A few hours later I spoke with Stephen Greer, an emergency room
physician who founded CSETI (the "C" stands for contact, but the
organization is unrelated to SETI), and who claims to have communicated
with aliens. Some highlights of his bizarre two-hour monologue: According
to one naval physicist, aliens are being shot down by Area 51's arrogant
"cowboys using unimaginable technologies"; after the Roswell crash, our
scientists reverse-engineered the technology of the spaceships, but if
they came forward to tell the truth "they would be killed and the
president of the U.S. couldn't protect them"; a consortium of fringe
religious groups and private corporations with alien technology has
banded together to interface with people's minds and induce "psychomotor
paralysis, terror, and dread"; Greer himself has supposedly met with
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA officials and identified "125
deep-throat witnesses" who know secret information about UFOs. In
conclusion: "This is one of the biggest stories in the history of the
human race."
TOUCHDOWN IN VEGAS
Science has long been a strange mistress of the military--and our
high-tech arabesques of the last few decades dance right into the
public's fears and fantasies about UFOs. But at the conference, not one
of the UFO researchers I questioned would talk. As John Petersen, an
engineer and president of the Arlington Institute, a think tank in
Virginia, said: "You'd have to stay on this story for a year, make
friends with all these guys, and then they'd only talk off the record
anyway."
Another scientist who refused to be named explained: "Remember that
phrase that was popular in the '60s and '70s, the `military-industrial
complex'? Well, there actually is such a thing. Once you've worked for
the National Security Agency or the CIA, you don't stop. You can't get
out. You know too much and you're too valuable. People in intelligence
and the military come to have a kind of haunted look. It's a strange
world where you have to be wary all the time."
Kind of makes you wonder. And then you start wondering some more.
The presentations the UFO researchers gave at the conference were at best
sophomoric; in private discussions attendees called them "UFO 101." Most
of the resorts discussed findings or cases that the researchers had been
familiar with for years. So why were these guys gathering in Vegas, a
desert city horn out of a mafioso's wet dream?
Very far off the record, a questionable source told me that someone
at this very conference was a "prince of darkness" and part of an
"end-of-the-world cult portraying alien abductions as a demonic
phenomenon necessitating a holy war." Again off the record, but from a
less fanatical source, a physicist and I stood talking outside the Monte
Carlo Hotel and Casino in the 100 degree desert sun, and he explained
that the scientists wouldn't talk to me because they were embarrassed
about their funding sources, especially Vegas real-estate billionaire
Robert Bigelow, who has founded an organization called National Institute
of Discovery Science (NIDS), and hired John Alexander, former head of
non-lethal weapons at Los Alamos, to run it. Bigelow had recruited a
stellar board of scientists, astronauts, generals, and former CIA
officials, and was said to have garnered the cream of the
"Aviary"--supposedly an informal network of CIA guys who'd donned bird
nicknames (Alexander had been known as the Penguin), as well as former
general who'd been in charge of Reagan's "Star Wars" program.
Bigelow had apparently just bought land in Utah where there were
rumored UFO sightings. Or maybe the guy just likes Utah. There are as
many UFO conspiracy theories as there are galaxies that might have
generated them. Take, for instance, the cadres of true-believers who
insist that bizarre cattle mutilations in the Southwest--documented by
filmmaker/writer Linda Moulton Howe--are not the work of hungry aliens
given carte blanche by our willing government in exchange for technology,
but are actually created by our government to fuel our own UFO paranoia
and distract us from the real aliens housed in underground tunnels at
military bases. It has also been said that every single technological
leap of the last 40 years--from the transistor radio to satellite
telecommunications, superconductors, and computer chips--has been
reverse-engineered from crashed spaceships.
Information and disinformation. Those two words keep the entire
spectrum of UFO tales maddeningly alive: If it's not genuine information,
it's calculated disinformation. This August, the CIA admitted that the
military had lied about spy planes amid a wave of UFO sightings in the
50's and 60's--over half of all UFO reports were accounted for by manned
reconnaissance missions. As Marc Barasch, a contributing editor to this
magazine who is working on a UFO documentary, put it in an e-mail,
"Everyone thinks everyone else is a disinformation agent. Who knows?
Trust no one. You gotta be a little nuts and alienated in the first place
to devote your life to this subject."
REST STOP IN RACHEL
I ditched the conference a day early. Immense Nevada skies opened
out before me, and after a few hours I passed the first sign for the
"Extraterrestrial Highway"--so named last year by the state's
governor--two lanes stretching like dust-coated taffy into the scrub
brush and mountains.
Tags:
alien,
area 51,
dumping ground,
extraterrestrial,
flying saucers,
government,
government conspiracies,
nevada desert,
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