Robert O. Dean — “explains his NATO UFO discovery” (his own account of “The Assessment”)
- Speaker: Command Sgt. Maj. Robert O. Dean (US Army, Ret.), recounting his core claim. ~7.5 min clip.
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/Um-TwBmjND4 (The UFO Anthology)
- Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio → Whisper.
- Primary for dean-nato-assessment-claim. His verbatim core claim: assigned to SHAPE (Rocquencourt) in 1963, Cosmic-Top-Secret access in the SHOC war room; a study initiated 1961, published summer 1964 as “The Assessment” (15 copies; copy 1 to NATO Sec-Gen, copy 2 to Gen. Lemnitzer/SACEUR, copy 3 to the SHOC vault); an Air Force colonel handed it to him (“read this, this will wake you up”); ~1.5 in. + 8 in. of annexes (EM effects, sightings, photographs, ABDUCTIONS, “photos of autopsies of little gray guys”); conclusions: Earth under survey by SEVERAL ETIs (“four different groups”) for hundreds/thousands of years, no military threat. Note the classic disclosure framing (intelligence agencies seed ridiculous tales to discredit reliable witnesses).
- NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript; verify quotes against audio.
Many people say that if the government was hiding real knowledge about UFOs the secret would leak out. After all no one can keep that big of a secret for so long. Well the truth is the secret has been leaking out. People like myself, people still in the military, people scared for their lives who speak anonymously have been whispering the news for years. And there are many ways to counter what witnesses say. Government debunking programs make some of us look foolish. Threats of prison, loss of benefits and salary silence other witnesses. Often intelligence agencies sponsor ridiculous tales and spread them throughout the UFO community just to make the more reliable witnesses and information seem less credible. Yet there are some of us who are mad enough to speak out no matter what the consequences. There are people making policy in Washington DC that were never elected to make policy. These guys are not responsible to any of the legally constituted branches of our government. This information must be exposed in the group robbed of its secret control. So here you’ll find a small bit of what the many ex-governmental employees have to say about what they’ve seen. And the first witness is none other than myself. For more details about what I’ve personally seen during my years in the military, go ahead and play the video you see down there in the corner. I’ve often been asked how I got into this crazy business. I think it’s important that I explain to you that I was a professional soldier through most of my adult life. Spent all those years in the infantry, special operations, special forces. I was a no-nonsense, pragmatic, hardcore, crew-cut, infantry officer. I had to see something and kick it, bite it, touch it to believe in it. Now I had always had some curiosity about the UFO matter, but I was a bit of a skeptic. I was a curious skeptic. I’d heard about it, read some reports about it, but I didn’t really believe very much about it. That all changed in 1963 when I was assigned to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe, at a little town known as Rokenkor. I arrived in the summer of 1963 and I was immediately assigned to the Operations Division. And from that I was further assigned to work in the Operations Center, a place we called SHOC, the Supreme Headquarters Operations Center. To work in the war room, I had to have a cosmic top-secret clearance. So my top-secret level of access was upgraded at that time to cosmic top-secret. And when I started working in the war room, I realized that there was a lot of gossip going on, a lot of talk. They were talking about it. It seems that SHOC had initiated a study of UFOs in 1961. Now the problem seemed to have been simply this. We and the Soviets had almost gone to war with each other at least a half a dozen times for the wrong reasons. The reasons were simply that there were strange, unknown, circular, metallic, disk-shaped objects flying all over Europe in those years. They would fly out of the Soviet sector, over Poland, East Germany. They would fly over Central Germany, over France, over toward the English Channel. Then they would generally turn north over the Channel and disappear off of NATO radar over the Norwegian Sea. These large, circular, metallic objects were flying in formation, very high, very fast, and very clearly under intelligent control. For a time, the Soviets thought they belonged to us, and for a short time we honestly thought they might have belonged to the Soviets. But it became very clear after a while that the advanced technology that these objects were demonstrating was so far beyond anything we or the Soviets had that none of us could have had that kind of machinery flying at that time. Even today we cannot match some of that technology. The performance of these craft, the altitudes they could reach, the speeds they could reach, the fact that they could stop on a dime, do abrupt 90-degree angle turns. So they initiated a study in 1961 at shape headquarters to figure out, first of all, what the hell is going on? What are these objects? Where are they from? Who owns them? Why are they here? What’s taking place? The subject was given a cosmic top-secret classification. They initiated it in the summer of 61. It was underway when I arrived in 63. I was there when it was published in the summer of 1964. This document literally changed my life, and literally it affected and changed the lives of every person who was there who had access to it. When the thing was published in 1964, they only printed it in 15 copies. It was cosmic top-secret. Copy number one went to the Secretary General of NATO. Copy number two went to General Lemnitzer, my boss, the Supreme Allied Commander, the one we called SACEUR. Copy number three was placed in the vault in shock in the war room. I worked there regularly. We were in there sometimes on 12-hour shifts. Well, after the summer of 64, while I was on duty there one morning, I’m sitting there twiddling my thumbs. There’s not much happening. The teletype machines are quiet, the phones are not ringing, and the controller who was on duty at that time was an Air Force bird colonel who saw that I was sort of fidgeting. He went over to the vault and he pulled this document out and he threw it on my desk and he says, here, read this. This will wake you up. It not only woke me up, it changed my life forever. The document itself was only about an inch and a half thick, but it was supported by about eight inches of annexes and appendices. There were ten separate annexes to the document that supported that. There were annexes on electromagnetic effects, on weather conditions, atmospheric conditions, sightings, photographs, on abductions. There were photos of autopsies of little gray guys, and it was quite a shocking experience for me because the old curious skeptic, for the first time in his life, realized that this wasn’t fantasy. This was real, and it really changed my life because it launched me on what I call a 30-year synthesis. The study itself was not as complete as I would have wanted. For example, it was strictly a military study. It was designed to determine was there or was there not a military threat to Allied forces in Europe, and when they concluded in 1964, they determined that there apparently was not a threat. But the conclusions were earth-shaking. One, they concluded that apparently the planet Earth and the entire human race have been under some kind of a detailed survey, an observation of some type. It’s been going on for a very, very long time. It apparently is being conducted by not one or two, but several extraterrestrial intelligences. We were to learn later, before I left shape in 1967, that there were four different groups that we knew of at that time. But this had been going on for a long time, hundreds if not thousands of years. There was a process unfolding. There was something developing. They didn’t know what it was in 1964, but they concluded that there were several different groups involved. It’s been going on for a very long time. Apparently, there was no malevolence or hostility involved, because there were no overt acts of hostility.