Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Cheonmunka]

I will recount a story. Something I saw. Once.
I am not going to recount a story of a machine that came down into the forest on my backyard and some green guys came out and looked at me and my dog went missing for two weeks.
Nothing like that and much more simple. Nevertheless a little extraordinary.
Not horrifying.
But something quite true.


My friends were in the car and I was in the front passenger seat. We were stuck in holiday traffic on the highway going out of the city and now in the hills.
Auckland, New Zealand. Nineteen-eighty something. Summer.
I put my head back and glanced up at the sky. There were a lot of stars.
Then these two flourescent light tubes were drawn across the black. Two white lines like light tubes. Under the stars (the stars above the lines of light were no longer visible.) The lights were drawn across, like a pencil draws on paper across a ruler. In our atmosphere, but pretty bloody high. (About 10 cm long if you hold your arm up and spread your thumb and forefinger wide open. The lights stayed on lasting about 3 seconds. After one second becoming discernible was a little white dot in between the 'light tubes' at the very end or tip. (Two millimeters in diameter if you hold your arm out and sqeeze thumb and forefinger closely.) Then the two lights went off, all in one go, fading off but very rapidly, taking just two tenths of a second to go out. The dot stayed where it was another half second then appeared to get smaller in size real quick and it was gone, too.

I thought, "Interesting."
I don't remember saying anything to my friends.
Maybe one comment.

One month later.

One month or so later I was watching TV. There was some kind of newsy item from a shuttle trip or satellite expedition in orbit.
A film was shown which was made by the astronauts on this craft. There was the curvature of the Earth. The typical obtuse angle shot. Not straight down as in satellite images but across the horizon of the planet with black space on the right side of the screen and brown Earth on the left. I wonder what continent that was.
An object, quite visible, was heading outward, out of the atmosphere already, maybe not at altitude of orbit, but heading outward, toward or already in space. The film from the craft was tending to look down at an angle on it, initially. Though the object soon was at a similar altitude with the craft. It was obviously fast but slow-looking due to the massive distance covered by the filming angle. The astronauts were filming this, steadily and clearly, and talking together and over radio also.
"What are we looking at here?"
"Your guess, Jim."

Astronauts see objects from orbit as a matter of course. Shuttles, satellite launches. Yet, they didn't identify this one.

I actively watched for this news item to be played again on TV but never did see it again.
This spherical object that was flying away from Earth at around the same time (within a week according to the news report) that I saw my one dot object flick across the sky then disappear, was not shown again on TV.

There's my story.
Not told very often.
Kind of a boring UFO.

[Rteacher]

Pioneering Astronaut Sees UFO Cover-up
By Leonard David, Senior Space Writer
Space.com

WASHINGTON -- One of America's first astronauts claims that the government has withheld information that alien spacecraft have visited Earth.

Leroy Gordon "Gordo" Cooper Jr. says the government has "swept under the rug" the truth about unidentified flying objects or UFOs.

"Each administration has probably tried to figure out how, with the least embarrassment, they could confess to this whole thing," he said at a recent appearance in Washington to promote his new book, Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey in the Unknown (HarperCollins Publishers, $25).

"They need to clean the slate about what has been going on or has not been going on," he said.

In space for a day

Cooper, 72, was one of the original Mercury Seven picked by NASA in 1959.


The last of the Mercury astronauts to be lofted into space, Cooper was blasted into orbit atop an Atlas rocket in May 1963. He circled Earth for 22 orbits in his Faith 7 capsule, becoming the first American to stay in space for a day.

Cooper returned to space in August 1965 with the late Pete Conrad on the Gemini 5 mission. After retiring from NASA in 1970, he went to work for Disney as a vice president for research and development. He later worked as a high-tech consultant and aircraft designer.

Since 1989, he has been a partner in an aeronautical design firm in Van Nuys, California. Now a retired Air Force colonel living in Los Angeles, he is campaigning to have the government open the books on UFO research.

Charges of cover-up

"There certainly have been too many people, very qualified people and qualified groups of people, that have had interface of one type or another with extraterrestrial craft or beings," Cooper said.

"To really deny that something is going on and deny that they definitely exist꿾e need a little more explanation."

Government officials say there is nothing to cover up about UFOs.

"Everybody is entitled to their beliefs and opinions based on their own readings and experiences," said Don Savage, a NASA spokesman. "The biggest problem with UFOs is that it's a difficult area to bring the scientific process into any kind of study."

UFO sightings, Savage said, "are transient events. They are not repeatable, so they are not subject to scientific study per se. It's something that we don't have any research into here at NASA."
But Cooper is undeterred in his UFO beliefs.

Early sightings

In his book, written with Bruce Henderson, Cooper tells how he saw his first UFO over Europe in 1951. An Air Force pilot in West Germany, Cooper and his squadron mates were scrambled in their F-86 Sabre jets to intercept what appeared to be several metallic silver and saucer-shaped craft.

Cooper also describes an incident at Edwards Air Force Base, California, in which he once looked at film of a crashed UFO in the American Southwest taken in the late 1950s. That film, he writes, was whisked away to the Pentagon never to be seen or heard of again.
Throughout the book, the former astronaut argues for the government to open up its files and come clean about alien visitations.

So convinced is Cooper that UFOs deserve serious study that he once testified before the United Nations in 1978 on the topic. His hope was that the U.N. would become a central repository for accounts of UFO sightings.

"I made the effort to get the U.N. to pick up the ball," Cooper said at the book signing. "They thought it was a great idea, but they never did anything about it."

The "Right Stuff" on the line

Still spry and witty, Cooper enjoys talking about his own jaunts into space.

"In the early days, there was so little that we knew about space. Every day was an 'oh, gee-whiz day' or big adventure," he said.

Recalling his circuits around Earth in his Mercury capsule, Cooper said that the spacecraft's cooling system developed problems. That in turn caused the electrical systems to fail one by one.

Where other pilots might have panicked, Cooper coolly took control of his capsule and flew it manually. All his maneuvers to drop out of orbit for a splashdown in the ocean were done with seat-of-the-pants flying -- a far-cry from the automated cockpit procedures of today's computerized space shuttle.

Cooper used his knowledge of star patterns and Earth's horizon to orient his tiny spacecraft for reentry into the atmosphere. For good measure, he had lines scribbled on his window to make sure he was positioned properly before firing his reentry rockets.

"So I used my wrist watch for time, my eyeballs out the window for attitude. Then I fired my retrorockets at the right time and landed right by the carrier," Cooper said, matter-of-factly.

Asked who was the best pilot among the Mercury astronauts, Cooper thrilled his listeners by reciting the line spoken by Dennis Quaid, who played Cooper in the movie The Right Stuff.

"You're looking at him," Cooper said, flashing a grin.

Holding out for Mars

Cooper is ready to leave Earth again, at the drop of a space helmet.

"I told the NASA administrator (Dan Goldin) that when I was John Glenn's age, I wanted to take another flight," he said with a smile.

"But the flight I want is to be put on [is] the Mars mission. I hope to hang in there for it."

http://www.ufoarea.com/ufo_cooper.html