BY: Mitch Potter Washington Bureau, Published on Tue Apr 30 2013
WASHINGTON-As close encounters go, this one has it all - an unprecedented week of seemingly official hearings in the very heart of Washington, jammed with spine-tingling top-secret accounts of the extraterrestrial kind.From Roswell, Area 51 and Britain's mysterious Rendlesham Forest Incident to the silent hovering craft that once disabled 10 Minuteman missiles in North Dakota, it's all coming out.And that's even before the hearings take a much-anticipated Canadian twist Friday, when former defence minister Paul Hellyer, now almost 90, arrives from Toronto to deliver the coup de grace on the irrefutability of alien contact.But wait. This isn't Congress; it's the National Press Club, 14 blocks away. And those six congressional leaders overseeing the blockbuster revelations, including testimony from more than 40 witnesses, are actually ex-congressmen and women, each enjoying an honorarium of 20,000 for their troubles.Actual U.S. government hearings are free to watch. But an online look at this week's Citizen Hearing On Disclosure (of what the U.S. really knows about UFOs) is yours for a fee of 3.80. Still, it all adds up to fabulous news for the long-suffering true believers of UFO lore, who have never brought their cause so near to the seat of ultimate power."We've been waiting years and now this is our week where it all comes out," said Canadian UFO researcher Victor Viggiani, who is attending the hearings."The quality of the testimony is almost too much for these former congresspeople to absorb. They are getting blown away. "I believe we are now approaching critical mass - all we need is one or more isotopes and we will have our dense mass. This will explode into the biggest story in the world in a matter of days."Nine countries, including Canada and France, have disclosed previously classified - and largely innocuous - files relating to investigations into unidentified flying objects. But the U.S. remains a holdout. Disclosure is the issue at the heart of this week's hearings, organized by the Paradigm Research Group. The hope is that the hoopla will translate into enough pressure to force a full American unveiling of whatever evidence remains in the dust-encrusted archives.The Obama White House actually addressed the issue in 2011, denying any coverup and stating that the government "has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race."Some of the witnesses in D.C., based on testimony thus far, believe otherwise. Others, as researcher Robert Dolan told the panel Tuesday, believe that "black-budget" government intelligence agencies are operating with technologies "three decades ahead of the rest of the world" that may explain some, if not all, of the phenomena.Viggiani, who played a key role in introducing Hellyer's current extraterrestrial theories to the broader UFO community, solidly resides with the former Canadian defence minister in the camp that believes the others are among us.Hellyer, who served as Lester Pearson's defence minister in the early '60s and later ran for the Liberal party leadership against Pierre Trudeau, crossed the floor late in his political life, winning a final term as a Progressive Conservative.But his conversation to true believer in extraterrestrials, said Viggiani, makes the former Canadian politician "one of the elder statesmen."It's not that we want the Americans to admit UFOs are real and we are being engaged by beings from beyond - we already know that," Viggiani said."We just want the U.S. government to acknowledge (that they know). The information age has given us a huge advantage because the data is moving around now beyond anyone's control."So what's the big deal? Just admit it. We're not adolescents. We're grown-ups. We can handle it."
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