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These
conspiracy theories span the spectrum from a belligerent desire by ETs to deprive humanity of its sovereign control of the planet,
to a benevolent desire to help humanity solve its myriad social,
economic, and environmental problems; and evolve as a species. As
far as the involvement of clandestine government agencies are
concerned, conspiracy theories range from non-elected government
officials intent on arrogating political power through a 'shadow
government', to an enlightened effort to gradually prepare the
general public for the startling truth concerning the ET presence.
Dr. Michael E. Salla has held academic appointments in the School of International Service, American University, Washington DC (1996-2001), and the Department of Political Science, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (1994-96). He taught as an adjunct faculty member at George Washington University, Washington DC., in 2002. He is currently researching methods of Transformational Peace as a Researcher in Residence in the Center for Global Peace (2001-2003) and directing the Center's Peace Ambassador Program which uses transformational peace techniques for individual self-empowerment. He has a PhD in Government from the University of Queensland, Australia, and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Melbourne, Australia.
He is the author of The Hero's Journey Toward a Second
American Century (Greenwood Press, 2002) and author/co-editor of
three other books: Essays on Peace (Central Queensland
University Press, 1995);
Why the Cold War Ended (Greenwood Press, 1995); and Islamic
Radicalism, Muslim Nations and the West (1993). He has authored
more than seventy articles, chapters, and book reviews on peace,
ethnic conflict and conflict resolution. He has conducted research
and fieldwork in the ethnic conflicts in East Timor, Kosovo,
Macedonia, and Sri Lanka. He has organized a number of international
workshops involving mid to high level participants from these
conflicts. Further biographical material is on his website at
www.american.edu/salla/
The Need for
Exopolitics:
Implications of
Extraterrestrial Conspiracy Theories
for Policy Makers and
Global Peace (1)
According to a September 2002 Roper poll, two thirds of US citizens
don't believe their government is disclosing the truth about an
Extra-Terrestrial (ET) presence over the last fifty years in the
USA, and 60% supported the Federal government releasing this
information. (2) In a May 2001 press conference at the
National Press Club in Washington DC., twenty 'whistle
blowers' from a pool of more than one hundred former US military,
government and aviation officials gave verbal testimony and provided
physical evidence on their participation in clandestine government
projects involving reverse engineering of ET technology,
collaborative projects with ETs or suppression of information
involving UFO's. (3) The television mini-series produced by Steven
Spielberg, Taken, was seen at least in part by 31 million US
viewers in the sixteen day period from its first episode on December
2, 2002, and has stimulated speculation that the public is being
prepared for official government disclosure on the ET presence in
the near future. (4)
Sources of Information The literature on the ET presence comes from a diverse array of sources that differ greatly in terms of their reliability, accuracy, and scholarly standards. Virtually all of these sources operate within the political context of an official government policy that denies any ET presence or a systematic cover up of such a presence by clandestine government organizations. This adds to the difficulty of studying the purported ET presence and accuracy of sources supporting the various perspectives on such a presence since official non-disclosure suggests either wholesale misrepresentation or deception by those supporting such perspectives, or a covert government program designed to keep this information from elected public officials and from the general public.
If the latter is indeed the case, which the evidence to be
presented indicates, then it seems clear that the study of
exopolitics
will be compounded by officially sponsored acts of disinformation,
official denial, and even intimidation by clandestine government
organizations. This contextualizes the question of accuracy of
sources supporting the ET presence since it cannot be simply assumed
that these are honest reports by independent witnesses or former
government employees, and not part of an officially sanctioned
program of disinformation designed to distract public opinion in
whole or in part from the truth about the ET presence.
Category A - Whistle
Blowers The first category of sources of information on an ET presence are reports and testimonies of former government or military officials, and/or civilian aviation personnel who have had first hand experience of UFOs and/or evidence of the ET presence. The most famous UFO incident in the US is the reported crash of an ET occupied saucer shaped craft in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The initial finding of the Army Intelligence officer sent to the site, Major Jesse Marcel, was that debris from the crash was that of a 'flying disk'.
A press release was then authorized by the information officer at the Roswell Army Airbase on the morning of July 8. (5) This immediately caused world wide headlines and after Major Marcel was ordered to Washington, DC., Brigadier-General Roger Ramey announced to the world press that Major Marcel was mistaken and the 'flying disc' was an experimental weather balloon. In a subsequent interview years after the incident that boosted claims of a government conspiracy to cover up what happened at Roswell, Major Marcel asserted that he was silenced by superiors, and said,
"It
was not anything from this Earth. That I'm quite sure of ... Being
in intelligence, I was familiar with all materials used in aircraft
and in air travel. This was nothing like this. It could not have
been." (6) Over the last five decades since the Roswell crash, there has been a slow but steady stream of former government or military officials willing to come forth and reveal information about the ET presence. It should be pointed out that these former officials have usually taken secrecy oaths not to reveal information about their former duties and run the risk of considerable financial or criminal penalties for violating their oaths, as well as risking reputations and friendships developed over the years of their official service. A prominent whistle blower recently revealing his official activities involving the ET presence is a former senior Pentagon official, Colonel Philip Corso (ret), who served in the Eisenhower administration and later headed the Foreign Technology Desk in the Army's Research and Development department.
After more than
thirty years of silence,
Colonel Corso publically revealed in his 1997 book,
The Day
After Roswell, that he led a top secret clandestine project to
reverse engineer ET technology recovered from the Roswell crash. (7)
He wrote that his project successfully released a number of these
reverse engineered ET technologies for both the military and
civilian sectors. Companies that benefited from this clandestine
project included IBM,
Hughes Aircraft, Bell Labs, and Dow
Corning.
Corso claims that the rapid technological advances over the
last 50 years, in fiber optics, integrated circuit chips,
night-vision equipment, and super tenacity fibers such as Kevlar
body armor, were a direct result of these clandestine projects.
Category B - Witness
Reports The second category of information sources on an ET presence are the testimonies of those who have witnessed ETs/UFOs. and/or been contacted by ETs. These form the bulk of the available literature on the ET presence. These sources are often accompanied by physical evidence in terms of photographs, videos, medical x-rays, or even ET artifacts, and have been so overwhelming in their frequency and scope that the US Airforce launched three consecutive inquiries of these that were designated Operation Sign (1947-48); Operation Grudge (1948-52); and Operation Blue Book (1952-69). (9)
Project Blue Book
dismissed the overwhelming mass of the evidence given in 12,618
sightings as misidentified aircraft or explainable by natural
causes, and left a relatively small proportion of cases, 701, as
"unidentified". An independent assessment by the University of
Colorado, the Condon Report, recommended terminating
Project Blue Book. (10) Rather than ending the matter of UFO
visitation this only generated more controversy over what many
argued to be the Chairman's bias in ignoring important evidence and
recommending termination of the Project. For many, the Condon report
was yet another instance of a cleverly orchestrated secret
government conspiracy to hide the truth from the American public.
Category C - Remote
Viewing The third category of sources comes from participants in Remote Viewing projects. Remote Viewing is an intelligence gathering technique that was the subject of several government funded projects organized at the Stanford Research Institute from the early 1970's to 1989. (15) Pioneered by researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Remote Viewing projects trained participants to spatially dislocate a part of their consciousness to designated locations, unknown to the remote viewers, in order to gain intelligence information. (16)
Remote viewers were simply given a
set of coordinates consisting of randomly generated numerical codes,
and instructed to report on what they observed. The apparent success
of these projects as an intelligence gathering tool on an ET
presence and other topics of interest to various intelligence
agencies, led to numerous individuals being trained in the rigorous
standards and protocols of this process. A number of these remote
viewers subsequently wrote of their experiences in observing the ET
presence, and began training others in this process. Among the more
prominent of these has been Dr Courtney Brown
who has written two books on
Remote Viewing that focus on the ET presence, and is
attempting to further develop Remote Viewing as a scientifically
credible intelligence gathering tool. (17)
Category D -
Independent Archeology A fourth category of sources is the work of archeologists who specialize in translating or interpreting archeological evidence of an historic ET presence. Often led by 'independent archeologists' who operate outside of mainstream archeology based in public institutions and universities, the theories and translations of the extensive public archives and monuments from the ancient world offered by these independent archeologists, continue to attract world wide audiences. Among the more prominent is Graham Hancock, whose Fingerprints of the Gods, proved to be an enormous best seller, with its speculative theories based on forgotten ancient civilizations and astronomical pointers to the homes of distant ET ancestors. (18)
Another prominent example is the Sumerian scholar Zecharia Sitchin who translated thousands of ancient Sumerian cuneiform texts that described an ancient ET presence on the planet. (19) While formerly independent, such authors typically produce high quality works that continue to generate controversy among mainstream archeologists. The controversy and subjectivity surrounding these debates of the archeological evidence of an ancient ET presence, requires a low ranking to this category of information. Therefore, evidence in this category will be assigned a ranking of weak-moderate.
The fifth and most controversial source of information on an ET
presence are the works of those claiming to be in telepathic
communication with different ET races. A majority of these 'channels'
have few academic or professional credentials, yet this has not
impeded them from gaining international prominence as leaders or
spokespersons in the Alternative/New Age movement. In something akin
to a burgeoning social movement with global reach and accompany
religious devotion, many hundreds of thousands if not millions of
supporters attest to the transformative effect of these messages
from ETs, and emancipatory value of these messages for all humanity.
Many of these channels support the idea that an ET presence has
existed on the planet for millennia, and that there exists an
officially sanctioned government conspiracy that is global in its
reach to keep this presence secret from the general public. In terms
of the evidentiary standards for information sources, due to the
highly subjective nature of channeled material, this category can be
assigned the low ranking of
weak.
Intruder Perspective In the 'Intruder perspective', ETs are depicted as off-world beings who have traveled great interstellar distances and, without announcing themselves or gaining permission, have repeatedly violated US air space and abducted citizens for genetic experiments for purposes yet to be fully determined. In a popular 1987 book by Budd Hopkins titled simply, Intruders, he supports the idea of ETs being intrusive in their manner of collecting and experimenting with genetic material taken from abductees. (20) A rather bellicose presentation of the Intruder perspective is made by Col Philip Corso who describes the ETs as repeatedly violating US airspace, abducting US citizen's for the extraction and manipulation of genetic material and having purposes that pose a direct threat to US national interests.
Col Corso
advocates that the US needs to use the recovered ET technology for
building a new generation of weapons capable of shooting down ETs
anywhere around the planet. Indeed, he claims that over the years
the US has been very successful in using this reverse engineered
technology to shoot down some of these ET craft, but more effort
and resources need to be committed for a comprehensive global
defensive shield. Testimony provided by witnesses in the
Disclosure Project
support Corso's view that such a clandestine operation targeting ET
flights has been underway for some time, however they depict the ETs
as not retaliating to these hostile actions by US military forces.
(21)
In reports on the content of the telepathic communication with
the Grays, abductees/contactees have reported that the Grays'
survival as a species is threatened due to genetic degradation as a
result of the repeated use of cloning for reproductive purposes. The
Grays say they need to create a hybrid race that integrates the
human and Gray genes in order for the continuation of their species.
It is claimed that with the creation of this hybrid race, the Grays
will somehow be able to transfer their 'essence' or 'consciousness'
as individuals into the hybrid thereby perpetuating the continuation
of their race.
The main focus for conspiracy theorists in this perspective are clandestine government agencies desiring to withhold the truth of the ET presence from the general public. The sources of information for this perspective are drawn from all categories, with an emphasis on the Whistleblower and Witness Reports categories. Given the strong evidentiary rankings ascribed to these two source categories, conspiracy theories surrounding the Intruder perspective can be judged to have strong evidentiary support.
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