Recently, the Wall Street Journal (5/6/11; J. Hookway) featured a grabby, partly tongue-in-cheek page 1 piece about strange events in Asia. “Alien Signtings Go Into Hyperdrive” — this time in Thailand — reminded me of the Klaatu Effect.

In the 1950s traffic was so bad in Washington that not even an interstellar spacecraft could find a place to park. Apparently, now the problem’s spread to Asia.
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According to the Mutual UFO Network in Colorado,

Since the slump in the Western banking system in 2008, UFO sightings among Asia’s fast-growing economies have accelerated. Suspicious UFOs have shut down airports in China, buzzed resorts in Borneo and lti up the night sky in Myanmar.

However, the action in Thailand is strangely familiar. For example, dozens of UFO enthusiasts — e.g., medical students, interior decorators, others — routinely camp out at their own personal “Stargate” to experience UFOs and their effects. One participant explains that,

When we meditate we can understand what they’re trying to tell us — we feel it through our bodies and we understand.

An American medical doctor in Thailand says he had his first UFO encounter in 1996 on the phone with an alien from Mars. The ET said “not to worry about the phone bill.” Now he sees them all the time.

They warn of natural disasters such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or political upheavals …

Other UFO investigators in Thailand believe they communicate with UFO aliens telepathically, and one army sergeant claims to have channeled ETs.

Then an alien voice spoke to us through the sergeant and told us he was there to help human beings reach the next level of development.

This is a replay of a UFO-related subculture that developed in the U.S. and elsewhere during the 1950s and 1960s, before and during the Apollo Maslow Window. Although seemingly with loose screws and easily dismissed, you can read about their cultural impact in computer scientist Jacques Vallee’s intriguing book, Messengers of Deception.

It suggests we may be approaching an affluent, ebullient time with a cultural focus on space, not seen since the 1960s.

In the 1950s, the medical doctor above would have been called a “contactee.” Alleged telepathic communications and warnings of threatening natural and political events were common. From 1953 until 1973, the famous contactee George Van Tassel, who was reportedly a flight test engineer for Howard Hughes, organized large, public UFO conventions — featuring all of the above — in the Southern California desert at Giant Rock (near Landers, CA).

During the early 1960s UFOs became so respectable that one contactee, Gabriel Green, ran for the U.S. Senate from California and received 171,000 votes in the primaries (M. Sachs, The UFO Encyclopedia, 1980).

About 5 years ago while casually perusing the UFOCAT (Center for UFO Studies), a computerized list of UFO sightings from 1946 to 2000, I noticed that UFO sightings were reported worldwide, including Europe, the UK, and North America. Athough they were plentiful from 1947 through the 1950s and 1960s, they petered out after 1973. The timing is coincident with the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window and the preceding decade.

Assuming the UFOCAT was accurate and complete, I still didn’t know if people were actually seeing more UFOs before 1973 than after, or if media reports were artificially stimulating the phenomenon. But I unofficially started calling this the “Klaatu Effect,” after the magnificent space alien in the original movie, The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951).

The current Klaatu Effect involves more than Bay Area-style UFO enthusiasts in Asia. For example, Dr. Lynne Kitei, a well-known physician and educator, discussed UFOs recently on Fox News Channel. She’s played a major role drawing attention to the extraordinary Phoenix Lights UFO sightings of March, 1997. They have been compared to one of the most intriguing mass witness UFO events ever: the Washington National Airport UFO sightings of 1952, when reportedly several UFOs flew in formation over the White House on consecutive weekends.

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