New University Class Claims Alien Conspiracy Theories Are Real, Government Is Covering Up Extraterrestrial Civilizations

A Turkish university is including a new course called "Ufology and Exopolitics" in its curriculum. The Dogan News Agency reported that the purpose of the class is to prepare students for the possibility of extraterrestrial contact.

"We believe representatives from the world and extraterrestrial civilizations will soon be making official contact with each other. We think they will be in an open and mass contact," the class's tutor, Erhan Kolbaşi, told the Dogan agency. "[It will be the] biggest change seen in the history of the world."

The course will focus not just on practical preparations and galactic diplomacy but also on the purported history of cover-ups related to alien contact. Kolbaşi, who told Dogan he expects contact within 15 years, also maintains that aliens have already visited Earth and that technologies like fiber-optic cable, microchips and night-vision instruments were developed from intelligence gathered at crash sites. He claimed that public knowledge of this kind of alien activity is being suppressed by a group known as MJ-12.

Kolbaşi is the deputy chair of the Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center, in Istanbul. MJ-12 has been the province of conspiracy theorists for years and also is the plot basis of the 1997 film Men in Black.

MJ-12 is short for Majestic 12, a vast, allegedly secret organization that President Harry Truman (allegedly) created to handle instances of alien contact and to (allegedly) keep them hidden from the public, even if that meant killing those who learned too much. Allegedly, anyway.

A journalist who previously requested the first documents to mention MJ-12 under the Freedom of Information Act explained in The Huffington Post that while the truth behind the rumors remained unclear, a lot of the claims were predicated on misinformation. And, in an FBI investigation of the first documents to mention the group, the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations ruled they were "bogus."

"In 1988, two FBI offices received similar versions of a memo titled "Operation Majestic-12…" claiming to be highly classified government document," the FBI records from its Vault website read. "The memo appeared to be a briefing for newly-elected President Eisenhower on a secret committee created to exploit a recovery of an extra-terrestrial aircraft and cover up this work from public examination. An Air Force investigation determined the document to be a fake."