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What's Behind the Use of "Ontological Shock" Claims to Attack UFO Skeptics?

7/29/2023

Since David Grusch stepped out of the backrooms of the UFO media circuit to become a public UFO celebrity, the phrase “ontological shock” has become his defenders’ go-to explanation across social media for why skeptics refuse to accept without evidence Grusch’s recycled assertions that the United States possesses multiple crashed alien spaceships and their dead occupants. “Ontological shock” is a phrase used in philosophy to refer to being forced to question one’s worldview. Historically, the phrase has been rarely used outside of theology, and even there, a search of databases finds it is not widely deployed. However, alien abduction researcher John Mack adopted the term to refer to abductees’ feelings about encountering space aliens, and he deployed the term in a 1994 Washington Post article about alien abductions, Reptilians, and Greys. A search of historical newspaper databases did not turn up any other reference to the phrase in relation to aliens. Similarly, a Google Books search finds the phrase used in connection with UFOs primarily in quoting John Mack.

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Read My CNN Piece about the UFO Hearing

7/28/2023

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This week the House of Representatives held a hearing in which they heard David Grusch repeat his claims that he heard from unnamed individuals that the United States has retrieved and studied crashed flying saucers and knows where the ships are stored. Representatives seemed to accept the claims with little pushback, even as the hearing turned into a gathering of dubious ufologists, paranormal researchers, and UFO media figures, working together to promote sensational and dubious claims. Jeremy Corbell, who attended the hearing as a guest of Grusch, claimed in an interview afterward that he had been given access to the secret locations where allegedly highly classified technology was kept--despite not being a government employee or having a security clearance. The fix is in. Congress and ufologists are working together to legitimize old hoaxes from the 1940s about crashed saucers.

I discussed some of the historical background for Congress's foray into dubious UFO lore today for CNN. Read it here.

A photo posted to social media depicting ufologists, UFO media figures, and David Grusch conferring before the UFO hearing.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E14 “The Top Ten Alien Craft”

7/21/2023

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I can’t think of an Ancient Aliens topic I could care less about than a list of the ten most popular shapes for alien spaceships. Triangles! Circles! Rectangles! Maybe this will be a helpful primer for the legislators busy preparing for next week’s UFO hearing in the House of Representatives. Or maybe it will just be another reminder that Ancient Aliens is less sophisticated than Sesame Street and spends more time repeating the same material over and over again than any given children’s program. Maybe Congress can use the remedial help. Rep. Tim Burchett, an erstwhile Ancient Aliens talking head who will co-chair the hearing, accused “the intelligence community” of somehow scuttling an amendment he offered to require the FAA to prepare a UFO report, only to have it come out that Burchett helped accidentally spike his own amendment by voting for a change in rules that prohibited a vote on it. We have real geniuses working on UFOs.

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Pentagon Says Whistleblowers Provided No Verifiable Crashed Saucer Information

7/20/2023

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In the wake of David Grusch’s claims to have seen evidence that the U.S. military has a secret program to reverse engineer crashed saucers from the interdimensional beings with which they forged secret agreements, next week, the House Oversight Committee will hold a hearing on UFOs. The hearing’s co-chair, Rep. Tim Burchett, who previously appeared on Ancient Aliens to explain why Yahweh was a space alien, said the hearing would be about “aliens.” The hearing’s other chair, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, shared a photograph of the materials she prepared for the hearing, which included debunked UFO images from online ufologists, numerous spelling errors, and the “I Want to Believe” poster from The X-Files.

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Review of "The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill" by Matthew Bowman

7/19/2023

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The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America
Matthew Bowman | August 2023 | Yale University Press | 288 pages | ISBN: 978-0300251388

Last week, in announcing his support for legislation that would nationalize the alleged bodies of dead space aliens and require the surrender of crashed flying saucers, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said that Americans had a “right” to learn about “non-human intelligence” and “unexplainable phenomena.” The collision of UFO fantasies and legislative grandstanding—a “frankly … bizarre” story, as NBC’s Gadi Schwartz described it on NBC Nightly News—may not have been exactly what historian Mark Bowman had in mind when he wrote The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, but it is the culmination of what, in Bowman’s view, has always been a ufology movement driven by dissention from the traditional bureaucratic inertia and elitism of America’s postwar liberal order.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E13: “The Top Ten Mysterious Islands”

7/14/2023

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In a week when the House of Representatives appointed Rep. Tim Burchett, who has actually appeared on Ancient Aliens as a talking head, to run a hearing into crashed saucers and dead aliens, and Congress worked to incorporate an almost verbatim copy of an old To the Stars Academy list of Lue Elizondo’s so-called “five observables” (plus Garry Nolan’s claims about UFO health effects) into the National Defense Authorization Act while nationalizing all privately held space alien bodies (!), should any exist, the Ancient Aliens mothership has nothing to say about the apotheosis of its paranoid vision of extraterrestrial infiltration. Instead, we have another hour of cobbled-together reruns, this time focused on islands. Why? Because back in 2013 the show did an episode about “Forbidden Islands” and the theme of the newest batch of episodes this season has been to rehash shows from ten years ago with minimal changes and minimal effort. Even NBC Nightly News had more information about crashed saucers and dead aliens tonight than Ancient Aliens!

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In Brief: House GOP Plans Late July Hearing on Space Aliens and Crashed Saucers

7/13/2023

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Under pressure from members of the GOP caucus, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has signed off on a hearing looking into claims that the U.S. has secret treaties with murderous space monsters and recovered their crashed flying saucers. Rep. Tim Burchett, the 2020 election denier who appeared on Ancient Aliens to claim the Bible is a record of space alien visitation, will lead the hearing. And lest there be any doubt that the embarrassing spectacle is all about space aliens, Burchett told Politico today, “That’s what it is about: aliens.” An anonymous Republican told Politico that some in the GOP understand that the hearing could become a debacle if “people run wild with it,” but thanks to the party’s razor-thin control of the House, members with wacky personal agendas have extraordinary leverage over the Speaker, making it almost impossible to stop a fantastical descent into sci-fi conspiracy theories. The hearing is currently planned for the end of the month.

Late in the day, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer backed a bipartisan Senate proposal to create a commission to declassify UFO documents, which the New York Times correctly characterized as an effort to combat conspiracy theories and tamp down on UFO fever of the kind seen on the House side.

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New York Times Praises Uri Geller for Profiting from "Benign" Post-Truth "Fraud"

7/8/2023

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This morning, the New York Times ran a puff piece in its business section claiming that 1970s-era spoon-bender Uri Geller has “won” the war against his debunkers by monetizing his fraudulent powers and attaining greater celebrity than his detractors. The story, by business reporter David Segal, praises what Segal describes as Geller’s repudiation of conventional standards of truth, substituting entertainment for evidence and using his postmodern attacks on evidence and reason to generate millions in revenue:

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E12: “The Top Ten Mysterious Devices”

7/7/2023

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It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a week since the last new(ish) episode of Ancient Aliens. The intervening Independence Day holiday made it a bit of a slow week for UFO news, with Congress out of session and the media largely on vacation. Instead, we got Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) generating controversy by claiming to quote Patrick Henry to the effect that America was a Christian nation, only to have it come out that he was actually quoting a 1956 edition of a white nationalist newsletter, The Virginian. The mix-up is telling. In the 1956 article, a (somewhat inaccurate) quote from Henry is positioned above the text Hawley cited. Whoever Hawley copied from mistook the attribution between the quote and the body text for a heading and thought the text below was the quotation. That makes quite obvious that Hawley’s source was intentionally copying from the white nationalist rag.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E11 “The Top Ten Pyramid Sites”

7/1/2023

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After a three-month hiatus, Ancient Aliens resumed its nineteenth season with a clip show last night. I wasn’t aware that the show had returned. Most of my TV viewing has switched to streaming, and with A+E Networks not affiliated with one of the big streaming services, I am blissfully ignorant of the History channel’s advertisements. The show only made a couple of tweets about the episode, which I missed. Oh, well. With the real energy in the space alien media space devoted to potential congressional hearings about David Grusch’s allegations that the United States government made a secret treaty with murderous space monsters while battling the Russians to “master” crashed UFO technology, and Sen. Marco Rubio walking back claims that he heard from “firsthand” crashed saucer witnesses while Rep. Mike Gallagher speculated UFOs are either future human time travelers or a lost parallel civilization from the Hollow Earth, the intense stupidity of real life has far outstripped its origins in the fever swamps of a cable TV industry in terminal decline.

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What's Behind the Use of "Ontological Shock" Claims to Attack UFO Skeptics?

Read My CNN Piece about the UFO Hearing

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E14 “The Top Ten Alien Craft”

Pentagon Says Whistleblowers Provided No Verifiable Crashed Saucer Information

Review of "The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill" by Matthew Bowman

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E13: “The Top Ten Mysterious Islands”

In Brief: House GOP Plans Late July Hearing on Space Aliens and Crashed Saucers

New York Times Praises Uri Geller for Profiting from "Benign" Post-Truth "Fraud"

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E12: “The Top Ten Mysterious Devices”

Review of Ancient Aliens S19E11 “The Top Ten Pyramid Sites”

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