SUBJECT: ET CONTACT - THE MEANING AND THE MESSAGE FILE: UFO3299 ET Contact - The Meaning and the Message. The symposium was hosted by the First Sunday contactee group members, through the Society for the Advancement of Civilization, at the UC Berkeley physical sciences building on Sat., Oct. 10, 1992. The conference started out with a town meeting, with the mock mayor role going to Bob Brown. Bob is known for being a co-sponsor of the World UFO Congress hosted each year in Las Vegas, and the producer of UFO videos through his Video City Productions in Oakland. This was a ques- tion and answer session with the questions from "constituents" going to a "town counsel" com- posed of Dr. James Harder, Dr. Leo Sprinkle, Dr. Richard Hains, and Dr. Richard Boylan. Three of the four panelists are psychologists, and Dr. Harder is a civil engineer and Prof. Emeritus of UCBerkeley, with a solid background in the hard sciences. It is beyond the scope of this short synopsis to go into great detail, but I did find the following comments very interesting: When Dr. Harder was asked how many alien races are visiting the Earth, he was reticent to answer the question, except to say that there were at least 20 documented and the he has reason to believe that the true number is very (unbelievably) high. I found this interesting that he would decline to give his full opinion. In the past I have heard him speak of the Galactic Federation, obviously relating information that contactees had given him. Perhaps he has taken a great deal of flak in this regard, and now chooses not to espouse this information publicly. And Dr. Hains, I believe it was, made the comment in response to a different question of mistaking known atmospheric events for UFO's "I don't believe there is such a thing as `ball lightening'", to which many people applauded. A subsequent speaker was Dr. John Salter, who expressed a great deal regarding his own contact experiences over the course of several years. An avid human rights activist, he related the out- come of his FOIA investigations regarding files on him kept by the FBI, and his designation as A1-8 (or similar code) that listed him to be rounded up and detained in the case of civil unrest or declaration of martial law. Dr. John Salter teaches a course in UFO studies at the University of North Dakota that assumes the earth is currently being visited by ET's, and reported that attendance of that class numbers nearly 200 students and is limited by classroom space. He also reported that after his TV appearances on the CBS TV show, Visitors for the Unknown, the US AirForce contracted his services at an AirForce Base to speak to officers and cadets. The main focus of the event was to encourage the open dialog between these researchers, their patients or people they are working with whom have had experiences, and people that want to know more about this phenomena. Later in the program, the individual "experiencers" took the podium, and expressed some of the ideas that were related to them in their ET contacts. I found it interesting that they would basically have the same information to tell, sometimes so much so as to strain the patience of the unprofessional listener. So this seems to be one consistent factor in ET contact that was immediately apparent. Some of the ideas related I have given before in a previous message, and will repeat here: We need to take care of our children with all our love as a society. - (Childrens' rights activists have argued for years that we treat our children in this society as 3rd class human beings. Without the rights, the resources, or the experience of adults, they are at the mercy of their parents, teach- ers and caretakers for almost everything they require to grow up physically and mentally healthy. Virtually indigent, they have no choice in who takes care of their needs, and are vulnerable to a plethora of predators and pitfalls.) We need to take care of our planet. We must change our ways now, or the consequences with be dire. - (Read Sen. Gore's book, he can say it better than I ever will.) We need to stop killing each other, and start loving each other. - (Will we every be free of the few that instigate wars for the many?) Take interest in the human condition, and speak up for civil liberty, and fight intolerance, racism, and injustice. We must work to evolve the human species as a whole. Share these messages, and the fact of our existence with others. The main premise underlying the entire event was the sponsors' belief that much of the current abduction literature is very negative in orientation, and that this only serves to "alienate" people from the underlying idea that all beings are our galactic family, and reinforce paranoia, perhaps to our government's ends. This would tend to go along with what I have heard Michael Lindemann say; "As far as our government is concerned, the only good alien, is a bad alien". And so, from the beginning of the conference, the host told us that they would not be using the term "abductee", because of the negative implications it tends to impose. Instead, the term "experiencer" and "contactee" would be used. In defense of this posture, Dr. Boylan (as I recall) related that his collected database of interviews with abductees tended to indicated that all people who reported a negative experience had a history of child abuse, or similar trauma at an early age. Thus, he believes, as do his colleges to some measure, that this is the bias that tends to make these experiences negative to only some minority of people reporting contacts, and that these underlying traumatic experiences have a great deal to do with why these people seek out help and end up the subjects of popular literature on the subject to date. I think Dr. Harder and his colleagues have a very good point here. While it is possible that some of the Greys are negative in orientation, it is also quite possible that there is more than one race of greys, and that like human beings on earth, some are negative, while the majority are fairly positive individuals. Another main idea that came out of the conference is that we tend to look at the UFO phenomena, and see only ourselves. We relate to everything from our own very limited and myopic viewpoint. They used the term anthropomorphism, which I had to look up in the dictionary, to be sure I understood, it being years since I took a social studies class: "The interpretation of what is not human or personal, in terms of human or personal characteristics". To analyze the ET experience in such terms is to limit it within the bounds of our own human experience, and surely limits it to a degree that insures we would never completely understand it. That is why the panelists prefer to largely abstain from judgement, and listen, document and analyze the information given to us by the experiencers. This last point is very important, and I feel it goes unheard much too often; to abstain from judgement. This is not easy to do; so often we want answers today, and make up our minds quickly on a given case or branch of UFOlogy, which tends to blind us in the future to new data constantly becoming available. I found it heartening that the dozen or so "experiencers" were willing to get up in front of people and share some of their thoughts. All seemed very lucid, and none were of a nature that I would have assumed to be psychotic. All were very genuine; as none of them were professional speakers that had any monetary gain to look forward to by communicating with the audience. It showed great courage to be in front of 400 people and claim that ET's contact you on a regular basis. In light of that idea, I found it ironic that many people did not attend the symposium, because such sharing threatens their concept of reality. The insensitive, uniformed, and unimpressed right-off the "abductees" as kooks. But to do so is to deny this new factor of the human experience. For when tens of thousands of people around the world are reporting such things every year, that is exactly what we are talking about, the birth of a new chapter in the book of human experience. Such can also be said for the AIDS virus, and the exploration of space. Perhaps there are parallels in ancient human history, but in modern times, these are new experiences that people were not having 40 years ago. For information on Audio/Video tapes of this event, contact the following individuals or groups. When I asked at the conference, it was not clear if video tapes would be made available or not, so it may depend on how many people request them in the coming weeks: SAC PO Box 9073 Berkeley, CA 94709-9073 Bob Brown Video City Productions Oakland, CA. 510-428-0202 Charles Wren Shining Star Media (Audio tapes) 1781 Castlegate Rd. San Jose, CA 95132 408-929-9290 ********************************************************************* * -------->>> THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo <<<------- * *********************************************************************