LOU ELIZONDO: They're
putting together the mosaic with disparate pieces of data. It's a bit like putting
together a jigsaw puzzle. At first, you have all these
little pieces on the table, but little by little,
the more pieces you have, the more the picture
becomes in focus. NARRATOR: Lou Elizondo has just
interviewed a second Vietnam veteran about a strange object
he saw in an active war zone. But he needs to
gather more data. LOU ELIZONDO: If we can
establish the things that they were seeing back then in the
past from the Vietnam War or indeed the same types
of vehicles being observed and perhaps the same type of
technology that we're seeing today, then maybe it'll help
us figure out what these things are and where they're from. NARRATOR: Today he's sitting
down with a veteran who witnessed a similar
object during the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999. Mr. Tarr, I presume. Yes, sir. Hey, how are you, sir? How are you, sir? Thank you very much for coming
here and speaking with me. I really appreciate it. DEREK TARR: My
name is Derek Tarr.
I was a senior airman
during the late '90s serving in the United States Air Force. This is the first time
I've ever told this story. NARRATOR: Derek Tarr was a boom
operator on an Air Force KC-10 responsible for the mid-air
refueling of NATO jets between bombing runs. DEREK TARR: You had a
lot of pilots out there, but you have very
few boom operators. These individuals are
trained experts on all sorts of allied NATO aircraft.
They know the difference
between an F-18 Hornet, between an F-117 night
fighter, an F-16. They know all these aircraft
because they see them day in and day out. NARRATOR: On March
24, 1999, Tarr is on a refueling mission
over the Adriatic Sea when suddenly he
sees a strange light. DEREK TARR: I was
sitting in the boom pod in the back of the KC-10
just waiting for the next set of receivers to arrive. I noticed a bright
light that was behind us slightly below our altitude. It just kind of
hung back, didn't seem to make any more forward
progress towards our aircraft. That's when I kind of started
to wonder what was going on. I called up to my
pilot on the interphone to ask him if we had
more receivers coming and said that we did not
have anyone scheduled. NARRATOR: Tarr says
the control center monitoring the airspace
reported all known aircraft were accounted for. DEREK TARR: We started into
a turn, and as I look back, it's just a bright white orb.
It was very bouncy,
almost like a super ball– very short, very succinct,
very sharp movements, but extremely rapid. The jostling or oscillations
that it was doing were certainly not
minute adjustments, probably several hundred
feet up, down, side to side. Once I got to about
our 8 o'clock position, it did a rapid climb and
just in the blink of an eye went straight up, and it just
shot right up in the sky. Fastest thing I've ever seen. NARRATOR: The UFO
Tarr claims he saw was spherical instead of the
oblong shape of Tic-Tacs. But it featured some of
the same five observables. DEREK TARR: We have
hypersonic velocities, instantaneous acceleration,
and, of course, positive lift or in the vernacular anti-gravity. NARRATOR: Four new sightings
spanning decades in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. US military
eyewitnesses reported single objects in close
proximity to American planes. And in the 2004
Nimitz encounter, where an entire carrier
strike group was present, radar operators reported
a fleet of objects.
LOU ELIZONDO: What Tarr saw
and what the Nimitz folks had reported back in
2004, there were some commonalities in the
performance of these things. NARRATOR: The team needs to
gather more data to address the biggest question. Are these the same objects,
and if so, what are they? In the case of Derek
Tarr's sighting, could the conflict
itself offer a clue? Clearly when we engage Kosovo,
we're operating in fairly close proximity to Russia, and it's an
opportunity for them to collect intelligence on
these cutting-edge aircraft in the US inventory,
including the stealth bomber. NARRATOR: The B2 stealth
bomber was first used in combat in the Kosovo war. At the time, it was America's
most advanced aircraft. So all of those
kinds of technologies are very pertinent to
the Russian military, who are constantly preparing
for the eventuality in which they may have to
engage the United States. DEREK TARR: The thought
did cross my mind that this certainly could be a hostile. LOU ELIZONDO: Are they really
an adversarial technology that has managed to
hoodwink us and leapfrog ahead of the United
States going back decades? If that's the case, then I think
we have a much, much bigger problem on our hands,
because that means there is something
inherently broken with our national
security apparatus.
DEREK TARR: I think
it very well could be a significant
national security issue. If we just kind of bury our
head in the sand or look away, we're screwed..