Reuters
An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials called on the U.S. government on Monday to reopen its generation-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security given continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings.
Famous UFO Pictures
An unidentified flying object was photographed by a government employee over the Holloman Air Development Center in New Mexico in 1964.
Eric Draper, AP
America’s most infamous UFO case centers in Roswell, N.M. Some people claimed an alien spacecraft crashed there in 1947; the military said it was a weather balloon.
AP
Mexican Air Force pilots filmed strange brightly lit objects that moved quickly in the skies on March 5, 2004. Some scientists said the phenomenon could have been caused by gases in the atmosphere.
Dan Bayer, The Hutchinson News / AP
Comet Hale-Bopp passes over Kansas in 1997. Hundreds of people watching the comet in Phoenix reported seeing an array of lights and an enormous delta-shaped craft.
AP
While descending an Austrian mountain in 1954, photographer Erich Kaiser captured an image of what he called mysterious silvery-white flying objects.
Air Force, AP
The Air Force issued the “The Roswell Report” in 1997. Countering claims that aliens were recovered at the site, the report said military officials picked up 200-pound dummies, above, that were used in an experiment.
Gene Forte, AFP / Getty Images
President Jimmy Carter, shown here in 1980, reported that he saw a UFO above Leary, Ga., in 1969. He filed a report about the sighting to the International UFO Bureau in 1973.
AP
Astronaut Gordon Cooper, who piloted several space missions in the 1960s, once said he saw a “typical saucer shape, double-cylindrical shape, metallic” UFO.
CNES, AP
An investigator in 1989 measures markings that some said were left behind by a UFO in Normandy, France. France began releasing its “X-Files” on UFO sightings in March.
Yonhap, AP
Meteors, like these darting through the sky in a time-elapsed photo in 2001, are sometimes misidentified as UFOs. Sources: abcnews.com, International UFO Bureau
“Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns … which cannot be associated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters,” they said in a statement released at a news conference.
The panelists from seven countries, including former senior military officers, said they had each seen a UFO or conducted an official investigation into UFO phenomena.
The subject of UFOs grabbed the spotlight in the U.S. presidential race last month when Kucinich, a member of Congress from Ohio, said during a televised debate with other Democratic candidates that he had seen one.
Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter are both reported to have claimed UFO sightings.
Most turn out to be misidentified aircraft, satellites or meteors. A panelist who once worked for Britain’s Ministry of Defense said 5 percent of incidents cannot be explained.
But the sightings are often dismissed by authorities without proper investigations, UFO activists say.
“It’s a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?” remarked John Callahan, a former Federal Aviation Administration investigator, who said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska.
The panel, organized by a group dedicated to winning credibility for the study of UFOs, urged Washington to resume UFO investigations through the U.S. Air Force or NASA.
“It would certainly, I think, take a lot of angst out of this issue,” said former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who said he was among hundreds who saw a delta-shaped craft with enormous lights silently traverse the sky near Phoenix in 1997.
The Air Force investigated 12,618 UFO reports from 1947 to 1969 in what was known as Project Blue Book. Investigators concluded that the incidents posed no threat and there was no evidence of space aliens or a super technology in operation.
“Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations,” the Air Force said on its Web site.
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