Gary Neitzel (MUFON)
By Carley Banks
In the Pentagon's $600 billion annual budget, $22 million is spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
It tracks unidentified flying objects.
A video released by the military in December shows pilot David Fravor encountering what appears to be a UFO during a standard training mission off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
"There's a whole fleet of them!" a voice on the recording said. "Look at them, dude!" said another.
"He reported this thing as flying very erratically, making maneuvers that -- if there was a human being inside of it -- they would be liquid," said Gary Neitzel, a Texas field investigator for MUFON -- the Mutual UFO Network.
Investigating UFOs for nearly 60 years, Neitzel maintains we are being visited by someone ... or something... not of this Earth.
"I just wonder where they're from, what they're doing here, if we're in jeopardy, if they're friendly, if they're not friendly... you just don't know," Neitzel said.
And he's not the only one. MUFON says there have been UFO sightings in 13 Texoma counties: four in Texas and nine in Oklahoma. But stories of unexplained sightings pre-date the modern world.
"You could probably take them back thousands of years," Neitzel said. "They were reported in the middle ages, in ancient times, and you can see different paintings that have what looks like could be UFOs in them.
Arkle Dennis Williams is a believer. He recalled a day in the 1970s when he was standing in the front yard of his childhood home outside Sulphur, Oklahoma.
"I noticed an object hovering in the sky, and it was lit up," he said.
Williams said his brother and father -- who didn't believe that man walked on the moon -- also observed the object in broad daylight. "He was right there along with me that we were witnessing a UFO ... it did some zig-zag motions, came closer, got further away, hovered continually for about 15 to 17 minutes, and then just did a zip and disappeared."
It's a phenomenon that Williams said he was meant to see.
"In my opinion, there are just a chosen few on this planet that are given the opportunity to witness sightings of such. For some reason, I was one of the chosen," he said. "In years to come, I believe there's a lot more that we have to witness. And maybe not in my lifetime, but we will witness very, very strange effects from the outer space."
And Gary Neitzel keeps looking for answers.
"It's technology far advanced than ours that's flying around our skies," he said. "A lot of people think they're out there."
