sad country song i got to tucson too late ♪ ♪ ♪ too late oh i got to tucson too late ♪ [ cheers and applause ] this is "nightline." >> tonight, bracing for impact. >> if you have not evacuated, you need to do that right now. >> millions on alert as hurricane idalia takes aim at florida, set to make landfall

just a few hours from now. winds that could hit 115 miles per hour. life-threatening storm surge as high as 15 feet. the latest storm track just in. plus -- >> oh, my gosh, dude. >> inside the pentagon's hunt for ufos. >> what we saw with four sets of eyes, we have nothing close to it. >> hundreds of reports of unexplained aerial phenomena. and the military scientists trying to unlock the mystery. do you think extraterrestrial life is out there? >> i think it's statistically unrealistic to think it isn't. and back to the future. the '80s blockbuster now a broadway musical. marty mcfly is what we all wanted to be growing up. it's what i still want to be. >> resurrecting the old and re-imagining the new.

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shingrix does not protect everyone and is not for those with severe allergic reactions to its ingredients or to a previous dose. an increased risk of guillain-barré syndrome was observed after getting shingrix. fainting can also happen. the most common side effects are pain, redness, and swelling at the injection site, muscle pain, tiredness, headache, shivering, fever, and upset stomach. shingles doesn't care but, shingrix protects. shingrix is now zero dollars for almost everyone. ask your doctor about shingrix today. good evening. thank you for joining us. there is a state of emergency as we come on the air tonight. millions on alert as hurricane idalia bears down on the florida

coast. now expected to make landfall within hours as the category 4 storm with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour in what's known as the big bend region north of tampa. residents in the bull's-eye boarded up homes and businesses today, heeding the final warnings to get out before it's too late. make no mistake, this hurricane is expected to be both historic and life-threatening. we'll have the very latest on the track in a moment. but we begin with abc's mireya villarreal in gainesville tonight. >> reporter: gainesville is a college town, home of the florida gators. we have spoken with a number of college students who have told us that they have not experienced a hurricane. they don't know really what to expect. so for residents and especially for these students, local leaders are recommending that they have three days of food and water ready to go. so we did see a mad dash at the grocery stores over the last 48 hours. while it is fairly calm behind me right now, we have seen rainstorms come through, bands that are starting to come

through. flooding is expected in this area, and some major winds, up to 100-mile-per-hour gusts at its height. cedar key is about 40 miles from where i'm standing. they are expected to get hit very hard. we spoke with business owners and residents who are extremely concerned. evacuation orders are in place. they were boarding up those homes and businesses. many of them are very worried that they will not have anything to come back to. that is how strong this storm is. >> in places like cedar key, is everyone evacuating? >> reporter: as of right now, most of the people in cedar key and surrounding areas are heeding the warnings and they are evacuating. but a number of these residents and business owners are staying behind. a couple of dozen that we spoke with saying that they are very worried about leaving their properties. these are businesses and homes that they have put a lot of love and money into. so there is a concern about wanting to protect them. and then on the back end, of course, they are also worried about the possibility of looting. local law enforcement has said, listen, we've got you, please be

safe, evacuate if you can. we will make sure to take care of your properties. and hopefully there is something to come back to at the end of all this. >> aimen. it's going to be a long night for you and you team. and now for the latest on the track, i'd like to welcome our abc meteorologist. welcome back to "nightline." >> glad to be here. >> when and where do we expect this hurricane to hit? >> the big bend of florida, mid- to late morning hours looks like when it's going to be moving in, and it's going to be doing so as a major category 4 hurricane. and it's got a lot of momentum with it, which means it's still going to carry category 1 hurricane strength through southern georgia and a tropical storm strength even into the carolinas. >> we know storm surge is a big concern. what can we expect? >> life-threatening catastrophic storm surge. that is the number one killer in hurricanes. 12 to 16 feet is where we're up to with storm surge that. goes right through the big bend. that water is going to come up

and not recede for quite some time either. >> once it gets through florida, is it still a major threat and where does it go next? >> it's carrying that momentum, which means it'll keep itself together as it gets into the carolinas. we're talking about a lot of rain, up to a foot of rainfall. high winds that could make it all the way into southern georgia with 100 plus-mile-per-hour wind gusts there. and also the tornados that this can spawn in the outer bands. there's already tornado watches up for a good chunk of florida. those will continue all the way into the carolinas through the coming days. we're grateful, thank you. stay with abc news for the latest developments overnight and throughout the morning. we turn now to the unexplained. whether we're really alone in the universe has been the subject of fascination in hollywood since moviemaking began. for those questions, they are no locker the stuff of fiction. >> oh, my gosh, dude. >> reporter: for decades,

mysterious sightings like these have captured our collective imagination. >> oh, my gosh, dude. >> reporter: unidentified aerial phenomena like this object captured on video by u.s. navy pilots flying through restricted air space in 2015. >> these are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles. >> reporter: so do aliens exist, and are those close encounters evidence they visited earth? to separate fact from fiction, we went to the man leading a search for answers from inside the pentagon. >> i'm a long-term intelligence officer, scientist, and military officer. >> reporter: dr. sean kirkpatrick in his first television interview after a year after the job tells us everything is on the table. what keeps you up at night? >> technical surprise. and that could be adversary technical surprise or extraterrestrial technical surprise. >> reporter: he leads the all-domain anomaly resolution office created by congress last

year to detect, identify, and attribute mysterious objects of interest in the air, in outerspace and even underwater. what's the most common misperception people have of uaps or of the work that you're doing? >> that they're all the same thing and that they're all extraterrestrial. and neither of those are true. >> reporter: his office is investigating more than 800 cases of potential uaps, reported by military pilots and service members. things like this video from 2019. navy sailors recording glowing triangles above them, now believed to be ordinary drones distorted by night vision goggles. unusual metallic spheres seen floating in the sky. but most have been later identified as weather or spy balloons. >> we have to go through the rigor of taking each one, matching it against our known objects and known catalogs. and then peer-reviewing that, making sure that everybody's in

agreement. >> reporter: but there's not an explanation for everything. most notably the so-called tic tac incident off the california coast in 2004. >> i can tell you i think it was not from this world. >> reporter: david is a retired navy f-18 pilot who spotted the object seeming to move at impossible speeds. he spoke with abc news in 2017. >> we get a call from u.s.s. princeton, he gives us a bearing range and altitude report. he's calling a contact force that they want us to investigate. as we start driving out there, i said what are we looking for and he said we don't know. he said we've seen these objects and they hang out at 20,000 and they go straight back up above 80,000 and disappear. there's two people in each jet. so four heads, eight eyeballs. and we start looking around. and right about that time i was, like, dude, do you see that? i go, what is that? so we're looking down. and there's a disturbance in the water right next to it was this little white object that looks

like a tic tac, just above the surface of the water and it's moving around left, right, forward, back, just random. no controlled thing. there is no rotar wash or jet wash. i say, i'm going to go check it out. we start coming down. so now we're in a clockwise flow. it starts going from 6 to 9. and it's coming up and we're going down. we start to cut across, it rapidly accelerates, climbs past our altitude and disappears. that's the last we saw of it. >> what's your best guess of what happened there? >> it's really hard to guess on this. and i don't like to guess. >> reporter: the mystery of ufos has inspired generations to wonder if we are not alone in the universe. orson's wells radio broadcast which infamously fooled millions of listeners into believing an alien invasion was imminent.

>> calling all over the country, one outside of buffalo, one in chicago. ♪ >> reporter: to close encounters of the third kind, bringing ufos firmly into the zeitgeist. and men in black envisioning a covert government operation that monitors the aliens already living among us. >> i knew it, this is an alien, and you guys are from some government agency trying to keep it under wraps. >> reporter: but it's not just hollywood. the possibility of intelligent life beyond earth has long been the subject of high-profile scrutiny. even the white house weighing in. >> we're saying that there's something our pilots are seeing. we're saying it has had an effect on some of our training operations. and so we want to get to the bottom of it. >> reporter: and with congress now taking a closer look. for decades many americans have been fascinated by the mysterious. it's long past time they got some answers. >> reporter: at a hearing in july, david fraver repeated the story he told abc news five years ago. >> i'm not like a ufo fanatic.

but i will tell you that what we saw with four sets of eyes over a five-minute period, still, we have nothing close to it. >> reporter: fravor appeared alongside lieutenant ryan graves. >> these sightings are not rare or isolated, they are routine. >> reporter: and a former military intelligence officer tur turned whistle-blower. he said the u.s. government has recovered evidence of extraterrestrials. >> as i've stated publicly already in my news nation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries. >> were they human or nonhuman? >> nonhuman. that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program. >> and he was retaliated against after learning of a supposed secret pentagon program that attempted to reverse-engineer uaps. >> in the last couple years, have you had incidences that

have caused you to be in fear for addressing these issues? >> yes, personally. >> after the hearing kirkpatrick refuted the public claims. he wrote, aero has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of a reverse-engineering program for nonhuman technology. the pentagon adding, it has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information about uaps. >> you can say categorically you've seen no convincing -- >> i have seen no convincing -- >> intact spacecraft kept by the u.s. government? >> no. i have seen nothing that leads me to that conclusion. >> is it possible there is some secret program that you're just not aware of? >> i don't think so. i have access to anything and everything i need. >> why do you think these whistle-blowers are coming forward? >> well, one, i think the recent law, which extended whistle-blower protections to them, and named aaro as the authorized disclosure authority,

opens the door for them to come and tell us exactly what they think they saw or know about. >> you believe them? >> i believe that they believe what they're telling me, and my job is not to -- it's not a question of belief, it's a question of what can i go research. >> he says between 95 and 98% of cases reviewed by his office are readily explainable, large birds, balloons, debris or drones. but a small number remain a mystery. >> so we are going to follow our data and our investigations wherever it goes. i have a full range of hypotheses. >> reporter: so you can't rule it out. >> i can't rule it out, but i don't have any evidence that says that yet. >> reporter: most americans believe intelligent life exists beyond earth. a majority say uaps are likely proof of contact. do you think extraterrestrial life is out there? >> i think it's statistically unrealistic to think it isn't.

i mean, given the vastness of the universe. >> reporter: are we going to find it on your watch? >> well, wouldn't that be fun? and that would be probably the best outcome of this job. >> reporter: our thanks to devon. coming up, "back to the future." we go behind the scenes as the time-traveling classic comes to broadway. when moderate to severe ulcerative colitis takes you off course. put it in check with rinvoq, a once-daily pill. when i wanted to see results fast, rinvoq delivered rapid symptom relief and helped leave bathroom urgency behind. check. when uc tried to slow me down... i got lasting, steroid-free remission with rinvoq. check. and when uc caused damage rinvoq came through by visibly repairing my colon lining. check. rapid symptom relief... lasting steroid-free remission... ...and the chance to visibly repair the colon lining. check, check, and check. rinvoq can lower your ability to fight infections,

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it's back to the future like you've never seen it before. a broadway musical.

introducing a new generation of fans to the 1985 classic. abc's will reeve takes us behind the curtain. >> my mom was a huge fan of michael j. fox and said that i reminded her of him. >> the only difference really is that my mother really never said to me, wow, you always remind me of doc brown. [ laughter ] thank goodness. >> "back to the future," the classic 1980s sci-fi adventure film is now on broadway. >> you're telling me you built a time machine out of a delorean? >> at the winter garden theater in new york. >> you're a slacker, mcfly. ♪ got to get back in time ♪ >> reporter: 21-year-old broadway up and comer casey likes plays time-traveling teen marty mcfly. >> great scott! >> good evening, this is dr. brown, and this is my time

machine. >> reporter: and stage veteran roger bart is the mad scientist doc brown who makes all that time traveling back to the 1950s happen. earlier this summer the pair brought me on stage for a behind-the-scenes look at the production. what do you bring to the stage adaptation of the character of marty mcfly? >> marty mcfly is what we all wanted to be growing up. it's what i still want to be. not doing an impression, but i'm doing enough of a reminder of how special michael is, while also mixing in a little bit of myself. >> mostly i try to be unpredictable and zany in the way chris lloyd was and make the audience feel like anything can happen. >> reporter: the musical started as a huge hit on london's west end. it was adapted for the stage by robert zemeckis, the movie's original director. >> this musical is really great. it's got everything you want in musical theater, got great characters, great story, fabulous music. >> so, roger, how does this start? >> well, it's entirely

voice-activated. it responds to my voice. not my normal voice, but my voice only. let me demonstrate it right now. start the car! [ engine revvs ] it sounds great. if only i could fit, we would really be cooking with gas. >> reporter: okay. maybe i'm not quite are ready to go back in time, but i could try to be as cool as marty mcfly in other ways. for instance, marty's classic guitar solo. ♪ go, go, go ♪ you're the pro. you do your thing, man. >> and then, bow! ♪ >> reporter: but nothing is cooler than what that car can do. collin ingram is the show's lead producer. he's also a huge "back to the future" fan. how do you get this thing on stage, move it around, how does it factor into this musical?

>> well, it's a character in itself. it does all sorts of different moves to give you the feeling that this is actually moving fast. and, of course, time travel. this is a real fusion between musical theater and film that's never been done before. it's extremely ambitious, and it works. ♪ >> reporter: those nostalgic elements all adding up to a musical filled with energy and special effects, only 2023 could deliver. you're one of those very few people in the world who's never seen "back to the future," you'll love this musical. and if you've seen "back to the future" hundreds of times, you'll love the musical because it celebrates the movie. >> reporter: what do you hope audiences say as they leave the theater having seen this show? >> man, that was a great time. i feel so much better having just seen that show it. >> made my way. and we get a lot of that. that's the wonderful thing about our show, it seems so bring so

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