UFO Sightings at Nuclear Bases (Full Episode) | UFOs: Investigating the Unknown

[Music] one of these three men is an expert on unidentified flying objects what is your name please my name is Jay Allen Hyatt my name is Jay Allen heinek my name is Jay Allen heineck jail and heineck came into the UFO field with the typical scientific attitude which is they shouldn't be studied there's nothing to them ultimately that changed and that's sort of the core of the J Ellen heineck story i j Allen heineck I'm a consultant to the United States Air Force on unidentified flying object like so many other key figures of that era heinek had to push against the government that he once worked for and stand up for the truth I am also professor of astronomy and director of a large University Observatory believed that science was the tool science could get us to an understanding of what UFOs are and that's what he advocated for there are a lot of people who don't always understand his rationale for the things he did or the things he said but heinek's impact today I think is immeasurable only one of these men is the real J Allen heineck the other two are imposters and we'll try to fool this panel on to tell the truth [Music] get reports every night around it I'd like to report a usual [Music] the US government closed its formal study of UFOs Project Blue Book in late 1969. and the government as a whole says we're not interested in the off all reports the air force made the decision let's get out of this business of investigating UFOs our business is National Security we've seen no threat let's stop Project Blue Book JL and heineck who was the scientist who worked for Project Blue Book for almost 20 years actually came through that with the opposite perspective which was that UFOs were something serious and they should be investigated in my association with Project Blue Book I don't I know very well that it was not a scientific project I also know that they never never would notify the media when an interesting case came up they did everything they could to keep it down so they definitely withheld information Dr heineck realized that this was a serious problem the UFO reports could not all be explained and that the military should be taking this more seriously we now know that there were UFO cases during this time period that did seem to have National Security implications I know that when I was a part of Blue Book there were a number of cases that never got into blue book They're Witnesses this was preserved at a missile base this was observed by an Air Force pilot you mean to tell me that the CIA or the FBI in the government hasn't investigated this I think the public would be shocked to realize that there were incidents going back even into the 60s where our nuclear missile silos were being interfered with production facilities weapons facilities we've had incidents over numerous ICBM bases during the Cold War intercontinental ballistic missiles called icbms were strategically located throughout Northern parts of the United States where they were within Striking Distance of the Soviet Union there were almost identical UFO events at two of the Minutemen ICBM locations at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota in 1966 and at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967. my name is Robert Salas in 1967 I was a lieutenant in the Air Force stationed in miles from Air Force Base Montana my name is David shimley I'm a retired Air Force captain at Minot Air Force Base North Dakota in 1966 my responsibility was to launch our 10 nuclear tip missiles upon appropriate and verified order my name is Robert Jamison I was a first lieutenant the United States Air Force Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana one of my jobs was to if a missile goes off alert for any reason is to go out and restart it the Air Force includes missile men here at Malmstrom Air Force Base a strategic missile Wing controls the most modern minute man in its underground silo the Air Force Specialists on this job buy continuous Readiness to launch their bird help prevent rather than start a nuclear war we had Minuteman 1 missiles and that's what 800 kiloton weapon and just for reference the weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima Nagasaki were 20 kilotons that capability is helping to keep the peace we have a policy of mutually assured destruction it would be suicide for us or our potential adversaries to launch a nuclear attack unless they could disable that capability in that system then they could conceivably decapitate the United States destroy the capital without fear of retaliatory response and change the global balance of power our location was 60 feet underground we are very well protected it was a concrete steel reinforced capsule and this capsule was sitting below what we call the launch controls facility we had six security guards topside they had the responsibility for making sure there was nobody trying to break in fact traveled to base to attend the pre-departure crew briefing after the briefing several missile Crews came up to me and said did you hear what happened overnight [Music] sometime in the evening hours I'd get up a call from the main guard upstairs he tells me that there are strange lights flying over the facility they're looking at reddish orange glowing pulsating light it's hovering just above the front gate and he pointed with his arms and he says it was right out there hovering and motionless and without sound they did think that there was a solid object within the light sort of oval shaped I kind of dismissed it I even said you mean like UFOs and uh kind of laughed and even he said well they're not airplanes sir about five minutes later he calls back and he's screaming into the phone is very frightened he's babbling he said he's got all the guards out there with their weapons drawn they wanted orders on what to do I told him make sure nothing enters the fenced area when I hung up the phone I thought we were under attack by who or what I had no idea and that'll be good bells and whistles going off at our control panel and we could see the lights going from green to Red all across the board meaning the missiles were inoperable now if the president had given the order to launch the missiles we could not have launched them [Music] losing 10 missiles was a shock except for that instance I never lost more than one missile at a time somehow someway Vehicles were able to maneuver right over those icbms and turn them off we don't know why they went down they're still doing well there's no other reason I can think of that would cause the tend to go off alert within seconds we knew it it wasn't an ordinary man-made machine because we had nothing like that after the incident I was required not to speak to anybody about it I attempted to question the security guard and he said sorry sir I've been told to keep quiet and he was told that as far as you're concerned it never happened I had to go through a spatial briefing this is where they told me you're not supposed to say ever again that something happened feels nothing happened of course the first thing I did when I got home is hey guess what happened there was a man from Air Force office of special investigations all he wanted me to do was to sign this document stating I would never speak about this again [Music] once we signed that document We Were released told to leave and that was that I never spoke about any of this until 1994 so I was about 27 years later three years after the Maelstrom incident in which 10 missiles were shut down the Air Force released a fact sheet to the public announcing the close of Project Blue Book and it stated that no UFO reported investigated or evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of a threat to our national security meaning not even one has represented any kind of national security threat that was certainly a a lie let's let's use the right word the Air Force knew full well these were UFO related incidents that UFOs were responsible for the shutdown of these missiles found out later in that in fact a secret memo had circulated called the bollander memo which stated that any national security cases could continue to be reported through channels already in place and so it was a complete black and white contradiction between what was being said to the public and what was being said behind the scenes [Music] there's something's in our atmosphere that we just don't know what it is these things seem to be interested in our nuclear capabilities and that's something that we should be concerned about I kept a secret for 40 years it was a long time to have this burden on the back of my shoulders I'm normally quiet personality and I just don't want to be in the Limelight but the public needs to know this Robert Salas did not speak out about what happened for many many years and it shows how intimidated these people are to come forward decades will go by and they won't even talk about it good morning my name is David sindley in 2001 I found an article describing Robert salas's incident and when I saw it I said oh my God the incident that he had was almost identical to the one I had I experienced a just a joyful freedom and I finally was able to tell my wife my secret and so thanks Robert for helping me out after the guards had called me and literally begged me to come out and see them because this was very traumatic experience for the guards but I just signed a non-disclosure statement so I had to tell them on the phone that I could not see them so when I talk about this I do it partly for those Airmen that begged me to come see him and I just couldn't do it there's a shyness and a reluctance on the part of many witnesses and understandably so against reporting because too many have been ridiculed and the life has been made somewhat miserable for them Dr heinek grew increasingly disillusioned by the Air Force's dismissive approach to these sightings and dismissive approach to the evidence heineck gradually realized that this was a subject that demanded a serious study back when heinek was in Project Blue Book there was a case it involved a father and his two sons in Idaho one day they all saw this object just zoomed down this Gully down the riverbed and disappear they all three saw it heineck found it fairly convincing he ended up writing it off as as something with a natural cause but that was heinic's official report to Project Blue Book why this is significant is years later when heinek started to change his mind he had regrets about that specific case he said with that case I should have said you know what it doesn't add up completely I think there's more going on here I'm not going to dismiss it I'm going to try to find out more so that was kind of the first in heinek's facade as a debunker I began to get threatened out because it was the people themselves I said to myself no come on how much longer am I going to call these people crazy and when I changed my glasses you might say a little bit and took a view that maybe these people aren't crazy and began to realize what the sort of people they were good solid people I said to myself well the time has come to maybe change my attitude [Music] with the United States Air Force leaving the role behind of taking in UFO investigations this left a large vacuum that civilian organizations began to fill in 1974 Jay Allen heineck founded the center for UFO studies abbreviated kufos this was a civilian group composed of very qualified people that runs the gamut of the average person with an enthusiasm to a very highly trained scientist or academic and the records that they provided are absolutely crucial [Music] yeah I'm Mark rodiger of the scientific director of the center for UFO studies in Chicago Dr haddock mentored me and designated me as a successor Dr heineck was the classic Professor he loved teaching he also really enjoyed jokes you know a good time he wasn't stuffy he had a little twinkle in his eye people really warmed up to him Alan was very open-minded and that is really the background of him being interested in UFOs UFO groups you know they're not massive organizations in fact we're now sitting in the basement in my UFO office here in my house you know the center is really like a scientific Think Tank Dr heineck realized that there was a need for a focused professional group to study UFOs that involves mainly three things being a place for people to report sightings number two is to be a place for Reliable information we publish a journal periodical with monographs and finally of course a place to do research we've stayed pretty close to that mission all through the years one of the first things that kufos did was establish a national hotline for UFO Reporting they distributed this hotline to law enforcement agencies around the country and said put this on your bulletin board if you ever get a call from someone who has seen a UFO call us on this hotline when we will do the investigation okay but it didn't look like anything I know of but there was a big difference between civilian and Military investigations of UFOs the military has access to other information civilian Stone I went to see Don Robson at the White House well mainly because it's a friend of mine and said to him look they have this Center for UFO studies and I wanted you to know that should this subject ever get to the presidential the Congressional level but there is a group of scientists who are ready to work on it and I said I do have a certain responsibility to these scientists are we spinning our Wheels if this work has already been done by somebody else I said because of my responsibility to be scientists I felt that I had a need to know and he snapped right back at me says you do not have a need to know you interpret that any darn way you want in any case you cannot stop scientists from working and that's the whole point of being a scientist they're individualists they're going to do what they damn please anyway in the 70s and 80s in general government officials were not talking about UFOs but some presidents were also interested in getting information about UFOs when Jimmy Carter was the governor of Georgia in 1969 he had a sighting with a group of other Witnesses saw a very bright light in the Western sky and it got closer and closer and then it seemed to stop in its proximity to us and then the color of a change from white to Blue to red Jimmy Carter was very impressed by that it really impacted him then in 1973 he filed a written report on this with a number of Civilian UFO groups so it's on the record so when he did become president he would approached NASA to see if they would open up a new investigation that could continue what the Air Force had been doing prior to closing down Project Blue Book the Air Force would not have wanted this to happen seven years after closing Project Blue Book so the Air Force jumped in on the process and said to NASA we don't want you to do this after a series of exchanges NASA did decline the president's request Under Pressure to answer by the end of the year Essa concluded that it would be pointless to mount a new research effort because of the lack of physical evidence it was kind of stunning that a request from the president would have been denied thank you if there is no concrete evidence of people from outer space how do you write a whole book about UFOs well that's exactly why I called it the UFO experience instead of something that would have sold more like sex in the UFO I called it the UFO experience because that's what I was talking about the experience that people had and you can't convince a person who's had a real UFO experience that he hasn't had it in the early 70s Jay Allen heineck came out with his Monumental book called the UFO experience it wasn't just about research he was somebody that would listen and took people seriously who had had sightings and had experiences he would go on lots of TV shows and radio interviews and he was a public figure advocating for official recognition and study of UFOs over the Space Program taking off there was a Groundswell of interest in outer space [Applause] it was a national movement and so people's imaginations of course run wild Hollywood was able to capture that and feed people's thirst and Imagination and it led to a long-standing powerful genre made a force be with you so UFOs became a cultural creative imaginative area and heinek's book was a big hit Dr J Alan heineck Stephen Spielberg bought the rights to heinek's book and hired Dr heineck as a technical consultant and so Spielberg worked with heineck in helping to get the facts accurate for his movie Close Encounters yeah I was very influenced by Jay Alan heineck because he was not looking at UFOs as science fiction but he was looking at them as science speculation so I met with him and I used him and I picked his brain and and he consulted with me Dr heineck was the fellow that coined the term Close Encounters across the counter the first kind is one is close but nothing really happened close encounter the second kind includes physical damage to the environment that could be landing pad imprints in the grass where a UFO was said to have landed and the Close Encounters of the Third Kind are the most interesting of all Close Encounter of the Third Kind is really when you meet him it was clear that Spielberg wanted real science real data accurate information about UFOs and that's why he called on J Allen heineck they were drawing from real U.S government information on how these things operated and maneuvered Hypersonic velocities or fast speed instantaneous acceleration even biological effects where Richard dreyf is half his face has his sunburn those were all observables that we were seeing in the U.S government real observables that made their way onto the Hollywood screen and that's because Steven Spielberg was provided information from people from Project Blue Book along with heineck Spielberg also talked to Jacques valet a French scientist who was well known in the UFO field and had written numerous books on the topic I had the privilege of working with Dr heineck for five years we built the first computer-based data catalog of UFO sightings starting with the Air Force flies which covered about 20 000 cases software didn't come from all over their country the French scientists in the movie character of Lacombe was based Loosely on on me France has an official scientific committee for UFOs that includes physicists the military including sociologists and psychologists by letting the project team leader be a Frenchman it immediately gave more of a depth to the understanding of UFOs in the whole history of American movies it's always they come from somewhere they kill somebody so we bring the tanks and they destroy all the tanks that's a very American way of looking at an alien life form if everything's ready here on the Dark Side of the Moon play the five tones the movie was the first movie in which we were greeting these aliens and they were coming to us as as equal and we were going to have an intelligent discussion with them our intelligent Exchange [Music] close encounters with just captured the spirit of the mystery of the phenomenon the scariness of the phenomenon and kind of the impact that it has on people whatever the government may think about them unidentified flying objects seem to be popular with the people Columbia Pictures reports that its film Close Encounters of a Third Kind has grossed 39 million dollars in three weeks I owe a lot to Jay Allen heinek his instilling in me a professional's point of view on this kind of field reporting and he helped me make the movie more credible than it would have been without his his existence Steven Spielberg actually brought him on set for when they filmed the movies huge climax at the secret UFO base in Wyoming United States Navy 443-431 and of course Close Encounters became a household term because of Steven Spielberg's movie and really catapulted heinic too the degree of celebrity therefore the real Dr J Allen heineck please stand up even though heinek worked for our government for almost two decades what he was doing in the 70s and 80s seemed to have no impact at all on the government and sightings continued there's the Fantastic sightings last year and this year in the Westchester and Putnam County areas those are literally out of this world I can find no logical explanation for them [Music] we were coming home from grad school and we were just yacking like we are now and all of a sudden Doris says what are those lights up there was driving north on 118 and as his coaching the light here I looked into the northern Skies sort of what appeared to be a large aircraft with Landon lights flying very low about 500c and it stopped and it rotated 180 degrees and started to head West I looked up at Interstate 84 and it was a parking lot people were out of their cars blinking rides pointing up at the sky and there was that City of Lights hovering over in my backyard and it went like from night to to broad daylight and all of a sudden it was it's going to land it's going to land when I came to the station the phones were ringing off the hook the object came directly over my head less than 500 feet above me Kevin host guy it's totally quiet no sound whatsoever you could hear a pin drop and I said oh what do I do with my family how am I going to handle all this what I saw was unbelievable mindbox the whole town saw what I saw beginning in around 1983 there was an incredibly dramatic series of sightings that took place in the Hudson Valley area of New York State and in Connecticut which was actually a wave because it took place over years people would report these UFOs to the police or maybe to local UFO groups and a lot of people were kind of odd and frightened it was a little spooky how come explainable what Jim Brooks saw there was a lot of local reporting some local civilian investigation our researchers have set up a special UFO Hotline in Westchester it was something that involved hundreds at least Witnesses if not more from our government even though these gigantic craft were cruising around over a part of the United States the Federal Aviation Administration has joined the Air Force and many astronomers in attributing most UFO sightings to man-made objects and natural phenomenon believe it or not the planet Venus is a fairly common UFO sighting it moved very slowly we looked up in the sky we saw six lights in a v-shape even after all these Witnesses had seen these objects and had reported them to their local police it still became a kind of a joke the head of my school he said you know some people might think you're crazy I was the commissioner of Motor Vehicles and I was involved in a political race at that time the last thing I wanted to be known for was little green people or UFOs my husband also thought I was nuts and so I didn't talk about it too much what is interesting tragic and amusing all of them one of the same time is that lots of people are afraid to talk about it they their friends will laugh at them and so forth and uh we need to let those people feel safe and talk about it on August 25th of 1984 heineck came to the Hudson Valley and he gave a talk at the middle school there this was the last case that he was involved with before he died and it made a huge impression on him here is a sketch of the thing going on in Westchester County now this is large Boomerang shaped object that moves slowly far below the stall speed of aircraft moves silently I've been told by highly responsible witnesses that it is as large as the football field it speaks to the importance of the Hudson Valley wave that Jay Alan heineck came here he thought it was important enough to speak to the witnesses to go to the sites I spend a weekend with Dr heinek Dr highly could ask you a question and he sit back and he would listen and if one of my kids jumped into the conversation he would just kindly just put up his hand and go I'll get right back to you a little wink and you were the most important person for that moment he was talking to you that's the way he made me feel it was very important for these Witnesses who were not getting any official recognition that somebody like Jay Allen heineck an astronomer who had worked for the government that he came there and spoke with them and took them seriously and we walk through the whole sighting he wanted to go every place and every time we made a stop he said what were you feeling do you feel anything in your gut did you feel connected to this object it made a huge difference to have him on site during the wave in the Westchester case in New Yorkers we had Witnesses geographically independent of each other didn't know each other and yet reported identically the same things now you cannot call that mass hallucination lack of scientific involvement or government acknowledgment of those encourages people's imaginations to go wild with what are they hiding we called the police when we got home and they didn't tell us that night but a couple of days later we were reading they thought they were ultralights the planes the chief meteorologist at the Westchester County Airport to some 25 years experience told me that when he saw it it moved very slowly like a ship docking at a birth now that cannot possibly be ultra lights flying in formation that's just out of the question information is one of the art one of the reasons cited including an article in in discover magazine this article that was in discover magazine talks about the pilots who were going up in hoaxing UFOs and it implies that that's probably what all the sightings were the engines planes fly all the time you hear 7 000 people coming out and saying ah I saw planes over my head no they saw something different ultralights they make noise so uh we've never had a good explanation so these Pilots did a huge disservice by creating this hoax situation to confuse everything and to bring a lack of credibility and to give the government something to hang their hat on when they were asked what people were actually seeing people began doubting themselves it kept the entire wave suppressed heinek who's just stunned by the fact that this was not getting attention the subject came up in the United Nations recently we have reports from 133 different countries and the same pattern exists around the world it's not just localized in one particular country you see so while our government was telling the public that there was nothing to UFOs that the investigations had all been shut down documents reveal that officials were in fact monitoring cases in other countries they were saying we're saying very similar to what was seen in the Hudson Valley [Music] this map was prepared by Dr Jacques Valley UFO reports are truly Global and they seem to occur in waves or flaps as they are often called notice how the slabs have been distributed throughout the years and over the world this is truly an international phenomenon there's no question about it there's a very similar pattern very similar reports foreign militaries are also having encounters the Belgian Air Force had some extraordinary encounters foreign a few years after the Hudson Valley wave a very similar wave occurred in Belgium these large black triangles again all the characteristic silent low beams of light hovering the Belgian authorities would scramble jets in order to try to get a better look at the objects they wanted to identify what it was that was invading protected airspace over their country it felt that this was their responsibility the f-16s that the Belgian military had attract these objects on radar so they they actually have radar imagery of the unknown moving through Belgian airspace and the contrast from how the Belgian government handled it there versus how our government didn't handle the events in Hudson Valley are really striking Belgian Air Force became actively involved with a group of scientists to collect reports from Witnesses they assigned a kernel to head up an investigation and they held a press conference packed with media in which they disclosed everything they knew and and how they were approaching this and the public were encouraged to file reports Air Force officers were coming forward and speaking about it they gave it a legitimacy that we have yet to see here in this country you said the government stopped investigating back in 1969 do these UFO Watchers have any reason to expect the government to get re-involved in investigating these claims right now they're a bit disappointed the government has not gotten more involved than it has in the last 10 years but we do know that the CIA and the defense department has been doing some research into other sightings in other nations like the Soviet Union and Iran but in the United States they seem very skeptical the Belgian case was documented by U.S government officials Colonel de Brauer had approached American officials to inquire whether this was ours and we had told them no and we had said also we'd like to know whose it was so there was a document filed about the Belgian wave but no document filed about a wave in our own country at least that we are aware of to me the greatest evidence for the existence of something strange going on is the caliber of many of the witnesses for instance in Westchester we had meteorologists a Navy test pilot IBM Executives a priest are they all saying the same thing that it is not explainable to them by any conventional explanation you just said a charter that's exactly what they're saying they're seeing the same things you know there were so many people that saw it it wasn't enough probably wouldn't have time I might have told my family right yeah but there were so many people that saw it that I was fine with you know yeah spreading the word me too and everybody that I told said they were sorry they didn't see it a lot of people took solace in the fact that heineck was a guy who was on their side if you witnessed the UFO heinek was one person who would take you seriously wouldn't make fun of you and really try to get a full picture of your experience and that that's so huge just to someone who has seen something weird in the sky and doesn't know how to tell anyone about it I felt validated that's the way Dr heineck made me feel so I could say there's nothing wrong with me and nothing wrong with my eyes and nothing wrong with my intuition they're all intact Dr heineck was someone who was very alive very open he told me once that the reason he became interested in UFOs was about the challenges about you know what is this world if this is real what does that mean for human existence the last thing heinek did before leaving this Earth was try to understand the nature of the denial and the disconnect among human beings when something this dramatic happens heinek wrote an essay it was a rough draft that was left on his computer when he died he said how is it possible that in the United States where even trivial events are often flashed across the world only one National TV and radio network carried an account of these utterly astounding sightings was no one minding the store was everyone asleep at the switch heinek was a different person than he was previously when he worked at Project Blue Book here he was saying UFOs there are scientific interests the witnesses should be taken seriously it was just the most profoundly important moment and setting a course of events that continued through the 70s 80s and 90s starting as a complete skeptic I underwent a transformation and now I guess the best way of saying it is it's an itch that I just have to scratch I feel that we have a phenomenon that could be of tremendous potential importance to the human race and I feel that strongly about it [Music] or something like that it's usually right over me highly restricted airspace you don't want something up there that doesn't belong there culture as a whole didn't really take UFO seriously I stuck with it despite the level of ridicule for decades there's a huge huge responses I want to break the story [Music] thank you

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 1,446,429

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, Close Encounters, Nuclear Bases, Investigating the Unknown, UFO, Full Episode, Close Encounters at Nuclear Bases, UFOs Investigating the Unknown, ufo investigation, episode 3, history shows, secret ufo program, ufo video, ufo video clips, alien, history, flying saucer, aliens, ufo sightings

Id: 54_bxf7n3Oo

Length: 42min 13sec (2533 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023