It's time for Earth's leaders to reach out and embrace some alien concepts, writes DAN ZAKin Washington
EXTRATERRESTRIALS EXIST and they visit Earth routinely, according to people who know this for a fact.
What does this mean for Washington, for America, for the planet? It means, according to the roughly 400 people attending the fifth X-Conference at the weekend, that politics isn’t local anymore.
It’s galactic. It’s universal. This is “exopolitics”.
In the banquet hall of a Hilton in suburban Maryland, there were no alien costumes. There were PhDs, ex-military men, activists and concerned citizens. They sat in on lectures with such titles as Obama and Disclosure. They browsed tables stocked with books such as Exopolitics: How Does One Speak to a Ball of Light?They talked about black budgets and quantum cosmology.
People in the exopolitical movement want full disclosure of any US government files on unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrials.
Only then, they maintain, can mankind deal with the sociopolitical implications of the universe: the rule of law in outer space, the sharing of technology between civilisations, and the physics of one-on-one interaction with ETs.
“No, we’re not alone,” said Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, speaking at the X-Conference on Sunday. “Our sun will burn out in due course, and we have to be off this planet . . . Our consumption rate of non-renewable resources is not sustainable . . . Our destiny is to become part of the planetary community. It’s time to start thinking in those terms.”
Forget “eco”. The most urgent prefix today, the X-Conference suggests, is “exo”. We need to evolve into an exoculture. We need to be exoconscious, to reframe our minds for interstellar relations and interdimensional experiences.
“If we live off-planet, we have to change our mind and bodies,” says Rebecca Hardcastle, a hypnotherapist and exoconsciousness coach from Phoenix, Arizona. “Your emotions, life force and what you’ve been taught is a belief system that cords you to the Earth. We must change our frame of reference.”
Hardcastle, wearing pearls and a black dress, says she has been contacted by ET intelligence since she was three. She, and others in the exopolitical community, say we must learn remote viewing and teleportation, propagate the practice of ESP, let ETs change us, and integrate technology and consciousness so we can participate in the universe.
What’s the secret? Diet and exercise and balanced living, says Hardcastle. Yoga and peacefulness, say others.
To be sure, conspiracy theories and creepy claims are a big part of the X-Conference – even an audiovisual glitch is a cue for mild paranoia.
When California podiatric surgeon Roger Leir takes the microphone, the topic is extraterrestrial implants. “How many of you have seen a UFO?” Leir asks the audience before showing video of alleged implant extraction surgery.
More than 100 people put up their hands.
“How many think you’ve been involved with the alien abduction programme?” Five hands go up.
"How many of you think you've been abducted and have never returned?" There is laughter. There is also a sentiment of acceptance and adaptation. Once we get our act together, once we understand our own selves, the ETs will engage us, says Michael Salla, president and founder of the Hawaii-based nonprofit Exopolitics Institute, which offers an online semester in galactic diplomacy for a little more than $1,000.
“Humanity is still tribalistic, driven by elite interests rather than global ones,” Salla says. “But with Barack Obama, for the first time in our planet’s history, we have a global leader. It’s a tremendous advance in our global society.” On the TV in the hotel lobby, Obama shakes hands with Hugo Chávez.
Over the past year, the British government has released thousands of documents pertaining to UFOs, attendees say. And Mitchell the astronaut is out in full force, saying the existence of ETs was confirmed to him 10 years ago by a member of the joint chiefs of staff (who subsequently denied it, but that’s how these things go).
The ridicule is ebbing, conference attendees say. The exopolitical movement has gone grass roots; the education and outreach phase is under way. One attendee is collecting 4,000 signatures in favour of a Denver Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission.
Another is calling upon the UN to create an “extraterrestrial civilisations liaison”.
For Nick Pope, in charge of UFO investigations for Britain’s Ministry of Defence in the early 90s, the bogeys in the sky are simply a matter of national security. “If we ignore UFOs because of the baggage that term has in people’s minds – because we don’t believe in flying saucers – it opens up a gap in our capacity to deal with these things . . . It’s dangerous. We’re ignoring a potential air-safety issue.”
Exopolitics: It’s about air-traffic control, honest government, self-empowerment, and healthy living and bold declarations of reaching for the stars. Ask too many questions, though, and you’ll see exopolitics is also about a race of humanoids who live under the barren surface of Mars and may, at some point, desire to mooch off Earth’s rich resources.
Exopolitics "provides a conceptual framework for dealing with our highly populated universe," says author, lawyer and activist Alfred Webre, who coined the term 10 years ago and has watched it creep into the mainstream. He also says the Martians are keeping to themselves for now. – ( LA Times-Washington Post service)