May 11, 2001

The U.S. government has been covering up evidence of extraterrestrial visits for more than 50 years, an array of 20 retired Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration and intelligence officers said Wednesday.

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They demanded Congress hold hearings on what they say is long-standing secret U.S. involvement with UFOs and extraterrestrials.
Calling it the "greatest secret of the 20th century," the officials, who termed themselves "witnesses" of UFO-related events, described a series of military investigations they said they saw: crashes of alien spacecraft, bodies of alien beings, secret government documents, even James Bond-style "erasures" of people who knew too much.
"The individuals who have these sightings range from airline pilots and military pilots to police officers, some of the people your lives depend on, on a daily basis," retired Air Force Lt. Col. Charles Brown told a roomful of skeptical reporters.
"They are very reputable, dependable people," he said.
"The field is filled with hoaxes and scams," said Dr. Steven Greer, director of the Disclosure Project, which had gathered the witnesses. "But it doesn´t mean all of it is."
The 20 witnesses, he said, were a fraction of the 400 people who are willing to testify under oathand under congressional immunityabout a secretive portion of the government they say has gone out of control.
UFOs have long fascinated Americans, including several U.S. presidents. Webster L. Hubbell, a former associate attorney general under President Clinton, has described in an autobiography his unsuccessful quest to determine government involvement in the topic.
John Callahan, a former FAA division chief of accidents and investigations, said he was directed by CIA officers to cover up a Nov. 18, 1986, incident involving a UFO and a Japanese airliner near Anchorage, Alaska.
"We were all sworn to secrecy that this event never happened," he said.
Michael Smith, a former U.S. Air Force air traffic controller stationed near Klamath Falls, Ore., in the 1960s and early 1970s, reported seeing a UFO hovering at 80,000 feet one night.
"I was told you keep it to yourself," he said. "NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] called me one night to say there´s a UFO coming up the California coastline. I asked them what to do. They said nothing, not to write it down."
After he was stationed at another military base in Michigan, UFOs were so close to one landing strip, he said, that two incoming B-52s had to be steered around them.
The Disclosure Project, a Crozet, Va.-based research organization that has been gathering government witnesses for several years, says its reason for going public is because the U.S. government has long had information on anti-gravity propulsion systems. These have been retrieved from downed spacecraft, such as those from a purported crash in Roswell, N.M., in July 1947.
These propulsion systems, which would use electromagnetic and "zero point energy state" technology to produce vast amounts of energy without any pollution, would drastically change the world´s oil-based economy. Such energy sources would not require damming the world´s rivers or building power plants, transmission lines or other expensive infrastructures needed to produce electricity for the world´s 6 billion inhabitants.
Such electro-gravitic technology would also allow people to travel totally above the ground, rendering roads obsolete. Several witnesses talked of incredible speeds demonstrated by these crafts, estimated by radar technicians to be more than 10,000 miles an hour. The fastest known speed of a man-made aircraft is 3,000 miles an hour.
But information on extraterrestrial speeds is never made public, said Daniel Sheehan, counsel for Project Disclosure. Even the Vatican Library, he said, has hidden information on UFOs.
Donna Hare, a NASA design illustrator with secret clearance, said UFOs were routinely airbrushed out of high altitude photos of the Earth before being released to the public.
"We always airbrush them out before we release them to the public," one technician told her. Curious, she began asking around the agency.
"A guard told me he was asked to burn some photographs and not to look at them," she said. "And there was another guard guarding him, watching him burn the photographs. He looked at one and it was a picture of a UFO and he immediately was hit in the head and had a big gash in his forehead."
Apollo astronauts, she said, had spotted UFOs, but they "are told to keep this quiet and not to talk about it," she said. One of them, Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 team, is a witness for Project Disclosure.
Karl Wolf, an Air Force sergeant who was assigned to the National Security Agency, said that mysterious structures were discovered on the far side of the moon when the United States was mapping its surface before the 1969 lunar landing. Those photos too were culled out of the public record.
The Pentagon does not comment on UFOs, except to say they do not exist and that such objects really are high altitude balloons, swamp gas or military aircraft.
Despite the government´s refusal to discuss the issue, several witnesses have also told of being stationed at military bases or near silos containing nuclear missiles when a UFO swung by. Afterward, military officers would discover the missiles had been temporarily deactivated.

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