​Sean Cahill is involved with yet another new UFO organization, following the failure of Skyfort and whatever followed that one. His new venture, announced this week on social media, for which he severs as a project advisor, is called Project Nanu, a social media space for everything from UFOs to cryptids to ancient history. Whether intentional or not, its risible name immediately calls to mind Robin Williams’s catchphrase from Mork & Mindy, in which his extraterrestrial character often yelled “Nanu, nanu!” 

​Late on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported ex-AARO administrator Sean Kirkpatrick learned in his time in office that UFOs had been the subject of a Pentagon disinformation campaign for decades, with military offices doctoring photos and seeding fake flying saucer stories to cover up secret research programs and encounters with foreign craft. The Journal also reported that Kirkpatrick concluded that many of the men in the Air Force who claimed knowledge of secret reverse engineering UFO programs were in fact the subject of a “hazing” effort from high-ranking officers who, for decades, had new intelligence agents view doctored UFO photos and sign and NDA after being convinced they were going to study UFOs. Most never learned the program was a joke. (The discovery reportedly shocked Biden-era Director of National Intelligence Avrill Haines, who had a hard time believing it.) AARO does not understand why the deception occurred, speculating it might have been a loyalty test. The paper also reported that the so-called Malmstrom Air Force Base incident, when a “UFO” allegedly shut off nuclear weapons, was actually a Pentagon-sanctioned test using an exotic electromagnetic pulse generator. In short: AARO found everything skeptics always assumed to be true was in fact true, and the UFO phenomenon is mostly smoke and mirrors. In fact, it is worse than skeptics thought, since the self-deluding Pentagon officials ended up doing actual damage by creating a false belief that undermined the ability of the government to understand real, non-alien threats thanks to a self-inflicted wound.

By the way, full disclosure: I spoke with Joel Schectmen, one of the authors of the article, a few months ago when he was working on this story and provided some background information into the UFO cabal orbiting the Pentagon.

​This weekend, NewsNation UFO correspondent Ross Coulthart prophesied an apocalyptic event for 2027, just far enough in the future for his fans to forgive and forget when it doesn’t come to pass. He claims that government officials are hiding doomsday from us: “I cannot begin to emphasize how serious a look I get… They’re saying to me, ‘People have a right to know this’… They are all constrained by their national security oaths. They want the public to know.” Meanwhile, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch returned for a new season this evening, which makes it all the more appropriate that the infamous “Ten Month Report” that Robert Bigelow’s team at BAASS delivered to the Pentagon in 2009 while studying alleged spooks on the ranch for AAWSAP leaked to the internet this past weekend.

​George Knapp is the kind of self-dealing hack who gives journalists a bad name. Across a lengthy career as a local newsman at NexStar’s Las Vegas station, Knapp has moved effortlessly, and with dubious ethics, between provincial journalism, working for or with wealthy ufologists, secretly advocating for UFO and Skinwalker Ranch spending in Congress for thirty years, and profiting from ufology across his range of media products—all while pretending to be an objective journalist. He is also rather unpleasant toward those who dare to criticize his transgressions. He has lobbed more than a few nasty insults at me, for instance. But now, as his career continues to fail upward toward ever more success, he can add another accolade: Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow has signed on to tell his life story and is planning a biopic set in the 1980s covering Knapp’s most famous reports, when he credulously introduced the world to Bob Lazar’s fantasies about aliens at Area 51. The untitled film will follow the thrilling intellectual adventure as Knapp develops “theories” about alien incursions in the Las Vegas area—all without a shred of evidence! Ryan Reynolds is reportedly interested in playing Knapp, which gives me hope that the film will either be a comedy making Knapp the butt of the joke or will bomb as hard as Reynolds’s most famous foray into alien-themed science fiction, Green Lantern. But it might be nice if Hollywood would stop trying to propagandize for fakery.

In a social media posting on X today, Lue Elizondo said that he did not attend a classified SCIF meeting with Congressional representatives last week because of a prior commitment to perform at an Oregon UFO festival, tacitly conceding that posing with UFO fans in alien costumes is more important than informing Congress about America's most important UFO secrets. Meanwhile, Douglas Dean Johnson published a definitive takedown of the claims made by the late Harald Malmgren, a former U.S. trade representative who spent the last months of his very long life pretending to have been a top presidential advisor privy to twentieth-century UFO secrets and a vast conspiracy to hide the truth.

Johnson's thorough research into the paper trail of Malmgren's career confirms something I suspected after I was unable to find significant references to him in databases of government records: He was not a terribly important official, and he spent a long time inflating his resume, eventually to cosmic proportions.

Be sure to read the complete report for a breakdown of his many fabrications and exaggerations, which ultimately undermine his claims about flying saucers--and also show how UFO journalism on outlets like NewsNation don't check the facts before running with wild stories.

For the better part of two decades, I have pressed the point the ufology and ancient astronaut theory are attempts to find a quasi-scientific substitute for traditional religious beliefs in an era of declining support for mainstream churches. It was obvious enough when the first ufologists were revealed to be Theosophists back in the 1950s, and it was just as obvious when John Mack and Ancient Aliens both concluded that so-called "abduction" reports proved that aliens were psychopomps who would take souls to a heaven dimension--or when Ancient Aliens told viewers to worship Lucifer. But the more recent wave of ufology, from 2017 until now, has tried to distance itself from the spiritual side, at least in public, and instead coat its faith-based initiatives in the clothing of official government support. Then Jeremy Corbell tweeted.

“You are not free. And this reality, has far more to it than you have been ALLOWED, to believe. And God is real,” so-called UFO whistleblower Matthew Brown is quoted as saying in a posting Corbell made to X yesterday.  This is about as clear an example of the underlying spiritual project behind ufology's search for superior alien species as you are likely to get. It is also, unsurprisingly, an unintentional return to the Theosophical ideas about unseen realms and hidden levels to reality that infested early ufology from the very first days of the UFO era. 

​John Greenewald of The Black Vault posted a cache of documents recently released through FOIA, and in the collection of emails and memoranda we learned the podcasted Lex Fridman secretly tried to involve himself in developing a UFO office for the Pentagon all while covering UFOs on his podcast.