A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact (39 page)

Beneath these issues, deeper trouble will be brewing. The shock experienced by all other sectors of society will be amplified among professional scientists.

Recall the 1961 Brookings Report. It concluded that, of all groups within society, scientists and engineers might be most shocked by the discovery of superior creatures, “since these professions are most clearly associated with mastery of nature.” Although non-religious people tend to believe that Disclosure would traumatize the faithful, it may well be that men and women of science will be most deeply troubled, at least initially. For during times of crisis, faith may be all a person has to rebuild their life. The scientist’s faith in “mastery of nature” will surely be humbled, if not broken, by the Others.

They will also be subject to profound public scorn. For years, scientists had arrogantly ridiculed legitimate inquiries into UFOs, dismissing virtually all contact evidence as hoaxes. The ineptitude of the scientific establishment in detecting such an obvious presence will be of profound significance.

With their record of failure and lack of intellectual rigor so badly exposed, people will begin to study the relationship of science to the national security structure of power. Not in generalities, but in specifics. That will inevitably lead to the clandestine world, the world of secrets, and the breakaway civilization that has grown within its secure confines.

At this point the public will hit upon some answers, one of which is that a portion of the scientific community has known about these things
all along. It is just that their work was classified for decades. And the rest of the scientific establishment bought into the “deny and ridicule” concept so deeply that they were forced to simply ignore inconvenient facts for fear of losing grants, prestige, and promotion.

Even in the pre-Disclosure world, independent analysts have concluded that too much of America’s scientific and innovative talent is dominated by national security restrictions and requirements. A 2009 report from the National Research Council argued that “national security controls on science and technology are broken and should be restructured.” Such controls, stated the report, initiated to protect U.S. technological secrets and advantages during the Cold War, have become obsolete, and now hamper America’s global competitiveness.
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Disclosure will bite the world of secrecy in its proverbial ass, and there will be calls around the world to investigate the structure of innumerable scientific establishments.

There will be two other areas of immediate concern and blowback to the post-Disclosure scientific community. One will be the previously mentioned Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The other will be the NASA space program.

Disclosure of UFO and ET reality means not only have classified elements of the scientific community known about it, but that the SETI program has been nothing other than a diversion. NASA’s controversy will be worse. Most likely, there will be admissions that NASA astronauts were silenced regarding UFO data and sightings, as has been frequently argued. Moreover, what if it also turns out that NASA had concealed anomalies on the surfaces of the moon and Mars, also something that has been argued for years. The result would be an angry public and a call for a complete housecleaning.
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What the public will learn—along with many unsuspecting scientists themselves—is that the management of the scientific community for national security purposes has been a matter of policy, overseen at the highest levels of power.

Many important re-evaluations will be underway. One of them will concern the late Dr. Carl Sagan.

Keeping the faith? We may finally reconcile science and religion. Observing the Milky Way using the laser guide star facility at Yepun, August, 2010
. Photo by Yuri Beletsky (ESO) via Wikimedia Commons.

Carl Sagan: They’re Everywhere But Here

Carl Sagan took America by storm during the 1970s and 1980s and became, practically speaking, America’s public Scientist-in-Chief. He first entered millions of living rooms as the affable scientist who appeared regularly on
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
. The Cornell University professor had a passion for astronomy and a gift of making complex ideas easy to understand.

Sagan’s celebrity increased with the release of the PBS
Cosmos
series in 1980, when he became famous for his phrase “billions and billions” to
describe galaxies, stars, and planets. He pioneered the science of exobiology and promoted SETI through the use of radio telescopes to listen for signals from space.

As an investigative reporter for PBS, specializing in space science, Bryce Zabel met Carl Sagan several times in 1981.
Cosmos
was still airing on the network, and the unmanned
Voyager
spacecraft was approaching the planet Saturn.

Sagan gave a live, on-air interview as the pictures came in and were assembled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He was effusive about what a great moment it was for humanity. He talked passionately about how this first step beyond Earth would someday lead to manned adventures further into space. He was positive that the universe, because of the sheer number of habitable planets and what he saw as the “bias” toward life, would be teeming with intelligent beings.

After the show, Zabel asked Sagan if given his feelings about a universe filled with life and humankind’s imminent expansion beyond our own Earth—he felt that some of those life forms could have already come here to see us? Might this explain reports of UFOs? Sagan reacted strongly and negatively, citing his famous phrase, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

In a half-hour parking lot debate, an annoyed Sagan made his case. He argued that the chances of extraterrestrial spacecraft visiting Earth were vanishingly small. His explanation for all the UFO sightings hit the basic points. Most were misidentifications of natural phenomena, he said. The rest were from lonely people who created hoaxes in order to feel important.

What about all the police officers and pilots? Sagan shrugged and said not one of them ever got a good photo of what they saw. No extraordinary proof meant it could not be taken seriously. Sagan did allow that the Cold War might have had a part to play in the UFO mystery. Some sightings could be of classified technology, and this most likely explained the suppression of some UFO data.

His bottom line could not be moved. He stressed as strongly as he could that, in his view, there was no strong evidence that aliens were visiting the Earth either in the past or present. Then he got in his car and drove away.

Throughout his career, Carl Sagan continued to advocate for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. He even wrote
Contact
, a novel on the subject that was adapted into a film. He clearly described his own feelings when, in the novel, the director of Central Intelligence (DCI) explained to a cabinet meeting, “There had been more than a million UFO sightings reported worldwide…and not one of them seemed on good evidence to be connected with an extraterrestrial visitation.” Fifteen years later, in his final book,
Demon-Haunted World
, Sagan wrote, “There are reliably reported cases that are unexotic, and exotic cases that are unreliable.”

Sagan’s twin insistence that the universe was full of intelligent lifeforms, yet none could ever reach Earth, seemed wildly illogical for a man so open to the idea that intelligent life was thriving throughout the cosmos. This is especially odd, given his contention that we were a young civilization and that most others were likely to be many years beyond us.

One of Sagan’s classmates at the University of Chicago, Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist-turned-UFO researcher (and the man who broke the Roswell case), called Sagan out publicly on his dismissive stance. “Every large scale scientific study of flying saucers has produced a significant number of cases which not only cannot be identified,” argued Friedman, “but which clearly indicate that some so-called flying saucers are manufactured objects behaving in ways that we Earthlings cannot yet duplicate with our manufactured objects.”
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Why would a man of Sagan’s brilliance waste his professional life-energy within such a close-minded and contradictory belief system? Why shut your mind to the one thing you most want to discover? It made no sense during Sagan’s life, and it makes less today. What could explain such behavior from a man who fervently believed in alien life and seemed committed to finding it?

There is one answer—speculation only—found in fiction. In 1997, just four months after Carl Sagan’s death at the age of 62, the penultimate
episode of the NBC UFO series
Dark Skies
gave Sagan his own fitting tribute. In that episode, the debunker hired by Majestic-12 to confound the public with radio telescopes searching for signals from space while simultaneously discrediting all UFO reports was none other than Carl Sagan.

The cover-up authorities had given him a choice as to whether or not he could learn the truth. Once he did so, however, he would never be able to speak about it publicly. Just as Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel had done before him in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have to deflect people from the truth. Or he could insist on his right to speak freely—but then the real truth would be withheld from him.

In the TV episode, the Carl Sagan character selected Door #1. Perhaps the real Carl Sagan made the same decision. In the topsy-turvy world of official denial, it is reasonable and possible that some day, in the not-so-distant future, a Freedom of Information Act request will uncover a document that shows Carl Sagan was in on the cover-up. For people who respect his vision and intellect, it would make a great deal more sense.

Whatever his motivation, however, the legacy of Carl Sagan will be tarnished. He will be seen either as blindly refusing to believe extraterrestrial life could actually be here now, or as willfully hiding that fact from humanity.

Sagan Was Not Alone

Carl Sagan was hardly the only scientist relentlessly hostile to the idea that alien life could be interacting with humanity here on Earth. If anything, the more we have learned about the probability of intelligent life elsewhere, the more the stridently skeptical the scientific community has become on this point.

With a few exceptions, astronomers and astrophysicists today have accepted Sagan’s skewed view that the universe probably abounds with life, and none of it has ever reached us. Even when Stephen Hawking made waves by arguing that aliens might be hostile, he never entertained the possibility that UFOs might be real, and those beings flying them might be the very aliens he was worried about. Even U.K. Royal Astronomer Lord Rees, while firmly favoring the likelihood of extraterrestrial life in a landmark March 30, 2010 lecture, could not resist ending it with a dig against
UFO belief. “If the aliens had made the tremendous technological effort to come here across inter-stellar space,” he opined with obvious amusement, “what a pity they only made a few corn circles and went away again and what a pity they only met a few well-known cranks.”
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His statement proved two things. First, as noted earlier, the policy of “deny and ridicule” has worked so well that most of society’s established authorities now do the work of the secret-keepers without prodding. Second, and more importantly, it proved that when Disclosure actually does come, the scientific community will be filled with prominent members who not only did not get it, but never looked for it. What can one say of Lord Rees and his colleagues, learned men and women, whose scientific curiosity missed the greatest story of our time, whose scientific method included ridicule of decent observers who actually were correct?

Fortunately, however, scientists are not the same as science itself.

New Frontiers

The Disclosure of a non-human intelligence interacting with humanity and planet Earth will shock and discredit the scientific community’s old guard, but it will also rejuvenate and spur our science to an unprecedented degree. Some of this may depend on whether or not the Others decide to be helpful, and some of it may depend on what secrets can be pried out of the Breakaway Group. However, it is probable that, barring any support from either of those (who have, after all, been secretive all along), there will still be important breakthroughs in a number of areas of current scientific endeavor.

Genetic manipulation.
What else can we learn about genetics? Assuming we gain access to alien physiology and genetics, we may gain great insights into ways of improving human health, increasing mental capacity, understanding what controls cellular and organ regeneration, and extending the human life span.