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The torrent of horrifying news coming out of Washington every few hours has left precious little room in the media to talk about anything else, so it’s no surprise that there hasn’t been much news about UFOs, Atlantis, space ghosts, and other indulgences that dominate only in boring, normal times. Bloomberg has a feature about the bizarre life of Joseph Firmage, a onetime tech leader who descended into UFO and antigravity scams. Politico ran an odd story this week that crossed between the paranormal and the Trump carnival. According to the report, an “informal working group” of FBI agents investigating UFOs are concerned that the Trump purge of thousands of agents who worked on January 6 investigations will cost them their jobs. The media spun this as an admission of an FBI UFO task force, but it turned out that the entire story was based off a claim made by Ryan Graves, the UFO witness turned UFO think tank founder who stands to gain from continued government UFO investigations. Politico claimed three other unnamed people confirmed the existence of the group, but they provided no information about who those people are or whether they have business ties to Graves or other UFO organizations. They said only that they were “familiar,” which could mean anything from FBI agents to filmmakers to SOL Foundation staffers. The bureau denied that anyone at the FBI had confirmed the existence of any such thing. And so it goes.
Another "drone" mystery died today when the White House admitted (or, rather, repeated from the previous administration's analysis) that many drones were FAA-authorized research flights. Anyway, I haven't posted much this past week, and I'm not really feeling too inspired right now. It's hard when I can't know how badly Donald Trump's horrifying actions are going to disrupt, or even devastate, our jobs, which include work funded by organizations that receive federal assistance. So, I guess now is as good a time as any to put into the record the cease-and-desist letter that Lue Elizondo's attorney, Todd McMurty, sent to Arthur Preston this weekend regarding an X thread Preston had made of Elizondo's alleged deceptions. It's an outrageous threat--cartoonishly promising financial ruin from legal bills if Preston doesn't comply--but I want to focus on a particular line: "Ostensibly, the goal of your thread is to disqualify Mr. Elizondo from government service by suggesting that he is opposed to Pres. Trump and a friend of the Democrat party." McMurty then states that Preston's thread might prevent Trump from "appointing" Elizondo, though he does not say to what position. That rather gives the game away, doesn't it? Elizondo, a conservative, is looking to rejoin the government, this time in a position of greater power, by toadying up to Trump.
On Sunday night, I appeared on I appeared on Shake It Off with Mert & Lucas, Live! on WNYM AM 970 to discuss Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. You can listen here or below. I'm the second half of the first hour. To be honest, when the publicist booked this appearance, the station only told me it was a local New York City-area radio show that did a weekly book chat. I assumed it would be something like NPR. I was not expecting it to be a conservative talk show, but aside from a couple of howlers, the conversation went smoothly. I remained shocked and surprised that the conservative media have been more interested in my book and more open to discussing the substance of it than any of the so-called mainstream liberal media, which one might think would be interested in celebrating a queer icon. Last night, second-tier cable news channel NewsNation gave credulous UFO journalist Ross Coulthart a primetime slot to reveal the latest supposed UFO whistleblower's claims. It was another fiasco from the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Jacob Barber claims that he participated in the retrieval on a small egg-shaped craft on behalf of a secret UFO crash retrieval program, one so secret he didn't know he was part of it. He provided footage of the retrieval to the Pentagon's UFO office and to NewsNation. “Just visually looking at the object on the ground, you could tell that it was extraordinary and anomalous,” Barber said before gushing about the paranormal, spiritual connection he felt to its non-human intelligence. “It was not human.” Social media lit up with instant analysis, much of it revolving around the accompanying video, which many said appears to show an aerostat blimp or other type of balloon, not an alien spaceship. In the video, the object sways and rolls while tethered to a helicopter. The Pentagon gave a statement to Steven Greenstreet of the New York Post confirming that AARO is aware of the video and did not assess anything non-human about it. Barber, however, rests his claims on the UAP Task Force that preceded AARO, a task force staffed with UFO believers like Travis Taylor and Jay Stratton. Members of that task force allegedly told Barber the egg-shaped seeming balloon was a vehicle piloted by non-human intelligence. Greenstreet also reported that Barber launched his own UFO organization, Skywatcher, in November, and its website is owned by Alex Klokus, the co-founder of the SALT conference, where UFO figures frequently speak to tech and financial elites.
On a recent episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, aspiring UFO czar Tucker Carlson sat down with UFO-obsessed journalist Michael Schellenberger, and part of their conversation revolved around the question of what UFOs really are. Schellenberger, began by fluffing Carlson and Joe Rogan with praise for the size of their audiences and their interest in UFOs, and then gushed over Rogan’s close relationship with Elon Musk before asking Carlson to explain why he and Rogan differ from Musk on the question of UFOs. Musk does not believe in an otherworldly threat, while Rogan thinks their ETs and Carlson… well, he reiterated his own evolving view that they are “spiritual entities” straight out of the Book of Enoch.
According to Prof. Wouter Hanegraff, writing on social media this morning, the apocalyptic fires devastating the Los Angeles area have completely destroyed the archives of the Theosophical Society, one of the largest collections of material on nineteenth-century esoteric beliefs in the world: I was just told that the entire property of the Theosophical Society in Altadena near Pasadena has been completely destroyed by the fires in Los Angeles. This was the world's largest archive of Theosophical materials, including a library with 40.000 titles, the entire archive of the history of the TS, including ca. 10.000 unpublished letters, pertaining to HPB, the Mahatmas, W.Q. Judge, G.R.S. Mead, Katherine Tingley, and G. de Purucker, membership records since 1875, art objects, and countless other irreplaceable materials. The archives also contained works of Boehme, Gichtel, donations from the king of Siam including rare Buddhist scriptures, and so on. News photographs showed the burned shell of the Theosophical Library Center, which housed the Society's collection. This is a devastating intellectual loss that only compounds the tragedy unfolding in California. Ironically, the first Theosophical Society headquarters in Altadena also burned to the ground in 1894.
It seemed silly enough when, a few minutes before New Year’s, the Daily Star announced that UFO documentary producer Mark Christopher Lee wants singer Robbie Williams, who recently confessed to encountering a supposed flying saucer, to serve as the U.K.’s UFO ambassador. It was doubly silly that Lee made the recommendation via UFO journalist George Knapp, who is friends with Williams (!).
The year that ended on December 31 marked a significant shift in American TV viewing habits. This past year, 75 of the 100 most-watched telecasts were sports, according to a Variety analysis, up from roughly half over the past several years. The only scripted series to make the list were CBS’s Tracker (fifteen times!) and the series finale of Young Sheldon. This reflects the broader trend of Americans watching significantly less traditional TV as they opt for social media videos. This, of course, creates a downward spiral as viewers watch less TV, are exposed to fewer promotions for new shows, and become less aware of what’s airing and thus watch less. This is a long way around me saying that since I cut my cable subscription last fall, I haven’t been as aware of the History Channel’s offerings and had no idea there was a new Ancient Aliens spinoff show—or that it had been airing for three months! Ancient Aliens: Origins is a repackaging of the show’s early episodes with a new roundtable discussion featuring talking heads from the show at the beginning and the end. The first episode featured commentary from Giorgio Tsoukalos, William Henry, and Jason Martell. It was not a terribly exciting way to recycle the same material yet again. The material has previously been recycled as Ancient Aliens Declassified, Ancient Aliens: The Ultimate Evidence, etc., not to mention its reuse in other episodes of Ancient Aliens itself. The wraparound commentary was of no particular value, more self-congratulatory than informative. Narrator Robert Clotworthy, however, continued the show’s bold tradition of always being wrong by proclaiming that Ancient Aliens has been on the air “for nearly two decades.” The correct number (as of the launch of Ancient Aliens: Origins this past fall) was 14 years, 15 if you count the 2009 pilot special broadcast a full year before the first season.
Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.
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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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