The incredible story of how Nazi scientists and UFO’s combined to create technology that changed the world. It begins in the final months of World War 2, as the Third Reich fights desperately for survival. In a last ditch effort to turn the tide – Nazi scientists produce a wave of experimental aircraft and weaponry so advanced they defy explanation. The battle for technological supremacy between axis and allies is intense, and the American response to the threat posed by German tech is overwhelming. The atomic bomb takes the arms race to a whole new level, only this time the foe is the newly emerged superpower – the Soviet Union. It is America’s determination to uncover Soviet atomic secrets that directly causes the most famous close-encounter of all time – the Roswell incident, and it is fear of the Red Menace that creates an entire new cultural phenomenon – the Flying Saucer Movie. At the height of the cold war, the USA is gripped by UFO fever, and it’s not just a product of overactive imaginations. In conditions of total secrecy American scientists and engineers are producing advanced aircraft and rockets which can best be described as science-fiction brought to life.
The amazing story of the hidden war between two of the United States most violent groups, the Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan. Our story begins at the end of the Civil War when a group of former Confederate soldiers create the Klan. What begins as a social club develops into an organization whose principal aim is to intimidate recently freed slaves. The Klan fades away until it is dramatically reborn in the wake of DW Griffiths’s epochal movie Birth of a Nation. By the early 1920s the Klan has become a huge political movement which uses its muscle to force the government into enacting laws limiting immigration and introducing prohibition. Ironically by making alcohol illegal, the Klan hastens the rise of the American Mafia, the organization that will eventually help destroy it. During the prohibition era, the Mafia organizes itself into a very wealthy organization that easily matches the Klan for violence and intimidation. The KKK reacts by trying to destroy Mafia speakeasies and their bootlegging operations, but they only succeed in the American South. In the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood joins the fray, producing films that glamourize the Mafia and attack the Klan.
The amazing story of how Hollywood took on Communism and played a key role in winning the Cold War. The story begins in the middle of WW2 when Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, joins British Naval Intelligence. He is so successful that he is sent across the Atlantic to help America set up the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. This extraordinary organization, headed by ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, recruits top Hollywood director John Ford and rising star Sterling Hayden for its undercover campaigns in occupied Europe and the Far East. When the war ends, Ford and Hayden return to Hollywood only to find a new conflict has broken out: the Cold War. It’s a different kind of war, but the stakes are just as high. As America is gripped by the ‘Red Scare’, Hollywood stars are asked to stand up and declare their opposition to Communist ideology. One prominent actor in the anticommunist campaign is Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors’ Guild. He works as an informer for the FBI and becomes the public face of Radio Free Europe, a CIA funded radio station, which broadcasts to Eastern Europe. In 1961 a Soviet officer, Oleg Penkowsky, contacts the US embassy in Moscow and offers to spy for America. He passes on hundreds of secret documents, including design drawings of Soviet missile launch sites. When in 1963 Penkovsky’s documents are crosschecked with photographs from a U2 spy plane, the world is thrown into crisis. Russia has been secretly sending nuclear missiles to Cuba, just 90 miles off the Florida coast. Fidel Castro, Cuba’s communist leader, has been the target of many secret CIA assassination plots, but now the United States prepares for all out war. After several tense weeks, the Soviets finally back down and agree to remove the missiles, but they continue to manufacture huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
