MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

In 1966, Walter Cronkite “the most trusted man in America” hosted an hour-long CBS special report titled UFO: Friend, Foe, or Fantasy. At the time, the UFO craze in the United States showed no sign of ebbing. There had been periodic waves of sightings for nearly 20 years, spawning flying saucer cults, amateur groups of zealous researchers, and a lucrative genre of sci-fi movies and books.

For his show, Cronkite enlisted a number of prominent experts, such as a young astronomer named Carl Sagan, to demystify UFOs. J. Allen Hynek, another astronomer who was a scientific adviser to the Pentagon’s ongoing UFO investigation, also was featured.

After Cronkite was done with the science portion of the show, he turned to other possible explanations, such as new military technology, “strange-looking crafts” that had been created by the budding aerospace industry for the Air Force. There were also other unknown craft, he added, “probably being tested in secret.”

Still, public interest in UFOs could not be dimmed. Several years after Cronkite’s broadcast, the Air Force contracted with the University of Colorado (CU) to convene a distinguished panel of scientists on the subject.

Led by the CU physicist Edward Condon, the group concluded in 1968 after an in-depth study that there was no basis to the extraterrestrial interpretation of UFO reports and that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years.”

The panel’s voluminous report totaled nearly 1,000 pages and focused “almost entirely on the physical sciences,” meaning it examined UFO sightings in the context of explainable celestial and meteorological phenomena.

In 1969, a National Academy of Sciences panel reviewed the report and concurred with its finding, writing: “While further study of particular aspects of the topic (e.g., atmospheric phenomena) may be useful, a study of UFOs, in general, is not a promising way to expand scientific understanding of the phenomena.” Pointing to these conclusions, the Pentagon announced that it would no longer investigate UFO reports.

None of this seemed to reduce the allure of flying saucers. UFOs remained a hot topic into the 1970s, as a new wave of popular sci-fi films, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien, continued to stoke public fascination. By the late 1990s, other big UFO subthemes had been prominently introduced into pop culture, such as the abduction phenomenon and government conspiracy narrative, via best-selling books and, of course, The X-Files.

The continued attention was also fed by new disclosures of previously unknown government interest in UFOs by US intelligence agencies. Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), dogged UFO crusaders successfully sued the federal government to unearth documents that revealed that the CIA had been periodically monitoring UFO reports and the active community of believers since the 1950s. The agency, it turned out, had even commissioned its own classified study to determine if there was any substance to any of the UFO reports.

It reached the same conclusion as the CU-led and National Academy of Sciences panels. Of course, the revelations of the CIA’s longtime interest in UFOs only reinforced the belief of many in the UFO community that the spy agency was hiding evidence of extraterrestrials.

Perhaps hoping to defuse this notion, the CIA in 1997 allowed its official historian, Gerald Haines, to publish a report explaining how the CIA’s U2 spy plane and other advanced reconnaissance projects, such as the SR-71 Blackbird, had frequently been mistaken for UFOs from the late 1950s through the 1960s.

Haines acknowledged that the Air Force’s UFO investigators during this period had been made aware of the CIA’s ultra-secret spy projects, but were told not to reveal the true cause of many of the flying saucer sightings. “This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.

We all know how deception fuels conspiracy theories. The UFO interest has always been deeply rooted in the pulp novelty of cloak and dagger intrigue brought on by secret Nazi deals made by the CIA – the Russian involvement in high tech space equipment capable of putting a man into orbit and the secret about crash debris and alien bodies that were recovered at Roswell and shipped to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Times have changed – the Cold War may be over, but a secret space race has returned and so have reports of fast-moving UFOs. All of the old UFO stories are still valid because in 2019 we are now real world where the so-called conspiracy theories are no longer theories and the smirks that once were on the faces of scientists are now being replaced with raised eyebrows.

Now that we are learning more and more about the Pentagon and how they are now dealing with Unidentified Flying Objects, we now realize that most of the deception that was carried out during Project Sign, Grudge and Blue Book has now backfires and while the military seems justified in covering up the truth for 70 years -others are demanding answers for the sake of final disclosure of the ETI reality.

The “seven-decade deception” might also have inadvertently contributed to the lingering distrust felt toward scientific experts by UFO believers. After all, those blue-ribbon panels in the late 1960s dismissed most sightings as optical illusions. Since then, scientists have become even more exasperated by the persistence of UFOs in the public mind. But we now know that a good number of those strange aircraft sightings were likely real—just not extraterrestrial in origin.

This larger, complex history of the UFO phenomenon is especially problematic for professionals in the military and intelligence community who have come forward of late with alarming stories of unknown “anomalous” aircraft and plead to be taken seriously.

The more you dive into the story of the Nimitz and the UFO reports that were first submitted in 2004, you begin to realize that there are layers to the story that are being overlooked by the mainstream media, even though they have attempted to report most of what happened and have now made it a point to occasionally ask the President what he knows about the Navy and their reports of flying Tic Tac-like objects seen over the Pacific Ocean.

Even I thought that most of the story was all sewn up as the account is now a new entry into UFO history – the Navy termed the event an “incursion” which is Navy speak for “invasion” and if you don’t believe that the Navy were about to engage in a UFO battle there have been recordings of the 2004 incident that have surfaced where pilots are not cheering on their encounters but are preparing for real-world tasking.

One of the biggest questions surrounding the most recent known spate of UFO encounters with U.S. Navy pilots – those that occurred off the southeastern seaboard of the United States between 2014 and early 2015 – pertains to how persistent they actually were. We know Super Hornet aircrews from Strike Fighter Squadron 11 (VFA-11), the Red Rippers, detected unknown objects multiple times on radar and one aircrew even had a close encounter visually with one of them, but what about the rest of the many Hornet squadrons based at Naval Air Station Oceana, not to mention the E-2 Hawkeye squadrons from nearby NAS Norfolk? We have the answer to this question and it is remarkable.

Ground Zero guest Tyler Rogoway of the War Zone has informed us that the presence of the mysterious objects in the restricted training airspace off America’s East East was so pervasive that it was largely common knowledge among local flying units.

It literally became such a common and near everyday occurrence that Naval Aviators and Naval flight officers from the base would talk about it informally with regularity.

But that doesn’t mean formal action wasn’t taken. Beyond filing an official safety report after one of the jets almost hit one of the unidentified objects.

What hasn’t been reported is that so-called Tic Tac craft was eerily described as translucent like a chrysalis with a black cube inside of it.

Notices to airmen were posted regarding the dangers potentially posed by unknown aerial vehicles flying in the same military operating areas that aircraft from NAS Oceana frequented for training. This action was taken by the base’s command leadership as they couldn’t figure out how else to address the bizarre issue and its perceived threat to their aircrews’ safety.

Tyler Rogoway reports that additional visual encounters occurred beyond the one near miss with the Super Hornet and the ‘cube inside an orb’ object.

There was no doubt that there were a uniform set of very strange looking objects that were spotted on radar, by infrared targeting pods, and by the naked eye, frequently over 2014 and the first part of 2015 above the waters off America’s southeastern coastline.

It has also been reported that similar craft had been detected and engaged in the Arabian Gulf. It was reported by Alejandro Rojas that Navy Strike Fighter Squadron 11, the Red Rippers, the carrier air wing to which it was assigned, and the Theodore Roosevelt also were engaged with the UFOs while the carrier strike group was launching airstrikes in Syria.

This incident happened in 2015, nearly a decade after the Tic Tac incident.

This only goes to show that the UFO incursion that was first revealed in 2004 has now turned out to be a series of events that have spanned ten years or so and there are many military personnel that have yet to come forward with what they know about these mysterious aircraft.

Two weeks ago we reported that A group of US senators, including the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, received a classified briefing about a series of reported encounters by the US Navy with unidentified aircraft, according to a congressional aide.

At the same time, the President was being grilled about his knowledge of UFOs.

Trump, of course, was very reticent in giving his views about the subject only to say that while he is not at all into UFO’s he knows what is military is saying and that he has to believe in what his Navy personnel tell him.

It is important that after two interviews on the subject – President Trump seemed to feel awkward on the matters of UFO’s but he did not joke about the subject like his predecessors Obama, Bush and Clinton when they appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show.

If you remember President Obama was always nervous and awkwardly laughing when he was asked to speak about UFOs at times from the earlier democratic debates to when a little girl asked him about aliens on the Ellen Show.

After Trump made his statements on national TV – both on ABC and Fox news – CNN reported that the Navy wanted to keep calm and to try and do damage control about alleged alien encounters with servicemen.

A Navy official told CNN that the Navy does not believe aliens have been flying around US airspace.

But there have been “a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,” the Navy said in a statement.

The Navy said these kinds of “incursions” pose both a security risk and safety hazard.

“For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the USAF takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report,” the statement said.

What is also curious about the 2004 encounter is that radio traffic reveals that the fighter pilots were first curious about a larger craft that was seen submerged in the water – that later disappeared.

The object was about the size of a 737 commercial airlines jet.

It was as if the Tic Tac UFO’s were there to protect a possible submerged craft— it is also been revealed that the UFO’s had ligatures and at times appeared snake-like with a black cube inside of them.

What is most interesting is a recent UFO flap where UFO’s that are similar are now being seen above land and there have been video and photo evidence of the UFOs.

A night sighting of a glowing snake-like craft was witnessed over Twenty Nine Palms, California.

Several weeks later, a similar object was spotted plunging from the sky before speeding off at breakneck speed over Colorado.

Then another was seen over Washington State.

There have been more than a dozen incidents off the East Coast recently and of course, the mainstream media are far too occupied with collusion and impeachment.

Trump’s personality, statements, tweets, speeches, random thoughts, passing comments, complaints, gripes, and of course, actions are the center of everything.

According to Politico, an increasing number of legislators have been requesting Pentagon briefings on UFOs — a sign, officials told the publication, of “growing congressional interest” in the topic. Three senators, including Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, have been briefed on the matter and after two weeks there may be more news surfacing soon.

What exactly those briefings are going to revel is unclear, but the mounting interest lends those with a belief in, or a curiosity about, the possibility of extraterrestrial life more fuel for speculation. The notion that the government knows more than it’s telling us has often figured into theories about alien life and claims of UFO sightings. Government actions in the last two years, including the briefings and steps by the Navy to formalize UFO reporting processes, would seem to feed into that dynamic.

The task at hand is trying to get the information that is being buried in political foot-dragging.

The International UFO Congress convenes on September 3rd and I am sure that much of what has been discussed behind closed doors will be revealed and much of it certainly will be surprising for those who have been skeptical about UFO cases.

We will eventually learn how important real-world tasking is when we consider what the UFO phenomena means to National Security and the future of space warfare.

Written by Ron Patton