George Knapp written testimony

instead, he said he was interested. It was the start of a private collaboration and conversation that
continued for the rest of his life. Senator Reid was immensely helpful to me over the years but didn’t
really want to be too public about his interest. That private conversation proved to be immensely
important years later. Suffice to say, by the time he co-sponsored the creation of the largest U.S.
investigation of UFO matters, Senator Reid firmly believed that the U.S., Russia, and China had
recovered advanced unknown technology and were in a race to reverse engineer the technology. The
first one to do so would control everything.
Here’s another name who also believed it: Howard Cannon. Senator Cannon, a predecessor to Reid,
was a bomber pilot and hero, a staunch defender of defense spending, Nellis, and Area 51, and who
had a personal relationship with the top guys at Lockheed. Cannon had never spoken publicly about
UFOs, but his son Alan confided in me that his father had told him the story about Roswell and crash
debris was true. I knew Senator Cannon during his years in office and wrangled a face-to-face with
him. He told me that his best friend in the Senate, Republican Barry Goldwater, had spoken to Cannon
several times about what was being hidden at Wright-Patterson. Goldwater suspected it was UFO crash
material, so he asked for permission to get in to see it, and even though he was a ranking member of
Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, the response wasn’t merely “no” but “hell no, and never
ask again.” I corresponded with Senator Goldwater in the early ’90s, and he confirmed the story to me.
When I asked Cannon on camera about it, he said yes, that’s what happened, admitted he was also
curious, then hinted that if he—Cannon—had asked, he thought he could get the okay. But then he
said, “What would be the point? You couldn’t tell anyone about it.”
Next name: Al O’Donnell. I have told this story in public before but have not confirmed the name. I
kept working the story and looked for people who were in a position to know if this story was
legitimate. Someone suggested I try to get Al O’Donnell to open up. Mr. O’Donnell is considered one
of the 100 most important people in the development of modern Las Vegas. He had been at MIT when
the three founders of EG&G engineered their amazing technology and became vital to the U.S. nuclear
weapons program. O’Donnell was sent to Las Vegas to be the first general manager of the EG&G
operation there. It meant he had the highest clearances for the most important national security
program in the world. He accumulated years of direct, hands-on experience with atomic weapons,
hundreds of which were exploded in the Nevada desert and elsewhere. He was the real deal.
It took me a while, but he agreed to open up about “that subject.” We would meet in coffee shops, and
he would answer my questions, but I wasn’t allowed to take notes. (I would always rush to my car
afterward and scribble down shorthand versions of what he shared with me.) Over several months, he
told me that he was directly involved in securing what amounted to a flying saucer that had crashed,
most likely in 1953. He said it wasn’t kept at Area 51. It was hidden at Indian Springs Air Base outside
of Las Vegas, now known as Creech AFB. Eventually, he also said there was a live being housed out
there, a crash survivor, but they did not know how to communicate with their captive. Its existence was
known by only a handful of people. He said sometime after 1955, when Area 51 was created, the craft
and the being were moved from Indian Springs to somewhere near Groom Lake, but he was never
specific.
Sometime later, at our final coffee meeting, he told me he had been warned to stop talking to me. He
told me he could not meet with me anymore. A few years later, a new version of his story emerged, one
different in every respect.
An anonymous source (who sounded to me like a carbon copy of Al O’Donnell) told a book author the
Roswell saucer was a Russian-made craft that was crashed on purpose in a remote, barely populated