Mankind has reached a critical stage in its evolution and has to come to grips with daunting environmental and existential challenges. After behaving as the rulers of their local world for many centuries, human beings must acknowledge that they are a relatively minor species on one of an essentially infinite number of planets and that they may be about to kill all earthly life, including their own, by their irresponsibly aggressive and greedy actions. This article spells out some of the facts that condition our survival and should inspire our collective behaviour.

PAUL HELLYER

Little did I dream when I addressed the Exopolitics Toronto Symposium on “UFO Disclosure and Planetary Direction” on September 25, 2005, where I boldly stated, “UFOs are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head … the time has come to lift the veil of secrecy and let the truth emerge” that I would soon be inundated with material of all kinds designed to prove the correctness of that statement as well as open up new areas of discussion directly or indirectly related to the proposition that we are not alone in the cosmos. We are, in fact, just one of many species and certainly the least technologically advanced of the ones that have visited our planet. This should come as no surprise. There are tens of thousands of star systems where some sort of life is theoretically possible, so we should assume that we have neighbours. Still, it is one thing to postulate on these matters and quite another to come face-to-face with what I call the “broader reality” of physical evidence that visitors have been moving freely through our airspace for decades and probably millennia.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that unlike laggards like me, there are people who have been studying these phenomena for decades and are more than anxious to share their experiences, ranging from a single sighting to the compilation of entire books full of data and interpretations. It was a dedicated enthusiast, Pierre Juneau, who succeeded in getting my attention. He mailed me diverse information ranging from copies of speeches and articles, to samples of his favourite books. Regrettably, I did not have time to read them, but his persistence was gentle and made me want to read something he had sent if ever I could tear myself away from what I was doing. That opportunity occurred in the summer of 2005. One of the books sent by Pierre, The Day After Roswell: A Former Pentagon Official Reveals the US Government’s Shocking UFO Cover-up (Pocket Books, 1998) by Colonel (Retd) Philip J Corso stared me in the face from my bookshelf. I found the story

told by the former United States (US) Army Intelligence Officer, who had been a member of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council and later, head of the Foreign Technology Desk at the US Army’s Research and Development Department, totally compelling.

Two or three times I asked myself if there was any possibility that the book could be wonderfully constructed fiction. The answer was no. Not even with the imagination of someone like Yann Martel, author of The Life of Pi, (Canada: Random House, 2001) a best-selling thriller that kept one wondering until the last page whether it was truth or fiction, could anyone fake the Roswell story. The book is replete with too many real names, places and dates that are familiar to me as a former Defence Minister of Canada. The former intelligence officer confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt the long-circulated rumour that on or about July 4, 1947, an unidentified flying object (UFO) crashed not far from Roswell, New Mexico and although the colonel was not actually present at the crash site, he subsequently saw the body of an alien recovered at the time, en route for autopsy. Even more significant, ten years later he was put in charge of a pile of scrap collected at the crash site and stored by the army. Under instructions from his friend and commander, Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, Corso was given the task of feeding the alien technology, which was decades or centuries in advance of our own, into the US industrial system for the benefit of the US military.

While reading Corso’s book I shared a few of the contents with my nephew Philip. He was highly sceptical, as was his right. A couple of days later he phoned a retired US Air Force General of his acquaintance to ask him about Corso’s book. “Every word of it is true and more” the general told him. That was enough to satisfy Philip. It was also the confirmation I needed. I had received an invitation from Victor Viggiani and Michael J Bird, two of Canada’s active Ufologists, to address their Exopolitics Toronto Symposium but had not taken the time to refuse before leaving Toronto on holiday. Once I had read Corso’s book and knew the general’s opinion, I decided to change my mind as I recognised some policy issues of cosmic importance that were not in the public domain, but should be to get public input. Before going public, however, I took the precaution of getting the message from the general personally.  I asked him about Corso’s book. “Every

word is true and more”, he repeated for my benefit. We then discussed the “and more” to the extent that he could without revealing classified material. He told me that there had been face-to-face discussions between the visitors and US officials. What he said was even more fascinating and compelling than the book. So with that assurance I was prepared to say my piece.

SUPPLEMENTARY EVIDENCE

News of what I said was no sooner out than corroborating material of all kinds began to flow in like a mighty river. My first encounter was with an aviation buff, Leo Pearce, a long-time resident of the condominium I moved to in 1981. He read about my speech and wanted to share his experience with me. Then a Canadian World War Two veteran tracked me down to relate his wartime and subsequent experiences with UFOs. Flight Lieutenant (Captain) Stan Fulham, of Winnipeg, Manitoba, tells the stories in his own words:

 “In July 1944, I was in a German prisoner of war camp for Allied airmen in Poland. There were several hundred British, Canadian and American airmen in the camp. Many of them had been shot down in the early part of the war—one Royal Air Force chap had been shot down the day after war was declared. On a hot afternoon that July someone shouted, ‘A rocket, hey look there’s a German rocket out there’. We ran out of our huts and gazed up at the sky. Yes. There was a brilliant red rocket flying at incredible speed and great height over our prison camp. We were all extensively trained in the technique of aircraft recognition—to know every major fighter and bomber aircraft involved in the war. This, however, was no airplane. It was too large, too high and too fast.

We concluded that it was a rocket because it had no wings, made no sound, was rectangular-shaped and certainly several times the size of our largest bombers. Furthermore, it was a brilliant red color, an impractical color for military aircraft. We assumed that it must be a new German rocket striking at the Russians on the Eastern Front. After all, they were using the V2 rockets against England. Then someone confounded the scene by pointing out that the craft could not be German because it was travelling from east to west toward Germany. The Soviets had no such technology at that time. The idea of a UFO was beyond our understanding at the time but years later, after the war, we realized that what we had witnessed was a UFO.

The sighting of this so-called rocket flying at an incredible speed and great height brought up the subject of ‘Foo’ fighters. Several of my prisoner of war mates were fighter pilots who had experienced the unearthly presence of the Foo fighters flying at their wing tips regardless of their speed and height. A Spitfire pilot said: ‘The first time I saw a Foo I was shaken. But after flying off my wing tip for several minutes, I cooled down because I realized that, first of all, it was too small to carry armaments. After it flew away, I realized that it was not hostile, but I still couldn’t help but wonder if it was a new German invention sent out to survey Allied aircraft. The scary part of those Foos was that their flight manoeuvre indicated an intelligent control and yet they were too small to accommodate a pilot however small he might be.

I reported the incident when I returned to base. The intelligence officer questioned me extensively about the Foo. I witnessed the Foos on several other nights and so did many other fighter pilots. But we soon learned not to report these Foo incidents to the debriefing officer because there were too many raised eyebrows and looks of disbelief ’. Obviously reporting unidentified aerial phenomena (UFOs) was not conducive to an airman’s career, going all the way back to WWII. It was part of the UFO mystique—if you don’t understand it, ridicule it.

Later, as a fighter controller with the North American Air Defence Command, I had the opportunity of monitoring UFOs on radar and then of scrambling fighter aircraft to investigate the alien spacecraft. One night in the early ’60s, two UFOs hovered two miles off the runway at an altitude of one thousand feet. The radar returns indicated craft three to four times the size of our jet fighters. I called NORAD command and informed them of the situation and suggested that I scramble standby jets to identify the unknowns. This was agreed.

As soon as our jets were airborne, the UFOs streaked away at phenomenal speeds approaching three thousand miles per hour, with our jets in slow pursuit. The discs reappeared and hovered over the ocean near Vancouver, British Columbia, until our fighters finally caught up with them. As our jets closed in, they streaked away and disappeared over the Pacific.

Thousands of people had seen the UFOs and also our jets. They called the control tower at their local airports asking for information as to these strange lights and aircraft in the sky. Several people suggested that they could be UFOs since they were not helicopters and yet hovered in the sky without sound. Some authorities (not identified) stated that it was an illusion and suggested that aircraft flying west to Japan would appear as if they were standing still in the sky. This was a phenomenon, they said, that very often confused people. The media were not happy with this explanation because they knew that aircraft flying from the west coast to Japan would fly the Great Circle route which was actually in a north-west direction toward Alaska and not directly west which would take them to Hawaii.

Early the next morning the media immediately called the Base Commander for confirmation and information about the UFO sightings. The Commander called and advised me of the media interest. ‘However’ he cautioned, ‘since nothing unusual took place last night, I suggest that we have nothing to discuss with the media’. I understood. This was the standard response to the public and the media in the North American Air Defense system under a secret United States–Canada Communications Agreement signed in 1956 relating to the control and reporting of UFO sightings”.

At that point, I had not talked to anyone who had actually seen a flying saucer close up. My long-time friend and former Canadian Forces Information Officer, Ray Stone, sent me an e-mail from one of his friends, Nickolas Evanoff, who had. It read as follows:

“In the late 1970s, or perhaps 1980 or 1981, I was visiting a certain USA government organisation in Virginia, which I cannot disclose, when I was asked if I wanted to see a real UFO. Of course, I said, so I had to go through a series of documents and had to sign them, mostly for non-disclosure. Because I was in the Emergency Preparedness Organization they said it would be of great help to me and our organisation if such an incident happened in Canada. I was not allowed to inform my bosses when I got back, or anyone else.

Next, I was on board a USA government aircraft and flown to the Midwest of the USA, which I think was either Arizona or Nevada and we landed at a US Air Force Base, which I cannot disclose.

Then we went into a humongous hangar and there was a damaged UFO. The interior size of it was about that which we saw at Local Heroes Bar side. When it crashed it had eight aliens on board and six of them died on impact and the pilot and co-pilot survived for a couple of days. The USAF doctors didn’t know how to treat them because they were from another planet so they died within a couple of days. I didn’t see the bodies but I was shown some photographs of them and they were similar to us humans but thinner, had a head and arms and legs and a torso along with five digits on their hands and feet. On board was a nuker for cooking food and a supply of water along with two bathrooms. The manuals were in hieroglyphics and no one could read them, including folks from Alaska, (Eskimos), India and Egypt. Berkeley University was awarded a contract to photocopy and try using their computers to read them but were unsuccessful.

The reason this UFO crashed was no different from youngsters (18 to 22 years of age) driving cars at excessive speeds on the 400 series highways in Canada or Interstate highways in the USA. The pilot and co-pilot who were young were not aware of the earth’s gravitational pull and it was too late to slow down when they reversed their thrusters so they crashed. Most of the craft was not seriously damaged but the collision

caused havoc on board.

I asked why didn’t the President of the USA inform the public of this incident and I was told it was because of religion and possible panic amongst Americans and other citizens around the world. I was also informed about a two passenger craft (pilot and co-pilot) that crashed outside Helsinki, Finland in 1952. This was published in newspapers around the world but the next day no more information was allowed. Bizarre!

That is pretty much it. We left the hangar, got back on board the aircraft and flew back to Virginia. I was frustrated for years because I couldn’t tell anyone what I saw, including my wife.      —Nick

I wanted to get the story personally from Nick so Ray set up an interview for a

Sunday afternoon in October 2007. Before the day came, Ray advised that if I wanted to talk to Nick, who had Lou Gehrig’s Disease, before he died, I had better telephone him, which I did, at once, on October 7, 2007. He confirmed the story and identified “Virginia” as Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley. He also told me about a UFO landing near Winnipeg, Manitoba that had not been publicised. A few days later he passed to his reward.

The biggest surprise I have encountered in the course of my research was to find a file amongst my own papers going back to my days in government. It contained a 15 page booklet, including several pages of photographs, entitled “Description and Performance of Unidentified Flying Objects from 1947–1967” as taken from newsstand sources, compiled by Malcolm McKellar, Vancouver, British Columbia. Sightings ranged from Brazil; Perth, Australia; Salem, Oregon; Queen’s, New York; Danville, Virginia; Santa Ana, California; Zanesville, Ohio; Melbourne, Australia; and Rouen, France; to mention only a few, where the best photos were taken. All of the descriptions are interesting but I am including only one that paints a precise portrait of one of the early type spaceships. In 1952, “Oscar Linke and daughter, reporting to NANA, Berlin, stated that before their escape from Russian held Germany, they used to take frequent motorcycle rides toward the border. On one such trip, the daughter called attention to a phosphorescent object in a small forest. From a distance of one hundred feet, the object appeared to be a disc, twenty-five feet across, resembling a huge warming pan without a handle. In the centre of it, there seemed to be a sort of upper works, which rose out of the top of the craft. It was darker than the rest of the object, which was the color of aluminum, well polished.

Two small figures—like tiny humans about four feet tall—were seen wearing shiny one piece garments, silver in color. On the chest of one of these creatures was a box or package about the size of three packs of cigarettes and on the front of the package was a bright, blinking blue light. They did not seem to be using this box. Both figures were standing outside the UFO.

Suddenly one tapped the other on the helmet (shiny, glasslike) and both climbed hurriedly into the spacecraft through a porthole on the top of the square part of the upper works aforementioned. The object was seen to have two rows of circular portholes around the edge, about the size of portholes on a ship. As father and daughter watched, the square upper works began to retract into the dome and simultaneously the UFO started to rise from the ground slowly. It rose to a hundred feet, hovered for a moment and then sped away.”

INTERESTING PERSONALITIES WITH MORE COMPELLING INFORMATION

As a result of the notoriety I gained from speaking out categorically there were many people who wanted to brief me. One of the best known is Steven Greer, who has given up a lucrative medical practice because he is so concerned about the secrecy surrounding the whole question of extraterrestrial presence and technology and the implications of what that means for all humanity. When Greer visited Toronto in May 2006, he gave me a three-hour briefing of what he had learned in the course of his research. Over the years, he has assembled dozens of former military officers, scientists, civil aviation officers, policemen, pilots and others willing to testify under oath, to what they know about subjects that the US government has been deliberately hiding from its people for sixty years or more.

Not only was I struck with the depth and diversity of the testimony Greer had assembled for his Disclosure Project, I was alarmed by some of the testimony of witnesses who confirmed my suspicions of American military plans that I consider highly questionable and not in the best interests of either the US or the world, including the militarisation of space. The peaceful use of space—a frontier as challenging and thrilling as climbing Mount Everest—should be open to all humanity. The revelations are disturbing enough but they are not a patch on Greer’s assertion that government leaders are unaware of what is going on in their own country and that in fact the real power is a “shadow government” the composition of which is unknown to man or beast with the possible exception of a handful of “insiders” whose names and addresses are amongst the most closely guarded secrets of the world. As US Senator Daniel K Inouye described them, “There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest free from all checks and balances and free from the law itself ”. Greer has been subjected to every kind of harassment, including threats to life and limb. Still he persists in seeking the truth and making it known before it is too late. He will be recorded as one of the pioneer heroes of the global disclosure movement.

Another well-recognised pioneer, Michael E Salla, author of Exopolitics: Political Implications of Extraterrestrial Life (Tempe, Arizona: Dandelion Books, 2004) and his wife Angelika Whitecliffe, invited me to be give a keynote address at the Extraterrestrial Civilizations and World Peace Conference, held on Big Island, Hawaii, in June 2006. They wanted me to elaborate on some of my military concerns, in particular, the issue of the weaponisation of space. The benefit from the visit was primarily mine. I had the opportunity to sit in on more than a dozen presentations by experts personally familiar with one or more aspects of the extraterrestrial phenomenon. I met the Italian American Ufologist, Paola Harris, who subsequently sent me a copy of her book, Connecting the Dots...: Making Sense of the UFO Phenomenon (Orem, Utah: Granite Publishing, July 2003) which I read with great interest. An interview we did later in Toronto has been distributed in several languages. I also met with Captain (Retd) Robert Salas, US Air Force and Disclosure witness. Salas was the officer on duty the night that a UFO rendered more than a dozen intercontinental ballistic missiles unserviceable. Their guidance systems were altered electronically. This underlined for me the special interest the visitors have in atomic weapons. UFO sightings increased markedly after the first US atomic bomb was tested and the proportion of sightings around military installations where atomic weapons are stored is high.

Other “presenters” were equally interesting in their own spheres of knowledge like Ambassador John W McDonald whose specialty, through the Institute for Multi-track Diplomacy, is conflict resolution. Nothing is more important than that. However, it was just one facet of the complex problems facing us Earthlings, but complemented all the other highly educational information. I was especially privileged to hear Philip Corso Jr talk about his father who had kept his knowledge of UFOs, the crash at Roswell, New Mexico and the subsequent reverse engineering of alien technology secret until his senior years, when he became convinced that someone had to set the record straight. Corso Jr shared some unpublished insights that are to be revealed in a follow-up book. All this information added greatly to my expanding reservoir of knowledge and made me thirst for more.

UPDATE

I read a number of books on various aspects of the “broader reality” that we humans must adjust to and each one helped my understanding in one way or another, although I must admit the boundaries of my “broader reality” kept getting stretched like a scroll being opened in both directions from the centre. I decided that before beginning to write about the subject I would go to another symposium and just listen to experts to ensure that there were no dramatically new developments that I was unaware of.

I attended the Fifth Annual UFO Crash Conference at Las Vegas, Nevada, in November 2007. It was sponsored by Ryan S Wood and his father Robert Wood. I had corresponded with Ryan, whose book Magic Eyes Only: Earth’s Encounters with Extraterrestrial Technology (Broomfield, Colorado: Wood Enterprises, 2005) related 78 UFO crashes over a period of about a century. Ryan admitted that the evidence for some incidents was stronger than for others, but if even half of them were adequately authenticated that is a large number of crashes. The conference gave me the opportunity to renew acquaintance with two additional pioneers. Stephen Bassett, head of Paradigm Research Group and sponsor of the X Conferences and Richard M Dolan, author of UFOs and the National Security State (Rochester, New York: Keyhole Publishing, 2000). Both these men had presented in Toronto, September 2005, where we had appeared at a press conference together at the end of the programme. I also had the good fortune to meet Daniel Sheehan, the Keynote speaker, who had defended the Berrigan Brothers and the late John Edward Mack, Harvard psychiatrist and author, who became one of the world’s leading experts in the field of human–extraterrestrial contact. Another rare opportunity was my meeting with Linda Moulton Howe, author of Glimpses of Other Realities, Volumes I and II (available at, www.earthfiles.com) and one of the world’s most thorough and successful UFO investigators. I had read one of her books and vowed to read the other when I had an opportunity to do so. Her presentation at the conference was limited to a single recent case, but that did not disguise the fact that her contacts in government, the military and among abductees is probably without parallel.

Through a stroke of good fortune, I was also able to interview two abductees before returning to Toronto. The first was Travis Walton, who agreed to come to Las Vegas to meet with me. He is the author of Fire in the Sky: The Walton Experience (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1997) and the real life character depicted in the Paramount movie of the same name. Although Travis insists that the movie was “jazzed up” a bit to make it more saleable, the basic story was authentic. On the evening of November 5, 1975, Travis and his co-workers were returning home after a day’s work in the forests of northeast Arizona. They saw a strange, unusually bright light in the sky and decided to follow it. Travis, his curiosity piqued, recklessly left the safety of the old truck they were riding in to take a closer look. He was soon overcome by a blast of mysterious energy. The other men fled in fear and after wondering what to do ultimately reported it as an encounter with a UFO, something they would not have dreamed of doing an hour or two earlier. The response to their report was a suspicion that they had murdered Travis and hidden the body. For the next five days, authorities conducted a massive search for Travis, or his body. Then Travis reappeared, unshaven, disoriented and initially unable to tell coherently the whole story of his terrifying experience. He soon realised that he had returned to a hostile world of disbelievers bent on proving that the whole thing was a hoax. Subsequent events proved to anyone with an ounce of objectivity that Travis and his colleagues were telling the truth and the case is now recognised as one of the best authenticated episodes on record. After spending considerable time with Travis, I am totally convinced.

The other abductee I met and interviewed at length was Jim Sparks, who has the distinction of being one of the best informed “experiencers” anywhere, as Mack liked to call them. I was fascinated by his early encounters with his abductors—he has been abducted dozens of times—but I was more interested in what he had learned from the visitors in the later years, after he had accepted the fact that he had some kind of role to play and that he might as well just relax and enjoy it. He eventually became comfortable in their presence. Jim has the added distinction of having been conscious throughout most of his encounters, whereas the majority of abductees only recall significant details under some form of hypnosis.

The extraterrestrials have a message for us that should make headlines in every newspaper and magazine in the world— “We are hell bent on the destruction of our planet as a hospitable place”. The extraterrestrials may have an agenda or agendas of their own—there are more than one species so there is no more assurance that their agendas are identical than there would be to get the US, Russia, China and India to present a common front. However, what they have in common with us is a concern that we are in the process of making our planet uninhabitable and that is neither in their interest nor in ours. On one occasion, the extraterrestrials showed Jim and other abductees a video of sparkling streams and lakes teeming with fish, beautiful forests, blue skies and snow capped mountains. Then the scene slowly changed and the same streams and lakes had dead bloated fish floating on the surface, the skies were loaded with smog, the forests were dying or being cut down at such a pace that they no longer had the capacity to renew the atmosphere. It was a chilling scenario but no different from the one we see daily in our newspapers, as we slowly but surely adjust to the reality that we are destroying the Earth’s ecosystems. Another of the extraterrestrials’ preoccupations is our military’s love affair with nuclear weapons. They rightly anticipate that if we do not reduce our stockpiles dramatically and soon, some megalomaniac will opt to bring about a nuclear Armageddon that will reduce the planet to a barren wasteland. This just confirmed my earlier suspicion based on the incidences of sightings that there is a direct connection between their concerns and our intransigence. The extraterrestrials’ greatest revelation to Jim, however, is that they have met with humans and collaborated by sharing technology. The deal, however, included specific timings for the release of this information to the public. This treaty, like many others, has been observed in the breach. The excuse for continued secrecy is that the public cannot handle the truth. That is the same old nonsense that we get from the ruling elite. Admittedly, there would have to be major adjustments to accommodate the new and broader reality. However, there are exciting opportunities including the possibility of saving this marvellous planet for the benefit of generations to come.

The extraterrestrials, having been betrayed by governments, are now working through ordinary citizens acting as their ambassadors—people like Jim and other experiencers who have been exposed to the same message. The people must be told the truth. Governments must reveal what they know. Full public inquiries must be held. This will not happen, however, unless full amnesty is granted to the people in the know, especially those who have been working in “black operations” under the jurisdiction of the shadow government without the knowledge, supervision or control of the elected government. The shadow government has broken almost every law in the book so amnesty, as recommended by the extraterrestrials and several human experts and whistleblowers, is essential at the outset. Full disclosure is our only hope of reversing the course of environmental degradation within ten years, which experts estimate is when we cross the Rubicon.

Subir