"Many governments all of a sudden are now involved in the search for extraterrestrial life." "You have to wonder why." "Between 1948 and 1969, the U.S. Air Force collected 12,618 UFO reports." "It was actually required that all officers fill out a form if they saw anything that might be regarded as a flying saucer." "And they were told not to discuss their sighting with anyone." "We have to be open to the possibility that the U.S. government is absolutely aware of extraterrestrial involvement in human affairs." "Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has credited its origins to gods and other visitors from the stars." "What if it were true?" "Did extraterrestrial beings really help to shape our history?" "And if so, could the truth be exposed by the alien hunters?" "London, England." "July 20, 2015." "A consortium of the world's leading scientists, including theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and SETI founder Frank Drake, gather at London's Royal Society as Russian billionaire and technology tycoon Yuri Milner announces his ambitious initiative:" "Breakthrough Listen." "The scope of our search will be unprecedented." "The project is a ten-year, $100 million search for intelligent extraterrestrial life that is widely regarded as the most comprehensive search for alien communications in recorded history." "The endowment will fund thousands of hours yearly on radio telescopes in North America and Australia, as well as data processing to look for radio signals in distant solar systems." "This Breakthrough Listen Project is revolutionary because not only are they going to survey a very long list of stars, they're going to survey ten times more area overall compared to previous surveys." "I think there's definitely been a turning point regarding the overall consensus about the possibility of extraterrestrial life." "Now that we're able to document and scientifically see out in the universe the possibility of planets that could sustain life, it also allows us the opportunity to know the odds that there is life out there is undoubtable." "Breakthrough Listen marks the first time that mainstream scientists have launched a major project with the explicit purpose of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life." "During the announcement, Stephen Hawking stated..." "While this new initiative is monumental, the hunt for the existence of life beyond Earth has persisted for many decades." "Starting around 1947, a series of events forced certain high-level members within the United States government to officially become alien hunters." "When you look at the year 1947, the statistics are that there were at least 800 reports to police and airports of people saying that they were seeing something in the sky, they didn't know what it was." "And probably the most important, and the one that made worldwide headlines was near Mt." "Rainier, Washington." "On June 24, 1947, a businessman and pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mt." "Rainier in Washington state." "As he was flying around the mountain, he suddenly caught sight of a squadron of strange-looking objects." "He could not figure out what they were." "He was able to time them as they went between two mountain peaks, which he knew the exact distance of, and calculated their speed at between 1,200 and 1,700 miles an hour." "Well, in that day, we didn't have aircraft that could go faster than about 500 or 600 miles an hour, so this was definitely something not of terrestrial origin." "He later described the objects as being somewhat delta shaped and flying as if you were to skip a saucer across a body of water." "And this gave rise to the term "flying saucer."" "Within days of Arnold's report being published, there were literally 20 other reports of-of similar objects seen in the sky around the northwest of the United States." "This opened the floodgates for literally hundreds of reports to pour in." "Just two weeks after this flurry of UFO sightings, the infamous Roswell Incident occurred." "But it was actually a sighting that happened a day earlier that thrust military officials into the hunt." "On July 7, 1947, at Edwards Air Force Base, then called Muroc Air Base," "Major J.C. Wise was sitting in his XP-84 fighter jet, experimental aircraft, when he noticed that people on the ground were watching an object off in the distance." "He looked and saw a bright, spinning, yellow object about 10,000 feet in the air that was a ball of about five to ten feet in diameter." "After the sighting, it was actually required that all officers fill out a form if they saw anything that might be regarded as a UFO or a flying saucer." "And in addition to that, they were told not to discuss their sighting or what was on their report with anyone." "In the wake of the incredible number of UFO reports that reached the military in the summer of 1947," "Lieutenant General Nathan Twining at Wright Field created a new order to ensure that all UFO reports reached the military." "This led to the creation of the first official UFO research program on the part of the military known as Project Sign." "On January 22, 1948, the U.S. government authorized its first official study of the UFO phenomenon." "The highly classified agenda was known as Project Sign." "Project Sign officially argued that these UFO sightings were authentic and hinted that they were, in fact, extraterrestrial in nature." "But the higher-ups in the military stepped in and redacted those statements, canceled Project Sign, turned it into Project Grudge, which ultimately became Project Blue Book." "The Air Force closed down Blue Book because essentially they said they didn't find any evidence that UFOs were real or represented a threat to national security." "Between 1948 and 1969, the U.S. Air Force collected 12,618 UFO reports." "Of that number, 701 remained unexplained." "While the Air Force's official stance was that Project Blue Book produced no compelling evidence that extraterrestrial craft occupied Earth's airspace, one important contributor to the study strongly disagreed." "Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Ohio State University, was appointed as scientific advisor for UFO studies during Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book." "Dr. Hynek was a pure skeptic at the very beginning of his career as a consultant to the United States Air Force." "In fact, he considered these UFOs to be utterly ridiculous." "But as he got more and more involved and began talking to more and more quality witnesses, like military fighter pilots, it became clear to him that there really was something to this whole UFO question." "When asked in his later years what turned him around on the whole UFO question, Dr. Hynek said two things." "The first is that the Air Force was dead set on putting an answer on every single UFO report, even if they had to force the answer." "The second is that he started talking to very, very credible witnesses that led him to believe that these objects were, in fact, real." "In the intervening years, UFO investigators and scholars have attempted to access Project Blue Book case files utilizing the Freedom of Information Act." "But the names, details and other personal information of all the witnesses and sightings have been blacked out from the documents, preventing any further examination." "Considering the way the U.S. government has labeled UFOs "top secret," we have to at least be open to the possibility that higher-ups within the U.S. government, or even those higher than U.S. government, are absolutely aware" "of extraterrestrial involvement in human affairs and have sought to cover up this phenomena for the past six decades." "Considering the top-secret nature of these projects, is it possible that the incredible claims of Dr. J. Allen Hynek are true, and that actual contact with extraterrestrial craft has been concealed from the general population?" "Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and claim that mankind has had contact with aliens since our earliest civilizations." "Humboldt University." "Berlin, Germany." "January 28, 2016." "Astroarchaeologist Mathieu Ossendrijver announces what he calls "a truly astonishing find."" "He has discovered evidence that astronomers living in the ancient city of Babylon invented sophisticated mathematical equations to track the movement of Jupiter some 2,000 years ago." "When modern astronomers think about the timing of events in the solar system, we use very complicated computer programs that take into account things like special relativity and general relativity." "We didn't think that ancient astronomers would have had the capacity to make the same calculations we do today." "We knew that the Babylonians were able to predict when Venus would appear and which constellations would be up at certain times of the year, but we never would have expected that they were using one of the precursors to calculus" "to figure out the motions of Jupiter in the sky." "When the Babylonians looked where Jupiter was in the sky, they would record where it was one night, and they would draw a point on a graph." "They would record the time on the bottom axis and the position on the top axis." "They'd do this the next night." "They'd see Jupiter was over here." "And then the next night, it's over there and over there." "And they could then draw a corner down to the time axis, and then they'd draw a line." "So you end up with a trapezoid in space." "How did the ancient Babylonians understand mathematical concepts that were thought to have been developed by Isaac Newton in the 17th century?" "And why were they mysteriously concerned with the precise movements of Jupiter, a planet that they associated with one of their most important gods, Marduk?" "The principal deity of ancient Babylon was Marduk, and he was associated with the planet Jupiter." "And there was a large mythology around his departure and eventual return." "They were very interested in the return of their divinity, so any sign that the planet Jupiter would give would be of great interest." "Why was Jupiter so important to this culture that they actually conscribed it as being one of their gods called Marduk?" "Was it that they believed that Marduk came from this planet and would eventually return one day?" "Are they recounting an extraterrestrial visitation from the past?" "And were they given this advanced knowledge as a way of knowing of when this extraterrestrial being would one day return?" "It's quite compelling that many ancient cultures went to great lengths to track these celestial bodies." "Much like the Breakthrough Listen project of today, many ancient cultures took great measures to study the heavens." "All over the planet, there are stone observatories." "These are systems of stones arranged to line up with the planets in celestial moments, suggesting that the ancients were really quite advanced in their study of the stars to use these and use them well." "We are fascinated, our current scientists, in the accuracy in the alignment that they have arranged and how they are so similar, these observatories, these configurations all over the planet." "It would be one thing if we found one ancient megalithic stone observatory." "But the fact is that there are at least ten all around the world that were fashioned in megalithic structures." "The most popular one is Stonehenge." "Stone observatories, oftentimes not only do they track the stars but sometimes they track specific constellations." "First and foremost, Orion, Sirius and the Pleiades." "So I have to ask the question why." "Because in association with those observatories, we have stories of beings arriving from the Pleiades, from Sirius and Orion, imparting knowledge to our ancestors." "This whole idea of observing the stars is something that is innate in our soul." "All of our ancient cultures were visited by the same type of extraterrestrials." "Is it possible that the Babylonians, as well as other ancient civilizations, were watching the stars for signs of extraterrestrial life?" "And if so, were they watching because contact had already been made?" "Why were they obsessed with tracking the movements of stars and planets?" "Was it just for orientation, so they could know what direction they're traveling when they're navigating on ships?" "Or could it be that they were actually visited by beings that came from these planets?" "I think absolutely yes." "Could our ancestors' near obsession with the movement of the stars be proof that they were in fact the first alien hunters?" "If so, could it lead to proof of extraterrestrial contact hundreds or even thousands of years ago?" "And might these ancient stone observatories be leading today's alien hunters towards the next big discovery?" "Barron, Wisconsin." "Summer 1934." "At the age of nine," "Coral Lorenzen spots a saucer-shaped object floating across the sky." "It makes no sound as it moves slowly northwest, before disappearing over the horizon." "The encounter lasts just 20 seconds but will forever change the course of UFO investigations." "One of the early important UFO researchers in the United States is Coral Lorenzen." "She had a UFO sighting long before the flying saucer wave of the '40s took place." "And it stayed with her her whole life." "In August of 1951," "Coral took on a role of being a reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette and wrote stories about UFOs." "She got lots of responses from other people who had seen similar objects." "In 1952, Coral and her husband, a former U.S. Army Air Corps officer," "Jim Lorenzen, established the first independent UFO organization, known as Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, or APRO." "Coral was highly disappointed with how the Air Force and the government was handling this whole UFO question." "She knew that these craft were real." "She felt there needed to be an investigative body not beholden to the government that could look into this question." "The Lorenzens decided the best way to investigate the phenomenon was essentially to set up an investigative group with people in different disciplines and fields who could look at reports, study them, and determine what the witnesses had seen." "At the height of its success," "APRO actually had more than 3,000 members, many of whom were out in the field investigating things, compiling reports, and really putting together a huge body of highly credible data, which far exceeded anything, really," "that Blue Book, Sign and Grudge were doing." "This was the first civilian organization to go and investigate UFOs." "And once she broke the ice on this, other organizations began coming and being created." "One of those organizations was called NICAP." "Admiral Fahrney, who was at the time in World War Two considered the guided missile scientist of the Navy, helped found and became the chairman of NICAP." "Even more interesting, the other member of NICAP was the first head of the CIA," "Admiral Hillenkoetter." "If there was anyone who should know if UFOs were real or not, you would think it would be the head of the Central Intelligence Agency." "In 1960, Rear Admiral Hillenkoetter stated the following three things:" "one, that the UFO phenomenon was real;" "two, that it was not Soviet;" "and, three, that we had not adequately studied scientifically the UFO phenomenon." "A former director of the CIA admitting that the UFO phenomenon is real?" "Might Admiral Hillenkoetter have come across definitive evidence of alien craft visiting Earth?" "Despite his audacious statement, the government maintained its position that no UFO reports had proved credible." "But the number of public UFO societies continued to grow." "On May 31, 1969, APRO member Walt Andrus created his own volunteer-based organization that combined Missouri, Iowa and Illinois." "What started as the Midwest UFO Network would ultimately change its name to the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, when it grew to become the largest UFO investigation organization in the world." "MUFON now has thousands of members." "They have state directors and field investigators covering the entire United States, and indeed a number of other countries, too." "And unlike the way in which things were done in APRO days," "MUFON's model involves giving a lot of autonomy to the states." "They organize their own conferences." "They handle research projects, and they literally get boots on the ground and go out and investigate." "These organizations became very popular because there was an overall change and shift in the thinking of what these phenomena were." "People were now coming out and looking up to the skies just to look for the possibility that there could be something up there, understanding the potential of what these objects could be." "According to ancient astronaut theorists, aliens have been visiting Earth throughout mankind's history." "So why is it that so many people in the mid 20th century suddenly became obsessed with finding evidence of extraterrestrial encounters?" "Some suggest that the aliens themselves may in fact be responsible for this increased awareness." "Coral Lorenzen's setting up of APRO, and Walt Andrus's breakaway organization MUFON, all of these were inspired by personal UFO encounters." "So could it be that there was more than chance alone at work here?" "Could it be that some force was somehow targeting people like Coral Lorenzen and Walter Andrus?" "Is there an overseeing presence that lies behind these apparently chance encounters?" "Could it be that while extraterrestrials have kept their presence concealed from humanity at large, they have chosen specific individuals as emissaries, that will ultimately reveal a greater truth?" "And if so, might their plan to reconnect with humanity have been set in motion in 1934, when nine-year-old Coral Lorenzen first spotted a strange object in the sky?" "Perhaps further answers can be found by examining efforts to not only find evidence of extraterrestrials, but to contact them." "Delaware, Ohio." "August 15, 1977." "At Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope, astronomer Jerry R. Ehman conducts research for SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence." "While reviewing recorded data, he detects a highly unusual signal originating from the constellation Sagittarius." "They're looking for this bandwidth of 1,420 megahertz." "Specifically, they believed that this bandwidth corresponds to water, and that intelligent civilizations might encode the electromagnetic frequency of water with a detectable signal." "So there is Jerry Ehman, on the Big Ear telescope, doing his SETI work, and a 72-second burst comes in on the 1,420 megahertz signal." "72 seconds of very bizarre static that does not look natural." "It looks artificial;" "it looks like something that was intelligently built and sent." "So he writes "Wow!" next to this part of the readout, and it is now known as the "Wow!" "signal."" "And still to this day, the Wow!" "signal has never been properly explained, nor has it been deciphered." "While there are various theories as to what may have caused the now famous Wow!" "signal, from terrestrial radio broadcasts to comet trails," "SETI has not ruled out the possibility that it may represent modern man's first radio contact with extraterrestrials." "And they have plans to reexamine the area where it originated in the near future." "To get a firsthand look into this continued search for extraterrestrial life, in March of 2016, researcher and publisher Giorgio Tsoukalos traveled to the Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California, where he met with the director for SETI research, Seth Shostak." "This is truly amazing." "What can you tell me about this place?" "Well, this place is, uh, an observatory." "But it's a radio observatory." "So these things around us, these 42 antennas, they pick up radio waves." "And we're trying to pick up very special sort of radio waves, namely some that would tell us somebody's out there." "By having lots of these dishes here, we can look at more of the sky at once." "We can look at multiple star systems at once." "Why radio waves?" "What's so significant about radio waves?" "Radio waves go at the speed of light, and they also, by the way, go through all the gas and dust that's between the stars." "So, you know, if you want to communite from one part of the galaxy to another, radio waves are a great way to do it." "So the way this works is actually kind of simple." "I mean, the cosmic radio static, it comes in from the sky, and it bounces off that big reflector there, that first one, okay?" " That's-that's a mirror for radio waves." "Mm-hmm." "And that redirects them to this secondary reflector, on the end, on the nose there." "And then they're directed to the receiver, and that's inside." "That information goes through a fiber optic over to the control room." "So, this is where the, uh, data coming through the fiber optics kind of ends up after it's been processed in a display like this." "And what are we looking at right here?" "So we're looking, in this case, at three star systems at once, okay?" "So that speeds up the search." "It also allows us to determine whether we're really seeing E.T. or just interference." "The data from one of these star systems is being displayed over on this part of the screen here." "This is called a waterfall plot." "That... can you see, can you see that line" " of brighter dots there?" " This right here, yes." "Mm-hmm." "Yeah, that's, uh, slightly more static at that frequency slowly going down the dot." "That's the kind of thing we're looking for." "So then, if this here were an actual E.T. signal, how would it differentiate itself?" "Uh, would it be a bit thicker, a bit more pronounced, a bit longer or..." "What are you looking for?" "It could be all of those things." "So what you do is, when you find a signal like this, you make a test." "You'll just move the antennas a little bit, and see if the signal goes away." "And then point it back at the star and see if it comes back." "You say, "Well, that's looking promising."" "You do that again, go off, go on, go off, go on." "If you do that five or ten times, you start to get excited." "I hope that that day will come very soon." "The Wow!" "signal continues to intrigue people." "So we are going to use the Allen Telescope Array to reobserve the Wow!" "signal, look in the same spot on the sky, look over a wider range of frequencies, and-and if there's something up there and it's still broadcasting, of course we would find it." "While SETI has yet to find an explanation for the Wow!" "signal," "NASA's Kepler Telescope team has continued to search for signs of alien life in other solar systems, despite the U.S. government's open denial of extraterrestrial contact." "In September 2015, after more than five years of research, members of the Kepler team revealed some incredible findings coming from the star KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's Star, named for the astronomer who discovered it." "What we see from Tabby's Star is changes in light output that are not attributable to comets, to planets, to asteroids or to other fragments that would orbit the star." "We're seeing quasi-periodic dimmings of the light that can be as much as a 21% reduction in the luminosity that's coming out of the star." "Now, we have the scientists who are publishing papers in which they propose that one of the explanations for what they are seeing is a massive extraterrestrial construct akin to something known as a Dyson sphere." "A Dyson sphere is actually a gigantic structure built around a star, which harnesses the energy of the star, and could in fact be used to travel from one place to another within the galaxy." "This story is a total game-changer, because it suggests that a Type II civilization, a civilization that can harness the power of an entire star, actually does exist and we can see it with our telescopes." "Is it possible that astronomers hunting for habitable planets may have accidentally discovered the first extrasolar civilization?" "And if so, why does the U.S. government continue to deny extraterrestrial contact?" "While the true cause behind the light patterns coming from Tabby's Star has yet to be discovered, ancient astronaut theorists suggest that world governments have ramped up the hunt for extraterrestrial life because they already know it exists." "Toronto, Canada." "September 2005." "Paul Hellyer, who served as the Canadian Minister of National Defence from 1963 to 1967, makes worldwide headlines by announcing his belief in the existence of UFOs, and that the United States government has made great efforts to conceal knowledge" "of their existence for decades." "To date, Mr. Hellyer remains the highest-ranking government official to ever publicly declare this information." "I came to the conclusion that there are issues here so profound for the future of the United States and the world, that they have to be discussed... openly and intelligently." "And one of them, of course, was the possibility the U.S. could get us in an intergalactic war." "And so, I decided that I should speak out." "UFOs are as real as the airplanes flying overhead." "This is actually paralleling something that Edgar Mitchell... the sixth man to walk on the surface of the moon... suggested, that there were multiple alien races visiting the Earth." "This is not unknown knowledge." "There are people that know and there seems to be many different, perhaps several different species of aliens visiting here." "And it looks like, likely they have been for a long, long time." "People in the military have witnessed UFO operations around our military facilities." "And there's been quite a number of reports of attempts to destroy some of our missile tests and the missiles in flight." "They are not particularly pleased, the alien visitors, with our warlike capabilities and our nuclear capabilities." "UFO researchers have suggested that the U.S. military has secretly built an installation on the surface of the moon to help combat an alien threat." "If there are extraterrestrials visiting the Earth, and they're potentially hostile, it would make a great deal of sense that we would be prepared for this." "A secret military installation on the moon?" "Could such claims, along with those made by former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer and Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, really be true?" "Perhaps further clues can be found by examining recently declassified documents." "July 20, 2014." "The United States Army declassifies and discloses one of its biggest secret missions:" "Project Horizon." "Project Horizon's mandate was to create, by 1966, three years before the first NASA landing of men on the moon, a military base which could hold at least 20 individuals and which would be expanded on over time as well." "It would be nuclear powered." "It would have its own water supply, oxygen." "And it really would be the moon equivalent of a military installation." "The feeling was, from Wernher von Braun, from NASA and indeed from-from the entire government, that space would become an important battlefield." "We talk about conventional warfare and how that would play out." "It's fairly clear that if there is another war, that space will be a battlefield." "The United States has been working for a long time in building new weapons based on the technology that they've gained." "If you control one of the approaches to the Earth, it gives you an advantage that you wouldn't otherwise have." "Also, it's a launching pad for anything you want to do on Earth." "Could it be, as some ancient astronaut theorists contend, that the U.S. military was successful in the construction of a military base on the surface of the moon?" "While the stated mission goal was to establish dominance over the Soviet Union during the Cold War, many believe the effort was not against an antagonistic global super power, but an unknown extraterrestrial force." "This is even further expanded upon when we look at Reagan's legacy and some of these things like the Star Wars initiative." "So, it's very possible that, when we look at what was happening in the Cold War era, maybe they were trying to divert attention to what was really going on." "And that could have been some type of collaboration between us and Russia, of putting a space base on the moon, or doing some other type of space platform that currently now exists within our solar system." "There is no doubt in my mind that Star Wars, initiated by President Reagan, was more related to the possibility of being able to take the extraterrestrials on for size than it was against rogue states." "All of the best information available is that it was more intended as a possible defense against UFOs than it was against rogue missiles." "Did the recent disclosure of Project Horizon only serve to try to dissuade inquiry into a real and escalating military presence in space?" "And, if so, is the military preparing to actively hunt out the aliens they've known about for decades?" "Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and suggest that with a recent NASA project, the U.S. government has reportedly enlisted average citizens in the hunt for extraterrestrial life." "April 21, 2015." "NASA launches an unprecedented initiative that creates a coalition of scientific experts with a mandate to lead the search for life in the universe." "This scientific endeavor, known as the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science... or "NExSS" for short... is a game-changer in the discovery of alien life." "The NExSS is a multidiscipline, multi-institute approach to try to answer the big question of:" "are we alone in the galaxy?" "The NExSS includes researchers from multiple institutions in different subfields." "It includes astrophysicists, planetary scientists," "Earth scientists and even helio-physicists... people who study the sun... so we can put all of the different pieces together and really learn what makes a planet tick and what kind of planets might have life on them;" "and if those planets do exist, whether they have life at all." "Since the launch of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope in 2009, more than 2,000 exoplanets... a planet that orbits around another star... have been found, with thousands of additional candidates awaiting research and confirmation." "The Planet Hunters project was the brainchild of NASA and Yale researchers." "The idea of the project is to allow average, everyday people... citizen scientists, as we call them... the opportunity to discover planets." "Citizen scientists have actually done a tremendous service to the astrophysical community by looking at Kepler data through the Planet Hunters portal." "Citizen scientists have really accelerated the pace of exoplanet discoveries, because that core of 260,000 people has looked at 20 million light curves by eye." "It's really interesting that NASA is doing this, because the fact is that they wouldn't be doing it unless they believed that there were:" "A, habitable exoplanets out there;" "B, that the general public could help in finding them;" "and C, that there might be alien life on those planets." "As the executive director of MUFON," "I can tell you this shift has already started." "We get calls from credible scientists, engineers, politicians and their staff, who want to know more about this phenomenon, because they realize that it is in fact real." "So, as we look into this question of who they are, why they're here and where they're from," "I think we'll learn more about ourselves... about who we are, where we're from and why we're here." "In the search for extraterrestrial life, there are a number of questions that need to be asked." "Where's this gonna lead to?" "What are the implications?" "If we find extraterrestrials are benevolent, well, that's good news;" "it's gonna help us." "If we find out they're malevolent and hostile, we could find ourselves in quite literally a world war." "Is it possible that governments around the world are now openly on the hunt for extraterrestrials because they already have knowledge of their existence?" "And if so, has the point finally come when this truth can no longer be covered up?" "Perhaps it will soon be revealed that aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, and that we are not searching for proof of their existence, but watching for their return." "CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS"