Unidentified flying object
© Getty Images/ktsimageUFO
In the second and concluding part of my series of what's happening in the world of UFOs/UAPs, I set out the astonishing proof that indicates we are regularly being visited by super-intelligent visitors from outer space.

In my previous article, I outlined how the official policy of denying and debunking the evidence that our planet is being engaged by extraterrestrial/non-human intelligences is - at last - crumbling. And being replaced by a more open, grown-up approach to these phenomena, with even US senators, ex-presidents and former CIA directors admitting these 'contacts' cannot be explained.

The first indication of this shift came in December 2017 when the New York Times, no less, published an article about a hitherto unknown secret Pentagon program that had researched strange aerial objects encountered by a number of US Navy pilots off the east and west coasts of the United States.

The first of these involved the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its carrier escort of ships in 2004. What made this highly significant is that the fighter aircraft involved used Forward Looking Infrared Radar (FLIR) video to visually capture an actual object that had been seen both visually and on radar.

The video provided corroborative physical evidence of an unknown object flying around in US airspace.

The pilots have described the object seen as similar to a Tic Tac sweet i.e., white, pill shaped, with rounded ends. David Fravor, the first pilot to go public about the incident, estimated the craft to be approximately 40 feet in length, not too dissimilar to the size of the F18 Super Hornet he was flying.

Significantly, the highly trained Navy pilots had never encountered anything remotely like what they observed. The flight characteristics of the object seemed to defy the known laws of physics and aerodynamics.

The New York Times article went on to reveal that on two further occasions, US Navy pilots had encountered similar objects in 2015 off the east and west coasts of America and that they too had been recorded on FLIR video.

Once again, the videos provided corroboration of what the pilots had observed and matched the ship-based radar data. The audio commentary of the pilots involved in these incidents makes it perfectly clear that the objects moved in ways unlike any object they had ever witnessed before.

Unusually, the three videos, which have become known as the 'FLIR1' (Tic Tac), 'Gimbal' and 'Go Fast' respectively, were released into the public domain.

The person who ran that secret program was identified as Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence specialist, who had recently resigned from the Department of Defense. Later, in a TV programme, Elizondo described what he and his team witnessed:
"Imagine a technology that can do 600 to 700 G-forces, that can fly 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and can fly through air and water and possibly space, and oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity. That's precisely what we are seeing."
The end of the official policy of debunking?

The confirmation of this secret Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) study was, in itself, a complete contradiction to the officially held US policy regarding UFOs/UAPs, which stated that since the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969, no such military/government research had ever been undertaken.

The secret program was called the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which ran for approximately five years between 2007-2012 and had been supported to the tune of $22 million. This is a small figure in defence terms, but nevertheless not an insubstantial amount of money on something that had been officially dismissed and ridiculed for so long.

Following the release of that information in 2017, the mainstream media have at last begun to realise that there may be something to this story and have been keenly following developments. In addition, many scientists have become interested in the topic. The subject has finally begun to be treated seriously on mainstream US TV.

In 2019, the US Navy finally confirmed that the three Navy FLIR videos that had been publicly released in 2017 were authentic, and that their status remained 'unidentified.'

In the years that have followed, numerous former military personnel have gone public about their involvement in the cases, especially in the 2004 USS Nimitz incident. Military pilots, radar operators, and technicians have given public statements about how these objects moved in ways that are beyond our current level of technology and that incredible performance data had been obtained.

This has resulted in some incredible disclosures. Kevin Day, a senior radar expert, who was on the carrier support ship USS Princeton, has stated that for a two-week period prior to the incident he had been tracking multiple targets that would often drop from 80,000 feet to 50 feet above the surface of the water in under one second!

All of these revelations are likely to come as a great surprise to the scientific and academic world, yet in reality they are nothing new. The objects that are being reported now with increasing frequency are moving in ways that have been observed by credible witnesses around the globe for over 70 years.

Let's take a look at a good example.

The Belgium Wave

Between 1989-91, Belgium received approximately 2000 UFO/UAP reports from members of the public, police officers and military pilots. On the night of March 30/31, 1990, two F16 fighter jets were scrambled to intercept a ground visual and radar-confirmed target.

Whilst the two pilots did not get a visual sighting of the object, they did confirm strong radar contacts which resulted in a 70-minute-plus pursuit of the phenomena. One of the two aircraft was able to record its cockpit flight instruments, which later revealed significant scientific data. In addition, three military bases and four civilian airports - using different radar systems - all confirmed that they had tracked the pursuit and the unknown object.

In an unusual move, the Chief of Air Staff for the Royal Belgium Air Force, Colonel (later Major-General) Wilfried de Brouwer, held a press conference where he disclosed details of the incident and the videotape of the cockpit instrumentation taken during the event.

He said, significantly:
"The day will come undoubtedly when the phenomenon will be observed with technological means of detection and collection that won't leave a single doubt about its origin. This should lift a part of the veil that has covered the mystery for a long time. A mystery that continues to the present. But it exists, it is real, and that is an important conclusion."
He added the following in 1991:
"The Air Force has arrived at the conclusion that a certain number of anomalous phenomena has been produced within Belgian airspace. The numerous testimonies of ground observations... reinforced by the reports of the night of March 30-31 [1990], have led us to face the hypothesis that a certain number of unauthorized aerial activities have taken place. Until now, not a single trace of aggressiveness has been signalled; military or civilian air traffic has not been perturbed nor threatened. We can therefore advance that the presumed activities do not constitute a direct menace."
Given his rank, his comments are highly significant because they confirm that an unauthorized, unidentified craft of unknown origin had entered Belgium airspace that night.

Subsequent research confirmed that during the pursuit the object had been able to evade/break numerous lock-ons achieved by the chasing aircraft.

Indeed, the top civilian radar specialist in Belgium, Professor Emile Schwietzer, was brought in to examine the accumulated data obtained during the pursuit. At one point during a video interview recorded by a UK-based solicitor and researcher called Harry Harris, he said that the unidentified object had made one particular manoeuvre that had impressed him greatly: a sharp high-speed turn that pulled a g-force in excess of 30G. This is well above the tolerance for humans to survive, which is around 10/11G by highly trained personnel wearing special flight suits.

This type of high-speed manoeuvre was witnessed by the pilots and the radar operators who were involved in the events as they unfolded in 2004, 2014 and 2015, off the coasts of the United States.

Up to 20X the speed of sound

Did these new revelations bring about a significant change of opinion by some of the celebrity scientists? Yes and no.

In September 2019, the celebrated physicist, author and TV personality Michio Kaku spoke at a UFO conference in Barcelona, Spain.

On the subject of the US Navy revelations, he said:
"We now know they fly between Mach 5 and Mach 20 — five to 20 times the speed of sound. We know they zigzag so fast that any pilot would be crushed by centrifugal force. That they have no exhaust that we can see."
The explanations usually invoked for UFO sightings — meteors, weather balloons, even the planet Venus — can't explain these live-action high-precision shots, said Kaku, leading to either of two possible conclusions: They are of human origin, representing a technology so cutting-edge that even leading scientists are puzzled by it. Or, he said, "maybe they are evidence of an advanced outer-space civilization." Kaku concluded:
"We've reached a turning point. It used to be that believers had to prove that these objects were from an intelligent race in outer space. Now the burden of proof is on the government to prove they're not from intelligent beings in outer space."
The possibility that they were vehicles from other planetary civilizations, Kaku predicted, "has to be put on the table."

It seems clear that the 'Pentagon admissions' and the three FLIR videos had caused him to take stock of the evidence that had been released into the public domain. Of course, other scientists remain locked in the debunking mindset that has been dominant for decades.

One is American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who, in March this year, posted onto Facebook a still image from one of the FLIR videos, saying cryptically, "Not knowing what it is, does not count as evidence for knowing what it is."

How can two highly distinguished scientists look at the same data and arrive at totally different conclusions?

In the world of UFO/UAP research, such inexplicable contrasts of opinion are not new. This is borne out by the history of prominent 'debunkers' deliberately being given huge coverage in the media over the course of several decades - from noted scientist Donald Menzel in the 1950s, to aviation expert Philip Klass, who was the world's leading debunker for many years until his death in 2005.

But things have swung the way of us who believe that these incidents are evidence that we are dealing with extraterrestrial/non-human intelligences that are engaging with planet Earth.

No longer cranks nor kooks

For the first time in nearly 70 years, the stigma of talking about the UFO/UAP phenomena is finally beginning to dissipate; people like me are no longer being called cranks or kooks. The recent US Navy report that demonstrated 143 mysterious sightings shows that it's time for the best UFO research accumulated over the last 70 years to be recognized and studied and that scientists, academics and researchers should have an adult conversation about the subject and move forward together.

This is why the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research (ICER) launched publicly in May 2021, to raise the global implications of 'Preparing for Contact.' It comprises scientists, academics and leading UFO/UAP researchers, with national representatives in 27 countries on five continents. ICER believes that the more the scientific data is analyzed, the more it will conclude that we are dealing with off-world intelligences based on vastly superior technology that we cannot get even close to matching with terrestrial machinery.

We believe that governments have a moral responsibility to begin to prepare people for that eventual reality and we are currently creating educational 'awareness' programs, centered on the extensive evidential history of the phenomenon going back to the 1940s for all sectors of society, including the media, who have been victims of the decades-old cover-up. It is also important to state that the UFO/UAP enigma is not just about the United States, it is a global phenomenon and ICER believes a worldwide approach is needed moving forward.

From my point of view, I believe that scientists and academics will soon have a choice to make. They either stick their heads into the sand and dismiss everything out of hand and ignore the mass of scientific data that's been recorded and continues to be collected on an almost daily basis by a vast array of military technology, or for the first time really open their minds to the possibility that 'non-human intelligences' may have found us and are, in a limited way, interacting with humankind.

The disciplines that have largely ignored the diligent work of the best UFO researchers, should now seek them out with an open mind and be prepared to learn from them about the rich history of the UFO/UAP phenomenon.

The subject of 'contact' is likely to have a huge effect on humanity and society in general, and surely it is now time for all of us involved in this enigmatic subject to work together for the benefit of the human race and help us prepare for a new reality.
About the Author:
Gary Heseltine is the vice-president of the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research (ICER). He is a former British police detective who retired in 2013 to create
UFO Truth Magazine, a bi-monthly ezine. He has dedicated much of his life to researching UFOs.