Documents / Official release
This release contains White House Exchange Mail records dated January 1998 to October 1999. Most of it is a transcript of a January 29, 1998 press briefing by Press Secretary Mike McCurry covering Iraq, Iran, the budget and the Lewinsky inquiry, plus a 1998 presidential speech. An October 19, 1999 email among Transnational Threats staff forwards a Florida Today article on how scientists expect alien contact would spark a media frenzy rather than a cover-up, describing the 1989 SETI detection protocol.
“Gray”6 pages
38365469.FIN Page 3 of 3 http://classified/email/data_source/exchange/record/cd018/octl 999/38365469.html 1/5/2010 Beyond that, the drill for authenticating a signal from ET effectively spreads the news very fast. Astronomers in countries around the world would be called to work in a harried bid to verify the alien beacon, making leaks to the media unstoppable and a cover-up impossible. In addition, those who think the government successfully could quash the scientific discovery of the millennium "greatly underestimate the urge to share heart-stopping news and the perceptive powers of the press," Shostak said. streets. But scientists say the chances that aliens actually will show up in spaceships, threatening to lay waste to our cities and abduct our women, are slim and none. It's more likely contact will come in the form of a remote radio signal, they say. "The point here is that there would be no immediate danger," said SETI Institute scientist Seth Shostak. "Just because you picked up a radio signal doesn't mean the aliens are hopping in their saucers and coming our way." However the announcement comes - if it does come - it probably will not shock the world. Public opinion polls the past few years show most people already believe life exists elsewhere in the universe. And as for a government cover-up, much to the chagrin of the conspiracy crowd, the international protocol clearly states that a confirmed alien detection "should be disseminated promptly, openly and widely through scientific channels and public media."
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Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 88 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.