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Observers might question the wisdom of MUFON directors in inviting exopolitical lobbyist Stephen Bassett to be a featured presenter at the 35th annual MUFON symposium. After all, Bassett is not a researcher or field investigator, nor even a member of the organization. Instead, he is a self-declared activist dedicated to ending the government-imposed "truth embargo on the fact of an extraterrestrial presence engaging the planet earth and the human race."
Known as the only "UFO lobbyist" in the nation's capital, Bassett has since 1966 tirelessly campaigned for open congressional hearings on UFO/ET events and evidence, in hopes of bringing about Disclosure of what the government knows and has kept secret about the extraterrestrial presence. He is the founder of the Paradigm Research Group, Executive Director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee (X-PPAC), and in 2002 was a congressional candidate for the 8th District of Maryland, openly campaigning for the truth about the extraterrestrial presence.
Following on the heels of John Schuessler, Bassett offered a direct challenge to MUFON (which he sees as "a citizens' science movement") to change its mission statement and reassert itself as the pre-eminent activist organization in the world on the UFO/ET issue and-after increasing its membership to 100,000-to exert its new-found influence to break the political impasse that prevents Disclosure from happening. Bassett made it clear that he would like MUFON to adopt his own motto: "If Congress will not do its job, the people will."
In essence, Bassett exhorted MUFON to reorganize itself as a political power and "go to Washington and kick butt," thus ending the truth embargo which he says began in July, 1947, when General Roger Raimey rescinded an official Air Force press release claiming retrieval of a crashed "saucer" in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, and substituted a dubious "weather balloon" explanation of those enigmatic events.
Not surprisingly, there was no immediate response by MUFON officials to Bassett's "modest proposal," nor is it likely that there will be.
For Bassett, Disclosure means that "the presence of extraterrestrials becomes a known fact, with all its implications," thereby precipitating the death of an outmoded worldview and the birth of another. In this scenario, the current dominant paradigm-absent a recognition of the extraterrestrial presence-collapses, ushering in a new golden age "in which the human race will step up and out, entering a galactic reality."
Strikingly, Bassett assured his audience that the ETs "are not here to turn us into some alpaca farm." Here, he subtly echoes Steven Greer, director of The Disclosure Project and the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI), who preaches that extraterrestrials offer humanity both technological and spiritual redemption (a view that is either profoundly naïve or unabashedly Machiavellian).
According to Bassett, the truth embargo--institutionalized with passage of the 1947 National Security Act and the initiation of the secret "Majestic 12" management group--has "broken the social contract, compromised the mission of NASA, eroded trust in government, withheld life- and environmental-enhancing technology and warped the relationship between two branches of government (executive and legislative) and the military intelligence community."
This truth embargo is now unraveling, says Bassett, "due to the emergence of military and agency witnesses since the end of the Cold War." Indeed, he insists that the witness process, exemplified in a dramatic press conference at the National Press Club four months before the 9/11 attacks, "is the number one factor driving the vector toward disclosure."
Ever ready to exploit a political moment, Bassett took advantage of his MUFON symposium platform to read open memos to Presidential candidates George Bush, John Kerry and Dennis Kucinich, who in his view are being increasingly pressured "to take a position on the most controversial and implicative issue in the world today."
In his memo to George Bush, Bassett holds out the prospect of becoming "the disclosure president" (the Republican power brokers' choice), thereby creating a legacy of "the leader who ended the truth embargo and informed the nation and the world of the extraterrestrial presence engaging this planet."
To John Kerry, he advises repudiating his membership in Skull and Bones-an "absurd and dangerous secret society"-in order to gain credibility, and if elected to reject need-to-know excuses from intelligence agencies "for their refusal to give you the information you need to make a disclosure decision."
Finally, Bassett exhorts Dennis Kucinich (whose worldview "already embraces the possibility of an extraterrestrial presence") to utilize his spot at the Democratic convention "to place the most important issues in the world before the nation," promising that "millions of people around the planet will stand and applaud true political courage."
Where does Bassett himself stand on the election? "I don't care who's president," he says, "disclosure has to happen."
For Bassett, the truth embargo simply cannot last four more years. He explains that "the national security state" (the military/intelligence infrastructure needed to hold the ET cover-up in place) has produced a growing disease that has severely eroded the foundations of democracy: "the need to lie, when the truth would probably serve."
The result has been a profound cynicism among the citizenry, Bassett says, to the point that "76 percent of Americans didn't vote in the last election, and George Bush was elected by 12.5 percent of the public. What 'democracy' are we talking about?"
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