Reid: 'American people can handle the truth' about UFOs
LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — What was the object, caught on camera, hovering above a Navy destroyer? It looked like a flying triangle, whose shape illuminated and then darkened.
"These are unidentified flying objects. Do we know what they are? We don't know what they are. We don't know, period,” Nevada’s former U.S. senator, Harry Reid, told us this week.
Reid wants to know what they are and wants you to know too. It’s why, in 2007, as a senator, he helped launch a program to study these unidentified phenomena.
“You know, I am the person that got this debate started. Had I not done this, I don't know where we would be," Reid said.
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The secret investigation Reid helped start 14 years ago was revived last summer as a task force, which will release a report sometime this month.
On Friday, news came that the report will say that there's no definitive proof these videos of objects are extraterrestrials, but there's also no proof they're not.
It's that ambiguity, Reid said, that means this upcoming report should be the beginning of many.
"And that's why I've said that they shouldn't do this as a one-shot deal, one-shot task force; they should provide money to have this ongoing research,” he says.
Reid has helped drag the discussion of UFOs from something of an oddity to a mainstream subject. Much of the video we see was shot by military pilots or ships at sea. The objects appear to do things that are impossible by our current technology.
"We don’t know how these objects can go so fast, leave no vapor trail. Once in a while, we’ll see some lights [but] usually none. And they can go so fast that under the technology we have today, we put one of our airmen in one of these airplanes, they'd die -- couldn't take the g-forces,” says Reid.
The former U.S. senator has been interested in UFOs for decades. There was talk that aircraft maker Lockheed had in its possession wreckage from a possible UFO. As a senator, Reid tried to see the classified documents to see if that was true.
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“Well, I made that application with the government and they wouldn't give me clearance,” Reid said.
But he has seen other secrets. He's been to Area 51, America's top-secret testing ground in the Nevada desert.
“Area 51 is a place where I could say that I found extremely interesting. Much of what I saw is still classified. Some of it isn't. For example, I went out there and saw the stealth helicopter before it became public,” he says.
So what does he think? Are we alone... or not?
“My gut tells me we live in a great big universe. And science has already indicated there are many different platforms out there that could provide the essentials for life, so I think it's something we need to continue to work on,” says Reid.
