I always find myself on the fence about retired military personnel who come out in their twilight years and make claims that UFOs are real and that the government has aliens or alien bodies. On the one hand, it makes sense. I mean, what do they have to lose? They can’t get fired. They aren’t afraid oif the government retaliating against them in any way. So they spill their secrets. On the other hand, maybe their old age has just made them bat-shit crazy? But honestly, none of the guys I’ve seen have come across as anything but completely sane and full of conviction.
When Air Force Lt. Col. Richard French was an alleged lead investigator of Project Blue Book in the 1950s, his job was to shoot down false reports of UFOs.
Given his job, French never dreamed he’d end up in Newfoundland one day watching what appeared to him to be two extraterrestrials performing repairs on a submerged, unknown circular craft.
In Washington, D.C., recently, the 83-year-old retired officer testified at the Citizen Hearing On Disclosure panel of six former members of Congress about his work as a UFO debunker in 1952.
French recounted how the Newfoundland incident unfolded decades ago, in the early 1950s, after two UFOs were seen by many people off the coast of St. John’s. French’s superiors ordered him to look into the situation.
“They said, ‘We have a UFO report and we want you to investigate it,’ and that was standard for what I was doing,” French told The Huffington Post. “They told me there were two of them involved and that they were deep under the water, after entering the water doing roughly 100 miles an hour.
“There were a lot of people assembled on the wharf, at least 100 standing around just looking in amazement at the water, including several local policemen.”
French recalls the water was very clear and he could see two circular craft, each one about 18 feet in diameter and approximately 3 feet thick. He said the two objects were floating below the surface of the water, a couple of feet apart, not more than 20 feet from the shore. And he saw two beings in the water near the ships.
“The first thing I saw was the UFOs, and it was apparent to me that they were doing something to the craft, and I couldn’t really tell what because they were on the bottom side of it and not visible to me except when they would occasionally get over to the side where I could see them. The water was fairly clear and I could see without any trouble. They weren’t down at the bottom of the [seabed] — they were about half way down.”
French told HuffPost that the two beings he saw “were about 2 or 3 feet tall, light grey in color, very thin, long arms with either two or three fingers. The top of their heads was much wider than their jaw line, their eyes were very slanted and you couldn’t see pupils in them. They looked the way [aliens] have been depicted in motion pictures.”
As the Air Force UFO debunker watched, he claims one of the ships began to rise out of the water.
“When it hit the [surface], it was going about 100 miles an hour. It then accelerated to somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 to 3,000 miles an hour and disappeared. It returned about 20 minutes later, slowed down to nearly a stop before it entered the water, then went down, and the two [beings] worked together.
“It took them about 20 minutes and then the two ships departed together, again slow when they exited the water, and immediately they sped up to a very high speed. I believe they were repairing [the ship] and tested that the repairs had been adequate, and then away they went.”
Ironically, French’s job at the time — as a Project Blue Book investigator — was to debunk UFOs. So, what kind of report did he file with Blue Book about this case he had personally witnessed?
“Needless to say, it was a fictitious report, as all of them were. I didn’t really say that they were UFOs — I said that there was something we didn’t know — some type of foreign or unrecognizable vehicle there. In other words, I weasel-worded it.
“Oh, I think without a doubt it was a UFO and I think there were aliens aboard it. There’s no question in my mind that was exactly what it was, and my duty was to debunk the story, so I did my best to do so.”
The events of the Newfoundland UFO and alleged aliens took place some 60 years ago, in the days before everyone had a digital camera or image-capture cell phone in their pocket. Despite the fact that there are no photographs to substantiate the report, it’s still an amazing story.
So what are we to make of this? Because it’s not the first time French has stirred up the UFO-ET pot.
Last year, he told HuffPost exclusively that there wasn’t just one UFO crash near Roswell, N.M., in 1947 — he said there were two.
I’m not sure about this whole “two crashes at Roswell” thing. I’ve heard it before, and other versions have it as two crash sites for the same vehicle. Ultimately though, without any real proof, these are just interesting stories.
