So last night was the long-awaited debut of V, the show about beautiful aliens who show up and claim to come in peace and offer us lots of goodies... but turn out to be rapacious lizards in disguise. The pilot moves along at a brisk pace, introducing the aliens in the first 10 minutes and setting up various characters as anti-alien and pro-alien. The younger priest is suspicious, but the older priest is an alien-sympathizer. Elizabeth Mitchell's FBI agent is suspicious too, but her teenage son guzzles the Kool-Aid. The nice-suited African American guy is conflicted and doesn't want to be "that guy" any more.

By the end of the first episode, it's already made crystal clear that these aliens are up to no good. They've had sleeper agents on Earth for years, including Alan Tudyk's FBI agent. And other aliens living secretly among us are part of an anti-alien resistance, which may look like terrorists to the uninitiated.

So now that you've had a chance to see the pilot for yourself, you can judge whether it's actually a broadside aimed at our president. The Chicago Tribune's Glenn Garvin seems absolutely certain it is:

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration — one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: "Why don't you show some respect?!" The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader's origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: "Embracing change is never easy."

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait — did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who's come here to eat us?

Welcome to ABC's "V," the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season. Nominally a rousing sci-fi space opera about alien invaders bent on the conquest (and digestion) of all humanity, it's also a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the president's supporters and delight his detractors.

The meme spread throughout the right-wing and left-wing blogospheres yesterday, with Ana-Marie Cox weighing in over at Huffington Post.

So now that you've had a chance to see the pilot for yourself, is it really all about how we would have been better off with McCain in the White House? Umm... Probably not. But it was definitely not a subtle episode. The aliens had "too good to be true" plastered on their faces from the beginning, and because the episode moves so fast, we're left wondering why anybody would have bought this dog-and-pony show in the first place.

And there are some little winks at the right-wing tea-partiers that may just be intentional, like when Anna (Morena Baccarin) talks about "change," and the sleazy journo guy asks her about universal health care. Mostly, though, the show seems designed so that you can project whatever ideology you want onto it — not unlike Anna's luminous screen, floating over the world's major cities.

The show isn't subtle, but that's part of the point — there are no hidden messages here at all. The messages are all right on the surface, and they're pretty basic science-fiction standbys, like "aliens who seem too good to be true usually are." Even the show's little jabs at the media and our dumb youth culture feel like they're just slapping a 21st century paint job on the show's 1980s fable. Media talking heads are blow-dried and dumb, young twerps enjoy tagging and Youtube — it's not exactly incisive social criticism.

I really doubt Obama is worried here.

The fast pace, though, is a good thing — that's one of the things that endeared me to this pilot in the first place. Anyone who remembers the original show is going to know these aliens are hucksters, so the faster that's revealed to the audience, the better. And compared to the pilot of FlashForward, which fixated on the crashy destruction and chaos attendant on the future vision/blackout in its pilot for several minutes, V got the disruption of the aliens' visit over fairly quickly, with one desultory plane crash.

Watching the pilot for a second time, the main problem that jumps out at me is that those two teenage kids are going to make me want to claw my face off. And it seems like Smallville's Laura Vandervoort is going to be somewhat painful to watch as well, with the woodenness. But getting to see Elizabeth Mitchell kick more ass and be less angsty than she was on Lost pretty much makes up for those drawbacks. And priest guy, who hails from The 4440, is still just as fun to watch as ever. Plus Baccarin can only get slyer and more engaging as the evil Anna, once her evil plans unfold.

I'm pretty sure this version of the pilot was significantly different from the version we saw at Comic Con. We knew the final sequence was going to be different — that laser shooting robot drone (in the clip above) was not there before, and the last few minutes were generally zippier. But also, my favorite scene is missing from the televised version. In the original version, when we meet Chad Decker, he's just had sex with the vice president's cougar-ish assistant, who promises to get him an interview with the Veep in return for the booty call. It lets us know right away that Decker is a man-whore, and is sort of hilariously trashy besides. In the televised version, that's replaced with a bland scene of him wanting to interview the Veep, but being told that he's just the talking head who reads the news. I have a feeling there were other weird, funny touches removed before the show aired, but I can't remember the others off the top of my head. This definitely felt a bit blander than the original pilot, although how much of that was editing and how much was just seeing it a second time, I'm not sure.

But despite some quibbles, this was a pretty fun outing, and a nice start to the series. It got us to the "OMG the aliens are evil lizards" part quickly and zippily, and set us up for three more episodes of alien intrigue and human gullibility, with an anti-alien resistance simmering under the surface. Now if those two teenagers can just get blown up in a tragic shuttlecraft accident, preferably next week...

Painting via Faithmouse

You may remember UFO expert Jeff Peckman from his lobbying efforts to get an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission created in Denver. At the height of his campaign, he promised journalists he would reveal absolute proof of the existence of aliens - via a video (now much parodied online) of an alien sort of jumping up and down outside a window.

Despite public criticism, Peckman soldiers on, continuing his quest to get governments at both the local and federal levels to acknowledge the secret history of UFO research and "X-Files" in the United States.

In a recent editorial, Peckman lays out exactly what the Obama Administration needs to know about aliens:

Sixteen months ago presidential candidate Obama said he did not know and did not pretend to know about intelligent life in outer space. But he’s also probably become aware that he can get a more detailed briefing on the real truth about ‘X-Files’ through the Internet than from U.S.military and intelligence agencies. President Obama's ‘Blackberry’ is his real key to the ‘X-Files’ treasury.

Expectations are high that President Obama will release the ‘X-Files’. But learning about UFOs and sharing that information with the people will not be a ‘slam dunk’ for the new U.S. President. Why? One reason is that U.S. Presidents in recent decades have been denied information about UFO ‘X-Files’. Another reason is that much of the evidence contained in the files was shifted to private corporations to keep it out of reach of Congress and U.S. citizens who might take the Freedom of Information Act seriously.

Are Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman reading this? Because I feel like the direction they've taken Fringe reflects this changed belief in the UFO community that the Big Bad who hides alien discoveries is the private sector rather than a secret government organization.

And if Orci and Kurtzman need some more ideas, Peckman's got a few. He thinks Obama needs to investigate the decades-old case of Billy Meier, a Swede who has some of the best images of UFOs ever seen (there's one above). How can Obama really hope to fix America if he doesn't deal with the Meier case? A good question indeed.

Read more Peckman, and see a lovely gallery of Meier images at the Examiner.

With only a few episodes left in the series, BSG is about to disappear from the airwaves. The question is whether it will stand the test of time as the world changes. We've got three reasons why Battlestar might remain relevant in years ahead, and three reasons why it might be headed for the ashcan of history.

Why it's still relevant: Stirring portrait of multicultural, gender-equal leadership.
The Fleet is a good example of what leadership might look like in a post-Obama America. One of the most powerful stories that BSG tells is of a community whose leadership is mixed-race and gender-equal. Admiral Adama is the Caprican equivalent of Latino, while characters like Gaeta, Dualla, and Tory are mixed-race. And women occupy some of the highest positions in the government and the military. While some shows might make a big deal out of this, and smarm you with PC unctuousness, BSG simply takes it for granted that its human society is racially mixed. Certainly there are racial issues, such as the dark-skinned Sagittarans being oppressed by the lighter-skinned Capricans. But the Sagittaran vs. Caprican conflict is really about economic power: The Sagittarans are poor, and that's what makes them powerless - not the color of their skins. BSG's mixed race future is part of that "hope" which the Obama Administration promises.

Why it's in the ashcan of history: Stale liberal siege mentality.
During the presidential campaign, fans of The Daily Show often asked whether the underdog liberal satire show could survive in a liberal administration, and you should be asking the same question about BSG. This smart scifi allegory about US politics may lose its edge now. For example, the new anti-cylon racism plot already feels like a rehash of stale liberal siege mentality - and stale BSG plots. Zarek and Gaeta's mutiny plot feels like something written for the Bush Era, a cautionary tale of what happens when xenophobia creeps into national policy. But President Obama has turned these kinds of cautionary tales into the stuff of campaign speeches. BSG no longer feels like a healthy dose of social criticism. Instead it's in lockstep with the party line espoused by one of the world's most powerful leaders.

Why it's still relevant: Though most of the show is about war, it is also about the thorny road to peace.
BSG tells a timeless story of the horrors of war and the ambiguous nature of peace. Obama may or may not make good on his promise to end the US occupation of Iraq, but assuming he does the scars of war will linger for generations. The high-intensity, emotionally ravaging battles in BSG - especially during the Cylon occupation of New Caprica - will never get stale. At the same time, the show manages to depict how difficult and slow the peace process is. This season's revelations about Starbuck's mysterious identity - is she cylon? something else? - allow BSG's creators to deal with what happens to people whose lives have been shaped by war. How will Starbuck adjust to peace? How will other Fleet members adjust to the idea that she's a human transformed by cylon technology? At the same time, the Tigh and Six plot promises to deal with the same thing. Theirs is a war baby, and its fate is tied to the fragile peace between human and cylon.

Why it's in the ashcan of history: The torture years are over.
Now that Obama has shut down Gitmo and other foreign prisons, we lack that feeling of panicked recognition as we watch the humans and cylons abusing each other. As Newsweek's Joshua Alston put it in a recent article about culture during the Bush Administration:

"Battlestar" has been more honest [than anti-terrorist thriller series 24] about the psychological toll of the war on terror. It confronts the thorny issues that crop up in a society's battle to preserve its way of life: the efficacy of torture, the curtailing of personal rights, the meaning of patriotism in a nation under siege. It also doesn't flinch from one question that "24" wouldn't dare raise: is our way of life even worth saving?

With a new president who isn't beating the "war on terror" drum, will BSG start to feel so retro that it's hard to take seriously? Will it become The Day After of our time, serious and intense when it was released but now naive and cheesy?

Why it's still relevant: BSG unflinchingly portrays the deep connection between religion and politics.
Though BSG is at its heart a show about the future politics and science, it's also about spirituality. Show creator Ron Moore has said a number of times that he thinks the mystical aspects of the Fleet's quest for a new home are crucial to the show. One of the show's most talented scientists, Gaius Baltar, has slipped between the roles of mad scientist and cult religious leader. President Roslin has quelled political uprisings and gone on religious vision quests. A lot of science fiction would shy away from the idea that religion will be as important in the future as it is in the present. And that's what will continue to make BSG relevant in the present - the power of religion isn't going away any time soon.

Why it's in the ashcan of history: Religious war is being replaced with religious tolerance.
Culture wars between Judeo-Christians and Muslims may be on the wane with Obama addressing his inaugural speech to "a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers." Over the past two decades, Western pundits like Samuel Huntington have tried to claim that Muslim fundamentalism is to blame for a global "clash of civilizations" - and that in some ways, this clash caused the 9/11 attacks. Under Obama, it's possible that this civilization gap will start to close. That might mean that future audiences will be unmoved or just bored by BSG's tale of two civilizations warring over God vs. gods. If Obama makes good on his promises of religious tolerance, in eight years BSG's religious anguish and culty weirdness may look as dated as Logan's Run.

G-Dog
Price: $705
Features: Once assembled, G-Dog takes commands from a wireless remote to perform a basic set of canine commands.
Pros: Some assembly required, so the girls will learn a little something before they can play with their new mechanized pet.
Cons: G-Dog lacks the autonomy of a real dog. Plus, it’s pretty ugly.

Wrex the Dawg
Price: $149
Features: Built to look like a literal junkyard dog, Wrex is a cartoon dog brought to robotic life. He walks, talks, farts, and performs all manner of doggie tricks. His infrared sensors allow him to roam free, or he can be programmed too perform up to 80 operation steps using a remote control. His mood shifts between happy, angry, or crazy, which changes the way he interacts with his surroundings.
Pros: Wrex provides hours of fun, can stand guard outside Malia and Sasha’s rooms, and is unlikely to crash into the furniture.
Cons: Wrex’s toilet humor may not be appreciated by White House guests.

robuDOG
Price: €3200
Features: This French doggie bot can dance, play soccer, and take color photographs. It can also interface with Windows, allowing the girls to play with it in a virtual environment.
Pros: It will not only provide companionship, but also document those early White House years.
Cons: Obama uses a Mac.

BJ
Price: ¥600,000
Features: Aiming to be the successor to Sony’s discontinued AIBO, BJ is a fully programmable pooch with a movable jaw, neck, legs, and tail, and the ability to sense distances and the proximity of people and animals.
Pros: BJ runs on Linux and is tinker-friendly, showing support for the open source community.
Cons: Needs to be renamed.

Pleo
Price: $349
Features: Pleo is an autonomous robotic dinosaur with the ability to recognize sounds, sights, and touch. It expresses hunger, craves affection, explores its environment, and displays a wide range of emotions.
Pros: More pet-like in its ability to react to sensory information and interact with its owner.
Cons: Not actually a dog.

Paro
Price: $5,531
Features: Paro is a baby harp seal that responds to petting by moving its tail, opening and closing its eyes, and making seal-like noises. It can also respond to sounds, learn a name, and show emotions. All of these features are designed to have a calming effect on humans.
Pros: Has been deemed the world’s most therapeutic robot.
Cons: It may be possible for children to get too attached to a robotic pet. Also, it’s still not a dog.

Mio Pup
Price: $49.99
Features: Mio Pup is an interactive toy that accepts petting, plays music, and flashes emoticons in its eyes to signal its mood.
Pros: Considerably less expensive than most robotic dogs.
Cons: Essentially the canine equivalent of a Furby.

Robopet
Price: $99.99
Features: The biomechanical pup performs the full array of canine tricks, responds to sound and human movement, and can be trained to perform tricks on command through positive and negative reinforcement.
Pros: Easier to train than a real dog.
Cons: For some reason, it has the capacity to become depressed.

Dacky the Healing Partner
Price: $149.99
Features: Dacky reacts to petting thanks to its internal sensors. It also asks about your day, sings karaoke, and appears to learn up to 650 words of Japanese.
Pros: Not only is Dacky furrier than most robotic pets, it could encourage the girls to learn a foreign language.
Cons: Only comes in elitist purebred retriever.

Sakadachi-Lucky
Price: $129.99
Features: Sakadachi is another furry bot who responds to voice commands. It can recognize its name, do a headstand, and play tug of war with its rope.
Pros: Unlike Dacky, Sakadachi is of indeterminate breed.
Cons: Also unlike Dacky, it only knows 13 words of Japanese.

BigDog
Price: $10 million (at least that’s what DARPA paid)
Features: Billed as “the most advanced quadruped robot on Earth,” BigDog can maneuver all manner of terrain, run, jump, climb stairs, and recover from a fall.
Pros: Malia and Sasha could spend countless hours exploring the White House on BigDog's back.
Cons: It’s not commercially available.

Historian and Nerve.com columnist Ken Mondschein wrote an excerpt from his imagined 2026 history book America: The First Quarter Millennium, which reflects on the historical context of Obama’s election and the achievements of his administration:

Electoral victory, however, does not always translate into successful governance. Historians have attributed Obama's success in his two terms as President to any number of factors — his reversing the ruinous economic policies of the New Right; his use of technology to transform a patrician, republican system of representative government into a responsive, flexible direct democracy; his ability to convince a country with a frontier mentality of the value of social welfare. But Obama's success was rather due to the way he embodied transformation. The ostracism and fear of blacks was the single greatest impediment to American progress. Obama, by the simple fact of his being, breached this seemingly impregnable mental stronghold, and demonstrated the truth of the motto e pluribus unum.

Adam Cutsinger at FutureBlogger, writing from 2014, focuses on the science policies of the Obama administration. President Obama reverses Bush’s ban on stem cell research, but it’s his speech on the use of nanotubes that advances scientific research in the US, earning him the nickname "Nanobama":

“It has never been in doubt, among scientists, and engineers, since the first “harvest,” if you will, of the tiny, hollow fibers, known as nanotubes, which are smaller than hairs, and stronger than steel, that their potential to revolutionize technology, in all aspects, in science, in engineering, in industry, in transportation, for medicine, and the treatment of the many health problems we face, for the infrastructure, for computers, satellites, for the exploration of our oceans, and for the exploration of space, is beyond any major advancement in the history of science. We cannot, and must not, stand in the way of progress, toward a safer, healthier world, at a time when we face so many serious challenges. America needs to show the world, we are not afraid of the future. We still have hope. It is important for us to focus, on the problems of the present, so that when we arrive in the future, we are prepared for it. We mustn’t let fear keep us in the dark ages. Humanity can’t afford it.”

I’m sure that, as the weeks go on, we’ll be seeing more near-future science fiction from people outlining their hopes for the next several years. And, it will be exciting to see not only what social and political changes writers will conjure up, but also what possible advances in science and technology they hope to see under Obama.

Image is John Hart’s Nanobama sculpture made from carbon nanotubes.

Call me crazy but was Wil.I.Am about to correct Mr. Cooper when he compared their new tech to Star Trek, because the hologram messaging method is clearly more Star Wars than Star Trek. Or is the Silver Fox trying to weasel is way into my nerdy heart even deeper?

British magazine Five Dials asked eleven writers to “remember” their experiences on November 5, 2008, the day after Election Day. Of the eleven, three select McCain as the fictional winner. Two imagine the president-elect as promptly dying, but Suketu Mehta, author of autobiography Maximum City posits a world where Obama and Palin both go rogue – for each other:

He told her he wanted to have a private talk, to tell her that her attacks on him were getting increasingly hysterical and dangerous. The man arrested with the rifle at his last rally had said he had ‘been riled up’ by her speeches. He was going to ask her to cool it down, just a little. So they went up alone, in the still of the night, to her suite in the Sheraton on the square.

Who knows what happened there? Was it just loneliness, the brutal months on the trail, or just intelligent desire? They’re not doing any explaining, and it doesn’t matter anyway. When he told his wife the next day, the first thing she said was, ‘I’m no Hilary.’ The cuckolded husband, on the other hand, didn’t bat an eyelid. He was used to it. ‘You’ll come back,’ he predicted.

Lydia Millet has written politically-tinged comedy (George Bush: Dark Prince of Love) and speculative fiction (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, where three Manhattan Project physicists are transported to modern America to survey their work). She envisions Obama eking out a victory, and how the Republican ticket handles the news:

John McCain, after delivering a cheerful concession speech that confused supporters and opponents alike with its puzzling allusions to ‘victory over the yellow man’, is taking a well-deserved rest in one of his eight homes in Sedona, Arizona while Sarah Palin, who plans to resign the governorship in favour of work in the private sector, is busy signing sponsorship deals with a number of corporations, including a hockey faceguard manufacturer based in Duluth and the trendy Japanese maker of her wire-rimmed glasses.

Playwright and memoirist Said Sayrafiezadeh, whose parents were members of the Socialist Workers Party, writes a fantasy that has neither major party candidate as victor. Instead, the people elect Roger Calero, the SWP candidate:

The Church of St Paul the Apostle was overflowing as usual and it was early evening before my wife and I could get inside. The carrot soup had a slightly metallic taste and the bread was stale and the stench of body odor was oppressive, but it didn’t matter. There was lots of excited talk at our table about how Calero had declared he was going to end the use of currency within three days of his inauguration. Within three weeks all factories and farms would revert to complete worker control. Were these just campaign promises? someone at the table asked. No, people responded vigorously, Róger Calero was a different kind of politician, he was a worker – a meat packer – and his interests were working-class interests. Everyone had a good laugh about the way McCain and Obama had tried desperately to salvage their campaigns by claiming that they too were socialists. ‘I’ve always hated capitalism and imperialism just as much as you have, my friends,’ someone said, mimicking McCain’s much-derided statement. A few of the lawyers got into a lively debate over how quickly Bernanke and Paulson would be brought to trial and whether they should be imprisoned for life or used to build roads and schools. And then everyone voiced their enthusiasm that Bush should also be tried if he could be extradited from the Cayman Islands.

But some writers suspect nothing ever changes, as with Hot Animal Love scribe Scott Bradfield, whose entire entry reads:

Of course I remember – who doesn’t?

Personally, I blame Nader.

The full entries are available in the latest issue of Five Dials.

Image from spudlyspudly.

[via The Guardian]

Well, sort of. Our hopes for an appropriately Voltron-esque democratic showdown were raised by a story in yesterday's New York Times about the problems that McCain supporters are having getting college students interested across the country, which contained this fascinating snippet:

The University of Florida in Gainesville is home to one of the country’s largest McCain student groups, with more than 1,000 members. Some of its volunteers stand for nine hours a day in a central campus plaza, pitching to students and selling T-shirts, their only source of campaign money.

The Obama group on campus, though, has hired a shuttle bus to drive Obama-supporting students to an early voting site 20 minutes away.

“Obviously, we don’t have the resources for that kind of thing,” said Joshua Simmons, 20, the chairman of Gators for McCain. “Right now, we’re just making sure that students know that this organization does exist, and that there are students out there who support McCain.”

As if to punctuate his point, Mr. Simmons was stopped midsentence while walking through campus recently and talking on his cellphone.

“What is that, a robot?” he said, exhaling noisily. “The Obama campaign has a robot set up in the plaza. It’s holding a sign that says ‘Powered by hope.’ Which I don’t think is entirely accurate.”

An actual Obama-supporting robot? Powered by hope? Our hopes were raised by the possibilities... and then dashed by the reality:
As Politico's Ben Smith complained, the robot "isn't quite as tricked out as one might have hoped." That's definitely one way of putting it - and yet more proof of being misled by lies and distortions of unscrupulous politicians (Insert your own political bias here).

The robot gap, cont'd [Politico]

The Obama campaign’s “McCain Wins” ad appeals to its base by not just speculating on what could happen if McCain wins, but by confronting them with the election night moment:

The Obama ad hopes actually seeing a McCain victory will have an emotional resonance, spurring people into action if they get a gnarly tingle down their spine. And MoveOn borrows the moment to remind young liberals to vote, further postulating a world where Obama supporters are more furious at non-voters than people who vote for McCain:

The most thorough work of speculative election fiction comes from James Dobson of Focus on Family. Dobson composed a 15-page “Letter from 2012,” illustrating a world after four years of an Obama presidency. Trying to sway young evangelicals who might be caught up in Obama’s rockstar appeal, Dobson paints the Obama dystopia as one where not just health care and defense policy are screwed up, but civil liberties are under attack:

Home schooling: “The land of the free”? Parents’ freedom to teach their children has been severely restricted. The Supreme Court, to the delight of the National Education Association, followed the legal reasoning of a February 28, 2008 ruling in Re: Rachel L by the Second District Court of Appeal in California (although that ruling had been later reversed). The Court declared that home schooling was an illegal violation of state educational requirements except in cases where the parents (a) had an education certificate from an accredited state program, (b) agreed to use state-approved textbooks in all courses, and (c) agreed not to not to teach their children that homosexual conduct is wrong, or that Jesus is the only way to God, since these ideas have been found to hinder students’ social adjustment and acceptance of other lifestyles and beliefs, and to run counter to the state’s interest in educating its children to be good citizens.

Granted both sides tend to paint their opponents’ presidencies in an extreme light, but perhaps if political candidates spent more time outlining their own visions for the future and less time doing battle, we’d end up with fewer undecideds.

At Thursday’s Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, Obama joked:

“Contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-El, to save the planet Earth.”

And Obama isn’t the first presidential candidate to refer, either in jest or in all seriousness, to extraterrestrial ties:

James Traficant: The former Ohio congressman ran a much-ignored presidential campaign in 1988, earning two percent of the vote in his home state’s primary. Traficant is better known for his corruption charges, his mountainous toupee, and his tendency to pepper his speeches with the phrase “Beam me up!” Traficant probably didn’t believe that a passing spaceship would actually hear his cry and teleport him away to a better world, but he could always hope. And, considering his current residence in a federal corrections facility, he probably still spends a great deal of time appealing to Scotty.

Jimmy Carter: In 1969, Georgia state senator Jimmy Carter spotted a self-luminous object hovering in the air. Four years later, while governor of Georgia, Carter would file a report with the International UFO Bureau, claiming that what he’d seen that night was an alien UFO. During his presidential campaign, Carter promised that, if elected, he would make all government documents about UFOs and alien life open to the public. But, as with so many political promises, Carter failed to deliver once he took office.

Ronald Reagan: After the attempt on Reagan’s life 1981, his wife Nancy began to consult astrologers to cope with her fear. But Ronald Reagan had a very different interest in the stars. In speeches, Reagan sometimes imagined what the world would be like under the threat of an alien invasion. He was, in a way, strangely optimistic about the possibility, envisioning humanity united against a common enemy:

Dennis Kucinich: Perpetual Democratic also-ran Dennis Kucinich may have had a close encounter of his own. Actress and new age enthusiast Shirley MacLaine wrote in her memoir that Kucinich had seen an alien spacecraft while staying at her Washington home, an incident that came up during one of the Democratic debates:

Barry Goldwater: Conservative Goldwater won the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, but ended up losing the election to Lyndon Johnson. And, in addition to his interests in photography and amateur radio, Goldwater was keenly and openly interested in UFOs. Goldwater tried repeatedly to gain access to Top Secret Air Force records that he believed contained evidence of the extraterrestrial nature of UFOs, and gave interviews stating that he believed the government was withholding this information from the public.

John Glenn: Astronaut and Ohio Senator John Glenn launched a presidential bid in 1984, but it never made it into orbit. With his first-hand experiences in space, Glenn would be the perfect candidate for an alien encounter, but he’s never claimed he’s had one. Or has he?

The beauty part of the chart below is that if you go to C-SPAN's website it lays out each debate like this, and you can easily mouse through it and click through quickly to videos and transcripts backing up the chart's claims. I'm telling you, this is pure information crack.

Keywords in the Debate and Timeline [via Information Aesthetics]

Peckman hopes to chat with Obama before he’s elected, when the CIA - gatekeeper of all shadowy information - hands the senator its own version of the extraterrestrial truth. At least one former president did get the full Facts of Intergalactic Life, according to Peckman:

President Reagan’s UFO/ET briefing at Camp David March 6-8, 1981 is described in a twenty-one page alleged transcript that was declassified from “Top Secret” last October 2007. The document suggests that CIA Director William Casey and several other unnamed advisors revealed facts about UFOs and ETs that clearly astonished Reagan.

But Democrats have apparently not have been afforded the same courtesy:

The day after his inauguration, President Jimmy Carter requested information on the UFO/ET issue but was denied the material by CIA Director George Bush Sr. Key Republicans like Bush Sr. are reported to have a big role in keeping information about UFOs from the public.

President Clinton was also not allowed a briefing from high level government officials. Instead he had to rely in large part on credible witness testimony from former high-ranking military, intelligence agency, and government contractor personnel organized by Dr. Steven Greer of the Disclosure Project.

So does Peckman think he’ll actually win Obama's ear? Probably not. He says the offer “is just a courtesy.” But ultimately, he wants the Democratic Party to force the issue on extraterrestrial disclosure by adding four objectives to its platform:

· To hold open, secrecy-free hearings on the UFO/Extraterrestrial presence on and around Earth.
· To hold open hearings on advanced energy and propulsion systems that, when publicly released, will provide solutions to global environmental challenges.
· To enact legislation which will ban all space-based weapons.
· To enact comprehensive legislation to research, develop and explore space peacefully and cooperatively with all cultures on Earth and in space.

There is no indication that Peckman plans to make a similar offer to Senator McCain. Perhaps McCain is one of those “key Republicans” keeping aliens and their technology under wraps.

[The Extra Campaign]

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