White House makes it official: No evidence of space aliens

In an announcement that further punctures the lore surrounding Area 51 and figures to deflate -- or inflame -- the most ardent believers in "The X-Files," the White House says outer space aliens have not made contact with Earth.

There are no captured flying saucers. No preserved alien bodies in Nevada. Nor at Roswell, N.M., for that matter.

"Independence Day," which depicted a U.S. alien research base deep under the desert, was .... just a movie.

That's the official word, anyway.

"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," the Obama administration said in a statement. "In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye."

"The fact is we have no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence here on Earth," according to the statement posted to the White House website and attributed to Phil Larson, a research assistant at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The statement "is the first time since this issue exploded in the public's mindset in 1947 that the executive branch has issued a formal position in writing on this issue. The first time in history," said Stephen Bassett, a physicist, researcher and Washington lobbyist who contends the government has been engaged in a long cover-up about the existence of UFOs.

But is the government to be believed when it says there are no ETs, in the face of evidence gathered and stories long told about strange lights in the sky, unexplainable photo images, and deep-in-the-night human abductions and weird experimentation?

"Of course not," said Bassett, who said the White House disclosure gives him and others fresh opportunities to challenge government officials and pry out the real truth.

They're not buying it either in Rachel , which has built a tourist trade from science fiction fans who drive in on Nevada Route 375 -- renamed The Extraterrestrial Highway -- looking for the center of UFO activity in the town 25 miles northeast of the secretive Area 51 military installation.

"The president is living proof that there's life outside Earth," said Sharon Taylor, a waitress at the Little A'Le'Inn, where it is said, "You can get a bite to eat and maybe share a close encounter."

"The height of conceit is to believe we are the only intelligence in the vastness," Taylor said between taking lunch orders Monday. "The human race went from horse and buggy to walking on the moon in 69 years. Please, we had to have help."

The White House statement, posted on Friday, comes in response to two public petitions created online. One, organized by Bassett, which had accumulated 12,078 signatures as of Monday, demands the government "formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race."

President Barack Obama had promised that petitions gaining at least 5,000 signatures within 30 days would get a response. Bassett said it took him four days to reach that goal. The threshold for an official petition response has since been bumped up to 25,000 signatures.

By denying the existence of aliens, Obama "probably did the UFO crowd a favor" by putting to rest their high hopes that he might be the "disclosure president" on extraterrestrials, said George Knapp, a veteran Las Vegas journalist who has covered the phenomenon for more than 20 years. "Now they can get on to something else."

Knapp writes a column for City Life, an alternative weekly published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal's parent company, the Stephens Media Group.

Knapp said "there's reams of stuff" in government records concerning UFOs.

"If somebody wants to look at the evidence, it's there," he said.

But, he added, storehouses of other information "may not be there anymore," and even the president might be in the dark, the truth buried so deep as to be virtually unreachable.

The White House said the lack of evidence about life beyond Earth is not for lack of trying. The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program, a private effort no longer funded by the federal government, points high-powered listening devices to the sky. NASA's Kepler spacecraft and the soon-to-be-launched Mars Science Laboratory also will seek signs of life elsewhere.

Area 51, the classified airfield at Groom Lake, where advanced spy planes were developed and tested, is at the heart of many UFO conspiracies. When the programs were declassified, retired CIA official T.D. Barnes and others who worked there finally were able to explain the once-mystifying lights in the sky.

But many people still choose to believe there were flying saucers, which Barnes, now retired and living in Henderson, came to accept.

"From my experience, regardless of what you present or tell them, some will believe that we have aliens and there is no way to convince them otherwise," he said. "They will still believe what they want to believe. You waste your breath if you try to convince them otherwise."

Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com
or 702-783-1760