1. Nocturnal lights
2. Daylight disks
3. Close encounters (day or night)
4. Radar readings.
Dr Hynek has an excellent history of UFO sightings, together with the reports of some well known people who made them.
Another reason for secrecy may lie in the hope of obtaining knowledge relating to advanced propulsion methods and anti-gravity systems before other potential enemies on earch may acquire it. Hence, though many nations are secretly investigating UFO's, they are reluctant to share their findings.
Major Donald Kehow describes in his book "Aliens from Space, The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects" the difficulties he had in 1957 in trying to get the truth from government agencies after he was Director of NICAP, the world's largest UFO research organisation with over 30 subcommittees in the U.S. and abroad.
According to some UFOlogists the attempts at cover-up by the CIA extent to destruction of evidence that it could not confiscate. Apparently some of our nation's important leaders have been denied access to some UFO secrets in the possession of an agency of the United States, the very existence of which is classified above top secret. Senator Barry Goldwater, a retired Air Force Reserve Brigadier General and pilot with many decades of flying experience, was quoted as saying "I certainly believe in aliens in space. They may not look like us, but I have very strong feelings that they have advanced beyond our mental capabilities". He said he was refused permission to check the Air Force files on UFO's and added, "I think some highly secret government UFO investigations are going on that we don't know about - and probably never will unless the Air Force discloses them." He said that he put faith in the reports of the Air Force, Navy, and commercial pilots who reported instances where a UFO would fly near them, right off their plane's wing - and then just zoom away at incredible speeds. He said he remembered the case in Georgia in the 1950's of a National Guard plane going after a UFO and never returning. And he recalled a case in Franklin, Kentuky, when four military planes investigated a UFO. One of them exploded in midair and no one knows why.
Power failures were also reported in association with UFO's in Brazil in 1957 to 1959, Rome, Italy, in 1958; and Mexico in 1965. Likewise, in Uberlandia, where the power station operators promptly closed the circuits when the UFO apparently caused them to open, it did no good, and they were unable to restore the power until the UFO departed.
The Ganddaddy of all blackouts to date was the stygian blanket that fell over 30 million people in the northeastern corner of the U.S. during the early evening rush hour period on November 9, 1965. Relay services that were supposed to automaticaly transfer the load in case of failure, but relaying on public power without alternative backup systems also failed, but there was no military emergency. Though it was largely over by the next morning, the official explanation about a malfunctioning small device in a Canadian hydroelectric generating plant never accounted for the failure of millions of dollars of electronic devices to shift the load when the breakdown occurred.
Background: Dean, a highly decorated veteran, served on the
front lines in both Korea and Vietnam. In 1963, while assigned to the Supreme Headquarters operations Center (SHOC), SHAPE's war room, headed up by then-supreme allied commander of Europe, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, Dean claims he was able to read the detailed
12-inch-thick NATO report on UFOs.
The Story: "SHAPE was one of those choice assignments. You had
to have a spotless record and pass security background checks. I applied on a whim and got it. I was very proud and pleased. At
SHAPE, I was put through more security checks, given a Cosmic
Top Secret clearance (yes, this is a real term, the highest NATO has), and assigned to the Supreme Headquarters Operations
Center, known as SHOC, the NATO war room. In those days, the
activity would run hot and cold, and much of it would depend on how the Soviets wanted to play it. The most intriguing thing to me was that we were continually having a problem with large,
metallic, circular objects that would appear over central Europe; these were reported as visual phenomena by our pilots and appeared on radar as well. Some flew in formation, and most of the time we spotted them coming out of the Soviet Union, over East Germany, West Germany, France, and then they'd often circle
somewhere over the English Channel and head north, disappearing
from NATO radar over the Norwegian Sea. These objects were very large, moving very fast, at very high attitudes, higher than we could roach at the time. And they seemed obviously under
intelligent control.
"In the meantime, the UFO matter literally brought about the
establishment of direct communication between the East and West in 1962, which I have always found interesting and ironic. We had pretty well determined by that time that these were not Russian craft, and the Russians had determined they were not ours. So, we came to an understanding, and a direct telephone line was opened between SHOC and the Warsaw Pact Headquarters Command. Of
course, a setup was always a possibility, so we had backup ways
of checking out whether the Russians were being truthful. But since we were both armed to the teeth and World War III was
just ticking away, it was a logical stop in the right direction.
That idea developed into the hotline between the president of the United States and the Soviet Premier, following the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
"Every time I got the chance, from then until I left, I would
read a section or two in it. It was the most intriguing document I'd ever read. It was put together by military representatives of every NATO nation and also included contributions from some of the greatest scientific minds. These objects were violating all of our known laws of physics, and the study team had gone to
Cambridge, Oxford, the Sorbonne, MIT, and other major universities for input on chemistry, physics, atmospheric physics, biology, history, psychology, and even theology, all of which were separate appendices.
"I read about theories on Einstein's sought-after unified-field
theory, the high radiation at various landing sites, and UFO reports that dated back to the Roman era and up to our own F105 pilots' sightings and encounters, and on and on. I had always been a skeptic. But this report concluded that this stuff was not science fiction. "I read about contact encounters. One incident that had just happened in 1963 involved a landing on a Danish farm. According to the report, the farmer went aboard with the two little beings and two more human-looking men who spoke to him in Danish. The report included parts of his interrogation by government authorities and their conclusions that he was telling the truth. In another incident, according to the reports, a craft landed on an Italian airfield and offered to take an Italian sergeant for a ride. He wet his pants -- that's what it said -- and was so scared, he didn't go.
"Inside, there were 12 small bodies, all dead. There were
pictures of the bodies, which looked like the beings known as the 'grays,' being laid out and then put on stretchers and loaded into jeeps and autopsy photos, too. Some of the little grays appeared to not be a reproductive capable species. The autopsy guys concluded, according to the report, that it looked as if they had been cut out of a cookie cutter -- clones with no alimentary tract. They did not ingest or process food as we
know it, nor did it appear that they had any system for
elimination.
"The craft itself was cut up like a pie into six pieces, put on
lowboys and hauled off. Scuttlebutt was that it was given to the Americans and flown to Wright Patterson Air Force base in Ohio. I
looked at these pictures and couldn't believe it. My skin got
cold and I thought, My God. I had never really believed we were all alone in the universe, but this was hard to swallow.
"The major conclusions in the NATO report blew me away. There
were five: 1) The planet and human race had been the subject of a detailed survey of some kind by several different extra-terrestrial civilizations, four of which they had identified visually. One race looked almost indistinguishable from us. Another resembled humans in height, stature, and structure, but with a very gray, pasty skin tone. The third race is now popularly known as the grays, and the fourth was
described as reptilian, with vertical pupils and lizard-like
skin. 2) These alien visitations had been going on for a very long time, at least 200 years, perhaps longer. 3) The extraterrestrials did not appear hostile since if that were their intent they would have already demonstrated their malevolence. 4) UFO appearances and quick disappearances as well as the flybys were demonstrations conducted on purpose to show us some of their
capabilities. 5) A process or program of some sort seemed to be underway since flybys progressed to landings and eventually
contact.
"I wanted so badly to copy this thing. I did take a photograph
of the cover sheet, which wasn't in and of itself classified. But I didn't want to wind up in Fort Leavenworth. So instead I would go to the bathroom and take notes surreptitiously, very carefully. "I have been through an awful lot in my life, but I've never been able to just walk away from that report. I know that I'm taking a chance by violating my oaths. But this is the most important issue of our times -- so important that I can't think of anything more important, and the public has been deceived and completely kept in the dark about all of this for all these years. It's the biggest scientific, political scandal ever. Besides, what have I got to lose? I'm 64 years old now. Are they
going to bump me off? I have told the truth. My integrity and
credibility stand. When is our government going to tell the truth?"
Update: After 27 years at military service, Dean retired and
began another 14-year career with the Pima County Sheriff's Department Emergency Services in Tucson, Arizona. In 1990, he gave a lecture at the University of Arizona in which he talked about UFOs. The talk garnered local media coverage. Afterward, he was denied a promotion at the Sheriff's Department, because, he alleged, he believed in UFOs. Dean filed suit and won an out-of-court settlement in March 1992. Now retired, Dean has become a member of several UFO organizations and has begun giving occasional lectures. He is working through "any and all legitimate channels" to uncover a copy of the NATO document and to gather witnesses for an open Congressional hearing on the subject of UFOs.
Unleased by the policy of Glasnost the Soviet media felt free to include accounts of UFO sightings. A Tass report of October 10, 1989, reported a large shiny ball or disk hovering over a Voronezh part; residents saw the UFO land and three creatures similar to human beings emerged, accompanied by a robot.
Apparently the Russians felt no need to suppress this report, but not in US News and World Report.
"I was told this had been going on for some time and that in
February 1961 there had been quite a scare. Fifty of these objects were spotted on radar and headed in formation from the Soviet Union toward Europe, flying at about 100,000 feet. The Soviets had closed all borders. Everybody went to red alert. All hell broke loose. We really thought 'The War' had started. We scrambled. We knew the Russians were scrambling. It was the largest number of these objects that had been seen. Fortunately -- and only by the grace of God -- we didn't start bombing and neither did the Russians. In nine minutes, they were gone.
"I was told that then-Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of Europe,
Sir Thomas Pike, had been repeatedly requesting information from London and Washington about these objects, but nothing would ever come. We found out later that the Columbine-Topaz spy ring in Paris was intercepting everything and forwarding it to the KGB, which often got intelligence information even before we did. So Pike decided, I was told, to develop an in-house study to determine whether these objects were a military threat.
"Well, by the time I arrived in 1963, everybody had been talking
about the study, and I had heard the rumors, seen the blips on radar, witnessed the commotions, and some of us occasionally even
talked about the possibilities. But nothing really prepared me
for what I started to read in the early morning hours one night in January 1964. "It was about 2:00 a.m. and a relatively quiet night when the SHOC controller on duty went into the vault and came out with this huge document. 'Take a look at this,' he said. The title was simply Assessment: An Evaluation of a Possible Military Threat to Allied Forces in Europe. It was numbered, #3, stamped Cosmic Top Secret, had eight inches worth of appendices, dozens of photographs, and had been signed into the vault by German Colonel Heinz Berger, SHOC's head of security. I quickly learned that it was based on two and a half years of research, was funded by NATO money, and that only 15 copies were published, in English, German, and French. Each one was numbered. All were classified and ordered to be kept under lock and key.
"The appendix that really got to me was titled 'Autopsies.' I
saw pictures of a 30-meter disc that had crashed in Timmensdorfer, Germany, near the Baltic Sea in 1961. The British Army, according to the report, got there first and put up a perimeter. The craft had landed in very soft, loamy soil near the Russian border and so hadn't destructed, but Ooe-third of it was buried in. We and the Russians, who also quickly showed up, had both tracked it.