At Roswell Festival, Doubt Is an Alien Concept
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 8, 2007; A01
ROSWELL,
N.M., July 7 -- Attention, all aliens. Come on down. Because,
seriously, this is your crowd. About 50,000 of your closest admirers
are expected this weekend for the Roswell UFO
Festival, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the nearby crash landing
of a flying saucer -- and, naturally, the ensuing government coverup.
A weather balloon? Please. We are not fools.
At
least that's the thinking here. Not up on the latest ufology? The
debate today is all about "disclosure," meaning not if, but when. When
is the government finally going to open its top-secret files to reveal
its voluminous data on the sightings, abductions and close encounters
dating back to at least July 5, 1947. "The anomalies." Here in the
desert Southwest. And probably Mars.
"The secret world will fall.
We want the truth embargo to end," said Stephen Bassett, the founder of
X-PPAC, the first political action committee established to target the
politics of UFO/ET phenomena. Bassett spoke at the festival's
conference, which, along with the Alien Chase fun run, costume parades
and carnival rides (Orbiter, Splash Down), have filled every motel room
in Roswell, once the home of the world's only atomic warfare unit and the Enola Gay B-29 bomber.
On
Friday night, Bassett told listeners of George Noory's "Coast to Coast
AM" radio show, which beamed live from the convention center to 500
stations, that: "I believe the Democrats are planning disclosures in
the first months of the next administration."
The Democrats? Naturally.
Several ufologists agreed that "the best ET ticket" would be Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York (or maybe Al Gore?) and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson
(D), who have probably already have been briefed on the truth. "But
they don't want to say so now," Bassett said. Interestingly, Richardson
is quoted at the UFO Museum and Research Center ("The Truth is Here!")
as stating: "I don't think the U.S. government has fully disclosed
everything they know."
Indeed. If only citizens could get access
to the data. Because the people here want to know about the shadow
guests, crop circles, shape shifters, crash retrievals, men in black,
cattle mutilations, probes and, of course, the antimatter perpetual
energy machines that have been kept under wraps in those deep-black
special limited access programs run by an international cabal of
military-industrial-intelligence-media interests.
Why won't they tell all? "Because they don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs," said Richard M. Dolan, author
of "UFOs and the National Security State," and another of the two dozen
speakers this weekend. Dolan is not certain that it is an antimatter
machine. Could be anti-gravity. But they're working on something, perhaps by "reverse engineering" based upon debris -- mechanical or biological -- vacuumed up at the crash sites.
"The topic is now being taken very seriously," Noory said. He said if the CIA
could release 693 pages of the "family jewels," the worst deeds by the
nation's spies, then the UFO research community asks why not the files
(probably kept underground) about the extraterrestrials. "We've been
visited from the very beginning of time," Noory said. "Maybe we've been
seeded. Maybe we've been changed. I don't know. But somebody does."
That
somebody might be Roger Leir, author of "The Aliens and the Scalpel,"
about his research on the abductees who have been implanted or probed.
His latest case, which he shared with UFO enthusiasts at the festival,
involves "a gentleman in his 60s" who awoke recently to see "a drop of
blood on his knee." CAT scans, X-rays and interviews, said Leir,
revealed a 60 percent certainty that the man had been snatched by the
ETs. The foreign object in his knee appeared to be a one-inch-long rod
as thick as a pencil. More testing, naturally, is required. "We try to
do this as scientifically as possible," he said. His pet theory? Mass
genetic manipulation. But it is only a theory -- so far.
Other
lectures at the festival include "Body Snatchers in the Desert," "Were
Early Contactees Ritual Magicians?" and "UFOs and the Occult: Reptilian
Overlords, Abductions, Mind Control and the New World Order."
Reptilian
overlords aside, the aliens have been pretty good for little Roswell,
population 45,000, which in recent years has embraced the 1947 flying
saucer crash as a boomlet for tourism dollars. "We're told the motels
are absolutely packed," said Roswell assistant city manager Bob
Thomson. Is he a believer? "There's a lot of excitement this year," he
said diplomatically.
Downtown, the street lamps of Roswell sport
lights depicting almond-eyed ETs. The local liquor store's sign offers
"aliens, beer, wine." Perhaps not in that order. At the Wool Bowl,
thousands came out to hear the Alan Parsons Project play. At the
convention center, a company is offering tours of the crash site, which
is on a ranch west of town. They're selling alien cat scratches,
glow-in-the-dark soap and Area 51 coffee mugs.
The crowds at the festival appear relatively sane. Many are from New Mexico,
and they say they are here for the fun carnival atmosphere in tidy,
laid-back Roswell. Some of the out-of-towners, the real enthusiasts,
can be a little intense. They're like trekkies at a "Star Trek"
convention, except that they pepper their conversations with the
phrase: "And that can be authenticated."
Guy Malone is one of the
official organizers of the weekend event. "There are a lot of views
expressed here, and I share them all," he said. "Angels, fairies,
demons, succubuses, ETs and aliens. They might all be the same
phenomena."
Please, continue. "Hundreds of years ago," Malone
explained, sporting black alien-style sunglasses, "it was elves and
fairies taking you to a cave and poking you with wands or having weird
sex in the woods." And today? "We call them aliens."
Why does the
public not know all this? "The single largest number one roadblock to
disclosure is the mainstream media," Dolan said. For example, he said,
last year there was a UFO sighting in Chicago. Did you know that?
"A flying saucer-like object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport
for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such
intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon," according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration
blamed "a weather phenomenon," but really, what else could they say?
The problem, said Dolan, is not that the major media avoid such stories
completely, "but they don't follow up."
The U.S. government, of
course, has issued its share of reports debunking UFOs. Here in
Roswell, those reports are generally seen as desperate attempts to
whitewash the truth.
Yet there is hope for the Roswell set.
Apparently from the French, who have declassified some of their UFO
files. The British and Brazilians have or will soon open their cases
for scrutiny. But the treasure trove belongs to the U.S. government,
and strangely, disclosure has not yet become an issue on the
presidential campaign.
The question is why.
Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/07/AR2007070701234_pf.html