Aliens and flying saucers have long fascinated Americans taken with the possibility that we might not be alone in the universe. Tales abound of UFO sightings, alien encounters, and even extraterrestrial kidnappings and experimentation. Hollywood has been in on the fun for decades, raking in tens of millions of dollars for every alien flick produced.
There have always been those who believed the sightings were real, who experienced them firsthand and investigated the phenomena, believing the government was covering up the evidence. Such people are usually derided as nuts and kooks.
But now the Pentagon is set to release a special report for Congress on recent sightings, essentially detailing what is known about what they term “unidentified aerial phenomena.” UFOs have taken on a whole new level of seriousness.
This new wave of interest began in 2017 when the New York Times broke a story on the Pentagon’s small, seemingly insignificant $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Its purpose: to study encounters with UFOs. Along with the story, the NYT broke videos taken by U.S. Navy pilots of their encounters with strange objects that seem to defy the laws of physics and are far more sophisticated than any known aircraft on earth. In April 2020, the Pentagon confirmed the videos were, in fact, real, and the craft unidentified.
A story released by the Daily Mail last week told of an incident where fourteen UFOs “swarmed” the USS Omaha in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. One craft, after hovering over the water for a period of time, suddenly plunged into the sea, but nothing was ever found or recovered from the area.
These sightings, though, are nothing new. For years there have been reports of similar incidents all over the country, some with photographic evidence dating back decades.
Even early American astronauts reported seeing UFOs. The most notable among this group was Gordon Cooper, a member of NASA’s first group of astronauts, the Mercury Seven. Cooper, an experienced Air Force test pilot, flew the final Mercury mission in 1963, the longest U.S. spaceflight up to that time at twenty-two orbits of the earth, and Gemini 5 in 1965, also the longest space mission up to that time, coming in just shy of eight days in space.
Cooper contended that when he was in the Air Force, stationed in Germany in 1951, his squadron encountered and chased a fleet of flying saucers but were no match for their extraordinary capabilities. The encounter went on for several days, he said.
Cooper also claimed that a flying saucer landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California in the late 1950s, and that there was video evidence of it. The film was quickly, and quietly, whisked away to Washington, where it disappeared, never to be seen again. “I do believe UFOs exist and that the truly unexplained ones are from some other technologically advanced civilization” that are not of this earth.
Until his death in 2004, Cooper believed the U.S. government was covering up evidence of UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence.
In 1975, Jim McDivitt, who commanded the Apollo 9 mission that tested the lunar module in earth orbit, reported having seen a UFO on the second day of his Gemini 4 flight ten years earlier.
“At the time I saw it, I said there was something out in front of me or outside the spacecraft that I couldn’t identify, and I never have been able to identify it, and I don’t think anybody ever will,” he said. “And it was rotating around, I noticed something out in front that was a white cylindrical shape with a white pole sticking out of one corner of it—it looked like a beer can with a smooth pencil sticking out. They checked NORAD records to see what they had up on radar, and there wasn’t anything within very close range of us.”
Although his crewmate, Ed White, was asleep at the time of the encounter, McDivitt did snap several photos. “I’ve seen the photos that were released” from the mission, he said. “I went back and went through each frame of all of the pictures that we took, and there wasn’t anything in there like what I had seen.” It was later explained away as debris from the launch of Gemini 4, though McDivitt, an experienced Air Force veteran who retired with the rank of brigadier general, refused to believe he could have made that kind of mistake.
Ed Mitchell, lunar module pilot on Apollo 14 and the sixth man to walk on the moon, grew up near Roswell, New Mexico, and he also believed in UFOs and alien encounters.
White Sands was a testing ground for atomic weapons—and that’s what the extraterrestrials were interested in… They wanted to know about our military capabilities. My own experience talking to people has made it clear the ETs had been attempting to keep us from going to war and help create peace on Earth.
Mitchell also told The Mirror that other military personnel had confided in him that alien spacecraft were responsible for disabling nuclear missiles and for shooting them down over the Pacific coast.
Experienced military aviators. Nuclear weapons officers with top security clearances. Trailblazing astronauts. Such distinguished Americans are certainly not kooks or nutcases, nor are they motivated to lie about alien encounters. And now with modern videos and evidence in hand, it is probable the government knows much more about UFOs than they have previously disclosed. We can only hope the soon-to-be released Pentagon report clears the air once and for all.
Ryan S. Walters is an independent historian who currently teaches American history at Collin College in North Texas. He is the author of Remember Mississippi: How Chris McDaniel Exposed the GOP Establishment and Started a Revolution, Grover Cleveland: The Last Jeffersonian President (coming soon from Abbeville Institute Press) and The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding (due February 15, 2022 by Regnery History). He has appeared on Breitbart Radio, the Mark Davis Show, and has spoken at a number of venues, including the Abbeville Institute and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His latest book, Apollo 1: The Tragedy That Put Us On the Moon, was released by Regnery History on May 25.