by Leslie Kean
This was a situation in which numerous expert witnesses saw something and radar detected the same thing. Radar equipment can be affected by many different factors, and can present a false echo, but a false target appears very briefly and is easy to recognize because it disappears quickly. It’s a different story when we have a regular trajectory to follow. Also, when we have more than one radar spotting the same target, we know it’s serious. This equipment operates in different frequencies, so we have the correlation of independent readings from different sources. These data have nothing to do with human eyes. When, along with the radar, a pilot’s pair of eyes sees that same thing, and then another pilot’s, and so on, the incident has real credibility and stands on a solid foundation.
A few days after these sightings, Brazil’s Minister of Aeronautics, Brigadier Octavio Moreira Lima, called a press conference to explain what happened. He revealed that six jets had been scrambled from Santa Cruz AFB and Anapolis AFB, and some of the pilots had made visual contact, while all objects were registered on radar. The minister promised an official report within the next thirty days, but for some reason he changed his mind about releasing it. This was probably for some political reason, or maybe fear of panic because at that time the thinking was that the population might panic, if they knew. But in the meantime, the pilots and controllers were not prohibited from speaking about it.
The events of that night were really amazing, and some of our simple questions have simple answers: Did the pilots see the phenomena? Yes. Did the radars spot them? Yes. Did Ozires and other military pilots see them? Yes. Did pilots in commercial aircraft see them? Yes. Do the times of the sightings correlate? Yes. Do the trajectories of the objects correlate? Yes; all of this was technically analyzed. So, did it happen?
Yes, it did happen.
Everything was spotted by both aircraft radars and the radars on the ground. On-board radars operate in a microwave band, which is very narrow, while ground radars operate in a much broader band, so there’s no risk of confusion or mistaken correlation.
During this event, the military was not fearful of any sort of invasion. Jets armed with missiles took off and reached the objects in less than two minutes. These jets are always armed, but with peacetime armaments, consisting of two small missiles. If those objects were from an enemy country, they’d have been crushed that night. These pilots were highly trained and their radar capacities were increased to the maximum, which normally isn’t required. Radars never operate at full capacity, in order to save energy and to prevent wear-and-tear on the equipment. But after the jets took off, the capacity was increased to a broader range. Communications never failed, and the country was suffering no threat whatsoever. The jets landed safely and the pilots returned unharmed. Mission accomplished!
I don’t think that UFOs have made any real threat to national security, but we have to recognize that the current lack of knowledge about the subject is enough to raise suspicions, as it would about anything as seemingly advanced. So we then come to the very biggest of questions: What were those objects? No one knows. They were not foreign jets attacking. They were unidentified flying objects. And where are these objects now? Who knows? Were they captured? Not that we know. So here is where the problem of material evidence comes in, and we don’t have it.
When I was a commander, these unusual sightings occurred about once a month and usually were of very short duration. I remember there were about two to three incidents per year of military pilots being sent up to intercept something unknown that appeared on radar. Our civilian pilots are not afraid to speak up, and they always do, because they don’t want to lose their jobs for not reporting unusual events. The first thing they do when they see something strange is to call the controllers, because they have a huge personal responsibility.
A civilian aircraft is always in contact with air traffic control, and all of these operations in Brazil are linked to the Air Force and are of a military nature. When a commercial pilot says, “There’s something going on here,” the control center will immediately report it to the military operations center in that area, in case it is something serious. They will take some action regarding that fact and report to the air defense operations center,7 which is the superior body and the only one to oversee the whole country. Then the pilot or the air traffic controller will fill out a report; they know where to get the form—from any Air Force base or any traffic controlling office throughout the country—and they deliver the completed papers to any Air Force base.
Next, there’s always an investigation after the pilot registers what he saw. As requested on the reporting form, he must report the direction, altitude, and speed of the object. We also need other details, such as the position of the sun compared to the aircraft at that time. The brightness of the object is also important, as well as the kind of clouds in the sky at the time. All these data are precious. The controllers are then able to check if some other aircraft crossed the path of this pilot, which could explain the event. An investigation will follow, and if they discover that no other aircraft was there and the weather was not a factor, we have a special situation. And all these things are easy to check when everything is spelled out in the initial report. We go on eliminating all possibilities until we are sure that there is no conventional explanation for the data, and then the report is securely filed.
Pilot reports that turn out to have a conventional explanation are eventually deleted, and someone from the Air Defense will inform the pilot that they found out what happened. If no explanation is found, the case is transferred to another folder, called the “Book of Flight Occurrences.” All of these unsolved cases are kept there in those books, and one hopes that researchers will eventually be allowed to see them. They include serious reports from pilots and air traffic controllers—everything we cannot explain, everything that is held as secret, goes to those books. It’s important to emphasize that this “Book of Flight Occurrences” contains cases that couldn’t be explained even after analysis by experts especially assigned to this task.
When I was a commander at COMDABRA, the Brazilian Airspace Defense Command, from 1999 to 2001, all cases involving UFOs spotted by military pilots and by radars would came to my attention. I directly participated in an investigation of a UFO incident only once, although I had access to secret files and both official and unofficial reports. After leaving the military, I still had access to nearly all the information I desired on this subject.
I haven’t followed what happened at the Air Defense over the last four years, but I know that we continue to receive reports. Even so, I want to mention something important. I believe that up to 90 percent of all sightings are never reported. Brazil is a huge country, and these reports are filed only where there is an airport or an Air Force base, and only by people who know how the process works. Civilians don’t even know that these forms exist and are available throughout the country. I don’t know the actual percentage of sightings that result in reports, but I think it must be tiny. So the number of reports that come to the knowledge of the military is almost insignificant.
It is a big step for a country to officially acknowledge the existence of UFOs, as France has done. But releasing information has not caused people to panic, and I don’t think it would if more files were to be opened. No one fears transparency; instead people fear the lack of it. I think that from the moment the government opens the subject for debate, all the fear people have toward this subject will disappear. And if there’s one country that never panics, it’s Brazil. Quite the opposite; maybe we would even create a new samba theme in celebration.
How do we handle the existence of UFOs? The evidence shows that unexplained phenomena are occurring, and this leads many of us to believe in the presence of alien spacecraft visiting planet Earth. However, drawing conclusions about what these things are is dangerous, since we do not have enough knowledge to do that. I believe science has much more work to do in order to identify and explain the phenomenon. We need astron
omers, meteorologists, aviation experts, astrophysicists, and many other scientists, because such an investigation must be jointly addressed by many specialists. In fact, this effort must engage the whole nation. The synergistic effect of knowledge is undeniable.
I’m a man devoted to science, a man with a scientific mind. If you present the hypothesis that extraterrestrials may be here and may be doing things that we can’t understand, your idea runs contrary to conventional scientific reasoning. As far as we know, our own solar system does not contain life on any planet except Earth.
I’m basing my ideas on the knowledge we have today, achieved by science as it currently understands the universe. This is the caveat to be considered. If we assume only current knowledge, I am forced to reject every possibility of anyone coming from outer space to Earth. And it gets more complex if we go further, because Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, does not seem to have a planetary system. We move then to the portion of the universe astronomers call the “inhabitable zone,” which is many light-years from Earth.
However, I would never assert that no other civilization could have advanced a million years ahead of us somewhere else. I humbly insist, therefore, that our current knowledge must be inherently insufficient for comprehending everything. After learning about UFOs while in the military, I became clear—in fact, certain—about the high level of ignorance we have regarding the universe, given the current stage of human scientific development. The UFO phenomenon has demonstrated that we have a lot more to learn about physics and other scientific areas. We don’t yet have the final word within science, and, eventually, we will be able to understand what is now unknown.
Look at what happened over the mere last hundred years, with discoveries ranging from penicillin to the airplane. We humans left the ground for the first time in an airplane nearly 100 years ago and within only one century were able to reach the moon. In astronomic terms a hundred years is nothing, not even dust. Obviously, an advanced people would not use rocket engines like our spacecraft sent into space. If in one century and with our limited capacity we could achieve this, think about it: Where will we be a hundred or a thousand years from now?
I don’t have a problem with philosophy entering into this discussion in attempting to address the issues we haven’t been able to solve: who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. Since Aristotle, human beings have been asking these same questions and we still don’t know the answers. The scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon in combination with other subjects within science and philosophy might be a way to move toward those answers.
No institution has the right to close the door on the discussion of any matters, be they scientific, political, social, or religious—and that includes the study of unidentified flying objects, which I consider to be within the realm of science. I believe that not only Brazil, but also all socially and technologically developed countries, should set up governmental agencies to address this matter. The United States should certainly lead the way, since that country is and will remain the planet’s greatest technological power, with a great ability to aggregate knowledge from other countries. And if it should be accepted that something is coming here from space, I think the United Nations should be responsible rather than leaving that task in the hands of individual countries.
PART 3
A CALL TO ACTION
“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.”
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
CHAPTER 21
Fighting Back: A New UFO Agency in America
Despite the astonishing yet rational deduction that the extraterrestrial hypothesis should be considered to explain some UFOs, as our experts have just pointed out, governments have an aversion to addressing that point or its implications. They are not motivated to pool resources and find out if this hypothesis can be proved, ignoring the popular interest in the subject and its potential for revolutionary discovery. In fact, the discomfiting quality of the extraterrestrial hypothesis—again, we’re only talking about a theory, not a fact—likely explains why many governments want to keep a safe distance from the whole messy business. The difficulty of researching something as evasive and unpredictable as UFOs is also a problem—though not an insurmountable one. The agencies that are attempting to face the challenge have accomplished a great deal, as was demonstrated in the previous section, but ultimately they lack the resources to fully resolve the UFO mystery on their own. Even after many decades of focused research in France, exploration of defense implications in the UK, and field investigations in the Brazilian Amazon (to take three significant examples), we still don’t know what the objects actually are. In their respective countries, some government agencies continue to collect case reports and look into sightings, adding more data to the heap but not solving anything, as the rest of the world looks away.
When asked, most military officers who have been personally involved with UFO incidents refrain from interpretation or speculation, yet privately many have a keen, persistent interest in getting to the bottom of the problem. They want to know what it was they themselves have seen, or what their trusted military colleagues have encountered, and this desire does not diminish over time. These witnesses and insiders recognize the extraterrestrial, or maybe interdimensional, possibility; once you have observed one of these bizarre manifestations at close range, your mind is newly opened, through no choice of your own. Even those who were prior debunkers, who would have scoffed at the mere notion of a UFO, are forced to recognize the once inconceivable. They often feel isolated, afraid of ridicule, unsupported by the world around them. But collectively, they may be able to make a difference.
Credible witnesses and government investigators have documented thousands of compelling case reports and first-person accounts. We now have accumulated enough data to establish the reality of some kind of consistent physical phenomenon without a doubt. Still, the American government lags behind, refusing to acknowledge any of this, leaving us American citizens stuck in a perpetual stalemate.
How can we overcome this? In terms of finding a workable model, we can look to France’s UFO agency as the mother of them all, because, as we have seen, its office within CNES has been diligently working on the problem for over thirty years, from a research perspective rather than a military one. By seeking knowledge purely for its own sake, the French have been open to a wide range of explanations for UFOs, as scientists should be. The historic COMETA Report of 1999 broke a barrier when its generals, admirals, and engineers, along with a former head of CNES, brought the issue into the military realm and declared with great authority that even though it had not yet been proved, the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the most likely explanation of the phenomenon.
Will we ever be able to find out, to the satisfaction of scientists in the world community, what UFOs are and where they come from? Is this something we, as a planetary society, would be capable of deciding to do? If so, we would have to be proactive, rigorously seeking a resolution to this problem, making it a priority. Alternatively, would we prefer to sit back and wait for the seemingly all-powerful flying objects to reveal themselves more fully to us? Nearly all of the most concerned, most credible, and most serious of the government and military officials I have talked to agree on three basic points, when it comes to moving the issue forward:
that further scientific investigation is mandated, partly because of the impact of UFOs on aircraft and aviation safety
that this investigation must be an international, cooperative venture involving many governments and transcending politics
that such a global effort cannot be effective without the participation of the United States, the world’s greatest technological power
We are locked in by the stifling UFO taboo, which has served to protect us from the deeper, underlying issues and even threats—both perceived and unconscious—inherent in the most basic acknowledgment of a shocking and unexplained physical phenomenon. No
w we need to rattle that cage. In this section, we will explore these crucial political questions with the help of a former high-level FAA official, a former state governor, and, more theoretically and philosophically, two leading political scientists. Yet, the final determination about our country’s potential role in the future will have to be decided by all of us.
Logically, the first step in moving toward a solution is the establishment of an office or small agency within the U.S. government to handle appropriate UFO investigations, liaison with other countries, and demonstrate to the scientific community that this is indeed a subject worthy of study. In order to achieve these goals, we must consider where—under what branch of government—the United States should create this modest “UFO office” to get the process started. Using other countries as a model, there are many options. Often it is the Air Force that handles these investigations, as we have seen in Belgium and Brazil, even though neither government had established a special department within the Air Force for this purpose. However, in both cases, the generals involved have stated that a specific unit tasked full time with UFO investigations would have greatly aided the process, and they advocate for that necessity. Perhaps America needs to open a new Air Force office, being extremely careful to avoid repeating the many mistakes of Project Blue Book. General De Brouwer of Belgium recommends that the Air Force be the location for the American agency, because it is responsible for airspace security and has the means to intervene if required. The work of the office, he adds, must be objective, open-minded, and transparent, and private civilian groups could assist in this effort.