Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny — Season 1

Forget the moon or the stars – every government has even bigger designs in the race to dominate the furthest corners of the sky. Uncover a plane crash in North Carolina that almost triggered nuclear Armageddon, the story of a UFO attack on a U.S. missile base that was suppressed for decades, and a daring Israeli heist to steal a cutting-edge fighter jet – right from under their enemies' noses.

What lies beneath? David Duchovny takes us into the top-secret government bases and the clandestine operations they were built to conceal. Discover a deadly poison lab operated by the Soviet Union's infamous "Doctor Death," a vast nuclear missile site buried beneath the Greenland ice sheet, and the U.S. government's doomsday bunker concealed inside a hollowed-out mountain.

When is Mission: Impossible more than just a movie? From the gaspingly record-shattering depths submarine divers have plunged to tap a secret Soviet communication line to the Special Ops team of suicidal soldiers sent to hand-deploy A-bombs in enemy territory, newly uncensored evidence will reveal the lengths that the few and the elite have gone to within the most hostile lands, all in the name of completing the mission.

While wars may be won by men, they're fought with weapons--and every country wanted to leave nothing to chance. Teetering between the apocalyptic and absurd, declassified records will unveil the top secret weapons programs that attempted to bring down the world, uncovering the Soviet atomic test that shook the Earth with a force 1,500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, the CIA's creation of a gun that fired a shellfish-harvested toxin, and the Allies' bizarre secret plan to end World War II by feminizing Hitler.

Imagine a world where you could be compelled to do anything, and everything, your government orders. That's not just a post-apocalyptic worst-case scenario, but at one in point in time, the reality of state-run programs designed to warp and control minds, both in the lab and on the battlefield. From the CIA's decades-long pursuit of the perfect truth serum to the U.S. Army's secret PsyOps in Vietnam, mind games have long been at play among countries, its enemies, and even its own citizens--every one a more alarming deception than the next.

The dangerous, emotional, and arduous toll of stealth ops has never been felt more deeply than by those who adopted completely separate personas to integrate themselves into a shadowy underworld. From "The Pond," an intelligence operation so secret the CIA was kept in the dark, to a luxury Red Sea diving resort covertly operated by Mossad agents, to the British security services' daring rescue of a double agent in Moscow, these undercover smokescreens were all driven by daring agents in service of executing a greater purpose.

The dark underbelly of science has never lurked as prominently as when it was harnessed for state-sanctioned "research". In newly published records, discover Stalin's gruesome trials to create a hybrid human-ape super army, the eerie reason East Germany's Stasi collected the scents of dissidents in airtight jars, and how the CIA uncovered a secret Soviet island devoted to developing deadly bioweapons. Even generations later, the extreme experimentations executed in the name of national security continue to chill one's blood.

While space has always been the final frontier, it's also been an unknowable one that every country has wanted to be first to conquer. Finally, newly released documents give us glimpses into NASA's covert plan to blow up the moon with a nuclear warhead, the Soviet Union's cover-up of history's deadliest space disaster, and how U.S. attempts to put spies in orbit paved the way for the first space station--and the secret space race that were hidden from headlines.

Every spy is only as good as their gadgets. From the seemingly innocuous children's toy engineered to save a crucial informant, to hirsute-inspired movie disguises, to the supersized spy balloon that ignited the world's greatest alien conspiracy, your government's most clandestine inventions are never what you would suspect--and that's exactly why no one never saw them coming.

They say better the devil you know, but what happens when you have to hold hands with him? When governments strike dark deals with cults, mobs, and even sworn enemies, frosty relationships and mounting tensions are tested head on. From the CIA's attempt to enlist the Chicago Mob to assassinate Castro, to the only World War II battle where U.S. troops fought alongside the German Army, to Vladimir Putin's recruitment of a convicted murderer as his personal assassin, which sacrifices are worth the bigger picture?