Donald Slayton

"I was testing a P-51 fighter in Minneapolis when I spotted this object. I was at about 10,000 feet on a nice, bright, sunny afternoon. I thought the object was a kite, then I realized that no kite is gonna fly that high. As I got closer it looked like a weather balloon, gray and about three feet in diameter. But as soon as I got behind the darn thing it didn't look like a balloon anymore. It looked like a saucer, a disk. About the same time, I realized that it was suddenly going way from me-and there I was, running at about 300 miles per hour. I tracked it for a little way, and then all of a sudden the damn thing just took off. It pulled about a 45 degree climbing turn and accelerated and just flat disappeared."

Donald Slayton, Mercury astronaut, in a 1951 interview.

Joseph Albert Walker

"I don't feel like speculating about them. All I know is what appeared on the film which was developed after the flight."

Joseph Walker from May 11, 1962 commenting during a lecture at the Second National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space Research in Seattle, Washington after he had filmed five or six UFOs, (he stated one his tasks was to detect UFOs), during his record breaking fifty-mile-high flight in April, 1962 while piloting an X-15.

Major Robert White

"There ARE things out there! There absolutely is!"

White exclaiming over the radio about a UFO encounter taking place on a 58 mile high X-15 flight on July 17, 1962.

Major Robert White, on July 17, 1962 during his fifty-eight-mile high flight of an X-15.

Al Worden

"And a literal translation describes very clearly a spacecraft with the ability to land vertically and take-off vertically, and it was an object that looked very much like the Lunar Module that we used on the Moon; and if it's going to land vertically and take-off vertically, it had to come from some place and go back some place."

Worden lectured on his views that Earth was visited in the past by extraterrestrial explorers.

He began by commenting on the well known "UFO interpretation" of the vision of the prophet Ezekiel in the Bible.

"In my mind the universe has to be cyclic, so that in one galaxy if there is a planet maybe that has arrived at the point of becoming unlivable, you will find in another part of a different galaxy a planet that has just formed which is perfect for habitation.

I see some kind of intelligent being, like us, skipping around the universe from planet to planet as, let's say, the South Pacific Indians do on the islands, where they skip from island to island.

When the first island blows up due to a volcano, they will have their progeny on all these other islands and they will be able to continue the species. I think that's what the [alien] space program is all about.

"I think we may be a combination of creatures that were living here on Earth some time in the past, and having a visitation, if you will, by creatures from somewhere else in the universe, and those two species getting together and having progeny.

I am not at all convinced that we are not the result of that particular union some many thousands of years ago. If that is the case in fact, a very small group of explorers could land on a planet and create successors to themselves that would eventually take up the pursuit of, let's say, inhabiting the rest of the universe."

Excerpts from his interview in the documentary "The Other Side of the Moon," produced by Michael G. Lemle, and broadcast by PBS in July 1989.

Al Worden was an Apollo 15 astronaut who later became a poet.

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