'Hannity' Investigates America's UFO Obsession

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," July 31, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: Our Conspiracy Theory special continues tonight with a look at the Americans' obsession with alien spaceships. Now, we're trying to answer the question that people have been asking for centuries. Are we alone in this universe?

Well, one man says that UFOs can actually be seen flying over his property each and every night. Now, our cameras traveled to Trout Lake, Washington, to capture the phenomenon and to see if we finally had proof that aliens, in fact, do exist.

Let's take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Gee, whiz!

HANNITY (voice-over): Flying saucers, alien spaceships, unidentified flying objects, the existence of otherworldly crafts is perhaps one of the most famous and widely-believed conspiracy theories in the United States. America has had a long fascination with the idea that we may not be alone in our universe, and that there are aliens that might actually want to contact us.

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From big blockbuster movies to amateur home videos, obsessing about these creatures has become an American pastime. Places like Roswell, New Mexico, have become centers to worship alien beings and the conspiracy theories that surround them, with hundreds of thousands of visitors flocking each and every year.

Many Americans say they, quote, "believe," but those beliefs are pretty much all the proof that they have. The government has not officially examined UFO sightings since 1969, when it ended its, quote, "Project Blue Book," a program started after the 1947 crash near Roswell, which the government says was a weather balloon, but conspiracy theorists, well, they still claim it was an alien spacecraft.

Most sightings can easily be explained away and seem to be random, unrepeatable occurrences. But one man in Trout Lake, Washington, claims that alien spacecraft have been appearing over his property every night for 13 years.

JAMES GILLIAND, ECETI.ORG: Things happen here. It's like a field of dreams. Everything from light spheres, appearing people, what they call orbs to ships flying over the field.

HANNITY: James Gilliand owns a spiritual retreat center in the shadow of Mount Adams. And yes, you heard right. He claims to have seen alien ships up close and personal. He had made UFOs his business, and people travel to his property every night to catch a glimpse of the foreign objects. And he says they are not disappointed.

GILLIAND: The ships come in here, have come in every size, shape and color you can imagine. We've had pink ones, green ones, blue ones, purple ones, yellow, golden ones. We've seen just about everything. I've seen flying pyramids, ships that look like pyramids. The ships we've seen, there are just so many of them, and they're so diverse, there's no way it could be, you know, some back project or something like that.

HANNITY: Now here is footage that we shot the night we traveled to his farm. Although the camera is shaky, the objects in the sky appear to be moving very fast and also seem to glow at various different times. Gilliand says the sheer numbers tells us we're not alone.

GILLIAND: The universe is vast, because if you take, you know, the 200 billion suns just in this little Milky Way galaxy with planets evolving around them. And then you add to that, the 500 billion galaxies that are just like this one out there, it's so vast, and it's inhabited. And there are beings that are thousands, millions, even billions of years ahead of us.

HANNITY: Now, he understands there are skeptics and even people who want to prove him wrong, so he has invited many critics to observe the phenomenon themselves.

GILLIAND: We have tribal police on record. We have triple Ph.D. Boeing engineers, Air Force base commanders. The list goes on and on: pilots, air traffic controllers. And thousands of people have come here and have seen the ships. And we have so much evidence. There's just a mountain of evidence. You know, any reasonable mind would have to say there's something fantastic going on here.

HANNITY: One of these critics even went on record saying, quote, "The two objects were apparently round with a reddish, orange glow. Movement of the objects were erratic and discontinuous. They appeared to move independently, circling and changing places in relation to one another."

And just like many other UFO true believers, he claims that the government plays a role in hiding information, even going so far to say that our technological advances came from the alleged UFO crash in Roswell.

GILLIAND: The government's had an extreme role in keeping this information from coming out. And it goes back even before Roswell. It goes back to the '30s.

But they've actually had interactions, and they have actually contacted with low-level contacts and worked with them and claimed technology from the E.T.s themselves and also the crash sites and things of that nature. Fiber optics, microwaves, the computer chip. All of that stuff came, you know, out of Roswell. Basically, they went to Bell Labs, and they disseminated from there on out.

HANNITY: But when we showed our footage to astronomer and UFO skeptic Bernard Haisch, he had a very different take on what we saw in the sky.

BERNARD HAISCH, ASTRONOMER, UFOSKEPTIC.ORG: You do see something, really, at the start here. It's bouncing around because of the camera. It's really moving very steadily with respect to the stars, and it's the kind of rate you'd expect for a satellite in the sky. This could be — it could the International Space Station, for example. There are lots of satellites in the sky. There are thousands of them. Only the brightest ones are the ones you can see with your naked eye. There are lots of things in the sky. If you pay any attention to the sky at all, you're bound to see one.

HANNITY: He claims that this is a common mistake. Dozens of satellites can be seen in the sky with the naked eye each and every night. But Gilliand showed our cameras two satellite-tracking Web sites, and both said that that the sky above his ranch was going to be clear that night.

GILLIAND: We're using Heavens Above. We also use the J-Tracker site. And to find out any visible satellites, like the ISS, the space station. Evestat (ph) is another bright one. You know, the tool bags that they dropped, we look at that. And just all the major things that are visible. Any visible satellites in the area.

So when we see something, we can use this data to prove that these are not anything that we have flying up there, that it's not some other object, you know, an unknown.

HANNITY: So the verdict is still out if Gilliand's UFO farm is really being visited by aliens ever night and if this footage is proof that aliens exist. But for him, there's no question.

GILLIAND: It's such a massive universe, there's — there's got to be life out there. And if we're the best the creator has to offer, it's a pretty sad place.

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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