Pilot Attacks UFO

As mentioned in an earlier post, there were pilots at the Citizen Hearing who told of intercepts of UFOs in which the craft were fired on but the bullets and missiles had no effect on the alien craft. I met the pilot of one of those missions just outside the National Press Club right after our panel on Roswell had finished. He was standing with Stan Friedman who called me over to look at a two page document from the US Department of Defense with a stamped date of June 3, 1980.

I read it over and noticed that it said, “The pilot, according to a third party, intercepted the vehicle [UFO] and fired upon it at very close range without causing any apparent damage.” I said to Stan, “We don’t know if he hit it.”

Stan said, “Why don’t you ask him. He’s standing right here.”

The guy was standing next to Stan, so I asked him. Comandante Oscar Santa Maria Huertas, a retired Peruvian Air Force pilot, told me that he had, indeed, hit the UFO with his cannon fire as he tried to intercept it.

Government documents, as well as the pilot, said that on April 11, 1980 an object like a balloon was hanging suspended off the end of the runaway about three miles away and about 2000 feet above the ground. Huertas was ordered to take off and bring it down. The object, whatever it was, was hovering in restricted airspace.

He took off in a Soviet designed SU-22 fighter, reached an altitude of some 8,000 feet, and got into position which would suggest he was above and behind the UFO. He fired a burst of sixty-four 30 mm cannon shells. He said that some of the rounds “deviated” from the target and fell away, but others hit it. He said that nothing happened and it seemed as if the rounds had been absorbed by the “balloon” which then it began to rise rapidly. It had now turned away from the base.

The “dogfight” didn’t end there. According to the pilot, he gave chase but the UFO always stayed in front of him. Huertas used the afterburners for additional speed but the UFO seemed to maintain its distance from him. He continued to climb until he was at 36,000 feet and some fifty-two miles from the base.

He was in full pursuit when the object stopped suddenly and he had to turn sharply to avoid a collision. From that point on, he was unable to get another “shot” at the UFO. Each time he was prepared to fire, the UFO would “escape by ascending vertically” seconds before he would open fire.

He said that he maneuvered into position twice more but before he could fire, the UFO again began a rapid climb. He gave chase until they were at 46,000 feet. He decided to try to get above it once again. By doing that, the UFO wouldn’t be able to suddenly climb out of position. He bumped his speed to Mach 1.6, something around 1,150 miles an hour.

His plan failed. The UFO suddenly climbed and fell into position near him, almost as if it was flying formation with him until they were at 63,000 feet. That momentarily eliminated his ability to attack it.

The UFO stopped again and he adjusted his wings and slats so that he would be able to maneuver at that altitude. He thought he might be able to get another shot at it now that it was no longer moving but that turned out to be impossible.

At that time his fuel warning light illuminated and he had just enough fuel to return to his base. He had to break off the pursuit but before he left the area, he attempted one last pass at the UFO. As he approached, to within 300 feet of the object, he saw that it was about 35 feet in diameter with a shiny dome on top that was cream colored. The bottom was silver that appeared to be metallic.

Although he never talked to American officials, and he never reported the incident to any American agency, as noted above, the Department of Defense received a report about it. This apparently came from the US Embassy Defense Attaché in Peru.

The flight, according to the pilot, lasted some twenty-two minutes. He had no conventional explanation for what he had seen.

Citizen Hearing and Merrill Cook

When I read that former Congressman Merrill Cook from Utah, one of those at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, had said, “I do not believe there has been any strong, credible evidence of [alien visits] at this point but I do think there has been some credible evidence of things that are unidentified that had been flying about,” I was disappointed. But then I thought about what he had said and realized that it was quite fair.

 

Merrill Cook

Cook, who asked some very convoluted questions, hadn’t dismissed the idea of alien visitation but had suggested that the strong evidence hadn’t been presented. Of course that was correct. Had there been that sort of physical evidence, then the conversation would have ended at that point and we could move onto the next phase.

 

There were some very persuasive documents presented. In one case from South America, a pilot, Comandante Oscar Santa Maria Huertas (Ret) of the Peruvian Air Force, who had fired on a UFO described the event. He had two pages of an official message about it. It said that he had fired on the UFO without results and I realized that could have meant he missed, so I asked.

 

Using a 30 mm cannon on his SU-22, he had hit the object when he shot at it. The rounds had no effect, and the object seemed to “absorb” the ammunition. Make no mistake, a 30 mm round is huge and explosive.

While I was on the “hot seat” along with Don Schmitt and Stan Friedman, Cook asked if anyone in 1947 had seen the alien bodies, but it wasn’t clear if he wanted to know if someone had discussed it in 1947 or if he wanted to know if someone there in 1947 had seen them. Each time we tried to offer an answer, he seemed to change the question by adding qualifications or modifications to it.

 

The answer was, of course, that none of us were around in 1947 (other than Stan) to gather evidence. However, Dan Dwyer had told family members in 1947 that he had seen the bodies, describing them as small humanoids.

This is the Frankie Rowe tale. She said that her father came home after seeing the crash site and told them of the little men he had seen. Later, Rowe’s sister, Helen Cahill said that sometime around 1960, she asked her father about the story and he told it to her. Does that make Rowe’s report true? No, just answers the question that we do have some testimony for that.

There was also Beverly Bean whose father, Melvin Brown, told her during the first moon landing that the UFOs were real and he had seen the bodies. There is another version of this that suggests he told her sometime later, but the point is that he was apparently saying these things prior to the publication of the Roswell information (and yes, both her sister and her mother have confirmed that Brown said these things, which, again, doesn’t make them true, only that he said them several times over the years).

I mentioned Edwin Easley and what he had said to family members, but, of course, this all came about in the early 1990s.

So, we had the names of people who seemed to have passed word of the bodies in 1947, and the names of people who had been there, in Roswell in 1947, who mentioned bodies to family members at some point after that. We had the answer to the question. We just didn’t articulate it well.

Cook at the Citizen Hearing

We did a poor job of answering the question for Cook and that is our fault. And before I get comments telling me that the testimony is in dispute, that we’re dealing with memories that are now decades old, and that we have some tales that have been disproved, I know all that. The question might have been had any of these people talked about bodies in 1947, and the evidence says that they did… but the proof is not there.

And he had a tendency to cut off an answer and ask another question, or maybe the same question a different way, which added to the confusion. He asked some convoluted question about the American Academy of Sciences and their endorsement of the Condon Committee report. I should have said that they had not engaged in a proper peer review because if they had, they would have noticed that 30% of the cases were unexplained. Worse, if possible, one was explained as a natural phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since but didn’t identify what that might be.

The real point is that we can prove the cover-up with documentation that has been declassified and documents that are clearly false. How else to explain the Air Force response to Senator Jeff Bingaman when he asked about Project Moon Dust? He was told that such a project never existed. Well it did and continues under another name (and no, I don’t know that name).

So Cook wouldn’t say that we proved to him that we have been visited, but we proved enough that he thought there is credible evidence that something unidentified is flying around. That might be splitting a hair, but I understand what he was thinking when he said that. Besides, he agreed that something unidentified was flying around and that is more than enough.

Had we had more time, had we brought other documents, had we provided more sources for the information, we might have done even better. For now, this is enough. Something unidentified is flying around and shouldn’t we attempt to find out what it is?