"The Holloman Landing: New Data" — the alleged Holloman AFB UFO-landing footage (here suddenly)

Source: YouTube channel "here suddenly," a documentary re-examining the alleged filmed UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base (the lore popularized by the 1974 Emenegger/Sandler film "UFOs: Past, Present and Future"), presenting the channel's new findings.
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQGhVBMFc1k (2023-05-22; 16:14).
Captured: 2026-07-10 via agy (Antigravity CLI + Gemini Flash), single narrator (with a few embedded archival voices). Machine transcription — proper nouns may be mis-rendered; verify specific citations against the video.
Analysis: ../../sources/davis-career-and-claims · ../../topics/the-evidence-question

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[Narrator, 0:01] Lately, I've been seeing a lot of discussion online about the alleged Holloman UFO landing footage.
[Narrator, 0:06] I've been fascinated with this ever since I first learned about it and I thought now might be a good time to make this video and share some new data I've uncovered.
[Narrator, 0:14] First off, a quick bit of backstory for those who might be new to the topic.
[Narrator, 0:18] In 1974, a documentary was released entitled UFOs: Past, Present and Future.
[Narrator, 0:24] What's unique about this film is the fact that it was initiated by the Department of Defense and was produced with the full cooperation of the Air Force.
[Narrator, 0:32] Civilian filmmakers were brought in to handle production, and to their surprise, Air Force officials revealed that within their vault was footage of a UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico several years prior.
[Narrator, 0:45] Even more amazingly, they were told the film showed Air Force personnel going out to greet the non-human beings who emerged from the craft.
[Narrator, 0:54] Now, the filmmakers weren't actually shown the footage, it was just described to them, but incredibly, they were told that they would likely be allowed to use this footage for the finale of the documentary if the Air Force could secure proper clearances from Washington.
[Narrator, 1:08] Now, I know this is a lot to swallow.
[Narrator, 1:10] The idea of the Air Force admitting to civilians that a UFO landed on a military base and offering up evidence for public consumption, well, it -- it's a lot.
[Narrator, 1:21] But there actually is compelling evidence to suggest that something along these lines happened, as strange as that sounds.
[Narrator, 1:29] Now, as the documentary neared completion, the Holloman landing film still hadn't been delivered to the filmmakers, and they eventually received word that in the wake of the Watergate controversy, the Pentagon had decided not to allow the footage to be included in the documentary.
[Narrator, 1:43] In fact, they actually sent someone in to remove the film from the Air Force archive at Norton Base, which is where the film was being held.
[Narrator, 1:50] The Air Force made it clear, though, that they still wanted the story of the Holloman UFO landing to be told in the documentary, but they wanted it presented as a hypothetical, something that may or may not have actually happened.
[Narrator, 2:02] So, in place of the confiscated footage, the filmmakers were forced to use a series of illustrations to depict the landing of the visitors.
[Narrator, 2:10] Incredibly, though, they were granted complete access to Holloman Air Force Base in order to film staged re-enactments of the commotion that allegedly surrounded the landing.
[Narrator, 2:20] I have so much more to share about this story, but I'm not going to delve into it too deeply in this video since I have a much more involved account of it coming in the future.
[Narrator, 2:28] But there is one aspect of it that I think deserves some extra attention, and that's what I'll be focusing on in this video.
[Narrator, 2:35] First, let's watch a portion of the staged re-enactment sequence filmed at Holloman Air Force Base in 1974.
[Documentary Narrator, 2:42] Let's look at an incident that might happen in the future, or perhaps could have happened already.
[Documentary Narrator, 2:48] The premise is that contact is made by extraterrestrial beings with representatives of the United States Air Force at Holloman Air Force Base, in the deserts of New Mexico.
[Documentary Narrator, 2:59] The day is clear, it's about 5:32 AM at Holloman Air Force Base. The wind is light. One recon plane is on the field ready for take-off, when Sergeant Mann is given a report of an approaching unidentified craft.
[Operator, 3:13] We have approaching objects on coordinates 41 42...
[Officer, 3:19] I see them over there. Make contact with them, Bill.
[Controller, 3:22] This is Holloman Air Force Base control tower. Identify yourself. What's your tail number?
[Controller, 3:29] You're encroaching on military airspace.
[Controller, 3:32] Warning. Identify yourself. You are in a restricted military air corridor.
[Narrator, 3:38] Now, as you saw, one shot in there showed a white object descending from the sky. It's a short clip and it's not very detailed.
[Narrator, 3:46] But what does it show?
[Narrator, 3:49] Decades after the film's release, word began to spread in the UFO community that this one shot actually was a piece of the legendary missing footage, that the DoD had, in fact, allowed this one brief snippet to be included, since it showed little more than a white speck moving across a nondescript backdrop.
[Narrator, 4:06] I mean, in recent years, it's virtually become an accepted fact that this clip is indeed part of the genuine Holloman landing film, silently inserted into a sequence of otherwise staged shots.
[Narrator, 4:18] And this idea has always fascinated me.
[Narrator, 4:21] I've just always been intrigued by the possibility that when we look at that shot, we might actually be looking at a genuine non-human craft, even if it's impossible to make out any real details.
[Narrator, 4:32] So, while conducting research about the 1974 documentary, I decided to see if there was any additional data I might be able to extract from this shot.
[Narrator, 4:41] Were there any other insights hiding within the footage?
[Narrator, 4:45] So, first and foremost, if at all possible, I wanted to verify that the footage actually was shot at Holloman and that it wasn't some prototype military test footage shot at another base, or footage of another event altogether.
[Narrator, 5:00] Nailing down the location was important, but as you can see, there really wasn't much information to work with in those nine seconds.
[Narrator, 5:06] However, I eventually zeroed in on a few distinctive features of the mountains in the background, most notably this shape, which looked sort of like a seagull to me, and then over here, something that looked sort of like a snake with horns.
[Narrator, 5:21] Yeah, I don't know, it's just how my brain works.
[Narrator, 5:24] Now, could these same features be located on Google Earth?
[Narrator, 5:27] I mean, surely geological formations like this wouldn't have changed too much in the last half century, right?
[Narrator, 5:33] I dove into the program and began analyzing the landscape around the base, and I quickly realized exactly what I was up against. There's just a ridiculous amount of land out there.
[Narrator, 5:44] I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I scoured nearly 150 miles of mountainside looking for these features.
[Narrator, 5:50] And I was just about to give up when all of a sudden, the needle in the haystack.
[Narrator, 5:56] There was the seagull shape.
[Narrator, 6:01] And there is the snake with horns.
[Narrator, 6:04] And looking closely, you can see other shapes that line up as well.
[Narrator, 6:10] Turns out, the mountain was in fact directly across from Holloman Air Force Base.
[Narrator, 6:15] Not in the direction of White Sands, as I had originally assumed, but instead, 12 miles in the opposite direction, just beyond the town of Alamogordo.
[Narrator, 6:25] The peak seen in the background of the landing shot is called Hershberger Peak, part of the Sacramento Mountain range.
[Narrator, 6:31] So, I had confirmed that the footage was indeed filmed in the vicinity of Holloman Air Force Base, but something didn't seem to add up.
[Narrator, 6:39] Now that I knew which mountain was visible in the background of the shot, it looked like the craft was coming down in the heart of Alamogordo, a city with a population of nearly 30,000 people at the time.
[Narrator, 6:51] Wouldn't some of these people have noticed a craft landing in broad daylight?
[Narrator, 6:56] Something was off.
[Narrator, 6:57] Was there anything else I could determine about where the camera was or where the craft might have landed?
[Narrator, 7:03] I scrubbed through the footage again, moving slowly, one frame at a time.
[Narrator, 7:07] And in the tail end of the sequence, I found another detail in the lower right corner.
[Narrator, 7:12] There appeared to be a two-lane asphalt road not far from the camera.
[Narrator, 7:17] Could I locate this feature on the map?
[Narrator, 7:19] I began by moving backward from the mountain and scanning the landscape looking for anything that matched what I saw in the corner of the shot.
[Narrator, 7:27] Really, the only thing that seemed to be in roughly the correct place was Highway 70.
[Narrator, 7:30] It did have the dashed white lines I was looking for, and even though it was now a six-lane highway, it was very likely a two-lane highway 50-plus years ago.
[Narrator, 7:42] Still, something about it didn't feel right, but I didn't see anything else in the region that fit the bill.
[Narrator, 7:47] So, I decided to skim through the staged Holloman re-enactment film one more time to see if there were any other details I had missed.
[Narrator, 7:54] And then, in the shot of two F-4 Phantoms taking off from the base, I found a detail that would be crucial to unlocking the entire mystery.
[Narrator, 8:04] Turns out I hadn't been looking for a road at all, but the runway at Holloman Air Force Base.
[Narrator, 8:09] This same arrangement of runway, berm and vegetation could also be seen in the landing footage, something that will become more apparent in a moment.
[Narrator, 8:19] I was still confused, though. I hadn't seen the runway in line with Hershberger Peak. The pieces didn't seem to line up.
[Narrator, 8:27] So, I went into Google Earth and I pulled the virtual camera back, back, back, back, way further than my eyes told me made any sense, and there it was, the runway at Holloman.
[Narrator, 8:40] And sure, maybe that should have been the first place I looked, but I was following the data, and the mountains in the film had looked so much closer than this.
[Narrator, 8:48] I quickly realized that my eyes had been fooled by the combined effects of two different types of technology.
[Narrator, 8:54] First, the telephoto lens on the film camera had compressed the perspective, making the mountains in the background look much closer than they actually were.
[Narrator, 9:02] This phenomenon is illustrated quite well here, where the barn on the right looks much larger and much closer due to the effect of the telephoto lens, even though it's the same distance away as in the photo on the left.
[Narrator, 9:14] Secondly, the exaggerated perspective within Google Earth had the effect of stretching the distance, making the background look much farther away than it was in reality.
[Narrator, 9:24] Both of these resulted in a visual mismatch between what I was seeing in the film and what I was seeing in Google Earth.
[Narrator, 9:31] Now I was getting excited, though. I had not only confirmed that the shot had been filmed at Holloman, but I had dramatically narrowed down the actual camera location.
[Narrator, 9:41] But, as I looked at the images, something quickly became apparent to me.
[Narrator, 9:47] Several details in the landing shot weren't just similar to those in the re-enactment, they were identical.
[Narrator, 9:54] And as a growing realization began to wash over me, I took the two images and overlaid them one on top
[Narrator, 10:00] ...the other. And just as I suspected, they lined up perfectly. Too perfectly.
[Narrator, 10:07] Every spot of vegetation on the ground, the dashed lines on the runway, details of the mountain in the background, all identical.
[Narrator, 10:17] This rigid alignment could only have been possible if the shots had been taken from the exact same spot in space.
[Narrator, 10:24] Not simply within the same area of the base, but literally from the exact same spot.
[Narrator, 10:29] And there is essentially zero likelihood that the landing footage would have been shot from one specific point and then years later this exact same spot would have been randomly chosen for the reenactment scenes.
[Narrator, 10:40] The implication of this, I feel, is pretty clear.
[Narrator, 10:44] The two shots, the landing shot and the shot of the jets taking off, were filmed on the same day from a tripod-mounted camera.
[Narrator, 10:52] The camera operator could zoom in and out and pan and tilt, but the location of the tripod and camera remained fixed.
[Narrator, 10:59] When we consider the simple fact that the landing shot is part of a long sequence of reenactment shots, and that every shot before and after it was filmed specifically for the documentary, it really shouldn't come as a surprise if the landing shot also turns out to be a recreation.
[Narrator, 11:15] I think it's worth pointing out that the filmmakers themselves never claimed that any portion of the mysterious footage made it into their documentary.
[Narrator, 11:21] They always maintained that the film was confiscated before they could watch it or do anything with it.
[Narrator, 11:26] And there is actually evidence from the 1970s showing that, even after the documentary came out, they were still trying to determine if the footage had actually ever existed in the first place.
[Narrator, 11:36] It's really only been other people, people who weren't involved at all, looking back decades after the event, who have decided that the shot must have been from the original film.
[Narrator, 11:46] And that definitely would have been more exciting, it just turns out to be not true.
[Narrator, 11:51] But if the shot isn't part of the legendary lost film, what does it actually show descending from the sky?
[Narrator, 11:57] What was coming in to land at Holloman that day?
[Narrator, 12:02] Well, I'm happy to say I can answer this somewhat definitively.
[Narrator, 12:07] I recently acquired a copy of the officially released 2007 DVD of the documentary.
[Narrator, 12:12] Prior to this, I had been working from a fairly low-quality transfer of the VHS release from the 90s, the same version that can be found posted in various places online.
[Narrator, 12:22] This DVD, however, was a game changer.
[Narrator, 12:25] Though technically not a high-definition format, it was clearly sourced from a clean, high-quality master, and the increase in detail was substantial.
[Narrator, 12:34] I quickly fast-forwarded to the landing footage and was momentarily stunned by what that extra detail revealed.
[Narrator, 12:42] It's a plane.
[Narrator, 12:44] The details are faint, but the wings and landing gear are unmistakable.
[Narrator, 12:49] The YouTube compression might completely obliterate the details here, so I'm going to let it play a few times while I tweak the settings on the footage.
[Narrator, 12:55] It won't be pretty, but I'm hoping one of these combinations will help the wings and landing gear survive the compression process.
[Narrator, 13:02] Now, you may be wondering, what is the round, white, glowing thing?
[Narrator, 13:07] And that's a good question.
[Narrator, 13:08] My first instinct was that the film was being run in reverse, and that what we're actually seeing are the plane's afterburners as it flies away from us.
[Narrator, 13:16] But the landing gear is clearly down, and if the plane was heading away from us, the landing gear would have already been stowed, so it's likely coming in for a landing rather than taking off.
[Narrator, 13:27] Now, we know the base had F-4s at the time, so it's logical to wonder if the incoming plane might also be a Phantom.
[Narrator, 13:34] And as shown in this footage, the F-4 Phantom had an intensely bright light that was sometimes used during landing, strong enough to flare camera lenses even in broad daylight.
[Narrator, 13:44] Is it possible that this light is what we're seeing in the footage?
[Narrator, 13:48] Well, let's do a quick comparison between the craft in the footage and a photo of an F-4 landing with its light on.
[Narrator, 13:56] It's purely subjective, but that looks like a pretty close match to me: the wingspan, the width of the landing gear, the placement of the light, the way the nose peeks out above the light - it all seems to line up pretty well.
[Narrator, 14:10] But there's no way to say for certain, and at this point, I don't think the type of plane is very important.
[Narrator, 14:16] What we can now say with a fair degree of certainty is that the landing shot in the documentary is not footage from the fabled Holloman UFO landing film.
[Narrator, 14:26] It was almost certainly a shot of a plane coming in to land at Holloman Air Force Base, filmed at the same time as the other reenactment shots.
[Narrator, 14:34] I also made a fresh new transfer of the older VHS release, and sure enough, now that I knew what to look for, I could see the landing gear, and even the wings were slightly visible in some frames as well.
[Narrator, 14:45] It's amazing how those details have just been sitting there all these years.
[Narrator, 14:50] By the way, I was able to finally nail down the camera position after combining all the data, and it was right around this area, though it didn't quite mean the same thing now that I knew the shot didn't actually come from the original Holloman film.
[Narrator, 15:04] And look, this isn't the conclusion I was hoping for.
[Narrator, 15:07] I set out on this line of investigation hoping to confirm the fact that the shot might possibly show a genuine, non-human craft descending to a military base in broad daylight.
[Narrator, 15:18] As I said, I've always been intrigued by this possibility.
[Narrator, 15:21] I just never imagined I would end up debunking the footage along the way.
[Narrator, 15:25] I want to be clear though, I am not saying that the Holloman landing never happened.
[Narrator, 15:29] In fact, I think there are compelling reasons to believe it very well may have happened, and that there is film of the encounter.
[Narrator, 15:36] There are also reasons to suspect that the DoD may have genuinely intended to reveal the footage at the end of the documentary, before changing their mind in light of the rapidly shifting political landscape.
[Narrator, 15:47] As I mentioned at the start of this video, I have a lot more to share about this story, so if you find it interesting, I encourage you to subscribe to the channel and click the bell to turn on notifications.
[Narrator, 15:57] Thanks for watching, and I'll be back.