Category: Ufos

Galileo Project Hires Jacques Vallée as It Morphs into BAASS/AAWSAP 2.0

1/23/2022

The Galileo Project announced this morning that it has hired Jacques Vallée, continuing the Harvard project's descent into Ancient Aliens territory and continuing the UFO industry's move to launder lunatic ideas through the auspices of government, media, and academia. The Galileo Project began as astronomer Avi Loeb's effort to find interstellar objects created by space aliens but has gradually morphed into a full-on effort to hunt flying saucers as Loeb has become enmeshed in the History Channel / Robert Bigelow UFO circle. The Galileo Project recently added Bigelow circle UFO advocates Chris Mellon and Lue Elizondo to its advisory board. Vallée claimed last year that in 1945 the U.S. government recovered an avocado-shaped UFO piloted by tiny space aliens which the aliens had purposely crashed into the Earth to give the United States super technology, a claim Mellon endorsed. Avi Loeb owns this now, even as they praise Vallée for his "wisdom and insights."

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E02 "Mystery of the Standing Stones"

1/14/2022

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This week’s episode of Ancient Aliens continues the theme of exploiting stuff you half remember from the last year or so as it presents an episode framed around the so-called “monolith” that caused a stir when the metallic art installation was photographed in the Utah desert in November 2020, sparking allegations that the shiny pillar was the work of space aliens, despite its very earthly rivets. The show has covered various standing stones and pillars many times before, so after last week’s relatively coherent episode with a strong narrative arc and somewhat original content, we return to form with the usual recycling. I will be frank. This episode is almost identical to the Season Five episode called “The Monoliths,” which covered almost all of the material we see tonight, mostly in the same order.

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UFO Twitter Is Talking about an Old Air Force Textbook on Ancient Aliens and UFOs

1/12/2022

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Twitter’s UFO enthusiasts have been abuzz in recent days after the rediscovery of an old textbook used in an elective physics course at the Air Force Academy from 1968 to the early 1970s. The book, volume 2 of Introductory Space Science, edited by Maj. Donald G. Carpenter was an internally developed anthology of chapters on aerospace matters from an assortment of authors. Chapter 33 covered Unidentified Flying Objects and therefore inspired UFO enthusiasts to claim that the Air Force was “teaching” UFOs. But there is so much less here than meets the eye.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S18E01: The Disclosure Event

1/7/2022

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The biggest surprise about this episode of Ancient Aliens, the first of the series’ eighteenth season, is that it took so long. While other networks were able to churn out special programs to capitalize on the release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s June 2021 report to Congress on unidentified flying objects within days or weeks of its release, the History Channel was exceptionally slow to capitalize on what should have been its Christmas season. Back in the summer they ran a slightly edited version of an old Unidentified episode, and that was their response. It has taken a full seven months for Ancient Aliens to make an episode about the events of last spring, even though the show operates on a shoestring and shouldn’t require more than a few days to toss together—if the people involved were both knowledgeable and competent. That’s a big if.

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Beam Me Up: The Year in Review 2021

12/27/2021

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Writing my annual year in review article used to be amusing, if not actually fun, because there was at least some entertainment value in seeing the wild claims and fantastical speculations that passed for history and science. But each year has been a little darker than the one before, and the job is less an exercise in tut-tutting foolishness than it is a depressing reminder that wealthy and powerful people are pushing conspiracies whose real-life consequences are no longer hypothetical but manifest every day in ways large and small, from the halls of Congress to hospital ICUs.

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Scott Wolter Claims to Have a Lost Book of the Bible with Aliens Inside

12/18/2021

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In a recent podcast interview, former television personality Scott Wolter made a bizarre assertion about prehistoric space aliens, a part of his ongoing conversion to full ancient astronaut theorist. Wolter discussed the documents he has asserted to be medieval records from the Knights Templar for the past several years, and in “new” Templar documents conveniently mirroring his own conversion to ancient alien enthusiast, he claims to have discovered evidence that space aliens intervened in human history.

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Read My New UFO Article in "The New Republic"

12/14/2021

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I have a new piece out in The New Republic about the National Defense Authorization Act and its new UFO office.

Six months after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, delivered a report to Congress that failed to explain more than 140 reports of unidentified flying objects—mostly because no one in government tried all that hard to explain them—Congress is set to approve legislation to create a new office within the Pentagon tasked with investigating military UFO sightings. The new office will gather reports of sightings, analyze them, and deliver reports to Congress on the subject at intervals. At least that’s the aspect of this decision on which the legislators who pushed for the new office want the public to focus. Underneath the surface, Congress is about to require the Pentagon to get weird. Very weird. Like, imaginary crashed-saucer wreckage weird.

Read the full story in The New Republic.

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Congress Set to Approve New UFO Office with Bizarre Research Mandates

12/8/2021

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Sometime in the next few days, the Senate will pass the version of the National Defense Authorization Act which passed the House this week. Section 1638 of the new legislation will require the establishment of a program to research UFOs, including some bizarre provisions taken straight from the fever swamps of cable TV UFO shows. The legislation, a slightly watered-down version of an amendment Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand proposed this fall, represents a triumph for ex-government UFO research advocates and infotainers Chris Mellon and Luis Elizondo, whose lobbying efforts and UFO wish list were incorporated almost completely, and sometimes nearly verbatim, into the law.

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Lue Elizondo Embraces "Zoo Hypothesis," Calls for Complete Social Restructuring

11/27/2021

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In a recent podcast appearance, UFO advocate and media personality Lue Elizondo explained his reasoning behind claiming that UFO mysteries have made him "somber." His speculative ideas are straight out of middle twentieth century science fiction, particularly the so-called "zoo hypothesis" that appeared in a number of stories at that time, imagining that Earth was essentially a zoo run by space aliens. This is an outgrowth of Charles Fort's claim that some non-human intelligence essentially operates Earth as a prison or an ant farm to watch us, and it is the basis for the "prison planet" claims of some contemporary ancient astronaut theorists.

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Pentagon Launches New UFO Group as Officials Deny Evidence of Advanced Tech

11/24/2021

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Yesterday, the Pentagon announced the creation of a new group to handle UFO investigations as part of an effort to distance the military from the increasingly unhinged fringe science narratives circling around the subject. The Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence issued a directive creating the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, which will investigate and identify potential aerial threats. According to officials who briefed reporters, the group was created in response to frustration within the intelligence community that the UAP Task Force did too little to explain sightings, letting UFO looneys promote alien speculation that military and intelligence officials do not take seriously.

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