Believers in Nevada scoff as White House denies UFOs are real
In an announcement that further punctures the lore surrounding Area 51 and figures to deflate – or in flame – the most ardent believers in “The X-Files,” the White House says outer space aliens have not made contact with Earth.
There are no captured flying saucers. No preserved alien bodies in Nevada. Nor at Roswell, N.M., for that matter.
“Independence Day,” which depicted a U.S. alien research base deep under the desert, was – just a movie.
That’s the official word anyway.
“The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race,” the Obama administration said in a statement. “in addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.”
The statement “is the first time since the issue exploded in the public’s mindset in 1947 that the executive branch has issued a formal position in writing on the issue. The first time in history,” said Stephen Bassett, a physicist, researcher and Washington lobbyist who contends the government has been engaged in a long cover-up about the existence of UFOs.
But is the government to be believed when it says there are no E..s, in the face of evidence gathered and stories long told about strange lights in the sky, unexplainable photo images, and deep-in-the-night human abductions and weird experimentation?
They’re not buying it either in Rachel, which has built a tourist trade from science fiction fans who drive in on Nevada 375 – renamed the Extraterrestrial Highway – looking for the center of UFO activity in the town 25 miles northeast of the Area 51 military installation.
“The President is living proof that there’s life outside Earth,” said Sharon Taylor, a waitress at the Little A’Le’Inn, where it’s said, “You can get a bite to eat and share a close encounter.”
“The height of conceit is to believe we are he only intelligence in the vastness,” Taylor said between taking lunch orders Monday. ” The human race went from horse and buggy to walking the moon in 69 years. Please, we had to have help.”
The White House statement, posted Nov. 4, comes in response to two public petitions created online. One, organized by Bassett, which had accumulated 12,078 signatures as of Nov. 7, demands the government “formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.’ Democratic President Barack Obama had promised that petitions gaining at least 5,000 signatures within 30 days would get a response. Bassett said it took him four days to reach that goal. The threshold for an official petition response since has been bumped up to 25,000 signatures.
By denying the existence of aliens, Obama “probably did the UFO crowd a favor” by putting to rest their high hopes that he might be the “disclosure president” on extraterrestrials, said George Knapp, a veteran Las Vegas journalist who has covered the phenomenon for more than 20 years. “Now they can get on to something else.”
Knapp writes a column for City Life, an alternative weekly published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s parent company, the Stephens Media Group.
Knapp said “there’s reams of stuff” in government records concerning UFOs.
“If somebody wants to look at the evidence, it’s there,” he said.
But, he added, storehouses of other information “may not be there anymore,” and even the president might be in the dark, the truth buried so deep as to be virtually unreachable.
Las Vegas, NV
Reno Gazette
by Steve Tetreault
November 13, 2011
