UFO spotters have been dismissed as loonies. But has the US government been hiding the truth?

For thousands of years, people across the world have seen strange objects doing weird things.

And for at least 70 years, there’s been a consistent hard-line position heeded by governments, media and the military, aggressively ridiculing and stigmatising anyone giving credibility to the phenomenon of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects), better known today as UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).

Watch more on this story in the video player above

Watch the latest News on Channel 7 or stream for free on 7plus >>

Most often, in polite company, if anyone raises the subject of ‘flying saucers’ or the possibility of non-human intelligent life, they’re generally dismissed with a derisory titter and snide references to tin-foil hat-wearing swivel-eyed loonies.

Just admitting that he saw a UAP destroyed the political campaign of one US Democratic Party presidential candidate, Dennis Kucinich in 2008.

But is the mockery justified? Why do we attack people who report seeing anomalous phenomena? Are the tens of thousands of witnesses who say they have experienced this high strangeness truly all deluded?

For the past five years, momentous allegations have been unfolding, largely in secret, in private hearings, in the United States’ Congress, that are likely to soon turn our understanding of this anomalous phenomena – and the stigma attached to it – on its head.

Politicians, scientists, and whistle-blowers are now openly accusing the US Government of a massive decades-long cover-up.

They’re suggesting the world has been egregiously misled in a deliberate disinformation campaign designed to suppress interest in a phenomenon that, contrary to its public position, the US has in fact always taken very seriously indeed.

And in a 7SPOTLIGHT investigation, multiple sources openly accused the US Government of a cover-up.

The world ‘deserves to know’

In Washington DC, Republican Congressman Tim Burchett, a member of the Congress’ Foreign Affairs Committee, was explicit: “I think there’s a cover up”.

Burchett told me the American public and the world “frankly deserves to know” what he says he now knows because of briefings he’s recently received from insider eyewitnesses.

It’s easy to dismiss the claims of an outspoken politician – but it is harder to ignore the candour of an eminent Stanford University Professor, a Nobel Prize nominee no less, who also alleges a US Government cover-up.

Professor Garry Nolan, one of the world’s most renowned immunologists, who has done secret work for the CIA investigating the effects of UAPs on military and intelligence service personnel, explained to me why he “knows” there’s been a coverup.

“I’ve spoken to the people who are about to come out and whistle blow on it,” he said.

“There’s been an active cover-up. The light has finally been shone (on the perpetrators),” he told me.

What Professor Nolan is referring to is astonishingly tough proposed new laws now before the Congress, which appear likely to be passed into law within months. There is speculation that there might even be public hearings into UAPs, just like the 1970s Watergate hearings, where whistle-blowers will get their chance to testify under oath.

What is likely to happen first are private hearings, and some have quietly been underway for several years.

It is the early revelations from those secret briefings that I’m told have goaded Congress into action.

Congress and UFOs

The US Congress’ powerful armed services and intelligence committees appear to have bipartisan support for muscular new laws that will compel the release of forgotten or hidden evidence about UAPs right back to 1947.

That date is no accident.

The year 1947 is the date of one of the most mythologised alleged UFO-UAP incidents in modern history, the purported crash of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico in July that year – a conspiracy theory long denied by the US Air Force.

Congress has already passed laws demanding cooperation by all US intelligence and defence agencies to allow former or serving Government and private contractor employees to blow the whistle on UAP secrets, ensuring there are protections against them losing their job for revealing what they know in breach of non-disclosure agreements or security oaths.

But the proposed new legislation goes much further, requiring information on all unidentified aerospace – or undersea – phenomena. Congress has clearly lost its patience.

As I was told by several political representatives and their staffers, there is a feeling that past legislative mandates requiring UAP disclosure have been wilfully stonewalled and ignored.

Congressional representatives and Senators are now finding the spine to challenge the Pentagon and intelligence services, whom it believes are holding back on UAPs.

This is because of what many of them have seen and heard in private briefings behind closed doors in secure hearing rooms, including dramatic videos shot by military pilots.

Extraordinary allegations have also been made by key witnesses already in these hearings.

The New York Times reported in 2020 that a defence contractor astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, who spent years working as a consultant for the Pentagon’s UAP investigation program, gave a classified briefing to the US Defence Department on what he called “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

Witnesses have suggested the seemingly incredible, that the US may well be in possession of advanced alien technology, possibly even bodies.

Debunkers scoff, but whatever the truth is, it appears likely to soon be resolved.

Growing public interest in UFOs

Politicians like Tim Burchett unabashedly admit they can see a vote in the enormous growing public interest about UAPs.

“If you look at polling data, it actually shows the majority of people think that there is something going on,” he tells me.

As Professor Garry Nolan observes, the Congress is even demanding lists of all non-disclosure laws associated with UFO-UAP secret programs.

“Why is that interesting?” he says.

“It’s not the NDAs themselves. It’s the people who signed the NDAs because that then is the paper trail to the individuals and the programs in which they’re associated.”

Nolan also told me that he knows that one of the most disputed recently leaked smoking gun UAP documents of recent times is authentic.

The so-called Admiral Wilson memo purports to record a conversation between physicist Dr Eric Davis and a former Director of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson.

In that conversation, which Wilson categorically denies ever having, Wilson reportedly admitted the existence of a secret US Government alien spacecraft crash retrieval program.

The memo records Admiral Wilson’s purported admission that the retrieved technology was hidden outside the oversight of Congress or Freedom of Information laws in a private aerospace corporation.

Clearly, if any of this is true, it suggests that crimes may well have been committed to conceal an historic secret from public knowledge.

Professor Nolan knows such claims sound incredible but, as he told me, he believes the memo is a true record of Dr Davis’ conversation with the DIA director.

“I might say to my colleagues out there, I know this all sounds absolutely crazy, but if you’ve seen the things that I’ve seen, you would only be able to come to a similar conclusion,” he says.

The US government’s investigation

Since the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book investigation into UAPs was shut down in 1970, the official position of most western governments has been to reject any suggestion that UAPs might pose any threat to national security or flight safety.

The public was assured that no further investigation into the phenomenon was justified since that time.

But it’s now becoming clear that the US Department of Defence secretly kept on studying UAPs; the evidence suggests it never really stopped its investigations into the phenomena at all.

In December 2017, the New York Times revealed the existence of a secret Pentagon UAP investigation probing, among other incidents, a spate of unidentified objects swarming around US Navy vessels off both the west and east coast of America in 2004 and through 2014-2015.

A turning point was the so-called Tic-Tac sighting incident, involving a carrier battlegroup of ships escorting the USS Nimitz off the California coast in 2004.

7NEWS Spotlight’s 2021 report detailed how multiple sensor systems, comprising advanced radar, ATFLIR – forward looking infra-red imaging, and other optical sensor systems, corroborated the accounts of pilot eyewitnesses who testified that they saw an object that looked like a giant peppermint tic-tac, possibly a craft of some kind, doing manoeuvres far beyond the capabilities of known human science.

These objects had no visible means of propulsion, yet they reportedly moved at hypersonic speeds, sometimes instantaneously.

More recent encounters were recorded by US Navy pilots on video, and it is these recordings that were shown recently to politicians in closed hearings.

I am told by former and serving pilots that these mysterious sightings encounters are still occurring and that there are growing fears there could soon be a collision or confrontation with one of these objects (or perhaps, craft?).

In the opinion of multiple sources, it is indisputably a national security and flight safety concern.

A secret decision

Seventy years ago, a decision was made in secret by a group of scientists, military officers and spies that public interest in UFOs, what we today call UAPs, should be debunked and discredited.

A secret report was prepared for the United States’ spy agency, the CIA (the Central Intelligence Agency), recommending a mass media campaign that would “strip” Unidentified Flying Objects of their so-called “aura of mystery.”

The report said: “The debunking aim would result in reduction in public interest in ‘flying saucers’ which today evoke a strong psychological reaction. This education could be accomplished by mass media such [as] television, motion pictures and popular articles.

“Basis of such education would be actual case histories which had been puzzling at first but later explained.

“As in the case of conjuring tricks, there is much less stimulation if the ‘secret’ is known. Such a program should tend to reduce the current gullibility of the public and consequently their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda.”

In truth, the now declassified Robertson Panel report records that while at least one scientist member of the panel concluded that an extra-terrestrial explanation was the only possible conclusion for “many cases”, he was overruled by the rest of the panel.

The panel’s decision to debunk UAPs appears to have been a fix, a forgone conclusion.

This Robertson Panel decision to suppress public interest into UAPs began the now 70-year-long campaign of ridicule and stigma attached to almost any UAP sighting.

If Professor Garry Nolan is right and whistleblowers are indeed about to come forward with dramatic evidence of a US Government cover-up, then things are about to get very interesting in Washington DC.

Ross Coulthart is an investigative reporter for 7NEWS Spotlight. He is the author of a best-selling book on UAPs, IN PLAIN SIGHT (HarperCollins, 2021). Ross also co-hosts a podcast on UAPs called NEED TO KNOW.