From: skindrud@rosebud.berkeley.edu (erik skindrud)

HEADLINE: WHITE HOUSE ALIEN POLICY
BYLINE: Edited by Vicki Kemper

BODY:

The White House has been accused of fumbling on foreign policy and veering in all directions on its domestic agenda. As if that's not enough, there may now be trouble on the final frontier. Some very persistent people--including one named Rockefeller--are upset because they say the president is keeping government secrets about UFOs and alien life.

UFO enthusiasts, concerned scientists and cosmic conspirators have been demanding documentation on the government's extraterrestrial intelligence for decades, but Laurance Rockefeller is trying a new tack: money. Lots of it.

Rockefeller, great-grandson of John D. and nephew of Nelson, has contributed some $700,000 to the Human Potential Foundation, a non-governmental UFO watchdog. The foundation, in turn, publicizes stories of extraterrestrial life; it gave almost $200,000 to John Mack, a psychiatrist, Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, so he could study people who say they have run with the aliens. In Abduction, Mack relates their tales of space travel, space ships, alien insemination and worse.

The foundation also offers political prognosis: The new congressional majority (may) hang this issue on the president, Human Potential's Scott Jones warned in a letter to the White House. He need not be politically damaged by this, but the old policy will have to be changed in a hurry.

(Right. Maybe in warp time.)

While the administration has yet to go cosmic, in April 1994 the Air Force did release some 900 pages on the big daddy of all so-called UFO cover-ups: the Roswell Incident. Rockefeller says many believe that this incident marks the beginning of government secrecy about UFOs.

Roswell became national news back in 1947 when a New Mexico tenant farmer named Mac Brazel found some strange-looking stuff in a sheep pasture. In what was either a major public relations faux pas or a slip of the truth, Roswell Army Air Base personnel collected the debris and pronounced it a flying saucer. It took them only 24 hours to retract that statement.

But the stories of alien visitors persisted. Respected citizens reported sightings of a flying disk and strange blue lights. It was rumored that as many as four alien bodies had been collected and spirited away to a secret holding pen at a Texas Air Force base.

The Air Force tried to put the controversy to rest last year with an official report claiming that what was found in Roswell was a radar target that looked like a weather balloon. Unconvinced, a UFO newsletter called The Monitor asked, How could such a lasting mystique have developed around Roswell had there been no more to the story than the crash of a weather balloon?

As for the aliens, the Air Force said, The review of Air Force records did not locate even one piece of evidence to indicate that the Air Force has had any part in an alien body recovery operation or continuing cover-up.

(Maybe they had gone home.)

Cosmic citizens want to know more, but a General Accounting Office (GAO) study, Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash near Roswell, New Mexico, is unlikely to satisfy true new-dimensions believers.

There's no question that Rockefeller's access and money have helped prompt a more open government policy on UFOs. But so far no one in the administration wants to speak on the record about it, much less use it as a platform. The Air Force and the White House both declined to be interviewed on the subject.

But that could change. The tabloids have predicted a new addition to the First Family and Hillary Rodham Clinton, for one, seems to be enjoying the joke. If the space baby comes, she quipped to reporters, we're ready for it.

She is not alone.

by Deborah Lutterbeck