Where We Stand
by Whitley Strieber
10 Feb 19999

This is being written on the eve of the Confirmation special, and I think it's a good time to take stock.

There is now enough evidence to suggest that some sort of alien or nonhuman presence, or a human presence in possession of very advanced technology, may be in the process of penetrating into human society for unknown reasons.

The evidence is now so plain that the people who continue to claim that there is no evidence of this, and seek to disrupt investigation of it, can be considered as assisting, whether intentionally or not, in the execution of a policy that is designed to keep the public unaware and thus passive to the reality of the situation.

We stand at a point where enough evidence has been gathered in various areas to justify the following continued investigations:

The Abduction Phenomenon

1. An organized program of implant studies and removals needs to be undertaken. This should involve both study of the individuals harboring the objects, the objects on site in their bodies, and the objects and surrounding tissue after removal. Both physical and psychological profiles should be taken before and after the removals.

2. A sequential study of abductees needs to be undertaken, to try to identify any patterns at all that may be present in this population group. Geography, race, familial connections, health, economic status, education, marital status, intelligence and many other areas need to be studied in order to create a profile of the typical abductee. Working backward from this, it may be possible to determine why this happens to people.

3. A PET scanning project needs to be devised that will enable us to determine which abduction memories reflect real events.

4. A narrative of the abduction experience needs to be extracted from a reading of interviews verified by the PET scanning process, if it proves viable as a determinant of whether or not a given memory is physical.

NASA

1. NASA is at the top of the list of problems. NASA has brought back inexplicable footage from two shuttle missions, then lied about the meaning of that footage. In part, the reason for this is that NASA is a failure as a public institution. It is focused toward the military and the intelligence community first, the public second. The use of the space shuttle as a platform for delivering military and intelligence satellites is what has brought this situation about. We need two things: first, the National Space Act of 1957 needs to be amended to allow NASA to comment upon unknown discoveries before the military decides on whether or not they represent national security risks. Second, an independent space exploration organization needs to be created, chartered in such a way that it is required to disclose all data that it gathers, and all exploratory activities need to be channeled through this new entity. It should be set up in such a way that the rivalry between Manned and unmanned exploration that now saps NASA's ability to explore appropriately and leads to such absurdities as JPL bending over backwards to obstruct or conceal any Mars discoveries that might lead the public to demand a manned mission to end. These kind of rivalries sap our strength.

The UFO Phenomenon

1. A concerted effort needs to be made to obtain technically viable records of the movement and aerial activities of UFOs. This needs to be done within the context of a larger policy that is designed to understand everything about them that we can. Data needs to be collected at a professional level of recovery quality and on an international scale. The medium term objective should be to answer the following questions:

Are UFOs physical objects?

If so, then are they natural manifestations, living creatures, or technological devices?

The answers to these two questions should lead to the second level of this study, which is to determine how they function and to construct similar devices of our own.

Official Secrecy

The whole area of UFO studies needs to be extracted from the classification system. This should happen in the context of a fundamental revision of the National Security Act of 1947, which should lead to a new act by the year 2000. We need to revise our whole approach to official secrecy, to declassify not only documents, but ongoing areas of activity. Intelligence gathering should cease to be the highly secretive process that it is. Areas of secrecy need to be made much smaller, and reasons for classification much more narrowly defined. There should be a technology assessment process that is mandated to declassify processes with possible public uses as quickly as practicable, based on the idea that continued concealment of useful processes compromises national welfare more than disclosure compromises national security.

Public Access

Public access even to what UFO information is available is presently highly restricted by a completely inappropriate media response. This media response has come about as a result of the culture of denial that has been created around the issue by a decades-long federal effort to conceal secrets and mute inquiries by a process of denial and ridicule.
This has extended to the point that major national media like the New York Times simply refuse to cover the subject, and most other reputable sources lie by omission when doing so, thus creating in the public mind the false impression that there is no credible evidence to be concerned about.

An example of this sort of fallacious reporting appears in a review of the Confirmation special in the February 15, 1999 issue of People. By the use of quotation marks, it skillfully seeks to create the false impression that the program is lacking in credibility. It contains the phrase that the program includes 'dramatizations of close encounters with extraterrestrials' and 'actual footage' of supposed alien implants. The quotations around the words 'actual footage' represent, in effect, a lie on People's part. They are designed to create the false impression that the footage is a recreation, when this is not the case. The review also lies by omission, by failing to take note of the evidence from credible sources that is presented that the objects are indeed remarkable to science. The reviewer claims that the objects 'look a lot like a bit of iron and a shard of glass' without mentioning the existence of the research, which found, unequivocally, that the shard involved was not glass.

The press has to shake itself free of the attitudes that lead to the publication of what is, in effect propaganda designed to lull the public into a state of passivity.

The Cultural Problem

In fact, the UFO skeptics, the press and numerous fake UFO investigators who indulge in rumor mongering, perpetrate hoaxes, and spread fallacious dissention combine together in support of government policy that encourages the public to ignore this issue. Meanwhile, the legitimate investigators are generally isolated inside an impoverished ghetto of true believers. The fanatical believers of all stripes are as useless and detrimental to the investigatory process as the rest of the very negative culture that surrounds the UFO issue.

The fact that the government has intervened actively in the creation of this culture needs to be faced. Merely by investigating UFO reports, which it has done, on the facts, as recently as 1996, while at the same time claiming the opposite, has supported the culture of denial and acted against the public good in what could be a very destructive way.

To change this, a number of things are needed. First, news organizations like the Times, which often hire former intelligence officers as reporters without disclosing this fact to the public, should make certain that these officers are never assigned to report on subjects which might divide their loyalties. Second, there should be serious fact checking of articles about the UFO subject. In fact, the only time any real editorial questions are raised in the general media regarding a UFO article is when it treats the subject in a rational manner. Third, the United States government should admit that it does investigate UFO reports, that it is seriously concerned about this activity, and explain why it feels that so much of what it has blacked out in documents obtained by various researchers under the Freedom of Information Act should remain secret.

There should be a civilian board appointed by the President to review secrecy in this area, which should be granted access to all such secrets, and charged with weighing their validity.

The Bottom Line

There is something strange happening. There is no way there would be so many UFO reports, and so many documented by video, including video from the space shuttle, if this was not happening. Some of the shuttle footage even shows a UFO performing an avoidance maneuver after being shot at. NASA's explanations of this footage are demonstrable as lies. The truth of what is happening in this video needs to be released to the public.

The abductee phenomenon needs to be studied properly and understood. Implants need to be understood, so that hosts can make rational decisions about whether or not to have them removed.

The media needs to face the fact that it has been serving a process of lying and disinformation for the past fifty years, and it needs to rehabilitate its coverage of this subject in a responsible manner. Its most recent lies should be its last.

The government needs to effect fundamental reforms that make secrecy the exception rather than the norm. NASA needs to be reformed, being split into two different organizations, a space exploration agency with no connection to the military and the intelligence community, and a service group that is openly tasked to do this work.

A Personal Statement

I have been told on a number of occasions by various different officials, some of them credible and others less so, that the US government harbors its secrets in this area for an urgent reason that cannot be disclosed and must be hidden at all costs or the welfare of the whole world may be placed in jeopardy.

The secret has been described to me in various ways. One has been that there has been a threat on the part of aliens to destroy the world if their presence is disclosed or their activities hampered. Another has been that the military is completely helpless to prevent the abductions, and that knowledge of the fact that they are going on, that nobody knows what they mean, and that they cannot be stopped, would cause public terror. A third is that by admitting the existence of our visitors we also somehow admit them to our world, ending up in the same situation that confronts primitive tribes when they are faced with technologically more robust civilizations, and that the government has agreed to keep everything secret until our species is ready to cope with the aliens effectively, without losing its sense of independence and innovation.

I don't know which, if any, of these claims reflect the true situation. But I do know this: there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding the UFO and abduction problems, and it has led to an extremely bizarre public situation, where open and obvious evidence is being denied by a process of propaganda and lying that is completely unprecedented in this society. ~

Where We Stand
© 1999 Whitley Strieber