A Dismal Revelation: 2023 in Review

​Another year has passed us by, and it seems that each one is somehow a little bit darker than the one before. I’ll be honest: I had a hard time bringing myself to write this year-end wrap-up this year. It’s been a hard twelve months. At the beginning of the year, the release of generative A.I. completely destroyed my career, wiping out virtually the entire industry of business writing that was my bread and butter. It happened so quickly and so destructively that CBS’s 60 Minutes came out to Albany to interview me about losing my job to a machine, and then I experienced a double humiliation when the venerable newsmagazine called me a few hours before my interview was scheduled to air to tell me that they cut me from the story and replaced me with an interview with a generative A.I. chatbot. 

​Instead, I spent most of the year scrambling to stay in the same place, only to be hit by massive financial hits, including a devastating bill for a new roof and the complete replacement of all rotten mess the previous owners had quietly covered up. And that was only one of the disasters that struck this year. A food delivery driver even crashed into my car (with me in it), and while no one was hurt and insurance paid for rebuilding the car, it destroyed the trade-in value of the car when I needed it most. Even my web hosting company got bought out and when my current contract expires next year, they may raise my hosting fees by as much as 300%. The only bright spot was the sale of my biography of James Dean to Applause Books, though the much-appreciated advance, my biggest single paycheck in two decades, barely made a dent in the bills. 

​But, hey, the federal government went completely bonkers for demon-piloted satanic UFO conspiracies while the world burned down around us, so that was something! This was supposed to be the year when everything changed for UFOs and the paranormal, but instead I was the year that the chattering class seemed to finally realize that our government had gone mad.
 
Here, then, is a look at a selection of highlights from the year that was, edited and condensed from my blog and newsletter:
 
January
The year started off on an unexpectedly apropos note when just before New Year’s Eve, Jacques Vallée claimed—correctly, it turned out—that the U.S. Congress had altered the text of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act to include references to his debunked book Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret in the hope that they could force the Pentagon to investigate Vallée’s claim that elementary school children saw tiny space aliens emerge from a crashed avocado-shaped ship in 1945. Ufologists and skeptics argued over the influence Vallée had over Congress in the early days of 2023, until we later learned that, yes, key members of Congress are in fact listening to him. The New York Times ran a credulous piece endorsing the claim. Congress soon requested, on the advice of ufologists, that the Pentagon official hire MUFON to hunt flying saucers. Graham Hancock tried to extend his fifteen minutes of fame from 2022’s Ancient Apocalypse by replying months late to complaints about his show and giving a series of interviews, including one with accused sexual assaulter Russell Brand, claiming archaeologists are conspiring against him and “despise” ordinary people, a claim he would return to multiple times during the year, after the public and media stopped paying attention to him. More people cared about a British tabloid blasting museums for “going woke” by describing preserved bodies as “mummified persons” instead of “mummies..” Ancient Aliens returned for a new season that stretched for most of the year, eventually including appearances from Harvard’s Avi Loeb, who had previously claimed to be serious and scientific about his UFO pursuits. New seasons of The Curse of Oak Island and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch also ran during the year but provided no verifiable evidence of anything other than cable audiences’ endless desire to be teased with no payoff. The release of a deposition given by Corey Goode, the ufologist who claims to be in a secret U.S. space program that travels the galaxy to battle aliens, showed that he would not repeat his ridiculous claims under oath, and in a separate revelation, we learned that conservative political heavyweight Tucker Carlson, who spent a week covering UFOs on his Fox show, traded conspiracy theories with Alex Jones, the first indication that Carlson was deeper into nutjob territory than his Fox News program had previously suggested. Sirius Mystery author Robert Temple put out a press release announcing that UFOs are really probes from a sentient blob of plasma living between the Earth and the moon. No one noticed.
 
February
After a busy start to the year, February slowed the pace down considerably. The New York Times reported that a classified UFO report given to Congress at the end of January concluded that many UFO sightings were actually advanced foreign spy drones. Only days later, we learned that the government overestimated the sophistication of UFOs when balloons caused a major UFO flap that involved the U.S. military shooting down “mysterious” objects because pilots weren’t able to identify balloons from a distance. Over the course of the year, we would learn that Congress’s pressure to hunt UFOs and staff the Pentagon UFO office with paranormally inclined ufologists resulted in the military overlooking or misidentifying spy balloons for years. Sen. Marco Rubio tried to reframe the issue around advanced space alien technology to avoid addressing the issue of the military being blind to balloons. UFO podcaster Jeremy Corbell told Russell Brand that he would be bringing forward new witnesses “known to the U.S. government” who claim that the military was reverse-engineering crashed saucers and had contact with space aliens. Only months later did it become apparent that he was prepping so-called “UFO whistleblower” David Grusch for his media debut. Michael S. Heiser, the Christian scholar who conclusively debunked Zecharia Sitchin’s claims, died. The CBC ran a radio documentary re-debunking Graham Hancock’s claims, but it made no impact because it was on the radio.
 
March
As March began, Republican congressmen Matt Gaetz and Tim Burchett said that they had attended a classified UFO briefing in which they were shown anomalous sensor data indicating objects that had both hot and cold parts floating in the sky. Gaetz told a right-wing news outlet that the House of Representatives would be investigating the UFO “threat.” Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand demanded at an intelligence hearing that the Pentagon and the national intelligence agencies prioritize the feelings of people who claim to see UFOs over facts. Meanwhile Avi Loeb of the Galileo Project posted online a speculative, largely unevidenced paper written with the head of the Pentagon’s UFO office claiming an alien “mothership” could be sending UFO probes to Earth, prompting a media frenzy and even network evening news coverage of the “mothership” and the threat aliens pose to the Earth. The next week, Loeb proclaimed that aliens likely use A.I. and that A.I. should run the world to take inferior humans out of the equation. He added that he wanted space-exploring A.I. to be modeled on his brain so “he” could explore space and negotiate with aliens on behalf of humanity. He then attacked scientists who criticized his claims ahead of the release of his new book. The History Channel announced a touring Secret of Skinwalker Ranch live show, featuring in-person access to cast members who claim to have been exposed to an infectious poltergeist and are, in theory, contagious with what they claim is a space ghost mind virus.
 
April
Former New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal, who co-wrote the infamous 2017 Times story launching the current UFO craze, devoted himself entirely to ufology. In April he published a nonfiction children’s book for kindergartners to indoctrinate them into the myth of flying saucers and space monsters. 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.” Avi Loeb concurred—momentarily—that he had seen no evidence of aliens, a conclusion that would last until he needed more research money. Sens. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin complaining that AARO was not tweeting enough and thus failing to educate the public about the alien menace. The Cosmic Summit fringe history and catastrophism meeting devolved into chaos when Graham Hancock pulled out over a contract dispute and was replaced by Scott Wolter, a onetime History Channel Knights Templar conspiracist who recently became an ancient astronaut theorist. Archaeologist Zahi Hawass accused a Netflix documentary about Cleopatra of “falsifying facts” by depicting the Macedonian Greek-descended Ptolemaic queen of Egypt as a Black African woman, prompting social media to erupt in a screaming match about racism. 
 
May
In May, Douglas Dean Johnson conclusively exposed Jacques Vallée’s “Trinity” UFO story for the hoax it is and Vallée as an aging fool taken in by fellow senior citizens’ tall tales. The debunking had no effect on Congress. Word went out that UFO celebrity Lue Elizondo’s memoir of hunting aliens while working for the Pentagon would be published over the summer. It was not. Elizondo did, however, claim on social media that the lack of evidence for aliens was a “prelude” to an upcoming revelation. This was later understood to be a sidelong reference to David Grusch. CNN analyst Peter Bergen launched a new current affairs podcast, which opened with a UFO episode in which the journalist embarrassed himself by exposing how uncritical he is of elite media like the New Yorker and New York Times, even when they write absurd things. NASA held a press conference to complain that its UFO task force suffered extreme harassment at the hands of UFO believers because they failed to find evidence of space aliens. I appeared on Germany’s ZDF to discuss UFO conspiracy culture in a documentary about the dark side of UFO beliefs. At the annual SALT conference, a global thought forum affiliated with the ultrawealthy, Garry Nolan spoke about his belief that flying saucers are a non-human intelligence, that confirmation of their paranormal connection will shake world religions to their core, and that he was but “two weeks” away from seeing a crashed flying saucer before the opportunity vanished. After the conference, Nolan said Avi Loeb was secretly a fully convert to ET beliefs. UFO witness and former fighter pilot Ryan Graves launched a UFO think tank with Garry Nolan, Chris Mellon, and Avi Loeb as board members to influence Congress on flying saucer issues. He immediately began patronizing far-right outlets and politicians to forward his agenda. The artist who mocked up a fake nineteenth century photograph of a pterodactyl posted that A+E Networks, the parent of the History Channel, licensed the picture for the second time in five months for a second documentary this year to knowingly claim the digital art could be an authentic image.
 
June
June opened with alien abductee Whitley Strieber announcing his support for anti-trans political positions. A Las Vegas family claimed ten-foot-tall space aliens emerged from a fireball that landed near their Las Vegas home. NASA identified the fireball as a meteor, and the family provided no evidence of aliens. Chris Mellon wrote an odd article in Politico asserting that the U.S. had recovered crashed alien spaceships, which in retrospect was another part of a concentrated campaign to pave the way for David Grusch, who was secretly working with Mellon and his colleagues behind the scenes. Mellon suggested that the threat of an alien invasion could be a benefit to humanity and bring about a utopia of peace and brotherhood. About 48 hours later, David Grusch went public with his claims that the U.S. military had recovered alien spaceships and was hiding that fact from the public and from Congress. Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal reported the story in The Debrief, an obscure fringe-science-focused web magazine, after major newspapers turned them down. The pair self-censored, declining to report Grusch’s claims about recovered alien bodies for fear it was too weird for serious journalism. The remainder of the month involved squabbling over Grusch and his claims. In an interview on NewsNation with Australian UFO journalist Ross Coulthart, Grusch expanded his claims to include allegations of recovered bodies, murders of people who knew too much about space monsters, and references to a hoax claim about Mussolini recovering a UFO. He even alleged that the U.S. had a treaty with space aliens. Mainstream media were quick to attack Grusch—for a time. New York Magazine decried his “crazy claims.” Forbes called his story “pure science fiction.” National Review wondered if the whole thing weren’t a psy-op and cautioned Republican politicians to avoid associating themselves with such insanity. Although Grusch had close ties with the usual suspects—prepped by Chris Mellon, advised by George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell, flanked by a UFO documentary crew, and secretly employed by Garry Nolan—Congress saw no conflict of interest and immediately rushed to investigate claims that their staffs had already heard privately last year and did not find compelling, pretending once the story made the news that it was now a crisis that demanded immediate action. Rep. Tim Burchett, who previously appeared on Ancient Aliens to allege the Bible recorded alien visitations, claimed House Republicans deputized him to lead their inquiry, though more senior Republicans insisted he had overstepped and was not in charge. His colleague, Rep. Mike Gallagher, claimed UFOs are either time travelers or representatives of a parallel civilization from the Hollow Earth (seriously), while the House had to delay a planned hearing into crashed saucers because most of their witnesses failed a basic background check. Sen. Marco Rubio had to walk back claims made on NewsNation that he had spoken to people who saw dead aliens when it turned out he had only seen paperwork about alleged special access programs that were not reported to Congress. The Senate passed legislation demanding private companies provide access to their (imaginary) alien artifacts and bodies. All of this activity, of course, led the New York Times to do a podcast wondering if all the many ways Lue Elizondo and his friends have seeded UFO lore into government means that aliens are really here. Soon, other outlets began speculating that aliens could be visiting Earth, despite the complete lack of proof, simply because Congress was talking about the evidence-free claims their pet ufologists were feeding them.
 
July
In July, Avi Loeb claimed some iron balls he found in the ocean were the melted remains of alien technology and implied some were miniature models of the Earth. They were not. Other scientists quickly noted such microspherules are known to be natural formations or the result of industrial waste. The New York Times ran a story praising alleged “psychic” Uri Geller for “winning” the war against his skeptics by using his unproven claims to paranormal powers to make more money than his critics. The Times argued that Geller’s “charade” was praiseworthy because his fakery created “wonder” and generated more money than skeptics earn. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer backed a plan under what we later learned had been secretly advice from David Grusch and other ufologists to declassify UFO documents and seize alleged “alien” artifacts held by private companies. The so-called Schumer Amendment eventually failed when House Republicans refused to accept it. AARO head Sean Kirkpatrick announced that Grusch and other supposed UFO witnesses had provided no verifiable crashed saucer information. This did not stop the House from holding a hearing in which Grusch, seated with advisors George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell behind him, testified about crashed saucers and “biologics” (i.e. dead aliens), despite having no evidence to support his allegations. That didn’t matter because House members didn’t bother to ask and at times actively helped to perpetuate old sci-fi myths masquerading as (pseudo-)science. I helped to cover the hearing for CNN’s online arm. Even network TV’s most pro-UFO reporter, NBC’s Gadi Schwartz, called the hearing “bizarre” on NBC Nightly News. The hearing was a turning point for ufology, but not the way they assumed; the media finally woke up and began pushing back on six years of pro-alien propaganda after the embarrassing scenes in Congress. Even cable TV, home to Ancient Aliens and other UFO programming, didn’t bother to produce specials about the hearing, waiting months to fold it into Ancient Aliens, like any other wacky claim-of-the-week. It’s almost like they didn’t believe it themselves.
 
August
At the beginning of August we learned that David Grusch wasn’t the independent whistleblower and concerned citizen that he claimed to be but had taken a job with Garry Nolan and had been working for Nolan’s new UFO think tank, the Sol Foundation, prior to going public with his UFO claims. The Intercept revealed Grusch’s battles with alcoholism and mental health issues, prompting Grusch and Ross Coulthart to allege a conspiracy to discredit Grusch. NewsNation had to issue a correction when it turned out Coulthart’s conspiracy theories were untrue, but it did not stop him from failing upward and becoming the network’s new conspiracy correspondent, producing a documentary about JFK conspiracies for the channel, among other projects. Nexstar, the owner of NewsNation, turned over much of NewsNation and sister outlet The Hill to UFO coverage in the hope of stealing audience share from rival outlets, particularly Fox News, the cable channel with the most UFO mentions per week. It worked; ratings rose significantly, doubling or even quadrupling the audience for some timeslots. For its part, Fox News ran a story speculating that UFOs are really demons sent by Satan. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand admitted that she had seen no evidence of space aliens. A scientific paper eviscerated the 2022 claim that that a comet had wiped out the Hopewell culture. The New Yorker pointed out the complete lack of any unambiguous photographs of an alien spaceship and got Leslie Kean to admit that the evidence she claimed as conclusive in her earlier work was, indeed, not conclusive: “I just don’t know who to believe sometimes, you know?” she confessed. Avi Loeb held a press conference repeating his disputed claim that his microspherules could be alien evidence, suspiciously timed around the release of his new book. By month’s end, ancient astronaut theorist and conspiracy nut Scott Wolter piggybacked on Grusch’s notoriety and began a podcast circuit tour and a series of public appearances alleging that the Vatican is hiding alien evidence. We later learned his appearances were to lay the groundwork for his return to TV in a series in 2024 about Knights Templar conspiracies on Gaia TV’s streaming conspiracy channel. He also operated a tour of Scotland with his new girlfriend keyed to the TV series Outlander. Fringe history author Graham Phillips spent the month promoting his new book, which incorrectly claims that the sunken North Sea territory known as Doggerland was Atlantis and Stonehenge was an Atlantean monument.
 
September
In September, George Knapp, who has the ear of Congress, speculated that God is an evil space alien and humans are this evil being’s flawed creation. Ufologist Michael Salla presented an interview with an alleged government whistleblower resurrecting the false claim that ancient space aliens have a stasis chamber on earth housing the bodies of white-skinned, red-haired alien giants. Unreliable Mexican UFO journalist Jaime Maussan displayed allegedly fossilized bodies of dead space aliens at a hearing held in Mexico’s Congress. The bodies were well-known fakes. Avi Loeb blasted “bloggers,” saying online critics weren’t fit to judge him. In an interview with Jesse Michels, David Grusch endorsed ancient astronaut claims and Majestic-12-style conspiracies. We learned that Jacques Vallée was attempting to sell his Trinity story to Disney for a movie and was very upset that debunking efforts might jeopardize the deal. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand conceded that most UFO sightings seem to be drones or balloons. A defender of Graham Hancock published a piece in New Dawn magazine alleging that I am a “collaborator” with “depraved elites” in oppressing Hancock. Hancock reprinted the piece on his own website. Thanks to a TikTok trend, American women spent the month deeply concerned that men spend too much time contemplating the Roman Empire, prompting hundreds of essays from major media explaining why thinking about anything other than pop culture, family, and money is somehow unpatriotic, misogynist, and bad.
 
October
In October, David Grusch said that embracing UFO conspiracy theories helped him return to the mysticism of his lapsed Catholic faith, with aliens replacing the divine. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Grusch got into a spat when Gillibrand claimed Grusch wouldn’t provide classified UFO secrets to the Senate unless Gillibrand gave him free plane tickets to Washington, a claim Grusch denied. Members of the House of Representatives met with the Intelligence Community Inspector General in a secure facility to discuss the classified information behind Grusch’s claims. Lawmakers left disappointed, variously saying that the ICIG offered nothing of substance and that there was no evidence of space aliens. One called it a waste of time. Jacques Vallée grudgingly admitted that some of Doug Johnson’s criticisms of his 1945 Trinity UFO crash claims were in fact valid and that he and co-author Paola Harris “missed” key information, but only because Johnson was using “libraries” to find facts, instead of simply listening to old men blather, like Vallée did. Former Pentagon UFO hunters James Lataski and Colm Kelleher, along with George Knapp, self-published a sequel to their previous book about investigating werewolves and the paranormal on the government’s dime, but the new book was largely a rehash of the previous one. It did serve its purpose of getting the authors on the podcast circuit to shill for Chuck Schumer’s doomed UFO amendment. The authors attacked Lue Elizondo as a liar, and Elizondo posted to X, formerly Twitter, that something “big” would happen in 2024 but he couldn’t say what lest his “haters” “sabotage” it. The History Channel canceled AlienCon, the Ancient Aliens fan convention, because it was cheaper and more profitable to send the Ancient Aliens and Skinwalker Ranch casts on live tours instead. Sam Osmanagich, the promoter of some natural hills in Bosnia as ancient pyramids and formerly a regular on Ancient Aliens, went full ancient astronaut theorist and claimed that ancient pyramids are communication devices used by space aliens. Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, the Indonesian government-affiliated geologist who claims Gunung Padang in Indonesia is a prehistoric pyramid complex that coincidentally makes Indonesia the oldest civilization on Earth, published a new paper repeating the claim, to the delight of Graham Hancock, who claims it is “vindication” of his speculations. After archaeologists’ enormous criticism of the faulty paper’s illogical conclusions, the journal that published the paper and its parent company opened an investigation, and the resulting scandal, ironically enough, did more to discredit Natawidjaja’s claims than his own bad research and ridiculous claims, which had gone mostly unchallenged in the media for a decade.
 
November
AARO’s Sean Kirkpatrick announced he would resign in December, prompting a search for a new Pentagon UFO hunter. Prominent UFO advocates intimated that they would play kingmaker in selecting a new head, and by this point, who could say they were wrong? Ross Coulthart embraced the ancient astronaut theory and then accidentally admitted in a podcast that his secret “sources” don’t actually have firsthand knowledge of their claims. What appeared to be promotional copy for Lue Elizondo’s long-delayed memoir leaked on a retailer’s website, but even professional puffery couldn’t make it seem like he had evidence of aliens. Journalist Garrett M. Graff caused a mainstream media UFO frenzy with a new book rehashing credulously old UFO claims, but since he is a member of the elite media, he got red carpet treatment for a book that lacked any originality. Even so, within days of publication and some critical reviews (like mine!), he began walking back his book’s embrace of space aliens and pretending on TV to be much more skeptical of space monsters. Garry Nolan’s Sol Foundation held a private conference in New York City that left even ufologists in attendance complaining about the arrogance and lack of evidence on display. The “UFO transparency” event occurred behind closed doors and forbade attendees from engaging in transparency. The main thrust of the conference was that Nolan, Grusch, Mellon, and others are planning a propaganda campaign involving a multi-step process to circumvent the need for scientific evidence and instead socially engineer belief in space aliens. David Grusch provided a keynote address on the “spiritual awakening” his UFO advocacy would bring about. He said that UFOs have the potential to unite humanity and overcome divisions as human beings move toward a kumbaya moment of earthly harmony under the grace of knowing our true place in the cosmos, beneath our alien overlords. In a concurrent piece for The Debrief, Chris Mellon echoed the Sol Foundation line, declared that governments probably shouldn’t tell us about space aliens to forestall panic, and that the alien-demon threat will convince world governments to unite for world peace. But if the aliens are technologically superior to us and could, in theory, wipe us from existence, what, precisely, is the future world Mellon envisions? Avi Loeb, fully embracing his role as a crank ufology celebrity, appeared at the Sol Foundation meeting, compared “bloggers” who criticize him to the totalitarians from George Orwell’s 1984, and speculated that maybe what he found in the ocean wasn’t from outer space anyhow but was instead the remains of an ancient lost prehuman civilization, on the order of Richard Shaver’s Deros. Rep. Andy Olges, a Republican, claimed UFO secrecy was tied to “wokeness” and the “Deep State.” Jacob Chansley, the so-called Qanon Shaman, who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and advocated an ideology drawing on UFO conspiracies and Graham Hancock’s claims, announced a run for Congress. When House Republicans rejected Chuck Schumer’s UFO amendment, secretly influenced by David Grusch and the Sol Foundation, UFO advocates aligned with the Sol team threatened an insurrection, with the Liberation Times speculating about an armed uprising and Ross Coulthart calling for violence against lawmakers. The planned protest, which took place at the Ohio office of Rep. Mike Roberts in early December, drew six people, according to a photo posted to social media. A British museum retroactively declared the Roman emperor Elagabalus a trans woman and began using female pronouns to describe the ancient ruler.
 
December
Graham Hancock delivered a lecture at a rented hall at University College in London to attack archaeologists once again for criticizing his year-old Netflix series and to repeat his claim that ancient history is the story of a lost spiritual connection between humanity, heaven, and earth, represented by a lost civilization better known as Atlantis. Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called for alleged UFO “whistleblowers” to put up or shut up. They did neither. David Grusch did a media tour attacking Republicans for killing Chuck Schumer’s amendment—all without acknowledging that he had himself recommended some of its provisions. High-ranking Russian officials close to Pres. Vladimir Putin, including a general in the FSB (the successor to the KGB), the head of a law school, and a member of the Duma, published an academic article in a scholarly journal adopting the ancient astronaut theory, forwarding Reptilian conspiracy theories, and arguing that such claims demand a further crackdown on homosexuality in order to protect men’s brains and spinal cords from being poisoned by sperm. Tucker Carlson, whom speculation had fingered as a potential 2024 vice presidential candidate and he tentative 2028 presidential frontrunner, admitted to being an ancient astronaut theorist and a UFO conspiracy theorist. Carlson, reflecting all of the rumors and lies emanating from the likes of Garry Nolan and David Grusch (both of whom he interviewed at length) and their colleagues, alleged that he had heard from his unnamed sources UFO stories of such existential terror that he would not repeat them. Despite their disturbing nature, he also made no effort to confirm them. Carlson went on to claim that, based on “inside” reports, he believes UFOs to be an evil spiritual presence, i.e. demons. “There are forces that aren’t human that do exist in a spiritual realm of some kind, that we cannot see, and that when you think about it, will sorta make you think we live in an ant farm.” Carlson added that “informed people” said that the U.S. government has an “agreement” with these entities. After several interviews in which Carlson blathered about demons controlling reality, it was quite evident that the biggest name in conservatism after Donald Trump was getting his information from people in the orbit of Nolan and Grusch, if not the men themselves, since everything he said one of them had already implied publicly this year. (George Knapp had voiced the same evil archon ideas in September, for example.) Bizarrely, behind the scenes, the leading UFO advocates with the ear of Congress had come to believe in something between Nephilim theory and the Shaver Mystery.
 
As 2023 came to an end, what had initially promised to be ufology’s biggest year turned into something of a Pyrrhic victory. Ufologists became the dog that caught the car. Now what? They got everything they wanted, from massive mainstream media coverage to a shiny new Pentagon UFO office to full government funding to a public Congressional hearing with a UFO whistleblower, and all it managed to do is expose the lack of anything besides stories and stories about stories behind the myth of flying saucers. But what a dismal revelation it nonetheless was for me to be proven right that our leaders are listening to kooks and self-deluded fools and are beholden to fabrications and mythology. In a year when conspiracy theories threatened the very Republic itself and democracy hangs in the balance, it chills the bones to realize that the people who will decide our fate and our future can be swayed by a spook story.