What You Missed at the 2013 Citizen Hearings on Extraterrestrials

Image: MIKI Yoshihito

Earlier this year, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, six former members of the United States Congress (including a former United States Senator) listened to over 30 hours of expert witness testimony in five days. The weeklong event was called the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, and the topic of the hearings was the events and evidence indicating that an extraterrestrial presence has been traveling to Earth and engaging with the human race. For UFOlogists and X-Files fans, the event was the wettest dream imaginable—the most concentrated body of evidence regarding extraterrestrial life ever presented to the press and the general public at one time.

For the last few years, Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell, an ex-MMA martial athlete turned filmmaker and artist, has been interviewing what he called “cosmic whistle-blowers,” people who have been at high levels within the US military and intelligence organizations. He’s currently in production of a few films documenting his work, one of which is titled Truth Embargo. The film follows three major individuals—a journalist, a historian, and an activist—as they put their entire careers on the line to prove the existence of not just one, but multiple types of alien life forms, and the government’s attempts to hide this from the public. Jeremy was nice enough to send us over a few clips, which are completely insane.

This week, I called him up to talk about aliens, and to be honest, I’m still pretty skeptical. I seriously doubt that aliens are beaming down to Earth and anally probing Southerners on the regular, or that they’re somehow in cahoots with the US government building a death ray. Jeremy never really offered me any solid proof, just a lot of “if I showed you what I’ve seen, it’d blow your mind” sort of thinking. That said, I’d probably self-immolate if I thought humans really were the only living creatures in an empty universe, so there better be something up there, if for no other reason than to put this gibbering, blubbering species out of its fucking misery.

VICE: Hi Jeremy. Do you believe in aliens?
Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: [Laughs] I no longer have the luxury of disbelief. Humanity is being engaged by non-humans—whether our minds can handle that fact or not is an open question. The realization that we are not alone is only the beginning. If you’d been witness to the testimony at the Citizen Hearing, it’s pretty compelling evidence for an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race when you listen to this stuff for a week at the National Press Club, two blocks from the White House.

At the citizen’s hearing, what kind of proof did you hear of the existence of Aliens?
So much. We have astronauts telling us that they’ve seen ships out in space, we have military pilots ordered to engage mile-wide craft on record, on radar. You can see the radar reports. You have guys that ran the minutemen missiles, this is on record documented by our military—in one incident, 10 missiles were shut down systematically by a glowing red disc hovering over the silo shooting a laser beam down inside. When you sit for a week in the National Press Club and hear these passionate people who’ve been holding these secrets for decades, secrets of what they saw and what they know. Some of these witnesses were admittedly part of the government’s disinformation programs.

How come the US seems to have a monopoly on this information? Were the Soviets being contacted during the Cold War?
Forget the Cold War. There is a global phenomenon of contact that has been going on since the beginning of recorded human history.

[Laughs] OK.
There is a rich history of government documentation regarding this issue. There’s mountains of government-documented evidence of non-terrestrial craft that has been invading our airspace. Some governments, like Brazil, Mexico, France, and England, have released some of their files. America just started doing this, in an almost comical way. The question is, who controls it? We have teams that are designated for crash retrieval globally. But who’s controlling it? I don’t know, but it seems like the US has a pretty strong monopoly on this stuff since at least World War Two.

When was the first moment that changed your mind and made you a believer?
Well, I’ve never seen a huge craft in the sky, but there have been a few personal experiences that have confirmed to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are being engaged by non-humans, and that the government knows about it. Honestly, my mind was changed very slowly, through a methodical accumulated history, as well as through a few specific sources over the years. Anybody can connect the dots if they want to. I’ve always been fascinated by the extraordinary beliefs and experiences of highly credible individuals, like the men and women who spoke at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure. These are highly trained professionals: astronauts, military pilots, FAA officials, researchers, even the past Defense Minister of Canada. These people aren’t crazy—they’re highly trained professionals, some of whom we’ve entrusted to have their fingers on the nuclear weapons of our country.

Since you started working on this film, certain information has come to light, especially about what went on at Area 51—it wasn’t anything extraterrestrial, they were testing the U-2.
No, that’s a huge bluff. What you’ve heard is that the government informally announced that Area 51 exists by not redacting its title in official documents. My mentor, investigative journalist George Knapp, announced the existence of Area 51 and has been reporting on it since the late 80s. The U-2 was a huge part of what happened at the facility, sure. But it’s a joke that this was the entirety of what went on. They’re just propagating a fake story that all that happened at Area 51 was related to the testing of U-2s and Stealth Fighters. I know this to be false. I have spoken with numerous credible individuals from the inside.

Well… what really happened there?
Area 51 appears to have been a place where some of the most secret aeronautics and propulsion projects were manifesting. The public ones were the U-2 and the Stealth Fighter. There’s a secret complex built into the side of a mountain at Papoose Lake called S-4. This is where we hold and have test flown a number of non-terrestrial craft.

Why does the government want to hide this?
Some people say the American public wouldn’t be ready for it, or that religion would crumble. All that’s bullshit. The people at the highest level have told me that there’s nothing that would harm us. The true architects of the secrecy aren’t the governments of the world, but the visitors themselves. If they wanted to be revealed, fully and openly, they would reveal themselves. But there are of course those who believe we aren’t able to handle the truth because it’s much bigger than religion or anything we could possibly imagine, and we might not like the answers to our quesitons.   After what I’ve learned, I can’t rule that out.  But I believe knowledge is power, and the holders of the secrets have no right.

It’s clear that you’re convinced of the existence of extraterrestrials. How will you use your film to convince people of this belief?
I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. It doesn’t work to tell someone we’re being engaged by aliens, and have been since the beginning of human history, or that extraterrestrials may have modified our DNA and had a hand in orchestrating our culture, language, writing, and religious belief systems. You don’t just say that to someone because it means nothing. But if I do my job right with this film, what I will convey is that serious, credible, and often military individuals have put every shred of their personal credibility on the line in order to tell the public that reality is extraordinarily different than what we’re being told. I hope to allow people to be open enough to construct their own architecture of understanding, which could become a more permanent facet to their character.

Truth Embargo will be released later this year. For now, head to TruthEmbargoMovie.com. Also, watch Motherboard’s recent documentary on Colorado’s UFO watchtower here.

Follow Ben on Twitter: @b_shap

This post originally appeared at VICE.