| Written by Billy Cox |
| Friday, 15 June 2007 06:00 |
| Depending on who you read, the number of registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., is between 11,000 and 39,402.
Don’t ask. What you can take to the bank is this: Only one of them is trying to persuade Congress to pry the lid of secrecy off UFOs. Predictably, he doesn’t have a whole lot of bribe money , er, spending money, to toss around. His name is Stephen Bassett, and he’s the executive director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee, or X-PPAC, at www.x-ppac.org. Not a lot of water in that desert so far. During his first year in office, President George W. Bush signaled his contempt for disclosing even the most innocuous formalities of history with Executive Order 13233. That one revoked the Presidential Records Act of 1978, a congressionally mandated, Watergate-era reform allowing public access to most presidential papers a dozen years after the end of any given regime. While waiting for the Bush-Cheney term to expire, Bassett puts the best odds for UFO openness in the next administration on a Hillary Clinton/Bill Richardson ticket. The Clintons flirted with the issue in the 1990s, even meeting with Laurance Rockefeller at a time when the late billionaire was distributing UFO briefing papers in political circles. Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell revealed in his autobiography how Bill Clinton had dispatched him on an unsuccessful mission to bring new details to light. In 2002, former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta held a press conference demanding the U.S. “open the books on questions that have remained in the dark on the question of government investigations of UFOs.” And just last year, responding to the longstanding skepticism by his fellow New Mexicans of government explanations about an alleged crash in 1947, Richardson contributed his own advocacy for openness to a book called “The Roswell Dig Diaries”: “It would help everyone if the U.S. government disclosed everything it knows… The American people can handle the truth, no matter how bizarre or mundane, and contrary to what you see in the movies.” No doubt the media will be all over this stuff in the primaries. |
Presidentialufo 