“Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.”
- Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderberg meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger, his speech was taped by a Swiss delegate to the meeting.
by Daphne Benoit
WASHINGTON (AFP) – UFOs may be fodder for comedians but there was no joking Monday when a group of former pilots recounted seeing strange phenomena in the sky and demanded the US government reopen an investigation into unidentified flying objects.
Several pilots offered dramatic accounts of witnessing UFOs — including a transparent flying disc and a triangular craft with mysterious markings — as they insisted their questions needed to be taken seriously more than 30 years after the US file was closed.
“We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms,” said Fife Symington, former governor of Arizona and air force pilot who says he saw a UFO in 1997.
“Instead our country needs to reopen its official investigation that it shut down in 1969,” Symington told a news conference.
“We believe that for reasons of both national security and flight safety, every country should make an effort to identify any object in its airspace,” said a statement from the 19 former pilots and government officials from around the world.
The subject of UFOs came up in a recent debate among US presidential candidates, with Democrat Dennis Kucinich saying he once saw a UFO — making him the object of ridicule and jokes by late night television comedians.
Skeptics say UFO sightings are merely aircraft, satellites or meteors re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
But the retired pilots spoke to a sympathetic audience of UFO “believers” who heard them recall their encounters with seemingly other-worldly objects appearing out of the sky.
“Nothing in my training prepared me for what we were witnessing,” said James Penniston, a retired US Air Force pilot, as he described seeing and touching a UFO when he was stationed at a British air base in Woodbridge.
He said he saw an inexplicable triangular craft in a clearing in the woods with “blue and yellow lights swirling around the exterior.”
The UFO was “warm to the touch and felt like metal,” Penniston said. One side of the craft had pictorial symbols and “the largest symbol was a triangle, which was centered in the middle of the others,” he said.
Then after 45 minutes the light from the object “began to intensify” and it then “shot off at an unbelievable speed” before 80 Air Force personnel, he said. “In my logbook, I wrote ’speed: impossible.’”
Rodrigo Bravo from Chile’s air force said UFOs needed to be studied but lamented that the media often belittle the sightings.
“Sadly the UFO subject has been contaminated with false information, out of touch with reality, provided by unqualified people to the media,” Bravo said.
“One of our most important civil aviation cases occurred in 1988, showing that unidentified flying objects can be a danger for air operations,” he said.
“A Boeing 737 pilot on a final approach to the runway at the Puerto Montt airport suddenly encountered a large white light surrounded by green and red.”
The pilot took a sharp turn to avoid a collision, according to Bravo.
The panel included a former Iranian fighter pilot, Parviz Jafari, who said in 1976 he tried in vain to fire from his jet at an “object which was flashing with intense red, green, orange and blue light” over Tehran.
But when he approached, “my weapons jammed and my radio communications garbled.”
A former Air France captain, Jean-Charles Duboc, said in 1994 he and his crew saw “a huge flying disc” near Paris with a diameter of about 300 meters (1,000 feet) that left no sign on radar.
The disc “became transparent and disappeared in about 10 to 20 seconds,” Duboc said.
The former pilot said like other major airlines Air France was mindful of its image and it was difficult to raise the subject of UFOs.
A former official with the Federal Aviation Administration, John Callahan, said government agencies discourage inquiries into UFOs.
“‘Who believes in UFOs?’ is the kind of attitude of the FAA all the time,” he said.
“However, when I asked the CIA person: ‘What do you think it was,’ he responded ‘a UFO.’”
When Callahan suggested the government tell Americans about a UFO, the CIA official allegedly told him: “‘No way, if we were to tell the American public there are UFOs they would panic.’”
2 responses so far ↓
dobropet // November 15, 2007 at 1:58 pm
There is already a threat from UFOs, just look at the incident involving Phobos 1(or Phobos 2), the satellites sent to Mars to recover images of the oddly shaped moonlet of Mars, Phobos. The satellite had been taking images of the martian surface and at one point was programmed to turn to Phobos and send back pictures of this tiny moonlet. Before the satellite could even turn, it snapped an image of Mars that clearly shows a “shadow” upon the surface(the shadow being cigar shaped), the second shot shows the shadow once again, only this time its more elliptical, and upon further examination(if memory serves) the object is well over a mile long. The last picture to be taken shows the object! It was covered in a French news paper, and distributed with the photo of the object, it explains that once the photo was taken of the object, transmissions from the satellite ceased. As most everyone knows, when radio waves are sent out to discover planets, asteroids, comets, etc. they return because they bounce off of these objects and return to the source, with the Phobos satellite however, they cannot find it! As if someone took it, the only other information I can recall on the missing satellite is that after the initial loss of communication with Phobos 1, sometime later, a weak and very faint signal was sent back to Earth that gave scientists the notion that the satellite was in a sort of spinning motion, as if something had hit it at an incredible speed. After this transmission was recieved, the satellite vanished, without any trace of pieces or even fragments anywhere in the area.
dobropet // November 16, 2007 at 10:19 pm
I have come across the information regarding the Phobo 2 incident, in the book Genesis Revisited; Chapter 12-Phobos: Malfunction or Star Wars Incident? it goes on to state
Om July 12, 1988, the Soviet Union launched an unmanned spacecraft called Phobos 2 and may have provided Mankind with its first Star Wars incident–not the “Star Wars” nickname of America’s Strategic Defense Initiative(SDI), but A WAR WITH PEOPLE FROM ANOTHER WORLD. Phobos 2 was one of two unmanned satellites, the other being Phobos 1, that were set off from Earth in July 1988, headed toward the planet Mars. Phobos 1, reportedly because of a radio command error, was lost two months later. Phobos 2 arrived safely at Mars in January 1989 and entered into orbit around Mars as the first step at its destination towards its ultimate goal–to transfer to an orbit that would make it fly almost in tandem with the martian moonlet called Phobos(hence the spacecrafts name) and explore the moonlet with highly sophisticated equipment that included two packages of instruments to be placed on the moonlets surface.
All went well until Phobos 2 aligned itself with Phobos. Then, on March 28, 1989, the Soviet mission control center acknowledged sudden communication “problems” with the spacecraft; and Tass, the official Soviet news agency, reported that “Phobos 2 failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled after completing an operation yesterday around the Martian moonlet Phobos. Scientists at mission control have been unable to establish stable radio contact.”[------] on the nextday, while while the publi was still being reassured that a resumption of contact with the spacecraft was achievable, a high-ranking official at Glavkosmos, the Soviet Union space agency, hinted that there indeed was no such hope. “Phobos 2 is ninety-nine percent lost for good,” Nikolai A. Simyonov said; on that day, his choice for words–not that contact with the spacecraft was lost but that the spacecraft itself was “lost for good” –was not paid any particular heed. [----] The spanish daily La Epoca, for example headlined the dispatch by the Moscow correspondent of the European news agency EFE “Phobos 2 Captured Strange Photos of Mars Before Losing Contact With its Base.” The text of the dispatch reads as follows:
The TV newscast “Vremya” revealed yesterday that the space probe Phobos 2, which was orbiting above Mars when Soviet scientists lost contact with it on Monday, had photographed an unidentified object on the Martian surface seconds before losing contact. The TV broadcast devoted a long segment to the strange pictures taken by the spaceship before losing contact, and showed the two most important pictures, in which a large shadow is visible in one of the pictures and in the other. Scientists characterized the final picture taken, in which the thin ellipse can clearly be seen, as “inexplicable.” The phenomenon, it was stated, could not be an optical illusion because it was captured with the same clarity both by color camers as well as by cameras taking infrared images.[------]
From another report from French sources:
One controller at the Kaliningrad control center said the limited signals received after conclusion of the imaging session gave him the impression he was “tracking a spinner.”
Phobos 2, in other words, acted as if it was in a spin. Now, what was Phobos 2 “imaging” when the incident occured?[--] here is what the Aviation Week & Space Technology report from Paris states, quoting Alexander Dunayev, chairman of the Soviet Glavkosmos space administration:
One image appears to include an odd-shaped object between the spacecraft and Mars. It may be debris in the orbit of Phobos or could be Phobos 2’s autonomous propulsion sub-system that was jettisoned after the spacecraft was injected into Mars orbit–we just don’t know.”[--]
The television sequence thus released focused on two anomalies. The first was a network of straight lines in the area of the Martian equator; some of the lines were short, some longer, some thin, some wide enough to look like rectangular shapes “embossed” in the Martian surface. Arranged in rows parallel to each other, the pattern covered an area of some six hundred square kilometers. The “anomaly” appeared to be far from a natural phenomenon. The clip was accompanied by a live comment by Dr. John Becklake of England’s Science Museum. He described the phenomenon as very puzzling, because the pattern seen on the surface of Mars was photographed not with the optical camera but with the infrared camera—-in other words, the pattern of parallel lines and rectangles covering an area of almost two hundred fifty square miles was a source of heat radiation.[---] When viewed over and over again, the pattern definitely looks artificial; but what was it, the scientist said,”I certainly don’t know.” The “anomaly” seen in the Phobos 2 transmission was a thin ellipse with very sharp rather than rounded points and the edges, rather than being fuzzy,stood out sharply against a kind of halo on the Martian surface. Dr. Becklake described it as “something that is between the spacecraft and Mars, because we can see the Martian surface below it,” and stressed that the object was seen by both the optical and infrared camera. Since the last frame or frames have not yet been publicly released even a year after the incident, one can only speculate, surmise, or believe rumors, according to which the last frame, halfway through its transmission, shows the “something that should not be there” rushing toward Phobos 2 and crashing into it, abruptly interrupting the transmission.