57 Alien Species: Are We Alone?
On May 9, 2001, twenty individuals from a variety of professions convened at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to disclose their personal experiences related to the subject of UFOs. Though largely and perhaps conspicuously ignored by the mainstream media, the conference included such high-profile speakers as Watergate lawyer Daniel Sheehan, former White House chief of staff John Podesta, and the orchestrator of the Disclosure Project (www.disclosureproject.org), emergency room surgeon and long-time lobbyist for disclosure, Dr. Stephen Greer. These witnesses were only twenty of over four hundred brought together under the Project’s umbrella.
Testimony at the conference ranged from actual work claimed to have been done on so-called Black Projects, including the reverse engineering of downed alien craft, to the sightings of commercial and military pilots and personal experiences of scientists, contractors, and various others. The general message of the conference: extraterrestrials do exist, they visit Earth, and certain elements within the military are covering it all up. Beyond this, testimony varies wildly.
One witness, Clifford Stone, allegedly a former sergeant in the U.S. Army, takes it all a step further when he claims that he has actually been involved in the removal of crashed alien spacecraft. He states that in total, 57 species of aliens have been catalogued, and that some of them look so similar to people that they can live among us, unnoticed. Stone’s testimony has created considerable controversy in an already controversial field of inquiry. While one cannot help but cast suspicion on such extraordinary claims, unsupported by direct evidence, they become somewhat less outlandish in the context of such a high-profile conference. Still, one common thread in the UFO conspiracy literature is that the secret is maintained through compartmentalisation. That is, each person involved only knows a fragment of the story, and the select few who are truly in the know are hidden within this web. In other words, if there really have been teams recruited to retrieve downed alien craft, they would not necessarily have been privy to any information other than exactly what they needed to know in order to clean up the mess. Governments, let alone secret governments, are not known for giving up sensitive information to those without a need to know. According to an interview conducted with Dr. Greer on the Internet radio show The Paracast (www.theparacast.com) last June, some of the Disclosure Project witnesses were uncomfortable sharing the podium with those with more extreme claims, such as Stone.
In the eight years since the Disclosure conference, various foreign governments have come clean on the subject of UFOs, albeit in more muted tones than some of those expressed at the 2001 conference. Great Britain has released years of documents of UFO reports; Belgian military officials have stepped forward about bizarre events experienced by literally thousands of their countrymen; and the French military published a glossy booklet on their UFO experience, intended for internal use, but eventually leaked to the public. Combine these with the interception of NASA spaceflight footage showing unidentified objects passing by space stations, shuttles, and even astronauts on spacewalks, talking to ground control about what they are seeing (Google Secret NASA Transmissions: The Smoking Gun’), and it is hard to deny that something strange has been happening in the skies.
It has been said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Whether or not this is true, the extraordinary claims made by Stone do not appear to be backed up by any evidence. Surely, if we are to believe something so highly specific, and so likely to drastically change our view of the world and of the universe, we need proof. In the absence of evidence in support of Stone’s claims, there are plenty of other tales related to the UFO subject which, although perhaps less extraordinary, are backed up by compelling evidence. While only Clifford Stone, and perhaps others who have shared his experiences but have not come forward, can know for sure about these 57 alien species, one thing is becoming increasingly certain: We are not alone.
