A. The White House is in a forbidden flying zone. Our response to intruders in such zones is to take immediate action to escort the intruders away or shoot them down. As far back as the summer of 1952 when, in July, UFOs did fly over the White House, orders were given to military interceptors to shoot down UFOs if they don’t land when instructed to do so. This is described in detail in Frank Feschino Jr.’s new book Shoot Them Down. Major General Roger Ramey proclaimed that interceptors had been scrambled hundreds of times without any luck. As an indication of the zeal of pilots, I have heard of at least 7 specific cases in which the UFOs zapped attacking earthling aircraft. Tim Good in his new book Need to Know recounts similar cases. I am working on a claim by a pilot that UFOs took out 20 of our planes in Europe in the early 1950s.

B. It may come as a surprise to many Americans, but the President of the USA doesn’t speak for Planet Earth. After all who elected him World President? Certainly not the billion people from India or the 1.3 billion people in China. Obviously the UN also does not speak for Planet Earth, either.

C. Normally, negotiations only take place between roughly equal parties. Surely it is not difficult to see that aliens have technology far in advance of earthling technology. Their vehicles are clearly faster, more maneuverable, and have access to huge space carriers (mother ships) with lord-knows-what capability. They have no reason to negotiate when they can already do what they please.

A. Graduate students doing their thesis work on the development of a primitive society, on a planet where, amazingly, there is no planetary government, and where there are many different languages; on various strange biological specimens, or on genetic variations of the intelligent beings.

B. Broadcasters with weekly shows such as “Idiocy in the Boondocks.”

C. Mining engineers similar to those who went to California and the Klondike and Australia for gold, or to Texas and the Middle East for oil. As it happens, the earth is the densest planet in the solar system, so would be expected to have more of the rare but very important very heavy metals such as gold, uranium, rhenium, platinum, tungsten, osmium, etc. These are all much denser than lead. We know from studying star spectra that they are rare. They also have very special properties.

Phobos NASA

D. Mining engineers extracting more common metals from the nodules on the bottom of the ocean and from the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. We have been talking about doing this. Obviously war is much more important than ocean mining to us, so we build nuclear submarines to stay in the depths of the ocean carrying their multitude of nuclear tipped missiles. There are also abundant supplies of so-called rare earths, many used in the electronics and nuclear industries. It should not be forgotten that a century ago the primary use for uranium was to prepare yellow glazes for pottery. Zirconium and titanium were essentially worthless. Now nuclear navies use zirconium based alloys because of their splendid nuclear and anticorrosion properties. Titanium is used in aircraft like the SR-71 because of its high strength and low density.

E. Operators of refueling and rest and relaxation centers on the back side of the moon or in the depths of the ocean or in the asteroid belt.

F. Visitors checking on old colonies established by their ancestors. Perhaps there were many different ones which might explain why we have black, brown, red, yellow and white races.

G. Jailers. This may be a penal colony on which aliens dropped off their bad boys and girls and that is why we are so nasty to each other. Georgia and Australia were first settled by convicts. Letting the convicts go bother other civilizations who, unlike us, have learned to live peacefully, may be a no-no in the galactic rule book.

H. Vacationers. This may be a recreation center. Notice how many people visit Hawaii and Las Vegas and Orlando. If the travel wasn’t easy, how many would venture forth to see Mickey Mouse or gaming tables or surfing beaches?

I. Specimen gathererers for ET zoos and aquariums. We are still finding new specimens.

J. Local galactic horticultural societies collecting specimens for their displays and genetic cross breeding.

K. Medical researchers. They may have to evaluate the genetic material of loads of specimens to find genetic defects or super-special genes. There are a number of conditions whose frequency in the population is quite small (for example, only one person in 14,000 has hemophilia) so many specimens must be checked.

L. Honymooners. Perhaps this is the honeymoon capital for this corner of the neighborhood. Special rates for a week on Earth… side trips to the moon and Mars…

M. Cartographers. Local neighborhood maps may describe, for example, the equivalent of English coaling stations in the 19th century.

N. Sports enthusiasts. There may be special excursions to observe various such events. Don’t forget that a World Championship Chess match was held in Iceland.

O. Scouts seeking the best site for a new amusement park in the solar system.

P. Weapons inspectors. If we make the eminently reasonable assumption that every advanced civilization is concerned about its own survival and security, than we would expect that our development of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the means for delivering them in the local neighborhood would be of great concern. Clearly after World War II it should take less than a century for us to master fission and fusion and other new technologies to allow us to take our brand of friendship/hostility… out there. Thus, a logical reason to visit is to quarantine us until we develop a technique for learning to live at peace with each other. No galactic federation new-member committee would allow us to join. Too primitive.I suspect that the SETI cultists think they would be welcome guests. Not very likely.

Q. Producers. Having worked on a lot of motion picture documentaries at many locations, I would suggest perhaps some visitors are planning epic fiction and factual movies for film companies at home… shooting on location hither and yon.

A. All major countries and many terrorist groups would very much like to duplicate the flight technology of the saucers. They can literally fly circles around our vehicles, move at very high speed, make right angle turns, move straight up and down — typically with little noise, no visible engines, no exhaust. They would make wonderful weapons delivery and defensive systems. Since we have recovered wreckage at least as early as 1947 (see Crash at Corona, Ref. 3) we would have set up a highly classified project (call it Operation Majestic 12 as described in my book TOP SECRET/MAJIC (Ref. 4)) to try both to evaluate the wreckage and to obtain measurements of flight characteristics using airborne and spaceborne and earth-based radar sets, cameras, electromagnetic sensors, and other instrumentation. Surely governments have very much more sophisticated instruments and observation platforms than do private individuals. The key rule here is that one can’t tell one’s friends without telling one’s enemies. It appears that there have been many UFO crashes including ones overseas (Varginha, Brazil, for example). There is a long history of countries gathering and evaluating crashed vehicles of their enemies. This does not require a conspiracy; everybody has the same self interest concerns.

B. Each country worries about its enemies determining the secrets of saucer technology before they do and must be concerned about how to defend against new vehicles and also how to learn what the other guy has already learned. Soviet spies at Los Alamos apparently shortened the time it took the Soviets to test their first A-bomb (1949) by at least a year.

C. What if an announcement were made, by highly trusted individuals around the world, such as the Queen and the Pope, saying that indeed SOME UFOs are ET spacecraft? Here are some things I believe would happen:

(1) Church attendance would increase.

(2) Mental hospital admissions would increase.

(3) The stock market would go down; uncertainty is always the enemy.

(4) Based on my more than 600 college lectures, the younger generation, which, unlike me, was never alive when there wasn’t a space program, would push for a new view of ourselves as EARTHLINGS instead of as Americans, Canadians, Greeks, Peruvians, etc. Many would think that would be great. But I know of no government on Earth that wants its citizens to owe their primary allegiance to the planet (where it belongs) instead of to individual national governments. Nationalism is the only game in town. I believe that alien visitors — they may be our landlords, for all we know — think of us as earthlings even though, because of our military traffic, they would be well aware of different ruling groups in different places.

D. A small group of religious fundamentalists (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson come to mind) have already loudly proclaimed that UFOs are the work of the devil and there is no other intelligent life outside Earth. What an insult to the notion of an all powerful GOD! They would be up the creek without a religious paddle if an announcement were to be made. They have had a great deal of political clout.

E. Making an announcement would require that governments admit they have been lying through their teeth for decades. I don’t know of any government that wants to do that.

F. If an announcement were carefully made without the scare mongering of “War of the Worlds”, a lot of people would think that surely, aliens, who can come here, must be far more advanced technologically than are we, since we can’t go out there. This would strongly suggest that soon there would be new methods of energy production, air and ground transport, computers and communication systems, i.e. economic chaos. We are not very good at large scale economic changes in a hurry. Think of the Soviet Union which, at our strong demands, had democracy, elections, freedom, capitalism. On the average, except for the high price of oil, are Russians better off today than they were 17 years ago??

G. Because I am convinced that military pilots in many countries have been disintegrated or “disappeared” by UFOs, I think governments would all be very resistant to telling their citizens that we tried to attack UFOs and they returned the favor — only they succeeded. The head of the American Rocket Society in 1952 took President Truman to task for the attack orders. Frank Feschino Jr. (Shoot Them Down) has gathered hundreds of reports of supposed airplane crashes in the USA and overseas in the early 1950s. Three military pilots, each of whom flew over 100 missions in Korea where they had to deal with marauding MIGs, crashed when they came back home. That seems very suspicious to me.

The star 55 Cancri has the most confirmed planets so far of any other (excluding the sun). NASA Art

A. In the first place, there are many indications that what crashed at Roswell and in the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico in early July, 1947, were small Earth excursion modules rather than the interstellar, very large vehicles (space carriers? mother ships?) which would have brought them to Earth just as our large aircraft carriers carry 75 or so small airplanes whose mode of propulsion is distinctly different from that of the carrier.

B. Secondly, when we examine major efforts by the Transportation Safety Board to determine the cause of aircraft crashes, we often find, after much effort, that it was simple unexpected things ranging from loose bolts, to ingested birds, to faulty wiring, to pilot error, to ice in the wrong place. It could have been very high atmospheric electricity levels because of storms or the great dryness of the desert air. Or unexpected high altitude hail. We know a radar set was on over at White Sands because of an impending rocket launch and the fact that it used vacuum tubes. This was a tracking radar pointed North. Crossing the beam might have led to a small hiccup in the control system for a magnetoaerodynamic propulsion system leading to a collision and subsequent collision of the lead saucer and its wingman’s saucer. Perhaps a US military rocket launched in the neighborhood might have inadvertently homed in on a saucer. Perhaps there was a momentary loss of attention when the Trinity highly radioactive site, at which the first atomic bomb was tested, was noted. We certainly have no reason to believe that aliens never make mistakes, or never run into the unexpected. Some day perhaps the government will release the report that was undoubtedly written as to the causes of the crashes. Just because we don’t have that report, it doesn’t mean the event didn’t take place.

A. So far as I know I have worked on more cancelled high technology classified programs than anybody and so can deal with those silly “It would violate the laws of Physics” arguments. Not many have worked on nuclear airplanes, or in general on fission and fusion propulsion systems.

B. Because I worked on many classified programs and have visited 20 archives, I am in a better position than most to deal with the silly “Secrets can’t be kept” notions.

C. Because I have probably had to answer about 40,000 questions at lectures and on talk shows and in classes, I have been forced to think about the questions such as the “WHY?” questions, more than most.

D. I was very fortunate to be able to find that my memory was good and reliable (at least until recently) and I could give acceptable answers in a hurry. Being on debate teams in high school probably helped a lot. I have been very lucky, first to have worked on so many leading edge classified programs, and second to be able to provide so many presentations to attentive audiences.