July 20, 1996
Source: NOW Magazine
By COLMAN JONES
While for most people the subject of UFOs and aliens arouses no more than mild amusement, if not outrigh t derision, the recent recruitment of high-profile former doubters to the believers’ side is shaking up a new round of dissonance.
In recent weeks, some of these converts have joined a long list of credible UFO enthusiasts who have been featured in a flurry of television and radio programs in the U.S. and En gland, programs that are no longer treating the extraterrestrial issue as a comedic interlude.
These newcomers to the cause wonder how long we will continue to stand idly by and let deliberately evasive governments shield the world’s peoples from what may be the most important and potentially dangerous news ever to surface — that we are not alone in the universe.
The most significant military UFO recruit is Nick Pope, the British government’s appointed investigator of UFO sightings who headed Britain’s secretariat air staff 2A division between 1991 and 94.
Unlike his predecessors, who merely rubber-stamped sighting reports, Pope contacted witnesses and civilian UFO researchers, checking aircraft movements, airship flightpaths and weather-balloon launches and ordering radar tapes to be impounded and sent to him for analysis.
“After rigorous investigation,” Pope says, “I uncovered conventional explanations for around 90 per cent of sightings. But 10 per cent simply could not be explained, and it was my belief that some of these were extraterrestrial in origin.
“There were too many cases where we were obviously not just talking about lights or shapes, but we clearly had evidence that there were structured craft, where the technology went way beyond even the cutting edge of our own.”
Not pleased
Pope is still working as a major for the UK ministry of defence, although his higher-ups have been none too pleased with his work and have attempted to discourage publication of his book, Open Skies, Closed Minds, due for publication in June by Simon and Shuster.
“(What lay behind the resistance) was the closed-minded attitude,” he says. “It was people’s embarrassment that perhaps I was going to talk about cases where we had visual sightings and radiation readings and where we could show that, unfortunately, the end response of the department was to do nothing.”
Another high-ranking addition to the UFO cause is Edgar Mitchell, the 65-year-old Apollo 14 astronaut and the sixth man to walk on the moon. In 1971, he and Alan Shepard spent 33 hours roving the desolate lunar hills. It was here that Mitchell first courted an avant-garde reputation, conducting mental telepathy experiments by transmitting symbolic images to an acquaintance in Chicago.
Shortly thereafter, he left the astronaut corps and founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences in an effort to integrate various scientific disciplines into the study of human consciousness. (Noetics comes from the Greek work for mind.)
Mitchell’s upcoming book, The Way Of The Explorer, addresses his latest research, including his conclusions about extraterrestrial intelligence.
Speaking from his home in Florida, he says, “The evidence has accumulated to the point that it can no longer be ignored. There is a body of solid, powerful, credible evidence — surrounded by a whole lot of disinfo rmation, misinformation and silliness.”
Solid evidence
Mitchell has tried to gather up as much first-hand data as possible. “I have personally gone out of my way to interview government people I can have some respect for, who have given firsthand accounts of (extraterrestrial) contact of different sorts. I can’t reveal these people, because they are under security restriction.”
Their accounts have convinced the former astronaut to join the growing campaign to press for lifting the gag orders on talking about UFOs. He is also pushing, along with 20,000 others, for an executive order to declassify any U.S. government-held information on the stirring 1947 affair at Roswell, New Mexico, where the U.S. air force allegedly retrieved the remains of a crashed spaceship complete with alien occupants — a tale that continues to fascinate millions.
Mitchell is only one of several astronauts to go public with what they know about UFOs. Another is major Gordon Cooper, one of the original seven astronauts who helped pioneer space exploration efforts. But unlike most of his colleagues, Cooper has said for decades that he believes at least some UFOs are alien spacecraft, testifying to that effect in front of the UN in 1978.
Cooper, who today runs an aerospace management company in Van Nuys, California, had already been a firm believer before he flew into space. Ten years earlier, in the early 50s, he was assigned to a jet fighter group in Germany. While stationed there, he remembers sighting an entire formation of circular metallic objects as he piloted his F-86 Sabrejet.
“We saw these objects coming over at quite a good altitude, flying in fighter formations,” he says. “We tried to get up to them, but we couldn’t get anywhere near as high as they were. They continued for about two days, coming over in great numbers.”
With so many reports of strange happenings, UFO types trained in military culture are astounded at governments’ apparent indifference to the possible strategic implications of all these unexplained phenomena.
That’s the concern of retired British admiral of the fleet Lord Hill-Norton, former chief of the defence staff and chair of the NATO military committee during the mid-70s.
The government “says that the matter is investigated,” he says from his home near London. “They admit readily 300 or 400 reports a year, which they investigate. The ministry’s official line is this is not of any defence interest. This is silly talk, of course.”
The security aspect of such sightings has been exhaustively explored by British writer Timothy Good, whose definitive 1987 book Above Top Secret soared up the best-seller lists. His latest entry, Beyond Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Security Threat, with a foreword by Hill-Norton and published just last week, is a fully revised edition, citing over 100 new sightings reported by military and civilian pilots around the world.
The new book’s focus is on the potential defence risks posed by UFOs. Good notes, “They interfere with aircraft communications systems and military weapons systems and jam radars. There have been quite a number of aircraft which have gone missing during close encounters with UFOs, in countries as far apart as the U.S. and Iran.
“These devices have been seen over nuclear missile bases and atomic energy commission installations in the U.S. since the 1940s. They have been known to paralyze launching systems of guided missiles. Here in Britain, at the famous Woodbridge case in 1980 (where U.S. military officers reported a bright triangular-shaped object landing in a field), at least one of the witnesses has confirmed that beams of light were shone down at a nuclear weapons storage area. Surely this poses a security threat.”
Lobbying friends
The latest figure to enter the fray is the 85-year-old environmental activist and venture capitalist Laurance Rockefeller, son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and brother of Nelson. For the last few years, Rockefeller has been lobbying his friends in political circles for any information they may have on extraterrestrial life. More recently, he agreed to fund a research report presenting the strongest proof of alien visits.
The 169-page document, entitled Unidentified Flying Objects Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence, has the support of the three major American UFO organizations and has been sent to U.S. president Bill Clinton, Congress and other world leaders.
The report, a copy of which has been obtained by NOW, includes case histories of UFO sightings.
“It is this large quantity of evidence of the existence of something completely baffling,” the document says, “which motivates many of us to urge the governments of the world to release all they know about UFOs so that the people of the world, and especially scientists, can begin to come to grips with a mystery that has far too long been subjected to secrecy and ridicule.”
With all this ferment, it’s somewhat sobering to note that the Canadian government is utterly uninterested.
In Winnipeg, at the Canadian forces’ aerospace control and surveillance centre, staff officer captain Jim McLean tells me that our air force gathers reports of UFO sightings, but little else. “In essence, what this office does is accumulate all the files and reports, and keep them on file — we don’t assess or investigate them.”
McLean says the government used to look into unusual sightings, but “it took up too much time for things that used to prove to be natural events, i.e. meteor showers. It took up many, many man-hours. We hold them on file, and can copy everything and send it off to anybody who’s interested.”
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