04/19/09
Apollo Moonwalker Calls for Disclosure of "ET" Contact!
by Dick Farley, capecodtoday Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON, DC -- April 19, 2009 --
Retired navy captain and Apollo XIV astronaut Edgar Mitchell today
called for the U. S. government to disclose to its citizens and other
Earthlings what he asserts are the realities of long-standing
extraterrestrial visitations and interactions with our planet.
Speaking this morning at "X-Conference
2009" in Gaithersburg, MD, a suburb of the nation's capital, Mitchell
told several hundred attendees and a phalanx of video cameras that,
with our planet confronting population pressures and critical questions
of environmental and energy sustainability, the need for disclosure
about extraterrestrial involvement with Earth is critical.
Mitchell contends that the dispersal of
knowledge about what he believes to be the end of Earth's apparent
quarantine from other civilizations, and advancement of planetary
culture beyond its present fragmentation and incoherence, are desirable
results of the widest public release of information about the
extraterrestrial presence he believes is real.
Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 astronaut
and moonwalker, says his belief in UFOs and aliens being real is
nothing new -- contrary to what tabloid reports might imply. Credit:
NASA.
The conference, organized by long-time
"UFO Disclosure" activist and one-time Maryland congressional candidate
Stephen Bassett, centers on an emergent field of cultural
reconsideration its advocates term "Exopolitics." Basset's nonprofit
Paradigm Research Group has mounted a decade-long broad spectrum
campaign advocating disclosure of what he says are unwarranted secrets
about "UFOs" and "ETs" held over as unnecessary "Cold War paranoia."
Questions of "What do we do and say after
we say 'Hello!' to ET?" remain distant from wider public consideration,
let alone consensus about their implications for national sovereignty,
religious traditions and global policy formulation, discussions about
which conference organizers and presenters are intent on provoking.
Mitchell, Bassett and other "ET
disclosure" activists are banking on President Barack Obama's repeated
assurances that government agencies withholding information from US
citizens are "on notice," in the President's words, that an era of
unnecessary secrecy is over.
Obama has said his administration's
tendency will be to unlock what he and senior officials consider
information rightfully belonging to the public, while recognizing
constraints required for national security, a presidential promise
replayed on video at the conference to sustained applause by hopeful
disclosure advocates.
Mitchell said he believes such changes
are essential for Earth to make progress through problems confronting
humanity's competing needs, religious imperatives and cultural
fragmentation.
"We live in challenging, magnificent
times," Mitchell said, emphasizing that, in his opinion, information
that we are not alone in the universe -- and indeed, he said, that we
here on Earth are having ongoing interactions with nonterrestrial
beings -- may provide a key to consciousness changes he and his
colleagues believe are necessary.
Mitchell said he believes such changes
are essential for Earth to make progress through problems confronting
humanity's competing needs, religious imperatives and cultural
fragmentation. His efforts since leaving NASA and the space program
have been focused on exploring frontiers "of the mind, body and
spirit," he said.
Mitchell acknowledged that, before
humanity can travel with practicality much beyond our own solar system,
solutions to Einsteinian limitations to faster-than-light propulsion of
our spacecraft must still be solved, a frontier the aging astronaut
said he believes science eventually will do.
But he stressed that our own limitations have not limited the extraterrestials he asserts are present on Earth.
"The aliens have done it!" Mitchell said of an apparent ability to traverse what to us are insurmountable distances.
He contends that as a result of wider
public awareness of the ET presence, revisitation of much phenomenology
catalogued in human history should precipitate revision of how we
understand planetary history in light of what he believes are
long-standing extraterrestrial interactions on Earth.
The Cape Cod connection?
The late Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John E.
Mack, a former summer Cape dweller who studied and wrote about
purported "ET alien abductions" in the early 1990s, and long-standing
"ET abduction" researcher (and Provincetown resident) Budd Hopkins, a
New York modern artist who has studied the phenomenon since his own
"UFO" sighting in 1964, met each other at the Cape. They were
introduced by a mutual friend, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, the acclaimed
psychiatrist and author, also at Harvard, who lives on the Cape.
The astronaut, who told Cape Cod Today he
was raised in a strict Baptist household, said reevaluations of source
phenomena that led to Earth's major faiths, and which he said foster
divisions among humans, might be another of the beneficial results of
wider awareness of what Mitchell believes is the historical and ongoing
"ET" presence and their asserted involvements in human development.
Mitchell and his fellow explorers of what
he has called the "Frontiers of Consciousness" have long contended that
broader public awareness of the extraterrestrial presence and
interactions the astronaut-scientist believes are reality could help
promote a "global mind change."
Mitchell and colleagues assert this could
point us toward "planetary transformation," helping Earth's culture to
mature sufficiently to gain entry into a wider community of
civilizations for which they believe abundant evidence exists, now and
throughout history, when viewed through a filter in which the claimed
extraterrestrial presence is considered.
Taking questions following his
presentation, Mitchell told Cape Cod Today that his beliefs as
expressed this morning about extraterrestrial involvements with
humanity on Earth are drawn from information generally available to
those who study the field of alleged "ET-UFO" events and experiences,
citing no "secret information" to which he has been privy.
He also contradicted some other
presenters at X-Conference 2009, who claimed that Mitchell and the
other NASA astronauts were briefed before their space flights about
potential encounters with UFOs of an extraterrestrial nature and how to
handle or disguise them from the public. He said unequivocally that
this did not occur.
In a previous private interview with Cape
Cod Today, Mitchell also expressed skepticism about some of the more
popular "UFO conspiracy lore," i.e., stories that NASA astronauts did
not really visit the moon or that the space agency has been covering up
satellite photographs of Mars purportedly showing evidence of past
civilizations.
"We had no briefings on UFOs during our
astronaut training," Mitchell told the conference, suggesting that
"human nature" tends to embellish and distort things about which there
is insufficient information or which embody concepts disruptive of our
respective world views.
Mitchell said decades of "UFO disclosure"
revelations, drawn principally from elderly military and nonmilitary
folks claiming bits and pieces of the larger puzzle about what they
believe really happened at Roswell, NM in 1947
He also acknowledged that the UFO field has often been the target of
disinformation and intentional misinformation seedings throughout the
years, some perhaps for legitimate national security reasons having to
do with terrestrial aerospace research and development.
But Mitchell's stance on NASA-centered conspiracy theories about "ET UFO" remained firm in the face of questions.
"It was not mentioned during my career,"
he said, adding that he and his fellow spacefarers saw no evidence of
space visitors on the back side of the Moon, another long-standing tale
among the more cult-like cohorts of UFO faithful.
Mitchell said decades of "UFO disclosure"
revelations, drawn principally from elderly military and nonmilitary
folks claiming bits and pieces of the larger puzzle about what they
believe really happened at Roswell, NM in 1947, helped shape his belief
that the event actually took place and was not, as the US Air Force
claimed, a crash-test balloon.
He cited what he described as the
credibility of the witnesses and the coherence of their stories as
influencing his belief in the reality of the ET scenario attendant to
the Roswell event, which stems from a 1947 cover-story released in July
of that year after a crash of some unspecified aircraft not far from
Roswell Army Airfield (AAF).
The next day the initial "recovered
flying saucer" cover story issued by Roswell AAF public affairs
staffers was countermanded by a senior Army Air Force commander, who
said a "weather balloon" was what had crashed, pieces of which had been
recovered.
The story died for three decades until
being resurrected in the early 1980s, eventually prompting a 1994 U. S.
Air Force revision of their "official story," contending that the
Roswell crash was of a "Mogul" project balloon of the type used for
atmospheric monitoring to detect possible Soviet nuclear weapons tests.
A subsequent version of the Air Force
story was that the alleged "recovered alien bodies" endemic to some
Roswell crashed saucer tales were, in reality, "crash test dummies"
used for testing experimental high-altitude equipment for the U. S.'s
growing strategic bomber forces.
As is well known to worldwide "UFO"
enthusiasts, the Air Force's efforts to defuse the Roswell story were
in vain, and a host of alternative scenarios have persisted.
These range from "ET crashed saucer
recovery" to speculations that the event being camouflaged was human
experimentation on unwitting subjects, in contravention of the
then-recently adopted Nuremberg Protocols governing medical
experimentation on humans following disclosure of Nazi concentration
camp Holocaust horrors.
Mitchell is among many former military
officials and large numbers of US and world citizens who scoff at the
Air Force "clarifications," citing what he says are the credibility of
the witnesses and the coherence and consistency of their recollections,
in his opinion, that an extraterrestrial craft indeed crashed and the
event covered up for six decades.
"What more do you need?" Mitchell declared, asserting that the Air Force's balloon stories are transparently false.
Ironically, the future astronaut grew up
in Roswell, NM, where his family had a ranch not far from the alleged
crashed saucer site, although Mitchell said that at the time it
happened, he had no firsthand experience or knowledge about it.
But other space related research was
going on at Roswell during Mitchell's youth, as rocket pioneer Robert
Goddard had moved his research and testing program to Roswell in the
1930s and launched numerous experimental rockets. The youthful future
astronaut was captivated by Goddard's efforts, which captured his
imagination about possible travel away from Earth and to the stars.
Mitchell also related that in 1945 he and
his family's neighbors witnessed the bright, white flash over the
horizon which signaled the advent of the atomic age with testing of the
first nuclear weapon at the Trinity site. Mitchell said the bomb
influenced him significantly when he later learned what it was and,
much later, better understood its implications.
Mitchell said he believes the nuclear
explosion also may have attracted the extraterrestrial presence he
believes resulted in the alleged ET aircraft collision which UFO
researchers have claimed for three decades happened near Roswell, which
is situated not far from where the nation's first nuclear weapon was
detonated.
"I have a sneaking suspicion that the
reason for Roswell (as the alleged ET aircraft crash is euphemistically
termed) was that the UFO phenomenon was drawn to our nuclear sites,"
Mitchell told the gathering. He said he is concerned about the
tendencies of terrestrial governments and their militaries to stake
claims and perhaps fly weapons in space, a concern Mitchell believes
may be shared by the intervening extraterrestrials.
Mitchell said that many years ago, after
leaving NASA, he authored a manuscript advocating against
militarization of space attendant to nationalistic colonization of the
high frontier for military advantage or benefits other than for all of
humankind.
"I submitted it to thirty-four
publishers, and all refused to publish it," Mitchell said.
He told the X-Conference that his coming forward so unequivocally at
this time reflects his concerns about the direction our planet is
heading and his belief that wider public awareness that "we are not
alone" will precipitate a healthier consideration of Earth's future.
permanent link: http://www.ufocasebook.com/2009b/saucersecrets.html
source & references:
http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.php/2009/04/19/apollo-astronaut-demands-release-of-gove?blog=73
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