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Sideshow: Rafael Correa hangs out with Raul Castro in Havana -- but so what? The underplayed story is how Ecuador's president is transforming its military relationship with UFOs/CREDIT: havanatimes.org
UFO glasnost has been sweeping South America for years now, and the piece skims some of those treetops. But the revelation here, and its primary focus, is the work of one man — Ecuadoran journo Rodriguez — who’s been pressing his government for UFO disclosure since 1983.
Working for Ecuavisa television, Rodriguez managed in 2005 to wring a major concession from Ecuador’s mercurial now-ex president Lucio Gutierrez, a former army colonel who staged a brief coup d’etat in Quito in 2000. Rodriguez persuaded Guitierrez to actually live up to a campaign promise about UFO transparency (whoa Nellie!), and the result was the Committee for the Investigation of the UFO Phenomenon (CEIFO). Staffed with six civilians, including Rodriguez, CEIFO was charged with collecting enough “convincing” data to write a cogent appeal for the government to end its UFO information bottleneck. But promised funding never materialized. So Rodriguez and crew managed to scrape together $12k to pursue their documentary research over the next two years.
The real trick here was getting military eyewitnesses, fearful of destroying their careers, to talk about what they’d seen. The story took a momentum swing in 2007, after Rafael Correa was elected to the presidency. Correa directed Ecuador’s Ministry of Defense to allow military personnel to openly discuss their UFO encounters. Perhaps that was a direct response to the documentary’s most curious twist — an allegation that “economic and career incentives” extended by the U.S. to the Ecuadoran military was at least partially contingent upon keeping UFO data “concealed.” Unfortunately, the hour-long feature offers no specific evidence of this charge.
President Correa is the wild card in this mix. Buds with the Castro brothers, calling it an insult to Satan when Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez denounced George Bush as “the devil” in the United Nations, Correa was anti-gringo from the get-go. But the documentary claims the spit hit the fan in ‘08, when Correa discovered his military “secret services” had been financed by the CIA. He expelled Americans he accused of being CIA operatives, then ordered the administrative restructuring of his country’s national security network.
Then Correa did something really cool: He invited Rodriguez into a meeting with Ecuador’s top military brass, and directed them to give Rodriguez whatever resources he needed to access UFO material. Ecuador’s men, and presumably women, in uniform have been talking on the record ever since. Here’s a glimpse. These guys appear to be active duty:
Can you imagine USAF pilots talking this candidly about what they saw in the skies above Phoenix or Stephenville? Although this feature doesn’t nudge us any closer to solving the mystery, it serves up intriguing excerpts from some 400 mostly-civilian videos routinely confiscated and hoarded for decades by the government. One was provided by a former Ecuadoran vice president, whose outdoor birthday party was abruptly interrupted by a UFO as friends and family boogied below.
But forget the data. The biggest shift is cultural. The ridicule factor, says Rodriguez, appears to be collapsing:
“We’ve noticed there’s a greater sense of maturity among us now. The population has a more mature attitude toward the UFO phenomenon. This stimulates us to move our work into the analytical part of the subject, which is what we really need to focus on now.”
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Uncle Sam to jump aboard the Love Train. Last April, following the WikiLeaks debacle, Ecuador expelled the U.S. ambassador for cabling home that Correa appointed a police commissioner he knew was corrupt. In September, when Correa was in New York for a UN meeting, the mayor of Union City, N.J., canceled an event Correa was scheduled to attend due to Ecuador’s deepening economic ties with Iran and Cuba.
So it goes. But politics are transient. Keep your eye on the real ball here. When it comes to UFOs, Ecuador and a growing number of its neighbors are snubbing their noses at our rules.
