By James Donahue

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell recently made headlines in England when he said during a British radio interview that UFOs were visiting Earth throughout his career with NASA and that the contacts made were covered up.

Mitchell, now 77, said sources at the space agency who had contact with aliens described them as “little people who look strange to us.” He said real life extra-terrestrials fit the traditional image of the “grays,” with a small frame, large head and large eyes.

“I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we’ve been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real,” Mitchell was quoted as saying. “It’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it’s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.”

Officials at NASA were quick to respond to Mitchell’s remarks, denying that such involvement with UFOs and aliens exist. When asked about this, Mitchell agreed that the story has been twisted since he gave the interview. “NASA had nothing to do with anything I’ve done. I wasn’t briefed by NASA. There haven’s been any sightings as a result of my flight service there.”

Mitchell is not the first astronaut to make such statements, although he perhaps is the first to disclose such graphic detail. Some hears ago this writer had occasion to hear a lecture by Jim Lovell, commander of the nearly disastrous Apollo 13 mission to the moon and back. His story and film footage was dynamic. Before the lecture was over, Lovell startled the audience by saying that he was convinced that UFOs were real.

He did not give any further details.

Anyone who has followed the UFO video footage and documentaries presented on the Discovery and History channels over the years has surely seen footage reportedly pulled from NASA cameras showing strange and unexplained lights from objects flying alongside the Apollo ships or in some way flying near them during the moon missions.

So have Mitchell and Lovell been sworn to secrecy by the U. S. government, or are they getting information from other sources?

There is another astronaut, Romanian Dumitru Prunariu, who participated on an eight-day space mission with Russian cosmonaut Leonid Popov on Soyuz 40 and the Salyut 6 space laboratory, who is also believes there has been an international government cover-up of the existence of alien craft.

“A Russian colleague saw two UFOs flying parallel to the ship during an expedition, both of which disappeared after a while. He reported this encounter to his chiefs, got only a negative reaction from them and was reminded he had been sent into cosmos for scientific purposes. The man was talked into not sharing the incident with anybody else.”

While the astronauts are only now beginning to speak of their encounters, the people on the ground, all over the Earth, are experiencing more and more sightings. The invention of computerized video cameras have made it possible for people to capture not only still images but moving footage of these ships that pass over us.

This writer has personally had two sightings and believes there may have been a third sighting linked to a possible abduction that occurred during his teen years. There is a distinct, but still frightening “dream” memory of a large oval orange ball hanging over my father’s barn on the family farm. I had this vision one summer night after climbing alone out of my upstairs bedroom window to sit on the roof of the house.

During my college years, while working one summer with an oil-well service company in southern Michigan, I was taking a late afternoon break, lying in some grass, looking up into a clear blue sky. Straight overhead was the pure white light of what looked like a star, except that it should not have been there in broad daylight. After a while, the object flew off to the west at a high rate of speed.

The most recent observation occurred one morning as I was driving down a rural country road on my way to a job as an assistant editor of a weekly Michigan newspaper. All of a sudden I saw this oval shaped craft drop down out of the sky almost in front of me. It was silver grey in color and had a turret with windows all around. It settled slowly down behind a cluster of trees just to the left of the road ahead of me. I could not believe what I had just seen. It happened so unexpectedly and only lasted a moment. When I got to the point where I could see behind the trees, there was nothing there.

Obviously something strange is occurring and it appears that something quite supernatural is going on in the skies around us. Is it alien contact or something else? It has been happening for a very long time. Such ships are found to appear in very old paintings dating back hundreds of years. Images of them are even found carved in rock by natives who walked this planet long before we came along.