[music playing] NARRATOR: Mention the phrase UFO
crash and Roswell, New Mexico immediately comes to mind. It is the most famous
UFO incident of all time. And marks the year 1947 as the
beginning of the modern UFO era. But few people realize
it wasn't America's first UFO-related incident. Two weeks before Roswell,
another UFO incident took place over Puget
Sound, in Washington State. But there are two key
differences between this crash in Washington and Roswell. Two people were killed and there
is still physical evidence left behind. We found some of the wreckage. NARRATOR: "UFO Magazine" is one
of the leading UFO phenomena publications. For more than 22
years, the publishers have gathered an unprecedented
archive of eyewitness accounts, video footage, and
never-before-seen documents. In the world of UFO reports,
you've got 90% of them total bull-[bleep]. The fact is, there is 10%
that are absolutely real. NARRATOR: In October 2007,
based on brand new leads, they reopened the investigation. Nobody has been able
to solve this case. NARRATOR: From underwater
retrieval of unknown material, possibly jettisoned by a UFO. You can't leave
any stone unturned. NARRATOR: To the discovery of
unidentified debris buried deep within a remote forest. Is this a UFO sight? Hey, guys. Check this out. NARRATOR: And analysis of
evidence from a confirmed crash site.
- Whoa. Holy cow. Are we safe? NARRATOR: Is there a
logical explanation? Or is there a connection between
this case and the Roswell incident? Science weighs in. He reported a UFO and it
resulted in a very tragic event. NARRATOR: For the first
time on television, what you are about to see
is case number 47001-- the UFO Before Roswell. [theme music] THEME SONG: Yes. I'm not the only
one, the only one. I'm not the only
one, the only one. [music playing] June 21, 1947, over two
weeks before Roswell, logger Harold Dahl along with
his 15-year-old son and two crewmen, are on a boat in
Puget Sound, near Maury Island, Washington. It is a lazy day in an
otherwise, unremarkable summer. But at 2:00 PM that all changed. Suddenly, six bright
metallic donut-shaped disks about 100 feet in
diameter appear overhead. One of the craft seems
to be malfunctioning. It shutters and tips
at precarious angles. And appears to be ready
to crash into the water. Suddenly, it ejects what is
described as a massive amount of steaming metallic debris into
the sound and onto the beach. The debris crashed
down onto Dahl's boat, breaking his son's arm
and killing his dog. According to their report,
the ejection of the material appeared to fix the problem. The five other disks
then arranged themselves into a formation around
the malfunctioning ship and they all sped off out
of sight in total silence. Dahl and his crew gather some
of the debris from the water and from the beach. This event was reported
to local police. The testimony of all four
witnesses was consistent. However, all of the
witnesses are now deceased. [music playing] Pat. Yeah. Good morning. Yes. Is you gear all
packed and ready to go? Yeah, just about.
Almost there. We had a big case today. We're headed off
to Maury Island. I'm Bill Birnes. I'm the publisher of "UFO
Magazine," the only magazine for UFOs in print
continuously since 1986. And I've been investing
in UFOs for 20 years. We have a really great break
in a 60-year-old case that's been lingering. It's been a mystery
for 60 years. Right here in the state of
Washington, on Maury Island Maury Island-- that's the case
that started the modern day UFO wave. My name is Pat Uskert. I'm a frequent contributor
TO "UFO Magazine." My job is tracking
down documents and talking to witnesses. Maury Island, two
weeks before Roswell. Guy out in the boat
sees six craft. They drop something on his boat. Hurt does son. Kill his dog. Damage the boat. We've had a break in the case. After 60 years, we found
some of the wreckage. For the first time, we can
actually bring stuff back into the lab. I'll need photographs,
archaeological measurements, and samples. Get me samples from the
beach, from underwater, from the aircraft site. Get me pieces of the aircraft. Samples from the Earth
around the aircraft. Anything you can get
me, I'll analyze it. I'm Dr. Ted Acworth I'm
a precision metrologist. I have a PhD in
mechanical engineering. I study the data. I make an unbiased analysis. And I come to an
objective conclusion. Jeff, your job is going
to be going out with us. Pat's going to go in the water. You're going to go out and
help collect the material and interview witnesses. We'll bring out some soil
samples, some of the debris samples, and we'll bring
them back to the lab. I'm Jeffrey Tomlinson. I'm currently doing research
in planetary biology and geological phenomena. Scientific inquiry
is my mission. This is it, guys. Nobody has been able to
solve this case in 60 years, but we will. [music playing] NARRATOR: Puget Sound is a
huge complex of bays, shallows, and islands totaling
2,800 square miles of inland marine waters. The team will be
going to the waters off the south shore
of Maury Island. 47 degrees, 35 minutes North. 122 degrees, 46 minutes West. Approximately 7 miles
north of Tacoma. Our first task is to try to
recover some of the material that the UFO jettisoned. Harold Dahl described the
material as a, sort of, metallic slag. And he was very specific about
where his boat was when he saw the UFOs. My hope is that I can dive into
Puget Sound, survey the bottom, and locate some of this debris. NARRATOR: The debris, or
slag, retrieved by Harold Dahl and his crew was reported
to be dark stone, lava-like in appearance,
with metallic properties. Some have speculated it
was in some way connected with the disk's
propulsion system. A jet experiencing
difficulty will dump its fuel to lighten the load and
lessen the chance of fire during an emergency landing. Was this mysterious disk
following the same protocol? [music playing] Does that water
look cold to you? It looks cold to me. Probably about 50
degrees on the surface. NARRATOR: The team is joined by
UFO researcher Ronnie Milione to help comb the large area. Pat will be diving into Puget
Sound looking for debris. The search area is approximately
6,000 square feet and up to 60 feet deep. We are approaching the area
where the Maury Island UFO incident occurred. The incident
involved the dropping of slag from some kind of
aerial vehicle into the water and on the beach. I'll be diving,
going into the water to look for evidence
maybe at the bottom. The slag is some
sort of molten metal. It's basically, the
same principle as lava. I'm thinking it was a metal-- liquid metal that was
somehow ejected from whatever craft this was. And now, might look like rock. The evidence is strong that
something real happened here. That maybe there was
a UFO incident here. And maybe I will find something. But I can't know
until we check it out. NARRATOR: The team is
considering a theory. Is it possible the unidentified
objects could actually have been nothing more than
planes flying in formation? I'm pretty sure this
wasn't an aircraft. It didn't look like an aircraft
because it was donut-shaped. It dropped something. Aircraft don't usually
drop something. It damaged the boat. It killed the dog. And it injured the son's arm. The day was clear so he would
have known what he was looking at on a clear day.
No. I'm pretty convinced this was
an unidentified object and not an aircraft. NARRATOR: Pat questions
whether the debris will still be at the site. 60 years have passed. I wonder what the chances are
of some of these pieces of slag still being there? NARRATOR: Pat is a certified
scuba diver, with more than 18 years experience. He is searching
for UFO debris that is different from
the local geology. The debris is reported to
appear and feel like lava rock, with a porous surface and
jagged, serrated edges. A hand. It's freaking cold. Good to see your face. Any slag? I took some sand
samples from the bottom. And I picked up a
few rocks that looked like they could be the kind
of rocks we're looking for. Well, we'll see. Climb up. Get warm. Get your body
temperature back to 80. Saw some stones on the ground
that may be related to slag, somehow. In doing an
investigation like this, you can't leave
any stone unturned. [music playing] NARRATOR: Coming up, is
this a piece of material jettisoned by a UFO in 1947? And the other theory is
that they were carrying pieces of extraterrestrial slag. NARRATOR: And could it be
that this type of debris somehow caused the deaths of
two military officers sent to investigate the UFO sighting? [music playing] In June 1947, over two weeks
before the reported UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico,
three men and a teenage boy on a boat in Puget Sound watched
as a donut-shaped metallic UFO apparently experiencing
some sort of malfunction jettisoned dark lava-like
slag, just before it stabilized and reportedly zoomed off. Working from the testimony
of Harold Dahl, the captain of the boat, the team has
located the spot where the debris fell into the water. We got some samples
down there of soil. I thought it couldn't hurt. Well, we could classify it
these pretty quickly, I'm sure. Whew, hold on. Gentlemen, gentlemen, this is
very interesting right here. This fits the description
of black lava-type. If you-- look at the structure. Just look at the surface
structure on it-- the texture. Look it compared to the
rest of the samples. But this one is
definitely unique. This is exactly the description
of what we're hearing and it fits the profile. NARRATOR: The team moves from
the dive site to the beach. In order to comb the
debris field completely, the team divides the area
into a grid of 3 foot by 3 foot sections,
beginning at the beach and traveling up the hillside. Anything there, Bill? Interesting crystal. Look at this. I'm looking for any kind of
rock that would appear like it was some sort of
byproduct of a, sort of, metallic smelting process. Something that was so
hot, it melted, liquefied, was ejected or dropped
from a donut-shaped UFO, and somehow landing
on the shore here. NARRATOR: 300 feet
from the shore, Ronnie finds a L-shaped object
approximately 14 inches long that seems to fit
the description. One really interesting
piece that I found is a piece of slag, I think. Again, we have to
really examine it. Very interesting. This, I found way up
there, up in the hill, which is this spot here. And that's, I
think, it's the path that, if the object was
starting to take-off, it would have
projected this way. What did you
come up with, Pat? I found them
sufficiently interesting. It's kind of striated. It's got a twist to it. It looks like it may have been
dripping, like oozing if it was molten at one time. And then maybe solidified
when it cooled. We found a few
pieces on the beach that seemed to match the slag
that we found in Puget Sound. The lab tests will
confirm this or not. We're going to be
talking to George Earley. He knows these cases. More importantly, he's spoken
to all the local people in the area. So he knows the ins and outs
of these cases and the details that few people could know
just from reading books. Here he comes. There's George now. Hi, George. Pull up a log. Thank you, Bill. NARRATOR: George Earley is a
UFO researcher and longtime resident of the
Pacific Northwest. He was brought in by the team
because he has an encyclopedic knowledge of this case
and of the events that resulted from this encounter. This is the first time George
Earley has spoken publicly about his research
into this case. A fellow named Harold Dahl saw
up there, six slightly squashed donuts, about 100 feet in
diameter with a hull about 25 feet. One of them began to
drop massive debris from this hole in the center,
which apparently, was red hot. Because he said it hissed
when it hit the water. It hit his boat. To hit his son, broke his arm. Hit the dog, killed the dog. NARRATOR: According to Earley,
the story of Harold Dahl's UFO incident reached the Air Force. And two intelligence
officers were sent to retrieve the
possible UFO debris. The Air Force
intelligence people who came, were given a box,
oh, like so, of fragments. Which they took,
kind of, reluctantly, but they took them back. So the Air Force B-25 leaves
and heads back to where? Hamilton? Hamilton Field in California. They went out of McChord
Field and they headed South, reportedly at 10,000 feet. So they're at
10,000 feet and that's when problems start to happen. Yeah. [music playing] NARRATOR: According to
official Air Corps reports, on August 1, 1947, 40
days after the incident, Harold Dahl reported
that he was visited by, quote, "two military
intelligence officers, who took from him the pieces of debris
he and his men collected." The officers brought the
specimens onboard a B-25 bomber, which was to take them
from McChord Air Force base in Tacoma, Washington
to Hamilton Air Force base in Northern California. What happened in the
minutes after takeoff is the biggest mystery of
the Maury Island incident. The plane had been thoroughly
inspected and overhauled just two weeks before. Yet, 20 minutes
after taking off, the plane crashed in the
remote wilderness outside of Kelso, Washington. Two passengers
parachuted to safety, but the two pilots
died in the crash. According to official
Air Corps reports, the plane was brought down by
a fire in an internal junction box. But some UFO researchers believe
the UFO debris in the cargo hold may have triggered
a series of events that brought the plane down. I think we've
done enough here. We're off to Kelso. Kelso is where the
plane wreckage is. We're going to do a grid search. We're going to look
for plane parts. We're going to walk the area. The answers may lie on Kelso. Indeed. Off to Kelso. NARRATOR: On the way to
the Kelso crash site, Pat insists the teams
stop at the library to see if town archives could
provide further information about the crash. So Pat, what have you found? Check this out. You were right. I was right? The summer of 47 was
swinging with saucers. The skies were alive
with flying saucer. Look at this. Flying disks now
seen in 39 states. [music playing] NARRATOR: Mysterious
objects in the sky first began to surface when
Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine silvery disks flying
over Mount Rainier three days after the Maury Island sighting. His story made headlines
all over the country. But two weeks later,
an even bigger story takes center stage. Here it is-- July 7. Trio describes flying saucers. I'm looking now, I'm trying
to see the Roswell connection here. OK, here we are-- July 8. Army reveals disk is
found in New Mexico. Army reveals disk
found in New Mexico. Unbelievable. The summer of saucers. OK, Let's go to August 1
and see what we can see. There you go. Look at this. Wow. Would you look at that? [interposing voices] OK, and if that's not
enough, check this out. I was checking the
internet earlier. What I found here was an
article on the nephew of one of the pilots. A Lieutenant Brown's
nephew or great-nephew. His name is Barry Fisher. Wow. What are the odds on this? Let's call him. Let's see if we can hook
up with him and call him. Let's bring him to the sight. NARRATOR: Coming up. The team scours the B-25
crash site for evidence. There's not a lot of it
left, but it's still here. NARRATOR: And find something
they hadn't expected. We got a hotbed here. [music playing] NARRATOR: On August 1, 1947,
after a reported UFO event, two military intelligence
officers board an Air Force B-25 bomber to bring mysterious
pieces of metallic debris supposedly jettisoned by a
UFO back to Hamilton Air Force base for analysis. A mere 20 minutes after
takeoff, an intense fire of unknown origin breaks
out inside the plane. One of the survivors
who parachuted to safety later recalled that the fire
was so intense and spread so quickly that there was no
time to try to put it out. Could this fire
possibly be connected to the samples of mysterious
debris the plane was carrying? The team from "UFO Magazine" has
decided to examine the remains of the plane wreckage to see if
the crash is somehow connected to the UFO sighting
off Maury Island. We made the trip from Maury
Island up here to Kelso. We're investigating the crash
of the B-25 in this area. This is a really puzzling case. I mean is it all coincidence
that there was a huge UFO incident and then a crash
after the officers investigated that incident? Maybe I'll have
some answers today. We'll find out. Here we are, guys. Garth.
- Howdy. Good to see you, my friend. Mr, Baldwin, how are you? NARRATOR: Garth Baldwin is a
Washington State archaeologist, an expert on the topography
and history of the area. For the first time, the team
is getting a look at the site of the actual plane wreck. If reports are correct, this
site may contain UFO debris. This is the Goble Creek Valley
where the crash took place. The left wing came down in
the open valley just over here around the corner, if we want
to go take a look at that? Yes, sir. Garth is a professional
archaeologist. He'll be helping us
examine this area. That's really what we need to
do to make this investigation the best that it can be. We need to bring in the pros. In this case, we have the
guy to examine the wreckage. This is where the
left wing came off. It came off from the
fire at the engine. So the plane lost its left
wing and then, I would guess, the wind dropped off and the
weight of the other engine, as well as its trajectory,
dropped it this way. And it slingshotted or
boomeranged right into the-- and it is right
around the corner. The crash site is right
around that corner there, in those trees. NARRATOR: At
approximately 2:20 AM, the plane came in from
the North-Northeast and crashed along Goble Creek. The debris field
could radiate as far as 1,000 feet from
the center point. This B-25 was carrying some
kind of mystery slag from Maury Island. That's the connection here. If there was nothing
going on on Maury Island, if there was no slag, if
there was no incident, why would these officers be
wasting their time carrying slag on their B-25? NARRATOR: In the
weeks after the crash, over 300 volunteers
removed much of the debris as part of a military operation. What makes this
crash so intriguing is that the circumstances
surrounding the crash were recorded in the press. According to "The
Kelsonian Tribune," quote, "the close guard which
army officers established around the crash scene
and their refusal to permit any pictures to
be taken of the wreckage added to the belief
that the plane was carrying secret cargo." But could there be some evidence
of this secret cargo left behind? Could the plane have come
down from mechanical failure? Sure, it could have. But we also know that the B-25
Mitchell bomber was notoriously difficult to fly. But there are other facts
of this case, as well. What was the plane carrying? What was the nature
of the material the plane was carrying? This is all evidence we have
to examine to figure out why this plane went down. NARRATOR: The team begin
searching the site of the plane crash. They face several
obstacles in their search. Garth, where are we? We're just about there. NARRATOR: The crash
happened 60 years ago. Then a little
cut ravine beyond is where the crash
impact area was. NARRATOR: And the crash site is
in the middle of the Washington wilderness, where the vegetation
grows very thick and very quickly. This is the
focus of the crash. It was focused right
into this little ravine. Like a baseball glove
caught that airplane-- pow. NARRATOR: Finally, the
high levels of ground water makes the soil unstable. And the debris may have
sunk deeper underground. [music playing] Well, here's the center
point of the material that we found out here
and that's been reported. Wow.
That's amazing. This is about our focus-- centroid, if you will. This would be either the
framing the motor was hung on or the protective cage
around the nose, maybe. It's aircraft aluminum. The metal structure on
this is ferrous metal, like steel, which is unusual
for most parts of an aircraft. We get a hotbed here in
the area of the wreckage. We have some materials that
are definitively from the B class or B series planes. There's not a lot of it
left, but it's still here. It's obviously aircraft. There's enough
aircraft aluminum here. There's stabilizers on it. It looks like some
kind of torque bars. There's this flashing, which is
usually an indicator for heat flashing. Right beneath
our feet could be the first real physical
evidence of UFOs. If there was something strange
in the cargo bay of that craft, then the impact of the crash
and the melting and the heat, it might transfer
properties of the cargo to the actual airframe. NARRATOR: As quoted in the
Department of Justice's Trace Evidence Recovery Guidelines,
Locard's Exchange Principle states that, "whenever two
objects come into contact, a transfer of material
will always occur." If we could find what
could have been UFO slag inside the plane that caused
the fire, that was near the very hot spot where the
fire started, then we'd be able to find the evidence
that UFOs were on the plane. NARRATOR: The team creates
a circular grid emanating from what Garth has
determined is the center. Because environmental law
prohibits digging up the soil, the team uses markers to
plot points of interest. There might be a certain
pattern that might come out. So I'm more interested
in finding something that the aircraft was carrying
that caused all the military to come out and do a
complete thorough search. Hey, guys check this out. I got some rubber here. Is that more of
your insulation? Or is that a tire? NARRATOR: These samples
will be sent back to the laboratory in Los Angeles
and tested for anomalies. Hey, got a couple
of soil samples. This one's at the
base of the crash. Super. And this one is from
the bank, from the engine. 2 meters from the engine. We've got so much
equipment that they didn't have back in 1947. Even though the army
sent out 300 searchers to comb this area,
their technology wasn't as sophisticated
as what we have now. We've got much more
sensitive metal detectors. And we're bringing in
ground-penetrating radar to actually see what's
going on beneath the Earth. Plus we've got Garth,
who's devised the master plan for this search. NARRATOR: The ground-penetrating
radar system has an operating depth of approximately 25 feet. The system sends
and receives signals to create a 3D underground
image of the crash site. Rob Shaw, a specialist
from GeoRadar Imaging, operates the ground-penetrating
radar system. This system will let the teams
see what lies under the forest floor. The team wonders if the
UFO debris was so hot, could it have burned its
way deep into the Earth, below the range of
metal detectors? After you collect
all this data and if you have it stored
on the hard drive and stuff, what is the next step? When you do the scan,
you end up with two files. You take and you
intertwine those files to make the 3D cube. NARRATOR: The
ground-penetrating radar scans each area twice, each
time from a slightly different angle. The computer program then merges
the two slightly different images into a three-dimensional
representation of what lies below the
surface of the ground. As Rob continues mapping what
lies below the Earth's surface, the team gathers
pieces of the B-25. [music playing] Coming up. Science answers some questions
and raises many more. The mystery still lingers. NARRATOR: And the team discovers
that not all the evidence is buried. Some of it is alive. Barry? [music playing] NARRATOR: The team
from "UFO Magazine" combs a supposed
UFO-related crash site outside Kelso, Washington. They have set up a
search grid and scanned with ground-penetrating radar. Since we can't
really dig underground, we could actually take almost
like an X-ray picture of it. NARRATOR: The images
from the radar were inconclusive, due to
the amount of overgrown vegetation and the uneven
nature of the terrain. So the data we're
getting from the GPR-- the ground-penetrating
radar-- this device really shows us
inconclusive data. In fact, the ground, the terrain
is really difficult for us to physically move the device. And on top of that, the ground
is over-saturated with water. It really doesn't provide us
with the right amount of data that we need. By all means, it's inconclusive. NARRATOR: The team
continues its aerial search and gets a visitor. Hello. Hey. Are you Pat? NARRATOR: Barry Fisher is the
grand nephew of Air Corps Pilot Frank Brown, one of the pilots
killed during the B-25 crash. So good to finally meet you.
Thank you so much. Very nice to meet you.
And hey. I brought you a couple of the
copies that we spoke about on the phone. Oh, fantastic. Some of the pictures,
you can kind of see here. So this is your uncle. This is my great uncle. Great uncle. Frank Brown. NARRATOR: During his
research of the incident, he made an intriguing discovery. Now what's this
little article here? Well, and this is
something that I just came by in the last couple of days. And I'm not sure
where it came from, but it has his
military ID up there. Now the strange
thing about it was, even though he assumed the
title of Second Lieutenant as an intelligence officer,
he was, in reality, a counter-espionage agent. Interesting. NARRATOR: Barry then says
something even more surprising. After his body
was recovered, they gave his personal
identification, his military ID, to somebody
named Kenneth Arnold. You would think that, that would
go back to either the military or the next of kin. Kenneth Arnold was
one of the first guys to spot UFOs over Mount Rainier. But I don't understand why he
would be given the dog tags? [music playing] NARRATOR: Harold Dahl witnessed
the Maury Island disks on June 21, 1947. Only three days
later, on June 24, flying disks are seen,
again, only 50 miles away. This time by Kenneth Arnold. His report of nine
shiny disk-shaped refers flying near Mount
Rainier electrified the country. His story appeared in
newspapers all over the US, making him the world's
unofficial expert UFOs. Two weeks later,
on July 7, 1947, a flying disk reportedly
crashed outside Roswell, New. Mexico is it possible that
all three of these events are somehow related? [music playing] Meanwhile, Harold Dahl remains
silent about what he had seen. When he finally
decided to go public, Kenneth Arnold was
asked to meet with him to compare their sightings. After speaking with Dahl, Arnold
believed his sighting was real and could possibly have
national security consequences. Arnold contacted
military intelligence, who came to Maury Island
and took the UFO material. What was the deal with
Kenneth Arnold, anyway? Why was he being asked to
investigate UFO sightings? After Kenneth
Arnold's sighting, the entire country
went UFO crazy. A week later, the army
released the story of the crash of a flying
disk and its retrieval outside of Roswell, New Mexico. So the army validated
Kenneth Arnold. But because Kenneth Arnold
was already the premiere UFO sighter in the country, that's
why he'd do the investigation. NARRATOR: After the death
of Pilot Lieutenant Brown, his military ID was
given to Arnold. The more we find out about the
relationship between the Kelso case and the Maury
Island case, the more we have to ask, why would
the Air Force send two counterintelligence
officers up to investigate this entire case? And why would they bring
this slag material back? NARRATOR: Under
mounting pressure, Harold Dahl recanted
his testimony to the FBI on August 7, 1947. However, until his death,
Dahl continued to believe the sighting was real. There has not been a whole
lot of resolution, which has kind of left a bit
of a hole in the family. So hopefully, we
can get a little bit of closure out of what you
guys are doing out here. This doesn't just exist in
cyberspace or in some UFO book. This is a real event. And regardless of what Harold
Dahl saw, he reported a UFO. And it resulted in
a very tragic event. [music playing] Whether or not there are
slag, it's a good question. In the lab, I do
expect that we'll find some sort of
reaction with the soil, with the organic
environment around here. A link has yet
to be established between the material we
found on the beach at Maury Island and the material that
we've already collected here at Kelso. That physical link can only be
established through laboratory testing. [music playing] NARRATOR: Coming up. The evidence is put to the test. Is the idea of a plane
being brought down by a UFO preposterous? Or is it possible that
a piece of UFO debris could really burn through
an airplane fuselage? The team's experiment
shows it could. [music playing] In October 2007, with
evidence in hand, the team arrives in Los Angeles
at the lab of Dr. Sam Iyengar. A research scientist
who will use state of the art analytical
equipment in an attempt to define the cause
of the B-25 crash. We're here amidst the
majestic hills of Orange County at Dr. Sam's lab. We brought a lot of material
back from Kelso for Dr. Sam to analyze. We brought back
soil samples to see if there was any anomalous
material in the soil. We also brought back
the rubber gasket from the fuel tank of that B-25. We want to see if a mechanical
failure, specifically the electrical fire that
one of the tech sergeants talked about, caused the gas
tank explosion that brought the B-25 down. NARRATOR: The team was rejoined
by MIT scientist Dr. Ted Acworth, who has just completed
testing on the reported UFO debris sample from Maury Island. Pat dove in Maury
Island, Washington State. And most of the
rock that he found was rock like this, which
is sedimentary rock. Very common in that area. He actually found
something more interesting, which I can imagine, he'd
be pretty excited about. This sample here, it's
actually very light. It's obviously, very
different from the rock that you see around that area-- color and weight. You see these bubbles are
a vesicular texture, which is consistent with what you
might see with a metal that had been overheated and aerated. So it's something that
could look like this slag. Some sort of metal that was
heated and turned to liquid and fell out of this UFO. What it actually is,
though, is igneous rock. It's rock that was formed
by volcanic activity. And bringing igneous rock
up towards the surface from the mantle. I don't believe that
it's alien slag. But I could see how Pat may have
suspected it could have been. NARRATOR: In search
of more results, the team heads for the lab. Hey, Sam.
How you doing? Hi.
Pretty good. - Good to see you, again, Sam.
- How are you? This is Dr. Sam Iyengar. NARRATOR: Dr. Iyengar will be
testing the samples of wreckage for any anomalies. This is the first time that this
type of scientific precision has been publicly applied
to a UFO investigation. We'll take measurements
off of these samples and look for anything
that's anomalous, that's unexplainable. [music playing] We had a number of soil
samples from the site. We had a piece of metal that
we believe was aluminum. And then we had
a piece of rubber that we also think
was a fragment from the crashed aircraft. Most of the material
I can identify. It's the question of
whether it's anomalous or whether it's normal. We ran a number of
conventional metallurgical tests standard in the industry. Transmissive X-ray. We're bombarding the
sample with infrared light. You look at the
molecular vibrations. We did a couple of X-ray
diffraction measurements. We did a scanning electron
microscope measurements. With this system, we're
actually passing X-rays through the material. I think the tests we've
run are comprehensive. And they're the right
tools for the job. We just need to get lucky and
find a sample that has evidence in the sample. NARRATOR: After
completing the tests, the results show an
interesting trend. I took a little sample
from the serrated edge of this aluminum piece
and then analyzed it by diffraction method. You can see, here's the
[inaudible] pattern for it. So the sample of aluminum
generated aluminum and aluminum oxide. Yes. It's a corroded-- NARRATOR: Aluminum oxide is the
result of aluminum combining with oxygen. A
chemical reaction that results from
corrosion or exposure to a high temperature
heat source. All test results show that an
extremely hot fire broke out aboard the B-25. This seems to go
against another theory-- that this was an explosion
caused by the gas tank. Next, Dr. Iyengar analyzes soil
samples collected by the team from around the crash site. Here are the X-ray diffraction
patterns for the four soils. The one near the engine and
5 meters away from the crash, they look almost the same. Except, why is it sharp? The sharpness in a diffraction
is due to the increased crystallinity. The one other ways of increasing
the crystallinity is heating. NARRATOR: The
crystallinity of the sample underscores how
intense the heat was and how all four soil
samples were affected. But the bigger
question still remains. What might have caused the fire
that brought the plane down? If someone simply
tells me, oh, maybe there was a spark on the plane, OK,
well, I have questions then. How did the spark happen? Is it possible that this
alleged slag material, through some sort of
intensive radiation or magnetic field
or thermal event could have brought
this airplane down? I'm not sure. We're going to go back to
the lab and run some tests. NARRATOR: The team heads to the
lab of researcher John Tindall, who demonstrates how a
piece of metallic slag could have a disastrous
effect on the mechanical and electrical systems of the B-25. This is a very
close approximation of what that slag might have
been or might have looked like. And because it has some
ferrous metal in it, it could be magnetic. But what we have here
is a relay, such as you might find on that airplane. In fact, there's probably
dozens of them on the airplane. Now if they set that slag down
or moved it during flight, it's possible that a magnetic
field could come and defeat the relay. NARRATOR: As the magnet
approaches the relay, the switch fails. If the reported UFO debris
was magnetically charged, it would have affected
multiple switches and motors inside the B-25. A failing relay could also put
the B-25s electrical system in jeopardy. Now the B-25 had 120
amps that powered it, to run everything from the
turrets, two starter motors, to whatever. And they all were
controlled by relays. What we have set up
here is a situation where we can create
a dead short, such as if a motor or
something went fluid. So you're running 120 amps
through a 20 amp circuit. Meaning the circuit
wouldn't be able to handle. That it's being overloaded. I think you can be
the judge of that. As you can see, the wire
was literally vaporized. NARRATOR: John has
one more theory. He's demonstrated how highly
magnetic slag could have affected both the electrical
and the mechanical systems of the plane. But is it possible that the very
composition of the slag itself caused the plane to crash? All right. I'm going to use an arc
welder to spark this slag off, much as might have happened
that night with the B-25. Standby. OK, look.
- Whoa. Whoa. Wow. So that is burning slag. And look at how it's
smoldering still. Would that burning slag
be of the temperature that would eat through
the aluminum on the plane? This slag, it's
around 4,000 degrees that slag is burning at. And aluminum melts at? 1,200 degrees. NARRATOR: Aluminum is one
of the main components in the fuselage skin
and wings of a B-25. A 4,000 degree fire inside the
structure would be devastating. If, on the B-25, there was
a short circuit and the short circuit got to slag, it's very
possible that there could have been a reaction similar to this. Is this the same
type of aluminum that the fuselage would've been
made out of or the wings or? Same kind of aluminum. These are all things that,
in the right combinations, can be very combustible and have
quite an exothermic reaction. Standby. Whoa. Whoa. [music playing] If the plane carried
that slag and experienced an electrical fire
at 4,000 degrees, you're looking at the
result on the hull. This fire was different from
a normal fire or even a gasoline fire, in that it was white hot. So this would have
seared through any metal and caused a whole lot of
problems on that plane. It's one thing to hypothesize,
well, it could have been this and it's another to
see with our own eyes. That yes, you can spark slag. Slag can produce combustion
and explosion, which can burn through metal,
which would lead to something like the crash of a B-25. And one of the
possibilities is that we're dealing with UFO debris that
may have caused this crash. So gentlemen, we are
back from Tindall's lab. We're back from Kelso. Although we weren't allowed
to dig up all the wreckage, we were able to dig up
some really good debris. And we were able
to really determine that a fire could occur. There was a reason that this
plane could have caught fire. So of all the
evidence in the case, the samples that Pat found while
scuba diving are definitely out. But the samples we were able
to analyze in Dr. Sam's lab, obviously, we didn't
find any smoking gun that there was definitely
some sort of UFO or extraterrestrial involvement. But, on the other hand,
nothing to disprove that. Nobody's really been to
the site over those 60 years after the Air Force
cleaned it up. We were there. We retrieved material. We tested material. We found reputable scientists
to evaluate the material. We reconstructed
the final moments of the crash of that B-25. We're bringing
science to ufology. Speculation out the window. Science right here. NARRATOR: Many samples
proved inconclusive, but experts say there
are definite signs of anomalous activity
surrounding both the Maury Island UFO incident and
the Kelso crash site. What really happened may
never be fully known. But witnesses are certain
that something took place in the Maury Island Sound
one summer's night in 1947. Did it cause bodily
injury to witnesses? And was it enough to set off
a chain reaction that resulted in the deaths of
two army pilots? The mystery continues. In the world of UFO
reports, you got 90% of them, total bull-[bleep], OK? Either delusional, either
out and out hoaxes, or honest mistakes. The fact is, there are 10%
that are absolutely real. We will find it
because it is there. And when we find it,
we will prove it.
