Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny (2025) s01e01 Episode Script
Secrets of the Skies
1
Throughout time,
governments and the people
who work for them have
done strange and even terrible
things in the name of national interest.
Tonight we look up.
Imagine an intelligence
agency stealing a fighter jet
in broad daylight.
He risks being blown out
of the sky at any instant.
And can we ever know with certainty
what happens at area 51?
This is actually responsible
for more than half of
all reported ufo sightings
in the 1950s.
This is pure evidence
that the government is
hiding something big.
It's time to bring these
secrets of the skies
back down to earth.
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It's fall 1954.
In Burbank, California,
aerospace manufacturer lockheed
is designing a top secret aircraft
whose very existence will ignite
one of history's greatest
conspiracy theories.
This plane is cutting-edge technology,
but it's kind of weird.
It uses advanced materials like titanium
that's strong and lightweight,
but it also has these strange features.
Like its gangly, and the landing gear
is lined up like bicycle wheels.
This is a curious-looking bird.
This plane has 130-foot-long wings
that droop at their
length, to the point that
they actually will hit the ground
when the plane is grounded.
Most unusually, though,
for a plane produced by
a fighter jet company, this aircraft isn't
going to carry a single weapon.
The reason for this
plane's extreme design
is its extreme mission.
It's being made for the U.S. government
to fly at record-breaking altitudes
on top secret reconnaissance missions
over Soviet territory.
In the 1950s, the Americans are worried
about the technology
that the Soviets have.
The rumor at the time is that the Soviets
had developed a bomber
capable of flying from Moscow
to the United States.
So the CIA comes up
with this ingenious plan
to find out if it was true.
We don't have much of
a spy network operating
in the Soviet union in the 1950s.
The Soviets are protected
behind an iron curtain.
If you can't go through the iron curtain
or sneak behind it, you
might have to fly over it.
To avoid detection,
the CIA decides to build
a state of the art spy plane.
Any aircraft that are
flying over Soviet territory
might be suscepted to air defense,
including sophisticated missiles,
and they might be accused
of violating international law.
The solution is to
create an aircraft that flies
twice as high as the him a lay an peaks.
70,000 feet and above.
No plane has flown so high for so long.
To achieve it means
developing brand-new technology.
So the government tasked lockheed
to build this spy plane.
And their solution is essentially
to make a giant glider
and to stick a jet engine on it.
Flying at the altitude that it is
presents all sorts of new challenges.
For instance, traditional
jet fuel just won't work.
They need to invent an entirely new
type of kerosene fuel
that doesn't boil off at low pressure.
Lockheed's engineers
call its new creation
the angel, as it flies so close to heaven.
The government
designates it utility aircraft 2,
or the u-2.
But building this incredible plane
is only half the battle.
When the u-2 is complete,
the government needs
to figure out how to test
it and, most importantly,
where to test it.
Building a plane in secret, that's doable,
because it's done inside of a hangar.
But testing a plane in secret,
that's a lot more difficult.
For decades, the location
of the u-2's testing site
remains one of the government's
most closely guarded secrets.
But conducting so many
flights of this classified plane
has a strange side effect.
When they start testing the u-2,
ufo sightings go up tremendously.
The public sees it.
They have no idea
what they're looking at.
Air traffic controllers
and professional pilots,
they don't know either.
They see the shimmering in the sky.
They don't know what it is.
It's really high up there.
Therefore, they think it's a ufo.
Rather than confess that
they're testing a top secret
new plane, which might
alert the Soviets to their plan,
the CIA launch a cover-up.
They claim the sightings
are due to natural phenomena.
So understandably, the
conspiracy theories go nuts.
There are some people
who argue that the u-2
in its early stages of development
is actually responsible
for more than half of all
reported ufo sightings in the 1950s.
- In 2013, the U.S.
- admits for the first time
what many have long suspected.
The name of u-2's
secret test base is area 51.
One of the reasons that area 51 is
so important and so
secret is that it's near
the Nevada proving grounds.
And no one in their right mind
is going to want to go into an area
where they're testing nuclear bombs.
They specifically purchased the land
for testing the u-2.
Were it not for the u-2,
there would be no area 51,
and we would have lost our
most iconic ufo conspiracy location.
While area 51 becomes
the most notorious ufo site
in the world, the u-2 plane
becomes one of america's
most vital intelligence tools.
Between 1956, the first operational flight
July 4 through may 1 of 1960,
the u-2 program dispelled the missile gap
and the bomber gap.
There was none.
We were still ahead of the Soviets,
even though they were
saying they were ahead of us.
Over the next four years,
30 flights photograph
almost 15% of the ussr.
This provides 90% of
the CIA's hard intelligence
on its fiercest rival.
The CIA thought it had a shelf life
of two to four years.
Well, other than the b-52,
the u-2 spy plane is the
longest-flying airplane
in the U.S. air force's arsenal,
and it's still flying today.
The u-2 isn't the only secret
aviation project to fly
into the record books.
A decade later, the world's
first supersonic plane
prepares for its maiden flight.
But this isn't the concorde
in London or Paris.
This is in Moscow, and
this aircraft is named tu-144.
The maiden flight of
the tu-144 is a massive
engineering and propaganda win
for the Soviet union over the west.
Up until that point,
the only planes to fly
over the speed of sound
are military jets.
No one has ever built a large-scale plane
like this that can carry passengers,
because the immense
technical challenge of it all.
The Soviet designers are on cloud nine.
The creators of the
concorde are in shock.
In 1962,
britain and France
entered into an agreement
to share resources to develop and build
a supersonic passenger
jet called the concorde
and get it in the sky
before the Soviet union.
The fact that the tu-144 beats concorde
into the sky is a surprise.
Even more shocking,
it has the same design.
Both planes have got
the same sleek nose,
the same delta wing
shape, and the same
after burning turbojet engine.
The tu-144 is so similar
that the western press,
they called it the concordeski.
The Soviets insist their craft is
100% Russian ingenuity,
but western engineers point to a series
of suspicious events during
concorde's development.
Right from the onset,
the Soviets showed
an incredible amount of interest
in the concorde program.
Could there also be a
mole within the organization,
someone within the trust
of the concorde program
giving secrets away?
Rumors of industrial
espionage remain just that.
Then, in 1992, a Russian bureaucrat
walks into the British embassy
in Latvia with a bold offer.
A disillusioned kgb worker
named vasili mitrokhin said
that he had scores of documents
that he would willingly hand
over in exchange for asylum.
When MI6 agents get to
mitrokhin's house in Russia,
they find a treasure trove of material
more than 25,000 pages.
In total, it's about six
trunks' worth of material.
During his time at kgb, vasili was actually
hand-copying notes that
he had access to as an archivist.
This discovery would turn
out to be the largest single
source of information
ever collected during
the entire history of the cold war.
Buried in this vast intelligence stash
is evidence of a spy codenamed ace.
Agent ace seems to be a British engineer
who was leaking
information to the Soviets.
This is how the tu-144 got in
the sky before the concorde.
Agent ace was the mole that
the UK and the concorde program
suspected from the very beginning.
For 20 years, the identity of agent ace
remains a mystery.
But in 2023, a British professor
pieces together clues
from mitrokhin's archive
to crack the case.
Agent ace's real name
is ivor Gregory James,
and he is a Hong-Kong-born engineer
who went to work in britain in the 1970s.
It was discovered that
agent ace had actually
supplied the Soviets with
more than 90,000 pages
of documentation related
to new aircraft designs
over more than a decade.
And inside that supply of information
were details related to
the concorde program.
The theft of the concorde secrets
is one of the largest
industrial espionage operations
of all time.
But for all its initial success,
there's a good reason you probably
never heard of the tu-144.
At this prestigious Paris air show,
both the concorde and the revised tu-14
are the star attractions.
The tu-144 flies at the Paris air show.
And initially, it looks great.
It takes off fine.
It flies for a few minutes.
But then it stalls and crashes.
It all breaks apart in flames.
It is a massive embarrassment
for the Soviet union,
and the plane's
reputation never recovers.
The tu-144 only ever
completes 100 domestic flights.
The rumors are the
Sonic jet ends its days
shipping mailbags in Siberia.
It's 1967, and a
mysterious light in the sky
over a key American missile base
is about to set off alarms
and ignite a long-running mystery.
On march 24, Robert
salas arrives for his shift,
overseeing 10 nuclear missiles
at malmstrom air force base.
As a young missileer,
his job is to serve as
the first line of defense
as part of america's nuclear arsenal.
In the late 1960s, the minuteman icbms
are really the centerpiece
of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Malmstrom is one of multiple sites
that houses 1,000 nuclear missiles.
Each one is in its own silo,
and 150 of them are at malmstrom.
Those missiles are kept on alert
and ready to fire on very short notice
in the event of a nuclear exchange.
Salas's work is critical
to national security,
but it also gets a little repetitive.
I actually had a chance to serve
at malmstrom air force base
as a nuclear missile officer.
And when you're there,
you don't feel very important.
You're just one of
about 1,000 other people
who are all there taking
turns going underground
and monitoring these missiles.
But in reality, you really are carrying
the weight of nuclear
deterrence on your shoulders.
This particular shift at malmstrom
is anything but routine.
Salas is in his command
headquarters, and suddenly
He gets a call from the gate personnel
at the entrance to malmstrom.
And the guard reports that there's
some sort of strange light that's flying,
moving in a strange pattern
over the actual base itself.
This is an area that's
restricted from aircraft
and restricted from commercial travel.
So what is this light
that's flying overhead?
They don't seem to be
engaged in threatening action,
but it is a little disconcerting
to see unexplained lights above the base.
A few minutes later,
salas gets a second call.
And this time the guard
calls salas in a cold panic.
There's a glowing orb of red light
that's hovering right above
the gate to malmstrom.
Needless to say, nobody
knew what this was,
and salas, who's 100 feet underground,
has no idea how to make
any sense of this at all.
Salas orders the gate personnel
to not allow anything to pass the gate.
And then within just a few seconds,
all 10 missiles under
salas's command go dark.
These minuteman missiles
are the most sophisticated,
technologically advanced
nuclear weapons
in the American arsenal.
The idea that 10 of them
could suddenly all
malfunction at the same time
is unthinkable to salas.
10 missiles actually covers
about 15 square miles
of location, all controlled
by a single launch
control capsule where
salas was actually sitting.
With no explanation,
the red orbiting light disappears.
The missiles reactivate,
and it's almost as if
nothing happened at all.
Was this a Soviet spy craft
sent to disrupt america's defenses
or some unidentified
aerial phenomenon?
To find out, the air force sends a team
from an ongoing secret investigation
known as project blue book.
Project blue book was
a U.S. air force program
that started in the early 1950s
and ran for about 15 years
to track and classify all
unidentified aerial phenomena
and see if any of them were
a threat to national security.
Investigators from project blue book
look into this incident at malmstrom,
and they don't think
it's an alien spacecraft,
but they also can't find any
other logical explanation.
The official word is that
the government doesn't know
why those missiles shut down.
Malmstrom is instantly classified
like many other project
blue book sightings.
Salas signs a nondisclosure agreement,
and he's sworn to secrecy
about the events that occurred.
He's convinced that if he
tells anybody what he saw,
he's going to face prosecution
and probably be put in prison.
The blue book investigation
ends three years later,
and its findings are made public.
The government concludes
that ufos pose no danger
to america's defenses.
There is nothing to hide.
There's nothing to hide at all.
And no credible evidence exists
for extraterrestrial
technology or vehicles.
Problem is, Robert
salas knows what he saw.
Decades later, in 2010,
he decides to tell his story to the world.
In 1967, I was a first lieutenant
stationed at malmstrom
air force base, Montana.
When Robert salas
came out with his story,
ufo theorists and the community
really seized on it and said,
"this is pure evidence that
the government is hiding
something that happened out there."
The ufo community starts to believe
that project blue book is designed to just
debunk ufo conspiracies
instead of actually investigating them.
I think the U.S. government
does know more about
some of these ufo
sightings than it lets on,
but that doesn't necessarily mean
that they're alien spacecraft.
A mystery is in some
ways just as challenging
as an actual secret.
Still, today, the U.S. government is
just as likely to classify its ignorance
as it is it's knowledge.
It's 15 years into the cold war.
Controlling the skies is
vital to defending the land.
One idea of an ambitious U.S. general
involves a fleet of
covert nuclear bombers
that circle the enemy nonstop.
But on a winter's night in 1961,
this plan goes up in
flames over north Carolina.
It's just before midnight on
an unusually warm evening
in the small town of goldsboro.
Some of the residents are still awake
when suddenly their rooms start to glow
with a strange red light.
They see this giant b-52 bomber
with just a single wing on fire
passing over their homes.
I can only imagine being one
of the residents of goldsboro.
You hear this loud
crash, this boom outside.
It's a b-52 blowing up right
over your head, more or less.
It had to be a horrific moment.
The plane explodes, scattering debris
across two square
miles of cotton farmland,
igniting fields of crops.
Military helicopters start
to descend upon the scene
quite instantaneously, just about.
Next thing they know, a
voice on a loudspeaker
is yelling at everyone to evacuate.
The residents of goldsboro
are told this crashed plane
has scattered deadly cargo.
Two 3.8 megaton thermonuclear bombs,
each 200 times more destructive
than the one that leveled Hiroshima.
What the world doesn't yet know is that
this crashed bomber
is part of a classified
national security initiative
named the airborne alert program.
The airborne alert
program is the brainchild
of general power, and the idea is that
the U.S. air force is going to be ready
to deliver a nuke to the ussr at any time.
General power comes up with this idea
to fly b-52s 24 hours a day,
because we want to make
sure that we are able to strike
Russia at any time, should
they launch these missiles at us.
For a brief, shining
moment, the Soviet union
pulled ahead of the United States
in the cold war nuclear standoff.
They had that first strike advantage.
So it seems absolutely batty and insane.
But undoubtedly, many
in the 1960s were thinking,
this is exactly how we ensure that
the United States
survives should the cold war
give way to a hot war.
No one has ever tried to keep a fleet
of nuclear bombers in the air 24/7.
So general power and his planners
developed these routes that
will go along the Soviet border
and come back out.
These were grueling
missions that are testing
the limits of human endurance.
The reality was that they're circling
in a b-52 over the arctic circle,
waiting to start a nuclear war.
They have to be refueled while in flight.
And that's very dangerous,
because these planes are
carrying a nuclear payload.
You have an American strategic bomber
thundering through
the sky at 40,000 feet
with a bomb bay full of
thermonuclear weapons,
trying to receive kerosene
from another airplane
while they both bounce
around in turbulent air.
What could possibly go wrong?
You just wrap your head around it.
Think about that.
There are at least two
nukes on every plane.
But general power and our military
think it's worth the risk.
After the airborne alert program
has been in secret operation for years,
general power decides to make it public
on January 18, 1961.
He wants to use its existence
as a deterrent to the Soviets.
But exactly one week
after his announcement,
one of his bombers Springs a fuel leak,
and the residents of goldsboro
end up running for their lives
from two unexploded nuclear bombs.
Shortly before this
mission was undertaken,
boeing realized that there
was a mechanical issue
with the b-52s,
and essentially, they
were doing a callback.
But this b-52 had yet to make the list.
That's when trouble strikes.
The military evacuate
locals, cordons off the area,
and brings in a crack team
of bomb disposal experts.
One of the bombs is very easy to find,
safely hanging from a tree,
ready for the government to take it away.
Now, the second bomb,
that one's a bit harder to get to.
The second bomb
experiences a failure to deploy
of its retarding parachute.
And the result is it slams
into the surface of the earth,
going 700 miles an hour,
and digs itself in to a depth of 180 feet.
The authorities dig for
seven days and nights
under floodlights, in rain and snow,
to try and find the bomb.
One wrong move, and
it could all go boom.
So finally, they decide
that further digging
represented a greater danger
than just isolating the device
and leaving it alone.
They realized the better thing to do
is to seal it up and call it a day.
They leave the bomb in
place and they just buy the field
from the farmer for 1,000 bucks.
The deed to this land forever states
that the owner is not to go more
than five feet into the
ground for any purpose.
45 years later, the air force releases
a never before seen
document detailing the crash,
compiled by a senior
nuclear weapons safety officer.
It reveals a shocking secret
and the paper thin
margin between near-miss
and nuclear apocalypse.
This document that
comes out decades later
reveals that the first bomb,
of its multiple redundant
security devices,
all but one are compromised.
As if by miracle, it
stopped at the final stage.
We're one tiny electrical
sequence away from
a thermonuclear
explosion in north Carolina.
As for the second nuke,
the one that is buried
deep in the soil of goldsboro,
it's been half a century.
It hasn't blown up.
So I guess we're doing ok.
And fingers crossed.
In the '60s, the Soviets released
one of the most formidable, most agile,
and most lethal fighter jets ever made.
But this must have
weapon to rule the skies
is not for sale to Russia's enemies.
So for the young nation of Israel,
stealing its secrets might
tip the balance of a war.
In the 1960s, a Soviet
union created a brand-new,
cutting edge fighter jet
that had the entire
western world on edge.
And it's a game changer.
It's so fast and agile that it becomes
the biggest selling fighter in history.
It is also designed to be simple to make
and cheap to produce,
which means air forces
could have lots of them.
It's called the mig 21.
And for one fledgling nation, Israel,
this nimble new fighter
plane spells disaster.
Israel is surrounded on all
sides by hostile neighbors.
Islamic countries that were buying
mig 21s from the Soviet union.
What the Israelis want
to do is study the mig 21.
They want to know its
potential weaknesses
and ensure their own ability
to maintain air superiority.
Israel's primary concern
was this new fighter jet
could tip the scales of
power for any future war
that might break out in the region.
If the Israelis lose air superiority,
they'll lose the war.
If they lose the war,
they'll cease to exist.
The commander of the Israeli air force
tells the head of Israeli
intelligence agencies,
meir amit, "if you can bring me a mig,
you'll have done me
a good day's service."
Meir amit accepts the challenge
and hatches a covert plan to steal
a mig 21 from right under the noses
of Israel's neighbors.
The first step?
Finding a pilot.
The Israelis started to
make approaches to pilots
in a lot of different countries.
The Israelis identify an
Iraqi pilot named munir redfa,
and they identify this pilot
because in an islamic country,
he himself is Christian.
They orchestrate a
meeting in a hotel room.
It's such an important mission.
The agency's top spy chief
even watches the entire meeting
covertly through a peephole.
Redfa is a deputy commander
of an Iraqi mig squadron,
and he's not happy,
because he's just been
passed over for promotion.
He believes it's because he's a catholic,
which is pretty unusual in Iraq.
He's also very unhappy
about being ordered to join
a bombing campaign
against kurdish tribesmen
on the Iraqis' northern border.
In all the cases I've ever worked,
in all the spies I've ever recruited,
it was a deep, real relationship
between us and them.
Just because you have
differing political idealizations
doesn't mean that you
aren't human beings together.
All you have to do is think in terms of,
what can I do to inspire
them to feel safe with me
and solve that action they
need solved in their lives?
It's a very delicate
process to create a defector,
to turn a patriot into a traitor.
And every defector comes
with their own interests,
their own needs.
Sometimes it's education.
Sometimes it's finances.
But in every case, all
a defector is looking for
is to have some sort of
control over their future.
Redfa is offered $1
million, Israeli citizenship,
and safe passage for his entire family
if he agrees to fly his mig 21 to Israel.
Redfa goes for the deal,
but there's one significant setback: Fuel.
As a Christian, redfa is
subject to a lot of scrutiny.
His movements are tightly controlled.
So he's rarely allowed
to fly with a full fuel tank.
This keeps him close to home.
Even if redfa has a full
tank, a journey to Israel
takes him through
hostile Jordanian airspace.
He risks being blown out
of the sky at any instant.
It's two full years before
redfa gets his chance.
Eventually, it happens.
He's told that he'll be
part of a formation flight
with a full tank of gas.
Mid-flight, he breaks
away from his formation
and heads for Israel,
powering over Jordanian airspace.
The Jordanians scramble
two jets to give chase,
but they can't match the mig 21's speed.
Redfa hits his afterburners,
sometimes flying as low
as 700 feet to avoid missiles
locking onto his plane.
After a 65-minute flight of sheer terror,
he reaches a base deep in the desert
on his last drop of fuel.
30 years later, details of this daring,
state-sanctioned heist are revealed
to a journalist writing
a history of the Mossad.
And it's now seen as a turning point
in the arab-Israeli conflict.
The ending of the story is
that the Israelis discovered
the mig's weaknesses, and in the event
that they have to fight
it, they're better prepared.
This operation
underscores just how good
Mossad is at understanding
their adversaries
and exploiting opportunities.
An intelligence
organization that belonged to
a small country that was
less than 20 years old
was now capable of
carrying out one of the biggest
heists in history.
The arms race to control the skies
has had governments everywhere
investing in groundbreaking
secret projects.
So maybe it was only a matter of time
before the most enduring
design in science fiction
the flying saucer.
Meet 1959's avrocar.
The avrocar.
It's effectively what you would get
if you mixed a flying
saucer with a hovercraft.
Project avrocar is the brainchild
of a British engineer named
John carver meadows frost.
He's a big dreamer, and he's
already got a project in mind
to begin to think about
the next generation
of aerospace design.
Frost begins to study this interesting
aerodynamic phenomenon
known as the coanda effect.
He shows that a jet engine's
exhaust can be routed around
to underneath the object,
where it forms an air cloud
that allows it to lift off the ground.
So basically, he's designed
a literal flying saucer.
His lab work convinces
the Canadian government
that this is actually a possibility,
and they are willing to support his work
for about two years.
And for frost, this becomes
his personal passion
to take this flying saucer
from a blueprint to reality.
But after a year,
the project's astronomical price tag
forces the Canadians to pull the plug.
Frost needs a new
backer to realize his dream.
Luckily for him, a rich
neighbor to the south
is in the market for a flying saucer.
In the early 1950s, the U.S. military
is looking for planes that
can vertically take off and land.
They're known as vtol planes.
Governments are
beginning to think about
what fighting world war
III would actually look like.
So they are focused on developing
planes that can take off vertically
that don't need long runways.
Also, the military has
been rocked by a series
of newspaper articles
claiming that the Soviets
are developing similar tech.
Apparently, Nazi engineers
had secretly developed
a working flying saucer
during the second world war,
and they were now working for the ussr.
So if there's even the
smallest chance that
the Soviets are developing
a game-changing vtol aircraft,
the U.S. thinks they need one too.
The story goes that
when frost gets wind of
the U.S.'s interest in saucers,
he spots a visiting delegation
from the air force and intercepts them
with his avrocar prototype.
Frost apparently shows
them work so secret
even his bosses don't know about it.
And shortly after, the U.S. air force
agrees to fund a million-dollar
feasibility study into his
flying saucer research.
For frost, this is magic.
In an instant, his project
has gone from a side hustle
of the Canadian
government to accessing
the largest, most powerful military
and budget in the world.
We'll never know what
frost said to get funding,
but a clue lies in a remarkable document
made public in 2012.
In it, frost makes some
extraordinary claims
about his flying saucer, now
code named project 1794.
Frost claims that his
saucer will far exceed
any jet fighter of the age.
It's going to be able
to go up to four times
the speed of sound,
fly to the edge of space,
travel between continents.
These are bold claims.
If you are an air force general,
this is a machine you
definitely want in your hangar.
Progress is anything but supersonic.
After eight years, in 1959, frost's team
finally has a prototype
ready for its first ever test.
And by this point, the
U.S. army also wants in.
The U.S. army has come
out of the Korean war
interested in having
basically a flying Jeep.
They see this flying saucer as perhaps
their answer to moving equipment,
moving troops, and even fighting.
So frost has both the army
and the air force, two bosses,
both pushing him for results.
Everything hangs on
the avrocar's first test.
The million dollar question
is, will this thing fly?
In the avrocar's first test flight,
it doesn't go completely as planned.
Frost's design has some
fundamental problems.
It doesn't have the control surfaces
that an airplane has to ensure stability,
and it has no thrust.
Like, the thing can't go fast.
It's riding on a cushion
of air, but as it goes up,
the air dissipates, so it loses its lift.
It's just bad all the way around.
After promising supersonic
flight at the edge of space,
frost delivers a wobbly 30 miles an hour,
3 foot from the ground.
Unsurprisingly, the
military pulls the plug.
The project is canceled.
A complete disappointment to everyone,
including, presumably, John frost.
Before it's grounded,
the avrocar racks up
over $100 million in
costs in today's money
a reminder that when it
comes to the national interest,
no idea is too crazy to try.
The prototypes are
quickly dumped into storage
as a very obvious embarrassment.
In the 1980s, decades
of press censorship
are crumbling in the ussr.
And with this new
freedom, Soviet newspapers
focus their attention on
a topic that really sells:
Ufos.
During the cold war,
the Soviet government
is very much against any stories that are
at all subversive or unorthodox,
and a ufo sighting is both.
Discussing ufos would
be viewed as admitting that
there was some sort of
power out there stronger
than the Soviet union itself.
And to do so would be
not only risking your career,
but also risking your
freedom and ending up in jail.
The media can't really
report on this story at all
until the government kind
of lets up on these rules.
In 1985, things start to change.
In this era of glasnost and perestroika,
you have the opening
up of all of these incredible
hidden stories that had been taking place
inside the Soviet union.
It was like the floodgates were opened.
All of a sudden, Russia just
kind of went crazy for ufos.
Many scientists inside the Soviet union
questioned the truth of these stories.
Soviet authorities tried to
explain away the sightings,
saying that it's a natural
phenomena like ball lightning
that can give the impression
of a large glowing orb
that people say they saw.
Ball lightning presents
itself in a circular form,
very similar to what people report as ufos
where they talk about flying saucers
or balls of light in the sky.
Others say that this
is just mass hysteria,
that people got one story,
and they just fed into each other
and got really excited.
It's easy to chalk this up as hysteria,
sightings by an uninformed public.
But then in 1991, a whistleblower
from deep within Soviet military circles
steps forward.
A pilot with a résumé so decorated,
her claims demand to be taken seriously.
Marina Popovich is one of the ussr's
most decorated and
well-respected aviators.
She's the first Soviet woman
to break the sound barrier.
She holds 100 aviation records,
and she's known in the
Soviet union as madame mig.
The changes gave
Marina the opportunity
to talk about her experiences
and what she had seen
as a pilot in the ussr
without the worry of repercussions.
In press conferences
and media interviews
and her own writings,
she begins to make
some pretty fantastical claims.
Popovich says she has
multiple experiences with ufos.
In 1982, she says she was in Siberia
when she saw what looked
like a giant glowing orb.
At a press conference
in the Russian consulate
in San Francisco, she
claims that the Russians
have been able to retrieve
five different downed ufos,
and she also claims that there's evidence
of some sort of hybrid breeding program,
breeding humans with aliens.
And then in this very dramatic moment,
she produces a photo that she says
is a 15-mile-wide alien spacecraft.
She says it is a ufo
that has either captured
or destroyed Soviet space probes.
Scientists explain it away as the picture
being very consistent with
the launch of a spacecraft.
But because Popovich is so respected,
the ufo community starts to back her,
saying that she's the
only one telling the truth
and the government is
covering up the real explanation.
Her claims obviously create
an incredible amount of interest.
I mean, you can imagine
the press would go crazy
over stories like this,
especially at that time in history.
Marina Popovich isn't the first
government whistleblower
to cry cover-up,
but she's one of the most influential.
Popovich becomes probably
the best example that we have
on the Russian side of a phenomenon
that's actually pretty common,
these so-called ufo whistleblowers.
Government workers,
pilots, intelligence officers
who come forward and say that
they have privileged knowledge
or have seen hidden evidence.
The whistleblowers will keep
coming forward with stories.
But until someone has
really verified evidence
that can be shown
publicly, it's just hearsay.
But still today, we don't know the truth
of what a lot of these
mystery sightings end up being.
Our world and our
universe is still weirder today
than we can imagine.
For every covert mission we discover
taking place in the skies,
many more remain hidden
until someone brings
these secrets to light.
I'm David duchovny.
Thanks for watching
"secrets declassified."
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Throughout time,
governments and the people
who work for them have
done strange and even terrible
things in the name of national interest.
Tonight we look up.
Imagine an intelligence
agency stealing a fighter jet
in broad daylight.
He risks being blown out
of the sky at any instant.
And can we ever know with certainty
what happens at area 51?
This is actually responsible
for more than half of
all reported ufo sightings
in the 1950s.
This is pure evidence
that the government is
hiding something big.
It's time to bring these
secrets of the skies
back down to earth.
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It's fall 1954.
In Burbank, California,
aerospace manufacturer lockheed
is designing a top secret aircraft
whose very existence will ignite
one of history's greatest
conspiracy theories.
This plane is cutting-edge technology,
but it's kind of weird.
It uses advanced materials like titanium
that's strong and lightweight,
but it also has these strange features.
Like its gangly, and the landing gear
is lined up like bicycle wheels.
This is a curious-looking bird.
This plane has 130-foot-long wings
that droop at their
length, to the point that
they actually will hit the ground
when the plane is grounded.
Most unusually, though,
for a plane produced by
a fighter jet company, this aircraft isn't
going to carry a single weapon.
The reason for this
plane's extreme design
is its extreme mission.
It's being made for the U.S. government
to fly at record-breaking altitudes
on top secret reconnaissance missions
over Soviet territory.
In the 1950s, the Americans are worried
about the technology
that the Soviets have.
The rumor at the time is that the Soviets
had developed a bomber
capable of flying from Moscow
to the United States.
So the CIA comes up
with this ingenious plan
to find out if it was true.
We don't have much of
a spy network operating
in the Soviet union in the 1950s.
The Soviets are protected
behind an iron curtain.
If you can't go through the iron curtain
or sneak behind it, you
might have to fly over it.
To avoid detection,
the CIA decides to build
a state of the art spy plane.
Any aircraft that are
flying over Soviet territory
might be suscepted to air defense,
including sophisticated missiles,
and they might be accused
of violating international law.
The solution is to
create an aircraft that flies
twice as high as the him a lay an peaks.
70,000 feet and above.
No plane has flown so high for so long.
To achieve it means
developing brand-new technology.
So the government tasked lockheed
to build this spy plane.
And their solution is essentially
to make a giant glider
and to stick a jet engine on it.
Flying at the altitude that it is
presents all sorts of new challenges.
For instance, traditional
jet fuel just won't work.
They need to invent an entirely new
type of kerosene fuel
that doesn't boil off at low pressure.
Lockheed's engineers
call its new creation
the angel, as it flies so close to heaven.
The government
designates it utility aircraft 2,
or the u-2.
But building this incredible plane
is only half the battle.
When the u-2 is complete,
the government needs
to figure out how to test
it and, most importantly,
where to test it.
Building a plane in secret, that's doable,
because it's done inside of a hangar.
But testing a plane in secret,
that's a lot more difficult.
For decades, the location
of the u-2's testing site
remains one of the government's
most closely guarded secrets.
But conducting so many
flights of this classified plane
has a strange side effect.
When they start testing the u-2,
ufo sightings go up tremendously.
The public sees it.
They have no idea
what they're looking at.
Air traffic controllers
and professional pilots,
they don't know either.
They see the shimmering in the sky.
They don't know what it is.
It's really high up there.
Therefore, they think it's a ufo.
Rather than confess that
they're testing a top secret
new plane, which might
alert the Soviets to their plan,
the CIA launch a cover-up.
They claim the sightings
are due to natural phenomena.
So understandably, the
conspiracy theories go nuts.
There are some people
who argue that the u-2
in its early stages of development
is actually responsible
for more than half of all
reported ufo sightings in the 1950s.
- In 2013, the U.S.
- admits for the first time
what many have long suspected.
The name of u-2's
secret test base is area 51.
One of the reasons that area 51 is
so important and so
secret is that it's near
the Nevada proving grounds.
And no one in their right mind
is going to want to go into an area
where they're testing nuclear bombs.
They specifically purchased the land
for testing the u-2.
Were it not for the u-2,
there would be no area 51,
and we would have lost our
most iconic ufo conspiracy location.
While area 51 becomes
the most notorious ufo site
in the world, the u-2 plane
becomes one of america's
most vital intelligence tools.
Between 1956, the first operational flight
July 4 through may 1 of 1960,
the u-2 program dispelled the missile gap
and the bomber gap.
There was none.
We were still ahead of the Soviets,
even though they were
saying they were ahead of us.
Over the next four years,
30 flights photograph
almost 15% of the ussr.
This provides 90% of
the CIA's hard intelligence
on its fiercest rival.
The CIA thought it had a shelf life
of two to four years.
Well, other than the b-52,
the u-2 spy plane is the
longest-flying airplane
in the U.S. air force's arsenal,
and it's still flying today.
The u-2 isn't the only secret
aviation project to fly
into the record books.
A decade later, the world's
first supersonic plane
prepares for its maiden flight.
But this isn't the concorde
in London or Paris.
This is in Moscow, and
this aircraft is named tu-144.
The maiden flight of
the tu-144 is a massive
engineering and propaganda win
for the Soviet union over the west.
Up until that point,
the only planes to fly
over the speed of sound
are military jets.
No one has ever built a large-scale plane
like this that can carry passengers,
because the immense
technical challenge of it all.
The Soviet designers are on cloud nine.
The creators of the
concorde are in shock.
In 1962,
britain and France
entered into an agreement
to share resources to develop and build
a supersonic passenger
jet called the concorde
and get it in the sky
before the Soviet union.
The fact that the tu-144 beats concorde
into the sky is a surprise.
Even more shocking,
it has the same design.
Both planes have got
the same sleek nose,
the same delta wing
shape, and the same
after burning turbojet engine.
The tu-144 is so similar
that the western press,
they called it the concordeski.
The Soviets insist their craft is
100% Russian ingenuity,
but western engineers point to a series
of suspicious events during
concorde's development.
Right from the onset,
the Soviets showed
an incredible amount of interest
in the concorde program.
Could there also be a
mole within the organization,
someone within the trust
of the concorde program
giving secrets away?
Rumors of industrial
espionage remain just that.
Then, in 1992, a Russian bureaucrat
walks into the British embassy
in Latvia with a bold offer.
A disillusioned kgb worker
named vasili mitrokhin said
that he had scores of documents
that he would willingly hand
over in exchange for asylum.
When MI6 agents get to
mitrokhin's house in Russia,
they find a treasure trove of material
more than 25,000 pages.
In total, it's about six
trunks' worth of material.
During his time at kgb, vasili was actually
hand-copying notes that
he had access to as an archivist.
This discovery would turn
out to be the largest single
source of information
ever collected during
the entire history of the cold war.
Buried in this vast intelligence stash
is evidence of a spy codenamed ace.
Agent ace seems to be a British engineer
who was leaking
information to the Soviets.
This is how the tu-144 got in
the sky before the concorde.
Agent ace was the mole that
the UK and the concorde program
suspected from the very beginning.
For 20 years, the identity of agent ace
remains a mystery.
But in 2023, a British professor
pieces together clues
from mitrokhin's archive
to crack the case.
Agent ace's real name
is ivor Gregory James,
and he is a Hong-Kong-born engineer
who went to work in britain in the 1970s.
It was discovered that
agent ace had actually
supplied the Soviets with
more than 90,000 pages
of documentation related
to new aircraft designs
over more than a decade.
And inside that supply of information
were details related to
the concorde program.
The theft of the concorde secrets
is one of the largest
industrial espionage operations
of all time.
But for all its initial success,
there's a good reason you probably
never heard of the tu-144.
At this prestigious Paris air show,
both the concorde and the revised tu-14
are the star attractions.
The tu-144 flies at the Paris air show.
And initially, it looks great.
It takes off fine.
It flies for a few minutes.
But then it stalls and crashes.
It all breaks apart in flames.
It is a massive embarrassment
for the Soviet union,
and the plane's
reputation never recovers.
The tu-144 only ever
completes 100 domestic flights.
The rumors are the
Sonic jet ends its days
shipping mailbags in Siberia.
It's 1967, and a
mysterious light in the sky
over a key American missile base
is about to set off alarms
and ignite a long-running mystery.
On march 24, Robert
salas arrives for his shift,
overseeing 10 nuclear missiles
at malmstrom air force base.
As a young missileer,
his job is to serve as
the first line of defense
as part of america's nuclear arsenal.
In the late 1960s, the minuteman icbms
are really the centerpiece
of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Malmstrom is one of multiple sites
that houses 1,000 nuclear missiles.
Each one is in its own silo,
and 150 of them are at malmstrom.
Those missiles are kept on alert
and ready to fire on very short notice
in the event of a nuclear exchange.
Salas's work is critical
to national security,
but it also gets a little repetitive.
I actually had a chance to serve
at malmstrom air force base
as a nuclear missile officer.
And when you're there,
you don't feel very important.
You're just one of
about 1,000 other people
who are all there taking
turns going underground
and monitoring these missiles.
But in reality, you really are carrying
the weight of nuclear
deterrence on your shoulders.
This particular shift at malmstrom
is anything but routine.
Salas is in his command
headquarters, and suddenly
He gets a call from the gate personnel
at the entrance to malmstrom.
And the guard reports that there's
some sort of strange light that's flying,
moving in a strange pattern
over the actual base itself.
This is an area that's
restricted from aircraft
and restricted from commercial travel.
So what is this light
that's flying overhead?
They don't seem to be
engaged in threatening action,
but it is a little disconcerting
to see unexplained lights above the base.
A few minutes later,
salas gets a second call.
And this time the guard
calls salas in a cold panic.
There's a glowing orb of red light
that's hovering right above
the gate to malmstrom.
Needless to say, nobody
knew what this was,
and salas, who's 100 feet underground,
has no idea how to make
any sense of this at all.
Salas orders the gate personnel
to not allow anything to pass the gate.
And then within just a few seconds,
all 10 missiles under
salas's command go dark.
These minuteman missiles
are the most sophisticated,
technologically advanced
nuclear weapons
in the American arsenal.
The idea that 10 of them
could suddenly all
malfunction at the same time
is unthinkable to salas.
10 missiles actually covers
about 15 square miles
of location, all controlled
by a single launch
control capsule where
salas was actually sitting.
With no explanation,
the red orbiting light disappears.
The missiles reactivate,
and it's almost as if
nothing happened at all.
Was this a Soviet spy craft
sent to disrupt america's defenses
or some unidentified
aerial phenomenon?
To find out, the air force sends a team
from an ongoing secret investigation
known as project blue book.
Project blue book was
a U.S. air force program
that started in the early 1950s
and ran for about 15 years
to track and classify all
unidentified aerial phenomena
and see if any of them were
a threat to national security.
Investigators from project blue book
look into this incident at malmstrom,
and they don't think
it's an alien spacecraft,
but they also can't find any
other logical explanation.
The official word is that
the government doesn't know
why those missiles shut down.
Malmstrom is instantly classified
like many other project
blue book sightings.
Salas signs a nondisclosure agreement,
and he's sworn to secrecy
about the events that occurred.
He's convinced that if he
tells anybody what he saw,
he's going to face prosecution
and probably be put in prison.
The blue book investigation
ends three years later,
and its findings are made public.
The government concludes
that ufos pose no danger
to america's defenses.
There is nothing to hide.
There's nothing to hide at all.
And no credible evidence exists
for extraterrestrial
technology or vehicles.
Problem is, Robert
salas knows what he saw.
Decades later, in 2010,
he decides to tell his story to the world.
In 1967, I was a first lieutenant
stationed at malmstrom
air force base, Montana.
When Robert salas
came out with his story,
ufo theorists and the community
really seized on it and said,
"this is pure evidence that
the government is hiding
something that happened out there."
The ufo community starts to believe
that project blue book is designed to just
debunk ufo conspiracies
instead of actually investigating them.
I think the U.S. government
does know more about
some of these ufo
sightings than it lets on,
but that doesn't necessarily mean
that they're alien spacecraft.
A mystery is in some
ways just as challenging
as an actual secret.
Still, today, the U.S. government is
just as likely to classify its ignorance
as it is it's knowledge.
It's 15 years into the cold war.
Controlling the skies is
vital to defending the land.
One idea of an ambitious U.S. general
involves a fleet of
covert nuclear bombers
that circle the enemy nonstop.
But on a winter's night in 1961,
this plan goes up in
flames over north Carolina.
It's just before midnight on
an unusually warm evening
in the small town of goldsboro.
Some of the residents are still awake
when suddenly their rooms start to glow
with a strange red light.
They see this giant b-52 bomber
with just a single wing on fire
passing over their homes.
I can only imagine being one
of the residents of goldsboro.
You hear this loud
crash, this boom outside.
It's a b-52 blowing up right
over your head, more or less.
It had to be a horrific moment.
The plane explodes, scattering debris
across two square
miles of cotton farmland,
igniting fields of crops.
Military helicopters start
to descend upon the scene
quite instantaneously, just about.
Next thing they know, a
voice on a loudspeaker
is yelling at everyone to evacuate.
The residents of goldsboro
are told this crashed plane
has scattered deadly cargo.
Two 3.8 megaton thermonuclear bombs,
each 200 times more destructive
than the one that leveled Hiroshima.
What the world doesn't yet know is that
this crashed bomber
is part of a classified
national security initiative
named the airborne alert program.
The airborne alert
program is the brainchild
of general power, and the idea is that
the U.S. air force is going to be ready
to deliver a nuke to the ussr at any time.
General power comes up with this idea
to fly b-52s 24 hours a day,
because we want to make
sure that we are able to strike
Russia at any time, should
they launch these missiles at us.
For a brief, shining
moment, the Soviet union
pulled ahead of the United States
in the cold war nuclear standoff.
They had that first strike advantage.
So it seems absolutely batty and insane.
But undoubtedly, many
in the 1960s were thinking,
this is exactly how we ensure that
the United States
survives should the cold war
give way to a hot war.
No one has ever tried to keep a fleet
of nuclear bombers in the air 24/7.
So general power and his planners
developed these routes that
will go along the Soviet border
and come back out.
These were grueling
missions that are testing
the limits of human endurance.
The reality was that they're circling
in a b-52 over the arctic circle,
waiting to start a nuclear war.
They have to be refueled while in flight.
And that's very dangerous,
because these planes are
carrying a nuclear payload.
You have an American strategic bomber
thundering through
the sky at 40,000 feet
with a bomb bay full of
thermonuclear weapons,
trying to receive kerosene
from another airplane
while they both bounce
around in turbulent air.
What could possibly go wrong?
You just wrap your head around it.
Think about that.
There are at least two
nukes on every plane.
But general power and our military
think it's worth the risk.
After the airborne alert program
has been in secret operation for years,
general power decides to make it public
on January 18, 1961.
He wants to use its existence
as a deterrent to the Soviets.
But exactly one week
after his announcement,
one of his bombers Springs a fuel leak,
and the residents of goldsboro
end up running for their lives
from two unexploded nuclear bombs.
Shortly before this
mission was undertaken,
boeing realized that there
was a mechanical issue
with the b-52s,
and essentially, they
were doing a callback.
But this b-52 had yet to make the list.
That's when trouble strikes.
The military evacuate
locals, cordons off the area,
and brings in a crack team
of bomb disposal experts.
One of the bombs is very easy to find,
safely hanging from a tree,
ready for the government to take it away.
Now, the second bomb,
that one's a bit harder to get to.
The second bomb
experiences a failure to deploy
of its retarding parachute.
And the result is it slams
into the surface of the earth,
going 700 miles an hour,
and digs itself in to a depth of 180 feet.
The authorities dig for
seven days and nights
under floodlights, in rain and snow,
to try and find the bomb.
One wrong move, and
it could all go boom.
So finally, they decide
that further digging
represented a greater danger
than just isolating the device
and leaving it alone.
They realized the better thing to do
is to seal it up and call it a day.
They leave the bomb in
place and they just buy the field
from the farmer for 1,000 bucks.
The deed to this land forever states
that the owner is not to go more
than five feet into the
ground for any purpose.
45 years later, the air force releases
a never before seen
document detailing the crash,
compiled by a senior
nuclear weapons safety officer.
It reveals a shocking secret
and the paper thin
margin between near-miss
and nuclear apocalypse.
This document that
comes out decades later
reveals that the first bomb,
of its multiple redundant
security devices,
all but one are compromised.
As if by miracle, it
stopped at the final stage.
We're one tiny electrical
sequence away from
a thermonuclear
explosion in north Carolina.
As for the second nuke,
the one that is buried
deep in the soil of goldsboro,
it's been half a century.
It hasn't blown up.
So I guess we're doing ok.
And fingers crossed.
In the '60s, the Soviets released
one of the most formidable, most agile,
and most lethal fighter jets ever made.
But this must have
weapon to rule the skies
is not for sale to Russia's enemies.
So for the young nation of Israel,
stealing its secrets might
tip the balance of a war.
In the 1960s, a Soviet
union created a brand-new,
cutting edge fighter jet
that had the entire
western world on edge.
And it's a game changer.
It's so fast and agile that it becomes
the biggest selling fighter in history.
It is also designed to be simple to make
and cheap to produce,
which means air forces
could have lots of them.
It's called the mig 21.
And for one fledgling nation, Israel,
this nimble new fighter
plane spells disaster.
Israel is surrounded on all
sides by hostile neighbors.
Islamic countries that were buying
mig 21s from the Soviet union.
What the Israelis want
to do is study the mig 21.
They want to know its
potential weaknesses
and ensure their own ability
to maintain air superiority.
Israel's primary concern
was this new fighter jet
could tip the scales of
power for any future war
that might break out in the region.
If the Israelis lose air superiority,
they'll lose the war.
If they lose the war,
they'll cease to exist.
The commander of the Israeli air force
tells the head of Israeli
intelligence agencies,
meir amit, "if you can bring me a mig,
you'll have done me
a good day's service."
Meir amit accepts the challenge
and hatches a covert plan to steal
a mig 21 from right under the noses
of Israel's neighbors.
The first step?
Finding a pilot.
The Israelis started to
make approaches to pilots
in a lot of different countries.
The Israelis identify an
Iraqi pilot named munir redfa,
and they identify this pilot
because in an islamic country,
he himself is Christian.
They orchestrate a
meeting in a hotel room.
It's such an important mission.
The agency's top spy chief
even watches the entire meeting
covertly through a peephole.
Redfa is a deputy commander
of an Iraqi mig squadron,
and he's not happy,
because he's just been
passed over for promotion.
He believes it's because he's a catholic,
which is pretty unusual in Iraq.
He's also very unhappy
about being ordered to join
a bombing campaign
against kurdish tribesmen
on the Iraqis' northern border.
In all the cases I've ever worked,
in all the spies I've ever recruited,
it was a deep, real relationship
between us and them.
Just because you have
differing political idealizations
doesn't mean that you
aren't human beings together.
All you have to do is think in terms of,
what can I do to inspire
them to feel safe with me
and solve that action they
need solved in their lives?
It's a very delicate
process to create a defector,
to turn a patriot into a traitor.
And every defector comes
with their own interests,
their own needs.
Sometimes it's education.
Sometimes it's finances.
But in every case, all
a defector is looking for
is to have some sort of
control over their future.
Redfa is offered $1
million, Israeli citizenship,
and safe passage for his entire family
if he agrees to fly his mig 21 to Israel.
Redfa goes for the deal,
but there's one significant setback: Fuel.
As a Christian, redfa is
subject to a lot of scrutiny.
His movements are tightly controlled.
So he's rarely allowed
to fly with a full fuel tank.
This keeps him close to home.
Even if redfa has a full
tank, a journey to Israel
takes him through
hostile Jordanian airspace.
He risks being blown out
of the sky at any instant.
It's two full years before
redfa gets his chance.
Eventually, it happens.
He's told that he'll be
part of a formation flight
with a full tank of gas.
Mid-flight, he breaks
away from his formation
and heads for Israel,
powering over Jordanian airspace.
The Jordanians scramble
two jets to give chase,
but they can't match the mig 21's speed.
Redfa hits his afterburners,
sometimes flying as low
as 700 feet to avoid missiles
locking onto his plane.
After a 65-minute flight of sheer terror,
he reaches a base deep in the desert
on his last drop of fuel.
30 years later, details of this daring,
state-sanctioned heist are revealed
to a journalist writing
a history of the Mossad.
And it's now seen as a turning point
in the arab-Israeli conflict.
The ending of the story is
that the Israelis discovered
the mig's weaknesses, and in the event
that they have to fight
it, they're better prepared.
This operation
underscores just how good
Mossad is at understanding
their adversaries
and exploiting opportunities.
An intelligence
organization that belonged to
a small country that was
less than 20 years old
was now capable of
carrying out one of the biggest
heists in history.
The arms race to control the skies
has had governments everywhere
investing in groundbreaking
secret projects.
So maybe it was only a matter of time
before the most enduring
design in science fiction
the flying saucer.
Meet 1959's avrocar.
The avrocar.
It's effectively what you would get
if you mixed a flying
saucer with a hovercraft.
Project avrocar is the brainchild
of a British engineer named
John carver meadows frost.
He's a big dreamer, and he's
already got a project in mind
to begin to think about
the next generation
of aerospace design.
Frost begins to study this interesting
aerodynamic phenomenon
known as the coanda effect.
He shows that a jet engine's
exhaust can be routed around
to underneath the object,
where it forms an air cloud
that allows it to lift off the ground.
So basically, he's designed
a literal flying saucer.
His lab work convinces
the Canadian government
that this is actually a possibility,
and they are willing to support his work
for about two years.
And for frost, this becomes
his personal passion
to take this flying saucer
from a blueprint to reality.
But after a year,
the project's astronomical price tag
forces the Canadians to pull the plug.
Frost needs a new
backer to realize his dream.
Luckily for him, a rich
neighbor to the south
is in the market for a flying saucer.
In the early 1950s, the U.S. military
is looking for planes that
can vertically take off and land.
They're known as vtol planes.
Governments are
beginning to think about
what fighting world war
III would actually look like.
So they are focused on developing
planes that can take off vertically
that don't need long runways.
Also, the military has
been rocked by a series
of newspaper articles
claiming that the Soviets
are developing similar tech.
Apparently, Nazi engineers
had secretly developed
a working flying saucer
during the second world war,
and they were now working for the ussr.
So if there's even the
smallest chance that
the Soviets are developing
a game-changing vtol aircraft,
the U.S. thinks they need one too.
The story goes that
when frost gets wind of
the U.S.'s interest in saucers,
he spots a visiting delegation
from the air force and intercepts them
with his avrocar prototype.
Frost apparently shows
them work so secret
even his bosses don't know about it.
And shortly after, the U.S. air force
agrees to fund a million-dollar
feasibility study into his
flying saucer research.
For frost, this is magic.
In an instant, his project
has gone from a side hustle
of the Canadian
government to accessing
the largest, most powerful military
and budget in the world.
We'll never know what
frost said to get funding,
but a clue lies in a remarkable document
made public in 2012.
In it, frost makes some
extraordinary claims
about his flying saucer, now
code named project 1794.
Frost claims that his
saucer will far exceed
any jet fighter of the age.
It's going to be able
to go up to four times
the speed of sound,
fly to the edge of space,
travel between continents.
These are bold claims.
If you are an air force general,
this is a machine you
definitely want in your hangar.
Progress is anything but supersonic.
After eight years, in 1959, frost's team
finally has a prototype
ready for its first ever test.
And by this point, the
U.S. army also wants in.
The U.S. army has come
out of the Korean war
interested in having
basically a flying Jeep.
They see this flying saucer as perhaps
their answer to moving equipment,
moving troops, and even fighting.
So frost has both the army
and the air force, two bosses,
both pushing him for results.
Everything hangs on
the avrocar's first test.
The million dollar question
is, will this thing fly?
In the avrocar's first test flight,
it doesn't go completely as planned.
Frost's design has some
fundamental problems.
It doesn't have the control surfaces
that an airplane has to ensure stability,
and it has no thrust.
Like, the thing can't go fast.
It's riding on a cushion
of air, but as it goes up,
the air dissipates, so it loses its lift.
It's just bad all the way around.
After promising supersonic
flight at the edge of space,
frost delivers a wobbly 30 miles an hour,
3 foot from the ground.
Unsurprisingly, the
military pulls the plug.
The project is canceled.
A complete disappointment to everyone,
including, presumably, John frost.
Before it's grounded,
the avrocar racks up
over $100 million in
costs in today's money
a reminder that when it
comes to the national interest,
no idea is too crazy to try.
The prototypes are
quickly dumped into storage
as a very obvious embarrassment.
In the 1980s, decades
of press censorship
are crumbling in the ussr.
And with this new
freedom, Soviet newspapers
focus their attention on
a topic that really sells:
Ufos.
During the cold war,
the Soviet government
is very much against any stories that are
at all subversive or unorthodox,
and a ufo sighting is both.
Discussing ufos would
be viewed as admitting that
there was some sort of
power out there stronger
than the Soviet union itself.
And to do so would be
not only risking your career,
but also risking your
freedom and ending up in jail.
The media can't really
report on this story at all
until the government kind
of lets up on these rules.
In 1985, things start to change.
In this era of glasnost and perestroika,
you have the opening
up of all of these incredible
hidden stories that had been taking place
inside the Soviet union.
It was like the floodgates were opened.
All of a sudden, Russia just
kind of went crazy for ufos.
Many scientists inside the Soviet union
questioned the truth of these stories.
Soviet authorities tried to
explain away the sightings,
saying that it's a natural
phenomena like ball lightning
that can give the impression
of a large glowing orb
that people say they saw.
Ball lightning presents
itself in a circular form,
very similar to what people report as ufos
where they talk about flying saucers
or balls of light in the sky.
Others say that this
is just mass hysteria,
that people got one story,
and they just fed into each other
and got really excited.
It's easy to chalk this up as hysteria,
sightings by an uninformed public.
But then in 1991, a whistleblower
from deep within Soviet military circles
steps forward.
A pilot with a résumé so decorated,
her claims demand to be taken seriously.
Marina Popovich is one of the ussr's
most decorated and
well-respected aviators.
She's the first Soviet woman
to break the sound barrier.
She holds 100 aviation records,
and she's known in the
Soviet union as madame mig.
The changes gave
Marina the opportunity
to talk about her experiences
and what she had seen
as a pilot in the ussr
without the worry of repercussions.
In press conferences
and media interviews
and her own writings,
she begins to make
some pretty fantastical claims.
Popovich says she has
multiple experiences with ufos.
In 1982, she says she was in Siberia
when she saw what looked
like a giant glowing orb.
At a press conference
in the Russian consulate
in San Francisco, she
claims that the Russians
have been able to retrieve
five different downed ufos,
and she also claims that there's evidence
of some sort of hybrid breeding program,
breeding humans with aliens.
And then in this very dramatic moment,
she produces a photo that she says
is a 15-mile-wide alien spacecraft.
She says it is a ufo
that has either captured
or destroyed Soviet space probes.
Scientists explain it away as the picture
being very consistent with
the launch of a spacecraft.
But because Popovich is so respected,
the ufo community starts to back her,
saying that she's the
only one telling the truth
and the government is
covering up the real explanation.
Her claims obviously create
an incredible amount of interest.
I mean, you can imagine
the press would go crazy
over stories like this,
especially at that time in history.
Marina Popovich isn't the first
government whistleblower
to cry cover-up,
but she's one of the most influential.
Popovich becomes probably
the best example that we have
on the Russian side of a phenomenon
that's actually pretty common,
these so-called ufo whistleblowers.
Government workers,
pilots, intelligence officers
who come forward and say that
they have privileged knowledge
or have seen hidden evidence.
The whistleblowers will keep
coming forward with stories.
But until someone has
really verified evidence
that can be shown
publicly, it's just hearsay.
But still today, we don't know the truth
of what a lot of these
mystery sightings end up being.
Our world and our
universe is still weirder today
than we can imagine.
For every covert mission we discover
taking place in the skies,
many more remain hidden
until someone brings
these secrets to light.
I'm David duchovny.
Thanks for watching
"secrets declassified."
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