When you make a recovery, you handle it the same way you would as if you were dealing with an airplane accident involving hazardous material. With the Blue Fly recoveries [ET craft], you do what is called an on-site analysis.
In short, you have experts out there who know what missiles are; who know what aircraft are. They are looking at this material. They are telling you what it isn’t. This leaves you to only one possible conclusion―something that did not originate on the face of this planet. That was the intent of the Blue Fly teams. It was very critical to do an immediate on-site analysis. You package debris as if it was hazardous material. You take precautions. While I still state the ETs are not hostile, there was always the potential for an accident or death.
Of course, you try to conceal the material, particularly if you have a large craft and it is disc shaped or say, wedge shaped―which is a shape that we get from time to time. And you take precautions, particularly if you have to go ahead and put it on a truck to bring it in. One of the biggest concerns we had was biological due to contamination as a result of this being truly of alien origin.
Now there are sighting events and there are recoveries of downed ET craft, but as I said, the recoveries are few and far between. One recovery took place in 1969 in Indian Town Gap… it was in the winter but there was no snow. We were on a field training exercise, the 96th Civil Affairs Group. I was the NBC Non-Commissioner Officer in charge. We were notified that they had an incident involving a downed craft and we needed to assist in the recovery.
It was a wedge-shaped craft. There was already a team set up and floodlights in place around the object. Fortunately, we didn’t have any problems with civilians or curiosity seekers or anything like that. I was asked to get closer to the object to take readings with the APD 27. As I did this, I realized the bodies I was seeing were not of an Earthly origin. I’m hesitant to go into it too much, because I don’t want to get emotional about it…
Another case we were involved with was the Iranian incident of September 19, 1976. Both fighters were taken apart to determine what caused these aircraft to malfunction at the same time. There were anomalies detected where one of the Air Force pilots saw the UFO go down to the ground. We recorded those anomalies with audio devices. We took film footage of the area and there were some strange things that showed up on that footage. Everything that took place there at the landing area, I am not privy to. But I can tell you this much, whatever took place there had people out there for two to three weeks. [See Appendix 2 and Appendix 3 for supporting documents.]
In 1986, we fired at a UFO on two occasions. The UFO took off like nothing happened. That same year you had the incident where twenty or more UFOs were flying around Brazilian aircraft, flying rings around them.
I was also involved with the UFO events in the summer of 1989 over Belgium and Germany and one scary incident on the border near the Soviet territory. The Russians were pretty upset because this was a huge object. It was shaped like an equilateral triangle; its median about three football fields in length. It flew over what we call “No-Man’s Zone.”
We were all getting jittery; you could feel your hair standing up on end. It was more than just getting shivers because of fright; there was some type of physiological effect taking place. Once this incident subsided, we put fighters on alert. We notified them that we may have a Russian aircraft coming across the gap and we were going to intercept it. The Russians did the same thing. The UFO went back over Soviet airspace and they scrambled fighters to try to intercept it. It wasn’t traveling fast at all. But on this particular night no one fired at it.
There were pictures taken. There was consultation with the Soviet Union. With this going on, everyone was taken in and briefed. People were informed that what they saw was nothing more than a Russian MIG-27 that had strayed across into the area far enough into the No-Man’s Zone to create a problem and cause some alarm. But it was no MIG-27. We knew exactly what we were looking at. You have flashcards which are silhouettes of the various craft of the Russians, and even our own. What we saw was a craft that was of an unusual origin. It was not aerodynamically sound. And when I say it was not aerodynamically sound, I mean it had no means of staying aloft… no propulsion system, and it was perfectly silent.
This was one of the incidents that got me a little concerned, made me think about wanting to get out and come back home to the family. We had the incident escalate. The Soviet Union filed an official protest through the Belgium Government to the U.S. Government stating that they were very concerned about the Belgium authorities, along with several other countries letting us fly stealth aircraft on reconnaissance missions into Russian airspace. We notified and discussed it with the Russians. We briefed their Military Liaison Mission Groups that this had nothing to do with our stealth aircraft.
Meanwhile, the Belgium authorities had their own UFO sightings. We had seen this on TV. What you don’t know about these sightings is that there was a tremendous… I don’t want to call it a cover-up―there was a movement to keep specific information about those sightings under wraps. There were some efforts to go ahead and alter the film footage of the radar screens to the point where it showed the UFO going underground, which it did not. I think it was supposed to have gone six hundred feet into the earth. Again, that did not happen. It was visible. People saw it. The pilots saw it. The pilot’s aircraft locked on to it. But these were things that would create more questions that we were willing to answer. So we decided to keep this out of the press. And we were successful at it.
Bentwaters [England] was another very interesting case. As far as the physical evidence, there were photographs. There was film footage. We found abnormalities in the area we referred to as the impact point. There was evidence of a higher than normal background radiation. We also noticed that the trees had been leveled off at the top.
And there were many eyewitnesses.
They were asking technical questions. I know for a fact that some of the radar operators, both British and U.S. were questioned. I know some of the people were out there on two different nights.
We got there in late December of 1980. We gathered up the materials and radar sightings and took everything back to Lindsey Air Force Base to prepare to brief Shape Headquarters (NATO). The information was then put with the special courier, the materials transferred on to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, headquarters at the time of the U.S. Air Forces Special Field Activities Group, Air Forces Field Activities Center. [See Appendix 7 for supporting document.]
Nick Pope is a British Ministry of Defense official who headed up the Ministry’s office for research and investigation of the UFO phenomenon for a number of years in the 1990s.
Britain’s most famous UFO case is the Rendlesham Forest incident, which is also referred to as the Bentwaters Case. It involved a series of UFO incidents over a number of nights in December of 1980, involving the Royal Air Force Bases of Bentwaters and Woodbridge in Suffolk, but in fact, they were operated by the United States Air Force.
In this case there were a series of encounters where some people saw lights in the sky performing extraordinary maneuvers, but much more significantly, on the first night of activity, people saw a structured metallic craft actually moving―not up in the sky―but right at ground level. It was moving through Rendlesham Forest, which adjoins the two bases. At one point, this small metallic, roughly triangular-shaped craft seemed to actually come down and land in a particular clearing.