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hawk down," a phrase immortalized on the battlefield in somalia 20 years ago this past week. >> let me show you what we found on the first dig. >> logan: tonight, you're going to see and hear things about that day you never have before. you were being hit from every direction? >> that's correct. >> logan: and taking casualties constantly? >> hooten: yeah, at close range. >> you can see exactly who is trying to kill you? >> you can. >> cooper: this is video of an asteroid in russia barreling toward earth at 40,000 miles per hour. it exploded into pieces 19 miles above and 25 miles south of the city of chelyabinsk, shattering glass and knocking some people right off their feet. more than 1,000 were injured. >> they're very low-probability events, but very high- consequence events. it's something that may not happen for another 100 years, 200 years. it may happen tomorrow morning. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm bob simon. >> i'm lara logan. >> i'm anderson cooper. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories tonight on "60 minutes." cbs updates. bromide inhalation powder. >> it is cancelling its planned furloughs since the defense department is calling back most of its civilian workers, disbas $3.35 a gallon, and gravity has the biggest october movie debut ever, 55 million. i am jeff glor, cbs news. 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(cat screech) you feel that in your muscles? i do... drink water. it's a long story. well, not having branches let's us give you great rates and service. i'd like that. a new way to bank. a better way to save. ally bank. your money needs an ally. >> kroft: there is a senate hearing scheduled tomorrow on a subject of some importance to millions of americans. but with the government shut down, it's not clear that the senate committee on government affairs will be able to pay for a stenographer to record the event. the hearing involves the federal disability insurance program, which could become the first government benefits program to run out of money. when it began back in the 1950s, it was envisioned as a small program to assist people who were unable to work because of illness or injury. today, it serves nearly 12 million people, up 20% in the last six years, and has a budget of $135 billion. that's more than the government spent last year on the department of homeland security, the justice department, and the labor department combined. it's been called a "secret welfare system" with its own "disability industrial complex," a system ravaged by waste and fraud. a lot of people want to know what's going on, especially senator tom coburn of oklahoma. >> tom coburn: go read the statute. if there's any job in the economy you can perform, you are not eligible for disability. that's pretty clear. so, where'd all those disabled people come from? >> kroft: the social security administration, which runs the disability program, says the explosive surge is due to aging baby boomers and the lingering effects of a bad economy. but senator tom coburn of oklahoma, the ranking republican on the senate subcommittee for investigations-- who's also a physician-- says it's more complicated than that. last year, his staff randomly selected hundreds of disability files, and found that 25% of them should never have been approved; another 20%, he said, were highly questionable. >> coburn: if all these people are disabled that apply, i want them all to get it. and then we need to figure out how we're going to fund it. but my investigation tells me and my common sense tells me that we got a system that's being gamed pretty big right now. >> kroft: and by a lot of different people exploiting a vulnerable system. coburn says you need look no further than the commercials of disability lawyers trolling for new clients. namely, the two thirds of the people who have already applied for disability and been rejected. there's not much to lose, really. it doesn't cost you anything unless you win the appeal, and the lawyers collect from the federal government. >> marilyn zahm: if the american public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits. >> kroft: marilyn zahm and randy frye are two of the country's 1,500 disability judges. they are also the president and vice-president of the association of administrative law judges. they are each expected to read, hear, and decide up to 700 appeals a year to clear a backlog of nearly a million cases. they say disability lawyers have flooded the system with cases that shouldn't be there. >> zahm: in 1971, fewer than 20% of claimants were represented. now, over 80% of claimants are represented by attorneys or representatives. >> kroft: why do you think there's so many more lawyers involved in this than there used to be? >> zahm: it's lucrative. >> randy frye: follow the money. >> kroft: last year, the social security administration paid a billion dollars to claimants' lawyers out of its cash-strapped disability trust fund. the biggest chunk, $70 million, went to binder and binder, the largest disability firm in the country. lawyer jenna fliszar and jessica white worked for binder and binder, representing clients in front of disability judges from new hampshire to west virginia. >> jenna fliszar: i call it a legal factory, because that's all it is. i mean, they have figured out the system and they've made it into a huge national firm that makes millions of dollars a year on social security disability. >> jessica white: i was hired at the end of 2008, and business was booming because the economy was so bad. we had a lot of people who their unemployment ran out and this was the next step. >> fliszar: if you're unable to find a job, and you have any type of physical issue, then it really becomes a last ditch effort because the job market is so bad. >> kroft: many of the cases they handled involved ailments with subjective symptoms like backache, depression, and fibromyalgia, which is joint and muscle pain, along with chronic fatigue. hard to prove you've got it? >> fliszar: yes. and there's really no diagnostic testing for it. >> kroft: hard to deny you don't have it. >> fliszar: correct. >> kroft: out of the hundreds of people that you represented, how many of these cases involved strong cases for disability? >> fliszar: strong cases, i would say maybe 30% to 40%. and then i would say half of my cases were not deserving of disability. >> kroft: how many of them ultimately ended up getting benefits? >> fliszar: half. >> kroft: we tried repeatedly to reach binder and binder for comment, but our phone calls were not returned. >> coburn: we ought to err on the side of... somebody being potentially disabled. and we have a ton of people in our country that are, but what's coming about now with where we are is the very people who are truly disabled, because we have so many scallywags in the system, are going to get hurt severely when this trust fund runs out of money. >> kroft: senator coburn says disability payments are now propping up the economy in some of the poorest regions in the country, which is why he sent his investigators to the border area of kentucky and west virginia. more than a quarter of a million people in this area are on disability-- 10% to 15% of the population, about three times the national average. jennifer griffith and sarah carver processed disability claims at the social security regional office in huntington, west virginia. how important are disability checks to people in this part of the country? >> jennifer griffith: they're a vital part of our economy. a lot of people depend on them to... to survive. >> kroft: to see it first-hand, they suggested we come back right after the disability checks went out. and we did, to find crowds and traffic jams. >> griffith: you avoid the pharmacy, you avoid wal-mart. you avoid, you know, restaurants because it's just... >> sarah carver: any grocery stores. >> griffith: it's just extremely crowded. everybody's received their benefits. "let's go shopping." >> kroft: not everyone in the throngs we saw is on disability, but jennifer griffith and sarah carver say there's no question that a lot of them are and probably shouldn't be. >> carver: we have a lot of people who have exhausted their unemployment checks and have moved onto social security disability. >> kroft: this is, sort of, a bridge between unemployment and collecting social security. >> carver: generally, yes. >> kroft: are they disabled? >> carver: not always, no. >> griffith: more often than not, no. >> kroft: around here, people call it "getting on the draw" or "getting on the check," but they have other names for it. >> carver: i think you could call it a scheme. you could call it a scam. you could call it fraud. i mean, there's different definitions for it. >> kroft: large scale? >> griffith: very large scale. >> kroft: they began complaining to their bosses at the social security administration six years ago after discovering that an outsized number of claims and some questionable medical evidence was being submitted by eric conn, a flamboyant attorney whose face is plastered on billboards throughout the area and on local tv. he runs the third largest disability practice in the country out of the eric c. conn law center, which is just off route 23 in stanville, kentucky. it's a complex of several doublewides welded together with an imposing replica of the lincoln memorial in the parking lot. surprisingly, it has only one space for the disabled. i mean, it's kind of hard to miss eric conn around here, isn't it? >> griffith: you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn't know who he is in this area. >> kroft: he calls himself "mr. social security." and some of his ads say "guaranteed success." how can he make that claim? >> carver: he backs that up. >> kroft: a slam dunk? >> carver: mm-hmm. pretty much. >> kroft: that's a remarkable record. >> carver: yes, it is. >> kroft: is he that good a lawyer? >> carver:: you know... >> griffith: no. >> kroft: a lot of conn's success, they say, had to do with a particularly friendly disability judge, david daugherty, who sought out conn's cases and approved virtually all 1,823 of them, awarding a half a billion dollars' worth of lifetime benefits to conn's clients. the decisions were based on the recommendations of a loyal group of doctors who often examined conn's clients right in his law offices and always endorsed them for the disability rolls. were most of the medical reports submitted by the same doctors? >> griffith: yes. >> carver: yes. sometimes, up to 13 to 20 reports a day. >> griffith: i know on one, we counted 16 exams by the same doctor all in one day at his office. >> kroft: and they were all approved? >> griffith: they were all approved. >> kroft: were all those valid claims? >> carver: there's no way that you're going to have 100% of clients walk through your door and be disabled. 100% of claimants, there's no way. >> kroft: we were hoping that, given eric conn's outgoing personality and love of publicity, he would be eager to talk to us, but that turned out not to be the case. at first, we were told he wasn't in the office. we said we'd wait. >> hey, take some pens, too, all right? >> kroft: okay. great. about an hour later, we got a call from his lawyer in washington. you know, we don't want to make it seem like he's hiding from us. the lawyer said he'd try to coax conn out of the office, and eventually, he emerged. >> eric conn: i'm very much familiar with you. how we doing today? >> kroft: i'm doing good. look, there's a lot of allegations out there... >> conn: there are. >> kroft: ...about you that we wanted to talk to you about. >> conn: i understand. well, i'm not normally a shy person, but i think it's probably best i speak in the legal realm rather than here. i know you all have come a long way, and i don't mean to be in... inhospitable, but i just think it's probably best right now. >> kroft: you can't talk about your relationship with judge daugherty or your incredible success in... in disability court? >> conn: boy, that's tempting. ( laughter ) oh, i would love to comment on some of that. but not... i'm really sorry, i don't think i should right now. >> kroft: conn didn't want to go into it with senator coburn's investigators, either. they've been quietly working on the case for two years, interviewing witnesses and pouring over disability documents. that's why they asked us to protect their identities. what did you find out in west virginia and kentucky? >> coburn: significant fraud. >> kroft: does the name eric conn ring a bell? >> coburn: mm-hmm. i would tell you, i wouldn't want him for a brother-in-law. and he's got a lot of money, and the american taxpayer paid him that money. >> kroft: is he breaking the law? >> coburn: that's probably going to be determined by the department of justice. >> kroft: coburn says the report, to be released tomorrow, will show that conn collected more than $13 million in legal fees from the federal government over the past six years, and that he paid five doctors roughly $2 million to sign off on bogus medical forms that had been manufactured and filled out ahead of time by conn's staff. you think what you found there is just an isolated case? >> coburn: no. i mean, it's... it may be one of the worst cases. it just shows you how broken it is. you take a good concept that's well meaning, and then you don't manage it, you don't monitor it, you don't over... congress doesn't oversight it. and pretty soon, you end up with places like, in west virginia, certain counties, where, you know, you're born to be on disability. >> kroft: it should be pointed out that no one is getting rich off disability payments of $1,100 a month. it's a minimum wage income with medicare benefits after two years. but each new case will eventually cost taxpayers, on average, $300,000 in lifetime benefits. for marilyn zahm, the disability judge from buffalo, the high demand for it is a measure of the low prospects that still exist for millions of americans. >> zahm: people run out of unemployment insurance. they are not going to die silently. they are going to look for another source of income. it is not unusual for people, especially people over 40, to have some sort an ailment or impairment. so they will file for disability benefits based upon that. for many of these people, the plant closed. there are no jobs in their communities. what are people supposed to do? >> kroft: some of these people are desperate people. >> coburn: absolutely desperate. i agree. but what you're really describing is our economy and the consequences of it. and we're using a system that wasn't meant for that, because we don't have a system over here to help them. which means we're not addressing the other concerns in our society, and that's a debate congress ought to have. >> go to 60minutesovertime.com to hear what will happen to the american disability program if we don't fix it now. sponsored by pfizer. 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[ water gushes, all cheer ] ♪ safe water. ♪ that's the power of global connections. that's bank of america merrill lynch. ♪ ♪ ♪ [ male announcer ] build anything with the new toyota tundra. toyota. let's go places. man: [ laughs ] those look like baby steps now. but they were some pretty good moves. and the best move of all? having the right partner at my side. it's so much better that way. [ male announcer ] have the right partner at your side. consider an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan, insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. go long. insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. >> logan: it was a defining moment in the history of u.s. special operations, and it was the first time american forces faced al qaeda in battle. you may remember it as "black hawk down," a phrase immortalized on the battlefield in somalia 20 years ago this past week. "super 6-1" was the call sign of the first black hawk helicopter to be shot out of the sky that day, setting in motion a series of events that remain seared into america's memory-- the sight of u.s. soldiers being dragged through the streets, the capture of a badly wounded american pilot named mike durant. when the fighting ended, america pulled out of somalia with the dead and wounded, but left behind the wreckage of super 6- 1. tonight, you are going to see and hear things about that day you never have before, and meet an american couple determined to bring home a lost piece of american history. to get to the crash site of super 6-1, you have to travel into the bakara market, the worst part of mogadishu. >> david snelson: there's still people there very sympathetic with the shabaab. >> logan: which is basically al qaeda in somalia? >> snelson: it's al qaeda in somali. >> logan: david snelson is a former warrant officer for u.s. army intelligence, and he's been running a private security company here with his wife, alisha ryu, for the past three years. he took us to the crash site with a small army of 20 armed guards. so the biggest threats here really are i.e.d.s, homemade bombs? >> snelson: i.e.d.s, v.b.- i.e.d.s, or vehicle i.e.d.s. >> logan: the violent history of this ancient arab city is written in the ruins that still dominate these streets. somalia has been a country without a government for most of the past two decades, and it's only now beginning to emerge from the chaos. david's guards set up a ring of security when we got to the site. >> snelson: it's just down over here, right, right here. >> logan: oh, my gosh. this tiny little alleyway? >> snelson: it's just this tiny alleyway. >> logan: there's nothing marking the spot, just a sense of history and the knowledge that this epic battle unfolded right here where super 6-1 came down. you can see where the wreckage was laying in these haunting images taken in the days after the battle. the smashed hulk of the main rotor was right against the wall where we were standing. >> snelson: in fact, i'm relatively confident that this... this section of the wall was probably damaged in the crash and just never been repaired. >> logan: how it ended up here began with a top-secret mission. a task force of u.s. special operations troops were sent in to hunt down a violent warlord, mohamed farrah aidid, who was preventing u.s. and u.n. troops from feeding starving somalis. >> norm hooten: the mission that day was to capture key leaders of his executive staff. we had all of his executive staff at one meeting, which was very rare. usually, you get one or two, but to have ten to 12 key leaders in one spot was, was just... was just something we couldn't turn down. >> logan: norm hooten was one of the special operators leading the assault force that day, and in 20 years, he has never spoken publicly about the battle. "60 minutes" was able to obtain this surveillance video, which has not been seen publicly until now. here you can see the very beginning of the mission. hooten was flown in on one of these "little bird" helicopters to the target building, which was quickly enveloped in clouds of dust. how well did you and your men execute that main... the main objective of the mission? >> hooten: it was flawless. from the time we set down to the time we called for the helicopters to come back and get us, i would say it was no more than five minutes and it was over. >> logan: so you thought you were going back, it was done? >> hooten: yes. the helicopters were on their way back to the target to pick us up. we had everybody that we'd been trying to get for months was in one package in one mission. >> logan: then, from this rooftop, with his men under fire, hooten watched as the lead black hawk, super 6-1, headed towards him. >> hooten: and it took a direct hit to the... to the tail boom, and it went and staíd a slow rotation. >> logan: how hard did it hit? >> hooten: it was a catastrophic impact. that's the only way i could describe it. >> logan: this is super 6-1 moments after it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, spinning out of control before it's torn apart on impact. >> going down. we got a black hawk going down. >> logan: when super 6-1 came tumbling out of the sky on october 3, 1993, these streets were already a battlefield. thousands of angry somalis and heavily armed gunmen were locked in an intense battle with the americans. and now, the unthinkable had happened. they'd shot down a black hawk, this powerful symbol of america's might. for the men on the ground here, it was the moment that changed everything. >> matt eversmann: there is now a... a complete 90-degree turn in our plan, and it is to go recover this aircraft. >> logan: matt eversmann was one of the army rangers who fast- roped out of these black hawk helicopters to secure the target building. until then, none of their operations had lasted more than an hour, and they had no reason to think this one would be any different. some of the guys didn't even take water with them, because they thought it would be over so quickly. >> eversmann: you're looking at one of them, you know? >> logan: you didn't? >> eversmann: what an idiot. i took one of my canteens out. because you could put seven magazines into the old canteen pouch. it was a perfect fit. >> logan: hovering a few hundred feet above the battlefield in the command and control helicopter was tom matthews. back then, he was the battalion commander for the 160th special operations aviation regiment, considered the finest helicopter pilots in the world. did you see super 6-1 get hit? >> tom matthews: i did. the nose went into a wall that was reinforced with another wall on the other side. the tail boom knocked down the wall behind it. the cockpit did not break through that wall because it was reinforced. so it crushed that cockpit. >> logan: which obviously meant that the... the two pilots had no chance. >> matthews: they had no chance at impact, in... in that particular case. >> logan: matthews told us the pilots, chief warrant officers cliff wolcott and donovan briley, were among the best under his command. he recalled those first few moments after the crash, as he tried to make sense of what had happened to the eight men on board. >> matthews: first thing i saw was a guy crawl out of the wreckage of super 6-1, one of the operators who was in the back, and take up a defensive fighting position at the corner of the building to protect that crash site. and that happened within probably 30 seconds of the... of the crash. >> logan: the dark figure you can just make out standing on the corner is 25-year-old staff sergeant dan busch, as he defended super 6-1 against swarming enemy fighters. he would soon be dead. norm hooten says he and his men were doing everything they could to get to the crash site that was in danger of being overwhelmed. you've described it as being like sharks, smelling the blood in the water. >> hooten: yes. they smelled blood and they were... they were moving towards it. >> logan: matt eversmann and his team of army rangers were also trying to get to super 6-1 in this convoy, but they kept running into a hail of gunfire. >> eversmann: i think we went through three or four ambushes along the way. literally, this is... the somalis line both sides of the street, face towards the center, and... and shoot while you're driving through. i mean, that's... that's their... their battle drill. and we start to lose more soldiers by attrition. >> logan: taking casualties on the convoy... >> eversmann: you know, we're taking casualties on the convoy. you know, each ambush, we're losing more guys. >> logan: the americans were outnumbered by thousands of somalis. norm hooten said it took him and his men hours to reach the crash site, which was only a few blocks away. and all the time, you were being hit from every direction? >> hooten: that's correct. >> logan: and taking casualties constantly? >> hooten: yeah, at close range. you're within a doorway away or over a brick wall, so within... within ten feet. so, it's very... very close and very personal. >> logan: you can see exactly who's trying to kill you? >> hooten: you can. >> logan: when you finally got to that crash site, what was that like, that moment when you first saw it, you knew that you were finally there? >> hooten: i can remember seeing the tail boom kind of broken and... and sticking out. and i remember the... the relief i felt when i saw it. i said, "finally, we finally... we can finally put our arms around this thing and start solving this problem." >> logan: in the midst of this intense fight, they faced a nearly impossible task-- to free the body of one of the pilots pinned in the wreckage. it took all night. >> hooten: we used every manual tool we could to try to disassemble that aircraft and recover. we went in with straps and lifts and basically pulled that aircraft off... until we could recover our friends and... and leave. i remember being inside that aircraft, working on it, and looking out and seeing the sun coming up and thinking, "here we go. it's getting ready to get... get bad again." >> logan: so you were not going to leave that pilot's body ... >> hooten: no, no, no. >> logan: ...trapped in that aircraft. >> hooten: that was absolutely not an option. >> logan: more than 13 hours after super 6-1 went down, they were still at the crash site and the battle wasn't over yet. out of 160 americans, more than a hundred were dead or wounded. one of them was a 21-year-old army ranger from new jersey, corporal jamie smith. >> hooten: he was shot in the leg, but he was shot way up close to the hip, so you couldn't get a tourniquet on him, you know. and we kept pushing i.v.s into him for hours and he would say "am i going to die?" and we would say, "no, you're not going to die." and we'd call the helicopter in to come and get him, and it would come in and that helicopter would get shot. and then we would try to get vehicles in, and, then finally, finally, you know, after hours of this agonizing thing with a young kid. you try to tell him "no, son, you're not going to die, you're going to live." and he died... and that, that is a... that's one of the things that i... you know, keeps me up at night sometimes-- that... that horrible lie that you tell someone trying to keep his spirits up. >> logan: the memory of corporal smith and the other men who died is what david snelson and alisha ryu say they see in the remnants of super 6-1. this past spring, after careful negotiations with local clans, they were able to start digging out the wreckage. they were anxious to get to it before the somalis went ahead with a plan to build a road over the crash site. the earth gave up one piece of twisted metal after another. it was surprising how much was there. few people realized that for 20 years since it fell, super 6-1 had been there, in that same place, where it went down. because of the threat from al qaeda, it was too dangerous for david and alisha to be at the site, and they were waiting for the wreckage to be brought to their home in mogadishu. >> i saw the truck pull in and i saw what appeared to be at least three of the rotor, of the blades, and i was, "wow." i said, "that can't be." >> i was amazed. >> logan: you had no idea? >> no idea. had absolutely no idea, it was just, absolute shock. >> snelson: let me show you what we found on the first dig. >> logan: they kept the wreckage safe behind their high walls and heavy security. pieces of the four rotors still attached. this massive part is the main rotor, which still dripped clean hydraulic fluid when they dug it out. >> snelson: i don't want to lift this up too much because it's really corroded and really fragile. >> logan: and these are the foot pedals used by one of the super 6-1 pilots as he struggled to control the helicopter in the final seconds of his life. it had taken them almost a year, and most of their life savings, but in june, they were finally able to package up the wreckage and send it on its way. with the help of the u.s. military, super 6-1 made it to fayetteville, north carolina, just a month and a half ago, and this is where it will stay-- on display at the airborne & special operations museum. >> hooten: i think it's coming back to where it belongs. >> logan: and that matters? >> hooten: and that matters. to anybody that was... that was there that night, it matters. >> welcome to cbs sports undate presented by pacific life, i am james with stories from around the nfl today. >> denver remains unbeaten as peyton manning throws four touchdowns, kansas city is. >> the saints also five and zero, drew brees throws two touches, green bay makes it 23 straight. >> and lions stopped since 87 and baltimore wins behind ray rice's two rushing touchdowns, for more sports news an information go to cbssports.com. >> he taught me that whales leave footprints, glassy circles on the surface that show us where they've been and sometimes where they're going. he would always say, "if you know where you're headed, you can make the smart choices to help you get there." and his legacy has helped me achieve my goals. 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[ dings ] ♪ [ male announcer ] every thought... every movement... ♪ ...carefully planned, coordinated and synchronized. ♪ performing together with a single, united purpose. ♪ that's what makes the world's leading airline... flyer friendly. ♪ >> cooper: for a long time, astronomers saw the asteroids and comets that come close to earth as useless debris, space rocks that blocked our view of distant galaxies. not anymore. they're now viewed as scientifically important and potentially very dangerous if they were to collide with our planet. the odds of that happening on any given day are remote, but over millions of years, scientists believe there have been lots of impacts, and few doubt there are more to come. a former astronaut told us it's like a game of "cosmic roulette," and one mankind cannot afford to lose. concern over our ability to detect these objects that come near the earth grew after an incident in russia this february, when an asteroid crashed into the atmosphere with many times the energy of the bomb dropped on hiroshima, narrowly missing a city of one million. this is video of that asteroid in russia, barreling toward earth at 40,000 miles an hour. it exploded into pieces 19 miles above and 25 miles south of the city of chelyabinsk. people thought it had missed them entirely, until minutes later, when the shock wave arrived. ( windows shattering; car alarm goes off ) shattering glass, crushing doors and knocking some people right off their feet. more than 1,000 were injured. how much warning did people in chelyabinsk have? >> paul chodas: none. >> cooper: paul chodas is a scientist at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena, california. he and his boss, don yeomans, have been trying to track near- earth objects for decades. >> chodas: we didn't see it coming. it was coming from the general direction of the sun, so it was in the daytime sky as it approached. >> cooper: so how did you find out about it? >> chodas: twitter and youtube, when we... when we first saw the images. >> cooper: so the first people at nasa that heard about it was twitter? ( laughter ) >> chodas: exactly. >> cooper: chodas says an object this size hits earth once every hundred years, on average. yet the same day, purely by chance, another asteroid twice as large came within 17,000 miles of earth, passing between us and the satellites that are bringing you this broadcast. the only reason there was any advance warning was because an amateur astronomer in spain, an oral surgeon by day, noticed it just before it moved out of view. >> amy mainzer: we know about some of the most distant galaxies in the known universe, and yet, we don't really know everything that's right in our own backyard. >> cooper: wow. amy mainzer is a nasa scientist who focuses on detecting asteroids. >> mainzer: so we got to move the dome out of the way. and then we're going to start to follow the asteroid as it tracks across the sky. >> cooper: this telescope at the table mountain observatory in california is one of dozens all over the world that are used to track and study near earth objects. mainzer told us they're often very hard to find. >> mainzer: some of these asteroids are really, really dark, darker even than coal in some cases. kind of like the soot at the bottom of a barbecue grill. >> cooper: so you're looking for something that's darker than coal against a black sky. >> mainzer: exactly. and now you see the problem. >> cooper: another problem is that ground-based telescopes can't see objects coming from the direction of the sun because they're in the daytime sky, like the asteroid that hit russia. astronomers find asteroids by taking repeated pictures of the night sky and looking for things that change position. professionals and amateurs all over the world work together, sharing information. once paul chodas and his nasa colleagues have multiple sightings, they can predict an object's location as far as 100 years into the future. >> mainzer: this particular object has a well-known orbit. >> cooper: the asteroid amy mainzer was observing the night we visited didn't look like much on her screen. that little thing? >> mainzer: yep, that's it. >> cooper: but it's nearly half a mile wide and capable of destroying an entire continent. so that's actually... that's a huge asteroid. >> mainzer: that's a huge asteroid. if something this size hit the earth, it would be devastating. it would be very bad. >> cooper: asteroids are composed mostly of rock; comets- ice and dust. they come in all shapes and sizes. some look like small planets; others, giant dog-bones. for a long time, nobody thought they were worth tracking at all. >> mainzer: it wasn't thought that they really did hit the earth. astronomers debated for a long time about the nature of the craters on the moon, and they thought that the craters on the moon were volcanic. >> mainzer: possibly, yeah. and it's only been fairly recently, within, you know, the last 50 years or so, that the field has really recognized that, yeah, impacts actually do happen. and not only do they happen on geological time scales, you know, millions and billions of years, but on human time scales, in some cases. >> cooper: the last major asteroid to collide with earth hit in 1908, in the tunguska region of siberia. it's believed to have been 40 yards wide and to have exploded in the air like a nuclear bomb, leveling 80 million trees in an area the size of metropolitan washington. this crater in northern arizona was created 50,000 years ago. it's one of more than 180 impact craters geologists have found so far. they think there are many more, hidden by water and vegetation, more even than on the moon, because the earth's gravity is greater. the most famous impact of all is the one that may have wiped out the dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago. the theory is that an enormous asteroid or comet collided so violently with earth, it created a cloud of debris that blocked out the sun, killing off 75% of all species, and leaving behind a crater in mexico more than 100 miles wide. >> don yeomans: these are objects that were once in space, pieces of asteroids. >> cooper: yeomans and chodas showed us some of the remarkable things that have fallen from the sky. >> cooper: this is a piece of mars? >> yeomans: you have it in your hand. it wandered around the inner solar system for a few million years, and a 40 pound stone came down in africa, about ten feet from a farmer, in... >> cooper: really? >> yeomans: ...october of 1962. >> cooper: it's amazing, to think this is from mars. they played a trick on me, as well. >> yeomans: would you hand that one to me, that big one? >> cooper: that one? >> yeomans: yeah. ( laughter ) come... come on. >> cooper: oh, my god. this one was iron-nickel and heavy as an anvil. not all asteroids are made of such dense stuff, but many contain high concentrations of valuable minerals, like platinum, that might someday be mined in space. >> president barack obama: we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid, for the first time in history. >> cooper: president obama's proposed budget for next year includes a plan to capture a tiny asteroid so that astronauts could rendezvous with it by 2025. the idea is to perfect techniques needed to explore deep space, and perhaps find a way to exploit the water resources that many comets and asteroids have. >> yeomans: you could extract water from them. you could break the water down into hydrogen and oxygen, which is the most efficient form of rocket fuel. so asteroids may serve as the fueling stations and watering holes for future planetary exploration. >> cooper: but as the scriptwriters of the hollywood blockbuster "armageddon" vividly imagined, asteroids have the potential to harm mankind as well. for better or worse, this is what many of us know about near- earth objects-- that if bruce willis hadn't nuked one, it would have destroyed the world. i mean, you see these movies with bruce willis where an asteroid is coming and is going to destroy the world. is that likely? >> yeomans: no. no. we've found 95% of the large ones, and none of them represent a threat within the next 100 years or so. >> cooper: what about the other 5%? >> yeomans: we're still looking. >> cooper: he's talking about objects over half a mile wide that are big enough to cause global destruction. the problem is, there are lots of smaller objects over 40 yards in diameter that are unaccounted for and potentially very dangerous. >> ed lu: if you look at the light green dot, that's the orbit of the earth. >> cooper: ed lu is a former astronaut who spent six months on the international space station. he showed us a computer- generated representation of our solar system-- that's the sun in the center, and those green dots are 10,000 near-earth objects astronomers have found so far. >> lu: so these green dots are the asteroids that could hit the earth. >> cooper: this is the... about the 10,000 known asteroids? >> lu: yes, these are the 10,000 known asteroids. here's the problem. there's about a factor of 100 more. the real solar system looks like this. and we know this because we've only been able to observe a small fraction of the sky, and we know that there's about 100 times more asteroids than we've found. >> cooper: wait... wait, this is all the asteroids that are... >> lu: there are about a million asteroids large enough to destroy a city out there. >> cooper: and right now, we only know of... of what percent of those asteroids? >> lu: about one half of 1%. >> cooper: does it worry you that you only know 1% of these asteroids that are big enough to destroy a city? >> chodas: well, most of those are really small. and the odds are that many of these would hit in a remote area or they could hit in an ocean. so that is why the larger ones are those that we were paying attention to first. now, the next size range is the one to concentrate on, those that can cause, you know, continent-wide extinction or destruction. >> cooper: yeah. that would be pretty good to prevent that continent-wide destruction. >> chodas: those are the next ones. we'll continue to find those. and we work our way down to the small ones. >> cooper: but right now, an object that could wipe out the eastern seaboard or new york city could be a day away and there's a very good chance we wouldn't know about it. >> yeomans: well, we're working to make sure that we will know about it. >> cooper: but right now, we wouldn't know about it. >> chodas: it's possible, yes. >> the committee on science, space and technology will come to order. >> cooper: nasa administrator charles bolden faced similar questions from congress after the near-miss in russia earlier this year. >> what would we do if you detected even a small one, like the one that detonated in russia, headed for new york city in three weeks? what would we do? >> charles bolden: if it's coming in three weeks, pray. >> cooper: is there anything you can do to deflect an asteroid that's going to hit, besides evacuating a city? >> yeomans: if you find it ten or 20 or 30 years in advance, then yes, you could actually send a spacecraft up, run into it, slow it down a millimeter or two per second so that, in ten or 20 years, when it was predicted to hit the earth, it wouldn't. >> cooper: just slam a spacecraft into it. >> yeomans: just slam into it. >> cooper: in 2005, nasa did just that-- as an experiment, firing a small unmanned spacecraft into a comet called tempel one. but you can't deflect what you don't detect, which is why former astronaut ed lu has taken on a new mission. >> lu: here's the telescope that we're building. >> cooper: he's now chairman of the b612 foundation, which has designed a space-based telescope to speed up the discovery of near-earth objects. nasa's amy mainzer has been developing one, too. both telescopes would be able to find asteroids by using infra- red sensors that detect heat rather than light. but a telescope like this would cost roughly half a billion dollars, and so far neither the united states nor any other government has committed significant funds. so the b612 foundation is trying to raise the money privately . by reaching out to individual donors. >> lu: i don't think there's any other global catastrophe, global scale catastrophe that we can prevent. this is the only one that i know of we can solve this particular issue for the cost of building a freeway overpass. i mean, and that's literally what it is. >> cooper: but nobody has been killed by an asteroid. >> lu: yeah. and what i'm saying is that you can't wait till that point afterwards, when you say, "we should have done it." you have to think of this as cosmic roulette, right? the phrase that they have in vegas is that the house always wins and, you know, the sort of secret to all this is that we're not the house. at some point, you know, the solar system's going to get you. >> yeomans: they're very low- probability events, but very high-consequence events. >> cooper: the problem it seems like is you're asking people to care about something which may not affect their lives, may not even affect their children's lives. >> yeomans: that's true. it's a tough concept to get across because, as you say, it's something that may not happen for another 100 years, 200 years. it may happen tomorrow morning. you really love, what would you do?" ♪ [ woman ] i'd be a writer. 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New-yorkUnited-statesChelyabinskChelyabinskaya-oblast-RussiaNorth-carolinaKentuckyHiroshimaJapanMogadishuBanaadirSomalia influenced the throw and trevathan stepped in front of escobar for the pick. phil: and pressure on him both play that is time. i don't think he wanted to throw the ball. at the last second he made the decision that got him in trouble. jim: and the pass, beautiful catch by thomas at the 10. phil: a little pick play inside. they are famous for this. i saw him do it so many times at indianapolis. has done it many times in denver. jim: time-out called by the cowboys. phil: now they have two. switched the route. hard for brandon carr to get there and -- through and get there. jim: here's the lineup tonight on cbs, beginning with "60 minutes" and the untold story of blackhawk down. follow bid new episodes of "the amazing race." "the good wife" and "the mentalist." that pass puts peyton over 400 for the game. the first time the cowboys in four games have allowed a 400-yard thrower. one of the highest scoring games in the history of the league you're catch watching. first and 10. and moreno is wrestled down by ware. and now the cowboys take a second time-out. if only super bowl 12 had been this exciting when these two franchises met in new orleans. phil: let's go back to the interception. two times, two plays by the dallas offense. the first time they sack romo. he gets pressure, can't step through it. and, too, also, an awesome play by trevathan. cutting in front. it looks like jason wit season going to be open but because of the pressure in front of him, he can't drive the football the way he wants and trevathan makes the interception. jim: romo's first pass intercepted since the first quarter of week one. nd now second and 9. julius thomas. he's out of bounds to stop the clock at 1:40. phil: of course that really helps the dallas cowboys. going out of bounds. they still have that one time-out but now it looks like in this situation -- jim: i got to be honest. when the ball was intercepted i wondered if dallas would ever see the football again. if the broncos would manipulate away to use up all the time and run it down to the end. but they have a third and 1. a yard to go for the touchdown. a foot to go for the first. it's moreno. and he's got the first. they haven't officially signaled it yet but it certainly looks like enough. and now the cowboys have called time-out. now the broncos have all kinds of options, kline -- including just taking a couple of neill-downs and waiting to end the game at essentially an extra point difference. they might have been better had just moreno taken it in for the touchdown. phil: i know that you're -- what you're saying baugh but i would have gone for the stop, jim, because they would have kicked a field goal if it was fourth and short. but now, if it is a first down jim: it is a first down. phil: so what do you do now? you're the denver broncos here in this situation. i think you neill on it. why even give them a chance? a return, there are so many things. i think you neill on the football and you kick the field goal to win the game. jim: you've seen dallas run up and down this field and romo throw for over 500 yards so why would you give them a chance to get the football back? phil: if you're the dallas cowboys, you let them go in. jim: i don't think denver will approach that line of scrimmage. they've gone into the victory formation. phil: yes. jim: and rare -- ware falls on peyton. you don't want to have any clean looks at manning but that puts it back to the center of the field. he's not too happy about that. listen, you just went to the sideline and conferred with him what the play was going to be. but they have it dead in the middle of the field now. jim: i think the cowboys are going to think back on that third and 1. if he wasn't stopped far loss, then let him go in. phil: you can't make that process during the play. it was so close. only a couple of inches. jim: and now they'll be able to run it down, take the time-out and bring prate ore -- prater out for the win. prater in his career when he's had a possible late lead-changing or winning field goal attempt at the end of regulation or in overtime has never missed. he's 13-13. and this one is just going to be a chip shot after this snap. it will make it about a 28-yard ield goal attempt. well, we should have known. we both were saying all week we thought this might be in the 30's. we could have actually gone ahead, jumped out and said first one to 50 wins. phil: you said it was going to be a high-scoring game. 30's, mid 30's, both teams. i said no way. im: and i was wrong. phil: listen, depending on what happens here, the cowboys lose. you know, i know and everybody knows the story is going to be that tony romo threw that interception and of course, the broncos, peyton manning, their offense, they are magnificent. but in these games down, in games like this it came down to who made that big mistake. it was the dallas cowboys. jim: prater for the win and the ick is good! 51-48, broncos. in the fourth highest scoring ame in the history of the nfl. peyton throws for 414 yards, four touchdowns. uns for another score. ever a doubt about the kick. john fox, your team is one of three unbeatens. along with kansas city and new orleans. tough, really, just a brutal loss for the cowboys, who were looking at one of those, if you ll, kind of season-changing, image-changing wins. phil: absolutely. momentum, confidence, everything going forward but now you have to regroup, be tough, try to find a way to get back on track next week. jim: that's 16 straight regular-season wins but the first win that was by less than seven points and it came down to the very last second. 51-48 denver is the final score. for phil simms and all the crew, jim nantz saying so long from dallas. you've been watching the nfl on cbs. over 20 million drivers are insured with geico. so get a free rate quote today. i love it! how much do you love it? animation is hot...and i think it makes geico's 20 million drivers message very compelling, very compelling. this is some really strong stuff! so you turned me into a cartoon...lovely. geico. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. >> cbs sports presents the geico play of the day. james: early in the first quarter, kansas city colquitt punts to ray northward, who elects not to make the fair catch. the damian williams kicks the ball, making it live, allowing cooper to recover for the touchdown. the chiefs improve to 5-0 for the first time since 2003. [ female announcer ] there will be winners. there will be losers. and you will see it all with free tv streaming to your device. [ cheering ] touchdown traveler. if it matters to you, it matters to us. ♪ >> cbs sports thanks you for watching this presentation of the national football league. ,,, captioning funded by cbs and ford >> pelley: we have gone from what, six to 12 million people on dissneability. >> where did all of these disabled people come from? >> kroft: senator tom coburn says the congress pays out $105 billion to americans claiming to be disabled, and a lot of them are not. >> if the american public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits. >> kroft: we decided to look into what appears to be a large- scale disability scam. there are a lot of allegations out there that we wanted to talk to you about. >> i understand. >> logan: it was a defining moment in the history of u.s. special operations, and it was the first time american forces faced al qaeda in battle. you may remember it as "black hawk down," a phrase immortalized on the battlefield in somalia 20 years ago this past week. >> let me show you what we found on the first dig. >> logan: tonight, you're going to see and hear things about that day you never have before. you were being hit from every direction? >> that's correct. >> logan: and taking casualties constantly? >> hooten: yeah, at close range. >> you can see exactly who is trying to kill you? >> you can. >> cooper: this is video of an asteroid in russia barreling toward earth at 40,000 miles per hour. it exploded into pieces 19 miles above and 25 miles south of the city of chelyabinsk, shattering glass and knocking some people right off their feet. more than 1,000 were injured. >> they're very low-probability events, but very high- consequence events. it's something that may not happen for another 100 years, 200 years. it may happen tomorrow morning. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm bob simon. >> i'm lara logan. >> i'm anderson cooper. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories tonight on "60 minutes." cbs updates. bromide inhalation powder. >> it is cancelling its planned furloughs since the defense department is calling back most of its civilian workers, disbas $3.35 a gallon, and gravity has the biggest october movie debut ever, 55 million. i am jeff glor, cbs news. 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(cat screech) you feel that in your muscles? i do... drink water. it's a long story. well, not having branches let's us give you great rates and service. i'd like that. a new way to bank. a better way to save. ally bank. your money needs an ally. >> kroft: there is a senate hearing scheduled tomorrow on a subject of some importance to millions of americans. but with the government shut down, it's not clear that the senate committee on government affairs will be able to pay for a stenographer to record the event. the hearing involves the federal disability insurance program, which could become the first government benefits program to run out of money. when it began back in the 1950s, it was envisioned as a small program to assist people who were unable to work because of illness or injury. today, it serves nearly 12 million people, up 20% in the last six years, and has a budget of $135 billion. that's more than the government spent last year on the department of homeland security, the justice department, and the labor department combined. it's been called a "secret welfare system" with its own "disability industrial complex," a system ravaged by waste and fraud. a lot of people want to know what's going on, especially senator tom coburn of oklahoma. >> tom coburn: go read the statute. if there's any job in the economy you can perform, you are not eligible for disability. that's pretty clear. so, where'd all those disabled people come from? >> kroft: the social security administration, which runs the disability program, says the explosive surge is due to aging baby boomers and the lingering effects of a bad economy. but senator tom coburn of oklahoma, the ranking republican on the senate subcommittee for investigations-- who's also a physician-- says it's more complicated than that. last year, his staff randomly selected hundreds of disability files, and found that 25% of them should never have been approved; another 20%, he said, were highly questionable. >> coburn: if all these people are disabled that apply, i want them all to get it. and then we need to figure out how we're going to fund it. but my investigation tells me and my common sense tells me that we got a system that's being gamed pretty big right now. >> kroft: and by a lot of different people exploiting a vulnerable system. coburn says you need look no further than the commercials of disability lawyers trolling for new clients. namely, the two thirds of the people who have already applied for disability and been rejected. there's not much to lose, really. it doesn't cost you anything unless you win the appeal, and the lawyers collect from the federal government. >> marilyn zahm: if the american public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits. >> kroft: marilyn zahm and randy frye are two of the country's 1,500 disability judges. they are also the president and vice-president of the association of administrative law judges. they are each expected to read, hear, and decide up to 700 appeals a year to clear a backlog of nearly a million cases. they say disability lawyers have flooded the system with cases that shouldn't be there. >> zahm: in 1971, fewer than 20% of claimants were represented. now, over 80% of claimants are represented by attorneys or representatives. >> kroft: why do you think there's so many more lawyers involved in this than there used to be? >> zahm: it's lucrative. >> randy frye: follow the money. >> kroft: last year, the social security administration paid a billion dollars to claimants' lawyers out of its cash-strapped disability trust fund. the biggest chunk, $70 million, went to binder and binder, the largest disability firm in the country. lawyer jenna fliszar and jessica white worked for binder and binder, representing clients in front of disability judges from new hampshire to west virginia. >> jenna fliszar: i call it a legal factory, because that's all it is. i mean, they have figured out the system and they've made it into a huge national firm that makes millions of dollars a year on social security disability. >> jessica white: i was hired at the end of 2008, and business was booming because the economy was so bad. we had a lot of people who their unemployment ran out and this was the next step. >> fliszar: if you're unable to find a job, and you have any type of physical issue, then it really becomes a last ditch effort because the job market is so bad. >> kroft: many of the cases they handled involved ailments with subjective symptoms like backache, depression, and fibromyalgia, which is joint and muscle pain, along with chronic fatigue. hard to prove you've got it? >> fliszar: yes. and there's really no diagnostic testing for it. >> kroft: hard to deny you don't have it. >> fliszar: correct. >> kroft: out of the hundreds of people that you represented, how many of these cases involved strong cases for disability? >> fliszar: strong cases, i would say maybe 30% to 40%. and then i would say half of my cases were not deserving of disability. >> kroft: how many of them ultimately ended up getting benefits? >> fliszar: half. >> kroft: we tried repeatedly to reach binder and binder for comment, but our phone calls were not returned. >> coburn: we ought to err on the side of... somebody being potentially disabled. and we have a ton of people in our country that are, but what's coming about now with where we are is the very people who are truly disabled, because we have so many scallywags in the system, are going to get hurt severely when this trust fund runs out of money. >> kroft: senator coburn says disability payments are now propping up the economy in some of the poorest regions in the country, which is why he sent his investigators to the border area of kentucky and west virginia. more than a quarter of a million people in this area are on disability-- 10% to 15% of the population, about three times the national average. jennifer griffith and sarah carver processed disability claims at the social security regional office in huntington, west virginia. how important are disability checks to people in this part of the country? >> jennifer griffith: they're a vital part of our economy. a lot of people depend on them to... to survive. >> kroft: to see it first-hand, they suggested we come back right after the disability checks went out. and we did, to find crowds and traffic jams. >> griffith: you avoid the pharmacy, you avoid wal-mart. you avoid, you know, restaurants because it's just... >> sarah carver: any grocery stores. >> griffith: it's just extremely crowded. everybody's received their benefits. "let's go shopping." >> kroft: not everyone in the throngs we saw is on disability, but jennifer griffith and sarah carver say there's no question that a lot of them are and probably shouldn't be. >> carver: we have a lot of people who have exhausted their unemployment checks and have moved onto social security disability. >> kroft: this is, sort of, a bridge between unemployment and collecting social security. >> carver: generally, yes. >> kroft: are they disabled? >> carver: not always, no. >> griffith: more often than not, no. >> kroft: around here, people call it "getting on the draw" or "getting on the check," but they have other names for it. >> carver: i think you could call it a scheme. you could call it a scam. you could call it fraud. i mean, there's different definitions for it. >> kroft: large scale? >> griffith: very large scale. >> kroft: they began complaining to their bosses at the social security administration six years ago after discovering that an outsized number of claims and some questionable medical evidence was being submitted by eric conn, a flamboyant attorney whose face is plastered on billboards throughout the area and on local tv. he runs the third largest disability practice in the country out of the eric c. conn law center, which is just off route 23 in stanville, kentucky. it's a complex of several doublewides welded together with an imposing replica of the lincoln memorial in the parking lot. surprisingly, it has only one space for the disabled. i mean, it's kind of hard to miss eric conn around here, isn't it? >> griffith: you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn't know who he is in this area. >> kroft: he calls himself "mr. social security." and some of his ads say "guaranteed success." how can he make that claim? >> carver: he backs that up. >> kroft: a slam dunk? >> carver: mm-hmm. pretty much. >> kroft: that's a remarkable record. >> carver: yes, it is. >> kroft: is he that good a lawyer? >> carver:: you know... >> griffith: no. >> kroft: a lot of conn's success, they say, had to do with a particularly friendly disability judge, david daugherty, who sought out conn's cases and approved virtually all 1,823 of them, awarding a half a billion dollars' worth of lifetime benefits to conn's clients. the decisions were based on the recommendations of a loyal group of doctors who often examined conn's clients right in his law offices and always endorsed them for the disability rolls. were most of the medical reports submitted by the same doctors? >> griffith: yes. >> carver: yes. sometimes, up to 13 to 20 reports a day. >> griffith: i know on one, we counted 16 exams by the same doctor all in one day at his office. >> kroft: and they were all approved? >> griffith: they were all approved. >> kroft: were all those valid claims? >> carver: there's no way that you're going to have 100% of clients walk through your door and be disabled. 100% of claimants, there's no way. >> kroft: we were hoping that, given eric conn's outgoing personality and love of publicity, he would be eager to talk to us, but that turned out not to be the case. at first, we were told he wasn't in the office. we said we'd wait. >> hey, take some pens, too, all right? >> kroft: okay. great. about an hour later, we got a call from his lawyer in washington. you know, we don't want to make it seem like he's hiding from us. the lawyer said he'd try to coax conn out of the office, and eventually, he emerged. >> eric conn: i'm very much familiar with you. how we doing today? >> kroft: i'm doing good. look, there's a lot of allegations out there... >> conn: there are. >> kroft: ...about you that we wanted to talk to you about. >> conn: i understand. well, i'm not normally a shy person, but i think it's probably best i speak in the legal realm rather than here. i know you all have come a long way, and i don't mean to be in... inhospitable, but i just think it's probably best right now. >> kroft: you can't talk about your relationship with judge daugherty or your incredible success in... in disability court? >> conn: boy, that's tempting. ( laughter ) oh, i would love to comment on some of that. but not... i'm really sorry, i don't think i should right now. >> kroft: conn didn't want to go into it with senator coburn's investigators, either. they've been quietly working on the case for two years, interviewing witnesses and pouring over disability documents. that's why they asked us to protect their identities. what did you find out in west virginia and kentucky? >> coburn: significant fraud. >> kroft: does the name eric conn ring a bell? >> coburn: mm-hmm. i would tell you, i wouldn't want him for a brother-in-law. and he's got a lot of money, and the american taxpayer paid him that money. >> kroft: is he breaking the law? >> coburn: that's probably going to be determined by the department of justice. >> kroft: coburn says the report, to be released tomorrow, will show that conn collected more than $13 million in legal fees from the federal government over the past six years, and that he paid five doctors roughly $2 million to sign off on bogus medical forms that had been manufactured and filled out ahead of time by conn's staff. you think what you found there is just an isolated case? >> coburn: no. i mean, it's... it may be one of the worst cases. it just shows you how broken it is. you take a good concept that's well meaning, and then you don't manage it, you don't monitor it, you don't over... congress doesn't oversight it. and pretty soon, you end up with places like, in west virginia, certain counties, where, you know, you're born to be on disability. >> kroft: it should be pointed out that no one is getting rich off disability payments of $1,100 a month. it's a minimum wage income with medicare benefits after two years. but each new case will eventually cost taxpayers, on average, $300,000 in lifetime benefits. for marilyn zahm, the disability judge from buffalo, the high demand for it is a measure of the low prospects that still exist for millions of americans. >> zahm: people run out of unemployment insurance. they are not going to die silently. they are going to look for another source of income. it is not unusual for people, especially people over 40, to have some sort an ailment or impairment. so they will file for disability benefits based upon that. for many of these people, the plant closed. there are no jobs in their communities. what are people supposed to do? >> kroft: some of these people are desperate people. >> coburn: absolutely desperate. i agree. but what you're really describing is our economy and the consequences of it. and we're using a system that wasn't meant for that, because we don't have a system over here to help them. which means we're not addressing the other concerns in our society, and that's a debate congress ought to have. >> go to 60minutesovertime.com to hear what will happen to the american disability program if we don't fix it now. sponsored by pfizer. 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[ water gushes, all cheer ] ♪ safe water. ♪ that's the power of global connections. that's bank of america merrill lynch. ♪ ♪ ♪ [ male announcer ] build anything with the new toyota tundra. toyota. let's go places. man: [ laughs ] those look like baby steps now. but they were some pretty good moves. and the best move of all? having the right partner at my side. it's so much better that way. [ male announcer ] have the right partner at your side. consider an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan, insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. go long. insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. >> logan: it was a defining moment in the history of u.s. special operations, and it was the first time american forces faced al qaeda in battle. you may remember it as "black hawk down," a phrase immortalized on the battlefield in somalia 20 years ago this past week. "super 6-1" was the call sign of the first black hawk helicopter to be shot out of the sky that day, setting in motion a series of events that remain seared into america's memory-- the sight of u.s. soldiers being dragged through the streets, the capture of a badly wounded american pilot named mike durant. when the fighting ended, america pulled out of somalia with the dead and wounded, but left behind the wreckage of super 6- 1. tonight, you are going to see and hear things about that day you never have before, and meet an american couple determined to bring home a lost piece of american history. to get to the crash site of super 6-1, you have to travel into the bakara market, the worst part of mogadishu. >> david snelson: there's still people there very sympathetic with the shabaab. >> logan: which is basically al qaeda in somalia? >> snelson: it's al qaeda in somali. >> logan: david snelson is a former warrant officer for u.s. army intelligence, and he's been running a private security company here with his wife, alisha ryu, for the past three years. he took us to the crash site with a small army of 20 armed guards. so the biggest threats here really are i.e.d.s, homemade bombs? >> snelson: i.e.d.s, v.b.- i.e.d.s, or vehicle i.e.d.s. >> logan: the violent history of this ancient arab city is written in the ruins that still dominate these streets. somalia has been a country without a government for most of the past two decades, and it's only now beginning to emerge from the chaos. david's guards set up a ring of security when we got to the site. >> snelson: it's just down over here, right, right here. >> logan: oh, my gosh. this tiny little alleyway? >> snelson: it's just this tiny alleyway. >> logan: there's nothing marking the spot, just a sense of history and the knowledge that this epic battle unfolded right here where super 6-1 came down. you can see where the wreckage was laying in these haunting images taken in the days after the battle. the smashed hulk of the main rotor was right against the wall where we were standing. >> snelson: in fact, i'm relatively confident that this... this section of the wall was probably damaged in the crash and just never been repaired. >> logan: how it ended up here began with a top-secret mission. a task force of u.s. special operations troops were sent in to hunt down a violent warlord, mohamed farrah aidid, who was preventing u.s. and u.n. troops from feeding starving somalis. >> norm hooten: the mission that day was to capture key leaders of his executive staff. we had all of his executive staff at one meeting, which was very rare. usually, you get one or two, but to have ten to 12 key leaders in one spot was, was just... was just something we couldn't turn down. >> logan: norm hooten was one of the special operators leading the assault force that day, and in 20 years, he has never spoken publicly about the battle. "60 minutes" was able to obtain this surveillance video, which has not been seen publicly until now. here you can see the very beginning of the mission. hooten was flown in on one of these "little bird" helicopters to the target building, which was quickly enveloped in clouds of dust. how well did you and your men execute that main... the main objective of the mission? >> hooten: it was flawless. from the time we set down to the time we called for the helicopters to come back and get us, i would say it was no more than five minutes and it was over. >> logan: so you thought you were going back, it was done? >> hooten: yes. the helicopters were on their way back to the target to pick us up. we had everybody that we'd been trying to get for months was in one package in one mission. >> logan: then, from this rooftop, with his men under fire, hooten watched as the lead black hawk, super 6-1, headed towards him. >> hooten: and it took a direct hit to the... to the tail boom, and it went and started a slow rotation. >> logan: how hard did it hit? >> hooten: it was a catastrophic impact. that's the only way i could describe it. >> logan: this is super 6-1 moments after it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, spinning out of control before it's torn apart on impact. >> going down. we got a black hawk going down. >> logan: when super 6-1 came tumbling out of the sky on october 3, 1993, these streets were already a battlefield. thousands of angry somalis and heavily armed gunmen were locked in an intense battle with the americans. and now, the unthinkable had happened. they'd shot down a black hawk, this powerful symbol of america's might. for the men on the ground here, it was the moment that changed everything. >> matt eversmann: there is now a... a complete 90-degree turn in our plan, and it is to go recover this aircraft. >> logan: matt eversmann was one of the army rangers who fast- roped out of these black hawk helicopters to secure the target building. until then, none of their operations had lasted more than an hour, and they had no reason to think this one would be any different. some of the guys didn't even take water with them, because they thought it would be over so quickly. >> eversmann: you're looking at one of them, you know? >> logan: you didn't? >> eversmann: what an idiot. i took one of my canteens out. because you could put seven magazines into the old canteen pouch. it was a perfect fit. >> logan: hovering a few hundred feet above the battlefield in the command and control helicopter was tom matthews. back then, he was the battalion commander for the 160th special operations aviation regiment, considered the finest helicopter pilots in the world. did you see super 6-1 get hit? >> tom matthews: i did. the nose went into a wall that was reinforced with another wall on the other side. the tail boom knocked down the wall behind it. the cockpit did not break through that wall because it was reinforced. so it crushed that cockpit. >> logan: which obviously meant that the... the two pilots had no chance. >> matthews: they had no chance at impact, in... in that particular case. >> logan: matthews told us the pilots, chief warrant officers cliff wolcott and donovan briley, were among the best under his command. he recalled those first few moments after the crash, as he tried to make sense of what had happened to the eight men on board. >> matthews: first thing i saw was a guy crawl out of the wreckage of super 6-1, one of the operators who was in the back, and take up a defensive fighting position at the corner of the building to protect that crash site. and that happened within probably 30 seconds of the... of the crash. >> logan: the dark figure you can just make out standing on the corner is 25-year-old staff sergeant dan busch, as he defended super 6-1 against swarming enemy fighters. he would soon be dead. norm hooten says he and his men were doing everything they could to get to the crash site that was in danger of being overwhelmed. you've described it as being like sharks, smelling the blood in the water. >> hooten: yes. they smelled blood and they were... they were moving towards it. >> logan: matt eversmann and his team of army rangers were also trying to get to super 6-1 in this convoy, but they kept running into a hail of gunfire. >> eversmann: i think we went through three or four ambushes along the way. literally, this is... the somalis line both sides of the street, face towards the center, and... and shoot while you're driving through. i mean, that's... that's their... their battle drill. and we start to lose more soldiers by attrition. >> logan: taking casualties on the convoy... >> eversmann: you know, we're taking casualties on the convoy. you know, each ambush, we're losing more guys. >> logan: the americans were outnumbered by thousands of somalis. norm hooten said it took him and his men hours to reach the crash site, which was only a few blocks away. and all the time, you were being hit from every direction? >> hooten: that's correct. >> logan: and taking casualties constantly? >> hooten: yeah, at close range. you're within a doorway away or over a brick wall, so within... within ten feet. so, it's very... very close and very personal. >> logan: you can see exactly who's trying to kill you? >> hooten: you can. >> logan: when you finally got to that crash site, what was that like, that moment when you first saw it, you knew that you were finally there? >> hooten: i can remember seeing the tail boom kind of broken and... and sticking out. and i remember the... the relief i felt when i saw it. i said, "finally, we finally... we can finally put our arms around this thing and start solving this problem." >> logan: in the midst of this intense fight, they faced a nearly impossible task-- to free the body of one of the pilots pinned in the wreckage. it took all night. >> hooten: we used every manual tool we could to try to disassemble that aircraft and recover. we went in with straps and lifts and basically pulled that aircraft off... until we could recover our friends and... and leave. i remember being inside that aircraft, working on it, and looking out and seeing the sun coming up and thinking, "here we go. it's getting ready to get... get bad again." >> logan: so you were not going to leave that pilot's body ... >> hooten: no, no, no. >> logan: ...trapped in that aircraft. >> hooten: that was absolutely not an option. >> logan: more than 13 hours after super 6-1 went down, they were still at the crash site and the battle wasn't over yet. out of 160 americans, more than a hundred were dead or wounded. one of them was a 21-year-old army ranger from new jersey, corporal jamie smith. >> hooten: he was shot in the leg, but he was shot way up close to the hip, so you couldn't get a tourniquet on him, you know. and we kept pushing i.v.s into him for hours and he would say "am i going to die?" and we would say, "no, you're not going to die." and we'd call the helicopter in to come and get him, and it would come in and that helicopter would get shot. and then we would try to get vehicles in, and, then finally, finally, you know, after hours of this agonizing thing with a young kid. you try to tell him "no, son, you're not going to die, you're going to live." and he died... and that, that is a... that's one of the things that i... you know, keeps me up at night sometimes-- that... that horrible lie that you tell someone trying to keep his spirits up. >> logan: the memory of corporal smith and the other men who died is what david snelson and alisha ryu say they see in the remnants of super 6-1. this past spring, after careful negotiations with local clans, they were able to start digging out the wreckage. they were anxious to get to it before the somalis went ahead with a plan to build a road over the crash site. the earth gave up one piece of twisted metal after another. it was surprising how much was there. few people realized that for 20 years since it fell, super 6-1 had been there, in that same place, where it went down. because of the threat from al qaeda, it was too dangerous for david and alisha to be at the site, and they were waiting for the wreckage to be brought to their home in mogadishu. >> i saw the truck pull in and i saw what appeared to be at least three of the rotor, of the blades, and i was, "wow." i said, "that can't be." >> i was amazed. >> logan: you had no idea? >> no idea. had absolutely no idea, it was just, absolute shock. >> snelson: let me show you what we found on the first dig. >> logan: they kept the wreckage safe behind their high walls and heavy security. pieces of the four rotors still attached. this massive part is the main rotor, which still dripped clean hydraulic fluid when they dug it out. >> snelson: i don't want to lift this up too much because it's really corroded and really fragile. >> logan: and these are the foot pedals used by one of the super 6-1 pilots as he struggled to control the helicopter in the final seconds of his life. it had taken them almost a year, and most of their life savings, but in june, they were finally able to package up the wreckage and send it on its way. with the help of the u.s. military, super 6-1 made it to fayetteville, north carolina, just a month and a half ago, and this is where it will stay-- on display at the airborne & special operations museum. >> hooten: i think it's coming back to where it belongs. >> logan: and that matters? >> hooten: and that matters. to anybody that was... that was there that night, it matters. >> welcome to cbs sports undate presented by pacific life, i am james with stories from around the nfl today. >> denver remains unbeaten as peyton manning throws four touchdowns, kansas city is. >> the saints also five and zero, drew brees throws two touches, green bay makes it 23 straight. >> and lions stopped since 87 and baltimore wins behind ray rice's two rushing touchdowns, for more sports news an information go to cbssports.com. >> he taught me that whales leave footprints, glassy circles on the surface that show us where they've been and sometimes where they're going. he would always say, "if you know where you're headed, you can make the smart choices to help you get there." and his legacy has helped me achieve my goals. [ male announcer ] let pacific life help you create a legacy for the ones you love. to find out how, visit pacificlife.com. [ bell dings ] ♪ [ bell dings ] ♪ [ bell dings ] ♪ [ buzzer ] [ buzzer ] [ female announcer ] check it out. [ bell dings ] subway is the first restaurant with meals to earn the american heart association's heart check mark. look for it on subway fresh fit meals like the classic subway club and the freshly-made double chicken chopped salad. subway. eat fresh. and the freshly-made double chicken chopped salad. no! you don't even get football. [ male announcer ] when you've got 100% fiber optic fios, you get it. america's fastest, most reliable internet. it's the ultimate for downloading, streaming, and chatting. -- that guy all over the football field. thanks, joe. if the running backs don't start picking up the blitz, the quarterback is going to have a long night. is that your sister? look, are you trying to take my job? maybe. technology that lets you play with the big boys. call the verizon center for customers with disabilities that's powerful. at 800-974-6006 tty/v. mom swaps one of my snacks for a yoplait. i don't mind, i mean it's orange crème. and when mom said bobby was too edgy... 'sup girl. i just swapped him out for tyler. 'sup girl. mom never questioned bobby again. two can play at this game. [ female announcer ] swap one snack a week for a yoplait. and everybody wins. yoplait. it is so good. >> cooper: for a long time, astronomers saw the asteroids and comets that come close to earth as useless debris, space rocks that blocked our view of distant galaxies. not anymore. they're now viewed as scientifically important and potentially very dangerous if they were to collide with our planet. the odds of that happening on any given day are remote, but over millions of years, scientists believe there have been lots of impacts, and few doubt there are more to come. a former astronaut told us it's like a game of "cosmic roulette," and one mankind cannot afford to lose. concern over our ability to detect these objects that come near the earth grew after an incident in russia this february, when an asteroid crashed into the atmosphere with many times the energy of the bomb dropped on hiroshima, narrowly missing a city of one million. this is video of that asteroid in russia, barreling toward earth at 40,000 miles an hour. it exploded into pieces 19 miles above and 25 miles south of the city of chelyabinsk. people thought it had missed them entirely, until minutes later, when the shock wave arrived. ( windows shattering; car alarm goes off ) shattering glass, crushing doors and knocking some people right off their feet. more than 1,000 were injured. how much warning did people in chelyabinsk have? >> paul chodas: none. >> cooper: paul chodas is a scientist at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena, california. he and his boss, don yeomans, have been trying to track near- earth objects for decades. >> chodas: we didn't see it coming. it was coming from the general direction of the sun, so it was in the daytime sky as it approached. >> cooper: so how did you find out about it? >> chodas: twitter and youtube, when we... when we first saw the images. >> cooper: so the first people at nasa that heard about it was twitter? ( laughter ) >> chodas: exactly. >> cooper: chodas says an object this size hits earth once every hundred years, on average. yet the same day, purely by chance, another asteroid twice as large came within 17,000 miles of earth, passing between us and the satellites that are bringing you this broadcast. the only reason there was any advance warning was because an amateur astronomer in spain, an oral surgeon by day, noticed it just before it moved out of view. >> amy mainzer: we know about some of the most distant galaxies in the known universe, and yet, we don't really know everything that's right in our own backyard. >> cooper: wow. amy mainzer is a nasa scientist who focuses on detecting asteroids. >> mainzer: so we got to move the dome out of the way. and then we're going to start to follow the asteroid as it tracks across the sky. >> cooper: this telescope at the table mountain observatory in california is one of dozens all over the world that are used to track and study near earth objects. mainzer told us they're often very hard to find. >> mainzer: some of these asteroids are really, really dark, darker even than coal in some cases. kind of like the soot at the bottom of a barbecue grill. >> cooper: so you're looking for something that's darker than coal against a black sky. >> mainzer: exactly. and now you see the problem. >> cooper: another problem is that ground-based telescopes can't see objects coming from the direction of the sun because they're in the daytime sky, like the asteroid that hit russia. astronomers find asteroids by taking repeated pictures of the night sky and looking for things that change position. professionals and amateurs all over the world work together, sharing information. once paul chodas and his nasa colleagues have multiple sightings, they can predict an object's location as far as 100 years into the future. >> mainzer: this particular object has a well-known orbit. >> cooper: the asteroid amy mainzer was observing the night we visited didn't look like much on her screen. that little thing? >> mainzer: yep, that's it. >> cooper: but it's nearly half a mile wide and capable of destroying an entire continent. so that's actually... that's a huge asteroid. >> mainzer: that's a huge asteroid. if something this size hit the earth, it would be devastating. it would be very bad. >> cooper: asteroids are
ChelyabinskChelyabinskaya-oblast-RussiaNorth-carolinaUnited-statesKentuckyHiroshimaJapanMogadishuBanaadirSomaliaBakara in the history of the league you're catch watching. first and 10. and moreno is wrestled down by ware. and now the cowboys take a second time-out. if only super bowl 12 had been this exciting when these two franchises met in new orleans. phil: let's go back to the interception. two times, two plays by the dallas offense. the first time they sack romo. he gets pressure, can't step through it. and, too, also, an awesome play by trevathan. cutting in front. it looks like jason wit season going to be open but because of the pressure in front of him, he can't drive the football the way he wants and trevathan makes the interception. jim: romo's first pass intercepted since the first quarter of week one. nd now second and 9. julius thomas. he's out of bounds to stop the clock at 1:40. phil: of course that really helps the dallas cowboys. going out of bounds. they still have that one time-out but now it looks like in this situation -- jim: i got to be honest. when the ball was intercepted i wondered if dallas would ever see the football again. if the broncos would manipulate away to use up all the time and run it down to the end. but they have a third and 1. a yard to go for the touchdown. a foot to go for the first. it's moreno. and he's got the first. they haven't officially signaled it yet but it certainly looks like enough. and now the cowboys have called time-out. now the broncos have all kinds of options, kline -- including just taking a couple of neill-downs and waiting to end the game at essentially an extra point difference. they might have been better had just moreno taken it in for the touchdown. phil: i know that you're -- what you're saying baugh but i would have gone for the stop, jim, because they would have kicked a field goal if it was fourth and short. but now, if it is a first down jim: it is a first down. phil: so what do you do now? you're the denver broncos here in this situation. i think you neill on it. why even give them a chance? a return, there are so many things. i think you neill on the football and you kick the field goal to win the game. jim: you've seen dallas run up and down this field and romo throw for over 500 yards so why would you give them a chance to get the football back? phil: if you're the dallas cowboys, you let them go in. jim: i don't think denver will approach that line of scrimmage. they've gone into the victory formation. phil: yes. jim: and rare -- ware falls on peyton. you don't want to have any clean looks at manning but that puts it back to the center of the field. he's not too happy about that. listen, you just went to the sideline and conferred with him what the play was going to be. but they have it dead in the middle of the field now. jim: i think the cowboys are going to think back on that third and 1. if he wasn't stopped far loss, then let him go in. phil: you can't make that process during the play. it was so close. only a couple of inches. jim: and now they'll be able to run it down, take the time-out and bring prate ore -- prater out for the win. prater in his career when he's had a possible late lead-changing or winning field goal attempt at the end of regulation or in overtime has never missed. he's 13-13. and this one is just going to be a chip shot after this snap. it will make it about a 28-yard ield goal attempt. well, we should have known. we both were saying all week we thought this might be in the 30's. we could have actually gone ahead, jumped out and said first one to 50 wins. phil: you said it was going to be a high-scoring game. 30's, mid 30's, both teams. i said no way. im: and i was wrong. phil: listen, depending on what happens here, the cowboys lose. you know, i know and everybody knows the story is going to be that tony romo threw that interception and of course, the broncos, peyton manning, their offense, they are magnificent. but in these games down, in games like this it came down to who made that big mistake. it was the dallas cowboys. jim: prater for the win and the ick is good! 51-48, broncos. in the fourth highest scoring ame in the history of the nfl. peyton throws for 414 yards, four touchdowns. uns for another score. ever a doubt about the kick. john fox, your team is one of three unbeatens. along with kansas city and new orleans. tough, really, just a brutal loss for the cowboys, who were looking at one of those, if you ll, kind of season-changing, image-changing wins. phil: absolutely. momentum, confidence, everything going forward but now you have to regroup, be tough, try to find a way to get back on track next week. jim: that's 16 straight regular-season wins but the first win that was by less than seven points and it came down to the very last second. 51-48 denver is the final score. for phil simms and all the crew, jim nantz saying so long from dallas. you've been watching the nfl on cbs. over 20 million drivers are insured with geico. so get a free rate quote today. i love it! how much do you love it? animation is hot...and i think it makes geico's 20 million drivers message very compelling, very compelling. this is some really strong stuff! so you turned me into a cartoon...lovely. geico. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. >> cbs sports presents the geico play of the day. james: early in the first quarter, kansas city colquitt punts to ray northward, who elects not to make the fair catch. the damian williams kicks the ball, making it live, allowing cooper to recover for the touchdown. the chiefs improve to 5-0 for the first time since 2003. [ female announcer ] there will be winners. there will be losers. and you will see it all with free tv streaming to your device. [ cheering ] touchdown traveler. if it matters to you, it matters to us. ♪ >> cbs sports thanks you for watching this presentation of the national football league. you woulda thoughtalked from the name of it, it was gonna be packed with sailors. so i immediately picked out the biggest guy in there. and i walked straight up to him. now he looks me square in the eye, and, i swear he says, "welcome to navy federal credit union." ha! whoa friendly alert! i got a great auto rate outta that guy. with rates slashed across the board, it's a great time to buy a car. 4 million members. 4 million stories. navy federal credit union. captioning funded by cbs and ford >> pelley: we have gone from what, six to 12 million people on dissneability. >> where did all of these disabled people come from? >> kroft: senator tom coburn says the congress pays out $105 billion to americans claiming to be disabled, and a lot of them are not. >> if the american public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits. >> kroft: we decided to look into what appears to be a large- scale disability scam. there are a lot of allegations out there that we wanted to talk to you about. >> i understand. >> logan: it was a defining moment in the history of u.s. special operations, and it was the first time american forces faced al qaeda in battle. you may remember it as "black hawk down," a phrase immortalized on the battlefield in somalia 20 years ago this past week. >> let me show you what we found on the first dig. >> logan: tonight, you're going to see and hear things about that day you never have before. you were being hit from every direction? >> that's correct. >> logan: and taking casualties constantly? >> hooten: yeah, at close range. >> you can see exactly who is trying to kill you? >> you can. >> cooper: this is video of an asteroid in russia barreling toward earth at 40,000 miles per hour. it exploded into pieces 19 miles above and 25 miles south of the city of chelyabinsk, shattering glass and knocking some people right off their feet. more than 1,000 were injured. >> they're very low-probability events, but very high- consequence events. it's something that may not happen for another 100 years, 200 years. it may happen tomorrow morning. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm bob simon. >> i'm lara logan. >> i'm anderson cooper. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories tonight on "60 minutes." cbs updates. bromide inhalation powder. >> it is cancelling its planned furloughs since the defense department is calling back most of its civilian workers, disbas $3.35 a gallon, and gravity has the biggest october movie debut ever, 55 million. i am jeff glor, cbs news. 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(cat screech) you feel that in your muscles? i do... drink water. it's a long story. well, not having branches let's us give you great rates and service. i'd like that. a new way to bank. a better way to save. ally bank. your money needs an ally. >> kroft: there is a senate hearing scheduled tomorrow on a subject of some importance to millions of americans. but with the government shut down, it's not clear that the senate committee on government affairs will be able to pay for a stenographer to record the event. the hearing involves the federal disability insurance program, which could become the first government benefits program to run out of money. when it began back in the 1950s, it was envisioned as a small program to assist people who were unable to work because of illness or injury. today, it serves nearly 12 million people, up 20% in the last six years, and has a budget of $135 billion. that's more than the government spent last year on the department of homeland security, the justice department, and the labor department combined. it's been called a "secret welfare system" with its own "disability industrial complex," a system ravaged by waste and fraud. a lot of people want to know what's going on, especially senator tom coburn of oklahoma. >> tom coburn: go read the statute. if there's any job in the economy you can perform, you are not eligible for disability. that's pretty clear. so, where'd all those disabled people come from? >> kroft: the social security administration, which runs the disability program, says the explosive surge is due to aging baby boomers and the lingering effects of a bad economy. but senator tom coburn of oklahoma, the ranking republican on the senate subcommittee for investigations-- who's also a physician-- says it's more complicated than that. last year, his staff randomly selected hundreds of disability files, and found that 25% of them should never have been approved; another 20%, he said, were highly questionable. >> coburn: if all these people are disabled that apply, i want them all to get it. and then we need to figure out how we're going to fund it. but my investigation tells me and my common sense tells me that we got a system that's being gamed pretty big right now. >> kroft: and by a lot of different people exploiting a vulnerable system. coburn says you need look no further than the commercials of disability lawyers trolling for new clients. namely, the two thirds of the people who have already applied for disability and been rejected. there's not much to lose, really. it doesn't cost you anything unless you win the appeal, and the lawyers collect from the federal government. >> marilyn zahm: if the american public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits. >> kroft: marilyn zahm and randy frye are two of the country's 1,500 disability judges. they are also the president and vice-president of the association of administrative law judges. they are each expected to read, hear, and decide up to 700 appeals a year to clear a backlog of nearly a million cases. they say disability lawyers have flooded the system with cases that shouldn't be there. >> zahm: in 1971, fewer than 20% of claimants were represented. now, over 80% of claimants are represented by attorneys or representatives. >> kroft: why do you think there's so many more lawyers involved in this than there used to be? >> zahm: it's lucrative. >> randy frye: follow the money. >> kroft: last year, the social security administration paid a billion dollars to claimants' lawyers out of its cash-strapped disability trust fund. the biggest chunk, $70 million, went to binder and binder, the largest disability firm in the country. lawyer jenna fliszar and jessica white worked for binder and binder, representing clients in front of disability judges from new hampshire to west virginia. >> jenna fliszar: i call it a legal factory, because that's all it is. i mean, they have figured out the system and they've made it into a huge national firm that makes millions of dollars a year on social security disability. >> jessica white: i was hired at the end of 2008, and business was booming because the economy was so bad. we had a lot of people who their unemployment ran out and this was the next step. >> fliszar: if you're unable to find a job, and you have any type of physical issue, then it really becomes a last ditch effort because the job market is so bad. >> kroft: many of the cases they handled involved ailments with subjective symptoms like backache, depression, and fibromyalgia, which is joint and muscle pain, along with chronic fatigue. hard to prove you've got it? >> fliszar: yes. and there's really no diagnostic testing for it. >> kroft: hard to deny you don't have it. >> fliszar: correct. >> kroft: out of the hundreds of people that you represented, how many of these cases involved strong cases for disability? >> fliszar: strong cases, i would say maybe 30% to 40%. and then i would say half of my cases were not deserving of disability. >> kroft: how many of them ultimately ended up getting benefits? >> fliszar: half. >> kroft: we tried repeatedly to reach binder and binder for comment, but our phone calls were not returned. >> coburn: we ought to err on the side of... somebody being potentially disabled. and we have a ton of people in our country that are, but what's coming about now with where we are is the very people who are truly disabled, because we have so many scallywags in the system, are going to get hurt severely when this trust fund runs out of money. >> kroft: senator coburn says disability payments are now propping up the economy in some of the poorest regions in the country, which is why he sent his investigators to the border area of kentucky and west virginia. more than a quarter of a million people in this area are on disability-- 10% to 15% of the population, about three times the national average. jennifer griffith and sarah carver processed disability claims at the social security regional office in huntington, west virginia. how important are disability checks to people in this part of the country? >> jennifer griffith: they're a vital part of our economy. a lot of people depend on them to... to survive. >> kroft: to see it first-hand, they suggested we come back right after the disability checks went out. and we did, to find crowds and traffic jams. >> griffith: you avoid the pharmacy, you avoid wal-mart. you avoid, you know, restaurants because it's just... >> sarah carver: any grocery stores. >> griffith: it's just extremely crowded. everybody's received their benefits. "let's go shopping." >> kroft: not everyone in the throngs we saw is on disability, but jennifer griffith and sarah carver say there's no question that a lot of them are and probably shouldn't be. >> carver: we have a lot of people who have exhausted their unemployment checks and have moved onto social security disability. >> kroft: this is, sort of, a bridge between unemployment and collecting social security. >> carver: generally, yes. >> kroft: are they disabled? >> carver: not always, no. >> griffith: more often than not, no. >> kroft: around here, people call it "getting on the draw" or "getting on the check," but they have other names for it. >> carver: i think you could call it a scheme. you could call it a scam. you could call it fraud. i mean, there's different definitions for it. >> kroft: large scale? >> griffith: very large scale. >> kroft: they began complaining to their bosses at the social security administration six years ago after discovering that an outsized number of claims and some questionable medical evidence was being submitted by eric conn, a flamboyant attorney whose face is plastered on billboards throughout the area and on local tv. he runs the third largest disability practice in the country out of the eric c. conn law center, which is just off route 23 in stanville, kentucky. it's a complex of several doublewides welded together with an imposing replica of the lincoln memorial in the parking lot. surprisingly, it has only one space for the disabled. i mean, it's kind of hard to miss eric conn around here, isn't it? >> griffith: you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn't know who he is in this area. >> kroft: he calls himself "mr. social security." and some of his ads say "guaranteed success." how can he make that claim? >> carver: he backs that up. >> kroft: a slam dunk? >> carver: mm-hmm. pretty much. >> kroft: that's a remarkable record. >> carver: yes, it is. >> kroft: is he that good a lawyer? >> carver:: you know... >> griffith: no. >> kroft: a lot of conn's success, they say, had to do with a particularly friendly disability judge, david daugherty, who sought out conn's cases and approved virtually all 1,823 of them, awarding a half a billion dollars' worth of lifetime benefits to conn's clients. the decisions were based on the recommendations of a loyal group of doctors who often examined conn's clients right in his law offices and always endorsed them for the disability rolls. were most of the medical reports submitted by the same doctors? >> griffith: yes. >> carver: yes. sometimes, up to 13 to 20 reports a day. >> griffith: i know on one, we counted 16 exams by the same doctor all in one day at his office. >> kroft: and they were all approved? >> griffith: they were all approved. >> kroft: were all those valid claims? >> carver: there's no way that you're going to have 100% of clients walk through your door and be disabled. 100% of claimants, there's no way. >> kroft: we were hoping that, given eric conn's outgoing personality and love of publicity, he would be eager to talk to us, but that turned out not to be the case. at first, we were told he wasn't in the office. we said we'd wait. >> hey, take some pens, too, all right? >> kroft: okay. great. about an hour later, we got a call from his lawyer in washington. you know, we don't want to make it seem like he's hiding from us. the lawyer said he'd try to coax conn out of the office, and eventually, he emerged. >> eric conn: i'm very much familiar with you. how we doing today? >> kroft: i'm doing good. look, there's a lot of allegations out there... >> conn: there are. >> kroft: ...about you that we wanted to talk to you about. >> conn: i understand. well, i'm not normally a shy person, but i think it's probably best i speak in the legal realm rather than here. i know you all have come a long way, and i don't mean to be in... inhospitable, but i just think it's probably best right now. >> kroft: you can't talk about your relationship with judge daugherty or your incredible success in... in disability court? >> conn: boy, that's tempting. ( laughter ) oh, i would love to comment on some of that. but not... i'm really sorry, i don't think i should right now. >> kroft: conn didn't want to go into it with senator coburn's investigators, either. they've been quietly working on the case for two years, interviewing witnesses and pouring over disability documents. that's why they asked us to protect their identities. what did you find out in west virginia and kentucky? >> coburn: significant fraud. >> kroft: does the name eric conn ring a bell? >> coburn: mm-hmm. i would tell you, i wouldn't want him for a brother-in-law. and he's got a lot of money, and the american taxpayer paid him that money. >> kroft: is he breaking the law? >> coburn: that's probably going to be determined by the department of justice. >> kroft: coburn says the report, to be released tomorrow, will show that conn collected more than $13 million in legal fees from the federal government over the past six years, and that he paid five doctors roughly $2 million to sign off on bogus medical forms that had been manufactured and filled out ahead of time by conn's staff. you think what you found there is just an isolated case? >> coburn: no. i mean, it's... it may be one of the worst cases. it just shows you how broken it is. you take a good concept that's well meaning, and then you don't manage it, you don't monitor it, you don't over... congress doesn't oversight it. and pretty soon, you end up with places like, in west virginia, certain counties, where, you know, you're born to be on disability. >> kroft: it should be pointed out that no one is getting rich off disability payments of $1,100 a month. it's a minimum wage income with medicare benefits after two years. but each new case will eventually cost taxpayers, on average, $300,000 in lifetime benefits. for marilyn zahm, the disability judge from buffalo, the high demand for it is a measure of the low prospects that still exist for millions of americans. >> zahm: people run out of unemployment insurance. they are not going to die silently. they are going to look for another source of income. it is not unusual for people, especially people over 40, to have some sort an ailment or impairment. so they will file for disability benefits based upon that. for many of these people, the plant closed. there are no jobs in their communities. what are people supposed to do? >> kroft: some of these people are desperate people. >> coburn: absolutely desperate. i agree. but what you're really describing is our economy and the consequences of it. and we're using a system that wasn't meant for that, because we don't have a system over here to help them. which means we're not addressing the other concerns in our society, and that's a debate congress ought to have. >> go to 60minutesovertime.com to hear what will happen to the american disability program if we don't fix it now. sponsored by pfizer. 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[ water gushes, all cheer ] ♪ safe water. ♪ that's the power of global connections. that's bank of america merrill lynch. ♪ ♪ ♪ [ male announcer ] build anything with the new toyota tundra. toyota. let's go places. man: [ laughs ] those look like baby steps now. but they were some pretty good moves. and the best move of all? having the right partner at my side. it's so much better that way. [ male announcer ] have the right partner at your side. consider an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan, insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. go long. insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. >> logan: it was a defining moment in the history of u.s. special operations, and it was the first time american forces faced al qaeda in battle. you may remember it as "black hawk down," a phrase immortalized on the battlefield in somalia 20 years ago this past week. "super 6-1" was the call sign of the first black hawk helicopter to be shot out of the sky that day, setting in motion a series of events that remain seared into america's memory-- the sight of u.s. soldiers being dragged through the streets, the capture of a badly wounded american pilot named mike durant. when the fighting ended, america pulled out of somalia with the dead and wounded, but left behind the wreckage of super 6- 1. tonight, you are going to see and hear things about that day you never have before, and meet an american couple determined to bring home a lost piece of american history. to get to the crash site of super 6-1, you have to travel into the bakara market, the worst part of mogadishu. >> david snelson: there's still people there very sympathetic with the shabaab. >> logan: which is basically al qaeda in somalia? >> snelson: it's al qaeda in somali. >> logan: david snelson is a former warrant officer for u.s. army intelligence, and he's been running a private security company here with his wife, alisha ryu, for the past three years. he took us to the crash site with a small army of 20 armed guards. so the biggest threats here really are i.e.d.s, homemade bombs? >> snelson: i.e.d.s, v.b.- i.e.d.s, or vehicle i.e.d.s. >> logan: the violent history of this ancient arab city is written in the ruins that still dominate these streets. somalia has been a country without a government for most of the past two decades, and it's only now beginning to emerge from the chaos. david's guards set up a ring of security when we got to the site. >> snelson: it's just down over here, right, right here. >> logan: oh, my gosh. this tiny little alleyway? >> snelson: it's just this tiny alleyway. >> logan: there's nothing marking the spot, just a sense of history and the knowledge that this epic battle unfolded right here where super 6-1 came down. you can see where the wreckage was laying in these haunting images taken in the days after the battle. the smashed hulk of the main rotor was right against the wall where we were standing. >> snelson: in fact, i'm relatively confident that this... this section of the wall was probably damaged in the crash and just never been repaired. >> logan: how it ended up here began with a top-secret mission. a task force of u.s. special operations troops were sent in to hunt down a violent warlord, mohamed farrah aidid, who was preventing u.s. and u.n. troops from feeding starving somalis. >> norm hooten: the mission that day was to capture key leaders of his executive staff. we had all of his executive staff at one meeting, which was very rare. usually, you get one or two, but to have ten to 12 key leaders in one spot was, was just... was just something we couldn't turn down. >> logan: norm hooten was one of the special operators leading the assault force that day, and in 20 years, he has never spoken publicly about the battle. "60 minutes" was able to obtain this surveillance video, which has not been seen publicly until now. here you can see the very beginning of the mission. hooten was flown in on one of these "little bird" helicopters to the target building, which was quickly enveloped in clouds of dust. how well did you and your men execute that main... the main objective of the mission? >> hooten: it was flawless. from the time we set down to the time we called for the helicopters to come back and get us, i would say it was no more than five minutes and it was over. >> logan: so you thought you were going back, it was done? >> hooten: yes. the helicopters were on their way back to the target to pick us up. we had everybody that we'd been trying to get for months was in one package in one mission. >> logan: then, from this rooftop, with his men under fire, hooten watched as the lead black hawk, super 6-1, headed towards him. >> hooten: and it took a direct hit to the... to the tail boom, and it went and started a slow rotation. >> logan: how hard did it hit? >> hooten: it was a catastrophic impact. that's the only way i could describe it. >> logan: this is super 6-1 moments after it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, spinning out of control before it's torn apart on impact. >> going down. we got a black hawk going down. >> logan: when super 6-1 came tumbling out of the sky on october 3, 1993, these streets were already a battlefield. thousands of angry somalis and heavily armed gunmen were locked in an intense battle with the americans. and now, the unthinkable had happened. they'd shot down a black hawk, this powerful symbol of america's might. for the men on the ground here, it was the moment that changed everything. >> matt eversmann: there is now a... a complete 90-degree turn in our plan, and it is to go recover this aircraft. >> logan: matt eversmann was one of the army rangers who fast- roped out of these black hawk helicopters to secure the target building. until then, none of their operations had lasted more than an hour, and they had no reason to think this one would be any different. some of the guys didn't even take water with them, because they thought it would be over so quickly. >> eversmann: you're looking at one of them, you know? >> logan: you didn't? >> eversmann: what an idiot. i took one of my canteens out. because you could put seven magazines into the old canteen pouch. it was a perfect fit. >> logan: hovering a few hundred feet above the battlefield in the command and control helicopter was tom matthews. back then, he was the battalion commander for the 160th special operations aviation regiment, considered the finest helicopter pilots in the world. did you see super 6-1 get hit? >> tom matthews: i did. the nose went into a wall that was reinforced with another wall on the other side. the tail boom knocked down the wall behind it. the cockpit did not break through that wall because it was reinforced. so it crushed that cockpit. >> logan: which obviously meant that the... the two pilots had no chance. >> matthews: they had no chance at impact, in... in that particular case. >> logan: matthews told us the pilots, chief warrant officers cliff wolcott and donovan briley, were among the best under his command. he recalled those first few moments after the crash, as he tried to make sense of what had happened to the eight men on board. >> matthews: first thing i saw was a guy crawl out of the wreckage of super 6-1, one of the operators who was in the back, and take up a defensive fighting position at the corner of the building to protect that crash site. and that happened within probably 30 seconds of the... of the crash. >> logan: the dark figure you can just make out standing on the corner is 25-year-old staff sergeant dan busch, as he defended super 6-1 against swarming enemy fighters. he would soon be dead. norm hooten says he and his men were doing everything they could to get to the crash site that was in danger of being overwhelmed. u've described it as being like sharks, smelling the blood in the water. >> hooten: yes. they smelled blood and they were... they were moving towards it. >> logan: matt eversmann and his team of army rangers were also trying to get to super 6-1 in this convoy, but they kept running into a hail of gunfire. >> eversmann: i think we went through three or four ambushes along the way. literally, this is... the somalis line both sides of the street, face towards the center, and... and shoot while you're driving through. i mean, that's... that's their... their battle drill. and we start to lose more soldiers by attrition. >> logan: taking casualties on the convoy... >> eversmann: you know, we're taking casualties on the convoy. you know, each ambush, we're losing more guys. >> logan: the americans were outnumbered by thousands of somalis. norm hooten said it took him and his men hours to reach the crash site, which was only a few blocks away. and all the time, you were being hit from every direction? >> hooten: that's correct. >> logan: and taking casualties constantly? >> hooten: yeah, at close range. you're within a doorway away or over a brick wall, so within... within ten feet. so, it's very... very close and very personal. >> logan: you can see exactly who's trying to kill you? >> hooten: you can. >> logan: when you finally got to that crash site, what was that like, that moment when you first saw it, you knew that you were finally there? >> hooten: i can remember seeing the tail boom kind of broken and... and sticking out. and i remember the... the relief i felt when i saw it. i said, "finally, we finally... we can finally put our arms around this thing and start solving this problem." >> logan: in the midst of this intense fight, they faced a nearly impossible task-- to free the body of one of the pilots pinned in the wreckage. it took all night. >> hooten: we used every manual tool we could to try to disassemble that aircraft and recover. we went in with straps and lifts and basically pulled that aircraft off... until we could recover our friends and... and leave. i remember being inside that aircraft, working on it, and looking out and seeing the sun coming up and thinking, "here we go. it's getting ready to get... get bad again." >> logan: so you were not going to leave that pilot's body ... >> hooten: no, no, no. >> logan: ...trapped in that aircraft. >> hooten: that was absolutely not an option. >> logan: more than 13 hours after super 6-1 went down, they were still at the crash site and the battle wasn't over yet. out of 160 americans, more than a hundred were dead or wounded. one of them was a 21-year-old army ranger from new jersey, corporal jamie smith. >> hooten: he was shot in the leg, but he was shot way up close to the hip, so you couldn't get a tourniquet on him, you know. and we kept pushing i.v.s into him for hours and he would say "am i going to die?" and we would say, "no, you're not going to die." and we'd call the helicopter in to come and get him, and it would come in and that helicopter would get shot. and then we would try to get vehicles in, and, then finally, finally, you know, after hours of this agonizing thing with a young kid. you try to tell him "no, son, you're not going to die, you're going to live." and he died... and that, that is a... that's one of the things that i... you know, keeps me up at night sometimes-- that... that horrible lie that you tell someone trying to keep his spirits up. >> logan: the memory of corporal smith and the other men who died is what david snelson and alisha ryu say they see in the remnants of super 6-1. this past spring, after careful negotiations with local clans, they were able to start digging out the wreckage. they were anxious to get to it before the somalis went ahead with a plan to build a road over the crash site. the earth gave up one piece of twisted metal after another. it was surprising how much was there. few people realized that for 20 years since it fell, super 6-1 had been there, in that same place, where it went down. because of the threat from al qaeda, it was too dangerous for david and alisha to be at the site, and they were waiting for the wreckage to be brought to their home in mogadishu. >> i saw the truck pull in and i saw what appeared to be at least three of the rotor, of the blades, and i was, "wow." i said, "that can't be." >> i was amazed. >> logan: you had no idea? >> no idea. had absolutely no idea, it was just, absolute shock. >> snelson: let me show you what we found on the first dig. >> logan: they kept the wreckage safe behind their high walls and heavy security. pieces of the four rotors still attached. this massive part is the main rotor, which still dripped clean hydraulic fluid when they dug it out. >> snelson: i don't want to lift this up too much because it's really corroded and really fragile. >> logan: and these are the foot pedals used by one of the super 6-1 pilots as he struggled to control the helicopter in the final seconds of his life. it had taken them almost a year, and most of their life savings, but in june, they were finally able to package up the wreckage and send it on its way. with the help of the u.s. military, super 6-1 made it to fayetteville, north carolina, just a month and a half ago, and this is where it will stay-- on display at the airborne & special operations museum. >> hooten: i think it's coming back to where it belongs. >> logan: and that matters? >> hooten: and that matters. to anybody that was... that was there that night, it matters. >> welcome to cbs sports undate presented by pacific life, i am james with stories from around the nfl today. >> denver remains unbeaten as peyton manning throws four touchdowns, kansas city is. >> the saints also five and zero, drew brees throws two touches, green bay makes it 23 straight. >> and lions stopped since 87 and baltimore wins behind ray rice's two rushing touchdowns, for more sports news an information go to cbssports.com. >> he taught me that whales leave footprints, glassy circles on the surface that show us where they've been and sometimes where they're going. he would always say, "if you know where you're headed, you can make the smart choices to help you get there." and his legacy has helped me achieve my goals. 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"i'm terry mcauliffe, candidate for governor, and i sponsored this ad." these are birth control pills. more than half of american women use them at some point in their lives but ken cuccinelli sponsored a bill that could have made common forms of birth control illegal, including the pill. cuccinelli was one of only five senators to support this "potentially radical intrusion into domestic, family and individual decision-making" why is ken cuccinelli interfering in our private lives? he's focused on his own agenda. not us. >> cooper: for a long time, astronomers saw the asteroids and comets that come close to earth as useless debris, space rocks that blocked our view of distant galaxies. not anymore. they're now viewed as scientifically important and potentially very dangerous if they were to collide with our planet. the odds of that happening on any given day are remote, but over millions of years, scientists believe there have been lots of impacts, and few doubt there are more to come. a former astronaut told us it's like a game of "cosmic roulette," and one mankind cannot afford to lose. concern over our ability to detect these objects that come near the earth grew after an incident in russia this february, when an asteroid crashed into the atmosphere with many times the energy of the bomb dropped on hiroshima, narrowly missing a city of one million. this is video of that asteroid in russia, barreling toward earth at 40,000 miles an hour. it exploded into pieces 19 miles above and 25 miles south of the city of chelyabinsk. people thought it had missed them entirely, until minutes later, when the shock wave arrived. ( windows shattering; car alarm goes off ) shattering glass, crushing doors and knocking some people right off their feet. more than 1,000 were injured. how much warning did people in chelyabinsk have? >> paul chodas: none. >> cooper: paul chodas is a scientist at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena, california. he and his boss, don yeomans, have been trying to track near- earth objects for decades. >> chodas: we didn't see it coming. it was coming from the general direction of the sun, so it was in the daytime sky as it approached. >> cooper: so how did you find out about it? >> chodas: twitter and youtube, when we... when we first saw the images. >> cooper: so the first people at nasa that heard about it was twitter? ( laughter ) >> chodas: exactly. >> cooper: chodas says an object this size hits earth once every hundred years, on average. yet the same day, purely by chance, another asteroid twice as large came within 17,000 miles of earth, passing between us and the satellites that are bringing you this broadcast. the only reason there was any advance warning was because an amateur astronomer in spain, an oral surgeon by day, noticed it just before it moved out of view. >> amy mainzer: we know about some of the most distant galaxies in the known universe, and yet, we don't really know everything that's right in our own backyard. >> cooper: wow. amy mainzer is a nasa scientist who focuses on detecting asteroids. >> mainzer: so we got to move the dome out of the way. and then we're going to start to follow the asteroid as it tracks across the sky. >> cooper: this telescope at the table mountain observatory in california is one of dozens all over the world that are used to track and study near earth objects. mainzer told us they're often very hard to find. >> mainzer: some of these asteroids are really, really dark, darker even than coal in some cases. kind of like the soot at the bottom of a barbecue grill. >> cooper: so you're looking for something that's darker than coal against a black sky. >> mainzer: exactly. and now you see the problem. >> cooper: another problem is that ground-based telescopes can't see objects coming from the direction of the sun because they're in the daytime sky, like the asteroid that hit russia. astronomers find asteroids by taking repeated pictures of the night sky and looking for things that change position. professionals and amateurs all over the world work together, sharing information. once paul chodas and his nasa colleagues have multiple sightings, they can predict an object's location as far as 100 years into the future. >> mainzer: this particular object has a well-known orbit. >> cooper: the asteroid amy mainzer was observing the night we visited didn't look like much on her screen. that little thing? >> mainzer: yep, that's it. >> cooper: but it's nearly half a mile wide and capable of destroying an entire continent. so that's actually... that's a huge asteroid. >> mainzer: that's a huge asteroid. if something this size hit the earth, it would be devastating. it would be very bad. >> cooper: asteroids are composed mostly of rock; comets- ice and dust. they come in all shapes and sizes. some look like small planets; others, giant dog-bones. for a long time, nobody thought they were worth tracking at all. >> mainzer: it wasn't thought that they really did hit the earth. astronomers debated for a long time about the nature of the craters on the moon, and they thought that the craters on the moon were volcanic. >> mainzer: possibly, yeah. and it's only been fairly recently, within, you know, the last 50 years or so, that the field has really recognized that, yeah, impacts actually do happen. and not only do they happen on geological time scales, you know, millions and billions of years, but on human time scales, in some cases. >> cooper: the last major asteroid to collide with earth hit in 1908, in the tunguska region of siberia. it's believed to have been 40 yards wide and to have exploded in the air like a nuclear bomb, leveling 80 million trees in an area the size of metropolitan washington. this crater in northern arizona was created 50,000 years ago. it's one of more than 180 impact craters geologists have found so far. they think there are many more, hidden by water and vegetation, more even than on the moon, because the earth's gravity is greater. the most famous impact of all is the one that may have wiped out the dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago.
ChelyabinskChelyabinskaya-oblast-RussiaNorth-carolinaUnited-statesKentuckyHiroshimaJapanMogadishuBanaadirSomaliaBakara ford builds 23,000 vehicles a day; lamborghini builds 11, each purchased a year in advance, each unique. it is very beautiful and it is completely impractical. >> yes. >> pelley: tonight, "60 minutes" celebrates 50 years of italy's super car, the lamborghini. >> stahl: cate blanchett is a won the academy award for best actress for her role in "blue jasmine," about a park avenue socialite married to a con man. >> you know, someday, when you come into great wealth, you must remember to be generous. >> stahl: she has played a queen, an elf, an albino, and a man. >> i guess i've got one of those faces that's not particularly beautiful, not too ugly, you know. i can look... >> stahl: come on. >> ...a bit masculine, i can look a bit feminine, depending on how you're lit, how you're shot. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm morley safer. >> i'm bob simon. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories tonight on "60 minutes". >> cbs money watch update sponsored by lincoln financial. calling all chief life officers. >> glor: king. ken feinberg tomorrow will unveil the terms of gm's ignition switch compensation plan. the supreme court rules tomorrow on whether businesses have to offer contraception coverage. and the white house will ask for more than $2 billion to help handle a surge of illegal immigrants. i'm jeff glor, cbs news. 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>> kroft: the social security administration, which runs the disability program, says the surge in claims is due to aging baby boomers and the lingering effects of a bad economy. but senator tom coburn of oklahoma, the ranking republican on the senate subcommittee for investigations-- who's also a physician-- says it's more complicated than that. in 2012, his staff randomly selected hundreds of disability files, and found that 25% of them should never have been approved; another 20%, he said, were highly questionable. >> coburn: if all these people are disabled that apply, i want them all to get it. and then we need to figure out how we're going to fund it. but my investigation tells me and my common sense tells me that we got a system that's being gamed pretty big right now. >> kroft: and by a lot of different people exploiting a vulnerable system. coburn says you need look no further than the commercials of disability lawyers trolling for new clients. namely, the two thirds of the people who have already applied for disability and been rejected. there's not much to lose, really. it doesn't cost you anything unless you win the appeal, and the lawyers collect from the federal government. >> marilyn zahm: if the american public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits. >> kroft: marilyn zahm and randy frye are two of the country's 1,500 disability judges. they are also the president and vice-president of the association of administrative law judges. they are each expected to read, hear, and decide up to 700 appeals a year to clear a backlog of nearly a million cases. they say disability lawyers have flooded the system with cases that shouldn't be there. >> zahm: in 1971, fewer than 20% of claimants were represented. now, over 80% of claimants are represented by attorneys or representatives. >> kroft: why do you think there's so many more lawyers involved in this than there used to be? >> zahm: it's lucrative. >> randy frye: follow the money. >> kroft: in 2012, the social security administration paid a billion dollars to claimants' lawyers out of its cash-strapped disability trust fund. the biggest chunk, $70 million, went to binder and binder, the largest disability firm in the country. lawyer jenna fliszar and jessica white worked for binder and binder, representing clients in front of disability judges from new hampshire to west virginia. >> jenna fliszar: i call it a legal factory, because that's all it is. i mean, they have figured out the system and they've made it into a huge national firm that makes millions of dollars a year on social security disability. >> jessica white: i was hired at the end of 2008, and business was booming because the economy was so bad. we had a lot of people who their unemployment ran out and this was the next step. >> fliszar: if you're unable to find a job, and you have any type of physical issue, then it really becomes a last ditch effort because the job market is so bad. >> kroft: many of the cases they handled involved ailments with subjective symptoms like backache, depression, and fibromyalgia, which is joint and muscle pain, along with chronic fatigue. hard to prove you've got it? >> fliszar: yes. and there's really no diagnostic testing for it. >> kroft: hard to deny you don't have it. >> fliszar: correct. >> kroft: out of the hundreds of people that you represented, how many of these cases involved strong cases for disability? >> fliszar: strong cases, i would say maybe 30% to 40%. and then i would say half of my cases were not deserving of disability. >> kroft: how many of them ultimately ended up getting benefits? >> fliszar: half. >> kroft: we tried repeatedly to reach binder and binder for comment, but our phone calls were not returned. >> coburn: we ought to err on the side of... somebody being potentially disabled. and we have a ton of people in our country that are, but what's coming about now with where we are is the very people who are truly disabled, because we have so many scallywags in the system, are going to get hurt severely when this trust fund runs out of money. >> kroft: senator coburn says disability payments are now propping up the economy in some of the poorest regions in the country, which is why he sent his investigators to the border area of kentucky and west virginia. more than a quarter of a million people in this area are on disability-- 10% to 15% of the population, about three times the national average. jennifer griffith and sarah carver processed disability claims at the social security regional office in huntington, west virginia. how important are disability checks to people in this part of the country? >> jennifer griffith: they're a vital part of our economy. a lot of people depend on them to... to survive. >> kroft: to see it first-hand, they suggested we come back right after the disability checks went out. and we did, to find crowds and traffic jams. >> griffith: you avoid the pharmacy, you avoid wal-mart. you avoid, you know, restaurants because it's just... >> sarah carver: any grocery stores. >> griffith: it's just extremely crowded. everybody's received their benefits. "let's go shopping." >> kroft: not everyone in the throngs we saw is on disability, but jennifer griffith and sarah carver say there's no question that a lot of them are and probably shouldn't be. >> carver: we have a lot of people who have exhausted their unemployment checks and have moved onto social security disability. >> kroft: this is, sort of, a bridge between unemployment and collecting social security. >> carver: generally, yes. >> kroft: are they disabled? >> carver: not always, no. >> griffith: more often than not, no. >> kroft: around here, people call it "getting on the draw" or "getting on the check," but they have other names for it. >> carver: i think you could call it a scheme. you could call it a scam. you could call it fraud. i mean, there's different definitions for it. >> kroft: large scale? >> griffith: very large scale. >> kroft: they began complaining to their bosses at the social security administration six years ago after discovering that an outsized number of claims and some questionable medical evidence was being submitted by eric conn, a flamboyant attorney whose face is plastered on billboards throughout the area and on local tv. he runs one of the largest disability practices in the country out of the eric c. conn law center, which is just off route 23 in stanville, kentucky. it's a complex of several doublewides welded together with an imposing replica of the lincoln memorial in the parking lot. surprisingly, it has only one space for the disabled. i mean, it's kind of hard to miss eric conn around here, isn't it? >> griffith: you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn't know who he is in this area. >> kroft: he calls himself "mr. social security." and some of his ads say "guaranteed success." how can he make that claim? >> carver: he backs that up. >> kroft: a slam dunk? >> carver: mm-hmm. pretty much. >> kroft: that's a remarkable record. >> carver: yes, it is. >> kroft: is he that good a lawyer? >> carver:: you know... >> griffith: no. >> kroft: a lot of conn's success, they say, had to do with a particularly friendly disability judge, david daugherty, who sought out conn's cases and approved virtually all 1,823 of them, awarding a half a billion dollars worth of lifetime benefits to conn's clients. the decisions were based on the recommendations of a loyal group of doctors who often examined conn's clients right in his law offices and always endorsed them for the disability rolls. were most of the medical reports submitted by the same doctors? >> griffith: yes. >> carver: yes. sometimes, up to 13 to 20 reports a day. >> griffith: i know on one, we counted 16 exams by the same doctor all in one day at his office. >> kroft: and they were all approved? >> griffith: they were all approved. >> kroft: were all those valid claims? >> carver: there's no way that you're going to have 100% of clients walk through your door and be disabled. 100% of claimants, there's no way. >> kroft: we were hoping that, given eric conn's outgoing personality and love of publicity, he would be eager to talk to us, but that turned out not to be the case. at first, we were told he wasn't in the office. we said we'd wait. >> hey, take some pens, too, all right? >> kroft: okay. great. about an hour later, we got a call from his lawyer in washington. you know, we don't want to make it seem like he's hiding from us. the lawyer said he'd try to coax conn out of the office, and eventually, he emerged. >> eric conn: i'm very much familiar with you. how we doing today? >> kroft: i'm doing good. look, there's a lot of allegations out there... >> conn: there are. >> kroft: ...about you that we wanted to talk to you about. conn: i understand. well, i'm not normally a shy person, but i think it's probably best i speak in the legal realm rather than here. i know you all have come a long way, and i don't mean to be in... inhospitable, but i just think it's probably best right now. >> kroft: you can't talk about your relationship with judge daugherty or your incredible success in... in disability court? >> conn: boy, that's tempting. ( laughter ) oh, i would love to comment on some of that. but not... i'm really sorry, i don't think i should right now. >> kroft: conn didn't want to go into it with senator coburn's investigators, either. they worked on the case for two years, interviewing witnesses and poring over disability documents. that's why they asked us to protect their identities. what did you find out in west virginia and kentucky? >> coburn: significant fraud. >> kroft: does the name eric conn ring a bell? >> coburn: mm-hmm. i would tell you, i wouldn't want him for a brother-in-law. and he's got a lot of money, and the american taxpayer paid him that money. >> kroft: is he breaking the law? >> coburn: that's probably going to be determined by the department of justice. >> kroft: coburn's report, which was released last fall, showed that conn collected more than $13 million in legal fees from the federal government over the past seven years, and that he paid five doctors roughly $2 million to regularly sign off on bogus medical forms that had been manufactured and filled out ahead of time by conn's staff. you think what you found there is just an isolated case? >> coburn: no. i mean, it's... it may be one of the worst cases. it just shows you how broken it is. you take a good concept that's well meaning, and then you don't manage it, you don't monitor it, you don't over... congress doesn't oversight it. and pretty soon, you end up with places like, in west virginia, certain counties, where, you know, you're born to be on disability. >> kroft: it should be pointed out that no one is getting rich off disability payments of $1,100 a month. it's a minimum wage income with medicare benefits after two years. but each new case will eventually cost taxpayers, on average, $300,000 in lifetime benefits. for marilyn zahm, the disability judge from buffalo, the high demand for it is a measure of the low prospects that still exist for millions of americans. >> zahm: people run out of unemployment insurance. they are not going to die silently. they are going to look for another source of income. it is not unusual for people, especially people over 40, to have some sort an ailment or impairment. so they will file for disability benefits based upon that. for many of these people, the plant closed. there are no jobs in their communities. what are people supposed to do? >> kroft: some of these people are desperate people. >> coburn: absolutely desperate. i agree. but what you're really describing is our economy and the consequences of it. and we're using a system that wasn't meant for that, because we don't have a system over here to help them. which means we're not addressing the other concerns in our society, and that's a debate congress ought to have. >> if a disability fund goes dry, what happens? go to 60minutesovertime.com sponsored by pfizer. 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( laughter ) it happens. >> pelley: no, really. >> niccoli: yeah, really, it's funny. we see here pink cars or strange colors, really. >> pelley: the customer is king? >> niccoli: yes, of course. >> pelley: as we walked the plant with niccoli, we were struck by a sharp division of labor. nearly everyone on this assembly line is a man. but if you go over to where the interior is done, nearly everyone is a woman. why is that? >> niccoli: i can tell you this. we really need women on the interior. because the precision that the women has, unfortunately, we as men, we don't have that. >> pelley: we don't have the precision? >> niccoli: not the precision and the manuality to really... to create a masterpiece like our interior. >> pelley: the car is male on the outside and female on the inside? >> niccoli: ( laughs ) let's say it like this. yeah, it could be. >> pelley: these don't look like any other car on the road. something that makes you smile. ( laughter ) the guy with the proud father look is filippo perini, the chief designer in charge of the look of lamborghini. when we were driving the aventador today on the road, there was a truck, and the passenger in the truck turned around to take a picture of the car. they want to take our picture. why does that happen? >> filippo perini: because we are in italy; people love beautiful cars. >> pelley: perini runs this shop, where designers who love beautiful cars take their inspiration, we're told, from the contours of insects and fighter planes. do you ever design something and show it to the engineers, and the enginers say, "we can't build that"? >> perini: yeah, yeah, it's all... it happened always like this. >> the driver, steering wheel... >> pelley: when we asked perini for lamborghini's dna, he drew a single arc. that is a lamborghini line. >> perini: this is a... really a lamborghini line, this is our own way to produce cars. >> pelley: an uninterrupted line from front to rear. it's very beautiful and it is completely impractical. there is no trunk. >> perini: no, we have a good trunk in front. >> pelley: all right. yeah. but if you want your golf clubs, you're going to have to have another car. >> perini: i think, with a car like this, you won't have time to do golf. >> pelley: you won't want to play golf because you'll be driving your car. >> perini: yes, yes. >> pelley: one thing that could fit in there are lamborghini's profits. in the $400,000 car business, any recession slams on the brakes. mr. lamborghini and a series of owners have lost fortunes. that began to change in 1998, when volkswagen bought the company under its audi brand. at a race in england, lamborghini president and c.e.o. stephan winkelmann told us the company has been making money now since 2006. one of the selling points, in addition to style and speed, is the sound. engineers labor over the growl. you can tell that a lamborghini's coming before you ever see it. in new york, we asked then-chief operating officer of lamborghint important question a buyer can ask: "what's wrong with it?" >> michael lock: what's wrong with it? i think... if i were to be critical, i would say that we need to do a very good job of managing the perception of our brand. we want to make sure that lamborghini is seen as a friendly brand. >> pelley: after the great recession, especially this soon after the great recession, you want to make sure your driver's not scorned. >> lock: no, indeed. i think that's very important. >> pelley: lock told us that even though the company is profitable, thanks to german discipline, the car still has to be sold the italian way. you're trying to seduce people... >> lock: indeed. >> pelley: ...with this car, because that's the only way you can get somebody to write a $400,000 check. >> lock: ( laughs ) seduction is certainly an important part of that process, yes. >> pelley: they have to be just a little bit irrational about this purchase. >> lock: they have to be a little bit romantic, certainly. >> pelley: what's the difference? you'd have to be hopelessly romantic and maybe embarrassingly rich to join lamborghini's 50th anniversary party in the spring of 2013. 350 owners shipped their raging bulls from all around the world for a ten-city, five-day sprint through italy. it looks like we sped these pictures up but, of course, we didn't. an italian road can really look like this when the steering is as precise as leonardo da vinci and the brakes have the stopping power of sophia loren. how do you get all this past the highway patrol? build them a lamborghini. nearly every model from every era filled the piazzas to be blessed, fussed over, photographed and admired as part of the national heritage. no two alike, each crafted as a matter of taste. even this was an offer lamborghini couldn't refuse. ( horn playing theme to "the godfather" ) the rally ended with a coming out party for a new car named for a bull that murdered a matador. lamborghini built only four venenos, one for itself and three that sold for $4 million each. who buys that?! >> lock: very few people. and the most difficult thing to manage in the process of selling those cars was having a palatable story for the six or seven who we couldn't get a car for. >> pelley: you had to tell them why they couldn't buy a $4 million car. >> lock: i had to explain that we had a very limited production available on these cars. >> pelley: how many of the three veneno buyers bought the car sight unseen? >> lock: all three of them. ♪ ♪ >> pelley: the golden anniversary party ended with opera and fireworks, as all italian celebrations must. with five decades in the rearview mirror, lamborghini is still exploring the limits of the science of engineering and the art of irrational romance. nice. wrench? what? aflac! so this is who you brought to help us out? oh yeah, he's the best. hmm... he doesn't look like he's seen a tool in his life. oh, he doesn't know anything about tools. aflac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac! but when i broke my arm, he lent a hand. he paid my claim in just four days. four days? wow! it's no accident - aflac pays fast. find out how fast at aflac.com and remember,accidents don't hurt as much when you have aflac. better. 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"vanity fair" called her "a character actress in a leading woman's body." so, you've played the queen of england, you've played an elf, you played an italian immigrant... >> cate blanchett: albino. >> stahl: albino. >> blanchett: and that's just before breakfast this morning. ( laughs ) i have pink eyes. like a putano, huh? like the devil, eh? >> stahl: the range is extraordinary. >> blanchett: i guess i've got one of those faces that's not particularly beautiful, not too ugly, you know. i can look... >> stahl: come on. >> blanchett: ...a bit masculine, i can look a bit feminine, depending on how you're lit, how you're shot. i don't mind not looking conventionally, you know, attractive, if that's what the part requires. >> stahl: so she can be gorgeous and regal as the elf queen in "lord of the rings"; not so much when she played bob dylan. >> blanchett: you just want me to say what you want me to say. i don't feel like, "now, i'm a great actress." i never feel that. you always think, "okay, i've learned that. well, now what if i did that?" golly! >> stahl: they call her a chameleon, the way she almost molts into her characters, as when she played katharine hepburn in "the aviator," for which she won an oscar for best supporting actress. >> blanchett: you're not extending enough on your follow- through. follow-through is everything in golf, just like life... ( laughs ) don't you find? >> stahl: she spent weeks with a voice coach perfecting hepburn's distinctive accent. can you speak katharine hepburn? >> blanchett: no, i can't do anything. i'm terrible. i'm the worst dinner party guest in the world. people say, "oh, do... do your scottish," and i'll go, "okee, i'll do me..." i sound like i'm a cross between sort of from new delhi and boston. ( laughs ) it's terrible. >> stahl: in "blue jasmine," she plays a desperate park avenue socialite who loses her life of status and luxury when her husband turns out to be a swindler like bernie madoff. >> blanchett: uh, i was forced to take a job selling shoes on madison avenue. oh, so humiliating. friends i'd had at dinner parties at our apartment came in and i waited on them. i mean, do you have any idea what that's like? she was monumentally deluded. and like a lot of us, i mean, we... our lives are built on a fictionalized sense of self, who we would... who we aspire to be, rather than perhaps who we actually are. >> stahl: you do a lot of research. you're known for reading, watching videos, getting... >> blanchett: it's enjoyable. it's enjoyable. >> stahl: is it true that you watched the "60 minutes" morley safer interview of ruth madoff? >> ruth madoff: if i could change things, at least if i had tried, i would have felt a little better. >> stahl: ...bernie madoff's wife? >> blanchett: yes, absolutely. >> stahl: did that help you? did it? >> blanchett: it did. i think that what i really got from them, that madoff interview, was the sense of shame. and i found that very useful. >> stahl: one critic called it "the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career." >> blanchett: you know, someday, when you come into great wealth, you must remember to be generous. >> stahl: but for blanchett, woody allen's notoriously minimal direction was unnerving. you really love to talk things out. and as i understand it, that's not his style. >> blanchett: ( laughs ) no. he's monosyllabic at best. i don't know how to do this thing unless it's in conversation with somebody else. i can't... monologue is... terrifies me. ( laughs ) >> stahl: but that's what you got. >> blanchett: first day, he said, "it's awful. you're awful." >> stahl: to you? >> blanchett: yeah. >> stahl: he said "awful"? >> blanchett: "it's awful." >> stahl: but he didn't say what to do? he just said, "it's awful"? >> blanchett: no. no. >> stahl: so then, you did it again... >> blanchett: and it was still awful. but... >> stahl: it was still awful? >> blanchett: well, obviously, it got a bit better because it didn't... you know, people hae gone to see it. >> stahl: her breakthrough role came in 1998 as the queen of england in "elizabeth." >> blanchett: i am married to england. >> stahl: after that performance, she was offered other big parts, but went for characters who stretched her, rather than ones that would make her famous. even though she's often on the red carpet these days, blanchett never sought to be a movie star, nor did she think she'd ever be one. she's the middle child of a school teacher mother and transplanted texan father, who died when she was ten. she dropped out of college to study theater. what she wanted was to be a great stage actress, and got her first major role in a play here at the sydney theater company. >> blanchett: there's a photo over here... >> stahl: in 1993, she co- starred with fellow aussie geoffrey rush in david mamet's "oleanna." look how into it you are. you are so inside. >> blanchett: it was one of those plays. you can look at yourself and you can see those things that i see. and you can find revulsion equal to my own. good day! >> stahl: you were a triumph in it. people were dazzled. >> blanchett: yeah, the director actually almost sacked me. and that was probably a big motivator for me to... to do a better job. >> stahl: are you one of those people... are you one of those people that... >> blanchett: likes to be terrified? >> stahl: ...likes to be terrified? >> blanchett: i think it's the only way to work for me. >> stahl: it motivates you? >> blanchett: yeah. i'm much better with truth. >> stahl: even if it hurts? >> blanchett: even if it hurts. >> stahl: well, i think you've talked about the whole process as the "trapeze effect." you're flying up there, and you could fall. >> blanchett: yes. >> stahl: it's fear. >> blanchett: when you're stretching yourself, as a role like "blue jasmine" did for me, you risk falling flat on your face. >> stahl: she applies that same risk-taking to her personal life, as when she and andrew upton, a playwright and director, decided to get married on a whim. they were both part of the sydney theater crowd. how did you meet? how did the sparks start? >> andrew upton: the sparks started slowly, i think, personally. >> blanchett: we didn't like each other. >> upton: we didn't get on at all at first sight. >> stahl: really? >> blanchett: and then, all of a sudden, we played poker... poker one night, and you were telling me about how you were in love with a friend of mine, and then... ( laughter ) we kissed. >> stahl: and all of a sudden, you're asking her to marry you, real fast, as i understand it. >> upton: i think it was about 21 days. >> stahl: and you said yes right away? three weeks? >> blanchett: yeah. but you leap off at the same moment. and i think it's all about timing. >> stahl: she says their marriage is a partnership-- in the raising of their three sons, ages five, nine, and 12-- and in their careers. upton has been her collaborator and sounding board. and they share a love of their country. she's australian through and through, down-to-earth, and happy to be 18 time zones away from hollywood. >> blanchett: i adore australia. i mean, i live and work here. and i'm buoyed up by it. i'm inspired by it. >> stahl: as she took us for a walk along the sydney coast, she talked about her private life. except for her husband, the only member of the family we'd be allowed to film would be the dog, fletcher. her home and her children were off limits. in the late '90s, she and upton moved to england, and her movie career took off. but in 2006, the sydney theater company invited them to come back and take over as co- artistic directors, and they jumped at it. >> blanchett: it was one of the quickest decisions i think we made, once the offer had come our way, apart from how quickly we got married. ( laughter ) maybe in the same spirit, strangely. >> upton: yeah, i think it was in the same spirit of adventure. >> stahl: it's a job they shared for six years. it kept cate in sydney, allowing her to spend more time with their children, and to return to her first love, theater. so this is wardrobe. while she acted in some of the productions, she also became an administrator, overseeing things like wardrobe and props. she and upton hired big name directors, and brought the company international acclaim with ambitious productions like "streetcar named desire," which they took to new york in 2009, with cate as blanche dubois. it is so intense. it was so intense. how long does it take you to come down from an experience on the stage like that? >> blanchett: at the time, you just... you do eight shows a week, my hair was falling out by the end, and i mean... >> stahl: your... is that true? >> blanchett: yeah. it was not... >> stahl: your hair was falling out, because you put so much into it. >> blanchett: but i think i was just so exhausted by... by it. >> stahl: she's known for being low maintenance, her dramas strictly onscreen or on stage. when we met her before a performance of "uncle vanya," she was doing her own makeup. >> your life should not be to grumble and moan. >> stahl: well, what's she like after a performance? does she stay in the role? >> upton: no. >> stahl: she comes home, and she's still blanche dubois that night... >> blanchett: don't answer that, andrew. ( laughter ) >> stahl: she comes home and she's cate...? >> upton: yeah. >> stahl: after these emotional, powerful... >> upton: yeah. quite calm and chirpy. >> stahl: she says she's not a "method" actor who "mines" her inner self to unlock a character. >> blanchett: it has nothing to do with me and the fact that my dog died or my father died with my... when i was ten, and making the grief small and personal and inward. and so therefore you don't carry it home, because you're not going through some personal, inward self-analysis every night that could eat you away. you're giving it away to the audience and hopefully, if it works, then, it's their... they have... it's their problem. >> stahl: they take it in. well, yeah. >> blanchett: they can take it home. >> stahl: in december, cate decided to leave the sydney theater company and a job she loved. what went into that decision? >> blanchett: the children. you could feel their school needs beginning to grow. they actually need that attention and, at a certain point, you have to make a decision about that, and that's not something we want to outsource. >> stahl: now, her decisions about what roles to take in movies include how long she'd have to be away from home or whether she can take the boys with her on location, as she did with "blue jasmine," her comeback to the movies, which she has done with a roar. you're 44 years old. >> blanchett: am i? we don't need to discuss that. >> stahl: yeah, you are... >> blanchett: we don't need to rub that in. let's not... >> stahl: i'm not rubbing it in. i think it's great to be 44, frankly. but it can be a tough age for an actress. at least, that's the myth, i guess. because for you, it's been a fabulous age. >> blanchett: well, i came to the film industry, i mean, in actress years, i was pushing 80, because i was in my mid-20s when i made my first film. >> stahl: now, her movie career is so hot, she's already signed up for seven films. she's booked solid through at least 2015. what is the hardest part of your job? the thing you struggle with the most? >> blanchett: oh, look. is it hard? i don't know that it's hard. i'm an actress. i think the most complicated thing-- it's the military maneuver of getting two careers, three children, but that's a working mother's problem, working parents' problem, that's not the challenge of work. i think, in relation to the work, the trickiest thing is beginning. i think it's quite a tricky neuro-linguistic process actually to try and make something that another... that a character has said, to make it come out through your body and make it seem like that's natural. it's kind of tricking yourself; the confidence trick. like an athlete does, you have to just say: "i'm just going to start. i'm ready. i'm open. let's go." >> stahl: she'll be returning to the stage in august, performing here in new york city in the sydney theater company's production of "the maids." her role-- a homicidal house servant in a world of haves and have nots. 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New-yorkUnited-statesAustraliaGermanyTexasNew-delhiDelhiIndiaKentuckyBostonMassachusettsIndiana ford builds 23,000 vehicles a day; lamborghini builds 11, each purchased a year in advance, each unique. it is very beautiful and it is completely impractical. >> yes. >> pelley: tonight, "60 minutes" celebrates 50 years of italy's super car, the lamborghini. >> stahl: cate blanchett is a won the academy award for best actress for her role in "blue jasmine," about a park avenue socialite married to a con man. >> you know, someday, when you come into great wealth, you must remember to be generous. >> stahl: she has played a queen, an elf, an albino, and a man. >> i guess i've got one of those faces that's not particularly beautiful, not too ugly, you know. i can look... >> stahl: come on. >> ...a bit masculine, i can look a bit feminine, depending on how you're lit, how you're shot. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm morley safer. >> i'm bob simon. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories tonight on "60 minutes". >> cbs money watch update sponsored by lincoln financial. calling all chief life officers. >> glor: king. ken feinberg tomorrow will unveil the terms of gm's ignition switch compensation plan. the supreme court rules tomorrow on whether businesses have to offer contraception coverage. and the white house will ask for more than $2 billion to help handle a surge of illegal immigrants. i'm jeff glor, cbs news. with roc® multi correxion® 5 in 1. proven to hydrate dryness, illuminate dullness, lift sagging, diminish the look of dark spots, and smooth the appearance of wrinkles. high performance skincare™ only from roc®. and smooth the appearance mom has a headache! had a headache! but now, i& don't. excedrin is fast. in fact for some, relief starts in just 15 minutes. excedrin. headache. gone. this is lady. ♪ she's a unicorn... ...and a pegasus. and why is she strapped to the roof of my rav4? 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>> kroft: the social security administration, which runs the disability program, says the surge in claims is due to aging baby boomers and the lingering effects of a bad economy. but senator tom coburn of oklahoma, the ranking republican on the senate subcommittee for investigations-- who's also a physician-- says it's more complicated than that. in 2012, his staff randomly selected hundreds of disability files, and found that 25% of them should never have been approved; another 20%, he said, were highly questionable. >> coburn: if all these people are disabled that apply, i want them all to get it. and then we need to figure out how we're going to fund it. but my investigation tells me and my common sense tells me that we got a system that's being gamed pretty big right now. >> kroft: and by a lot of different people exploiting a vulnerable system. coburn says you need look no further than the commercials of disability lawyers trolling for new clients. namely, the two thirds of the people who have already applied for disability and been rejected. there's not much to lose, really. it doesn't cost you anything unless you win the appeal, and the lawyers collect from the federal government. >> marilyn zahm: if the american public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits. >> kroft: marilyn zahm and randy frye are two of the country's 1,500 disability judges. they are also the president and vice-president of the association of administrative law judges. they are each expected to read, hear, and decide up to 700 appeals a year to clear a backlog of nearly a million cases. they say disability lawyers have flooded the system with cases that shouldn't be there. >> zahm: in 1971, fewer than 20% of claimants were represented. now, over 80% of claimants are represented by attorneys or representatives. >> kroft: why do you think there's so many more lawyers involved in this than there used to be? >> zahm: it's lucrative. >> randy frye: follow the money. >> kroft: in 2012, the social security administration paid a billion dollars to claimants' lawyers out of its cash-strapped disability trust fund. the biggest chunk, $70 million, went to binder and binder, the largest disability firm in the country. lawyer jenna fliszar and jessica white worked for binder and binder, representing clients in front of disability judges from new hampshire to west virginia. >> jenna fliszar: i call it a legal factory, because that's all it is. i mean, they have figured out the system and they've made it into a huge national firm that makes millions of dollars a year on social security disability. >> jessica white: i was hired at the end of 2008, and business was booming because the economy was so bad. we had a lot of people who their unemployment ran out and this was the next step. >> fliszar: if you're unable to find a job, and you have any type of physical issue, then it really becomes a last ditch effort because the job market is so bad. >> kroft: many of the cases they handled involved ailments with subjective symptoms like backache, depression, and fibromyalgia, which is joint and muscle pain, along with chronic fatigue. hard to prove you've got it? >> fliszar: yes. and there's really no diagnostic testing for it. >> kroft: hard to deny you don't have it. >> fliszar: correct. >> kroft: out of the hundreds of people that you represented, how many of these cases involved strong cases for disability? >> fliszar: strong cases, i would say maybe 30% to 40%. and then i would say half of my cases were not deserving of disability. >> kroft: how many of them ultimately ended up getting benefits? >> fliszar: half. >> kroft: we tried repeatedly to reach binder and binder for comment, but our phone calls were not returned. >> coburn: we ought to err on the side of... somebody being potentially disabled. and we have a ton of people in our country that are, but what's coming about now with where we are is the very people who are truly disabled, because we have so many scallywags in the system, are going to get hurt severely when this trust fund runs out of money. >> kroft: senator coburn says disability payments are now propping up the economy in some of the poorest regions in the country, which is why he sent his investigators to the border area of kentucky and west virginia. more than a quarter of a million people in this area are on disability-- 10% to 15% of the population, about three times the national average. jennifer griffith and sarah carver processed disability claims at the social security regional office in huntington, west virginia. how important are disability th a lot of people depend on them to... to survive. >> kroft: to see it first-hand, they suggested we come back right after the disability checks went out. and we did, to find crowds and traffic jams. >> griffith: you avoid the pharmacy, you avoid wal-mart. you avoid, you know, restaurants because it's just... >> sarah carver: any grocery stores. >> griffith: it's just extremely crowded. everybody's received their benefits. "let's go shopping." >> kroft: not everyone in the throngs we saw is on disability, but jennifer griffith and sarah carver say there's no question that a lot of them are and probably shouldn't be. >> carver: we have a lot of people who have exhausted their unemployment checks and have moved onto social security disability. >> kroft: this is, sort of, a bridge between unemployment and collecting social security. >> carver: generally, yes. >> kroft: are they disabled? >> carver: not always, no. >> griffith: more often than not, no. >> kroft: around here, people call it "getting on the draw" or "getting on the check," but they have other names for it. >> carver: i think you could call it a scheme. you could call it a scam. you could call it fraud. i mean, there's different definitions for it. >> kroft: large scale? >> griffith: very large scale. >> kroft: they began complaining to their bosses at the social security administration six years ago after discovering that an outsized number of claims and some questionable medical evidence was being submitted by eric conn, a flamboyant attorney whose face is plastered on billboards throughout the area and on local tv. he runs one of the largest disability practices in the country out of the eric c. conn law center, which is just off route 23 in stanville, kentucky. it's a complex of several doublewides welded together with an imposing replica of the lincoln memorial in the parking lot. surprisingly, it has only one space fo the disabled. i mean, it's kind of hard to miss eric conn around here, isn't it? >> griffith: you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn't know who he is in this area. >> kroft: he calls himself "mr. social security." and some of his ads say "guaranteed success." how can he make that claim? >> carver: he backs that up. >> kroft: a slam dunk? >> carver: mm-hmm. pretty much. >> kroft: that's a remarkable record. >> carver: yes, it is. >> kroft: is he that good a lawyer? >> carver:: you know... >> griffith: no. >> kroft: a lot of conn's success, they say, had to do with a particularly friendly disability judge, david daugherty, who sought out conn's cases and approved virtually all 1,823 of them, awarding a half a billion dollars worth of lifetime benefits to conn's clients. the decisions were based on the recommendations of a loyal group of doctors who often examined conn's clients right in his law offices and always endorsed them for the disability rolls. were most of the medical reports submitted by the same doctors? >> griffith: yes. >> carver: yes. sometimes, up to 13 to 20 reports a day. >> griffith: i know on one, we counted 16 exams by the same doctor all in one day at his office. >> kroft: and they were all approved? >> griffith: they were all approved. >> kroft: were all those valid claims? >> carver: there's no way that you're going to have 100% of clients walk through your door and be disabled. 100% of claimants, there's no way. >> kroft: we were hoping that, given eric conn' outgoing personality and love of publicity, he would be eager to talk to us, but that turned out not to be the case. at first, we were told he wasn't in the office. we said we'd wait. >> hey, take some pens, too, all right? >> kroft: okay. great. about an hour later, we got a call from his lawyer in washington. you know, we don't want to make it seem like he's hiding from us. the lawyer said he'd try to coax conn out of the office, and eventually, he emerged. >> eric conn: i'm very much familiar with you. how we doing today? >> kroft: i'm doing good. look, there's a lot of allegations out there... >> conn: there are. >> kroft: ...about you that we wanted to talk to you about. conn: i understand. well, i'm not normally a shy person, but i think it's probably best i speak in the legal realm rather than here. i know you all have come a long way, and i don't mean to be in... inhospitable, but i just think it's probably best right now. >> kroft: you can't talk about your relationship with judge daugherty or your incredible success in... in disability court? >> conn: boy, that's tempting. ( laughter ) oh, i would love to comment on some of that. but not... i'm really sorry, i don't think i should right now. >> kroft: conn didn't want to go into it with senator coburn's investigators, either. they worked on the case for two years, interviewing witnesses and poring over disability documents. that's why they asked us to protect their identities. what did you find out in west virginia and kentucky? >> coburn: significant fraud. >> kroft: does the name eric conn ring a bell? >> coburn: mm-hmm. i would tell you, i wouldn't want him for a brother-in-law. and he's got a lot of money, and the american taxpayer paid him that money. >> kroft: is he breaking the law? >> coburn: that's probably going to be determined by the department of justice. >> kroft: coburn's report, which was released last fall, showed that conn collected more than $13 million in legal fees from the federal government over the past seven years, and that he paid five doctors roughly $2 million to regularly sign off on bogus medical forms that had been manufactured and filled out ahead of time by conn's staff. you think what you found there is just an isolated case? >> coburn: no. i mean, it's... it may be one of the worst cases. it just shows you how broken it is. you take a good concept that's well meaning, and then you don't manage it, you don't monitor it, you don't over... congress doesn't oversight it. and pretty soon, you end up with places like, in west virginia, certain counties, where, you know, you're born to be on disability. >> kroft: it should be pointed out that no one is getting rich off disability payments of $1,100 a month. it's a minimum wage income with medicare benefits after two years. but each new case will eventually cost taxpayers, on average, $300,000 in lifetime benefits. for marilyn zahm, the disability judge from buffalo, the high demand for it is a measure of the low prospects that still exist for millions of americans. >> zahm: people run out of unemployment insurance. they are not going to die silently. they are going to look for another source of income. it is not unusual for people, especially people over 40, to have some sort an ailment or impairment. so they will file for disability benefits based upon that. for many of these people, the plant closed. there are no jobs in their communities. what are people supposed to do? >> kroft: some of these people are desperate people. >> coburn: absolutely desperate. i agree. but what you're really describing is our economy and the consequences of it. and we're using a system that wasn't meant for that, because we don't have a system over here to help them. which means we're not addressing the other concerns in our society, and that's a debate congress ought to have. >> if a disability fund goes dry, what happens? go to 60minutesovertime.com sponsored by pfizer. 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( laughter ) it happens. >> pelley: no, really. >> niccoli: yeah, really, it's funny. we see here pink cars or strange colors, really. >> pelley: the customer is king? >> niccoli: yes, of course. >> pelley: as we walked the plant with niccoli, we were struck by a sharp division of labor. nearly everyone on this assembly line is a man. but if you go over to where the interior is done, nearly everyone is a woman. why is that? >> niccoli: i can tell you this. we really need women on the interior. because the precision that the women has, unfortunately, we as men, we don't have that. >> pelley: we don't have the precision? >> niccoli: not the precision and the manuality to really... to create a masterpiece like our interior. >> pelley: the car is male on the outside and female on the inside? >> niccoli: ( laughs ) let's say it like this. yeah, it could be. >> pelley: these don't look like any other car on the road. something that makes you smile. ( laughter ) the guy with the proud father look is filippo perini, the chief designer in charge of the look of lamborghini. when we were driving the aventador today on the road, there was a truck, and the passenger in the truck turned around to take a picture of the car. they want to take our picture. why does that happen? >> filippo perini: because we are in italy; people love beautiful cars. >> pelley: perini runs this shop, where designers who love beautiful cars take their inspiration, we're told, from the contours of insects and fighter planes. do you ever design something and show it to the engineers, and the engineers say, "we can't build that"? >> perini: yeah, yeah, it's all... it happened always like this. >> the driver, steering wheel... >> pelley: when we asked perini for lamborghini's dna, he drew a single arc. that is a lamborghini line. >> perini: this is a... really a lamborghini line, this is our own way to produce cars. >> pelley: an uninterrupted line from front to rear. it's very beautiful and it is completely impractical. there is no trunk. >> perini: no, we have a good trunk in front. >> pelley: all right. yeah. but if you want your golf clubs, you're going to have to have another car. >> perini: i think, with a car like this, you won't have time to do golf. >> pelley: you won't want to play golf because you'll be driving your car. >> perini: yes, yes. >> pelley: one thing that could fit in there are lamborghini's profits. in the $400,000 car business, any recession slams on the brakes. mr. lamborghini and a series of owners have lost fortunes. that began to change in 1998, when volkswagen bought the company under its audi brand. at a race in england, lamborghini president and c.e.o. stephan winkelmann told us the company has been making money now since 2006. one of the selling points, in addition to style and speed, is the sound. engineers labor over the growl. you can tell that a lamborghini's coming before you ever see it. in new york, we asked then-chief operating officer of lamborghini america michael lock the most important question a buyer can ask: "what's wrong with it?" >> michael lock: what's wrong with it? i think... if i were to be critical, i would say that we need to do a very good job of managing the perception of our brand. we want to make sure that lamborghini is seen as a friendly brand. >> pelley: after the great recession, especially this soon after the great recession, you want to make sure your driver's not scorned. >> lock: no, indeed. i think that's very important. >> pelley: lock told us that even though the company is profitable, thanks to german discipline, the car still has to be sold the italian way. you're trying to seduce people... >> lock: indeed. >> pelley: ...with this car, because that's the only way you can get somebody to write a $400,000 check. >> lock: ( laughs ) seduction is certainly an important part of that process, yes. >> pelley: they have to be just a little bit irrational about this purchase. >> lock: they have to be a little bit romantic, certainly. >> pelley: what's the difference? you'd have to be hopelessly romantic and maybe embarrassingly rich to join lamborghini's 50th anniversary party in the spring of 2013. 350 owners shipped their raging bulls from all around the world for a ten-city, five-day sprint through italy. it looks like we sped these pictures up but, of course, we didn't. an italian road can really look like this when the steering is as precise as leonardo da vinci and the brakes have the stopping power of sophia loren. how do you get all this past the highway patrol? build them a lamborghini. nearly every model from every era filled the piazzas to be blessed, fussed over, photographed and admired as part of the national heritage. no two alike, each crafted as a matter of taste. even this was an offer lamborghini couldn't refuse. ( horn playing theme to "the godfather" ) the rally ended with a coming out party for a new car named for a bull that murdered a matador. lamborghini built only four venenos, one for itself and three that sold for $4 million each. who buys that?! >> lock: very few people. and the most difficult thing to manage in the process of selling those cars was having a palatable story for the six or seven who we couldn't get a car for. >> pelley: you had to tell them why they couldn't buy a $4 million car. >> lock: i had to explain that we had a very limited production available on these cars. >> pelley: how many of the three veneno buyers bought the car sight unseen? >> lock: all three of them. ♪ ♪ >> pelley: the golden anniversary party ended with opera and fireworks, as all italian celebrations must. with five decades in the rearview mirror, lamborghini is still exploring the limits of the science of engineering and the art of irrational romance. nice. wrench? what? aflac! so this is who you brought to help us out? oh yeah, he's the best. hmm... he doesn't look like he's seen a tool in his life. oh, he doesn't know anything about tools. aflac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac! but when i broke my arm, he lent a hand. he paid my claim in just four days. four days? wow! it's no accident - aflac pays fast. find out how fast at aflac.com and remember,accidents don't hurt as much when you have aflac. better. 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'cause it's the very foundation of your sandwich. we don't take that lightly. so we're always trying to make it even better. that's why we added some ingredients and took others out. we think it's our best bread yet. but come in and see for yourself. bread is on the rise at subway. but come in and see for yourself. >> stahl: to the surprise of virtually no one, this year's oscar for best actress went to cate blanchett for her leading role in woody allen's "blue jasmine." blanchett grew up in australia, where, as we first reported in february, she started her career in the theater. she's a movie star who does shakespeare. she's first and foremost a theater actor, winning wild praise for her hedda gabler and blanche dubois on the stage. this doesn't mean she can't take a joke, or a fun role in blockbusters like indiana jones. it seems she can do it all, playing americans, russians, germans, skinheads, albinos, and men! "vanity fair" called her "a character actress in a leading woman's body." so, you've played the queen of england, you've played an elf, you played an italian immigrant... >> cate blanchett: albino. >> stahl: albino. >> blanchett: and that's just before breakfast this morning. ( laughs ) i have pink eyes. like a putano, huh? like the devil, eh? >> stahl: the range is extraordinary. >> blanchett: i guess i've got one of those faces that's not particularly beautiful, not too ugly, you know. i can look... >> stahl: come on. >> blanchett: ...a bit masculine, i can look a bit feminine, depending on how you're lit, how you're shot. i don't mind not looking conventionally, you know, attractive, if that's what the part requires. >> stahl: so she can be gorgeous and regal as the elf queen in "lord of the rings"; not so much when she played bob dylan. >> blanchett: you just want me to say what you want me to say. i don't feel like, "now, i'm a great actress." i never feel that. you always think, "okay, i've learned that. well, now what if i did that?" golly! >> stahl: they call her a chameleon, the way she almost molts into her characters, as when she played katharine hepburn in "the aviator," for which she won an oscar for best supporting actress. >> blanchett: you're not extending enough on your follow- through. follow-through is everything in golf, just like life... ( laughs ) don't you find? >> stahl: she spent weeks with a voice coach perfecting hepburn's distinctive accent. can you speak katharine hepburn? >> blanchett: no, i can't do anything. i'm terrible. i'm the worst dinner party guest in the world. people say, "oh, do... do your scottish," and i'll go, "okee, i'll do me..." i sound like i'm a cross between sort of from new delhi and boston. ( laughs ) it's terrible. >> stahl: in "blue jasmine," she plays a desperate park avenue socialite who loses her life of status and luxury when her husband turns out to be a swindler like bernie madoff. >> blanchett: uh, i was forced to take a job selling shoes on madison avenue. oh, so humiliating. friends i'd had at dinner parties at our apartment came in and i waited on them. i mean, do you have any idea what that's like? she was monumentally deluded. and like a lot of us, i mean, we... our lives are built on a fictionalized sense of self, who we would... who we aspire to be, rather than perhaps who we actually are. >> stahl: you do a lot of research. you're known for reading, watching videos, getting... >> blanchett: it's enjoyable. it's enjoyable. >> stahl: is it true that you watched the "60 minutes" morley safer interview of ruth madoff? >> ruth madoff: if i could change things, at least if i had tried, i would have felt a little better. >> stahl: ...bernie madoff's wife? >> blanchett: yes, absolutely. >> stahl: did that help you? did it? >> blanchett: it did. i think that what i really got from them, that madoff interview, was the sense of shame. and i found that very useful. >> stahl: one critic called it "the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career." >> blanchett: you know, someday, when you come into great wealth, you must remember to be generous. >> stahl: but for blanchett, woody allen's notoriously minimal direction was unnerving. you really love to talk things out. and as i understand it, that's not his style. >> blanchett: ( laughs ) no. he's monosyllabic at best. i don't know how to do this thing unless it's in conversation with somebody else. i can't... monologue is... terrifies me. ( laughs ) >> stahl: but that's what you got. >> blanchett: first day, he said, "it's awful. you're awful." >> stahl: to you? >> blanchett: yeah. >> stahl: he said "awful"? >> blanchett: "it's awful." >> stahl: but he didn't say what to do? he just said, "it's awful"? >> blanchett: no. no. >> stahl: so then, you did it again... >> blanchett: and it was still awful. but... >> stahl: it was still awful? >> blanchett: well, obviously, it got a bit better because it didn't... you know, people have gone to see it. >> stahl: her breakthrough role came in 1998 as the queen of england in "elizabeth." >> blanchett: i am married to england. >> stahl: after that performance, she was offered other big parts, but went for characters who stretched her, rather than ones that would make her famous. even though she's often on the red carpet these days, blanchett never sought to be a movie star, nor did she think she'd ever be one. she's the middle child of a school teacher mother and transplanted texan father, who died when she was ten. she dropped out of college to study theater. what she wanted was to be a great stage actress, and got her first major role in a play here at the sydney theater company. >> blanchett: there's a photo over here... >> stahl: in 1993, she co- starred with fellow aussie geoffrey rush in david mamet's "oleanna." look how into it you are. you are so inside. >> blanchett: it was one of those plays. you can look at yourself and you can see those things that i see. and you can find revulsion equal to my own. good day! >> stahl: you were a triumph in it. people were dazzled. >> blanchett: yeah, the director actually almost sacked me. and that was probably a big motivator for me to... to do a better job. >> stahl: are you one of those people... are you one of those people that... >> blanchett: likes to be terrified? >> stahl: ...likes to be terrified? >> blanchett: i think it's the only way to work for me. >> stahl: it motivates you? >> blanchett: yeah. i'm much better with truth. >> stahl: even if it hurts? >> blanchett: even if it hurts. >> stahl: well, i think you've talked about the whole process as the "trapeze effect." you're flying up there, and you could fall. >> blanchett: yes. >> stahl: it's fear. >> blanchett: when you're stretching yourself, as a role like "blue jasmine" did for me, you risk falling flat on your face. >> stahl: she applies that same risk-taking to her personal life, as when she and andrew upton, a playwright and director, decided to get married on a whim. they were both part of the sydney theater crowd. how did you meet? how did the sparks start? >> andrew upton: the sparks started slowly, i think, personally. >> blanchett: we didn't like each other. >> upton: we didn't get on at all at first sight. >> stahl: really? >> blanchett: and then, all of a sudden, we played poker... poker one night, and you were telling me about how you were in love with a friend of mine, and then... ( laughter ) we kissed. >> stahl: and all of a sudden, you're asking her to marry you, real fast, as i understand it. >> upton: i think it was about 21 days. >> stahl: and you said yes right away? three weeks? >> blanchett: yeah. but you leap off at the same moment. and i think it's all about timing. >> stahl: she says their marriage is a partnership-- in the raising of their three sons, ages five, nine, and 12-- and in their careers. upton has been her collaborator and sounding board. and they share a love of their country. she's australian through and through, down-to-earth, and happy to be 18 time zones away from hollywood. >> blanchett: i adore australia. i mean, i live and work here. and i'm buoyed up by it. i'm inspired by it. >> stahl: as she took us for a walk along the sydney coast, she talked about her private life. except for her husband, the only member of the family we'd be allowed to film would be the dog, fletcher. her home and her children were off limits. in the late '90s, she and upton moved to england, and her movie career took off. but in 2006, the sydney theater company invited them to come back and take over as co- artistic directors, and they jumped at it. >> blanchett: it was one of the quickest decisions i think we made, once the offer had come our way, apart from how quickly we got married. ( laughter ) maybe in the samespirit, strangely. >> upton: yeah, i think it was in the same spirit of adventure. >> stahl: it's a job they shared for six years. it kept cate in sydney, allowing her to spend more time with their children, and to return to her first love, theater. so this is wardrobe. while she acted in some of the productions, she also became an administrator, overseeing things like wardrobe and props. she and upton hired big name directors, and brought the company international acclaim with ambitious productions like "streetcar named desire," which they took to new york in 2009, with cate as blanche dubois. it is so intense. it was so intense. how long does it take you to come down from an experience on the stage like that? >> blanchett: at the time, you just... you do eight shows a week, my hair was falling out by the end, and i mean... >> stahl: your... is that true? >> blanchett: yeah. it was not... >> stahl: your hair was falling out, because you put so much into it. >> blanchett: but i think i was just so exhausted by... by it. >> stahl: she's known for being low maintenance, her dramas strictly onscreen or on stage. when we met her before a performance of "uncle vanya," she was doing her own makeup. >> your life should not be to grumble and moan. >> stahl: well, what's she like after a performance? does she stay in the role? >> upton: no. >> stahl: she comes home, and she's still blanche dubois that night... >> blanchett: don't answer that, andrew. ( laughter ) >> stahl: she comes home and she's cate...? >> upton: yeah. >> stahl: after these emotional, powerful... >> upton: yeah. quite calm and chirpy. >> stahl: she says she's not a "method" actor who "mines" her inner self to unlock a character. >> blanchett: it has nothing to do with me and the fact that my dog died or my father died with my... when i was ten, and making the grief small and personal and inward. and so therefore you don't carry it home, because you're not going through some personal, inward self-analysis every night that could eat you away. you're giving it away to the audience and hopefully, if it works, then, it's their... they have... it's their problem. >> stahl: they take it in. well, yeah. >> blanchett: they can take it home. >> stahl: in december, cate decided to leave the sydney theater company and a job she loved. what went into that decision? >> blanchett: the children. you could feel their school needs beginning to grow. they actually need that attention and, at a certain point, you have to make a decision about that, and that's not something we want to outsource. >> stahl: now, her decisions about what roles to take in movies include how long she'd have to be away from home or whether she can take the boys with her on location, as she did with "blue jasmine," her comeback to the movies, which she has done with a roar. you're 44 years old. >> blanchett: am i? we don't need to discuss that. >> stahl: yeah, you are... >> blanchett: we don't need to rub that in. let's not... >> stahl: i'm not rubbing it in. i think it's great to be 44, frankly. but it can be a tough age for an actress. at least, that's the myth, i guess. because for you, it's been a fabulous age. >> blanchett: well, i came to the film industry, i mean, in actress years, i was pushing 80, because i was in my mid-20s when i made my first film. >> stahl: now, her movie career is so hot, she's already signed up for seven films. she's booked solid through at least 2015. what is the hardest part of your job? the thing you struggle with the most? >> blanchett: oh, look. is it hard? i don't know that it's hard. i'm an actress. i think the most complicated thing-- it's the military maneuver of getting two careers, three children, but that's a working mother's problem, working parents' problem, that's not the challenge of work. i think, in relation to the work, the trickiest thing is beginning. i think it's quite a tricky neuro-linguistic process actually to try and make something that another... that a character has said, to make it come out through your body and make it seem like that's natural. it's kind of tricking yourself; the confidence trick. like an athlete does, you have to just say: "i'm just going to start. i'm ready. i'm open. let's go." >> stahl: she'll be returning to the stage in august, performing here in new york city in the sydney theater company's production of "the maids." her role-- a homicidal house servant in a world of haves and have nots. 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