Little Green Men: The Cover-up Continues
by Peter Farley

As any UFO researcher will tell you, the roadblocks set up in his or her way in seeking to understand the subject are numerous. The roadblocks set up to confuse and delude the interested public on the other hand, are often even more insidious and certainly equally as effective.

The most obvious of these roadblocks for the researcher are the denials, disinformation, and deflections provided by the various government and military agencies seemingly since time immemorial. These often include agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and other covert agencies, the various judicial departments, NASA, as well as various elements of the scientific community heavily reliant on the government for their monetary grants and subsequently their livelihood.

Next come the often blatantly hostile attacks put forth by various moral and religious groups, that act as a roadblock to those intimidated by this kind of pressure. One of these was recently launched on myself after my talk in Roswell by a church group acting under the guise of an organization known as Alien Resistance Headquarters. These kind of groups have as their purpose the blockage of any kind of free flow of information and ideas to the public that disagree with their own limited visions. Insecure in their own beliefs, they feel their limited visions of the world will be threatened by the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligences who may not agree with their often dogmatic ideals.

Last but not least comes the most deceptive, least noticeable, and certainly least publicized type of roadblock set up to hinder the inquiring mind from ultimately finding its own truth. This is the roadblock set up by the local businessmen and women of a community under the guise of making an honest dollar. Herein lies the realm of those most nefarious little roadblocks known in UFO circles as ?the little green men.?

Standing all of 5 to 6 inches tall, weighing no more than a few ounces at best, made of malleable green plastic and cast in the image of that most ubiquitous of all aliens?the Grays from Zeta Reticuli?this little alien intruder represents possibly the greatest danger of all to the free and unrestricted discussion of issues surrounding UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation. Representative of a whole broad range of tourist treasures ranging from T-shirts and key chains to refrigerator magnets and false alien Ids, these little green men represent to many investigators, authors, and other persons interested in this field of study, the complete trivialization of the whole alien question.

Complicit in this cover-up of serious questions concerning alien visitation such as abduction, animal mutilation, and possible government interaction with alien forces, are the public-at-large themselves. Ever eager to be led astray from honest solutions to honest problems, steeped in a T-shirt-and-trivia television mentality, the public bares the ultimate responsibility for its own lack of knowledge on many of these issues. It also has to bare some of the responsibility for the ability of certain groups from the government and the corporate-own media to cover them up, seemingly at will.

One might expect that this would certainly not be the case in Roswell, New Mexico, the world?s most recognizable name in terms of its association with the UFO phenomena that has swept the world, particularly over the past five years. To put this kind of assumption on Roswell may be a little unfair, however, since no one in Roswell ever necessarily chose to be the center of this, in certain segments of the population, often unwanted world attention. This small southeastern New Mexico city of around 50,000 people has inherited the role as much as by default as anything else after the alleged crash of a flying saucer north of the city on or around July 4th, 1947.

It was not the crash itself that brought on so much of the attention, however.
Rather it was the article that appeared the following day in the local newspaper, the Roswell Daily Record, after a receiving a press release from the local army air base saying in fact that they had recovered the wreckage of a flying saucer from the crash site. This admission was almost immediately retracted on orders from higher echelons of command. It remains, however, the one slip in an otherwise consistent wall of denial by the government of the existence of UFOs. It, therefore, remains to this day the one chink in the armor to which the whole world clings in hope of finding out the truth about the whole enigmatic phenomenon of UFOs, and ultimately whether or not we are alone in the Universe.

Whether or not this incident really occurred or not is of little or no consequence in the grander scheme of things. Almost any day of the year these days there seem to be credible eyewitness accounts of UFOs and cases of cattle mutilations and abductions that would lead any reasonable human being to believe that we are being visited by extraterrestrial lifeforms. Crop circles appear overnight in various parts of the world and in shapes and sizes that could not be duplicated with anywhere near the complexity using any of the known terrestrial technology.

So, as the Mecca for experiencers and those who want to believe alike from all over the world, Roswell is also perhaps the first city in the world to witness and have to deal with the trivialization of the issues surrounding UFOs to a greater extent and on a larger scale than has ever been dealt with before?even among those who purport to know better.

First opened in 1992 against initial resistance from a staunchly conservative and deeply religious farming community, the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell now attracts as many as 200,000 people a year, and is one of New Mexico?s newest major attractions.

While it houses an interesting and creative display of artifacts from the 1947 incident, the museum devotes almost equally as much space to displays of flying saucer-like hubcaps, newspaper cartoons, Hollywood memorabilia, and even fake pieces of UFO wreckage once pawned off on an eager public as being genuine. Admission is free to the public, and the museum is described as an educational, non-profit institution. It is supported entirely by donations and the income garnered from a small but incredibly well-stocked gift store where both educational materials and the requisite ?little green men? type souvenirs are sold. The gift store?s manager is reluctant to say exactly how much is brought in by the store, but rumors have it that it is considerable. Obviously the fun souvenirs of the ?little green men? type outsell the educational materials?though the ratio is not readily known.

It is not uncommon for one to see a tourist bus unloading passengers at the museum and hordes of anxious sightseers lining up to sign in and then heading straight for the gift shop, bypassing the museum displays altogether. All this for the sake of getting little Johnny or the folks back home a mandatory souvenir of the museum. In Tom Robbin?s cult-classic 1971 novel Another Roadside Attraction, every little town in America was almost required to have some kind of tourist attraction with which to make people stop, at least just long enough to spend some much-needed money in their community. Along these lines, Roswell has found itself a goldmine.

In Roswell?s case, however, the town has managed to tap into something much deeper in the human consciousness than just a desire to relieve some overworked kidneys and gaze at a two-headed boa-constrictor. They instead have tapped into the whole thirst for knowledge by almost every individual on the planet to know why they exist, and whether or not we are alone in the Universe. The question is, does Roswell help to answer these questions for the people attracted to the town?s hype, or does it indeed set up another roadblock along the way to the disclosure of this very vital information?
The much-publicized 1997 50th anniversary celebration of the Roswell Incident drew an impressive list of speakers on various aspects of the subject. Subsequent festivals have drawn, at best, small crowds to what were little more than city-wide fairs centered more around kitsch than serious speakers and honest discussion of the issues. Guided as they have been by local businessmen, and focusing on ?scientific? researchers such as the notorious Dr. Stanton Friedman, these events and the museum itself have now placed their focus heavily on ?scientific? fact rather than on what seems to be of most interest to the public in general?personal experiences and broad-ranging answers to honest questions about life and existence in the Universe.

It is this scientific method that, though having an obvious validity in uncovering some of the clues to help in solving the larger issues, has itself few if any of the answers to explain any of the phenomena it purports to study. It is a limited view in which everything is still an apparent mystery, but by calling it so, the scientists are then able to perpetuate their own superior roles as controllers of the information.

Meanwhile, potential speakers such as Gregg Braden, author of Awakening to Zero Point, and renowned for the depth and integrity of his research on the areas of pole shifts and planetary movements, have been dismissed as being ?too far out? to be recruited among possible speakers for the museum events. Well-documented abductees such as those written about in by psychotherapist, author, and well-known convention speaker Constance Clear in her book, Reaching for Reality, have also been casually dismissed, along with the remark that they ?only say they have been abducted.?

One case of this bias that involved the author of this article brought home the depths to which this roadblock mentality can sink. After a recent standing-room only talk at the museum for the Roswell UFO Festival during which I did my best to cover the immense field of alien involvement in human origins in the short time available, my talk was attacked by Dr. Friedman as being ?unscientific,? and by a fringe-element religious group in the city as being alien-cult related. Covering the ideas of much-vaunted researchers such as Zecharia Sitchin and Laurence Gardner, the material succeeded in putting together the pieces of what obviously is a very complex puzzle. These comments came among almost universally positive feedback from everyone else who attended, though as usual it is the negative complaints that get passed along and not the positive ones. A subsequent request by me to do a book signing at the museum one weekend was denied on the basis, and I quote, that the museum ?didn?t want anything to do with the paranormal? in its facility. How ironic coming from supposedly the world?s foremost UFO museum.

It seems as though if something is not immediately reproducible in the laboratory or does not agree with the accepted scientific community?s view, then it is not fit to be heard by the public, those who can always vote with their feet should they not like what is being presented. This is the same public who have made shows about the paranormal a staple part of our entertainment diets on both television and in movies, as well as in the books that it reads and that it buys. Subjective experiences such as the more than 17,000 UFO sightings on the museum?s database and more than 2,000 personally reported to museum personnel should then, by these definitions, also be dismissed because these people only say they have witnessed a UFO.

Arthur Miller?s famous play The Crucible, a standard in most high schools or universities, is based exactly on this kind of witch-hunting suppression of freedom of speech and free discussion of ideas.

Attached to the museum is also a research library with more than 3,000 books, videos, and sundry files and reports, many of them donated by noted UFO researcher of almost 50 years, George Fawcett. Fawcett?s contributions came from his own personal library and included many books of a philosophical or metaphysical bent, covering the whole field of paranormal phenomena.

Librarians at the research center, all with little or no experience in the subject field, freely admit that they think much of the donated material and books such as those dealing with planetary sacred sites, extradimensional phenomena, and metaphysical studies, shouldn?t be in the library because ?it has nothing to do with UFOs.?

Again, this kind of limited view of the whole enormous field of which UFOs are only one small part, is perhaps the greatest roadblock put in the way of all our hopes to one day find our true place in the Universe. The limiting of what kind of material and information people have access to or can listen to is the most insidious form of control over men?s minds ever devised.

Much of the field of UFOlogy has itself been usurped as personal territory by the religion of science, as evidenced by the number of PhD?s and doctorates listed behind the names of many of the most prominent speakers and researchers in the field. This is not to say that rational judgment isn?t helpful at certain times, but not to the exclusion of all other kinds of creative thought and analysis. When people seek to understand themselves and their place in the Universe through an understanding of extraterrestrial lifeforms and UFOs, the often grandiose and pompous attitudes exhibited by so many in the field who want to decide what is fit and proper information for them to use, serves only to hinder rather than to help.

A good example of this limited scientific thinking occurred recently on an edition of Whitley Streiber?s very popular nationally syndicated radio show, Dreamland. During the whole time the subject of the new harvest of crop circles in England was discussed by a prominent doctor and scientific journalist, every scientific aspect of the crop circles was discussed. What, however, was never mentioned nor even intimated at was the question of what the heck are these crop circles trying to tell us. Electro-magnetic fields, physical effects on people entering the crop circles, military surveillance of the phenomena?all were covered in depth, everything that is but the possible messages these crop circles and their creators were trying to convey.

It is very much like the case of the professor I once had for an honors course in the works of Plato. This scholarly gentleman spent all of his time lecturing on the various intricacies of Socratic argument while admitting he knew none of what it was that either Plato or Socrates were trying to say in these arguments. In these times where the medium has become the message (or the massage as Marshall McLuhan would say), the true messages concerning alien involvement with the planet have fallen by the wayside, hidden by the smoke and mirrors of people?s attitude of self-importance and their desire for power over others. This has become the most effective cover-up of all.

As a journalist and former instructor of journalism, I have watched with heartfelt sadness at the almost complete destruction of our First Amendment Rights in this country. It is, however, the public?s right to know that is at the heart of this current battle in UFO-dom, a right that as we have seen from recent releases under the Freedom of Information Act, has never been very well respected by any of the powers that be.

Where commercialism is concerned, we find the trivialization of the subject matter at hand??the little green men? syndrome. Where either religion or science are allowed to control the areas or topics for debate, the honest search for truth is also trivialized or made impotent by the narrowness of focus.

As Dr. Friedman was so vocal in making known at his recent Roswell appearance, he did not care for the inclusion of so-called ?New Age? speakers among serious speakers at the recent UFO symposium held in Istanbul, Turkey. In almost the same breath he publicly stated, with no apologies to former President Bush or other government and military figures who have used the term, that he believed there was no such thing as the New World Order or its conspiracy.

The real truth of the matter will only be found with the input of all those concerned, and with no information being dismissed as irrelevant. The public should be informed that not only are they the victims of so many of these roadblocks and cover-ups meant to keep them blind to the knowledge around them, but they are also the cause of roadblocks such as those created by the ?little green men? syndrome. They need to be reminded that the lines in the old song are true, ?There are none so blind as those who will not see.?

2006-12-12