He wants to tell Members of Congress
about the alien spacecrafts visiting
Earth. They’ve been coming for years, he
says, often scooping up humans for test
probes. And if lawmakers could muster
the political backbone to address the
issue, Bassett would like to present
some people to testify about making
contact, as well as reams of evidence to
back up their claims.
Trouble is, it’s tough to get a meeting
on Capitol Hill when your subject is
little green men. Bassett himself,
founder of the Paradigm Research Group
and the only full-time lobbyist on the
extraterrestrial issue, acknowledges
these are dark days for the UFO lobby.
“The guys on the Hill won’t touch it,”
even though, according to Bassett, “it’s
more important than the war.”
Many of Bassett’s mainstream
counterparts on K Street have expressed
similar frustration this year with their
inability to advance their clients’
priorities, as lawmakers spent valuable
time trying to stem political scandals.
But advocates of more eccentric causes
have felt the tightest pinch. Bassett, a
former tennis pro and business
consultant, moved from a second-story
home office in Bethesda, Md., to
Northern California, where he says
friends are supporting him as he hunts
for new benefactors to restart his push
in Washington, D.C.
It wasn’t always this way. Just a few
years ago, the UFO cause had backing
from some of the Beltway’s heaviest
hitters. Former White House chief of
staff John Podesta headlined an October
2002 press conference at the National
Press Club calling on the government to
disclose what it knows about the flying
crafts.
“It’s time to find out what the truth
really is that’s out there,” Podesta, a
self-proclaimed fan of the spooky Fox
show “X-Files,” told the crowd that day.
The event was sponsored by the SciFi
Channel, which in part was looking for
promotional opportunities to attract
viewers to “Out of the Blue,” a
documentary that argued for the
existence of life beyond Earth.
The channel decided to put some major
corporate muscle behind a lobbying
campaign on the UFO issue, hiring
PodestaMattoon, the firm headed by
Podesta’s brother, Tony, and Dan
Mattoon, a confidant of Speaker Dennis
Hastert (R-Ill.), to spearhead it.
Lobbyists at the firm collected $380,000
working the issue for the next three
years. They helped the science-fiction
network set up the Coalition for the
Freedom of Information, or CFi, to pry
new disclosures from the federal
government. The group launched with a
slick Web site and a well-publicized
lawsuit against NASA to get the space
agency to release information about a
reputed UFO crash in Pennsylvania during
the 1960s.
To top it off, the CFi commissioned a
poll showing that not only do roughly
seven in 10 Americans believe the
government is withholding information
about extraterrestrials, but that one in
seven report they or someone they know
actually has had a close encounter with
aliens.
For the PodestaMattoon team, however,
close encounters with Members and staff
were harder to come by. Firm officials
decline to speak publicly about their
work on the issue, since it ended in
2004. But a source close to the effort
said finding receptive audiences in
Congress was “very hard.”
“I don’t think most Members were that
much into it,” the source said. “The
bottom line is that if you’re living in
the real world today, everything else is
more important, so this kind of issue
has no traction whatsoever.”
Any group of 535 people should include a
few with offbeat interests, but the few
friendly faces that UFO enthusiasts once
found are no longer there. As recently
as 1994, they had won their biggest
advance when then-Rep. Steven Schiff (R-N.M.)
decided to look into claims that an
alien craft had crashed 50 years earlier
in his district near the tiny town of
Roswell and that the government swiftly
covered it up.
Federal officials over the years had
issued several explanations for the
craft — which slammed into the desert in
the summer of 1947 — including
identifying it as a weather balloon and
a Soviet satellite. But UFO believers
dismissed the reports, and a mythology
involving a repaired spacecraft and
recovered alien bodies made the incident
a rallying point.
Responding to constituent pressure to
get new answers, Schiff asked to see
radio traffic records from Roswell Army
Air Corps Base between 1946 and 1949,
but both the Defense Department and the
National Archives declined to help. The
lawmaker then took his request to what
was then known as the General Accounting
Office. He again was denied: Officials
there told him records for that time
period were missing.
At the GAO’s request, the Air Force
launched its own inquiry, arriving at
the conclusion that the craft was an
experimental high-altitude balloon to
monitor Soviet nuclear tests. But Barry
Bitzer, the lawmaker’s then-chief of
staff, said the Air Force’s report left
more questions than answers.
“My conjecture at this point is that
none of the answers we’ve been given so
far square with all the facts,” said
Bitzer, who’s now chief of staff to the
mayor of Albuquerque.
Schiff died in 1998, and Roswell and the
nearby crash site now are represented by
Republican Rep. Steve Pearce. David
Host, the lawmaker’s communications
director, said Pearce believes the Air
Force report was “fairly conclusive and
credible.”
“He is not actively working on that
issue today, but there is a tremendous
interest in this story across the
country, and Rep. Pearce certainly
encourages everybody to come to Roswell
and find out for themselves,” he said.
Those who work on the UFO issue agree
that the challenge is getting Members of
Congress past the fear of looking
foolish by taking the subject seriously.
Bassett says the lawmakers are “too
weak, in terms of fortitude, to put
their status on the line.”
But others say figures like Bassett, who
talks openly about an alien civilization
attempting to disclose its existence to
humankind, only contribute to that
problem. Leslie Kean, an investigative
journalist who now heads the CFi, said
that “by leaving himself open to
ridicule through his particular style of
rhetoric, [Bassett] has greatly
diminished his possible effectiveness.”
A better approach, Kean said, would be
to treat the subject as a valid, open
question, without pushing any
conclusions. In other words, The Truth
Is Out There.
“Our premises are different,” she said.
They are “based on the fact that there
is much evidence that demands further
scientific investigation, while he
believes that the government and the
media must accept the UFO phenomenon as
a self-evident extraterrestrial
incursion.”
Either way, while the current elected
establishment regards both of those
sides as if they’d just flown in from
Mars, the UFO lobby takes heart in
knowing that a long line of top-ranking
politicians have indicated they’re open
to considering the topic.
Former President Gerald Ford held
hearings on the issue while serving in
the House in the 1960s. Before Ford’s
successor won the White House,
then-Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter filed two
formal reports describing his
observations of UFOs.
“I don’t laugh at people anymore when
they say they’ve seen UFOs, because I’ve
seen one myself,” he was quoted as
saying.
And enthusiasts have long gossiped about
a report that President Ronald Reagan,
after a 1982 screening of the movie E.T.,
turned to director Steven Spielberg and
said, “There are probably only six
people in this room who know how true
this is.”
Meanwhile, UFO advocates are holding out
hope that a breakthrough is on the
horizon.
The SciFi Channel, since purchased by
NBC, has shifted its focus, but Ed
Rothschild, a PodestaMattoon lobbyist
who worked on the account, is still
listed as a volunteer director of the
CFi. Kean, who is working on a
documentary about the possibility that
consciousness survives after death, also
is birddogging the group’s NASA lawsuit.
Bassett, for his part, has signed up two
new clients — the Exopolitics Institute
and
www.exopolitics.com
— albeit on a pro bono basis. And he has
set up a political action committee
called the Extraterrestrial Phenomena
PAC. It has received only $4,555 and has
given no money out to candidates, but
Bassett said he is hopeful it will grow.
Shortly before the elections, Bassett
sent out an e-mail alert announcing that
in anticipation of Democratic
majorities, his group was swinging back
into action. “Direct meetings will be
sought with a larger than usual freshman
class of members,” he wrote. “More
importantly, secrecy, institutional
lying and abuse of power are part of the
lexicon of issues being addressed in the
election coverage — all aspects of the
past and present management of the
extraterrestrial presence truth
embargo.”
To kick off the new push, Bassett said
he is planning to return to Washington.
“There’s going to be a concerted effort
to engage some of the new Members in the
Senate and House and let them know
there’s a real issue here,” he said.
