In Search of... UFO Coverups

Have you seen the newest footage purporting to show  the body of a dead space alien, which this time apparently originated in Russia?  If not, you can watch the 1 minute video HERE.  It's caused a 'viral video' sensation in recent weeks, and now has almost 10 million views.

This reminded of an episode of the 1970s TV show In Search Of... titled "UFO Coverups" that first aired in 1980, alleging that the government was secretly keeping dead alien bodies in Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. You can watch a 10 minute segment from this episode by clicking HERE. I liked the TV show In Search of... a lot as a kid. I've enjoyed re-watching some of the old episodes and lovingly critiquing, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, some of the explanations proffered for the mysteries the show examined. 


This episode features clips of an interview with a man named Peter Gersten, who is described as an attorney who sued the government to force it to release classified UFO-related documents. As an epilogue, Peter Gertsen is still alive today and has retired to Sedona, Arizona.  In a 2007 interview posted on You Tube HERE, he details his plan to leap off Bell Rock there at 11:11 AM on December 21, 2012 (the Winter Solstice)  because he believes that at that precise moment a 'cosmic portal' will open there and propel him through it.


When I saw this episode as a kid, it was the first time I'd ever heard of Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. "For 30 years rumors have spread about Wright-Patterson Air Force Base," explained narrator Leonard Nimoy. "According to the stories, the US government is concealing under top security flying saucers from another world, and alien bodies cryogenically suspended in huge freezers...The stories and rumors all mention a mysterious Hangar 18."  


A man named Ray Fowler, introduced as a 'leading civilian UFO investigator for 17 years,' then produces an un-named eye witness to a UFO crash in Kingman, Arizona in 1953, who agrees to an on-camera interview only if his identity is hidden.  The mystery man then relates an amazing story about having been unwittingly drawn into a surreptitious  military mission to recover the wreck of this alien spacecraft, and about having seen 'two bodies.' Leonard Nimoy makes extended references to how long Ray Fowler has known this un-named man as a friend, and to Ray's own professional background working on the Minuteman missile.  Presumably this was all done to bolster the credibility of this anonymous witness.


According to Wikipedia, Ray Fowler is still alive today as well, and is in his late 70s. Though in a 1991 book he apparently acknowledged publicly for the first time that he had himself been abducted by extraterrestrials. According to Wikipedia, this revelation caused a rift in his family and he was thereafter forbidden from seeing his grandchildren for some time.