NARRATOR: This radio telescopes scans
the universe for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Who or what sent this unexplained signal?
Is this image of a face on the surface of Mars
a cry for help from a dying planet?
Was this woman abducted by aliens
and used as a guinea pig for their medical experiments?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001
and inventor of the communication satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other worlds.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ARTHUR C CLARKE: I'm helping to launch
a new Japanese TV channel.
From my back garden, my contribution
is being beamed thousands of miles
to Japan thanks to tons of satellite equipment
crammed on my roof.
But it won't stop there.
All our radio and TV travels onwards to the far corners
of the universe.
It's an extraordinary thought that intelligent beings
may be watching us out there.
But much weirder is the claim that aliens have come to Earth
and are abducting human beings for peculiar
scientific experiments.
NARRATOR: Howard and Connie Menger
became famous throughout America after claiming
they'd been chosen by aliens who wanted to know
more about life on our planet.
They say that in the 1950s, the area near their home
became an intergalactic meeting place.
According to the Mengers, flying saucers
brought numerous unearthly visitors
who were able to materialize or vanish at will.
They even took Howard with them on journeys
through the solar system.
Ever since, Howard has tried to discover
the secrets of their spacecraft in the workshop at his home.
This is a poor, low-grade model of an Earth man
who built this trying to simulate what they have.
Let me put it this way.
This is what you'd call a Model T Ford as
compared to their Rolls Royce.
The walls are luminescent.
There is a circular panel of men sitting around watching
what we call television.
But their monitors, they're far beyond us.
The women were about five, six-- the men ranged over six feet,
very similar to us.
They all had long hair, mostly blond.
The women were beautiful.
They had a glow about them.
They were angelic.
I keep saying angels, because I think they were angels.
What made me so sure they were aliens?
I think because they came down in a craft unknown
to this planet.
They cancel out gravity.
It's not a jet.
It's not gasoline.
It's not explosive in any way.
It's canceling out gravity.
It's an anti-gravity machine.
It could even be a time machine.
They could be time travelers.
They're way ahead of us.
NARRATOR: Howard's experiments progressed
from launching simple wings to powering modeled spaceships.
Well, people were saying, how come the ring goes up and comes
right back down again?
Can't you do something to keep it up
there flying around the room?
So I did.
But the trouble with flying around the room,
it would hit you in the head, and it's no control.
And the first model broke against the ceiling.
So I built this, and I tethered it down,
and I had a wooden guide to keep it going where I want it,
not where it wants to go.
And here's a good example of it going up and staying up.
A lot of power there.
See?
It wants to take this up with it.
But I believe within the next 10 years, we'll be on Mars
and we'll be going other places.
There will be a movable space station.
And we'll be getting technology in that would be
fantastic to people of today.
NARRATOR: Betty Hill claims she and her husband
Barney were abducted while driving
through New Hampshire in 1961.
Her full story was only revealed when she was hypnotized.
She said a spacecraft blocked the road in front of them.
She and Barney were taken aboard by its crew of aliens.
There was one person there who spoke English in a very limited
way who kept trying to reassure us that no harm was
going to come to us.
They just wanted to do some simple tests.
Both of our exams were very similar in most parts
in that they were very interested in our eyes, ears,
nose, throat.
They took scraping of our skin sample, of our hair,
and are interested in our feet.
Then with me, they did what they called
testing my nervous system.
And he tried to insert a needle-like instrument
into my navel, which he called a pregnancy test.
And it caused pain, so they stopped doing it.
They did not all look alike.
They ranged in height probably four to five feet.
As far as appearance, they had no hair and no protruding
part of the ear.
They had large eyes, small nose, thin slit for a mouth.
They were all basically dressed alike
in a one-piece dark outfit.
Some were wearing jackets, but not all of them.
Some were wearing caps, but not all of them.
If you've been abducted, you know something unusual has
happened, you go to the police.
Every real abduction I've worked with
has gone directly to the police within five hours.
And not only that, these people who think they've been abducted
and haven't are real abductions.
They always take some possession blogging to the person.
About six weeks after our abductions,
Barney and I came home one night, and on the kitchen table
was a pail of dry leaves and my blue earrings
I was wearing that night.
So we knew they knew where we lived.
NARRATOR: At Harvard University, psychiatry Professor John Mack
records and analyzes abduction stories.
To help his subjects recall their experiences,
he uses hypnosis. -Let your body relax.
Just sink inside.
What particularly worries you?
I'm right on the edge of what I'm going to remember.
I'm going to see and--
JOHN MACK: What persuaded me that I was dealing
with something of extraordinary importance
here is the degree to which the experiences
or the experiencers share so much in common
in what they report has happened to them.
And it goes something like this.
The person is in their home, bedroom, in a car,
in a schoolyard in the case of children.
They will hear a humming or experience
a very bright light, which emanates sometimes
from a UFO which they may see.
They feel paralyzed by it.
They may see one or more small, gray beings with large eyes
or more luminous beings.
They're shocked by this.
They don't believe it.
There's a drawing here which was made by one of the people
that I've worked with.
They're 3 and 1/2 to 4 feet tall.
They have these large, pear-shaped heads,
these huge, black eyes, which is the most compelling feature,
just little slits for nostrils, a tiny hint of a mouth,
no ears, no hair, wearing a single garment,
a tunic, communicating telepathically.
Inside the ship, they are gazed at by these beings.
They are probed with instruments which are very similar
among the different abductees, but not
similar to any medical surgical tools that we have here
on Earth.
Skin scraping is taken.
Egg is taken from the women, sperm from the men.
This they report.
NARRATOR: Under hypnosis, a British policeman
was amazed to find himself recalling a close encounter.
Alan Godfrey was on patrol in the small hours of the morning
in his police car.
As I came up the road here, I was
confronted with this diamond-shaped object.
20, 25 meters wide, 40 meters high, huge thing.
The top half of it are dark windows, all dark paneling.
It extended the full road here.
It was hovering about five feet off the ground.
The bottom half was rotating.
There was no noise coming from the object,
but the trees were all shaking violently.
I was just totally gobsmacked.
And the next thing I can remember,
there was a blinding white light.
And I came around again another 200 meters up the road actually
driving the police car, because an hour had gone by.
So I decided that I would undergo hypnotic regression.
And what I said under hypnosis absolutely amazed me.
I described being taken aboard the craft.
The frightening thing-- to me, anyway--
was I was absolutely terrified of these small creature type
things with large heads and black eyes.
I described their heads as being a lump shape, a light bulb
shape, with these black eyes.
People say you can lie under hypnosis.
Well, I have no reason to lie.
In fact, the only reason I did the hypnotic regression
was for the truth.
And the truth sometimes is very hard to believe.
In Kentucky, Dr. Robert Baker avoids
hypnosis when he interviews people who
claim they've been abducted.
Louise Smith says she and two friends
felt something strange and frightening
had happened to them after a night out.
The women's journey home had taken
much longer than they expected.
I felt so dirty.
I just felt like-- oh, I felt dirty even though I'd
taken a bath to go out to eat.
And Elaine and Mona said they felt the same way.
So I went into the bathroom and I washed.
I proceeded to wash my hands and face.
And when I did, I burned as if I was just-- oh,
it was just real hot.
The night that it happened, we had called a neighbor of mine
over and told him that something had happened
and we didn't know what.
We saw this thing.
We just described we saw this thing.
And he said, what thing?
And he said, well, since you're all artists, don't
say it in front of each other.
One go in one room, one into another, and one int another,
and you draw what you saw.
And when we came back, they were almost identical.
ROBERT BAKER: What did you draw?
Could you draw it for me?
Yes.
I'd be glad to.
This'll be a rough sketch.
ROBERT BAKER: Sure.
What appeared to be hovering over us.
This was a bright light here as if it was silver on top.
And then there was small lights of different colors
all around this way, all around the ship--
as I call it the ship.
You have any idea-- how big did it appear to be?
Well, I'd say as big as a football field.
That's the way that I described it.
A very large, large-- yes.
We didn't know anything what had happened
to us until after hypnosis.
I felt that my head was covered, and then
something hot just began-- felt like it was flowing over me.
And I've lived with the fear ever since that they
had made a mold of my face, because I
could feel this coming off.
Did you see anything?
I kept begging, please, let me see something.
And that's when I began to get real agitated,
because I wanted to see where I was at and what was going on.
And then when they uncovered my eyes, I remember crying aloud,
I don't want to see anymore.
I had saw him, and around me was these little figures
that was about four to four and a half feet tall.
And they appeared to have hoods on.
But the eyes were very dark, and just piercing dark eyes.
And their hands weren't fingers like ours.
They came down as if to be like-- I had
described it like a bird when you take it
and pull its wing apart.
It had little jaggard things like this,
like wings, but it wasn't.
They just flopped around, and they were in gray color.
It's as real to me today as it was
the day of hypnosis when I really discovered
what had happened to me.
But I got a sense of relief out of it knowing that I
was totally under their power.
They had me there.
I had no way of escape.
But through-- they let us go so, that's why I don't have
a complete fear of them, because they
had every opportunity to keep me or to do whatever they wanted.
NARRATOR: As well as questioning Louise about her story,
Dr. Baker investigates the field where the women
say the spaceship hovered.
His report is skeptical.
ROBERT BAKER: Well, interestingly enough,
when we talk about any alien abduction, the only way
that people can get to it and at it
is through hypnotic regression, which
is the most unreliable procedure that man has ever invented.
Because once you are in this state of high suggestability,
you can't tell the difference between your memory--
what really happened-- and what you think or imagined happened.
I think they had what was called a hypnagogic hallucination.
This means that when you get tired and are falling asleep
or int he process of falling asleep,
you see some very strange things.
You see lights coming towards you.
You feel like you're being engulfed
by a very bright light.
You faces on the walls.
You see things coming through the walls at you and so on.
We should always be wary of stories told
under hypnosis, even to researchers
with the best of credentials.
It's almost impossible to avoid putting ideas
into people's heads or to eliminate
deeply embedded fantasies.
I can gave you an example of my own.
I have a memory-- I think I have a memory-- of something that
happened at an Air Force base that I
was working on during the war.
I seem to see a fighter spiraling down
and crashing, and the pilot just stepping out casually unharmed.
Now, it's very clear in my mind, but I can't
really believe that happened.
But now after all these years, there's
no way that I can tell whether it was real or a fantasy.
NARRATOR: NASA's Goddard Space Center near Washington
is the workplace of a man with a mission.
Vincent Dipietro lives and breathes
the mysteries of the cosmos.
My main interest and hobby is space.
I collect all sorts of data sheets and pictures
and whatever I can get my hands on about
the planets, specifically about the planet Mars.
I'm so interested in this one place,
because we can actually land there.
And the more I keep investigating this place,
it looks like that at one time, it was very Earth-like.
NARRATOR: From the day he heard rumors of a face
on the Martian landscape, Dipietro was hooked.
VINCENT DIPIETRO: I went over to the National Space Science Data
Center on Goddard and thumbed through their catalogs of press
release photos, and sure enough, found this photo that was
labeled head, H-E-A-D. And sure enough, when I looked at it, it
did look like a face or a head.
That's when I became interested.
I said, OK, now I've seen the picture myself.
Give me the data.
It looked like a face to me.
If it looks like a face, maybe it is a face.
And if it is a face, what put it there?
Who put it there?
What did it?
Was it natural?
Was it such a quirk of light that the wind and whatever
climate or weather that was present on Mars
had put all these things in a magic wand and created a face?
Could it have been that, or could it
have been that some outside intervention did
this thing of putting a face or carving this thing or whatever?
And I just had to know.
So that's when I began to go after the scientific data.
It's a large object.
It's undeniably very large.
It's a mile across.
We've designed some computer programs
to actually take the raw data and make pictures of them
and present them on the PC, on the computer.
For instance, if we replace some of the pixels in the eye
cavity-- in the center of the eye cavity,
I've replaced some of the pixels in the very center with red,
and then coming out further with green, and then with blue.
You can see that there is a definite dome or round
shape within the eye cavity, which in my interpretation,
might resemble something that looks like an eyeball.
We have so much evidence that this
is not a natural formation.
We found teeth in the mouth area.
We found a hairline that goes all the way around.
We found symmetry of the object.
All of these things say that there's too many coincidences.
I wish I knew who made this thing, but I don't.
I can only speculate.
We're really grasping now for the stars here.
The planet, as we know, used to be much
different than it is today.
It had abundant oxygen. It had atmosphere.
It had water. It had oceans.
It had everything that Earth has.
Perhaps the planet was dying.
And this may have been a message to anyone who came from afar
to let them see that there was someone down here,
and please come and help us.
Well, the face on Mars is undoubtedly real.
It's recorded on computer tapes and photographic film.
But what made this extraordinary formation?
The tentacles of alien beings or the vast
sandstorms that rage across the Martian desert?
Here on Earth, there are countless examples
of nature's artistry.
My favorite is Point Bernard Shaw,
a Canadian island shaped just like the profile
of the famous writer.
I'm quite certain that the Martian face is just another
of nature's little tricks.
But I hope I'm wrong.
We won't get the final answer until there's a closer survey
by orbiting spacecraft or until men
and women set foot on the surface of the red planet.
NARRATOR: Every 22 seconds, this radio telescope scans 8
million radio channels at once.
It's searching the heavens for signals in the hope
that these will help scientists find intelligent life
somewhere in the universe.
Paul Horowitz could be the man who discovers it.
I'm convinced that there's life out there
and that it's probably transmitting--
to us specifically, perhaps, or just transmitting generally
in the galaxy waiting for civilizations that reached
technological maturity to look for the signal, to find it,
and to respond on some time scale.
I'm convinced that Earth will establish
contact through these means or something similar some time.
Well, in now almost 10 years of running,
we've found definite signs of intelligent life.
But that intelligent life happens to be Earth-based.
We see many signals each day, each minute from the multitude
of radio transmitters, radars, broadcast
stations, and so on, on Earth.
And the major problem in this business
is sorting through this thicket of signals,
these myriad transmissions of intelligent life
on Earth looking for the one weak signal
that's propagated 100 light years
from some alien civilization.
NARRATOR: In all the years of searching,
only one signal has come through the weeding out process.
But this tantalizing call from the cosmos was never repeated.
This is some archive data from the 9th to the 11th
of September in 1988.
This is when the strongest signal of our five
years of running came in.
And I'm going to take this data, sort it by signal strength.
And here we see a signal much stronger
than all the noise-- one isolated, strong signal.
Let's take a look at what it looked like.
And now I'm going to display exactly what was on the screen
complete with graphs.
Here's the full 8 million channels.
Here's the different display of the 8 million channels showing
this very strong spike, a blow up showing nothing
but the signal, strong signal.
Any noise nearby is completely suppressed
by the strength of that.
This signal survived all our culling
for the tell tales of interference
of transmitters of radars and all that kind of stuff.
We have never once seen one of these signals
say hello a second time.
We are the first generation-- or maybe the second-- on Earth
that even has the technological capability to engage
in this kind of discourse.
You couldn't do this 100 years ago.
We didn't have radio telescopes.
We didn't have microwave receivers.
We didn't have computers.
We'd have to be crazy not to try.
So my feeling is, how can you not do this experiment when
the contact with an extrateresstrial civilization
would be the first bridge across 4
billion years of independent life start and evolution?
It will be the end of Earth's cultural isolation
in a very deep sense.
It will be the greatest discovery
in the history of mankind.
When a friend of mine became Deputy Director of the world's
most famous intelligence agency, on his very first day
in office, he gathered his scientists together
and said, boys, what's the truth about these flying saucer
reports?
And they gave him two answers.
One-- we're pretty sure there's lots of intelligent life
out there in space.
Two, we haven't the slightest piece
of evidence for its existence.
If there really were visitors from outer space,
it would be absolutely impossible to cover
up such an epoch-making event for more than about 24 hours.
Take it from me-- unless, of course,
you think I'm part of the conspiracy.
[MUSIC PLAYING]