Category: Ufos

New Book from Jacques Vallée Claims Evidence for 1945 New Mexico UFO Crash

5/7/2021

UFO researcher Jacques Vallée pulled his new self-published book The Best-Kept Secret on the day of its May 4 release. A new press release explains why: Jacques Vallée and coauthor and “exopolitics” researcher Paola Harris are self-publishing a revised edition on June 1 under the title Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. The book will attempt to provide corroborating evidence for a story first told in the early 2000s about an “avocado-shaped” UFO crashing in San Antonio, New Mexico in August 1945, near to the Trinity nuclear test site. According to the book description and press release, Vallée analyzed a piece of debris that one of the witnesses claims to possess and will suggest that it is of extraterrestrial origin.

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The Vicious Circle: The Small Group of Believers Behind Recent UFO News

5/4/2021

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Note: This post also appears in my Substack newsletter.

The last few days have seen a flurry of UFO news, sparked by recent articles in the New Yorker, the New York Post, and Politico surrounding the upcoming Pentagon report on UFOs this June required by Congress. The articles, collectively, sought to legitimize the question of flying saucers as a serious issue of national security, relying on the same small group of sources, and they appear to have achieved that goal. Yesterday, the Department of Defense’s Inspector General opened an investigation into “the extent to which the DoD has taken actions” regarding UFOs. They did so, according to an article in The Debrief, because senators on the Armed Services Committee requested the investigation. The wording suggests that senators read recent media reports and want to know if the Pentagon is doing anything about flying saucers—a strange request since Congress itself required the Pentagon to investigate UFOs back in the 2000s. Apparently, senators are outraged by the Politico article claiming the Air Force has not fully cooperated in Congress’s required UFO report.

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Flying Saucers and the Nuclear Menace

4/29/2021

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This piece is cross-posted in my Substack newsletter.

Earlier this week, NBC Nightly News ran a story about UFOs keyed to the controversy over the Pentagon confirming that night-vision video of a triangle apparently in the sky had been taken by Navy personnel. In the story, reporter Gadi Schwartz interviewed ex-Pentagon functionary and ex-To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science security official Lue Elizondo, who told Schwartz that UFOs had been involved in compromising American nuclear sites. “We’ve actually had some of our nuclear capabilities disabled by these things,” he said. Schwartz tweeted his suggestion that Navy ships encounter UFOs because of the nuclear issue as well. “As for the nuke question, may or may not have any bearing... but worth noting that our carriers and subs are nuclear powered. Which would mean any carrier group is likely traveling with several nuclear reactors,” he wrote.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E09 "The UFO Pioneers"

3/6/2021

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This week, Ancient Aliens again chose to create a putatively “new” episode from recycled parts of earlier episodes. As with last week’s episode, three pundits—this time, Giorgio Tsoukalos, David Childress, and Nick Pope—sit around a conference table and offer blather to connect together prerecorded packages, some from previous episodes. This episode swirls around personalities associated with UFO investigation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These people, some serious, some kooky, are lionized as “pioneers”—but pioneers of what? The fantasy that the unknown must be extraterrestrial, paranormal or something combining both, mostly. The potted biographies offer little you haven’t seen before, even if you hadn’t watched earlier episodes of the series. Since there is little worthy of discussion here, and since the show’s viewership remains under one million viewers, and the readership of these summaries under five hundred readers, I will offer only a brief summary of the highlights of each segment as a record for historical interest.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E08 "The Space Travelers"

2/27/2021

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Last week, Ancient Aliens rose total audience, climbing to 998,000 viewers, an increase of almost 50,000 viewers over the previous week’s William Shatner special. But the number of younger viewers watching ticked downward, knocking the show out of the top twenty for the night. I continue to remain amazed that about a million Americans will watch Ancient Aliens even when it simply repeats old material from previous episodes and shamelessly copies and pastes. But people also pay good money to stream reruns of The Office they’ve seen many times before, so I guess it’s to be expected. However, since Ancient Aliens is putting no effort into sewing together Frankenstein’s monster episodes from cadaverous parts, I won’t put that much effort into reviewing it. According to my blog traffic statistics, reader engagement with Ancient Aliens has collapsed. In past years, thousands, often tens of thousands, of people would research the show and find their way to my reviews in the first week after publishing them. This past week, 602 people read my review—fewer than read archival reviews! It just isn’t worth the effort.

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"To the Stars" Falls Back to Earth, Refocusing as an Entertainment Company

2/22/2021

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Since I bothered to make the graphic several years ago, I feel like I need to deploy it one final time to report that this will almost certainly be the last To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science Alien Metals and Poltergeist Update. TTSA, it turns out, is getting out of the alien metals and poltergeist business after successfully poisoning the public discourse by infecting the media with unproven stories of likely industrial waste they pretended was debris from crashed UFOs. According to their latest filing with the SEC last week, TTSA is reorganizing and dropping nearly all of its science and aerospace initiatives in order to focus primarily on entertainment products. The relevant section of the SEC report is copied below:

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Review of Ancient Aliens S16E06 "William Shatner Meets Ancient Aliens"

2/12/2021

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In recent interviews, William Shatner claims that he is agnostic on the question of ancient astronauts, or even skeptical of some of the ancient astronaut theorists’ claims. That wasn’t always the case. Almost 45 years ago, Shatner at least pretended to be an enthusiastic ancient astronaut theorist when he stepped into the shoes of the late Rod Serling to serve as host of Mysteries of the Gods—“as incredible as Star Trek”—a film adaptation of Erich von Däniken’s book Miracles of the Gods and a follow-up to the various film versions of Chariots of the Gods, including Serling’s In Search of Ancient Astronauts. Shatner’s former Star Trek colleague Leonard Nimoy was also subbing for Serling on In Search of…, the television continuation of In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and the most successful of von Däniken’s various intellectual offspring.

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Read My New Slate Magazine Article on Joe McCarthy, Tucker Carlson, and UFOs

2/12/2021

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I have a new article out today in Slate magazine examining Joe McCarthy, Tucker Carlson, and UFOs in light connection with masculinity issues and pop culture.

On a cold December night in 1950, red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy spent a charity dinner at Washington’s Sulgrave Club trading insults with liberal journalist Drew Pearson. McCarthy had attacked Pearson on the floor of the Senate, calling for a boycott of his radio show. Pearson had attacked McCarthy on air and in his newspaper column, accusing the senator of lying about communist infiltration of the American government. McCarthy had recklessly accused the State Department of harboring hundreds of communists, sparking a massive investigation and an ongoing purge. After dinner, the two ran into each other in the cloakroom and their conflict turned physical. McCarthy kneed Pearson in the groin, and Sen. Richard Nixon had to pull McCarthy off Pearson.

Read the rest at Slate magazine by clicking here.

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New York Times Puff Piece Celebrates Robert Bigelow's Hunt for Life after Death

1/21/2021

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Recently, UFO propagandist Leslie Kean had her book on the afterlife adapted as a Netflix series. Her writing partner, Ralph Blumenthal, is about to publish his long-gestating biography of alien abduction researcher John Mack, endorsing Mack’s ideas about reaching a transcendent afterlife through aliens. The pair came to renewed national attention in December 2017 when they revealed the existence of a Pentagon UFO office, a report instigated through the offices of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, staffed by refugees from both the government office and its major contractor, wealthy UFO believer and hotelier Robert Bigelow’s flying saucer research organization. The relationship between these various data points wasn’t entirely clear until now. Today, the New York Times ran a new piece by Blumenthal rhapsodizing over Bigelow’s newest venture, an effort to prove life continues after death.

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Review of "The Believer" by Ralph Blumenthal

1/1/2021

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Ralph Blumenthal’s The Believer is probably the wrong book for me to be reviewing right now. Coming on the heels of me finishing a six-month project writing my own new book, which also combined biography with UFOs, the structural and formal similarities between our two volumes became uncomfortable. That Blumenthal made exactly the opposite choices in putting his book together served for me as an object lesson in the difference between reportage and storytelling. The Believer is a bad book, though not without a basic factual utility. It’s unpleasant to read, confusing, and lacks a clear perspective on its subject beyond hagiography. But worst of all, it’s bad as biography. You won’t leave this book feeling anything for or about John Mack, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who became an alien abduction researcher and who serves as the book’s titular subject. He never feels human.

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