"UFOs are often seen coming in and out of the water so suspect that in our deepest oceans and trenches we may well have alien bases," Heseltine, who spent six years working with the Royal Air Force Police and more than two decades with the British Transport Police, told The Sun.
"That sounds crazy but if you think about it we only know five percent of the oceans. We know more about the surface of the moon or Mars than our own oceans, so that would seem to me why UFOs are seen regularly coming in and out of the water."
Last month, investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbell leaked a video showing a UFO that seemed to have disappeared into the ocean. The video, which was taken aboard a Navy stealth ship in 2019, featured an aircraft flying above the water off the coast of San Diego before plunging into the sea. Officials speaking in the video could be heard saying that the object "splashed."
The Department of Defense confirmed that the footage was taken by Navy personnel but declined to give more details for national security reasons. Corbell said that a submarine had been dispatched to look for the object but failed to find any sign of it. (Related: UNEXPLAINED: Navy submarines detect fast-moving unidentified vehicles underwater.)
Heseltine opined that such UFOs tend to dwell where there are nuclear weapons: "There is a massive correlation between UFOs being seen near nuclear facilities, whether it's nuclear aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, nuclear weapon storage areas, power plants."
He noted that if the Third World War were to break out, it would pollute the world's oceans, affecting the supposed alien habitats undersea.
"It's as if they're saying, 'We don't like nuclear weapons,' so they show up," he added. "Maybe they realize we could destroy this beautiful planet."
Much is still unknown about the military's recent UFO sightings, but Heseltine is confident that the renewed interest in UFOs will eventually show that these mysterious objects have an extraterrestrial origin.
"We know that ultimately this conversation will lead to confirmation that we're being engaged with some kind of intelligence that is likely to be extraterrestrial," said Heseltine, who is currently the vice president of the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research (ICER), a newly formed nonprofit composed of UFO researchers from 27 countries.
Former U.S. intelligence officials are also not ruling out the possibility that some UFOs are operated by extraterrestrial intelligence.
Christopher Mellon, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said in an interview with Chris Cuomo last month: "There's no scientific reason or basis to doubt that possibility … It's possible somebody found us before we found them."
The Pentagon and other intel agencies were expected to present Congress a report about UFOs late in June. Administration officials who were briefed on the report ahead of that disclosed to The New York Times that America's intel agencies found no evidence of alien technology in the Navy's UFO sightings. At the same time, however, they are still unable to explain the extraordinary movements seen in these encounters.
Heseltine noted that the sightings being investigated now were already seen and described in the middle of the last century when claims of a UFO sighting surged.
"Nothing has changed. All we have is better technical equipment like video on aircraft so we can pick things up easier, that's why it's being seen more," he explained.
Noting the possibility that UFOs are alien technology, he said that people have to be prepared for a "massive psychological change." (Related: Pentagon says test findings on UFO wreckage could "change our lives forever.")
"Through awareness programs we want to prepare people for the shock of this new reality on a global scale because 95 percent of the world is in ignorance about it," he remarked. "Seventy years of past history would say they've been here all that time, and they're not a threat."
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