The television show PARANORMAL BORDERLINE featuring astronaut Colonel Gordon Cooper aired in St. Louis at 2:05 am Thursday, May 9th, 1996. What follows is a transcript of that event. Please forgive me for any typos that may occur.

First, to the producers of the program: Please forgive me for this public display of the fore mentioned excerpt of the program. I merely want to share and take no payment what-so-ever in its' distribution.

PARANORMAL BORDERLINE

BREAKING THE SILENCE Original air date: 05-07-96 3rd segment

Executive Producers MACK ANDERSON and BRADLEY ANDERSON

Produced by THOMAS McGOUGH

Host JONATHAN FRAKES
Correspondent YOLANDA GASKINS

JF = Jonathan Frakes YG = Yolanda Gaskins GC = Gordon Cooper

JH Let's say you don't believe this planet is being visited by aliens and UFOs. You may be changing your mind in the next several minutes.

We have an exclusive interview with a true American hero. A man who knows aircraft and space craft. A man who has risked his life in Americas' space program. A man who knows UFOs are very real. His name... Gordon Cooper.

He was one of the pioneers. One of the original 7 NASA astronauts. Together they wrote a new chapter in the history of Mankind. The first exploration of space. His illustrious career as an aviator spanned decades, and during that time Col. Gordon Cooper saw it all.

He was an Air Force Lt. and jet pilot at the age of 22. After obtaining an aeronautical engineering degree, he became a test pilot, and then came the call from NASA to join Americas' Space Program

On May 15th, 1963, Gordon Cooper launched into space while the whole world watched. In person at Cape Canaveral Fla., on television sets around the US and Europe, and over radios virtually everywhere else. The world held its' breath... The launch and mission were overwhelming successes. Cooper, our last astronaut to go into space alone, set the record for the longest flight by an American. After the flight, President John Kennedy spoke to Cooper and gave this news conference:

[John Kennedy: We're proud of Maj. Cooper... and we're proud of all those thousands Americans who worked with him... to make this flight possible.]

JF Gordon Cooper returned to Earth a hero, and a national symbol of American achievement and courage. Clearly, he had "The Right Stuff".

But there is another side to Coopers' lifetime in aviation. One that for years he would only discuss with close friends, until now. It involved his personal encounters with UFOs.

For him it began in 1951 while flying in Europe for the U.S. Air Force. There Cooper, and other pilots, witnessed an incident that has never been officially explained. A vast armada of UFOs flying in formation at extremely high altitudes. Recently, Yolanda Gaskins spoke with Gordon Cooper. In this exclusive interview Col. Cooper spoke for the first time on television about his encounters with UFOs.

YG I've read about this incident you had in 1951, and you said you saw literally hundreds of unidentifiable flying objects.

GC Yes they were flying quite high, how high we couldn't tell because we couldn't get anywhere near their altitude, but they were either very large craft way up, or... smaller craft still above well above what we could get to.

YG For a day and a half all of this happened... but then no one wanted to talk about it.

GC Well we sent a report forward on it, and the answer that finally came back months later was they were probably high flying seed pods, which didn't sound very logical.

YG There are always allot of excuses, there's always um the weather balloons, I've heard that one before... and uh...

GC Weather balloons frequently by the way, are often mistaken for UFOs. I'd say this one time I was in an airplane... boy it really looked like a big saucer very high and I had an after-burner going and got as high as I could get in this airplane... as I started pulling up along close to it I had a very shame-faced-look on my face when I realized it was a big weather balloon with the radio package hanging under it.

YG But still the point is you could get close to that. In 1951 you couldn't even get close to the things that were flying over-head. You or anyone else that that was flying...

GC They were flying faster, higher.

JF Six years later Cooper encountered a UFO. This one definitely was not a weather balloon. While supervising flight testing at Edwards Air Force Base, his military camera crew actually filmed an unidentified saucer shaped object landing near the sight.

GC As they were sitting there filming a little saucer came from, I say a little saucer, it was *a* saucer, came flying over their heads, put down three little landing gear and landed right out on the dry lake bed. Then they picked-up their cameras and started over toward' it filming as they went, and when they got in fairly close to it lifted up - put the gear back in the wheel-wells - tipped up and took off at a great rate of speed. And so they brought, came into my office and told me what had happened and I sent them over to develop the film, and then had to go through all the proper regulations of reporting this, and we wound up having to send the film forward to Washington in the base jet airplane, and uh, I don't know whether anyone's ever seen it since.

YG Now the vehicle that you just described, how similar was it to the very first sighting you had back in 1951?

GC Quite similar. It was about basically the same plan form vehicle. They were a double saucer, lenticular. If you're going to go in and out of atmospheres like Earth or other places might have, you certainly need a little more aerodynamic type of vehicle, and the saucer has the capability of going through the air at tremendous rates of speed and handling the bow and trailing wave without making a shock wave. So it can be very silent while traveling big rates of speed through the atmosphere.

JF But sightings of UFOs wern't limited to the military. Cooper has commercial airline colleagues who've also seen UFOs.

GC This friend of mine is a captain on a major airline, uh, at night was flying along and noticed this - suddenly big a glow came off his left wing. He looked out and this big saucer sitting right off their wing, and so he turned slight towards it, it moved away - turned back and it moved back in position and turned to his co-pilot and said "Do you see what I see?" and he said "Oh God yeah I do." And it traveled along with them for quite a period of time and tipped up flying very steeply away.

JF For many years rumors have circulated about astronauts sightings of UFOs in space. Cooper believes most of them are false, with one exception.

GC To my knowledge the only thing that was ever seen, on any of our space flights, and believe me all of us would like to have seen something, was on Jim McDivitts' Gemini 7 mission where they saw this glint of something metallic off in the distance, and he reported it and nobody had it listed on the ground so he tried getting a picture of it, but sun unfortunately was glinting off of it so bright all he got was just glint, there was no detail on what it was, but never any uh, any further sighting at all on it. (note that should be Gemini the 4, first space walk mission of McDivitt/White. Either that or it wasn't Mcdivitt _ Don)

JF Years later Cooper approached the United Nations with a proposal for a committee that would explore the UFO phenomenon.

YG Alright now, tell me about the letter to the UN.

GC Well the letter to the UN was in conjunction with a meeting I had with Kurt Waldhiem (sp?) and the Security Council of the UN, to try to encourage the UN to establish a committee to start comparing notes and data and information and to really look into all of this from a unbiased neutral point of view.

YG Here's a quote from your letter: "I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets and are obviously a little more advanced than we are here on Earth." And now you're saying that's exactly why governments have been trying to keep this information private because of that obvious advancement.

GC Very possibly, right.

JF Maybe someone's listening. This year NASA announced PROJECT ORIGINS. It's goal? To search for inhabitable planets orbiting nearby stars.

GC I think we'll see our government having a totally different approach really (or relating) to the UFO situation, or extraterrestrial or whatever you want to call it. I think the pressure that comes to bear on the government from whatever reason they withhold information is certainly getting more and more and more so I would like to think that they're going to really release all the information.

YG Did you ever think that we were the only ones that, in this vastness of space did you ever think that there was a possibility that we were the only planet that had some kind of life on it?

GC No I've always felt that there're allot of planets that had life on it. With all of those numbers of potentially habitable planets out there I think we're kinda vain to think that God would habitable only one of them.

JF I hate to editorialize, but c'mon! It's pretty clear that various government agencies have information and evidence of alien contact they refuse to release. *Hey!* just release it! We're grownups! We promise not to panic, and we have a right to know; besides, one of the side benefits of ending a conspiracy is... it'll shut-up all those conspiracy nuts. (end of segment) --