Andrew D. Basiago
The president and founder of MARS, Andrew D. Basiago, J.D., M.C.R.P. (Dist), M.Phil. (Cantab), 48, is an American lawyer, writer, and environmental scholar.
He was born on September 18, 1961 in Morristown, New Jersey, the youngest of five children, and grew up in Northern New Jersey and Southern California.
Andy was one of the "whiz kids" who served from 1969 to 1972 in DARPA's secret time-space exploration program, Project Pegasus.
Soon, he will publish his long-awaited memoir of his childhood experiences in US time-space exploration at the time of its emergence, entitled Once Upon a Time in Time's Stream: My Adventures in Project Pegasus at the Dawn of the Time-Space Age.
A past member of Mensa, the high IQ society, Andy holds five academic degrees, including a BA in History from UCLA and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
While an undergraduate at UCLA, he became a journalist and protégé of editor Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, who once compared him to Robert Hutchins and nominated him to be the Editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Andy was inspired by a meeting with the futurist Buckminster Fuller in 1981 to pursue a career in environmental policy. After their meeting, Fuller wrote: "Andrew Basiago's integrity augurs well for humanity's continuance in (the) Universe."
He began his career writing articles about the urban environment for Los Angeles newspapers, national periodicals, and the Cousteau Society journal Calypso Log.
Andy studied environmental law at Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and then went on to design nature-friendly urban plans for cities in California and study environmental law with Professor Malcolm Grant at Cambridge.
His papers about the theory and practice of urban sustainability have been published in international, peer-reviewed journals in Australia, Britain, and the United States, cited widely, and placed in the environmental policy collections of university libraries.
Andy was admitted to the Washington State Bar Association in 1996.
A lawyer in private practice, he specializes in personal injury law while representing and collaborating with writers and filmmakers in the development of books, TV shows, and feature films with planetary and interplanetary themes.
Recently, Andy edited several major works related to humanity's contact with extraterrestrial life.
He was the editor of Alfred Lambremont Webre's book, Exopolitics: Politics, Government and Law in the Universe (Universe Books, 2005), which uses as a case study human contact with an advanced civilization on Mars.
He also edited The Fátima Trilogy by Joaquim Fernandes, Fina d'Armada, and others (Anomalist Books, 2007), a definitive history of the Fátima Incident of 1917 that explores its extraterrestrial aspects.
Andy founded the Mars Anomaly Research Society (MARS) in 2008 after discovering evidence of life in a photograph of the Red Planet beamed back to Earth by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.
His discovery of life on Mars might be an epochal event in history. His crusade to evaluate and prove his findings and bring them to public light has been called "heroic."
About his discovery of life on Mars, Andy stated:
"From my perspective, the question that now confronts us is not 'Shall we permit the belief that Mars is inhabited?' but rather, 'How shall we think about it, now that we have knowledge that another planet in our solar system harbors life?'"