If WikiLeaks didn’t already have the attention of the world’s conspiracy theorists, its founder Julian Assange grabbed the X-files crowd by their tin-foil helmet antennae in December, when he mentioned that the site plans to publish leaked cables that reference UFOs.
But after two months of allowing the UFO-obsessed to let their psychotic imaginations run wild, Assange may have put a damper on hopes that Area 51’s secrets will finally be exposed.
In the first of a series of video interviews posted Sunday that WikiLeaks is calling a “Live People’s Conference,” Assange answered questions submitted by the group’s’ fans. One, sent in by a Canadian named Pierre Brunet, asked about the upcoming UFO cable release. And Assange’s answer, which appears around 5:40 in the video below, may disappoint those who have been busy building alien landing sites out of their mashed potatoes.
WikiLeaks’ UFO-related material, Assange says, largely deals with the UFO cult group known as the Raelians, whose beliefs mix religion, sex, pseudo-science and alien mythology. State Department officials in Canada have expressed concern over the group’s influence there, citing a 2002 incident when the group falsely claimed to have cloned humans.
Here’s the transcript of his answer to the question:
I have said in passing there is information about UFOs in Cablegate. And that is true, but these are only small passing references. Most of the material concerns UFO cults, and their behavior in recruiting people. For instance, there is quite a large cable, which we’ll try and release in the next few days, concerning the Raelians, a UFO cult which has a strong presence in Canada and was of concern to the U.S. ambassador in Canada. At that time, the Raelians claimed to have cloned an individual, and fantastically, the press all around the world ate this up and turned it into front page stories.
If this deflates many UFO fans, it may come as more of a shock to the Raelians themselves, who awarded Assange the title of “Honorary Guide to Humanity” in December.
Although the UFO community has placed many of its hopes on Assange and even suggested that he may have subconsciously revealed backwards encrypted messages about aliens in his 60 Minutes interview, the WikiLeaks founder’s disdain for the Raelian cult shouldn’t come as a surprise. In answering Guardian readers’ questions in December, he complained that “weirdos email us about UFOs or how they discovered that they were the anti-christ whilst talking with their ex-wife at a garden party over a pot-plant.” WikiLeaks has also long battled the Church of Scientology, and Assange himself fought with the Church’s lawyers as early as the mid-90s, when anti-Scientology sites were hosted on the Internet service provider he co-founded, Suburbia.net.
In interviews, Assange has also railed against paranoiacs who tout false conspiracies, citing the 9/11 Truth movement. “There are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It’s important not to confuse these two,” Assange told the Belfast Telegraph last July. “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as [those that surround] 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.”
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