UFOs - Leslie Kean [124]
After he retired from the U.S. Navy, Miller began taking steps to set up a series of information briefings that culminated in meetings in 1997 with Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, vice director for intelligence on the Joint Staff, and in 1998 with Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). (Wilson later became director of the DIA and Hughes, the corporate vice president for intelligence and counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.) Miller has provided me with a confidential, detailed account of these meetings and those leading up to them, including attendees, preparatory briefings, topics discussed, and reactions from attendees.
He explains that he raised two national security concerns at his briefings: the risk of uninformed human aggression toward UFOs, leading to a possible disaster, and the government’s disregard for public concern about UFOs and its refusal to provide honest answers to legitimate questions. Miller feels strongly that unnecessary secrecy threatens the public’s sense of personal security while eroding trust in the government institutions mandated to inform and protect U.S. citizens. “The officials have universally received these briefings with the same serious consideration as briefings on any other national security issue,” he says.
I first contacted Commander Miller ten years ago, in 1999, through the introduction of a mutual colleague. I was repeatedly struck by the similarity of his conclusions and approach to those expressed by retired French military officers in the COMETA Report, communicated to me before Miller had any idea of its contents. He and the French officers had all been through a similar process to arrive at these positions, but within two different militaries. They were all meticulously careful about what they said, suggesting that they knew more than they could reveal. Of course, Miller has never had the strength-in-numbers of the French group—his is a lone voice in a vast wilderness, by contrast, and a particularly courageous one given the risks to his reputation through association with the UFO subject.
I sent him a confidential copy of the translated COMETA Report while writing my first UFO story for the Boston Globe. I then spent many months in substantive telephone interviews with him, and we met in person a year later. Over time, I came to know and trust him as a person of integrity, clarity, and devotion to his country, and have regularly consulted with him about issues involving UFOs and the military. Well connected at high levels within the impenetrable military and intelligence world, Miller is a true “insider” of the highest order. He is one of the few who has persistently taken his concern about UFOs to authorities above him, and has spent many years assessing the official relationship to the phenomenon through his access to American generals, admirals, NSA contacts, and other sources of sensitive information.
“The military officers I talked with were extremely interested in getting factual information on the UFO subject, since even at the flag-officer level, they were unable to get that information through normal military intelligence channels,” Miller told me. Throughout the years, as he continued to speak with his contacts, he became more and more convinced of the existence of a well-concealed, “need-to-know” UFO program, based on statements that he says confirm this fact, made by military personnel attending his Pentagon briefings and others.
I asked him in late 2009 about his overall assessment. He replied in an e-mail:
It is a fact that there are those in high places in the government who have an interest in this subject (in many cases it is because they or a member of their immediate family has had a sighting or personal experience with the phenomenon).
When the American people say the government is in the middle of a massive cover-up, in most cases that is absolutely NOT the case; those people in positions where you