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knew I had an interest. I've done this for a long time." By 1989, Miller had become acutely aware that high-ranking military officers were not properly informed about the UFO phenomenon, and he became concerned, like the COMETA authors, about possible national security issues arising, not from the UFOs themselves, but from a lack of preparedness. He believes that we must assume UFOs have the same rig of self-defense to hostile intent or hostile acts as we accord our own military forces. Fortunately, these rights have not been acted upon by the UFOs, as far as we know, when attacked. "Only a small fraction have demonstrated even a remote semblance of hostility, and that was only with severe provocation, usually an attack by military aircraft," he says. "If the entire body of data were examined, the obvious conclusion would be that UFOs are not hostile. That is precisely what the U.S. military declared after many years of UFO study: that UFOs pose no threat to the national security of the United States." After he retired from the U.S. Navy, Miller began taking steps to set up a series of information briefings that culminated in meetings in 1997 with Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, vice director for intelligence on the Joint Staff, and in 1998 with Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). (Wilson later became director of the DIA and Hughes, the corporate vice president for intelligence and counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.) Miller has provided me with a confidential, detailed account of these meetings and those leading up to them, including attendees, preparatory briefings, topics discussed, and reactions from attendees. He explains that he raised two national security concerns at his briefings: the risk of uninformed human aggression toward UFOs, leading to a possible disaster, and the government's disregard for public concern about UFOs and its refusal to provide honest answers to legitimate questions. Miller feels strongly that unnecessary secrecy threatens the public's sense of personal security while eroding trust in the government institutions mandated to inform and protect U.S. citizens. "The officials have universally received these briefings with the same serious consideration as briefings on any other national security issue," he says. I first contacted Commander Miller ten years ago, in 1999, through the introduction of a mutual colleague. I was repeatedly struck by the similarity of his conclusions and approach to those expressed by retired French military officers in the COMETA Report, communicated to me before Miller had any idea of its contents. He and the French officers had all been through a similar process to arrive at these positions, but within two different militaries. They were all meticulously careful about what they said, suggesting that they knew more than they could reveal. Of course, Miller has never had the strength-in-numbers of the French group—his is a lone voice in a vast wilderness, by contrast, and a particularly courageous one given the risks to his reputation through and the at have received these with the serious same