Presidential candidates believe the truth is out there

October 28, 2007

If the weather-balloon incident in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 is a big issue for you, Bill Richardson is your presidential candidate.

The New Mexico governor hosted a town-hall meeting the other day when a voter asked Richardson whether he’d be willing to get to the bottom of the “mystery.” Not only did Richardson take the question seriously, he’s also apparently had his own questions about this for a while.

“I’ve been in government a long time, I’ve been in the cabinet, I’ve been in the Congress and I’ve always felt that the government doesn’t tell the truth as much as it should on a lot of issues,” said Richardson, who is governor of New Mexico.

“When I was in Congress I said (to the) Department of Defense … ‘What is the data? What is the data you have?’ ”

He was told that the records were classified.

“That ticked me off,” he said, as the crowd laughed.

“What do you want me to do? You want me to open up all those files?” he asked the alien enthusiast, who answered that he did.

“I’ll work with you on that.”

As the AP noted, the Air Force, not too terribly long ago, disclosed that the Roswell incident was actually part of something called “Project Mogul,” a top-secret effort to monitor Soviet-era nuclear testing. It’s why officials were always reluctant to answer questions about what happened.

Of course, those who prefer to believe a UFO was involved have rejected this explanation. Richardson apparently wants more information, too.

I’d just add that there seems to be quite a bit of interest in this area lately.

Later Sunday, during a town-hall meeting in Exeter, Giuliani assured a young questioner that preparedness will be key for all crises, including those from outer space.

“If (there’s) something living on another planet and it’s bad and it comes over here, what would you do?” a boy asked.

Giuliani, grinning, said it was his first question about an intergalactic attack.

“Of all the things that can happen in this world, we’ll be prepared for that, yes we will. We’ll be prepared for anything that happens,” said Giuliani, who mayor during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

I’m as big a sci-fi fan as the next political blogger, but I had no idea the candidates would actually start fielding questions on the subject.

Update: And, of course, as commenters remind me, there’s also Kucinich’s reported UFO experience, though to date, he’s been a little cagey in talking about it.

So what.

It’s almost Halloween.

  • . . .and you forgot Shirley Mac’s bio story that Kucinich had a UFO experience. Maybe Richardson wants that investigated before the space invaders help Kucinich pass Richardson in the polls (don’t worry, Bill – Giuliani is ready to shoot ’em all down, just like in a hollywood blockbuster.)

  • Kucinich had a UFO experience

    That says it all about him. He even looks like the Hale-Bop / Heaven’s Gate guy (Joe Lie does, too).

  • There’s also this little nugget:

    NASA has agreed to search its archives once again for documents on a 1965 UFO incident in Pennsylvania, a step the space agency fought in federal court.

    The government has refused to open its files about what, if anything, moved across the sky and crashed in the woods near Kecksburg, Pa., 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

    Traffic was tied up in the area as curiosity seekers drove to the area, only to be kept away from the crash site by soldiers.

    The Air Force’s explanation for the unidentified flying object: A meteor or meteors.

    “They could not find anything,” one Air Force memo stated after a late-night search on Dec. 9, 1965. Several NASA employees also were reported to have been at the scene.

    Eyewitnesses said a flatbed truck drove away a large object shaped like an acorn and about the size of a Volksawagon bus. A mock-up based on the descriptions of local residents sits behind the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Department.

    UFO enthusiasts refused to let the matter die and journalist Leslie Kean of New York City sued NASA four years ago for information.

    The agency has turned over several stacks of documents which Kean says are not responsive to the request, an argument that U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan agreed with.

  • My guess is that New Mexico Governor Richardson is simply doing what governors do, promote state tourism.

    Whatever you decide, you’re likely to be intrigued by the many exhibits and programs about the crash itself and the phenomenon of UFO research. Opened in 1991, the [International UFO ]Museum and Research Center shortly thereafter earned 1996’s “Top Tourist Destination of New Mexico.”

  • Everyone knows that the government frequently doesn’t tell us the truth. The question is: what are they covering up, and why? Inquiring minds want to know!

    It was either very suspicious, or very stupid, for the government to keep information about 1940’s weather balloon technology classified for decades. What makes more sense: keeping secrets about balloons from the Russians, or keeping secrets about space aliens from the American people? That’s right – neither one makes any sense at all.

    The rest of the Warren Commission documents on the 1963 JFK assassination won’t be released until 2017, and even those will be redacted. What are “they” hiding, and why?

    I think that the government has a vested interest in promoting wild conspiracy theories. If people are obsessing over Roswell, they won’t be paying attention to whatever Dick Cheney is cooking up in his basement.

  • I made a special trip to Roswell on my summer cross country trek. I hope that any aliens that do exist exhibit more imagination than we do.

  • I agree with OfromM. The more ridiculous a category they put stuff in, the sooner they can start handing out alyoumineeum haberdashery. I don’t care what they’re about. Zealously hidden files are hiding stupidity, illegality or aliens. I could use a good laugh or another glimpse into the coal black heart of our gov’t or the welcome news that we’re not alone in the universe.

    Just open the f’n files.

  • No, Zeitgeist, Cheney is obviously from the night of the living dead. If you removed his makeup, you’d see the rotting flesh.

  • All I know is that….
    Those covering up Roswell…
    Are the same people who killed JFK…
    Who are the same people who that faked the moon landings…
    Who are the same people who put explosives in the Twin towers…
    Who are the same people who put latex over the reptiles Bush and Cheney…
    Who are the same people who put money under my pillow when I put a tooth under there…

    Peace out people!
    Pyramid power and crystal power unto you!

  • It wouldn’t matter what the government released or what gets declassified. Some of us need to believe in UFO’s. If a complete data dump didn’t reveal that UFO’s from other planets exist then the UFO believers would insist that something was being held back.

    I know from direct experience that there are inexplicable aerial phenomena. I doubt that the government knows much more about them than the rest of us.

  • Anyone remember when Reagan waxed rhapsodic about aliens invading Earth and uniting the USA and USSR together in common struggle? That was fucking creepy.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhUmCthFK0k
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyqRglNocG4

    Actually, I like this new emphasis on space. Maybe after Bush is gone, and we get our world back to normal, we’ll see more international cooperation on space exploration.

    Even if we don’t find any aliens, with global warming kicking in, we really should be looking at ways to get off of this rock.

    Also, anyone notice that, at times of peace and prosperity, Americans become semi-obsessed with aliens from space? In the 1950’s it was all those UFO sightings. In the 1990’s it was X-Files and Art Bell and the like.

    I am MORE that willing to put up with UFO nuts than I’ve been to put up with NeoCons. The UFO nuts are at harmless.

  • The UFO nuts are at harmless.

    Clearly, you haven’t yet felt the lash of the disintegrator guns that the Space Brothers have provided us.

  • Of course, those who prefer to believe a UFO was involved have rejected this explanation. Richardson apparently wants more information, too.

    That’s probably because not a lot of people seem to know that the Air Force copped to Project Mogul a decade ago – it never, ever, ever seems to get discussed on the UFO shows that run endlessly on the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, or the National Geographic Channel. Even in the last 5 minutes of those shows where, when the formula is followed, the skeptics get a chance to point out all of the problems with the UFOlogists’ theories and “evidence”.

    Plus – the official answer is just so boring. If Roswell’s not going to be a UFO you at least want it to be something cool, like early stealth technology experiments, or early supersonic jet experiments, or experiments with technology acquired from the Nazis after WWII – something cool. Having it turn out to be experiments with high altitude weather balloons to spy on the Russians is just so – mundane. People want a bit of excitement in their lives.

    I’d just add that there seems to be quite a bit of interest in this area lately.

    Halloween – the last two months have seen an uptick in the UFO/Hauntings/Cryptozoology shows on the basic cable channels leading up to the big monster day.

    Why channels that have built their brands around science and history spend so much time broadcasting shows about pseudo-science and pseudo-history is another question. I guess it’s ratings, but you’d think that the brand of the History Channel would suffer when it’s showing things like “Monster Quest” and investigating Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

  • I’m convinced that the “Roswell UFO incident” will never die. Reason?

    When that UFO landed and the aliens on it deplaned to explore, they impregnated untold numbers of Earthlings, all of whom eventually gave birth to a strange hybrid — part human, part Democrat. And all of those hybrids went into politics and some reached very prominent positions (both Clintons, for example). If you look at the list and then check those folks’ birthdays, you’ll see that the gestation period ranges from -2yrs to +5 yrs. Which is proof positive that they weren’t normal humans.

    I kid you not! There’s an e-mail, describing the event and its consequences, which gets recycled periodically and, every time it surfaces, one of my acquaintances from the dark side of the moon forwards it to me (fair enough; I forward to them every anti-Bush/Cheney joke I can find). I’ve noticed also that the list gets a bit longer every time I get it; doubtless as more questions about the incident get answered, the more we know about how far all those aliens ranged before taking off again.

  • The Roswell incident is a remarkable story in American folklore. As NonyNony says, it’s a shame that it has such a mundane resolution. But I hardly think an intelligent, alien species would barge in on us that way. It’s ridiculous to even consider.

    It’s also a shame that there are so many millions of UFO enthusiasts wasting a lot of time and money on the hobby when they could be contributing to real scientific efforts in exobiology and astronomy by donating to organizations like the SETI Institute, and by lobbying their Congresspeople to focus on unmanned exploration in NASA, rather than the enormously wasteful and largely scientifically unproductive manned stunts in space.

    It will be an utter tragedy if we piss away a trillion dollars hitting golf balls on Mars when we could learn so much about other solar systems with proper funding.

  • . But I hardly think an intelligent, alien species would barge in on us that way. It’s ridiculous to even consider.

    Oh, I wouldn’t go that far – there are very few things that are too ridiculous to even consider – the last two decades of political weirdness in the US have taught me that much.

    For example, I could see an event like the Roswell event happening to us if we had extrasolar space travel capabilities and found a world that supported life. A freak crash landing on an alien planet when the explorers have strict orders not to make first contact without explicit permission from their command structure is actually a highly plausible scenario. There are a lot of things that UFOlogists say about Roswell that are amazingly implausible, but the crash itself isn’t necessarily one of those things.

  • Regardless of the relevance of UFOs to the Pres Election there is more to the UFO thing than weather balloons. UFOs were and are spotted near military installations and Air Force bases because, yes, that is where it makes sense to test such high tech and stealth craft. UFOs have long been used by the government and the military to cover up research and development of such craft by fellow earthlings as human as the rest of us. Walker AFB, Roswell, was the home to aircraft carrying atomic devices at that time. People still don’t like the idea of unaccounted for nuclear devices, especially if they crash. Same with the JFK assassination, misinformation and disinformation used to discredit and neglect legitimate research.

  • I just read up a little on project Mogul. I had actually never heard of that before today when I read this post. Very interesting stuff.

  • libra @ 19 seems to be on the right track, but fails to mention the deal made with the aliens to delay their invasion, thus guaranteeing wealth and security for the men currently in power in the US. Part of the deal included working to prepare the planet for eventual colonization by killing off large numbers of existing Earth species, and destablilizing the planet’s climate systems, so that alien ecosystems can be more conveniently transplanted. Surely you didn’t think George W. Bush and the wider global-warming-denier movement just happened, do you?

  • As regards the presidential election though, I’m more worried about cereal box cartoon characters than space aliens. Rudy Giuliani already reminds me more and more of Count Chocula with each passing year. Then the Daily Show recently pointed out that Fred Thompson bears a striking resemblance to Frankenberry. They way Jonh McCain’s cheeks keep inflating, he’s either storing up nuts for the winter or transforming into Boo Berry before our very eyes (and I think Tom Tancredo already has). You gonna tell me this is all just coincidence?

  • That video game Area 51 is awesome.

    Unfortunately I never got around to showing up with enough quarters to beat it…

  • CB, I think the question you’re overlooking in this post is, once they get here, how do we know whether or not it’s hostile?

  • To all the haters out there, I just want to say, how would you like it if someone came along and said they do not believe in you?

    That’s it, I’m out.


  • On October 28th, 2007 at 10:47 pm, Loch Ness monster said:

    Something’s wrong here. The real Loch Ness Monster only posts on those conservative blogs which criticize Republicans as well as Democrats and which also welcome opposing views.

  • biggerbox @ 24, I’m more inclined to believe Bush came to be when the aliens dumped the chemical toilet on their spaceship when they stopped on our planet. Cheney, he is just an empty pod like a used styrofoam McDonalds burger container from another planet.

  • I am a reptilian shape shifter currently in charge of one of your primitive nation states and I am really getting a kick out of these replies . . .

  • Reagan saw UFOs several times. Here’s the first story:

    Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis described her father as “fascinated with stories about unidentified flying objects and the possibility of life on other worlds.” She compared the “madness” of her father’s inauguration day to “a fifty’s movie in which flying saucers descend on the metropolis.”

    Reagan may have gained this intense interest from sightings he had while he was Governor of California. Kitty Kelly in her Unauthorized Biography of Nancy Reagan stated Reagan admitted to believing in flying saucers, and “even swore that he had seen a few unidentified flying objects.”

    Two of these Reagan UFO encounters have become public. The first sighting story was made public by Steve Allen on his WNEW-AM radio show in New York. Allen stated that a well know personality in the entertainment industry had confided a UFO story to him many years before. As the story had already made the rounds in the rumor mill, there was no question the comedian and host was referring to Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy.

    Ron and Nancy were expected at a casual dinner party with friends in Hollywood. Except for the Reagans, all the guests had arrived. Ron and Nancy showed up a half hour later quite upset. They stated that they had seen a UFO coming down the coast.

    Lucille Ball in her book “Lucy in the Afternoon” also described the event. In her account of the event she stated, “After he elected President, I kept thinking about that event, and wondered if he still would have won if he told everyone that he saw a flying saucer.”

    full story:
    http://www.presidentialufo.com/reagan_ufo_story.htm

  • Here’s the second Regan UFO story:

    Norman C. Millar, then Washington Bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, later the editor of the Los Angeles Times. Reagan told Millar:

    “I was in a plane last week when I looked out the window and saw this white light. It was zigzagging around. I went up to the pilot and said, ‘Have you seen anything like that before?’ He was shocked and said, ‘Nope.’ And I said to him: ‘Let’s follow it!’

    We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement it went straight up into the heavens. When we got off the plane, I told Nancy all about it.’

    The pilot of Governor Reagan plane was Bill Paynter, and he backed up Reagan’s version of the incident with the UFO.

    I was the pilot of the plane when we saw the UFO. Also, on board were Governor Reagan and a couple of his security people. We were flying a Cessna Citation. It was maybe nine or ten o’clock at night. We were near Bakersfield when Governor Reagan and the others called my attention to a big light flying a bit behind the plane.

    It appeared to be several hundred yards away. It was a fairly steady light until it began to accelerate, then it appeared to elongate. The light took off. It went up at a 45-degree angle – at a high rate of speed. Everyone on the plane was surprised.

    Governor Reagan expressed amazement. I told the others I didn’t know what it was. The UFO went from a normal cruise speed to a fantastic speed instantly. If you give an airplane power it will accelerate – but not like a hotrod, and that is what this was like.

    We didn’t file a report on the object because for a long time they considered you a nut if you saw a UFO.

    Paynter added the UFO incident didn’t stop there. He stated that he and Reagan had discussed their UFO sighting “from time to time” in the years following the incident.

    Reagan, in his discussion of the sighting with Norman C. Miller added that he had told Nancy about the UFO he had seen, and they had done personal research on UFOs. This research had uncovered the facts that there were references to UFOs in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Reagan was telling his story in a very animated way. This led Miller to conclude that Reagan seriously believed in UFOs. He asked him, “Governor, are you telling me that you saw a UFO?”

    Suddenly, according to Miller, Reagan realized that he was talking to a reporter. “This look crossed his face,” recalled Miller, “and he said let’s just say that I’m an agnostic.”

    http://www.presidentialufo.com/reagan_ufo_story.htm

  • Here’s the story of Jimmy Carter’s UFO sighting:

    As previously mentioned, Jimmy Carter is one of two U.S. Presidents who have reported seeing a UFO before becoming the President….

    Carter’s UFO sighting began shortly after dark on a windless night. Jimmy Carter was standing outside the Lion’s Club in Leary, Georgia, waiting for a meeting to start. Suddenly, he and ten or more witnesses, sighted a red and green orb radiating in the western sky. Carter described an object that “it seemed to move towards us from a distance, stop, move partially away, return, then depart. Bluish at first; then reddish – luminous – not solid.”

    “At times,” reported Carter, “it was as bright as the moon, and about as big as the moon – maybe a bit smaller. The object was luminous; not solid.”

    In an interview with the Atlanta Constitution, Carter described the moving nature of the event. He described the sighting as a “very remarkable sight.” This is an important event, because many of the skeptical investigations done on the Carter sighting, have tried to paint the event as a ho-hum occurrence. None of the descriptions Carter has made of the event have ever described it as ho-hum.

    Jimmy Carter’s mother Lillian also confirmed that Carter had been very impressed by what he had seen. “The UFO made a huge impression on Jimmy,” she stated. “He told me about the sighting many times. He’s always been a down-to-earth no-nonsense boy, and the sighting by him, as far as I am concerned, is as firm as money in the bank.”

    Carter had, in fact, described the UFO sighting many times in the years since it occurred. In every instance, including the latest known telling of the story at Emory University in 1997, Carter has never backed off on the spectacular nature of the event. He has also never conceded that was he saw was some misidentification of a natural phenomena.

    Carter estimated that the object was three hundred to one thousand yards away. He estimated that the event had lasted 10 minutes. Then the object disappeared. Carter was so impressed by what he had seen, he recorded his impressions of the event on a tape recorder at the time.

    http://www.presidentialufo.com/jimmy.htm

    And here’s the link to his official signed report:

    http://www.presidentialufo.com/carter_ufo_report.htm

  • The following text is the press release spread in August 2006 by the C.U.N., Italian ufological association.

    REAGAN AND THE HYPOTHESIS OF AN ALIEN THREAT DISCUSSED IN GENEVA, IN 1985:

    M.S. GORBACHEV CONFIRMED THE CONFIDENCE OF THE FORMER AMERICAN PRESIDENT

    Last June 23, during the press conference of the first day of the international seminar entitled Media between Citizens and Power taken place in San Servolo Island in the Venetian Lagoon,… the ex Soviet premier Michail Sergeevich Gorbachev answered to some tens of national and local press correspondents. The international seminar was supported by the Venice Province and by the World Political Forum , founded by Gorbachev.

    The last but one question…was put by Luca Scantamburlo, Gruppo Editoriale Olimpia’s correspondent for the Italian magazines Tecnologia&Difesa and UFO Notiziario.

    The question put to the great Russian statesman concerned some public declarations by Ronald Reagan about the possibility of “an alien threat from outside this world” to the Earth coming from “another planet”, eventuality that would help all the men to recognize the common bond which “unites all the members of the humanity” (speechs in front of a high school in Maryland on December 4, 1985, and in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations during the Forty-second Session on September 21, 1987).

    During the press conference the ex premier Gorbachev interrupted the Italian journalist and, referring to Reagan, said: “Among other things he once talked about it with me as well”; the correspondent replyed: “In Geneva in 1985”, without denial from Gorbachev, to whom he finally asked a comment about the baffling declarations released last year at the Toronto University from Paul Hellyer, ex Canadian Minister of Defense (see the article by Maurizio Molinari for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, November 26, 2005, page 10), who talked about the possibility of an imminent “intergalactic war” because of that the United States of America would get ready by secret.

    Although the Gorbachev’s answer was: “we are in a range of hypotheses” and he concentrated on “the more serious” cometary and asteroidal threat of the so-called NEOs (against that we could use a “reduced armament of nuclear defense”, kept only for that), the recent Gorbachev’s confirmation is remarkable.

    But why did Reagan talk to Gorbachev in private about an alien threat from other species? We are still waiting for an answer.

    Press release written by: Vladimiro Bibolotti, Secretary of the C.U.N., Ufological National Centre info: http://www.cun-italia.net Luca Scantamburlo, B.A., freelance and writer

  • Astronaut Gordon Cooper Says
    Aliens Are Here!

    By Michael Lindemann
    CNI News

    To many UFO enthusiasts, Gordon Cooper is a legend. An original Mercury astronaut, he was one of those clear-eyed, ambitious, optimistic, straight-arrow Americans with “the right stuff” as Tom Wolfe put it — men who made the U.S. space program synonymous with success and national pride. But unlike most of his fellow astronauts, Gordon Cooper has said for decades that he believes at least some UFOs are alien spacecraft.

    … I asked him about his famous UFO sighting. It was in 1951 over Germany. He and several other pilots were flying F-86 jets — “We were super-sonic, barely” he said — when they looked up and saw what appeared to be a large group of “double lenticular shaped” aircraft, classic flying saucers, flying in formation. He said these craft were much higher than his plane could go, though he couldn’t tell how high. They were going faster too, though he couldn’t tell how much faster. Over the next two or three days, he and other pilots saw “several hundred” of these craft. Cooper said they flew formation maneuvers very much like his own squadron would fly. He and the other witnesses were uniformly convinced they were seeing a technology that wasn’t human.

    …He (Cooper) wrote a letter to the United Nations in 1978. It said, in part, “I do believe UFOs exist and that the truly unexplained ones are from some other technically advanced civilization… I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which are obviously a little more advanced than we are here on earth… I feel that we need to have a top-level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion”

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