WATCH: Former Pentagon official calls for big UFO reveal after secret investigation
Michelle Basch WTOP | 26 July 2018
Michelle Basch WTOP | 26 July 2018
“Show it to the National Academy of Sciences. Don’t hide it. Show it! We’ve been waiting for it! We’ve been waiting for it forever,” retired Air Force Col. David Shea said, raising his voice. “But so far, that hasn’t happened, and I don’t know why.”
Shea, 80, was the Air Force’s press spokesman on UFOs at the Pentagon from 1967 to 1971. He considers himself an “agnostic” when it comes to whether some unidentified flying objects are ships piloted by intelligent beings from faraway worlds.
“I would believe if I saw some evidence that showed we were visited by alien spacecraft, but there hasn’t been evidence to my mind of such,” he said in an interview at his Northern Virginia home.
In 1969, Shea wrote the news release that announced the end of Project Blue Book, an Air Force investigation of more than 12,000 UFO reports.
It concluded that there was no threat to national security, no sign of advanced technology and no evidence that UFOs are extraterrestrial.
And with that, it appeared to the public that the government had washed its hands of UFOs.
But in December, almost 50 years after Project Blue Book ended, came explosive news.
The New York Times reported that Bigelow Aerospace had been storing material recovered from “unidentified aerial phenomena” in its buildings in Las Vegas as part of a secret Pentagon UFO investigation project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
Shea was not surprised by news of the project’s existence, but he thinks if more people were aware of the government’s history with UFOs, they would better understand why, in his opinion, the government should not get involved again.
“The UFOs never seem to go away,” he said.
Government investigations and scientific studies
What is considered the modern UFO era began as Americans’ Cold War fears of the Soviet Union were heating up.
In 1947, a veteran pilot flying near Mt. Rainier in Washington reported seeing nine strange objects flying in formation at incredible speeds.
The sighting made national news, and the same year, the Air Force (still the Army Air Forces at the time) began investigating — with intelligence officers in charge — reports of UFOs.
“They really weren’t sure what was going on. But by the end of ’49 they quickly became convinced that there was no threat, and there was no visitation, there was no advanced technology, and that was a good time to get out of the business, but they didn’t,” Shea said.
The work went on under several code names including “Project Sign,” “Project Grudge” and “Project Blue Book.”