Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: DISCUSSION
In personal discussions and in correspondence with Paul Villa, I pointed out the inaccuracy of certain prophecies he claimed to have been given by his space friends, such as that 17 nations would have the atomic bomb by 1966 (30 years later, however, one could make the case that 17 nations had some approach, at least, to an atom bomb), and that Ronald Reagan would be elected president in 1976 (though he was thus elected four years later). Furthermore, some of the information supposedly imparted to Villa is spurious. Mars, purportedly used as a base by his space friends, had ‘canals’ and even ‘pumping stations’ as well as ‘cacti and other plants’ in certain locations. Atmospheric pressure at ground level, he told me in 1976, was equivalent to that at 12,000 feet on Earth (it is actually less than one-hundredth of the Earth’s), and there were some high stratus clouds (true, but this was already known).
Undaunted, Villa passed on the information he had acquired, as well as his photographs, to a certain Mr Martin at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which runs NASA’s unmanned space programmes, including the 1964 Mariner, the 1976 Viking and the 1997 Pathfinder probes of Mars.
Was it possible, I asked Villa, that his space people had lied to him? ‘No,’ he replied, ‘the space people, as you write, are not lying to so-called contactees, they just don’t divulge hardly anything about their plans. Why should they?
People would just make money from that info; besides, how can humanity appreciate anything if it is beyond their capacity to understand?’
Accusations that Villa made money with his photographs are without foundation: he lived in very modest circumstances, spending much of his time and money sending free copies of his colour photographs to all and sundry. ‘We write to premiers, kings, governors, leaders all over the world,’ he wrote to
me.
In 1967, with Villa’s permission, Ben Blazs of UFO International copyrighted and sold sets of the photos, but Villa himself saw very little of the money, he told me. Villa claimed that the Walt Disney Studios, as well as the US Air Force, had studied the negatives of his photographs and could not fault them. Dr Edward Condon, who headed the University of Colorado’s investigation team which, sponsored by the Air Force, studied the subject of UFOs from 1966 to 1968, reportedly said ‘they were the best he had ever seen’, Villa told me.
There is no mention of either Villa or his photos in the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, edited by Dr Condon.
Villa reported to William Sherwood that after studying his camera and the negatives, Dr Robert Low, co-ordinator of the Colorado project, said that although the team knew that his pictures were ‘good’, they could not use them because the committee was committed to an essentially negative conclusion.
Villa, who died of cancer in 1981, shunned publicity throughout his life, avoiding interviews with the media and rarely granting meetings, even to researchers. Perhaps this was due in part to some disturbing threats: he claimed, for instance, that he had been shot at once in his pickup truck (I saw the bullet hole in the side window), and that helicopters frequently hovered around him.
Most researchers who did manage to spend time with him found him genuine. ‘He certainly never tried to use his unusual personal experiences for monetary gain,’ wrote Bill Sherwood. ‘To me he seemed always humble and sincere, unimpressed by the attention he received from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, U Thant, who called him at his workshop to discuss his experiences with the extraterrestrials.’
During the 40-minute telephone call in 1970, U Thant reportedly also discussed the worldwide UFO situation.
In my own correspondence with him, Villa sometimes waxed effusive about politics and religion, seldom decisively addressing questions I posed. Our discussions in person in 1976 proved more fruitful. Three different groups of extraterrestrial beings were coming to Earth, including ‘certainly one that is good’, he asserted. ‘We are not under observation, since they are here all the time.’ The space people had hundreds of bases within our solar system, including many on Earth, Mars and Venus. Some groups came here simply as tourists. Villa’s group liaised with about 70 contactees in the United States and about 300 worldwide Their craft, when not completely silent, made sounds like a ‘musical saw’ or an ‘enormous generator’, or a ‘clanking noise’. Unlike some other craft, those belonging to Villa’s group did not ionize air as a by-product of propulsion.
Water was as essential to them as it is to us, and it was first vaporized before being taken on board the craft. In spite of their ‘phenomenal abilities’, the space people were not superhuman, which brings forward an interesting point.
Villa drove Lou Zinsstag and me to those sites in the vicinity of Albuquerque where he had taken photographs of craft and conversed with the crew (who would not allow themselves to be photographed). Though some were dressed in the traditional one-piece suits, he said, most were dressed in more typical human clothing. At one of these sites, beside the Rio Grande near Algodones, I asked him what the other crew members were doing while he conversed briefly with a man he assumed to be the pilot. ‘Oh, they were just bathing their feet in the river,’ he replied, without hesitation.
At the time, that reply, delivered without so much as the bat of an eyelid, astonished me. Eventually, though, it contributed to a growing conviction that Paul Villa’s story contains essential elements of truth. As so often is the case, contactees’ stories seem to mix truth and fiction, and something of a problem is presented, then, in sorting out the wheat from the chaff.