GEORGE FILER INTERVIEW - CONTINUED

INCIDENT AT MCGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE

In 1978 I was working at McGuire Air Force Base, in the Twenty-first Air Force command post. The Twenty-first Air Force controls half the military airlift command aircraft, essentially all the troop carriers. It's like the government's airline. They fly everybody from the President on down, the navy, army and so on. I would go into work around four o'clock in the morning to prepare a briefing. As I came in the gate, I noticed that out at the end of the runway, off in the distance, were all these red lights, like there might have been an accident. I entered the command post, a great big, solid concrete-block building, and they said there had been UFOs flying in a pattern during the night. Those in the tower had seen them, they were on radar and crews on aircraft had seen them. One of the UFOs had crashed. Something had happened at Fort Dix - they weren't sure what, but an alien was seen on the ground, was shot at by the military police and a chase was going on. The state police were involved as well as the military police at Fort Dix. There was just a fence between Fort Dix and McGuire and McGuire security police were trying to intercept the alien. And I said, "Oh, an alien...," thinking of foreign nationals. They responded, "Oh, no, an alien from outer space!" "What?" They were very clear about this. They said they wanted me to do the standup briefing. So I called the wing command post to ask if they knew anything about it, and they essentially repeated the basic information. A little bit later the information came in that they had captured the alien and he was lying dead at the end of the runway. I didn't see him.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to determine if the story I was told was real and I talked to different colonels who said they had heard it just like I had. They assumed it was true but obviously didn't have any firsthand knowledge. They hadn't seen anything. But the command post and the intelligence service treated it as a true story. In any case, I was checking around and finally got a call from this sergeant who allegedly was there. They interviewed him. He was pretty sure it was an alien. He said it was a small person, not of this Earth. He said what made him feel that it was real was that the UFOs flew in the right patterns. He was transferred to Okinawa, I believe. And even in talking to me he was very frightened. Actually, there were some other people as well; people were kind of talking about it and were threatened to some extent. In my case, no one ever said anything to me other than, "Don't brief the general."

There was another interesting part to this. In the command post you can normally only brief up to "Secret," while "Top Secret" and special intelligence code words were written into a notebook along with pertinent messages. If there was anything important I would take it down to the general and let him read it -- we weren't supposed to discuss it. In other words, he would just read it and say, "That's interesting," or "What do you think?" Well, I took that down to him that morning, and in his office was the Lt. Colonel in charge of the security police. He was kind of disheveled and needed a shave, looking like something had happened. I waited till he'd finished with the general and when he came out I took my book in. But nothing was said about the alien situation. I just thought that this kind of fit, made me think that something really did happen, because I normally didn't see this Colonel there. He worked at a much lower level. Since then I've called him and General Sadler, and neither one of them would talk to me about it over the phone. I've never gone to see them. In our phone conversations they really never confirmed one way or the other. I don't think that they would ever admit it other than in private -- and even then they would probably never tell you.

THE DISCLOSURE PROJECT

My friend, Bruce Widaman, the State Director of the Missouri UFO Network, says, "I've been told your files have been read in the White House, the Congress and the Senate. I truly believe disclosure is going to happen." He claims that he's been contacted by insiders and essentially they're saying to him that there are three major groups on the inside, around a hundred people who know what's going on. For the sake of argument, let's say thirty-five want it brought out, thirty-five want it kept quiet, the others are noncommittal. Those who feel it has to come out are gaining in influence. It's kind of like the old group is the one who doesn't want it to come out and the new group does. I don't know if any of this is true, but this is what he's telling me. The reason they got in touch with Widaman is that he had written an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that said, they're here, let's talk about it, it's something that's no big deal, it doesn't look like they're going to kill us. Of course I've been hearing for twenty years that they're going to release information.

The disclosure project had an impact not only on the audience, the public, but also on Congress and White House Officials. I don't know if you were there or read about it, but there were twenty television cameras and a couple hundred reporters at the National Press Club in May 2001. After I'd spoken, a couple of them came and talked to me and said, "You don't realize, there are press briefings at the National Press Club every day. Normally people stand in front of twenty reporters and give a talk and reporters won't even listen, they just grab a handout and walk away. At this press conference you had a couple hundred important reporters here. And they essentially give you a standing ovation and stayed for two hours. This is very significant. There's been nothing like it since Reagan was at the height of his popularity and came here." There were a couple of stories the next day in the press, but it wasn't really carried widely here in the United States, though I did get a call from the BBC. Shortly thereafter an editor of the Wall Street Journal came to my house to talk to me. He was not exactly sure why and he didn't think that the government was controlling it, but he said he would have a great deal of difficulty, even as an editor, getting it in the Wall Street Journal that in a sense would say that all this is real. He said that soon a lot of people in the field would be retired and there'd be a new breed in there. He said "I think you're reaching that second level of people." In other words, there's at last a group coming along who's willing to admit that something is going on. Way back in the fifties people had open minds, which was essentially defeated through ridicule -- anyone who saw a UFO was basically a hillbilly or whatever.

NIGHT VISITORS ON THE LAKE

I live on a ten-acre lake. One night, right after I moved into the house, the bedroom lit up, like somebody was shining a bright light from the outside in. It woke me up and I looked out the window. On the lake what looked like a disc-shaped UFO was surfacing like a submarine. It had something like blue plasma going around it in a circle and was rather spectacular. To me it seemed made of metal, was about twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter, and as it surfaced it came over to my dock. I kind of remember going toward my deck, which has a better view of the dock and is about fifty feet away; the bedrooms are in another section of the house. The next thing I remember is standing on the deck looking down at the UFO. It was pulling away from the dock, got away from the trees and took off at a high rate of speed. I turned to the front of my house, looked out and saw cars go by. To me, to my senses and everything, that UFO was just as real as those cars going by -- like you see a 2002 Volkswagen drive by and you can identify it as a Volkswagen, or you can identify a Lexus or whatever.

Another incident involved a woman I knew, an engineer out at White Sands. A friend of mine, his father and she were out hiking one day in the area, kind of walking along a bluff. As they got to the top of the bluff they could peek over into the valley with just their heads showing from below because of how the path went. They looked into the valley, and there was a UFO with a couple of smallish beings in silver suits picking up rocks. And because the three scientists really couldn't be seen, they looked the beings over, examining them. I was in high school at the time. It became kind of a joke almost, and we were telling the woman that she was crazy but she kept insisting it was real and eventually she convinced me that she really saw the UFO. And that was kind of the first time I knew that UFOs might exist, because I believed this woman scientist.

Continued tomorrow.