Clinton witness order claim (1995)
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 9
| Date | 31 March 1995 (Vallée's journal) |
|---|---|
| Source of claim | John Petersen, founder of the Arlington Institute |
| Recorded by | Jacques Vallée, Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles |
| Claim | President Clinton signed an order allowing certain people to speak freely about UFOs |
| People named | Astronaut Gordon Cooper; remote viewer Ingo Swann |
| Record | No such order found; a 1994 Clinton declassification order did not refer to UFOs |
| People | Jacques Vallée, Bill Clinton, John Petersen, Gordon Cooper, Ingo Swann, Tim Cooper |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 122 |
| Year | 1995 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1995 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 9 |
According to Jacques Vallée's journals, on 31 March 1995 he had lunch with the futurist John Petersen, founder of the Arlington Institute, a think tank that worked with defense and intelligence clients.[1][2] Petersen claimed that President Bill Clinton had signed an order allowing certain people, including the Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and the remote viewer Ingo Swann, to speak freely about what they knew of UFOs.[1] No such executive order has ever been found in the public record. Neither Cooper nor Swann said they had been released from secrecy obligations by presidential order.[1][6][7]
The journal entry
The claim appears in the fourth volume of Vallée's published journals, The Spring Hill Chronicles, covering 1990 to 1999.[1][2] Its publisher describes the volume as taking readers "to meetings with congressmen and intelligence officials" and "to the closed sessions of the Rockefeller Initiative".[2] The journals now run to six volumes, from 1957 to 2019, and readers value them as candid portraits of the UFO research scene and its personalities.[1][3][4] In the entry for 31 March 1995, Vallée records Petersen's statement that Clinton had signed an order freeing certain witnesses to talk about UFOs, naming Cooper and Swann.[1]
Petersen
Petersen was already linked to the Clinton administration's handling of UFO records. In September 1993, as an acquaintance of CIA Director R. James Woolsey, he brought Woolsey a package of heavily redacted CIA UFO documents released to the researcher Stanton Friedman. That prompted Woolsey's agency-wide review of UFO files, the basis of the CIA's 1997 UFO history.[8]
Context
The claim arose while the Rockefeller family was lobbying the White House on UFOs. In 1993 the philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller and his niece Anne Bartley, then president of the Rockefeller Family Fund, launched a UFO Disclosure Initiative. It asked that all government UFO information, including CIA and Air Force records, be declassified, with Roswell as the first test case.[9] Rockefeller briefed Clinton on the initiative in 1995.[9] Clinton did sign an executive order in late 1994 to declassify numerous documents in the National Archives, but it did not specifically refer to UFO-related files.[9] It was a general declassification order, not one releasing individual witnesses.[9]
The witnesses
Gordon Cooper (1927–2004) was the youngest of the original Mercury astronauts. He flew the last Mercury mission in 1963 and Gemini 5 in 1965.[6] He had long spoken publicly about UFOs, and the earlier version of this article cited a 1978 letter to the United Nations. Other accounts say that in 1978 he testified before the UN on the subject.[6] He said he first saw a UFO over West Germany in 1951, and that in 1957 a film crew at Edwards Air Force Base photographed a saucer-like craft landing, whose film was never returned. He maintained until his death that the government was covering up UFO information.[6] His public statements long predated 1995, so he did not need any order to speak.[6]
Ingo Swann (1933–2013) was a psychic and artist whose claims were studied in the CIA's Stargate remote-viewing program, and he is credited with creating "remote viewing".[7] In his 1998 book Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy, he described working for an unidentified agency that studied extraterrestrials. He wrote that he had remote-viewed a secret alien base on the far side of the Moon, and concluded that extraterrestrials live among humans.[7] The testimony this article draws on notes that Swann suggested non-human intelligences might be operating a kind of "control system" humanity was not aware of, without specifying how it worked.[5]
Assessment
The claim rests on a single second-hand remark recorded in a private diary.[1] No executive order of the kind Petersen described has been found. Neither man named ever said he had been released from secrecy by the president, and one of them had been speaking openly for years.[6][7] Petersen's claim remains unverified.[1]
People and topics
- Jacques Vallée — Computer scientist and astronomer, author of the Forbidden Science journals and a central figure in UFO research.
- Bill Clinton — 42nd U.S. president, lobbied about UFO files by Laurance Rockefeller.
- John Petersen — Futurist who founded the Arlington Institute.
- Arlington Institute — The futurist think tank founded by John Petersen in 1989.
- Gordon Cooper — Mercury astronaut who spoke publicly about UFOs.
- Remote viewing — The claimed ability to describe distant places by mental means.
- Ingo Swann — Artist and psychic whose tests at SRI led to the government's remote-viewing program.
- Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
- Tim Cooper — California researcher who said he received many MJ-12-style documents from anonymous sources in the 1990s.
- Non-human intelligence — A term for intelligent beings of non-human origin, used in UAP legislation.
On the Timeline
- Dan Sherman's second assignment (1995) (Early 1995) — Sherman says he moved to a second Preserve Destiny location.
- America West Flight 564 sighting (25 May 1995) — An airliner crew and an F-117 both see a huge cigar-shaped object over the Southwest.
See every 1995 event on the UAP Timeline →
Further reading
- Stargate Project — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Stargate collection — CIA Reading Room · cia.gov · archived copy
- Jacques Vallée — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
References
- Forbidden Science — the journals of Jacques Vallée (Anomaly Archives) · anomalyarchives.org · archived copy
- Forbidden Science series — Anomalist Books · anomalistbooks.com · archived copy
- Review of Forbidden Science 6 — SFCrowsnest · sfcrowsnest.info · archived copy
- Forbidden Science Dispatches — Tanner Boyle (journal summaries) · tannerfboyle.substack.com · archived copy
- amazon.com · amazon.com · archived copy
- Gordon Cooper · en.wikipedia.org
- Ingo Swann · en.wikipedia.org
- Gerald K. Haines, "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90" (1997), via FAS · sgp.fas.org
- Laurance Rockefeller · en.wikipedia.org
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Gordon Cooper”, “Ingo Swann”, “Laurance Rockefeller”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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