We’ve all seen the guys who make crop circles for fun, and it is apparent that many of the UFO enthusiasts in Roswell are a couple sandwiches short of a picnic. But did you know that astronauts, cosmonauts, pilots, police officers, governors and even presidents have seen UFOs?

I’m not talking about a random light in the sky, either. Astronauts and many credible government workers have come forward with mind-blowing testimony of seeing advanced forms of engineering up close. However, you are much more likely to hear about Whitney Houston or Newt Gingrich than the hundreds of reported UFOs last week.

“At no time, when the astronauts were in space were they alone: There was a constant surveillance by UFOs,” astronaut Scott Carpenter said after photographing a UFO while orbiting the Earth in 1962.

While the U.S. government denies any knowledge of alien life, many reliable people have come forward with pictures, videos and incredible stories of close encounters with UFOs that seem to exhibit technology far more advanced than anything engineered on planet Earth.

“There was something out there that was close enough to be observed,” famous astronaut Buzz Aldrin said, who saw a UFO on the Apollo 11 mission and talks openly about his experience.

Former astronaut Edgar Mitchell shares the record for the longest ever moon walk, at nine hours and 17 minutes during his 1971 mission, and guess what? He claims that aliens do exist, and the government is covering it up. In July 2008, he stated that aliens have visited Earth and describes them as “little people who look strange to us.”

“Military pilots, airline pilots, mostly, from all over the world, for 50 years, have reported these things, but they’ve quit because they’re told to shut up and not talk about it by military and intelligence people,” Mitchell said, noting that the aliens are much more advanced than us and so far have been nonviolent.

We’ve recently had unexplained events such as the Phoenix Lights in 1997 and again in 2008, which were videotaped and seen by thousands of people. The sightings in Stephenville, Texas, in 2008 were seen by pilots, policemen, city councilmen and hundreds of locals. Yet, these always get brushed off as weather balloons or flares.

“I do believe UFOs exists and that the truly unexplained ones are from some other technologically advanced civilization. From my association with aircraft and spacecraft, I think I have a pretty good idea of what everyone on this planet has and their performance capabilities, and I’m sure some of the UFOs at least are not from anywhere on Earth,” said Gordon Cooper, who was the first American astronaut to stay in space for a day.

In light of so many credible witnesses, we need to have an intelligent conversation about these phenomena rather than ridiculing people. I see the same Earth-centric ideology about alien life that Galileo must have felt from the culture in his time about the Earth revolving around the sun. Our inability to see past our own egos didn’t help us then, and it won’t serve us well moving forward either. These accounts are simply too credible to laugh off and too important to ignore.

Feel free to comment or ask questions. Next Wednesday, I will discuss the ethical and social implications of aliens making contact with the human race.