Ancient Aliens

Wherever there are strange encounters...

they appear.

These people see a UFO,

and suddenly these sinister counterintelligence officers

turn up.

They question witnesses and demand silence.

A man shows up dressed in a black suit

and white shirt. Gives a warning:

If you tell anybody about whatever it is that you saw,

bad things could happen to you or to your family.

Who are the men in black?

Men in black are without doubt

the most feared beings in ufology.

Who do they work for?

Some people believe the men in black

weren't guys from the government.

And what do they want?

Perhaps the men in black are the gatekeepers...

of the UFO secret.

There is a doorway

in the universe.

Beyond it is the promise of truth.

It demands we question everything

we have ever been taught.

The evidence is all around us.

The future is right before our eyes.

We are not alone.

We have never been alone.

Blackhawk helicopters descend upon

a government facility secluded on a mountaintop:

the U.S. National Solar Observatory.

Men dressed in black swarm in, seize material,

evacuate employees, and shut the site down.

The National Solar Observatory

is a U.S. government science project.

It has some sensors. They're pointed up in space;

it's looking at the sun, at other phenomenon, heavens.

This is one of the most powerful

and, uh, professional solar observatories on the planet.

And it was shut off for the day.

There wasn't really a good explanation ever given

as to why this happened.

Did we discover a signal from outer space?

Did we see a spacecraft? Were we contacted?

Government investigators questioned all the witnesses,

gathered evidence, and they told people strongly

not to speak about this event.

So it would seem that these government investigators

were in fact the men in black.

But who are they, who do they work for?

The men in black?

Government agents assigned to monitor

extraterrestrial activity?

Is it possible that this top secret police force

actually exists?

There's been a lot of speculation

as to who the men in black are.

It's altogether likely that they're part of

some shadowy government agency

who doesn't want reports out there.

The government was involved in a lot of efforts

to discredit and debunk the phenomena,

and to suppress the reporting of UFO incidents.

The men in black are without doubt

the most feared and sinister beings in ufology.

The men in black have always been described

by eyewitnesses wearing these black suits

with the black, dark shades and black hats.

They call on the house of the witness;

they introduce themselves, usually as a G‐man.

The whole experience ends with the men in black saying,

"It is in your best interests to stay silent."

While the idea of a real ET police force

may seem far‐fetched, encounters with the men in black

have been reported for more than seven decades.

And recently, new evidence has come to light

that may prove the agency's existence.

Author and ufologist Mike Bara

arrives at the island to investigate a UFO encounter

that occurred in 1947.

Known as the Maury Island incident,

it is the first case on record involving the men in black.

Mike is meeting near the site of the incident

with investigative filmmakers

Scott Schaefer and Steve EDMISTON,

who have secured recently declassified

government documents about the event.

The Maury Island incident was first reported

by local Harold Dahl, who worked as part

of an informal harbor patrol retrieving logs

that had floated free from nearby lumber mills.

When you talk about the Maury Island incident,

what exactly happened?

What did Harold Dahl exactly claim to have seen that day?

So June 21, 1947, Dahl was right off the island here

on a boat scavenging logs, that's what he did.

‐And around 2:00...

...six donut‐shaped discs came down.

If we go over here, we can show you where it happened.

So this is where this event actually took place

right through here.

Yes, out on the water, just up the shoreline here.

All right, so Mike, imagine you're out in your boat.

You got a crew of two people and your son and a dog.

‐Right. ‐And all of a sudden, you see six flying disks

come over your boat.

One of them appears to be in trouble. It's wobbling.

And all of a sudden, some chaff falls out of it,

and then seconds later, hot molten slag.

And it hits your boat,

kills your dog, injures your son.

And they decide they've got to get off the water,

and there ain't no place to go except this beach,

where we're standing right now.

Okay.

Harold Dahl escaped the rain of metal unharmed,

but he claimed that the most frightening aspect

of the incident occurred the next day...

when he was paid an unexpected visit

by a strange man.

A man shows up at Harold Dahl's house

and invites Harold Dahl to go to a diner

because he would like to talk to Harold

about what Harold saw on the water.

So he goes there, and basically intimidates Dahl, right?

He absolutely gives what we now believe

is that classic Man in Black warning.

‐BARA: Right. ‐If you tell anybody

about whatever it is that, you know,

you saw on the water yesterday,

bad things could happen to your or to your family.

We think it's the first man in black associated with

a UFO case...

‐Wow. ‐...in modern history.

While Harold Dahl

was frightened by the visit from the man in black,

it didn't stop him from recounting his UFO sighting

to Chicago‐based Fate magazine publisher Ray Palmer,

who in turn hired a pilot named Kenneth Arnold

to investigate.

Arnold had become famous for his own reported UFO sighting,

when he claimed to have seen nine strange objects

flying above Mt. Rainier.

He enlisted the help of two U.S. Army Air Force officers

to investigate Dahl's claims:

Captain Lee Davidson

and First Lieutenant Frank Brown.

They had actually come out,

conducted interviews at the Winthrop Hotel in Tacoma

of the witnesses,

and they were provided samples of this slag‐like material.

They left just after midnight on August 1, 1947.

They get on their B25 bomber,

made it about 45 minutes into the flight;

when the plane spontaneously caught fire, inexplicably.

The two pilots, the Army Intel officers,

Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown,

perished in the crash, along with the slag materials.

A spontaneous fire?

Is it possible that the plane crash

that killed both investigators

and destroyed the evidence they had obtained

was not an accident?

After this incident,

Harold Dahl refused to talk about his UFO encounter,

and even went so far as to insist it was a hoax.

You go online, it's a hoax.

But as we started to investigate,

and we stuck exclusively to actual government documents,

they began to tell a different story.

A story, not of a hoax,

but of a man who faced so much danger,

that he decided to invent a fabrication,

that he'd made it up.

Under the Freedom of Information Act,

Schaefer and EDMISTON obtained formerly classified documents

that confirm an FBI investigation

into the Maury Island incident took place;

one that reached all the way to the top of the Bureau.

So here we are on August 14 of 1947,

and this is a teletype that was written by

‐J. Edgar Hoover himself. ‐BARA: Wow.

And he is confirming what he has been told by his deputy.

What he's been told is that it's a hoax,

because that theory had been injected into the media;

and three hours later,

there is another teletype from the field agent, Jack Wilcox.

He writes this teletype directly to Hoover.

Your conclusions are wrong.

Dahl was only going to say his story was a hoax,

only if questioned by authorities would he say that.

He did not want any further trouble.

So isn't that almost confirmation

that he's been receiving pressure

from these men in black?

Despite the efforts of FBI Field Agent Jack Wilcox,

shortly after the exchange of these teletypes,

the FBI closed the Maury Island case.

But while producing their movie, Schaefer and EDMISTON

were approached by a man who claimed he could prove