Category: Ufos

Watch Me Talk UFOs on Germany's ZDF

5/31/2023

Earlier today, NASA held a meeting about UFOs with representatives from the Pentagon’s new UFO office (AARO) and members of NASA’s UFO research group, and the results were about what you would expect. Sean Kirkpatrick of AARO revealed that “Go Fast,” one of the famous videos of a “UFO” cited by the New York Times and claimed by Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon to be moving at impossible velocities turned out to be traveling around 40 miles per hour, in line with an object at that altitude being blown by wind. He said that a handful of cases seemed truly anomalous but that none indicated any evidence whatsoever of space aliens. Other members of the panel complained loudly about receiving harassment from UFO believers for not supporting the space alien claim.

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CNN Analyst Peter Bergen Launches New Podcast with UFO Episode

5/16/2023

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Journalist Peter Bergen, probably best known from his appearances on CNN as a national security analyst, launched a new podcast through Audible today, In the Room with Peter Bergen. The high-profile new podcast aims to cover national security issues and today’s three-episode launch includes an episode on flying saucers—because, of course you need UFOs to draw interest. As you might expect, the podcast includes interviews with the usual suspects, including Alex Dietrich, Chris Mellon, Mick West, and Seth Shostak, as well as New Yorker writer Gideon Lewis-Krauss. It also has nothing of value to say about UFOs, as evidenced by its reliance on Lewis-Krauss, whose only connection to the UFO “mystery” is writing an article about it. But, hey, that’s enough for a lifetime ticket as a UFO “expert”!

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Douglas Dean Johnson Exposes Jacques Vallée and the "Trinity" UFO Hoax

5/5/2023

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I have been trying to find some time to write blog posts, but it’s been difficult of late. With my livelihood under pressure from ChatGTP and related A.I. programs that are steadily replacing the kind of copywriting that used to be my bread and butter, I’ve been forced to take on less interesting and more time-consuming work to make ends meet, and that leaves me with less time for writing anything that doesn’t pay. Nevertheless, I did want to point out the massive journalistic project the Douglas Dean Johnson undertook to investigate the 1945 so-called “Trinity” extraterrestrial encounter recently publicized in the self-published book Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret by Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris and, according to Vallée and the New York Times, an influence on recent Congressional legislation revising the Pentagon’s remit to include UFO involvement dating back to 1945. In short, Johnson concluded that the old geezers spinning the story are habitual liars and that the story is a bunch of bunk:

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In Brief: At UFO Hearing, Senate Subcommittee Told No Evidence of Aliens

4/19/2023

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This morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities held a hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena, i.e. UFOs. The most newsworthy statement came from the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Sean Kirkpatrick, who told senators: “I should also state clearly for the record, that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” Kirkpatrick made this statement after writing a paper with Galileo Project director Avi Loeb speculating that these same UFOs that show no evidence of extraterrestrial, physics-defying traits nevertheless could be probes sent by an alien “mothership.” After the hearing ended, members of the public watching the hearing offered Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the driving force behind the Senate’s UFO efforts, stories about their own UFO interests and encounters, and one man gave her a copy of his UFO book.

The bottom line from Sean Kirkpatrick, head of AARO

"I should also state clearly for the record that, in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, offworld technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics." pic.twitter.com/FYAtj8mKIc
— Mick West (@MickWest) April 19, 2023

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Ralph Blumenthal Publishes "Nonfiction" UFO Children's Book

4/14/2023

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Regular readers will remember that former New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal published a book about alien abduction researcher John Mack two years ago in which Blumenthal concluded, preposterously, that Mack was a heroic figure whose transcendent greatness would transform humanity—by talking about aliens probing people’s butts. Blumenthal’s current claim to fame is his role in writing the 2017 Times story that set off the current round UFO mania that will see the U.S. Senate take up another UFO-themed hearing next week as the Pentagon’s new UFO office continues its interviews of looney tunes ufologists at the behest of a handful of UFO-addled legislators.

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Avi Loeb Attacks Paper Calling 'Oumuamua Natural Ahead of New Book Release

3/24/2023

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I felt a sense of relief this week when I discovered that Ancient Aliens wouldn’t be airing a new episode. On the other hand, it leaves me with little to write about. It’s been a very slow season for alternative history, the paranormal, and UFOs. I’m not sure why. I wonder if part of the reason is that most of the lower-tier TV series that used to drive the conversation have moved from cable to streaming, where they are locked behind paywalls and harder to see. (That may change when Discovery+ merges with HBO Max and I get bombed with them against my will.) Another factor may be the move away from traditional media outlets toward social media. Less material gets the full TV / book / magazine treatment and instead burns out quickly in a Reddit thread, a TikTok video, or a tweet storm. In my own little corner of the world, ever since Inner Traditions stopped sharing galleys for their upcoming titles, I’ve seen many fewer fringe books. But even Inner Traditions, the largest occult history publisher, has virtually stopped publishing fringe archaeology and has returned to its traditional specialty, New Age occultism.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E09: “Aliens in Our Airspace”

3/10/2023

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The longer Ancient Aliens has been on the air, the less time they spend on “ancient” material. It’s been many years since the title accurately described the series, and at this point, the show is more or less a catch-all garbage dump for whatever UFO or paranormal material they can shovel into the void. This week’s episode revolves around supposed mysteries involving airplanes, ranging from pilots witnessing UFOs to the disappearance of whole planes. As you might notice, airplanes are not terribly ancient (the show’s claims about prehistoric flying contraptions notwithstanding), and I am growing increasingly tired of UFO stories. Forgive me, but I don’t have the energy to detail every UFO sighting in this week’s episode. Aerial paranormal paranoia is not my area of expertise, so this review may be more of a list than an analysis.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E08 “The Mysteries of Alasksa”

3/3/2023

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Maybe we aren’t supposed to remember Missing in Alaska, a History Channel series about paranormal happenings in Alaska from almost a decade ago. Or the episode of The Proof Is Out There from last year in which Ancient Aliens’ sister show looked at the so-called paranormal “Alaska Triangle.” Or maybe we were also supposed to forget The Alaska Triangle, a Travel Channel series from 2020. And we probably aren’t supposed to remember Aliens in Alaska, a 2021 Discovery+ series. Alaska’s paranormal UFO mysteries are growing a little stale after so many televised romps through their fraudulent fantasies, and everyone knows that overripe fake mysteries are exactly the sweet spot for Ancient Aliens, which consistently brings up the rear of the supernatural circus train. This episode, though, is more of a clown car, stuffed with made-up mysteries that aim to be amusing but come across as unpleasant.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E07: “Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind”

2/24/2023

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Two seasons back, American Horror Story fantasized for half a season that ufology’s fever dreams of alien contact were all true. In Ryan Murphy’s telling, space aliens crashed their UFO into the Earth, Dwight Eisenhower established the Majestic-12 to negotiate an agreement with the aliens that involved selling humans for experimentation in exchange for technology, and he and Richard Nixon worked with alien ambassador Valiant Thor while keeping the aliens secret from Democrats. Or something like that. It seems that somebody at Ancient Aliens was watching because they decided to make their own version of the same set of familiar lies, recycling claims from earlier episodes into a narrative of U.S. government direct involvement with space aliens—with no concern whatsoever for the blatant contradiction between this set of fantasies and the allegation from past weeks that a Pentagon UFO office is a major achievement because we have no knowledge of or contact with space aliens.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S19E05: “The MUFON Files”

2/10/2023

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After the United States shot down a Chinese balloon last week, and even before the U.S. shot down an unidentified aerial object over Alaska Friday afternoon, media outlets from the New York Times on down reported that the government had been unaware of certain kinds of aerial incursions because no one had thought to look for them and that the UFO office run by space poltergeist and cosmic werewolf believer Jay Stratton had classified previous incursions as UFOs and failed to identify them as foreign balloons. As we well know, this is because they were looking for alien spaceships and interdimensional ghost monsters. Insiders blamed the “stigma” of UFOs for the military’s incompetent response to foreign incursions, and UFO believers declared it a great victory for ufology, for if ufologists hadn’t convinced Congress to hunt space aliens, no one would have found the evidence of balloons overlooked due to (checks notes) the stigma and humiliation caused by ufology’s ridiculous alien and space ghost beliefs.

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