The biggest names in the UFO field - past and present - are remarkable for their apparent lack of skepticism.
■ Kenneth Arnold (The Coming of the Saucers) believed the 1947 Rhodes hoax photos; claimed the object (a shoe heel) resembled the 9 objects he saw on June 24, 1947 (the first "flying saucers").
■ Dan Aykroyd (Unplugged on UFOs): Believes Roswell, Betty Hill, Travis Walton, Billy Meier, the Phoenix lights & the Ariel School incident involved extraterrestrials. Claims to have seen 4 UFOs which were actually birds, balloons, a helicopter & a Chinese rocket re-entry.
■ William Birnes (UFO Magazine; UFO Hunters) believed Phil Corso (90's Roswell hoaxer) & the 2009 Morristown prank (road flares tethered to balloons).
■ Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) believes aliens have a secret flying saucer base in the ocean.
■ Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) believes the Roswell myth, and that Ezekiel's wheel (a vision in the Bible) was a flying saucer.
■ Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) believes UFOs are angels.
■ William Cooper (Behold A Pale Horse), believed JFK was assassinated because of UFOs.
■ Ross Coulthart (NewsNation) believes in the Roswell myth & the MJ-12 hoax. Promoted "alien" photos of airplanes, Starlink satellites and a radio tower.
■ Col. Gordon Cooper (NASA astronaut) believed in second-hand UFO stories, abductions and the Hangar 18 hoax.
■ Jeremy Corbell (Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers; Weaponized podcast) believes the Bob Lazar (1989) & Travis Walton (1975) hoaxes, the Roswell myth, & that the Phoenix lights (flares, 1997) were a huge transparent "craft." Corbell is a prolific source of popular military UFO footage showing planes (Flir1, Gimbal), balloons (GoFast, Mosul, Jellyfish, Sphere, Acorn), drones (USS Russell) & flares (29 Palms).
■ Philip Corso (The Day After Roswell) believed he had seen "a time machine."
■ Kevin Day (Nimitz incident) identified a video of a flying milkweed seed as a "Tic Tac" UFO.
■ Tom Delonge (To The Stars Academy) believes UFOs are from "parallel realities" & that the mythical star of Bethlehem (Matthew chapter 2) may have been a flying saucer.
■ Lue Elizondo (Imminent) believes in the Roswell myth; claims to possess psychic abilities and is convinced his house is haunted. Shows fake UFO slides at paid lectures, including Petit-Rechain (styrofoam with LED lights) and "Romania 2022" (a light fixture reflected on a window).
■ Stanton Friedman (UFOs Are Real; Roswell Incident; Crash At Corona) believed/promoted Jesse Marcel (Roswell) & Betty Hill, the Aztec, Trent, Heflin, Meier, Walton, Cash-Landrum, Gulf Breeze & Guardian hoaxes, the MJ-12 forgeries & Roswell frauds Gerald Anderson & Glenn Dennis. Said people who didn't believe in aliens were "brainwashed" by government propaganda. Believed photos of lenticular clouds & the 1966 Catalina film (an airplane) were flying saucers and suggested that UFO skeptic Phil Klass was a government agent and that Jesus of Nazareth was an alien.
■ Col. Robert Friend (Project Blue Book) believed Madeleine Rodeffer was in psychic contact with aliens in 1959. Also fell for a spiritualist-style "spirit writing" hoax. Friend was head of Project Blue Book from 1958 to 1963.
■ Timothy Goode believed Roswell/MJ-12 hoax, and that the Rendelsham forest was visited by ET.
■ Dr. Steven Greer (Unacknowledged) talks to aliens and seems to believe all hoaxes, lens flares, distant lights & blurry photos are genuine ET. Personally taught psychic "CE5 protocols" to "light beings" from the Andromeda galaxy. Believes monster movies like Invaders From Mars & Alien are produced by the US government as propaganda to make the population fear the benevolent space brothers and prevent them from bringing us free renewable energy.
■ David Grusch (2023 "whistleblower") believes the Roswell myth & the Vatican saucer hoax. Believes some of Maussan's fake alien mummies are real because they match what he's seen in briefings.
■ Betty Hill (famous abductee) believed a helicopter & a street light were flying saucers.
■ Budd Hopkins (Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions) believed Whitley Strieber was abducted by aliens.
■ Rep. Ana Paulina Luna (R-FL) believes in interdimensional beings; mistook the constellation Orion for a mysterious drone swarm.
■ Linda Moulton-Howe (A Strange Harvest) leading proponent of the livestock mutilation myth, believed in Roswell and the MJ-12 and Billy Meier hoaxes.
■ J. Alan Hyneck (Project Blue Book) fell for the 1967 Jaroslaw hoax. Also thought the 1952 Trementon film showed a swarm of UFOs & accused Project Blue Book of a cover-up when they correctly identified them as birds. Suggested that UFOs he couldn't explain were from a "parallel reality." Says Ezekiel's wheel was a UFO.
■ Dr. Michio Kaku (City College of New York) believes UFOs are ETs who travel through Star Trek wormholes and "the burden of proof is on the Pentagon to prove otherwise."
■ Leslie Kean (UFOs: Generals, Pilots & Government Officials Go On Record; "Glowing Auras & Black Money") believes in ghosts, the Phoenix lights & the Roswell myth. Also believed the Trent (1950) & Petit-Rechain (1990) hoaxes and insisted that a fly in the 2010 Santiago air show video was ET: "Is this the UFO case skeptics have been dreading?"
■ Maj. Donald Keyhoe (Flying Saucers Are Real) believed the Thomas Mantell Skyhook balloon (1948) was a homicidal ET.
■ George Knapp (8 News Now Las Vegas; Weaponized podcast) believes and promotes Bob Lazar, John Lear, Whitley Strieber, the Roswell myth, the Phoenix lights, livestock mutilation, the face on Mars, crop circles, Skinwalker Ranch & the 2023 Las Vegas hoax. Also the Trent, Heflin & Meier fakes, ancient aliens & biblical UFOs. Suggests that humans (& Earth's religions and their founders) were created by aliens. Accused George Adamski of being a government disinformation agent. Says conventional balloons & aircraft are aliens in disguise.
■ Bob Lazar (Area 51 hoax) believes Billy Meier.
■ Dr. Avi Loeb believes comets and proto-comets are giant alien spacecraft and that the Messiah will soon arrive in one of them to bring peace on Earth.
■ Dr. Bruce Maccabee (The FBI-UFO Connection) believed the Trent, Gulf Breeze & "Guardian" hoaxes & thought the 1978 Kaikoura UFO (a squid boat) was a flying saucer. Also thought a recent YouTube drone video of a flying milkweed seed was an alien spacecraft: "I often wonder whether somebody got their head chopped off for the release of this stuff."
■ Dr. Bob Mack (Harvard University) believed and promoted abduction stories, psychic trans-dimensional space brothers, the 1994 Zimbabwe school incident (a flock of storks), and a journalist who faked a preposterous abduction story involving JFK & Nikita Khrushchev.
■ Chris Mellon (To The Stars Academy) believed a mylar birthday balloon was a flying saucer.
■ William Moore (The Roswell Incident) co-authored The Philadelphia Experiment (1979), believed/promoted the Aztec and Roswell/MJ-12 hoaxes.
■ Ray Palmer (The Coming of the Saucers) fell for the 1947 Rhodes (shoe heel) hoax & believed (or claimed to believe) hollow Earth theories and the hallucinations of Richard Shaver.
■ Hal Puthoff (To The Stars Academy) believed in the psychic powers of Uri Geller.
■ Kevin Randle (UFO Crash At Roswell) believed the 1947 Rhodes hoax and 90's Roswell hoaxers Glenn Dennis, Jim Ragsdale, Frankie Rowe, Frank Kaufmann & Don Schmitt.
■ Jenny Randles (British UFO Research Association) believed in ghosts, time travel, the Maury Island & Socorro hoaxes and the Roswell myth.
■ Don Schmitt (UFO Crash At Roswell) believed Roswell hoaxers Glenn Dennis, Jim Ragsdale, Frankie Rowe & Frank Kaufmann. Also thought the Atacama mummy (a deformed child) was an alien.
■ Frank Scully (Behind the Flying Saucers) fell for, and promoted, the 1949 Aztec hoax.
■ Wendell Stevens (Contact: The Billy Meier Story) believed/promoted contactees Paul Villa & Billy Meier.
■ Jay Stratton (Office of Naval Intelligence) believed a bear outside his Maryland home was a werewolf.
■ Whitley Strieber (Communion) recounted a detailed false memory of witnessing the 1966 campus shootings in Austin, Texas.
■ Donald Trump (Celebrity Apprentice) believes UFOs are visitors from Mars.
■ Jacques Vallee (The Invisible College) believed in the cattle mutilation myth & the psychic powers of Uri Geller.
■ Erich von Däniken (Chariots of the Gods) believes/promotes "ancient astronaut" theories: UFOs in the Bible (Ezekiel's wheel, Zechariah's scroll, Elijah's chariot), in medieval art (he mistakes the sun, moon & clouds for saucers), on King Pakal's sarcophagus (a supposed "cockpit"), and Sumerian inscriptions (he mistakes Venus for the sun & the sun for a saucer).
"[Extraterrestrials] could have been souls that never were fouled up like our Adam and Eve and never went through all this, and if they are perfect souls elsewhere, the thing is, they are not killable; they're immortal already. So the idea of the Air Force telling them to shoot them down is idiotic." - Frank Scully, interview, 1953
Note: this statement contradicts the "facts" in Scully's 1950 "nonfiction" book, Behind the Flying Saucers - the story of crashed, dead, aliens. Not quite immortal.
[A whole year? You don't say!]
Note: Cooper has since said that he saw ETs land at Edwards AFB in the late '50s.
"I think it's credible." - Gordon Cooper in response to Merv Griffin relating the Aztec/Del Rio/Hangar 18 crashed saucer myth, 1978.
Note that Dr. Hyneck was not convinced by the evidence, but by his personal belief in the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
"What if it turns out that the aliens are really the gods of the Bible? ... They might be the same beings who were here in Jesus’ time, and had left Jesus or other religious leaders behind and are now back to check on how things had gone." - Stanton Friedman, Crash At Corona, 1992
Top: a model made of styrofoam & LED lights.
Bottom: a rearview mirror from a 1940s Ford pickup.
"I got...a few books that started to outline these UFO events that were happening to pilots, astronauts, presidents... I'm reading this stuff [and] oh my God, if 10% of this is true, this is like the missing glue to all world events going back as far as we can think. And you start wondering. You're like, 'Was the star of Bethlehem a UFO?' ... I don't look at [UFOs] and think, 'E.T.' I look at these as displacement craft that are coming from parallel realities." - Tom Delonge, interview, 2021
"We have so many lifeforms which are interacting with us which we don’t even know about. Not just UFOs, but things like ghosts and Bigfoot, too." - Tom Delonge, 2025
Mylar balloon (the numeral "1"). Chris Mellon called this a "Tic Tac" UFO.
"There are persistent rumors that the U.S. government recovered 'crash materials' from UAP, and even that the government has been working secretly to reverse engineer the technology." - Chris Mellon, Politico, 2023
"The first chapter of Ezekiel is pretty clear of a UFO sighting." - Tim Burchett (R-TN), interview, 2023
Whistleblower David Grusch
David Grusch: "I think you might want to trust some of these witnesses."
- NewsNation interview, 2023
"Since a peaceful future is part of the Messianic forecast, I suggested that perhaps the Messiah will [come from] another planet." - Avi Loeb, 2023
"I had a direct experience with [evil]. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs...by a demon, or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides... I was totally confused; I woke up and I couldn't breathe...and my wife and dogs had not woken up, and they're very light sleepers... I knew it was spiritual immediately... and then I was seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible." - Tucker Carlson, 2024
"These [crashed UAP] recoveries have been the result of the summoning of these craft... You're talking about a phenomenon that exists in the spiritual realm... That's more like a séance than a science expedition... Doesn't make it any less real, by the way, but it changes the category." - Tucker Carlson, 2025
"The main thing they [The Government] want you to believe is that the supernatural is not real.... They're working for supernatural forces, actually... They take physical form... they're not just shadows floating around... they're physical." - Tucker Carlson, 2025
"I just personally still have a lot of questions that are unanswered, because it wasn’t just New Jersey. It was happening in different parts of the country." - Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, 2025, on the New Jersey Drone Scare of 2024, which was the widespread misidentification of airplanes, planets and stars.
"Like, I’m obsessed with the whole UFO thing. What’s actually going on? What were those videos all about? What’s actually happening?” - Vice President JD Vance, 2025
"Interdimensional beings... can operate through the time-spaces we know... and beyond." - Rep. Ana Paulina Luna (R-FL), Joe Rogan interview, 2025
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