Astronaut Gordon Cooper on UFOs
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishAccents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Hi there. Welcome to History obscura. Today I'm taking you back into outer space. Today's topic is about Major Gordon Cooper. You may or may not be familiar with Gordon Cooper a man board in Oklahoma in 1927. Well, this was a particularly intelligent and ambitious man. And following studies at the University of Hawaii, the University of Maryland and the Air Force Institute of Technology, Cooper was posted to the flight test engineering division at Edwards Air Force Base in 1956. There, he worked as a test pilot, flying the F 102 a and F 106 beat. On February 2nd, 1959 Cooper was invited to attend a NASA briefing on Project Mercury, a project that would involve piloting spacecraft. Cooper went through the selection process alongside another 109 pilots and was not only selected to take part in the Mercury program but was the youngest of the seven pilots chosen. By the time Gordon Cooper joined the space program, he was already a firm believer in the existence of UFOs, having experienced his own brush with the unknown. In 1951 the sighting occurred while Cooper was flying an F 86 Sabre jet over western Germany. What he saw in the sky was a group of metallic saucer shaped disks that could outrun and outmaneuver any American fighter planes. That was not the only time that Cooper would see UFOs. On May 3rd, 1957 when Cooper was at the Edwards Air Force Base, he was managing a setup of a precision landing system on a dry lake bed. Part of this system included a camera that took photographs at one frame per second as an aircraft landed upon returning from their work on the site, the crew James Bid IQ and Jack Gettys told Cooper that they had seen a strange looking saucer like aircraft. The unidentified flying object apparently made no sound either upon landing or takeoff to Cooper, who knew his crew was very experienced in the field of experimental aircraft. It was noteworthy that Vatican Gettys were both so anxious about the incident. They told him that the saucer had hovered over them before landing some 50 yards away. With the help of three extended landing years. To report the incident, Cooper used a special telephone number at the Pentagon. The voice on the other end of the line told him to have the cameras film developed and send it to the Pentagon, but under no circumstances actually look at the photos or make any prints. Gordon Cooper looked anyway, and he found high quality photos of exactly what his crew had described. Contrary to what he expected, there was no follow up inquiry, and he never heard about the photos again. In 1978 Cooper shared his UFO experiences with the United Nations. He told them, I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets. Most astronauts were reluctant to discuss UFO's. I did have occasion in 1951 to have two days of observation of many flights of them off different sizes flying and fighter formation generally from east to west over Europe. Though it has been reported that Cooper witnessed agreeing glowing UFO during his Mercury space flight in 1963 the astronaut later denied such an event had ever occurred. Nevertheless, he continued to speak publicly about his UFO experiences while working as a test pilot, even mentioning them in his book Leap of Faith. An Astronaut's Journey into the Unknown, which was published in 2000. In his book, Hooper shared his experiences with the Air Force and NASA, along with his belief in a UFO cover up conspiracy. This is from the book. It's clear that our government started out in the 19 forties trying to keep UFO information quiet because of a concern about public panic at the thought of vehicles from space being able to outperform our best aircraft by multitudes, which meant that we would have little defense in the case of interstellar warfare. That concern was expressed by none other than U. S Army General Douglas MacArthur, who warned in his last major address to Congress in 1955 that the people on Earth must unite to make a common front against attack by people from other planets. I give the public more credit than our government has. At times. Most people want to know what's going on in the world around them and would rather hear the truth, whatever it is, then a pack of lies. After the government told the first untruth about UFOs, it had to tell another to cover that one, then another and another. It just snowballed. And right now I'm convinced that a lot of very embarrassed government officials of sitting in Washington trying to figure out a way to bring the truth out. They know it's got to come out one day, and I'm sure it will. America has a right to know, but as I see it, our government is now trapped in a big box of old lies. It's going to take a lot of courage on the part of some future administration to say, folks, our government has been lying to you all these years. Now we're going to come clean and tell you the real truth. As I said, that's going to take courage, something there doesn't seem to be a surplus of in Washington these days. Cooper assumed that the film his crew had obtained at the Edwards Air Force Base had been passed on to Project Blue Book, the official study of UFOs conducted by the U. S. Air Force starting in 1952. Once the project was declassified, however, he saw that his report had not even been included in the Air Force's list of UFO sightings. He later learned that the crew members who had witnessed the UFO were told by authorities within the Air Force that the object they'd seen was a weather balloon distorted by the effects of the desert atmosphere, a claim that clearly did not satisfy Cooper. The astronaut concluded that Project Blue Book had been more about placating the public than actually conducting any serious studies into UFOs, he said, called Blue Book What You Will. But while continuing to deny the existence of UFOs and eventually terminating its own investigation, the Air Force never attempted to offer any credible explanation for sightings of objects flying around our airspace, whose flight characteristics seem to preclude them from belonging to our military or any military on the face of the Earth. Years later, Gordon Cooper met a man by the name of Dan Frye. As Cooper put it, this wasn't the kind of guy you found on the next barstool telling a tall tale about little green men from Mars. But he did have a fantastic story to tell about extraterrestrials. He related it in his unassuming manner was suggested that he didn't particularly care if anyone believe them or not. Dan Frye and I had seen our first UFO within a few months of each other. It was on the evening of July 4th, 1950 that Dan Frye encountered a UFO. As Cooper relates in his book From his work with aircraft and missiles, Dan knew that the craft before him was more advanced than anything in the U. S. Arsenal. His first thought was that it might be some secret technology belonging to the Russians who he'd heard were ahead of us in the development of large rockets. But this wasn't a rocket. Whatever this vehicle might be, it had operated efficiently and effortlessly in violation of the law of gravity. The builders of this machine had found the answers to a number of questions that had eluded our best physicists. For that reason, Dan had a strong feeling that the object before him had not been built in the Soviet Union or anywhere on Earth. The scientist in him to go over trying to figure out just how to handle the situation. He could return to the base and report the strange craft, but it would probably take an hour to walk back, find someone in authority and return with witnesses. What if the object took off. In the meantime, there would be nothing but a crumpled patch of brush left behind. What could we learn from that? He approached the craft. It was about 30 feet in diameter at its widest point, which was about seven feet above the ground. The objects vertical dimension, was 15 to 16 feet. Its curvature was such that from below, the craft could appear to be salsa shaped when, actually, it was more like a soup bowl inverted over a saucer. Dan Frye claimed that he communicated mentally with an alien pilot located 900 miles above the surface of the Earth, and that he was invited aboard for a ride in the ship he'd found Once inside the saucer ship. Fry told Cooper he flew over New York City and back to New Mexico in 30 minutes while communicating remotely with the alien pilot. During the flight. For I was Educated about physics, the prehistory of Earth and the ancient civilizations of Atlantis and Lem, Maria Cooper believe fries stories so completely as he later recounted it that he enthusiastically accepted the latter's offer of a flying saucer trip of his own. Cooper packed a bag and a camera and waited for fries telephone call to confirm the rendezvous point. The hours tick by, but that call didn't come much to Cooper's disappointment. Fry would later explain that the missed appointment was due to some last minute political disagreements on the home planet of his alien contact. The former astronaut was reportedly very saddened at the knowledge that he would not be returning to outer space. Thank you, as always, Good night.