US government urged by military pilots to reopen UFO files

DEMOCRATIC US presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich may have been ridiculed for saying he had seen a UFO, but for some former military pilots and other observers unidentified flying objects are no laughing matter.

An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials have called on the US government to reopen its generation-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security given continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings.

“Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns... which cannot be associated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters,” they said in a statement released at a news conference.

The panellists from seven countries, including former senior military officers, said they had each seen a UFO, or conducted an official investigation into UFO phenomena.

The subject of UFOs grabbed the spotlight in the US presidential race last month when Mr Kucinich, a member of Congress from Ohio, said during a televised debate with other Democratic candidates that he had seen one.

Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter are both reported to have claimed UFO sightings.

Most turn out to be misidentified aircraft, satellites or meteors. A panellist who once worked for Britain’s Ministry of Defence said 5% of incidents cannot be explained.

But the sightings are often dismissed by authorities without proper investigations, UFO activists say.

“It’s a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?” remarked John Callahan, a former federal aviation administration investigator, who said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska.

The panel, organised by a group dedicated to winning credibility for the study of UFOs, urged Washington to resume UFO investigations through the US Air Force or NASA.

“It would certainly, I think, take a lot of angst out of this issue,” said former Arizona govenor Fife Symington, who said he was among hundreds who saw a delta-shaped craft with enormous lights silently traverse the sky near Phoenix in 1997.

The Air Force investigated 12,618 UFO reports from 1947 to 1969 and concluded there was no evidence of space aliens.