Former astronaut: Man not alone in universe

Right: NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell, 1971
April 20, 2009

(CNN) -- Earth Day may fall later this week, but as far as former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell and other UFO enthusiasts are concerned, the real story is happening elsewhere.

Mitchell, who was part of the 1971 Apollo 14 moon mission, asserted Monday that extraterrestrial life exists, and that the truth is being concealed by the U.S. and other governments.

He delivered his remarks during an appearance at the National Press Club following the conclusion of the fifth annual X-Conference, a meeting of UFO activists and researchers studying the possibility of alien life forms.

Mankind has long wondered if we're "alone in the universe. [But] only in our period do we really have evidence. No, we're not alone," Mitchell said.

"Our destiny, in my opinion, and we might as well get started with it, is [to] become a part of the planetary community. ... We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there."

Mitchell grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, which some UFO believers maintain was the site of a UFO crash in 1947. He said residents of his hometown "had been hushed and told not to talk about their experience by military authorities." They had been warned of "dire consequences" if they did so.

But, he claimed, they "didn't want to go to the grave with their story. They wanted to tell somebody reliable. And being a local boy and having been to the moon, they considered me reliable enough to whisper in my ear their particular story."

Roughly 10 years ago, Mitchell claimed, he was finally given an appointment at Pentagon to discuss what he had been told.

An unnamed admiral working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff promised to uncover the truth behind the Roswell story, Mitchell said. The stories of a UFO crash "were confirmed," but the admiral was then denied access when he "tried to get into the inner workings of that process."
The same admiral, Mitchell claimed, now denies the story.

"I urge those who are doubtful: Read the books, read the lore, start to understand what has really been going on. Because there really is no doubt we are being visited," he said.

"The universe that we live in is much more wondrous, exciting, complex and far-reaching than we were ever able to know up to this point in time."

A NASA spokesman denied any cover-up. Well, duh. That's their story and they are sticking to it.

"NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover-up about alien life on this planet or anywhere else -- period," Michael Cabbage said Monday. humpt. Cabbage always gives me gas...

Debates have continued about what happened at Roswell. The U.S. Air Force said in 1994 that wreckage recovered there in 1947 was most likely from a balloon-launched classified government project.

Stephen Bassett, head of the Paradigm Research Group (PRG), which hosted the X-Conference, said that the truth about extraterrestrial life is being suppressed because it is politically explosive.

"There is a third rail [in American politics], and that is the UFO question. It is many magnitudes more radioactive than Social Security ever dreamed to be," Bassett said.

Not to mention that it would rock the religious world to the core--the Old Testament would be taken more literally, bringing up the actual existance of God as an abstract mystical father versus God as alien beings who came from the heavens and procreated with man/woman.

Wichita UFO report draws wide attention

BY TIM POTTER
The Wichita Eagle

It flew fast like a jet, made a whirling sound and left an odd glow.

That's how an amateur photographer described a flying machine he spotted in the skies near Rose Hill on Friday. The UFO world is now paying attention to his photograph.

On Monday, the photo appeared under the headline "Weird Object in Wichita," on UFO Digest, a Canadian Web site.

The object looks like some kind of new-technology fighter jet, possibly a prototype, said UFO Digest editor and publisher Dirk Vander Ploeg.

Jarrod Bartlett, spokesman for Boeing Integrated Defense Systems-Wichita, said in an e-mail that he checked with flight operations staff "and they were not able to identify the aircraft. We do not often get calls regarding unidentified aircraft."

McConnell Air Force Base declined to comment.

The man who captured the image said he took the photo at 8:42 a.m. Friday near 210th and Prairie Creek Road, about three miles south of Rose Hill.

"I was facing east when I shot the photo," the man, who asked not to be identified, said in an e-mail. He described what he saw: "The object came out of the clouds really fast. It sounded kind of like a jet but much, much softer and had a whirling sound with it.

"I only got off one shot because it was really close before I realized it was something different. It went back upward, much like a jet, and was gone. "There was a odd pinkish glow in the sky behind it."

In a telephone interview, the man said he takes still-life photos as a hobby. He said it was fortunate he had his camera out when the object flew into his view because he saw it for only a few seconds.

"The only problem was I had a real slow lens... . I wasn't planning on taking a picture of anything moving," he said.

He said he used to work at Boeing and has seen a lot of aircraft over the years. "It didn't sound like one of these jets that I hear all the time.... It was much quieter, much quieter," he said.
He noticed that the flying machine's exterior looked black and shiny.

He estimated the object came no closer than 1,000 feet above the ground. It swooped in as if it was on "a bombing run." "Then in one smooth motion, it went back up," he said.

After he took the photo, relatives urged him to send it to the UFO publication. He was reluctant.
"I didn't want people to think I'm nuts," he said.

Vander Ploeg, the UFO Digest publisher, said he is a former small-plane pilot who is familiar with various aircraft. He said he was confident that the image is not a hoax.
"But I can't tell you what it is," he said.

"I've never seen a plane that looks like that."

The Unidentified Flying Object that buzzed O'Hare airport in 2006

Originally published in the Chicago Tribune on January 1, 2007

It sounds like a tired joke--but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously.

A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.

Was it an alien spaceship? A weather balloon lost in the airspace over the world's second-busiest airport? A top-secret military craft? Or simply a reflection from lights that played a trick on the eyes?

Officials at United professed no knowledge of the Nov. 7 event--which was reported to the airline by as many as a dozen of its own workers--when the Tribune started asking questions recently. But the Federal Aviation Administration said its air traffic control tower at O'Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if controllers had spotted a mysterious elliptical-shaped craft sitting motionless over Concourse C of the United terminal.

No controllers saw the object, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said. The FAA is not conducting a further investigation, Cory said.

The theory is the sighting was caused by a "weather phenomenon," she said. The UFO report has sparked some chuckles among controllers in O'Hare tower."To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable," said O'Hare controller and union official Craig Burzych.

Some of the witnesses, interviewed by the Tribune, said they are upset that neither the government nor the airline is probing the incident.Whatever the object was, it could have interfered with O'Hare's radar and other equipment, and even created a collision risk, they said.

The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the term that extraterrestrial-watchers nowadays prefer over Unidentified Flying Object) was first seen by a United ramp worker who was directing back a United plane at Gate C17, according to an account the worker provided to the National UFO Reporting Center.The sighting occurred during daylight, about 4:30 p.m., just before sunset.All the witnesses said the object was dark gray and well defined in the overcast skies.

They said the craft, estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter, did not display any lights. Some said it looked like a rotating Frisbee, while others said it did not appear to be spinning. All agreed the object made no noise and it was at a fixed position in the sky, just below the 1,900-foot cloud deck, until shooting off into the clouds.

Witnesses shaken by sighting"I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don't understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport," said a United mechanic who was in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 that he was taxiing to a maintenance hangar when he observed the metallic-looking object above Gate C17. "But I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an [Earth] aircraft," the mechanic said.

One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and "experienced some religious issues" over it, one co-worker said. A United manager said he ran outside his office in Concourse B after hearing the report about the sighting on an internal airline radio frequency."I stood outside in the gate area not knowing what to think, just trying to figure out what it was," he said. "I knew no one would make a false call like that. But if somebody was bouncing a weather balloon or something else over O'Hare, we had to stop it because it was in very close proximity to our flight operations."

The databases of various UFO-watching groups are full of accounts filed by pilots about sightings of unknown aircraft and anomalies that affected navigational equipment onboard planes.

Whether any of the UFO incidents are real or merely the result of individual perceptions, some experts say the events pose a potential safety risk to pilots and their passengers."There have been documented cases where safety appears to have been implicated, and more and more we are coming to the point of view that we are dealing with an intelligent phenomenon," said Richard Haines, science director at the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, a private agency.

"We must be proactive before an aircraft goes down," said Haines, a former chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA's Ames Research Center. Haines is investigating the O'Hare incident. He said he has determined that no weather balloons were launched in the vicinity of O'Hare on Nov. 7. "It's absurd that the military would be conducting aerial test flights" near the airport, Haines said.

All the witnesses to the O'Hare event, who included at least several pilots, said they are certain based on the disc's appearance and flight characteristics that it was not an airplane, helicopter, weather balloon or any other craft known to man.

United denies UFO report

They're not sure what was hanging out for several minutes in the restricted airspace, but they are upset that no one in power has taken the matter seriously.

A United spokeswoman said there is no record of the UFO report. She said United officials do not recall discussion of any such incident."There's nothing in the duty manager log, which is used to report unusual incidents," said United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy. "I checked around. There's no record of anything."

The pilots of the United plane being directed back from Gate C17 also were notified by United personnel of the sighting, and one of the pilots reportedly opened a windscreen in the cockpit to get a better view of the object estimated to be hovering 1,500 feet above the ground.The object was seen to suddenly accelerate straight up through the solid overcast skies, which the FAA reported had 1,900-foot cloud ceilings at the time."It was like somebody punched a hole in the sky," said one United employee.Witnesses said they had a hard time visually tracking the object as it streaked through the dense clouds. It left behind an open hole of clear air in the cloud layer, the witnesses said, adding that the hole disappeared within a few minutes.

The United employees interviewed by the Tribune spoke on condition of anonymity. Some said they were interviewed by United officials and instructed to write reports and draw pictures of what they observed, and that they were advised by United officials to refrain from speaking about what they saw.

Federal agency backtracks

Like United, the FAA originally told the Tribune that it had no information on the alleged UFO sighting. But the federal agency quickly reversed its position after the newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

An internal FAA review of air-traffic communications tapes, a step toward complying with the Tribune request, turned up the call by the United supervisor to an FAA manager in the airport tower, Cory said.

Cory said the weather might have factored into what the witnesses thought they saw." Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," she said. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low [cloud] ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things. That's our take on it.

Just thought it was interesting.

Edgar Mitchell, Ex-Astronaut: Aliens Are Real and NASA Knows It

Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr. Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — claims aliens exist.

He says extraterrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview in Birmingham, England, that sources at NASA who had had contact with aliens described the beings as "little people who look strange to us."

He said supposedly real-life ET's were similar to the traditional image of a "small gray" — short, slight frame, large eyes and large head.

Mitchell also claimed human technology is "not nearly as sophisticated" as the aliens' and "had they been hostile," he warned "we would be been gone by now."

• Click here to read the full story at Australia's Daily Telegraph.

• Click here to listen to Mitchell's interview with Kerrang! radio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Mitchell