by Bill Birnes

Unlike many conversations in which the interviewee rails at the government for its extended coverup, Aykroyd actually excuses the powers that be for not being forthcoming about extraterrestrials, at least back in 1947.

Even today, he suggests, with our country at war and the threat of terrorism around the world, government budgets, especially ours, are correctly focused on supporting military operations rather than engaging in research and development of UFO technologies.

Yet, Aykroyd says, from the time of President Ronald Reagan, who openly reported on his UFO sighting when he was California governor, the U.S. government turned to a space-based defense system as an antimissile shield to deter threats from other nuclear powers. But, he wonders, might the shield that was supposed to protect the U.S. from Soviet missiles also have been designed to defend against hostile extraterrestrials?

In one of the most interesting exchanges we had with Dan, we asked him to take us inside the politics of dealmaking in the entertainment industry. When it comes to the subject of UFOs and the truth, Hollywood is as vulnerable to political pressure as any other place.

Case in point, Dan says, was his attempt to launch his talk show series, Out There, on the Sci-Fi channel. The series had been shot and edited, he tells us, and he had managed to land very important guests, who spoke openly about the politics of UFO disclosure.

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Among the most prized interviews was an episode in which he talked about the realities of disclosure with Dr. Steven Greer of the Disclosure Project and Stephen Bassett, Washington, D.C. lobbyist and former independent candidate for the House of Representatives from the 8th Congressional District. (Bassett was also the director of the highly successful X-Conference in April 2004 in Washington.)

Both Greer and Bassett are very well connected, having spoken to people in government and in the military who have either seen UFOs, spoken to witnesses, or handled sensitive documents pertaining to UFOs. Accordingly, what both Greer and Bassett have to say can be characterized as sensitive, regardless of whether evidence exists to substantiate their claims. According to Aykroyd, both Greer and Bassett were very forthcoming about what they knew, enough so that what happened next surprised everyone.

After delivering the Greer/Bassett episode of Out There, Aykroyd reveals that while he was waiting outside of the Sci-Fi Channel offices near the corner of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, he received a cellphone call from singer Britney Spears, asking him to appear with her on his old show, Saturday Night Live.

As he was speaking to her, he turned to see a big black sedan pull up to the Sci-Fi Channel building. A very large man wearing a black suit got out, looked directly at Aykroyd, shot him a menacing look, and then turned back to the car. Aykroyd, startled by the look, himself turned away to finish his conversation with Spears.

But it was only for a moment. When he turned back to the building to get a better look at the man, the car was gone. It was gone, he says, right in the middle of afternoon Manhattan midtown traffic. He walked to the corner of 42nd and Eighth, walked back to the building, looking all over for the car. Even Kojak, with his light flashing and his siren wailing, couldn’t have gunned his car out of there that quickly.

Apparently it didn’t just drive away; it completely disappeared. Aykroyd said he’d never seen anything like that before. On a midtown Manhattan afternoon with taxicab and truck traffic thick around the Port Authority Building, a large car should have taken at least 15 minutes to navigate its way out. But this vehicle seemed to have slipped through a hole in the universe.

Dan Aykroyd couldn’t make much of the incident at the time, except to remark to himself how weird it was, and then return to his conversation with Britney Spears. His major episode on disclosure had been delivered, he’d gotten both Greer and Bassett on camera in a comprehensive discussion, and the series would soon be broadcast on Sci-Fi. But that was not to be the case. He learned that the show was cancelled that very afternoon.

A month later, Aykroyd tells us he received official notice from the Sci-Fi Channel that they would not be picking up his series. The rights to Out There would revert to him, and Sci-Fi was out of the picture. Aykroyd was stunned. What could have caused the turnaround?

It occurred to him that the strange black car outside the Sci-Fi offices on that Manhattan afternoon might have had something to do with it. Was the look Dan received from the individual dressed in black a warning, perhaps an admonition – a message that he would be allowed to play inside a small fishbowl, but never be allowed out? Could very serious powers-that-be have gotten to the decision-makers at Sci-Fi, or was there another reason that Sci-Fi decided to drop Out There in favor of another show on the paranormal?

Aykroyd remembers one night in particular during a summer in the 1980s when he was living in upstate New York. He awoke in the middle of the night and had an urge he had never experienced before – to go outside and look at the sky. He told his wife over and over again that he had this strange urge. But he resisted it, and lay there until it passed.

The next morning, he heard that hundreds of thousands of people throughout northern New York State, the Great Lakes region, Ontario, and Quebec had experienced the same urge. Those who responded to it and went outside were treated to the incredible sight in the nighttime sky, of a massive pink spiral that wound its way over the Great Lakes.

Physicists are his heroes, Aykroyd says. If he were able to travel through time, whether in a machine or on a UFO with extraterrestrials, or have lunch with anyone he chose in the history of the world, Aykroyd named Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr, all of whom are great physicists.

According to Aykroyd, “Those guys know what is really going on in the universe.” If all of creation is a giant puzzle with people nibbling at solutions from their respective areas of academic expertise, it is Aykroyd’s view that physicists are the supreme technologists – the theoreticians best able to establish “laws” that predict how things will act.

Einstein’s predictions, he explains (even those concerning how gravity warps around objects moving through space), are only just now being proven, because our instruments have gotten better. Maybe someday, there will be a way to test – perhaps through robotic exploration – Steven Hawking’s theories about the “event horizon” surrounding a black hole.

On television, Aykroyd might have played a callous toy manufacturer, or the hawker of the Bass-O-Matic, or a ghostbuster, but he is a serious scholar in the paranormal field, as well as ufology. He cites with precision the dates of key events in ufology, those who have written about the events, and even the critics and skeptics who challenged them.

Aykroyd holds a doctorate in literature, and expresses himself with skill in a variety of essential issues, such as the environment and ecology, the art of war, national defense, and pragmatic politics. Unlike some TV and film personalities who become absorbed with fame and their own public image, Aykroyd instead is involved with a variety of humanitarian issues focusing on the environment and the preservation of natural resources.

The new video Dan Aykroyd: Unplugged on UFOs is an in-depth interview in which Aykroyd talks not only about his own personal experiences with the paranormal; he also recounts a history of the U.S. government’s involvement with UFOs and the implications of that involvement. Interviewer David Sereda begins the film by asking Aykroyd about current UFO cases and the media coverage that surrounds them.

Intercut with video and stills from some of these sightings, Aykroyd narrates the story of the recent Mexican military footage of eleven UFOs captured on invisible infrared cameras developed by the U.S. military. It was shocking, he says, because the Mexican government was very forthcoming in releasing the video, even while debunkers in the U.S. were quick to call it swamp gas and ball lightning. But swamp gas doesn’t fly in formation, the Mexican Air Force videos reveal, and ball lightning shouldn’t act as if it’s being maneuvered by an intelligent presence.

The interview covers a brief history of UFOs, the crashes in the American Southwest in the late 1940s, the UFOs over Washington, D.C. in 1952, and over Arizona in 1953, and NASA space shuttle videos of the past 20 years. The evidence in Sereda’s video is compelling: formations of strange objects, circular objects navigating across the NASA camera lens, and darting objects shooting through space.

Aykroyd also talks about the release of the dramatic photos of UFOs by the Belgian military, and Ronald Reagan’s very open disclosure of his personal encounter with a UFO over the California desert while he was governor of the state. Then-Governor Reagan hid nothing, Aykroyd explains, telling a Wall Street Journal reporter exactly what happened. He also told the reporter that he intended to tell his wife Nancy about the encounter.

Was it this encounter that informed his speech to the U.N. General Assembly, in which he posed the hypothetical question about how the world would react in the face of an alien threat from outer space? Was it this encounter that drove Reagan to push as hard as he did for his Space Defense Initiative (popularly known as “Star Wars”)?

Star Wars wasn’t only about anti-missile missiles, Aykroyd says: it was about particle-beam weapons and high-powered lasers that could shoot down not only enemy ballistic missiles, but also extraterrestrial spacecraft maneuvering through Earth’s atmosphere. This begs the question, he says, about the intentions of the extraterrestrials.

How advanced are they? What is their intent in penetrating our air space? Whatever their intentions, Aykroyd is not certain that all ETs are trying to take over the human race. So far, he says, “There are no projectiles being used – no weapons of mass destruction against humanity.” Perhaps, he says, “They are just tourists, curious about life and how it is evolving.”

Dan Aykroyd: Unplugged on UFOs contains dramatic video footage of recent UFOs in Arizona and California. These are clear images of disc-shaped UFOs, giant floating triangles, aircraft showing no FAA-mandated blinking lights, and a number of exciting UFO shots of hovering cylinders and flying rectangles.

Even a skeptical viewer is left with the impression that, absent a rational explanation, these video images constitute compelling evidence. If extraterrestrial objects are really here and are this apparent, Aykroyd wonders, where is the media, and why isn’t the government disclosing this to the public?

One of the most important prospects of UFOs and their occupants is what can we learn from them, Aykroyd suggests. Obviously they have far more advanced space technology, and propulsion systems that can go faster than light. Is this technology too advanced for us, or might we benefit from it? How will the disclosure or reverse-engineering of such technology affect humanity?

In America, Aykroyd points out, mainstream scientists and university physics professors keep laughing at the UFO phenomenon, even while UFOs are being videotaped by thousands and thousands of American witnesses.

Academic conferences shun discussion of possible UFO sightings, even when those sightings are photographed by astronomers and caught on earth-orbiting satellite cameras. While American scientists look the other way (probably because this is a taboo subject in a field heavily funded by military defense budgets), foreign scientists do not.

If the technology of UFO propulsion, whether zero-point or antigravity, is kept out of the hands of mainstream scientists by fearful government secret-keepers, how will that technology be developed? What if scientists in Russia and China study extraterrestrial technology in their universities, and make the next quantum leap in antigravity propulsion systems? Will we lose what technical superiority we may still have? Or has the exploitation of extraterrestrial technology gone so far underground that not even the president knows about it?

This, Aykroyd suggests, is a dangerous game. We exist in a paradoxical situation, he tells the viewer. With the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, the universe has been shown to be far greater than the ancients ever imagined. But while Hubble keeps finding a bigger universe, our perspective on creation gets more and more myopic.

We are using up our planet’s natural resources at an alarming rate, and our own government is keeping the kinds of secrets that could not only stave off the inevitable depletion of resources, but also might even create new sources of energy. Although there may be many other inhabited worlds in the universe, Aykroyd says, we are the planet that produced works of genius and beauty from artists like Mozart, Beethoven, and Ray Charles.

And yet we suffer from being trapped here on this treasure of a planet, not knowing the answers to the most basic and ancient questions of human origin. The answers might be right in front of us, just waiting to be recognized.

Printed with the permission of New Saucerian Press