Hoping to take advantage of the more open type of government President Obama espoused during his election campaign, 5,387 people have signed a petition asking for the immediate release of any information the government has concerning extraterrestrial life. Another group managed to get 12,078 people to sign a petition asking the government to admit that the U.S. government has been actively engaged in hiding evidence of visits by extraterrestrial beings. Now, the government has responded via the Internet. Phil Larson from the Office of Science and Technology has posted a response on the official White House web site called We the People. A project put in place to specifically address questions or concerns by anybody that is able to get 25,000 signatures, online or on paper. And while neither of these groups was able to come near that figure, the White House decided to respond anyway.
The first sentence says it all, “The U.S. government 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.”
Larson went on to say that as far as he and his colleagues can tell, no credible evidence has ever been brought to the government for study. He does acknowledge that there is a possibility that intelligent life could exist out there, and cites many government entities actively pursuing leads to that effect. He also points out that the government does contribute funds to research projects activity engaged in searching for such life, such as the SETI project, which has a bunch of radio antennas pointed at the sky in the Mojave desert, listing twenty four hour a day for anything that might offer evidence of other worldly life.
The site also provides links to pages that describe the petitions that have been signed. The first one calls on the President to “disclose to the American people the long withheld knowledge of government interactions with extraterrestrial beings.”
The second one urges the President to “formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race” and to release any information the government has collected over the years.
No mention was made to specific incidents in either petition or in the response from the White House, such as the supposed crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico back in 1947. Because of the way the response from the White House was worded, there was apparently no need as no evidence at all, would include such incidents if they ever actually occurred.