Aliens came to Earth to stop nuclear war between the United States and Russia, former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, is claiming.
"My own experience talking to people has made it clear the ETs had been attempting to keep us from going to war and help create peace on Earth," Mitchell, a veteran of the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, told the British tabloid site
Mirror Online.
Mitchell, who has proclaimed his belief in space aliens since his moonwalk, claimed that top ranking military sources have spotted UFO during weapons tests, and had seen spaceships flying over the White Sands facility in New Mexico, the site of the first nuclear bomb testing in 1945.
Mitchell said he grew up in New Mexico near White Sands and Roswell, the reputed
crash site of an alien spaceship, and told Mirror Online that "you don't know the area like I do. White Sands was a testing ground for atomic weapons, and that's what the extraterrestrials were interested in. They wanted to know about our military capabilities."
The former astronaut said he has heard similar stories from Air Force officers who worked at the missile silos during the Cold War, who told him "UFOs were frequently seen overhead and disabled their missiles."
He also claimed other officers from bases on the Pacific Coast complained about their test missiles being shot down by alien aircraft.
Nick Pope, a former Ministry of Defense UFO researcher, told Mirror Online that he believes Mitchell to be "an honorable and truthful man" but his information has come from other sources, not what he's seen himself.
"He's had access to government, military and intelligence community personnel at the highest level, but because, quite understandably, he won't name his sources, we can't be certain these people were being straight with him, or indeed that they were privy to any classified information about UFOs," said Pope.
And aliens that stopped war is a "nice thought," said Pope, but "it's almost exactly the plot of the classic 1951 sci-fi movie 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'."
More likely, he said, the sightings around nuclear facilities or military bases involved spy planes.