Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey into the Unknown

In recently published memoirs "Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey into the Unknown", by USAF Colonel L. Gordon Cooper (Ret.) recounts how he chased UFOs over Germany in his F-86.  Following this experience, Cooper was very open minded about UFOs.  He writes, "I knew an Air Force master sergeant assigned to a team that received an emergency call-out from Washington D.C., to the Pacific southwest (not Roswell.)  He told me they reached a canyon and found a wreckage at the site.  According to his friend -- and I had been around him enough to consider him a reliable guy -- a metallic disk-shaped object had crashed, and sitting atop the wreckage were two very human-looking fellows in flight suits, waving at  them.  They were hustled away, and the sergeant never found out who they were or what happened to them."As a captain stationed at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., on May 3, 1957, he became aware that a metallic, saucer-shaped craft had landed (silently) sometime after   8:00 a.m. on base property.  He alleges that the event was filmed by a startled technical film crew on assignment 50 yards away, the craft zooming out of sight when the photographers tried to approach it for a better camera shot.  Cooper writes that, upon learning of the incident, he telephoned appropriate Pentagon officials, who ordered him to have all the film developed (but not printed) and to ship it immediately to the Pentagon. He adds that, before complying, he chose to peek at some of the negatives, which confirmed the existence of the "saucer" as described to him by the film crew.  Cooper notes that he heard nothing more about the film or the results of any investigation.