By Billy Cox
De Void
8-30-13
Last December, when he was organizing the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, Stephen Bassett thought he saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Five straight days of UFO testimony in Washington, D.C., and Americans would be clamoring for more coverage.
"The media is the most powerful lever the public has to stick it to government," he said then. "Without the media, its almost impossible to press the government to take action in the public interest... We'll create so much public interest, a lot of the editors are gonna say, Christ almighty, enough is enough, that's it, let's get some answers from these guys. And if they ask the right questions, I predict the truth embargo will be over within 60 days."
Four months gone now since the week-long parade of eyewitnesses - some impeccable, some dubious - participated in a mock congressional hearing at the National Press Club. Coverage was erratic, often snarky and most definitely allergic to follow-ups, even with veterans testifying to bad juju surrounding U.S. nuclear missiles. Which apparently proves that, in order to impress the media, it'll take a lot more than 600,000, the conservatively estimated retail price for putting the Citizen Hearing together.
Q: So where do these desultory results leave Bassett's Paradigm Research Group?
A: Gearing up for the next round.
With continuing financial assistance from Vancouver millionaire Tom Clearwater, PRG is transferring all this videotaped testimony - some 30 hours worth - into multi-DVD sets; by late October, it plans to have sent them to the offices of all 535 Congressional members. Then comes a followup social media/email blast requesting that Disclosure advocates pressure the pols - or at least staffers - to review the videos, then lobby them to meet with Bassett about staging real hearings on The Hill. The reasoning here is that, with record-breaking, bottom-sucking popularity numbers, way down there in the muck with the albino catfish, skates and methane-eating microbes, elected officials will have to think twice about blowing off constituent requests.
But there's no getting around the media flop on the front end. Bassett acknowledges that. "It did not get anywhere near to what I thought it would get. There were no network interviews at all," he says. "We just didn't have enough money to drive media awareness. Between that and the bombing nine days before the hearings..."
Right - the Boston Marathon bombings. Media commitment to that horror story drained the air out of the Hearings and practically everything else that went down in May. Bassett has a right to feel snakebit. In 2002, he ran for Congress in Maryland's 8th District on a platform of UFO disclosure. As his independent campaign rounded the home stretch that October, car-trunk snipers Lee Boyd Malvo and John Muhammad decided open fire on Beltway-area voters who weren't all that interested in hearing about UFO coverups at that point.
Anyway, Bassett remains convinced his use of "extraterrestrial presence" is the right way to flag Congress, and that detractors who say the ET riff is premature are the ones playing games.
"The number of potential Earth-like planets that can sustain liquid water has increased exponentially," he says, referring to this summer's Astrophysical Journal Letters hypothesizing that as many as 60 billion habitable worlds could exist in the Milky Way alone. "We have zero evidence for operating in another dimension or moving around in time. Politically, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if you're talking about time travel or ETs or whatever, OK? Semantics is just another debunking tool."
So here's the context for PRG's next round: Only one (1) percent of Americans think Capitol Hill is doing an "excellent" job, and just 6 percent label its work as "good," according to a recent Rasmussen Poll. "Poorly" - that's a euphemism for what 64 percent think. In fact, the 113th Congress is on track to become Americas most worthless collection of public "servants" since evaluations began in 1948. Now, throw in WikiLeaks revelations about unending malfeasance abroad, garnish with Edward Snowdens exposes on domestic surveillance, then marinate with a generation of disillusioned and wired digital-native millennials who, for some reason, think American institutions are diseased and contagious. Slide this broth into the oven and Bassett figures he's got a winning recipe for Disclosure hearings.
"Gee, would the NSA lie about surveillance on the American people, would the president lie about WMD in Iraq? What the millennials see is a government that will lie about anything," Bassett says. "They lie about war, they lie about peace, what's to stop them from lying about extraterrestrials? We're going to need the participation of the 20 to 35 crowd. They're the ones who are going to make the difference."
And if that approach doesn't work, well, as long as mysterious Tom Clearwater, a reputed oil man, keeps the money coming, no doubt something else will.
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See Also:
Group Wants Global Effort to Unveil UFO Evidence
Stephen Basset Offers His Take In The Wake of The Citizen Hearing for [UFO/Alien] Disclosure
Bassett Doubles Down on UFO Disclosure
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Origin: truth-just-ahead.blogspot.com
