This week, to distract from the January 6 Commission hearings, Fox News devoted multiple segments to UFOs, even sending Tucker Carlson to Brazil, where he discussed the bizarre recent Brazilian UFO hearings, which included accounts of alien abductions and space brothers from Saturn. Avi Loeb continued his anti-humanist campaign by openly lusting for artificial intelligence to rule over and “save” inferior, unworthy humanity. And the strange saga of Travis Taylor only became stranger this week with news from the Pentagon that the Ancient Aliens and Skinwalker Ranch star was indeed a part of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, but that Taylor had exaggerated his job title and inflated his role.
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In an interview June 21 with George Knapp on KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, Travis Taylor announced that he served as the head of science for the U.S. government’s UAP Task Force, the entity which analyzed UFO incidents and delivered the June 2021 report to Congress which precipitated the current Congressional UFO action, including a 2021 law establishing a permanent UFO office and a 2022 UFO hearing. While serving in this capacity, Taylor appeared on CBS Sunday Morning in 2021 to analyze UFO videos and comment on the imminent UFO report without disclosing to CBS or to the audience that he was a paid government UFO researcher working on that very report. He has appeared since then on both Ancient Aliens and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch to analyze and research UFOs without disclosing to the audience that he served as a paid government analyst of the same material he discussed on the History channel as an “independent” analyst. Taylor also works for a defense contractor analyzing UFOs for the federal government. Taylor and his former UAPTF boss both now work for the same contractor.
In a podcast interview this weekend, government contractor, cable TV personality, and future UFO book author Lue Elizondo said that he hopes to serve in Congress in the next five years—an aspiration he has teased less explicitly in the past. Elizondo expressed a number of right-leaning political views, making it clear that his intention is to run as a Republican. Wyoming has only one representative in the House, currently Liz Cheney. Unseating the incumbent will be a tough task for a looney tune whose claim to fame is promoting leaked government “UFO” footage and speculating about interdimensional underwater space monsters. Who are we kidding? He will fit right in.
Undergirding the UFO movement is a spiritual longing for immortality, and increasingly, the advocates of UFO research are making no show of even pretending otherwise. In a new article for Edge Science, expanded from passages in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, Colm Kelleher tries and fails to argue that visitors to Skinwalker Ranch, especially “disrespectful” ones, attract poltergeists that follow them home and then infect their family and friends, until they meet people who don’t believe in them, at which point they apparently stop spreading their blue orbs and werewolves. Leaving aside the obvious failures of logic—it’s no surprise to anyone who studies paranormal experiences that impressionable teenagers and fantasy-prone adult believers are the ones seeing these orbs and mistaking coyotes for werewolves, and there is no way to measure whether an alleged ghost came from Skinwalker Ranch or was already haunting someone’s home, ignored until panic triggered perception—the real takeaway is that Kelleher is actually looking to use the paranormal to overturn materialism and thus argue, implicitly, for the survival of the soul after death.
At last month’s UFO hearing in Congress, Rep. Mike Gallagher entered into the Congressional Record the so-called Admiral Wilson Memo, a dubious account of a supposed conversation between the former head of the DIA and longtime government-adjacent ufologist Eric Davis about crashed saucers and recovered aliens. Gallagher claimed to be new to ufology and looking for answers. On a podcast with Jonah Goldberg this week, Gallagher appeared to go full-alien, having discovered that being the alien guy is less problematic than having to defend toxic Republican policies. “There’s got to be a way to get to the bottom of this whole aliens thing. It’s driving me insane.”
Something weird is going on in UFO world, and it’s not just the grift at the UFO Disclosure Symposium in which ex-fighter pilot and UFO celebrity Chris Lehto shilled for alien-themed NFTs: “You can look at your boring bank account, or you can look at this. […] It’s that simple.”
It’s been a fairly slow week, perhaps due to the holiday and the unofficial start of summer. UFO Twitter buzzed with rumors that the United States Senate is planning to hold a hearing on UFOs, and Lue Elizondo once again broke his promise to stay away from UFO media so he could join Ancient Aliens guest star and Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett to fantasize about their dream lineup of witnesses for future House or Senate hearings, which would include Eric Davis, one of the Bigelow-affiliated researchers fooled by the infamous Alien Autopsy video. Elizondo appeared in the video with a gun leaning against the wall behind him.
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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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