The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
24-04-2022
Military Whistle Blower reveals new top secret information on retrieval of Alien and Man Made UFOS!
Military Whistle Blower reveals new top secret information on retrieval of Alien and Man Made UFOS!
Dr. Greer discusses new explosive information from a member of a Nellis-based UFO retrieval team who was sent on missions to retrieve both man-made and ET craft.
He also describes his subsequent attempted abduction by covert human operatives using ARVs and fake "aliens grays".
Ufo's bestaan écht en dit is waarom | UITGEZOCHT #14
Boven Nederland zijn de laatste tijd opvallend veel ufo's gespot. Bij elkaar al meer dan 900. Zijn het buitenaardse wezentjes die hier even komen rondneuzen? Of is er een andere verklaring? #uitgezocht#ufo#spacex
VS: geen bewijs dat ufo's van aliens zijn
Er is geen bewijs dat ufo's van buitenaardse wezens zijn. Dat zeggen Amerikaanse experts. Toch kunnen ze niet met zekerheid zeggen dat de vliegende objecten niet toch van aliens zijn. #jeugdjournaal#ufo#aliens
UFO’s: De grootste doofpot aller tijden! Duncan Robles en Anton Teuben
Een doofpot waar weinig over gesproken wordt: Unidentified Flying Objects. Voor deze video is het team van NEXT afgereisd naar het noord Groningse dorpje Winsum. Duncan Robles gaat in deze video in gesprek met Anton Teuben. Anton Teuben is bekend van het oudste UFO-meldpunt van Nederland en bekommert zich al meerdere decennia om dit topic. Door zijn affiniteit met vliegen is hij in contact gekomen met verschillende ervaren piloten, die hem verhalen vertelden over ongeïdentificeerde vliegende objecten. Dit heeft bij Anton een sterke interesse gewekt voor dit bijzondere fenomeen.
Naast UFO’s houdt Anton zich al geruime tijd bezig met de Schumannresonantie. Anton vertelt tijdens het interview dat dit de constante trillingsfrequentie van de aarde is. Deze wordt ook wel de hartslag van onze planeet genoemd. Volgens Anton speelt de Schumannresonantie een onmisbare rol voor al het leven op aarde.
Duncan en Anton blikken vooruit op de toekomst: volgens Anton ziet deze er een stuk positiever uit dan menigeen zich nu voor mogelijk houdt. Wil je weten hoe? Check dan deze aflevering van NEXT.
Ufo’s en buitenaards leven zijn onderwerpen waar meningen sterk over verschillen. En dat is ook niet gek. Er is nog nooit wetenschappelijk bewijs geleverd dat er buitenaards leven is, en zeker niet dat er aliens bestaan. En hoewel wij er ook niet in geloven: de volgende tien gebeurtenissen zullen je flink aan het denken zetten over dit interessante onderwerp!
THE PENTAGON has another sensational UFO video taken from the deck of a US warship showing two car-sized ball of light objects.
Footage is said to have been filmed by crew aboard the USS Kearsarge of the strange encounter - but it has now been locked away and marked as classified.
Documentary filmmaker Dave C. Beaty - who produced 2019 film The Nimitz Encounters about the famous 2004 US Navy encounter with the "Tic Tac" object - said he understands the video exists.
It comes as US military begins to open up about the phenomena which is now being openly discussed by military insiders and politicians.
Mr Beaty revealed details of the USS Kearsarge's encounter earlier this month as it becomes the latest warship to have been shadowed by UFOs.
Mock up of two balls of light flying over the USS Kearsarge
The phenomena - described by sources familiar with the encounter as odd and menacing "balls of light" - are said to have been following around half a mile behind the ship and around 200 feet above the ocean in October 2021.
Mr Beaty said the US Marines who sighted the objects filed a report on the incident with the Department of Defence.
The report included a video - but that report and footage is now understand to have been marked as classified.
It shows that while many in the US are attempting to be more open about subject - there still remains a veil of secrecy around the issue, with some well placed civil servants opting to be more bureaucratic than others.
The US Navy officially updated its UFO reporting guidelines in 2019 as it sought to "update and formalise" the process.
It is understood a message to the fleet was sent out detailing these new instructions and procedures.
UFOs are now more commonly referred to as UAPs - unidentified aerial phenomena.
Documents released this week explained the change, telling the US Navy's press office to explicitly not use the term UFO.
USS Kearsarge is the latest warship to have had a UFO encounter
Credit: FACEBOOK/USS Kearsage
"The latter term is intrinsically linked to the concept of extra-terrestrials and the associated hysteria generated by the media that cover this topic," it reads.
Much of the US's renewed efforts over UAP sightings has been an apparent effort to seemingly focus the reporting process.
The UAP report released last summer said that "efforts are underway to standardize incident reporting across the US military services and other government agencies".
But it is understood however that UAP reports remain filed as classified.
And this is something which frustrates many who call for more openness in the investigation of the topic, including open up the files so they can be studied by the scientific community.
USS Kearsarge had been training at the time ahead of an overseas deployment - including with systems designed to take down enemy drones.
The weapons included anti-drone "Ghostbusters" style backpacks, and systems mounted on vehicles.
Pictures from the ship's public Facebook page reveal they had these capabilities onboard at the time of the encounter.
The objects are said to have been spotted by the deck-watch at night - who could not gain a thermal targeting lock on them.
They're not ours
Marines onboard are said to have believed at first that the UFO's were part of a surprise training exercise for the new anti-drone weapons. However, they discovered the countermeasures did not disrupt the objects - which were doing swooping manoeuvres as they followed the ship. Mark told Mr Beaty that the USS Kearsarge radioed command about the objects and were shockingly informed that the objects were "not ours".
Marines pictured aboard USS Kearsarge at time of the encounter
Mr Beaty previously revealed deck logs that confirmed a UFO encounter by the USS Kidd - when the destroyer was swarmed by at least four unexplained objects in July of 2019.
And there has been a step change in recent years, after the viral trio of US Navy UFO videos, the "Gimbal", "Go Fast", and "Tic Tac".
The footage stunned people around the world and remains unexplained to this day - sparking a new, more mainstream, interest in UFOs.
US officials have now set up a new office in the Pentagon - putting an official reporting structure in place for UFO encounters for the first time in decades.
It came after a landmark report on the subject was released last summer - confirming dozens of unexplained encounters, now officially referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs).
Defence insiders, intelligence officials, senators and former presidents have all gone on record admitting there is an unexplained "something" in our skies.
And it comes after the Pentagon released 1,574 pages of documents related to its UFO programme.
The documents were government commissioned scientific reports and letters to the Pentagon regarding the UFO programme it claims is now shut down.
The haul includes reports into research on the biological effects of UFO sightings on humans, sets out categorisations for paranormal experiences, and studies into sci-fi-style tech.
David Wilcock is a professional intuitive consultant who, since reading Richard C. Hoagland’s “The Monuments of Mars” in 1993, has intensively researched ufology, ancient civilizations, consciousness science, and new paradigms of matter and energy. He is the author of a critically acclaimed trilogy of scientific research works, known as the Convergence series, which gives definitive support to the idea that a change in matter, energy and consciousness is now occurring on the Earth and throughout the solar system.
Wilcock has appeared on broadcast television, lectured throughout the United States and Japan, published a variety of magazine articles and appeared on numerous radio talk shows. He is the co-author of the book “The Reincarnation of Edgar Cayce,” now available in bookstores nationwide, and a summary of his latest scientific work appears therein, where a breakthrough case for mass, spontaneous DNA evolution on Earth is unveiled. David is also an accomplished musician and composer within a variety of styles, including jazz-fusion, meditative and world music.
David Wilcock explains on March 19, 2020 during the the World Wide Coronavirus lockdown that it is NOT the end of the world. The lockdowns are to ensure the peoples safety during world wide mass arrests in conjunction with Operation Defender Europe 2020.
Thanks hope you all are staying cool out there. Stay tuned for more updates from BIN News!
Among the many types of UFO encounters on record, some of the most compelling and believable are those that have happened out near military airbases. Here we often have very reliable and trained witnesses who have very little reason to lie, and who generally seem to come away from such events fully stumped as to what has gone on, with no immediate rational explanation. Such reports are mostly known from the United States and Europe, but they go on in various far-flung places, and one region with its share of spooky air base UFO encounters is the island nation of Japan.
Sitting out at a place called Chitose, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, is Chitose Air Base, a Japan Air Self-Defense Force base and an integral base for monitoring Japan’s maritime borders with Russia. Back in 1947, the United States Armed Forces had taken over the base in the wake of World War II, and it was primarily under the control of the United States Army Air Forces, and later the United States Air Force Fifth Air Force. From July 1, 1947 to September 16, 1947, it was also the center of a very strange flap of UFO phenomena that has never been explained.
On July 1, 1947, a strange radar target was picked up 16 miles north of the base on a course of 180 degrees, moving at 500 m.p.h at an altitude of approximately 9,000 feet. The target sharply reversed course to 360 degrees and was tracked out to a range of 28 miles, before abruptly changing course again to 240 degrees, then reversing and returning to its original position before fading out of range. During the duration of the incident, the object seemed to not only defy known physics and technology at the time, but also break into two smaller objects, before merging back together again. A portion of the official report reads:
In the case of the pick-up on 1 July 1947 it was indicated as being more than one object. The size was comparable to that of the response received from four P-51 type aircraft. When this target initially reversed course at point A’ it broke up into two responses and then again merged into one large response on its outbound course.
There could be found no origin for the mystery object and no known aircraft were supposed to be operating in the area at the time. Two more radar contacts of this nature were picked up on August 29 and September 16 of that year, with the September incident showing something moving at supersonic speeds and showing maneuverability far beyond what was known at the time. The official report would conclude on this:
The speed indicated in the last report seems unreasonable for piloted aircraft since it was well into the supersonic range. The target, if an aircraft, would require an extremely large fuel supply for this speed. If rocket propelled, it is hard to visualize its operation for a long enough period of time to enable it to return to its base. The cable report of this last sighting indicated that further details, including weather, would follow. Upon receipt of this information a better evaluation may be possible. Present information does not permit a definite evaluation that all objects reported were either aircraft or airborne missiles but does support the conclusion that they were not natural phenomena. Great stress was given by the reporting agency to the high degree of proficiency of the radar operators and controllers in each case. An operator of even moderate proficiency would have no trouble in differentiating between a target and weather phenomena. Frontal activity as seen on a radar screen would show depth while the reflection from a meteor exists for such a short period of time that it would probably not be distinguishable from static interference. Therefore, it appears that the incidents are not due to natural phenomena.
What was going on here? In 1952 there was a strange incident at Haneda U.S. Air Force Base, near Tokyo, where on August 5 of that year two Air Force control tower operators at the base noticed a brilliant light in the sky. This object approached the base and clearly hovered near the control tower, and it was noticed that behind the light, there was a dark circular shape four times the light’s diameter. This unidentified object apparently flitted around and did a variety of aerial maneuvers, all while being tracked both visually and by ground radar. The base was alarmed, and an F-94 interceptor was scrambled with pilot 1st Lieutenant W.R. Holder, who was unable to successfully lock onto the mysterious object as he chased it. A report on the incident would read:
The UFO was given chase by the F-94, tracked on ground radar also, and went into a series of circular maneuvers, repeated several times. At one point, the UFO suddenly raced away at a clocked speed of 300 knots (about 345 mph), dividing into three separate radar targets at spaced intervals. Contact with the UFO either by radar or visually from Haneda AFB, was maintained for over 30 minutes. During this period, scattered witnesses saw the UFO exactly where radar showed it to be. The UFO maneuvers were so clearly under intelligent control that Major Dewey Fournet, the representative of Project Blue Book at the Pentagon, elected it one of the example that would prove that UFOs are spaceships from some other planet.
The whole thing would be brushed under the carpet, the official explanation being that it had been “a light that looked like a star and false radar echoes caused by a temperature inversion layer.” The UFO study called the Condon Report, of the University of Colorado would come to the same conclusion, but some ufologists disagree, with researcher Patrick Gross stating:
This is one of the cases that the Colorado Project has considered “explained” – a star and an anomalous radar propagation. Not so. On the contrary, as a careful study of the records shows, it is a very interesting case of anomalous flying objects in the sky who fly under intelligent control and cannot be of human origin. The Colorado Project, a skeptical UFO study effort conducted for the USAF that did not want to deal with the UFO problem anymore, minimized the details of the sighting. Every little detail of the case is important. Actually, it is by forgetting and minimizing case details that this case has been turned into an “explained” case by the Colorado Project which lead to the Condon Report. Professor James McDonald, a world famous specialist of meteorology and atmospheric physics, who disagreed with the handling of UFO cases by the Condon Report, re-evaluated and re-investigated the case and demonstrated how erroneous the Condon Report conclusion on this case – and on many other cases – was. I deeply encourage the seriously interested person into reading all the documents listed above.
Who knows what was going on there. Moving ahead to 1963, we have a case from Naha Air Base, in Okinawa, Japan, with a report filed from a base personnel to NICAP. The witness, named Marty, says that he was skywatching with a partner called Frank at around 11:40 p.m. on June 26 of that year when they saw something up there in the sky that they could not explain. The witness would say of it:
It looked like nothing we had ever seen before. I positioned my binoculars for a better look. We did not use the term “UFO” at that point, but we knew the craft we saw did not match anything in the Air Force’s aircraft inventory. We saw a large, slow-moving disk traveling in a steady northerly direction–right smack over our base. We did not see the usual flashing navigation lights or red and green wing-tip lights. All pilots who fly at night must have their aircraft’s navigation lights turned on. It was not just an unusual cloud formation, flares or a weather balloon. In the Air Force, working as communications specialists at control towers and around busy flight lines, Frank and I became knowledgeable about most types of aircraft in the military inventory. It traveled at an estimated speed of one hundred knots. The craft held a steady altitude of three or four thousand feet. It had a diameter of about seventy-five feet. We saw no antennae, dome, windows or markings. It was silent and produced no engine noise. Having a disk shape, it looked as flat as a quarter. The craft’s outer surface appeared smooth, constructed of a dull, yet reflective metallic material. Its outer edges appeared razor thin.
At first they were afraid it was preparing to engage them, they decided to get out of there, but luckily it was moving away from them and they relaxed somewhat. They then climbed the building’s fire ladder to watch the strange object, which they did until it faded out of sight. They then were in confusion about what to do about what they had just seen, and when they called it in they were told that there had been no radar contacts to corroborate it. Marty began watching the skies hoping to see the object again, and after several weeks of searching in vain he was successful. He says of this:
For weeks, I spent my free time watching the night sky and hoping for another sighting. I even bought a Nikon 8mm camera. I carried it with me wherever I went—just in case. My hopes of seeing it again began to fade after several weeks. However, just as I started to think the earlier sighting was just a onetime fly-by, I saw it again. Returning to my barracks from a second shift tour at the Communications Center, I decided to relax for a while. I sat in a chair on the second floor outside landing. Propping my feet up onto a railing, I began reminiscing about the first sighting. Since I was alone, the thought scared the hell out of me. Just before 1:00 a.m. I was about to call it a night when it reappeared. A craft similar to the type Frank and I saw one month earlier. In an instant, my mind switched from a relaxed state to one of “fight or flight.” My body froze and my adrenaline level skyrocketed. My hair hackled. My heart raced. I could not move my legs. My camera—I left it in my room. In my mind, I calculated the best course of action. There I was, sitting alone in the dark outside my barracks with no one else around, except–what? Common sense soon prevailed. No light beams were shooting down at me from the craft. It became clear that it took no notice of me and was moving northward away from my position. Thank God. After a few seconds, my brain regained control of my body and I was able to move my legs. I stood and took the next logical step, I ran like hell.
Once again, no radar contacts were reported. The witness was requested to fill out an Unidentified Aircraft Report and he declined, wary of being seen as crazy. That seems to have been the end of it, and we will probably never know just what really went on out there. Indeed, all of these cases remain unsolved and mostly forgotten, but they are certainly bizarre examples of these sorts of reports going on all over the world.
It’s not just that we are in the midst of a top-down directed global revolution. It’s one that is designed to change the very nature of humanity. Is there any relationship between this and the UFO/UAP phenomenon?
Richard Dolan is one of the world’s leading researchers and writers on the subject of UFOs and believes that they constitute the greatest mystery of our time. He is the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and the National Security State, both ground-breaking works which together provide the most factually complete and accessible narrative of the UFO subject available anywhere.
He also co-authored a speculative book about the future, A.D. After Disclosure, the first-ever analysis not only of how UFO secrecy might end but of the all-important question: what happens next?
MANY WITNESSED LARGE BLUE ORB ALIEN CRAFT IN ARIZONA
MANY WITNESSED LARGE BLUE ORB ALIEN CRAFT IN ARIZONA
NOTE: The above image is real but from another case file.
CIRCA 1978………BLACK HILLS ARIZONA
On our second night in California we were watching the local news in San Diego. The news reporter said that thousands of calls were coming into the news station as people were reporting sightings over the area of Palo Alto, California. The strange thing was no T.V. footage was shown and it must have been the government trying to cover it all up. The people reporting the sightings said they saw huge discs hovering over Palo Alto in the middle of the day and it was starting to cause panic for some people. I do remember the news people saying that it was not a good idea for people to travel up to Palo Alto because of too much traffic from all of the on lookers. All of us at the motel just thought it was strange and never gave it any thought after hearing the report on TV. Well we stayed in San Diego for about 3 weeks before we all decided to head back to Massachusetts, so we did. We pooled our money together and bought a 1968 Dodge Charger for the big trip home so we could have more freedom than being stuck on a bus for the next 5 days. We left California during the late night hours so the car would not overheat during the day as we crossed through the areas of desert. Well all was fine until we crossed into the area of Arizona known as the Black Hills.
We had to drive over a mountain range that seemed to take hours to get over, once we were headed down hill to the desert areas and level highway we noticed something very strange indeed. We saw 3 blue beautiful lights ahead of us, they were the color of cobalt blue like the old vicks salve jars. It seemed that no matter how far we drove the lights were always in the same location in the sky ahead of us. We decided to pull over and get out to see if these lights were aircraft or radio towers as it was hard to tell moving at 70 miles per hour in a car. Once we pulled over we got out for a closer look and noticed that these blue lights did not make a sound at all and they were in the same exact spot as an hour before when we first spotted them in the sky. Another strange fact is that we were the only car on the highway at the time and not even a truck or anything was spotted during this time. So we got back in the car and drove for almost another hour before pulling over once again because the lights were still in the sky in the same location as before. We started getting a little nervous and wondered if this was what the people in Palo Alto have been seeing.
We decided to turn on the car radio to find out if anybody had called in anything about what we were seeing in the Arizona desert but as fate would have it the radio was nothing but static on all stations. We just thought we were so far away from the nearest radio station and that was why we could not get any music or news on the radio. We all looked at each other in shock asking one other if we all saw the same blue lights and if we could still see them, we all said yes to that. After a few minutes my friend who was driving decided to turn off the car head lights and shut off the engine and as soon as he did we then became instant believers of UFO’s because when he turned off the lights the 3 cobalt blue lights that looked as if they were at least 500 feet apart from each other began to move towards each other until the 3 lights became one large blue light that headed away from us and then went upwards at the speed of a shooting star.
That’s a highly controversial title for this article. It becomes even more controversial if the answer to the title is “Yes.” Certainly, there are more than a few claims that ufologists have been wiped out for what they knew. Indeed, I wrote about such things in my Assassinations book and in my Diary of Secrets book that addresses the claims Marilyn Monroe might have lost her life because of what she knew about UFOs and aliens. Moving on, one of the strangest stories revolves around (A) a man named Fred Crisman and (B) a place called Maury Island. June 21, 1947 was the date of one of the most mysterious and widely-debated incidents in UFO lore. A man named Harold Dahl, his young son, and several men were shocked and amazed by the sight of a veritable squadron of circular UFOs, with holes around the sides, flying over the waters of Maury Island, Puget Sound, Washington State. Five of the craft seemed to be moving in a smooth fashion at roughly 2,000-feet. That certainly couldn’t be said of one of them: it was clearly, and dangerously, out of control.
(Nick Redfern)
Marilyn dead because of what she knew about UFOs and aliens?
That was made even more obvious when that particular craft suddenly plummeted to a height of around barely 700 feet. This was not a good sign. It was practically an omen. The rest of the mysterious aerial vehicles skillfully maneuvered out of the way, except for just one craft: it proceeded to “touch” the malfunctioning one, as things were described at the time. That didn’t seem to help. The craft then started to “spew forth” a huge amount of material – and showered down a mass of weird debris into the water. Some of it was an extremely thin, light metal. Other material, black in color, was boiling hot – something that was made clear when the wreckage hit the water and instantly caused a huge amount of steam to violently billow and bubble all around. Very unfortunately, the Dahl’s family dog was killed by some of the material as it slammed not just into the water, but onto the family’s boat, also.
A shocked Dahl quickly contacted his boss and friend, Fred Crisman; he was a man who had links to U.S. intelligence, and who wasted no time in gathering up as much of the material as possible. With Crisman and his son helping too, it wasn’t long before a sizeable amount of the material was on the boat and in their collective hands. Seeing the potential dollar-value in the story, Crisman contacted Ray Palmer. He was the publisher of Amazing Stories magazine. Crisman wondered if he, Palmer, might be interested in having an article written on what had happened – something that led a number of UFO researchers to wonder if Crisman had conjured up an elaborate hoax. Certain events that continued to grow quickly suggested it wasn’t a fabrication. First and foremost, the U.S. military was soon on the scene to scoop up the material. Specifically, the two involved were Captain William Lee Davidson and First Lieutenant Frank Mercer Brown. The pair was acting on the orders of General Nathan Twining, a key figure in the U.S. military’s early investigations into Flying Saucers. Those orders were never fulfilled. How can you fulfill orders when you’re dead?
Brown and Davidson flew into the area – from Hamilton Field, California – with not a problem in sight, at all. They collected as much of that weird debris as they could and took to the skies. On the way back, however, the absolute unthinkable happened. Their planned destination was Wright Field, Ohio (today, known as Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). A team was to be ready and waiting at the other end to take hold of that mass of curious material. The two hadn’t been in the skies for long, however, when malfunctions kicked in. Severe malfunctions. To the extent that the plane plummeted to the ground, killing them in a fiery nightmare. The wreckage mysteriously vanished. All we have left are a few old, black-and-white photos taken at the time and held by the FBI.
(Nick Redfern)
a UFO-JFK connection?
There is a bizarre afterword, I must stress. And what an afterword it is. While Harold Dahl largely fell into obscurity afterwards, the same most definitely cannot be said for Fred Crisman. He became a prominent figure within the Kennedy assassination. Indeed, in 1968, when District Attorney Jim Garrison was at the height of his investigation of JFK’s death, Crisman was subpoenaed by Garrison, himself. Garrison had it in his mind that Crisman wasn’t just a minor figure in the death of the president. For Garrison, Crisman was quite possibly one of the assassins at Dealey Plaza, Dallas on November 22, 1963. Garrison was sure Crisman was poised and ready to go on the fateful day, but in the guise of one of three “hoboes” – as they were described – seen lurking around the Grassy Knoll when JFK was shot. Was all of this just a catalog of unconnected weird situations? Was there something that deliberately placed Crisman in the heart of President Kennedy’s assassination? And, if so, was all this linked to real UFOs? Or, was the Maury Island incident – that began it all – a bad joke turned absolutely tragic? Just like so many other cases involving ufologists who might have lost their lives because of UFOs, the Maury Island controversy can go either way.
During the Autumn of 1947, the air was still fresh with news of “flying saucers” that many in the United States—including military personnel—were claiming to have seen.
Although many in officialdom remained skeptical, there nonetheless remained a level of concern within the United States Government regarding the origins of the saucers; were all of these witnesses just mistaken, or could the Soviets have a new aerial capability that seemed to surpass anything we had here at home?
The Army Air Forces naturally became tasked with looking into the matter, and occasionally aiding their inquiries were field agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, when requested. However, by September of that year, things had begun to grow sour in terms of the level of cooperation between the agencies. How cooperation between the Army Air Force and the FBI related to UFOs fell apart is one of the many interesting historical footnotes in the more than seven decades of U.S. government involvement with the subject.
US Army Air Forces recruitment poster from the Second World War
(Public Domain).
One Air Defense Command Headquarters memo dated September 3, 1947, titled “Cooperation of FBI with AAF on Investigations of ‘Flying Disc’ Incidents,” might be seen as the catalyst for the breakup. It was delivered to Command Generals with the First, Second, Fourth, Tenth, Eleventh and Fourteenth Air Forces, and came directly from Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence Colonel R. H. Smith at Headquarters of Air Defense Command, Mitchel Field, New York. In it, Smith outlined the problems that had begun to appear between the agencies, along with his own apparent flippancy toward the flying saucer reports.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has agreed to assist Air Force Intelligence personnel in the investigation of ‘flying disc’ incidents in order to quickly and effectively rule out what are pranks and to concentrate on what appears to be a genuine incident,” the memo stated, adding that the original arrangement had been that the FBI “would investigate incidents of so-called “discs” being found on the ground” and that the Bureau’s services “were enlisted in order to relieve the numbered Air Forces of the task of tracking down all the many instances which turned out to be ash can covers, toilet seats, and whatnot.”
The memo’s dismissive tone regarding “ash can covers” and “toilet seats” mistaken for fallen saucers hadn’t gone unnoticed. In fact, one field agent with the FBI’s San Francisco office became particularly irked by the Colonel Smith’s tone, firing back a few choice words in a memorandum of his own, dated September 19, 1947.
“It is my understanding from recent Bureau instructions that we are to assist the Air Force Intelligence personnel in the investigation of flying disc incidents,” wrote Harry M. Kimball, Special Agent in Charge, in the late September memo.
In his retort, Kimball wrote that “the attention of the Bureau is respectfully called to paragraph two of this letter and to the last sentence therein which states, ‘The services of the FBI were enlisted in order to relieve the numbered Air Forces of the task of tracking down all the many instances which turned out to be ash can covers, toilet seats, and whatnot.’
While Kimball primarily took issue with instructions contained in Smith’s September 3 memo which, in his view, would have a limiting effect on the investigations conducted by the FBI, he also took notice of Smith’s sarcasm, stating that “it appears to me the wording of the last sentence in the second paragraph mentioned above is cloaked in entirely uncalled-for language tending to indicate the Bureau will be asked to conduct investigations only in those cases which are not important and which are almost, in fact, ridiculous.
“The thought has occurred to me the Bureau might desire to discuss this matter further with the Army Air Forces,” Kimball wrote, “both as to the type of investigations which we will conduct and also to object to the scurrilous wordage which, to say the least, is insulting to the Bureau in the last sentence of paragraph two.”
On September 26, Kimball’s initial letter received a response from Assistant Director Ladd, who wrote in a memorandum of his own that “It is recommended that the Bureau protest vigorously to the Assistant Chief of Air Staff-2,” further recommending that the FBI “discontinue all activity in this field and that the Bureau Field Offices be advised to discontinue all investigations and to refer all complaints received to the Air Forces.” With the help of Ladd’s response, Kimball’s initial complaint with the Army Air Force and, more specifically, Colonel Smith’s “uncalled-for language” went all the way up to Director J. Edgar Hoover, who upon reading it, fired off a memo of his own directly to Major General George MacDonald, Assistant Chief of Air Staff.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the keeper of all secrets
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been requested by your office to assist in the investigation of reported sightings of flying discs,” Hoover’s memorandum led off. My attention has been called to instructions disseminated by the Air Forces relative to this matter.”
However, things went downhill from here, as Hoover’s dissatisfaction quickly became reflected in the further wording of the memorandum to General MacDonald.
“I have been advised that these instructions indicate that the Air Forces would interview responsible observers while the FBI would investigate incidents of discs found on the ground, thereby relieving the Air Force of running down incidents which in many cases turned out to be ‘ash can covers, toilet seats, and whatnot.’
“In view of the apparent understanding by the Air Forces of the position of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in this matter,” Hoover steamed, “I cannot permit the personnel and time of this organization to be dissipated in this manner. I am advising the Field Divisions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to discontinue all investigative activity regarding the reported sightings of flying discs, and am instructing them to refer all complaints received to the appropriate Air Force representative in their area.
Hoover’s stormy reply to the Army Air Force was followed by an additional Bureau Bulletin, which was sent out on October 1, stating that “Effective immediately, the Bureau has discontinued its investigative activities,” and that “All future reports connected with flying discs should be referred to the Air Forces and no investigative action should be taken by Bureau Agents.”
Thus ended the cooperation between the Army Air Force and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI on the investigation of UFOs, and within months of the story of “flying saucers” first coming to public attention in the summer of 1947. One can’t help but wonder whether things might have played out differently, had the Assistant Chief of Air Staff-2, Colonel Smith, not felt it appropriate to inject his own cynicism into the matter.
Nonetheless, the resulting document trail marks the beginning of a pattern involving uncooperative exchanges between government agencies on the UFO issue… a pattern that after more than seven decades, continues even into the present day.
Last June, the world received a snapshot of what the current attitudes within the United States Government are when it comes to unidentified aerial phenomena, or what are historically known as unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
In a report entitled “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: Preliminary Assessment”, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) presented a brief summary of the findings of the Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (UAPTF). At just six pages, the report left much to the imagination, although it did provide at least some details about the government’s current UAP investigative efforts. These included 144 incidents involving the apparent detection of objects that could not be identified, most of which were observed by members of the U.S. military in controlled airspace.
In many ways, the report amounted to an inkblot test for those who read it; the scant information provided was vague enough to leave open to question what, precisely, the UAP observed by U.S. military personnel are, and what their origins might be.
That ambiguity wasn’t enough to prevent many from drawing premature conclusions about the phenomenon witnessed. Since the report’s delivery, there have been ongoing assertions that while we still aren’t sure about what UAP are, we do supposedly know what they are not.
Now. Powered by Northrop Grumman is a blog presented by the famous American multinational defense and aerospace company, known for being one of the world’s largest manufacturers of military weapons. According to one online source, the blog is described as a site that “covers relevant, topical subjects in cutting-edge science, from deep space to the deep sea and everything in between,” whose mission is “to help this audience understand that their issues and interests are our issues and interests.”
In a recent posting at the blog by Nancy Huang, titled “UFO Sightings Are Real, but Aliens Are Not Responsible”, the author paradoxically asserts—despite the post’s title—that in 18 of the 144 incidents the report references, “UAP exhibited unusual movement patterns” which “could be due to sensor errors or observer misperception, but they could also be due to breakthrough technologies (from Earth) or aliens.”
That’s right, she said aliens. Indeed, reading the excerpt above, it seems hard to imagine that the author has really concluded that “aliens are not responsible,” and that extraterrestrial technologies can be entirely ruled out as a possible source behind some UAP observations logged in the June assessment.
The article goes on to describe how the ODNI report from last June presents five categories into which, according to the author, “All UAP incidents are expected to eventually be included”. Those categories, as detailed in the ODNI report, are “airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.”
A cursory glance at these might lead one to the mistaken conclusion that if all UAP observed by the military fall into one of these categories, then there must be little more to the issue than surveillance drones or other technologies in use by adversaries of the United States (actually a rather concerning prospect). On the lesser extreme, UAP sightings might consist only of natural phenomena or other things with mundane explanations.
However, those who have read the ODNI report may recall that on Page 6 of the assessment, the authors present the following interesting additional information about the otherwise unremarkable sounding “Other” category:
“Although most of the UAP described in our dataset probably remain unidentified due to limited data or challenges to collection processing or analysis, we may require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize some of them. We would group such objects in this category pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them. The UAPTF intends to focus additional analysis on the small number of cases where a UAP appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management.”
One would likely find it hard to imagine that anything relatively mundane could also display “unusual flight characteristics or signature management,” the latter meaning that some of these objects appear to possess the ability to reduce their visibility or instrumental detection by technological means.
From this, several conclusions may be drawn about some of the “Other” category phenomena in question, which includes 1) that some UAP are technological devices, 2) that some of these devices appear to operate in ways that our military doesn’t fully understand, and 3) that whatever these objects are, they are purposely trying to avoid detection.
Add to this the fact that, as we have seen in recent days, Russia’s military may well have bitten off more than it could chew with its attempted invasion of Ukraine. What many feared (and Russia no doubt believed) would be a swift military takeover has resulted in almost a month of battle, and the unnecessary loss of countless innocent Ukrainian lives, as well as the deaths of Russian soldiers by the thousands.
The point here, with relevance to the UAP argument, is this: are we really supposed to believe Russia, with the obvious limitations its military has been shown to have throughout this conflict, are the ones producing UAP being observed by the U.S. military in its own airspace? The likelihood of this possibility in light of recent events, or even their belonging to a nation like China, grows increasingly slim.
In summary, although many continue to proclaim in headlines that UAP/UFO sightings do occur, but that they aren’t aliens (while seemingly contradicting themselves just a few sentences into their own articles that make such proclamations), the truth is that we simply don’t know what these objects are, or where some of them might come from.
Yes, the extraterrestrial hypothesis remains a possibility. This, along with a few other potential alternatives, should remain on the table until enough data is collected that conclusive determinations about the nature and origin of UAP can be made.
Clif High: UFO Technology & What Happened at Roswell - Crystals, Crafts Overhead, Night Vision, Ships Fleeing
Clif High: UFO Technology & What Happened at Roswell - Crystals, Crafts Overhead, Night Vision, Ships Fleeing
Clif High has a patent on computer-assisted reading technology which allows reading from computer screens at up to 2000 words per minute. Reaching into other areas of hidden potential within language use by humans, he has been developing a system of software internet agents (like search engines use) and other proprietary processing methods to predict future events.
The software project, begun in 1997, captures near-real-time changes in language patterns within internet discussions. Then, employing radical linguistic techniques of his own devising, he develops a model which anticipates future events with some seeming accuracy. The processing has, at its core, a method of assigning emotional values to complex content and time carry-values to predict changes in future behavior based on how people are using language now.
Since June 2001 when the work projected a major ‘tipping point’, that is a ‘life-changing event’ with aspects of ‘military and accident’ that would forever change the way we live to occur inside 90 days, the web bot project has continued to give archetype descriptors of future events such as the anthrax attack in Washington, the crash of American 587, the Columbia disaster, the Northeast Power outage, the Banda Aceh earthquake and most recently the flooding of the Red River. As a continuing project, reports are offered from the extracted archetype information at his web site, www.halfpasthuman.com
Laura Eisenhower is a Global Alchemist, Researcher and Medical and Intuitive Astrologist. She is an internationally acclaimed speaker who has presented her work world wide. Laura is the great-granddaughter of President Dwight David Eisenhower and she reveals Exopolitical information about his administration, that has been largely held in secrecy. She is considered by many to be one of North Americas leading researchers on: Health, Exopolitics, Alchemy, Metaphysics, and Galactic History. Laura works to free us from the 3-D holographic time-loop,
False Archonic systems and Military Industrial Complex and exposes hidden agendas so we can take our power back. Feeling a calling regarding her mission since she was a child, she has gained incredible insight through her wilderness adventures, psychic development and has been connecting major dots about how to guide us into higher Earth energies.
She has a deep understanding of Gaia-Sophia and our Divine Blueprint and how they connect to the Venus transits, Earth grids, Global Alchemy, DNA & ET races. Her passion is to inspire unity consciousness and bring us back to the Zero point/Unified field, the totality of our divine powers.
We live in a world in which secret surveillance is becoming ever-more dominating. Just about every bit of data on our iPhones can be secretly accessed. Our every online activity can be scrutinized behind closed doors. Even our Smart TVs are wide open to hackers. And, who is responsible? The government, of course. As one example: regardless of what you or me think of the Edward Snowden affair and its attendant revelations, the fact is that Snowden demonstrated – to an extraordinary and disturbing degree – just how much of a 1984-like society we have become. And in an incredibly short period of time, too. The National Security Agency and other agencies of government have the ability to penetrate just about every aspect of our private lives: our medical records, where we take our vacations, what books we might buy on Amazon, and more are all issues that can be easily accessed with the right technology. But, it’s not just government that has taken us down apath to an Orwellian nightmare. The surveillance state is now a part of our culture, too: take, for example, the outrageous trend of companies now regularly demanding access to the passwords of the Facebook accounts of their employees.
Of course, the primary reason for such widespread spying – and lying about the spying – is due to the current state of the planet: the war on terror, in other words. When it comes to shutting down terrorist cells, finding and wiping out crazed bombers, and tracking down those who would do us harm, surveillance technology has achieved a great deal. The problem is, though, that it has gone too far. The lunatics are now running the asylum. Common-sense has gone out of the window. Does an eighty-year-old lady – living with just her cat for company – really need to be a victim of data-collection? No. In other words, the surveillance has reached unwarranted, outrageous proportions. All of which sets the scene for a study of another kind of surveillance, one which involves not terrorists – of the foreign or domestic kind – but none other than those people who claim to have been taken away by extraterrestrials. We’re talking about the alien abduction phenomenon. The government secretly spends vast amounts of money on monitoring those who claim to have been kidnapped by strange, unearthly beings with even stranger agendas? Most people would laugh at such a scenario. They shouldn’t though: that is exactly what is going on. And, it has been going on not just for years, but for decades. For some, the dangerous and sinister Men in Black are the cause of all the paranoia. Now, onto UFO paranoia.
(Nick Redfern)
Watching 24/7
All around the world, people have reported close encounters with extraterrestrial entities. Witnesses describe being kidnapped in the dead of night by large-headed, black-eyed creatures from other worlds. Those same creatures have become popularly known as the Greys. People subjected to alien abduction typically report intrusive experiments that revolve around genetics, human reproduction, and even the creation of alien-human hybrids. There is, however, another aspect to the alien abduction controversy. It is, perhaps, the most sinister aspect of all. Abductees very often report being followed and spied upon by military and government personnel. It is typical for abductees to see black helicopters hovering directly over their homes, in intimidating style. Mail is very often intercepted. Letters are opened. Phone-calls are monitored. Emails and social media are hacked into. Strange men dressed in black suits photograph the homes of the abductees. All of which brings us to the matter of what have become known in the domain of alien abduction research as “MILABS,” or “Military Abductions.” According to numerous abductees, after being kidnapped by alien entities, they are shortly afterwards kidnapped again…by the government.
These follow-up MILABS are the work of a powerful group hidden deep within the military and the intelligence community. It is the secret agenda of these highly classified organizations to figure out what the goal of the so-called Greys really is. And, the best way for the government to get the answers is to interrogate and monitor those who have come face-to-face with the UFO phenomenon: the abductees, themselves. The idea that agencies of the U.S. government, the military and the intelligence community are actively and secretly monitoring Americans who have been subjected to the alien abduction experience may sound outlandish to many – perhaps even paranoid. The startling reality, however, is that such a situation is not at all outlandish. And nor is it paranoia-driven. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. It’s very important to note that there is an amazing precedent to the alien abduction controversy and its connections to government spying. It all revolves around what is known as the “Contactee” phenomenon, which had its origins in the early 1950s.
(Nick Redfern)
George Van Tassel’s Integratron, a historic part of the Contactee phenomenon
It was in the summer of 1947 – specifically June 24 – when the UFO phenomenon began. That was the date on which the first report of an encounter with what quickly became known as a Flying Saucer occurred. The witness was a pilot named Kenneth Arnold. He encountered a squadron of such craft near Mt. Rainier, Washington State. In the days and months which followed, more and more sightings of such craft occurred: a phenomenon was born that is still very much with us to this day. But, in those early days, the UFOs hardly ever landed. Even when they did, their crews never exited their craft. That all changed, though, in the early 1950s when – after a few years of deliberately staying behind a curtain of secrecy – they slowly but surely showed themselves. Long before the first alien abduction incident was
reported, elements of the U.S. Government were already secretly monitoring certain figures in the United States who claimed close encounters with extraterrestrials. Agencies were carefully collating files, listening in on phone calls, and intercepting the mail of dozens of people. Those same figures became known as the Contactees. It’s important to have an understanding of the Contactee phenomenon, as it serves to demonstrate how and why it led government, military and intelligence personnel to focus on the claims of E.T. interaction – and then to do precisely the same when the abduction issue took off.
(Nick Redfern)
“Giant Rock,” California where George Van Tassel hung out. So did the FBI, now and again.
Most of the secret work in the Contactee field was carried out in the 1950s. It was undertaken to learn what was allegedly being done to American citizens by our mysterious visitors. At the time, the bulk of the work fell under the auspices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and at the express order of none other than almost-legendary FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover. How do we know this? Simple: thanks to legislation brought about under the Freedom of Information Act, numerous files on the Contactees have now been released into the public domain. Real X-Files? You bet. Those files make it abundantly clear that the U.S. Government went to extraordinary steps to ensure that the Contactees were placed under careful, secret watch – and particularly so those Contactees who were clearly influencing public opinion on matters relative to not just alien visitations, but also in relation to politics, the economy, and religion. In light of all the above, it’s no wonder that both Contactees and Abductees have become paranoid about how they are/were watched by both the “others” and by government agencies.
During the early 1950s my dad, Frank Redfern, like all young men of his age at that time, had to serve three years of National Service. And, having a passion for aircraft, he chose to join the Royal Air Force. During his three years in the RAF, and before returning to his regular job as a carpenter, which he held until his retirement at the age of sixty-five, he was trained in the field of, and worked on, radar. It was towards the end of his service that my dad was involved in several radar-based UFO encounters, all of which occurred at the height of a September 1952 NATO operation, called Exercise Mainbrace. On each occasion, fast moving objects of unknown origin were tracked on the radar-screens, fighter planes were scrambled, and the ominous and official stamp of secrecy came firmly down on just about everyone and everything. Certainly, my dad didn’t tell me about this most weird affair until I was in my early teens, around 1978 or 1979. It was an event that got me deeply interested in UFOs, and set me on a path to seek out the truth concerning all things saucer-shaped and flying. And it’s a strange and conspiracy-filled path that I’m still on today. And, arguably, those September 1952 events left a deep and lasting impression on my dad, too, since – if asked – he is still willing to talk about them to this very day.
(Nick Redfern)
Radar and my dad: still sharing his UFO experiences
There’s no doubt it was my dad’s experiences – and particularly those military-based radar events he was involved in -that got me involved. With that said, let’s now take a look at some other UFO-radar cases that I consider to be important. On March 26, 1957, there was an amazing encounter. The UK Air Ministry documentation (now in the public domain) states in part: “A report was received from Royal Air Force Church Lawford on 26th March, 1957 of a sighting of an unusual nature. The object moved at a speed timed at exceeding 1400mph [italics mine]. This in itself was unusual as the object had accelerated to this speed from a stationary position [italics mine]. No explanation has yet been found for this sighting but a supplementary report, including a copy of the radar plot, was requested and has been received from Church Lawford this afternoon.” Few of the files have been placed into the public domain.
(Nick Redfern)
At the National Archives
A perfect example of UFOs and radar, is a collection of U.S. Air Force documents that detail an astonishing wave of UFO activity that occurred in early 1958. They are files declassified under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, but which have not generally received the positive commentary they deserve. The mystery began on the night of March 9, 1958. The location: a now-closed U.S. Army installation on the Panama Canal Zone called Fort Clayton. It was around 8:00 p.m. when a UFO was tracked, by anti-aircraft personnel, in the Canal Zone area. Further blips soon appeared on the screen. Clearly something unusual was afoot. It turns out that Fort Clayton was not the only base monitoring unusual aerial activity. Radar staff at Fort Amador, Flamenco Island were also tracking something airborne and unknown. In fact, they were tracking two UFOs – both of which maintained a circular pattern above a nearby installation, Fort Kobbe. Their heights, however, fluctuated between 2,000 and 10,000 feet. It was at this time that staff at Taboga Island’s Track Radar Unit confirmed they were keeping a careful watch on certain unknowns, too.
Shortly before midnight, personnel at Fort Amador chose to take a new and novel approach to try and identify the UFOs: they bathed them with powerful, ground-based searchlights. The response was incredible: in no more than a handful of seconds the UFOs headed skywards from 2,000 to 10,000 feet. Official records on this particularly eye-opening development state: “…this was such a rapid movement that the Track Radar, which was locked on target, broke the Track Lock and was unable to keep up with ascent of the objects. As Track Radar can only be locked on a solid object, which was done in the case of the two unidentified flying objects, it was assumed that the objects were solid.” This strange and bizarre activity continued into the early hours of March 10 – something which saw UFOs hovering and accelerating to speeds around 1,000 miles per hour, and unknown objects tracked on radar.
(Nick Redfern)
The U.K.’s Ministry of Defense
One of the most fascinating of all UFO encounters – an incident that almost resulted in a mid-air collision between a UFO and a Meteor jet – occurred over Royal Air Force Gaydon, Warwickshire, England, on the night of October 21, 1957. Less than a week later, the UK media was chasing down the story. Describing RAF Gaydon as “one of the RAF’s top V-bomber stations,” the Sunday Express newspaper stated that the Air Ministry (today, the Ministry of Defense) had taken rapid steps to get to the heart of the mystery. Reportedly, the UFO was seen visually by the pilot and tracked by ground-radar personnel – and only a few minutes apart. Questions, unsurprisingly, were quickly being asked: could the UFO actually have been a Soviet spy-plane? It was certainly a scenario that the Air Ministry felt important enough to address. Although – as will become apparent – the description given by the pilot did not sound like that of the average Russian aircraft. Plus, six days after the event occurred, Air Ministry staff were still scratching their heads. As all of this demonstrates, radar and UFOs come together – and in an amazing fashion. Sometimes with your own dad!
New L.A. Marzulli: UFO Disclosure - Full Length Film
New L.A. Marzulli: UFO Disclosure - Full Length Film
New L.A. Marzulli: UFO Disclosure – Full Length Film
In the last few years, we’ve seen a heightened interest from the public … the media … and the government on UFO encounters. Would it be beyond imagination to suggest that one day an alien craft might appear on Earth, claiming to represent the ones who seeded our planet millions of years ago? If Christians are gone, who wouldn’t believe their lie? Or, perhaps this “official disclosure” explains away the rapture of the church, the day Jesus takes millions of believers to heaven as He promised us in the Bible? How else could they explain away our mass disappearance?
Carlos Diaz: The Man Who Contacted And Filmed The UFO
Carlos Diaz: The Man Who Contacted And Filmed The UFO
One morning in January 1981, Mexican photographer Carlos Diaz pulled into a deserted car park at Ajusco Park near Mexico City. He was on an assignment for a magazine, and had arranged to meet a journalist who was yet to arrive.
Diaz sat in his car, preparing his camera for the job ahead. Although it was early in the morning, the air was thick with humidity which made even sitting still uncomfortable. Impatiently, Diaz began to look at his watch.
Suddenly, his attention was caught by a strange yellow glow coming from the valley below him. At first he thought it was a forest fire, but, an instant later, the source of light revealed itself to be a large, orange, oval-shaped UFO, slowly hovering about 30 metres from his car.
Unable to believe his eyes, Diaz quickly grabbed his camera. With it resting on his steering wheel, he began frantically firing off shots. Then, without warning, the whole car began to shake violently.
Diaz got out of the vehicle and took two more photographs before the craft sped up vertically into the sky, leaving Diaz in a state of shock. This encounter marked the beginning of what was to develop into one of he most fascinating and long-running contactee cases in the history of UFOlogy.
Carlos Díaz
Today, the case remains among a small minority of alledged extraterrestrial encounters to be supported by verified film documentation that has stood up to the scrutiny of a range of experts.
KEY ENCOUNTER
Indeed, the apparent credibility of Diaz’s claims has attracted the attention of some of the world’s top UFO researchers, including German author Michael Hesemann and abduction researcher Dr John Mack. Both concluded that Diaz’s story is completely credible.
Hesemann echoes the views of most researchers when he states: ‘The Carlos Diaz case is the most important case of documented alien-human contact to have emerged in modern times.’ Certainly, at the time of his initial encounter, Diaz little suspected what was to come.
The transition from a run-of-the-mill UFO sighting in an area now acknowledged as a UFO hot-spot, to one of the key cases of recent years did not occur until weeks later. In the days that followed this January sighting, Diaz remained preoccupied by his experience.
Unable to forget what he had seen, he repeatedly returned to the Ajusco Park location, hoping to secure more pictures. After a succession of fruitless visits, Diaz began to think that he was wasting his time. But then, on 23rd of March, his patience was rewarded.
RETURN TRIP
While roaming the greenery, Diaz was again alerted to the presence of a UFO by an orange glow, which he could see only dimly through the fog and rain that had saturated the forest in Ajusco Park. As he climbed up the walls of the valley, he managed to position himself within 45 metres of the object. Diaz watched the ‘craft’ hovering above him, eminating a bright orange light.
It was, he said, dome-shaped with a smooth ring in its centre. This, claimed Diaz, was covered with a number of half spheres, each around one metre in diameter. Crouching behind some rocks, Diaz thought his actions had gone unnoticed, but, as he continued to watch the craft, he felt someone grab his shoulder from behind.
Diaz immediately fainted, and, when he awoke, it was dark and the UFO was gone. He was shocked to discover that, despite heavy rain, his clothes were completely dry. At that point, he knew something strange had happened to him. When he returned to his car, Diaz noticed another car parked in front of him.
At this point, Diaz claimed, a humanoid entity with fair hair approached him and told him that if he wanted to know more about what he had just experienced, he should return to the same spot at noon the following day. Apparently, when Diaz returned the next day, he discovered the same entity sitting on the grass.
Diaz claimed that the being then turned to him and explained that it was he who grabbed his shoulder the previous day. Before leaving, the being also told Diaz that he had come from inside the craft and that Diaz would gradually recover his memory of what had happened while he was unconscious. Sure enough, over the next few months, Diaz’s memory returned, piece by piece.
According to his account, he recalled the craft hovered directly over his head. As he attempted to touch the craft, his hand seemed to pass through the yellow light and he seemed to merge with it. The next thing he recalled was seeing the craft parked on a platform inside a giant cave.
Diaz was filled with awe when he remembered what he had seen inside: ‘It was full of stalagmites, some of which were carved into what appeared to be Mayan sculptures,’ he stated.
‘I saw many people in the cave, some of whom waved to me and, in a state of shock, I waved back.’ Apparantly the being Diaz had encountered in the park then led him to a smaller cave which contained seven glowing, egg-shaped orbs, one of which Diaz was invited to step into. On entering, Diaz could at first only see yellow light.
But then he found himself surrounded by the image of a forest. ‘I could see all the details of the forest as if I was walking through it,’ said Diaz. ‘I couldn’t touch anything, but I could feel the temperature and moisture.
I could see and experience everything, yet I wasn’t physically there.’ His guide then told him that the orbs were also a system for storing information and that certain data had been imparted to him. Diaz was then returned to the ship and, in time, to the park.
CONTINUING CONTACT
According to Diaz, this was only the first of a series of contacts with the same beings, which continue to this day. Since 1981, Diaz has stated that his experience inside the orbs has enabled him to ‘travel’ to different regions of the Earth’s ecosystem – forest, desert, jungle, shoreline, even Arctic areas – with his ET contact.
Through this contact, Diaz claims to have been imbued with an awareness of the interconnectedness of all life and the need to preserve our environment.
To many UFOlogists, especially those who have had their ‘fingers burnt’ by alledged contactees before, these claims may appear far-fetched. However, Diaz is seen by many researchers as a highly reliable source, not least because of the strong body of photographic evidence he has amassed to support his claims.
INDISPUTABLE PROOF?
Mexican TV journalist and UFOlogist Jaime Maussan, who has been at the centre of UFO investigations in Mexico since the wave began in 1991, believes that Diaz’s UFO photographs are among the most impressive he has seen.
Maussan took Diaz’s photographs to Jim Dilettoso, an image processing expert at Village Labs, in Tucson, Arizona, who concluded they were genuine. After satisfying himself he was not dealing with a hoaxer, Maussan visited Diaz at his hime in Tepoztlan, Mexico. There, he spoke to a number of other witnesses who claimed to have seen exactly the same type of UFO.
The apparent credibility of the Diaz case has also attracted UFO researchers from further afield, who have attempted to glean insights into the alien agenda from Diaz’s contactee claims. German author Michael Hesemann, who first interviewed Diaz in June 1994, is convinced of the credibility of Diaz’s story.
‘Not only is he contacting these beings through encounters on the ships,’ says Hesemann, ‘but he claims to be meeting these beings socially, since he believes some of them are living among us.’ However Hesemann explains that, according to Diaz, the beings are reluctant to fully disclose their origins.
‘Apparently,’ says Hesemann, ‘they did, however, explain that they have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, and are particularly interested in our evolution which, compared to their own, has happened at a much faster rate. They are trying to learn why.’
Another UFO researcher intrigued by Diaz’s case is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, John Mack. Mack has a long history of dealing with abductees and contactees and believes that the Diaz case is among the most convincing he has come across.
In his book Passport to the Cosmos, he states: ‘Out of all the experiencers I have worked with, it is Carlos Diaz who seems to have developed the richest understanding of the interconnected web of nature. Diaz’s experience of connecting with living creatures is so intense that he seems literally to become the thing he is describing.’
Diaz’s experience, Mack claims constitutes an ‘awakening’, a process which, he says, is common in abductees. Diaz told Mack that his contact with the ETs had instilled in him a need to preserve the environment and the ability to ‘enjoy a beautiful planet’.
Whether or not an extraterrestrial influence was involved, Diaz’s new-found concern for the environment has certainly become a driving force in his life. he has repeatedly and passionately conveyed this environmental warning publicly, most notably at a UFO conference in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1995.
Diaz has revealed that he had been informed through his contacts that the civilization of the visiting extraterrestrial, like ours, had been threatened by its own history of destruction, but had somehow managed to survive.
He remains convinced that his contacts’ disturbing prediction for our future is only too real – a prediction that states with near certainty that humanity, on its current course, is headed for total extinction.
ALIEN MESSENGER
This outspokenness, coupled with the public nature of his experience, has le Diaz to assume visionary status in both his home town of Tepoztlan and UFO circles. however, Diaz has been quick to dispute this, claiming that he is not a unique visionary, but merely ‘a messenger’.
The real nature of Diaz’s current incarnation aside, for many UFOlogists, the Diaz case remains among the most convincing on record. Indeed, few UFO reports exist that boast such impressive and abundant photographic evidence. And fewer still have emerged that have stood up to the scrutiny applied to Diaz’s images.
PERFECT PICTURES
Expert analysis of Carlos Diaz’s UFO pictures has been extremely thorough. Mexican UFOlogist Jaime Maussan gave the original transparencies to Professor Victor Quesada at the Polytechnical Institute of the University of Mexico for examination.
Quesada stated: ‘We were shocked to discover that the spectrum of light from the object was unlike anything we have ever seen, it broke all previous parameters and didn’t match anything in our data banks.
The light was extraordinarily intense. There was no evidence of superimposition or a hoax. We estimated the object to be around 30 to 50 metres in diameter.’ Interestingly, the photographs were also analysed by Dr Robert Nathan at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Nathan, a notorious UFO sceptic, stated that he could find no evidence of a fake.
Certainly, for many who have examined the three images, the first shot is the most impressive. In it, the orange glowing craft can be seen through the windshield of the car, and light from the object is reflected both off the car’s bonnet and off the metal guard rail by the side of the road. These, in particular, are details that experts claim are extremely difficult to fake.
VIDEO EVIDENCE
Mexican UFOlogist Jaime Maussan was so intrigued by Carlos Diaz’s account of his experiences that he provided him with a video camera and asked him to see if he could record the UFO on tape when it next appeared. A few weeks later, Diaz awoke at 5 a.m. and grabbed his camera. He walked out and waited.
Apparently, within minutes, the craft appeared and hovered over the house, where Diaz filmed it. When Maussan saw the remarkable footage, he asked Diaz if he could get even closer to the craft while filming. Two months later, Diaz was once again able to film the craft, which this time hovered directly above him, without moving.
However it is Diaz’s third attempt to capture the craft on video that is the most spectacular. In this footage, Diaz having mounted his camera on a tripod, walks to the bottom of a field waving a flash light.
Responding to this, the craft suddenly materializes directly above Diaz’s head and sends beams of light down towards him. Then, the unidentified object remains motionless for 30 seconds, before blinking out. It is universally recognized that this video contains some of the best UFO footage ever taken.
In Oregon, a man said his health deteriorated after a glowing blue orb passed through his body. A family in California reported strange lights and a gray figure with spindly legs in their orchard. A werewolf-like creature allegedly prowled around homes in suburban Virginia.
All three incidents were probed as part of a secret Pentagon program investigating UFOs. The program, contracted by the Defense Intelligence Agency, plumbed the connection between the flying objects and the paranormal for two years, according to the men who ran it.
It was the beginning of a years-long effort by UFO advocates that eventually led to Congress passing legislation in December 2021 ordering the Pentagon to spend the next four years investigating unidentified flying objects.
The Pentagon's new office for what has been rebranded as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, has deep roots in the paranormal. Underneath the Washington defense talk about threats from China and Russia, there is a conviction among advocates that the strange objects glimpsed by troops and military equipment are part of a mysterious phenomenon that stretches back decades or, perhaps, throughout human history.
As the stigma over flying saucer talk lifts, and the military connection has taken UFOs mainstream, some have become more open about those beliefs.
"People say, 'Well, we're only going to look at the nuts-and-bolts machines.' Well, you better come up with a lot of physics. It's far more advanced than we're capable of now," said James Lacatski, a now-retired DIA intelligence officer who set up the UFO program that ran from 2008 to 2010. "And then there's others who say, 'Well, they're nothing more than ghosts. Part of the paranormal world.'
"No, they're a hybrid of both," he said.
Lacatski, a bespectacled man whom a colleague described as looking like a rocket scientist, started research right out of college on missiles and directed energy weapons such as lasers.In the early 2000s, he headed up the DIA annual missile threat assessment. He originally started the research out of concern that UFOs could pose a national security threat, specifically to U.S. missile defense systems.
"You know what was on the internet at the time, it just sounded like advanced technology to me," Lacatski said. "I said, 'I'm interested. We need to do something about this if it's true.' And I spoke to my management, and it started from there."
Lacatski's later work unearthed the case of Navy fighter pilots with the USS Nimitz strike group who saw a mysterious flying "Tic Tac"-shaped object zip away while training in the Pacific. The incident and witness testimony became key evidence after it was leaked in 2017, used by former Pentagon and CIA officials to prod the government into taking UFOs seriously.
Their effort pushed the UFO issue in crucial ways that eventually convinced lawmakers something needed to be done.
"I don't care what anybody says, it is the story of the millennia and it needs to be talked about," said Jim Semivan, a retired operations officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations who co-founded To the Stars Inc., a group that helped expose and publicize the three Navy videos in 2017 that helped drive the response in Washington.
In an image from video provided by the Department of Defense labelled Gimbal, from 2015, an unexplained object is seen at center as it is tracked as it soars high along the clouds, traveling against the wind. (Department of Defense via AP)
In the Beginning
The Pentagon's unusual UFO program echoed classified DIA and CIA programs in the 1970s and 1980s that explored whether human psychics could use the power of their minds, called remote viewing, to spy on the Soviets and other foreign adversaries from far away.
The earlier programs spanned 25 years and were featured in the nonfiction book "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which was made into a fictionalized movie in 2009. The programs were ultimately terminated in 1995 and deemed ineffective for intelligence operations, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
For the UFO program, Lacatski would work closely with Colm Kelleher, a contractor who ran its daily operations.
Kelleher was trained in Ireland as a biochemist and cancer researcher and speaks with the remnants of an Irish lilt. He had spent years working for Robert Bigelow, a wealthy Las Vegas real estate mogul and aerospace company owner with a deep interest in UFOs and the afterlife. Kelleher and Bigelow already had a history of investigating UFOs and paranormal phenomena, and Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies was the lead contractor on the DIA program, formally called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP.
Lacatski and Kelleher recounted their work in interviews with Military.com, having previously published a book about the program, “Skinwalkers at the Pentagon,” that was cleared for release by the Defense Department.
The two men were fans of the remote viewing program, using a pseudonym in their book that was a nod to one of that group's psychics.
In a stroke of happenstance, one of the biggest UFO cases in history literally walked through the door in the first days of the new UFO initiative. The existence of the program, funded with off-the-books money authorized by the late Sen. Harry Reid, was first reported by The New York Times in 2017, though the paper largely left out the paranormal research and conflated the DIA work with a later program.
It was in early 2008, just as the AAWSAP was getting off the ground, and Kelleher was interviewing program manager candidates in a Las Vegas office. A Marine CorpsF/A-18 Hornet fighter pilot who was looking for a job shared an incredible story.
"At the very end of the interview, he drops this bombshell on me that actually he had been part of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group," Kelleher said. "And of course, I immediately perked up because I mean, this was pretty interesting."
The Marine pilot's story is now widely known. Pilots and crew reported tracking unusual objects on radar in a military training area off the coast of California in 2004. An infrared video purports to show one shoot quickly out of view.
Cmdr. Dave Fravor, a Navy pilot who publicly described the episodes in 2017, said he was scrambled to investigate and encountered an oblong white object that flew without any visible propulsion system or wings. It mirrored his flying before disappearing before his eyes. Part of his account was backed up by Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, a junior pilot at the time who said she witnessed the object for about 10 seconds.
Fravor said in interviews he believed the object was "not from this world," further fueling speculation.
"Some of the pilots involved in this were actually briefing Senate Armed Services Committee members and staffers, and Senate Intelligence Committee members and staffers," Kelleher said about the impact the Nimitz incident would have years later. "So, it was considered sort of a sentinel case where the credibility of the so-called UFO phenomenon was introduced at a very high level to Capitol Hill."
In early 2009, Lacatski and Kelleher sent a sailor whom they described as a senior engineer in naval intelligence, on a four-and-a-half month investigation of witnesses and evidence in the Nimitz case. That work would remain secret for years before being leaked by others.
After the Nimitz investigation, the sailor and two Marines were sent to a Utah property known as Skinwalker Ranch, where Bigelow, the owner, had funded his own private research of UFO and paranormal activity over the previous decade.
Skinwalker sits on just over 500 acres of steppe land near the town of Ballard in northeastern Utah. It has long been an alleged epicenter of strange happenings, dating back to tales from the Native American Ute tribe and Navajo people, who believe in malevolent witches called skinwalkers who can transform into animal-like creatures.
The ranch would later be the subject of a paranormal reality TV show under another owner.
A gate to Skinwalker Ranch in 2009 during the Pentagon’s UFO program. (Courtesy of George Knapp)
The three active-duty service members, whose identities have been concealed by the researchers and the Defense Department, allegedly witnessed a black void on the land that filled them with fear. Lacatski and Kelleher claim the men experienced paranormal activity after leaving the ranch and returning to homes in the Washington, D.C., area, such as orbs, dark figures in bedrooms at night, and strange noises.
The wife and two teen children of the sailor who investigated the Nimitz incident claimed to have seen a wolf-like creature that walked on two hind legs staring into their Virginia home on two occasions.
Military.com asked the Pentagon whether it could confirm the paranormal research. "No," was the one-word response from Sue Gough, the department's spokesperson on UFOs. She pointed to the boilerplate disclaimer on the Lacatski and Kelleher book, which says the department's clearance for publication does not imply factual accuracy.
Going Public
Lue Elizondo, an Army veteran and former counterintelligence special agent with a high-and-tight haircut and rectangular strip of goatee, loved his "smoke and mirrors" work in places like the Middle East and Afghanistan. His father, a Cuban exile, participated in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
In 2008, Lacatski met with Elizondo in an office in Rosslyn, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The DIA analyst had identified Elizondo as a potential recruit into the DIA program.
"He looked at me very seriously and he said, 'So, what do you think about UFOs?'" Elizondo said in an interview with Military.com. "I told the truth. I said I don't think about it. He said, 'What do you mean, you don't believe in them?' I said, 'I didn't say that. What I said is I don't think about them.'"
Elizondo didn't end up joining with Lacatski. But he did go on to run the Pentagon's smaller in-house UFO program created when the DIA program ended.
"It wasn't involved at all with Skinwalker, and that was a conscious decision to do that," Elizondo said. "It was a decision we had to make because there were some 'antibodies' in the Department of Defense that were starting to become concerned about the focus of AAWSAP and what it was doing."
The Nimitz 'Tic Tac' investigation done by Lacatski's team was transferred to Elizondo, who was then running what was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP.
Working with a "very, very small cadre of people in the Pentagon," Elizondo uncovered another series of military experiences with UFOs that would form the second piece of crucial evidence leading to the legislation in December.
Pilots training with the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Atlantic between 2014 and 2015 reported picking up -- and sometimes seeing visually -- objects on a daily basis that appeared to travel at extremely high speeds and high altitudes. In a near midair collision, a pilot reported seeing what looked like a sphere with a cube inside, according to The New York Times.
By 2017, Elizondo said he was trying to brief then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis personally about the incidents and having no luck. He kept briefing Mattis' staff and brought in the pilots and radar operators.
"The problem was, nobody wanted to tell the boss, and I think, hindsight being 20/20, the rationale was that this is a man who's highly respected, this is a man who everybody trusts," he said. "If we briefed him on the fact that there are these things called UAP, or in the vernacular UFOs, if he's asked [about it] by a member of the press, he'd have to say yes, and that could hurt his credibility."
Despite the compiled accounts and videos, UFOs remained a taboo topic for many within the Pentagon.
So instead, Elizondo worked to get infrared cockpit videos of the Navy encounters cleared for public release. Then, he quit the Pentagon in protest and emerged in public as a whistleblower in 2017. The three videos were leaked to Chris Mellon, a former deputy secretary of defense for intelligence, in the Pentagon parking lot.
The New York Times broke the story that the Pentagon had a UFO program in December 2017, with Elizondo and Mellon as key sources. At the same time, both men joined the To the Stars company, which jointly published the Nimitz and Roosevelt Navy videos with the newspaper -- causing a global sensation that hasn't abated.
What's Belief Got to Do with It
To the Stars was a new company formed with the hopes of publicizing the belief that UFOs are an age-old phenomenon that could hold profound meaning for the human race. It was co-founded by Semivan, the CIA operations officer, and Tom DeLonge, a rock musician and former front man for the band Blink-182.
Elizondo and Mellon were original members, along with Hal Puthoff, a physicist who worked on the DIA and CIA psychic remote viewing programs of the 1970s and 1980s.
"We all knew that this did not belong to the military, that this phenomenon and these UAPs are appearing everywhere," said Semivan, who also did consulting work for Elizondo when he headed the Pentagon AATIP program. "They're appearing over military sites, nuclear sites, over carrier task force groups and things along this line, but they're also appearing all over the United States and all over the world in general."
DeLonge, who spent decades researching UFO lore before forming the company, has been public about his beliefs in the paranormal aspects of the alleged encounters and that a nonhuman intelligence has been influencing people throughout history. He's also indicated the military may have recovered parts of UFOs and be secretly working to understand them.
"If something's been here for a long period of time, and it really is showing up in people's bedrooms, or in front of an F-18, or on a petroglyph wall, or in an ancient text down in the archive of the Vatican, or whatever it might be, it's obviously doing something and it's obviously having an influence," DeLonge said in a YouTube video posted in December.
The belief that UFOs are a mysterious phenomenon -- possibly moving through dimensions or consciousness -- that has affected people's minds and bodies throughout history was popularized decades ago by authors such as Jacques Vallee, a prominent UFO researcher who was portrayed by the French New Wave director Francois Truffaut in the 1977 movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Semivan described Vallee as a kind of patron saint to his company.
Elizondo, who left the company around the end of 2020, has since become a kind of celebrity in the UFO community, a group of people around the world who have banded together on social media sites such as Twitter and Reddit, and created podcasts and YouTube shows dedicated to the topic. Both Elizondo and Mellon, along with other members of the To the Stars company, starred in a History Channel series called "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation."
"You know when we describe a white flying Tic Tac in 2004, it was described in the '60s as a white flying throat lozenge, what was described in the '50s as a white flying butane tank," Elizondo said in the interview with Military.com, claiming that solid government evidence exists of UFO encounters going back decades.
Pickaway County Deputy Sheriff John Wolford supervises the loading of a part from an Air Force balloon that descended from the sky in south central Ohio farmland, April 19, 1966. (AP Photo)
In scores of interviews and appearances in recent years, the former counterintelligence agent always appears to measure his words carefully. He has compared UFOs to ancient beliefs in sea monsters that turned out to be sharks and whales, pointed to ancient Roman accounts of "flaming shields" in the sky, and suggested the human race may be headed for a profound paradigm shift in understanding reality.
In his interview with Military.com, he declined to elaborate on what he meant by the comments or his beliefs in UFOs.
"Belief really doesn't have any play in this field, and this is part of the problem because people have made this topic about belief. It's a very emotional topic for some people," Elizondo said. "This topic cannot be about belief. It must be about facts."
Selling the UFO Idea
Mellon, the former Pentagon official who helped make the 2017 Nimitz videos public, brushed off questions about the earlier DIA research in an interview with Military.com. A descendant of the wealthy Mellon family of Pittsburgh, he said his family name has led many to assume he grew up wealthy, but that he was actually raised in inner-city Chicago under difficult circumstances.
"They think I grew up in a nice home in the countryside with a limo or something, and that was anything but the case," Mellon said.
He served in the Pentagon under President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and worked on Capitol Hill for more than a decade, eventually rising to minority staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
His knowledge of the national security apparatus and facility with the language of the Pentagon, Congress and Washington, D.C., quickly elevated him as a top expert, who was loudly blowing a national security klaxon. He compares the overall Pentagon response to UFO reports to missing radar indications of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
"I found out that this had been going on not just for months, but for years in dozens and dozens of incidents off the coast, including a near midair collision," Mellon said. "And the secretary doesn't know. Congress doesn't know, senior officials don't know. I mean are you kidding me? This is such a grotesque failure of imagination, of curiosity and of the system."
In 2017, Mellon began his effort to convince members of Congress to act, though he said he avoided any mention to lawmakers of the earlier research by Lacatski and Kelleher, or the beliefs of the founding members of To the Stars.
Those topics would have been counterproductive, he said.
"You had to provide some political cover for these people, some legitimate basis on national security grounds for them to engage and say, 'OK, I'm willing to take a brief or I'm willing to look at this,'" Mellon said. "You don't go in there and say, 'Oh, we've got little green men or people coming out of interplanetary portals; or, you know, woo-woo kind of stuff. You wouldn't get to first base."
The coverage of the UFO story by The New York Times, the paper of record, had also done a lot to legitimize the issue among Congress and the public, since many of the paranormal aspects weren't included. Thousands of other news stories would follow.
"I want you to put aside all that stuff that people talk about, extraterrestrials and all that," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a 2020 interview broadcast by a local news station. "This is a very simple equation for me -- there are things flying over our military installations. We don't know what they are or where they are from."
Meanwhile, many in the public mistook the military's acknowledgment that the Navy videos are authentic as an admission that UFOs exist.
A Tale of Two Programs
The 2008-2010 DIA program had sent out teams of investigators to UFO sightings, such as the members who staked out the California orchard with night-vision goggles. It followed tips from the Mutual UFO Network, a U.S. grassroots organization that has recorded and cataloged sightings since 1969. The group bills itself as the world's largest and oldest civilian UFO organization, with its own lab to analyze mysterious metals and a research group focusing on people who claim to have been abducted by alien craft.
The program produced a raft of theoretical papers attempting to imagine and explain highly advanced future technologies it believed could be related to UFOs.
The legislation passed in December ordering a new Pentagon office to investigate UFOs has no stated connection to the paranormal, but it mirrors some aspects of the earlier DIA program. President Joe Biden signed the legislation, part of the must-pass annual defense authorization bill, on Dec. 27, ordering Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to set up an office to "synchronize and standardize" the reporting, collection and analysis of the unidentified aerial phenomena across the military and intelligence community.
Both the older DIA program and the new initiative have investigative teams that deploy to UFO sightings to collect data and witness accounts, and science teams to analyze data on the objects. Both programs have a focus on the medical and health effects of UFO encounters. Both include theoretical descriptions of how UFOs may work.
The Pentagon's UFO science plan should seek to explain UFOs "that exceed the known state of the art in science or technology," and start the process of trying to replicate those capabilities, according to the law. Congress has ordered annual reports on what the Pentagon finds, with the first due this October.
A lot of the law's language "seemed to come right out" of the earlier DIA program, Kelleher said.
But the research by Lacatski and Kelleher would remain largely out of public sight through much of the UFO debate in Washington. The outstanding questions about UFO sightings were nonetheless convincing to those on the Hill.
"There are too many things that are unexplained that we just need an explanation for," said Emily Harding, the deputy director and senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
Harding was the deputy staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee as it worked on the issue. She said Rubio took the lead and was able to approach it with an open mind. The reports from pilots and military personnel raised serious security issues -- and highlighted a real lack of data that made any conclusions about the incidents impossible.
Some of the information provided to lawmakers was given in classified briefings, though it's unclear whether there was much beyond the public Navy videos and witnesses. The committee believed the first step was getting better data from the Pentagon and intelligence community.
"Maybe the explanation is that an adversary has come up with a new technology that we definitely need to understand. Maybe the answer is that our sensors are giving us readings that are confusing us," Harding said. "And if that's the case, then that's something that definitely needs to be fixed before we find ourselves in something like a great power competition."
Despite the positive reception in Congress, there are still some pushing back against the mainstreaming of UFO research.
Mick West has become famous like Elizondo in UFO circles, but for the opposite reason. He's skeptical. The former video game designer and founder of the website Metabunk, has spent years using science, math and data mining to debunk conspiracy theories claiming airplane contrails are chemical agents, or chemtrails; the 9/11 attacks were faked; and mass shootings are false flag operations.
Over the past few years, he's turned his investigative skills on the UFO claims behind the new Pentagon program. A British transplant to California, his dry delivery of theories and almost Vulcan-like logic have frustrated many believers. What he sees are adherents to the paranormal UFO theories of Jacques Vallee using inconclusive evidence to push their agenda.
"They've got to kind of phrase their arguments to the congressmen and the senators in terms of things like national defense, which is a very physical thing," West said in an interview. "In reality, they believe in this weird extra-dimensional nonhuman intelligence E.T. hypothesis, and yet they've toned it down so they can get this stuff passed by their lobbying efforts."
West has published detailed examinations of the three Navy UFO videos, which he says likely have mundane explanations such as exhaust glare, loss of camera lock, and misperception.
In 2017, the Chilean government released similar infrared military footage of what it claimed was a genuine UFO. Within a few days, West, with the help of other web sleuths, identified the object as a scheduled passenger plane departing a nearby airport.
The Navy and Pentagon have only confirmed the U.S. videos were recorded by the military, but have never described what they show.
An initial report on the military UFO situation, ordered by Congress and released in June 2021 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provided some context and left many questions unanswered. The investigation was "largely inconclusive," with 144 cases of objects reported since 2004 that couldn't be identified, and 18 that seemed to include unusual flight, such as moving against the wind or at high speeds without visible means of propulsion.
There were likely multiple explanations, including airborne clutter and foreign systems, the report found.
"But of course there's always the question of is there something else that we simply do not understand that might come extraterrestrially," Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said at a public event in November.4
Travis Tritten can be reached at travis.tritten@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Tritten.