Pilots and generals go public about UFOs

Pilots and generals go public about UFOs

Kean said her first article on the subject was for the Boston
Globe, and was distributed nationally through the New York
Times.

“I felt at that point I had a leg to stand on because I had
published a story that was very legitimate,” she remarked. “But over the
years, I haven’t communicated with very many journalists, to tell you
the truth. I’m often surprised that more journalists don’t contact me
and don’t want to jump in and follow up on some of these things
themselves, especially journalists that have the backing of a major
newspaper, like the Washington Post or the New York Times.”

What makes Kean’s work different from other UFO books are
chapters written by pilots and high-ranking military officials, who
claim to have seen UFOs.

As well, there are essays by government
officials from several countries, including the United Kingdom and
France, who have investigated these phenomena.

The man who ran the French government’s UFO agency for 21 years,
Jean-Jacques Velasco, writes that a few cases involve objects that are
“distinct from ordinary phenomena”.

Moreover, they demonstrate “a
physics seemingly far different from that which we employ in our most
technologically advanced countries”.

According to Velasco, that includes “stationary and silent
flights, accelerations and speeds defying the laws of inertia, effects
on electronic navigation or transmission systems, and the apparent
ability to induce electrical blackouts”.

He also states that in
these rare cases, the UFOs appear to be under some kind of “intelligent
control”.

“I am fascinated with the possible correlation between nuclear
activity, the location of nuclear weapon storage facilities, and the
presence of UFOs,” Velasco observes in the book. “We can see on a graph
the relationship between atomic explosions and visual/radar sightings,
by looking at the similarity in the two curves. We can’t be certain why,
but perhaps UFOs are ‘monitoring,’ and this activity was heightened
during times of dangerous nuclear activity on the planet.”

During her interview with the Straight, Kean pointed out
that many things can be mistaken for a UFO. They include weather
balloons, flares, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft,
birds reflecting sunlight, blimps, helicopters, and planets such as
Venus and Mars, as well as meteors, meteorites, and numerous other
naturally occurring events.

“Most UFO sightings are meaningless,”
she said. “They really can be explained. We’re talking about a very
specific group of sightings. Those are the cases in my book.”

She also emphasized that a UFO is merely an object that cannot be
identified, and not necessarily an alien spacecraft.

“I can’t
tell you how much of a barrier that creates,” Kean said. “When you
really, properly define what a UFO means, it really has nothing to do
with anyone’s belief system.”

The first case cited in her book occurred over Belgium during a
two-year period beginning in late 1989.

According to Maj.
Wilfried De Brouwer, retired head of operations for the Belgian air
staff, there were 143 sightings—observed by 250 people—on a single
evening in November 1989. Among those filing reports were 13 police
officers; 70 of the sightings were investigated.

De Brouwer
writes that none could be explained by conventional technology.

Witnesses claimed that these large UFOs were able to hover
motionless in the sky. U.S. officials told De Brouwer that no stealth
aircraft were operating in the area.

One Belgian man took two colour-slide photos of the UFOs, which
were later examined by a trio of researchers: former NASA senior
scientist Richard Haines, French satellite-imagery specialist François
Louange, and University of Paris-Sud professor André Marion.

They
concluded that there was no tampering with the slide.

Several
years later, in a subsequent analysis using more sophisticated
technology, Marion noticed a halo surrounding the UFO. It was in the
form of a snowflake pattern, similar to the appearance of iron filings
in a magnetic field.

Kean said these incidents generated media
coverage in Belgium, but not much in North America.

UFOs also covers a wave of similar sightings in New
York’s Hudson Valley region that lasted several years in the early
1980s.

Witnesses claimed at the time that these objects were as
large as football fields and could travel at incredible speeds, either
remaining silent or emitting a humming noise.

Kean said the
Hudson Valley sightings generated no government investigations and
little media coverage in the U.S.

“How could it not be all over
the front pages?” she asked.

Some of the more remarkable stories in the book take place in
South America, where there’s a keen interest in UFOs among military and
government officials.

Two retired high-ranking officers in the
Chilean military, as well as a retired Brazilian brigadier-general, have
contributed chapters to UFOs.

May 19, 1986, is known as
“UFO night” in Brazil, writes Brig.-Gen. José Carlos Pereira; on this
date, radar showed 21 unidentified objects in the sky between São Paolo
and Rio de Janeiro. Pereira notes that jets carrying missiles were
dispatched, but he didn’t feel that the UFOs posed a threat to national
security.

“What were those objects?” he asks in his essay. “No one knows.
They were not foreign jets attacking. They were unidentified flying
objects.”

Pereira ends his chapter with a plea to all technologically
advanced countries to set up government agencies focused on UFOs: “The
United States should certainly lead the way, since that country is and
will remain the planet’s greatest technological power, with a great
ability to aggregate knowledge from other countries.”

Two air-force pilots have contributed chapters to Kean’s book
recounting their attempts to shoot down UFOs.

Retired Iranian
general Parviz Jafari tells the story of pursuing a UFO over Tehran in
1976, as it flashed intense red, green, orange, and blue lights. When he
got ready to fire, he writes, his weapons jammed and his radio failed.

Retired Peruvian Commandante Oscar Santa María Huertas writes
about firing at a balloon-like object. On three occasions, it suddenly
shot upward. The UFO was seen by more than 1,000 soldiers.

Kean obtained a U.S. government memorandum on the Iranian
incident, which stated that the case “meets all the criteria necessary
for a valid study of UFO phenomena”. It was seen by multiple witnesses
was confirmed by radar.

In November 1982, Portuguese air-force pilot Júlio Guerra claimed
that an oval-shaped object without a tail or wings appeared to the left
of his plane at an altitude of between 5,000 and 5,500 feet.

It
had climbed from the ground in less than 10 seconds, and finally stopped
in front of him. In his chapter in UFOs, Guerra describes it as a
“metallic disc composed of two halves, one on the top and another on the
bottom, with some kind of band around the center, brilliant with the
top reflecting the sun”.

Guerra states that he planned an “intercept”, but that the object
was faster than his own aircraft, and flew over his path, “breaking all
the rules of aerodynamics”. Two other pilots witnessed the event.

A 30-member, multidisciplinary team of experts investigated and
determined that the object was flying vertically at more than 300 miles
per hour, which is impossible for a helicopter.

At other times,
it travelled at about 1,550 miles per hour, Guerra writes. The object
remained unidentified after the study was completed.

Richard Haines, the former NASA scientist, has focused his
research on the potential impact of unexplained aerial phenomena on
aviation safety. He points out in his own chapter in Kean’s book that
Guerra’s experience demonstrates the dangers of a near miss with an
unidentified object in the skies.

He also states that
unidentified aerial phenomena can impair safety by interfering with
proper navigational equipment. A third concern is the distraction these
apparent objects create for flight crews.

“History is filled with accounts of previously ridiculed subjects
that have turned out to be important to mankind, as a study of the
history of science confirms,” Haines writes.

The U.S. experience with UFOs differs significantly from several
other countries.

In 1951, the U.S. air force launched Project
Blue Book, which was ostensibly created to receive UFO reports from
citizens, conduct investigations, and provide explanations to the
public.

According to Kean’s investigation, it soon turned into a
public-relations operation intended to debunk UFO sightings and
discourage public interest in the topic.

She explained to the Straight
that a key part of this shift was the Central Intelligence Agency’s
creation of a scientific advisory panel in 1953, chaired by H. P.
Robertson, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology.

After four days, the panel suggested creating a new
public-education campaign focused on explaining away sightings.

A
scientist who worked on Project Blue Book, J. Allen Hynek, was given
this task. The U.S. UFO reporting system was shut down in 1970, and two
years later Hynek wrote a book stating that the entire operation was set
up to discredit the existence of UFOs.

When the Straight asked Kean why the U.S. government was
so opposed to an open discussion of the topic, she said that the
denials began during the Cold War, and there may have been fear that the
Soviet Union would take advantage of a UFO panic.

“Maybe there is some kind of a secret program that they don’t
want anyone to know about,” she added. “There is a whole lot of possible
reasons. I think the main point is they are not conducting policy
responsibly, and it needs to change—regardless of the reasons for it.”

University of British Columbia astronomer Erik
Rosolowsky told the Straight by phone that people
occasionally contact him with stories about UFOs. Many involve the Venus
or other planets or satellites.

He noted people in Norway once
mistook a Russian manned space launch for a UFO. Over the past three
years, he said, there have been only two instances brought to his
attention that he could not account for using standard astronomy.

“It
does seem like there is a small set of UFO phenomena that are not
explained yet,” Rosolowsky commented. “The nature of science is that
because they’re not explained yet doesn’t mean that they can’t be
explained. But at the same time, you don’t know.”

The head of a Vancouver group of skeptics questions whether
extraterrestrial beings could even send a spacecraft from another galaxy
to Earth.

Lee Moller, chairman of B.C. Skeptics, told the Straight
by phone that one would think that society would be “hip-deep in
high-resolution photos of yetis and aliens right now”, given the
abundance of cameras. “But we’re not.”

Then, in a reference to crop circles, he quipped: “If I were
going to spend the trillions and trillions of dollars and the
unimaginable amount of energy that it would take for me to get from one
planet to another, I think the place that I would want to post a message
would be in the local wheat field.”

But these types of comments don’t dissuade Gord Heath of UFO B.C.

Before leaving the Straight office, he turned over
extensive reports that his group had prepared of two UFO sightings. One
involved a giant object in the skies over the Yukon on December 11,
1996, reportedly observed by 31 people. The other concerned a
57-year-old mystery about a pilot who disappeared over Lake Superior.

Neither the media nor the Canadian government paid much attention to
either case.

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter at twitter.com/csmithstraight.

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