UFO HUNTER

[Mercy Now]

Pat Uskert of “The UFO Hunters” Reveals All… Part One

Filed Under: Uncategorized by admin
Dec.06, 2010


At first, I wanted to do a summary article of my interview with Pat Uskert, one of the stars of the History Channel’s series, “The UFO Hunters”.  I thought that people might not be patient enough to stick with it and read the entire interview.   After thinking about it, I decided against it.  I wanted his thoughts to be unfiltered and uninterpreted.

This will be a long read.  But I promise you that it is nothing short of incredible.  You are about to read the thoughts of a gentleman who has investigated the most famous UFO cases ever reported.  So hang in there.  This is a long interview, but it is worthwhile.

Without further adieu, WeWantToBelieve.com is proud to present UFO Hunter, Pat Uskert.



1.  Why and how did you end up joining the UFO Hunters series that aired on the History Channel?

You know, it’s funny.   While filming the show, I was always conscious that there are hundreds of people more qualified to investigate the phenomenon than I am. And I also knew that when this thing aired, people would probably wonder, “who the hell is this guy?“ 

And if I had been head producer of the show, looking for talent, I probably would not have hired me. And yet, somehow, in spite of myself, I ended up being one of the three UFO Hunters.

            To answer the why and how, well basically, the show evolved out of my own quest for truth regarding the UFO topic. Around 2004, I began working on my own little UFO documentary, visiting people who reported UFO sightings, filming the investigations, and assembling them into a film. I had put together a little DVD documentary with UFO personality David Sereda which eventually caught the attention of Bill and Nancy Birnes over at UFO Magazine – their office was only about a mile away from my apartment in Venice, California. The documentary was absolutely dreadful, but they somehow enjoyed it, saying that they got a huge kick out of watching me. One day, they called me over to their home and UFO Magazine headquarters in Marina del Rey for a little talk.  Their place happened to be a little 40 foot sailing boat, docked in the marina. I knocked on the hatch, and was invited down into their wooden galley for a talk. And it was there, sipping coffee, crammed somewhere within their hull that they proposed their plan.

            They said, “Pat, we like what you’ve done. We think it’s something that might make a good TV show. We would like to work with you, and together make an attempt at a TV show based on this concept of you investigating UFOs.“  I listened, couldn’t really believe what they were saying. Me… on a TV show?   It just didn’t seem like a reality. But, taking into consideration that Bill Birnes wrote the New York Times best-seller “Day After Roswell“ about US Army Colonel Philip Corso‘s knowledge of the Roswell Crash and his involvement with reverse engineering alien technology, I figured I had nothing to lose.  On that day we all shook hands and agreed. I would go about creating a video-demo for the concept called “UFO Road Trip“, about UFO investigators that travel to investigate the UFO phenomenon. Bill would then take the concept and demo, and pitch the show to various networks.

            The whole process took much longer than I expected. It took years. I began to get gray hair.  We had some interest from Hearst Media at first, and then they didn’t call us for about a year. I fell into a depression, and felt that the whole thing was rather foolish. My family and friends wondered if I was okay, as I was visiting people with a video camera, investing UFO cases in California, and telling my family that I was  creating a UFO show. It just doesn’t sound good, right?  I began to wonder if Bill and Nancy had the connections that they said they did – perhaps they really were nuts. I began to doubt the whole thing, and slowly felt the increasing burn of investing myself into something totally stupid – you know when that heat comes to your face, your heart begins to pound, and you feel the panic. I started to have trouble sleeping. But then it happened.

            Bill called, his voice excited, saying we had a chance to shoot a segment for a History Channel show about Underwater UFOs.  We wouldn’t get paid, unfortunately, but we could get our concept on TV – actively investigating the UFO phenomenon. This was to be our big shot. We had to swing, and we had to hit it out of the park. When the day came, we did our best. This show, I am told, went on to become of the highest rated one-hour shows ever aired on the History Channel.  After it aired,The History Channel approved the pilot for a series based on adventures in UFO investigation.

            So that’s how I became part of the show. I was creator of the original demo, co-creator of the concept, “UFO Road Trip“, and I performed on-screen in the original USO segment and later the original pilot episode.

            As for the why:  Why I did it?  I think somewhere around 2003, I got tired of just sitting and wondering if any of this information about the UFO phenomenon is true. The 2001 Disclosure Project press conference had an impact me. For those who haven’t seen it online, it was the first major press event, held in Washington DC National Press Club, in which government employees and former military stepped forward to share their knowledge of the UFO phenomenon.

There was also James Fox‘s film, “Out of the Blue”, in which astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell say that UFOs are real, and they are dead serious.  After watching their interviews, it was hard to just shrug them off, turn out the light and go to bed. It actually began to bother me that UFOs could be real. I thought if any of this is real, maybe I should have a look into it.

            We know for a fact that certain factions in governments hide things from the public – from sick medical experiments to CIA operations overseas. Anyone who believes we are in Iraq and Afghanistan to spread US love and democracy is a simpleton. Governments do things, and it is not in their interest to share their intelligence with the public. The USA has perhaps the largest, most effective national security state in the world, with the best propaganda techniques ever developed. If they want secrETs kept, they can do that. And now that we have human hardware on other planets, it really is not crazy that someone else, some other intelligent species, is putting their hardware on our planet.

I just could not go on sitting in my office cubicle, while astronauts were swearing that UFOs are real. I would say this is a pretty significant bit of news. So, I had no choice in the matter, really. My curiosity pushed me to investigate what the UFO phenomenon is. My desire to figure out this big puzzle hurled me into UFO Hunters.         

2.  Bill Birnes himself was quoted on the series as saying that, “90% of the cases were bullsh*t”.  How did the team decide which cases to investigate?

Ha! Bill said that? That’s hilarious. But, yes, it’s true. 90% may even be a little low. It could be that 99% of the UFO phenomenon is noise. There is noise of thousands of people misidentifying aircraft or atmospheric phenomenon, imagining things, or simply making things up. Many famous cases are hoaxes. There are people out there who just cannot help themselves; they are compelled to hoax things, and they are extremely good at it. And these hoaxes often survive for decades and implant themselves into the collective consciousness. For example, on his deathbed, the photographer of one of the best photos of the Loch Ness monster admitted it was a prank that got out of control. That photo had been in books and documentaries for decades, waved around as evidence that the Loch Ness monster really exists. So we have to filter out the hoaxes.

And let’s get serious here for a moment because there is something in the UFO field that you don’t often hear discussed in UFO forums, UFO radio and TV shows, and it is an especially loud source of this noise. And this is people afflicted with serious psychological disorders – borderlines, multiple personalities, paranoids, narcissists who believe aliens have chosen them to save the world, and so on. They are out there, functioning in society, or on disability. The lunatic fringe is very real. They write letters to UFO magazines, file reports with MUFON, and some of them even write books. We have to filter them out also.

And I’ve come across this plenty of times – More times that I would like. Here’s one example – my neighbor:  She is about 60, semi-retired, divorced, owns a home and a car. One day she confided in me that she was being abducted, almost every night.  She said the ETs were putting energy implants into her – implants of pure energy, undetectable by doctors. She didn’t trust the ETs, and said she could sometimes elude them, by hiding in her bathtub, shielded by a forcefield of water. This was very interesting. I kept an open mind. Later when she told me that she was a reincarnation of Mary Magdalene, and had recently been told by God to visit France so that she could search and uncover her skull, the buried skull of Mary Magdalene – which she actually went to do! She eventually traveled to France, maxing out her credit cards and refinancing her home, going on this epic journey to find a skull, as God had instructed her to do. She returned without the skull, but she reported suspicious activity, and believed the CIA moved the skull before she could find it.

I share this to illustrate my point. My neighbor, the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene, attends UFO conventions, writes to UFO magazines, and reports her sightings to MUFON and to the police. You might disagree with me, but I believe my neighbor is insane. And I believe there are thousands of people like this:  Crazy, but functional. You don’t know they’re crazy, until you talk to them. This is a significant source of noise around the UFO phenomenon, and it is very difficult to sift through it all.

            So finally, getting back to your question.   How we decided which cases to focus on, was by simply making a list of the best cases and famous cases. If you notice, we relied heavily on cases involving military and aviation professionals. We covered some of the best cases in UFO History. We actually went into Rendelsham Forest, with Colonel Charles Halt, the deputy commander of Rendalsham Air Force Base, and found the exact spot where he and his men had their UFO encounter. We talked with General Parfiz Jafari of the Iranian Air Force about his famous encounter with a UFO over Tehran. This was an encounter so serious and unexplainable that our Defense Intelligence Agency investigated it.

            Basically, Bill and I went for the throat of UFOlogy.  We wanted to stop to the nonsense and get to the source of it. We went for the serious cases with heavyweight interviews. But we had a problem – The History Channel wanted episodes to be exciting, designed for short attention spans, and for high ratings. This meant that too much talking, too many talking heads, was not good. Long interviews, even with air force commanders and astronauts, was considered bad TV. So we had a real challenge getting material that the network wanted.  

People have to remember, this was a TV show. TV shows are entirely governed by popularity and ratings. If ratings dip below a million viewers, you are finished.  Advertisers pull their ads, and then you say hello to your last episode. So, executives and  producers dreamed up bizarre things that were pretty unnecessary for UFO investigation, but were thought necessary to make the show more interesting – like kayaking with sharks, which I did in season 3. Totally silly, in my opinion, and I knew it at the time. Bill and I were not in control of things. Although we designed episodes around certain cases, each episode was developed by an episode producer, who then bounced the ideas to History Channel producers, who suggested changes and finally approved episodes. Towards the end of the process, Bill and I were much like dancing puppets, trapped in the machine we helped create. Believe me, we knew certain episodes and cases were bad. But the machine was in motion.

 Bill and I picked the best cases, backed up with high-caliber witnesses. History Channel and producers added the rest. But hey, that’s TV. It’s a collaborative effort.

3.  During your work as a UFO Hunter, what was the most compelling evidence the team found that could qualify as proof that extraterrestrials have visited our planet?

You know, when we started the show, I actually imagined that somewhere in the near future, that some disgruntled military general would call us, or some retired CIA agent, and would spill the beans. I imagined, somewhat naively or insanely, that our final episode might be where we fling open some huge vault door under Area 51, and show the audience the flying saucer. The episode would end with Bill and I standing victoriously on a big metallic flying disk, cameras flashing as journalists from around the world record the moment.  Another crazy daydream of mine was that someone like former President Carter would agree to do the show, look into the camera, and say, “It’s true America! As the President, I knew that UFOs were landing on Earth, but I couldn’t tell you about it. It’s all true. Aliens are here. I beg your forgiveness.“  But none of these things came to pass. There was no vault of alien parts, no earth-shattering testimony from high government, no undisputable photo or video.

The best I got was testimony from extremely high caliber individuals, such as high ranking military officers, who swear on their lives that UFO are real, and the government is suppressing this information.  

The most compelling evidence?  For me, there is no one single piece of evidence that stands out as incontrovertible evidence. For me, it’s a combination of all of the weirdness put together that reveals something strange. But there are two things that give me some satisfaction that UFOs are very real, and not of human origin:  My interview with a pissed off former FAA official, and a UFO incident at Edwards Air Force Base in 1965.

            The FAA offical is John Callahan, division chief of accidents and investigations. After retiring from the FAA, he boldly stepped to the forefront to announce that UFO incidents occur, the government knows about UFOs, and they cover it up to avoid panicking the public. Here is a guy with a flawless career, who could easily retire to a hammock in Tahiti and sip Pina Coladas for the rest of his life. I asked him why he is rocking the boat now, and he said, “Well, it pisses me off that they know about this and they’re keeping this quiet. People have a right to know about this.“  He described how after a UFO incident over Alaska was being investigated by the FAA and Ronald Reagan‘s scientific staff, the CIA entered the FAA offices, confiscated the radar data, and swore all to silence saying, “We (the CIA) were never here, and this never happened.“ When I asked Callahan how he could come forward like this, and not worry about some kind of reprisals against him, he said, “I know where all the bodies are buried. They won’t come for me.“   Keep in mind, this is a Chief Investigator of the FAA, the number one head honcho of accidents and investigations of the Federal Aviation Administration, retired, with a pension, and he is saying that UFO encounters are real, and they are kept from the public. And he is pissed off. Think about it.

            The other thing that really bugs me is an incident that occurred over Edwards Air Force base in 1965. Multiple radar installations around Los Angeles all reported unusual activity over Edwards, and could not identify the targets. Keep in mind that this was the Cold War, and the US simply could not have unknown craft hovering over a major military installation. Something like this could trigger World War III. Pilots of two separate F-16s had contact with unknown craft. One of the pilots wrote a deathbed letter to his wife, describing the UFO he had seen that night, and was not able to share with her while he lived. The other pilot had radar contact with an unidentified object at altitude. Not a balloon, or atmospheric disturbance, but a hard target. The main eyewitness at the center of this event was tech sergeant Chuck Sorrels, who was in the control tower the night of this event. He personally observed the orb-like craft doing impossible, unusual maneuvers high over the Air Force base, and kept the incident secret for years. It was only after seeing UFO Hunters on History Channel that he stepped forward to a national audience to share this experience. He doesn’t know what the objects were, but it is clear that the incident made an impression as the single most unusual, unexplainable incident of his long, professional career. It involved multiple radar facilities and pilots, all unable to explain what was happened.  And decades later there is still no explanation.

It is hard for me to believe that all of these people were confused by some kind of unusual lightning storm or atmospheric phenomenon. It is hard for me to believe that the military was playing a joke on the military. If our military was not flying orbs over Edwards Air Force base in 1965, then who was? Russians? Were Russians in MiGs darting about over Edwards doing loop-de-loops, penetrating our air space and laughing wildly? Was it Cuban pilots, buzzing about in their orb craft?   Who would have the technology and capability to fly unchallenged over one of our most advanced test facilities, and outwit everyone? Who? Think about that.

I haven’t seen concrete evidence of extraterrestrials, but the testimony from impeccable sources is hard to ignore. In talking to these people, people who are experts in their fields, who are telling me, in their professional opinions, that there are objects operating in our world that are not ours, not of human origin, operating outside the limits of our present capabilities, with incidents that are silenced by government agencies so as not to panic the public, I don’t think we can ignore it. To do so, in the face of all the testimony, is the very definition of ignorance.


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