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It's May 3rd, 1957, and a young military officer is about to watch a film that was shot a few hours earlier.

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What he's watching is nothing more than a negative, but already he can tell that the images on the film are extraordinary.

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The film shows an unknown disc-shaped craft landing on the ground.

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Six years later, this young officer, the Roy Gordon Cooper, became a national hero when he became the last American astronaut to fly solo in a Mercury capsule.

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As for the film he saw, its contents still remain a state secret.

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The film is a film that was shot in the air in the early 1970s.

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The film is a film that was shot in the early 1970s.

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The film is a film that was shot in the early 1970s.

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The film is a film that was shot in the early 1970s.

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The film is a film that was shot in the early 1970s.

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The film is a film that was shot in the early 1970s.

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It is said that UFOs have always been an ongoing concern for the Army, both in the US and abroad.

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Military commanders have even classified this subject as ultra-top secret.

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Are these rumors true? Are UFOs really a state secret?

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On December 30, 1947, faced with a growing number of UFO sightings being reported throughout the country,

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Defense Secretary James Forrest Dahl set up an investigation committee.

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The Air Technical Intelligence Center, or ATIC, was located at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

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The committee was known as Project Sign.

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Before it even had time to determine protocol, the US Air Force was faced with a crisis.

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On the afternoon of January 7, 1948, barely a week after Project Sign had been created,

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Thomas Mantell, a pilot with the National Guard, crashed in his P-51 while pursuing a large silver-colored sphere over Kentucky.

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This incident was the first to be investigated by Project Sign.

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According to investigators, Mantell mistook Venus for an unknown craft.

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He was not wearing an oxygen mask, so he must have gone beyond a safe altitude, lost consciousness, and crashed to the ground.

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This explanation was far from convincing to military commanders.

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In 1952, the Mantell case was investigated by the US Air Force,

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who concluded that the pilot had probably mistaken a sky-book balloon for a UFO.

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There's a significance to Mantell, which is very important, I think,

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and that is that the Mantell case came in the 1940s just after the birth of the flying saucer phenomenon,

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if you like, when Kenneth Arnold had named the flying saucers.

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And I think it's important to recognize the power of that image that Arnold created

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because of what happened to Mantell, a sober, sensible, normal pilot who appears that say he did make a mistake.

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It was led on by the publicity and the hype into this new phenomenon,

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and it said a lot about how much of a grip this had on the American public in the 1940s.

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It looked like it could be a quick fad, but of course it hasn't been.

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But the Mantell case was one of the first deaths really associated with the subject and huge publicity.

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The publicity generated by the Mantell case only added to the problems of Project Sign.

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The situation went from bad to worse as more and more UFOs were sighted across the country.

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On July 24, 1948, two pilots with Eastern Airlines reported having seen a bright cylinder-shaped object while flying over Alabama.

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Apparently they barely avoided a collision.

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Things were getting tense for military commanders.

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They ordered Project Sign to produce a report assessing the current state of the situation.

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What we do know about Project Sign is that right from the beginning,

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analysts over at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio were divided as to what UFOs meant.

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Some said, yes, I believe this is evidence of extraterrestrial interplanetary aircraft.

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This was not necessarily a minority viewpoint.

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There were, however, others that said, no, no, that's impossible.

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It cannot be that. It must be something on the fringes of science that we don't yet understand.

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Now, what appears to have shaken the Sign team up were a series of very important sightings that took place in the summer of 1948.

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One was in the Netherlands and a few days later in the United States, in Alabama,

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one took place of seemingly an identical object.

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In both cases, it was an object that had very exceptional speed, was seen clearly, visually, by trained pilots,

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and did things that aircraft weren't supposed to be able to do.

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The Sign team apparently was very impressed by this and wrote what has been called the estimate of the situation.

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Now, we should state that no copy of the estimate has ever surfaced.

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We think that the evidence is good that it did exist.

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There are some very reputable people who have gone on the line to say, yes, I've read it. I know it's in it.

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Basically, the estimate was a document that the Sign team wrote up that said, yes, UFOs are real.

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We believe they're interplanetary.

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This was a document that landed on the desk of Air Force General Hoit Vandenberg.

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According to the story, Vandenberg said, I'm not going to accept this conclusion. Give me something different.

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Whereupon the Sign team came back and gave him something different.

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And after that, the extraterrestrial thesis went out of favor among Project Sign.

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Supposedly, after rejecting the initial conclusions of the estimate of the situation,

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which stated that the flying saucers could be extraterrestrial in origin,

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General Hoit S. Vandenberg gave the order to burn all copies of the report.

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In February 1949, ATIC submitted a new official report, which contained no reference whatsoever to extraterrestrials.

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However, the document did state that 20% of the sighted objects had not been identified.

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The Pentagon reacted by replacing Project Sign with another group,

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whose job was to minimize sightings of questionable objects.

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This group was known as Project Grudge. The Dark Age had begun.

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Eleven months later, an announcement was made that UFOs were nothing more than a case of mistaken identification,

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mass hysteria, or hoaxes. Military commanders knew better.

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In September 1951, after extraordinary sightings were reported over New Jersey,

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the U.S. Air Force revived its Project Grudge.

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Captain Edward Ruppelt was assigned to the project.

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But unlike his predecessors, Ruppelt refused to turn a blind eye to the UFO phenomenon.

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He demanded that thorough investigations be carried out,

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which led to the creation of Project Blue Book in 1952.

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The arrival of Captain Ruppelt held in a new wave of public interest in UFOs.

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It was hoped that Ruppelt would ensure that UFO investigations were impartial.

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Ruppelt hired a scientific advisor, Joseph Allen Heineck,

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an astrophysicist affiliated with Northwestern University in Illinois.

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Unfortunately, political winds changed direction in July 1952,

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when UFOs were sighted over the nation's capital.

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General John Samford, spokesman for the U.S. Air Force, held a press conference

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and stated that the lights were nothing more than a natural phenomenon

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created by temperature inversions.

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This explanation was hardly convincing.

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Several federal agencies in the U.S.

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including the CIA were demanding a meeting.

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They feared that the flying saucer mania would lead to mass hysteria throughout the country.

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When this meeting was finally held in January 1953,

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the CIA explained that it was vital to convince the public

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that UFOs were nothing more than hoaxes or a case of mistaken identification.

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The U.S. Air Force instructed Ruppelt to direct his efforts towards this goal.

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Project Blue Book became nothing more than a public relations agency.

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Ruppelt resigned a few months later, fed up with his new orders.

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Project Blue Book evolved out of the former project sign,

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which then became something known as Project Grudge,

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and that became Project Blue Book in the spring of 1952.

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The reason it did is because of the upsurge of UFO sightings that took place at that time.

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It was decided that this project required a little bit more status

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within the Air Force chain of command, and it became Blue Book.

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Captain Ruppelt headed up Project Blue Book for about two years in 1952-53.

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He led several good investigations, but there was a crisis situation in 1952

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following the Washington Marigold round incident as it was known.

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For two weekends in a row on both Saturday and Saturday nights,

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the skies over Washington, D.C. were filled with UFOs, and this needed to be downplayed.

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A large press conference was held in Washington,

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during which the military claimed that the objects were nothing more than mirages,

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but this explanation was not very convincing.

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There was a change in policy within the organization,

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and studies into UFOs were brought to a halt.

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That's when Ruppelt decided to resign from Project Blue Book.

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Their job became to explain away.

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We know this because of now declassified documents that lay out the matter very clearly

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to the Blue Book staff, which is, you know, if you have something that is easily explainable,

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this is what you tell the public.

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If you have something that is not easily explainable, don't talk about it to the public.

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It was a very clear recommendation.

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Their job was to get the unexplained percentage to an absolute rock bottom minimum.

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The goal of Project Blue Book was now to find natural explanations for UFO sightings.

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A key player in this game was Alan Hynek,

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an astronomer who worked on the project for nearly 20 years until the end of the 1960s.

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It was basically the first official investigation into the reports of UFOs.

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There was no actual Blue Book, but Blue Book amounted to the codename

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for all the UFO reports being collected together and examined by the university,

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apparently independent of the government.

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In fact, it was more independent than the government probably intended,

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because Hynek was Gamekeeper Turn Poacher.

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He eventually became one of the leading lights of the UFO industry,

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and indeed for some time he was kind of playing a double game.

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But it took into account mainly lights in the sky and distant objects of flying saucers if you would,

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but it also took in the high strangeness cases, such as the cases of entities seen in Kentucky, for example, in 1955.

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And it would examine several of those kind of reports.

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It was to some extent the cover-up.

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They already had determined, the CIA had already determined,

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that they were interested in certain aspects of the UFO phenomenon,

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such as how rumour circulated amongst the population and so on.

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So it was a study of a lot of that aspect as well.

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It was in effect though, the first U.S. government study,

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and it would lead on in the end to the Condom Report in 1969 in the government's, in due course.

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The US Air Force quickly dispatched Alan Hynek to the scene.

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The astrophysicist proposed that the phenomenon had been caused by methane swamp gases.

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It was the beginning of the end for Project Blue Book.

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The swamp gas incident that occurred in the 1960s,

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which was particularly brought to bear by Professor Alan Hynek,

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who wrote it up in his book, The Hynek UFO Reports and so on.

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Basically in Ann Arbor, in Michigan, there were a lot of reports of lights and so on in the skies.

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Looking back on that now, we might assume that if they weren't structured craft and so on,

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which was obviously speculated by the UFO people at the time,

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that they might be something more like tectonic activity that we've seen in places like Hesterlern and so on,

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where we think that sort of earth movements are causing these lights.

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But at the time, these lights were thought to be some sort of phenomenon at Ann Arbor.

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And an explanation was given, which wasn't that absurd really,

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which was that it could be igniting swamp gas that was creating the light.

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Unfortunately, it was kind of picked up by the tabloids of the time and so on.

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And they made a big point about what seemed to be the government explaining away UFOs as just swamp gas.

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And I think the government has done some stupid things and they quite rightly are pulled up by this.

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But in fact, on this occasion, it may not have been that silly a case.

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Having said that, what happens when you get flaps like that, like Warminster, like Hesterlern,

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Gulf Breeze, Ann Arbor and so on, is that you've probably got real UFO incidents there.

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And these other things get seen by people who get very excited and then the whole thing becomes a flap.

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And of course, a lot of nonsense gets into the data reported.

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I think there were probably some real cases in there, but unfortunately, the whole thing became a complete fiasco

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because of this so-called cover-up of using the swamp gas explanation.

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Desatisfied with Hynex explanations, the press hounded Project Blue Book for the truth.

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In the midst of the upheaval, military commanders set up an ad hoc committee made up of military officers and scientists.

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They concluded that it would be best for a civil agency to take over,

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relieving the Army once and for all of its UFO problem.

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The Air Force dumped the problem into the lap of the University of Colorado.

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So basically what had happened is that Project Blue Book had lost all credibility at this point.

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The U.S. Air Force had lost credibility on this project.

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People weren't believing the Air Force answers that it was all weather balloons, or it was all ball lightning,

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or some other kind of, you know, the planet Venus every single time.

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So that what the Air Force wanted to do, and had wanted to do for years, was to get rid of Project Blue Book somehow.

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Their problem had always been that they had conceded that UFOs might represent a problem of national security and defense.

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And therefore, they could not come up with a good excuse for getting rid of Blue Book.

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If they couldn't say that, you know, there's no security problem.

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They were backed into a corner, in other words.

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So what they did was in 1966 hand the ball over to the University of Colorado,

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a very carefully selected institution, I might add, to study this matter once and for all that was believed in a scientific matter.

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The Colorado Project, also known throughout history as the Condon Committee, lasted for about two years.

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Now, at the end of that time, the Condon Committee decided that UFOs were not worthy of scientific inquiry,

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essentially nonsense, and that the Air Force should drop Project Blue Book.

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The problem with the Colorado Project was that its director, Edward Condon, although he was a world-renowned physicist,

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really knew nothing about UFOs, didn't want to know anything about UFOs, and was wrapped up with studying the crackpot cases

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and had stated his position long before the project ended, that it was all nonsense,

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long before they were supposed to have any conclusions. He was already stating them to the public, to the press.

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There was essentially midway through the project, a mutiny among many of its members, who realized that this was a problem.

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They realized that the director was preordaining a negative conclusion.

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Matters came to a head, and many of the staffers were fired midway through.

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There's also a memorandum issued by the second in command of the project, a man by the name of Robert Lowe,

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who in 1966, at the beginning of the project, wrote an internal only memo, which said that the trick of what we do will be to

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convince other scientists that we are actually engaging in a serious study of this project, when in reality we have no expectation of finding anything at all.

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That memo leaked out about a year into the project and caused a very, very big controversy.

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So there were things like this that showed that the project may not have been an impartial study.

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Certainly if you review the Condon Committee report, there are many deep flaws with it.

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It is a deeply, deeply flawed scientific document. The conclusions did not match the data.

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Some reports were well investigated, others were not.

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And so that it was a very spotty report.

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For a document that was supposed to solve the UFO controversy, it did not do it.

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Now, none of that really seemed to matter.

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The Condon Committee report was released in January of 1969, and the press basically said, oh, okay, nothing to it.

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End of story, the Air Force said, thank you very much.

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We're done with Project Blue Book. By the end of the year, Project Blue Book had been disbanded.

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So in a sense, the Condon Committee was messy, but it did the job.

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The conclusions of Project Colorado were so incoherent that people wondered whether Dr. Condon had even bothered to read the report before drawing his own conclusions.

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Once the Condon report was released and Project Blue Book was disbanded, the U.S. Air Force disassociated itself with the UFO issue.

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Officially, that is.

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After 1969, the U.S. Air Force has continued to maintain that it no longer investigates reports of unidentified flying objects or UFOs.

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This has been its consistent position now for over 30 years.

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This is patently untrue.

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We know, for instance, that there have been many intrusions of sensitive airspace that took place in the 1970s over the U.S. Northern border and in Canada at the Falcon Ridge Air Force Base in Ontario.

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Many airspace violations along the U.S. Northern border in November of 1975.

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And this received significant attention by the U.S. military.

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We know that they investigated it.

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We also have a memo from 1969 by General Carol Bollander, which stated that the important UFO files that affected national security were not part of the Blue Book system.

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He was very clear about this.

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So that, certainly, there is more than sufficient reason to believe that UFO investigations continue.

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There have been discussions of possible projects such as Aquarius, another project known as Moondust, and others.

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Projects such as these that have been said to exist.

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And I think such projects probably do exist.

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It's hard for me to say specifically, for example, what was the history of Project Aquarius.

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We don't really have much information about this.

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And the documents that discuss Project Aquarius have themselves been disputed in their authenticity.

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It's very hard to know exactly what it was about.

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What is clear is that examination and study and investigation of UFOs has continued to the present day.

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Today, the U.S. Air Force claims that all files relating to UFO sightings are available in National Archives.

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But we have reason to believe that these archives are only the tip of the iceberg.

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There are a number of astronauts I know who take this very seriously.

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I've spoken to Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth man to walk on the moon Apollo 14.

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He's told me he is convinced that there is a cover-up and that the United States has covered up information about a lot,

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including Roswell, for over 50 years, and that the information is now held by a group that has spun off from the military intelligence organizations of the past.

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Gordon Cooper has a great interest in the subject.

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I've communicated with him.

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He has confirmed that when he was director of the Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base, California, in the late 1950s,

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a disc actually landed.

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It extended tripod landing gear and landed on the dry lake bed and was filmed by his camera crew,

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which were filming various experimental flights at that time.

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He's confirmed that the disc was around 30 feet in diameter.

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He did not see this event, but he studied the film and he was ordered to send it by pouch to Washington.

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And it hasn't been seen or heard of since.

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Even though more than 30 years have elapsed since Project Blue Book,

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chances are that the U.S. Air Force still has several UFO files locked in the vault somewhere.

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State secrets that will remain secret for years to come.

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After the Second World War, most NATO countries looked to the U.S. to solve the UFO problem.

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But that didn't stop them from carrying out their own investigations.

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In the early 1950s, the Canadian Air Force and the Department of Transportation held several meetings to discuss UFOs.

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These meetings were known as Project Second Story.

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In March 1953, the committee concluded that there wasn't anything in the UFO file worth pursuing.

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Up until 1967, when the Canadian Army released its UFO files to National Archives,

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the military had done only a few cursory investigations to ensure that the sightings were not a risk to national security.

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Even today, the Army is keeping a discreet eye on UFO sightings, but only for security reasons.

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It keeps a close watch on air traffic.

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We know that all civil air traffic control towers throughout the country keep a UFO sighting checklist.

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When an air traffic controller receives a phone call from the public or from a pilot who has seen something strange in the sky,

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the controller must fill out a report and send it to the 22nd in North Bay,

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an underground military base that monitors the entire Canadian airspace

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and works closely with the Cheyenne military base in Colorado.

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These are the basics that we know that anyone who is a member of the Cheyenne military base

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can find out that there is nothing hidden.

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It's all part of monitoring the Canadian territory.

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Whenever the Army detects an object flying in the Canadian airspace that refuses to identify itself

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and to respond to radio calls, it has strict instructions to send up fighter jets to intercept the object.

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In our case, these jets are CF-18As, otherwise known as hornets,

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and they're usually launched from the third wing at the Bagotville military base.

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The hornets' job is to intercept, identify and accompany an aircraft such as a Russian Tupolev

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to the international airspace where it belongs once it responds to the call sign.

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If the object does not respond at all, the Army's last resort is to fire at the object with the intention of destroying it,

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because that's the Army's job.

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And I think it's important to note that there's a difference between what we think the military does and what it actually does.

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It can be summed up in three letters, IID, intercept, identify and destroy.

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That's what the military does, that's what they're paid to do.

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I would say that UFOs are pretty far down on their list of concerns.

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They're not paid to study UFOs, that's not their job,

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and I would even go so far as to say that they scoff at the whole idea of UFOs.

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As long as national security is not in danger, they will come up with a story about how something strange was spotted in the sky

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and the story will end there.

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The information will be passed on to the NORAD base in Cheyenne, Colorado, but nothing more will be done about it.

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Towards the end of the 1970s, all of the information was being passed on to the Hertzberg Institute in Ottawa,

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which would put the information together.

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Then the RCMP would create a file from the information gathered.

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This process ended around 1995-96 due to cuts by Brian Mulroney's conservative government,

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and nothing has been happening since.

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This means that the public shouldn't expect the military to be launching at the same time as the war.

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The military should be ready to be launching any intensive investigations into the UFO phenomenon.

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In the Canadian history of ufology, there was one case in particular that caught the attention of the Canadian forces.

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A strange flying machine was spotted by prospector Stephen Michalak near Falcon Lake Manitoba in 1967.

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Stephen Michalak was an engineer, a very humble man, an immigrant from Poland from the time of the war.

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In 1967, he was doing some amateur prospecting in a very remote area of Manitoba,

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not too remote to be completely inaccessible.

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In fact, just a matter of miles away from a very busy highway, but yet off the beaten track.

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He had said that he was taking a break, eating his lunch, and had started to chip away at a rock formation

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because there was much silver and gold and other minerals in the area.

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In fact, he had state claims to that effect previously that he had seen an object, silver in color,

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about 35 feet in diameter, shaped like a flying saucer, like we would imagine from a Hollywood movie,

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to land on a rock outcropping not that far away from him, shining very, very bright lights out of openings in its turret, its little dome.

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After a while, a little door opened in the side of it, and he could see light coming from that too.

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What is interesting is that he had not conceived that this was a spacecraft from outer space.

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He thought immediately that this must have been some sort of American flying vehicle that was top secret

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and had broken down and they had to make repairs so that nobody would see.

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So he walked up to the craft a little ways away and shouted out,

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Hey Yankee boys, what's the matter? Your secret aircraft broke down? I'll give you a hand fixing it.

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What had happened was, previous to him saying this, he had heard some voices coming out of this opening,

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thinking that they were humans, perhaps. As soon as he called out to them, the voices stopped.

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And he thought, oh no, maybe this isn't Americans. So he called out in Russian,

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because he was fluent in a number of languages, asking the same thing. Still no response.

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He tried German and his native tongue Polish as well.

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He walked up to the doorway, put his hand, his gloved hand, he had rubberized gloves for dealing with rock chips on the side of the craft.

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Still thinking it was some sort of secret aircraft.

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And had to pull away because the gloves melted, because the heat was so intense on the outside of this vehicle.

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The door shut like a camera iris, whoof whoof whoof, like this.

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And the whole object rose up slightly and began to turn so that there was an exhaust vent,

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like a radiator grill in front of him. And a blast of hot gas hit him in the chest and the object took off.

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The blast of hot gas was hot enough that it actually set his clothes on fire.

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And he quickly struggled to take off the clothes, throw them onto the ground and beat them out with some grass and some leaves and stomp on them.

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But he started feeling very, very dizzy and nauseous and he was in pain.

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He did receive second and third degree burns.

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He managed to walk out of the bush to where he was staying at a small motel a few miles away.

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And decided that he would go back into Winnipeg seeking some medical help.

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He arrived in Winnipeg a few hours later and had called his family to meet him at the hospital because he told them he had been burned by an aircraft.

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The doctors at the hospital in Winnipeg treated him for the burns and didn't know what to make of some of his other effects.

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He was dizzy, he was vomiting, he was very much out of sorts.

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Only later did he actually explain to his family what had happened.

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And he thought that because this was some sort of secret aircraft and perhaps it wasn't a Canadian or American craft, that it was some other device that he should tell authorities about this.

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So he contacted one of the newspapers in Winnipeg and told a reporter about his experience.

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And when the reporter heard the fantastic story, it broke all across Canada in fact around the world and it became one of the most intensely investigated reports in all of North America.

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At first the authorities turned over the investigation to Sergeant Paul Biskey of the Canadian Air Force.

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His report was filled with contradictions.

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Biskey recognized that Mikolak was honest, yet he remained convinced that the whole thing was nothing more than a hoax or a hallucination.

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Biskey was very much against the notion of flying saucers.

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In fact, an interesting letter which we have found on file described how he was going to get Mr. Mikolak drunk at a bar to try and loosen his lips to come forth with the truth about what happened.

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He was looking for any explanation, any reason why what Mikolak had said really didn't occur.

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And I believe was a detriment to the investigation.

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Perhaps dedicated, but he was so convinced that the case could not have occurred that perhaps he went a little bit overboard in his evaluation.

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Biskey's conclusions were not accepted unanimously by the authorities, especially since radioactive ground samples were taken from the site.

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I actually grew up very close to where Mr. Mikolak lived.

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In fact, as a child I played with one of his sons.

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And I remember his son telling me one time that his father had been burned and was very, very sick, and I didn't think anything of it at the time.

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But later on, as I continued my connection and relationship with the family, I became interested in the UFOs and flying saucers and asked for a reason.

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I had more questions about what had happened and he showed me the burns on his legs and what was left on his body at that time.

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Some of the material that had been left and told me of his fantastic story.

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So on the one hand we have a fantastic story, but it is backed up by some physical evidence, some material on the ground,

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the evidence of the burns on his body, plus the astounding testimony and expert testimony of some of the investigators.

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So I suppose depending on who you talk to it's either one of the best cases ever on record of a person encountering a flying saucer and being burned by it,

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physically injured, or elaborate hoax.

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And if it is an elaborate hoax, it is surely one of the most profound ever on record with the most incredible evidence.

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The Mykolaq case was never really explained.

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Even today, 35 years later, part of the Mykolaq file is still inaccessible, classified as a state secret by National Defense.

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In Europe, there is no Freedom of Information Act, so it is difficult to assess the role of the military with regards to UFOs.

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We do know that the British government has always been interested in UFOs.

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Between 1991 and 1994, Nick Pope was in charge of studying reports of UFO sightings.

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Between 1991 and 1994, my job at the Ministry of Defense was to research and investigate UFO sightings,

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to evaluate them, to see if there was evidence of a threat to the defense of the United Kingdom.

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So I would receive between two and three hundred reports each year,

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and I would have to, to the best of my ability, to look at each one of these, to consider all the possible alternatives,

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and to try and find a conventional explanation.

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Now, I managed to find a conventional explanation with 90 or 95% of these sightings,

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but that left me with a hard core, which I couldn't explain by conventional means.

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I had that particular job for three years, but in various forms, that job or something very much like it has existed since 1950,

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and the work does continue to this day.

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Having said that, I think over the years, the way in which the subject has been treated has varied enormously.

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Sometimes due to the attitudes or belief of whoever is doing the job at the time,

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so I, for example, was quite involved in the subject because I thought it was worthy of interest.

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Others, I think, over the years have taken a less involved view.

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The British Ministry of Defense has been interested in UFOs since 1950.

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The Churchill administration was concerned with the US situation, and the British press were a bunch of fearmongers.

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Military commanders were questioning the nature of these flying saucers.

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Could they be a new weapon being developed by the Russians?

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Yes, the British government's interest in UFOs dates back to about 1950,

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and at that time, clearly we were aware of the situation in America with Kenneth Arnold's flying saucer sightings,

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and we knew, of course, that Project Sine had been set up and Project Grudge,

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and that, of course, evolved into Project Blue Book.

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In 1950, a very eminent scientist in the British government, Sir Henry Tizard,

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one of the founding fathers of radar technology,

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felt that UFO reports could not be dismissed and should not be dismissed without some form of proper investigation.

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And so the Air Force and Air Force Intelligence was tasked with setting up a working party to look into this.

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This was known as the Flying Saucer Working Party.

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It formed in 1950, and it reported formally its conclusions in 1951.

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Its conclusions were quite skeptical and drew heavily on the American party line,

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that these things were generally either misidentifications or hoaxes.

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Having said that, when it reported and recommended that no further action was taken,

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a year or so later this was overturned because of a high-profile series of UFO sightings involving the military.

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But that is how the official interest started.

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Once the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Defence had set up a small unit to look into these UFO sightings,

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that project ran, and indeed to a certain extent still runs to this day.

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The job that I did between 1991 and 1994 is simply the modern version of the research and investigation effort

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that was set up in the early 50s and has run ever since.

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Now of course there have been changes in, of course, the personnel.

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There have been changes in the way in which these incidents have been investigated,

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but essentially it is the same project and the fundamental brief has not changed.

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That is to look at the sightings to satisfy ourselves that there is evidence of no threat to the defence of our country.

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By definition the army is secretive and doesn't reveal information to the public.

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It prefers to keep silent rather than work openly with ufologists.

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But a few years ago the Belgian army decided to cooperate with a group of Brussels ufologists.

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Sobebs, the French acronym for the Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena.

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In the fall of 1989 an airship appeared over Belgium.

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Witnesses described a large black triangular shaped craft with three flashing red lights.

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In Brussels Sobebs was quickly inundated with reports of sightings.

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The Belgian army agreed to cooperate with the ufologists and was ready to send up a reconnaissance aircraft.

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00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:24,000
On March 30th 1990 a triangle was detected on radar screens at Szemersack station.

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Just after midnight two F-16 fighter jets were sent up to pursue the object.

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One of the F-16s had the UFO on its radar screen but the other aircraft was flying without radar.

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The unidentified object took off at speeds that no human could withstand.

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A few days later Colonel Wilfred de Bruyre, head of the Air Force, presented radar images to the press.

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They were quite astounding. The images showed that the spacecraft had accelerated at a speed of 30 to 40 Gs.

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At the same time Colonel de Bruyre rejected any possibility that the UFO could be some sort of secret prototype.

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The Belgian wave of sightings lasted until 1994.

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Now ten years later they have yet to come up with a concrete explanation for all of the sightings reported.

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What's important to remember is not so much the sightings themselves but rather the open dialogue that took place between a group of ufologists and the National Army.

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This joint effort was much more important than you may think.

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To carry out a thorough investigation researchers need to know all of the data and the best reports are often found in military files

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because they are written by experienced pilots and they are supported by physical evidence such as radar echoes.

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These files are rarely released to civilian researchers, the Army claiming that they must remain confidential for security reasons.

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Ideally state agencies would be set up throughout the world, managed by an international body such as the UN.

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But the world is not ready for such an organization just yet.

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Towards the end of the 1970s several meetings were held at the UN to discuss UFOs.

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Among those who attended were Professor Heineck, former advisor to the US Air Force, Astronaut Gordon Cooper and several other key figures.

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The meetings were presided by Kurt Waldheim who was Secretary General at the time.

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The idea was to hold an international debate on UFOs.

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Unfortunately the meetings were short lived since an American diplomat threatened to complain to the Senate that American funds to the UN were being used to study UFOs.

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Proof that before God we are all equally wise and equally foolish.