In his opening statement, Mr. Strieber said of abduction, "It's a tough, difficult, complex experience. It's one thing to say it's a wonderful experience, and we should all have it. It's another thing to say it's terrible, and we need to get rid of all these aliens! How do we do either one of these things? The answer is, we don't know. BUT, with effort we can begin to manage, and even control, to some extent, our side of this. I think that the best weapon we have to deal with this is each other - operating, and working in concert - so that when this experience emerges into our lives, we react to it in a consistent way, instead of the chaotic and confused way that all of the secrecy that surrounds it has mandated so far."

It struck me that this quote not only applies to abduction, but to the entire UFO question.

"I know," Strieber continues, "that the 'Visitors' (Those beings generally known as 'the Grays', who appear and then take abductees, perform medical experiments on them, emplace implants in them, and even mate with them.) are physically real. I'm sure of it! I don't know what they are, or where they're from, or if they're from another planet. But, I know that because of so much video that's been made in Mexico, and now also in the U.S., and other spots around the world...the UFO enigma is a physical enigma. I don't know what the connection is between the abduction experience and the UFOs. We've never gotten a case where we've captured an abduction on video. Therefore, we have only anecdotal evidence to relate the two things."

The greatest reason for there being only "anecdotal evidence" about the UFO question lies squarely with the Air Force. According to Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt in their book UFO Crash At Roswell, "On July 8, 1947, in a press release issued by USAAF First Lieutenant Walter Haut, at Roswell, New Mexico the world was informed that flying discs were real. It read: 'The many rumors regarding flying discs became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the Sheriff's office of Chaves County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week.(July 2, 1947). Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters."

The next day the Air Force refuted its press release and said the wreckage was that of a weather balloon. Major Jesse Marcel was forced to pose with the remains of a balloon. Haut, still alive today, openly admits the lie, as does Marcel and others who were present at the time, but threatened with loss of jobs, prison, or loss of life if they told what they had seen! This was the beginning of an on going program of deceit foisted on the American public by the U.S. Air Force, and government. To this day they deny the existence of the wreckage strewn field found by Mac Brazel, the ranch foreman, and also the discovery of a disk, and bodies of it's crew, at Corona, all of the above collected by the Army, and sent to Fort Worth, Texas, and then on to Wright Field, in Dayton, Ohio. In his book, Crash At Corona, Stanton Friedman says, "For a few hours on July 8, 1947, the lid was off and it was possible to peek inside the mystery. The lid was then slammed back down so firmly and so authoritatively that nearly everyone soon forgot it had ever been off." To this day, almost 50 years later, the entire UFO matter has been tightly shrouded in secrecy. And, to this day, Lt. Haut, and the Marcel family, who were shown various kinds of wreckage by Jesse, maintain the wreckage was not that of a weather balloon, but of an extraterrestrial craft.

Robert O. Dean served at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe), NATO in Brussels Belgium in the 1960s as a Master Sergeant in the U.S. Army. He held a Cosmic Top Secret clearance, and was made to read a document called the "Assessment", dealing with UFO's and whether they posed a military threat to NATO forces in Europe. The report was ordered by British Air Marshall Thomas Pike, and General Lyman Lemnitzer, in response to hundreds of confirmed sightings of mysterious, fast moving UFOs over military installations in western Europe.

Speaking at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Dean said, "According to what I read in the Assessment, the Earth is being visited by at least four different civilizations," Having read it, I know the reality of UFOs. I know the reality of extraterrestrial intelligence. I know there's an intimate relationship that's been going on for years. I know that as of 1976 our government knew what we were dealing with are: multidimensional, extraterrestrial, extra solar, extragalactic. It wasn't somebody coming here from Venus, or wherever, it's much, much more complicated than that "The Assessment also concludes that the visitors are peaceful, as with their highly advanced technology, they could have taken over Earth long ago. It also said they are increasing contact with us; a gradual plan with which they eventually want to interact with Earth's inhabitants. We're not alone. We've never been alone. We're a part of a vast and infinite community of life." Bob Dean was one of the few allowed to share the secret.

"The trouble is," Whitley Strieber states, "you and I are living this secret. Our children are living this secret. Since 1991 there has been an explosion of UFO footage taped in Mexico, and in Colorado, and Arizona. Since October of last year, a wave of close encounters and abductions, have taken place all over the world. They are totally overlooked by the major media, who are part of the cover up. We abductees are suffering with this, frayed around the edges from coping with the secret. Our republican form of government is in deep trouble, because if we don't know the major issues in our society - and this is a major issue - then this is no longer a republic; they're running an oligarchy (a government run by the few). The ones who know the secrets are the only ones who are free. We are not free! The republic stops where the secrets start! I think they're scared (the government) - I think they're the ones who would panic if the secrets are disclosed, not us. It just could well be that there are Aliens here, and there may be some kind of complicity; that the secrecy is being ordered, and the government has agreed to it. It's as if the Alien's lives, or ours, depend on it!"

END

Editor's note: All emphasis and information in parenthesis are the author's