​In a new piece for the Debrief published yesterday, Chris Mellon offered an incoherent set of thoughts on UFO disclosure that accidentally revealed more than he probably meant to about the campaign behind the scenes to pressure government to embrace space aliens and also repeated the utopian fantasy that undergirds the UFO mythos.

​In a blog post this week, Harvard astronomer and alien-hunter Avi Loeb completed his metamorphosis, achieving the final form of pop culture ufologists: He’s now into ancient mysteries and prehistory’s lost civilization secrets. Loeb announced that UFOs may be a technological relic of a lost prehistoric civilization destroyed by a geological catastrophe, with only their orbiting spacecraft to mark their passage:

UFO journalist Ross Coulthart expanded his conspiracy theory repertoire in a new direction this weekend when he produced a special for NewsNation about JFK assassination conspiracy theories. As is inevitable, association with one conspiracy theory leads down the primrose path toward the broader conspiracy culture. It's also a savvy move for the ambitious Coulthart, who saw his stock rise in the U.S. after a series of controversies had damaged his reputation in his native Australia. Parlaying success in one conspiracy theory into a more general role as a conspiracy journalist for a second-tier cable news network allows him to keep building an audience, even during downturns in the UFO story.

Several online retailers posted what they say is the promotional copy for UFO celebrity Lue Elizondo's long-delayed memoir, apparently titled Disclosure. Elizondo signed a deal two years ago with William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, to write an account of his time hunting UFOs on the government's dime, and the book has had a couple of potential release dates that never happened, the most recent being October of this year. The new promotional copy suggests that Elizondo won't be bringing much new to the table since the promo copy has nothing to plug but hoary old chestnuts and familiar favorites:

Note: This post also appears in my weekend newsletter.
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This week, the new Speaker of the House, Christian conservative Mike Johnson, came under fire for his past comments on homosexuality, notably his claim that gay marriage is a cancer that would lead to the collapse of Western civilization. But more humorously, CNN unearthed a 2008 clip this week that revealed that Johnson believes that “rampant homosexuality” was responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire: “Many historians, those who are objective, would look back and recognize and give some credit to the fall of Rome to, not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals, but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society.” The Roman Empire fell, of course, when it was officially Christian and had Christian laws.
 
Meanwhile, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, the Indonesian government-affiliated geologist who claims Gunung Padang in Indonesia is a prehistoric pyramid complex that coincidentally makes Indonesia the oldest civilization on Earth, published a new paper repeating the claim, to the delight of Graham Hancock, who claims it is “vindication” of his speculations. However, Natawidjaja only provided radiocarbon dates for organic material buried within the hill of Gunung Padang without providing evidence of human occupation at the time or of human deposition of the organic material.
 
Finally, the Daily Mail reported that Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon’s UFO office, will resign in the coming weeks following months of attacks from ufologists in the mainstream media and on social media that he is too closed to witnesses’ extraterrestrial claims, is hiding the “truth,” and is too willing to work with alleged conspirators hiding UFO evidence. He is rumored to be replaced with a candidate more open to space aliens.

Grusch, who lives in California, previously received car service from a UFO documentary crew when he testified before a subcommittee of the House of Representatives this summer. With his documented support from wealthy, jet-setting ufologists like Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp and extreme popularity among UFO fanatics, Grusch should have had no trouble raising money for a flight to D.C. He could, for example, have started a GoFundMe, which probably would have raised the money in a few hours. Or he could have NewsNation or a documentary crew arrange travel while filming him. But, sadly, Grusch just won’t share the world-changing truths about the most earth-shattering revelation in human history because a senator from a state where Grusch doesn’t live won’t give him a free plane ticket. Amazing how often a die-hard commitment to bettering humanity through Disclosure (as Grusch claimed to the Washington Post recently) runs aground on the shores of minor inconvenience. 

UPDATE: Grusch let it be known through anonymous “friends late Tuesday that he paid his own way in July and has the money to pay again, claiming that Gillibrand was ​“misinformed” about the reasons he had not yet spoken in a SCIF.

​The History Channel has canceled the semi-annual Alien Con after nearly a decade. A representative told New York Post journalist Steven Greenstreet that the company would instead focus on its Ancient Aliens and Secret of Skinwalker Ranch touring live shows because they make more money. “We make money on the tours,” a spokesperson for History’s parent company, A+E Networks, said. And of course they do. The traveling shows feature a few guys sitting in chairs, and even orthopedic chairs cost less than all the overhead that goes into putting on a full convention with all the trimmings, especially as the shows’ ratings decline and the incentive to travel a thousand miles to a convention declines. It’s much easier to get casually interested audiences to go to a local show.

​This week, the Washington Post offered a thoughtful account of how so-called “UFO whistleblower” David Grusch ended up testifying before Congress. The story itself didn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know, but the new details were intriguing. First, there is the obvious: Grusch declined to sit for an interview with the Post and instead has devoted his time to largely uncritical UFO podcasts and YouTube channels. A serious man with serious evidence should, in theory, be sitting with the biggest media outlets to get his story out, especially when they offer. And yet, Grusch isn’t. Indeed, he has not really ventured outside of the small network of ufologists who know and work with one another.

​Longtime UFO huckster Jaime Maussan showed the Mexican Congress two alleged “fossilized” alien bodies whose “DNA” was one-third “unidentified” in a presentation attended by Mexican and U.S. officials. Maussan claimed the bodies had been recovered near Cusco, Peru and had been carbon-dated to at least 700 years ago. They looked very much like crude clay sculptures of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., and an x-ray showed small bones embedded within them. (Previous, similar fakes were made from the bones of human fetuses and/or animals, some looted from graves; experts identified these fakes as sand-covered paper mâché over animal bones.) The bodies were first publicized in 2017. At the time, the World Congress on Mummy Studies declared them a fraud. Avi Loeb, who told the Telegraph this week that his critics are mostly “bloggers” who aren’t fit to judge him, judged Maussan via video link and requested that scientists be allowed to study the alien bodies, something he hasn’t yet allowed for his own alleged extraterrestrial discovery. The Mexican UFO hearing occurred shortly after Jesse Michels released a multi-hour interview with U.S. UFO “whistleblower” David Grusch, who endorsed various Majestic-12-style conspiracy theories and speculated about a number of Ancient Aliens-style ancient astronaut hypotheses.