The 2014 International UFO Congress, Part 1

Well, it's February again, and so here I am once again at at Ft. McDowell, Arizona, not far from Phoenix, for the 23rd annual International UFO Congress, the largest UFO conference in the world. Once again, my resolution is to not Blog extremely long passages, just brief ones - if I can stick to it.

Government agents bombard the International UFO Congress with Chemtrails to try to disrupt the conference, without success.

The Congress began on Wednesday, February 12, and the first speaker was Ted Peters, whose subject was UFO Abductions: Are They Spiritial? In a nutshell, the answer apparently is "yes." Peters is a professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, a man who obviously knows his religious history and comparative theology. I wrote about Peters' talk at the 2011 MUFON UFO Symposium, where the title of his talk was "Will ET Contact End World Religions?"  The short answer was "no," he did a survey of various religious grouips, and found that practically nobody viewed 'beings on other worlds' as a threat to their faith.

Ted Peters

Peters gave some examples of the parallels between UFO encounters and religious thought. UFO abductee Dick Johnson said he is not religious, but his alleged ET contacts conform to the Celestial Savior model. And, he notes, these days the Celestial Savior often offers Eco-Salvation. Even the statements about ETs by SETI scientist Jill Tartar conform to several of these religious categories. He suggests what is needed is a process of "demythologizing" such religious-tinged accounts. Reject the substance of the myth, but retain the transcendant God behind the myth.

He discussed the history of Hypnotic Regression to help supposed experiencers remember, from Betty and Barney Hill to the Satanic cults of Michelle Remembers to the daycare satanic molestation panic. 

The next speaker was UFO Disclosure-Man himself, Stephen Bassett of the Paradigm Research Group (PRG). They are the ones who produced last year's farcical "Citizens Hearing" on UFOs, so ineffective that Google Trends actually recorded a decrease in interest in UFOs as it unfolded. His Disclosure Petition VI, asking for Congressional Hearings on UFOs, goes up on the White House's We The People website in April, needing 100,000 signatures in 30 days.

Stephen Bassett

Bassett insists that his PRG can "checkmate" the government's position within four months (that would be June 12). The Truth Embargo can be ended this year! He is mailing out complete DVD sets of his Citizens Hearing to all members of Congress, and to U.S. Ambassadors. When they see this, they will be astonished. Soon a full media storm will be unleashed, which nothing can resist! Unfortunately, PRG lost a bunch of money that it had invested in silver assets when gold and silver tanked, money they must now get back. What kind of business is it that keeps its working capital invested in silver assets? A foolish one, as any banker will tell you.

Bassett acts and speaks exactly like everybody's image of a paranoid Conspiracy Theorist, which alone is enough to guarantee that he will never be taken seriously by the major media. However, he was extremely popular with the conference audience, who gave him a standing ovation.

Kim Carlsberg

The next speaker was Kim Carlsberg, titled "My Secret Life Comes Full Circle," in which she told of her many, many, many UFO abductions over the years. She showed some video clips from a movie based on Budd Hopkins' abduction-finding, depicting a woman on a table being examined by aliens. "Those tables are really cold," she added. 

Alien fetuses are apparently somewhat smaller than human ones, so that an earth woman carrying one hardly even notices it. She was asked to breastfeed, and to hold, hybrid fetuses, and she talked about her various alien children. In fact, she has seven alien grandchildren!

Once she woke up in a tank of liquid, and was forced to breathe it in. Somehow, she was able to survive. One time she went camping in the California desert, and woke up on another world. 

Mike Clelland and his friend Cynthia. Both report abduction-type experiences.

Next was Mike Clelland, speaking on "Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee." He lives in the Tetons, Wyoming, and is a very outdoorsy guy. He described various camping adventures in which he and female companions encountered owls in spooky circumstances. He began looking into UFO incidents allegedly involving owls, and gradually became obsessed with owls, to the point where he even questioned his own sanity. Owls might be, he explained, a "screen memory": what you remember are owls, but what you really saw were aliens. He delved into the mythologies of owls, Jungian archetypes, and all that. 

Driving home from this very same conference last year, at his campsite in a remote area Clelland saw a formation of lights on a hilltop, a round structure, looking exactly like a landed UFO. And there is no structure at that spot. What all this means, he admits he does not know, but if he finds out, he will certainly post in on his Blog Hidden Experience.

Robert Powell

The last speaker of the day was Robert Powell, MUFON's Director of Research since 2007, on "UFOs & Government: The Historical and Changing Role of Government Over Time." He gave a fairly standard history of Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Bluebook, the Robertson Panel, etc. Most of this is stuff most of us have heard many times, although I'm sure many at the conference have not. Also he talked about his favorite cases, including the RB-47 case, which recent work by Tim Printy pretty well takes apart. He has a theory of why the ET showed up during and after WWII (a recent UFO trend is to try to push back the start of the modern saucer era from Arnold and 1947 to WWII itself): the ETs detected radioactive isotopes in our atmosphere, and came to check it out. If that's correct, the E.T.s must have been hanging out pretty nearby, as the flash of light from the Hiroshima bomb had not even gotten halfway to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, when Kenneth Arnold saw his nine flying boomerangs.