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WASHINGTON – We are not alone.
That is the conclusion of two former members of Congress who heard five days of testimony this week about supposed UFO landings and a government conspiracy to cover them up.
Asked if he now believes the government is suppressing the truth about visits by extraterrestrials, former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) said, “Very much.”
"The testimony was convincing," he told the Daily News.
![Former Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) said, ‘If everybody here is telling the truth, there is pretty compelling evidence that at least some [UFOs] didn't come from [Earth].’](http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1334969.1367647477!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/bartlett-roscoe-mct.jpg "Former Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) said, ‘If everybody here is telling the truth, there is pretty compelling evidence that at least some [UFOs] didn't come from [Earth].’")
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Former Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) said, ‘If everybody here is telling the truth, there is pretty compelling evidence that at least some [UFOs] didn't come from [Earth].’
Former Rep. Merrill Cook (R-Utah) said aliens were the best explanation for the claims of UFO sightings made by witnesses.
“There's an implication for which one of the answers has got to be an extraterritorial origin,” Cook said.
The Paradigm Research Group – which is dedicated to ending the “government-imposed truth embargo surrounding an extraterrestrial presence” – paid six lawmakers $20,000 each to preside over the weeklong “Citizen Hearing on Disclosure.” The group videotaped the proceedings for presentation in a documentary at a later date.
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Former Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) found some of the UFO claims ‘a little out there,’ but the testimony she heard shows the need for a more open government.
The other four lawmakers who heard testimony offered more cautious views about alien life, but none of them ruled it out.
"The Air Force has admitted there were 701 UFOs that they could not identify. So the presence of unidentified flying objects is obvious," said former Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.). "If everybody here is telling the truth, there is pretty compelling evidence that at least some of them didn't come from here."
But when pressed, Bartlett said he wasn't sure if the claims he heard were true.
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Former Rep. Merrill Cook (R-Utah) said aliens were the best explanation for the UFO sightings made by witnesses.
"I'm a scientist and I know how far away the closet star is, and unless they know something we don't know, I have trouble understanding how they could get here," he said.
Former Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said she found some claims at the hearing "a little out there." But she said the testimony, at a minimum, shows the need for a more open government.
The witnesses this week included former Air Force personnel who insisted they had knowledge of UFO visits and self-styled investigators and researchers who recounted sightings that, they said, had no earthy explanation.
The Paradigm Research Group is the same organization that filed a petition on the White House’s “We the People” website in 2001 urging President Obama to “formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.”
The petition received more than 50,000 signatures and an official White House response:
“The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.”
