One of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R., Wis.) Democratic challengers is a conspiracy theorist who believes in extraterrestrial life and that the 9/11 attacks were a "false flag" operation.
Amardeep Kaleka received press attention after his decision to run due to the murder of his father at a 2012 shooting at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee.
Mother Jones reports that Kaleka also directed a documentary called "Sirius" that claims to present evidence of the existence of alien life and advances 9/11 "truther" conspiracy theories.
"Sirius" includes a number of confusing scenes during which Greer and his companions, including Kaleka, are filmed stargazing, claiming to spot alien aircraft. "It's got a path," Kaleka says in one such scene , as he looks at the sky. "It's got like a movement. And then it's gone." Onscreen text describes the congressional candidate as a "UFO Witness."
The movie also features a dose of 9/11 trutherism. "The question, on some people's minds, is whether or not this disaster was exploited, or worse, engineered," the narrator says midway through the movie. He asserts that 9/11 was a "false flag" operation mounted by the government a few months after a major conference of alien watchers in order to distract the public and suppress the truth, and he likens the 9/11 attacks to the Gulf of Tonkin incident during the Vietnam War. The movie goes on to suggest that the Bilderbergers and Rockefellers were behind a series of global conspiracies. […]
Kaleka's film is not an examination of those who believe in extraterrestrials. It's a sympathetic vehicle to promote their views to a wider audience. Ufologist Greer anchors the film by pacing a stage and giving a lecture, as if he's channeling Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth. Near the end of the movie, Greer states that there have been over 4,000 cases of extraterrestrial vehicles landing on Earth.