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From: campbell@ufomind.com (Glenn Campbell, Las Vegas) Date: Fri, 27 Jun 1997 16:24:12 -0800 Subject: Terry Hansen's Position Statement |
[Provided by email on 6/24/97. Posted with permission POSITION STATEMENT -- Terry Hansen As a journalist, my interest has more to do with the sociological and political aspects of the UFO controversy, rather than with UFOs per se. Sociologically, the UFO controversy is similar to previous scientific controversies such as the decades-long debates concerning meteorites and continental drift. A major complicating factor in the UFO controversy, however, is the role of governments in suppressing awareness of empirical data necessary to decide the issue. This has historical analogues with official attempts to suppress astronomical discoveries and research into human anatomy. Science, in the pure sense, is inherently a politically subversive activity. Hence, governments traditionally have attempted to maintain a degree of control over its practitioners, both to protect the social status quo and also to extend the power and influence of the ruling elites. This is particularly easy today when most scientific research depends entirely upon governments for financial support. Hence, to obtain funding and social legitimacy, most modern scientific researchers must relinquish their intellectual freedom and become, in effect, occult investigators subservient to the military/intelligence community. Anyone who rocks the boat will run into difficulties, even in academia. The word "occult" means "hidden," so occult knowledge is information that has been hidden from the public because of its perceived danger to the powers that be. Because early civilian attempts to investigate UFOs were successfully derailed by officialdom, UFO research today is quite accurately described as an occult activity. This does not mean it is scientifically illegitimate, however. On the contrary! Civilian UFO research is now carried out mainly by amateurs who typically lack the technical facilities and financial resources for substantial progress. In addition, their lack of formal credentials and institutional ties usually forbid them access to the scientific literature which is necessary to communicate their results to the mainstream or "legitimate" scientific community. This is no accident. Finally, they are constantly under attack by various organized political forces. Based on U.S. government documents and the testimony of countless former military personnel, UFOs presented a national-security threat to the U.S. government by the late 1940s and may still be regarded that way. For this reason, most high-quality evidence for the phenomenon gathered through military-intelligence channels has remained classified. Thus, the public is forced to speculate about whatever progress the government has achieved in understanding and controlling the UFO phenomenon. Rumors abound, as does disinformation, and it is essentially impossible for an outsider to distinguish between the two. The steady growth of the so-called "black budget" (off-the-books expenditures), along with a parallel decline in the Soviet threat once used to justify it, suggests that much of the black budget may be devoted to addressing the UFO problem. It's quite possible that the vastly overblown Soviet threat was largely a cover story used to justify covert UFO-related research and development, especially in the closing years of the Cold War. (I was interested to see that Col. Philip J. Corso (Ret.) claims this was the case in his recent book, "The Day After Roswell.") To a large extent, this strategy makes sense. Unlike many objects of scientific investigation, the controllers of UFOs appear aware of our efforts to understand them, and they probably adapt their behavior to disguise their true motives. Thus, UFOs are more appropriately a scientific-intelligence problem for governments, rather than a straightforward scientific question for discussion in the open literature. In parallel with government efforts to sequester relevant data, an extensive media-management effort was launched employing sophisticated psychological-warfare methods developed during World War II and the Cold War, in conjunction with the intelligence community's traditional ties to sympathetic national media outlets. The success of such efforts in influencing public opinion has gradually declined along with increasing public sophistication about the workings of media institutions, and the rise of alternative sources of information. The intelligence community's media-management efforts also seem to have capitalized on the traditional resistance of the scientific establishment to evidence that threatens its basic assumptions. Thus, much of the scientific establishment remains profoundly ignorant of the UFO data because, fundamentally, it dearly wishes to believe in the deception. Accepting the physical reality of UFOs would require abandoning the special status of mankind which many scientists have vainly struggled to preserve since the time of Ptolemy. UFOs also threaten to force major revisions to their elaborate complex of theories about the origins of mankind, civilization, etc., and this is not a happy prospect for the academic establishment. A major question before us now is whether the U.S. government can remain in control of the social situation, since public-opinion polls indicate that few Americans now believe the official story about UFOs, and political pressure has mounted steadily for opening the classified files. By maintaining what has become an increasingly untenable position in the face of the Internet, hand-held video cameras, and other non-traditional information technologies, the authorities are tempting fate. New technology has made it progressively more expensive for the government to deceive its citizens, and it now has about as much credibility with its public as did the government of the former Soviet Union prior to glasnost. It is reasonable to ask whether maintaining the current official policy of suppression has become counter-productive. The yawning credibility gap over UFOs may now threaten the nation's very political stability. Is it wise for the King to go on pretending he is fully clothed when the public knows very well that he is stark naked and fears that he may be raving mad as well? Even so, the Catholic Church took some 400 years to acknowledge the discoveries of Galileo, so it's entirely possible the U.S. government will continue to fight this public-policy Vietnam for decades to come, while its authority and credibility continue their steady decline. Fear of a political backlash following an admission of guilt may motivate the government's seemingly irrational impulse to stonewall. There are indications of a policy split among government agencies, with some policymakers favoring progressive release of UFO data while others fight on for continued secrecy. As far as the nature of (genuine) UFOs, most seem to be intelligently controlled devices. The historical record prior to 1947 establishes that they are not new, but only new to contemporary society. It is undoubtedly a mistake to explain all UFOs with a single hypothesis, however. The universe is large and offers many possible sources for anomalous phenomena. Mainstream scientific evidence points to a universe teaming with life, and UFOs are entirely consistent with this evidence. One only needs to anticipate that interstellar travel eventually becomes routine among a few technologically sophisticated societies for most of the pieces to fall neatly into place. There probably is no distinction between interstellar, interdimensional, and time travel, since we can't do one without the others. Time itself may be merely an illusion. Evidence suggests that the fundamental nature of intelligence is non-material and that intelligence manifests itself in what we call the physical universe only when there is some purpose for it. There is evidence that the entities responsible for UFOs know this quite well, and apply it. The full explanation of the UFO phenomenon will most likely surprise us all. But the answers will not come easily since, as philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, the resistance to new ideas is directly proportional to their importance. -- Terry Hansen, June 1997 *************************************************************************** * Terry Hansen | KFH Publications, Inc. * * Editor | Puget Sound Computer User/Cybernautics Digest * * twhansen@cuix.pscu.com | http://www.pscu.com * *************************************************************************** * "May you live in Internet times." * * -- Chinese curse, Ver. 2.0 * ***************************************************************************
Ufomind Index: Terry Hansen
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