GEORGE FILER - FINAL

"HUNTING" FOR UFOS

I started collecting data, seeing people in the Air Force, talking to literally hundreds of pilots, air crews and so on who have seen them. If you say, "Gee, I saw something funny in the sky the other day when we were flying. It was round," kind of bringing out the point that you've seen a UFO without saying "UFO," it's amazing how many people will say, "Oh yeah, I saw one the other day," or whatever. It's come to the point where I'm more surprised that people have not seen them than that people have seen them. All these people I was talking to were officers in the military who had high clearances.

Near where I live, Hammerton, New Jersey, there's what the locals call the "phantom train." Route 536 near route 206 has a lot of trees and forest. In any case, we're getting repeated reports that people see what looks like a train coming toward them, coming out into an open field, a farmer's field with the big headlights on. It comes right up to them and then hovers over the car, so you can see the light of this thing on all four sides of the car. People are obviously frightened so they drive really fast. I've gone there trying to find this thing, but it's funny - I've never seen a UFO while hunting for one.

We had a case where an eight-year-old boy saw UFOs, almost every night. He'd tell his sister and mother, "There's UFOs out there!" and they're all like, "Yeah, yeah," and kind of ignored him. They went out for pizza one night and when they came home, the eight-year-old says,, "Oh, there it is!" Of course, they all look up and see it. This went on for weeks. They'd call us, and we'd try to go there, but whenever we went it wasn't there. Theirs was a half million dollar home, a beautiful home not far from the Philadelphia Airport. Behind the house is a farmer's field and some forest and the UFO would hang over the forest. Every so often a plane from Philadelphia airport would fly by and when that happened, this thing would sink down into the trees. It would cut its lights, make them very dim so they could hardly be seen. The plane would fly by, then the UFO would lift up out of the forest and hang around once again. Well, things started happening; they finally saw the aliens and became very frightened about it. Interestingly enough, they also became very religious. According to them the aliens took them on flights. So we would go out and watch, but the aliens wouldn't show up when we were there. We went to a few neighbors and asked them about it. They seemed to be very frightened themselves and would slam the doors in our faces. We've had a number of cases like that.

A story frequently not told in the UFO field is that if the aliens are bothering you, they can do lots of strange things, like levitate items in your house. We had one case where the dishwasher door opened and all the utensils inside the dishwasher came out, got up on the counter and marched around the room. You check out the people to whom this happens. They hold good jobs and have college degrees, live in big homes and are very successful -- and they're telling you that their utensils are marching down the countertop! It's kind of hard to believe, but you start getting these stories from more than one source. That's not normally in UFO books, because it sounds so crazy. But they deliberately do stuff. I think, that seems crazy, so that the story sounds like you have lost your mind. Maybe they also have a sense of humor; that could be part of it.

COLLECTING EVIDENCE

In terms of back engineering, I've heard the stories but have no first-hand information. In our top-secret files I've never seen any official-looking document that I knew was real that even mentioned it. Since I was an intelligence briefer for various generals and military and tactical air command, I used to put on morning briefings with hundreds of slides and had good access to almost any slides that existed in the air force. I went to Washington, DC and got hundreds, if not thousands of slides, many of which were classified, to use in the briefings. And because sometimes we would get pilot reports about a UFO buzzing them or something like that, and as I'm collecting these other slides, I'd ask, "do you have any UFO reports? "They'd say, "Oh, we have a couple cabinets full." But when I said that I needed some for the briefing, they told me they couldn't give them to me unless I had a letter from the commander who was a four-star general, one of the top four or five generals in the air force. A letter from him would release the photos. I went back and wrote the letter and sent it to my intelligence commander, and he didn't want to send it up to the general to get the authorization for the pictures.

What got me into collecting files after my retirement in 1978 was that I became an investigator for NUFON and would go out and check into various cases. When you go to investigate a case, it's usually not around the corner, it's an hour or two away. You get there and sometimes the people are there, sometimes they're not, and it gets to be a real hassle. And even when you get the information and write it up and send it to NUFON, that's kind of the end of it. All this work people were doing, investigating cases, I just thought it should be published somewhere. So I started putting my files together in January of 1997. I just felt that this UFO thing was something I'd always been interested in, that it was almost a mission for me to report it to the world.

I hadn't seen anything in the military that indicated they took it very seriously. Even when you would brief generals and colonels about UFOs, everybody would kind of smile. I think many people have been through that, they know the kind of strange look you get when you start talking about UFOs. As a matter of fact, that strange look of ridicule that's developed through the years is probably the main reason we don't know what this is all about. There isn't to my knowledge, any real funding that looks into the situation. Most corner pizza stores are run with a lot more funding than NUFON, and we're supposedly the biggest group of UFO researchers in the country. Without money, there's not a lot of respect and there's no real research going on in a university, that kind of thing. Yet at the same time, there's a huge demand for information and interest is growing.

PROVING THE EXISTENCE OF UFOS

Large numbers of people now have binoculars, video cameras and other cameras. If they see anything, something like a third of the witnesses reach for a camera or binoculars and get a much better view of what it is they see. And that's happening in many countries throughout the world. In Argentina they're taking pictures and putting them on TV, also in Japan, Nepal, Australia and England -- essentially all over the world. At Popocatepetl there's a video camera on twenty-four hours a day, regularly picking up UFOs or at least black objects of some size flying around the volcano. I think that the data indicates there's something going on. There seems to be more activity now.

In the late forties and early fifties, there seemed to be a lot of activity people were reporting and initially it was taken very seriously. But they didn't get really good photos and there was a lot of silliness. And allegedly the government came to the conclusion that they should deny it, that it might hurt us in a time of war, clog up our communications and so on. Consequently, they stopped emphasizing and started denying it and the ridicule factor set in. Many people realize that, whatever their career, it's a good thing to forget about and not report having seen a UFO, because it could hurt your career in many fields. But if you could get these people before Congress to tell their story and it was on TV, then a certain percentage of the population could listen to it. Congressional hearings would have to happen at the demand of the public.

We'll need some kind of an exceptionally important situation to occur. I think one just happened in the Ukraine, where a Su-27 crashed into a crowd at an air show. And it's interesting that there's some question fo exactly how many were killed -- somewhere between seventy-six and eighty-three people were killed and two hundred and fifty were wounded. A UFO is in films of the plane falling to the ground, films that were shown in both Russia and Germany. You have to slow the film down to see the UFO, which is a cigar-shaped craft -- it looks like a white cigar. The Su-27 is doing some kind of aerobatics, when it appears to be stalling and becomes unstable, and the UFO goes right under it. Now, we don't know if this was a harmful thing or a helpful thing, going under the aircraft at high speed. In any case, it appears to have given the pilot enough time to eject. But even in the Ukraine the fact that this UFO was there is now almost being ignored. The immediate causes of the crash were supposedly a mistake by the Su-27 crew and their piloting techniques, flying over the crowd, being too heavy and so on. The pilots are denying that they are at fault. In any case, if it gets into some kind of open court, where both sides could give their information, the UFO might become very important. I personally think that a court case of something like this might be where we actually prove the existence of UFOs. I try not to be too sensational, but I'm obviously pro-UFO!
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We want to thank the Sedona Journal of Emergence for this interview by Nancy Red Star.