INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE FILER III

EYE WITNESS
Major George Filer III, as told to Nancy Red Star
Sedona Journal of Emergence
November 2002

I graduated from Bradley University and ROTC, joined the air force and went to flying school. I was a member of a couple of flying units in England. That's where I really first became aware of UFOs, although I had some experiences as a child that make me think I might have seen some then.

The first time I remember seeing one as a grownup, London control asked us if we'd mind intercepting an unidentified flying object that was over the Oxford Airdrome. We were flying tankers. A tanker was up every night -- not necessarily one of ours but one from a squadron, kind of like a gas station in the air in case the weather got bad in England. So we'd put all the fighters to bed, and then we'd usually fly navigation missions over the North Sea. In any case, this particular night they asked us if we'd intercept the UFO, and we started letting down toward it. I guess we were a hundred miles or so away, and over the coast of England they cleared traffic for us so we could intercept the aliens' heading. We were at around 30,000 feet and the UFO was at 1,000 feet, so we're diving down on it at 425 miles an hour. I picked it up on the aircraft radar going 135 miles per hour. It was a very large target and I'd gotten a solid return on the radar, in other words, it appeared to be a steel structure. Control gave us headings, and a couple of miles out from it, it just flew off, up into space, almost like a shuttle launch. I don't know if you've ever seen that at night, but there are a lot of lights, there is explosive power. I asked control if there was some kind of a rocket launch in England and they said no. The UFO had disappeared and we could continue on our mission.

That kind of made me a believer; there was something out there. I couldn't see a structure exactly, but there were a lot of lights and it was on the radar -- both ground and airborne radar. To me that meant something probably not from this Earth had visited England. Talking to other pilots and their navigators and so on, you'll realize that more of us have seen something than most people think. I had one chap who was telling me that in Korea he had one right on his wing, right next to him! The number of stories starts mounting, and they're told by people you believe, because they have no reason to lie to you. All you really have to do is start asking. I'd say one out of three people will tell you that they've seen a UFO. And then maybe six months later the ones who said they hadn't seen any UFOs would tell you that they have seen them.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

I've come to the point where I just believe that this is all true. In intelligence work especially, you start getting reports, usually about some pilot who chased a UFO or something along those lines.

One of my friends chased one in Georgia. He was right on its tail when it went down close to the deck, about two feet off the ground. It was moving at a couple hundred miles an hour, and as he was chasing it, it went right down to the ground level, flying across the fields. The UFO was something like fifty feet in diameter and the two outer ends, which looked like wings, kept churning out red smoke, which was the dust off the field. My friend was with a couple of other pilots. They were right behind the UFO, but they didn't have any cameras on the planes. They chased this thing, and it was almost like it was playing a game with them, because it obviously had greater performance. They were convinced that something was there, something real. They saw the clouds of smoke coming from it and were concerned that the dust coming off the fields could get into their engines and cause an accident or something.

I remember one F-106 pilot who told me that he and his wingmen had dived on a UFO in an experience very similar to ours, but this was in Colorado. At the time, the F-106 was the hottest airplane in the air force. They dove on this thing, which was hovering, doing about thirteen hundred miles an hour. When they got near it, it took off like they were standing still. I suppose there's always the possibility that we have some tantastic, experimental aircraft that nobody knows about.

Most of the sorties involve someone in a high-performance aircraft, and these things are not twice as fast as the aircraft - they are ten times faster, a hundred times faster. They go too fast for the eye to follow, like trying to watch a speeding bullet. I personally think that they actually fly away and don't just disappear. Video will pick them up and show that they are moving - but obviously very fast, because the cameras barely keep up. When they are farther away, then they don't appear as fast, because you have a wider range on the film. In some cases they might actually disappear. The eye can't always see infrared and different aspects. In other words, technically the craft is still here, but one, the eye isn't able to keep up with it, or two, it's changing into an infrared spectrum or some other spectrum that the eye can't normally pick up. There have been cases where dogs or cats seem to be able to follow the craft, but people can't see it. There are indications that a craft will appear or disapper, and the animal still seems to be able to see it.

I have a friend who flew out of Trenton airport in a light plane. He was an airline pilot,, but he would fly these light planes for fun. He was over Pinceton when he looked off to the north and saw a UFO coming pretty fast straight at him. He thought it might hit him. Frankly, he didn't know what to do, so he just kept flying straight ahead, trying to figure out what was this thing, which looked like a disc, was going to go. First it looked like it might hit him, and then it dover underneath. It might have been just a hundred or two hundred feet below his altitude, but he passed right over it or almost right over it. He banked his plane and could see the top. He said there was a very interesting design, essentially like a wheel with four spokes on it. The ends of the spokes spread out onto the wingtips, onto all four sides of the wingtips, and crossed in the middle like a certain kind of old cross. In any case, he came about the closest to a UFO in flight that I know of. He's an engineer, intelligent, and all that, and I'm pretty sure he saw what he saw.

I was a master naviator in the air force. Our aircraft used to fly into Tehran when we were still friendly with Iran. One day we received a report that F-4s had taken off out of Teheran, to chase a UFO that people on the ground had reported seeing. Crews on commercial airliners also saw it, coming into Tehran from something like forty miles north of the city. It was probably a large craft, ,several hundred feet in diameter. Crews on the F-4s, which are usually flown in pairs with a wingman, were going to consider attacking this UFO. They turned on the fire control for their weapons, got ready to launch missiles and the systems went down, as if in some way the aliens had control over their weapons. We know the aliens are tremendously powerful and have electromagnetic energy, the equivalent of your local generating station. They have a huge amount of power, and they have worked with some stuff that can be really nasty. This energy might have been what caused their fire control systems to shut down, or the aliens could have actually accomplished it with some other method. There have been many other cases, for example, where they've stopped cars, that kind of thing, showing they have some kind of capability along those lines. There have been cases of aliens turning off engines, turning off lights in homes. Anyway, as I understand it, a second ship was sort of launched from the mothership. The F-4s were essentially inoperable, but when they got about twenty miles away, their systems came back on and they could land without any problem. But I think the crews were scared. The little ship came down and appeared to land north of the city. Although they had a pretty good fix on where it went down, when they went out the next morning they couldn't find any indication of what had happened whether the ship had landed. Many people on the ground saw the craft, and of course it was seen from the air.

There are other interesting cases with multiple witnesses and where craft were also picked up on radar. In other words, it's not just one person's eyes looking at it. Obviously many sightings are false identification of one kind or another, but when you have radar, both ground and airborne and multiple witnesses, you have a pretty good case!

I think the ridicule factor is what's defeated excellent reporting. I've had people in the Ukraine, Crimea, Russia, Argentina and different far flung places of the Earth sending me cases. You have to sit down at your computer, spend roughly a half-hour writing out what you saw. Most people wouldn't waste their time doing that unless they believe they saw something.

INCIDENT AT MCGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE (Continued tomorrow)