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This weekend I am attending an event in Gaithersburg, Md., that is the fulfillment of a life-long dream for me. The First Annual Exopolitics Expo, also called the X-Conference, from April 16-18 at the Hilton hotel, is the first major UFO event that is overtly, publicly, in-your-face political in nature. I have been arguing for a political approach to this issue since attending my first UFO conference in Toronto, Canada, in 1981.
Timothy Good of England published an essay of mine entitled "Speak Plainly and Go Political" in his book, Alien Update 1993, which got very little if any circulation in this country. I was also involved in Operation Right to Know, founded by Ed Komarek of Georgia and directed by Elaine Douglas in Washington D.C., which mounted a political attack against UFO secrecy through public demonstrations.
I served as master of ceremonies at ORTK's July 5, 1993 demonstration in front of the White House, introducing speakers on a stage set up on Lafayette Park as pickets bearing signs saying "End UFO Secrecy" marched on the sidewalk in front of the White House. Video bites of those pickets got a lot of mileage, because they kept showing up years later in mostly disparaging news stories about UFO "believers."
Ironically, our little White House demo got short shrift from other members of the UFO community. One writer in UFO Magazine said it would be better if the event would not take place because reporters would zoom in on the "kooks and crazies" in the crowd, holding the entire movement up to ridicule and jeopardizing the work of established UFO research groups that had been trying for years to earn public legitimacy.
Fortunately, the ridicule factor in recent years has diminished thanks largely to cable television. The SciFi Channel last year ran a series of high-quality documentaries on the most famous UFO cases, namely Roswell, N.M.; Kecksburg, Penn.; and Rendlesham Forest, England. Stephen Spielberg's fictional miniseries "Taken" based on the abduction phenomena that aired on SciFi with extensive publicity also added to public acceptance. SciFi also launched the Coalition for Freedom of Information, which initiated a lawsuit against NASA for the release of documents related to the Kecksburg incident.
Stephen Bassett, organizer of this weekend's conference and director of Paradigm Research Group, in his column in the current issue of UFO Magazine, writes, "From the beginning it was intended to be much more than an entertaining weekend. It was set in the middle of the presidential primaries, all members of Congress were sent personal invitations … all presidential candidates were sent personal invitations, and the political media have been repeatedly approached to cover this event."
Sadly, inviting the media is no guarantee that they will attend or that they will cover the event objectively, no matter how astounding the information presented, as Dr. Steven Greer, founder of the Disclosure Project, can attest. In May 2001, Greer called a press conference at the National Press Club in which he presented 20 government witnesses who testified to the government cover-up of alien contact. The event got hardly any publicity - I myself didn't find out about it until June last year - and the live web broadcast of the event was jammed by computers traced to the Department of Defense.
Greer is one of the many distinguished speakers at the X-conference, along with Timothy Good, Philip Corso Jr. (whose father wrote The Day After Roswell), Linda Moulton Howe, Richard Dolan (author of UFOs and the National Security State), conspirary writer Jim Marrs, Stanton Friedman, Robert and Ryan Wood, and many more.
Considering the importance of this issue, one might wonder why it took this long to make it to the political arena. Other erstwhile "fringe" groups, for example homosexuals, have used politics to enter the mainstream. Perhaps it is because the pioneers of the UFO research community were originally scientists, not politicians.
The late astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the "father of ufology," while working on the Air Force's Project Blue Book, realized that the project was biased against UFOs as extraterrestrial craft. His solution was to form his own research group, just like Blue Book but open to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The group he founded, Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), is a model for most others, based on the premise that only impeccably scientific and objective reports could convince the public of the reality of UFOs.
Little did Hynek realize, however, how deep and nefarious the government cover-up was.
Blue Book was one of many cover programs designed to divert public attention from the alien artifacts and bodies the government had already acquired as early as 1942. This was revealed last November at the Crash Retrieval Conference in Las Vegas organized by Robert and Ryan Wood, which this website covered (see Extraterrestrial Archives 2003).
In other words, while private researchers were diligently collecting UFO sightings, the cream of U.S. scientific minds and billions of dollars from the black budget were invested into studying real aliens and their technology, a veritable Fort Knox of knowledge.
Theories abound as to the reason for this continuing secrecy, but most of them don't hold water. Preventing panic seems like the most benign reason, but as Bassett said in an earlier column in this space, terrorists are also terrifying, but that's no reason to keep people in the dark about them.
There is also the excuse that, like the native Americans and other relatively primitive tribes who came in contact with Europeans, humans would suffer from contact with an advanced race. This is also bogus. Humans are not a virgin species. There is extensive and irrefutable evidence that humans have long had contact with extraterrestrials, who are known as the gods and angels of ancient scripture, and who played a major role in the development of human civilization and even our genetic makeup. Even the Bible (Gen. 6) says the "sons of God" mated with the daughters of men.
Another theory is that the government fears traditional religions might collapse if the truth about aliens were known. If true, this violates a cardinal principal of our Constitution -"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise thereof."
If, as Lincoln said, our government truly is "of the people, by the people and for the people," the people should be trusted to figure things out for themselves, instead of letting anonymous bureaucrats anoint themselves decision-makers for everybody. Isn't it ironic that those who manage our relations with other intelligent races have such little faith or trust in their own race?
One theory discussed in UFO circles is "acclimatization," the idea that the bureaucrats are releasing dribs and drabs of information to gradually prepare us for the "big announcement." Hogwash! With the prominence of science fiction in entertainment, frequent airing of UFOs and the abduction phenomenon on TV, with UFOs being the second largest category on the Internet after pornography and alien faces appearing on everything from T-shirts to lollipops, how "acclimatized" do we have to be!?
I maintain that the secret bureaucracy will never release its hold on the truth until forced to do so by a stronger political power. It is a simple law of politics that bureaucrats never put themselves out of business or diminish their powers voluntarily.
Consider the Internal Revenue Service. Given the mandate to collect revenue from the people, it pursued that mandate to such an extreme that it turned into what was called an American Gestapo. Responding to citizen complaints, Congress passed laws that diminished the IRS' powers and protect taxpayers' rights.
The stealth bureaucracy, however, can act with impunity because it officially doesn't exist! It is beyond scrutiny by the media, Congress or the law. Plenty of bureaucrats would kill for such a sweet deal, and it appears that they have, frequently. John F. Kennedy, James Forrestal, Marilyn Monroe and Vince Foster are only a few of the most prominent names in the body count of suspicious deaths associated with the government.
Knowing the human lust for power, our founding fathers in their wisdom established three branches of government to create a balance of powers. If one branch gets too powerful, the other two can gang up on it and restrain it. They never imagined that, under cover of wartime secrecy, a bureaucracy acting outside the tripartite system would acquire unlimited power.
The X-conference, therefore, has implications far more important than just finding out about UFOs. It is really about saving our democracy from a grave internal threat, the most deadly ever experienced by this nation. Our government is becoming more and more like the bad old Soviet Union, where the Big Lie ruled and the people totally lost trust in their government. We need a revolution like Gorbachev brought to Russia, which he called "glasnost" and "perestroika," or openness and restructuring.
I hope the X-conference will spark a coordinated effort by government, the media and the American people to expose and dismantle what Churchill called the "Bodyguard of Lies" and release all its secrets involving extraterrestrials. Here are three simple steps I hope the conference organizers will consider:
Grant immunity. The president could issue an executive order granting immunity to all those who signed security oaths in relation to UFOs or alien contact. Clinton set a precedent by rescinding security oaths imposed on servicemen who were subjected to secret chemical-biological experiments.
Selective and limited immunity to members of the national security organs who committed crimes in the pursuance of the national interest as they understood it at the time should also be considered. Some crimes might not be so easily forgiven, especially political assassinations of U.S. citizens. It may be more tolerable, however, to let some criminals go free than to allow their criminal enterprise to continue.
Change the national security law. Congress should change the law that gives bureaucrats carte
blanche to stamp "top secret" on anything they deem to be in the national interest. Only the people through their elected representatives should determine what the national interest is. Congress should pass a law that lists those things that should legitimately be kept secret - identity of agents, design of weapons, intelligence means and methods and so on - leaving all things not on the list in the public domain. Without even mentioning the word UFO, all the government's files and warehouses holding UFO-related facts would be open to the public.
A panel of independent encyclopedists could be convened to handle the flood of testimony and information that would ensue from the above two measures and make it available to the public, perhaps in the form of an "Encyclopedia Galactica" (to borrow a term from Asimov's Foundation novels) in every university, public library and on the Internet.
Outlaw the bodyguard of lies. Lawyer Peter Gersten and Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) have been fighting a David vs. Goliath battle to declassify secret documents and to seek relief for individuals harmed by official UFO secrecy. What America needs, however, is a massive legal campaign akin to the one that ended racial discrimination in the South. A top legal team should be convened, not only to handle individual cases, but to challenge the secrecy policy as a whole before the Supreme Court. The issue is this: Can those sworn to protect the Constitution be allowed to destroy it in the name of national security?
We also need an organization to mobilize grass-roots political pressure, which in turn requires money and volunteers. I believe ample resources already exist for such an organization, both in existing UFO groups and in the increasingly broad constituency that would have a personal or economic interest in the subject.
This is no longer a matter for the so-called "granola factor''- the ``fruits, nuts and flakes'' in the New Age movement. I do not mean to use the term disparagingly. In fact I consider myself firmly in the "flake" camp.
According to a 1997 CNN/Time poll, 72 percent of Americans believe the government is covering up information about aliens. This constitutes a vast untapped political resource, but it has not yet been organized. The American Association of Retired Person's (AARP) advertising slogan says, "35 million people dedicated to social change." If the polls are true, 100 million people could be involved in an even more important social change.
A movement like that could not but have global implications. Knowledge of extraterrestrial civilizations could lead to a global consensus that we humans must get our act together to benefit from a relationship with our cosmic neighbors. Perhaps the promise of a new age based on advanced technology from the stars might persuade the contending parties of the world to abandon their petty squabbles for the sake of a more prosperous future for all.
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