JASON COLAVITO

Whistleblower Tells Congress the U.S. Has a Secret UFO Crash Retrieval Program

6/5/2023

This morning Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean published a story in the Debrief reporting on claims made by a former liaison to the UAP Task Force alleging knowledge of a secret UFO crash retrieval program and the recovery of complete space alien vehicles. The report, however, raised several important questions about the quality of UFO information circulating in the Pentagon and of the information being provided to the United States Congress by advocates for UFO “disclosure.”

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Chris Mellon Becomes Ozymandias, Talks Benefits of Alien Threat to Humanity

6/3/2023

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On the same day that butt-probed alien abductee Whitley Strieber waded into the right-wing anti-trans campaign by opining that a woman is only “a person with 2 X chromosomes” and that “what people are and what we feel like are two different things,” Politico magazine gave fellow UFO advocate Chris Mellon prime real estate in Politico Magazine to insinuate, without evidence, that the United States has retrieved crashed alien spaceships, in an apparent effort to encourage additional funding for the many defense contractors vying for UFO investigation money—and his fellow ufologists who now work for them. That this piece ran only days after NASA reconfirmed that there is no known evidence of space aliens visiting earth or operating flying saucers is surely no coincidence. NASA’s briefing also declared Mellon’s analysis of the so-called “Go Fast” UFO video, which Mellon provided to the New York Times after Lue Elizondo took the video from the Pentagon without official permission, wrong. It was not traveling anomalously fast but was moving at the speed of the wind, like a balloon in the breeze.

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Watch Me Talk UFOs on Germany's ZDF

5/31/2023

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Earlier today, NASA held a meeting about UFOs with representatives from the Pentagon’s new UFO office (AARO) and members of NASA’s UFO research group, and the results were about what you would expect. Sean Kirkpatrick of AARO revealed that “Go Fast,” one of the famous videos of a “UFO” cited by the New York Times and claimed by Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon to be moving at impossible velocities turned out to be traveling around 40 miles per hour, in line with an object at that altitude being blown by wind. He said that a handful of cases seemed truly anomalous but that none indicated any evidence whatsoever of space aliens. Other members of the panel complained loudly about receiving harassment from UFO believers for not supporting the space alien claim.

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Adrienne Mayor Claims Talos as a Greek Myth of Artificial Intelligence

5/24/2023

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In Engelsberg Ideas, folklorist Adrienne Mayor has a new piece discussing the Greek myth of Talos as the original version of the “A.I. dilemma,” expanding on ideas from here 2018 book Gods and Robots. Artificial intelligence is all the rage this year thanks to the rapid emergence of A.I.-powered chatbots and image generators. I’ve always had a little bit of a problem with the effort to find in the story of Talos a precedent for robotics and A.I., mostly because the idea of Talos as a robot probably wasn’t original to the myth and likely developed gradually and incidentally.

There were, of course, ancient myths are were explicitly about androids and robots, such as the Chinese story of Yen Shih and his artificial human, which dates back at least to the fourth century BCE. I do not disagree with the concept that the ancients thought about robots. I disagree, though, with the idea that Talos was originally or primarily conceptualized as a robot in the modern sense.

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CNN Analyst Peter Bergen Launches New Podcast with UFO Episode

5/16/2023

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Journalist Peter Bergen, probably best known from his appearances on CNN as a national security analyst, launched a new podcast through Audible today, In the Room with Peter Bergen. The high-profile new podcast aims to cover national security issues and today’s three-episode launch includes an episode on flying saucers—because, of course you need UFOs to draw interest. As you might expect, the podcast includes interviews with the usual suspects, including Alex Dietrich, Chris Mellon, Mick West, and Seth Shostak, as well as New Yorker writer Gideon Lewis-Krauss. It also has nothing of value to say about UFOs, as evidenced by its reliance on Lewis-Krauss, whose only connection to the UFO “mystery” is writing an article about it. But, hey, that’s enough for a lifetime ticket as a UFO “expert”!

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Long-Secret James Dean Files Offer Some Shocking Surprises

5/10/2023

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Note: This article is cross-posted from my Substack because Twitter is limiting links to Substack. I think you'll find the historical content interesting.

Nearly seven decades after James Dean died, I would have thought that everything that could be known about him was known. All but a small handful of people who knew him in life are now dead, and those left alive have had nothing new to say in decades. The magazine and newspaper articles have been raked through many times, and the scraps of archival materials picked clean. Then, to my amazement, Nate D. Sanders Auctions announced the sale later this month of more than 500 pages of James Dean’s business, legal, and personal correspondence and papers from the estate of his New York talent agent, Jane Deacy, who died in 2008. These papers, never before seen, are, frankly, astounding in what they reveal.

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Douglas Dean Johnson Exposes Jacques Vallée and the "Trinity" UFO Hoax

5/5/2023

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I have been trying to find some time to write blog posts, but it’s been difficult of late. With my livelihood under pressure from ChatGTP and related A.I. programs that are steadily replacing the kind of copywriting that used to be my bread and butter, I’ve been forced to take on less interesting and more time-consuming work to make ends meet, and that leaves me with less time for writing anything that doesn’t pay. Nevertheless, I did want to point out the massive journalistic project the Douglas Dean Johnson undertook to investigate the 1945 so-called “Trinity” extraterrestrial encounter recently publicized in the self-published book Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret by Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris and, according to Vallée and the New York Times, an influence on recent Congressional legislation revising the Pentagon’s remit to include UFO involvement dating back to 1945. In short, Johnson concluded that the old geezers spinning the story are habitual liars and that the story is a bunch of bunk:

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Graham Hancock Pulls Out of Cosmic Summit, Replaced by Scott Wolter

4/25/2023

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[Update: George Howard said the dispute revolved around contract negotiations and concerns about payments and the ownership of the rights to material presented at the conference.]

In a surprise move, Graham Hancock pulled out of June’s Cosmic Summit, a meeting of catastrophists in support of the theory that a comet hit the Earth at the end of the last Ice Age and destroyed a high-tech lost civilization. Atlantis speculator Jimmy Corsetti, who was also scheduled to speak, also said he would not be attending. Corsetti claimed he had been “removed” against his will from the list of speakers, leaving the conference in chaos.

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A Dispiriting Project Update

4/22/2023

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Over the last year, my former literary agent sent me outlandish descriptions of the various reasons publishers gave for rejecting my book. Frankly, I always had it in the back of my mind that he was making them up. When publishers told him that in “this political climate” a book about a queer topic was inadvisable, or when an editor claimed that there was no reason to ever mention James Dean’s sexuality again because it had been discussed in 1975, I wondered if this could possibly be serious. Then this week I received the most dispiriting of rejections, one that left me flabbergasted.

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In Brief: At UFO Hearing, Senate Subcommittee Told No Evidence of Aliens

4/19/2023

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This morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities held a hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena, i.e. UFOs. The most newsworthy statement came from the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Sean Kirkpatrick, who told senators: “I should also state clearly for the record, that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” Kirkpatrick made this statement after writing a paper with Galileo Project director Avi Loeb speculating that these same UFOs that show no evidence of extraterrestrial, physics-defying traits nevertheless could be probes sent by an alien “mothership.” After the hearing ended, members of the public watching the hearing offered Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the driving force behind the Senate’s UFO efforts, stories about their own UFO interests and encounters, and one man gave her a copy of his UFO book.

The bottom line from Sean Kirkpatrick, head of AARO

"I should also state clearly for the record that, in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, offworld technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics." pic.twitter.com/FYAtj8mKIc
— Mick West (@MickWest) April 19, 2023

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