New UFO Hunter
Real UFO News Freak
UFO Quotes from famous people including presidents, politicians and military people etc.
Government Leaders
President Harry S. Truman , 1950: "I can assure you that flying saucers -- given that they exist -- are not constructed by any power on Earth."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January '61: "In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence -- whether sought or unsought -- of the Military-Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and we persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked his air minister Lord Cherwell to investigate in 1952: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?" He was told 12 days later that there was no evidence flying saucers existed.
President John F. Kennedy, Nov. 21, 1963: "We seek a free flow of information ... We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: "The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been requested to assist in the investigation of reported sightings of flying disks..."
President Jimmy Carter: "I don't laugh at people any more when they say they've seen UFOs," Carter said at a Southern Governors Conference a few years ago. "I've seen one myself. It was the darndest thing I've ever seen. It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors, and it was about the size of the Moon.. We watched it for 10 minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was. One thing's for sure -- I'll never make fun of people who say they've seen unidentified objects in the sky! … I think it was a light beckoning me to run in the California primary. … If I become President, I'll make every piece of information that this country has about UFO sightings available to the public." [What happened after he was elected? Absolutely nothing! What stopped him? 2
President Gerald Ford: "In the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs, and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment of the subject." (remarks made during his years as a U.S. Congressman). [Gerald Ford never again addressed the issue of UFOs.]
President Ronald Reagan, 1974: "I was in a plane last week when I looked out the window and saw this white light. It was zigzagging around. I went up to the pilot and said, 'Have you ever seen anything like that?' He was shocked and he said, 'Nope.' And I said to him 'Let's follow it!' We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield. All of a sudden to our utter amazement, it went straight up into the heavens. When I got off the plane, I told Nancy all about it. But we didn't file a report on the object because for a long time they considered you a nut if you saw a UFO ..." "In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. I occasionally think how quickly our differences, worldwide, would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this World." -- President Ronald Reagan, while sharing the stage with former Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, 1988. [Was this stated to prepare the human race for an alien reality? Did alien contact influence the collapse of communism?]
Senator and Air Force General Barry Goldwater: "... So when people tell me they've seen UFOs, I don't say they haven't. In15,000 hours of flying, I've never seen one. But I've talked to pilots who have. I talked to an airline crew that swore up-and-down that an object came alongside them one night, and before they could do anything it vanished. We lost a military pilot who went up to intercept strange lights and never came back. His plane disappeared too ... " He said that he put faith in the reports of the Air Force, Navy, and commercial pilots who reported instances where a UFO would fly near them -- right off their plane's wing -- and then just zoom away at incredible speeds. "I remember the case in Georgia in the 1950s of a National Guard plane going after a UFO and never returning. And I recall the case in Franklin, Kentucky,when 4 military planes investigated a UFO. One of them exploded in mid-air and no one knows why." "I certainly believe in aliens in space. They may not look like us, but I have very strong feelings that they have advanced beyond our mental capabilities." He said he was refused permission to check the Air Force files on UFOs and added, "I think some highly-secret government UFO investigations are going on that we don't know about-and probably never will unless the Air Force discloses them." "It is true that I was denied access to a facility at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio because I never got in. I can't tell you what was inside. We both know about the rumors (concerning a captured UFO and crew members). I have never seen what I would call a UFO, but I have intelligent friends who have." (quoted from a letter he wrote dated April 11, 1979) [Did anything significant happen regarding UFO secrecy? The Pentagon warned him to drop his interest in UFOs. Why if UFOs do not exist?]
President Bill Clinton: "I want you to find the answers to 2 questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?"-- From Friends in High Places by Webster Hubbell, Clinton's associate attorney general. 3
Hubbel revealed that the President made the UFOs a priority when he appointed him. He continues: "Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but he wasn't satisfied with the answers." Clinton Update: Even President Clinton is talking about Roswell these days. During a recent visit to Northern Ireland, Clinton's somber plea for peace turned to UFOs when answering a young boy's question. "No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947," the President said. "If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either … and I want to know."-- Oct. 1999. The latest Clinton Quote, Nov. 7, 1999: "If we were being attacked by space aliens, we wouldn't be playing these kinds of games," Clinton told educators visiting Washington, DC.
Senator Daniel K. Inouye : "There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest free from all checks and balances. And free from the Law itself."
Japanese Prime Miniser Tushiki Kaifu: "UFO Problem -- Japan had to take into account what should be done about the UFO question, and that we had to spend more time on these matters. In addition, I said that someone had to solve the UFO problem with far reaching vision at the same time. Secondly, I believe it is a reasonable time to take the UFO problem seriously as a reality... I hope that this Symposium will contribute to peace on Earth from the point of view of outer space and take the first step toward the international cooperation in the field of UFOs." (in a letter to Mayor Shiotani of Hakui City, dated June 24, 1990, endorsing an upcoming Space & UFO Symposium)
Dick D'Amato, National and International Security Specialist for Senator Robert Byrd and a member of the National Security Council, stated in 1991 that an incredibly powerful "black arm" of the Government has been keeping UFO information secret and has also been illegally spending enormous sums of money in this operation.
Victor Marchetti, former Special Assistant to the Executive Director of the CIA: "We have, indeed, been contacted -- perhaps even visited -- by extraterrestrial beings. And the US government -- in collusion with the other national powers of the Earth -- is determined to keep this information from the general public." (in an article written by him for Second Look entitled "How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon", Vol 1, No 7, Washington, DC, May, 1979.)
Military Officers
General Douglas MacArthur, Oct. 8, 1955: "You now face a new World, a world of change. We speak in strange terms, of harnessing the cosmic energy, of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy. … The nations of the World will have to unite for the next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the Earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets."
Lord Hill-Norton, Chief of Defense Staff, Ministry of Defense, Great Britain, 1973; Chairman, Military Committee of NATO, 1974-77: "The evidence that there are objects which have been seen in our atmosphere -- and even on terra firma -- that cannot be accounted for either as man-made objects or as any physical force or effect known to our scientists seems to me to be overwhelming... A very large number of sightings have been vouched for by persons whose credentials seem to me 4
unimpeachable. It is striking that so many have been trained observers such as police officers and airline or military pilots. Their observations have in many instances... been supported either by technical means such as radar or -- even more convincingly -- by... interference with electrical apparatus of one sort or another...." (quoted from his foreword to Above Top Secret by Timothy Good, Morrow & Co's Quill Books, 1988)
General Lionel M. Chassin, Commanding General of the French Air Forces and General Air Defense Coordinator of the Allied Air Forces of NATO: "The number of thoughtful, intelligent, educated people in full possession of their faculties who have "seen something" and described it grows every day... We can... say categorically that mysterious objects have indeed appeared and continue to appear in the sky that surrounds us." (in foreword to Aime Michel's Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery, Criterion Books, 1958) Former CIA Director Vice-Admiral
Roscoe Hillenkoetter: "Unknown objects are operating under intelligent control ... It is imperative that we learn where UFOs come from and what their purpose is ..." "It is time for the truth to be brought out... Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.... I urge immediate Congressional action to reduce the dangers from secrecy about unidentified flying objects." (signed statement to Congress, August 22, 1960)
Gen. Nathan Twining, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "This 'flying saucer' situation is not at all imaginary or seeing too much in some natural phenomena. Something is really flying around. The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious."
Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Air Force Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain: "More than 10,000 sightings have been reported, the majority of which cannot be accounted for by any 'scientific' explanation... I am convinced that these objects do exist and that they are not manufactured by any nation on Earth. … I can therefore see no alternative to accepting the theory that they come from some extraterrestrial source." (printed in Sunday Dispatch, London, July 11, 1954)
Maj. Donald Keyhoe, Director-NICAP, 1953: "With control of the Universe at stake, a crash program is imperative. We produced the A-bomb under the huge Manhattan Project in an amazingly short time. The needs, the urgency today are even greater. The Air Force should end UFO secrecy and give the facts to scientists, the public, to Congress. … Once the people realize the truth, they would back, even demand a crash program ... for this is one race we dare not lose..."
M. Robert Galley, French Minister of Defense: "I must say that if listeners could see for themselves the mass of reports coming in from the airborne gendarmerie, from the mobile gendarmerie, and from the gendarmerie charged with the job of conducting investigations, all of which reports are forwarded by us to the National Center for Space Studies, then they would see that it is all pretty disturbing." (interviewed on radio by Jean-Claude Bourret, February 21, 1974)
Col. Steve Wilson: "I have no feelings, truthfully. My association with MJ-12 has left me dead inside. I feel myself still cold and calculating. I never let anyone get close to me. I feel like a human robot. I have killed mercilessly and lied for the good of the Country. Or so I believed at the time." "The things I have seen are beyond human understanding and totally unbelievable. I only have a desire to help humanity somehow through what is bound to come soon."
Air Marshall Roesmin Nurjadin, Commander-in-Chief of the Indonesian Air Force: "UFOs sighted in Indonesia are identical with those sighted in other countries. Sometimes they pose a problem for our air defense. And once we were obliged to open fire on them." (in a letter to Yusuke J. Matsumura dated May 5, 1967, reprinted in Good ibid)
General Carlos Castro Cavero, General in the Spanish Air Force and former Commander of Spain's Third Aerial Region: "I believe that UFOs are spaceships or extraterrestrial craft... The nations of the World are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data. Maybe when this group of nations acquires more precise and definite information, it will be possible to release the news to the World." (in an interview with J. J. Benitez, La Gaceta del Norte, Balboa, Spain, June 27, 1976)
Col. Phillip Corso: "If you suppress the truth it becomes your enemy ... If you expose the truth, it becomes your weapon. … I had the evidence that a crash did happen. I ask you this: were you there with me? did you have the clearances? They can't answer these questions -- they simply criticize with no evidence."
Admiral Delmer S. Fahrney, former head of the Navy's guided-missile program: "No agency in this country or Russia is able to duplicate at this time the speeds and accelerations which radars and observers indicate these flying objects are able to achieve... There are objects coming into our atmosphere at very high speeds." (printed in New York Times)
Major-General Wilfred de Brouwer, Deputy Chief, Royal Belgian Air Force: "In any case, the Air Force has arrived to the conclusion that a certain number of anomalous phenomena has been produced within Belgian airspace. The numerous testimonies of ground observations compiled in this [SOBEPS] book -- reinforced by the reports of the night of March 30-31 [1990] -- have led us to face the hypothesis that a certain number of unauthorized aerial activities have taken place. Until now, not a single trace of aggressiveness has been signaled. Military or civilian air traffic has not been perturbed nor threatened. We can therefore advance that the presumed activities do not constitute a direct menace. … The day will come undoubtedly when the phenomenon will be observed with technological means of detection and collection that won't leave a single doubt about its origin. This should lift a part of the veil that has covered the mystery for a long time. A mystery that continues to the present. But it exists … it is real ../ and that in itself is an important conclusion." ("Postface" in SOBEPS' Vague d'OVNI sur la Belgique - Un Dossier Exceptionnel, Brussels: SOBEPS, 1991)
Bob Dean who has served 27 years in the Army and has researched UFOs for the last 40 years once saw an astonishing super-secret NATO report entitled "The Assessment". This top-secret report had been complied in the early 1960s by top-level military experts and scientists and its conclusions were: 1) Earth has been spied upon by several extraterrestrial civilizations for thousands of years. 2) These civilizations appear to be peaceful since they are so advanced they could have taken over our planet by now. 3) The visitors are increasing contact with us in a gradual unfolding of a plan in which they eventually interact with Earth's inhabitants. Bob Dean's conclusions from his 40-year study is that "The human race is a hybrid race and not only are we not alone in the Cosmos, but we also have never been alone." Dean also stated, "The human race has had an intimate inter-relationship with several high technology, extremely advanced extraterrestrial civilizations for several thousand years."
Astronauts
Donald "Deke" Slayton, Mercury astronaut: "I was testing a P-51 fighter in Minneapolis in 1951 when I spotted this object. I was at about 10,000 feet on a nice, bright, sunny afternoon. I thought the object was a kite. Then I realized that no kite is gonna fly that high. As I got closer, it looked like a weather balloon -- gray and about 3 feet in diameter. But as soon as I got behind the darn thing, it didn't look like a balloon anymore. It looked like a saucer, a disk. About the same time, I realized that it was suddenly going way from me-and there I was, running at about 300 miles-per-hour. I tracked it for a little way … and then all of a sudden the damn thing just took off. It pulled about a 45-degree climbing turn and accelerated and just flat disappeared." (in a 1951 interview)
James Lovell flying with Frank Borman and William Anders: "Mission Control, please be informed, there is a Santa Claus." Upon emerging from the dark side of the Moon during their historic first circumlunar mission, Apollo-8, in December, 1968. "Santa Claus" was the mission code used if sighting a strange object such as a UFO.
Cosmonaut Victor Afanasyev commenting on a UFO sighting that occurred while en route to the Solyut 6 space station in April of 1979: "It followed us during half of our orbit. We observed it on the light side. When we entered the shadow side, it disappeared completely. It was an engineered structure, made from some type of metal approximately 40 meters long with inner hulls. The object was narrow here and wider here. And inside there were openings. Some places had projections like small wings. The object stayed very close to us. We photographed it, and our photos showed it to be 23-to-28 meters away."
Dr. Vladimir Azhazha: "Neil Armstrong relayed the message to Mission Control that 2 large, mysterious objects were watching them after having landed near the moon module. But this message was never heard by the public because NASA censored it." According to a Dr. Aleksandr Kasantsev, Buzz Aldrin took color movie film of the UFOs from inside the module and continued filming them after he and Armstrong went outside. Armstrong confirmed that the story was true but refused to go into further detail, beyond admitting that the CIA was behind the cover-up.
Scott Carpenter: "At no time, when the astronauts were in space were they alone: there was a constant surveillance by UFOs." Carpenter photographed a UFO while in orbit on May 24, 1962. NASA still has not released the photograph.
Eugene Cernan, who commanded the Apollo 17 Mission: "...I've been asked about UFOs and I've said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization." (the quote is from a 1973 article in the Los Angeles Times)
Dr. Brian O'Leary: "We have contact with alien cultures."
Major Robert White: "There ARE things out there! There absolutely is!" -- exclaiming over the radio about a UFO encounter taking place on a 58-mile high X-15 flight on July 17, 1962. He later reported, "I have no idea what it could be. It was gray-ish in color and about 30-40 feet away."
James McDivitt: "At one stage, we even thought it might be necessary to take evasive action to avoid a collision." -- commenting on an orbital encounter he and Ed White had with a "weird object" with arm-like extensions which approached their capsule. Later in the flight, they saw 2 similar objects over the Caribbean.
Female Cosmonaut: "I'll take it and hold it with my right hand. Look out the peephole! I have it!"
Male Cosmonaut: "There is something! If we do not get out, the World will never know about this!" -- from the final transmission of a pair of Cosmonauts whose scheduled 7-day mission was interrupted by a malfunction of unknown origins. This piece of conversation was recorded on February 24, 1961 while they were trying to repair the damage. The 2 Cosmonauts were never heard from again.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Mission veteran : "I've talked with people of military and government credentials and position and heard their stories and their desire to tell their stories openly to the public. And that got my attention very, very rapidly... The first-hand experiences of these credible witnesses that now in advanced years are anxious to tell their story. We can't deny that. And the evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident and that indeed an alien craft did crash. And that material was recovered from that crash site..." "I have been over the years very skeptical like many others. But in the last 10 years-or-so, I have known the late Dr. Alan Hynek who I highly admire. I know and currently work with Dr. Jacques Vallee. I've come to realize that the evidence is building up to make this a valid and researchable question. Further, because my personal motivation has always been to understand our Universe better and my own theoretical work has convinced me that Life is everywhere in the Universe that has been permitted to evolve, I consider this a very timely question .... By becoming more involved with the serious research field, I've seen the evidence mount towards the truth of these matters. I rely upon the testimony of contacts that I have had -- old-timers -- who were involved in official positions in government and intelligence and military over the last 50 years. We cannot say that today's government is really covering it up. I think that most of them don't know what is going on anymore than the public..." Gordon Cooper and Ed Mitchell: "The evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident and that indeed an alien craft did crash and that material was recovered from that crash site," says Mitchell, who became the 6th man on the Moon in the Apollo 14 mission. Mitchell doesn't say he's seen a UFO. But he says he's met with high-ranking military officers who admitted involvement with alien technology and hardware. Cooper told a U.N. committee recently, "Every day in the U.S.A., our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us." Cooper speculates that public skepticism toward UFOs will shift dramatically.
Colonel L. Gordon Cooper, Mercury and Gemini Astronaut: "I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth. I feel that we need to have a top-level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the Earth concerning any type of encounter and to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion.... For many years, I have lived with a secret in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. … As far as I am concerned, there have been too many unexplained examples of UFO sightings around this Earth for us to rule out the possibilities that some form of life exists out there beyond our own world." (in an address to the UN in 1985 after announcing that he had seen and chased UFOs over Germany in the 1950s) Cooper also reported a greenish object which passed by his capsule going East-to-West (opposite normal man-made orbits) while in orbit in May of 1963. The object was tracked by ground-based equipment in Perth, Australia. The Press was told that it could not question Col. Cooper on this aspect of the mission. "I had a good friend at Roswell -- a fellow officer. He had to be careful about what he said. But it sure wasn't a weather balloon like the Air Force cover story. He made it clear to me what crashed was a craft of alien origin and members of the crew were recovered."
Scientists
Dr. Wernher Von Braun (legendary rocket engineer), reflecting on the deflection of the U.S. June 2 rocket from orbit in 1959, stated: "We find ourselves faced by powers which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed and whose base is at present unknown to us. More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with those powers. And in 6-or-9 months time, it may be possible to speak with some precision on the matter."
Professor Hermann Oberth -- the German rocket expert -- is considered to be one of the fathers of the space age. In 1955, Dr. Von Braun invited him to the U.S. to work at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and later at NASA where he researched UFO propulsion. Oberth stated to a group of reporters in 1959: "It is my thesis that flying saucers are real and that they are spaceships from another solar system. I think that they are possibly manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our Earth for centuries. I think that they possibly have been sent out to conduct systematic, long-range investigations -- first of men, animals, vegetation and more recently of atomic centers, armaments, and centers of armament production. They are propelled by distorting the gravitational field, converting gravity into useable energy. I and my colleagues feel that they may use Mars or some other body as sort of a 'way station'. They probably do not originate in our Solar System, perhaps not even in our Galaxy." Years later he was quoted as saying, "We cannot take the credit for our record advancement in certain scientific fields alone. We have been helped." When asked by whom, he replied, "The people of other worlds." Among Oberth's colleagues [or former colleagues] was Dr. Walther Riedel, once chief designer and research director at the German rocket center in Peenemunde. After the War, he engaged in secret work for the U.S. LIFE Magazine reported on April 7, 1952: Dr. Riedel has never seen a saucer himself, but for several years he has kept records of saucer sightings all over the World. He told LIFE: "I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis." Dr. Riedel has 4 points to his argument: "First, the skin temperatures of structures operating under the observed conditions would make it impossible for any terrestrial structure to survive. The skin friction of the missile at those speeds at those altitudes would melt any metals or nonmetals available.
"Second, consider the high acceleration at which they fly and maneuver... In some descriptions, the beast spirals straight up. If you think of the fact that the centrifugal force in a few minutes of such a maneuver would press the crew against the outside and do likewise to the blood, you see what I mean. "Third, there are many occurrences where they have done things that only a pilot could perform but that no human pilot could stand. "Fourth, in most of the reports there is a lack of visible jet. Most observers report units without visible flame ... and no trail. If it would be any known type of jet, rocket, piston engine, or chain-reaction motor, there would be a very clear trail at high altitude. It is from no power unit we know of ..." Also quoted in the LIFE article was Dr. Maurice Biot -- leading aerodynamicist and mathematical physicist -- who said: "The least improbable explanation is that these things are artificial and controlled ... My opinion for some time has been that they have an extraterrestrial origin."
Wilbert B. Smith was a Canadian electrical engineer. In a formerly classified Canadian government memorandum dated November 21, 1950, he wrote: "The matter is the most highly-classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb. Flying saucers exist. Their modus operandi is unknown, but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush."
Following an interview with physicist Robert Sarbacher back in 1950 in which Sarbacher confirmed the existence of crashed saucers and the recovery of alien bodies, Smith got the Canadian government to establish Project Magnet -- an attempt to understand and duplicate flying saucer performance. This has all been well-documented from Smith's notes of his meeting with Sarbacher, confirmation by Sarbacher in the 1980s, and various declassified Canadian government documents. Smith gave a tape-recorded speech in Ottawa, Canada on March 31, 1958 in which he summarized findings of a 2-year UFO investigation, including a series of communications with intelligences claiming to be extraterrestrial and laboratory experiments suggested by these entities that confirmed the validity of their alien science. The transcript of Smith's speech is in Flying Saucer Review, Sept/Oct 1963, pp. 13-16. Timothy Good in Above Top Secret (p. 205) also noted that Smith wrote an article in 1958 in which he said that contact had been established with the occupants of UFOs, and that he had learned a great deal from investigating these contacts. He wrote, "But it soon became apparent that there was a very real and quite large gap between this alien science and the science in which I had been trained. Certain crucial experiments were suggested and carried out. And in each case, the results confirmed the validity of the alien science. Beyond this point, the alien science just seemed to be incomprehensible."
On June 7, 1968, Lee Katchen -- an atmospheric physicist with NASA -- stated that on the basis of the 7,000 reports that he had examined, he believed UFOs to be extraterrestrial probes. "UFO sightings are now so common that the military doesn't have time to worry about them. So they screen them out. The major defense systems have UFO filters built into them and when a UFO appears, they simply ignore it." When asked for specifics, Katchen specifically singled out the radar network employed by SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environmental system) - the North American tactical air defense system which tracks all aircraft flights. "The filters cut out all unconventional objects or targets and makes no record of UFOs".
"Unconventional targets are ignored because apparently we are only interested in Russian targets, possibly enemy targets. Something that hovers in the air, then shoots off at 5,000 miles-per-hour doesn't interest us because it can't be the enemy. UFOs are picked up by ground and air radar, and they have been photographed by gun camera all along. There are so many UFOs in the sky that the Air Force has had to employ special radar networks to screen them out." Claude Poher, Ph.D. in astronomy, founder and first director of GEPAN, the UFO investigative office under the French government's National Center for Space Sciences: "Taking into account the facts that we have gathered from the observers and from the location of their observations, we concluded that there generally can be said to be a material phenomenon behind the observations. In 60% of the cases reported here, the description of this phenomenon is apparently one of a flying machine whose origin and modes of lifting and/or propulsion are totally outside our knowledge." (writing in the GEPAN Report to the Scientific Committee)
Industry & Media
Ben Rich, head propulsion engineer for the legendary Clarence "Kelly" Johnson of Lockheed's 'Skunk Works' that developed the U-2 spyplane and SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 Stealth fighter: "The secrecy business is a bureaucracy. They use security (first) to protect jobs. Second, to protect budgets. And that's wrong! If you become too loose with it, you make everything secret. And that's bad. It's an abuse of power ..."
Jim Goodall, aviation sleuth and curator of a Minnesota National Guard museum that contains an actual A-12 (SR-71) that Goodall obtained from the military \: "13-to-15 billion dollars \[1992 budget] of research money is being controlled by a handful of people who are not accountable to anybody for Black Budget line items that you and I and 99% of Congress will never see. If you are a full Colonel or GS-14, ... you have almost as much power and prestige as Bill Gates ..." "Ben Rich told me twice before he died: 'We have things in the middle of the Nevada desert that you and the best minds in the World won't even be able to conceive that we have for 30 or 40 years, and won't be made public for another 50.' A friend of mine at Lockheed told me: 'We have things in the Nevada desert that are alien to your way of thinking -- far beyond anything you see on Star Trek.' "One time I interviewed a retired senior master sergeant who had been at Groom Lake three different times as an Air Force safety specialist. ... At first he was real nervous. But when he warmed up, he told me: 'We have things that would make George Lucas envious.' I know one retired guy who worked at Lockheed for 30 years, most of the time at Area-51. He's very proud of what he's done, and he wants the story of the place to be told so that his grandchildren will have some idea of what he was involved in. In the summer of '86, I asked him if he believes in UFOs. He said, 'They absolutely, positively do exist !' I said, 'Can you expand on that?' And he said, 'No, I've said too much as it is.'
Government Leaders
President Harry S. Truman , 1950: "I can assure you that flying saucers -- given that they exist -- are not constructed by any power on Earth."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January '61: "In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence -- whether sought or unsought -- of the Military-Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and we persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked his air minister Lord Cherwell to investigate in 1952: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?" He was told 12 days later that there was no evidence flying saucers existed.
President John F. Kennedy, Nov. 21, 1963: "We seek a free flow of information ... We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: "The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been requested to assist in the investigation of reported sightings of flying disks..."
President Jimmy Carter: "I don't laugh at people any more when they say they've seen UFOs," Carter said at a Southern Governors Conference a few years ago. "I've seen one myself. It was the darndest thing I've ever seen. It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors, and it was about the size of the Moon.. We watched it for 10 minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was. One thing's for sure -- I'll never make fun of people who say they've seen unidentified objects in the sky! … I think it was a light beckoning me to run in the California primary. … If I become President, I'll make every piece of information that this country has about UFO sightings available to the public." [What happened after he was elected? Absolutely nothing! What stopped him? 2
President Gerald Ford: "In the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs, and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment of the subject." (remarks made during his years as a U.S. Congressman). [Gerald Ford never again addressed the issue of UFOs.]
President Ronald Reagan, 1974: "I was in a plane last week when I looked out the window and saw this white light. It was zigzagging around. I went up to the pilot and said, 'Have you ever seen anything like that?' He was shocked and he said, 'Nope.' And I said to him 'Let's follow it!' We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield. All of a sudden to our utter amazement, it went straight up into the heavens. When I got off the plane, I told Nancy all about it. But we didn't file a report on the object because for a long time they considered you a nut if you saw a UFO ..." "In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. I occasionally think how quickly our differences, worldwide, would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this World." -- President Ronald Reagan, while sharing the stage with former Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, 1988. [Was this stated to prepare the human race for an alien reality? Did alien contact influence the collapse of communism?]
Senator and Air Force General Barry Goldwater: "... So when people tell me they've seen UFOs, I don't say they haven't. In15,000 hours of flying, I've never seen one. But I've talked to pilots who have. I talked to an airline crew that swore up-and-down that an object came alongside them one night, and before they could do anything it vanished. We lost a military pilot who went up to intercept strange lights and never came back. His plane disappeared too ... " He said that he put faith in the reports of the Air Force, Navy, and commercial pilots who reported instances where a UFO would fly near them -- right off their plane's wing -- and then just zoom away at incredible speeds. "I remember the case in Georgia in the 1950s of a National Guard plane going after a UFO and never returning. And I recall the case in Franklin, Kentucky,when 4 military planes investigated a UFO. One of them exploded in mid-air and no one knows why." "I certainly believe in aliens in space. They may not look like us, but I have very strong feelings that they have advanced beyond our mental capabilities." He said he was refused permission to check the Air Force files on UFOs and added, "I think some highly-secret government UFO investigations are going on that we don't know about-and probably never will unless the Air Force discloses them." "It is true that I was denied access to a facility at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio because I never got in. I can't tell you what was inside. We both know about the rumors (concerning a captured UFO and crew members). I have never seen what I would call a UFO, but I have intelligent friends who have." (quoted from a letter he wrote dated April 11, 1979) [Did anything significant happen regarding UFO secrecy? The Pentagon warned him to drop his interest in UFOs. Why if UFOs do not exist?]
President Bill Clinton: "I want you to find the answers to 2 questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?"-- From Friends in High Places by Webster Hubbell, Clinton's associate attorney general. 3
Hubbel revealed that the President made the UFOs a priority when he appointed him. He continues: "Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but he wasn't satisfied with the answers." Clinton Update: Even President Clinton is talking about Roswell these days. During a recent visit to Northern Ireland, Clinton's somber plea for peace turned to UFOs when answering a young boy's question. "No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947," the President said. "If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either … and I want to know."-- Oct. 1999. The latest Clinton Quote, Nov. 7, 1999: "If we were being attacked by space aliens, we wouldn't be playing these kinds of games," Clinton told educators visiting Washington, DC.
Senator Daniel K. Inouye : "There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest free from all checks and balances. And free from the Law itself."
Japanese Prime Miniser Tushiki Kaifu: "UFO Problem -- Japan had to take into account what should be done about the UFO question, and that we had to spend more time on these matters. In addition, I said that someone had to solve the UFO problem with far reaching vision at the same time. Secondly, I believe it is a reasonable time to take the UFO problem seriously as a reality... I hope that this Symposium will contribute to peace on Earth from the point of view of outer space and take the first step toward the international cooperation in the field of UFOs." (in a letter to Mayor Shiotani of Hakui City, dated June 24, 1990, endorsing an upcoming Space & UFO Symposium)
Dick D'Amato, National and International Security Specialist for Senator Robert Byrd and a member of the National Security Council, stated in 1991 that an incredibly powerful "black arm" of the Government has been keeping UFO information secret and has also been illegally spending enormous sums of money in this operation.
Victor Marchetti, former Special Assistant to the Executive Director of the CIA: "We have, indeed, been contacted -- perhaps even visited -- by extraterrestrial beings. And the US government -- in collusion with the other national powers of the Earth -- is determined to keep this information from the general public." (in an article written by him for Second Look entitled "How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon", Vol 1, No 7, Washington, DC, May, 1979.)
Military Officers
General Douglas MacArthur, Oct. 8, 1955: "You now face a new World, a world of change. We speak in strange terms, of harnessing the cosmic energy, of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy. … The nations of the World will have to unite for the next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the Earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets."
Lord Hill-Norton, Chief of Defense Staff, Ministry of Defense, Great Britain, 1973; Chairman, Military Committee of NATO, 1974-77: "The evidence that there are objects which have been seen in our atmosphere -- and even on terra firma -- that cannot be accounted for either as man-made objects or as any physical force or effect known to our scientists seems to me to be overwhelming... A very large number of sightings have been vouched for by persons whose credentials seem to me 4
unimpeachable. It is striking that so many have been trained observers such as police officers and airline or military pilots. Their observations have in many instances... been supported either by technical means such as radar or -- even more convincingly -- by... interference with electrical apparatus of one sort or another...." (quoted from his foreword to Above Top Secret by Timothy Good, Morrow & Co's Quill Books, 1988)
General Lionel M. Chassin, Commanding General of the French Air Forces and General Air Defense Coordinator of the Allied Air Forces of NATO: "The number of thoughtful, intelligent, educated people in full possession of their faculties who have "seen something" and described it grows every day... We can... say categorically that mysterious objects have indeed appeared and continue to appear in the sky that surrounds us." (in foreword to Aime Michel's Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery, Criterion Books, 1958) Former CIA Director Vice-Admiral
Roscoe Hillenkoetter: "Unknown objects are operating under intelligent control ... It is imperative that we learn where UFOs come from and what their purpose is ..." "It is time for the truth to be brought out... Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.... I urge immediate Congressional action to reduce the dangers from secrecy about unidentified flying objects." (signed statement to Congress, August 22, 1960)
Gen. Nathan Twining, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "This 'flying saucer' situation is not at all imaginary or seeing too much in some natural phenomena. Something is really flying around. The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious."
Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Air Force Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain: "More than 10,000 sightings have been reported, the majority of which cannot be accounted for by any 'scientific' explanation... I am convinced that these objects do exist and that they are not manufactured by any nation on Earth. … I can therefore see no alternative to accepting the theory that they come from some extraterrestrial source." (printed in Sunday Dispatch, London, July 11, 1954)
Maj. Donald Keyhoe, Director-NICAP, 1953: "With control of the Universe at stake, a crash program is imperative. We produced the A-bomb under the huge Manhattan Project in an amazingly short time. The needs, the urgency today are even greater. The Air Force should end UFO secrecy and give the facts to scientists, the public, to Congress. … Once the people realize the truth, they would back, even demand a crash program ... for this is one race we dare not lose..."
M. Robert Galley, French Minister of Defense: "I must say that if listeners could see for themselves the mass of reports coming in from the airborne gendarmerie, from the mobile gendarmerie, and from the gendarmerie charged with the job of conducting investigations, all of which reports are forwarded by us to the National Center for Space Studies, then they would see that it is all pretty disturbing." (interviewed on radio by Jean-Claude Bourret, February 21, 1974)
Col. Steve Wilson: "I have no feelings, truthfully. My association with MJ-12 has left me dead inside. I feel myself still cold and calculating. I never let anyone get close to me. I feel like a human robot. I have killed mercilessly and lied for the good of the Country. Or so I believed at the time." "The things I have seen are beyond human understanding and totally unbelievable. I only have a desire to help humanity somehow through what is bound to come soon."
Air Marshall Roesmin Nurjadin, Commander-in-Chief of the Indonesian Air Force: "UFOs sighted in Indonesia are identical with those sighted in other countries. Sometimes they pose a problem for our air defense. And once we were obliged to open fire on them." (in a letter to Yusuke J. Matsumura dated May 5, 1967, reprinted in Good ibid)
General Carlos Castro Cavero, General in the Spanish Air Force and former Commander of Spain's Third Aerial Region: "I believe that UFOs are spaceships or extraterrestrial craft... The nations of the World are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data. Maybe when this group of nations acquires more precise and definite information, it will be possible to release the news to the World." (in an interview with J. J. Benitez, La Gaceta del Norte, Balboa, Spain, June 27, 1976)
Col. Phillip Corso: "If you suppress the truth it becomes your enemy ... If you expose the truth, it becomes your weapon. … I had the evidence that a crash did happen. I ask you this: were you there with me? did you have the clearances? They can't answer these questions -- they simply criticize with no evidence."
Admiral Delmer S. Fahrney, former head of the Navy's guided-missile program: "No agency in this country or Russia is able to duplicate at this time the speeds and accelerations which radars and observers indicate these flying objects are able to achieve... There are objects coming into our atmosphere at very high speeds." (printed in New York Times)
Major-General Wilfred de Brouwer, Deputy Chief, Royal Belgian Air Force: "In any case, the Air Force has arrived to the conclusion that a certain number of anomalous phenomena has been produced within Belgian airspace. The numerous testimonies of ground observations compiled in this [SOBEPS] book -- reinforced by the reports of the night of March 30-31 [1990] -- have led us to face the hypothesis that a certain number of unauthorized aerial activities have taken place. Until now, not a single trace of aggressiveness has been signaled. Military or civilian air traffic has not been perturbed nor threatened. We can therefore advance that the presumed activities do not constitute a direct menace. … The day will come undoubtedly when the phenomenon will be observed with technological means of detection and collection that won't leave a single doubt about its origin. This should lift a part of the veil that has covered the mystery for a long time. A mystery that continues to the present. But it exists … it is real ../ and that in itself is an important conclusion." ("Postface" in SOBEPS' Vague d'OVNI sur la Belgique - Un Dossier Exceptionnel, Brussels: SOBEPS, 1991)
Bob Dean who has served 27 years in the Army and has researched UFOs for the last 40 years once saw an astonishing super-secret NATO report entitled "The Assessment". This top-secret report had been complied in the early 1960s by top-level military experts and scientists and its conclusions were: 1) Earth has been spied upon by several extraterrestrial civilizations for thousands of years. 2) These civilizations appear to be peaceful since they are so advanced they could have taken over our planet by now. 3) The visitors are increasing contact with us in a gradual unfolding of a plan in which they eventually interact with Earth's inhabitants. Bob Dean's conclusions from his 40-year study is that "The human race is a hybrid race and not only are we not alone in the Cosmos, but we also have never been alone." Dean also stated, "The human race has had an intimate inter-relationship with several high technology, extremely advanced extraterrestrial civilizations for several thousand years."
Astronauts
Donald "Deke" Slayton, Mercury astronaut: "I was testing a P-51 fighter in Minneapolis in 1951 when I spotted this object. I was at about 10,000 feet on a nice, bright, sunny afternoon. I thought the object was a kite. Then I realized that no kite is gonna fly that high. As I got closer, it looked like a weather balloon -- gray and about 3 feet in diameter. But as soon as I got behind the darn thing, it didn't look like a balloon anymore. It looked like a saucer, a disk. About the same time, I realized that it was suddenly going way from me-and there I was, running at about 300 miles-per-hour. I tracked it for a little way … and then all of a sudden the damn thing just took off. It pulled about a 45-degree climbing turn and accelerated and just flat disappeared." (in a 1951 interview)
James Lovell flying with Frank Borman and William Anders: "Mission Control, please be informed, there is a Santa Claus." Upon emerging from the dark side of the Moon during their historic first circumlunar mission, Apollo-8, in December, 1968. "Santa Claus" was the mission code used if sighting a strange object such as a UFO.
Cosmonaut Victor Afanasyev commenting on a UFO sighting that occurred while en route to the Solyut 6 space station in April of 1979: "It followed us during half of our orbit. We observed it on the light side. When we entered the shadow side, it disappeared completely. It was an engineered structure, made from some type of metal approximately 40 meters long with inner hulls. The object was narrow here and wider here. And inside there were openings. Some places had projections like small wings. The object stayed very close to us. We photographed it, and our photos showed it to be 23-to-28 meters away."
Dr. Vladimir Azhazha: "Neil Armstrong relayed the message to Mission Control that 2 large, mysterious objects were watching them after having landed near the moon module. But this message was never heard by the public because NASA censored it." According to a Dr. Aleksandr Kasantsev, Buzz Aldrin took color movie film of the UFOs from inside the module and continued filming them after he and Armstrong went outside. Armstrong confirmed that the story was true but refused to go into further detail, beyond admitting that the CIA was behind the cover-up.
Scott Carpenter: "At no time, when the astronauts were in space were they alone: there was a constant surveillance by UFOs." Carpenter photographed a UFO while in orbit on May 24, 1962. NASA still has not released the photograph.
Eugene Cernan, who commanded the Apollo 17 Mission: "...I've been asked about UFOs and I've said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization." (the quote is from a 1973 article in the Los Angeles Times)
Dr. Brian O'Leary: "We have contact with alien cultures."
Major Robert White: "There ARE things out there! There absolutely is!" -- exclaiming over the radio about a UFO encounter taking place on a 58-mile high X-15 flight on July 17, 1962. He later reported, "I have no idea what it could be. It was gray-ish in color and about 30-40 feet away."
James McDivitt: "At one stage, we even thought it might be necessary to take evasive action to avoid a collision." -- commenting on an orbital encounter he and Ed White had with a "weird object" with arm-like extensions which approached their capsule. Later in the flight, they saw 2 similar objects over the Caribbean.
Female Cosmonaut: "I'll take it and hold it with my right hand. Look out the peephole! I have it!"
Male Cosmonaut: "There is something! If we do not get out, the World will never know about this!" -- from the final transmission of a pair of Cosmonauts whose scheduled 7-day mission was interrupted by a malfunction of unknown origins. This piece of conversation was recorded on February 24, 1961 while they were trying to repair the damage. The 2 Cosmonauts were never heard from again.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Mission veteran : "I've talked with people of military and government credentials and position and heard their stories and their desire to tell their stories openly to the public. And that got my attention very, very rapidly... The first-hand experiences of these credible witnesses that now in advanced years are anxious to tell their story. We can't deny that. And the evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident and that indeed an alien craft did crash. And that material was recovered from that crash site..." "I have been over the years very skeptical like many others. But in the last 10 years-or-so, I have known the late Dr. Alan Hynek who I highly admire. I know and currently work with Dr. Jacques Vallee. I've come to realize that the evidence is building up to make this a valid and researchable question. Further, because my personal motivation has always been to understand our Universe better and my own theoretical work has convinced me that Life is everywhere in the Universe that has been permitted to evolve, I consider this a very timely question .... By becoming more involved with the serious research field, I've seen the evidence mount towards the truth of these matters. I rely upon the testimony of contacts that I have had -- old-timers -- who were involved in official positions in government and intelligence and military over the last 50 years. We cannot say that today's government is really covering it up. I think that most of them don't know what is going on anymore than the public..." Gordon Cooper and Ed Mitchell: "The evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident and that indeed an alien craft did crash and that material was recovered from that crash site," says Mitchell, who became the 6th man on the Moon in the Apollo 14 mission. Mitchell doesn't say he's seen a UFO. But he says he's met with high-ranking military officers who admitted involvement with alien technology and hardware. Cooper told a U.N. committee recently, "Every day in the U.S.A., our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us." Cooper speculates that public skepticism toward UFOs will shift dramatically.
Colonel L. Gordon Cooper, Mercury and Gemini Astronaut: "I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth. I feel that we need to have a top-level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the Earth concerning any type of encounter and to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion.... For many years, I have lived with a secret in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. … As far as I am concerned, there have been too many unexplained examples of UFO sightings around this Earth for us to rule out the possibilities that some form of life exists out there beyond our own world." (in an address to the UN in 1985 after announcing that he had seen and chased UFOs over Germany in the 1950s) Cooper also reported a greenish object which passed by his capsule going East-to-West (opposite normal man-made orbits) while in orbit in May of 1963. The object was tracked by ground-based equipment in Perth, Australia. The Press was told that it could not question Col. Cooper on this aspect of the mission. "I had a good friend at Roswell -- a fellow officer. He had to be careful about what he said. But it sure wasn't a weather balloon like the Air Force cover story. He made it clear to me what crashed was a craft of alien origin and members of the crew were recovered."
Scientists
Dr. Wernher Von Braun (legendary rocket engineer), reflecting on the deflection of the U.S. June 2 rocket from orbit in 1959, stated: "We find ourselves faced by powers which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed and whose base is at present unknown to us. More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with those powers. And in 6-or-9 months time, it may be possible to speak with some precision on the matter."
Professor Hermann Oberth -- the German rocket expert -- is considered to be one of the fathers of the space age. In 1955, Dr. Von Braun invited him to the U.S. to work at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and later at NASA where he researched UFO propulsion. Oberth stated to a group of reporters in 1959: "It is my thesis that flying saucers are real and that they are spaceships from another solar system. I think that they are possibly manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our Earth for centuries. I think that they possibly have been sent out to conduct systematic, long-range investigations -- first of men, animals, vegetation and more recently of atomic centers, armaments, and centers of armament production. They are propelled by distorting the gravitational field, converting gravity into useable energy. I and my colleagues feel that they may use Mars or some other body as sort of a 'way station'. They probably do not originate in our Solar System, perhaps not even in our Galaxy." Years later he was quoted as saying, "We cannot take the credit for our record advancement in certain scientific fields alone. We have been helped." When asked by whom, he replied, "The people of other worlds." Among Oberth's colleagues [or former colleagues] was Dr. Walther Riedel, once chief designer and research director at the German rocket center in Peenemunde. After the War, he engaged in secret work for the U.S. LIFE Magazine reported on April 7, 1952: Dr. Riedel has never seen a saucer himself, but for several years he has kept records of saucer sightings all over the World. He told LIFE: "I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis." Dr. Riedel has 4 points to his argument: "First, the skin temperatures of structures operating under the observed conditions would make it impossible for any terrestrial structure to survive. The skin friction of the missile at those speeds at those altitudes would melt any metals or nonmetals available.
"Second, consider the high acceleration at which they fly and maneuver... In some descriptions, the beast spirals straight up. If you think of the fact that the centrifugal force in a few minutes of such a maneuver would press the crew against the outside and do likewise to the blood, you see what I mean. "Third, there are many occurrences where they have done things that only a pilot could perform but that no human pilot could stand. "Fourth, in most of the reports there is a lack of visible jet. Most observers report units without visible flame ... and no trail. If it would be any known type of jet, rocket, piston engine, or chain-reaction motor, there would be a very clear trail at high altitude. It is from no power unit we know of ..." Also quoted in the LIFE article was Dr. Maurice Biot -- leading aerodynamicist and mathematical physicist -- who said: "The least improbable explanation is that these things are artificial and controlled ... My opinion for some time has been that they have an extraterrestrial origin."
Wilbert B. Smith was a Canadian electrical engineer. In a formerly classified Canadian government memorandum dated November 21, 1950, he wrote: "The matter is the most highly-classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb. Flying saucers exist. Their modus operandi is unknown, but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush."
Following an interview with physicist Robert Sarbacher back in 1950 in which Sarbacher confirmed the existence of crashed saucers and the recovery of alien bodies, Smith got the Canadian government to establish Project Magnet -- an attempt to understand and duplicate flying saucer performance. This has all been well-documented from Smith's notes of his meeting with Sarbacher, confirmation by Sarbacher in the 1980s, and various declassified Canadian government documents. Smith gave a tape-recorded speech in Ottawa, Canada on March 31, 1958 in which he summarized findings of a 2-year UFO investigation, including a series of communications with intelligences claiming to be extraterrestrial and laboratory experiments suggested by these entities that confirmed the validity of their alien science. The transcript of Smith's speech is in Flying Saucer Review, Sept/Oct 1963, pp. 13-16. Timothy Good in Above Top Secret (p. 205) also noted that Smith wrote an article in 1958 in which he said that contact had been established with the occupants of UFOs, and that he had learned a great deal from investigating these contacts. He wrote, "But it soon became apparent that there was a very real and quite large gap between this alien science and the science in which I had been trained. Certain crucial experiments were suggested and carried out. And in each case, the results confirmed the validity of the alien science. Beyond this point, the alien science just seemed to be incomprehensible."
On June 7, 1968, Lee Katchen -- an atmospheric physicist with NASA -- stated that on the basis of the 7,000 reports that he had examined, he believed UFOs to be extraterrestrial probes. "UFO sightings are now so common that the military doesn't have time to worry about them. So they screen them out. The major defense systems have UFO filters built into them and when a UFO appears, they simply ignore it." When asked for specifics, Katchen specifically singled out the radar network employed by SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environmental system) - the North American tactical air defense system which tracks all aircraft flights. "The filters cut out all unconventional objects or targets and makes no record of UFOs".
"Unconventional targets are ignored because apparently we are only interested in Russian targets, possibly enemy targets. Something that hovers in the air, then shoots off at 5,000 miles-per-hour doesn't interest us because it can't be the enemy. UFOs are picked up by ground and air radar, and they have been photographed by gun camera all along. There are so many UFOs in the sky that the Air Force has had to employ special radar networks to screen them out." Claude Poher, Ph.D. in astronomy, founder and first director of GEPAN, the UFO investigative office under the French government's National Center for Space Sciences: "Taking into account the facts that we have gathered from the observers and from the location of their observations, we concluded that there generally can be said to be a material phenomenon behind the observations. In 60% of the cases reported here, the description of this phenomenon is apparently one of a flying machine whose origin and modes of lifting and/or propulsion are totally outside our knowledge." (writing in the GEPAN Report to the Scientific Committee)
Industry & Media
Ben Rich, head propulsion engineer for the legendary Clarence "Kelly" Johnson of Lockheed's 'Skunk Works' that developed the U-2 spyplane and SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 Stealth fighter: "The secrecy business is a bureaucracy. They use security (first) to protect jobs. Second, to protect budgets. And that's wrong! If you become too loose with it, you make everything secret. And that's bad. It's an abuse of power ..."
Jim Goodall, aviation sleuth and curator of a Minnesota National Guard museum that contains an actual A-12 (SR-71) that Goodall obtained from the military \: "13-to-15 billion dollars \[1992 budget] of research money is being controlled by a handful of people who are not accountable to anybody for Black Budget line items that you and I and 99% of Congress will never see. If you are a full Colonel or GS-14, ... you have almost as much power and prestige as Bill Gates ..." "Ben Rich told me twice before he died: 'We have things in the middle of the Nevada desert that you and the best minds in the World won't even be able to conceive that we have for 30 or 40 years, and won't be made public for another 50.' A friend of mine at Lockheed told me: 'We have things in the Nevada desert that are alien to your way of thinking -- far beyond anything you see on Star Trek.' "One time I interviewed a retired senior master sergeant who had been at Groom Lake three different times as an Air Force safety specialist. ... At first he was real nervous. But when he warmed up, he told me: 'We have things that would make George Lucas envious.' I know one retired guy who worked at Lockheed for 30 years, most of the time at Area-51. He's very proud of what he's done, and he wants the story of the place to be told so that his grandchildren will have some idea of what he was involved in. In the summer of '86, I asked him if he believes in UFOs. He said, 'They absolutely, positively do exist !' I said, 'Can you expand on that?' And he said, 'No, I've said too much as it is.'