UFO HUNTERS - UFO Relics

History Channel - Original Air Date: 5/6/09

Is there any "trace evidence" of UFO visits?  And, if there is, will Bill, Pat, and Kevin be able to turn it up?  Pat points out that having something you can analyze is very rare.  Kevin wants to make sure there is actual physical evidence, not just stories.  Kevin says to meet his test -- the test of science -- an object has to be both extraterrestrial and manufactured.  The team firsts goes to Pennsylvania, Bucks County, to be exact.  They interview the witness (from the UFOs Over Earth show) who saw a craft drop a sparkling substance down into her trees.  The team talks to MUFON (in a weird show cross-over) about what they did and what they found -- but the case was already a week old when MUFON collected evidence, and Kevin suggests contamination is a possibility.  Oddly, or maybe not, what this show says MUFON concluded is not what the MUFON show said (see review).  They Bill and company get distracted by the usual witness accounts, and Bill takes multiple similar accounts as "proof" of the reality of sightings and the "trace evidence."  They then talk to a Boston UFO researcher who talks about a case in Poland where a witness found a strange ring of stones on the ground after sighting a glowing light.  Another strange sighting yielded a strange hole in a snowy field, but no evidence of digging. Bill speculates that the UFOs are doing some kind of soil testing/exchange.

The team takes pieces of the "contaminated" tree and the rock to an expert for examination. Checking with an electron microscope, the expert finds some unexpected elements (boron) in the tree leaves, though that could be from fertilization -- and "strange" UV particles turn out to be bird urine.  The rock turns out to be soil partially turned to glass, something that could be done by lightning, though that doesn't seem to be the case here.  Pat speculates it might have been hoaxters playing a prank.  The expert thinks vitrification would need industrial involvement.  The team sets out to see if they can recreate it with common welding elements.  They have some succes, but not enough to produce "rocks" like the ones they've seen.  (They don't, I note, try using a kiln, which might produce greater heat for longer periods.)  Kevin argues that it seems silly for advanced civilizations to be scooping up rocks and dumping sparkles on trees.  Bill and Pat disagree.

Finally, they visit Bob White, who has a strange pinecone-like object he claims fell from from a trio of glowing lights.  He found the object at the end of a long groove in the ground below where he sighted the objects.  A former airforce man claims the object, when taken for testing, drained the hotel safe's batter 3 days in a row.  He concludes the malfunction was caused, somehow, by the object; he also claims the object caused spots on x-ray film.  Bob claims that the scientists he had test his object lied about their results; the team takes the thing for new testing.  Their new expert says that the object is an aluminum alloy of unknown origin.  He concludes the object is manufactured but, as Bill notes, was it made by us or ET?  A second exert says this is not part of aircraft aluminum, and it has some silver content -- possibly to ehnance superconductivity and magnetic field repulsion.  The first expert opines this material's properties woudl be most useful in space.  (Though I must admit, I think I've seen these experts appearing in UFO cases before; perhaps they're UFO investigators in their spare time?)

In the end, though, Kevin concludes that the evidence is disappointing, with no clear UFO origin. Bill disagrees, as usual.  He thinks the differernce between the evidence they have now and "absolute proof" is "tissue paper thin."  Personally, I think their "proof" is actually the tissue paper.  In a weird coda, one expert calls in at the show's end to speculate that the White object is some form of nanotechnology, unkown when the object was found in 1985.  To me, it still looks more like a failed art project.