Watching the Skies with Hillary
By the 1990s, serious UFOlogists struggled to distance themselves from the conspiracy contingent, but the fact is that voluble fringe players inevitably attract media attention. In April 2015, shortly before Hillary Clinton announced her second run for the presidency, Mother Jones magazine blogger A. J. Vicens wrote a piece called “ETs for Hillary: Why UFO Activists Are Excited About Another Clinton Presidency.” Vicens described President and Mrs. Clinton’s relationship with the late philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller, who urged the president to open classified UFO files.
The Clintons were fond of Rockefeller, but in the mid-1990s a White House staffer warned the president and First Lady to avoid prolonged public contact with the man. If they did not, the staffer warned, reporters would link Bill and Hillary with Rockefeller’s avowed interest “in extra-sensory perception, paranormal phenomena, and UFOs.” The Mother Jones blog caught the eye of Chicago Tribune columnist Rex W. Huppke. He contacted a UFO conspiracy theorist named Michael Salla, whose blog, exopolitics.org, studies and reports on “key individuals, political institutions, and processes associated with extraterrestrial life.”
Salla elaborated on the Hillary tale, telling Huppke about documents “actually verifying that [Hillary Clinton] does have an interest in the UFO issue.” The antipathy held in some quarters for the Clintons—with recent animus directed more frequently at Hillary than at Bill—is expressed partly as conspiracy notions: Hillary’s Wall Street connections and her scheme to enslave the world; Hillary’s involvement in the murders of more than ninety enemies of the Clintons; Hillary’s role—perhaps as a mistress—in the 1993 suicide of White House chief of staff Vince Foster; Hillary’s penchant for decorating the White House Christmas tree with condoms and vulgar sex toys; her determination to turn America into a theocracy ruled by Scientologists. The rumors go on in this imaginative fashion, encouraging dead- serious conspiracy buffs and wisenheimers alike to concoct more tales.
Around 2010, a man named Tonio Cousyn (described on the Web as a “researcher”) looked at 1995 photos of Laurance Rockefeller and Hillary Clinton, snapped at Rockefeller’s Wyoming ranch. Hillary cradles a book in her arm as she walks with her host; just a portion of what appears to be the back cover is visible. Cousyn investigated and identified the volume as Paul Davies’s 1995 book Are We Alone?
Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life. Davies is a celebrated physicist with an intense and rational interest in theology. Are We Alone? proposes that human discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life would have rich and positive effects on theology as well as science. Such a discovery would confirm a theory held by Davies and many other scientists—that the universe and its structures tend toward complexity.
Intelligent life other than our own would suggest that complexity and, as Davies sees it, “give us cause to believe that we, in our humble way, are part of a larger, majestic self-process of cosmic self-knowledge.” Davies’s book was new when Hillary Clinton visited the Rockefeller ranch.
Given Rockefeller’s well-known interest in extraterrestrial life, we can hardly be surprised that Hillary arrived with (or, perhaps, that Rockefeller gave to her) a copy of Are We Alone? Regardless, conspiracy buffs inferred that Hillary Clinton possesses a fevered interest in extraterrestrial life, rather than casual curiosity. Consider this: if Hillary had visited Robin Burruss (president of Georgia’s Tip Top Poultry, Inc.), she might have carried a copy of Mack North’s Commercial Chicken Production Manual. Jumping to a conclusion, we might claim that Mrs. Clinton hoped to one day raise chickens in the White House back yard. Well, that’s just dull; a suggested link between Hillary Clinton and extraterrestrial life is considerably more intriguing.
Blog chatter about the Hillary-UFO conspiracy continued throughout the Clinton presidential campaign.