By: Mitch Potter Washington Bureau, Published on Tue Apr 30 2013
WASHINGTON—As close encounters go, this one has it all — an unprecedented week of seemingly official hearings in the very heart of Washington, jammed with spine-tingling top-secret accounts of the extraterrestrial kind.
From Roswell, Area 51 and Britain’s mysterious Rendlesham Forest Incident to the silent hovering craft that once disabled 10 Minuteman missiles in North Dakota, it’s all coming out.
And that’s even before the hearings take a much-anticipated Canadian twist Friday, when former defence minister Paul Hellyer, now almost 90, arrives from Toronto to deliver the coup de grace on the irrefutability of alien contact.
But wait. This isn’t Congress; it’s the National Press Club, 14 blocks away. And those six congressional leaders overseeing the blockbuster revelations, including testimony from more than 40 witnesses, are actually ex-congressmen and women, each enjoying an honorarium of $20,000 for their troubles.