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Dad said go get the binoculars cuz he did not want to take his eyes off of it. It's a mile, good mile away. It was flying. You definitely see the lights very clearly. They blinked in sequence. 1 2 3 4 5. As Krumins describes it, red and orange lights on what appears to him to be a rotating disc. And then it gets even more bizarre. This thing actually lands. A NASA probe spots an unusual crater on the lunar surface. The moon is literally smothered in craters. But this one is different.
It looks like something has smashed into the moon. Investigators discover a strange object sitting inside. It actually almost looks engineered. So what is this? For centuries, astronomers have witnessed and documented strange phenomena and objects in the skies above Earth. Nowhere more so than on the moon. People have been registering reports of anomalous activity on the moon stretching back 400 years. In fact, NASA actually has a report called Lunar Anomalies, which traces 400 years of lunar observations. The 1968 NASA document lists almost 600 reports of unexplained events and objects on the moon.
Since then, some conspiracy theorists claim that NASA missions have even captured evidence of extraterrestrial craft and structures on the lunar surface. We yet do not know what the solution is to all these things that people have seen. In 2012, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter takes an image that offers to shed new light on these mysteries. On February 12th, as the craft scans an ancient volcanic plain known as the Sea of Islands, it spots an unusual 130-ft wide crater below it. I've studied a lot of craters on the moon. This is different though. This is not my regular. Looks like there's an object inside.
It looks like something has smashed into the moon. It's really odd. The moon is covered with craters, the result of a heavy bombardment of rocks from space. But whatever landed here is no meteorite. We're not seeing the typical round shape or the rim that we normally find when we're trying to examine impact craters on the moon. When a meteoroid hits, they come in at such speeds that they fragment completely. There's nothing left. They vaporize. When astronomers zoom in on the object in the crater, what they discover shocks them.
Whatever this is, it's still intact. It looks as if it's something engineered. But engineered by what? Most experts who study the image think that it contains the remains of a human spacecraft. A scenario for what we are seeing in this image could be that it is a man-made object that has crashed down onto the surface of the Moon. If this is evidence of a human craft, then who crashed it and when? One possibility is a Russian probe called Luna 9, the first spacecraft to land on another world. Luna 9 sent back the first pictures from the surface of the Moon. That was a massive milestone, a real coup for Soviet engineering.
Shortly after landing, contact was lost. We have no idea where the Luna 9 probe actually ended up. The NASA image was taken close to Luna 9's last known location. But the size of the crater suggests this cannot be the resting place of the doomed Soviet craft. Luna 9 was actually really small. There's no way it could make a hole that big. Investigators search for larger candidates for the crashed craft. One possible suspect is the relic of a weird experiment carried out by NASA over four decades ago. On April 19th, 1972, the Apollo 16 crew deliberately crashed their S-IVB rocket booster into the Moon.
We've had seismographs on the lunar surface that would have picked up the impact of the S-IVB. The plan was to measure shock waves from the impact to learn more about the Moon's internal structure. It was very valuable to those who were trying to develop from the seismograph signals a picture of the internal mass of the Moon and what it was like. The 15-ton, 58-ft long booster hurtled towards the Moon's surface at over 500 mph. But just before impact, NASA lost contact with it.
This booster rocket has been really a subject of intense speculation and we just don't know where it is. The length of the object in the image matches the Apollo booster. And scientists believe the huge cylinder is one of the few objects strong enough to withstand such a violent impact. Something like a rocket booster crashing down onto the surface of the moon is more likely to stay intact because it is built to withstand high pressures and temperatures. The idea that this could be the missing booster rocket from Apollo 16 is very plausible. It makes a lot of sense. It appears that after half a century of searching, the mystery of the disappearing Apollo booster may have finally been solved.
We need higher resolution images to be sure, but NASA is pretty confident they finally found their missing booster after all these years. August 2017 Tech billionaire Yuri Milner spends $100 million of his fortune searching for alien signals in space. Today, he strikes gold. His Breakthrough Listen project detects 15 strange signals coming from the Auriga star system. It's basically like a beacon of radio energy rippling outwards across the universe kind of like a stone makes ripples in a pond.
The signals stand out as distinctly artificial. It repeats over and over. And that's exactly the sort of thing that we would look for in a signal from ET. Now scientists face a massive challenge. If this is a message, what does it mean? And how can we possibly decipher an alien code? Science fiction makes it look easy. We're from Mars. Don't be afraid. On TV, you know, the aliens always speak idiomatic English. I mean, usually better than the English spoken by my relatives, right? But in reality, that's not likely to be the case.
They're not going to speak English. Whatever message may be hidden in the mysterious radio signal will be much harder to decipher than any human language. We have to be prepared when we intercept alien languages, not just an alien version of English, but a totally different dimension of sound, sights, smells, colors that aliens may use. NASA has poured millions into researching the ways animals receive and relay information as a first step towards trying to understand how aliens might communicate.
Even on the planet Earth, animals communicate in a much different way than we communicate. Take a bat, for example. If you could somehow breed a bat that becomes intelligent, they would talk to you with sonar. If you were to talk to a race of birds, they would communicate with melodies. Or take a dog. Dogs think in terms of smells, thousands of smells drifting in and out of their consciousness. That's how they would communicate. The space agency's largest investment has been in an attempt to communicate with dolphins, the nearest thing we have on Earth to intelligent aliens.
They aren't terrestrial. They don't live on the land. These are aquatic creatures, but they're incredibly intelligent. Three dolphins, including a particularly clever one called Peter, are brought to a specially built submerged laboratory in the Caribbean. Perhaps someday we'll understand what they're saying. There was such a feeling of optimism that the scientists dubbed themselves the Order of the Dolphin. They believed that dolphins could one day take a seat in the UN and represent their entire species to the world and even make a contribution to world affairs. But after 3 years of hard work, it all comes to nothing.
By putting his mouth halfway out of the water, Peter did learn to say something that sounded like, "Hello, Margaret." Whether Peter really knew what that meant or not, we don't know. The team run up against a fundamental problem of cross-species communication, which makes cracking newly received alien code seem almost impossible. They're never going to be able to speak good English or any other language. It's just not part of their brain structure. If in the end we can't speak with dolphins, who are biologically very similar, what's the chance we're going
to be able to speak with aliens from a different civilization? Three objects float in a triangular formation. It doesn't look like anything I've ever seen on the outside of the shuttle. That's for sure. NASA says it's space junk. Why are they filming if it's just space junk? You don't start by eliminating the obvious. You start by opening your mind to all the possibilities. But these unidentified objects could threaten an entire shuttle mission. Okay, we're seeing three or four objects. Yeah, there are uh there are three objects. Okay, copy. The next is to uh mate P5 to J5.
September 20th, 2006. Okay, in the course of your next is the outboard 1812. Space Shuttle Atlantis prepares to come home. Its crew has spent the last 12 days assembling the International Space Station. Then something happens that no one expects. This Atlantis. Go ahead. The day before the shuttle returns back to Earth, the commander reports kind of sighting something that he's not seen before.
There's some kind of reflective structure. Mission Control asks Commander Brent Jett to describe what he sees. structure that's definitely not rigid or uh it's not a you know, solid metal structure. Doesn't look like anything I've ever seen on the outside of the shuttle. That's for sure. Mission Control take remote control of the payload bay camera. That's when things start to really get interesting. Okay, we're seeing three or four objects. Yeah, there are three objects. Strangely enough at that point, you have multiple objects, three you know, two more that join in and essentially form some sort of triangular formation. For 20 minutes, Atlantis tracks
the flashing lights across the sky beaming images back to Mission Control. They're going over the video that you guys sent down. Video is looked at right away and engineers jump on it right away. When news of the sightings reaches the media, it causes a sensation. Everyone's buzzing about these three objects that were seen. We're awash with stories about unexplained craft, but when you get these from astronauts, you pay a little bit more attention. In the lore of what are termed unidentified flying objects,
one of the most iconic shapes in all of that is the triangle. So, this fits the bill. Based on the way the objects are moving, NASA assumes this is space debris reflecting the sunlight. You are flying through a vacuum. So, things that are out in space will generally tend to hang out together. Having three objects, you always have a triangle. But, not everyone agrees with the official explanation. NASA's explanation is space junk to me is just you know, just ridiculous. They should be able to recognize what space junks are. These guys are astronauts, okay?
They're trained for this. But, NASA really does suspect they're tracking space junk. And they're worried. Because 3 years earlier, shuttle debris brought down the shuttle Columbia. Following what occurred on STS-107 when we lost the Columbia, is very interested in tracking virtually every piece of debris. NASA fears the Atlantis is seeing a critical piece of its hardware that's broken off. In mission control, we really want to get pictures like this of anything floating nearby any shuttle, especially if it appears to have come off the shuttle.
This kind of warning that was missed in are the warnings you want to get every time and you want to find them out, you want to see them, you want to report them, and you want to react to them. Unsure what these unidentified objects are, NASA doesn't take any chances. They've decided that based on this object that we saw that we're going to wave off tomorrow. So, our next deorbit opportunity is going to be on flight day 13. Atlantis, we copy. NASA delays the landing so they can check that Atlantis has not been compromised. This is mission control Houston from during the survey to confirm the integrity of Atlantis's heat shield. In this case, it looks like it's more
likely to be an incidental object broken free accidentally from the shuttle. And I believe that's in the end the NASA decision. One day after first sighting the mysterious flashing lights, STS-115 is finally cleared to land. Yeah, 15,400 mph. Altitude 225 ft. When they later examine Atlantis, NASA confirms that it was hit by a micro meteorite. Touchdown. Welcome back. Congratulations on return to assembly. No one knows if this is related to the triangular formation spotted by the crew. But NASA's caution brings the shuttle safely home.
Atlantis was a terrific ship. It was real critical that she performed well, and she did. A witness reports a strange object hovering in the night sky over Virginia. When the witness is a NASA engineer, well, you sit up and pay attention. The sighting remains unexplained for almost half a century. I mean, what was that thing? What was it? Can newly declassified NASA documents finally solve the mystery? Hampton, Virginia. David Crimmins is an 11-year-old schoolboy driving home with his father. We were in the car and we pulled into our driveway.
The door was half open and he stopped. And he was staring through the windshield. Dad said go get the binoculars cuz he did not want to take his eyes off it. It's a mile, good mile away. It was flying. You could definitely see the lights very clearly. They blinked in sequence. 1 2 3 4 5. As Crimmins describes it, red and orange lights on what appears to him to be a rotating disc. And then it gets even more bizarre. This thing actually lands. In many ways, the Hampton incident is just another UFO sighting. But David's father is no ordinary witness.
My father was a service engineer. He worked at Langley Air Force Base, at NASA. He basically knew the exotic advanced equipment that NASA used and he could get into it, figure it out, fix it, make it work. When you have a NASA employee reporting a UFO, especially over a military or government installation, the government has to report it. The US Air Force launches its own investigation into the Hampton incident. The Air Force put forth a theory that the object that was seen was actually an H-3 Sea King helicopter. [snorts] You can see these at night time where the blade actually gives off some electric discharge.
You can see the colors like a laser just going back and forth and back and forth. But the Air Force explanation doesn't fit with Crimmins' witness report of a silent craft. This just doesn't add up. The fact that the Air Force says that it was an H-3 Sea King, first of all, the helicopter makes a ton of noise. We listened, you know, however hard you can listen. And uh no, we couldn't hear anything. You should in my mind, now I know for sure it's not a helicopter.
Crimmins pushes the investigation further. After being interviewed by the Air Force, Crimmins actually gets in touch with NICAP. NICAP, the leading UFO investigation group at that time, opens an investigation. And this is when things get really interesting. NICAP investigators suggest the location of Crimmins' sighting could provide an explanation. In the vicinity of where these two witnesses had their sighting is Langley Air Force Base.
Could there have been some secret testing there that would explain their sighting? The Air Force at that time was building what we called Project 1794. And this was their first attempt in building an actual flying saucer. At the time of the sighting, Project 1794 was designated top secret. But in October 2012, the Department of Defense released declassified documentation. According to the documents, the craft would have had a top speed of Mach 4 with a ceiling of over 100,000 ft. Theoretically, the flying saucer would have been able to perform the incredible maneuvers witnesses described. Most importantly, it would have been capable of VTOL, vertical takeoff and landing. But evidence from another US
military flying saucer program suggests such a craft would have been hard to build. The military did build a prototype craft called the Avrocar, but it never moved beyond the point of being able to fly just a few feet into the air. The plug gets pulled on the Avrocar project in 1960. Well, that's 5 years earlier, so that can't be the explanation. For almost five decades, the Hampton incident remains unsolved. But in 2012, NICAP investigators uncovered documents that could offer a new lead. Our driveway that we pulled into on Windmill Point faces straight across this place called Plum Tree Island. Now, Plum Tree Island was this very dark, scary place.
It was government property. It used to be a bombing range, we were told. The documents revealed Plum Tree Island was also the site of highly classified NASA spacecraft tests. In the mid-1960s, NASA would have been doing drop tests on the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft. Which involves lifting it up with some sort of crane or a helicopter and then dropping it down to test landing in water, crash landing on the earth, parachute tests, things like that. Some of these tests were done in secret. I mean, remember in all of this, America was still in the race to get to the moon first. But even if NASA was conducting secret drop tests at Plum Tree Island, the spacecraft would not be capable of
the maneuvers the UFO performed. Okay, I mean, Plum Tree Island would have been a fine place to do that, but this thing wasn't dropping. No, it was hovering. Surely NASA engineers would have seen a drop test before and wouldn't mistake the capsule for something truly unknown. 50 years on, David Cremins is still searching for answers to the mystery that baffled his father. We all have memories that we can identify, you know, in very specifically and in vivid terms. That's one of them for me.
We'll probably never know what those two saw. There are still a lot of unanswered questions here.
