Claim: Existence of an Allied Forces Report about a 1963 Mass UFO Sighting in Europe

The late Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defence, gave in 2017 an interview to the YouTube channel "The Hannibal TV". Aside from a lot of wild claims, he was very specific about the alleged existence of a report from the Allied Forces being issued about a 1963 mass ufo sighting supposedly having occurred in Europe,




The claim is made at 33:04:
Including the armada that flew south over Europe. I guess it was 1963. About 50 UFOs. And the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe was concerned; about to press the panic button. Unfortunately, they all turned around and went back over the North Pole. So he was satisfied they weren't Soviets and that they had to be in fact extraterrestrials. So he ordered a study to be done and it took three years. And what the study concluded was that there had been at least four species at least four visiting earth for thousand of years.

I have been trying to find any evidence of either the existence of such a Allied Forces report or mass UFO sighting occuring in the 60s in Europe. But so far have been unsuccessful from any available online records.
 
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Paul T. Hellyer was born in 1923, and got interested in UFOs in 2005, near his 82nd birthday. The alleged report is titled "An Assessment: An Evaluation of a Possible Military Threat to Allied Forces in Europe", Hellyer dates it at 1964 in his book "The Money Mafia: A World in Crisis", and his knowledge of it is second-hand. The alleged sighting dates to February 2, 1961.

Article:
Saturday, 11 May 2013
Removing The Shackles: transcription of Paul Hellyer testimony: People's Disclosure

Transcription of the video titled, "2 Living ET's Working With US Government" posted on Vimeo
[...]

My name, as said, is Paul Hellyer, I am a former Minister of Defense for Canada. I served in three governments, during a total of 23.5 years of Parliament. Although as Minister of National Defense, I had sighting reports of U.F.O.'s, I was too busy to be concerned about them because I was trying to unify the Army, Navy, and Air Force into a single Canadian Defense Force, and that itself was a kind-of battle to the finish. So, this was not high on my agenda, but about 10 years ago I started getting interested due to a young man from Ottawa sending me material on the subject. I told him I was too busy to read it, but he had confidence that someday I would. He sent me a copy of Colonel Corso's book, The Day After Roswell. It took me awhile to get around to reading it, but I took it for my summer reading in 2005, and was really impressed with what was contained in it. What I thought to myself was, 'there are huge issues here, HUGE issues, and the American People and the People of the World have a right to know what's going on because they're part of it, it's not just an isolated thing.'

From "The Money Mafia: A World in Crisis" (2014) by Paul T. Hellyer, chapter 9 "Visitors From Starry Realms", via Google Books:
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The Historical Office of SHAPE denies that this report exists.
Article:
A retired U.S. Army Sergeant Major named Robert O. Dean has frequently claimed in speeches and internet postings that while stationed at SHAPE in the mid-1960s he read a highly classified document with the title "The Assessment: An Evaluation of a Possible Threat to NATO Forces in Europe", which studied all aspects of the existence of UFOS and the potential threat they posed to NATO. [..]

We have analyzed these claims in detail, including a photograph alleged to be of the front cover of the assessment, and have concluded that the cover page is a forgery and that SHAPE prepared no report on UFOs during the 1960s. While some will no doubt dismiss this conclusion as part of some sort of long-standing cover-up of the existence of UFOs, we would like to point out that in the 1960s – like today - SHAPE was confronted by much more pressing threats than UFOS and did not have the time and resources to spend 2½ years studying them, as Sergeant Major Dean alleges. We are not saying that UFOs do or do not exist but simply that SHAPE did not prepare a report on them.

For the complete Historical Office analysis of the alleged 1964 SHAPE "Assessment" of UFOs, see "The Alleged SHAPE 'Assessment" of UFOS: What the Official Historical Records Show" in the Historical Documents section.


Edit: updated link to SHAPE document
 
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Fascinating reading. I think I am seeing a slide from the very reasonable "UFOs -- that is, radar targets that look like but are not incoming Soviet ICBMs -- are a real and obvious threat and we need to figure out what is going on" into, to be kind, the less reasonable "there are four alien civilizations who have been visiting us for thousands of years." If the timeline for that belief could be established, it might be an interestng psychological study in how one falls into a Rabbit Hole from an initial state of responsibly trying to find out what is really going on.

(In passing, I was struck by the bit where SkepticSteve includes the quote from his source: "And the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe was concerned; about to press the panic button. Unfortunately, they all turned around and went back over the North Pole. So he was satisfied they weren't Soviets..." That is the strangest use of "unfortunately" that I have ever seen. I might have used "fortunately," "extremely fortunately" or even "thank you merciful God" as a descriptor for WWIII not starting over what sounds like some bogus radar reflections.)

(Apologies for not using the quote feature, I cant figure out how to quote it so that it doe not look like something SkepticSteve said...)
 
The late Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defence, gave in 2017 an interview to the YouTube channel "The Hannibal TV". Aside from a lot of wild claims, he was very specific about the alleged existence of a report from the Allied Forces being issued about a 1963 mass ufo sighting supposedly having occurred in Europe,




The claim is made at 33:04:


I have been trying to find any evidence of either the existence of such a Allied Forces report or mass UFO sighting occuring in the 60s in Europe. But so far have been unsuccessful from any available online records.

There is a list of solar storms in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms), and there was one in May 1967 which resulted in :
Blackout of polar surveillance radars during Cold War led U.S. military to scramble for nuclear war until solar origin confirmed
The reference takes you to this article:
The May 1967 great storm and radio disruption event: Extreme space weather and extraordinary responses

which focuses on the storm, but there are mentions of the problems the DoD had to face, even though NORAD was informed (emphasis added):
“Probably the first significant operational impact came from a major solar flare and the resultant geomagnetic storm in May, 1967. AWS notified NORAD in real time of the event and the associated mission impacts. However, outside agencies were not aware of the space environmental factors and made uninformed decisions without considering the drastic impacts the event imparted to NORAD's early warning systems, which have a direct bearing on decisions being made at the highest levels of the US government. As a result of this near incident, the need to incorporate real-time space weather information into the Air Force decision-making process was made obvious to many, and several major efforts were undertaken to greatly improve the operational capability of the AWS Space Environmental Support System.”
Military radio technologies were severely impacted by (1) solar radio bursts, (2) solar energetic particle deposition, and (3) general disruption of ionospheric radio and ground-to-satellite communication channels.

So Mr. Hellyer may have mixed different events and claims (the alleged SHAPE UFO assessment, and the 1967 near incident due to the solar storm)
 
So Mr. Hellyer may have mixed different events and claims (the alleged SHAPE UFO assessment, and the 1967 near incident due to the solar storm)
Definitely not. Hellyer misrembered the year in that interview, but in his book, he correctly represents what Robert Dean claims to have read in the elusive SHAPE report.

If you want to discuss the incident, you need to first decide whether you want to trust Robert Dean. If you do (I don't), I find it highly unlikely that he would have read about a 1967 event in a 1964 report. Dean's duty at SHAPE extended to April 1967.
 
Definitely not. Hellyer misrembered the year in that interview, but in his book, he correctly represents what Robert Dean claims to have read in the elusive SHAPE report.

If you want to discuss the incident, you need to first decide whether you want to trust Robert Dean. If you do (I don't), I find it highly unlikely that he would have read about a 1967 event in a 1964 report. Dean's duty at SHAPE extended to April 1967.
Hellyer was in the government in 1967. I wouldn't expect him to remember exact dates, but at least to have had some distant (first hand) memory of such a 'near incident'.

Then we have a non-existent assesment, that for all we know, may be totally made up, or maybe again based on distant memories, as Dean "became a whistleblower in the 1990s".

You yourself said Heyller knew second hand about Dean's non-existent assessment. But if the story describes something he had some memory of, it would be easy to make the connection.

Totally specullative, I know, but not the first time I see this kind of mixing stories. It's only my take on this. Feel free to think otherwise.
 
Hellyer was in the government in 1967. I wouldn't expect him to remember exact dates, but at least to have had some distant (first hand) memory of such a 'near incident
Please re-read my transcript excerpt in post #2. Hellyer does not remember any reports from that time, he probably wouldn't have been briefed on a secret incident in Europe, and nothing he writes goes beyond Robert Dean's testimony. He also writes explicitly that he read about it in a book and confirmed it with Dean's wife.

If you want to contradict that, please point to anything Hellyer has said or written that goes beyond Dean's testimony.
And then please show me a quote of Hellyer claiming he remembers any UFO reports from his goverment job, because my quote implies strongly that he doesn't.

In other words, please show me evidence that Hellyer was anything but an octagenarian who developed an interest in UFOs late in life, which he fed through books and the Internet. My evidence supporting this take is on the table, and it comes from Hellyer himself.

I grant you that Hellyer may have been more inclined to trust Robert Dean if he vaguely remembered the 1967 incident. (But it would have been reported to him, so not "first-hand".)
 
You are right. He is just parroting from other books.

In the OP, @SkepticSteve was wondering about a possible event related to the alleged report. I have the feeling the story may have been loosely based (or made up based) on the 1967 CME event that lead to nearly triggering a conflict, as the orginal story goes (yet, in different dates).

I have no proof of this, I may be totally wrong, but that would be me line of investigation in case I had the time to do it.
 
I have the feeling the story may have been loosely based (or made up based) on the 1967 CME event that lead to nearly triggering a conflict, as the orginal story goes (yet, in different dates).
It's the wrong type of event, though, as it doesn't involve any actual UAPs. I'd have picked another event, and even that is a huge stretch:
Article:

5 October 1960

Radar equipment in Thule, Greenland, mistakenly interpreted a moonrise over Norway as a large-scale Soviet missile launch. Upon receiving a report of the supposed attack, NORAD went on high alert.

23 May 1967

A powerful solar flare accompanied by a coronal mass ejection interfered with multiple NORAD radars over the Northern Hemisphere. This interference was initially interpreted as intentional jamming of the radars by the Soviets, thus an act of war.


Your own source that you cited earlier confirms the wikipedia description.
Article:
The storm made its initial mark with a colossal solar radio burst causing radio interference at frequencies between 0.01 and 9.0 GHz and near-simultaneous disruptions of dayside radio communication by intense fluxes of ionizing solar X-rays. Aspects of military control and communication were immediately challenged. Within hours a solar energetic particle event disrupted high-frequency communication in the polar cap. Subsequently, record-setting geomagnetic and ionospheric storms compounded the disruptions.
[...]
Such an intense, never-before-observed solar radio burst was interpreted as jamming. (Recall that a similar situation occurred in the early days of radar development in World War II when “enemy jamming” turned out to be solar RFI [Hey, 1946].) Cold War military commanders viewed full scale jamming of surveillance sensors as a potential act of war.

And, as you say, it's all speculation anyway.
 
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