NARRATOR: An enigmatic craft
is filmed over Daytona Beach, Florida. Invisible to the naked eye, it's
captured by an infrared camera operated by society's most
credible witnesses, the police. Are policemen from
all over the world seeing things they're
not allowed to report? From Yorkshire, England-- The top part is rotating. NARRATOR: --to the
skies over Stonehenge-- We saw an object
that certainly was not from this planet. NARRATOR: --and high
over Daytona Beach. I didn't know what it was. NARRATOR: Using the
latest technology, and presenting video
footage of sightings never before seen
on television-- We have a police
officer telling us that he has a UFO on video. JEFF TOMLINSON: This is a police
officer we're talking about. This isn't some random civilian. NARRATOR: --the UFO
hunters examined the wall of silence surrounding
police reports of UFOs. Police officers are the
most credible witnesses who are trained to observe. NARRATOR: Are police officers
routinely encountering things not of this world? And are their reports
being suppressed? This is case number
91104, Cops Versus UFOs. [music playing] We just got shipped to
us a really great video. This is a video
from March 1, 1991. NARRATOR: The team has uncovered
a police videotape of something extraordinary flying over
Daytona Beach, Florida on March 1, 1991. A video shot by two employees
of the Volusia County Sheriff's Office of an object, and
I'll play it for you. [music playing] NARRATOR: Seen here for the
first time on television, this strange
barbell-shaped object was taped by two sheriff's
department employees, Mark Patterson and Jim DelaRosa. I've never seen that
shape before, honestly. Is it a UFO? Is it a conventional object? So both of these guys are
convinced that they're looking at something unusual here? Yeah, they are, because
of the shape of the object. NARRATOR: The officers were
in a helicopter equipped with a forward-looking infrared
camera, commonly known as FLIR. The camera is sensitive to
heat radiating at wavelengths invisible to the human eye. They didn't even know
that they were filming this because they had the FLIR
camera looking out to sea, and it picked up this. PATRICK USKERT: I don't
know about you guys, but unless it's like, two
balloons tied together, I mean, it could be some sort
of dumbbell-shaped UFO. How do we know
this is not a hoax? How do you know this is
just made up stuff or fake? Why would cops
present hoax footage? Could it be a ghost
image, or some sort of internal reflection
or refraction? Possibly. But I'd have to learn more
about the-- the camera. I want to know, guys, what
did this look like visually? What is the surrounding
environment? And I want to know
what is it doing? Is it animated? Is it stationary? Is a tracking them? Well, you know, to
answer your questions, there's only one way to do it. Get down to Florida, Look
at the lay of the land, talk to these two
police employees, have them recount the
story from that night. Did they know they were
shooting something? Did they not know they
were shooting something? These are all the questions
that need to be answered. In other words, we
don't know anything except here's an object
that looks very strange, shot by an infrared camera
and captured on videotape all the way back in 1991, period. Guys, let's go. [music playing] NARRATOR: The team meets
with Mark Patterson, a former sergeant with the
sheriff's department of Volusia County Florida for 30 years. He served as a police
airplane and helicopter pilot for 18 years. This is New Smyrna
Beach Airport. This is where we
were that night. NARRATOR: New
Smyrna Beach Airport is a small municipal airport
that closes at night. Police air patrols routinely
scan it with infrared cameras. There's always suspicious
activity around airports. So we're checking hot aircraft
that come in late at night to see if there's any connection
with a foreign border crossing or somebody that may have
come in illegally from out of country. One of our duties would be
to do ramp checks of aircraft for security reasons, using
the infrared camera to look at aircraft. I took off to the north
and made a 180 turn down US Highway 1
here to the east of us at about 400 or 500 feet. NARRATOR: Patterson
and his partner, Jim DelaRosa, left New Smyrna
Airport around midnight. They had only been flying
south for a few minutes when something strange appeared
on their infrared camera. MARK PATTERSON: We were already
turned south along the highway, and basically, the FLIR
unit, when we discovered it was looking to the
right of the aircraft, was looking back out in
this general sky area. I noticed that the FLIR
screen had an object on it. I didn't know what it was. It was a round,
egg-shaped object that appears to be producing
a great heat signature. Started looking out
my window, but there was nothing there to see. NARRATOR: Because it was
a dark, moonless night, Patterson and
DelaRosa saw nothing outside their helicopter. Yet the FLIR camera
captured 33 seconds of a strange
barbell-shaped object. MARK PATTERSON: Just
inadvertently, the infrared happened to pick this object up. And we couldn't play
it back in the cockpit, so we headed back to the hangar. You had called in to see
if anybody had this object on radar, is that correct? Well, my partner remembers
that I called air traffic control in Daytona, and
they scanned the area and according to him said,
no, there was no other traffic in the immediate area. So there's no visual,
the camera picks it up, but radar doesn't pick it up. So the only thing that's
picking up an object is the FLIR camera. It doesn't lie. It's there. Mark is a veteran
police officer with a lot of flying time. He'd never seen anything like
this before or after that. So this was truly an
unusual event for him, and he knows that. We have an object caught on
video that they can't identify. And of course, I want
to analyze it and hear what some experts have to say. NARRATOR: Mark
Patterson's co-pilot that night was Jim DelaRosa,
another longtime veteran of the Volusia County Sheriff's
Department, now retired. Oh, I felt very confident
with running the instrument. I've had 1,000 plus hours
on that FLIR monitor, and this thing here had
nothing that I'd ever recognized before. What was your altitude? 400 to 500 feet. TED ACWORTH: And the object
seems to have two-- you know, two distinct pieces of it. JIM DELAROSA: Looks like it
possibly has two different heat sources. MARK PATTERSON: Right in the
middle, you see a white band, and that, to me,
indicates a colder area. WILLIAM BIRNES: So it's
two separate heat sources on the object,
which is why there's a cold band in the middle. Or one heat source
with some cold insulator. Right. Now, it looks like
there's something going on in the rear of that craft,
like there's something turning. NARRATOR: The image appears to
show a craft with a rotating section. Jim is certain it's
not a helicopter, but there is nothing on
the video that identifies the object as any
known aircraft. In my opinion, it
was not a helicopter. I couldn't identify what it was,
because the fact is, there was no distinct fuel fuselage,
no tail boom, no rotor blade motion. Have you ever seen, in
your experience using FLIRs, any kind of artifacts
in the field? This is an oddball
entity, to say the least. You know, I'm
listening to what could be a reasonable
explanation for what I'm hearing. You know, for example,
maybe it's a solid object, like a helicopter at distance,
but the camera system is defocused, which is blurring it. I have a lot of experience
working with optical systems, and you get all kinds of
artifacts when any object you're looking at
fall out of focus. There's no chance that
this was a blur of some sort, something out of focus? You can tell by the cursor
moving that it's in focus and he's coming
back up to the sky. But as we go into this turn,
you will start to see the detail on the ground that you can
tell the trees and the bushes, you can tell where the water is. [music playing] PATRICK USKERT: You can
clearly see that periodically, the camera's shifting
down to the ground below, and we're seeing in focus
field in the near field and off into infinity. So that pretty well
discounts this defocus issue. NARRATOR: The discovery that
something is flying nearby is troubling, but
Patterson and DelaRosa are more disturbed
by the realization that it seems to
be tracking them. Is it traveling alongside you? Is it coming in towards you? This thing here is
station, staying with us at that approximate same speed. Do we have evidence of some
sort of intelligence behavior of this object? It counteracted every
move that we made. It stayed with us. WILLIAM BIRNES: So it's
like it's tracking you? JIM DELAROSA: Exactly. MARK PATTERSON: The object came
down at a fairly rapid rate and was at least
trailing the same speed that we were traveling. You guys know anything
that would do that? I've never seen
anything like this. And I'm sure if it was a
helicopter or an airplane in my close proximity, it would
have appeared just that way. We all know this is
a UFO investigation. My question is, is this a UFO? I can't tell you
whether or not. It's unexplained
in my opinion, and I've got, like I said,
1,000 plus hours using that instrument, and I have
no idea to this day what it possibly could be. PATRICK USKERT: We have
two seasoned officers who have a lot of flying time,
a lot of experience telling us that they have a UFO. It was caught using some of
the best optical equipment out there. Now it's really a mystery. WILLIAM BIRNES: The
shape of that signature reminds me of a gyrocopter. But if you went out
and actually FLIRed another aircraft, a gyrocopter,
a helicopter, you're going to see the
structure, you're going to see the rotor blades. I don't have anything
that proves that it was an extraterrestrial
object, but I haven't found anything that
disproves that it couldn't have been. sheriff's department employeeso on a routine patrol
over Daytona Beach, Florida captured 33 seconds
of an unknown invisible craft, seen here for the first time. It's very strange that we
have things flying around over our cities that police
officers can't identify. NARRATOR: The team goes to the
foremost authority on UFO image analysis to find some answers. Optical physicist Dr. Bruce
Maccabee draws on his lifetime experience in image analysis
for the United States Navy in an attempt to identify
what others cannot. WILLIAM BIRNES: We are having
this debate over this Volusia County Sheriff's
Department video about whether this thing
shot is a UFO, a helicopter, or something else. So please try to
resolve it for us. OK, well, this is a picture
of the helicopter they were in. You can see the
overall shape of it. If you had a helicopter
and you're looking at it in infrared, that is
where the hotspots are, you would see a real
hotspot up here at the top. The rest of it would be
cool and you would see the shape of the helicopter. You would see the tail part. You'd see the rotor flashing. NARRATOR: Maccabee believes
the recorded image does not match the heat signature
of the helicopter. But it points out another
important difference. One part of the object seems
to be rotating in a manner unlike any known aircraft. And the funny thing about that
is, the rear rotor's rotating like this, and it's not rotating
the way one of these propellers would be on the back. Bruce Maccabee claims
this is not a helicopter. The rotation of the
blades in the object on this video footage are
going in a different direction than the way the blades
on a helicopter would go. Take this thing right here
as the model of a helicopter. Here's the front
of the helicopter, here's the tail
shooting out the back. Now, they have a top rotor that
goes like this and that lifts it up and down, but if they
only had the top rotor, the whole thing would
start to rotate, so they put another rotor
on this side with a plane of rotation like that, right,
and that keeps it from turning. But this thing here, instead
of rotating in this plane, it's rotating this way. I'm saying the rotation
is in the wrong plane if it were a helicopter. Therefore, it's
not a helicopter. If it's not a helicopter, and
it's not a plane, what is it? I don't know. All I can say is it's
not a helicopter. [music playing] Let's tack off what we got. We have two pilots in the
chopper that night who say, you know what, we
don't know what it is. There's one more thing. You'll see in the FLIR footage
there's a segment where there's a person unloading what looks
like boxes out of a pickup truck. We've tracked that person down
and we can give him a call and see what we can learn.
- He's on this video? That's right. Wow. We were down in Florida, we
were analyzing the FLIR footage from 1991, and in
analyzing the footage, we found what's clearly a
person unloading a vehicle, and we were able to find
out who that person was. That's Mike Holliman. NARRATOR: Mike Holliman,
a NASA engineer, claims that he was in the
area when Patterson DelaRosa allegedly filmed the UFO. That's it right there. I've got the number for Mike.
Why don't we call him right now? Do it. TED ACWORTH: All right. To me, I want to know, does
he remember hearing or seeing a second object aside
from the helicopter? Was it lit? Was it unlit? Was there audible
noise coming off of it? Maybe we can pick up some
additional information for him. MIKE HOLLIMAN (ON
PHONE): Afternoon. Hi, Mike, this is Ted Acworth
and the UFO Hunters calling. Can you tell us what
you saw in the air that night near or in the
vicinity of Mark Patterson's helicopter? MIKE HOLLIMAN (ON PHONE):
And I know that I stepped out and actually observed
this helicopter circling the airfield. NARRATOR: Holliman saw
the officers' helicopter from Massey Ranch Airport,
located six miles from New Smyrna Beach Airport, the
spot where the officers filmed the alleged UFO. Did you see any
other helicopters or any other aircrafts
around that same time? MIKE HOLLIMAN (ON PHONE): No. I never-- I never witnessed any
other aircraft that evening. Have you ever seen an air
vehicle flying with no lights? MIKE HOLLIMAN (ON PHONE): I've
never observed any-- anyone doing that in this area. So whatever it was, was
flying stealth and flying black. TED ACWORTH: The
fact that Mike didn't see another marked or audible
vehicle near the helicopter tells us something. NARRATOR: If this object was not
visible and produced no sound, what could it be? We can analyze that FLIR
footage on and on and on, but the reality is that
that whole case is 1991. It's old material. We need something that's
current, that's fresh, where we can get there,
boots on the ground, and get hard evidence that's-- that's current. Still, with this huge
curtain of ridicule that's drawn around
this whole subject, it's impossible for cops to
come forward and report UFOs. At least here in
the US, but in the UK, which is kind of a really
exciting place for UFO sightings, there
is a report that comes out each year called
PRUFOS, Police Reports of UFO Sighting. And in this report,
officers are encouraged to note their UFO sightings. Let me get the report so
you could take a peek. NARRATOR: The United Kingdom
has the highest number of police UFO encounters in the world,
but it is also the only country with a system to document them. Recently, these reports
have increased by 39% from 97 cases in 2006,
to 135 cases in 2007. These cases are
really interesting. They're a combination. Some are off-duty, some
are on-duty sightings. And there's some real
hard evidence in here. We've got to get over
there and investigate this. [music playing] NARRATOR: Police encounters
with UFOs in the UK date back to as far as 1901. 50 years later, the
Ministry of Defense began officially investigating
reported sightings of UFOs. Since 1950, the
British government has received over
10,000 UFO reports. NARRATOR: Nick Pope worked
for the UK Ministry of Defense for 21 years. For four of those years, he
investigated UFO sightings. NICK POPE: Many governments
still investigate UFOs officially. The British government does,
the French government does, the American government says
that it doesn't, and a lot of people feel that
that's a mistake. NARRATOR: Project Blue
Book was started in 1952 to study UFOs and
determine if they were a threat to national security. The US Air Force collected more
than 12,000 witness reports until the project was
shut down in 1970. While most sightings were
found to be misidentification of known phenomena, about
6% defied analysis and were classified as merely unknown. NICK POPE: My own views on UFOs
are that while most of them can be explained as
misidentifications, there has consistently been a
small percentage of very, very interesting cases. There's something going on over
and above misidentifications and hoaxes, but what
it is, I don't know. NARRATOR: The team meets with
Gary Heseltine, the creator and manager of the world's
largest database of police reported sightings, PRUFOS. Heseltine is currently
a detective constable in West Yorkshire
with over 18 years experience on the police force. He runs PRUFOS
solely on his own. It is not affiliated with
any police department. In 2001, I came
up with the idea of creating an unofficial
national database to record British police
officer UFO sightings. PRUFOS is an organization
that I created six years ago. And I thought, well,
I'm a police officer, I bet there's loads of
police officers out there who've seen things. So I then contacted the guy
who was the editor of "UFO Magazine" Graham Birdsall. I went to see him and I said,
look, how about this idea? Would you allow me to write
an article for the magazine? NARRATOR: That 2001 article
in the British edition of "UFO Magazine" brought in a
flood of reports from policemen all over Great Britain. GARY HESELTINE: Now, some
six years later, I've got 260 reports involving around
600 British police officers. Certainly, there is a constant
flow of information coming from police officers. [music playing] So Gary, these are the
police UFO reporters. The database has cases
going back to 1901. There was a sighting
reported in 1901? GARY HESELTINE: That's
the earliest one I've got. NARRATOR: December 12,
1901, West Yorkshire. A few minutes after midnight,
two on-duty police constables spotted a luminous
cigar-shaped UFO. According to "The
Keighley News," the object slowly moved
across the sky for 15 minutes before taking off. Two other people reported
seeing similar objects. By its edge, the
UFO was cigar-shaped, it was seen low over the village
where it occurred in England, and suddenly shot off. Well, how many things in 1901
could do that sort of thing? How many things in
1901 were in the air? GARY HESELTINE: Yeah. Well, they did have
dirigibles, right? Hot air balloons. But they wouldn't just shoot
off like that at high speed. And there are very, very few
reported dirigibles, balloons, whatever you want to call them,
that would make those kind of flights over town. NARRATOR: The 1901 case follows
the pattern of many modern day UFO sightings, not least because
it happened in an area that's become known as England's
UFO hotspot, Yorkshire. Police officers have
reported 37 UFO sightings in this single area, including
one of the most baffling encounters in recent years. In May, 2003, a police
officer in North Yorkshire, England records a
strange, bright light with the camera mounted on the
dashboard of his police car. It's pretty high-quality
in terms of resolution. NARRATOR: The red light is
the reflection of the camera's record light in the windshield. At exactly 9:30
PM, a bright object appears to fly into the
officer's field of vision, moving right to left. The obvious explanations
don't match up. It doesn't look like an
aircraft, doesn't look like an astronomical object. NARRATOR: The policeman who
captured this object wishes to remain anonymous for
fear of ridicule and concern for job security. He has purposely withheld
the exact date and location of the sighting. There's some footage
on there that's some sort of
unidentified object. NARRATOR: Dr. Ted Acworth
dissects the footage with Jack Kasher, an
imaging expert for NASA. TED ACWORTH: The car is starting
out about 50 or 48 miles per hour. NARRATOR: As the
object comes into view, the police car slows down. It's possible the
police officers are seeing that and slowing down. The fact that the car is
slowing down once the object is observed says to me that the
cops who were driving the car saw something, and they
didn't understand what it was. And they're trained observers,
so that makes me wonder what this could possibly be. To me, it looked like it was
flying in from the right side. That was my first impression. But it's coming in, and the
cars turning to the right, which makes it appear that the
thing's moving to the left. Right. And it's not moving. It's always above the
same spot on that hill. TED ACWORTH: That's right. Yeah, you're right. So we have a stationary light. NARRATOR: Using the
information available, Ted tries to determine where
the unknown object was hovering. The police car was
traveling along Route 59, a 7 mile road between
Skipton and Bolton Abbey, 21 miles northwest of Leeds. We have a divider here at
the beginning of the footage. Two lanes on the
right, one on the left. You see the inner lane on the
right has the left turn arrow. If we just scan along
the route, right here, you can see that the road begins
a white striped divider, which makes way for three lanes
with two left turning arrows. JACK KASHER: That's it. TED ACWORTH: So we're off
in a direction like that. With the limited amount of
information that these officers did give us, I believe we
definitively determined the location of this cruiser
as it's moving down the road, and we're able to determine
the sight line to the object. So a line along that straight
path after it straightens out. Somewhere in this direction. Somewhere along there. So I'm always curious
to see if, you know, if there's a major airport
right along this line. That would tell us a lot. NARRATOR: One theory is that
the bright light is actually a plane flying away from
the police officers, creating the illusion
that it is stationary. And no airports. It's certainly not
an astronomical object of any kind, even though
it's stationary in the sky. TED ACWORTH: There's
a moment there where it gets very bright. To me, that really
discounts the possibility of an astronomical object,
or even an aircraft. JACK KASHER: Yeah. TED ACWORTH: It could be a radio
antenna, a tower, a lighthouse of some sort. I think it's not
any of those things, because the elevation angle
from our point of view, you'd have to be too high,
the light is too bright, it doesn't meet some
sort of rotating beacon. This is pretty
amazing footage to me, because we've just given it a
pretty thorough analysis here. If we find anything else,
I'll be sure to let you know. Let me know. You bet. TED ACWORTH: If two cops who
are running their normal beat, they see the same geography day
after day, night after night, if to them, it's
something unusual, that is very mysterious to me. [music playing] NARRATOR: Encounters like
these among police officers are not uncommon. The team introduce Alan Godfrey. He claims he not
only saw an alien, but experienced something
much more terrifying. My story began 27 years ago. Three police officers in
Halifax were up on the moors when they saw a blue
pulsating light, and it kept making swooping
movements towards the police cars. NARRATOR: The first
sighting of the alleged UFO was at Halifax, 12
miles from Todmorden. It headed towards the
village of Littleborough, where it was again spotted by
two different police officers. Two other police
officers in Littleborough were up on the moors, and they
saw the same object hovering. Again, it moved away in this
general direction of Todmorden. NARRATOR: Godfrey alleges he
spotted the craft hovering over this road. When I was driving
the police car, I got to approximately this spot
over here, so I stopped the car and I put the lights on. NARRATOR: Godfrey remembers
driving to about 60 feet from the object. It was completely
blocking the road. So it was huge? It was huge, yeah. It was as wide as the road,
and it was hovering about 5 foot off the ground, 40
feet high, diamond-shaped. The lights of the car
were reflecting off it. It was a nuts and bolts
craft, solid as a rock. The top part was rotating. The bottom part appeared
to be stationary. The trees to either
side were all shaking. NARRATOR: He remembers
trying to call for help, but the radio did not work. He took a notebook and
began sketching the object. I picked me clipboard up
and instinctively started to draw it. And as I'm drawing it,
just a white light. [music playing] NARRATOR: Initially, Godfrey
had no memory of what happened after the white flash. When consciousness returned, he
found himself behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. I suddenly found
meself driving, you know? NARRATOR: He quickly
drove into Todmorden and returned with
a fellow officer. The two policemen noticed
broken tree limbs and debris surrounding the site
where Godfrey claimed the UFO was hovering. ALAN GODFREY: That the road
was bone dry in that area where the UFO had been, and he also
saw the pattern that the leaves had made, the swirly
whirlpool pattern. I don't know what to
think about this case. It's so weird and bizarre. What happened to you
after what you remembered after the bright light went on? They realized that there was
a time lapse of 40 minutes. This is one of these
fantastic UFO cases because it is
multiply witnessed, you have people from
three different agencies, you've got a very
credible witness. It went to the highest level
of the police department. He had to sign an
official statement which made specific mention of a UFO. That's tantamount
to an admission on the part of the police. My gut tells me that Alan
Godfrey would have no reason to make up a story like this. If we are dealing with
the reality of UFOs, then we have to accept the
possibility that somebody landed and took a good
look at Alan Godfrey. So did being involved
with this have any effect on your personal
life or your career? It's had a-- it's had
an astronomical event-- affect on my life, both
personally and within the job itself. NARRATOR: In 1981, less than
one year after his UFO sighting, Godfrey was ordered to
take early retirement. Although three other
officers witnessed the craft, Godfrey was the only
one to speak out. Basically, the
other officers just stated that they saw lights, but
it was Alan Godfrey that really got deeper into it with
stories of his alien abduction, and I could see how a
police department would want that to go away. [music playing] WILLIAM BIRNES: Here we
are on Salisbury Plain. Isn't that something?
- Take a look at these things. They're huge. I mean, how would they
put these together? NARRATOR: In investigating
whether policemen are reluctant to file reports
of encounters with UFOs, the team has come to one of
the most mysterious places in the world. It's claimed that over
a dozen officers watched a mysterious object perform
impossible maneuvers in the sky. There's a whole theory that
the extraterrestrials actually helped the ancient people
build this entire site. NARRATOR: Stonehenge is
one of the most famous prehistoric sites in the world. Located on the Salisbury
Plain in Wiltshire County, very little is known about
who built Stonehenge or why, but later civilisations
regarded it as a holy place. Even today, modern druids
and other new age believers hold ceremonies underneath
it's awe-inspiring stones. Through the centuries, this
has been associated with UFOs and ETs and everything else. So it's a really magical spot. We saw an object
that certainly was not from this planet. [music playing] NARRATOR: On June 21, 1987,
Officer Phil Hutchings and dozens of other
police officers were on duty at Stonehenge
during the summer solstice. But they were no match for
one unexpected visitor that arrived late that night. Myself and a large number
of other uniformed colleagues were encircling the
stones, keep people away, and we were there literally
through the night. Probably 2:00, 3
o'clock in the morning, object started to
come across the sky. But then I noticed that
this object had suddenly taken a 90 degree turn
whilst maintaining its speed. Did you try to
form any guesstimates as to what was happening? I remember saying to the guys,
the way it flew across the sky, I just felt it was almost
seemed to be mapping the area. The object certainly
wasn't from this planet. Did you file an incident
or a witness report about this with your command? You don't file a report. It's a difficult
situation, because you will find that you're
held up to ridicule. Even though there were a
number of other officers? It would probably be
difficult for some of them to come forward. So do you expect
some consequences from this interview? From some of my colleagues,
past and present, yes. NARRATOR: But did the alleged
UFO, witnessed by a dozen policemen, have a reason for
its maneuvers over Stonehenge? I have a sneaking suspicion
that the way Phil described the maneuvers of that UFO
that it was mapping something, that it was actually
forming a grid. Means that it was
here for a reason. [music playing] NARRATOR: Experiments
producer John Tindall has a theory about this
UFO's behavior at Stonehenge. Is there a link between
the UFO sighting in 1987 and Stonehenge itself? The team travels back to
the lab in Los Angeles to test this theory. [music playing] John has created a scale
model of Stonehenge and uncovered some
secret patterns. As you recall, the police
officer, Phil Hutchings, saw UFOs making
patterns in the sky. So I thought, well, patterns,
what kind of patterns could we create
within Stonehenge. The officers were
looking up in the sky and they were seeing these
geometric shapes being drawn. There are some internal
geometric shapes and things that I think are
quite interesting, and mathematically, there may
be something more going on that no one's discovered. I got this idea that there were
internal equilateral triangles working within the
geometry of Stonehenge. Our model of Stonehenge
is basically built out of acrylic and front
surface mirrors, and the whole thing
is about geometry. Jeff, would you turn
off the overhead lights. WILLIAM BIRNES: Oh, wow. We've now taken
some lasers and we're gonna see if we can discover
maybe some sacred geometry and some secrets that
Stonehenge is still holding. Phil Hutchings was
part of a skirmish line of police constables guarding
Stonehenge that night. They looked up in the sky when
they saw an object zigzagged across the sky, forming
a geometric pattern. Remember, what makes this
UFO sighting so significant is not merely that
it was zigzagging, but zigzagging sharply
without slowing down. No helicopter is gonna do that,
no plane is gonna do that. WILLIAM BIRNES: Right. Now, Phil Hutchings
didn't describe anything like this on Stonehenge. What he did describe were
patterns up in the sky. So I set up a front surface
mirror on the ceiling to basically get the
aerial view of Stonehenge, actually, the UFO's point
of view, if you will. So why not explore the idea
that since this UFO is making zigzags in the sky, maybe
there's a possibility that he's-- he's playing around
with the geometry of Stonehenge and some sort of internal
reflections and internal geometry that we still
don't understand. Stonehenge is in
a specific spot. It's made of stone, which
doesn't reflect light, but it would
reflect radio waves. If they were
seeing energy waves, what did that
design mean to them? What if they're appointed and
arrayed with respect to one another as a signpost for UFOs? Clearly, there's something going
on from stone to stone in terms of energy that we don't see, but
somebody else or something else can see. JOHN TINDALL: It seems like
everything in the officer's descriptions can be found here. You've got your right angles,
you've got your zigzags. If the UFOs were
reflecting radio waves, they might be making
these geometric shapes, and perhaps what the
officer saw was these guys were making the same
shapes up in the sky as they're kind of tuning
in their instruments. What I'm seeing here is
our best possible guess of what might be going on
with this zigzagging UFO. This is all hypothetical. It's John Tindall's best
stab at putting together some kind of theory
around the zigzagging UFO. The laser light
bouncing off the mirrors inside this little Stonehenge
model revealing this sort of grid of energy may
be a reason for this UFO to be zigzagging across the sky. [music playing] NARRATOR: More
than 15 years ago, police officers in Florida
using a thermal imaging device unexpectedly filmed
an anomalous flying object. I didn't know what it was. NARRATOR: Now, back
in Los Angeles, the team performs further
scientific experiments with FLIR cameras at the lab
of experiment's producer, John Tindall. We're outside the lab today
because we wanted to set up a little demonstration
that would illustrate what the police officers went through
that night in the helicopter with the FLIR camera. They said they couldn't see
anything with the naked eye that night. And then people
would question, well, if you can't see it with the
naked eye, is that valid? So what we're going to
do is do a comparison and see can we see John
with a visible light versus the infrared light. NARRATOR: The team explores the
capabilities and limitations of infrared technology. JOHN TINDALL: Here I go. Going into the void. NARRATOR: John,
cloaked in black, demonstrates how a
seemingly invisible object-- PATRICK USKERT: I
can't see him at all. WILLIAM BIRNES:
He's disappeared. NARRATOR: --can still be
detected with this technology. And now look at the camera. You know, plain as day,
there is his figure. So I mean, look,
try raising hands. WILLIAM BIRNES: How does
this relate to the FLIR case? TED ACWORTH: The helicopter
footage, there was no Moon that night, there were no
spotlights on the front of the helicopter, so there was
no way that with a visible eye, they would either pick
up any emitting light off of the object that
they detected, but on the other
hand, it was hot. And so this camera
is picking that up. Well, this really exemplifies
what happened, where they were able to see an object
through their FLIR camera, even though they couldn't
see it visually, never actually saw it visually, and
that object stayed with them, always on the FLIR camera. The thing with a
FLIR camera is it only gets an image based on
the ambient heat of the object itself from the
background atmosphere. So you really can't tell if
an object is far away what the shape is. All you know is the heat
that it's throwing off. NARRATOR: According
to Ted, there's still one theory worth investigating. As a pilot myself, I've flown
imagery helicopter for NASA, and maybe it's a solid object
like a helicopter at distance, but the camera
system is defocused, which is blurring
it, and we've got to look for any evidence I
can find that would prove or disprove that hypothesis. NARRATOR: Did the distorted
heat signature of a helicopter produce this puzzling image? WILLIAM BIRNES: I knew this
was gonna be a tough case. NARRATOR: The team, along with
UFO researcher Ronnie Milione, travels to Corona, California
to test this hypothesis. So I had the FLIR system guys
send me an actual camera which has the same exact
specs of the 3000 camera that they had back
in the UFO case. Pat, we're gonna
benchmark this. This is scientific
benchmark test. My friends at Corona PD are
gonna take a helicopter out, Ronnie's gonna film it with this
camera, set to the same specs as the one 10 years ago. We're gonna compare a real
helicopter on infrared to the images from
Florida and we're gonna see at the end of
the day, are they the same or are they not the same? NARRATOR: The team meets
police sergeant Neil Reynolds, a helicopter pilot for the
Corona Police Department. RONNIE MILIONE: Can
you explain, like, where would be the
heat signatures on your particular
aircraft here? On our aircraft, the hot areas
would be the exhaust port right here, then the
engines underneath it, which is extremely warm as well. Another hot area would be the
transmission under the rotor mast here. And lastly, the tail
rotor gearbox back there. So a prototypical image from
a FLIR of another helicopter would be a diminished
image of the top rotors and a stronger image
of the tail rotor. NEIL REYNOLDS: Right. Or the tail rotor an
area where the gearbox is right at the back
of the tail boom. [music playing] NARRATOR: Ronnie
starts the FLIR camera as the helicopter lifts off. Look at that, right here. There he is.
WILLIAM BIRNES: There you go. RONNIE MILIONE: There you go. Look at that helicopter. It's amazing. WILLIAM BIRNES: This
is very exciting. OK, look, we've got
it on tape, guys, let's get Sergeant Reynolds,
let him see both and make a decision. NARRATOR: Sergeant Reynolds
helps the team analyze the FLIR footage. This is set in black
hot, so the hottest parts are gonna show darker,
cooler parts will show light. PATRICK USKERT: I would never
confuse that for anything but a helicopter. I'm seeing rotors. The rotor blades are very
distinguishable in this. WILLIAM BIRNES: See, the
closer it gets, Pat, the more defined the shape is. The further away
the helicopter is, the less defined the shape is. Let's see what happens when that
helicopter goes far away, just like the other one. You know what that is? That's a helicopter. NEIL REYNOLDS:
That's a helicopter. NARRATOR: The infrared
camera gives enough detail to identify the helicopter,
regardless of its distance. The team now compares
this new image of a helicopter with the
unidentified image from 1991. WILLIAM BIRNES: Does its
performance in the air look like a conventional
aircraft to you? Yeah, it actually doesn't-- doesn't seem abnormal
for a helicopter flight. Something else that I would
be interested in seeing is a gain or a focus change,
because if the gain is set incorrectly or the focus is out,
it can take just that dark heat image and overpower the rest
of the image of what you're looking at. NARRATOR: The team
scans the footage of the helicopter
for any moments that are unfocused
or overexposed. RONNIE MILIONE: Watch
what's gonna happen. WILLIAM BIRNES: Look. The camera goes out of focus. Sergeant, What do you think? I think that's how the
other one was filmed. RONNIE MILIONE: Look at that. WILLIAM BIRNES: Look at that. RONNIE MILIONE: You tell
me, you see a difference between the two of them? Resembles to me those
images that I've seen before, an object that the
gain and focus is out, and it's overwhelmed the rest
of the detail of the object. NARRATOR: The team
can manipulate footage of a helicopter to make it
look very similar to what Mark Patterson filmed, but Patterson
insists that his camera was always in focus. You can tell by the cursor
moving that it's in focus, and you will start to see
the detail on the ground that you can tell the
trees and the bushes, you can tell where the water is. PATRICK USKERT: So we've
got a long depth of focus. Could you call that
object a helicopter? If you had to file a report,
a professional report based on this video
evidence, would you call that object a helicopter? My first gut reaction
would say it's a helicopter, but in a professional report
that I'm going to go to court and testify on, I couldn't say. PATRICK USKERT: Would you
say you're not certain? NEIL REYNOLDS: I would
say I'm not certain. [music playing] WILLIAM BIRNES: I think we
really had an experience with this FLIR footage. To the limit of
my technical skill, I cannot positively identify
what that object was. It may have been a
helicopter, but we have no way to really prove that it was. And it's very possible that
the Florida FLIR footage is a helicopter, but the thing
is, all the experts tell us otherwise. They say it was
not a helicopter, and they're firm on that. We have an expert guy on the
FLIR, we have an expert pilot, we have Bruce Maccabee
analyzing the footage, they all say it's
not a helicopter. NARRATOR: More and more. Policemen all over the world
are coming forward with detailed and credible reports of
encounters that cannot be explained. WILLIAM BIRNES:
These are the people whose eyewitness testimony we
trust as credible, except when it comes to UFOs, and that's
what's so frightening to me. NARRATOR: Could all these
highly trained witnesses be misconstruing ordinary
objects into UFOs? Or are their reports simply
official confirmation of what thousands of people have
been seeing for years? [music playing]
