Ex-CEO of USWeb and amateur Ufologist Joe Firmage has severed his last remaining ties with the company he helped to found. On Friday January 8 1999, Firmage stepped down as chief strategy officer of USWeb, which recently merged with CKS to form USWeb/CKS. Rumor has it that Firmage was pressured to resign by Robert Shaw, the ex-Oracle exec who replaced him at the helm of USWeb, but Firmage insists that the move was his own idea. I genuinely have invested my life in this company and I want to see nothing in terms of collateral PR damage to the firm, so it was my choice, Firmage told the San Jose Mercury News. He denies some of the more extreme coverage of his views: I have never said that we got fiber optics from an alien. I’ve never said we got the microprocessor from them. However, he added, I do believe in the UFO phenomenon. At the age of 28, Firmage has made his fortune twice in Silicon Valley. First with Serius, a software start-up which he sold to Novell for $24m in 1993, and again with USWeb. He was widely respected until, on September 25 1998, he published a web site detailing documents from what he called the Deep Throat of Cyberspace. Firmage maintains that these documents shed new light on UFOs in general and the alleged crash of a spacecraft at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. By distancing himself from USWeb/CKS, he hopes to draw the fire of negative press coverage of his views away from his former company. But Firmage’s decision to go public with his beliefs before resigning from USWeb means the damage may already have been done.
