I sent Doug to Council Bluffs
to try to get real physical evidence of a UFO crash,
so I can put a nail in the AARO report,
which claims that nothing of that kind can possibly exist.
So, I've been dying to hear about the Iowa trip.
- Oh boy. - What'd you run into?
So, I went out there, and I met with Mike first.
He took me to the exact location.
He said it occurred in a park by this lake.
He was with his spouse at the time, with Chris,
and said that they saw... an object fall from the sky,
and then they investigated.
And when Mike arrives there with Chris,
there's what he described as, like, molten lava.
And he collected some materials from the source,
which I have. I'll show you.
- Okay. - If you can take a look at this...
- It's like slag. - Yeah.
I mean, it's really hard. I couldn't break this if I tried.
Now, I took a magnet to it, and parts of it are magnetic,
so that too kinda threw me off
'cause it's not completely iron if it's iron.
But on the elemental table,
there's only three natural, like, resources that are magnetic
that come from the Earth.
Iron's one of them, but the whole thing is not iron.
So I'm like, "Okay, is this an alloy?"
Like, how did this get there?
- You put me in contact with Darrell... - Right.
And he said, "This is not from outer space."
"I'm telling you, I did this."
What's his explanation? What was he doing out there?
There's the Union Pacific Railroad
based in Omaha, so a lot of people work for the railroad.
Some of his buddies had taken this thermal welding kit...
Right.
They went out to this location in the park,
havin' some beers, put it on the hill,
same hill that Mike and Chris were talking about,
ignited it, and it was like a free fireworks show for them.
Wow. So there was something in the sky that was fallin' down.
Darrell says that he caused it to happen from the ground up,
not the other way around.
We really need to do proper testing
on both of these possibilities.
Is this extraterrestrial material, or is it a hoax?
We'll find out.
I sent the Council Bluffs materials
to Garry Nolan at Stanford for analysis.
So, while we wait for the results,
I'm headed out to meet some explosives experts in Texas
to see if they can prove whether or not the alleged hoaxer's story
that the UFO sighting was actually the result of a thermite explosion
is a viable explanation for what the witnesses experienced there.
So, consider the context, the AARO report,
all those thousands and thousands of cases have now been swept away
with a wave of a magic wand by AARO,
saying, "There's no evidence any of them are unexplained."
"They're all, um... They're all effectively debunked."
But the debunking theories rarely get tested.
I've debunked my share of cases. I think there really is something to it.
But I try to put both sides to the same level of scrutiny
and see what's left at the end.
- I'm George Knapp. - Pleased to meet you. Jake.
I'm Sean. Nice to meet you.
Nice to see you guys in person. We've talked about some of the details.
I thought we'd go over a bit of it now. This Council Bluffs story.
There aren't many cases in the whole world where you've got actual physical material
that allegedly fell from a UFO.
So it's important for us to figure out,
could this material be explained by thermite being exploded on the ground?
And if not, then it remains a legitimate mystery.
Yeah, we've worked with thermite, normally in the form of grenades
and some other methods, not traditionally with welders.
But it's not hard for us to recreate a welder, as we have done
based upon research in the railroad industry
and thermite welders.
So we're gonna set up a test scenario to see what kind of plume we can get
and see if this scenario actually is feasible.
The original incident happened in winter. The ground was covered by snow.
We'll get some ice to try to replicate that.
- Let's blow some stuff up. - Absolutely.
So, here is our thermite welder.
It is basically a container with a ceramic liner to resist the heat.
And it's full of thermite. Five pounds, to be exact.
And this is similar to what rail workers would use
to weld tracks together?
Correct. It's the exact same ratio,
same compound. There's no difference.
It's difficult to ignite thermite.
Not something you can take a match to it, and it will kick it off.
You have to melt down the aluminum to finally react with the iron oxide
to finally get this going.
But once it gets going,
nothing's gonna stop it except burning it out or smothering it.
So normally you'd point it downward to have the slag go downward.
- But we're pointing it upward. - Correct.
This is a really important case.
It's one of the few in UFO world that has multiple levels of evidence
at a time when AARO, the Department of Defense,
is trying to discredit the entire UFO subject.
So it's important we do everything we can
to make sure this case holds up in the face of the hoaxer's recent claim.
- Ready? - Yeah.
All right. Firing in three, two, one...
There we go.
So that's it, right? It's over.
Oh yeah, that's it.
It did shower some sparks up there.
How high do you think that went? Twenty feet?
Tops, yeah. About 20 feet.
I'm just trying to imagine how, under what circumstances,
people could mistake that, which was pretty cool,
but it's not as spectacular as what the witnesses said they saw.
Yeah, this is not very spectacular. It looks cool.
It's basically a fireworks show.
It looked like a Roman candle that you'd set off on the 4th of July.
Nothing like what was described
on the night back there in December of 1977
when it supposedly could be seen for a long distance and was way up in the sky.
All right.
So here we can see all the slag that ejected,
very small bits where it congealed, and there's most of it right there.
The Council Bluffs slag that we got, we've got several pounds of it.
This is not much slag at all.
No, it would have had to be way more thermite,
way past the feasibility of just one guy that said,
"Yeah, I got a bunch of thermite, and I lit it off, and it was cool."
Like, we're a professional setup here, and this took a lot of work.
To just simply say, "I managed to get thermite from a railroad and fire it,"
that's getting into a little bit of a stretch.
Just heard from Dr. Garry Nolan at Stanford University.
He's got the results in.
He's ready to share that with us about this material from Council Bluffs.
We gave him a huge sample of slag from this incident.
So we're hoping he can tell us the chemical composition,
how it was probably created, and where it may have come from.
And that would go a long way in our counter report to AARO.
Dr. Nolan. Garry. How you doing?
- I'm great. How are you? - Good to see ya.
So, Council Bluffs.
- We shared some material with ya. - Right.
You're familiar with that case and what happened.
Tell us what you found.
Sure. I took three samples from the sample you gave me.
And the sample you gave me was like this big. It was...
- You know, it was huge. - Yeah.
What I'd noticed was that the sample had a lot of bubbles in it.
And so when I tapped one of them, uh, it was clearly hollow.
And I thought, "This would be a great place
to get one of the samples from on the inside
because it had been untouched for 50 years."
So the principal materials are titanium, magnesium, aluminum,
silicon, and iron.
It was incompletely mixed.
Depending on where you looked,
you got different amounts of iron and titanium or aluminum or silicon.
So what it tells me right out of the box
was that it is the result
of some kind of industrial or, uh, um, intelligent process.
But, you know, one of the things that had always bothered me
was this notion that this was thermite.
Right.
The most common thermite is actually a mixture of rust and aluminum.
Uh, the rust is the oxide.
It provides the energy for burning the aluminum.
But there were no aluminum oxides in the material.
So that basically completely blows out of the water
any idea that this was thermite.
You know, we're still left with a mystery.
We don't know what it is.
Have you seen any that is an unobtainium, a... an undiscovered element?
Would you expect to see one from these cases?
Or is it more like that, since they've been here a long time,
they would also use earth materials?
Yeah, why not? I mean, they don't need to go
to Alpha Centauri to make, you know, a steering wheel
because you've got the stuff here.
Can you make a guess
why this stuff would be dripping out of a craft, if that's what it was?
I mean, pure speculation,
but maybe it's the result of a process gone wrong,
and it needed to be dumped overboard.
I mean, there have been plenty of instances of UAPs
that have been alleged to have been seen that look like they're in distress.
And so that to me... That's... that's a possibility.
The Council Bluffs materials is not a smoking gun.
We don't know who made this stuff or why, but it is still an open, viable mystery.
It's not quite enough to counter the AARO report,
but there are other types of evidence, including mass sightings,
that would push back against that AARO report
to suggest that nonhuman intelligence is real, and it's here.
Mass sightings seen by hundreds or even thousands of people
at the same time
could provide the sort of undeniable proof of nonhuman intelligence
that I need for my report, if they can be validated.
Mass UFO sightings are true anomalies.
They don't happen very often.
My personal opinion is we only see 'em when they allow us to see 'em.
Sometimes we get these brief glimpses. It seems like a show of force maybe.
Maybe it's meant to inspire us, to show us
what technical capabilities are out there that we haven't achieved yet.
If AARO is not gonna do the work,
if they're not gonna honestly tackle these big questions,
then we're gonna have to do it
while there are still people willing to share their stories.
In 1954, a soccer match
in Florence, Italy, came to a complete standstill
when the 10,000 spectators and the players on the field
all noticed strange craft hovering over the stadium.
Part of a wave of sightings all across that country.
Then there's the Belgian wave that began in 1989 and lasted into 1990.
Thousands of people across Belgium watched two F-16s chase a massive triangular UFO
over the course of an hour and fail to intercept it.
But perhaps the most significant mass sighting of all time
happened in the heart of one of America's largest cities,
the phenomenon known as the Phoenix Lights.
A lot of folks are wondering what they saw in the skies over Arizona.
Was it a supersecret military aircraft or visitors from outer space?
What happened in Phoenix was seen by thousands of people,
and a lot of 'em got photographic evidence of it.
In 1997, thousands of eyewitnesses watched in awe
as a boomerang-shaped formation of lights
cruised slowly and silently over the city of Phoenix.
The Phoenix Lights case is huge, both literally and figuratively.
Huge in the sense of what witnesses described,
this gigantic boomerang
that some people said was the size of three football fields.
Witnesses thought these were separate lights flying in formation
but quickly realized the lights were all part of a single gigantic something.
And it's big in a figurative sense in that it was such an overt demonstration.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of witnesses.
It lasted for hours.
This is one of several home videos
recorded that night last March.
A few say they saw the lights as far as 100 miles north from Phoenix
Many more saw them over the city.
There were a lot of attempts to debunk the Phoenix Lights case.
You had the governor of Arizona
making a silly statement with somebody dressed in an alien costume.
And now I'll ask Officer Stein and his colleagues to escort the accused
into the room so that we may all look upon the guilty party.
You had the military. At first, they said,
"No, we don't have anything in the air. That wasn't us."
And a couple of days later, they said, "Oh yeah. We had some flares up there."
"Some A-10s were dropping flares. That's what people must have seen."
Which is wholly unacceptable
as an explanation for what people witnessed and videotaped.
But it seemed to have worked because 37 years later,
this case is pretty much forgotten, swept under the rug.
I want to find out and expose
how that happened to AARO and to the public.
They need to understand
how the truth about nonhuman intelligence is concealed to this day.
I've got leads on witnesses in town
who saw how their stories are discounted and dismissed.
And it's motivated them to share their stories and to keep this case alive.
They swear that what they saw that night was a real nonhuman craft.
And many believe this was not a one-time event.
It's happened many times over the years.
Tom King is an example.
He was here when it happened and says that some of the same orbs
and things we're seeing in association with this giant boomerang
are still in the skies over Phoenix, and he's got video of it.
- How you doing? - Tom King. Good to meet you.
A lot of times, people become obsessive
and they'll record everything that's in the sky,
every bird, every plane, every satellite, every balloon, and call it a UFO.
So I'm interested in what Tom King has been doing,
and want to take a look at what he's caught on tape.
Well, this is like the bridge of the Enterprise in here.
Yes, I call this, um, the UFO lab.
I have 4K cameras that are looking north, south, east, west,
and I have an all-sky camera looking at the entire sky.
These are on the roof.
They're weatherproof, and they can survive the Phoenix heat.
They'll go up to about 158 degrees before they're gonna shut down.
Have you ever added up what all this cost you?
Or do you not want to know that number?
It would be a very nice Ferrari.
A very, very nice Ferrari.
It's not shocking for me to learn how much Tom invested
in his UFO monitoring operation.
These kinds of things affect us.
Once you realize that there's something else out there,
that we are not alone, I mean, it really shakes you to your core.
It did me.
I call this the green tube. It's like a neon electric.
It has its own light it's giving off.
- Pulsating. - Yeah, it's not reflecting the sun.
I could have a PhD in skywatching.
As many years as I've done this, I've never seen nothin' like that.
You ever seen anything like this in all your cases?
No.
This is one of the most interesting videos I've ever captured.
It was shot just last year.
So this is one of those white orb type objects.
What we're looking at here is, uh...
I used a software called Keonova,
and I used it to trace the flight path.
So what happens is
it does this racetrack pattern where it comes down,
does a half a circle, and it repeats that twice in this video.
It's not a bird. That's too high to be a bird.
This is up about twice as high as the planes
either taking off from Sky Harbor or the planes coming in for a landing.
In fact, the whole area here is Class B, uh, airspace.
There's a plane for visual reference right now.
And these objects are above these planes.
This just blows me away.
It goes... bounces off that part of the sky
and does a complete 180 turn, like that.
And now it's gonna go off the way it came in and do another M.
- Yeah, that's very strange. - So this is under intelligent control.
Tom's videos do bear hallmarks of legitimate UFOs,
including signs of intelligent control and the ability to move at high speeds
and rapidly change direction without any visible means of propulsion.
Look at this object. It was gigantic.
It floated right over Phoenix, right over a major international airport,
right in proximity to a major US Air Force base.
And AARO is not even taking a look at it. How does that make sense?
Let's talk about the Phoenix Lights incident.
Tell me what you saw, how it affected you, and why it's still relevant today.
That night we had an appointment
to go over to this man's house named Steve Blonder.
He lived in South Phoenix.
This is the location.
- I wanna go home. - This is Steve right here.
We're sitting there talking,
and that's when this double light comes up.
There it goes.
There's two side by side. This is slightly different.
And then they started lighting up one by one by one by one.
- There's another one too. - Where?
They're lined up in a pattern, man. There's geometry behind this.
- Yeah. - They're definitely moving.
This video got seen worldwide. They said this is our town's Roswell.
This is the biggest event that's happened in the history of this town.
We're still trying to uncover what that thing was.
It's my plan to make sure the boomerang can't fly
around here unchecked anymore.
- So if it comes back, you're ready. - Oh yeah. I'm more than ready.
There were attempts to debunk it.
The airport said nothing showed up on radar that night.
They had follow-ups from reporters who contacted the tower,
and they said they didn't see anything on radar.
And everything is hush-hush from...
Nobody wants to talk about this on an official basis from the FAA,
air traffic control, and the military.
It's like, "Let's just pretend this goes away by itself."
I am sympathetic to the authorities
who are confronted with something like this.
They don't know what it is. I can see them trying to downplay it
because they don't want the public to panic.
But talking with Tom and other witnesses, it does seem there was a coordinated,
larger effort to get this story out of the headlines.
To have the public not take it seriously.
That's sort of what AARO has been doing.
The report that they issued seems designed to make Congress ask fewer questions,
to discourage the media from pursuing this story. Same tactic.
So here's the obvious next step.
Reach out to some sources and find out what they might know
about how much effort was put into suppressing this story.
Since George is working on his response to the AARO report,
he asked me to look at things from a pilot's perspective
and see if the skeptics actually have a case.
Through some of my pilot networks, we were able to get in touch with Greg.
He was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
He flew F-15s in the Air Force. And he even flew commercially.
And he experienced this firsthand, not in the sky but on the ground.
And this guy has extensive experience.
He can give me specific information on how this thing maneuvered,
what it did, what it looked like, how big is it possibly.
- What did you see? - Oh yeah. Okay.
It was just a... you know, a real pleasant evening.
My wife and I were driving back, um, from a restaurant.
And then all of a sudden she kinda looks forward in the windshield
and goes, "What are those lights?"
And she had some urgency in her voice.
And I kind of looked up, and I went, "It's just a flight of fighters."
Because we were in that area, under Luke's airspace.
- And there was formation? - Yes.
And so... But as soon as I went, "Oh, it's just a flight of fighters,"
I immediately went, "Uh, no, it's not. There's no anti-collision lights."
"There's no strobe lights."
- I'm going, "Man, it's quiet." Um... - Mm.
"There's no harsh incandescence."
"Uh, so it's not a big airplane."
I could see it sort of blanking out the star field,
and there was mass in between, but I couldn't make out the shape.
- What do you think it was? - I have no idea.
Do you feel like it's technology that we would have?
Why would the military devise a large radar-stealthy craft
and fly it over a population...
For thousands to see.
...with the lights turned on to prove that it can be seen?
Now, the military has a lot of secrets,
and we could have created some kind of stealth technology
that most of us don't know about.
Based on what I've heard, this doesn't sound like this is something
that the military has or that's man-made.
People have said that night there was a flare exercise.
Uh, it has been kind of the primary distraction
from the Phoenix Light sighting,
uh, that the skeptics actively seize on as, "Oh, that was flares."
But what I saw that night was not flares. They didn't do anything real dramatic.
They just flew silently out of sight on about an east-southeast heading.
- No parachutes. - No parachutes. No smoke.
- No trail. - No.
And they held a nice formation too, as they went out of sight.
In your aviation career, you deployed flares?
Primarily, uh, in Vietnam is where I did the flares.
- Mm-hmm. - Um...
I had lots of experience with those.
We actually had a flare standby mission
where you're designated the flare pilot for that night.
- The company would get troops in contact. - Right.
And then they'd require flares to illuminate the battlefield.
The other way I've seen the flares is from the ground
because I was on a fairly small fire base.
- Right. - And occasionally the NVA would attack us.
So I've seen the flares being dropped above me.
- So you see the parachute. - Yeah.
They're suspended, and they sorta flicker
in a very distinctive way.
And then they're very hot magnesium tubes when they hit the ground.
I heard you'd never spoken about this experience until now.
Nah, it was one of those like,
"I have no idea what I saw. If I go describing something like that..."
- They might ground you. - Yeah.
Right, yeah. I get it.
Now, I get why he was reluctant to come forward after all these years.
Because as a person in uniform, our reputation is everything.
Our mental health is everything.
I mean, his career was on the line if he came forward.
Why do you think this is your first time coming out?
The Phoenix Lights was an actual event.
This was a craft that flew over Phoenix.
And I wanted to be able to,
without having my face blurred out or anything,
say that this happened,
and be a credible person testifying to that.
After talking to Greg, he honestly had a good answer for every single point
that folks have tried to use to debunk what this was.
Which is exactly what George needs to respond to the AARO report.
But what would be even better is someone who saw this craft closer up.
And I'm hoping between George and myself,
we can actually find someone who witnessed this from the air.
Hey, Peter. This is George Knapp. How you doing?
George, hi. Good to hear your voice.
For almost 30 years, Peter Davenport has run NUFORC,
the National UFO Reporting Center.
It's a central phone base
that anyone around the world can call in and report UFO activity.
On the night of the Phoenix Lights incident,
his phones blew up.
One of the calls in particular came from somebody at Luke Air Force Base.
I was gonna ask you about that night, March 1997.
I was told that you talked to someone at Luke Air Force Base,
uh, perhaps an aviator.
Do you recall that?
Yes. He was an Air Force airman.
And he said that they had intercepted an object above Camelback Mountain.
And the reason he was calling at 3:20 in the morning is because he knew
that they were gonna be ordered to say nothing about this incident.
It was so strange.
What happened after this intercept?
The two fighters returned to Luke Air Force Base.
The airmen then raced around to three points on the aircraft
to retrieve videotape.
He raced them to an Air Force executive jet,
threw the tapes in the aircraft,
and that aircraft took off immediately for points unknown.
Peter told me there is gun camera footage recorded by a military pilot
who flew up close to the Phoenix Lights object,
captured this footage,
turned it into higher-ups in the Air Force.
That footage was never seen again.
Now, presumably, AARO could get that footage,
could share it with Congress and with the American public.
I am convinced they're not gonna do it. Not unless we force them to do it.
Of all the cases that you've covered,
thousands and thousands of cases and calls that you've had over 29 years,
this one stands out as an outlier,
I think, because it's such an obvious demonstration.
This thing seems like it wanted to be seen.
What do you make of that?
You know, in my estimation it's the most dramatic UFO event
that I've covered in the 29 years that I've run the hotline.
Now, I was getting calls from all over the southwestern United States,
from Arizona, Nevada, Texas.
So those objects were flying over a large area of the United States.
You said objects, plural.
There were either five or six large triangles in the night sky.
The first call I got was from a retired police officer,
and he described several objects in a formation.
And it was more than just one or two objects.
The deeper we get into this case, the more astounding it is
that it was so quickly dismissed.
If it was a cover-up, it would have to be wide-ranging and well organized.
One of the missing pieces in the Phoenix Lights case is
what went on over the Sky Harbor Airport during this event.
There are no FAA reports or air traffic control reports whatsoever
documenting this thing ever happened.
And the only pilot who was in the air at the time
who's come forward was actor Kurt Russell, who kept it quiet for 20 years.
You guys saw a UFO, true?
- Yeah, it is true. - In a plane?
So we're going into Phoenix, and there's this bank of lights,
six lights in the shape of a triangle.
Fortunately, Tom King,
whom I met earlier, was able to get me in touch with somebody
who worked at Sky Harbor Airport during the Phoenix Lights
and witnessed the phenomenon, his friend, Clive Christopher.
I heard a story about you.
- Yeah, I, uh... - You were a youngster, huh?
I was 15 years old, underage, working at Sky Harbor Airport.
Got off of work, late, uh, caught the Red Line.
And, lo and behold, there was these... It started off as two lights in the sky.
But as the bus turned, and we got a better angle,
I was able to see five of them, right as we were leaving the airport.
And we got off of the bus.
The entire bus, all of us, got off and watched this.
Even the bus driver got off.
So, uh, this is right over the airport.
The left side of it probably crossed over Terminal 3,
Um, but it definitely went over the airport, and it headed south.
The big hole in the story, this object was gigantic,
flying over Phoenix.
Some people say a mile across.
Something that big near the airport
should have been reported by the FAA, by the tower.
Where are those reports? We haven't seen 'em.
I'd be interested in talking to the people who were working the tower
at the airport that night.
What they saw, what happened.
Who came knockin' on the door,
asking for tapes and radar returns and things of that sort.
So when you go to work the next day, is everybody talking about it?
The boss let us know right away, "Be on your p's and q's."
"There's, you know, people in this airport that you don't wanna get in trouble with,
and make sure you're doing your job correctly."
So you think investigations were underway. Some kind of outside presence was at the--
I believe so. Um, and not only that, I mean,
you didn't have to see the Phoenix Lights to know that
federal agents, quote, unquote, "men in black" stuff like that...
'Cause they went around months afterwards
and were confiscating videos and things like that.
Really? I would just think something that big,
that close to the airport would have disrupted flights.
One thing that I do remember while looking,
I don't remember seeing any incoming or outgoing airplanes.
It... it's almost like they were stopped somewhere.
So, I mean, unlike most UFO cases
that are just like that, and it's gone, this one lingered.
It was like a demonstration.
There are beings that are flying those things.
What are they trying to do? Was it a message?
Was some kind of message being sent, do you think?
Me, personally, I... I kept seeing or having experiences afterwards.
And almost everybody that I've talked to after the Phoenix Lights
continuously has other experience that have happened.
What kind of experiences you mean? Not just sightings, something else?
Um, yeah. Loss of time, sightings.
I actually have a picture on my phone here I can show you.
This is an event that happened pretty much right here
in this exact area, so...
It started seeing a black military helicopter,
and it just flew across the sky, caught my attention.
And then I was photographing one of the BMX riders
who was at this track down the street. I caught him in the first turn right here.
And you can see the black helicopter in the clouds in the distance.
And he flashed right here. There's one photo...
- What the hell is that? - I thought something flew off of him.
So I took three photos. Here's the second one. Clear as day.
- There it is. Yeah. - What is that?
Black triangle, no propulsion system that I can tell of.
It's got some...
I don't know if those are windows on the top or anything.
It's got almost a curved underbelly.
There's no FAA lights on that.
There's no strobe.
No taillight. I don't know what that is.
It's not like a glitch because it's in all three photos.
- And it's a different spot. - All three photos.
So that happened on a Saturday.
From Saturday to Wednesday,
that place closes down, but they reopen on Wednesday.
So I got video of it this time 'cause I saw it.
Here it comes.
A military helicopter circled this area and that mountain
13 different times with a spotlight on.
Also sending a message, I guess.
Here it comes again.
Clive says nearly every time he sees UFOs, he sees black helicopters.
That story is consistent through the long history of UFO lore.
Black helicopters show up
at the alleged UFO crashes, cattle mutilation cases,
as if they are monitoring this.
The general public, you tell 'em about black helicopters,
they think it's a conspiracy theory.
It's real. Those things happen. Thousands of people have seen 'em.
Where are those reports? You don't see that in the AARO report.
It's as if they don't want us to believe that they're real,
and they wanna keep a handle on the story.
Hold on.
- Hey, it's coming straight up. - No, it's here. Here it is.
- There's two. - Where?
There's one going back that way.
That thing is hauling. That is hauling.
- It's right above me. - It's right above us.
It's right above us.