UFOs - Leslie Kean [123]
I am willing to take such sensitive information seriously when two or more credible, qualified sources report the same thing independently of each other—for example, when men from different branches of government who don’t know each other, with years separating their statements, provide essentially the same reports. And concerning the question of a secret government research program on UFOs, this has occurred. A number of reliable sources have told me about their conversations with high-level military contacts who say they are aware of a deeply hidden program for UFO research, one which is so closely guarded that even people at the highest levels of the military are denied access to it. Some of these independent accounts include names and specific details. Much case evidence over the years has also pointed to the plausibility of this kind of program, although it can’t authoritatively be determined one way or the other.
Some of the anonymous sources I refer to include mainstream scientists, all Ph.D.s with impressive, lengthy resumes, some of whom have worked for the CIA or other intelligence agencies—an astrophysicist, a physicist, an astronomer, among others—and a NASA aerospace engineer. One military source, Commander Will Miller, U.S. Navy (Ret.), has gone on the record while keeping certain specifics confidential. He agreed to reply to a series of questions I presented to him in late 2009 about the question of government secrecy.
Although still very active, Miller, who now lives in Florida, retired from active duty in 1994, the same year he was awarded the Department of Defense Meritorious Service Medal. As a naval officer and decorated Vietnam combat veteran, he had his own sighting from a Navy vessel while serving near Vietnam. He later became a senior Department of Defense command center operations action officer, a senior intelligence analyst, and a program manager for DoD future operations programs such as WWIII planning, nonlethal weapons systems, and future space systems. He was an advisor to U.S. Space Command and U.S. Southern Command and its international counterdrug operations, Joint Interagency Task Force East. As an expert in special contingency operations, Miller held a Top Secret clearance with Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) access, meaning he had access to sensitive information whose handling is restricted one step further than the Top Secret classification, including that which is related to topics and programs not publicly acknowledged.
While an officer on active duty throughout the 1980s, Miller did not hide his interest in UFOs. “I was simply a concerned officer who studied the subject, looked at the facts, and talked to people in the military,” he says. “People with personal knowledge would seek me out because they knew I had an interest. I’ve done this for a long time.”
By 1989, Miller had become acutely aware that high-ranking military officers were not properly informed about the UFO phenomenon, and he became concerned, like the COMETA authors, about possible national security issues arising, not from the UFOs themselves, but from a lack of preparedness. He believes that we must assume UFOs have the same right of self-defense to hostile intent or hostile acts as we accord our own military forces. Fortunately, these rights have not been acted upon by the UFOs, as far as we know, when attacked. “Only a small fraction have demonstrated even a remote semblance of hostility, and that was only with severe provocation, usually an attack by military aircraft,” he says. “If the entire body of data were examined, the obvious conclusion would be that UFOs are not hostile. That is precisely what the U.S. military declared after many years of UFO study: