have increasingly been made since the middle of the last century. Especially after the first atomic bombs were detonated by the U.S., objects whose appearance and flight characteristics were incomparable to anything ever seen before were frequently spotted in the sky and on radar. Countless sightings were made over U.S. territory in particular, which not only alarmed the population but – in times of the Cold War – also the U.S. military. That’s how the UFO phenomenon was born. It is known that as a result, the United States Air Force established a division called Project Blue Book (formerly Project Sign/Project Grudge) to record and investigate such sightings. Captain Edward Ruppelt was head of the Project Blue Book from 1951 to 1953. He gives an authentic and objective description of this particularly exciting time for the U.S. military in his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. But not only the USA, also other countries – including France, Great Britain, Chile and Argentina – set up UFO investigation authorities. The reason for this was that the phenomenon became strikingly present and often seemed to affect national security or aviation safety.
In addition to regular waves of sightings (like in Belgium), there have always been convincing individual sightings (e.g., the case of Japan Airlines flight JAL 1628 on 17 November 1986 over Alaska), and the mantle of silence or disinformation was often placed over both. An example of how German media dealt with this topic was provided by Harald Lesch in 2016 in a Terra X episode (German popular science TV show) on the subject of extraterrestrials. There, Professor Lesch claimed that the Belgian wave of UFO sightings can now be explained: it had just been Belgian military helicopters. What a blatant tall story! How stupid would the Belgian military be if during its investigations it had simply forgotten to think of its own formation flight? Instead, the Belgian military had specifically asked the NATO allies and especially the Americans whether they had carried out secret test flights over Belgium. In the end, the military leadership even held a press conference and admitted in unprecedented openness that the objects observed were not a conventional phenomenon and that the military has absolutely no explanation for it. In addition, the poor investigation for the Terra X episode on UFOs is revealed by two facts: First, the observed objects were described as noiseless, and they demonstrated flight maneuvers that a helicopter could not have performed. Second, the then commanding Chief of Staff of the Belgian Air Force Major General Wilfried de Brouwer, now retired, had explicitly rejected the helicopter thesis put forward by skeptics in the 2010 book UFOs by investigative journalist Leslie Kean – as well as in an interview from 2014 – and reaffirmed that the Belgian military found no explanation for the sightings over Belgium even after intensive investigation.3
Skeptics also liked to ignore the authenticity and standing of the eyewitnesses (before the December 2017 paradigm shift). Since the press conference of the Disclosure Project in 2001, the number of high-ranking UFO observers from the military and government has steadily increased. These include, for example, General Parviz Jafari of the Iranian Air Force, NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper and John Callahan, former Division Chief of the Accidents and Investigations Branch of the FAA, to name but a few. If you want to know more about this, you can read the testimonies of numerous witnesses in Leslie Kean’s book UFOs. Also, the Apollo astronaut and sixth man on the moon, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who died in 2016, publicly announced that he had been informed about the existence of UFOs. In addition, there are hundreds of other witnesses, mostly former members of the military and employees of secret research projects. The website of Dr. Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project provides access to testimonies that last more than several hours.4
And there is not only witness testimony when it comes to UFOs. A number of previously classified documents that are dealing with the UFO matter are now freely accessible. A well-known example is the so-called Wilbert B. Smith memo from 21 November 1950.5 The radio engineer Wilbert Smith headed Project Magnet, a UFO investigation program of the Canadian government’s Department of Transport. In this »Top Secret« document from the Department of Transport, Smith notes the following:
»I made discreet enquiries through the Canadian Embassy staff in Washington who were able to obtain for me the following information:
The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.
Flying saucers exist.
Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Doctor Vannevar Bush.
The entire matter is considered by the United States authorities to be of tremendous significance.
I was further informed that the United States authorities are investigating along quite a number of lines which might possibly be related to the saucers such as mental phenomena (…)«6
I have insider information that Smith was communicating with Admiral Herbert Knowles. Both discussed not only the UFO phenomenon but also the topic of direct communication with extraterrestrial beings and the content of received messages. In addition to Smith’s note, there are dozens of other documents which prove the great interest of the U.S. military and the CIA in UFO sightings. Many of these documents can now be consulted directly on the CIA’s website.7 One example is a memo to the Director of the CIA dated 2 October 1952.8 According to this document, »flying saucers« pose an element of danger that »concerns the vulnerability of the United States to air attack«. Action recommended: »That the Director of Central Intelligence advise the National Security Council of the implications of the ›flying saucer‹ problem and request that research be initiated.«
Another advice reads as follows:
»In order to minimize risk of panic, a national policy should be established as to what should be told the public regarding the phenomena.«
As mentioned before, the question on the existence of UFOs can now be considered as settled. On 16 December 2017, the New York Times, the Washington Post and POLITICO unanimously reported on a UFO research program of the Pentagon funded with 22 million dollars between 2007 and 2012.9 The program was called The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and was officially confirmed by the Pentagon. Not only radar and video (infrared) recordings of encounters between U.S. military pilots and flying objects, whose flight behavior seems to contradict the laws of aerodynamics, were examined. Materials originating from UFOs were also stored and analyzed in modified buildings. In a radio interview, physicist Dr. Harold Puthoff explains that the analyzed exotic material did not contain new elements but consisted of an unusual composition of layers of materials »that you wouldn’t expect to be able to be layered« and that had »certain unusual characteristics that you wouldn’t have predicted in advance«.10
In the following, three now globally known videos of the on-board cameras of U.S. Navy fighter jets showing unknown objects have been published:
The so-called »GIMBAL« video, captured by a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet using the Raytheon AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pod, was the first of the three videos that has been through the official declassification review process of the United States government and has been approved for public release.
The second declassified video (»FLIR1«) is the only official footage captured by a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet present at an incident in 2004 off the coast of San Diego regarding the USS Nimitz, a nuclear powered U.S. Navy supercarrier (also using ATFLIR). The Navy pilots described the UFO as a large bright white Tic Tac with a size of approximately 40 feet.
»GO FAST« is another authentic DoD video that captures the high-speed flight of an unidentified aircraft at low altitude by a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet with an ATFLIR pod.
Luis Elizondo, former head
