The Man Who Would Know About Alien Contact

In compiling information for my next book (titled The Big Book of UFOs and due out Fall 2010), I collected some trivia for a "Did You Know?" section.

One of the documents I found in going through my files at Ufology Research was the Outer Space Treaty. Not well known, the treaty was drafted by a subcommittee of the United Nations and ratified in 1967, and signed by the USA, Soviet Union and United Kingdom. In other words, it's a document of international law.

Buried in dozens of pages of gobbledygook is the following note, found in Part One, Section E, Article 5, Point 3:

In carrying out activities under this Agreement, States Parties shall promptly inform the Secretary-General, as well as the public and the international scientific community, of any phenomena they discover in outer space, including the Moon, which could endanger human life or health, as well as of any indication of organic life.

In other words, if anyone finds or contacts aliens (and presumably UFOs of they are spacecraft), the first person to be notified is currently Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations. Then, the public should be notified, and then the scientific community.

So, the one person who should be informed of any alien contact is Ban Ki-moon. He's the go-to guy.

I don't recall him commenting about evidence for aliens in any of his recent speeches, however.

The good news is that the public is supposed to be informed too.

The text of the complete treaty can be found here:
http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/oosa/en/SpaceLaw/outerspt.html