Paul Hellyer
Paul Hellyer (1923–2021) was a Canadian politician and minister of national defence from 1963 to 1967. In his retirement years, from the 2000s on, he claimed that Earth is visited by several alien species and that Western governments are concealing this; he became one of the highest-ranking public advocates of the subject.
Paul Hellyer (1923–2021) was a Canadian politician. He first entered parliament in 1949 as a member of the Liberal Party, and from 1963 to 1967 he was minister of national defence in Lester Pearson's government. He is associated with the unification of the Canadian service branches into a single force, the Canadian Armed Forces, carried out in 1968. From September 1967 he became minister of transport, and in 1968, in Pierre Trudeau's government, Canada's first senior minister, the forerunner of today's deputy prime minister post. In 1969 he resigned over a dispute on housing policy. He later passed through several parties, and in 1997 he founded a small party called the Canadian Action Party.
His connection to the UFO subject
Hellyer's name was already linked to the subject while he was a minister, though then in a more playful form: on June 3, 1967, as defence minister, he inaugurated the world's first "official" UFO landing pad in the town of St. Paul, Alberta, which the town built to mark the Canadian centennial. He later said that as minister he was busy with the unification of the forces and did not deal with UFO reports.
In his retirement years, in the early 2000s, he began speaking publicly about UFOs. By his own account, his interest was sparked by Philip Corso's book The Day After Roswell, which is about the cover-up of a 1947 UFO crash. According to Hellyer, a U.S. Air Force general later confirmed to him that every word in the book was true.
What he claims
According to Hellyer, Earth has been visited by alien civilizations for millennia, and governments, especially that of the United States, keep this secret for economic and power-related reasons. In one interview he spoke of at least four alien species, among them the so-called "Tall Whites," two of which, in his view, work together with the United States; later he mentioned as many as 80 different species. He also claimed that he himself had seen a UFO, and that the aliens' technology could offer a solution to humanity's environmental and energy problems. Because he spoke as a former defence minister, his statements received wide attention in the UFO community.
Official and skeptical position
The Canadian government did not wish to either confirm or deny Hellyer's claims, and the U.S. government does not acknowledge the presence of alien visitors. According to skeptics, Hellyer did not present a single public, verifiable piece of evidence, and his claims came not from his experience as a minister but from books and unnamed informants. In their view, he received attention because of his former position, but that is no substitute for evidence.