A few days after John Greenewald’s FOIA request for Chris Mellon’s messages to Sean Kirkpatrick revealed David Grusch had misrepresented his efforts to avoid speaking to AARO about his crashed saucer claims, Chris Mellon coincidentally released messages he exchanged with an allegedly high-ranking government official about a crashed saucer in Kingman, Arizona—messages he sat on for more than three years. The new messages, sent through a government text-messaging service, sent a tizzy of excitement through a ufology community reeling from accusations that this week’s new whistleblower, Jason Sands, told inconsistent stories about working for the UFO Task Force that suggested he was making his story up.
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(UPDATED 4/23/24) John Oliver devoted the main story on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight to UFOs, with more than twenty minutes of commentary that reportedly took more than a year to produce. The result was a disappointing attempt to play both sides, deriding skeptics as “killjoys” and believers as lunatics and positing, with neither evidence nor argument, that the truth must be somewhere in between.
The episode is currently streaming on Max but won’t be available for free viewing on YouTube until the Warner Bros. Discovery-mandated waiting period expires. I will embed the video when it becomes available. In an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, rightwing personality Tucker Carlson reaffirmed his belief that UFOs are vehicles belonging to ancient “spiritual entities” that live deep under the earth and in the oceans. Building on comments he first offered a few months back, Carlson suggested that supernatural beings operated alongside ancient humans, echoing the infamous 1940s Shaver Mystery that has become a bedrock belief of fringe conspiracy culture. New government documents obtained by John Greenewald of The Black Vault show that so-called “UFO whistleblower” David Grusch repeatedly refused offers to provide testimony and evidence to the Pentagon’s UFO office, AARO, even while Grusch publicly stated that AARO had refused to meet with him. The documents show that Grusch initially expected that AARO would simply rely on previous statements Grusch had made to the intelligence community inspector general, not realizing that because he raised a potential criminal matter (about hiding programs from Congress) the material was not accessible to AARO during the investigation. When asked to repeat his testimony to AARO, he refused, raising false concerns that AARO wasn’t legally entitled to classified information and refusing to show up for scheduled interviews. Even after AARO and Congress informed Grusch he was wrong about the law, he did not speak to them.
After two months of miserable Ancient Aliens episodes on all but one Friday, I felt more than a little relief to receive a bit of time off from the grind. But that doesn’t mean that the outer edges of pseudoscience fell silent. After John Wiley & Sons retracted the infamous Gunung Padang paper claiming the Indonesian site was an Ice Age mega-pyramid, the author of the paper, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, published on Graham Hancock’s website what he says is the full text of his team’s communications with the team at Wiley over the retraction. Natawidjaja seems to think that doing so vindicates his claim that nefarious forces of Western orthodoxy ae suppressing his superior science, but reading through the correspondence makes plain that Natawdjaja and his team have no real evidence to support their claims, failed to consider alternative explanations, and relied almost entirely on drawing conclusions from a visual inspection of rocks—basically, “looks like, therefore is.” Natawidjaja seeks to reverse the burden of proof, demanding that critics prove that the natural-seeming formations he identifies as prehistoric constructions are not human-built, rather than offering any positive evidence of their artificiality.
I have often argued that the driving force behind ufology beliefs is primarily spiritual, an attempt to reenchant the world, reverse the damage Charles Darwin did to faith, and seek meaning in a literalized higher power, substituting aliens for angels in paying backhanded homage to the place of science as modern arbiter of truth. From the aliens-as-religion department comes two surprisingly blunt confirmations this week.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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