Leslie Kean - UFOs

On a personal level, each one has been transformed in one way or another, sometimes drastically so, by this interaction with the “impossible.” They are all baffled and want answers to the same serious questions as the rest of us, but usually for their own reasons. Each one began his relationship to the UFO issue as a natural skeptic, and even though many are now retired from their official jobs investigating UFOs, most have not been able to disengage from the intense drive to want to find out what UFOs are. They remain involved in various ways. One is planning to teach a course on UFO history at a prominent university; another is contacted frequently by the media to be a spokesperson on the issue; a former NASA scientist heads a research group studying anomalous aerial phenomena; a former government investigator is often called via cell phone by nervous Air Force personnel observing strange phenomena in remote locations. So in this sense, these men are not really fully “retired.” And some are now captains working for commercial airlines.

I noticed that many, even the ones I came to know well, were hesitant to reveal the emotional aspect of their experiences dealing with UFOs. Some witnesses struggle for years with the impact of a mind-boggling close encounter. It was my job to nudge as much as I could from the minds of these reticent military men and Air Force pilots not prone to disclosing their fears. These are men oriented toward duty first, and the significance of their statements cannot be overemphasized. This courageous group is breaking a huge story for the world.

Over many years they have all discovered a great deal about UFOs, despite the phenomenon’s ability to remain unidentified even while making repeated, tantalizing appearances in so-called waves, or engaging in cat-and-mouse chases with Air Force pilots. The objects come and go, sometimes leaving a blip on radar, an image on film, or an imprint on the ground. This diverse group can provide as intimate and factual a look at this mysterious phenomenon as we can ever hope to acquire as outsiders.

None of these writers were privy to the others’ statements, nor, to my surprise, have any ever asked me what the other contributors were writing about. Even so, striking similarities exist, not only in their reports of the UFOs themselves, but also in their interpretations, attitudes, and ideas for future resolution. To me, this uniformity validates the worldwide nature of the phenomenon, and it also shows that when properly investigated, the same conclusions are drawn no matter where the investigation takes place.

There exists a universal curiosity, increasing over time, about the UFO mystery. I have seen it grow, and have observed an improvement in straightforward media coverage about UFOs since I began this study ten years ago. The more we learn, the more confounding it becomes. Still, many people continue to think the subject is based on fantasy or mistaken identity, or is some kind of a joke and therefore a waste of time. My deepest hope is that these people in particular will read through this entire book, sticking with it from beginning to end, and then draw a conclusion. We can all agree, I assume, that no one is entitled to dismiss a subject without knowing something about it.

I have done my best to distill from a huge mass of material some of the most compelling and essential facts. In this country, UFOs became a national issue in the late 1940s, when there were many sightings of great public interest and concern that were covered widely by the media. The U.S. Air Force took the lead in addressing these events, complicated by the onset of the Cold War, attempting to explain away as many cases as possible in order to divert public attention from the mystery. Behind the scenes, the topic was of great concern at the highest levels, and the Air Force was not equipped to protect the public from an entirely unknown but apparently technological phenomenon that could come and go at will. In the early 1950s, it established Project Blue Book, a small agency that received reports from citizens, investigated the reports, and offered explanations to the media and the public. Blue Book gradually solidified as largely a public relations effort intent on debunking UFO sightings. Hundreds of files accumulated, and the Air Force closed down the program in 1970, ending all official investigations—or so they said publicly—without having found an explanation for many shocking UFO incidents. The cases presented by our contributors all occurred after the close of Project Blue Book, between 1976 and 2007.

Our government still stays out of the UFO controversy and has no policy in place to address growing concern. Within the historical framework, the upcoming chapters will examine the role of the CIA in establishing the protocol for the debunking of UFOs; the stark contrast between the handling of UFOs by our own government and the governments of other countries; the issues of aviation safety and national security as they pertain to UFO incidents; the psychology of the UFO taboo; and the question of a U.S. government cover-up.

Much of the American public has grown increasingly frustrated with the pattern of government denials about UFOs, especially as the evidence has mounted over time. With digital cameras and cell phones now commonplace, UFO photos are snapped almost every day, although they are easier to fake, making the new technology a mixed blessing. As exoplanets are discovered and scientists acknowledge the probability of life elsewhere in the universe, the demand for studying the neglected UFO phenomenon has become imperative. I think you will agree, by the time you finish reading, that there is now renewed hope for solving the UFO enigma, and that you will also agree as to the signal importance of that endeavor.

It’s extremely important to establish at the very beginning that neither I nor the other writers are claiming that there are alien spacecraft in our skies, simply because we do not deny data showing a physical presence of something there. The term “UFO” has been misused and has become so much a part of popular culture that its original (and accurate) definition has been nearly completely lost. Almost everyone equates the term “UFO” with extraterrestrial spacecraft, and thus, in a perverse twist of meaning, the acronym has been transformed to mean something identified rather than something unidentified . The false but widespread assumption that a UFO is, of necessity, an alien spaceship is usually the reason the term generates such an exaggerated and confusing range of emotional responses. A recognition of the extraterrestrial hypothesis as being a valid, although unproved, possible explanation worthy of further scientific scrutiny is something entirely different from approaching the subject of UFOs as if this discovery had already been made.

Historically, it was the U.S. Air Force that, some fifty years ago, invented the term “unidentified flying object” to replace the popular but more lurid phrase “flying saucer.” The Air Force defined a “UFO” as “any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object.” This is the definition embraced by all the contributors to this book, and the definition employed by all relevant government documents and official pilot reports.

If an object in the sky cannot be identified but we still can’t rule out the possibility that it could be if we had more data, then it is not a true unknown. In that situation, we can’t determine either what it is or what it is not. Again, a genuine UFO, the UFO we are concerned with in this book, is an object that, for example, exhibits extraordinary capabilities beyond known technology while being documented on radar and observed by multiple qualified people, to such an extent that enough data is obtained and enough study is undertaken to eliminate other known possibilities.