Citizen Hearing 2013: Rendlesham Forest Encounter, Part 2

0:03 thank you very much sir i think in our first session we did a pretty good job in terms of what's happened to you guys and you can always do military servants i can hereby are questioning that we're very concerned and i'm sure the entire congress would be i'd like to use this time to talk more about the incident uh what actually happened if it was any recordings if you took any notes and anything else you might help to educate us in terms of what we're looking at in line with what this hearing is about and i'll i think i'll just go down the line here i think i'd like to do mr pope first frescona the second and then and we'll have the the two servicemen mr pope um we have i guess a significant problem in terms of the evidence record that despite the fact that the ministry of defense case file has has now been declassified and released and you'll have some of the the the document that i referred to

1:05 uh dated february the 16th in the final where it mentions that general gabrielle visited the base um papers relating to that visit have not yet been located and i it's my that this would be perhaps the key in not just john and jim's quest for their medical records but perhaps a wider revelation of what it is that we're dealing with because clearly if if the united states air force visited and we know exactly because of that document the time scale it must be between the date of the incident itself and 16th of february people whether they be journalists or or attorneys or whoever have a very narrow window of time to go after the paper trail that must uh clearly must exist showing why such a united states air force officer visited those bases uh and it seems to me that there must be

2:07 questions that could could be asked along the lines of may we have the paperwork relating to the general's visit uh to the items of evidence which were presumably back to his headquarters at ramstein to any investigation that was done either at ramstein or by headquarters uh usaf or or dod or indeed by any other agency um so so i think there is uh this this possibility uh that armed with the declassified ministry of defense document we now know what we want that's a good point that's a good point can you speak a bit about the aircraft itself am the aircraft itself and if there were any uh presence of any life any different things any in your investigations is can you share with the committee anything along those lines well i think what i would say is that sketch of the craft and the sketch of

3:07 the symbols that you have and jim can when you question him doubtless elaborate on this i believe came from jim peniston's police notebook his his air force police notebook and again he'll correct me if i'm wrong on this but he he did as well as the photographs that he took did some sketches and and then did a a slightly more sanitized version uh which you have in front of him uh in front of you when he'd stop shaking does that exist now mr pendleton is there a notebook and pictures and all that or does the military have that i do have my own notebook and it's in my possession i i the chances of that notebook surviving are probably one in a thousand surviving what uh not being disregarded thrown away or by you sure you're gonna throw it away well at the time it was like i wanted the whole situation to go away well but

4:08 it's here the only thing's gone is your medical records at this point yeah i know i know i mean i think please don't throw it away that's no at the time that's what i i i threw it in a drawer and i i didn't exercise proper care with it and i found four years later it tells you i'm a pack rat four years later after we pcs came back to the states and uh then i said well you know i better keep that i think you better hold on to that it's just for prosperity as well as it's part of your life and a lot of history that's unfolding so it would be behoove you to hold on to it probably put it in the safety deposit box and that kind of holding on i don't mean just in a dresser drawer no it's no longer a dresser drawer that's uh i think you preserve it because it's historical and you may be rewarded more than you think well you know we've had testing done and all that stuff for the people wanted to date it i guess and uh but those are the those everybody carried notebooks back then uh the uh everybody didn't have your experience so well we were all what we did it for is the record uh for

5:10 yes and i'm i'm trying to keep everything rational and and procedural like i was used to so how do i explain all this i'm writing this down exactly and that's required as you were in charge that night that you would take as much documentation as you could so that you can prepare an adequate report that's how that works i'm sure okay mr pope are you done yes yes thank you madam chad attorney counselor anything you want to add madam chair thank you um i have to say that um as far as the importance of the evidence or what what i can say about that is this i the first several many years of my legal career was spent as a public defender and as such i went to court every day as the underdog pretty much and oftentimes didn't have any real evidence in my favor other than human testimony witness and i gained a respect for much like i'm sure each of you have through hearings such as this uh today

6:12 that the the testimony that you hear from your fellow man or woman um can be just as good if not than documentary evidence much of the in this particular case i have had the privilege of being privy to some that john and jim have had with many of some of the folks rather we've spoken about today uh some of those rather high ranking and nobody's telling or describing the sight of the smoking gun to this but just by what they say and how they to certain questions and what they might to an answer at the very end that they give it some thought it tends to point in a certain direction all the arrows point in one direction and that's not necessarily et or or black ops project but it points to something very strange and i've seen that a number of times

7:13 and i guess i would say that if this were a case if i went back that to be the younger public defender i was many years ago this would have been one of my best criminal cases to take because the testimony is all there for me to win uh that case absolutely the main thing you'd be dealing with today that you would not be if they weren't not military and regular is the military yes which is much of what this whole disclosure hearing is but that's good and we commend you for that public defenders are major in our and when you have a passion that i feel from you for them they get good representation so thank you very much mr pendleton would you like to add anything else before i go to my members do you have any questions that in that i was wondering are your questions going to go into the cover-up um we'll have to see each of these members are leaders in their own rights they're all going to get a chance don't don't press them because you know we could be here you know they'll they'll come to it though did you want

8:14 to say something about the cover-up well it's it'll take you'll take quite a while that's why well i want you to paraphrase because one thing about it you've lived it you were there you're here with us today and whatever you'd like to offer you should start i think that in a because of the culture in the environment at the time of the air force after blue book it wasn't prudent or good career moves to be talking about any type of or ufos or things like that it just wasn't a good idea for your career so when john and i left that forest that night we were we were discussing uh well how far do we go with this and tell them everything yeah well i'll be pretty much a career ender we're thinking that so we reported in the next day with our shift commander uh the morning after and we told him about what happened and he questioned his son and we were somewhat sanitized i mean instead of

9:15 being up next to a craft i was at a distance you know it was metallic you know those kind of things and he says this is just not a good idea to report this he says i think we should let it go you just let it go away so uh when i was taken down to also i called on the osi to make my report i went in there and the thoughts of preserving my career were they went away because i was scared to death osi they were just threatening me down there uh they said you know it's in the way they do is a good cop bad cop that kind of thing and i went down there and they says if you write everything that don't leave anything out this goes away okay that's exactly what i want have happened i want this to go away and so i did i wrote out four long pages of uh uh documents uh uh my statement on uh legal paper they

10:18 came back in about uh 20-25 minutes and they have a typed half-page document that is out now on the internet and they say it's my statement the history channel they're out all over it's not my statement in there it says that i got within 50 it says it's a metallic object and it's very very very uh general and uh the or the agent says and i'm not sure these these are osi agents but i was in the osi building let me clarify that too uh i knew all the agents but wasn't i didn't know these people and they said okay read this statement and i said okay and he said read it again i said okay they said we want you to memorize i read it again i said okay and and they said you you this is the official statement that you're going to your command element or anybody else from this point on

11:19 that asks about it because this is a classified investigation and osi can operate outside the the chain of command they do it over in at that time they actually worked for the state department uh and i said okay no problem so i'm under orders by because it's an active investigation by uh whoever those are people in front of me and uh so that's why i report to the wing commander he doesn't even blink an eye general williams doesn't he said listen you know williams is the wing commander general major general williams that's what he at the time is colonel williams you retired a major general and when we reported into colonel halt's office i briefly talked to colonel conrad who was the base commander at the colonel halt worked for him and then john and i met up there and then we went in and talked to the wing commander reported into the wing commander and uh explained the the i gave him the osi

12:21 i mean i told him that's what happened it was general and he thanked us very much for our time and uh told us that that he appreciate the uh the candor that we had and they never asked one and uh so there's where the cover-up probably started it started by the of that uh that statement from osu submitted sergeant you submitted that statement so it really kind of started as you were writing the statement and submitting it well when i uh wrote the four the four pages out let me make that clear man when i wrote them out i was in detail i wrote down everything that wasn't what you submitted you submitted what they asked you to submit i gave them everything they wanted they said write every detail down four pages four pages and i wrote uh the fact about the temperature about it beyond the ground the glyphs the notes from my notebook uh they were uh i didn't have my notebook there but

13:22 all that stuff was included uh including the binary code which i called ones and zeros in because i'm not math person and at that time give that to the wing commander i gave that to the osi building and did you give that to the wing commander no no ma'am what i gave to the winning commander was the osi sanitized statement and the one that i was supposed to give him and why did you not give that one to the wing commander because i was under orders from because it was osi said it was a ongoing and they can work outside the realm of the base commander wing commander and everything else like that and my position is new with this and all that that might have been the beginning of the cover-up yes i agree all right thank you and i want to badger you appreciate your service trying times some how many years ago was this this is 80 and this is now 13 that's 23 33 years ago so no that you're still standing in relatively good health thank god for that and we'll see what we can do with

14:23 thank you man thank you sir mr burroughs yes ma'am what stands out to me is the fact that you had an incident take place over three nights the largest tech fighter wing in the in the air force at the time you had over three fight flights and probably well over 150 personnel that were aware of something going on whether they were listening to on the radio whether they were observing something from their location or were actually up close and personal with whatever was out there how many times does something come back three nights in a row i've seen very little evidence involving the ufo community where something comes back more than once we had the distinct pleasure of having something business three times as you said a cover-up began immediately

15:26 it drew the attention of somebody because the c5 came in on sunday night what was reported was a team from langley air force base that had their own helicopters their own vehicles and their own security they cordoned the the force off i was posted on the gate on monday tuesday and wednesday and my orders were because i was involved already involved in the that you'd be aware that some strengths could possibly be going on if i saw anything happen it was my job to not report on the radio but to call it in on the phone don't get alarmed by anything that could be going on but if there's something of extreme importance call it on the phone so we had a team out there what what we're involved with what's also interesting to me is the fact that it it was off base and that wasn't our property at the united states air force was given the lead on this investigation is that what did they already know

16:29 was there something that keyed them into whatever we were involved with why would they send a team in from langley to investigate this from there after the investigation was concluded with the team and they there was all kinds of rumors of what was going on what sergeant pence and i did was our what we were told to do is remain quiet but over the years different personnel have come forward and been interviewed about what took place different things have come up as far as what was seen what's clear and i'm not going to hold anything back on this almost everybody involved some saw something they reported something different they reported different things that they felt and what went on there was static electricity in the air there was problems with equipment um and yet after all this went on none of us were ever brought in and

17:29 officially debriefed none of us were ever taken care of or checked out medically but none of us were relieved of duty and just recently in the past two years the um the the the the deputy base commander at the time who then was promoted to colonel ended up being base commander at that and other locations came out and went on the record and said what he saw out there he felt was of intelligence was under intelligence control one of the questions that's come up to me over the years is was it us was it somewhere else or could it be i believe what we were looking at out there on those three nights was something that was going on both with us and whatever we were doing drew something in it created a reaction and i believe this case could be the defining case in the history of ufos that might be able to break this open if there's people that are willing to take charge of this in the positions of power and look into this thank you

18:31 very well spoken thank you very much thank you very much congressman bartlett there had to be an official uh investigation of this do we have any idea where the records of my best assessment sir is that the start point was general gabrielle united states air force in europe but whether his staff after his visit conducted the or whether his staff then handed off the investigation to somebody else i don't know that sir but but at least having the start point it should enable uh freedom of information act requests to say if if you don't have those records who does

19:32 is it my understanding that when he left he took with him some of the documentation yes sir um it was the custom and practice of the deputy base commander charles holt to take with him a handheld cassette recorder on which he documented his his thoughts and observations and it's tape recording which is now in the public domain uh that is referred to in the document has been taken back to rammstein what the document does not say and is what else he took back but we know for example uh from from testimony of others that there were things such as soil that went went somewhere um samples i believe from the damaged trees that were facing this craft and indeed whatever documentation the may have taken with him

20:32 you were there when the craft took off yes sir yes sir uh there was no sound or was there sound when the craft generated uh it did generate more lighting and uh and that concerned me i thought i wasn't sure it was going to explode or i wasn't really sure about that so i did take a somewhat a defensive position on that it it it rolls off the ground uh with that uh it went up to tree level in uh momentary hovered and then took off in the blink of an eye the things that it didn't do was stuff that it should have done at least that's what i was hoping at time i was hoping for air displacement all aircraft do that from the engines i was hoping for aircraft sound all aircraft do that i was hoping for those type of

21:34 things that would occur one of the things that stopped was i after i reached a certain point was the static the feeling of clothing in that that did uh it did it with silence i also made an observation that i figured it was intelligent i mean i'm not saying it's manned i was too small for that what i'm saying that when a craft will momentarily hover murray on object and if it turns to the right that tells me it's intelligent control of some kind a drone doesn't just sit there and go why why bother it would take off and then go make the flight plan or whatever we wanted to do so that was odd and to this day i have seen any technology that would even come close to replicating uh the technology that i observed that night a matter of fact if the united states had that kind technology you could probably count your defense

22:34 budget in half and not have to worry about thing i mean it's that would be uh the the key of uh pox americana or whatever you know a piece on our american control but uh yeah that's uh uh are we gonna go back to the cover-up part of it or i i really have some issues on with the cover-up yeah this is your time uh sergeant well we're here at we invited you to come to and the members are trying to gain information um i'm gonna let him finish and then i'm gonna get back to you okay okay relative to the to the cover-up it obviously started pretty quickly because uh you were told to sign a an abbreviated sanitized statement that put you far enough away from the that it could be interpreted as hallucination or reflections or like that other than than the exchange you had when that sanitized

23:36 abbreviated statement was prepared were you ever interrogated as to the details of what you saw that's that's interesting uh the first the only time i remember consciously remember uh being interviewed that's a nice way to put it uh by uh at the osi building was on i believe it was the monday monday after the incident the incident happened on a weekend and uh i believe it was monday or tuesday when i was called in there i remember that and that's writing out my statement all that but under hypnosis uh in 1994 it's apparently uh around february first of that year it was uh noted in the hypnosis that i was taken back in into the osi building or it could have been the wing intel i'm not sure and uh also uh interrogated at that point again uh and that one was where i was

24:37 administered sodium pentathol which is a very graphic uh uh thing to watch on film um and additional questions were asked and this additional discoveries were why personally do you think there was an interest in cover-up well there's i think john alluded to it a little bit earlier i think part of the problem there was they were drawn into the area this object was drawn there uh because there was interest in the area and the interest is has to do with uh a top secret facility which i later wrote security plans for and stuff at that base which was marvelous from heath it was a c3 facility communications and it had a building

25:38 there that um at the time had a retinal eye scanner in 1980 that's like high-tech stuff and you don't really waste your your money the government's money on those kind of things over there like that and but that was the unusual part of it so there was operations within there and they were civilian by the way none of those people were wearing uniforms and then just down the street from that another mile and a half or two was mi6 uh british intelligence that operated out of there and then of course we had the control towers that were strategically placed around the base too operated radar systems and and it's also a part and i think john should talk a little bit about if you don't mind talking a little bit about cobra you want to talk about that okay yeah okay this is this is documented it's on the internet before our incident there was a

26:41 project called cobra mist i don't know if you're all any of you are aware of it but it was over the horizon radar um the russians had their project called and there was activity going on between both sides trying to counteract this particular what's interesting is and it's posted right in the um why it was shut down was when they when they posted coburn mist on the coast and by the way the nsa had a facility there with cobra mist was the fact that it didn't work properly they brought in the stanford stanford research institute to find out why it didn't work properly okay what they determined was that there was something coming from inside the country that was keeping it from working properly they had spent a lot of money on this project and they just shut it down almost immediately after that but the thing was the people that work on cobra mist

27:42 civilians and military and the stanford research institute never left they were moved on to bentwater's and it morrows from heath so what appears to happen was whatever they were working on at the time they came to realize something else was going on in the area and they continued to work forward with whatever project they were working on at the time there obviously had to be a lot of about what had happened there there are three fairly obvious possibilities one was it was an experimental something we were doing it was something the soviets were doing or it was extraterrestrial which of those was the general consensus for the rest of the base sir what do you mean for the what the rest of it well yeah there had to be a lot of discussion as to what went on out there things were shut down the discussion was uh limited anybody that was in the know

28:43 was told it was classified you don't talk about it anybody that wasn't in the talked about it how quickly were you told that oh that was the morning it started almost immediately with the shift commander and continued on with the fact and also one other note that we confirmed through the controller who was in charge of writing at the reports that day the uh all the documents were immediately classified secret yes and what's interesting is cnn chuck the carl special assignments reporter attempted to do a report on the and when he asked for the incident reports and the 15 well the 1569s and the water entries on do you want to know what his answer was given to him they disappeared they're lost somebody took them we don't know where they are okay did they give you an indication of why they were classifying it let me give you a different one last question any indication why they were classifying it no at the time i mean you've got to remember 1980 we were young airmen

29:44 um today they're yeah we we have a general idea why it was probably well it's because they wanted to cover it up as a general consensus i think at that time they had to have some explanation why you classify it um no we were not in the need to know we didn't have the clearance level or the the authority to you know ask why we were told to shut up and call her some of the other evidence that was i i would assume would be taken by general gabriel uh was in the wing command post it's a hardened shelter on bentwaters our control center for up channeling helping hands covered wagons these are code words for security reports down channel reports you know def con threes those kind of things uh they have a at the time a real real and they would record all of the uh radial transmissions on our four channels i believe we had four a command net and i think uh le net and

30:45 a couple others and they would record all that those things like that that's a smoking gun that actually had our radio transmissions and what was transpiring over the net those were taken the 1569 which is a complaint and incident report which is if once you make a blotter entry it's a more detailed uh report uh that you write out uh from your notes and uh that that would go on record but there we were told by the senior and that was sergeant coffee that uh those were immediately immediately pulled from csc central security control for uh in uh in classified secret so that that was another step toward the the containment uh efforts to have it uh um uh quieted down in in some more i'm still holding off the cover-up i really am biting at the bit on that one pretty well but you just mentioned

31:46 another opportunity to discuss something and i didn't write it down so i'm kind of what else did i i said i was going to yield back to you to ask you ask are we going to talk well it's here to see here when we're told everything's classified and anybody else that was involved it's classified don't talk about and that you know we take that seriously and protect our country's interests then they decided to make cover stories and you know the brilliance of the united states air force and cover stories i love it uh they said that it was alien they said it was e.t related they said they had floating stuff and all this other stuff was said uh it was a ufo and with a little green men basically that's what they said it was so was it absolutely not it was a craft on all origin i was on it wasn't able to determine the origin of the craft when it comes down to investigations

32:49 we take our job seriously we only report the facts as we see them there's no we have other people that can look at those things assess the situation my main threat my main issue i had that night after i knew it was an aircraft crash i just said that because we lost contact with the with a bogey about 15 minutes prior to them reporting uh reporting it and getting me to the gate so i was uh i i was thinking it was more of a security situation out there and uh we had a hundred and around 160 i believe it was six squadrons a-10 tank killers there we had 10 000 people working on that base live there we had munitions storage sensitive weapon we had c3 facilities we had part of the cobra mist team that we can't go in those areas and we had

33:50 other mission requirements that still remain classified today uh and my job was to ascertain if it was threat to the security the war making of that base that was what i was doing out there so everything we put in a report is not it's all facts we don't allude to even though i must admit i knew this thing wasn't like uh uh in the james book of known i said it had to be some kind technology that was beyond uh what we could produce at the time i mean yeah those thoughts went through my but do i report it as such no no i like stuck to the facts the fact that you saw something not normal in your training and your experience and you wrote that in a three or four page memo what you saw and what you experienced i wrote that in my statement ma'am yes ma'am what you gave to the wing commander was something less than that

34:51 yes and i you know yeah i got a little i felt really guilty about that um about giving the other one or well you're the first one there's a loyalty thing going on here too i mean i'm under orders but that's my wing commander that's my base commander i have an always to protect them and to follow their orders and not tell them anything it's not true and here i have orders from the at the osi building saying you're going to go ahead and give this statement to your command element or anybody else ask about it i lived with that for about 31 years and i had the opportunity to talk to major general williams gordon williams and that was one of the things i i brought up and he says don't worry about it following orders he says i know how it was i know what happened i understand you weren't treated fairly he says i'm here what what do you need from me okay let's hold that one right there your point's well taken and the more you

35:52 talk the more it is coming out we've heard several incidences this is roswell has nothing on this we hear and we're going to hear roswell tomorrow very cousins probably i mean the incidents sisters brothers or whatever but you know i feel your passion and your pain and 30 years plus is a long time and now to be in a situation where you can't get health care because of your cert you know it's it's way bigger than the two of you and i know you know that by now but let us continue to get the information we need to make intelligent decisions but we're here to work we're not just going to see us just for the day take our names we'll help and work with you as well but we're going to get it back to that congress that you work for who works for you i should congresswoman wilson please well um sergeant uh pennison i'll leave you more time for your cover-up if you want i mean it doesn't sound like you feel like you're finished yeah but i did have a question you mentioned sodium pentathol

36:54 was that administered during your va as part of the hypnosis or during the intelligence control or the osi in uh 1994 when i was uh out of the service retired i went to a therapist and she put me under that and under when i was that's when you told your story went way back and told the whole thing that you that's correct man okay uh and it it said that i had additional visits to the uh um and being interrogated and that's where they came out about the sodium pentathon not uh it wasn't a memory that i had oh so the sodium pentathol was when uh according to the hypnosis in 1994 that was done on february 1st 1981 are there about give or take a few days

37:54 the during the osi interrogation yes but i knew all the osi agents these individuals were not osi they were uh american one was british okay the that seems a little strange and when you didn't that make you feel like you were the the guilty one yes like something happened you made it i mean wouldn't you have told him everything you knew without it well it shouldn't surprise you man that the government's not always honest they they uh we wanted it to go away uh they said that if we went and were completely honest with them and up front this would go away uh great that's what we wanted uh but it didn't go away apparently on our hypnosis they continue to go ahead and us like we're prisoners of war a matter

38:56 of fact i think there's laws against doing that to prisoners of war okay the sodium pentathol i must agree to it i don't think they would have just gave it to me i'm thinking i can i can guess i can say well maybe they want to make sure i was telling the truth maybe that was it maybe they want to make sure that this wasn't a fabrication of a story or something like that maybe that's what they wanted to do but under hypnosis it came out to be more of a they knew things and there's things they wanted to know that didn't seem to make any difference to anything but they they had a general knowledge that this has been going on for a while there's been a a concerted effort to uh to deceive the people on it the the public and do you want to um offer any more on that subject of the cop deceiving

39:58 the cover up well i wanted to i i'm not sure how the what the i'm not sure who was actually in charge pulling the strings on this i don't know if it was the nsa i don't know if it was dis uh defense intelligence service uh they were they were down at chick sans which is 50 miles away uh so i'm not exactly sure who they were i don't even know if they were from the embassy they could have been state department who knows uh but uh the the other thing is that we they kept we most of the people all pcs permanent changes station within uh three months of the incident um i'm not saying it was you know something that was just in by design i'm saying that's what happened though on february 1st i got a promotion i became the non-commissioned officer in charge of plans and programs we wrote top secret plans

40:58 continuously planning those kind of for you know time faced deployment listings stuff like that uh you know how we'd fight the war and different wars and different scenarios and i wrote the base security plans and i worked uh under uh the direct observation in some capacity of the base well why would that happen i didn't know nothing about plans and programs man i was a security force member they they said well we'll educate you we'll send you there for the next you know six months of classes or something that they wanted they wanted to watch me so i stayed there with colonel hall until 1984. and of course i hear scuttlebutt i hear people talking about the ufo incident and that but that there are people that weren't going to know they were just you know they were just listening to the the false information that was uh put out so uh do you have anything to add yeah i i'd like to add a couple of things

41:59 of note that stands out to me number one the the state department admits there was something went on and by doing that there mean there was an international incident involved because why else would department of state be briefed the osi oversees reports to the department of state they don't report to local authorities you know in the a little bit different setup so immediately the department of state was briefed on this why would they be briefed on this if nothing of significance took place from that point i've had the privilege of sitting down face-to-face with general williams colonel conrad and colonel hall colonel hawt's on the record saying that he was aware that we were brought in and interrogated he was aware that we were not treated properly and that there was drugs or in his words we were messed um that's where my problem starts with my chain of command where were they for us when they knew this was going on and why didn't they stop it general williams who we had a face to face with said he tried to help us but when our

43:00 attorney contacted the master if we go on a record and do a statement a sworn he said he'd have memory problems that he would fail to forget he would have a problem remembering everything that went on colonel conrad was most concerned about the fact that colonel pop that colonel hall has been on the record on a lot of this stuff he said he violated the code of conduct by an officer that basically that he was out there talking about something that should stay quiet and remain classified we we clearly understand the fact that even in your positions you are given information is deemed national defense and classified but what wasn't taken into effect again is what i stressed earlier was a human and does it really matter what we was just deemed classified and that it needs to be maintained and held back from the general public why were we not given the care that we were we were supposed to receive and why

44:02 weren't we at least briefed a little bit on what we were dealing with because besides the physical problems which i have a pacemaker defibrillator in me now at 52 we are still puzzled by what we were dealing with and why it happened to us i'll yield back i'm sure i've used all my time thank you senator gravel to your knowledge were there any nuclear storage facilities within the area i can either confirm or nor deny that sir well what do you mean uh you can't confirm that did you forget the classification stuff you know this is quite a number of years and just so you're comfortable i was in cic in the army which is the equivalent of your osi and we interface with them so my question again is did you have

45:03 that there was any storage area and maybe mr pope can elaborate upon that uh there may have been a conflict on me so you better uh yeah go ahead nick you can explain nick you step forward you're a foreigner we're not gonna do anything to you was was there an issue over nuclear uh and what now what was being stored was it well sir i checked the position uh with the ministry of defense press because this is a question that comes up from time to time and i was told that if that question is asked even about a historical incident the british government's lying on that is still neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons however sir please yeah let's put the crap aside while i can't answer that question i would refer you to again what lord hill norton as the former uh chief of the defense staff

46:05 which is the uk the equivalent of the chairman of the joint chiefs basically he said look this was a nuclear base so that's that's what the chief of the defense staff said and the chairman of the military committee and do you realize that all of that hoopla was over the fact that they didn't want the british people to know that we were storing nukes over there and that they would be reacting to it that's what this is all about uh and but the but the tie-in for us here is the fact that you had extraterrestrial interest which seems to in what readings i've done in preparation for the hearing that there's a lot of this stuff that was going on with icbms not functioning when these when these extraterrestrials are around and they take an interest particularly we had this yesterday that in new mexico which was the center our quote defense posture in that regard that seems to be why they had an

47:06 interest in it and so you know th this is th this is not rocket scientific and this is not terribly secret you know the public knows about this uh this has been highly discussed uh in international and political science records uh all over that you know that we were here we still had this problem in okinawa we still had this problem why we took nukes out of south korea because that's what triggered the north koreans to start going nuke was because we had nukes in the peninsula so the uh and of course we still have nukes in europe uh so we we can we can all bury our heads in the sand say oh this is they said ha ha this is big secret not a big secret we know it what's what's the secret is the treatment of people like yourself who are just doing your job at a level uh and then everybody in the chain of command are just lying through their

48:07 and what they think good reason is does this increa increase a defense of our i don't know you know but here you answered my question so that you didn't have to say it somebody else said it of record that they were nukes and but but we i don't know about the others but i certainly about it and i've been out of office for 40 years uh now let me reiterate is there anything you want to fess up that you'll feel comfortable with and sleep better tonight if if you tell us because there's no danger to you trust me there is no danger to you uh in this regard uh you're you're out of the service uh i don't know what you signed when you're there but you have a moral responsibility like anybody else to tell the truth or or share your knowledge with us because that's what we're all trying to get to is is a level of knowledge to the public so there'll be a reaction

49:08 let me just intervene right here uh contrary to some of the things that you said and we do want the truth as much as we can get it but we don't want to jeopardize anybody's safety or anything benefits include it so i think we're going to leave that chain of thought right there and let it just lay because what i don't want to see and as members of congress we have a classification but there are two or three levels over us that we don't have so you need to know that as well there's definite levels of and i don't whatever you said 35 years ago i went and that old you took and signed that paper and gave them this instead of that you know i think we've heard that we've worked that enough today but i want you to change this changer change continue but just go somewhere else but let me let me dispute that a little bit congressman uh first off as far as i'm concerned the members of congress have the highest degree of uh of classification of what's secret now i'm not talking about order of battle where troops are put at risk because

50:10 somebody blabs about something but when i'm talking about here i'll give an example i had edward teller i was a senator for 30 days edward teller is sitting at my in my office and i barely passed physics 101 and here's this awesome person edward teller trying to persuade me on an abm system and all i could think of was when i'm listening to him talk was that he probably knows more than i ever know or he's forgotten more than i will ever know on physics and the bomb and the nuclear stuff but i'll tell you i'm equal to him or to superior to him in the determination of whether we will use the bomb period and that goes for the members of and so when we talk about that we're bound by secrecy let me tell you again that there's a supreme court decision 1972 that any member of congress can release any information on any subject of any classification level i don't care

51:11 if it's cosmic and not cannot be questioned in any other location that is the law of the land based on the constitution and the supreme court backup decision on it so we may have our differences in that but but i'll be happy that i'll be happy to terminate it on that but let me again if you want to share something that you're feeling uncomfortable about about the secrecy the cover-up please feel free to do so but if you don't feel comfortable about doing that fine i understand all i can say sir is i believe we're going to continue with our quest we believe we will expose more things as we go along things that we can verify is factual and we promise you anything that we come up with will be made available to you to help us great okay thank you very much and thank you thank you sandra you're very welcome uh councilman cook has just asked for a brief moment let me give him a minute please i was just like 30 seconds i appreciate the chairs indulgence to uh one of the senators i respect more than

52:12 any i i was a fan of him when i was in college of senator gravel here he's a wonderful man but i would take on what he said i think there is some danger to you and going beyond what might be from a member you know from our standpoint as former members of congress or even as members of congress you may not have those same protections so i advise you to listen to mr fres conga on these kinds of questions rather than any one of us who are not experts on this but you don't i mean you guys still have oaths of office we understand that and also points well well taken thank you very much uh yes thank you madam chair um very how many people i mean when i first heard you speak about this object that lit up the sky and and that you observed and touched how many people knew about that i mean was that reported in the press

53:14 i mean you're near a base was there a lot of members that at your base that knew about this uh there was quite a few people at the base that knew about the people that had the need to know uh there's other people that have seen stuff in the sky right i mean there had to be something if it came from the sky somebody had to see it there's a uh and yeah he's been on record his name is harris okay he lived just off base and uh you know of course i got to talk to him a number of years later and uh he says well you know i noticed stuff was going on he said i seen you know this light over the canopy of light over the forest he says then i see all this activity i think they were talking about the the third night with john i'm not sure and he says i was pretty he said it was all unusual stuff he says and so there was concern and then he uh also uh worked i guess he had a car shop he worked on automotive stuff

54:15 and people from the base used that and of course the scuttlebutt that which was running amok about some kind of ufo and that was actually the cover story right was uh has been seen and they they they just started to uh uh put more of those stories out and uh i think that's that's i think that's what deflated the situation with the uh the civilian population because we were uh uh with our british uh uh neighbors there i mean that uh that uh they would not you know they they heard things like we visited pubs we went to uh you know local economy we did all that stuff so there was uh there was chatter uh going on i'm sure and you know unfortunately with the chatter they were hearing was not true it was a cover and uh one of the interesting part about it and uh is a it came out in the sky

55:16 whatever book that was sky something um the sky crash yeah yeah there was three british investigators that was investigating it uh initially in 83 and one of the things they talk about and first of all is the uh uh what happened and it's the cover story they don't even know they're talking about the cover it's hilarious uh but we did it was good containment i mean it was working well uh then in 83 the news of the world uh i had a disgruntled airman apparently talked to him and they put that story out and uh that that was a cover story i mean it wasn't the right story so it worked it worked well and then then the other thing is uh i gotta ask downtown about hey would tell us about that the situation off the what situational base well you know i'm really good at invasive stuff i said what the pol trucks or what or the plane that came in or what are you talking no no don't know about about your wing

56:16 commander talking to the ufo people that you know that's the stuff they would say i mean it's all cover so we had that kind of chatter and after a while you know it's just a it's a laughable situation for people but you were were you the only two that actually saw it and touched it no ma'am uh that was uh well we had the full security flight working that night and we had the full law enforcement and the difference between security and law enforcement protects is protects the priority a b and c resources of the base the operational war making stuff law enforcement well they're like the police for the base you know they do domestics and things like that and there was 60 uh approximately about 60 of them it could have been 80 on some some nights we're doing we were transitioning earlier from the f4s there to the a-10s so there was still some overages in in so but totally on the both

57:19 of the two nights i would say it's more like 160 people uh trained observers security force they didn't all keep quiet about this the ones that were were uh directly involved yes okay uh those are the that's how it works ma'am orders and you follow orders i mean it was ongoing investigation it was you can't talk oh we don't have the privilege of congress we we can't talk about things like that criminal activity they don't use the sometimes they don't use the purpose you're right so how many other people are there any other people in your situation that were there i mean that may have touched it or there are not not touching it uh like i said i got the distinction or being close by or close by i mean you're

58:21 talking within a hundred to 200 feet that was the east gate area we had a restricted area that was down there that housed a10s they were parked in hardened structures down there and we had security response teams that were patrolling those areas alarm response teams entry controllers we had those kind of people that were working and what happened is uh the control center a order across the net saying everybody just stopped transmissions and let us talk and do what we were doing out there that was a security situation and everybody got to listen everybody unfortunately probably watched i mean they should be doing their job at that time you should heighten your security a little bit more you know if there's something going off the base don't you know start collecting an area those are some mistakes that were probably some vulnerabilities that we did that that probably we shouldn't be

59:22 known either but they happened and it was 30 some years ago it doesn't matter now uh yeah there's probably some things that were not correctly done but it was out of curiosity people were doing that i mean why wouldn't you be curious about what had happened so is there anybody else that that's in the same situation you are why would any of these people that sort of knew about it because they were close by would they cover up would they be part of the coverup yeah okay matt what's interesting is the fact that of the three nights only five statements have surfaced from what went on the first night there were three of us and one out there the second night you had the shift commander and the on-duty flight chief on the third night colonel hall took a team out there and there was also other personnel in the woods and different people saw different things so

1:00:23 that's one of the reasons why we come forward besides our health issues is i feel it's necessary that anyone that was even out in that area should have the opportunity to be checked out medically and and be told what they were exposed to especially something that's over 30 years old that's one of the questions he asked me first up he goes what the heck was going on out there that would draw this much attention from the agencies involved to this day what would still be classified and if it is what did we have or what were we dealing with that would still remain silent today almost every weapon we've ever developed back in that time frame has been exposed that we're aware of and yet today this is still classified and we can't even receive medical treatment for it should we tell them about what happened oh yes one one other thing that happened that when we sent our foia request osi blew their time limit and after we made certain announcements yes they blew it by a year but our

1:01:23 attorney can go into detail the contact we had in a make-up form they asked us to sign implying that we could be perjuring so they try to yes they're trying to throw intimidation 32 years later they're trying to intimidate you i can see that you've been yeah we're too intimidated we're not too we laughed about it we went is that the best they got is that the best they can do after 32 years is try the intimidation it had a made-up form ma'am i mean come on they think we're idiots you know that was a made-up form and and then you had contact too also our tourney and which shook him up a little bit i think because he wasn't you were you okay with that i've had the nsa call me on my cell phone just to see how i was doing and now remember i used the word weird yes this is another example of so why why why the interest 32 years later nothing happened and why

1:02:24 did they blow what's under the law the foia requests they refused they refused to answer our second what we submitted which was a little different than the first time but the excuse they used was they'd already answered the first four requests so they're not going to answer the second voyage request what are they hiding until this day you know those those dogs don't hunt they don't they're telling us stuff like they think we're airmen i mean like just two years five years in oh no no we're growing men that that stuff like it's not going to work with and you think we're going to i'll make the record clear we're not going to sit back and take anything for the united states government right now at this point i mean we're here to go ahead and clear this up the best we can and to get answers this is a step in the process and this is not over this is not over john and i i mean we're going to continue to do that once we achieve what we want to achieve we're going to go off radar you'll never hear from us again

1:03:25 never hear from us again we'll be off and that's what we want to have happen that's all we ever wanted to have happen we wanted it to go away you want those those questions answered which you deserve yes and i think if the if the if we didn't have the caveat for congresswoman two more minutes please if we didn't have the caveats that were laid on our uh command structure at the and also the classified documents that then programs that were going on which have been declassified now we will talk about them later um i i don't think that uh i think here's here's let me let me go and change my my thought on this if if you look at the take a look at the bent waters incident reynolds force incident uh

1:04:26 not as a ufo incident but as a incident that uh is going to cause apparently the dod and other federal uh federal agencies uh if now that any of that information got out why is there so much grief involved why is there something so classified that it can't get out well i think it's because and i'm going to go ahead and say this my thoughts on it i think it's because of the lies that have been done for the last 85 years i think they don't want the real truth to come out not because they american people can't handle it because they don't want to get caught with their pants down that's the problem they've been lying about ufos that's what that's what's going on here you know what if you ask a question to the united states government anybody you say well

1:05:26 tell me what you know about ufos well you know what that's not the right what you've got to do is you've got to ask the right questions tonight to whatever agency you're you're asking you've got to be very specific at what you're asking you know what to say tell me about ufos oh um well ufos like says ufos cfos they don't they don't give me i yield a half a minute let me help you on that one sure when they when the issue is brought before the white house the white house says there's nothing out there you know nothing's gone on nothing's being covered up so in order to back up the white house the whole chain of command within the continues this this this mockery uh of of not telling the truth because this is the position of the white house if the white house came out and said well there is then all all bets would be off so it it starts there and it ends down at you i think it's bigger than that though i think it's i think presidents come and

1:06:27 okay i think you folks come and go i don't think i don't think these secrets are general knowledge to you or or to presidents okay that's my thoughts on it uh an interesting conversation i'll share with you uh uh we were coming back from a larry king in 2007 and governor simonson was in there and he was i guess friends with president clinton or still are is still is uh some kind of situation over their friends so uh we got done with the show and the president uh had called fife and was talking to him and of course he's on but he didn't know he brought the conversation about the two questions that he asked when he was president you know like who killed kennedy and our ufo was for real yeah yeah he didn't know either he didn't have a need to know apparently but that time has

1:07:29 thank you thank you very much thank you very much you too sir thank you very um one thing you said sergeant in that last and the more you talk the more information we get by the way but you did say something if you take ufos out of it that is the issue you were pulled out of that's it next congressman cook well all the chair's admonition to focus my questions on the incident with one i'd like to turn back to the medical because i think in the context that you open up maybe a small file as far as most people would consider you might be able to take a truth embargo blockade and maybe move it a brick at a time but that's where major cracks start occurring and where things start

1:08:30 falling into place now if this panel for example and i'm going to talk to each one to see if i could get to sign a letter that i'm going to be asking them to help compose to both the veterans administration and to the president of the united states because we've had let me well on a very yes yeah wait till you hear what's going to be in the letter you may not be so enthused i figure you've got you've had three very strong united states senators fighting with the veterans administration i think it's time to ask president obama himself in the letter maybe we'll initially send it to veterans with a copy to him and then we'll send it to the president of hope or something to ask for something very simple here something that may not sound very dramatic to anybody and that's

1:09:32 sergeant burroughs and sergeants medical records because i submit if we see in those white gums if we see in those heart problems at a young age of a recent air force person that served in england if we find uh some of the other and i can't remember each i wrote them all down i've got i may have to talk to you again to get this letter but but i submit that if we those kinds of evidences and what there's no legal reason i've even chatted with an attorney during the break to withhold a medical record and i'm sure your attorneys probably would confirm what what my attorney just told me i think this could be the start of that brick taking down process at least so we'll know now getting back to the incident

1:10:34 bent waters and woodbridge and i'd like first focus this on nick pope now they're in suffolk county now is excuse my lack of geography of your country but uh ipswich is that close yes it is yeah i just remember station well serving in in britain from my church actually uh we would go up to there to get american hamburgers because quite honestly with all due respect the british wimpy's just didn't meet our standards in those days but and the reason i'm asking that is because even though those are two raf royal air force bases how many american servicemen are on those or surrounding those bases are on those bases compared to how many british service people the bases are prefaced as royal air force right but essentially sir that's in name only okay there is i i think literally one or

1:11:36 two british liaison officers i needed the clarification so almost everybody there is an american yes sir okay now this can explain maybe general gabriel coming in there and just taking charge and upsetting the minister of defense at the again yes yes sir i mean because i'm going to ask nick pope this question directly if gabriel hadn't been taking evidence the way it's outlined in your at the time been taking it and taking it back to what einstein germany or whatever it was you said the minister of defense was upset this was in the early stages of the thatcher the iron lady what did he do about it what did the british because this is a significant thing a minister of defense not being happy with something the united states general just did we've heard this stuff about nuclear

1:12:39 weaponry and i think there might be very definitely to that some kind of well the british have nukes too it's not just the american but this must have as you say these were american operated things and i'm going to try to hurry this up a bit but what can you tell me about that clearly there's already lots of evidence of radiation of something strange that had to be stopped immediately and covered up doesn't necessarily mean ufo as mr peniston has absolutely told us but give us just a little more detail so that we can get a sense of why so quickly and then and i just take a minute because i've got a lot i still have to get into the incident itself i've only got a few minutes left okay i i apologize if i have inadvertently misled anyone in this point i i meant to say uh that the the ministry of defense was corporately upset uh about this

1:13:39 not not the minister personally but to um just expand on that point uh clearly america was always regarded by by us in the ministry of defense as as the senior partner within nato and there was i think the best way i can characterize a sort of unwritten don't criticize the rule and uh so while you'll see in some of those british documents a discernible frustration with the way in which the americans took over this investigation that was never articulated in a more fulsome manner okay uh anyway there is a very strong suspicion of nuclear weaponry information exchange or something going on here but we don't know but the question i have for sergeant peniston here these two submittals to us today

1:14:39 my understanding is you drew this yes when was this first given after when did you draw this first of i believe it was the 27th 28th 29th of so right within a day or two of the first yes and what about this that was drawn last year uh the one in my notebook is a is two um it's too squiggly i'm right in there free hand and i was nervous uh and so i cleaned it up to show exactly what it looked like and that's what it looked like except but this isn't the notebook that you did not throw away am i right no this book this book is i still have it and uh you have to verify that uh but the circular object at the bottom of it is actually on the top on on the uh notes i have and and that's where it was on the craft so okay this is what that's what i wanted

1:15:40 to ask you next but you answered it this this was what you believe and then the original notebook that this came from was written was done at the same essential time right it was dense december december the notebook was written in real time sir okay at the time uh okay so um and you say this was on the that's my observations and part of my report yes so when did anybody that's superior to you in the air force or anybody in the united states government at all see these initially when did you first submit these uh the drawing uh the rough drawing of the craft was done for osi it says right on their osi yeah but well i can't read it too well that's so small well it's 20 i can't read whether it's 29th or 21st or we're right but that's okay so it was in

1:16:42 and i take it this was not submitted at that time no unless you submitted the no the glyphs were not uh that was uh strange because they uh in the interview i i wrote down i said there was glyphs i said you wanted to see what the gloves looked like they didn't care about it i knew they knew i that's what i thought okay i have another minute okay well let me ask you then uh who do you recall or what title of the person that you submitted this to and what were their reactions osi does not wear uniforms uh their ranks are restricted um but like i said they had to be from another base or they either probably had the state department the odd part when you said they had to be was there a requirement or is that what your perception is no the uh at that osi it doesn't work for the wing commander or air force or anything like that over there yeah and whether in overseas uh capacity in england they work for the state

1:17:43 department in london are working on london that's what they're so this is why you're saying the state department knew full well what you were saying days of when you said it or when you first described it to your right and and also with uh uh mr pope they there there's back up on how fast the mod started uh investigating it too though with the um other people coming out there i mean a matter of days there's people out there investigating and if mr pope could just quickly add anything there on that my understanding is that uh certain people came out to check potential nuclear chemical biological or radiological hazard phenomena please yes the gentleman two extra minutes thank you very much go ahead uh that was really all i wanted to say on that point sir my understanding again as i say is is that it was the potential hazard that that was of of interest and and

1:18:43 really the yeah the potential nbc has it and uh sergeant j burrows i wanted to ask you uh were you aware at the time that uh sergeant pence and was sending this to the osi folks or no sir you were when did you learn about sergeant pence i can't give you the exact approximate it was in the early 90s when colonel hall released the three statements so and there's more information coming out okay that that is one of our questions number one why the memo was ever released number two why the tape was ever released and number three why our statements were released all that was done after we were told it was going to remain classified and we didn't have to worry about it any longer ah and give me again a sense of the dates on those real quickly here the the of when those different releases occurred the memo came out i believe in 83 right nick when news of the world took it

1:19:44 yes in 1983 the memo through freedom of information act was released to the general public shortly after the tape was released and put all over the air and last but not least our statements were released in early in the early 90s by colonel hall okay and one thing i'd like to add yeah this is my take personally from talking to the colonel i believe he wants to talk more but because it's still classified i believe he feels and he's gone on the record saying that that he'd be willing to talk about what he knew if the members of congress would bring him in swear him in and he would have the protection given to him to talk about what is classified and what's going on okay let me make sure i understand is this the same colonel that worked for gabriel at the time no colonel halt was the deputy-based commander oh they're their names are similar right colonel hall i believe would come forward and he's made statements to the fact that he would be willing to testify everything he knew in front of congress okay well let me just ask you then that if nick you know or if

1:20:44 uh sergeant peniston you know or anybody else that might know within a day or two of the december 26 or first sighting let's say the memo clearly showed some indents into the part of the forest where you the craft as being am i right about that that's correct there's there's no question about there's another question no that he he and he wrote that memo the colonel that was assigned to general uh gabriel that we did that did get released from that was the one letter or the one memo we have was i'm just trying to make sure i got this right not sure where he's going with this i i i'm not i'm not going anywhere i'm just trying to gather excuse me just one moment uh the gentleman time has expired would you like another minute so just one minute just one more time i

1:21:47 i'll try to explain the chain of command yeah general gabriel was in charge of the entire usafe area right okay general basley was the third air force commander okay um colonel halt would have worked for colonel conrad and general williams so he wrote the memo and the way the story was told was he was told to after general williams took the tape to general baisley and they came back this was the exact words of colonel hall the staff got together reviewed the tape and they said uh we don't want to touch this this is a birdie's problem come back general williams came back to colonel hall and said go ahead and write up a brief memo and brief the british on what happened okay but he def that memo definitely talks about those indentations it definitely talks about a much higher than normal radiation level that he checked out a day later that's what i needed to understand thank you i yield back any time thank you no no thank you very much but congressman bartlett would like

1:22:49 to ask additional questions i believe the year was 1957. i was at an american physiological meeting i had just come off of four years of teaching medical school i was now a very a young phd in a very serious basic researcher working at the national institutes of health i was going to deliver a paper i did deliver the paper on physiological effects of colitis in humans this was just after alfred kinsey had published his first book so you can get some idea of the of the environment at that time there was some serious concern that i would be punished for this by nih that there would be repercussions for giving this paper this was not the kind of thing you did at that time i thought that medically it would be nice to know whether medical activity would be hazardous to your health or not and so we published that paper one of

1:23:50 the members of the press came up to me and said you don't need to worry about repercussions from this because uh there would be all hell to pay in the press if in fact there were repercussions because you are giving this paper today relative to the question that senator gravel asked it really disturbs me that there would be a suggestion by the way i think that is inconceivable that the whole truth and you swore an oath that you were going to tell us the truth and the whole truth it's inconceivable to me that the whole truth could have any impact on our national security and you know i have some real concerns about our civil liberties in the future is why i carry a copy of the and you know i just think i have no idea if there's anything in your breast that you need to to clear but but if there is i just think that there are enough people watching this there's enough press out there with all of their liabilities i think that the press will not stand by if there are any repercussions from this i just wanted to get this

1:24:51 i have a huge concern about our civil liberties and and our security for the future and you know i just don't want to be a part of uh effort to restrain your freedom to tell us anything and everything that you think might be important here thank you madam chair thank you thank you very much um councilman wellesley well i just have very quick question and uh to each of you up there uh what is and this is opinion i'm asking what is your opinion on the containment or the cover-up is it because of the nuclear issue or connection between uh the base and nuclear or is it because of ufos or do you just you don't have to answer but i i like your opinion you're in it i'd like to go first

1:25:54 as i said earlier we're doing an ongoing and what's becoming apparent to us is whatever we're dealing with and it's been labeled ufo et alien one of the first things you'll see in an incident including where i lived in arizona the phoenix light is they bring up the alien stuff and automatically almost immediately makes a lot of people shy away from it based on the cover-up that i believe started with war of the worlds when they started conditioning people that aliens and stuff are not a smart thing to talk about or be involved with but i believe honestly and i believe eventually we're going to be able to show this that why our government is holding what they are and other governments are it's got nothing to do with secrecy from the american public or the other countries it's about power if you look what the capabilities that we saw out there that night are would you not believe that there would be a race by every government of the

1:26:56 world to try to take that technology and use it for one thing which is we're all good at in this world is war making capabilities and to control people and countries and i believe in my heart that it will be eventually exposed that it's is somewhat of national defense but ultimately we as a society and a world we need to get away from that but that's what's going on with this it's being covered up because everybody's in a race to try to take this technology and use it against each thank you okay the committee will stand adjourn until after lunch at 1 45. thank you