White House: No Evidence That ETs Have Reached Out To Touch Us -- Or Even Exist
There's no evidence of any extraterrestrial life and "no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye."
And there you have it, straight from the White House's mouth, so to speak. UFO aficionados, skeptics and believers alike have waited patiently since September to see how the Obama administration would respond to two petitions under the new "We the People" program.
According to the official response written and released Friday evening by Phil Larson at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, while the government is saying it has "no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race," the door is still open to the possibility and search efforts "of life outside our planet."
And those efforts include the ongoing Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- or SETI -- which uses ground-based telescopes to try and tune in to signals from another world.
Larson's response also mentions the Kepler spacecraft in Earth's orbit, searching for Earth-like planets, and the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory, a car-size vehicle that will explore the geology of the red planet to look for any of the building blocks of life.
Undoubtedly, the minions who believe that Earth has already been visited by at least one race of extraterrestrials -- citing photographic, film, video tape, radar returns and landing traces as evidence -- will surely be disappointed with the White House's "no evidence" stance.
Steven Bassett, who penned the first alien disclosure petition in September, isn't satisfied with the White House response and has announced on his Paradigm Research Group site his intention of filing another petition.
"The [White House] response was unacceptable. Much feedback is likely. PRG will begin to pre-promote a new petition relevant to the Disclosure process ... and will continue to keep the Disclosure issue front and center within this attempt at participatory democracy by the Obama administration," Bassett wrote.
If someone, like Bassett, isn't happy with the response given by the Obama administration, he or she can turn right around and file a new petition with no restrictions.
"There's no reason someone couldn't submit a second petition," White House spokesman Matt Lehrich told The Huffington Post in an e-mail Monday. "If it crosses the threshold [of 25,000 signatures], it will get a response. Obviously, if the petition is very similar, it may garner a similar response."
Any backlash to the White House ET response will most likely come from people and organizations who will point to the thousands of pages of previously classified government documents about UFOs -- many of which clearly indicate that some UFO encounters with military forces and airline pilots in the past were considered so important that they weren't disclosed to the public.
Of course, anything in the sky that can't be identified is a UFO. Experts, government officials and military personnel have often been unable to explain away sightings. That doesn't prove the existence of ETs, but it convinces many that we are not alone in the universe.
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First Posted: 11/07/11 01:44 PM ET Updated: 11/08/11 08:08 AM ET