Interview with John Alexander
By, Richard Thieme

RT: I want to talk with credible people. As a respected professional, I know the effect ridicule can have. No one wants to be mistaken for a “conspiracy theorist.” My own credentials are solid–

JA: That doesn’t matter.

I am thinking of two organizations in particular. One was Scientific American, the other the Federation of Atomic Scientists. Both did articles on non-lethal weapons in which I was interviewed and both made ad hominem attacks on me by dragging in the UFO topic.

RT: So rather than say that your credibility in non-lethals gives credibility to your investigation of UFOs, they go the other way.

JA: One says something like, he would make a good character in a science fiction novel but shouldn’t be trusted with government money. The other said, since Alexander believes things that most scientists don’t, his judgment must be questioned.

The one who wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists sent an email that was basically an apology.

I decided to put together a group at a very high level of security to take a look at the subject. I included the usual suspects. To participate, we had to know who you were and you had to have the right level of clearance, because if there is a black level program some place they will want it contained. Over time I never found an inference of such a program, which could mean that we didn’t crack the nut, but I got to higher and higher and higher levels. Something interesting here is that people distinguish between their personal belief systems and institutional belief systems. They are quite different. I found people at very high levels who were quite interested personally in the topic. For example, I was talking to a guy who was THE head of one of the lettered intelligence agencies, who said (a) we have no requirement to collect information about UFOs (they collect intelligence against requirements) but (b) let me tell you about the ones I saw.

How come these twains do not get together? That’s one of the most interesting aspects of it. Part of it is personal fear. If you do step forward and are seen as credible, it is used in ad hominem attacks that proliferate well beyond the boundaries of that topic.

RT: When you say “what they saw”—what is it that is seen?

JA: One of the most perplexing aspects is that you do not come up with a consensus of what is seen. From a scientific perspective, from a mechanistic reductionist approach, you can put it under a microscope and break it down to smaller and smaller pieces. We just don’t find that to be true. The phenomena are terribly complex. Understanding the observers themselves is a key aspect of it, but having said that, you get deeper and deeper into it and find that there is multi-sensory data that tends to support at least that something is going on.

I am making an argument in two specific areas – one is national defense and the other is in airline security. These are tangible kinds of things. I don’t care what your belief system is, if you can come up with a certain amount of evidence that says these things are threats in those arenas, then it deserves scientific investigation. But it is very dangerous to one’s career. I am old enough now that I am impervious to pain.

RT: Me too. I think of the military pilots who have told me of their encounters, it’s on record SOMEwhere. – so what is done with that kind of report? What happens to that information? What kind of boundary is around whatever organizational structure manages that kind of report?

JA: The problem is – this is one of my issues – the Air Force has been particularly bad. Their reputation is absolutely horrible. I am convinced that something happened at Roswell and equally convinced that I have no idea what that something is. But the AF explanation has been so bad, they were caught lying and now admitted they were lying but lie again to do that. You know about (US Representative) Steven Schiff (from New Mexico). Karl Flock’s wife was his AA. I’ve seen the documentation on that and it is unconscionable. He wrote the SecDef and some Colonel wrote back and said basically, get screwed. Not “the secretary has asked me to respond,” using common courtesies, that was not done. It went back and forth and down hill from there. Now why did they do that?

One barrier is the personal belief system you are encountering – they do not want to accept the possibility. One high level briefing I gave, as head of a scientific committee, they were studying space and I was asked at the four star level to go in and brief them on this topic, UFOs. I gave UFO 101 for about an hour and a very senior guy who was extremely senior in industry at that moment and had been senior in defense before that, asked, well, do you have any comments or questions? Then the guy went ballistic and became absolutely livid and screamed at me, “You’re not supposed to know that! That’s what you learn when you die!”

I said I thought we were in a scientific meeting, I often get “the work of the devil” argument in the public forum, but not in a scientific context in front of his colleagues. I picked up my slides and said, Thank you.

RT: So what would you suggest? Where do you go in this sea of confusion?

JA: There are a few books that are credible. Peter’s Sturrock’s book. He’s an esteemed astrophysicist. It’s very straightforward and gives both the pros and cons. In non-lethal weapons as well as UFOs, it’s very difficult to talk to people in generalities or give them a theoretical construct. You have to translate it into practice. In Peter’s book, the Mansfield Ohio case is quite remarkable, well documented, multiple witnesses who did not know each other. What you pointed to is a major problem. The signal-to-noise ratio is tremendous and it’s very easy to slip into a “conspiracy theory.” The skeptics then jump on some of these conspiracy theories or things that are pretty far out and they say, here are examples of what these people think. By taking it to those extremes, they a priori eliminate the thought of the people who are much more staid. For the average person coming in from the outside it is very very difficult, and there is a lot of internal controversy as well.

RT: I am trying to build a coherent picture based on eyewitness accounts. In other domains, people would have a tendency to believe what others say. In this domain, it is generally dismissed as unreliable.

JA: We do know that eyewitness testimony is unreliable. Our memories are pretty faulty, even though they are accepted in court. I have a background in near-death studies and one of the most interesting aspects of that is you would expect memories to dissipate over time, but re: NDEs people say sixty years later, I remember it with exquisite detail. These are critical emotional events. They don’t dissipate.

RT: (Referencing the young fisherman on the lake, thirty years later, remembering the encounter with clarity.)

JA: The biggest impact of the Condon report was not what it said about UFOs. It set up this air about it that made it ridiculous and impossible to study and challenged anybody who would dare be so ludicrous to do it. The Condon Report itself is actually not that bad, but we know that Condon was not involved in any investigations, but wrote the summery, recommendations, and conclusions. It was a personal vendetta on his part. We have the memo where Condon said, run around and look busy. But that report has had lasting effect for thirty years.

When I would talk to senior folks about it, they would say, yes, that was studied and they found out there was nothing to it. End of comment. That was because of the personal credibility of Condon. The report is internally inconsistent. There are cases where they say, this is a real UFO, but the conclusions and recommendations are not based on it. The report did exactly what the Air Force wanted. They wanted it to go away. An action past is an action handled. It said, this is not a threat, and in retrospect, they were right. It has not been a threat.

RT: You have been interested in this for over forty years --

JA: Fifty years.

RT: Our technology now is vastly different from the accounts of the 40s and 50s. In terms of what you know about current technology, how would a lay person distinguish clearly between what we have got and can do and what we can’t?

JA: The answer is, with great difficulty. Photographic evidence now is virtually worthless in and of itself. There is nothing you can not do digitally. But there are cases like the 1976 Iranian case that stand. The pilots themselves, multiple witnesses, multiple radar, and now we have overhead satellite imagery that confirms that something was in the area. Multi-sensory data from multiple sources comes in and the data are corroborative and at some point the aggregate evidence ought to be sufficient to say, this deserves a credible scientific look as opposed to, “and the answer is ... . The problem is, they take that next step and say, the answer is, while we’re dealing with things that are terribly complex.

RT: Now, I know that the human mind forms patterns, sometimes in the face of incomplete data, and relates what it thinks it sees to other things it thinks it sees. With all due respect for the way this can distort ... you have looked at this for fifty years. What do you think? What is your tentative hypothesis? What are the most probably true statements you can make, in light of Ruppelt’s tentative conclusion?

JA: A year or two ago, I would have been more likely to come forward with something concrete. I have been arguing for and hope to get funded a “step back” approach. I have not studied just UFOs. People who get into the study of diverse phenomena tend to say, I will study – NDEs, UFOs, psychokinesis, whatever it is, and the first step is to define what is in and what is out. I have noticed that there are huge common factors and central to all of this is something called consciousness. I am not sure what that is, even, but there does appear to be (I know Jacques Vallee well) – both consciousness and deception pieces. On one hand you have good testimony, hard veridical data, and on the other hand, you see some things that are totally bizarre and don’t seem to fit. The typical scientific approach is to eliminate what we can not understand and don’t know how to fit in and I think that’s a critical mistake. If you live in a mechanical universe, you can do those sorts of things, but I don’t think that’s the way my universe is built. So you bring in abductions, cattle mutilations (which we study because we have some physical evidence). But the more we look at it, the more it looks like we’re being presented with information that is real, and yet there is no theoretical foundation that allows you to explain why this set of circumstances could or should exist. At this time, it is necessary to step back, outline the observations (just tell me what your observations are, let's not attach any assumptions to them and assume it's a UFO or fits into any certain box), then do a macro analysis that says, what are the patterns that we see emerge from that, as opposed to vice versa? I think it’s a mistake to eliminate observations because they do not fit an established paradigm. You lose a lot of data that way. On the other hand, there are crazy people. So we’re not suggesting that there are not some really crazy folks out there.

RT: Which leads people to be so conservative in how we talk about it –

JA: The dichotomy between people who say, if we can prove that life exists elsewhere than earth it would be one of the most important scientific discoveries, and on the other hand, when you say, here’s evidence for it, they say, we don’t even want to discuss it.

Carl Sagan in Cosmos says, now here’s the math, there must be life out there but there is not one shred of evidence to support it, but read his book on UFOs and the scientific debate, that he edited, and some of the best evidence as of 1969 is in that book. The UFO proponents say here’s the evidence, and the skeptics say, it’s all emotional. If you read the skeptics’ responses, they are all emotional.

I had a debate with Phil Klass about a current case, he said it was Venus, so we showed him that Venus was 15 degrees below the horizon, but it didn’t matter. They say that “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof,” but when you provide that proof, it’s ignored.

RT: I told him a story (I was asked to keep the details confidential) of a remarkable encounter alleged to have happened in the Nevada desert and the suggestion that it implied a relationship between the US government and extraterrestrials.

JA: There are two different parts to the story. The first is the strange encounter, that does not bother me at all. We have had extraordinary stories from – for example – Utah like that. I have problems when it comes to this conspiracy theory, that we have high end alliances with space aliens ... I have talked to a substantial number of very very senior folk, people who in my mind, if there were x number of people who knew, would almost have to know, for example Edward Teller, and they almost invariably come back with, this is really interesting, but they have no institutional responsibility for it – senior senior folks in SDI who have access to everything going on in SDI, for example, I had met with Abrahamson, and we were about to develop a system that would zap missiles so you had to discriminate before you started to shoot at things, and there was no indication that anybody had ever briefed them or said anything about it. I talked to Ed Mitchell and asked about the Apollo stories and he was in fact in charge of security for the missions beyond Apollo 14 which he was on. I asked if anybody had ever talked to him, other than in abstract terms, about the possibility that you are going to bump into somebody out there, and the answer is no. There were contingencies especially in the early missions about quarantine but nothing about bumping into friendly or unfriendly folks out there. They say, nobody ever listed that. NASA has and has had contingencies for many years as to what should happen in the event of an ET encounter, but as far as briefing anybody – and Apollo was not about going to the moon, it was about national prestige. I find it unfathomable that we would send somebody to the moon if there was even a remote possibility that they would have an encounter. You would at least have contingency plans, oh if you have an encounter, here is what you say, if you bump into somebody and yet you don’t find that.

I suspect a number of things are imaginal realities. That does not fit the universe as reductionists have constructed it. There are things that come into physical reality and while they’re there they are very physical but transient and they disappear. The question, where did you go to? is not a useful question. You ask what do I wind up believing and that’s an explanation that allows for, how do things appear that are witnessed by credible people, caught on various kinds of sensors, clearly they are real as we know them, and later they are not there.

I was talking to a rancher in northern New Mexico who was on horseback riding out to look at the cattle and rides up to a clearing and as he does, about a hundred meters in front of him, he sees this creature running across that is about as tall as he is sitting on top of the horse. He sees it looking back over his shoulder and all of a sudden it runs into nothingness. It didn’t run into the trees or anywhere. He did not want to come forward, he is not proud of it, these are communities we had to spend a lot of time cultivating before they would trust us enough to talk to us.

We live in boundaries that we have arbitrarily established. You could not think without constructs in which to think.

What’s interesting is, I am 99% and the 99% is based on, I have talked to more people than I think anybody has, and the answer is entirely consistent. Having said that, there is 1% of people who I know intimately and fully respect and say, we have been told that it is real – and I also give talks on secrecy and give one at the Remote Viewing conference, see Moynihan’s book on secrecy for the adverse effects and it says we missed the big ones like the collapse of the Soviet Union because the intelligence community was feeding on itself and had they taken their scenarios out and shown them to economists who understood the Soviet Union, they would have said this is ridiculous, they are fundamentally flawed but secrecy prevented that. I have had similar problems: the people we trick end up being ourselves, we rarely end up tricking the enemy.

UFO phenomena was used officially when U2s were being developed and I knew that when it was classified and pilots were saying, nothing can fly that high, so we were glad to use it.

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