Steve Bassett

Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a two-part series about UFOs/UAPs and the connection between past sightings in the Minot area and the recent sightings of mysterious drones across the country.

Drones have been swarming military facilities and around U.S. ships for a year or two and in all cases they were never shot down, Steve Bassett, a UFO lobbyist and executive director of the Paradigm Research Group, told The Minot Daily News in a Dec. 26, 2024, interview.

Because of all the recent sightings of mysterious drones in the U.S. and also in the United Kingdom, Bassett said, “People are filming them with their cameras and these films are turning up online. The government is getting hard questions and the best that the U.S. government has been able to do in several interviews with the press is that it’s not ours, it’s not a foreign adversary or another nation and we don’t know what it is.

“Now this is ridiculous,” Bassett said. He said any swarms of objects like that around U.S. warships would be shot down and every effort would be made to bring them down if any of these objects were over military bases.

“But it would be a huge, huge national security matter. We know that they’re not shooting them down; they’re not capturing them,” he said.

He said people are seeing what obviously are drones.

“But there’s a huge amount of other stuff up there which are not drones,” he said.

“The only conclusion that makes sense is that this is a UFO (unidentified flying object) flap. There have been a number of these (flaps) over the last 70 years. There’s a lot of sightings, a lot of stuff in the area even nationally and then it goes away,” he said. “This is the biggest one ever. It’s been going on for at least two years.”

He continued, “I believe what is going on is that the nonhumans – or whatever you want to call them. I call them extraterrestrials – are putting on a helluva display. They are swarming around sensitive facilities and the reason they are doing that is not to attack those facilities but to get the maximum attention. They are doing this for a reason and the government is helpless. There’s nothing it can do about it.”

Bassett maintains the government knows that they’re nonhuman.

“They absolutely know that these are not human craft, human-made craft, whatever,” he said.

“But what do you do? They can’t ignore it. They have to answer the questions and the best they’ve been able to do is they’re not ours, they’re not another counties, they’re not a threat and they’re not shooting them down,” he said.

Bassett said he believes the military is launching its own drones up into these events so people do see drones.

“They’re masking the nonhuman part of this by at least adding the human part so people will see that and then they can just call it a drone swarm and not have to face the ultimate question is what are those things up there that aren’t drones?” he said.

“This is the only thing that explains what is happening within the standard logic that one can imply and the government is in an impossible position and if the nonhuman craft up there continue and continue to do this activity, the government is going to have to finally acknowledge that we are not alone. That’s what I think is going on,” Bassett said.

Nuclear weapons shutdown witnesses

He went on, “Now the reason I think this is interesting for Minot is that, of course, this has made it much easier to get the nuclear weapons shutdown witnesses and other related witnesses to the attention of Congress.”

Bassett said it’s very likely the next hearing will include the nuclear weapons shutdown witnesses. He said the witnesses to nuclear ICBM shutdown events have been trying to get in front of a hearing in Congress for many years but have been ignored.

“That’s really going to bring those cases really back into the world and people will learn about what happened 60 years ago,” Bassett said.

He said some of the witnesses have been reluctant to speak about the incidents because it wasn’t a good situation.

“But the situation is obviously changing so I think that we may see several more be willing to come forward once we have the formal hearing process,” he said.

Bassett said he has said in hundreds of interviews that the shutdown of ICBMs by these entities is the single most important thing known about them.

“This is a big, big deal,” he said.

“We were hoping that mock hearing in 2013 would help lead to real hearings” He said it provided some help but it took several more years before a hearing finally took place.

When another congressional hearing is held, David Schindele, a former Minot Air Force Base missile officer who was involved in a UFO incident that occurred in the Minot missile field in 1966, said he would “definitely testify before Congress when I’m called to do so.”

“As far as Trump, there’s a very good possibility that he’s going to seize this, based upon what I’ve been reading in the news and other statements. He may jump on this early. We could see this break in the first 30 to 60 days of the Trump administration. We could have hearings that may come forward or he may just come forward on his own because he’s Donald Trump,” Bassett said.

“So this embargo on the truth of this matter may be about to end in the next couple months and it can’t happen too soon,” Bassett said.