US government may re-open UFO investigations after 30-years shutdown

The Coalition for Freedom of Information is calling on the U.S. government to re-open investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects that it shut down 30 years ago.

Photo: US government may re-open UFO investigations after 30-years shutdown

James Fox, producer and director of the documentary film "Out of the Blue" joined forces with the Coalition to organize the panel.

"We want to demonstrate that the phenomenon is real and that it's happening world wide and we want the United States government to start an international exchange of information (and) dialogue on an official level, openly," he told CTV.ca

Using previously classified documents, the group intends to discuss many well-documented cases, including two already investigated by the American government.

The two cases include a Peruvian Air Force pilot who fired several rounds at a craft that was not affected and an Iranian pilot who claims his control panel became inoperable when he attempted to fire on a UFO.

Both pilots will speak publicly about the events on Monday at a panel discussion in Washington D.C., moderated by Arizona Governor Fife Symington.

The panel will include former government, aviation and military officials, with representatives from France, England, Belgium, Chile, Peru, Iran and the U.S. It will call for the U.S. government to re-open its UFO investigations.

The panelists have all either sighted UFOs or conducted an official investigation.

Symington himself claims that he had a sighting 10 years ago during his second term as governor.

He said he witnessed a massive object navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix, Arizona.

A pilot and former Air Force officer, Symington said the craft didn't resemble any man-made object he'd ever seen.

"It was truly breathtaking," Symington told CNN on Friday. "I was absolutely stunned because I was turning to the west looking for the distant Phoenix Lights."

The governor said that the incident was witnessed by hundreds of concerned Arizona residents who called his office.

The U.S. Air Force eventually claimed responsibility, admitting that they'd dropped flares. However Symington said that what he saw was something else, as flares don't fly in formation.

There are many high-ranking officials who share Symington's concerns, and they want the U.S. government to stop telling the public that all UFOs can be explained in down-to-earth terms.

The subject of UFOs grabbed the spotlight in the U.S. presidential race last month when Kucinich, a member of Congress from Ohio, said during a televised debate with other Democratic candidates that he had seen one.

Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter are both reported to have claimed UFO sightings.

Most turn out to be misidentified aircraft, satellites or meteors. A panelist who once worked for Britain's Ministry of Defense said 5 percent of incidents cannot be explained.

But the sightings are often dismissed by authorities without proper investigations, UFO activists say.

"It's a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?" remarked John Callahan, a former Federal Aviation Administration investigator, who said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska.

The panel, organized by a group dedicated to winning credibility for the study of UFOs, urged Washington to resume UFO investigations through the U.S. Air Force or NASA.

"It would certainly, I think, take a lot of angst out of this issue," said former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who said he was among hundreds who saw a delta-shaped craft with enormous lights silently traverse the sky near Phoenix in 1997.

The Air Force investigated 12,618 UFO reports from 1947 to 1969 in what was known as Project Blue Book. Investigators concluded that the incidents posed no threat and there was no evidence of space aliens or a super technology in operation, Reuters reports.