Eric Taber, who’s been a defence aerospace contractor for 13 years and has held security clearance to work on military craft, testified to the Pentagon’s UFO investigation unit earlier this year about a story his late great uncle Sam Urquhart once told him. Sam, who died last year at the age of 75, served in the US Air Force for 28 years before becoming a contractor at Area 51, where he started out as a defence contractor EG&G.

The mysterious military base in the secluded Nevada desert has long been ᴀssociated with eerie alien and UFO sightings. Eric told the Daily Mail he repeatedly questioned his uncle about his time at Area 51 but never got much of an answer. That is until Sam was on his last legs and decided to finally reveal all. The data configuration specialist and head of security for his engineering group, opened up about one incident in particular that happened shortly after he started at Area 51 in 1997.

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Eric explained his great uncle, who he said worked at Area 51 until 2014, was told the UFO had been found fully intact lying in a remote desert. Going into more detail about what it looked like, he added: “The senior EG&G engineer described to my great uncle that it was egg-shaped, about the size of an SUV, smooth and seamless, metallic-looking, silverish grey in colour, with no control surfaces, no flaps, no inlet, and no exhaust, and no writing or symbols on the outside.”

But Sam told Eric that the engineers struggled to figure out anything about the mysterious object. He said: “These are the best and brightest engineers you can think of. They tried to no avail to figure out what the power source was, how to activate it, and how it works. They tried to induce electricity to it, X-rays couldn’t penetrate it; it showed up on X-ray as a solid object. They tried to open it and penetrate its hull; they couldn’t.”

He claims his great uncle was told some small samples of the material of the UFO were taken and it was concluded “it was not made on Earth”. Eric said Sam told him the alien craft was eventually shipped off to another military base, possibly the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and the engineers never heard about it again.

But he claims his great uncle was at work one day when he saw something surprising. Eric explained: “My great uncle would collect radar data, and bring it into secure vaults to catalogue and store it. He was in one of these secure data vault storage rooms in the main control building, nicknamed the Taj Mahal, when on the wall he saw an up-close crystal-clear colour pH๏τograph of the exact same object that the senior engineer had discussed.”

But Sam told Eric the pH๏τo of the egg-shaped UFO never left the Area 51 vault and “the American people would probably never get to see it”. Eric’s claims come after former military officials told Congress at a special UFO hearing in July that the US government has a secret program to retrieve and analyse non-human craft in an attempt to gain technological insights from them.

In May, Eric was interviewed about his great uncle’s claims by staff at the Pentagon’s UFO investigation office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), who are currently collecting testimonies of alleged government possession of nun-human craft. The AARO is now set to compile a memo of Eric’s account, alongside other reports and witness statements, to be sent to Congress next year.