Cheryl Costa is an upstate New York resident and a NY native, who saw her first UFO at the age of twelve. She’s a veteran of two military services: the Air Force and the Navy. Cheryl is retired from a 32-year career at Lockheed Martin, as a Senior Data Security Analyst. From 2013 - 2019, Cheryl wrote the wildly popular UFO newspaper column, “New York Skies” for Syracuse New Times.
In this episode, we talked about her recent book: UFO Sightings Desk Reference: United States of America 2001 - 2020. Cheryl will be one of the speakers at the upcoming Contact in the Desert conference—the largest UFO show in the world. This virtual event will be happening June 25 - 28, and pass-holders will have two full weeks to watch the lectures and workshops. For more info and to purchase passes, visit the CITD website.
Among the topics discussed in this conversation, Cheryl talked about what was known as The Condon Committee—this group was funded by the United States Air Force in 1966, and ran for approximately two years. The purpose of this group was to study unidentified flying objects under the direction of physicist, Edward Condon at the University of Colorado.
Addressing the question of how much the government knows about UFOs, Cheryl said:
“Dr. Condon filed that report to Congress back in 1968 and basically he said that there was no reason to study this stuff; nothing could be learned. That’s a quote from his report—nothing can be learned by studying these things. So that shut off money for government agencies to do it. Academia to do it. The Air Force got out of the [Project] Blue Book business, and what do we have? We have a 50 year hole of people in the government not studying.
A lot of people say, ‘oh the government knows more than they’re telling us.’ Tiny pieces of the government may know about it, but think about this: we’ve had three generations of turnover in the military [with people in the military retiring in 20 years] since then, and some of these people are saying, ‘why are we under this stuff?’ You guys did it! Your predecessors did this—they shut this down, and so we’re 50 years behind understanding what these things are.”
When asked about how information on UFOs is handled by various government agencies and branches of the military, Cheryl said:
“There was a problem of material being moved up the chain of command […] the Navy guys not being able to talk about it, or to be able to get it to an intelligence agency. This is a failure of the chain of command reporting system that the military prides itself on—this is a failure of that, and in a way it’s a dereliction of duty somewhere along the line and it needs to be corrected.”
Expanding on this point, and how the different agencies’ lack cooperation with each other when investigating UFO reports, Cheryl added:
“Remember that The 9/11 Commission found out that all these security agencies: the FBI, the CIA—all these people, none of them were sharing data with each other. Everybody had a piece of the puzzle, and one of the things that [former director of the Advance Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), Luis] Elizondo is saying right now, and I agree with him, is that this is probably a big intelligence failure on the scale of 9/11.”
Asked about the undertone of fear in recent government reports due to not knowing what UFOs are, where they’re coming from, are they a threat, and if people should be afraid, Cheryl answered:
“Well, the way I look at it? Remember, I wrote a newspaper column for seven years from 2013 to 2019 […] and 239 articles. And one of the things that I saw consistently was that polls kept coming out, and 80% of Americans felt that the government wasn’t telling us what it knows. And what it seemed likely is that they don’t know as much as they think they know.
Lately in the news at least the military guys are saying, ‘hey, this might be a threat.’ Well, military guys are trained to think that way—I was trained to think that way, I did intelligence gathering […] so, here we’ve got this situation: people saying, ‘well, god, it might be an imminent threat.’ It is an imminent threat if it is really the Chinese or the Russians. But, if it’s the off-worlders, they’ve been here since Biblical times. They could’ve stomped us out a long time ago, OK? ‘They’ seem to be studying.”
During the interview we also look at a large number of UFO sightings in the United States that Cheryl has collected from 2001 - 2020, and the data she has acquired from these reports that make up her recent book, UFO Sightings Desk Reference. She shares what States have the most UFO sightings, what are the common UFO shapes, and how frequently they have been seen.
Cheryl’s book is available for purchase via Amazon, and for the full interview with Cheryl, click the YouTube link below. Don’t forget to check out Cheryl’s presentation at this year’s Contact in the Desert conference taking place June 25 - 28.
