On September 22, 2012, at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, a debate was organized by members of the group “Military UFOs: Secrets revealed”.
Among the speakers were: an Air Force colonel, a former military base commander, two former Air Force officers, who worked within the “Blue Book” project, an official military project regarding the UFO phenomenon in the 1950s and 1960, as well as a former investigator from the British Ministry of Defense.
The executive director of the museum, Allan Palmer, a former military pilot, told The Huffington Post agency, which reported and commented on the event: “All these people had positions of great responsibility, with high-level security clearances. They are not the kind of people who tend to imagine things or go crazy with some inventions”.
Colonel Charles Halt was the deputy commander of the Bentwaters RAF military base in England and one of the eyewitnesses to the UFO events in December 1980 from there. He believed that the UFOs observed than had an extraterrestrial or extradimensional origin.
The colonel now declares: “I have heard many people say that it would be time for the government to appoint an agency to investigate (the UFO phenomenon); but, folks, there is already a (secret) agency, a very special and compartmentalized one that investigates the phenomenon for years, and there’s also the very active role played by many of our intelligence agencies, who probably don’t even know in detail what happens after they collect and transmit the data. It’s kind of scary, isn’t it? “. “Over the past few years, the British have declassified a ton of information, but has anyone ever seen what their conclusions were, or heard anything about the Bentwaters case officially? When the documents were released it was seen that the time frame in which we were involved in the incident is missing — he simply disappeared. Nothing else is missing,” he added.
The cold could destroy them
Halt stated that he was never harassed regarding the reports he made regarding the Bentwaters UFO incidents. “Probably for several reasons. Number one, my rank and part of the tasks I had, but also because, from the very beginning, I made a very detailed and I made several copies looking at everything I knew about the case and they made them more withdrawn. Maybe I’m paranoid. I don’t know, but I think it was good when I made those tapes.”
Although the panel members may not have completely agreed on all the details of the specific UFO cases, they agreed on the common thread that ran through them. A rare public appearance was that of retired Air Force colonel Bill Coleman, a former spokesman for Project Blue Book between 1961 and 1963.
This controversial study concluded in 1969, concluding that UFOs did not represent “beyond technology or principles of current scientific knowledge”. Coleman recounted his fascinating encounter with a UFO while piloting a B-25 bomber in 1955 in Alabama.
The unknown object, “a classic flying saucer” with a diameter of more than 20 meters, descended, from an estimated height of 20,000 meters, so close to the ground that it raised dust in its wake. Coleman tried to follow him.
“We were moving at maximum continuous power, for a B-25, about 300 miles an hour, and headed for the treetops to overtake him… I got to within 450 yards of the ground, then I could see the object above a freshly plowed field; it was moving at a fairly good speed, and it was pulling two vortices behind it.” When the pilot tried to overtake him, the UFO shot up and disappeared.
Coleman finished his exposition by offering a possible reason why aliens would be reluctant to visit Earth: “If a non-terrestrial landed here, a common cold could kill him. And their common cold could destroy the population of planet Earth. . They are smart enough to have built a vehicle that can travel light years, so they must be smart enough to know that our diseases could destroy them.”
Real or fake IDs?
When Coleman was the spokesperson of the Blue Book Project, the director of the project was Colonel Bob Friend. He disagreed with the Air Force’s negative conclusions about UFOs in 1969: “My primary belief in these things is that, yes, (UFOs) are real, and I think it would be much better if the government or some other agency would take note of these things and investigate their scientific aspects”.
A friend also extended an invitation to the many who believe they have seen UFOs but were reluctant to report them for fear that they would not be taken seriously: “UFOs are real, and you will not be ridiculed if you address an honest organization that studies the phenomenon.
Make your case and let people investigate as much as they can to make some determinations about what you saw. In the future, remember that we are on your side”.
Nick Pope, a civilian member of the UFO panel and a former UFO investigator for the UK Ministry of Defence, admitted that many in the audience probably came to the lecture anticipating extraordinary revelations of UFO evidence.
He stated: “I apologize to those people who may have been expecting or hoping for a ‘smoking gun’ like a ‘spaceship in a hangar’, but what you’re getting here is a big picture coming from people who investigated this mysterious and annoying subject for the government”. “The subject of UFOs is a field that has its share of eccentrics, charlatans and cultists.
Those who are here tonight, for this purpose, form a group of people who, indisputably and with determination, have dedicated themselves to the field, for the benefit of the government and the military”.
Pope recounted how the former official commission in the United Kingdom, established in 1950, known as the “Task Force on Flying Saucers”, concluded in 1951 that UFOs were only false identifications, hoaxes, and illusions and that in -no additional time or effort should be wasted on this topic.
Unfortunately for them, in 1952 there was a wave of UFO sightings all over Great Britain; most of the witnesses were Royal Air Force pilots, and some of the objects were also seen by several radar operators. The Ministry of Defense not only continued the investigation of UFOs but also kept the ufologist community under close observation. Among other things, he subscribed, anonymously, to their publications. “I — said Pope — sneaked secretly to their conferences”.
Pope concluded by saying that the Ministry of Defense always had one thing in mind regarding UFOs: “Whatever nonsense you see on this subject, we have not lost sight of the fact that, out of all these hundreds of thousands of sightings, if the fans he would be right only in one case, that would change everything”.
Another speaker was retired colonel John Alexander, a former military with access to top secret documents, who organized, in the 1980s, the Advanced Theoretical Physics Group, whose members were recruited from the military and aerospace services, as well as from the intelligence community. They concluded that although there were numerous cases of credible UFO encounters, no real evidence of a government cover-up could be found.
Alexander cited several interesting UFO cases involving pilots, and emphasized that UFOs are “real and a global phenomenon — it’s not just something that happens in the US.” “We need the phenomenon to become admissible for scientists, for them to discuss and research these topics… There are no simple answers, and not only do we not have the answers, but we are not even close to asking the right questions, and this is what we should strive to do”.
The lecture also included an animated session of questions and answers. Although the audience was not presented with any ET organism or a piece of an alien ship, the participants of the presentation appreciated the sincerity of the speakers. Of course, the audience probably left with more questions than answers.
Before the meeting, one of the five guests, Colonel Coleman, 89 years old, a veteran of the Second World War, let it be understood that he would make a shocking revelation. It seemed that he wanted to say something very important, as commented Palmer, the executive director of the Museum.
“But he decided at the last moment not to pull the trigger”, hesitating between the duty not to disclose certain things and insufficient provocation from the public.
There was also healthy tension between former colonel John Alexander, whose book “UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities” claims that the phenomenon is real, but the military is not hiding anything, and Charles Halt, who is convinced that there is an inaccessible government agency that keeps sensitive UFO information secret.