Aviation expert John Lear goes into detail about Florida UFO sightings in 1987, discusses the effect that ridicule has played in suppressing information and talks about how information is kept even from the president. His account comes during an interview with investigative journalist George Knapp in the second segment of “On the Record,” which aired on Jan. 28, 1988, on KLAS TV in Las Vegas. Second of 3 Parts.
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George Knapp: Welcome back to On The Record. My guest again this week is UFO researcher John Lear. John, you say this documentary was put together in Florida recently, and it’s some pretty stunning stuff.
John Lear: Pensacola, Florida, and they’ve had all kinds of physicists and scientists look at the film. It’s absolutely authentic. There is nothing fraudulent about it. And it’s just really, it’s really interesting. I just can’t understand … well I can understand why the networks didn’t pick it up — because each one is controlled by a member of MJ-12.
Knapp: That’s quite a claim, but we’re going to take a look at the film now and see if it’s worth suppressing.
Unknown UFO Witness: Things were very normal around the house, just a normal evening. My wife says she’s got to run to the store. Anyway, I’m sitting at my desk. Out the window, I noticed something … a glow. I got up and walked around outside and looked. It just didn’t look like a helicopter or an airplane. I realized it was not something normal. I thought of calling the police and I said, well, I’d better take a picture first. I had no feelings I was going to be, you know, hurt or anything. I took four shots, and ran out of film. Again, in my mind, take some more pictures. I ran back in, took the last package of Polaroid film out, opened it up and crammed it in there, because the thing’s flying around out there you know. I mean, get it quick. It either saw me or whatever, because it started coming. It altered its course. It started coming my direction.
Announcer: That was Nov. 11, 1987, about six o’clock in the evening. A Gulf Breeze resident who insists on remaining anonymous took these photographs. Charlie and Doris Somerby say they saw the same thing that night over East Bay.
Charlie Somerby: And suddenly, Dory said, “Look! What’s that, Charlie?” I’ll be darned. Portholes, we saw light coming out of the portholes.
Announcer: And over the next three months, many more pictures would be taken by different people, and video tapes, too.
Budd Hopkins: I feel there’s absolutely no sign of a hoax, that the photographs are genuine, that the witnesses are telling the truth and that this represents probably the best, without any doubt, the best photographic evidence in 40 years of UFO investigations.
Knapp: As this series goes on, we see a lot more of that video tape evidence.
Lear: Yeah, there’s a minute and 38 seconds of it.
Knapp: It’s pretty interesting. Interesting stuff. We’ve never seen that before, have we?
Lear: it’s great. And on one morning, he goes out with his camera and three of them show up, and he has a spectacular shot of three of them. And on one of the shots, they tip the saucers so that they can see up in the inside and the bright glowing ring of however it’s powered.
Knapp: I take it that’s not a weather balloon. The government wouldn’t contend it’s a weather balloon.
Lear: No, that’s for sure.
Knapp: How does the government explain this, or has anyone ever put the question to them?
Lear: Nobody’s put the question to them because they’ve still got their stock response. The Air Force quit investigating UFOs in 1969.
Knapp: What do you suppose that bunch wanted? They knew pictures were being taken of them. Why were they hanging around there?
Lear: It’s got something to do with what’s going on now, and I just I can’t even fathom what’s going on. But it shouldn’t be too long before we find out.
Knapp: A lot of stuff has happened in the interim between July 1947 and that incident we just saw. You were going to bring us up to date.
Lear: I was going to tell you that a lot of Air Force pilots have been killed, and the planes destroyed. The first one was the Thomas Mantell crash Jan. 7, 1948. He was in a P-51 and he was chasing a flying saucer, ordered to chase one, and he got up to it, and said, “Oh my God, it’s huge.” And that’s the last thing they heard of him. 1948 was the second crash of a flying saucer near Aztec, New Mexico. 1950 was the third crash near Laredo, Texas, about 30 miles inside the Mexican border. 1952 we had two weekends in a row where the UFOs flew over the capital, Washington D.C., buzzed the White House. Despite pictures and radar confirmations of the objects, the Air Force said it was a temperature inversion.
Knapp: And did this ever make the newspapers in 1952?
Lear: It made all the newspapers. But it’s been such a fantastic mental programming that we’ve been forced to forget this. It was in the papers. It was one of the most spectacular UFO events in history, two weekends in a row.
Knapp: In the newspapers, I don’t know if you’ve gone back and looked at the newspapers from that era, but how did the newspaper people explain what it was?
Lear: They told the Air Force line. It was temperature inversion. But they had pictures of them and just said it was temperature inversion.
Knapp: And what happened after that? What’s next?
Lear: The government established an intensive program of ridicule against anyone who said they saw flying saucers and fear of ridicule was the foundation on which the coverup was placed. Nobody likes to be ridiculed. They built that fear into anybody so that nobody would talk about it. 1952 Eisenhower was elected, he was briefed by (Roscoe) Hillenkoetter. Eisenhower being military took steps to ensure that the secret was kept. Because of his military background, he made it more military-oriented than, say, a civilian president would have. And it’s this, I think, that has let — his actions — let the real power of the executive office slip through the hands of the president into MJ-12.
Knapp: And we’ve got a copy of I think, outside of that document where Eisenhower is briefed.
Lear: He was briefed, and he set it up. Interesting thing, in late ’53 or early ’54, Eisenhower witnessed an alien demonstration of technology and power at MUROC Dry Lake, which is now called Edwards Air Force Base.
Knapp: How do you know that? How did you get that?
Lear: We have witnesses who were there. The president was there. There’s an English guy, he passed away just recently, but before he did, he was the last living person who was present at that meeting. And he said that Eisenhower told the aliens that the world was not ready for them, and nothing happened until the first part of the ‘60s. Several more crashed in the ‘50s. In 1960, Kennedy was elected. Eisenhower’s the last president to have a full briefing on the alien problem. There was a disdain of elected officials throughout the intelligence and military communities and they just didn’t like elected officials. So every president since then has not had high enough clearance to know the whole problem. Now they know there’s aliens. They know we’ve recovered saucers, and they know that we’re trying to get technology. But there are certain other things which probably only about 25 people on the face of this earth know. Now, April 25, 1964, was the first official communication between our government and the aliens. Three saucers landed there by prearranged agreement. It was filmed by five high speed cameras 68,000 feet of film. The reason we know this is because in 1972, when they were going to release the first information about UFOs to the public, a very knowledgeable writer whose name was Robert Emenegger was asked by the agency to write a documentary, which he did. And they were going to release this thing and we had the whole history of the UFOs, and in the last part of the documentary was the footage of the saucer landing. But in 1973, when they’re ready to go, we had Watergate and they were faced with two problems. Number one is they didn’t think the public could handle two traumatic experiences at the same time. And number two, they thought that the public would perceive this picture of aliens and spacecraft as a ploy by Nixon to divert the attention from Watergate. So they shelved it. The documentary actually came out, it was narrated by Rod Serling, but instead of the real footage, they had drawings of these flying saucers landing, and they said, Rod Serling says, “Let’s consider an event that could possibly happen in the future or may have already happened,” But it did already happen. But what happened then.
Knapp: I’m jumping ahead of you here and we can backtrack a second, but the next president after Nixon, President Carter, I remember him as a candidate saying that one of the things he’d like to do when he got into office was to get to the bottom of this UFO stuff, to look into the Project Blue Book files, and to let people know, basically, to open it up and let people know if it was a hoax, it’s a hoax. And if there’s something more to it … but he never did that.
Lear: No, he said, when he was, during his campaign, he said, “If I become president, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists. I’m convinced that UFO’s exist because I’ve seen one.” But MJ-12 got to him and they explained how important it was to keep it a secret. Apparently, he agreed with him because we never heard anything from Carter.
Knapp: Okay, what else in between Nixon and Carter anything?
Lear: The end of the ‘60s when I believe we made a deal. 1973-1980, there were cattle mutilations. 14,000 cattle mutilations all over Canada, United States, South America, and we believe that they use the parts of the cattle for food or genetic experiments. There was a documentary made by Linda Moulton Howe called “Strange Harvest.”
Knapp: Okay, perhaps we can take a short break. When we come back we can go to that because I think it’s a little bit long. We’ll be right back.
NEXT STORY: Cattle mutilations and beyond: John Lear and ‘the grand deception’ — Part 3
