The torrent of horrifying news coming out of Washington every few hours has left precious little room in the media to talk about anything else, so it’s no surprise that there hasn’t been much news about UFOs, Atlantis, space ghosts, and other indulgences that dominate only in boring, normal times. Bloomberg has a feature about the bizarre life of Joseph Firmage, a onetime tech leader who descended into UFO and antigravity scams. Politico ran an odd story this week that crossed between the paranormal and the Trump carnival. According to the report, an “informal working group” of FBI agents investigating UFOs are concerned that the Trump purge of thousands of agents who worked on January 6 investigations will cost them their jobs. The media spun this as an admission of an FBI UFO task force, but it turned out that the entire story was based off a claim made by Ryan Graves, the UFO witness turned UFO think tank founder who stands to gain from continued government UFO investigations. Politico claimed three other unnamed people confirmed the existence of the group, but they provided no information about who those people are or whether they have business ties to Graves or other UFO organizations. They said only that they were “familiar,” which could mean anything from FBI agents to filmmakers to SOL Foundation staffers. The bureau denied that anyone at the FBI had confirmed the existence of any such thing. And so it goes.
5 Comments
Another "drone" mystery died today when the White House admitted (or, rather, repeated from the previous administration's analysis) that many drones were FAA-authorized research flights. Anyway, I haven't posted much this past week, and I'm not really feeling too inspired right now. It's hard when I can't know how badly Donald Trump's horrifying actions are going to disrupt, or even devastate, our jobs, which include work funded by organizations that receive federal assistance. So, I guess now is as good a time as any to put into the record the cease-and-desist letter that Lue Elizondo's attorney, Todd McMurty, sent to Arthur Preston this weekend regarding an X thread Preston had made of Elizondo's alleged deceptions. It's an outrageous threat--cartoonishly promising financial ruin from legal bills if Preston doesn't comply--but I want to focus on a particular line: "Ostensibly, the goal of your thread is to disqualify Mr. Elizondo from government service by suggesting that he is opposed to Pres. Trump and a friend of the Democrat party." McMurty then states that Preston's thread might prevent Trump from "appointing" Elizondo, though he does not say to what position. That rather gives the game away, doesn't it? Elizondo, a conservative, is looking to rejoin the government, this time in a position of greater power, by toadying up to Trump.
Last night, second-tier cable news channel NewsNation gave credulous UFO journalist Ross Coulthart a primetime slot to reveal the latest supposed UFO whistleblower's claims. It was another fiasco from the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Jacob Barber claims that he participated in the retrieval on a small egg-shaped craft on behalf of a secret UFO crash retrieval program, one so secret he didn't know he was part of it. He provided footage of the retrieval to the Pentagon's UFO office and to NewsNation. “Just visually looking at the object on the ground, you could tell that it was extraordinary and anomalous,” Barber said before gushing about the paranormal, spiritual connection he felt to its non-human intelligence. “It was not human.” Social media lit up with instant analysis, much of it revolving around the accompanying video, which many said appears to show an aerostat blimp or other type of balloon, not an alien spaceship. In the video, the object sways and rolls while tethered to a helicopter. The Pentagon gave a statement to Steven Greenstreet of the New York Post confirming that AARO is aware of the video and did not assess anything non-human about it. Barber, however, rests his claims on the UAP Task Force that preceded AARO, a task force staffed with UFO believers like Travis Taylor and Jay Stratton. Members of that task force allegedly told Barber the egg-shaped seeming balloon was a vehicle piloted by non-human intelligence. Greenstreet also reported that Barber launched his own UFO organization, Skywatcher, in November, and its website is owned by Alex Klokus, the co-founder of the SALT conference, where UFO figures frequently speak to tech and financial elites.
On a recent episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, aspiring UFO czar Tucker Carlson sat down with UFO-obsessed journalist Michael Schellenberger, and part of their conversation revolved around the question of what UFOs really are. Schellenberger, began by fluffing Carlson and Joe Rogan with praise for the size of their audiences and their interest in UFOs, and then gushed over Rogan’s close relationship with Elon Musk before asking Carlson to explain why he and Rogan differ from Musk on the question of UFOs. Musk does not believe in an otherworldly threat, while Rogan thinks their ETs and Carlson… well, he reiterated his own evolving view that they are “spiritual entities” straight out of the Book of Enoch.
It seemed silly enough when, a few minutes before New Year’s, the Daily Star announced that UFO documentary producer Mark Christopher Lee wants singer Robbie Williams, who recently confessed to encountering a supposed flying saucer, to serve as the U.K.’s UFO ambassador. It was doubly silly that Lee made the recommendation via UFO journalist George Knapp, who is friends with Williams (!).
Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.
At a UFO convention last month, Secret of Skinwalker Ranch star and occasional U.S. government UFO investigator Travis Taylor attempted to tie together cattle mutilation, UFOs, and metamaterials in a grand speculative hypothesis about the real reason space monsters want to cut up our cows: "What if these aliens are using, somehow, the cow blood to make their engines go--work right?" he said in a clip recently posted to X. Taylor speculates that aliens mutilate cows to lubricate their UFO engines with a topological insulator from bovine albumin serum for faster-than-light travel. Bovine albumin serum has indeed been investigated as a topological insulator, though it would seem to defy logic for aliens to require cows. Just imagine: After flying across millions of miles of space, through wormholes across the universe, the aliens need to top up on cow blood to make their rickety space jalopies go. Good thing there are cows on Earth, or they'd be in real trouble.
|
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
Enter your email below to subscribe to my newsletter for updates on my latest projects, blog posts, and activities, and subscribe to Culture & Curiosities, my Substack newsletter.
Categories
All
Terms & ConditionsPlease read all applicable terms and conditions before posting a comment on this blog. Posting a comment constitutes your agreement to abide by the terms and conditions linked herein.
Archives
February 2025
|