Paul Hellyer was Canada's Minister of Defense in the mid-1960s. He is now a critic of the United States' willingness to trigger an interstellar war with aliens—aliens who might give us more advanced technology if only we were less belligerent.

"They've been visiting our planet for thousands of years," Hellyer told RT's Sophie Shevardnadze in a televised interview.

"There's been a lot more activity in the last few decades, since we invented the atomic bomb. and they're very concerned about that, and about the fact that we might use it again," added Hellyer, who said that a cold-war era commission determined that at least four alien species had come to Earth. "The whole cosmos is a unity, and it affects not just us but other people in the cosmos, they've very much afraid that we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again. This would be bad for us and bad for them too."

Scientists are at fault for dismissing the evidence of "authenticated" alien contacts, added the longest-serving member of Queen Elizabeth Canada Privy Council. "This information is top secret in the way that government isn't talking about it, but if you talk to the whistleblowers … there's a lot of information and it doesn't take a lot of effort to find it"

About 8 out of 10 UFO reports are false or mistaken. But it's the remainder that are so interesting, and amount to overwhelming evidence. Hellyer has even had his own encounter with a UFO–if not the aliens themselves.

"I have seen a UFO, about 120 miles north of Toronto, over Lake Muskoka," Hellyer said. The UFO "just looked like a star … we watched it until our necks almost broke. It was definitely a UFO, because it could change position in the sky by 3 or 4 degrees in 3 or 4 seconds. … There was no other explanation for it except that it was the real thing."

The Star of Bethlehem, he added, was one of God's flying saucers.

Moreover, the number of known alien species has leapt from "between two and 12" to as many as 80, said Hellyer, the senior cabinet minister from Pierre Trudeau's 1968 cabinet. "They have different agendas. Maybe all of us on earth should have have the same agenda. … Nearly all of them are benign, but one or two are not, and that's what I'm investigating now."