Doug
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Wall Street Journal - January 11, 1999
Silicon Valley Star Leaves Company To Dwell on Other-Worldly Matters
By JIM CARLTON Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Joe Firmage, a young star of Silicon Valley, is leaving his company to focus on other planets.
Mr. Firmage, 28 years old, said he is resigning as chief strategist of USWeb/CKS Corp., a fast-growing Internet-consulting firm, to publicize his theories that Earth has been visited by aliens and that many high-tech inventions were brought by unidentified flying objects. He had stepped down in November as chief executive of the company, which he co-founded.
In an interview, Mr. Firmage said he feared his views about aliens might hurt the company's image.
"I don't want to subject the company to any possibility of risk for misinterpretations of what I am saying," Mr. Firmage said. "I do expect to be a tar baby here, but if I can cause people to wake up and consider there might be a bigger picture, then all this will be worth something."
News of the resignation was reported Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle. Company officials expressed regret at Mr. Firmage's departure, but said his position wouldn't be filled.
The company, originally known as USWeb, is among the largest of a new breed of consulting firms that help businesses set up operations on the Web. The firm has grown quickly through acquisitions, including a December merger with Internet-marketing firm CKS Group Inc.
Mr. Firmage has estimated he has spent about $3 million so far publicizing his UFO theories. In November, Mr. Firmage posted a 700-page book on a Web site entitled "The Truth," in which he describes an other-worldly encounter at his home in Los Gatos, Calif., about 15 months ago, with a "remarkable being, clothed in brilliant white light ..." The site also contains 200 pages of documents that he says point to a government coverup of information about UFO activities that include the purported crash of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, N.M., in 1947.
Mr. Firmage, an industry prodigy raised in Utah, founded a software company called Serius at the age of 17 and sold it to Novell Inc. six years later for $24 million. In 1995, he and other former Novell executives founded USWeb. He was replaced as CEO in November by Robert Shaw, a 51-year-old former Oracle Corp. executive. Although that was about the time Mr. Firmage posted his manifesto, both he and Mr. Shaw said the job change was an unrelated move to give the young company more management experience.
Mr. Firmage says he notified the firm's top management a week ago that he was severing all ties to pursue his extraterrestrial interests. Mr. Shaw said there had been no external pressure for Mr. Firmage to do so.
When contacted this weekend, Mr. Firmage expressed little regret at leaving his old life behind. "All I ask," he said, "is that people respect what I am saying and let history be my judge."