The colonel said he learned later that the U.S. Army eventually gathered up the crash debris, put it into crates and flew it all back to the United States.
The third story having to do with UFOs and warfare in the Persian Gulf region also has surprising resiliency — and brings the whole story right up to the present day. What’s more, it’s also connected to the same mysterious Russian colonel.
This account always seems to start out with the same question: Did Saddam Hussein at one time possess a UFO?
This, in turn, leads to two more questions: Did Saddam’s regime have its own top secret version of Area 51? And if so, was this where the elusive WMD, the unfound weapons of mass destruction that led to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, were actually stored?
Even before that massive assault against Saddam began, there were persistent reports that the dictator had come into possession of a damaged UFO, possibly shot down either during the 1991 war, or more likely around 1998, while the U.S. military was enforcing a strict no-fly zone over Iraq.
That particular scenario starts on December 16, 1998, when a video clip, said to have aired on CNN, appeared to show a UFO flying over Baghdad. The object was seen trying to avoid antiaircraft fire being shot at it by Saddam’s forces.
At the time it was assumed this was just another UFO sighting, one of dozens that take place around the world every day. But then rumors started bubbling up that maybe the UFO was actually hit by the AA fire, shot down and recovered by Saddam’s military.
As the story went, the UFO, or pieces of it, were then taken to Iraq’s version of Area 51, a place known as Qalaat-e-Julundi. Once there, Saddam had his weapons experts reverse engineer the alien technology, and from that, create some mind boggling WMD.
So, was this fantastic weapons cache what the United States was secretly after all along? Was this the elusive WMD?
Even scientists within Iraq didn’t totally discount this theory. Some even took it one step further by claiming that extraterrestrials who’d survived the UFO crash had been living in the modern Babylonia under Saddam’s protection.
One scientist was quoted before the 2003 invasion as saying: “It is rumored at a market in Sulaimaniya, to the south of Zarzi, that aliens are Saddam’s guests. Where do they stay? People mention some underground base at the old stronghold Qalaat-e-Julundi. It is practically impossible to penetrate into it. The citadel stands on a hill surrounded with vertical precipices on three sides; the precipices plunge down to the Little Zab River. It is said that Saddam lets aliens stay there.”
Then the story gets even better.
“Saddam gave the aliens sanctuary, so that they couldn’t be captured by the Americans,” the scientist claimed. “Nobody can reach the citadel Qalaat-e-Julundi at night. They say that the aliens created ‘watchdogs’ for Saddam. The aliens took ordinary desert scorpions and used their bioengineering to grow them to giant size. Scorpions of a cow-size! They are wonderful watchdogs: they blend in with the desert, swiftly and silently move on their warm-blooded prey for a decisive attack. Luckless intruders just hear some strange sound from behind, then a pincer crushes their necks, another pincer crushes their legs. Death comes almost immediately.”
It’s a crazy tale — and possibly created solely to keep the highly superstitious Iraqis away from a legitimate military installation located in the old fortress of Qalaat-e-Julundi.
But what’s interesting about this account is that much of it, along with the mysterious Russian colonel’s UFO shoot-down story, was reported, quotes included, in Pravda, the onetime official newspaper of the Soviet Union.
And while the Pravda of the old Moscow regime doesn’t exist now as it did then, it is still a media outlet in Russia. A bit sensationalistic, but still highly read.
As one Russian journalist who didn’t want to give his name explained to us: “Pravda today is sort of ‘yellowish.’ They don’t have any correspondents’ network or stringers. They are sensation hunters and usually compile secondhand news from the Internet.
“However, that does not mean what they write about is not true.”
20
The Grand Puzzle
Among his fellow UFO researchers, the late Richard Hall was known as the “Dean of Ufology.”
Best described as a critical-minded proponent, his 1964 book The UFO Evidence is considered one of the best ever written on the subject. Simply put, Hall believed that UFOs were extraterrestrial and that the U.S. military was deceiving the American people when it came to what they knew about them.
According to his obituary, published in the Washington Post, in a 1966 paper, Hall wrote: “Ninety-seven percent of the nibbles a fisherman feels on his line may be caused by his line snagging on rocks or seaweed or by wave motion. But that doesn’t prove there are no fish in the ocean.”
These are more than just wise words for describing the UFO mystery; there are numbers that bear them out. By the time the U.S. Air Force officially closed Project Blue Book in 1969, it had collected reports on about 13,000 UFO sightings. At least 700 of them — a significant number — were labeled unexplained.
However, when factored in that much of the activity at Blue Book from 1952 onward was devoted to whitewashing UFO sightings, that 700 figure has got to be regarded as being very, very low.
More numbers. Polls in the United States say forty million people have either seen a UFO themselves or know someone who has. Eighty million U.S. citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials.
Several thousand UFO sightings are reported each year. Several hundred thousand have been documented over the past half century or so.
But because only a fraction of people who actually see a UFO report it, this means the actual number of UFO sightings since the early 1950s is in the millions.
Something is happening. True, there’s a lot of clutter and a lot of noise. But all these sightings cannot be illusions, birds, airplanes, weather balloons, reentry vehicles or the planet Venus. And all it takes is for one of them to be true — because then, in a way, they all become true.
But how do we get to the truth?
The UFO enigma is so important that it demands to be placed in the hands of objective, apolitical, purely scientific-minded people whose goal must be to simply tell us what we’ve been seeing all these years. What are these things that have been flying around our skies, watching our wars, tampering with our doomsday weapons, and quite possibly altering the course of human events by, for example, appearing in the sky in the shape of a cross?
More than $10 billion was spent to build the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland in an effort to re-create the first few microseconds of the Big Bang. NASA has spent billions on satellites, space probes and earthbound listening stations, all in its search for the secrets of the universe and the possibility of life different than ours among the stars. One would think the same type of earnestness, dedication and curiosity would have been directed to solving the question of UFOs.
Instead, the job was given to the U.S. military — and considering the results, or the lack of them, that might go down as one of the worst decisions in history.
We were fooled at first. When the U.S. Air Force set up Project Blue Book in 1951, people were led to believe it would be a vast scientific institute like Fermilab, or Los Alamos, or Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In reality, it was never more than one office and four people, two of whom were secretaries, all under orders to lay low and not to make waves.