A former CIA director has spoken of his new ‘openness’ to the possibility of alien life, telling a story of an airplane that was brought to a halt at 40,000 feet, and saying he hope that mankind was ‘friendly’ to extraterrestrials, if they ever made contact.
R. James Woolsey, who ran the CIA from 1993-1995, spoke to The Black Vault’s YouTube channel on Friday.
Woolsey, 79, spoke to promote his new book, Operation Dragon – in which he claims that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK on the orders of the Kremlin.
The former intelligence chief, who served under Bill Clinton, said he had in recent years heard numerous stories of unexplained aerial phenomena.
‘There have been over the years now events of one kind of another, usually involving some kind of aircraft-like airframe,’ he begun.
R. James Woolsey, Clinton’s CIA director, spoke on Friday to the YouTube channel
Woolsey is pictured speaking in 1994 as Clinton talks to Anthony Lake, national security advisor
Woolsey said that the stories ‘always seemed pretty far-out to me.’
He continued: ‘But, there was one case in which a friend of mine was able to have his aircraft stop at 40,000 feet or so and not continue operating as a normal aircraft.
‘What was going on? I don’t know.
‘Does anybody know?’
Woolsey said that the source was ‘someone I respect’.
John Greenewald Jr, the host, pointed out that other former CIA directors have said they are open to the possibility of alien life.
In December, John Brennan, CIA director from 2013-17, told a podcast he felt it was ‘arrogant’ to believe we were alone in the universe.
‘Life is defined in many different ways,’ Brennan said during the December 16 episode of Conversations with Tyler.
‘I think it’s a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe.’
On March 19, Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said there were far more sightings reported than were publicly known.
John Ratcliffe appeared on Fox News last month to discuss the forthcoming report
Navy pilots recorded seeing unexplained objects spinning in mid air, in the summer of 2014
‘There are a lot more sightings than have been made public,’ he told Fox News.
‘Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.
‘Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.’
Analysts are eagerly awaiting a forthcoming report into unexplained aerial phenomena.
The government was, in December, given a 180-day deadline to disclose what it knew, meaning that the report should be out before June 1.
The report, produced by the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, must identify, among other things, any threats posed by unidentified aerial phenomena and whether they may be attributed to foreign adversaries.
Pictured: A photo from the Project Blue Book archive shows lights misidentified as a group of UFOs over a Coast Guard air station in Salem, Massachusetts in 1952
Woolsey said he hopes that ‘we can be friendly and able to deal with a wide range of behaviors’
‘These people have reported very curious behavior by aircraft,’ Woolsey continued.
‘And it may be something real that is an extraordinary change, for some unheralded reason.
‘Or it may be a complex set of what is going on in the world of cyber and so forth.
‘I just don’t know.
‘I am not as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly.
‘Something is going on that is surprising to a series of intelligent, experienced pilots and we’ll just have to see what it is.’
Asked how he would define his mindset, Woolsey said: ‘Openness to new things.
‘Willingness to examine them.
‘Hope that we can be friendly and able to deal with a wide range of behaviors, in terms of dealing with our fellow human beings, or other creatures if they exist.’