This article is to highlight some of the UFO research found in Shirley MacClaine's new book Saging While Aging edited for this website by Alan Steinfeld

After reviewing her years as a showgirl with the likes of Frank, Dean and the rest of the Rat Pack, she gets to what I feel is the real meat of the book.  I can honestly say what Shirley gives us in chapters 7 and 8 is one of the most comprehensive overview, I have found, on UFOs to date. Those only slightly familiar with the circumstances will receive a great education. Her investigations reports the stark the authenticity of the situation. 

Yes it is here that she reveals, the now famous tale, about former presidential candidate, Dennis Kucinich, who “had a close sighting over my home in Graham, Washington…the smell of roses drew him out to my balcony” Beyond this however she goes into every aspect of the UFO question in a neat and orderly fashion leaving the reader no doubt that the phenomenon is real, happening, and viable. It is all here in considerable detail; from the Air force cover-ups; to John Mack’s investigation into the abduction scenarios by ETs; to Disclosure and Exo-politics; a term coined by political analyst Alfred Webre. This is the latest move by people such as Washington lobbyist Steven Bassett to push the government into revealing to the public its secret files.
 
If you have an intelligent open-mind you will not be able to refuse what Shirley so thoughtfully and thoroughly puts forth. Why this is not in our common awareness is the subject of more detailed upcoming articles by me. But a brief explanation provided by Shirley’s research will suffice for now.  She reveals that military intelligence analyst John Maynard, working for the Defense Intelligence Agency for 21 years was hired to “implement disinformation or misinformation programs” about UFOs.  Maynard states: “… that the military was using the media to keep those UFO researchers from making too much of the issue by having the media brand them as kooks, weird, paranoid, and unbelievable; better yet, by having people who go around chasing after shadows in a belief that UFOs are real and the government is hiding something.  To date, this plan has worked well above average, and the general public still has an opinion that follows whatever the media tells them.”

Shirley initiates the topic with what is simultaneously the beginning of modern UFO encounters and the beginning of modern UFO cover-up, namely the Roswell UFO retrieval of 1947.  She gives us key witness testimony: “According to [US Army Cornel] Corso and Trudeau there were two beings in the craft, described as having small, wiry, trim bodies with eyes that looked like wrap around goggles, who communicated telepathically in English with the humans that found them”

For Shirley, however, the first awareness of the situation happened as a young girl growing up in Virginia. She remembers being moved hearing about a sighting over the nation’s capital. She tells us: “It was a Saturday night, in 1952 (I know because I recorded it in my dairy.) A pilot reported seeing UFOs…and two Air Force F-94 jets streaked over Washington in hot pursuit.  The next morning the banner headline in The Washington Post was SAUCER OUTRAN, JET PILOT REVEALS.”

She really does some fine reporting when she follows-up on the 1952 incident: “Life magazine did a cover story called ‘There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.  Have We Visitors from Outer Space?’  It reviewed ten recent UFO sightings and concluded that they could not be written off as hallucinations, hoaxes, or earthly aircraft.” Highlighting the most important aspect of the Life piece she reveals: “An unnamed officer was quoted saying, ‘the higher you go in the Air Force, the more seriously they take flying saucers.’”

In a very eerie revelation, which is one of the mainstays of UFO folklore, Shirley discloses that: … in 1954, President Eisenhower made a trip to Palm Springs… On the evening of Saturday, Feb 20th, he disappeared…There are a number of sources alleging a meeting between Eisenhower and star beings that constituted a formal ‘First Contact event.’”  What Shirley does not say, but what I have put together from other sources is that at that meeting Eisenhower made a deal with the aliens to allow them to abduct a percentage of the population for genetic experiments, in exchange for knowledge of advance technology.  Pretty strange to be sold-out by your own government, but it is not the first time.

Another revelation: “Perhaps the most important document ever released in Canada is the Top Secret memo of November 21, 1951, from Wilbert B. Smith: ‘We believe that we are on the track of something which may well prove to be the introduction of new technology…the existence of a different technology is borne out by the investigations which are being carried on at the present time in relation to flying saucers.’

Putting it all in perspective Shirley muses; “What could be more interesting than speculating upon who we are, where we come from, and will we come again?”  She, like many others, feel that a great spiritual evolution is already underway, and that it may culminate in a massive shift in consciousness on December 21, 2012 - the date upon which the Mayan calendar ends. “I can feel the polar shift unfolding, which only means that the sacred vortices are moving in accordance with the procession of the equinoxes…Perhaps we should look at the karmic prophecies more as dharmic prophecy."