A Writer's First UFO Conference

by Tim Gale

A relative newcomer to the field of ufology and the extraterrestrial phenomenon, I recently attended the X- (for Exopolitical) Conference in Gaithersburg, MD, a little ways north of Washington, D.C. It was my first foray into a subculture that draws from most any demographic you’d care to name: academia, science, researchers, political activists, patriots, spiritual seekers, contactees, remote viewers, hawkers of t-shirts and videos, writers, and everyday Joes now intensely curious after seeing inexplicable lights in the sky.

If you’ve never had the unique pleasure of attending such a gathering, I suggest you do so when the chance arises and the stars are properly aligned. Certainly plowing through books on UFO crash retrieval incidents, military cover-ups, notorious sightings, and ET abduction is foundational for those drawn to this fascinating, though marginalized, topic. However, short of an actual sighting or face-to-face close encounter of the fourth kind (not recommended), immersing oneself in the carnival mystique of a big name UFO conference will reveal certain things about the unfolding relationship between humankind and ETs that no book or documentary film ever will.

The reader should know my education on the UFO/ET topic has been informed early on by reading and taking seriously the message put forth in The Allies of Humanity (books I and II). The Allies’ perspective, fairly new on the scene and not yet given due consideration, is little known and has scarcely made a dent in the hodgepodge of fact, fiction, disinformation, misperception, and mental manipulation which comprise the rapidly expanding field of exopolitics and UFO/ET study.

Us versus Them

An overriding impetus of the X-Conference is to build momentum in the drive towards Disclosure—defined on the X-Conference website as: “Formal acknowledgement by the U.S. Government of an extraterrestrial presence engaging the planet.” The citizens of the world’s great superpower want answers. They gather at events like the X-Conference in anticipation of the day when a great unveiling will commence and put all the lies to rest. This is the backbeat of the X-Conference, the polarized Us-vs.-Them mentality feeding upon itself and leading to a renewable, righteous indignation as each piece of evidence or testimony gathered by a researcher is held up for display.

The attendees and presenters are weary of the tight-lipped prevarications of security and intelligence agencies entrusted with safeguarding both the homeland and her many unpalatable secrets. Stirring the familiar alphabet soup—NSA, CIA, DOD, FBI, NASA, NRO—with the Freedom of Information Act ladle for the last thirty years in hopes of finding fresh dumplings is getting old. They’re certain just downriver, near the shores of the Potomac, there are rooms chock full of documents, photographs and film, all of which, if divulged, would unequivocally prove the existence of UFOs and the beings who pilot them.

UFO historian Richard Dolan’s presentation, “Knife in the Back—Who Killed the American Republic?,” was sobering, educational and inspirational. He cast a look backwards to the corruptive slide of imperial Rome and urged attendees to read Cicero. He traced the development of “invisible fascism” in the United States and quoted Machiavelli who, five hundred years ago, noted how old forms of power could be maintained as long as a façade of normalcy is continually propped up. I felt a knowing shudder ripple through the audience.

Dolan fingered the government’s hijacking of the 9-11 tragedy and its aftermath, the war on terror and the unilateral invasion of Iraq, as grim examples of how strings are being jerked by elites for whom bottom-line profits are the guiding principle. Our society’s spineless media, larded with infotainment and now showing outright symptoms of censorship, also came under his fire. Dolan understands the lineaments of the National Security State very well and, at the end of his lecture, posed a radical question, “Can Disclosure lead to a revolution?” His question points in a direction of hope for our democracy now tattered even more by the passage of the USA Patriot Act and the last two fraudulent “elections.”

Could human unity, something the Allies of Humanity discuss at length in their briefings, result from America’s “formal acknowledgement” of the pervasive ET presence? It was refreshing to hear a perspective that sought to use careful documentation of information suppression as a potential springboard from which rank and file citizens could petition their governments to deal with the most ignored issue of our time: the increasingly active ET presence here on Earth.

The conference also featured long-time warhorses like Stanton Friedman who relish their ability to catch the liars at work, using bona fide, signed memos to show how Air Force General X or Commander Y blatantly contradict themselves time and again. The falsifications of Projects Grudge, Sign, Blue Book, and that old whipping boy the Condon Report, were recapitulated, perhaps in hopes that under sheer weight of repetition the vault of secrecy will eventually crack open and divulge its cherished contents. Some of this material was beyond boring. One team of archivists launched into an in-depth analysis of paper and font types, using spectrometers to measure how different inks degrade over time. Barely pertinent stuff.

The Disclosure Grail

The longer these sorts of discussions went on, the more I found myself observing the Disclosure fray from an ET perspective. I could almost hear their commentaries as they gathered for evening cocktails. “Yo, Zarkuba, did you listen in on the X-Conference today? The humans were tearing their hair out by the roots over the latest Roswell expose! And that military abduction presentation. I thought they were going to rally and storm Capitol Hill on their lunch break! Keep up the good work, bro!”

If we view all this backbiting confusion as the result of an elaborately orchestrated bait- and-switch shell game or a carefully constructed hall of prisms and mirrors with smoke machines running full blast, one thing becomes obvious: The ETs have mastered the art of sowing chaos and dissension. Just look at where the last fifty years of UFO research have brought us. I soon found myself pondering another question. What if full Disclosure was mandated and all the information was released tomorrow? Would it make a lick of difference? Would the patently obvious questions of why are the ETs here and what do they want be laid to rest? Unlikely. That is, unless the ETs have taken pains to do their own disclosure with our government and tell them what their fifty-year plan is for the human race.

All this is to say that the more I listened, the more I realized the grail of Disclosure may well be of dubious value, perhaps unworthy of the time and effort directed towards it. For indeed, the time we have for grappling with the ET crisis may be shorter than we know. All the recriminations in the world do not a solution to our problem make. If Disclosure is achievable, it must be pursued with the express purpose of initiating a constructive dialogue about how to deal with ETs. If we citizens relentlessly castigate our government institutions, it’s hardly going to elicit a beneficial response which fosters unity of purpose. Longstanding, hard-boiled factionalism is getting us nowhere and only benefits the ETs.

Then there is the topic of deep black budgets, the reverse engineering of downed craft and their advanced propulsion systems. What do mega corporations like Boeing know? What do they have on their shelves that could help ease the impending energy shortages Peak Oil has in store for us? Entire books could be written on this subject alone. But the simple fact is the more the human race worships technology and becomes increasingly dependent upon it, the longer we allow our energy crisis to worsen, the more vulnerable we will be to enticements and manipulations from beyond.

Up Close and Personal

In addition to the bigger picture, meta-issues brought forth by exhibitors were the personal interactions I had with contactees and others attending the conference. I use the term contactee with some reservation. From what I’ve read and now heard firsthand, most people who’ve been onboard with ETs had little choice in the matter; hence the term abductee is really more accurate. The Allies’ perspectives on the increasing ET manipulation of the “mental environment,” ongoing “pacification,” and the now well-documented interbreeding program all provided a context by which to gauge what I was hearing from people whose basic civil rights had been callously violated by the visitors.

I queried one fellow from upstate New York as to what he knew about ETs. It turned out to be plenty. He had been abducted numerous times since childhood. His first marriage ended in divorce after his wife had multiple miscarriages which she attributed to ET abduction/fetus removal procedures. The abductions then carried into his second marriage. One morning he awoke to find all three of his children in bed with bloody noses, a telltale symptom of nasal implants. He concluded our conversation by telling me how his father, at eighty years old on his deathbed, revealed a life long history of interaction with little people in his bedroom at night. Here was a regular guy whose lifetime of inter-generational abduction could have been a case study straight out of the research done by Budd Hopkins or David Jacobs.

A woman about fifty years of age admitted to having had multiple abductions during which her pregnancies were tampered with. She and her husband had their car sucked up into a mother ship then later set down in the middle of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. When I asked her what she thought of such treatment, she calmly replied that the visitors were a dying race whose reproductive capabilities were compromised and they were in need of human genetic material to sustain themselves. She told me this quite matter-of- factly, from behind a hollowed-out, thousand yard stare. After talking with her, the Allies’ use of the word “pacification” to describe the results of human/ET interaction left me more than a little uneasy.

At the conference banquet I ended up sitting beside an emergency medicine doctor from California. His neck tie was festooned with smiley faces and those of the trademark, goggle eyed Grays. He rattled along, spewing a semi-coherent monologue for an hour during which I was able to interject a few quick questions. He was a seasoned CSETI member who actively sought out aliens with his “team” whose members had been trained by the contact guru Steven Greer. He told me he wasn’t sure if “abduction is even real” since so much of it happens “in the theater of the mind.”

Even so, he had experienced several instances of missing time and, after one encounter, became a channel, which he truly enjoyed, until his channeling capabilities were cut off six months later. This was disappointing, but he recouped himself by “getting spiritual” and realizing that the PSI bank was a phenomenon of which he was an integral part. He closed by commenting that if abduction was in fact real, the most important thing to grasp about it is that the contactee’s perceptions and expectations dictate whether the experience will be negative or positive. Strike yet another blow for the hugely popular New Age nostrum urging everyone to simply realize we all create our own reality. I was relieved to be done with that conversation. The doctor’s mind and thinking seemed rather loopy and unhinged.

A thoughtful woman I met had observed five glowing spheres hovering above the street while she was making early morning coffee in her New York City apartment.

Awestruck, she later embarked on a research odyssey which led her to read The Allies of Humanity books. Like me, this was her first UFO conference. She, too, was flabbergasted by the myriad viewpoints and theories being promulgated from dawn till dusk.

ETs versus Humans?

What is one to believe? Are ETs little more than holographic projections or interdimensional beings from inside the earth or the fourth dimension come to uplift the human species? Or are they, as keynote speaker Monsignor Balducci from the Vatican implied, blessed intermediaries who could serve as a liaison to the angels for the human race? Are we as a species so irredeemably mired in sin as to need ET intercession on our behalf in order to become closer to God? Will all the other ET races eventually sit down to feast at God’s table with Jesus, identified by Balducci as “the King of the Universe”? The good Father proclaimed it so to the deathly bored banqueters, most of who struggled to keep from falling asleep with their faces in their chocolate cake.

During the afternoon of the last day, I observed a contradiction which summed up the ET/human situation quite well. A woman walked past with a stack of materials gathered from speakers, authors, and booksellers. On the very top of the stack was the book Calling on Extraterrestrials, by Lisette Larkin. Folded beneath it was a document called The Declaration of Human Sovereignty. Lisette’s book, which I had skimmed a few months ago, is a detailed instruction manual on how to open oneself up and invite ETs to take you onboard one of their nifty craft. It extols the virtues of becoming a “contactee” or “experiencer” (Lisette has a real beef with the words “abduction” and “abductee”) and heralds the men and women chosen for interaction as forerunners on a spiritual journey, heroes endowed with paranormal capabilities and privy to enlightenment from the star people.

Conversely, The Declaration of Human Sovereignty draws a very deep line in the sand and calls for immediate cessation of all uninvited and illegal ET offenses directed against the human race. These include, as quoted from the document itself:

“…violation of restricted airspace; abduction and transportation of humans without their consent; murder, rape, torture, sexual abuse, interbreeding with humans and cruel experimentation; theft and trade of human biological and genetic materials; theft and trade of Earth’s natural resources; covert mental and psychological influence; mutilation of humans and animals; tampering with and disabling of military defense systems; and clandestine infiltration into human society.”

I couldn’t help but wonder how, if the woman took a close look at the materials she had gathered, she would then be able to reconcile them in her own mind and heart. Would she soon be attending one of Lisette Larkin’s or Steven Greer’s workshops in hopes of establishing ET contact, telepathic or otherwise? Would she examine The Declaration of Human Sovereignty and pause to consider, if even for a moment, what the ET presence already means for the human race? Maybe a copy of The Allies of Humanity was at the bottom of her stack and she would read it someday soon. Might she then ponder with great seriousness what the historical record reveals to be the case when a technologically superior race encounters a technologically inferior race whose home territory contains an untold wealth of scarce resources? I hoped so.

Parting Thoughts

As the conference waned and people started packing up and saying their goodbyes, I recalled an aphorism I heard a few years back: When nobody knows anything, everyone becomes an expert. As I mingled with throngs of others like me, most of us a little weary from avidly pecking after crumbs of truth, these words seemed particularly descriptive of the current human condition with regard to ETs.

Here we are scurrying about on the ground, festering in gridlocked traffic, coping with the exigencies of daily life, concerned about this great mystery unfolding above our heads and in our bodies, wombs, minds, dreams and bedrooms, in our governments, militaries and security agencies, in our theologies, and onboard the mother ships we know are there. All the while the visitors carry forward, ever surreptitious, abducting people and interbreeding with them, biding their time, altering humanity’s mental environment, dissecting cattle, navigating our skies and oceans, laying down crop circles, sowing dissension, occasionally visible but mostly invisible, doing whatever it is they have come here to do.

The destiny of the human race is being shaped every moment of every day by myriad forces. For those who have taken the time to look into the matter, it is blindingly obvious that human beings and ETs are now and will continue to become increasingly intertwined. The current situation for humans is anything but beneficial, nor is there one iota of clear communication from our ET visitors. I, for one, think the acronym UFO should be updated to include Under Foreign Occupation as its more realistic meaning.