On Sunday afternoon, 17 December, 2023, four Esparto area men and four women, participated in a lively discussion at Hog Canyon Deli in Esparto about UFOs and extraterrestrials. An Esparto woman who happened to be present in the restaurant, hearing the purpose of the meeting before it started, at once exclaimed, “I saw a UFO! My husband and I were driving down Beamer in Woodland one evening about twenty years ago. After passing the freeway east of town, we saw a bright object hovering in the air in front of us. It was moving upward very slowly, then it suddenly shot off up into the sky. It didn’t make any sound at all. We both saw it!”
Kevin Bledsoe of Woodland then responded that, just a few weeks earlier, he had seen three lights in a large, perfect triangle shape to his left while he was travelling east down Highway 16 to his home after dark. “They looked like bright stars,” Bledsoe explained, “but seemed to block out the stars between them. I was driving, and couldn’t stop at the time. Thinking it was a UFO, but also that they could have just been three stars, I went back to the same place at the exact same time the next evening to look. The three lights weren’t there. Just to make sure, I went again the next night and, again, they weren’t there. All three nights the sky was perfectly clear.”

After this wonderful, unexpected introduction, Allan Keislar of Esparto formally started the meeting. He told about a good friend of his, the late Dr. James Harder, who was a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, when Allan was studying for his Ph.D. there. Harder was one of six scientists who testified before the U. S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics in 1968 about UFOs. Committee members who knew about unknown craft travelling at thousands of miles an hour, much faster than any known human aircraft, and which could make sudden 90- or even 180-degree turns, wanted to find out about their propulsion systems. Harder, who had been scientifically studying UFOs and extraterrestrials for sixteen years by that time, testified that he believed these exotic craft were operated by persons from other planets who used a sort of advanced magneto-gravitic technology.

Before and during the 1990s, Harder had frequent meetings with friends in his Berkeley home about extraterrestrial life which Keislar often attended. At that time, Harder claimed to be in regular contact with various intelligent beings from other planets. He said (as he had testified in the U. S. Congress in 1968) that there were no less than 57 known different extraterrestrial races, at least 90 to 95 percent of them friendly or favorable to humanity.Harder and his friends believed that powerful, benevolent extraterrestrials have prevented selfish ones (and selfish human beings) from taking over or destroying our planet. However, these good space neighbors say that no one else is going to save us and we are the ones who must learn the truth, work together to expose and remove our own corrupt leaders, and then end war to establish world peace. Only then will we Earthlings be able to join with our extraterrestrial brothers and sisters in peace throughout the galaxy. (On 15 December, 1954, in the midst of widespread concern about many sightings of UFOs around the United States, President Eisenhower publicly announced that “an Air Force official had assured him that flying saucers were not invading the earth from outer space.” – New York Times, 16 December, 1954)

Keislar noted that, from 1968 until 2022, for 54 years, Congress never again publicly discussed UFOs or extraterrestrial life. For half a century, both the Pentagon and the U.S. Government denied the existence of intelligent beings or vehicles from outer space. However, in December 2017, the New York Times published videos of UFOs taken in 2004 by Navy airmen about 100 miles southwest of San Diego, and in 2015 off the east coast. In September 2019, the Navy officially confirmed these videos were real; in April 2020, the Pentagon did, too, as well as itself publicly releasing the videos.

On 26 July, 2023, much more about UFOs and extraterrestrials was revealed to the public, televised live, at a Security Subcommittee meeting of the U. S. House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee. Three military witnesses testified that they had either personally seen or knew about the existence of UFOs (now officially called UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). One of them was David Grusch, a decorated Afghanistan combat veteran and former U.S. Air Force officer who worked for 14 years in Military Intelligence, much of it analyzing UAP reports and helping senior intelligence officials and Congressional leaders understand them. He testified under oath that he had learned in the course of his official duties about “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program” and that, during official interviews with 40 high-level witnesses over four years, he was informed the U.S. Government is even in possession of non-human spacecraft along with bodies of their dead pilots.

Another witness was retired U. S. Navy pilot Cmdr. David Fravor, who saw the 2004 UFO off the coast of San Diego. He said that, before his own encounter on 14 November, 2004, Navy radar controllers had been watching UFOs moving in ways they could not explain: “The controller told us that these objects had been observed for over two weeks coming down from over 80,000 feet, rapidly descending to 20,000 feet, hanging out hours and then going straight back up.” For five minutes Fravor and three other Naval Air Force officers watched a UFO, without wings or rotors, hovering over the ocean and moving “erratically.” When they tried to get closer to the mysterious craft, “it rapidly accelerated and disappeared right in front of our aircraft, leaving no detectable turbulence.” Radar showed it was 60 miles away in less than a minute. Fravor also had told CNN on 19 December, 2017, that this object moved abruptly, “like a ping pong ball, bouncing off a wall,” and had “the ability to hover over the water, and then start a vertical climb, from basically zero up towards about 12,000 feet, and then accelerate in less than two seconds, and disappear.”

A third witness, former U. S. Navy pilot Ryan Graves, said he was flying an F-18 off the coast of Virginia in 2014 when he watched a UFO unlike any aircraft he had ever seen, hovering in one place despite hurricane-force winds. He said that UFO encounters in the region were “not rare or isolated” and that both military and commercial pilots saw objects “performing maneuvers that are unexplainable due to our current understanding of our technology and our capabilities as a country.” He added: “If everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change.”
Keislar next told about his own meeting and talking with an extraterrestrial on a saucer-shaped craft, twice. He recalled, “In 1956, when I was nine years old, I was walking home from school through a wooded area one day, and in a clearing I saw a flying saucer parked, on three stilts, with a stairway leading up to an open doorway. There were five or six clearly non-human beings on the craft and the captain, a woman, invited me on board with a wave of her hand. When I reached her, she embraced me and spoke to me so tenderly and lovingly that I felt she was my real mother. In fact, when I got home, I told my biological mother, ‘You’re not my real mother!’ When I saw this captain of that flying saucer a second time, more than 35 years later, she looked the same age, about 25 or 30. Later, she explained that her people can live for thousands of years, so 35 of our years makes very little difference to them. She even left me physical evidence of our meeting so I would not think later that it may have been a dream or hallucination.”

At the end of the meeting, participants decided to form a study group and continue getting together at 3:00 p.m. on the third Sunday of every month at Hog Canyon Deli (16811 Yolo Ave., Esparto). They will also have an informal New Year’s Eve party there at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, 31 December, mainly just to talk and get to know each other better. Everyone is invited to attend.