Quotes

A collection of quotes from high-ranking officials speaking out.

2023

Garry Nolan Stanford Professor

The creation of a whistleblowers program specifically, that allows people from within - and I'm going to say this - who have been working on the reverse-engineering programs, reverse engineering of objects, so that they can come in and break their oaths, but specifically just to talk to congress and give that information in classified settings. The most recent one that happened was just last weekend and it created quite a hornets nest in Washington.

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Bill Nelson NASA Administrator

There are phenomena out there and those Navy pilots know that they saw something, you've seen it on TV.

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Steven Spielberg American Film Director

I don’t believe we’re alone in the universe[...] There is something going on that is not being disclosed to us.

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Tim Burchett US Congressman

We are not alone. Washington needs to release the unredacted files. Let the people decide.

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Marco Rubio US Senator

Advanced objects demonstrating advanced technology are routinely flying over our restricted or sensitive airspace posing a risk to both flight safety & national security.

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Ryan Graves Navy Fighter Pilot

In my opinion, I've seen enough evidence inside the anomalous bucket to consider that there is another entity, a consciousness, there is something there that is other.

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2022

Kirsten Gillibrand US Senator

There are so many of us now on the intel committee and armed services that we’re going to stand by the service members who documented this stuff. They have video. They have radar. They have heat sensors. They have everything.

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Scott Bray Deputy Director Navy Intelligence

It's clear that the majority, that many of the observations that we have are physical objects from the sensor data... We haven't had a collision. We have had at least 11 near misses.

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2021

Avril Haines Director National Intelligence

There’s always the question of ‘is there something else that we simply do not understand, that might come extraterrestrially?‘

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Mitt Romney US Senator

Well I don’t believe they are coming from foreign adversaries. Why if there were that would suggest they have a technology that is in a whole different sphere than anything we understand, and frankly China and Russia just aren’t there, and neither are we by the way…

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Bill Nelson NASA Administrator

Now that I'm here at NASA, I've turned to our scientists and I've said, 'Would you, looking at it from a scientific standpoint, see if you can determine what it is, so that we can have a better idea.

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Barack Obama President

What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.

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John Ratcliffe Director National Intelligence

Usually we have multiple sensors that are picking up these things… Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for, or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom… Technologies that we don’t have and, frankly, that we are not capable of defending against.

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2020

John Brennan Director Central Intelligence Agency

It’s a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe… I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might… constitute a different form of life.

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Marco Rubio US Senator

We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours…

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2019

Christopher Mellon Deputy Assistant Secretary

Carl Sagan once famously said ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.’ He was absolutely right. But now we have the proof.

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Bryan Bender National Security Correspondent, Politico

It is hard to conceive of a secret military test program that explains all of these instances. Not just here in the United States but around the world.

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2017

Luis Elizondo Director AATIP

I can’t speak for the US government anymore. My personal belief is that ah, there is very compelling evidence that we ah, we may not be alone, whatever that means.

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2016

2008

Edgar Mitchell Apollo 14 Astronaut

I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real. It has been covered up by governments for quite some time now.

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1998

Stephen Hawking Professor

Of course it is possible that UFOs really do contain aliens as many people believe, and the government is hushing it up. I wouldn’t like to comment on that.

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Philip Corso Colonel

Let there be no doubt. Alien technology harvested from the infamous saucer crash in Roswell, N.Mex., in July 1947 led directly to the development of the integrated circuit chip, laser and fibre optic technologies, particle beams, electromagnetic propulsion systems, depleted uranium projectiles, stealth capabilities, and many others. How do I know? I was in charge! I think the kids on this planet are wise to the truth, and I think we ought to give it to them. I think they deserve it.

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1996

Harold Puthoff Parapsychologist & Electrical Engineer

The possibility of reduced-time interstellar travel either by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations at present or ourselves in the future, is not fundamentally constrained by physical principles.

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Hill Norton Baron, British Chief Of Defense Staff

The evidence that there are objects which have been seen in our atmosphere, and even on terra firma, that cannot be accounted for either as man-made objects or as any physical force or effect known to our scientists, seems to me to be overwhelming. A very large number of sightings have been vouched for by persons whose credentials seem to me unimpeachable.

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1995

Donald Slayton Mercury Astronaut

I was testing a P-51 fighter in Minneapolis when I spotted this object. […] It looked like a saucer, a disk. About the same time, I realized that it was suddenly going away from me – and there I was, running at about 300 miles per hour. I tracked it for a little way, and then all of a sudden the damn thing just took off. It pulled about a 45 degree climbing turn and accelerated and just flat disappeared.

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Stanton Friedman Nuclear Physicist

The evidence is overwhelming that the Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled vehicles from off the Earth.

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Ben Rich Head Of The Lockheed Skunk Works

We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity… anything you can imagine we already know how to do.

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1994

Brian O’Leary Astronaut

For nearly 50 years, the secrecy apparatus within the United States Government has kept from the public UFO and alien contact information. [...] We have contact with alien cultures.

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1990

Mikhail Gorbachev Soviet President

The phenomenon of UFOs is real. I know that there are scientific organisations which study the problem. It must be treated seriously.

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1979

Victor Afanasyev Cosmonaut

It followed us during half of our orbit. We observed it on the light side, and when we entered the shadow side, it disappeared completely. It was an engineered structure, made from some type of metal, approximately 40 meters long with inner hulls. The object was narrow here and wider here, and inside there were openings. Some places had projections like small wings. The object stayed very close to us. We photographed it, and our photos showed it to be 23 to 28 meters away.

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1978

Gordon Cooper Mercury & Gemini Astronaut

I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth.

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1976

James Irwin Apollo 15 Astronaut

Look, I have a pension to worry about. I have a family to take care of, and they told me to just back away from this entirely or else.

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Jimmy Carter President

I don’t laugh at people any more when they say they’ve seen UFOs. It was the darndest thing I’ve ever seen. It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors and it was about the size of the moon. We watched it for ten minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was. One thing’s for sure I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky. If I become President, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.

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1975

Barry Goldwater Senator

…I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright Patterson Air Force Base where the information is stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above top secret.

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1974

Ronald Reagan President

I looked out the window and saw this white light. It was zigzagging around. I went up to the pilot and said, have you ever seen anything like that? He was shocked and he said, “Nope.” And I said to him: “Let’s follow it!” We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement it went straight up into the heavens. When I got off the plane I told Nancy all about it.

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1973

Eugene Cernan Apollo 17 Astronaut

…I’ve been asked [about UFOs] and I’ve said publicly I thought they [UFOs] were somebody else, some other civilization.

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1972

J. Allen Hynek Air Force Scientific Consultant

When the long awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, I believe that it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science, but a mighty and totally unexpected quantum leap.

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1968

James Edward McDonald Atmospheric Physicist

I believe that the scientific community has been seriously misinformed for twenty years about the potential importance of UFOs.

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1966

Gerald Ford President

…I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment on this subject.

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1965

Albert M. Chop Deputy Public Relations Director, NASA

I’ve been convinced for a long time that the flying saucers are real and interplanetary. In other words, we are being watched by beings from outer space.

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1962

Douglas MacArthur General

We speak in strange terms […] of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy.

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1960

Roscoe Hillenkoetter First CIA Director

Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe that unknown flying objects are nonsense.

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1958

Donald E. Keyhoe Marine Corps Major

The Air Force had put out a secret order for its pilots to capture UFOs. For the last six months we have been working with a congressional committee investigating official secrecy concerning proof that UFOs are real machines under intelligent control.

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1956

Delmar Fahrney Rear Admiral, USNR

Unidentified Flying Objects are entering our atmosphere at very high speeds and obviously under intelligent control. We must solve this riddle without delay.

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1954

Hermann Oberth The "Father Of Modern Rocketry"

It is my thesis that flying saucers are real and that they are space ships from another solar system. There is no doubt in my mind that these objects are interplanetary craft of some sort. I and my colleagues are confident that they do not originate in our solar system.

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Hugh Dowding Lord, Air Chief Marshall

Of course UFOs are real, and they are interplanetary. The cumulative evidence for the existence of UFOs is quite overwhelming and I accept the fact of their existence.

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1952

Walther Riedel Chief Rocket Designer

I am completely convinced that UFOs have an out-of-world basis.

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Maurice Biot Leading Mathematical Physicist

The least improbable explanation is that these things are artificial and controlled… My opinion for some time has been that they have an extraterrestrial origin.

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1950

Harry S. Truman President

I can assure you that flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on earth.

This quote from Truman is hard to find a proper source for. If you can confirm or debunk the quote, suggest a change.

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1947

Nathan Twining US Air Force General

This ‘flying saucer’ situation is not at all imaginary or seeing too much in some natural phenomena. Something is really flying around. The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious.

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J. Edgar Hoover First Director Of The FBI

We must insist upon full access to disks recovered. For instance, in the La case the Army grabbed it and would not let us have it for cursory examination.

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