Date: Feb 2, 1999

From Internet to Interstellar
A tale of the entrepreneur and the extraterrestrial

By Jane Meredith Adams / Special Contributor

Of all the risks Joseph P. Firmage has taken in his young career as a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, this is easily the most controversial: On Jan. 8, Mr. Firmage, 28, left the $2.1 billion Internet consulting company he founded to espouse his view that the Earth has been visited by beings from other planets.

"I know people will interpret what I say as either blasphemous or ludicrous," Mr. Firmage says. "I'm saying definitively that the UFO phenomenon is real."

Recent advances in physics now prove, he says, that gravity can be manipulated to allow interstellar travel at extremely fast speeds. With this new evidence, he says, it is scientifically feasible that beings from other planets have traveled to Earth, where he believes they have acted as "teachers" who have appeared as messiahs in the world's religions and have nudged along advancements in technology.

Aware that his theories are controversial, Mr. Firmage says he resigned from USWeb/CKS in Santa Clara, Calif., to protect the reputation of the publicly held company.

"I received no pressure from inside the company to do this," he says. "Wall Street doesn't take kindly to these kinds of extracurricular activities."

His beliefs, put forth in a 700-page book called The Truth on his Web site (http://www.thewordistruth.org), have been met with both curiosity and ridicule in Silicon Valley.

Dr. Bernard Haisch, a scientific editor at the prestigious Astrophysical Journal, is among those intrigued by what Mr. Firmage says. He says that Mr. Firmage is not entirely off base in his interpretation of new research about gravity, some of which is being done by Dr. Haisch himself.

"It still needs a lot of further development," says Dr. Haisch, who is studying gravity for NASA at Lockheed Martin in the San Francisco Bay area. "I'd be a little more conservative than he is . . . but who knows what the applications are?"

Skepticism was particularly strong after a local news report stated that Mr. Firmage believed that lasers, fiber optics and semiconductors - whose inventors are still alive and working in technology - came from aliens. Mr. Firmage now says that visitors from other planets may have offered "hints" about how to improve technology.

"That's crazy," said Dr. Charles Townes, a University of California at Berkeley physics professor who shared a Nobel Prize in 1964 for inventing the laser. "I know very well how the laser originated in the lab."

Mr. Firmage also has backed off statements that the seeds of high technology can be traced to an alien spaceship that allegedly crashed at Roswell, N.M., in 1947. According to his book, government investigators gathered wreckage and reverse-engineered the materials to create modern-day technologies.

"I don't know whether the Roswell event occurred," he says now.

Mr. Firmage, who has the demeanor of an articulate, clean-cut businessman, says that for years he dismissed the idea of unidentified flying objects, although he had been fascinated with astrology and science fiction as a boy growing up in Salt Lake City.

After receiving a physics scholarship to the University of Utah, Mr. Firmage left after two years of study to start his first company, Serius, which developed programming tools. That company was sold in 1993 for $24 million to Novell, where Mr. Firmage served as vice president of networking strategy in 1995. In December 1995, he co-founded USWeb, which later acquired CKS.

He revisited the question of UFOs in 1997, around the time he says a being bathed in white light hovered over his bed in his Los Gatos, Calif., home.

"Whatever it was, I consider it a real experience," he says. "It was a very loud wake-up call to widen my world view."

Part of this wider world view involved seeking a scientific explanation for spiritual matters, he says. Raised a Mormon, Mr. Firmage says he rejected the church at age 15. Now, he says that if interstellar travel is possible, UFOs provide an explanation for the "visitors from above" that he says appear in every major religion.

This could include Jesus Christ, he says, whom he describes as part human and part other-worldly, possessing unusual powers as a result of genetic engineering from beings from other planets.

"Science and spirituality can be true at the same time," he says. "Science has discovered God."

Dr. Frank Drake, president of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif., dismisses Mr. Firmage's claims.

"He supplies no concrete evidence," says Dr. Drake, whose institute searches for radio transmissions from other stars and was the model for the Jodie Foster movie Contact.

Dr. Drake, who has received funding from such high-tech luminaries as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Hewlett-Packard co-founders William Hewlett and the late David Packard, says the idea that gravity can be engineered has been asserted but remains "speculation."

Dr. Drake, though, has been made famous for his estimate that there may be 10,000 other advanced civilizations in the Milky Way.

"It's certain there's life out there," he says. He calls the evolutionary development of Earth "a normal process that must have been repeated."

Mr. Firmage believes that the truth about UFOs is being covered up by the military-industrial complex and says his book offers proof through documents, including a purported 1947 memo from President Truman that established a secret operation - code-named "Majestic Twelve" - to investigate extraterrestrials.

"Based upon the most comprehensive study of which I am aware across multidisciplinary thought-leading concepts in science, faith and unexplained phenomena, I have come to the conclusion that the process of human life in the past several thousand years has been part of a far grander plan than most of us in the West believe," Mr. Firmage writes.

"The hypothesis, if true, has profound implications for our past and future."