Three army veterans have told of their encounter with a UFO at a Middle Eastern US military base and how they were told to “keep quiet” after the strange sighting.
The former cavalry scouts are opening up about their experience as the first public Congressional hearings on UFOs in half a century got underway on Tuesday.
Private First Class Dovell Engram, 28, E4 Specialist Vishal Singh, 29, and Sergeant Travis Bingham, 36, said they saw eight bright objects hovering and darting across the sky at incredible speeds from their desert outpost in Sinai, around December 2014.
They had been stationed at Observation Post 3-1 in Sinai near the south end of the Israel-Egypt border, when they had the incredible experience.
One of the men told The Mail Online of how he was told to keep his “mouth shut” by a senior officer after word spread among his regiment about the sighting.
The men, who were trained in identifying aircraft, believed the objects they witnessed were of non-human origin.
However, the men said they were afraid to make official reports about the incident for fear of being sent away for a career-damaging psychological evaluation - and said there was no proper process to make a report anyway.
Their account is the latest of a number of reports of incursions of airspace by seemingly technologically advanced craft, and the military’s disinterest in taking them seriously.
The three men had been part of the 3rd Cavalry regiment, which was part of a Multinational Force and Observers mission (MFO) deployed to monitor the border for nine months.
Engram was the first to spot something strange and described being “scared s***less” after seeing a bright craft-like figure in the night sky when he was on watch in the guard tower one December night.
He said the craft appeared to be spinning, with smaller lights emerging from it. He subsequently radioed other outposts at least 200 miles away, where Cavalrymen said they could also see the lights.
Engram then called his sergeant Bingham, who said he was “unprepared” for the inexplicable sight.
“I would describe it as a big object with several smaller objects, which appeared to be communicating, or scuffling, like a dogfight in the air,’ he said. ‘We knew it wasn’t our military and it was baffling.
“The objects were glowing – you could clearly see them with the naked eye, and it was clear how fast they were moving.”
After spotting the craft, Singh said he focused on it using his night-vision goggles. While he said it was difficult to identify a shape, he said he could roughly see an oval-shaped object in a horizontal position that was the size of a jumbo jet, moving at “hypersonic” speeds.
A senior US defence contractor with knowledge of advanced aircraft said they knew of no technology held by the US or other major militaries that could exhibit such behaviour.
The contractor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “The USA, Europe and China are all pursuing drone mothership technology where a mothership aircraft launches and recovers swarms of drones.”
The troops said they were left shaken and stunned by what they’d seen. Engram said he had asked his international comrades to check in with Egyptian and Israeli authorities, but said neither knew what the ‘craft’ were.
And while their mission was to observe potential military activities in the region, the soldiers said they were unable to report what they had seen - as it didn’t appear to be an actual aircraft.
Congress passed a bill in December last year mandating a new UFO office to help take such sightings seriously.
The new law, which was part of the latest defence spending authorisation bill, required the government to establish “procedures to synchronise and standardise the collection, reporting, and analysis of incidents, including adverse physiological effects, regarding unidentified aerial phenomena across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community”.
Defence officials were reportedly being grilled on their progress following through on the new requirements, as Bingham claimed more support was needed to ensure credible UFO sightings were reported effectively.
“We need a set of procedures so that we can report such events. Give me a format, give the soldiers some training,’ he said. ‘It could be really lethal… If these things were hostile, we couldn’t defend ourselves,” he said.
Last week Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff announced he would be holding public hearings into the government’s handling of the UFO phenomenon, in a bid to break the cycle of “excessive secrecy” around the topic.
Singh has claimed he was targeted for talking about his experience with his comrades and was disproportionately punished for minor violations.
His commanders even tried to get him fired over allegations about his mental health, he claimed.
“My fellow veterans who have been through the same experience as myself all strongly suspect that senior Pentagon officials were responsible for the persecution and intimidation efforts so that military personnel would not speak out in public about what they had seen,” he said.
Singh left the Army some three years later, after being diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
