Playboy magazine ran a feature profiling a day in the life of Jeremy Corbell, following the UFO podcaster at the Contact in the Desert paranormal gathering. Reporter Mattha Busby captures the tawdry side of ufology, from UFO show host Ben Hansen selling $720 binoculars to UFO buffs during a for-profit UFO hunt that brought in an estimated $10,000, to what Busby implied was Corbell's narcissistic and controlling personality. Busby correctly identifies ufology as an incipient religion, and UFO celebrities, as depicted in the piece, ride the line between wannabe saviors basking in the adoration of their fans and paranoid grifters scamming every last dollar from revelations they have no intention of delivering. 

The piece left Corbell enraged, and he demanded an apology because Busby confused statements from two alleged UFO witnesses, attributing them to the wrong witness. Corbell then used that opening to attack the article as a hit piece that failed to pay sufficient homage and respect to ufology and ufologists, especially, say, Jeremy Corbell.

I invite you to read the piece in full, but there are a few highlights worth pointing out:

• Corbell is now proudly an ancient astronaut theorist: “I suspect that there’s a technologically advanced civilization that has been in contact with humanity since the beginning of recorded human history,” he said at Contact in the Desert.
• Corbell seems to reveal some Freudian reasons for his deference to the US government as the sole path to Truth, calling the government "Daddy."
• Corbell has a large contingent of female fans in an otherwise male-dominated field, and they seem to be sexually attracted to him.
• Corbell is apparently obsessed with his press and tries to alternately charm or intimidate reporters into writing only positive things about him.
• Everything in ufology comes with a fee attached. It's all about the Benjamins. 

​The majority of the news conference was devoted to complaints that the Trump Administration and the Department of Defense have not released enough records. Lawmakers called on Trump to grant immunity from the Espionage Act to anyone who can provide information on the location of an alien or its ship, presumably due to unproved allegations that such information is classified.
 
The members of Congress demanded the U.S. government release files related to the 1996 Varginha UFO sighting in Brazil, a country which is not the United States, despite the convincing evidence presented on Brazilian television earlier this year that the alleged alien encounter was a hoax. The FBI investigated at some point, and Congress reviewed the files. A former Brazilian official who has no power to declassify anything allegedly said that Brazil would not release its Varginha files until the U.S. did. (Why?) Believers allege that the Varginha alien traveled to the U.S. after visiting Brazil, but none of the lawmakers made any move to subpoena testimony from Bill Clinton, who was the president at the time and would have overseen the alien’s transportation.
 
In addition to the de rigueur praise from several GOP representatives of Donald Trump as the greatest human alive (“a leader that the American people can trust to challenge institutions that have grown far too comfortable operating without accountability”), the mostly Republican lawmakers added, weirdly, that the real purpose of demanding to see the aliens was to investigate how the Pentagon spends money and whether it is meeting its obligations to report to Congress.
 
Kean advocated for the “public release of any evidence concerning recovered advanced nonhuman biological entities.” As a journalist, she ought not to be standing with lawmakers to advocate for specific government policies, and it will be interesting to see how quickly The New York Times violates its own policies on political advocacy to have her write another UFO feature. (Kean previously advocated for UFO disclosure actions as part of a lobbying organization with political operative John Podesta in the early 2000s before pretending to have always been a disinterested journalist when writing her UFO book and reporting for the Times.)
 
Grusch closed the show with an impassioned call for an end to UFO secrecy and government conspiracies. He claimed that Donald Trump and his team are being blocked and lied to by “high-ego, politically appointed actors,” so Trump is blameless in the conspiracy. He blew more smoke up Trump’s ass in begging Trump to disclose the truth about aliens, finishing with “God Bless America!”
 
Then the choreographed presentation of supposedly serious claims about UFOs and national security all fell apart when right-wing network Real America’s Voice got the first question and asked Grusch how many types of aliens there are on Earth.
 
“I certainly don’t have the compendium,” Grusch said. “It’s a continuum from a corporeal bipedal type life to, you know, what I would consider is like sentient plasma life, but there are several that the US government is aware of.” (He might have said sentient plasmoid instead of plasma; it was a bit difficult for me to make out the word.)
 
There isn’t really any coming back from that, and when the questions devolved into speakers recommending the public watch UFO documentaries to learn the “truth,” that pretty much said it all.
 
Unfortunately, the sentient plasma declined to attend the news conference, citing a prior engagement.

In a new interview with Chris Sharp for the Liberation Times, UFO advocate Lue Elizondo came out as autistic, endorsed parts of the ancient astronaut theory, and says he may be remembered as "the biggest villain in history" if the public panics over aliens. Elizondo said that his autism was socially "debilitating" but left him with a black-and-white view of right and wrong that he has used to his "advantage" in pressing for UFO disclosure. Elizondo added that he now believes that Nordic and Grey aliens are related to humans and that all three species share one origin, and the so-called aliens may in fact be beings that evolved on the ancient Earth--basically Richard Shaver's Deros. Elizondo says he expects NASA to find alien artifacts on the moon, and he implied that Majestic-12 was not a hoax. You can read the whole interview, with much more detail, on the Liberation Times website.

​I will admit to being surprised by the sudden turn ufology took into Satanic Panic. Over the last few weeks, the leading lights in government ufology appear to have reached a consensus that UFOs are in fact demons. Literal demons. From Hell. After Vice President JD Vance announced his belief that flying saucers are the Prince of the Air’s private jets, all hell—metaphorically—broke loose in the UFO world, with other Republicans jumping on the license to talk about Fallen Angels, Nephilim, and demons. This culminated over the weekend in a New York Times report about the possibility that flying saucers are aerial demons—a claim so absurd that it’s hard to imagine another time when the Paper of Record would openly entertain such a thought.

​At a cabinet meeting this morning, Pres. Donald Trump praised his administration for releasing UFO files because of their popularity on social media: “We're releasing a lot of information having to do with extraterential, terrestrial, uh, things,” Trump said, struggling to say the word “extraterrestrial.” “And, uh, people are totally fascinated by it. It’s amazing. I wasn’t sure if they would enjoy it. It’s literally trending number one. Can you believe it? So a lot of people out there like it.” His comments did not appear to signal any imminent announcement of alien life, despite claims from ufologists that presidential confirmation of ETs on earth is coming soon.

​NewsNation UFO correspondent Ross Coulthart claimed in a live interview with the network’s Alex Caprariello that the Trump Administration is soliciting advice from religious leaders about how best to prepare the country for the “ontological shock” of a planned announcement that extraterrestrial beings are operating on Earth. As with many of Coulthart’s recent claims, his comments did not have any verifiable facts or specific names attached to them:

​This week, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson released a new book about extraterrestrials, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter, which was greeted with fairly negative reviews for its superficial combination of science trivia and movie references. Somehow, Tyson wrote a glib book about how fictional aliens connect to scientific concepts without ever mentioning written science fiction. But his book launch occasioned the need to drum up publicity about space aliens, so Tyson has been on a media tour and earning backlash for his comments on flying saucers and the government’s interest in them.

​More than a quarter-century ago, the CIA released a 1952 archival document listing archived photographs taken in 1950. According to the heavily redacted 10-page document, a couple whose names were withheld—but were certainly anthropologist and Afghanistan scholar Louis Dupree and his first wife, Annie Dupree—took photos during a trip to Afghanistan between July and December 1952.
 
The agency’s primary interest was in the Afghan photos, but the roles of film, which were loaned to the agency and then returned, also included some exposures from a stop-over in Lebanon and Egypt on route. Photos taken of the Sphinx caused a stir online yesterday when social media gadflies like Jimmy Corsetti suggested they proved the CIA had evidence of the supposed Hall of Records under the Sphinx.

​A Tennessee pastor’s claims about UFO disclosure made headlines this week. In an April 27 YouTube video, Perry Stone, a televangelist, claimed that a friend had told him that a group of pastors gathered for a secret meeting in an unnamed state with U.S. government officials, who urged them to be prepared for the UFO files Donald Trump ordered released to reveal the presence of Reptilian creatures. The officials “were telling us as pastors, ‘You need to prepare your people, and you need to get ready to answer them for what you're about to hear being released’,” Stone said. 

Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet had a distinguished career in the Navy and in oceanography before he became obsessed with UFOs and the paranormal. Now he’s better known for his frequent appearances on the UFO podcast circuit and on cable news channels to promote UFO conspiracy theories, especially his pet idea that UFOs part in underwater bases. He also participated in a 2016 episode of the Travel Channel’s The Dead Files claiming that his house is haunted and that his daughter communicates with ghosts. Now Gallaudet has a new memoir to flog, so he’s once again touring the podcasts to drum up sales—and making some wild claims along the way. One that caught my attention was a claim he made to The Free Press that Atlantis is real.