JASON COLAVITO

Congressional UFO Hearing Goes Badly for Ufologists

5/17/2022

The United States Congress held the first hearing on UFOs since the 1960s, and it went about as well as those of us in the reality-based community could have hoped. In the hearing, called in a subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee by Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), who recently admitted to getting his UFO ideas from cable TV and media articles, naval intelligence officer Scott Bray and Defense Department intelligence official Ronald Moultrie effectively made the case that the flap over UFOs is a tempest in a teapot driven by sensationalism.

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"The Basement Office" Lays Bare the Deception Behind the AAWSAP/AATIP Story

5/13/2022

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Unfortunately, yesterday my son and I both tested positive for coronavirus. As of this writing, we are both doing OK, with mild symptoms. I am feeling tired, though. So, in lieu of a blog post, please enjoy Steven Greenstreet's Basement Office episode for The New York Post in which he dissects the murky path through which a group of propagandists created a UFO flap by leveraging the New York Times. As I have pointed out many times, and as Greenstreet explains in the video, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal purposely omitted essential information about AAWSAP's paranormal research in order to create a piece of advocacy rather than journalism in order to generate spurious "credibility." At the end, Greenstreet catches Lue Elizondo in a lie. Despite claiming never to have been involved with paranormal-hunting AAWSAP, only the later UFO-hunting AATIP, Elizondo claimed in official documents to have worked for AAWSAP for two years and to have performed the function of its director. Elizondo took to social media to try to mitigate the damage, arguing that his involvement didn't count because he decided "within 24 hours" not to perform his assigned AAWSAP duties. His explanation was implausible.

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Weekly Roundup: A House UFO Hearing, Prehistoric Phallic "Civilization," and More!

5/10/2022

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This week, Rep. André Carson announced that his subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee would hold a hearing next week on the Pentagon’s lack of transparency on UFOs. It is the first UFO hearing in Congress since 1966. Naturally, the New York Times brought back its biased reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, both with conflicts of interest, to cover the story. Both reporters are longtime members of the UFO community. Blumenthal has openly spoken of his “transcendent” belief in the paranormal power of UFOs, and Kean spent much of the last year working for Bob Bigelow, a key figure in the government UFO story. She was also the longtime romantic partner of the late Budd Hopkins, an alien abduction researcher funded by Bigelow.

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Queer Numbers: Tracing the Origins of a Misleading Statistic

5/2/2022

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As part of the research for the new book I am crafting out of parts of the one that didn’t garner much interest, I have been researching government persecution of queer people in the postwar era. In so doing, I came across a rather dramatic fact that led me down a statistical rabbit-hole as I hunted the source of a seemingly dramatic fact that turned out not be what it seemed.

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Turkish Official Claims Göbekli Tepe Depicts Space Aliens

4/27/2022

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The mayor of the town where the ancient site of Göbekli Tepe is located claimed that the temple complex's stylized carvings of human figures are so unusual that they may depict space aliens, according to the Hurriyet Daily News. Zeynel Abidin Beyazgül, the mayor of Şanlıurfa, said that the clothing worn by the T-shaped carvings resembled outfits he associated with space creatures.

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Avi Loeb Wants to Search the Pacific Ocean for Crashed Alien Tech

4/24/2022

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This week, Harvard astronomer and ufologist Avi Loeb published a piece in The Debrief claiming that a meteor that crashed into the Earth in 2014 could be a piece of alien technology and arguing that it should be recovered from the bottom of the ocean for study. The wild claim earned coverage in tabloids like the The Sun and the Daily Mail, but otherwise continues Loeb’s downward trajectory. Last year, he was a media darling whose thoughts on UFOs appeared in every major publication and across the TV news landscape and stood on the verge of having his status as America’s UFO arbiter enshrined by Congress in federal law. Now, he’s headlining looney ufology conferences, appearing at cryptocurrency events, and publishing on fringe websites while spouting ersatz philosophy about aliens saving us all.

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The Apocalyptic Fringe Theory Behind Tucker Carlson's Homoerotic Documentary

4/18/2022

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Note: This piece is cross-posted in my Substack newsletter.

This weekend, Fox News commentator and UFO aficionado Tucker Carlson posted previews for the new season of his Fox Nation streaming service documentary series Tucker Carlson Originals. This season’s episodes designed to appear to the prejudices and preferences of old white conservative men whose last new idea occurred to them in 1979 include one on why trans people regret changing their gender, one on the crisis of UFOs attacking and mutilating our cattle, and the one that received the most ridicule: “The End of Men,” a documentary alleging that male testosterone levels have declined steadily for decades, and men will cease to be masculine in our lifetimes unless conservatism restores their virility.

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Kit Green Says Supposed "UFO" Injuries Aren't Alien After All

4/13/2022

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Jack Brewer has a fascinating interview with ex-CIA employee Kit Green, the longtime paranormal enthusiast who worked with Hal Puthoff and Jacques Vallée on so-called “real-life X-Files.” Green is the author of one of the studies recently released by the Pentagon that sparked a tabloid frenzy with claims that the government had identified specific health effects from UFO encounters and alien abduction. Now, speaking with Brewer, Green makes clear that he did not find any evidence of space aliens, despite the claims made for his research. I’ll leave you to read the whole thing for yourself, but I will highlight a couple of key points, starting with Green saying “In my paper, I didn't think any of the stories were necessarily valid,” a rather shocking claim when writing a paper looking for evidence of anomalous health effects. Nevertheless, his conclusions stand at odds with Garry Nolan’s implications of interdimensional mind parasites infecting the brains of susceptible geniuses:

Over the course of the 75-minute conversation taking place by phone on April 6, Green unequivocally stated he believes human beings are responsible for producing the technology that ultimately injured patients in the cases he examined. I'd add that nowhere but UFO World would his position be considered controversial or outside the box, should such cases actually prove to be indicative of encounters with aerial vehicles as Green indicates he believes.

"All I'm saying is I don't need alien spacecraft from another dimension to explain the injuries. That's all I'm saying," Green added. Never once, in the last 15 years of examining the cases, has he had to invent an extraterrestrial or an esoteric device to account for the injuries.

"[...] I don't think it's a guy with slanty eyes from far, far away in his shape-shifting universe. I think these are human technologies. Sometimes, accidents that are occurring because instrumentation and deployment that has another purpose is approximating what it is as having an unintended consequence – that is a medical consequence – and that's happened in government technology centers and laboratories ever since technology was a tire that was put on a vehicle and it rolled away."

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Review of The UnXplained S04E03: "What Lies Below"

4/11/2022

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Normally I put an episode number here, but the show is listed as both S03E11 and S04E03. History appears to have started a new season last week, but production codes listed the new episodes as a continuation of season 3.

Since I am not a robot, I was not able to review the latest episode of The UnXplained this weekend, but it was certainly a doozy. I hadn’t expected the show to return to the well of lost prehistoric super-civilizations quite so quickly, but here we are again. I guess that explains why William Shatner has been so insistent on battling archaeological criticism on Twitter this past week with petty insults. This time, the Ancient Aliens remix hour in which Shatner presides over recycled material from Prometheus Entertainment’s other nonsense fake science shows goes hunting for lost continents and sunken civilizations. Not a word is spoken about the many hoaxes and frauds that undergird the show’s claims, and if you think anyone involved will so much as whisper that the modern versions of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu were born in racism and celebrated a white master race that civilized the world, you don’t know how propaganda works.

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Tabloids, Abductions, and Porn: New Documents Unveil Pentagon UFO "Research"

4/6/2022

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The Pentagon released a trove of documents related to the AAWSAP/AATIP program that famously hunted paranormal phenomena and UFOs at Skinwalker Ranch in the 2000s. Its official purpose was supposedly to investigate breakthrough aerospace technologies, though Bigelow Aerospace always intended the $22 million contracted for the initial research to probe the mysteries of interdimensional poltergeists and flying saucers to “reverse engineer” (though they used the term wrongly) new technologies from the seemingly magical properties they imagined for unseen sky specters.

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