by Jean Eisenhower

Wednesday, February 27, 2008
from RattleSnakeFire Website
 

Background

 

At least half the population of the United States, according to polls, believes in intelligent life beyond Earth’s atmosphere. (Statistics are even higher in other countries.) Most of those also believe it’s probable that ET life has already contacted humanity or will one day. And many say they know people, and thousands say they are people, who have been contacted.

Since ancient stories from every culture on the planet, including stories in the Bible, speak of people visiting from the stars or heavens, it’s difficult to understand, without resorting to conspiracy theories, why our nation’s newspaper and television stations continue to ridicule or ruthlessly suppress those who witness what seems to be evidence that alien contact may be happening now.

 

That we don’t acknowledge this suppression may be evidence we are content, as a culture, to be “of two minds.”
 

 


Cultural Reticence

 

In Stephenville, Texas, the publisher of the Empire-Tribune felt compelled to fire his only staff reporter, Angelia Joiner, for not thoroughly enough refusing to respond to the world-wide (http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4142232&page=1) (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22656172/) and local interest in the UFOs sighted in their small rural community by over fifty vocal citizens.

 

Maybe it had something to do with her last story, about a primary witness harassed by someone who apparently had the power to stop or not stop the military jets and helicopters flying repeatedly over his property after his testimony. (I've experienced that.)

Another recent UFO sighting occurred near San Diego on January 8 this year, but I found it difficult to find any major news media that have retained the story in their archives a little over one month later.

 

When I searched the site of the Associated Press, I discovered that both the San Diego and Stephenville stories have been deleted from the archives.
 

 


News Background/Insight

 

I’ve been in the news business for years, as a radio feature producer (UPI award-winning) and PR professional. When I worked for the United Way or local domestic violence shelter, everything I sent out resulted in excellent coverage: powerful editorials and once a three-night series on prime-time news.

 

As soon as I began to write about environmental and political problems, however, one project spearheaded by two powerful corporations, nothing was printed, despite my material being professionally presented, well-documented, and supported by numerous national and international organizations, one a prestigious science association not commonly involved in activism.

One of the local reporters who did try to cover the issues was not fired, but forced to transfer departments. His publisher gave carte blanche to the PR people from one of the corporations to sit beside the reporter at his desk all day, day after day.

 

What they said, the reporter could not tell me, but he hung his head as he admitted he couldn’t stand up to their harassment – allowed by his publisher.
 

 


News and 'UFOs"

 

This sort of story is told by independent reporters all across the nation. It answers the oft-asked question,

“If extraterrestrials exist, why don’t we know about it?”

Another common question,

“Why don’t they land on the White House lawn?”

...is ironic because in the 1950s, LIFE Magazine printed on its cover a photo of a convoy of UFOs flying by the dome, and America was quite excited about it.

 

The Air Force, back then, called them ETVs – “extraterrestrial vehicles” – a term quietly laid to rest since then, as our government now pretends they’re “unidentified.”

OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD was a CIA project, conceived in the late 1940s, to plant government agents high in authority inside every major media in the nation. I believe they accomplished their goal, which explains why this subject is ridiculed or made light of, if it’s covered at all, and why people like Joiner are fired from their jobs.
 

 


Suppression

 

The heavy-handed treatment of those who see UFOs (ETVs) – so similar to the treatment of environmental activists – is an interesting coincidence, and meaningful, I believe.

My book, RattleSnake Fire, is about the conjunction of all these issues and how they played out in my personal and professional life. My account opens while I’m trying to sleep during the first week of an historic trial, in which the FBI is defending itself against charges, eventually successful, that they violated activists’ rights while refusing to investigate an assassination attempt on a non-violent activist colleague of mine, Judi Bari. (The feds would be found guilty on most charges and pay a history-making $4.4 Million.)

Amazingly, five of us working full-time for six weeks, were unable to convince any media outside California to cover the story. The major media in Washington DC remained mute until the trial was over, then ran single paragraphs “buried” inside, on page eight, for instance, next to the fold, where it would be least visible.

This single anecdote is not my story by any means, but a microcosmic element of a much larger account.

 

This opening, though, serves notice to the reader that certain elements within our government can fail to defend the citizens, can slander the innocent and even the attacked, can control what we’re allowed to learn through our un-"free press," and can certainly fail to tell us what we think we should know about and might naively think our government or schools or someone should tell us.
 

 


American Split-Mind

 

Many Americans believe there’s a UFO cover-up, but many don’t believe it’s an important issue.

 

Explanations include the benevolent and malign:

  1. They’re protecting us from hysteria, or

  2. They’re protecting us until they understand it better themselves, or

  3. They’re in cahoots with ETs in projects we wouldn’t support, and darker versions of this latter theme.

I have no single opinion on this at the moment. For one thing, “the government” is not monolithic. Researchers have found evidence that even our Presidents, such as Jimmy Carter, who promised to open up the information, and Bill Clinton, were refused the information they requested.

 

Apparently, all those motives above might apply to different individuals at different levels of government.

Dr. John Mack, the late Harvard professor who hosted the MIT conference on Close Contacts of the Fourth Kind (“abductions”) who almost lost tenure over this research, came to believe his subjects had had genuine experiences and were not mentally unwell, except for the stress of having their world view severely transformed and having no one with whom they could speak their truth about it.
 

 


Government Denial: Aliens & Ecology

 

An interesting coincidence in Dr. Mack’s research is that many abductees reported experiences with aliens that caused them to “wake up” to the environmental problems on our planet and to become activists for environmental causes. This work, most activists know, threatens corporate bottom-line thinking, so well supported by our government today.

 

So there appears a series of correlations:

  • Alien contact to environmental awareness

  • Environmental awareness counter to typical corporate and government mindset

  • Alien contact denied by the government ( “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?”)

The reason behind these correlations might be debated, but the relationships should, at least, be acknowledged.
 

 


Split Mind

 

In a very real way, we are almost all victims of the split mind, the mind that separates what we know in our hearts from what we’ll speak about in public, or even acknowledge in the privacy of our own conscious thoughts.

 

This splittedness, I believe, is endemic to our culture, and maybe others as well.

While fifty to eighty percent of people, depending on how the question is phrased, will answer polls about alien existence on Earth in the affirmative, how many people will join a conversation in public? Very few is my experience. Try bringing up the subject at your next cocktail party and listen to the silence – though this may be on the verge of changing!

 

The United Press carried a story under a section titled “Quirks in the News”, describing how people are becoming “less shy” about the topic. Let’s hope. It could be the beginning of the end of our sociological splittedness.
 

 


Splittedness as "Ideal"

 

Meanwhile, consider why our nation holds this “ideal” of separation of mindsets, as in “separation of church and state.” Presuming we hold to the scientific model (which I actually believe is twisted quite often), wouldn’t it be a scientifically and philosophically high-minded practice to work to integrate the “two minds” – to integrate our spiritual and political philosophies?

I can see no purpose served by an entire nation asking its citizens to be of two minds and remain that way for the duration of their lives. The only purposes I can come up with aren’t good ones: confusing, dumbing down, disempowering… in a word: conspiracies. The split mind of church and state paves the way for splitting on a variety of other topics, beliefs about extra-terrestrial intelligence being only one.

A belief that extraterrestrials have already contacted humans on Earth, for good or ill or both, is a perfectly reasonable scientific theory for contemplation and legitimate research.

 

It’s far less reasonable to insist that no intelligence would find us in "the emptiness of space," since life is so diverse and seems to exist everywhere on the planet, from sand dunes to boiling water under the ocean, and current science posits many dimensions of reality with easy access between them.

 

Moreover, the theory of alien contact is supported by ancient history and sacred scriptures from every culture on the planet, by archeology, folklore, and probably even by our own families’ experiences and beliefs in demons, angels, ghosts and more. And it’s usually supported by common people like you and me, when we’re not standing in that cocktail party, pretending to be sophisticated.

Do we go along with the charade because of programming (television and other)?