UN Meeting on UFOs?

Over the last couple of weeks, there has been a controversy raging inside the UFO community about a meeting held at the United Nations in which UFOs figured prominently. According to the exopolitics web site and Dr. Michael Salla, a confidential source had come forward to talk of this meeting and to tell us of the importance of it as we, allegedly, move toward full disclosure in 2013 or maybe 2017, depending on the mood of the reliable, but confidential source. Clearly, this meeting proved that UFOs were important and that the United Nations was aware of that importance.

According to Salla, who has been one of the leaders of exopolitics for years, "There are dozens of extraterrestrials races with a variety of motivations that are interacting with global humanity..."

He knows this because other people he believes, such as former U.S. Army sergeant Cliff Stone told him so. Stone has said that he knows, based on his service with super secret military organizations that there are 57 known alien races... just as there were 57 card carrying members of the communist party in the State Department and there are 57 varieties of Heinz products. For more on Stone and some of the other leading stars in the exopolitics heaven see the November 2005 blog. But I digress.

Anyway, this unidentified but highly qualified and reliable source said that the secret meetings were attended by the U.S. Air Force, the National Guard (the National Guard... what in the hell for?), the Vatican, representatives from 27 countries (where in the hell was the rest of the world?) and three U.S. senators. This meeting came up with such astonishing findings as that the UN is an international organization... "Therefore the briefing has do with other nation-states in context to sightings,"... whatever in the hell this means.

I could go on, but there is just too much that seems to be ridiculous in this. This inside source said "Although incidents are occurring around the world, these are NOT ‘Independence Day’ types. In fact, our source stated that the ships are not as big as the ones protrayed [sic] in the film."

And the ever popular, "You’ll know things are heating up when suicides dramatically increase."

Well, all this circulated around the Internet until it was learned from the UN that no such meeting had taken place, inside sources aside. Bernard Thouanel wrote on March 12, "It is obvious these so-called UFO Meetings at the UN never happened... and are pure hoax."

Thouanel’s information came from the UN Public Affairs Unit (at inquiries2@un.org) which wrote to him on March 11, "Greetings from the UN Public Inquiries Team. As far as we are aware there was no meeting concerning UFO’s at the United Nations." They attached copies of the journals for those days that showed all the meetings that took place, and they ran to more than forty pages.

Of course the "true believers" know this is all part of the cover-up and of course the United Nations would not admit to such meetings even if photographs and the agenda were published by this inside source. To prove what they said, Salla and the exopolitics crowd eventually identified the important inside source as Gilles Lorant who was further identified as a member of the French Institute of Advanced Studies for National Defense (IHEDN).

Well, that seemed to put a lie to the UN denial, which in the world of UFOs and conspiracies, and even Washington Post journalism (sorry, but I wanted to identify the source of the creation of the term) was a non-denial denial.

And then, as happens in the world of UFOs, the IHEDN denied that Lorant had ever had a role in its program. In fact, according the Gildas Bourdais (a reliable French UFO researcher and a decent fellow) reported that IHEDN was going to sue Lorant for "usurpation of title", which was going to get pricey for Lorant. He retracted his claim and confirmed that he "is not and has never been an auditor at IHEDN."

Worse still, Bourdais reports, "Michel Ribardiere, of the French group FEA (Federation Europeenne Airplane) has authorized me to reveal publicly that Gilles Lorant told him that he had not met with the two UN diplomats in charge of the UFO question!"

This, of course, didn’t mean that the meeting hadn’t taken place and we shouldn’t reject the claim just because the inside source turned out to be unreliable and the UN denied that it happened. Where would Ufology be if it wasn’t for those who claimed inside knowledge and who were eventually shown to have been less than honest in some of their claims? We listen to men (well, one man) who was thrown in jail for child molestation, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t telling the truth about his inside knowledge. We listen to those who claim high military rank only to learn that they hadn’t served in the military, or in the grade claimed, only to be told their records have been changed to make them look bad. How much of this crap are we supposed to swallow?

In the end, we’re left with another black eye for Ufology. It’ll be said that this whole sorry episode was another of the brilliant disinformation campaigns that the government has engineered to keep the truth buried when, in reality, it is just one more case of someone inventing a story to propel himself into the UFO spotlight. The landscape is littered with many examples from Cliff Stone and his 57 variety of aliens, to Gerald Anderson who injected himself into the Roswell UFO crash only to be caught in various lies, to George Adamski (or a couple of dozen other contactees) who claimed to have ridden on flying saucers with the benevolent space brothers to the nonsense of MJ-12.

The only thing to remember from this is that it was members of the UFO community who investigated the claims and revealed them for what they were. I know that the skeptics and debunkers will get the credit, but it really belongs to those who did the work, some of them cited here.

Oh, yeah... and we never learn. Tomorrow will have another story like this and in the end, it’s about the only thing people will remember... that some guy claimed to know a lot about UFOs but really didn’t.