Back in September I blogged about the grass roots effort spearheaded by the Paradigm Research Group to petition the White House to ‘fess up about “an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.” (Here’s a description of the petition at the Open Minds website.) I noted at the time that, though I think the truth should be told, I was ambivalent about the effort. That ambivalence has now been validated by the White House’s response: “We don’t know anything and know of no proof for ET visitation.”

Can you see the irony and humor in this?

What exactly did the petitioners think they were going to get in the way of an answer?  I’m guessing for many the optimism stemmed from the misguided belief that the Obama administration was a transparent one. If you believe that, you might be interested in some of Harold Camping’s new calculations for the rapture. But to be fair, no government is going to put forth this sort of information (if they had it) unless it served them politically (or, to be slightly more cynical, unless it was an important cog in some larger end game scenario of the federal powers that be and the military-industrial complex). It’s just naive to believe the federal government would be forthcoming about this (and a whole host of other things).

The irony is that, now that this administration has given the same answer as all the others in the past — including those that the disclosure crowd loved to hate (Bush, Rumsfeld, etc., etc.) — are they going to believe that President Obama has indeed been forthright and so the issue is finally settled … or are they going to turn on the administration, arguing it’s just as sinister and clandestine as the previous one?  The former is a double-dose of naivete; the latter shows just how misguided the whole idea was in the first place.

I can hardly wait for someone to “decode” the response and milk more conspiracy out of this.