Gary Heseltine is the vice-president of the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research (ICER). He is a former British police detective who retired after 24 years to create UFO Truth Magazine, a bi-monthly online ezine.
The policy of denial and debunking evidence of encounters with ‘alien spacecraft’, that’s been in place since the 1950s, is crumbling. Even ex-US presidents and CIA directors admit there’s something out there we can’t explain.
It’s often said that when mankind acknowledges that ‘life’ in the universe has been confirmed and an intelligent civilisation reaches out to us, that ‘contact’ will be the most profound moment in human history.
So, almost everyone is in agreement as to the ramifications of such ‘contact’, but have we actually not had an ongoing engagement between humans and super-intelligent creatures from other planets for decades?
Today, on World UFO Day, as we approach the summer of 2021, the world is potentially on the brink of learning something that most people will be astonished and perhaps shocked by.
For more than 70 years, highly trained, credible people have found themselves involved in multiple witness reports and having an interaction with some kind of intelligence that is, literally, out of this world.
These cases from all around the world have been fully investigated and documented, yet have largely been ignored by governments, military and scientists and the academic world.
Why?
The explanation is simple and stark: governments across the planet, supported by the mainstream media, have poured scorn on and trivialised the subject of unidentified flying objects, or flying saucers, since the early 1950s.
As the late Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and huge UFO proponent, used to say, “It can’t be, so it isn’t.”
That phrase is particularly apt if we ask the question as to why the scientific and academic worlds have largely ignored the mass of corroborated testimony from military pilots, commercial pilots, astronauts, cosmonauts, radar operators, air traffic controllers, sonar operators, military personnel, and police officers etc.
In recent years, a new acronym has been created to replace the term ‘UFO’ – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) – in the hope that science, academia, and the media would be more open to investigating the subject. However, such is the manufactured stigma attached to this topic that it is still deemed too ‘taboo’ for most.
Given the way the subject has been trivialised and dismissed for so many years, it isn’t surprising that most scientists and academics do not take the UFO/UAP phenomena seriously. After all, for most of their lives they have been told that there is no evidence to support the premise that some of these reports are credible, and cannot be explained, and may be of extraterrestrial/non-human origin.
However, almost all of them do not realise that they – and hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens – have been hoodwinked by a huge propaganda machine that was artificially and deliberately created by the United States.
In January 1953, a group of scientists met for two days to figure out a way to ‘strip the aura’ of flying saucers that the public had for the subject. They decided the best way to do this was to begin a debunking program. Flying saucers were to be dismissed, trivialised, and scorned by the deliberate use of the media in all its forms, i.e., television, film, newspapers, books, and magazines.
The group responsible for this policy is known as the ‘Robertson Panel’, which took its name from that of its chairman, Harold Percival Robertson.
It was a policy that effectively created the terrible stigma and ridicule that has plagued this topic for decades, and yet most people are totally unaware of how it began.
Most astronomers won’t even consider looking at the mountains of UFO/UAP evidence, while those that do express a willingness to get involved in genuine research have been prevented from doing so, because of the perceived risk of ridicule and the effect on their careers.
This fear has persisted for decades and has been a powerful deterrent for those that dared to take the phenomena seriously. The message was clear to scientists and academics: stay away from UFO/UAP research or risk ruining your career.
Yet there have been significant developments on this subject in recent weeks and months that seem to be signalling the end to this long-standing policy of deceit and denial.
Last week, a US Navy Task Force submitted a nine-page preliminary assessment report to Congress regarding US Navy encounters with UAPs off the east and west coasts of America that have taken place in recent years.
It cited 144 cases recorded by the US military since 2004 and stated that 143 remained UNEXPLAINED. Given the huge technological resources the US has, it is a staggering statistic. How could 143 military personnel, using the most sophisticated equipment in the world, fail to identify the mysterious objects that they witnessed?
We’ve also seen people at the highest levels of government and the military change their tune and speak out about the phenomenon, in complete contrast to what leaders have said on the matter before.
Senator Marco Rubio said in a TV interview last year: “We have things flying around military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours. So, that’s a legitimate question to ask, and I’d say frankly if it’s something outside this planet it would actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technology leap on behalf of the Russians, the Chinese, or some other adversary…
“The bottom line is, if there are things flying over military bases and you don’t know what they are, they’re not yours, and they exhibit potential technologies you don’t have at your disposal, that to me is a national security risk and one we should be looking into.”
He added in another interview: “Dozens of men and women we have entrusted with the defense of our country are telling us about encounters with unidentified aircraft with capabilities we do not fully understand. We cannot allow the stigma of UFOs to keep us from seriously investigating these encounters.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan recently spoke at George Mason University, and stated: “I think it’s a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe…
“I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand, and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”
John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence, recently said on Fox News that there were “things that we are observing that are difficult to explain,” adding: “There’s actually quite a few of those. Sometimes we wonder whether or not our adversaries have technologies that are a little bit further down the road than we thought or than we realised.
“But there are instances where we don’t have good explanations for some of the things that we have seen. When we talk about sightings, it’s not just a pilot or just a satellite, or some intelligence collection. Usually, we have multiple sensors that are picking up these things.”
Another former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told CNN earlier this year: “I don’t know why we haven’t been more transparent about it in the past, and I’m part of that crime I guess, and my former capacities. I didn’t, I didn’t insist on more transparency with respect to this issue.”
In an unexpected development, even former President Barack Obama has talked in specifics for the very first time publicly about UAPs.
On the James Corden chat show that aired in May, he said: “But what is true – and I’m actually being serious here – is that there’s footage and records of objects in the sky that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern.”
The timing of these comments from such high-level individuals indicates that – at last – the very real possibility that we have been witnessing UFOs in action around our Earth for decades will be taken seriously by the world’s top scientists and will, for the first time, be investigated properly.
This is likely to have profound implications for humanity.
It is not as if there isn’t a lot to investigate. The amount of unexplained ‘contacts’ with potential visitors to our planet is large and growing. In the second part of my article, to be published tomorrow, I will detail some of the most astonishing unexplained encounters.
