Citizen Hearing on Disclosure

The Citizen Hearing on Disclosure was a mock congressional hearing on the claim that the U.S. government is withholding what it knows about UFOs and extraterrestrial life, held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., from 29 April to 3 May 2013. Stephen Bassett's Paradigm Research Group organized it and paid six former members of Congress about $20,000 each, plus expenses, to hear roughly 30 hours of testimony from researchers and military, agency and political witnesses. The panel was the former senator Mike Gravel and the former representatives Darlene Hooley, Merrill Cook, Roscoe Bartlett, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick and Lynn Woolsey, with Kilpatrick presiding.

Bassett said he wanted to reveal what he describes as the government's policy of extraterrestrial information containment, and that he did not care what the former members actually thought about extraterrestrial issues, only that they knew how a hearing is run. The panelists were not required to believe in aliens or a government cover-up, but pledged to keep an open mind. Press coverage stressed the cost and the spectacle: the New York Daily News headlined its report "UFO buffs beam up to well-paid ex-pols" and counted roughly 100 members of the public, including Louis Farrakhan, Hollow Earth advocates and people in space-alien costumes. Richard Dolan, who testified, has said the hearing reached a new generation of viewers through YouTube.

Organization

Bassett, executive director of the Bethesda-based lobbying organization Paradigm Research Group, which he started in 1996, sent invitations to about 50 former members he thought likely candidates; Kilpatrick, who served in Congress from 1997 to 2011, was the first to respond. Bassett's groups paid the six former members to preside over the "citizen hearing" as if they were on the Hill, and Bassett said he approached them to interview dozens of witnesses in a style similar to hearings on Capitol Hill.

Proceedings

Testimony was organized in panels, one of them the "Truth Embargo Panel," at which Bassett gave opening remarks and introduced a video. Dolan told the committee that "we all know about media consolidation" and about the intimate relationships between elite members of the corporate media and the political leadership, particularly the military and intelligence community. Greer told the committee that in October 1954, "a date I want the committee to remember," there was "actionable intelligence from someone who worked inside the National Security Agency" that gravity control had gone deep black, so that "we have not needed rockets, jets, internal combustion engines and surface roadways between cities." Paul Hellyer, the former Canadian defense minister, alleged during the hearing that two space aliens were coaching U.S. government officials on clean energy and that this was being suppressed by the petroleum industry.

Bassett introduced a 15-minute video of a witness whose name would not be used: the vast majority of people who dealt with the issue while working for the government since the 1940s, he said, took what they knew to their graves, and this witness, in extremely poor health, had received numerous threats from his government not to talk. Bassett said he had decided alone to show the video, and that Howe had interviewed the witness almost 14 years earlier when he considered coming forward and backed away because of threats to his family and himself, while Dolan had interviewed him recently. Howe then told the panel that blocking truth, which she calls the truth embargo, has been the American government's official policy of denial since 1947, when the Truman administration decided to keep all information about non-human intelligences interacting with the planet from the public and media, including Congress and the Supreme Court.

Gravel asked whether the being the witness described was dead or alive. Howe answered by relaying what the witness said he saw inside Papoose Mountain at Area 51: a gray being dressed "in something like they had tried to make it look sort of American. It had on a T-shirt and as if they had put clothes on it right at the last minute for this meeting."

Coverage and distribution

The New York Times News Service and the Associated Press covered the hearing, the latter under the headline "Kilpatrick Presiding Over Extraterrestrial Hearings." Dolan has described the audience that found the hearing online as "an entire new generation of people going onto YouTube looking for UFO information" who "stumble across this hearing that was held with six retired members of the U.S. Congress."

Open questions

References

Source ratings:

(

[1 Wikipedia-grade]

·

[2 Questionable]

·

[3 Reporting/Analysis]

·

[4 Speculative/Hearsay]

·

[5 Ungrounded]

). (To change source ratings,

edit this page

.)

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Unidentified flying object", as of an unknown date, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.