We don't need to tell you that the next president of the United States is going to have a lot to do. He has to fix the economy, the environment and Wall Street. And he's going to have to explain the whole UFO thing to the U.S. public, if the Paradigm Research Group has its way.

The group, which says it is dedicated to ending the "government imposed Truth Embargo regarding an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race," is launching a pressure campaign it hopes will force the government to fess up. Its Million Fax on Washington campaign is just that: an initiative to bury the next president in faxes and mail, all of it demanding that the U.S. government reveal the truth about its alleged knowledge of UFO activity.

In an interview with Wired.com, Paradigm founder Stephen Bassett says that President Carter, who reported seeing a UFO in 1969, signed off on two studies after taking office but that they were kept under wraps for national security reasons. Bassett says reports of extraterrestrial sighting have been on the upswing since the end of the Cold War, creating pressure on the government to "disclose."

"Witnesses are coming forward," Bassett says, "and 50 percent of the U.S. public believes that this is real."

Adding to the pressure is recent moves by other nations.

"You have the U.K. declassifying reports of extraterrestrial sightings," Bassett says, "and members of the Mexican Air Force videotaping what they think are UFOs."

He says China is also conducting UFO research, but France is the most likely nation to disclose unilaterally. "They are a proud, independent people," he explains. "And they're very sensitive to their legacy. This is an area where they can take the lead."

Extraterrestrial work is nothing new for Bassett, who in the 1990s studied at the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research in

Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Laugh if you want, but the organization was founded by Dr. John Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and psychiatry professor at Harvard

Medical School). In 1996, Bassett founded Paradigm with the goal of

"using all means possible to confront the United States."

In 1999, he got political by founding the Extraterrestrial Phenomena

Political Action Committee, the first PAC in history to target the politics of UFO/ET phenomena. Paradigm's work has included supporting political candidates, lobbying for congressional hearings on extraterrestrials and hosting the annual X-Conference, an event designed to share collective knowledge about the government's involvement with extraterrestrial phenomena.

Bassett says disclosure offers the incoming president an ideal chance to win over a tired, mistrustful public.

"You're coming off eight years of an administration known for its secrecy," he says. "Disclosure is a way to break with the past and start fresh." He calls Barack Obama "an innocent on the issue" but says John McCain would have more to explain for.

"He's been in Washington for a long time. With all his military contacts, you have to wonder if he already knows."

Bassett seems confident that his fax campaign will be a success, and is counting on viral marketing to help spread the word (his Facebook group has only 76 members, but it's early). For Bassett, the big question is not whether disclosure will happen, but what will follow.

"It is going to be fascinating to watch the tug of war between the people and the government once this gets out," he says. "The people will want to know everything, but some of the information will be held for national security reasons."

Bassett says disclosure would be the most profound event in human history. "With all due respect to the Christ event," it took a long time for that information to be disseminated. "With this, the impact will be instant."

Photo: UFO Casebook

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