High-profile speaker hopes to lend legitimacy to alien topic
The organizers of “Canada’s first major UFO symposium” hope that a ringing endorsement of their cause by a former defence minister will be the wake-up call the world needs to start taking the UFO phenomenon seriously — and they are doing everything they can to get the media’s attention.
Paul Hellyer, 82, a former defence minister, stood at a podium at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall and said things no Western defence minister has publicly said before.
He said that UFOs are “as real as the airplanes that fly overhead. ” That their existence has been kept at a level of secrecy so high that “a vast majority of politicians were never in the loop.” That the U.S. military has developed the aliens’ own weapons. That Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program to put weapons into space was “designed for use against alien intruders” because, ever since we made contact in Roswell, N.M., in 1947, the U.S. government has viewed the aliens as the enemy.
Just don’t call it a coverup or a conspiracy theory. It’s “a 58- year-old truth embargo,” says Victor Viggiani, a former Toronto- area high school principal and co-organizer of the UFO Disclosure and Planetary Directions Symposium, which took place yesterday. Its organizers, the UFO-disclosure groups MUFON and Exopolitics Toronto, hope to use the event as a pulpit to pressure the government into talking publicly about what they see as the reality of human-alien contact.
Paul Hellyer’s presence was no accident. It is part of a campaign to lend legitimacy to the “ufology” movement by bringing out the most credible speakers in the most credible settings and drawing as much media attention as possible.
“We held this here (at U of T) for a reason. We wanted it to be at a seat of learning,” Viggiani says. “We’re looking at an intellectual pursuit here. It’s not just talk of lights in the sky - - it’s challenging people’s perceptions. And how do you do that? You give them top-quality information.”
The various speakers at the symposium seemed determined to do that, many of them citing documents from government archives and using methodologies seemingly no different from what any university department would require. And the speakers seem acutely aware that their myriad websites on the subject are viewed by many people as the ramblings of crackpots.
Enter Paul Hellyer. His speech was emotive, filled with wit and a touch of humour, even if the topic seems straight out of The X- Files. For the UFO disclosure movement, his appearance could not be understated, even if he does deny that his job as defence minister gave him any insight into any alien presence. Just how important is Hellyer? Important enough for it to be a “historic” occasion, Viggiani says.
Moon mission is a coverup: Hellyer
Politically, former defence minister Paul Hellyer has been around the block. He has sat in Parliament as a Liberal and a Progressive Conservative and founded two political parties, one of which, the Canadian Action Party, is still around. The principal tenet of that party is to fight NAFTA, which it sees as the tool by which Canada is being turned into “the 51st state.” Hellyer’s speech yesterday showed he still views the U.S. with deep suspicion. He questioned the U.S. government’s alleged policy of seeing aliens as “the enemy” and suggested the $108-billion US manned mission to the moon, announced by NASA last week, might secretly be the realization of a plan to build a moon base from to monitor alien activity.
‘Truth embargo’ is keeping ufo facts from public: viggiani
The UFO disclosure movement is learning the importance of controlling language in order to control the political agenda. So, the government’s “lies” about UFOs are now a “truth embargo,” UFO debunkers are practising “anti-ufology pseudo-science” and, perhaps most important, “close encounters” are evolving into much more complex “exopolitics.”
“Exopolitics is the engagement of people here on Earth with the potential politics involved with civilizations beyond the planet, extraterrestrial politics,” said Victor Viggiani, an organizer of yesterday’s UFO symposium at the University of Toronto.
Boosters of this field of study see it as a political science that should be treated with the same seriousness as any other academic field.
“They’re looking at ways of communicating with aliens,” Viggiani says. “How will our political systems engage themselves? Who’s going to speak for us? Will it be George W. Bush? Will it be the UN? Will it be you? You could be chosen.”
But the syllabus at www.exopolitics.org goes further than musing over who gets to go to champagne parties in the Crab Nebula. Michael D. Salla, a former professor at American University in Washington, D.C., argues that private individuals and corporations are in contact with aliens, a sort of “second track” of intergalactic diplomacy. Salla goes even further in another exopolitical tract, saying that military-intelligence groups are preparing us for the day when they will “reveal” the UFO presence. And when will that day come? “Once international terrorism fails to be a credible justification for the vast military expenditures by the U.S. military,” Salla writes.
Dose
Monday, September 26, 2005
