![]() “I’m just looking at this desert and I’m going, ‘We have no idea what is out there,’ ” he recalls. ![]() After passing the International UFO Museum, Bassett drove into a vacant expanse of desert and experienced an intense revelation. Bassett’s focus is not “lights in the sky” but “lies on the ground.” Screenshots courtesy of Stephen Bassett.Īlong the way, Bassett stopped in Roswell, New Mexico, site of the famous 1947 crash that left metallic wreckage of something-some say it was a weather balloon, others insist it was a UFO-littered across a ranch. He secured a volunteer position with Mack’s organization, the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research, and in 1996 set off on the more-than-3,000-mile drive from his home in San Luis Obispo, California, to its headquarters in Boston. ![]() But it wasn’t until he reviewed the numerous accounts of supposed alien encounters explored by Mack-a Harvard psychiatry professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning author-that he decided to pursue the subject more seriously. Bassett had long maintained a peripheral interest in the subject of extraterrestrials, devouring science fiction as a child and following stories of alien contact that occasionally popped up in the media. It was around this time that Bassett read a canonical work of UFO research, Abduction by John Mack. “You realize if you don’t do something proactive,” he says, “you’re just going to fade away, and you’ll be gone.” By the mid-1990s, he was 49 years old, unmarried, and unhappy. Petersburg, Florida, in 1970, he began bouncing from one job to the next-EPA official, tennis pro, business consultant-while struggling to find his life’s purpose. After earning a physics degree from what’s now called Eckerd College in St. “The President of the United States will publicly confirm the extraterrestrial presence is in fact real- we are not alone in the universe.”īassett got into UFO activism 26 years earlier, during a period of personal despair. The government, he insists, is still sitting on far bigger secrets, and he won’t stop pushing for answers until the White House makes a complete disclosure. ![]() Federal intelligence officials have no explanation for the vast majority of the sightings, and some are concerned that the strange objects could be advanced technology developed by adversaries such as Russia or China.īut while encouraged that Congress was willing to hold a public hearing, Bassett is far from satisfied. Over the past five years, the Navy has begun establishing a more formal reporting process for pilots who spot mysterious objects in the sky, intelligence agencies have publicly documented 144 cases of unidentified aircraft, and both the Department of Defense and NASA have launched efforts to help make sense of it all. Though long dismissed as the delusions of science fiction, UFOs have emerged as a serious subject in the nation’s capital. “It’s that anxiety that you get when you’re getting close to the finish line,” he says, “but it’s still not clear it’s a done deal.” Yet as he watched official Washington finally take the topic seriously, an uneasy feeling struck him. As DC’s first registered UFO lobbyist, he’d spent more than a quarter century pleading for lawmakers and the administration to stop snickering at the issue. Photograph by Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images.įor Bassett, this first public congressional hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years was a milestone. But they are real.” Congress recently held a hearing on UFOs after a government report documented 144 sightings of unidentified aircraft. “For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis,” André Carson, the Democratic congressman from Indiana who chairs the House Intelligence subcommittee that had organized the event, told the audience. As the proceedings got underway, one of the Pentagon higher-ups played recently declassified footage showing a mysterious object darting across the sky. Over the next hour and a half, he stared at his 43-inch LCD monitor and observed stern-faced military officials in a congressional hearing room answer lawmakers’ questions about the unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs-another term for UFOs-that servicemembers had encountered in recent years. On a Tuesday morning in mid-May, Stephen Bassett flipped open his laptop, logged on to YouTube, and watched live-streamed coverage of America’s elected representatives doing something he’d waited years to see.
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