called Storm Area 51.
• 1:36:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: was that if enough people charged the base at once, the guards could not stop them and they could see the aliens for themselves.
• 1:36:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nearly 2 million people clicked to say they were going.
• 1:36:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Authorities in Nevada took it seriously enough to prepare for crowds.
• 1:36:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the event,
• 1:36:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the weekend of September 20, 2019, a few thousand people turned up in Rachel and the nearby town of Hiko for what turned into a pair of improvised music festivals in the desert.
• 1:36:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost no one approached the gate.
• 1:36:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: A handful of people were arrested, most people can't, danced, wore alien costumes and went home.
• 1:37:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there is a much more serious story about Area 51 from the 1990s, and it concerns not aliens but people.
• 1:37:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1994, a law professor at George Washington University named Jonathan Turley.
• 1:37:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of former workers at the Grume Lake Facility and the widows of two others.
• 1:37:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were civilian contractors and they alleged that for years hazardous waste had been disposed of at the base by burning it in large open trenches.
• 1:37:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The waste reportedly included paints, solvents, fuels, and it was suggested the exotic materials used in stealth coatings.
• 1:37:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The workers said they had been exposed to the toxic smoke and that it had made them sick.
• 1:37:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: They described skin conditions, respiratory illness and other ailments.
• 1:38:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the workers, a sheet metal worker named Robert Frost, had died in 1989, analysis of his tissue.
• 1:38:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: carried out by researchers at Rutgers University was reported to show high levels of compounds such as dioxins.
• 1:38:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lawsuit was brought under federal environmental law, which requires that hazardous waste be handled in specific ways and that information about it be made available.
• 1:38:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the workers faced an extraordinary problem.
• 1:38:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were suing over conditions at a place that the government would not admit existed.
• 1:38:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The government's response was to invoke something called the State Secrets Privilege.
• 1:38:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a legal doctrine that allows the government to block the disclosure of information in a lawsuit, if disclosing it or would harm national security.
• 1:38:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The government did not say what was at the base.
• 1:38:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not admit that any waste had been burned.
• 1:39:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that to discuss it in court would damage the national security of the United States.
• 1:39:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, in September of 1995, President Bill Clinton signed a presidential determination exempting in the government's careful phrasing, the Air Force's operating location near
• 1:39:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a curious document.
• 1:39:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It acknowledged the existence of an operating location at Grume Lake, while still refusing to say anything about it.
• 1:39:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: That determination has been renewed every year since by every president.
• 1:39:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The case was dismissed.
• 1:39:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1998, a federal appeals court upheld the dismissal and the Supreme Court declined to hear.
• 1:40:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: about what they had been exposed to, or whether it had caused their illnesses.
• 1:40:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: For many people who followed the case, it was a sobering reminder that the secrecy surrounding area 51 was not a game, not a matter of sources and tourists, but something that had real consequences for real people who had no recourse in the courts because of it.
• 1:40:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet slowly over the years, the secrecy began to lift.
• 1:40:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1994 and 1997, as we have heard, the Air Force published its reports on Roswell.
• 1:40:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: acknowledging project mogul and the high altitude dummy drops.
• 1:40:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1997, the CIA historian Gerald Haynes published his account of the agency's involvement with UFO reports, including the role of the U2 and the A12 in generating sightings.
• 1:41:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the years that followed, the government declassified a great deal of information about the A12,
• 1:41:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: have blue program, the Migtesting and other projects connected to the base.
• 1:41:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most symbolic moment came in August of 2013.
• 1:41:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: A researcher at the National Security Archive, a private research institute at George Washington University, had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the
• 1:41:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the document was released in a less heavily-censored version of the four, it openly described the selection of groom-lake, the construction of the base, and the role of the place it called an area 51.
• 1:41:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the first time, a government document released to the public used that name and showed the base on a map.
• 1:42:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than 58 years after Tony Levere first spotted
• 1:42:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The government had acknowledged that area 51 existed.
• 1:42:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story ran in newspapers around the world.
• 1:42:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some people found it almost funny, given that the base had been photographed from space and commercial satellite images of it were freely available online.
• 1:42:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it marked the end of a very long silence.
• 1:42:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the question of unidentified flying objects themselves had returned to the center of American public life in a way few could have predicted in December of 2017.
• 1:42:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The New York Times published a front page story, revealing that the Pentagon had run a secret program to investigate reports of unidentified aerial phenomena, as the government now called them, from about 2007 to 2012.
• 1:43:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program had been funded at the urging of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.
• 1:43:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: and much of its money that gone to a Las Vegas company owned by the Aerospace Entrepreneur Robert Biggler.
• 1:43:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story was accompanied by videos recorded by the infrared cameras at Navy fighter jets, showing objects that the pilots could not identify.
• 1:43:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them came from an encounter in 2004, off the coast of Southern California, involving aircraft from the carrier, USS-Ninners.
• 1:43:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pilots described a white object shaped like a large tic-tac mint, which seemed to move in ways no-no aircraft could.
• 1:43:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In April of 2020, the Pentagon formally released these videos and confirmed that they showed phenomena it had not identity.
• 1:43:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Congress began to take a sustained interest.
• 1:44:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: In late 2020, lawmakers directed the intelligence community to produce a report on what was known about these phenomena.
• 1:44:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: In June of 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary assessment.
• 1:44:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It examined 144 reports.
• 1:44:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: mostly from military personnel gathered between 2004 and 2021.
• 1:44:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was able to explain exactly one of them, which turned out to be a large, deflating elude.
• 1:44:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of the rest, it said that most probably represented physical objects since many had been detected by multiple senses.
• 1:44:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It noted that 18 incidents involved objects that appeared to move in unusual ways it proposed several broad categories of possible explanations, airborne clutter such as birds and balloons and drones, natural atmospheric phenomena, secret American government or industry programs, foreign adversary technology, and a final category
• 1:45:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: it's simply called other.
• 1:45:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not say that any of the objects were extraterrestrial, but it did not rule it out either and it acknowledged frankly how little the government knew.
• 1:45:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In May of 2022, a subcommittee of the House of Representatives helped the first public congressional hearing and subject in northern half a century.
• 1:45:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: and acknowledged that the number of reports have grown.
• 1:45:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's some of the Pentagon established a new permanent office to investigate these reports called the All-Demain and Normally Resolution Office.
• 1:45:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's later reports explained many of the new cases as balloons, drones, birds, and sensor articles.
• 1:46:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: While a significant number remained uncharacterizing for lack of data, then on July 26,
• 1:46:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: 2023 came the hearing that brought the old legends of Roswell and the secret base roaring back into the present.
• 1:46:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, three witnesses testified under oath.
• 1:46:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two of them were former Navy pilots.
• 1:46:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: David Frava had been one of the aviators who encountered the Tic-Tac object in 2004.
• 1:46:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ryan Graves described frequent sightings of unidentified objects by his squadron off the coast of Virginia in 2014 and 2015.
• 1:46:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: including one that he and other pilots described as a dark queue inside a clear sphere.
• 1:46:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both men called for better reporting systems and less stigma for pilots who come forward.
• 1:46:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The third witness was a former Air Force officer and intelligence official named David Grooch.
• 1:47:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grush had worked with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconocence Office, and he had served on the Pentagon's earlier task force, investigating unidentified phenomena.
• 1:47:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2022, he had filed a whistleblower complaint.
• 1:47:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But now, under oath, he told Congress that he had been informed in the course of his official duties that the United States government had for decades been running a secret program to retrieve and reverse engineer crashed craft of non-human origin.
• 1:47:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: When asked whether the government had recovered the remains of the pilots of these craft, he said that it had recovered what he called non-human biologics.
• 1:47:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was an astonishing moment.
• 1:47:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: A former intelligence officer, speaking under oath before Congress, was making claims that echoed almost exactly the stories that had grown up around Roswell and Area 51.
• 1:48:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: over the previous half century.
• 1:48:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there were important limits to what Grush said.
• 1:48:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He made clear that he had not personally seen any craft or bodies.
• 1:48:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: His testimony was based, he said, on interviews with dozens of people who had first hand knowledge.
• 1:48:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on documents he had reviewed, he said that he could not provide details in a public hearing because they were classified and offered to share names and locations in a secure closed session.
• 1:48:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Pentagon responded that investigators had found no verifiable information to substantiate claims that any program regarding the possession or reverse engineering
• 1:48:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: of extraterrestrial materials had existed in the past, or existed currently, the hearing had real consequences.
• 1:49:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was notable for being by partisan members of both parties expressed frustration with government secrecy.
• 1:49:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In its wake, senators Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, and Mike Rounds, a Republican
• 1:49:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: proposed legislation called the unidentified anomalous phenomena discloserate.
• 1:49:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In its original form, it was remarkably ambitious, modeled on the law that had been passed in the 1990s, to release records about the assassination of President Kennedy.
• 1:49:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would have created an independent review board to oversee the release of government records on the subject.
• 1:49:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it even gave the government the power to take possession of any recovered materials of non-human origin held by private companies.
• 1:49:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Much of that was stripped out before the final version became law at the end of 2023.
• 1:50:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: What remained required that the national archives created dedicated collection
• 1:50:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: that those records would eventually be made public.
• 1:50:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In March of 2024, the Pentagon's all-domain anomaly resolution office released the first volume of a historical report, examining government involvement with the subject since 1945.
• 1:50:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It reached a clear conclusion.
• 1:50:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It found no verifiable evidence that any sighting had ever represented extra-terrestrial technology.
• 1:50:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and no evidence that the government or private companies had ever reversed engineered such technology.
• 1:50:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It argued that many of the claims had been passed around within a relatively small circle of believers, inside and outside government, repeated so often that they began to seem confirmed.
• 1:51:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it pointed to the same pattern we have been tracing tonight that many sightings throughout history had been caused by real, secret American programs from the U-2 onward whose secrecy had helped give rise to the stories.
• 1:51:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Critics of the report, including grouches supporters and some members of Congress, said that it had not engaged with the specific
• 1:51:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: made in closed sessions and called it a white walk.
• 1:51:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Further congressional hearings followed in late 2024 and again in 2025, with more witnesses and more claims and with continuing calls for disclosure.
• 1:51:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as of this telling, no physical evidence of alien craft or alien remains has been presented to the public.
• 1:51:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: No document has been released confirming a crash retrieval program.
• 1:52:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the official government position remains what it was in 1947, though stated far more carefully, that there is no evidence of anything from beyond the earth.
• 1:52:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So where does that leave us?
• 1:52:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It leaves us, I think.
• 1:52:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: with two places and two kinds of truth.
• 1:52:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: At Roswell, in the summer of 1947, something fell out of the sky onto a sheep ranch.
• 1:52:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The weight of documentary evidence suggests that it was a train of balloons and radar reflectors launched as part of a secret program to listen for Soviet atomic bombs.
• 1:52:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: an officer at the local airfield issued a press release saying it was a flying disk and a general informed worth said it was a weather balloon.
• 1:52:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both statements were in their way misleading.
• 1:52:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The truth that it was a classified spying device could not be told.
• 1:53:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and because it could not be told, a door was left open, or through which decades later an entire mythology ward.
• 1:53:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: At Grume Lake, beginning in 1955.
• 1:53:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The government built a place to fly aircraft that no one was supposed to know about.
• 1:53:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It flew them for decades over the Nevada desert and across the skies of the West and people saw them and could not explain what they had seen.
• 1:53:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The government knew what they had seen and did not say.
• 1:53:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It denied that the base existed at all.
• 1:53:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It used the corpse to keep secret, even the waste it burned.
• 1:53:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And at times, if recent reporting is accurate, some of its own people may have deliberately nudged the public towards alien stories, because aliens were easier to laugh off than the truth.
• 1:53:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Neither of these is the story the legends tell, but both of them are stories of real secrecy, real deception, and real consequences.
• 1:54:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The flying saucer myth did not grow up in spite of government secrecy.
• 1:54:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It grew up because of it.
• 1:54:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the space between what people saw and what they were told.
• 1:54:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And perhaps that is the most human part of this whole long tale.
• 1:54:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: When we see a light in the sky and no one will tell us what it is, we cannot help but wonder.
• 1:54:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: We fill the silence with stories.
• 1:54:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of those stories are fears about enemies and weapons.
• 1:54:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some are hopes that we are not alone on a dark night in the desert,
• 1:54:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is easy to understand why so many people looked up and imagined someone looking back.
• 1:54:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The question of whether anyone ever has been looking back remains open, in the sense that science keeps all such questions open.
• 1:55:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Astronomers today search seriously for signs of life on other worlds, and the universe is very large.
• 1:55:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the evidence that has come out of Roswell and Area 51.
• 1:55:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: After nearly 80 years, points not to visitors from the stars, but to ourselves, to our ingenuity in building strange machines, to our habit of hiding them, and to our endless restlessness need to understand the sky.
• 1:55:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so we come to the end of our journey tonight.
• 1:55:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: We began in the summer
• 1:55:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: with a pilot over the cascades and nine flashing shapes against the mountains.
• 1:55:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: We followed a rancher into Roswell with a truck full of strange debris and watched a press release go around the world and come back again in a single day.
• 1:56:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: We waited through 13 quiet years.
• 1:56:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: and saw the story reborn in the doubt and distrust of a later age.
• 1:56:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: We flew with the U2 and the Oxcard and the Nightwalk over the dry lake bed at Groen Lake.
• 1:56:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And saw how a real secret could cast a long and fanciful shadow.
• 1:56:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and we sat in a hearing room in Washington, listening to a story that seemed to bring everything full circle.
• 1:56:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this time with me here on sleepless history.
• 1:56:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good night!