The U.S. government has released a long-awaited report on UFOs.
From their early sightings as flying saucers to the alien theories they've spawned, this is the complete history of Unidentified Flying Objects.
From their early sightings as flying saucers to the alien theories they've spawned, this is the complete history of Unidentified Flying Objects.
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00:00I think people mistakenly believe that government, our government, other governments,
00:05have not released lots and lots of data and information about UFOs.
00:10And I will tell you that is not true.
00:23Seeing odd things in the sky and wondering what they might be, that goes back
00:28to ancient days. That's as old as there have been human beings in the world.
00:33But this more recent thing that we identify with UFOs,
00:37that's a phenomenon that only started right after World War II in 1947.
00:45There's a guy in Washington state who's flying a private airplane around Mount Rainier in the
00:53summer of 1947. And he sees some really strange things as he's flying along. He says there's like
01:01nine aircraft seeming things that are flying in a pattern together. And he comes down on the ground,
01:06reports it, tells the media about it. At the time, his own attitude about it was that this stuff is
01:13really just probably, you know, secret military aircraft or experimental reconnaissance rockets
01:20or something like that. But he didn't really know. And when he was asked by a journalist about
01:25how did these things move, he said, well, they kind of moved like a saucer would if you skipped
01:31it across water. And some really ambitious, clever journalists came up with the moniker,
01:38the headline flying saucer. And within literally within weeks, 90 percent of Americans reported
01:44they had heard this term flying saucer. Tonight, you may be the first television audience to see
01:50a flying saucer. February the 18th, 1952, I saw two flying saucers over Tiaras Canyon at 645 a.m.
01:57Nobody is clear on what this could possibly be. Here is a picture that was released just today
02:05by the United States Coast Guard. It shows four luminous objects in formation in the sky
02:10over Salem, Massachusetts. And the idea that it's alien, that it might be extraterrestrials, that
02:15was really kind of low on the totem pole at the time. Really, most people believed it had to have
02:21some kind of other explanation. War in general, and particularly the Cold War, had a lot to do
02:28with how this thing was talked about. There's an awareness that advanced technologies are out there
02:36and that we would not be told about them until they're sort of, you know, carted out.
02:45We know for a fact that in the 1950s and 60s, people were in fact witnessing really, really
03:00bizarre and strange looking aircraft in the skies. And those aircraft in the end actually were
03:07secret planes, right? Things like the U-2 spy plane and things like that. And the military,
03:13there was no way the government was going to come forward and say,
03:16we have this, by the way, this secret airplane that we use to spy on the Soviets.
03:30They're like, well, we're pretty confident this isn't us. So who is it? Or are these things
03:37genuine? And do we have reason to be concerned? They flag and recruit a few people within their
03:44circles to look into this stuff, to take in reports that are out there, to analyze the reports
03:51and to do, you know, kind of intelligence work on it. So the interest of the Air Force has always
03:57basically been one thing. Are these things a national security threat? And basically all of
04:03these projects concluded the same thing that no, we don't see any reason to be concerned about this
04:10stuff. There is a lot of stuff that's long since been declassified. Our government and multiple
04:27governments across the world, ever since the mid 2000s, like around 2005 or six, it began,
04:34they just started declassifying and releasing reams and reams of information and reports about
04:39this stuff. There's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they
04:51are. I think the reason why you still will always have secrecy surrounding this stuff is as I talked
04:57about before, this stuff deals with military intelligence and national security issues.
05:11People who are UFO investigators and have done it for a long time will tell you the vast majority,
05:18the number that people usually bandy around is anywhere from 95 to 98% of sightings are easily
05:26explainable by mundane things, meteorological phenomenon, the planet Venus, optical illusions,
05:33aircraft, balloons, all sorts of things. The question has always been, okay, what do we do
05:39with that two to 5% that don't seem to be easily explainable on the surface? For me,
05:46I'm pretty comfortable living in a world of ambiguity.
06:01My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.
06:08I want us to have a process to analyze the data. Every time it comes in,
06:11that there be a place where this is cataloged and constantly analyzed until we get some answers.
06:16We keep using the mystery to ask questions about who we are. What are we capable of? What
06:22possibilities are there for our society? What are our technologies doing to us?
06:27What is the fate of the planet? All of those questions were being asked already in the 1950s
06:33and they're still being asked today. And the UFO thing gives us a way to do that.