Strange Arrivals

Popular culture has been important in UFO folklore, both absorbing the existing stories around UFOs and creating new narratives. The 90s television show The X-Files was probably the most important of all UFO-related media. Show creator Chris Carter and writer Glen Morgan talk about making the show and its relation to the UFO narratives at the time.

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Richard Doty makes a deal with Bill Moore to trade what the government knows about flying saucers for information about the UFO community. But what is this information that Moore receives and can it be trusted? 

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In the late 1970s and early 80s, an electrical engineer named Paul Bennewitz filmed lights over Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, NM, and recorded audio signals that he believed were alien communications. Instead of asking him to stop, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations convinced him that he was, in fact, seeing and hearing extraterrestrials. Why?

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The Roswell crash is perhaps the most famous UFO incident in history. But for more than 30 years after the debris was found in 1947, the case was relatively unknown. It resurfaced in 1980, amid an era of civilian UFO investigation and government disinformation, two efforts that would meet in the case of an electrical engineer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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After Project Blue Book was shuttered, J. Allen Hynek was the best known authority on UFOs and cemented this perception with his Close Encounters classification system. But despite his scientific training, Hynek was very interested in and receptive to the paranormal. What effect did this have on his conclusions about UFOs?

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J. Allen Hynek arrives in Michigan to investigate a rash of UFO sightings. Under pressure to come to a quick conclusion, he delivers an explanation that prompts anger, ridicule and another official look at Project Blue Book's two decades of work.

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J. Allen Hynek joins the Air Force’s UFO investigation effort in its earliest stages. He finds most cases easy to explain, but become increasingly troubled by the ones that he can’t. During the Spring of 1966 in Michigan a series of UFO sightings, including by police and almost 100 students at a local college, seems to have the potential to spark the mass panic that the Robertson Panel feared.

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In 1964, a patrolman on a desert stretch of highway hears an explosion. Investigating, he sees two beings standing outside an egg-shaped vehicle. As he watches in terror, the vehicle takes off with a great noise and recedes across the landscape. To find answers, the Air Force sends Project Blue Book personnel to determine what has happened. With them is consultant J. Allen Hynek, who becomes a key figure in the development of how we view UFOs.

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The three main witnesses to the Rendlesham Forest encounters agree about the basic events that happened over the three nights. But there are parts where they don’t agree, and that's where things get even stranger. And what, exactly, did they encounter during those 72 hours? They don’t agree on that, either.

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The British tabloids get wind of the Rendlesham encounter and it becomes public in 1983. The news prompts a closer look at the Rendlesham narratives, and researchers put forward alternative explanations that don’t involve unknown craft entering the air space above RAF Bentwaters. Twenty years after the encounter, the UK Ministry of Defense releases its Rendlesham file. What’s inside is not what researchers were expecting.

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