All Categories

Congressional Ancient Astronaut Theorist to Lead House Search for Crashed UFOs

6/8/2023

According to an article in The Guardian, the House Oversight Committee is in the early stages of planning a hearing into David Grusch's claim to have heard from other people in the intelligence community that the U.S. has captured alien spaceships. According to the newspaper, Rep. Tim Burchett, the far-right election denier who appeared on Ancient Aliens to claim that the Bible is full of flying saucers, will lead the House investigation into crashed UFOs ahead of the hearing, whose date will be set in a few weeks' time. “Congressman Burchett’s office is working through logistics, including a witness list of the most credible witnesses and sources who would be able to speak openly at an unclassified hearing,” a spokesperson said.

3 Comments

UFO "Whistleblower" Has Suspiciously Close Ties to the Usual Suspects

6/7/2023

5 Comments

NewsNation reported last night that the House Oversight Committee plans to investigate David Grusch’s claim that other people told him that the United States has both crashed flying saucers and dead aliens. Legislators said they had no knowledge of the claim and did not read the article or Grusch’s testimony to House lawyers, but they wanted to investigate anyway, based on what they heard on TV. NewsNation claimed this would involved a “hearing,” but their reporter appeared to have misunderstood what “looking into” and “investigating” means.

5 Comments

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

6/5/2023

3 Comments

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.”

3 Comments

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

6/3/2023

3 Comments

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.

3 Comments

Watch Me Talk UFOs on Germany's ZDF

5/31/2023

6 Comments

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.

6 Comments

Adrienne Mayor Claims Talos as a Greek Myth of Artificial Intelligence

5/24/2023

4 Comments

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.

4 Comments

CNN Analyst Peter Bergen Launches New Podcast with UFO Episode

5/16/2023

24 Comments

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”!

24 Comments

Long-Secret James Dean Files Offer Some Shocking Surprises

5/10/2023

14 Comments

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.

14 Comments

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

5/5/2023

7 Comments

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:

7 Comments

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

4/25/2023

79 Comments

[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.

79 Comments