Stephen Bassett

Stephen Bassett (born 1946) is an American political activist and the only individual ever registered with the United States Congress to lobby on the subject of UFO/UAP disclosure. He is the executive director of the Paradigm Research Group (PRG), which he founded in 1996, and the organiser of the 2013 Citizen Hearing on Disclosure — the largest mock-congressional hearing on UFO/extraterrestrial reality ever convened. Bassett has argued since the mid-1990s that the U.S. government's suppression of the alleged extraterrestrial presence — what he terms the "truth embargo" — is the defining political issue of the era.

Background and entry into ufology

Bassett worked as a tennis professional and as a business consultant before his 1995 reading of John E. Mack's Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens redirected his trajectory toward ufology. Following brief volunteer work with Mack at the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research at Harvard Medical School, Bassett established his own pro-disclosure organisation, initially operating from his aunt's attic.

Paradigm Research Group

Bassett founded PRG in 1996 and registered as a lobbyist with the U.S. Congress in 2001, making him — as of 2021 — the first and only individual to have formally lobbied Congress on the subject of UFO disclosure. PRG's central demand is the termination of what Bassett calls the "truth embargo" — the systematic, classified suppression of evidence for the extraterrestrial presence on Earth. He has repeatedly argued that this embargo involves not just classified programmes but a parallel governance structure operating outside democratic oversight.

According to PRG, Bassett's first three years of congressional lobbying produced meetings with only three members of Congress, prompting a strategic pivot from direct lobbying to public-education and media work, including:

• speaking engagements at UFO conferences;
• recurring guest appearances on Coast to Coast AM;
• a 2011 We the People White House petition campaign;
• the April–May 2013 Citizen Hearing on Disclosure;
• media commentary for NBC News and other outlets.

Citizen Hearing on Disclosure (2013)

Main article:

Citizen Hearing on Disclosure

In April–May 2013, Bassett organised the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The event featured over forty researchers and witnesses testifying over five days before six former members of the U.S. Congress, structured deliberately as a facsimile of a Senate hearing.

Bassett personally chaired sessions and introduced witnesses, including one anonymous individual appearing only via video due to threats received from government agents. Introducing that witness, Bassett explained: "This individual is in extremely poor health and probably will not be with us much longer... The story is quite powerful. His intersection was quite powerful and he's received numerous threats from his government. Not to talk."

The hearing was described by participants as a turning point. Former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer also testified. Steven Greer, initially sceptical, attended and testified, stating that intelligence from a NSA source placed the commencement of a complete energy and propulsion cover-up at October 1954.

Witness interviews

Beyond organising hearings, Bassett has conducted field interviews with military and intelligence witnesses, including a former CIA analyst who claimed to have handled UFO reports from Project Blue Book as early as 1958 and was later assigned to help President Eisenhower investigate Area 51's alien programmes after MJ-12 stopped reporting to the White House.

Advocacy and the "Truth Embargo" framework

Bassett's core argument is that extraterrestrial reality has been withheld from the public through a deliberate, structured suppression dating to at least the late 1940s. He coined the term "truth embargo" to denote this regime of concealment and has argued that ending it is prerequisite to addressing climate change, since he believes suppressed free energy technologies derived from recovered ET craft would render fossil fuels obsolete.

Subsequent media work and predictions

Bassett starred in the 2024 streaming series Paradigm Shift on UNIFYD TV and appeared in Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs. Since 2003 he has repeatedly predicted imminent government UFO disclosure.

See also

• Disclosure Project
• UFO cover-up
• Citizen Hearing on Disclosure
• Paradigm Research Group
• 2023 UAP Congressional Hearing

References

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Stephen Bassett", as of 2026-04-27, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.