WASHINGTON—After five days and 40 testimonies from international witnesses from the military, scientific and academic fields, a committee of six former Congress members agreed to seek international support to break a “truth embargo” on encounters with extraterrestrial life.
On May 3, the last day of the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, (CHD) organizer Stephen Bassett read the contents of a communiqué signed by four of the six retired Congress members.
According to it, the Citizen Hearing Foundation will pursue a global campaign to form a world conference dedicated to discovering the truth behind “overwhelming scientific evidence” that suggests a link between sightings of unexplained craft and extraterrestrial intelligence.
“Given the enormous global implications, if these craft are indeed of extraterrestrial origins, such an issue is a matter for the General Assembly for the United Nations,” Bassett read.
Firsthand Accounts
The hearing included firsthand accounts of extraordinary sightings. Former United States Air Force officers, Capts. Robert Salas, Bruce Fenstermacher, and David Schindele and Sgt. David Scott gave personal accounts of seeing unidentified crafts hover over nuclear launch sites in Wyoming and North Dakota, and described how the crafts shut down ballistic missiles, stopped vehicles, and cut radio communication. Two of the officers had never spoken publicly about their experience before.After hearing their stories, former Michigan Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick said she was convinced “There is something out there.”
“The military witnesses spoke of incidences from 30, 40, 50 years ago and have remained silent during this time. They have come out of retirement with compelling information that would have us look further into these phenomena,” she said.
The first African-American woman to sit on a House defense committee and the first to agree to participate in the CHD hearings, Kilpatrick said: “This is an international phenomena and the U.S. and other countries need to acknowledge that there is other life.”
Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel said the reported shutdown of U.S. missiles was the “smoking gun of the whole issue.”
“Defense is spending billions of dollars on something that is vulnerable,” he said.
Gravel, who served in the Senate from 1969 to 1981, tried to end the draft during the Vietnam War, and is remembered for reading the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record in 1971, for which he nearly lost his position.
Gravel questioned the ability of Congress to do anything on the issue and pointed to the international witnesses at the hearing, which included representatives from Canada, Chile, Argentina, England, Brazil, Italy, China, Peru, and Uruguay.
America Knows
Canadian researcher Grant Cameron has spent the best part of 28 years studying Canadian and American government documents particularly in relation to U.S. presidents.He described documents he had obtained from the Canadian government: “They admit that document is legitimate. It says flying saucers are real … and the U.S. knows,” he told the hearing.
Cameron was motivated to research the issue in 1975 after witnessing and photographing UFOs over a period of months in Manitoba, not far from the Canada–U.S. border.
While a number of international witnesses described their governments’ open approach to UFO sightings, particularly in Latin America, Cameron noted that the United States had defined a policy of secrecy on the issue over many years.
Cameron said officials from other countries had told him they would be open about UFOs as soon as America led the way.
In 2011 the White House issued a statement denying that it has any evidence of extraterrestrial life or that it has any “credible information” that evidence is being hidden.
Richard Dolan, one of the most respected authorities on the study of UFOs, believes there is a “truth embargo” in American government about the issue.
“One of the things that has struck me is the discrepancy between the massive amounts of documentary evidence that we have on the one hand, and the near complete absence of official acknowledgment of the reality on the other,” he said.
Dolan has been credited with compiling the most comprehensive study of government handling of UFO events in his books “UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up 1941-1973,” and a second volume, “UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991.”
While he notes that none of the thousands of official documents released represent definitive evidence of national security or intelligence engagement with extraterrestrial life, “accumulatively … we are obligated to ask why are they so interested.”
Transparency Needed
Former members of Congress, California’s Lynn Woolsey and Maryland’s Roscoe Bartlett, did not sign the CHD statement because they had not been out of Congress for over a year, having lost their seats in the 2012 election.Woolsey said she initially approached the hearing with some trepidation, fearing ridicule, but chose to participate because it was the “perfect vehicle” to examine “openness and transparency” in government.
After hearing the witnesses, Woolsey said: “Anybody that ridicules this effort, they are the ones that are out of step.”
Woolsey referred to testimonies from former defense personnel who had been unable to talk about UFO related events or even seek medical support for decades because of the secrecy surrounding the issue.
“I had no idea how badly everybody had been treated,” she said.
Roscoe Bartlett said the totality of evidence presented was “very difficult to argue away.”
He said that officials who made the decision to keep the reported encounters secret many years ago must have thought they were doing the best for the American people but he believed that was no longer the case.
“I am very concerned that a government that can so easily ignore the Constitution to do what they think are good things today, can ignore [it] to do the bad things tomorrow,” he said.
In an interview near the end of the event Bartlett asked, “How do we treat the disease if we don’t know the source?”
