Perhaps it will restore your faith in human reason to learn that this whacked-out measure has lost big, approximately 84% against vs. just 16% in favor. Or perhaps it will cause you concern to learn that approximately one in six voters thought this "extraterrestrial affairs" twaddle had substance. I suspect, however, that many voters - espacially younger ones - voted "Yes" on this measure largely as a joke. Let's hope that's all it was.
The movement for an "Extraterrestrial Affairs Comission" has its roots in "The Disclosure project," a group of conspiracy-oriented UFOlogists headed up by physician Dr. Steven Greer. It began with a big press conference on May 9, 2001 in the National Press Club in Washington, DC, with twenty persons making sensational UFO claims. No doubt Greer and his pals thought that the red-meat journalists inside the Beltway would jump on these sensational claims of government cover-ups and secrecy. But none of the speakers had any proof of what they were claiming, and seasoned reporters largely ignored them. Surely Greer's claims about "super-luminal" (i.e., faster-than-light) UFOs being reverse-engineered in the U.S. serve as a red flag for all sane persons to ignore him. But the Disclosurists did snag one reporter in their UFO net - just one - Leslie Kean, best known for her work on KPFA, Radical Public Radio from the Peoples' Republic of Berkeley, and now the author of a best-selling pro-UFO book, "UFOs On the Record". I'll have much more to say about her, but later.
Now "Disclosure" is slowly morphing into "exopolitics," and this is precisely what Ordinance 300 is about. The idea behind exopolitics is simple: "Since extraterrestrials are obviously here, we should do our best to make friends with them. "A noble sentiment, to be sure, but one resting on a highly dubious premise. I've written quite a lot about Exopolitics in my "Psychic Vibrations" column. Every time you turn around, exopolitics has some hilarious new absurdity, such as Alfred Webre's claim that people are being teleported back and forth to a secret American base on Mars. Ordinance 300 was essentially an attempt to implement the concerns and goals of Exopolitics within the existing political framework.
Speaking of Dr. Greer, from Oct. 2-4 his organization CSETI held a seminar in Rio Rico, Arizona, where for 495 (room fees not included) he promised to teach conference registrants his techniques of how to signal ETs to be contacted. (Greer is not a popular figure within establishment UFOlogy. They think he's giving them all a bad name, which he is.) According to one participant, the contact sessions were supposed to take place from 8:00 to 12:00 nightly, but the ETs failed to show. One might think that such embarrassing failures would make it hard to get people to sign up for future seminars, but Greer has confidently scheduled another seminar in Joshua Tree, California for Nov. 7-13. He knows that there's one born every minute.
