The possibility of extraterrestrial life fascinates
almost everyone, and the world is full of
people who claim to have some experience about
UFOs and their alien passengers.
Not all of them are random farmers and rural
residents with strange tales of little green
men and strange lights in the sky, either.
In fact, there’s a surprising number of
famous people who just might know a thing
or two about alleged alien activity.
10.
Winston Churchill
It’s tempting to think that the little green
men Winston Churchill might have seen were
an unfortunate side effect of his massive
alcoholic intake.
However, not only was the legendary British
Prime Minister’s relationship with alcohol
vastly exaggerated, but he actually had to
deal with UFOs in his professional capacity
at least once.
In 2010, the British Ministry of Defense released
a number of UFO-related documents to the National
Archive.
Most of it involved 1950s intelligence chiefs
trying to figure out the whole “unidentified
flying object” phenomenon, but one document
mentioned a much older meeting.
During World War II, Churchill was present
in a meeting where they discussed a reported
encounter between a strange, disappearing
UFO and some Royal Air Force bombers.
Churchill was so concerned by the incident
that he immediately ordered the story to be
kept secret for at least 50 years, to prevent
what he described as “mass panic.”
He also reportedly said that a future Prime
Minister should review the story and decide
whether to release it.
To be fair, other sources state that the story
is largely based on unverified documents and
there is very little hard evidence.
It’s up to the reader to decide whether
this means that the story is just one of the
many dubious UFO stories floating around…
or if the British Government is just really,
really good at keeping secrets.
9.
Hillary Clinton
The 2016 Presidential Race was such a wild
ride that few people even remember that at
one point, a candidate literally offered to
open the famed X-Files to the public.
The candidate was Hillary Clinton, and she
made the promise during an interview with
Jimmy Kimmel.
Of course, she included a few conditions:
She wouldn’t reveal any information that
presented a threat to national security, but
other than that, she’d be prepared to open
all UFO-related files.
This was a significant departure from the
sitting President’s policy, as Barack Obama
had always dismissed any such talks with a
quick joke.
Since Clinton was otherwise a fairly cautious
and moderate candidate, the ease with which
she talked about the possibility of extraterrestrial
life surprised many.
She was also extremely up to date with the
subject, and corrected Kimmel that the current
government nomenclature isn’t UFO anymore.
Instead, they apparently prefer UAP, which
stands for “unexplained aerial phenomenon.”
Was it all just a plan to draw more interest,
and hopefully votes?
Or does Clinton, a former First Lady, really
have some information that she would have
liked to release, given a Presidential security
clearing?
This is yet another case where everyone gets
to make up their own mind.
However, Clinton is on record saying the following
about UFOs: “There’s enough stories out
there that I don’t think everybody is just
sitting in their kitchen making them up.”
8.
Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers
If you have any opinion of the early 2010s
pop phenomenon the Jonas Brothers, chances
are that the word “brave” doesn’t feature
in the first few sentences.
However, the youngest of the brothers, Nick
Jonas, qualified for that description in 2015
when he openly talked about the UFO sighting
he experienced during his teens.
When he was 15, Nick was hanging around in
his backyard with a friend when they suddenly
saw three flying saucers in the sky.
At first, he refused to believe his eyes,
but his friend said that he saw the same thing.
So Nick went online and discovered that just
two weeks before, there had been three different
sightings that all described the same thing
that he had witnessed.
This experience made Nick Jonas a low-key
UFO enthusiast who’s always interested in
mysterious phenomena.
In 2015, he was enthusiastic about the strange
blue lights seen over the California sky,
and said: “That blue light freaks me out
in the best way possible.”
Of course, that particular light turned out
to be a Trident missile launched by the Navy,
so who knows what his original sightings were?
7.
Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott, veteran director of several
Alien movies, Prometheus, and Blade Runner
(among other things), believes that humanity
is likely doomed as soon as we actually meet
any alien spaceships.
According to him, experts estimate that there
are up to 200 otherworldy species following
a similar evolutionary path as we do, and
if they are so advanced that they can travel
through space to meet us, they’re also going
to be advanced enough to wipe us out easily
if they felt like it… which, according to
Scott, there’s a very real chance that they
might.
It’s unclear just how Scott has acquired
this information.
Maybe one of his scientific advisors over
the years has given him information that is
so classified that most people will never
hear about it.
Or it could be that he’s just a man who
has made several successful movies about hostile
aliens, doing what he does best and telling
a story.
Regardless of what Scott himself thinks, some
very reputable experts disagree with him:
Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with the
extraterrestrial life -seeking SETI Institute,
has said that there is absolutely no data
that supports Scott’s estimate of up to
200 hostile species.
Then again, Shostak goes on to say that the
actual number of humanoid alien lifeforms
out there could be around five times higher,
so maybe Scott was just breaking the news
lightly.
6.
Kesha
Kesha is another singer who says that she
has witnessed a UFO.
Unlike Nick Jonas, however, she decided to
make the experience a part of her art.
The artist doesn’t say exactly when her
sighting happened, but she was in the Joshua
Tree national park.
She also makes a point of stating that she
was completely sober at the time.
This disclaimer makes sense, because what
followed sounds a whole lot like the product
of an… inspired state of mind.
She was walking around in the “desert,”
when suddenly, she looked up and saw 5-7 UFOs.
She was so shocked that she didn’t even
think of taking a picture — she just stared,
when suddenly, the lights in the sky zoomed
away.
Then, as she was still trying to get her bearings,
they came back in a different formation.
At that point, she realized what she was looking
at: Alien spaceships.
She fully realizes that what she saw seems
hard to believe, and that she has no proof.
Even so, she found the experience so defining
that it became part of the theme of her next
album, Rainbow.
One of the album tracks is even named Spaceship.
5.
Fran Drescher
Fran Drescher, most famous for her role in
the sitcom The Nanny, was not content with
just seeing spaceships hovering in the sky.
She actually claimed that she was abducted
by aliens when she was young, and that they
implanted a chip in her hand.
What’s more, she says that her ex-husband,
producer/writer Peter Marc Jacobson, was also
abducted and carries a chip of his own.
They apparently have very similar-looking
scars in the exact same spot of their hands,
though Jacobson was sceptical about the theory
and thought Drescher’s scar was from a drill
bit or a hot cup of water.
A few days later, Drescher completely changed
her tune and said that the whole thing had
been a joke that people had believed a little
too well.
This is certainly a more plausible explanation
than aliens branding The Nanny with strange
microchips.
Then again, in the interest of fanning the
flames of a wonderfully strange story: Isn’t
that exactly what you’d say if aliens were
listening in on you through a microchip in
your hand?
4.
Ronald Reagan
It’s probably not a massive surprise that
the man who proposed the Star Wars program
thought that an alien attack was a possible
political scenario.
However, no one could have imagined what President
Ronald Reagan did in 1985, in the middle of
the Geneva Summit with the Soviet Union.
Reagan took a lakeside walk with his Soviet
counterpart, President Mikhail Gorbachev,
accompanied by only their personal interpreters.
It wasn’t until 2009 when their discussion
was made public in an interview with Reagan’s
Secretary of State at the time, George Schultz,
and Gorbachev himself.
When Schultz remarked that the two Presidents
of the Cold War countries came back from that
walk, they acted almost like friends.
At that point, Gorbachev revealed what the
walk had been about: All of a sudden, Reagan
had asked him: “What would you do if the
United States were suddenly attacked by someone
from outer space?
Would you help us?” Gorbachev said that
they absolutely would.
Reagan replied that the US would return the
favor, if things were the other way around.
Maybe this was just a clever ploy by Reagan.
Maybe he had some actual, worrying information.
Or maybe he, a lifelong science fiction fan,
only had an overactive imagination.
Still, no matter the reason — just like
that, the two leaders had privately agreed
to stop the Cold War if aliens started making
trouble.
3.
Tom DeLonge
Tom DeLonge is the former guitarist of the
pop-punk band Blink-182, which doesn’t necessarily
sound like the perfect pedigree to become
an influencer of any sort, except maybe for
earworm tunes and T-shirt sales.
Still, that’s precisely what DeLonge is
for the UFO research community.
Since quitting the band in 2015, he has become
a well-connected and influential mouthpiece
for alien investigation.
He is said to hold sway over many scientists
and former government insiders, in no small
part thanks to his rock star charisma that
is like catnip to the more reserved and gray
personalities both professions generally attract.
In 2017, he launched the To The Stars Academy
of Arts & Sciences, a collective of researchers
and creatives that focuses on the many classic
X-Files-style ideas that DeLonge is so fond
of.
But here’s the thing: As tempting as it
is to write DeLonge off as a complete lunatic,
there’s a chance that the man knows something
about… well, something.
Case in point: Just months after To The Stars
was founded, one of the foundation’s first
employees became a main source for the New
York Times article that ended up revealing
a decade-long, top secret Pentagon program
that investigated UFO activity.
2.
Edgar Mitchell
Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell probably
wasn’t the most popular guy at NASA get-togethers.
Sure, he was the sixth man to walk on the
moon, and an instrumental part of restoring
the agency’s reputation after Apollo 13
became such a disaster that Tom Hanks would
later star in a movie about it.
It’s just that the three days Mitchell spent
returning to Earth after his Apollo 14 mission
did something to him.
No one seems to know what, least of all Mitchell:
He just says that he started feeling “an
overwhelming sense of universal connectedness,”
and that the experience was nothing short
of an epiphany.
After this experience, Mitchell became a devoted
preacher of extraterrestrial life.
He has stated on multiple occasions that there
is intelligent, benevolent life on other planets,
and that we have already been visited by them,
including saying that: “I happen to have
been privileged enough to be in on the fact
that we’ve been visited on this planet and
the UFO phenomena is real.”
“It’s been well covered up by all our
governments for the last 60 years or so,”
he has said.
“But slowly it’s leaked out and some of
us have been privileged to have been briefed
on some of it.
I’ve been in military and intelligence circles,
who know that beneath the surface of what
has been public knowledge, yes – we have
been visited.”
NASA has managed to balance the tightrope
of their heroic astronaut telling everyone
they’re lying to people about the existence
of aliens with grace: “Dr Mitchell is a
great American, but we do not share his opinions
on this issue.”
1.
Jimmy Carter
We have already talked about Presidents and
presidential hopefuls who have hinted that
there might be something beyond our understanding
out there.
But only Jimmy Carter has actually filed an
official report about a UFO sighting.
During his presidential campaign, no less.
The year was 1973, and then-Governor Carter
was hot on the campaign trail.
One evening, while waiting outside for a meeting
in Leary, Georgia, he saw what he described
as “the darndest thing I’ve ever seen”:
an extremely bright object that kept changing
colors and was about the size of the moon,
hovering above the horizon, then moving toward
the Earth and finally disappearing in the
distance.
The event was witnessed by 10-12 other people.
Carter was so impressed by the incident that
he not only filed an official report and told
a reporter that he’d never again ridicule
anyone who claimed they saw a UFO — he actually
promised that if he were elected, he’d work
to release every piece of information about
flying saucers available to the public.
Of course, when he was elected, he immediately
backtracked and said that the information
couldn’t be released because it would pose
a threat to national security.
