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I worked for the British government’s Ministry of Defence for twenty-one years. Three of those years were spent on the UFO project. During that time, two things really changed my mind about the UFO phenomenon. The first was that I had access to a huge archive of classified material going back decades. It was clear to me from looking through this archive that there were many, many cases where these things, whatever they are, were seen by police officers, pilots, military personnel. They were tracked on radar. We had very convincing photographs and videos that we couldn’t explain in conventional terms. There’s no such thing as an infallible witness, of course, but when the person describing a UFO sighting to you is a member of the military, and particularly air force, that testimony is given a higher degree of credibility than perhaps testimony from members of the public. That was the first thing. The second thing that changed my mind was a handful of very interesting cases that I looked at personally. There are many, many things that I saw both on the UFO project and in my MOD career more generally, but I will not and cannot divulge them. I take my security oath seriously.
The Roman emperor Constantine’s vision of a fiery cross at the famed Battle of the Milvian Bridge is one of the incidents featured in the NASA document “Unidentified Flying Objects in Classical Antiquity.” The great Italian painter of the High Renaissance, Raphael, depicted the scene in the fresco Constantine’s Vision of the Cross (circa 1508–1520) in the Room of Constantine, one of the four Stanze di Raffaello in the Vatican Palace in Rome.
Fine Art / Corbis Historical / Getty Images
It’s been suggested that some of these UFO sightings could be attributable to meteors or shooting stars. I don’t believe that. Pilots and air traffic controllers are very good observers and they’ve seen those things before. They can tell the difference. In my experience, around 80 percent of UFO sightings can be explained in conventional terms, case closed. For another 15 percent or so, the information that we have is just too sketchy to make a firm assessment. But in 5 percent of cases, I think there really is some intriguing evidence that there’s something above and beyond the conventional, and it’s that 5 percent that interests me.
UFO sightings have certainly been with us for all of human history. Whether it’s cave paintings, medieval art, or ancient texts. There are many, many reports of what nowadays we would term “UFOs.” Of course back then they were called all sorts of different terms such as “flying chariots.” But basically they were UFOs: unidentified flying objects.
One can draw some fascinating parallels between ancient astronaut theory and the more modern concept of UFOs and alien abductions. I suppose from a cultural point of view, our gods have always dwelt in the sky. And sometimes, if you look across a whole range of religions, those gods come down from the sky and interact with human beings. I think when one draws parallels between the ancient and the modern, sometimes really the only thing that sets them apart is the language. It’s the labels we put on them.
In 1566, a newspaper reported a series of strange events that took place on July 27–28 and August 7 over the city of Basel, in northwestern Switzerland. The article describes a battle in the sky between red and black spheres.
Apiarius, Samuel and Koch, Samuel. “Seltsame Gestalt so in disem MDLXVI Jar gegen Auffgang und Nidergang under dreyen Malen am Himmel . . .” Woodcut. ca. 1566. NEBIS, http://opac.nebis.ch/F/Y135EVQ5EXMIBAVKQ6PHGBIDM1B6BTGRGLA1CEQHT4NMXGDMAA-02189?func=find-b&find%5Fcode=SYS&request=005991344&local%5Fbase=NEBIS&CON%5FLNG=GER&pds_handle=GUEST
There is a document titled “Unidentified Flying Objects in Classical Antiquity” that was put out by NASA, which is quite surprising. The document describes a lot of historical accounts of UFO sightings. Of course, they didn’t use the term “UFO” or “flying saucer” back in the times of the Romans and the Greeks, but they spoke about things like sky armies, sky shields, and sky ships. One reads accounts by Pliny, Ovid, Livy, Seneca—some of the great thinkers of the age—and they’re talking about something that we’re obsessed with in the modern era, but it turns out it’s been with us for millennia.
I was particularly struck by the sighting from Judea in AD 65, which described a sky army. The idea of the gods at war with themselves is something that has been with humanity for a long time. Now, is this allegorical or is it real? Were these people documenting something that they actually saw in the sky?
One of the most high-profile UFO sightings in the document is Emperor Constantine’s vision of a fiery cross in the sky during battle. A battle after which Constantine cemented his position and became emperor of Rome and arguably ruler of the known world at the time. This was particularly significant, because after the battle during which Constantine saw the UFO, Constantine adopted Christianity and it became the official religion of Rome. So there was this complete about-turn. Before that Christianity had been frowned upon and Christians had been persecuted and killed. When it became the official religion of the Roman Empire it became part of the establishment. Arguably, this was a turning point in human history, and it turns out that a UFO sighting may have been at the heart of it.
Why would NASA put out a document like this? Why would NASA seemingly try to ignite a public debate about a subject that publicly doesn’t exist? It’s a mystery. I think the answer is that while the corporate position of NASA is a very skeptical one, there are a number of people who worked for the agency (who I have met) who are believers.
The modern UFO phenomenon really began in earnest during the Second World War, which was a conflict unlike any other. This was carnage on a previously unimaginable scale in terms of the barbarism, the horrors of the holocaust, and—critically, I think, in relation to UFOs—the detonation of nuclear weapons. If Earth is being observed by intelligent extraterrestrials, how would they have regarded the Second World War? What would they have thought of a people who systemically annihilated a whole group of other people for being a particular ethnicity? What would they have thought of a species that casually deployed nuclear weapons on populated cities inhabited by noncombatants? Wouldn’t that have given intelligent extraterrestrials real concern at the direction that humanity was taking?
THE BATTLE OVER NUREMBERG
At dawn on the morning of April 14, 1561, citizens in Nuremberg, Germany, awoke to what was later described in a local news flyer as “a very frightful spectacle.” Perhaps disturbed from their slumber by the strange noises coming from overhead, they stumbled out of their houses to discover unidentifiable objects in the sky, engaged in what appeared to be an aerial battle. The entire event was memorialized in a broadsheet (the sixteenth-century equivalent of a newspaper) that still exists today in the Zurich Central Library.
The broadsheet account includes a famous woodcut illustration depicting the incident. The library also displays a woodcut of an almost identical sighting in Basel, Switzerland, in 1566. The woodcut advised people to “repent for their sins” and interpreted the extraordinary events as signs from God. Many of the witnesses used religious imagery to explain the objects they had seen, describing crosses flying in the sky—an image strikingly reminiscent of Emperor Constantine’s famous vision of a fiery cross, which inspired him to declare Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Though we may tend to think of UFO sightings as a distinctly modern phenomenon, incidents like the sighting over Nuremberg are shockingly common—going all the way back to antiquity, from Roman orator and senior senator Marcus Tullius Cicero’s account of witnessing a bright spherical object appearing in the sky and then dividing into several smaller spheres, to Christopher Columbus’s recording of a UFO sighting in the log books of the Santa María, to nineteenth-century Japanese testimonies of encounters with a strange craft, which seem to link to one of the single most documented sightings of all time—the late-twentieth-century incidents in Rendlesham Forest, halfway around the globe in the United Kingdom.
Glaser, Hanns. “Celestial phenomenon over Nuremburg.” Woodcut. Ca. 1561. NEBIS, http://opac.nebis.ch/F/FIV8HFJLUFMNE8PPXDFTK9VBPX6H8QFXRAGGCRR4X9HKNQYS3F-02615?func=find-b&=&=&=&=&find_code=SYS&request=0052892769&local_base=NEBIS&CON_LNG=GER&pds_handle=GUEST
There have certainly been a lot of UFO incidents during wartime, and a lot of important sightings have taken place close to military bases. Now, some people have said that if we’re being visited by extraterrestrials, that is the reason: they’re concerned about our military activities. They’re concerned at the fact that the human race seems to be perpetually at war with itself.
One of the great mysteries of the Second World War involved the so-called foo fighters (a term used by Allied aircraft pilots to describe UFOs and other mysterious aerial phenomena). While most foo fighter sightings involved balls of light, some involved structured craft. During a bombing raid over Turin in 1942, the crew of an RAF aircraft witnessed a UFO that was a solid structured craft about 200 to 300 feet long, performing speeds of around 500 miles an hour. A particularly staggering account of a foo fighter sighting was from 1943 and involved the sighting of an object that was cylindrical in shape, had what appeared to be portholes down the side, and after being pretty much stationary, shot off at a speed of thousands of miles an hour, as reported by the military air crew who witnessed it. After the war it transpired that German and Japanese pilots had seen these things too and thought they were British or American secret weapons.
One story to have emerged from recently released Ministry of Defence UFO files is an allegation that during the Second World War, Prime Minister Winston Churchill conspired with General, and later President, Dwight D. Eisenhower to suppress information about a spectacular UFO sighting witnessed by an Allied bombing crew on their way back from a mission. It’s been alleged that the crew of this aircraft encountered a huge UFO with speeds and maneuvers that were clearly way ahead of anything in the infantry of either the Allied or the Axis nations. Apparently, Churchill was horrified by this and said there would be mass panic. There would be hysteria. It would shatter people’s worldview. It would undermine people’s religious faith.
A news clipping from the Ames Daily Tribune dated August 2, 1952, describes a UFO sighting near Washington, DC. Known as the Washington Flap, this incident took place on consecutive weekends, July 19-20 and July 26-27, and involved sightings of strange lights and the detection of unknown objects on the radar of Washington National Airport (now known as Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport).
Ames Daily Tribune / Newspaperarchive.com
In 1952, Winston Churchill wrote a memo to the Air Ministry in which he asked, “What is all this stuff about flying saucers? What does it all amount to? What can it mean? Please tell me the truth on this issue.” Churchill was told that all UFO sightings could be explained as either mis-identifications, hoaxes, or psychological delusions. The reply fails to state what the British and the American government actually knew full well, however; that is, that a number, albeit a small number, of these sightings could not be explained in those terms. Churchill was misled.
In the 1980s, this pattern of UFO activity near military forces continued, and in fact escalated, with the Rendlesham Forest incident, near the twin military bases of Bentwaters and Woodbridge. The Rendlesham Forest incident is Britain’s most compelling and interesting UFO sighting. It’s a case that draws together everything that makes a UFO case important. There’s a multiple-witness event. Those witnesses are trained observers. There’s radar evidence. There’s physical trace evidence in terms of radiation readings, damage on the ground, and so on.
What makes the Rendlesham incident especially important is the number of military witnesses involved. We probably have direct testimony from several dozen people. In fact, including people who have not yet formally gone on the record, there are probably several hundred people who are either direct witnesses to the UFO or were involved in a more peripheral sense. Bentwaters and Woodbridge were Royal Air Force bases, but leased to and operated by the United States Air Force. Bentwaters and Woodbridge were twin bases. In other words, they were so close geographically that they were under one command. Bentwaters/Woodbridge was home to the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing. These were the A-10 aircraft, the so-called tank busters—a critical part of the whole NATO alliance.
There was incredibly high security at Bentwaters/Woodbridge because of the facility’s importance to NATO. Shortly after midnight on December 26, 1980, some of the security police and law enforcement personnel at Woodbridge saw strange lights in the forest close to the base. They speculated about the source of the lights. Some thought a light aircraft had crashed. Others thought there might be a fire in the forest. In either event, it was clear to the military personnel that they were looking at something highly unusual and that they needed to go and investigate to determine what it was, to see if there was a potential threat to the installation.
There would be mass panic. There would be hysteria.
Three personnel, John Burroughs, Jim Penniston, and Ed Cabansag, were dispatched to investigate. They drove their jeep out through the east gate of the Woodbridge facility and headed into the forest down a logging track. Eventually the terrain became too rough for them to proceed in their vehicle, so they stopped, got out, and went forward on foot. All the time they were following this light through the trees, and this was unusual; it was like nothing they’d ever seen before. It was almost as if this thing were toying with them, leading them on somehow through the trees.
Eventually they found a clearing in the forest, and in this clearing there was a small triangular craft, about the size of a car or a small tank. The craft was either hovering very close to the ground or it had landed on three legs—a tripodlike device, they thought. This thing was quite clearly a structured craft. This was not a light in the sky; this was not a vague shape. This was a landed structured craft. Someone had built this thing. Someone was operating it. It was clearly under intelligent control.
On the side of the craft, Jim Penniston witnessed strange symbols, which he likened to Egyptian hieroglyphs. He sketched these symbols in his police notebook. The whole situation was extraordinary. Jim Penniston touched the craft. He said it was slightly warm to the touch and felt almost ceramic.
John Burroughs and Jim Penniston had been dispatched to investigate this; this was a military tasking. They had no kind of agenda here. They were simply doing their jobs. When they made their report, they were simply recording what they had seen, what they had experienced. They had nothing to gain by making this report up or embellishing it. I’ve met John Burroughs and Jim Penniston. I’ve spent a fair bit of time with both of them. It’s clear to me that they are honest and truthful. They were simply doing their best at the time and reporting what they saw and what they felt. It’s also clear to me that John Burroughs and Jim Penniston are still quite shaken up by the experience. They would far rather that it hadn’t have happened to them.
On the second night of activity, Colonel Charles Halt was at a social function when an airman came in and said to him, “Sir, it’s back.” Halt said, “What’s back?” He was told that the UFO had returned. Halt threw together a small team of people and went out into the forest, in his words, “to debunk this UFO nonsense.” He wanted to put the whole thing to bed. He couldn’t debunk it, however, because he then himself encountered the UFO.
He saw lights through the trees, different colored lights: blue, red, white. He also saw lights in the sky. Again, there was a sense as with the first night that they were somehow being led, that the lights were under intelligent control. They moved intelligently. They seemed to intentionally draw Halt and his team deeper into the forest, with the lights reacting to the fact that Halt and his team were closing in on them. It was like a game of cat and mouse taking place in the forest, with Halt trying to find the source of the lights and the lights being quite elusive.
Are we alone or not in the universe? Are we being visited? These are the biggest and most profound questions we can ask ourselves.
Colonel Halt emerged from the forest into a field. He saw a strange glow and lights over the field, and at one point, a beam of light came down from an aerial object and struck the ground very, very close to where he and his team were. They were absolutely spooked by this. Colonel Halt wondered if it was meant as some type of communication. Was it a warning? It was clear that whatever it was, it was indeed under intelligent control. It spotted Halt and his team and let them know that they had been spotted.
Later on that night Colonel Halt learned through monitoring the radio frequencies that the UFO had actually been directly over the base firing light beams down at the installation. So not only had Halt encountered a UFO firing down at him and his team, there had been another—or possibly the same—unidentified object interacting with the base itself.
Over a series of days, we have multiple reported encounters that involve a landed craft with symbols on the side, radiation levels at the landing site that are significantly higher than standard background radiation levels, UFOs firing light beams down at some of the personnel, and UFOs firing beams of light down at the facility itself. All this was witnessed and documented by numerous highly trained military personnel, some of them senior in rank.
I’m not saying that this thing was extraterrestrial. But if it was, one can only speculate what it was doing in the area. I suppose one point is that this was one of the most critical military establishments in the NATO alliance at a time of huge international tension. So it was certainly an interesting place to be.
Rendlesham Forest, in Suffolk, England, where U.S. Air Force personnel witnessed a series of unexplained lights and other strange phenomenon in December 1980. The strange events began on December 26, when a security patrol witnessed lights descend into the forest. Then, on December 28, deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt encountered similar lights while patrolling the forest.
Jason Salmon / Shutterstock.com
Many UFO researchers believe that the government withholds important information regarding extraterrestrial life. In my own government work on the UFO issue, it was consistently our position to downplay the true extent of our interest and involvement for the British Parliament, for the media, and for the public. Is that a UFO cover-up? Well, it’s not exactly a spaceship in a hangar, but it’s certainly not telling the entire truth about the phenomenon either.
THE UTSURO-BUNE
In the year 1803, numerous fishermen in Hitachi province on the eastern coast of Japan reported seeing a strange vessel wash up on shore. They described the vessel as circular, hollow, and made of metal and glass, with cryptic symbols inscribed on its hull. From the bizarre craft emerged a beautiful woman—clad in clothing of a style and material unrecognizable to the local villagers who had gathered on the beach. In her hands the mysterious woman clutched a small box, which she would not allow anyone to touch. She could not speak Japanese . . . or any other identifiable language. Various historical illustrations of the Utsuro-Bune story depict the same set of symbols etched in the ship’s hull. And fascinatingly, though separated by two hundred years and several oceans, the strange shapes on the craft are eerily similar to those described by Sergeant Jim Penniston in Rendlesham Forest. Could the shared symbology point to an extraterrestrial alphabet? Is it possible the Utsuro-Bune and the Rendlesham Forest craft traveled from the same otherworldly origin? And what does it mean that the Utsuro-Bune washed ashore near the Dragon’s Triangle, also called the Devil’s Sea, an area of the Pacific Ocean in which more than eight hundred ships have allegedly disappeared?
https://cultofnyarzir.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/utsurobune2.jpg
More and more government and military officials who have been involved with the UFO phenomenon are coming forward and speaking out. Indeed, some governments around the world are opening up their UFO files. There’s a kind of quickening of the pace here. It’s like we’re building up to something, and if there is a great secret to be discovered, I think the disclosure movement is doing its part and keeping interest focused on this fascinating mystery.
My own experience of this is that after I finished my work on the British government’s UFO project, I thought it was far too interesting and important just to walk away. So, I stayed involved and I decided to speak out on this issue. Questions of, Are we alone or not in the universe? Are we being visited? These are really the biggest and most profound questions we can ask ourselves. They interest me, and that’s why I stay involved with it and why I am so passionate about it.