Killing machines wielding deadly heat-rays and poison gas. The largest city in the world devastated within hours. This was the nightmare that H G Wells foretold more than a century ago. A story made even more terrifying by the fact that the marauders were creatures from Mars who fed on human blood. As fantastic as the story was, it struck a deep-rooted fear in everyone who read it. And much later caused legendary panic in the streets of America. UFO Files s2e11: Beyond The War of the Worlds, History 21st November 2005
When The War of the Worlds was published as a novel in 1898, it became an instant best seller. ibid.
Ecuador, February 1949: Tens of thousands of panic-stricken residents ran into the streets to escape deadly Martian gas-rays. ibid.
For the next decade pop culture kept the dream of life on Mars alive. ibid.
It is one of the most bizarre UFO stories ever told. Aurora, Texas, April 17th 1897: Witnesses reported a flying airship 5 years before the Wright brothers took flight. In the wreckage a small badly disfigured body is discovered, described in newspapers as ‘not an inhabitant of this world’. The pilot was buried in the local cemetery and a legend took shape. UFO Files s2e12: Texas Roswell, History 12th December 2005
Someone or some thing was inside the craft. ibid.
According to the Fort Worth Register the alien did not survive. They reported he was given a Christian burial in the town cemetery. ibid.
There were over a dozen different articles about the mysterious airships listed in the 19th of April edition of the paper [Dallas Morning News]. ibid.
Right-angle turns and rapid altitude changes like those described by witnesses. ibid.
For as long as there have been eye-witness sightings of UFOs in our skies there have been similar reports of so-called USOs, or Unidentified Submerged Objects, in our seas. UFO Files s3e2: Deep Sea UFOs
14th June 1992 10.24 p.m. For almost two minutes the waters of the Pacific Ocean explode with light as hundreds of bright disc-like craft are witnessed flying out of the water together … in complete silence. ibid.
Late USO researcher Ivan T Sanderson’s 1970 book Invisible Residents was the first to analyse the USO phenomenon. ibid.
The 11th October 1492 sighting was not an isolated occurrence. Over the two-month journey Columbus’s log shows a consistent pattern of cryptically reported peculiar incidents including unexplained sightings and unusual events in outer space. ibid.
In late 1969 while conducting their regular operations – deep-freeze ice-breaking exercises near Antarctica – US Navy sailors aboard the USS Calcaterra apparently witnessed an unidentified submerged object with some extraordinary capabilities. A large submarine-shaped object at least one hundred feet long was seen bursting out of the frozen ocean passing through several yards of solid ice at incredible speed. This case is one of many similar incidents reported by navies around the world. ibid.
Four images of a saucer-shaped object taken in 1965 by Rex Heflin in Santa Anna, California, and sited by many as a hoax on the basis that Heflin could not possible have shot three Polaroids in just twenty seconds with his old 1950s camera. ibid.
Suppose an alien spacecraft had crashed in the desert and we had recovered it. Our job is to discover how it works. With the help of leading physicists, astronomers and engineers we’ll decipher UFO technology. UFO Files s3e3: Alien Engineering I, History 6th February 2006
Few of the reported sightings mention wings, tails, jets or propellers. But an object lacking these essentials could still stay in the air. ibid.
Saucers aren’t that stable or easy to control at least for us humans. ibid.
Some radar reports indicate an object going from rest to 9,000 miles per hour almost instantaneously. ibid.
A gravitational force-field – this must be exactly how the alien inertia-canceller works. ibid.
Our next goal is to decipher the propulsion system: our experts believe it’s either a force-field generator or an anti-gravity drive. ibid.
Since gravity bends space, the aliens might be utilizing that phenomenon to jet across the galaxy. ibid.
What optional extras are included on this model: An antimatter reactor, tele-transporter, laser weapons … worm-hole generator, warp drives … What about a shield that renders you invisible? … A forcefield generator … The most appealing has to be the tele-transporter. UFO Files s3e4: Alien Engineering II, History 13th February 2006
No joystick – we think they control it telekinetically. ibid.
100% of the matter and the antimatter become energy. ibid.
Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe what we should be asking is, Why do we care if they’re out there or not? Why do we seem to be reaching out to them? ibid.
UFO Cults: The synthesis of mainstream religion and cutting edge science fiction. The belief in these technological angels comes from a long history of mankind’s faith in a divine plan for the universe. UFO Files s3e6: UFO Cults
39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California, in 1997. ibid.
Marshall Applewhite, the leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult, told his followers there was a UFO in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. ibid.
They turned their New Age and Christian ideologies into a business and went searching for followers. ibid.
He [Marshall] asked the men to join him in castration. ibid.
The students of the Unarius academy attend classes in past-life therapy, inter-dimensional physics and the psychology of consciousness. In 1954 Earnest and Ruth Norman founded Unarius in Glendale, California. Ruth prophesied that so-called ‘space brothers’ were coming to Earth in the year 2001 to build a university, where solutions to world problems would be discovered. ibid.
The ‘space brothers’ were a no-show in 2001. Unarius students believe that the landing will happen when the majority of Earth’s people become open to the idea of contact with interplanetary beings. ibid.
In the Santa Catalina channel where coincidentally at 9.37 p.m. the night before, witnesses reported seeing several disc-shaped silver USOs diving into and out of the channel. UFO Files s3e8: Deep Sea UFOs: Red Alert
USS Franklin D Roosevelt: One of the great USO mysteries of the 20th century: bright USO-like craft rose from the water and remained relatively silent over this 45-second event before flying away. ibid.
Do these sightings offer evidence of top-secret military and defence technology or do they hold clues to something more mysterious? UFO Files s3e9: An Alien History of Planet Earth I II
There were hundreds if not thousands of these [foo-fighters] unexplained phenomena. ibid.
This is a journey into a world of mystery and deceit, a fantastical place full of UFOs, strange encounters and stories of alien abduction ... I want to know what really has been flying through our airspace. Do these sightings offer evidence of top-secret military and defence technology? Or do they hold the clues to something more mysterious? ibid.
Allied air crews described strange glowing balls of light that tracked their aircraft, and even coined a name for them – Foo Fighters. ibid.
The Air Force issues a second document called The Roswell Report: Case Closed in 1997. ibid.
The Air Force’s commitment to act on the UFO problem would result in one of the biggest military investigations in military history. The Air Force, which had secretly been investigating UFOs since 1947, were forced to set up an open Inquiry. Called Project Bluebook it promised to investigate each separate sighting report that was filed by the general public. ibid.
The most challenging aspect of the UFO phenomenon is alien abduction. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s stories of abduction swept across the US. Over two million Americans claim to have been taken by aliens. ibid.
Contactees were a group of people who claimed they had been visited by human-like aliens from planets such as Venus and Saturn. Unlike Travis Walton’s aliens, these visitors were reputed to be benign. Living in the shadow of the arms race, Contactees preached peace towards all species whether alien or terrestrial, and campaigned for disarmament. ibid.
I also think there’s something else – our need to believe. ibid.
Nellis is at the southern-most tip of the Nellis Air Force range, a closed-off area totally barred to the public that’s about the size of Switzerland. And nestling within the Nellis Air Force Range is Area 51, the world’s most secret Air Force Base. ibid.
It’s the testing ground for the US Air Force’s most secret technology. When the U2’s covert life ended, this is what Bissell’s designers came up with – the Blackbird is the apex of aerospace technology. ibid.
It wasn't just Bissell who had flying saucers on his mind. Just across the border Avro, a Canadian-based company, had recruited talented British aerospace designer John Frost to work on a flying saucer ... Called the Avro-car it was a handful to fly and could barely get off the ground. But it caught the eye of the United States Air Force. ibid.
Buried in the depths of the archives I’ve discovered some blueprints which reveal something quite fantastic. A supersonic saucer called the Silverbug. It was truly revolutionary. ibid.
The CIA ruthlessly misled the American people about UFOs in order to hide their surveillance programs against the Soviet Union. ibid.
The chief sceptic of all, Dr J Allen Hynek, who investigated UFOs for the US military, also became a believer. It was Hynek’s interviews and expertise that formed the basis of the 1977 film Close Encounters directed by Steven Spielberg. ibid.
The story of successive attempts to develop radically different forms of flight conducted under the strictest secrecy is inextricably bound up with our relationship with UFOs over the last sixty years. ibid.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio: Are there declassified documents that prove UFO wreckage was secretly flown to the base? UFO Files s3e12: Hangar 18: UFO Warehouse, History 6th November 2006
For more than half a century similar stories have surfaced about UFO wreckage, alien bodies, secret underground cryogenic chambers, and a mysterious hangar at the base. ibid.
There are many other cases tied to Wright Field: October 1947, Paradise Valley, Arizona; May 1953, Kingman, Arizona; June 1953, Laredo, Texas; and December 5th 1965, Kecksburg, Pennsylvania – are only a few of the alleged flying saucer recoveries in the US alone. No matter where a UFO lands, it seems all roads lead back to Wright-Patterson and Hangar 18. ibid.
But according to many UFO researchers at the same time that the press is distracted with supposedly fake debris, the actual Roswell wreckage and possibly other retrieved items are taken under military control. They are surreptitiously flown almost 1,500 miles away to a military base in Dayton, Ohio, named Wright Field. According to UFO legend its precise destination is a hangar on the base: Hangar 18. ibid.