Canadian Ex-Official Claims ETs Shop in Las Vegas, Secretly Manipulated Earth for Centuries

1/15/2014

A former Canadian cabinet minister claimed on a Russian-operated English-language cable television channel that as many as eighty species of extraterrestrials are currently operating on earth, that they have been influencing human civilization for thousands of years, and that two individual aliens recently went shopping in Las Vegas while dressed as nuns.

I am not making this up, though I wish I were. The Russian story led Iran’s official news agency to issue a fabricated report that Edward Snowden’s document leak contained information about a race of “Tall White” aliens who masterminded events in Nazi Germany and then the United States. According to the Iranian fabrication, the Nordic aliens plan to assimilate into human society and take over the world under the leadership of Barack Obama, which is somewhat confusing since, while he is tall, he is not white.

Paul Hellyer served as Minister of National Defence under Lester B. Pearson in the min-1960s but did not become a believer in UFOs until, he claimed, he watched ABC newscaster Peter Jennings’s controversial February 2005 UFO special. Inspired by the television report, he began reading UFO books and soon after accused then-U.S. President George W. Bush of conducting an “intergalactic war.” In 2010 he claimed Stephen Hawking was working to spread misinformation designed to hide the fact that aliens had been manipulating humanity, possibly for thousands of years.

He had recently appeared at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in 2013 where he claimed that four species of alien worked on earth, and two aliens were operatives working within the U.S. government.

His latest claims, broadcast on RT’s Sophie Co, follow a familiar pattern of increasingly extreme and paranoid ideas. The four species have now, according to media reports, become eighty (including Greys and Nordic aliens), the number working for the U.S. government has grown, and the aliens’ influence has gone from occasional to pervasive.

Hellyer is currently 90 years old, and he developed his belief in aliens when he was in his 80s. Hellyer’s claims all derived from fringe books he read after 2005, four decades after he served in government. If ever there were a case where irresponsible television promotion of fringe claims led directly to an audience member’s belief in fringe material, this would be it. There is not enough evidence to suggest that his age contributed to his acceptance of aliens, but frankly I don’t know what to make of somebody who saw a UFO show on TV and decided to believe. It reminds me of my 97-year-old grandfather, a Democrat and a liberal since the time of FDR, who became aggressively conservative a few years ago, when he became a regular Fox News viewer. My late grandmother, who adored Hillary Clinton, similarly changed in the last years of her life after becoming a daylong Fox News viewer.

I have no idea where Hellyer got his “information” about alien nuns shopping in Las Vegas.

However, this does dovetail nicely with an editorial appearing in Op-Ed News that takes the History channel to task for Ancient Aliens, writing that

Millions of people take it seriously, largely because it has the general appearance of a "science" program, and because it appears on an "educational" channel. Ironically, this "educational" series actually "dumbs down" the typical viewer.

The author goes on to make a good point about the differences between Ancient Aliens and its long-ago predecessor In Search of… (which had been spun off of In Search of Ancient Astronauts, itself an adaptation of Erich von Däniken’s works, just like Ancient Aliens). The older show presented mainstream views as well as controversial ones, and it presented a disclaimer about its controversial positions, noting that other interpretations were possible. Ancient Aliens does not carry a disclaimer, something even Destination America’s Unsealed: Alien Files does.

[Update: A recording of Unsealed I reviewed carried a disclaimer, but I can't find evidence that the show uses one regularly. It's possible that the recording I viewed had a disclaimer added by a local station or international broadcaster more sensitive than the show and was not actually part of the production.]

There’s a reason for that--Unsealed was originally produced for syndication on broadcast television stations, like In Search of…, and therefore uses disclaimers to avoid getting its stations into any trouble with the FCC, which regulates broadcast (but not cable) TV. In the past, the FCC had required fairness in presenting controversial issues, and while that requirement is no longer in force, broadcast stations still operated on a stricter set of standards than cable. It is the very fact that cable is not regulated that makes Ancient Aliens possible in its current form.

The editorial, however, doesn’t really have any research to back up its claims, and its author, Jonathan W. Maxwell, has published his own books through a publisher often described as a stealth vanity press.

But, here is the takeaway: Cable TV says alien nuns are in your malls and supermarkets!

I hate cable.

23 Comments

Only Me

1/15/2014 08:01:42 am

In the name of our blessed credit scores,

All your capitalism are belong to us!

Amen

Anonymous

1/15/2014 08:12:06 am

There's a Police Force in Scotland that's got a File claiming someone was killed by an extraterrestrial. This is no joke. This is serious. It was featured on a serious television documentary.

The Other J.

1/15/2014 08:04:06 am

I've wondered just how much of a role the sweeping media deregulation of the 1980's played in the substance-free, mile-wide-inch-deep media environment we now live in. It effectively means news and factual programming has to compete with entertainment, and it has a direct impact on how well a democracy functions because it plays a role in how well-informed the electorate is.

For examples, before the sweeping deregulation, if a radio station was to be licensed it had to have a news department. Those were always loss-leaders, but their job was to basically keep the public up to date on local and state news that would otherwise be buried in the minutes of a town meeting. And that news was brought to you at the top and the bottom of the hour, so even if you weren't really paying attention, you were at least familiar with the ramifications of, say, a zoning bill when you went to the polls.

When deregulation happened, the requirement for radio stations to have a news department was axed, and so were more than 90% of the news departments at radio stations across the country.

I don't know how much of a role this may play, but I think it's curious that the kind of deregulation we got -- which effectively forces news to compete with entertainment and basically become infotainment -- came on the heels of the Vietnam War and the fallout of Watergate. In Vietnam news crews were down on the beaches and in the jungles showing the carnage first-hand, and that didn't sit well with families who were watching the 6:00 news while eating dinner. It played a big role in turning the public against the war. And everyone knows that Watergate made the news business almost a Romantic pursuit for about a decade. From a political perspective, no one could get away with just shutting down the news or dictating what it could or couldn't report -- the first amendment gets in the way of that. But you can achieve the similar goals by just making news ineffective and constricting its access to the public by flooding those same channels with more interesting content, and entertainment will almost always trump news. The end result is something like CNN turning the first Gulf War into a video game they reported on.

Which is why Anchorman is more of a documentary than a comedy.

1/15/2014 08:06:58 am

Sorry, that was hastily-written, and could have been clearer, and spell-checked.

Matt Mc

1/15/2014 08:24:24 am

Only Me.. not sure I can answer this fully but local news stations that are broadcast over the air still have a responsibility to notify the public in emergency situations (Ie weather). Cable News stations do not have that. However cable news providers do have to provide public notification of emergencies (the normally add a crawl at the bottom of the screen) but only in the city the are licensed out of,, some cable companies cross county borders so you many get warnings and updates from a different area. Over the air broadcast news also has more strict regulations on the truthfulness of the news and commentary and editorials have to be noted as such. That is why you find better more concise news on broadcast networks and less one sided report. There is no rules dictating cable news content and in fact they are considered on a whole not as news programs but new commentary programs on there broadcast licenses.

The equal time law that used to apply to new agencies is gone. The equal time law dictated that if one political side was given advertising and coverage but the other side was not they new agency had to give equal time at there expense to the news agency. This was thrown to the wayside with the communications act of 1934 at the middle of the first Bush administration.

The whole cable deregulation started in the 80's with Reagan and the growth of Cable TV. The regulation applied to broadcast only and cable since it was a private for pay service was not a "publicly available" resource. The broadcast networks pushed for deregulation in their end to compete with cable and we lost a lot of regulations. A major defeat was losing the Owned and Operated clauses which prevented mega networks like we have now with Disney, Time, Discovery, Scripts ect...

I hope that helps a bit, it is a lot more complicated and honestly I have not been following the course of deregulation since the late 90's.

1/15/2014 08:26:01 am

"However cable news providers do have to provide public notification of emergencies"

That should read cable service providers and not cable news providers.

1/15/2014 09:05:05 am

Yep, that 80's deregulation is what allowed the cable industry to explode like it did. If some of the mandates of broadcast television were in place for cable from the outset, I doubt cable would have grown so large so quickly, but it also would be less likely to feature wackadoo content.

1/15/2014 09:16:28 am

Yeah it is sad.

I spend a lot of time trying to remind people that CNN, FOX, and MSNBC are not new outlets. They are new commentary and that commentary is dictated by ratings and nothing else. There is no real political motivation involved beyond getting advertisers dollars and learning to cater to a audience for those ratings. I cannot begin to explain how often we were told at FOX to make the packages more sensational just for that purpose.

I hope on day we can hold broadcasters to the standards they used to have but that would mean people would have to stop watching and telling there representatives and senators that they want change. Maybe one day.

The reason I discuss it with news is because if news has little set standards the rest of the programming will also.

Oh you sorry for calling you Only me, Other J.

1/15/2014 09:29:08 am

Matt Mc, were you the one in the comments a while back talking about going through propaganda techniques used on shows like America Unearthed and Ancient Aliens?

In another life I worked in cable advertising, and watching cable programming to make sure certain commercials were coming down at the right times was part of my job, and most of what I watched was news. It was that weird pressure for ad dollars that content providers succumbed to that eventually moved me to leave it (that and the kind of people who populate the industry, which is where the pressure comes from - -think Glengarry Glen Ross).

One of the strangest experiences I ever had, though, was watching CNN to make sure the spots were coming down, and seeing them interview my dad. Neither of us knew this was going to happen -- we weren't in the same city. CNN just happened to be doing a report on the industry my dad worked in (brewing), and went to his place of work because it's a landmark (largest six pack in the world). He was the day supervisor, so they interviewed him.

1/15/2014 09:37:59 am

Yeah that was me.

I have worked in cable news since the mid 90's. I worked as a online editor for CNN forever and then went to a the State Dept working for a govt funded Arabic News Station, after leaving there I freelanced at CSPAN, FOX, CNN, and Bloomberg.

I am two years out of the news biz except for a few last minute freelance gigs. I left out mostly because I hated the standard practices. Since I worked in the editing of clips and editing of "live" talk programs I learned and studied a lot of techniques of how to manipulate things to make it fit into needed points of view.

Gregor

1/15/2014 10:25:25 am

For what it's worth, "Unsealed: Alien Files" recently ran (without disclaimer, in what little I bothered to watch) marathon-style on Science Channel. Also for what it's worth, Destination America, Discovery, TLC and Animal Planet (but not, obviously, History / H2) are all amongst the properties owned by "Discovery Communications", channels that routinely run programming from the ethnically slanderous ("Gypsy Sisters", etc.) to the ridiculous ("Mermaid: The Body Found").

Shane Sullivan

1/15/2014 11:45:33 am

"In 2010 he claimed Stephen Hawking was working to spread misinformation designed to hide the fact that aliens had been manipulating humanity, possibly for thousands of years."

Well, it's certainly true that aliens interacted with early humans. A small, green-skinned alien crash-landed on Earth during the paleolithic, and spent a few years harrying an early human and his family.

http://www.theresevannier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/38113256.jpg

1/15/2014 11:55:59 am

The Great Gazoo!

"This is no joke. This is serious. It was featured on a serious television documentary."

1/15/2014 04:06:32 pm

Heh -- dum-dums.

Michael C. Dunn

1/15/2014 12:53:11 pm

Nah. Nuns would stand out too much in Vegas. They'd blend in better dressed as aliens.

Martin R

1/15/2014 01:31:11 pm

They'd blend in better as Elvis impersonators. Don't they all seem a tad alien?

Pope Impius XXIII

1/16/2014 03:45:28 am

Stitch? (as in "Lilo and")

buzz

1/15/2014 04:50:51 pm

this show totoally sucks, all it does is to stretch further what people are thinking, never finds anything that makes a different in todays or yesturdays history, people waste time to watch this, because all the show is designed to do is keep the mind wandering, not finding the truth of anything (im sure the government has a lot to do with it, but not entirely) the show is a fake and money maker from the weak minded people of this planet or land that we call ours!

1/15/2014 04:55:14 pm

and scott is the biggest fake!!! honestly, if he had thoughts of any of this being the truth, he would get away from the money making bullshit series, and really push for the truth, but I know he is to scared for any of that!!!!

Paul Cargile

1/16/2014 02:09:07 am

Sometimes, people become conservative because liberalism has failled them, and then they begin tuning into conservative news outlets.

1/16/2014 07:20:57 am

Sometimes, but it's a little hard to believe that two elderly people who had been democrats since the 1930's would all of the sudden become fire-breathing conservatives because they thought the entire political ideology they subscribed to failed them overnight. Usually, people within and organization or group will tend to try to fix their own house first before rushing to the other house to toss bombs at it.

I'm not even convinced it's always a "liberalism failed them" thing and isn't just as likely "propaganda caught them" thing. I have a relative who has always generally acted like a liberal, including providing aid to a refugee population in her home town, reproductive rights, staying out of others' religious choices, generally pro-science, etc. But she's drunk deep from the well of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, primarily because her elderly father was a republican back when most northern republicans were more liberal than southern democrats. She will use the current kind of conservative rhetoric when talking about politics and will always vote conservative, but she just doesn't live like that. It's very confusing dealing with her at times, because what she says, socially and politically, isn't really what she believes or what she acts on. But if you bring up one of those subjects outside of the context of politics, she sounds like almost like an old-style progressive.

That's a triumph of media and message, not ideology.