UFO Comments
by the World's Top Military Leaders

A collection of exerpts and quotations
by top military and intelligence personnel

"It is time for the truth to be brought out... Behind the scenes high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.... I urge immediate Congressional action to reduce the dangers from secrecy about unidentified flying objects."

Former CIA Director Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, signed statement to Congress, August 22, 1960.

"I don't know whether this story has ever been told or not. They weren't called UFOs. They were called enemy helicopters. And they were only seen at night and they were only seen in certain places. They were seen up around the DMZ in the early summer of '68. And this resulted in quite a little battle. And in the course of this, an Australian destroyer took a hit and we never found any enemy, we only found ourselves when this had all been sorted out. And this caused some shooting there, and there was no enemy at all involved but we always reacted. Always after dark. The same thing happened up at Pleiku at the Highlands in '69."

General George S. Brown, USAF Chief of Staff, Department of Defense transcript of press conference in Illinois, October 16, 1973.

"We have, indeed, been contacted -- perhaps even visited -- by extraterrestrial beings, and the US government, in collusion with the other national powers of the Earth, is determined to keep this information from the general public.

Victor Marchetti, former Special Assistant to the Executive Director of the CIA, in an article written by him for Second Look entitled "How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon", Vol 1, No 7, Washington, DC, May, 1979.

"In any case, the Air Force has arrived to the conclusion that a certain number of anomalous phenomena has been produced within Belgian airspace. The numerous testimonies of ground observations compiled in this [SOBEPS] book, 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.

"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 in itself is an important conclusion."

Major-General Wilfred de Brouwer, Deputy Chief, Royal Belgian Air Force, "Postface" in SOBEPS' Vague d'OVNI sur la Belgique - Un Dossier Exceptionnel, Brussels: SOBEPS, 1991.

"More than 10,000 sightings have been reported, the majority of which cannot be accounted for by any "scientific" explanation... I am convinced that these objects do exist and that they are not manufactured by any nation on Earth. I can therefore see no alternative to accepting the theory that they come from some extraterrestrial source."

Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Air Force Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, printed in Sunday Dispatch, London, July 11, 1954.

"The evidence that there are objects which have been seen in our atmosphere, and even on terra firma, that cannot be accounted for either as man-made objects or as any physical force or effect known to our scientists, seems to me to be overwhelming... A very large number of sightings have been vouched for by persons whose credentials seem to me unimpeachable. It is striking that so many have been trained observers, such as police officers and airline or military pilots. Their observations have in many instances... been supported either by technical means such as radar or, even more convincingly, by... interference with electrical apparatus of one sort or another...."

Lord Hill-Norton, Chief of Defense Staff, Ministry of Defense, Great Britain, 1973; Chairman, Military Committee of NATO, 1974-77; quoted from his foreword to "Above Top Secret" by Timothy Good, Morrow & Co's Quill Books, 1988.

"The number of thoughtful, intelligent, educated people in full possession of their faculties who have "seen something" and described it, grows every day... We can... say categorically that mysterious objects have indeed appeared and continue to appear in the sky that surrounds us."

General Lionel M. Chassin, Commanding General of the French Air Forces, and General Air Defense Coordinator of the Allied Air Forces of NATO, in foreword to Aime Michel's "Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery", Criterion Books, 1958.

"I must say that if listeners could see for themselves the mass of reports coming in from the airborne gendarmerie, from the mobile gendarmerie, and from the gendarmerie charged with the job of conducting investigations, all of which reports are forwarded by us to the National Center for Space Studies, then they would see that it is all pretty disturbing.

"I believe that the attitude of spirit that we must vis-a-vis this phenomenon is an open one, that is to say that it doesn't consist in denying a priori, as our ancestors of previous centuries did deny many things that seem nowadays perfectly elementary."

M. Robert Galley, French Minister of Defense, interviewed on radio by Jean-Claude Bourret, February 21, 1974.

"Taking into account the facts that we have gathered from the observers and from the location of their observations, we concluded that there generally can be said to be a material phenomenon behind the observations. In 60% of the cases reported here, the description of this phenomenon is apparently one of a flying machine whose origin, modes of lifting and/or propulsion are totally outside our knowledge.

Dr. Claude Poher, Ph.D. in astronomy, founder and first director of GEPAN, the UFO investigative office under the French government's National Center for Space Sciences which analyzed reports from the Gendarmerie from 1974 through 1978, writing in the GEPAN Report to the Scientific Committee, June, 1978, Vol 1, Chapter 4.

"Around Szolnok many UFO reports have been received from the Ministry of Defense, which obviously and logically means that they [UFOs] know very well where they have to land and what they have to do. It is remarkable indeed that the Hungarian newspapers, in general newspapers everywhere, reject the reports of the authorities."

George Keleti, Minister of Defense, Hungary, in article by Attila Lenart entitled "Ask a Question to the Minister of Defense: George Keleti, Are You Afraid of a UFO Invasion?", Nepszava, Budapest, August 18, 1994.

"UFOs sighted in Indonesia are identical with those sighted in other countries. Sometimes they pose a problem for our air defense and once we were obliged to open fire on them."

Air Marshall Roesmin Nurjadin, Commander-in-Chief of the Indonesian Air Force, in a letter to Yusuke J. Matsumura dated May 5, 1967, reprinted in Good ibid.

"First of all, I told a magazine this past January that, as an underdeveloped country with regards to the UFO problem, Japan had to take into account what should be done about the UFO question, and that we had to spend more time on these matters. In addition, I said that someone had to solve the UFO problem with far reaching vision at the same time. Secondly, I believe it is a reasonable time to take the UFO problem seriously as a reality... I hope that this Symposium will contribute to peace on Earth from the point of view of outer space, and take the first step toward the international cooperation in the field of UFOs."

Toshiki Kaifu, Prime Minister, Japan, in a letter to Mayor Shiotani of Hakui City, dated June 24, 1990, endorsing an upcoming Space & UFO Symposium.

"I believe that UFOs are spaceships or extraterrestrial craft... The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data. Maybe when this group of nations acquires more precise and definite information, it will be possible to release the news to the world."

General Carlos Castro Cavero, General in the Spanish Air Force and former Commander of Spain's Third Aerial Region, in an interview with J. J. Benitez, La Gaceta del Norte, Balboa, Spain, June 27, 1976.

"No agency in this country or Russia is able to duplicate at this time the speeds and accelerations which radars and observers indicate these flying objects are able to achieve... there are objects coming into our atmosphere at very high speeds."

Admiral Delmer S. Fahrney, former head of the Navy's guided-missile program, printed in New York Times, January 17, 1957, p. 31.